Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  XV. — CLYTEMNESTRISMOS.

  Thy warrior comes in regal state,

  What words of welcome for him, wife?

  The lips of love, the heart of hate,

  The bath, the net, the knife.

  STORIES OF MYCENÆ.

  BETWEEN his own tripos work, which he stuck to steadily and grimly, and found by mere force of routine less disagreeable than he expected, Rugby football, the storm and stress of social duties, as he called them — which meant dining out or having people to dinner five nights out of the seven — and constant rehearsals for the Greek play, the Babe’s time was very fully taken up. Furthermore, on Mr. Gladstone’s principle, though otherwise their principles had nothing in common, he always slept for eight and a half hours every night, and if, as often happened, he did not go to bed till two, the hours of the morning were somewhat curtailed. The Babe, however, did not object to this, as the morning seemed to him the really disagreeable part of the day. There was something crude and raw about the air until lunch-time, which made itself felt, whatever one was doing. It was necessary of course to get through the morning in order to arrive at the afternoon, but the shorter it was made the better, and by breakfasting late and lunching early one could make it very short indeed.

  He worked at the Greek play with extraordinary zeal and perseverance. The happy band of directors had begun to see that he knew more about acting than all the rest of them put together, though one had seen two hundred and thirty-seven different French plays, mostly improper, and the Babe was present throughout every rehearsal, sitting in the stalls when he was not on the stage himself, and making suggestions whenever they occurred to him. Mr. Mackay, the second stage director, had very strong and original ideas on the subject of Cassandra, whom he made his special care, and he had mapped out exceedingly carefully the gestures, tones, postures, and faces she was to make as the prophetic afflatus gradually gained possession over her. She was a tall young gentleman with a most lovely girlish face, and about as much knowledge of the dramatic art as of the lunar theory. But Mackay was indefatigable in coaching her. She was to point down with both hands outstretched on the word “blood”; she was to roll her eyes and stare at the centre of the fourth row of stalls at the word “Apollo”; she was to make a noise in her throat resembling gargling on the second “Alas”; she was to stagger on the third, and palpitate on the fourth. She was to gaze with agonised questioning at the Ophicleide when Clytemnestra told her she was mad, as if to ask whether he too agreed with her, and breathe as if she had just come to the surface after a prolonged dive; and from that point onwards she was to cast restraint to the winds. She was mad; let the audience know it. Mad people were incoherent and throaty; what she said was incoherent, let her mode of saying it be as throaty as possible. She must continually gargle, gurgle, mule, puke, croak, creak, hoop, and hawk, and if then she didn’t bring down the house, well, — the fault was not hers.

  Cassandra, who at any rate had a good memory, and did blindly what she was told to do, had just been through her part with faultless accuracy, and was a little hoarse after it, and no wonder. She had screamed, croaked, gurgled, gargled with pitiless precision, and on the last word she uttered, her voice, by an entirely unrehearsed effort, had cracked like a banjo string in a hot room. Mackay thought this particularly effective, and when he heard it was unpremeditated, urged her to practise it. He patted her on the back as she came off, and implied that if she acted like that in the performances, they would be very helpful to Æschylus’s reputation. The other two stage directors, it is true, had intermittently indulged in unkind laughter during the performance, but Cassandra had not heard them, and if she had, she would not have cared.

  At the end of the rehearsal the Babe stayed behind for a few moments to see about his dress, and passing across the stage again on his way out, found the three stage directors like the King, the Queen, and the Executioner in Alice in Wonderland in hot discussion. Like Alice, he was instantly appealed to by all three, and asked to give his opinion about Cassandra.

  “Do you want me to say exactly what I think?” he asked.

  “By all means,” said Mackay, confidently.

  The Babe hesitated a moment.

  “I haven’t criticised Cassandra at all,” he said, “because I understood she was, so to speak, preserved. Also she is rather slow, and there would hardly be time for her to learn her part in the way I should suggest, and it would be a pity to confuse her mind farther. But if you ask what I think, she only reminds me of a strong young lady battling for reason against the clutches of delirium tremens.”

