Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  To-day, on his way to the museum, just as David passed the long French windows of the Head’s study, he stepped out and called him.

  “So you’ve seen your father off, Blaize?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” said David, beaming.

  “Ah! Well, we’ll take a little stroll across the field, you and I, before we begin our English literature.”

  It was one of those days when Rhadamanthus unbent, when the man who could be so terrible became wholly enchanting, a man not to fear but to love. These days were not common, but when they came they were golden. And now that tremendous person, who had been a rowing-blue at Oxford, who was the incarnation of fate and retribution, laid his arm over David’s shoulder and put aside his terrors.

  “I had a long talk to your father, David,” he said. “No, no one can hear me call you David; don’t be alarmed; and no doubt he has told you part of what we said, that you are to go up for a scholarship at Marchester next week. Do your best, won’t you, and be a credit, not to me, which doesn’t matter so much, but to yourself. And I told your father I was proud of you, and I meant it. You and I have had what they call words before now, haven’t we? In fact, I’m afraid that sometimes it has come to blows. You have often been most unsatisfactory, idle and careless and disobedient; I dare say there’s not a single school rule that you haven’t broken. But I told your father that I had never found you mean nor bestial. I look upon you as a boy I can trust.”

  David’s young skin flushed with pleasure, and then went white again with a resolution that frightened himself “I — I’ve done lots of things you don’t know about, sir,” he said. “I don’t think it’s right you should think me good — I’ve—”

  The Head stopped, and David’s heart sank into his boots. “What an ass he had been to say that! Why not have received this handsome tribute, however undeserved, without disturbing the misplaced faith that prompted it? And yet he knew that he had done it deliberately and because he had to.

  “Do you wish to tell me about them?” asked the Head. But his voice was still quiet and kind. David seemed to himself to be going mad. He just heard his voice in a quaking whisper say:

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then, David, I don’t want to hear about them,” said this astounding man, “though I thank you for wishing to tell me. I feel sure you have broken rules of school often enough, but I don’t think you have broken rules of character. They are much more important, though school rules have got to be kept as well.”

  Suddenly his grip on David’s shoulder tightened, and his eye fixed itself on the back of a small boy who was sitting on the wire railing at the edge of the field, unconscious of their approach.

  “Ferrers Minor, I think,” he called out in an awful voice.

  The Head thought right, and Ferrers Minor presented his startled and dejected countenance.

  “Did you, or did you not, know the rule about sitting on the railings?” demanded the Head.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ferrers Minor.

  “Then this is wilful disobedience,” thundered the Head. “I will not be bullied by you, Ferrers Minor, nor have you disregard the rules with which you are perfectly well acquainted. I suppose you wish to make a fool of me, to hold me up to ridicule for having the impertinence to frame rules which Mr. Ferrers Minor keeps or not, as he finds convenient. Was that your plan?”

  “N-no, sir,” said Ferrers Minor.

  “Then I will make a plan for you instead, and it is that you write out in your best copy-hand ‘I will not sit on the railings like an ass’ a hundred times. You may go, Ferrers Minor.”

  But Rhadamanthus, the inexorable terror, had only mounted his judgment throne for a moment, and came down off it again. His grip relaxed, and he patted David’s shoulder.

  “And now for our literature lesson,” he said. “It’s too hot to hold it in the museum, isn’t it, Blaize, when we can sit under the trees instead. Let’s have it out here: go in, will you, and tell the class to come out. And, personally, I shall take my coat off, and anybody else who likes to do the same of course may.”

  The boys trooped out at David’s summons, peeling off their coats, and grouped themselves in the shade of the four big elms that stood in a quadrilateral clump at the edge of the field. The Head had taken off his coat, and, leaning on his elbows, lay on that part of his person which in ordinary mortals is called the stomach, with a book or two in front of him.

  “All comfortably settled?” he said. “That’s all right. Now to-day I’m going to talk to you about a man whom very likely you have never heard of, and read you something he wrote. His name was Keats, John Keats. Has anybody heard of him?” Nobody had.

  “He was a chemist’s assistant,” said the Head, “and if some ninety or a hundred years ago, you, Stone, or you, Blaize, had gone into a doctor’s little dispensary near Hampstead to get a dose because you had a pain in your inside, from eating too many strawberries, or from having shirked into Richmond and devoured more than a sufficiency of Maids of Honour you might have had your medicine given you by one of the greatest lyrical poets who ever lived. The doctor’s assistant, a pale young man with a bad cough, might perhaps have mixed it for you, and if you were wide awake you might have seen that when he got up to give you your pill or your powder, he laid down a pencil and a piece of paper on which he was scribbling. Stone, if you leave that wasp alone he will not get angry and sting you, or lose his head and think it was me who was annoying him. Yes, and then when you had paid your twopence and gone away with your pill, you may be sure he would have taken up his pencil and paper again. No doubt, if you had asked him, he would have copied out for you what he was writing on another piece of paper, in which he was accustomed to wrap up parcels, and wondered that you cared to pay another twopence for it. But if you sold that piece of paper to-day you would get, not twopence, but hundreds of pounds for it. For on it would be written lines by John Keats, in his own hand. And what you might have found on that piece of paper is this:

  “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

  A minute since, and Lethe wards have sunk.

