Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

“Because I was going to put him into the twenty-two to-night sir, though he doesn’t know yet, and I must let him enjoy it a bit. And then there’s the eleven against the sixteen on Saturday next, and after his whole record in house-matches, it’s just a question whether he oughtn’t to play for the eleven. There are four places left.”

  The Trinity scholar had certainly got absorbed in the captain of the eleven.

  “You mean he has a chance of his school-colours?” asked the Head.

  “Yes, sir, if he goes on developing like this,” said Maddox. “It’s five weeks yet to the Lords match, and it’s easily possible he may be the best slow bowler in the school.”

  Maddox paused a moment.

  “He’ll have to practice a lot,” he said, “and he’ll have to think about it a lot. Three-quarters of a slow bowler is brains, you know, sir. Or would you rather I didn’t try to bring him on at cricket? He wouldn’t notice; he hasn’t the slightest idea how good he is. And even if he had—”

  “Well?” said the Head.

  Maddox dropped the surname altogether.

  “You see, David’s the best chap who ever lived,” he said, “and we’re tremendous friends. If I didn’t put him in the twenty-two even he’d think it was perfectly all right. As you’ve talked to me about him, sir, I want to tell you that I’ll do what you think best for him. I should naturally put him into the twenty-two this evening, because he deserves it, and, as I said, I was thinking of playing for the eleven next week. But if you think not, if you think it would do him more good all round to be kept back, well, I will. But there’s no fellow in the school less uppish, if you mean that.”

  That was all the Head wanted; he had got at David’s character, as seen by Maddox, with far more completeness than Maddox knew.

  “Do just what seems best to you as captain of the eleven,” he said. “But there are lots of you fellows who want watching, and it takes work off my shoulders if I know that you elder and steady men are doing some watching for me. Good luck to both of you. If you live till ninety, you’ll never find a better thing than a friend. At least I haven’t.”

  Maddox found David wallowing in the tepid water, and at intervals making hazardous experiments from the high header-board. This was instructive as showing the flight of heavy bodies through space, and was occasionally followed by further interesting results as showing what happened when these heavy bodies flatly met a flat and incompressible material. Thereafter they went to school shop, and David ate his way, so to speak, from in at one door to out at the other. This was a long and sumptuous process, for the place was full, and congratulations were hurled at them. Tomlin, the diabolical, was there among the crowd, taking his defeat in a wide-minded manner.

  “Thought you had me once or twice during your last over,” said Maddox to him. “Fiendish over, Tommy.”

  Tommy considered this.

  “’Twasn’t a very bad one,” he said. “I think I should have liked to have sent it down to Blaize instead of you. Jolly good match, though. Hullo, Blaize! You’re a rotten bad bat you know. I’ll stand you both strawberry mess.”

  It was perfectly impossible for David not to feel elated at sitting down to strawberry-mess with two members of the eleven, in the full light of day, and in sight of the school generally, or, having dreamed night and day of being “some good” in house-matches, not to feel exalted when those dreams had merged into realities that so far exceeded all his imaginings. But in a little while Maddox and Tomlin began to speak in undertones, and David rose, with the sense that private conversation was going forward.

  “I think I’ll be getting back to house, “ he said. “Thanks awfully for the strawberry-mess, Tomlin.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Maddox. “I’m coming down in a second. Go and blow yourself out a little more.”

  David thought it the part of wisdom not to do that, and strolled outside to wait for his friend. Glorious as all those things had been there was nothing so glorious as that Frank and he had been associated in them. That friendship meant more to him than cricket, or this sort of open recognition of itself. Till now their ages and places in the school had necessarily divided them in public; and so to-day it was best of all the delicious happenings when Frank joined him, and they went off together.

  “The Head asked after you this afternoon, David,” said Frank. “Made inquiries. I told him you were fairly rotten.”

  David did not rise at this.

