Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 14

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When C. went back to Eton after Christmas to start on the last year of his school life, he was nearly seventeen years old. He had grown rapidly during his last year at Eton, and now looked less loose and less immature; his thick hair was a little less unkempt; his eyebrows beetled a little less, and he had faint indications of an embryo moustache.

His younger brother was taller than he was, and far better looking. He had already made a name for himself as a cricketer and a football player. C. was in the Lower Boats, but that fact summed up all his athletic achievements so far. In any other house he certainly would have had his house colours by now. He was in Upper Division. He did German for Greek. His intellectual career had been, up to this point, of the most ordinary. He had never got a "distinction," although he had sometimes got a "class" in Trials. He had never been sent up for good; on the other hand, he had never failed to pass Trials. His last year was destined to be the happiest of his school time, possibly the happiest of his life.

He had changed. In the first place he was much tidier. Instead of his clothes being covered with candle-grease stains from head to foot, and instead of his hat being always brushed the wrong way, there was a certain smartness and finish about his appearance, his clothes, his socks, and his ties, which he was unconscious of, and which he inherited from his father, but which other boys noticed. His tutor, too, noticed it immediately, and congratulated him satirically on his elegance. This enraged C., and he no longer wore the new socks he had chosen, which were somewhat audacious in design, except when he went on leave. The boys at his house did not even call him "lush," as they would any other boy, for C.'s smartness was subtly different and they did not criticise him, they accepted him, and confined themselves to laughing appreciatively when in pupil room at private Mr. Pringle made pointed jokes at the expense of C. and of his handkerchiefs. Mr. Pringle tried to foist the name of "Beau Brummel" on him, but it was too late. C. was already known to the house and outside it as "C.," and nothing can displace a nickname once it is there.

It was during C.'s last summer half that Mr. Carr suggested that his name should be put up for the literary society, on the strength of what Calmady had told him, but the literary society would not hear of it. They considered C. to be an absolute Bœotian.

Bentham, in the meanwhile, had printed a small book of satirical verse, and was contemplating the editorship of a periodical. It was to be called the Weekly Scug, but his tutor got wind of it, and exercised preventive censorship, so the newspaper was written out for private circulation only, and had only one number.

The romance, The Opal Ring, in three volumes, but only 100 pages of MS. was sent to a whole series of publishers, and to an equal number of magazines for serial publication, but it was always returned with thanks. Calmady, smarting under what he considered to be the injustice of these refusals, sent it to Madame Sarah Bernhardt, with a view to its being dramatised. He never heard if it reached her. It was certainly never performed.

C., in the meantime, partly on his own initiative and partly under the indirect influence of Calmady's tutor, which reached him through Calmady, continued to make discoveries in English literature. He discovered Wordsworth; Matthew Arnold, and Marlowe, as well as the later Elizabethans, and lastly, he made the astonishing discovery that Shakespeare's verse was intelligible--that it was verse.

During C.'s last summer term the ninth jubilee of Eton was being celebrated. There was an exhibition in Upper School of Eton relics and banquets of old Etonians were taking place, and there was a feeling of excitement in the air. But C. spent all his time either on the river or in the boys' library. He had an out-rigger and he enjoyed sculling up to Monkey Island after six, and the sights and sounds of the river on the long summer evenings, or bathes at Athens, and feasts of cherries and squash-fly biscuits on the bank. C. did not know this was to be his last summer half. Had he known it, it is probable that he would have liked the world to stand still on one evening which he spent on the river, and which he never forgot in after life. He was sculling back from Surly in his outrigger, taking long, sweeping strokes. The threat of a thunderstorm had turned the sky grey. There was not a breath of air, and the water of the river was as still and seemed as even as glass. Every reflection in it was distinct and clear-cut. In spite of this there was nothing oppressive in the air, only an enveloping soft summer warmth. By the time he had sculled past Athens and reached the Brocas, and Windsor Castle came into sight, the sky seemed like a warm, grey curtain made of an even silken texture, unfurrowed and without a ripple in it. And this infinite greyness seemed to be faintly, but only just faintly, suffused by the softest pink tinge, as if somewhere behind the curtain there had been a gorgeous sunset ablaze which shone through it. The storm did not break. A few large drops of rain fell, and that was all. The storm floated or drifted away stealthily to the sound of a far-off murmur of thunder, and instead of the rain, a tall, vast rainbow presently encircled Windsor Castle, and by the side of it shone another fainter ghost of its sevenfold glory.

The effect was magical; the elm trees of the Brocas, the grey walls of the Castle, the little houses and the roofs below the Castle, seemed to have become more unsubstantial than their reflections in the water; as unreal, as fantastic as that great round rainbow itself, and to be of the same stuff as those castles that are faery, that hang for a moment like many-coloured gems in the morning air and then vanish at the call of an unearthly bugle.

As C. skulled past the Brocas it seemed to him that he had entered into an enchanted space, and that he was released from the bonds of time. "Stay," he could have said to the fleeting moment, "for thou art in very truth so beautiful." That was one of the impressions of school life which was destined to remain with him.