  “Lethe we had in our Homer not long ago. Lethe, the water of forgetfulness. Sometimes I think Blaize and others of you have drunk it.

  “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

  But being too happy in thy happiness

  That thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees

  In some melodious plot

  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

  Dreamest of summer in full-throated ease.”

  He read on, occasionally stopping to explain a word; once and again his voice trembled, as it did sometimes when he preached; once it nearly stopped altogether as he came to the lines:

  “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

  She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

  “In tears amid the alien corn,” he repeated.

  The entire informality of these proceedings, the absence of the sense that they were being taught and had got to learn, disarmed the boys, and before this stanza was reached the fact that it was the portentous Head who was reading to them had quite vanished. They were all sitting or lying about at ease on the grass, one or two of them listening intently, the others, for the most part, feeling just lazy and soothed and comfortable. But among the intent listeners was David, and as the Head paused and repeated “alien corn,” he rolled over on to his back, absorbed and lost.

  “Golly,” he said quietly to himself. “Oh Golly!” Then he became aware that he had spoken aloud, but scarcely wondered whether the Head had heard or not, so completely did the magic of the words possess him. And in some mysterious way they added to his store of happiness: they became part of him, and thus part of the fact that he was going to Marchester next week, and would see Hughes
, that there was a half-holiday this afternoon, that he was in the eleven. Keats’s poem was part of the whole joy of life, it, and its music, and the sense of longing for something he did not know about, which it produced in him. Then his attention was completely diverted by the feeling of a slight vibration in his trouser-pocket, caused by the movements of the Monarch and his wife who were there in their travelling-carriage, and, now that he recollected them, became part of the beneficent joy of things in general. So for fear of their not getting their proper share of the oxygen of the world, he withdrew the box from his pocket, laid it on the grass, and forgot about them again, in hearing of the “ foam of perilous seas.”

  The Head finished the Ode, and invited questions. Stone wanted to know what Hippocrene was, thinking this an intelligent question, but Ferrers’s inquiry as to what the “magic casements” were earned stronger approbation from the Head, who mysteriously told him that no one could tell till they looked out on to the “perilous seas.” It was not like the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar, this which he had read them, because it could mean different things to different people. Each sentence of the “Commentaries” meant one thing and it was the business of boys to find out, with the aid of a dictionary, what it was. But music and poetry were altogether different: they meant to you what you were capable of finding in them. Then he turned to David, who alone of the class had not asked any questions, intelligent or otherwise.

  “Nothing you want to know, Blaize?” he asked.

  “No, thank you, sir,” said David. “But would you read it us again, sir, as you do sometimes?”

  The Head sat up, clasping his knees with his arms, and without answering David began the Ode again in that extraordinary voice of his, this time not looking at his book. He began in tones so low that it needed an effort to hear him; it boomed out over “charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; it sounded like a breeze at night in the stanza “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet”; again it shook with emotion over the “sad heart of Ruth,” and David felt a lump rise in his throat, a mysteriously blissful misery took possession of him. And when the Head finished he found himself smiling at him with mouth that trembled a little.

  There was silence a moment.

  “That will do for to-day,” said the Head. “You can go.”

  The group rose from the grass with alacrity, for though Keats was all very well, an extra half-hour at the bathing place, for the lesson had been very short, was even better. But in spite of the permission David lingered.

  “Did he write much else, sir?” he said.

  The Head handed him the volume.

  “You may see for yourself,” he said. “Give it me back when you’ve finished with it.”

  David deposited this in his desk in the museum, and then ran after the others to the bathing-place, with lines still ringing in his head, but untying and unbuttoning as he went so as to lose as few seconds as possible before the first heavenly plunge out of the heat and baking sunlight into the cool arms of the water. That, too, on this morning of vivid life was more consciously delicious than ever before, when with a long run he sprang, an arrow of gleaming limbs, off the header-board which he left vibrating with his leap, and burrowed into the cool embrace of the water. Some flower must have opened in his brain to-day, quickening his sense of living, and though no whit less boyish than before, he was far more conscious of the water and the sun, and above all of himself.

