Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The life of the children at Hengrave House and at Bramsley was conducted rigidly according to plan both during the half-year that was spent at Bramsley and that which was spent in London. The children saw little of their parents. The two boys were brought down to say good-morning after breakfast in the nursery, or later in the schoolroom, a meal which was ready punctually at eight, and all the family met at luncheon. The rest of the time was spent by the children in the nursery or the schoolroom.

C. joined the schoolroom soon after his sixth birthday, and became a minor, obstinate and rebellious satellite in the system of lessons which revolved immediately round the severe and arid moon of Mademoiselle, but which was none the less under the perpetual influence of a remote but effective sun, namely, Lady Hengrave. For although the children seldom went downstairs, Lady Hengrave frequently visited the schoolroom, and she kept a sharp eye on the course of her children's lessons. She herself drew up the scheme of lesson hours and of the subjects and books to be studied, and she insisted on the children learning passages of Shakespeare, Schiller, and La Fontaine by heart, which they were sometimes made to recite before people.

C., although fond of story-books and fairy tales, detested these incursions into literature. He learnt the passages like a parrot and had no idea what the words meant, nor any idea that they could by any stretch of imagination be poetry.

He pretended to learn them with much greater difficulty than was really the case, as his memory was in reality quite remarkably good. German and French he detested still more, and allowed as little as possible of either tongue to penetrate into his mind. Nevertheless by the time he went to school he knew a great many speeches from Shakespeare's historical plays by heart, and a great many of La Fontaine's fables, besides passages from Pope and Dryden, all of which were far too advanced for him to understand.

The routine of lessons was the same for the children in London and in the country, and lessons, save for the interruption of a walk, took up all the morning, an hour in the evening before tea, and a certain amount of time for "preparation" after tea.

Towards the end of July the nursery and schoolroom passages were obstructed by large shiny leather boxes, which meant that the family were going to move down to the country. "We're going to Bramsley," the children would shout in the passages and down the staircase.

Bramsley Hall was in Easthamptonshire, only a little over an hour's journey from London. It was situated in rather a bleak stretch of country, and the west front of the house looked out on the high-road to London. The nursery looked out on this road, and on Sundays C. used to watch from the nursery windows the high velocipedes whizz by; and sometimes a regiment of red-coated soldiers would march past to the music of drums and fifes and "The Girl I left behind Me." There was a "park" which had once boasted of fine trees and deer, but the finest timber had been cut down, and all that was left of the park was a walled-in approach. The garden was still stately, and the house had a shabby dignity of its own. It was an old house, but had been made more modern at three different epochs. The prevailing style was Early Victorian, although there were still scattered traces and solid remains of many periods, Caroline, Queen Anne and Georgian, and it had escaped the vandalism of restoration.

The move to Bramsley was an event which would have been hailed with excitement by the children, and especially by C., who greatly preferred the country to London, if life at Bramsley had not been marred by several permanent drawbacks. In the first place, there was Mademoiselle, and Mademoiselle and lessons in general were far more irksome in the country than in London; in the second place, there was a neighbouring family, the Calhouns, which played an important part in their lives; and in the third place, there were the uncles and aunts who stayed in the house for long periods at a time. Lessons at Bramsley seemed to C. in the summer an almost unbearable tyranny.

It was hard to pore over problems in arithmetic, to learn by heart the fable of Les Animaux Malades de la Peste, to grapple with rules of French past participles, while outside at that very moment there was a bird in the raspberry nets waiting to be caught; minnows waiting to be fished in the stream which ran through the kitchen garden; peaches hanging ripe on the sunburnt wall, waiting to be stolen; while the breeze, through the open windows, brought with it sights and sounds from the world which was at present forbidden and shut from view even by the red and yellow Venetian blinds: the rhythmical music of the mowing machine, and the smell of the warm flowers on the terrace, and the cries of Harry, who was not yet a thrall to the full discipline of the schoolroom, as he raced down the lawn. It was in moments like these that C. hated lessons with a bitter fury. He saw no possible redeeming feature in them anywhere, and as he pored over the speech in Absalom and Ahitophel, which he was learning by heart, he wished that all authors, and especially the French and British poets, were at the bottom of the sea.

Mademoiselle Walter was intelligent enough to know that C.'s education was being conducted on radically mistaken lines. The English governess who had preceded her, Miss Meredith, had likewise understood C.'s mentality far better than Lady Hengrave did and had alleviated the aridity of his classical education by letting him have a whiff of Longfellow and a soupçon of Southey. But then Miss Meredith had left just when she might have been a friend for C.