  The stage director who had seen so many French plays, smiled.

  “I said drunk,” he said.

  “Drunk, certainly, and also I think beset by the black-beetle visions,” said the Babe. “I daresay inspiration by Apollo may be like that, but I am afraid to an English audience it will suggest D. T.”

  “I thought she was splendid this morning,” said Mackay.

  “Well, I’ve told you what I think,” said the Babe.

  “What do you advise?”

  “If there is time, I should advise her to remodel herself a little. Not to choke so much; she spits at me like a llama, you know. Not to be so inspired. There is too much saliva in her madness, I think.”

  “My dear fellow,” broke in Mackay, “you miss the whole conception of the part. She is mad, stark, staring mad.”

  “I daresay I’m wrong,” said the Babe. There was an awkward pause, broken by Mackay who picked up his coat abruptly.

  “Very well,” said he. “Take her in hand yourselves. I must be going. We rehearse again at five, I think.”

  A moment’s silence followed and they all looked at each other with the air of detected conspirators.

  “Will you help us?” asked Dr. Propert at length of the Babe.

  “Do you mean, will I coach Cassandra?”

  “Yes.”

  The Babe hesitated.

  “I don’t want to interfere,” he said, “but certainly there is room for improvement in Cassandra. And I don’t want Mackay to think I am meddling with him. I would much sooner not.”

  “I think Mackay wishes it,” said Propert, “only he didn’t like saying so.”

  The Babe shrugged his shoulders.

  “I didn’t gather that from his manner, but if you can assure me of it, I will do my best with her.”

  Dr. Propert heaved a sigh of relief. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” he said magnanimously. “We have too many stage directors. We all of us really want you to manage the whole thing. Some one will say your part this afternoon — I will myself — if you will take the rehearsal alone. Besides, the architecture of the palace is all wrong, and I have found a fifth century statue with sandals on. There is a cast of it in the Museum, and I must get it copied. We have our hands too full.”

  So that afternoon Dr. Propert read out Clytemnestra’s part, and the two other stage directors sat meekly in corners, and busied themselves with sandals, and from the centre of the stalls the Babe issued his orders, while Dr. Propert read his part in a fine sonorous voice and in a modern Greek accent, which made the Iambic lines, so said Mackay, who had made a special study of ancient metres, sound like minor Galliambics. Cassandra exhibited mild surprise when the Babe stopped her gurgling, and when he forbade her to ogle the place where the Ophicleide should be, she felt like an unanchored ship, drifting helplessly about among quicksands. So the Babe reserved her for private instruction, and told Agamemnon not to go like Agag.

  There was only a fortnight more before the performance, and the Babe worked like a horse, and like Hans Müller made miracles. The casual visitor to his rooms was likely to be confronted with a raging prophetess or a credulous king, in front of whom stood the Babe showing them how to rage or how to express the extremes of credulity. Dr. Propert found enough to do in superintending the stage properties and the second stage director became a sort of benignant elderly Mercury to the Babe. Mackay alone held slightl
y aloof.

  On the night of the first performance, there was a thick, palpable atmosphere of nerves abroad, like a London fog. Agamemnon kept repeating his first line over and over again and wiping his hands on his himation, and tried to remember that, whatever he did, he must not clear his throat before he began to speak. The calm and prosy Argive elders put by their prosiness and became peppery; Dr. Propert flew about with altar wreaths in his hands, which he deposited carefully in safe places and then forgot where he had put them. Even the placid, moon-faced Cassandra pricked her fingers violently with her fifth-century brooch. As for the watchman it was a serious matter for doubt whether his shaking knees would ever take him safely down his somewhat ricketty watch-tower. The Babe alone, on whom really the whole responsibility as well as the heaviest part rested, towered head and shoulders above the nervous fog, and was absolutely his own silly self. He caught up Agamemnon three minutes before the curtain was to rise and tried to induce him to dance a pas de quatre out of the palace, and when Agamemnon trembled so that there was imminent risk of the sandals coming off, let alone dancing, danced a pas seul himself. He set Mr. Sykes upon the altar and crowned him with roses. He said he couldn’t remember a word of his part, and proposed to act the execution of Mary Queen of Scots instead or send the audience empty away. He peeped through the spy-hole of the curtain and said the conductor hadn’t come, which sent Dr. Propert flying round to see what had happened, whereas he had been in his place for ten minutes. In fact, he crowded, as he said, into five minutes of glorious life, the fatuities of years. The effect of all this was that the rest of the company were so completely taken up with deploring his behaviour, that they quite forgot to be nervous, which was precisely the end which the Babe had in view.

