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Before C. left, Calmady, Bentham and he had a little sheaf of verses printed at New's, the stationer's, consisting of ten short lyrics. The pamphlet was called: "In the Boys' Library and other Poems," printed for private circulation. Most of the lyrics were written by Bentham, but Calmady contributed an Ode (in the Spenserian stanza) to Algernon Charles Swinburne, and C. wrote a Vale. Only a few copies of this pamphlet were printed, and the joint authors enjoyed correcting the proofs enormously, but their proof-correcting was more enthusiastic than accurate, for the only fragment of this pamphlet which is still extant is a stanza from a poem which had been stuck by C. into a notebook, and subsequently torn, so that all the remains of it is this:--

Wsulsoroven 'co tell the tale,

His triumph, love and tragedy,

. . . Colchian shore set sail.

This and the incomplete and undated title page, torn likewise:--

"In the Boys' Library and other Poems"

by

C. B., R. L. C., and E. B.

Printed for Private Circulation,

is all that remains of the printed work, and it must be admitted that the fragment is one which even a German Shakespearean commentator would find difficulty in reconstructing, and he would have grave doubts which of the three possible authors to attribute it to.

C.'s Vale survived in MS. He had showed it to his tutor, who had written on it: "Good, but there were others at Eton besides Poets."

Here is the Vale which was found in Malone's papers:--

Vale

Farewell, this is the first, the worst Farewell,

Good-bye to the long dream;

I hear the tolling of my boyhood's knell,

And I must cross the stream.

Good-bye, South Meadow, Athens, Cuckoo Weir,

Good-bye, tall Brocas trees;

To me you are more sacred and more fair

Then the Hesperides.

Good-bye, dear Library, dear musty shelves,

Worn books and marble bust,

Where over tables scholars skipped like elves,

And raised a cloud of dust.

But there I saw--as through a misty veil,

A chalice of white fire--

The light of Shelley's song, and heard the tale

Of his divine desire.

'Twas there I read how, led by fatal chance,

A mortal loved the Moon;

And thus I learnt the language of romance,

And heard the magic tune.

The little book was like a silver key

To many-coloured lands,

Where wondrous harps upon a ghostly sea

Are swept by a mermaid's hands.

To-morrow I shall be beyond the spell,

The fields behind; the road

Before me; banished from the wishing-well,

And on my back a load.

Yet none can steal the tasted happiness,

And if I meet dark hours,

Dear Mother, I will turn in my distress

Back to thy chiming towers.

Though pangs begotten of sweet memory

Make worse the present woe,

I'll turn to thee and say: "At Eton I

Was happy long ago."

"What can I give thee, Mother, in return

For all thy gifts to me?

What if no laurel shall adorn my urn,

Nor deed of high degree?

"Others with honour, glory and green bays

Shall brighten thy bright fame;

I, with no more than love, can swell thy praise

With one forgotten name."

His tutor complimented him on it in a bantering tone, repeating what he had written on the copy, and hinting that C. had left out everything that made Eton important. C. felt this was only too true in another sense. He had left out everything that had mattered to him, his thoughts, his dreams, his friendships, all that Eton had meant. He had left it out because he couldn't say it.

During the Christmas holidays after his last half at Eton, C. realised more sharply than he had ever done before, what a gulf there was between himself and all the rest of his family with the exception of Harry.

Julia and Marjorie, since they had been out, had become models of crystallised convention. They had their father's pride, without his dignity and ease, and their mother's rigid limitations, without her culture. C. felt there was no one now at home whom he could talk to about anything that interested him, and he felt more than this. He felt it was impossible to say what he really thought about any subject under the sun. If he got near to doing so before his sisters a misunderstanding would be sure to arise, and this would quickly grow into an argument, and from an argument into a quarrel, which would rage until Lady Hengrave would intervene and put a stop to it by telling C. not to tease the girls.