Mademoiselle Walter divined in C. a possible future love of literature, and cleverly allowed him to read the lyrics of Victor Hugo, which he delighted in, in secret. But such was his dislike for Mademoiselle that he never admitted he learnt these poems by heart for his own pleasure. On the contrary, he pretended that he hated them, and he never lost an opportunity before Mademoiselle of decrying the French; only since she was Alsatian, and in order to make quite sure of offending her, he decried the Germans as well. There was only one ecstatic moment in schoolroom life at Bramsley, and that was when Mademoiselle Walter went for her holidays; this happened sometimes in the month of August and sometimes in the month of September. The second cross of the children's life at Bramsley were their neighbours, the Calhouns, a family who lived ten miles off, and consisted of a retired soldier, an energetic wife, three daughters, who were the bosom friends of Julia and Marjorie, and two boys, Albert and Freddy, one of whom was older than C. and the other the same age. They were his playfellows, and were always held up to him as an example of what boys should be. They did their lessons well; they were said to be, and what is more, they were, extremely intelligent; they rode well and they played cricket well. It was this last fact which was destined to mar two of the principal pleasures of C.'s life at Bramsley, namely, hunting and cricket.

C. had been taught how to play cricket by Mr. Hatch, the under-butler, and in company with James, the footman, Alec, the groom, and Teddy, the gardener's son, and every now and then a few further recruits from the servants' hall, the stables, and the garden, C. used to enjoy ecstatic games of cricket in the summer evenings with a single wicket on the roughest of pitches, a patch of ground near the stables.

C. was for some time successful in keeping these games dark from Mademoiselle and the drawing-room. Experience had taught him that it was wiser never to mention a treat. If one did, the chances were that for some unaccountable reason it was forthwith forbidden. This had happened so often to C. that he had become prudent and cunning in the concealment of his secret treats, hiding them behind plausible substitutes.

Mrs. Calhoun had sometimes suggested that C. should go over and play cricket with their boys, but to C.'s infinite relief the distance made it inconvenient, and Albert Calhoun, who was at school, did not press his mother to invite a raw novice. So somehow or other it was taken for granted that C. did not play cricket.

Unfortunately, one evening Colonel Calhoun, riding back from a visit in the neighbourhood, happened to ride down the secluded lane which fringed the improvised cricket ground where C. was playing. Colonel Calhoun was an enthusiastic cricketer, full of theory, not only as to how the game should be played, but also as to how it should be taught. He watched the game with equanimity for some time, but at last he could bear it no longer, and he shouted to C., who was batting:--

"Play forward, play forward, you're not playing with a straight bat."

He then cantered to the house and asked to see Lord Hengrave. Lord Hengrave was in the garden. The Colonel left his cob in charge of the footman and sought Lord Hengrave, who was busily engaged in pulling the bindweed out of the phlox on his terrace border. After mutual salutations were exchanged, Colonel Calhoun went straight to the point.

"I have just seen your boy playing cricket near the stables. They're teaching him to play very badly. He's not playing with a straight bat. They'll ruin the boy's style. Nothing is so important as to be taught right at the beginning."

"Ah, yes," said Lord Hengrave thoughtfully, as he espied another piece of bindweed. "Of course, the boy's small," he added.

"He's not too small to learn," said the Colonel. "Now I have a professional over from Carbury twice a week to teach my boys."

At this moment Lady Hengrave appeared on the scene, and Colonel Calhoun began again at the beginning.

"Can't the boys come over," he suggested, "on the days that the professional comes to us?"

"Harry is too small," said Lady Hengrave, "and C. doesn't care for cricket."

"But," said the Colonel, "I have just seen him playing." And he told the story all over again, dwelling on the faults of style that were being implanted in him, and how he was not playing with a straight bat. "It's better," he said, "not to be taught at all than to be taught badly."

"I'll see that he learns properly," said Lady Hengrave.

She determined at that moment that, if cricket was played, she would put the game on a proper basis.

Colonel Calhoun, after declining to stay for dinner, went away feeling that his words of wisdom had not been spoken in vain. Colonel Calhoun's visit was the seed of a large organisation, namely, the Bramsley Hall Cricket Club, and end of C.'s fun as a cricketer.

Lady Hengrave interviewed Oldham, the gardener, and Wilkes, the coachman, who were both of them enthusiastic cricketers, and the result was that a field was made into a cricket ground. The village schoolmaster became the honorary secretary of the Bramsley Cricket Club, and the professional who visited the Calhouns came over to Bramsley once a week and bowled to C. at the nets, and insisted on his playing forward and with a straight bat, and Colonel Calhoun rode over every now and then to see how he was getting on. C. was given some small cricket pads and small cricket gloves, and made to score during the matches on Saturday afternoon, and taught how to keep the bowling analysis. Bramsley was soon able to challenge Frimpton, where the Calhouns lived, and Albert and Freddy Calhoun came over and played. Theirs was always the winning side.