  The performance rose to the level of excellence, and Cassandra maintained it, but Clytemnestra — the pens of the critics failed before Clytemnestra. They couldn’t, they confessed, do her justice. She was a creation, a revelation, an incarnation; she was wonderful, marvellous, stupendous, gorgeous, inimitable, irresistible, unapproachable, inexplicable. She held the mirror up to Nature, the ηάτοπτρον up to art, and the speculum up to drama — this was a little involved, and Dr. Propert is responsible. A shaggy student from Heidelberg who represented his university, thought she was a woman, and, heedless of Agamemnon’s doom, fell in love with her on the spot, and was disposed to take it as a personal insult that the Babe was of the sex that Nature made him. However, as marriage was out of the question, he wrote an appreciative article in the Heidelberg Mittheilungcn on Clytemnestrismos (made in Germany), contrasting it with Agamemnonismos, with a great deal about the standpoint of the subjective Ego, in the presence of objective archaism. She held the house, she entranced the audience, she dominated their imaginations; she tore away the veil of realism from in front of idealism (whatever that may mean); she gilded Æschylus’s conception, and enriched his execution. She was Clytemnestra. And then they began all over again with variations.

  Every night at the fall of the curtain, the Babe was called back again and again, every night the whole house rose at him like one man, and the florist outside the theatre must have realised a competence for the rest of his days. It had been a rather dull and uneventful term, the University wanted something to go mad about, and stark staring mad it went. If Cambridge had not been in a Christian country, it would have had a Babe-cult on the spot. His photograph, taken at the great moment when he came out with “murder beaming from every line of his countenance” as the Cambridge Daily News finely observed, and slowly wrung his hands free of the blood that dripped from them, was in half the shops in the town. For the second time — a unique distinction — he was in authority in the “Granta,” and the Cambridge Review had a long article entirely about him, beginning, “It must surely have occurred to any thoughtful critic.” Night after night the cry of “Speech” — what could have been less appropriate than that Clytemnestra should make an English speech after a Greek play? — went up from a crowded house, and as regularly the Babe bowed and smiled and shook his black-wigged head, and gracefully declined. Once — it was most indecorous and improper — he went so far as to whistle to Sykes who was always in attendance, and made him bark, but otherwise the attempt to get a speech from the Babe was as unprofitable as trying to get water out of a stone. And his performance was the more remarkable in that he did not repeat himself slavishly: acting was an instinct with him, and each night he acted as his mood prompted him. For instance, his manner of entry after the murder, changed every night. Once he stood at the palace door quite silent for nearly a couple of minutes, until Dr. Propert turned quite pale with the thought that perhaps the prompter might think that he wanted prompting, and spoil the moment, wiping his hands slowly, and smiling a ghastly smile at the chorus; once he came out quickly and threw the axe away from him and plunged into his speech; once, and an audible horror ran round the house as he did it, he broke into the silence by a mirthless laugh as he fondled the axe with which he had done the deed, like a mother nursing her child. In a word, he made it clear, that Æschylus was a most excellent dramatist, and that he was a most excellent actor.

  XVI. — AFTER LUNCH.

  I shall be by the fire, suppose.

  BROWNING.