  He swam and floated and dived, came swiftly up behind Stone, who swam in rather a water-logged manner, and with a firm hand placed suddenly on the top of his head sent him down to the bottom of the bath, and before he came up again, spluttering and more water-logged than ever, was floating with arms and legs spread star-fish fashion, gazing serenely and unconsciously into the sky. Stone concluded mistakenly that it was Ferrers who had done this thing, and raised a storm of splashing in his indignant face, and got ducked again for that, and so precisely flicked with a wet towel when he came out that he cried on the name of his Maker and danced with the shrewdness of the touch. Upon which David, forgetting that his mouth was submerged, laughed, and thereon swallowed so much water that he had to come out and lie face downwards on the grass in order to disgorge it. That was pleasant also, and he lay there on the grass with his forehead on his arms till his back was dry and baked. Then, making a compact parcel of himself with his hands clasped round his ankles, two friends lifted him and swung him into the water again.

  Bags the unbathed had brought down some strawberries and newly baked buns, and David, having filled himself up with those things, took to the water again in spite of Ferrers’s warning that if you bathed directly after a heavy meal you got cramp in your stomach and sank like a stone to rise no more. It was necessary to test the truth of this remarkable legend, and it was found to be wholly untrustworthy.... And all the time the magic casements and the alien corn wandered fragmentarily in his head.

  The first eleven played the next sixteen that afternoon, and still that happy tide of the consciousness of life and the beautiful jolly things of life bore David along. He made a catch of an unparalleled order off his own bowling from a hit so smart that he had only meant to put up his hands to protect his face, and the ball stuck in them to his great surprise and hurt more than anything had ever hurt. Subsequently he made thirty runs after being missed three times, which added zest to the performance, and took the Head’s volume of Keats up to bed with him. But, Glanders being ill, and the dormitory unpatrolled, he had a wonderful pillow-fight with Bags instead of reading, and did not, as his custom was, go instantly to sleep when at length he got into bed. Instead he lay in a lump with his hands round his knees saying “Jolly happy, jolly, jolly happy! By Gad, ‘fairy lands forlorn! Fairy lands forlorn.’ Gosh, how that catch hurt! but what frightful sport! Marchester next week too... five bob....”

  And these images lost their outline, and became blurred with the approach of sleep.

  One of the house-masters at Marchester was an old friend of the Archdeacon, and it had been arranged that David should stay with Mr. Adams when he went up for his scholarship examination. Hughes, David’s great chum of a year ago, was in Adams’s house, and by permission met him at the station, and, after the first greetings, looked David over with an eye made critical by the adamantine traditions that bind junior boys at public schools. Hughes was extremely glad to see him, but he had certainly been very anxious to get an early and private view of him to see if he came up to the standards and ordinances then prevailing, and make such corrections in his bearing and attire as were necessary. It would be an awful thing, for instance, if David turned up in a straw hat with his school eleven colours, as those were identical with the Rugby fifteen colours at Marchester, and to be seen walking about with a small alien boy in fifteen colours was a nightmare possibility. But there was a lot, as he saw at once, to be said in David’s favour: his clothes were neat, he looked exceedingly clean (not grubby, a thing which Hughes, from his faded reminiscences of Helmsworth, was dismally afraid of), his hair was short behind and well inside his collar, and he stood straight. On the other hand, there were certain details that must be altered.

  “I say, have you been travelling in a smoker?” he asked. “Second, too.”

  David wished he had spent his last shilling in going first.

  “Yes, first was so frightfully expensive,” said David.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that: all the fellows go third. Yes, the bus will take your luggage up, and we’ll walk, shall we? It’ll take the fug of the smoking-carriage out of your clothes.”

  David marvelled at this: he had thought a smoking-carriage must be the manly thing. He had a packet of cigarettes also in his coat-pocket.

  “Don’t fellows smoke here?” he asked, looking tip in timid admiration at Hughes, who had grown enormously.

  “Oh yes, in some scuggy houses,” he said, “but not in Adams’s. It’s thought frightfully bad form in Adams’s!”

  David fingered his packet of cigarettes
nervously, conscious suddenly of the enormous gulf that yawned between a private and a public school, and yearning to bridge it over by every means in his power.

  “I’ve got some cigarettes in my pocket,” he said.

  “Oh, chuck them away,” said his friend, “or give them to a porter. It would be a rotten affair if any of the fellows in the house knew. You’d come here with a bad name.”

  David’s face fell for a moment, for those were gold-tipped cigarettes, which he had thought would probably be so exceedingly the right thing.

  Hughes noticed this, and gave consolation, for really Blaize was extremely presentable.

  “I say, Blazes,” he said, “I’m awfully glad to see you, and we’ll have a ripping time. But it’s best to tell you what’s the right thing and what isn’t, don’t you think?”

  David responded cordially to this.

  “Rather,” he said, “and it’s jolly good of you. Thanks, awfully. Do tell me if there’s anything else.”