  “You always stick up for a chap,” he observed. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. I may as well tell you, as everybody else will know by chapel-time. Fact is, I’m putting you into the twenty-two to-night. And on Saturday, next week, you’re playing in the eleven and sixteen match for the eleven.”

  David stopped quite dead. And then he thought he saw. Frank had tried to get a rise out of him just now and failed, and of course was trying again. It wasn’t really quite nice of him to try to get a rise out of him over such matters, but then he didn’t know how dreadfully David cared.

  “Oh! Jolly funny!” he said, and walked on again.

  “David, do you think I’m such a brute as to try to get a rise out of you with that sort of thing?” asked Frank.

  “B-b-but do you mean it’s true?” asked David suddenly stammering.

  “Yes, you ass. That’s what I wanted to consult Tommy about, and he agrees. We can’t have a kid like you bowling the eleven out, so you’ve jolly well got to bowl the sixteen out instead. And I’ll take away your twenty-two cap, if you don’t.”

  “Oh, Frank, I can’t quite believe it,” said David. “What’s it all for? What have I done?”

  “That’s one of your bad points, as I told the Head, “ said Frank. “I said you were filthily conceited.”

  “Lord!” said David.

  “Well, congratters on your twenty-two And you can bring your preparation to my study if you like, and I’ll give you a construe. I haven’t got any work to do myself.”

  “Comes of being a scholar of Trinity,” remarked David, and fled.

  Frank had written out the list of promotions into the twenty-two when David came to his study with a copy of “Œdipus Coloneus,” which was his lesson for next day, and he pushed it over to him.

  “I’ve stuck you in first,” he said, “to prepare for your appearance next Saturday. Now we’ll leave the silly business alone. What’s your work? ‘Œdipus Coloneus’?”

  “Yes; twenty-five lines of a chorus that’s simply beastly,” said David, finding his place. “There; line 668.”

  Frank looked over his shoulder.

  “Oh, it’s not without merit,” he said. “Now look out every word you don’t know, and then try to make something of it for half an hour. After that, I’ll give you a construe. No talking.”

  “Oh, won’t you construe it first?” asked David. “It’ll save me a lot of trouble.”

  “And did you suppose I wanted to save you trouble?” asked Frank.

  David sighed.

  “Thought you might,” he said. “It’s rather flat working after this afternoon.”

  “No, it isn’t. You’ve got to learn that people like Sophocles matter more than any silly house-match.”

  “’Twasn’t a silly house-match,” said David.

  “Don’t talk!”

  David looked round.

  “Lend me your dictionary, then,” he said. “I’ve left mine in my study.”

  David had a very vivid sense of the beauty of words, and though it took him some time to whistle his mind away from the splendours of the afternoon and from the glories of that list that lay on the table, which would soon be displayed before the eyes of the entire school, he became conscious before long that the words of the “beastly chorus” which was open before him were beautiful things, and that their meanings, so his dictionary told him, were beautiful also, for it was all about horses, and nightingales, and thickets, and ivy the colour of wine — this was rather puzzling unless perhaps it meant crème de menthe — and clus
tering narcissus. Then by degrees he became absorbed in it, and all the time was slightly ashamed at being able to be interested in a mere Greek chorus, when his name lay on the table as heading the list of promotions into the twenty-two. But his absorption gained on him.

  “Why, it’s ripping!” he said to himself under his breath, and, whistling softly, hunted up another jewel of a word. Then he lost himself again, diving into wonderful translucent depths.

  “Gosh! I’ve done more than twenty-five lines, “ he said at length, “and I never noticed. I say, give me a construe, Frank; I’ve been more than half an hour. I want to hear how it sounds in English.”

  Frank drew his chair up to David’s, so that they could both share the same book.

  “Right oh,” he said, “but let me read it through first.”

  This was the education of David, and Frank was tremendously anxious to construe the beautiful passage well, and he took some five minutes more going over it, while David’s glance fed on the list of the twenty-two promotions. Then he began.

  “Stranger,” he said. “Blast it; that won ‘t do: it sounds American.”