Another equally strong one was the school concert of the same summer half, which was held on the evening of June 23rd. Neither C. nor Calmady belonged to the musical society, and they went to the concert together. Shelley's Arethusa was sung first to music by Goodhart, and C. and Calmady both enjoyed hearing the words of their favourite poet, for he was to them at that time the poet of poets; his verse was for them on a different plane to that of all others, however magnificent those others might be, sung out by the fresh young voices.

C. remembered reading that lyric for the first time after tea the same evening he had discovered The Cloud.

"Shepherding her bright fountains" struck him as being a wonderfully beautiful image. He had never thought about it before. The music pointed it out to him.

The loud ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,

And divided at her prayer,

moved him inexpressibly, and the vision of the worlds beneath the sea--

Under the bowers

Where the ocean powers

Sit on their pearled thrones.

Through the coral woods

Of the weltering floods,

Over heaps of unvalued stones,

touched, as it already had done when he read the poem for the first time, a spring in his mind that opened a door on to a kingdom of wonder; but most of all he enjoyed the last stanza:--

And now from their fountains

In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,

Like friends once parted,

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.

He wondered whether friends, really great friends, could or did ever part, and whether, if they did, they grew single-hearted once more. The words and the music steeped him in a curious day-dream, full of questions and shot with wonder; but the end of the lyric soothed and rocked his anxious doubts and uneasy questionings to sleep.

At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep

In the cave of the shelving hill;

At noontide they flow

Through the woods below

And the meadows of Asphodel;

And at night they sleep

In the rocking deep

Beneath the Ortygian shore;

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky,

When they love but live no more.

There was a wonderful peace about this ending, a final beatitude in the suggestion that love would endure when the turmoil of life was over; and the sense of the poem and the sound of the music both of them left something behind them that remained long after they had ceased to be heard.

Arethusa was followed by the Eton Ode, of which the words were written especially for the occasion by Swinburne, and set to music by Parry. The music was essentially English; English in the same way as Shakespeare's chronicle plays and Herrick's lyrics are English, with nothing shoddy or vulgar about it.

Shelley's name is mentioned in the poem. "Shelley, lyric lord of England's lordliest singers." This pleased C. and Calmady, especially as Calmady had asked their division master if he liked the poem, and the master had said that the introduction of the name of Shelley had given him great pain. This had made Calmady and C., to whom he had retailed the story, furious. They were incensed at a master daring to find fault with Shelley, but this offence was wiped out by the triumph they felt in hearing these words sung in public by a large chorus, and in noting the gratifying fact that the master in question was singing in the chorus himself and paying tribute with his lips, if not with his heart, to the genius of Shelley. But when the ode reached its close--

Still the reaches of the river, still the light on field and hill,

Still the memories held aloft as lamps for hope's young fire to fill,

C. became conscious of a thick lump in his throat. He suddenly realised that he must leave Eton one day, that all this must come to an end; he suddenly became conscious, and for the first time, that he was the part of something large, of a corporate body, of a long tradition, a note in an endless series.

Bright with names that men remember, loud with names that men forget,

they sang, and he knew that, if his name was not destined to increase the blaze of the long record, it would, at any rate, be one of those obscure notes that contribute to the volume of continuous sound. And at the thought of the brief nature of the longest Eton school life, that it might come to an end almost at once, and then for ever, C. felt an intolerable pang, and bent his head lest Calmady and others should see that he was crying.

That same week he tasted a sip of Eton's outward and visible triumphs in the procession of the boats, which had been put off from the 4th of June. He went up for long leave for the Eton and Harrow match, and Calmady's people had a coach, where Calmady and C. enjoyed their luncheon, but they neither of them enjoyed the cricket, which was not exciting. C. and Calmady were taken to a Gaiety burlesque on Saturday evening, and up till then all was great fun, but when C. found himself wandering aimlessly about the gaunt rooms of Hengrave House, or sitting in an empty back drawing-room, where the furniture was covered with brown holland, fearful of disturbing his father, and afraid of finding visitors in the drawing-room, and ultimately taking refuge in the schoolroom, and even there liable to come across a tête-à-tête between one of his sisters and a girl friend, he was glad on the whole when his leave was over and he got back to Eton.

He left Eton at the end of the summer nursing a secret project about which he had spoken to no one, not even to Calmady; and this was to win the Shakespeare prize. Four plays had been set--The Tempest, Henry V., As You Like It, and Julius Cæsar. C. was perfectly determined to get this prize, and he set about to study these plays, which he had read already, till he knew them almost by heart. He did not say a word about it.

When he went back to Eton at Michaelmas he still did not know it was his last half. Lady Hengrave wrote the momentous decision to Mr. Pringle, and asked him to communicate it to C. This he did shortly after C. arrived. C. was just out of first hundred. If he stayed until the summer he would be in the Upper Boats. He would in all probability get his house colours, unless Pringle's did impossibly badly in the house cup. He was up to a rather severe master, Mr. Whitethorn, but he liked him. They understood each other. Never had Eton life seemed more pleasant or more promising. It was just beginning, he thought, to be really enjoyable. C. was just about to emerge from his shell when the blind Fury had come with the abhorred shears to slit his thin-spun Eton career.