Towards the end of the holidays the Hengraves went up to London as usual, and C. and Calmady were able to meet. C. was in the flush of the full and complete discovery of Swinburne, and he was intoxicated with the beverage. He thought, as so many people have thought on making the same discovery in the days of their youth, that there was no such poetry in the world; nothing like it at all; nothing to be compared with it, and Calmady and C. chanted The Hymn to Proserpine, and The Triumph of Time, and other poems as they walked down the London streets or in the parks. They felt a great desire to express the homage they felt for the poet in some tangible way. They wanted to see him and tell him--no, tell him they would never dare--but express the fervour of their worship to him by their silent and reverent awe. It seemed a pity, as so many poets were dead, that one who was alive and so superior to all the rest should not receive the homage that was due to him from the living.

Calmady had already written to Mr. Swinburne a year before, but had received no answer. A bolder project now took shape in their minds. This was to call on Mr. Swinburne, and to take with them a letter asking him if they might have the supreme honour of shaking hands with the greatest poet of the age. They discussed the matter for hours, but as C. was going abroad and Calmady was due to return to Eton, time was short, and whatever was to be done would have to be done quickly.

The Sunday before Calmady was due to go back to Eton, C. was asked to luncheon with Calmady's people in Grosvenor Place, and after luncheon they determined to put the long-talked-of and daring project into execution. They looked out Swinburne in the Court Guide, and found that C. A. Swinburne lived in a flat in Hyde Park Mansions. They were faintly astonished to find that his initials ran C. A. instead of A. C., as on the title pages of his books, but they thought that perhaps A. C. were his initials as an author, and C. A. his initials as a private gentleman. They then composed a letter, a very brief letter, asking if they might be allowed to shake hands with the author of Atalanta in Calydon and other immortal poems. Armed with this missive they set out for the flat in Hyde Park Mansions. It was a large building. They arrived at a hall where there was a mahogany board with an immense array of names in slots, showing who was in and who out. They found a hall porter in uniform.

Did Mr. Swinburne live there? they asked in trepidation.

Yes, he did.

Was he at home?

Yes, he was.

They were shown into a lift, and were whirled up to an upper landing. They rang an electric bell. A dignified butler opened the door; not quite the kind of butler you expected in a poet's household. There was nothing Bohemian about him, and his face had a mask-like calm, his shoulders a military squareness.

Was Mr. Swinburne at home?

He was.

Would he kindly give him this letter and ask for an answer?

The butler acquiesced with perfect deference and departed with the letter. The boys scrutinised the little ante-room with awe. It was hung with trophies of sport; antelopes' horns, stags' heads, riding whips, and some prints of a naval battle.

"His father was an admiral," whispered Calmady.

They waited a moment and then a dignified, very upright, military gentleman with white hair and kind, grey eyes walked into the ante-room, holding the letter in his hand.

"I am afraid I am not," he said, "my illustrious namesake, but I shall be delighted to shake hands with you."

C. and Calmady blushed scarlet, and wished the earth might swallow them up. They shook hands, but they were not able to speak, and they left the building not knowing what they were doing.

"Wasn't it awful?" said C.

"Awful!" said Calmady, "what must he have thought of us? He didn't seem to mind," he added.

"No," said C. "That's what made it worse, his being so awfully jolly. I don't expect he'll tell anybody."

"I hope he doesn't know my people," said Calmady. C. shivered at the possibility.

"Nor mine. Mine would be worse, as Mother hates Swinburne."

"So does Mamma," said Calmady, "but nobody need ever know."

"Those are just the sort of things that leak out years afterwards when one has forgotten all about them," said C., remembering dramatic, belated disclosures in novels.

Calmady groaned, and agreed. "Yes," he said, "like in a Greek tragedy or Hall Caine."

And the two boys felt that from henceforth a Nemesis would hang over them, and that they had sown a fatal seed, as the members of the House of Atreus were wont to do, which was bound to bear some dreadful fruit.