  “Guest?” suggested David.

  “Yes; that’s better. ‘O guest in this land of horsemen, thou hast come to the most fair of earth’s homes, to gleaming Kolonos, frequented by the nightingale that bubbles liquidly in the shelter of green glades, making his habitation amid the wine-dark ivy, and the untrodden bowers of the god, myriad-berried, unseen of the sun, where Dionysus, master of revels, ever treads, companied by the nymphs that nursed him.’”

  “O-o-oh! “ said David, pushing back his yellow hair, and still rather shy of liking this.

  “‘And, fed with heavenly dew, the sweet clusters of the narcissus are flowering mom by mom, the immemorial crown of the great goddesses, and the golden-beamed crocus is a-blossom. Nor dwindle ever the sleepless springs whence come the wandering waters of the Kephissus, but every day he flows in stainless tides over the plains of earth’s ripening bosom, giving speedy increase, nor have the choirs of Muses abhorred the spot, nor golden-reined Aphrodite.’”

  Maddox paused.

  “That’s your twenty-five lines,” he said.

  “Oh, ripping,” said David. “It really is. Absolute A1. Do go on.”

  “I told you it had merit,” said Frank, and proceeded to the end of the chorus “Why, it’s better than ‘Atalanta,’” said David at the conclusion, despite his barbarian instinct that things like the beauties of Greek literature might perhaps be thought about, but hardly talked of. Maddox, however, had no such notions.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “And some time, if you work frightfully hard, and love it all, you’ll find, as the Head told us the other day, that you simply laugh at the thought of translating it at all. You’ll know it can’t be translated, and that will be the reward of your work, for it will mean that Greek has got into your blood, that it’s part of you.”

  “Do you mean the Head’s like that!” asked David. “All the same, I think I would sooner translate it like you.”

  “You don’t understand, but you would if you had heard him the other day. We had a Plato lesson with him, but instead of going through a single line of it, something set him off, and he talked to us for the whole hour about Athens and the life they led there. You never heard anything so splendid. Yon could go up to the Acropolis in the morning, and look at the frieze Pheidias had put up in the Parthenon, a procession of horses and boys riding to the temple on Athene’s birthday. He showed us pictures of it; some were mounted, — oh Lord, they had good seats — and others were still putting their horses’ bridles on, and one horse was rubbing its foreleg With its nose, or t’other way round.”

  “Pheidias?” asked David.

  “Yes; biggest sculptor there’s ever been, far ahead of Michelangelo or Rodin or any one. And when you had seen that, you and your friend — you and me, that is — would sit on the wall of the Acropolis looking over the town out to the mountains, the purple crown of mountains, as they called them, Hymettus where the honey came from, and Pentelicus, where they got the marble for the Parthenon, and another one — what’s its name? — oh, Parnes. Then to the south you would look over the sea, all blue and dim, out towards Salamis which, as the Head said, was the Trafalgar of Athens, where they beat those stinking Persians; and then we should lunch off grapes and figs, and cheese wrapped up in vine-leaves, and yellow wine, and go down to the theatre just below to hear perhaps this very play by Sophocles, first performance, and no end of an excitement. Then perhaps we should see Pericles, awfully handsome chap, and the biggest Prime Minister there ever was, and a queer, ugly fellow would go by, who would be Socrates. And all the boys and young men were fearfully keen about games, quite as keen as we are, because they used to date the year by the Olympic games, same as we use A.D., or B.C.... Lord, I’m jawing; I wish I could tell it you as the Head did.”

  “Oh, go on,” said David.

  “Well, it wasn’t only games that they were so keen about. They loved sculpture and painting and writing so much, that no one ever touched them at it, before or since. It was the consummate age, so the Head said. And then, when it came to fighting, a little potty place like Attica, no bigger than a small English county, just wiped the Persians up. In everything, so the Head told us, the Athenians of the great age were the type of the perfect physical and intellectual life. Oh, David, let’s save up and go to Athens.”

