Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 13

Table of Contents

C. was now at the top of Lower Division. He had so far accomplished nothing brilliant nor noteworthy, either at work or at play. He had no friends besides the few which have been mentioned. He was not known in the school at large, and he made friends with none of the masters. Calmady's tutor, Mr. Carr, was literary, and extremely anxious and willing to help and encourage any signs of literary taste in the boys. He would get Calmady and some others to come and read poetry in his house. C. was asked to join the group, but he resolutely refused to do so. Nevertheless, Calmady used to bring back scraps from the feasts of poetry that were held on these occasions.

C. was up in the Lent half to D. D. Keanes, an energetic teacher, unconventional in manner, but conventional at the core, and a thorough Philistine. Keanes saw there was something in C., but his indifference and slovenliness irritated him to madness.

"You're not the fool you pretend to be. You've got some brains," he used to say to C., "but you're as obstinate as a mule, and your scholarship is miserable."

One day Mr. Keanes told the boys they were each of them to write down the name of his favourite poet, and C., without thinking of what he was doing, wrote Dryden. He would have put Shelley, who was then his favourite poet, but he did not like to desecrate his admiration by proclaiming it. Mr. D. D. Keanes was astonished and thought C. was posing.

"Dryden!" he said. "Quote me one line of Dryden."

Upon which C. mechanically, automatically, as if in the schoolroom at Portman Square, began to spout:

Of these the false Ahitophel was first;

A name to all succeeding ages curst:

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit;

Restless, unfix'd in Principles and Place;

In Pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace:

A fiery soul, which working out its way,

Fretted the Pigmy-Body to decay,

And o'er-informed the Tenement of Clay.

A daring pilot in extremity. . .

until Mr. Keanes had to tell hint to stop.

"Where did you learn that?" he said.

"At my first school," said C.

This, although it sounded plausible, was totally untrue, as he had learnt it at home in the schoolroom.

"Well," said Mr. Keanes, "if you can quote Dryden, you ought to be able to learn your saying lessons decently, and I shall see in future that you do."

C. was conscious of an error in tactics, and saw that in future it would be useless for him to pretend to have a memory as bad as the one he had hitherto taken pains to be credited with. During the Easter half he used to enjoy running with the Beagles when the trees of the playing fields were just tipped here and there with green; he delighted in the vistas of fallow country and the fresh furrow, the brown earth, the grey skies with a gleam of blue, the meet at Ditton Cross Roads, or Salt Bridge; he enjoyed, too, the pleasant exhaustion afterwards; the hot bath, and the long, lazy tea with sausages and boiled eggs and strawberry jam, while Weigall read aloud Three in Norway. But even here, while taking part in an occupation that he liked, he seemed to take trouble not to distinguish himself, and he purposely and successfully escaped notice, although he probably put in as much hard work as any one else.

It was not that C. was really without ambition. Ever since he had made friends with Calmady a tiny seed, un grain d'ambition, began to swell in his heart, but his ambition was not of an ordinary kind, and as soon as it was born he felt it was destined to be thwarted. He gradually realised during the last two years that he spent at Eton that there was a want of harmony between his values, between what he thought was important, unimportant, desirable, undesirable, fun or no fun, good or not good and the values and tone of those who surrounded him both at school and at home.

He realised that he had always felt this unconsciously at home, but he had never been able to put it into words. He did not even now put it into words. He was merely conscious of a kind of uneasiness, of a misfit, of being either too square or too round for the hole in which he had been placed.

His second summer half in Fifth Form opened out for him a new era of enjoyment. Calmady's tutor took him out with one other master and Calmady one day down-stream. They rowed past the Bells of Ousely to Runnymede. C. rowed extremely well, and Mr. Carr asked him why he wasn't in the boats. He had never put down his name for Novice Eights. Mr. Carr told him he must do so at once.

Calmady was a dry-bob, and took no interest whatsoever in the boats, and only a platonic interest in cricket, but since he came from a cricketing family he thought it would be treason not to be a dry-bob.

The next evening C. put down his name for Novice Eights, and went through the ordeal successfully. He ended by getting into the Lower Boats.