The next week Calmady went back to Eton, and C. started for France. It was settled that he should spend three months at Versailles in the house of an old musician, whose wife had been in old days a friend of Lady Hengrave's, and who had known better days; then, perhaps, three months in Germany. After that it was to be determined by a competent judge whether he had any chance of passing into any public office, or whether his brother Edward could find him something in the City. It was thought that in either case foreign languages were a necessity, and as he already knew French and German fairly well he would only need to rub them up a little. It would be out of the question, it was thought, for him to go to the University. That would be sheer waste of time, besides being impossibly expensive.

C. had never been abroad before in his life. He felt a certain excitement, not unmingled with apprehension and a sickening longing to go back to Eton.

He asked to be allowed to spend one Sunday at Eton before he left, so as to say good-bye to Harry. This favour was granted. He went down on one Saturday afternoon to Eton and stayed with his tutor. He arrived about tea-time and strolled through the familiar passages. He found Weigall, who had just finished tea, and who now messed with a boy called Sims. They were discussing questions that concerned the Beagles and the House Debating Society, and they could not pay any attention to C., so absorbed were they in the immediate facts of the present.

C. realised with a pang that he no longer belonged to the life that was going on; that he was of yesterday. He went out and strolled to Calmady's house. There was a riotous game of passage football going on, and Calmady greeted him cheerily, but could not leave it.

He came back and went to see his Dame, Miss Derwent. She was very glad to see him, and they discussed novels, as usual, and when she heard he was going to Versailles she said he would enjoy the park in the summer, and that it was conveniently near Paris. She, herself, was perhaps going to spend Holy Week in Paris. She preferred France to Germany; in Germany there was the music, of course, only she did wish they would not do so much Wagner.

They talked about Tennyson's latest poem on the death of a royal personage, which Miss Derwent said she thought might have been a little more personal. C. said it was a pity Swinburne wasn't Poet Laureate, upon which Miss Derwent said that he was a republican and had written very unpleasant things.

"But he wrote much the best Jubilee Ode," said C., "and he's not a Home Ruler."

Miss Derwent admitted that not to be a Home Ruler was something, and she thought he was sound on the subject of Mr. Gladstone, but, nevertheless, he had written some unpardonable things.

C., finding the conversation was becoming dangerous, said he must go and dress for dinner.

At dinner there were four Eton masters, and C. was shy and silent. They talked about R. L. Stevenson all through dinner, capping each other's quotations. C., who had only read Treasure Island, felt out of it. Mr. Pringle approved of C. going to France and deplored his having to go to Germany. He said that the Germans were barbarians, and that their language was excruciating. There was nothing to read in German, but Mr. Whitethorn, who was there, said he would enjoy the music in Germany, and that he would be able to hear a Beethoven symphony for two marks. C. had never heard a Beethoven symphony, nor even of one, although he knew that Beethoven was a phenomenon that Lady Hengrave approved of. But he reflected that if it was anything like the kind of music he had heard at his Aunt Fanny's house he should not spend two marks on it. C. had heard little music in his life, but Lady Hengrave had instilled a certain respect for Mozart and the Italian opera into him, and he had a genuine love of tune.

On Sunday he went to chapel, and after luncheon he went out for a long walk with Harry, as their custom had been while they were still at Eton together. They had always been for the same walk. Up the Long Walk, round the spurless equestrian statue of King George, and home.

C. knew that this was the last time that he and Harry would ever be together on the old terms, and even now that he had left the situation was no longer the same. It was the finale of a long piece of music which, while it had been going on, had passed unnoticed.

Harry was now in Army Class. He had already got his house colours, and he was in upper sixpenny. He was extremely popular both with the boys and the masters, and his career showed every sign of exploding into a blaze of Eton triumph. The two boys talked about the future, and they talked about the past; the tyranny they had mutually suffered at the hands of Mademoiselle Walter, and of their detestation of the Calhoun family.

Harry asked C. what he was going to be, and C. said he had no idea. He loathed the idea of the City. He loathed the idea of a Government office.

"Wouldn't you have liked to go into the Army?" asked Harry.

"I should never have passed the exam.," said C.