As for C., he imbibed a hatred for the game which lasted for the rest of his life, and the only incident of all the cricket matches which subsequently occurred with regularity at Bramsley and Frimpton which he recalled with any pleasure was one occasion when Freddy Calhoun's front tooth was knocked clean out of his mouth by a swift ball. That was exciting enough in itself, but it was nothing to what happened immediately afterwards. The tooth was lost on the cricket pitch, and Mrs. Calhoun advanced swiftly from among the public, searched for and found the tooth, and replaced it in its socket with dexterity and firmness, where it solidified, grew, and remained firm and sound. This seemed to C. miraculous.

During the summer there were no guests at Bramsley but with the autumn a few relations and old friends arrived for the hunting season and for such shooting as Lord Hengrave was able to offer, but never many at a time until Christmas. The children called this the uncle-and-aunt season, and they all of them disliked and feared it.

There was Aunt Harriet, a widow of a brother of Lady Hengrave's, a formidable old lady in a peaked cap, who was a rigid churchwoman on the Low side, and who invariably asked C. whether he had learnt last Sunday's collect. Learning the collect and the Catechism was one of the Sunday duties of the children, and C. learnt the collects with ease, and till the end of his life could repeat them all word-perfect; but when his Aunt Harriet was present he could not bring the first word of any one of them across his lips.

At Christmas there was always a family gathering, consisting of such uncles and aunts as were in England and free. The Rodens never came. They had Christmas gatherings of their own. But Uncle George, a younger brother of Lord Hengrave's--a grey-haired, grumpy, very upright old gentleman--always arrived punctually on the 20th of December. He took the opposite line to the rest of his family on every topic under the sun. Because his elder brother was a Tory, he was a Whig, and if he went out walking with his younger brother, Harold, who was a clergyman, he spat if they chanced to meet a bishop.

Uncle William, the sailor, came if he was in England, but he was generally in some far-off station.

Far more formidable than the uncles were the aunts. Lady Hengrave had two sisters older and one younger than herself. The eldest sister, Aunt Louisa, had been the beauty of the family. She had been radiantly fair and elegant in her youth, and she maintained her elegance when she grew older by natural, and the fairness of her complexion and the glitter of her hair by artificial means. She had made a runaway match with a younger son, who, on marrying her, had left the Army for the Stock Exchange. They had a small house in Stratford Place, and they had difficulty in making both ends meet, which they achieved by living largely on their relations and friends.

The second sister, Aunt Fanny, married Cuthbert Transome, a Fellow of All Souls, who wrote history and contributed to the Nineteenth Century. They had a large house in St. John's Wood. Aunt Fanny was extremely cultivated and well read, but her taste was forbiddingly austere. She read German philosophy and gave musical afternoons at her house every now and then, where only the severest classical music was tolerated. C. was sometimes taken to these entertainments by his mother, and had to sit through quintets and trios in which not a repeat was spared. He suffered acutely. Aunt Fanny and Uncle Cuthbert spent Christmas at Bramsley regularly.

As Uncle Cuthbert was an atheist, neither he nor Aunt Fanny went to church, even on Christmas Day, and Lady Hengrave used to explain this to the children by saying that the church was draughty, and Uncle Cuthbert had a weak chest; but the children were not taken in, nor would they have been, even if Mrs. Oldham, the housekeeper, had not carefully explained to C. that there was no fear of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Cuthbert not going to hell for their unbelief.

Lady Hengrave's third sister had married a diplomat and lived almost always abroad. She seldom came to Bramsley and never at Christmas time. C. detested all his aunts equally and cordially. He did not know which he detested most, Aunt Louisa, who found fault with his seat on horseback and the cut of his clothes, Aunt Fanny, who asked him questions in geography and the dates of the Roman Emperors, a list of which she said was always on her dressing-table, or Aunt Emma, who on her comparatively rare appearances at Portman Square, criticised his French accent and found fault with his manners.

C. and the girls were taught to ride when they were quite small, and were soon allowed to go out hunting. They all inherited their father's horsemanship. C. rode well and easily, but here again the Calhoun family intervened and turned this pleasure to bitterness. It was always being pointed out to him that the Calhoun boys rode so much better than he did, which was true, and every time he went out hunting he had to face a fire of hostile criticism from Colonel and Lady Calhoun. Mrs. Calhoun hunted herself, and never a meet passed at which she did not criticise C.'s deportment on horseback. Lord Hengrave, too, was a formidable critic, whether on horseback, or, if his gout was too bad, in a carriage, and sometimes he would shout at C. at the top of his voice. C. did not mind this, but what he did mind was the expression of unconcern on the faces of the two Calhoun boys, while the criticisms were being made in public. C. knew that they were greedily drinking in every word.