All this time, and all this summer, he was living in fairyland. Spurred on by Calmady, and his accounts of the poetry sessions at Mr. Carr's, C. was making fresh discoveries for himself in the boy's library. He discovered another little volume bound in red morocco, namely, the works of Keats, published by Moxon, in 1863. He read again the Ode to the Nightingale, which he had found unintelligible when he had come across it in a book of recitations. Now it was unintelligible no longer. It touched unguessed-of springs in his nature, and opened the door on to another province of the fairyland into which he had already entered with the magic password of Shelley; a wonderful limbo of dreams and desires--colour and sound.

Then followed after this, the discovery of the romantic poets, of Walter Scott, Coleridge, William Morris's Defence of Guenevere, which he found, too, in the boys' library, and the Ballads of Rossetti. But with the exception of Calmady and Bentham, whose scholarship was more advanced, and whose taste was already on the severe side, there was no one whom C. wished to talk to on the subject of his discoveries.

If Bentham was less extravagant in his enthusiasm, and more circumspect in his literary adventures, Calmady made up for it by his unlimited exuberance, and his undisciplined extravagance of expression. Calmady kept the loud pedal pressed down on C.'s enthusiasms, and one day, when C. confided to his friend a great secret, namely, that he wished one day to be an author, Calmady said there was no doubt that he was destined to be one of the greatest of English authors. He knew it for certain. But Calmady's violence of expression did not only take a literary direction. He and C. were up during that summer half to a mathematical master called Smythson. Nothing could be slower or more dreary than the routine of arithmetic, algebra and Euclid carried on on a hot summer's afternoon under the influence of Mr. Smythson's ponderous personality. Calmady became more and more restless, and less and less attentive, till at last Mr. Smythson remonstrated with him fiercely, and threatened him with divers punishments. Calmady, stung to the quick by what he considered the injustice of the proceeding, rose to his feet and delivered a fiery oration. He carried the attack into the enemy's camp, and took the offensive. The disorder and misrule during the mathematical hour was Mr. Smythson's fault, he said, and not the boys' fault.

"We none of us do a stroke of work," was his peroration. "Everybody cribs. You teach us nothing. In point of fact," and here his voice reached a high pitch of hysterical frenzy, "you're the rankest beak in Eton!"

Mr. Smythson was so dumbfounded at this outburst that he did nothing. He merely wrote a note to Calmady's tutor afterwards, telling him that his pupil was apt to get dangerously excited and to lose self-control. He supposed it was the hot weather.

Calmady's literary enthusiasm took the shape, firstly, of composing, with the help of C., and again, of Bentham, a fantastic romance modelled to a certain extent on Marie Corelli, with reminiscences of Marion Crawford and Rider Haggard, called The Opal Ring, and, secondly, of writing long letters to distinguished authors discussing their works, and the works of other authors. C. was asked to join in this correspondence, but all he consented to do was to make suggestions; he refused, except on one occasion, either to write or even to be the co-signatory of a letter either to Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. William Morris, Mr. Gladstone, or Mr. Walter Pater. But Calmady wrote to some author of note about once a week. One of the masters having said that Jack the Giant-Killer was not an English story, Calmady wrote by the next post to Mr. Andrew Lang on the subject of Märchen; told him what he thought about his works, and received a civil answer.

In the Christmas holidays of C.'s sixteenth year, Calmady was given, as a Christmas present by one of his relations, Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. He brought it back with him after the holidays, and he and C. both revelled in this work.

"Why," they said, "have we never been told of Swinburne before?"

Calmady wrote at once to Mr. Swinburne himself, and told him of this sad neglect in their education. Here was one of the greatest English poets alive and still writing, an Etonian into the bargain, and they had never heard his name mentioned by one of the masters. It was true, they discovered, that Atalanta in Calydon, Erectheus, and some of the poet's later works were in the boys' library, but it was an amazing thing that they should have been kept in ignorance on so important and vital a subject.

"I am not the only person," wrote Calmady, "who considers you to be one of the greatest of English poets."

To this letter Calmady received no answer, and C. expressed the opinion that he feared the great poet had considered the letter to be cheek.

They were both of them unaware of the existence of Poems and Ballads, which was not on the shelves of the school library, until C. happened to find the volume in question, which belonged to his brother Edward, at home. Lady Hengrave saw him looking at it and she promptly burnt the book.