But this wasn't true. He knew that his mother would never have let them both go into the Army, and it was, of course, right that Harry should do so in preference to him. They got back in time for chapel, and C. remembered, as he heard the last hurried, frantic beats of the chapel bell, the old panic he used to have of shirking chapel. Those final hurried beats of the bell had seemed to him the most ominous sounds, fraught with inevitability and doom, in the world. And now he would not hear them in that same way any more.

He went back to London on Sunday night, so as to have a whole last day in London before starting for France.

He started from Victoria Station on Tuesday morning for Paris and Versailles. At the station there was another Eton boy, whom he had known by sight, bound for the same destination. His name was Pelly. They greeted each other shyly, but on the boat they made friends. They were both violently seasick during the whole of the crossing, and both of them swore that they would never cross the Channel again. They arrived at Paris rather late in the evening, and C., who was by way of going straight on to Versailles, put off going till the next day, so as to spend the evening with Pelly, who also desired to have one free evening before joining his pension. They both of them sent telegrams to their respective hosts.

During the journey C. and Pelly had made great friends. Pelly was a quiet, cultivated scholar, and he was about to study French in Paris before going to the University. They went to a small hotel in one of the side streets off the Rue de Rivoli. C. knew the name of it, because Miss Derwent had told him she always stayed there. It was dark and cheap, clean and stuffy, and had no bathrooms and no electric light, and wooden bedsteads with curtains.

After they had unpacked their things, and washed and tidied themselves, they felt extremely hungry, and they thought they would like some dinner. They strolled up the Avenue de l'Opéra till they passed, on the right-hand side, an unpretentious-looking restaurant, on which they saw the name Bignon.

"Let's go and have dinner here," said C.; "it looks quite decent."

Pelly agreed that the place seemed inviting and not too crowded. They sat down at a table, and a friendly waiter suggested that they would, no doubt, fancy "des hors d'œuvres et quelques huîtres" a nice, plain consommé Milanaise, and, perhaps, a truite meunière to follow, and a plain roast poularde with a little salad. That sounded simple enough. Another waiter, with large side-whiskers and black apron, hinted with aloof disinterestedness at the wine, and C. said he thought some claret, just an ordinary Bordeaux, would be the thing. The waiter agreed. There was a Hautbrion which he was certain would meet the case. He came back presently bearing with reverence, and yet with the intrepid familiarity of those who are used to handling sacred things, an old cobweb-covered bottle, slightly tilted in a basket. He uncorked the bottle without shaking it.

The food proved to be simple and excellent. The wine, too, was soothing, so much so that they ordered another bottle.

They began by discussing Eton, the boys and the masters, recent events and happenings; they went on to discuss books and poets, and C., after a few glasses of the Hautbrion, declaimed reams of Shelley and Swinburne to the surprised but interested Pelly. They sat on talking until late. They finished up with coffee, and the waiter suggested a "verre de fine." This proved to be also very pleasant and soothing, and not at all fiery. They repeated the dose. They then asked for the bill. It was unobtrusively brought, face downwards, and amounted to 251 francs 35 centimes. C. was aghast. This represented his monthly allowance. He would only just have enough money to get to Versailles, and he doubted whether he would have enough money to pay his hotel bill. Pelly was anxious to pay half, but C. insisted that he had invited him. Luckily Mrs. Roden had sent him a cheque before starting, otherwise he would not have been able to pay the bill at all.

He put down on the plate 250 francs in paper and 20 francs in gold. The waiter indicated by his gesture that he would fetch the change, but C., half as in a dream, and half feeling that if he was in for a penny it was better to be in for a pound, and that the tip was only on the scale of the rest of the extras, waved him away, and left him in possession of the lordly tip. The waiter took the twenty-franc piece like a lamb, with perfect composure, indicating that the transaction which had just been accomplished had been between gentlemen and men of the world who understood each other perfectly, and C. wondered whether all restaurants in Paris were as costly as this one. Fortunately his hotel bill proved to be unexpectedly moderate, and he had just enough money left to travel to Versailles.