  “Rather! But why did the Romans walk over them?”

  Frank got up; the bell for chapel had begun. “Because they became corrupt and beastly.”

  “What an awful pity! I say, you made me feel awfully keen with that construe, and telling me what the Head said. I haven’t thought about the twenty-two for — for ten minutes. And one’s got to try to get at it all by sapping?”

  “Yes; that’s how you’ll get to love it.”

  “Sounds almost worth while,” said David.

  “But they liked games as well. That’s a comfort.”

  Frank took up his straw hat; he took up also the list that lay on the table.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to put this up on the notice-board before chapel.”

  “Oh, don’t,” said David. “All the fellows will see it, and I shall turn crimson when we stand up for the psalms.”

  “Bosh; every one expects it.”

  David’s volatile mind went back to the Greek talk.

  “Pheidias, was it?” he said.

  “Yes: sculptor-man,” said Frank.

  David, usually a solid sleeper, could not take his usual plunge into the dim depths that night on getting into bed, but he did not make any particular effort to do so, for it was really waste of time not to lie awake when there were so many delightful things to think about. Round and round in his head they turned, like some bright wheel, and now it was the events of the last three days (house-match, in other words) now the more immediate happenings of the evening, his promotion into the twenty-two, and the much huger honour of playing for the eleven next week that sparkled on the wheel, or again this sudden illumination with regard to the Greeks fed his contemplation. Up till now it had not been real to him that the people who wrote these tedious or difficult things which he had to learn were once as alive as himself, or that beauty had inspired them to make plays and statues, even as beauty had inspired Keats and Swinburne. Until Frank had given him the gist of the Head’s discourse, he never thought of those plays as being performed in a theatre, before an audience, who had not to look up words and learn the grammar, and consider what governed an apparently isolated genitive, or account for an irregular aorist. They were not bookworms and scholars, but men and boys who ran races and crowned the victor, and had their Trafalgar just as if they were English.... It was all vague, but decidedly there was a new light on matters concerning Sophocles.

  But, permeating all these things, was their inspiring spirit, Frank, who lay in the bed next him, whose face he could dimly see in the light from the unblinded
open window just opposite. And then for the first time it was borne in upon David with a sense of reality that in a few weeks more, five and a piece, to be accurate, Frank would have left. At that thought all the pleasant and interesting things which had so delightfully entertained this waking hour was struck from his mind, and he sat up in bed giving a little despairing groan.

  “Hullo!” said Frank softly. “You awake too? What’s the groaning about?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said David, lying down again. “Well, then, what isn’t it about?”

  David slewed round in bed facing him, as he leaned on his elbow.

  “It’s only five weeks to the end of the half,” he whispered, “and — and you don’t come back.”

  “I know; it’s foul. I was thinking of it myself. It’s been keeping me awake.”

  David was silent a minute; then Frank spoke again.

  “I’m sorry to leave for a whole heap of reasons, “ he said. “One more than any.”

  “What’s that? “ said David.

  “Fellow called Blaize. Thought I should just like to tell you. Now don’t groan any more. Go to sleep, you swell in the twenty-two.”

  “Right oh, fellow called Maddox,” said David

  CHAPTER XIII

  DAVID was sitting on the bank below the pavilion on the last afternoon of the term, waiting for Frank, who was paying certain bills in the town, to join him, and take his cricket things away. To save time, David had packed them for him, emptying his locker into his cricket-bag, and now it and his own, ready packed, lay beside him on the grass. The plan was to sit here and talk till chapel-bell began, when they would take their belongings down and leave them at the lodge in readiness for the ‘bus to the station next morning. It was their last opportunity of being alone together, for after chapel they would have to go down to their house to dress for concert, and after concert was the house-supper in honour of their having won the cricket-cup. It would all be exceedingly public and rejoiceful, and Frank would have to make a speech, and David was afraid he would want to groan again instead of applauding, which was quite out of the question, as the occasion was one of uproarious mirth.