In the holidays C.'s life proceeded with unvarying monotony. At Christmas the aunts and the uncles arrived. The hounds would sometimes meet at Bramsley. The Calhouns would ride over. One of the Calhoun boys was now at Harrow, one at Eton in circles removed from those of C., and the girls were out. In the summer there were cricket matches and lawn tennis. Marjorie and Julia were now both of them out, and the Hengraves spent more time in London than they had been used to do hitherto. Fräulein Setzer had gone, and the schoolroom régime was at an end. Marjorie and Julia affected to be very grown-up, and talked disdainfully of C. and of Harry as the "boys."

The finances of the Hengrave family were undergoing one of their periodical crises, and Lady Hengrave told C. during the Christmas holidays, of his sixteenth year, that the next year would have to be his last year at Eton, as they would not be able to afford to keep him there any longer.

It was during the same holidays that C. made a discovery. In one of the turrets of the old part of the house at Bramsley there was a small room full of books. It contained all the British poets, from Chaucer to Byron, and most of the Elizabethan dramatists. C. discovered that now that he had tasted of modern verse, that the verse of the older epochs was readable too, and did not only consist of dreary, unintelligible passages that had to be learnt by heart. He read the works of Milton and delighted in Paradise Lost. He discovered that he could even read the classics of the eighteenth century--Pope and Dryden--whom he had learnt to dislike as a child, with pleasure. He spent a great deal of time in this turret, and found it a refuge, a sanctuary, especially when the house was full of relations and guests, and Julia and Marjorie were indulging in noisy chaff with their contemporaries, and sarcastic remarks at the expense of C., his brother, and of schoolboys in general.

Lady Hengrave had settled that they could not afford to send C. to the university, and the question of his profession was discussed, and for the time being settled. Harry was to go into the Army. That had to be at all costs. He was to go to Sandhurst from Eton, and that being so it would be impossible for C. to go into the Army as well. Besides, he was not fitted for it. He was not himself consulted. The question was, what remained? It was thought unlikely that he would ever pass the examination into the Foreign Office. There was an off-chance of his passing into the Diplomatic Service, should he chance upon an examination in which his fellow candidates were not of the most exalted intellectual calibre, but even then, could they afford to have a son in diplomacy? The answer was in the negative. He was not clever enough to pass into the Indian Civil Service. The Bar was out of the question. All that remained was the chance of Edward getting him "something in the City," or the doubtful and frankly miraculous supposition that C. might suddenly develop capacities and brains.

Finally, Lady Hengrave settled, and Lord Hengrave assented to the following arrangement. C. should stay one year longer at Eton. He should leave at Christmas, before his eighteenth birthday. He would then go abroad for a time and learn some foreign language sufficiently well to qualify him for employment in the City, or for any other profession that might possibly turn up.

All these arrangements, which for the time being C. ignored, were based on the reports that Lord Hengrave received from Mr. Pringle. They were to the effect that C. was getting on fairly well, but that he left much to be desired. He was not a scholar and never would be one. He did not take enough trouble, and did not do nearly as well as he could do. Sometimes he distinctly showed signs of greater ability than his average work manifested. The masters who had to deal with him were all agreed that he could do better if he tried. They all agreed that he did not take pains. His tutor admitted that he was frankly puzzled by the boy. Some masters gave him an excellent report; others could make nothing of him and do nothing with him. The science masters praised him without qualification. His science abstracts were admirable, and yet he took not the slightest interest in science, and did badly in the subject in trials. The truth was that science abstracts gave C. a rare opportunity of writing English, of composing, which he did much better than the other boys. Sometimes he was praised by other masters for his English in translations, but rarely, for, in common with many people, when he translated he did not write so well as when he wrote out of his own head.

Mr. Pringle put down the unsatisfactory nature of the results achieved by C. to his companionship with Calmady, who, so he wrote to Lady Hengrave, was an exceedingly idle and, to his mind, an exceedingly tiresome boy.

Lady Hengrave, who knew Calmady's father and mother, who were both in her eyes thoroughly right in every respect, took no notice of this. His friendship with Calmady was, to her mind, the one bright spot of C.'s Eton career.

She sighed, when she read these reports, and settled in her mind that it was useless to expect anything either useful or brilliant from C., and that he would be fortunate if he obtained "something in the City." That was, however, what she determined he should achieve, unless it were possible to find some private secretaryship for him.