  THERE were only three weeks more to the end of the term, but as soon as the play was over, the Babe at once settled down again to his social and historical duties. With December a hard frost had set in, and football for a time was at a standstill. But next to football as an after lunch amusement, the Babe preferred above everything else a warm room, a large chair, and congenial company. With these objects in view he asked Reggie and Ealing to lunch with him one day, and entirely refused to go out afterwards. Reggie, who had a sort of traditional notion that people always went out after lunch, or else they were ill, was overruled by the Babe, who sent his gyp out to order muffins for tea, and drew his chair close up to the fire.

  “But it’s such a jolly day, Babe,” said Reggie, who was only half persuaded.

  The Babe looked out of the window and shuddered.

  “By that you mean that there is a horrid smell of frost in the air, that the sun looks like a copper plate, and that by walking very fast and putting on woollen gloves you can get completely warm, with the exception of the end of your nose. I hate woollen gloves, I hate walking fast, and I hate the tip of my nose to be cold. I avoid all these things by sitting by the fire.”

  “Fuggy brute.”

  “About my being a brute,” said the Babe, “there may be two opinions. But fuggy, as you call it, I am. I confess it, and I glory in it. At the same time I’m no fuggier than you. If you had your way you would go a nasty walk in order to get fuggy. We both want to be fuggy, and I merely adopt the easiest method of becoming so. Dear Reggie, you are so very English. You love taking the greatest possible trouble to secure your object.

  That is called the Sporting Instinct. Personally I am not troubled with a sluggish liver, but if I was I should take a pill. That would not suit English people at all: instead of taking a pill, they take exercise, purely medicinally, and they always adopt the most circuitous ways of taking it. What can be a more elaborate method of guarding against a sluggish liver than spending three thousand pounds on building a tennis court, which can only be used by two people at a time?”

  “What do you play Rugger for, then?”

  “Why, because it is the most expeditious way possible of getting exercise. You concentrate into an hour the exercise you couldn’t get under half a day if you went a walk.”

  “I have known you get keen about it,” said Reggie. “Was that only because you admired the expedition with which you were getting exercise?”

  The Babe yawned.

  “We’ll change the subject,” he said. “I’ve been asked to your Comby on the 6th. I don’t know why a college should celebrate the birthday of their founder by making scurrilous rhymes about each other, but I’m quite glad that they should, and I have very kindly consente
d to come.”

  “Thanks, awfully,” said Ealing.

  “Don’t mention it. But really it’s a very interesting point, as Longridge would say. You all go to chapel, and they sing ‘Zadok the priest.’ Then you have a big feed in Hall, and the whole college assembles together, and they libel each other in decasyllable couplets. Luckily there’s no rhyme to Babe.”

  “There are heaps,” said Reggie precipitously.

  “I think none. Talking of Long-ridge, he is supposed to be perfecting a plan by which, as you walk up to your door you tread on a spring, and the door flies open. He says it is so tiresome to open a door when your hands are full. And his hands always are full.”

  “It sounds very pleasant,” said Reggie. “Has he tried it yet?”

  “Only once. That time his door was already open, and when he trod on the spring, it shut with, I believe, quite incredible violence and knocked all his books out of his hands, besides hurting him very much and breaking his spectacles. You’d think that would stop him? Not a bit. He merely rose on the stepping-stone of his dead self to higher things. It only gave him another new idea. He is going to have a second spring inside the door, which, when trodden on will shut it again after you. At least that’s what he means to do, when he is fit to walk about again. At present he is incapacitated. I went to see him yesterday; his nose is in splints. I am so glad I haven’t an ingenious mind.”

  “I wouldn’t be Longridge’s bed-maker, if I was paid for it.”

  “Bed-makers are paid for it,” said the Babe. “Besides, as he truly says, if you can have a dumb waiter why not have a dumb bed-maker made of some stronger material?”

  “He never said anything of the kind, Babe,” said Ealing.

  “My dear chap, he has said lots of things of the kind. You force me to contradict you. He hardly ever says anything of any other kind.”