C. at once confided the news to Calmady.

"And what are they going to make you do next?" he asked.

"They're going to send me abroad to rub up my French. They don't know that I know French now as well as I shall ever know it in my life."

"And then will you go to Oxford?" asked Calmady.

"No; they say it's too expensive. They are going to send me into the City into my brother's office, if he can find a place for me."

"Well," said Calmady, "I don't expect they'll let me stay much longer either. They want me to go up for the Diplomatic Service, and I shall have to go to a crammer's or abroad."

And then they spoke of their ambitions and their projects for the future. Calmady wanted to be a composer, and to study music in Leipsig or Berlin, or, failing that--his appreciation of the arts was catholic--to be an artist and to study in the Quartier Latin. Unfortunately, he knew little of music, had no ear, and could not draw at all. C. wanted to be a writer--any kind of writer. He would have liked to begin at once at the lowest rung of journalism, in the most humble capacity, but he knew it was not the slightest use to suggest anything of the kind to Lady Hengrave.

"You will be a writer," said Calmady. "I am quite sure you will. My tutor corrected some of your papers last Trials, and he said you were one of the few boys he had ever come across who wrote good English. He said he was quite sure you would write some day if you wanted to."

C. then told Calmady about the Shakespeare prize. Calmady was delighted. He was himself going in for the Prince Consort's prize for German, but had no chance, no chance at all, of winning it. C. swore Calmady to secrecy about the Shakespeare. Later, however, he was obliged to let his tutor know, as his name had to be sent in. His tutor was agreeably surprised and greatly astonished. He thought at first for a moment that there was something behind it, that C. was doing it to avoid a school or to shirk work of some kind, but he did not say this. He contented himself by asking in a mildly bantering fashion how long C. had been a Shakespeare student. C. was inclined to answer "All my life," which he felt was only too painfully true, but he wisely said nothing. He went in for the prize. He thought he'd done very badly and answered wrongly questions which he could have answered perfectly well at any other time. But to his immense surprise, and to the still greater surprise of Mr. Pringle, one day, when he had for the moment forgotten all about it, a large sheet of paper with the well-known blue ink writing caught his eye on the school board, and he stopped to look at it and saw the words "Shakespeare prize." He felt quite dizzy for the moment, and could not read the rest of the words, which seemed to be blurred. Then through the mist he caught the words "Shakespeare Prize: Prizeman, Bramsley major." He walked away, chewing the cud of the great news to himself in silence. Presently he was met by Calmady, who had seen the news, and who greeted him with a shrill scream of triumph. They both walked up town together, and, as though celebrating some old time-honoured ritual, they walked into Califano's, and ordered two chocolates. Calmady's joy was completely disinterested and all the more unaffectedly sincere from his having failed even to be mentioned among candidates for the Prince Consort's prize.

"I knew you'd get it," said Calmady. "My tutor told me this morning. He set the papers, and he said yours were far the best."

Mr. Pringle was astonished, and as annoyed at having been taken in by C.'s pretended ignorance as he would have been had he been deceived by an assumed knowledge. But he congratulated him warmly, nevertheless, and told him that a man who could quote Shakespeare would never be dubbed a fool.

"You've been taking me in for years," he said. "I thought you were a dunce, and you were a knave all the time. However, I prefer a knave to a dunce," he said graciously, and he gave C., in addition to the book which he was going to present him with on leaving, a Shakespeare Concordance.

The end of C.'s last half went by with incredible rapidity. He was given his house colours, but Pringle's did not get beyond second ties in the matches for the House Cup. Then came the end: the last school concert; the last breakfast at Little Brown's; dinner with his tutor; the choosing of his prize at Ingalton Drake's. He chose the works of Shelley, in four large red volumes, Buxton Forman's edition, and some little books. Mr. Pringle gave a slight snort when he saw the books, and said:

"Why don't you choose something you'll like when you're older?"

Then came the last school concert. The deafening roar as the swells walked up the school hall with their coloured scarfs. The melting voice of Digby, whose voice was just about the break, singing the most sentimental of all sentimental songs, Lay your head on my shoulder, Daddy. The boating song, spoken more than sung by the Captain of the Boats; and the Vale, which C. had enjoyed so often before when the fact of leaving had seemed so impossibly remote, but which was now almost unbearable.

The last morning in Chapel.

Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing;

sang the choir. How often C. had wondered what it would feel like when the well-known words

Let Thy Father-hand be shielding

All who here shall meet no more;

would apply to him. They had always given a feeling of sadness, but, on the whole, it was a pleasurable sadness; and, now for the first time in his life, he learnt the difference between the tears that are luxuriously shed in tasting an emotion that does not belong to you and the tears of recognition that respond to the call of actual experience.

The final packing; the last walk through Eton with Calmady and Bentham, neither of whom were leaving yet. The last morning; the scurry. And then farewell to Mater Etona. A sad farewell for C., the saddest of all, for what he was leaving had been a home, and the home to which he was returning was a place of exile.