Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Intellectual kinship, community of tastes had very little part in those friendships: they were founded on a subtle instinct, and they were born of a blind mutual choice. Often your tentative scouting was quite stillborn: you would hope for a friendship, and perhaps he would have no signals for you, but wait wide-eyed and expectant, for somebody quite different. Or again you could have a “culte” (to adopt an odious phraseology for which, in English, there happens to be no equivalent) for someone, who in the sundered worlds of modern and classic schools, might be miles away, and then with a sudden and wondrous reward, the idol would give some such signal of glance (that would be a direct method) or more indirectly, he would say something to his companion as he happened to pass you in the court, which you knew was really meant for you, and on your next meeting you would perhaps get a glance, which was at least an enquiry as to whether you were disposed towards friendship. And then as you waited in the clear dusk of some summer evening for the sounding of the boring chapel-bell, you would sit down on one of the seats round the lime-trees in the court outside, and he would stroll by, still linked by an arm to some other friend, and you rather dolefully wondered whether, after all, there was to be anything doing. The two would be lost in the crowd beginning to collect round the chapel gate, and then perhaps the figure for which you were watching would detach itself, alone now, from the others, and with an elaborate unconsciousness of your presence he would stroll to the seat where you waited, and with the implacable shyness that always ushered in these affairs still take no notice of you. As he sat down it may be that a book dropped from under his arm, and you picked it up for him, and he said, “Oh thanks! Hullo, is that you?” knowing perfectly well that it was, and you would say, “Hullo!”... So after each had said, “Hullo,” one said, “There’s about three minutes yet before stroke, isn’t there?” and the other replied, “About that,” and then taking the plunge said:

  “I say, I’ve got a squash court to-morrow at twelve. Will you have a game?” and the answer, if things were going well would be, “O ripping; thanks awfully!” Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it was time to get up and go into chapel, with a new joy of life swimming into your ken. Never did Cortez stare at the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with which he and you looked at each other as together you passed out of the dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that game of squash to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the foundation-stone of the temple of a new friendship. There would be time enough after that for a dip at the bathing-place, and a breathless race not to be late for hall....

  The ardent affair, if the squash and the bath had been satisfactory, blazed after that like a prairie fire, and the two became inseparable for a term, or if not that for a few weeks. But to suppose that this ardency was sensual is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely physical is no doubt true, for it was founded primarily on appearance, but there is a vast difference between the breezy open-air quality of these friendships and the dingy sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to them. A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture their quality, so as to experience it emotionally, but to confuse it with moral perversion, as the adult understand that, is merely to misunderstand it.

  For a year I sat solid and unmovable in the form in which I had been placed when I came to Marlborough, and was then hoisted into the lower fifth, and began a rather swifter climbing of the scholastic ladder, because I came for the first time under a master who woke in me an intellectual interest in Greek and Latin. This was A. H. Beesly, who was by far the most gifted teacher I ever came under either at school or at the University. Not for me alone but for his whole form he made waters break out in the wilderness, and irrigated the sad story of Hecuba with the springs of human emotion. He had translated it himself into English blank verse, with a prologue that told how some Athenian slave, carried off to Rome to serve in the household, read to fellow-captives this song of Zion in his captivity. What the intrinsic merits of the translation were, I can form no idea, but of the effect of it on his form, as read by the author, I cherish the liveliest memory. For three or four Hecuba lessons we would get no reading, and then Beesly would turn round to the fire when we had stumbled through another thirty lines, and say, “Well now, you boys don’t know what a fine thing it is. Let’s see what we can make of your last few lessons. I’ll read you a translation: follow it in your Greek. We’ll begin at line 130.” Then he would read this sumptuous jewelled paraphrase, which rendered in English blank verse the sense of the passages we had droned and plodded through, and gave them the dramatic significance which we all had missed when we took the original in compulsory doses of Greek. For a long time we never knew who was the author of this English version, and then one day Beesly brought into form a whole bale of copies, printed in sheets, unfolded and uncut, and gave one to each of us. There was the name on the title page, as translated by A. H. B., with the heading, “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge.” Never in bookshop or in second-hand bookstall have I seen a copy of that work, and I rejoice in that for perhaps I might be disillusioned as to its merits, if I had seen it subsequently. Certainly “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” was printed, but I suspect (and bury the suspicion) that it fell stillborn from the press, and that the author bought up the unbound copies. As it is, it has for me the significance of some equerry who introduced me to the presence of royal Greece, making the Greeks from that day forth the supreme interpreters of humanity. Under the influence of “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” I passed through the portals into the very throne-room of that House of Art, so that to this day I must secretly always employ a certain Greek standard to whatever the world holds of beauty. Greek gems, Greek statues, became for me the gold standard, compared to which all else, though noble, must be of baser stuff. There were to be many idle terms yet before I cared one atom about the Greek language intrinsically: as far as the literature went I only cared for the spirit of it revealed in “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge.” And before I quitted that form we had pieces of Œdipus Coloneus brought to our notice, and once again Beesly read out some translation — I suppose of his own — of the great chorus.

  “But if you want the spirit of it,” he said, “listen to this. It’s by a man called Swinburne, of whom you have probably never heard. Shut your books.”

  I can see him now: it was a chilly day in spring and he put his feet up on the side of the stove that warmed the classroom. He had closed his book too, and his blue merry eyes grew grave as he began:

  “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,

  The mother of months in meadow and plain

  Fills the hollows and windy place

  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain,

  And the bright brown nightingale, amorous,

  Is half assuaged for Itylum,

  For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

  The tongueless vigil and all the pain.”

  Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that magic: we were all quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp in his hand and he thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I remember well that he waited at the end of one stanza, and said, “Shall I finish it or would you like to go? Any boy who likes may go.”

  Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disapproval), and he went on:

  “For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

  And all the season of snows and sins,

  The day that severs lover from lover,

  The light that loses, the night that wins.

  And Time remembered is grief forgotten,

  And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

  And in green underwood and cover

  Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”

  He came to the end of the chorus and got up.

  “You can all be ten minutes late next school,” he said, “because I h
ave kept you.”

  Just as I must always think of “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” as being among the masterpieces of blank verse in the English language, so I cannot believe that Beesly was not the finest racket-player who has ever served that fascinating little hard ball into the side-nick of the back-hand court. There was a new racket court just built in the corner of the cricket-field, and here at twelve o’clock on three mornings of the week, Beesly and another master played the two boys who would represent the school in the Public Schools racket competition at Easter. The court, anonymously presented to the school, was announced, when Beesly retired a few years later, to be his gift, and he provided practically all the balls used in these games. Hour after hour I used to watch these matches and began to play myself with the juniors. Beesly often looked on from the gallery, in order to detect new talent, and on one imperishable day, as we came out of the court he said to me, “You’ve got some notion of the game: mind you stick to it.” If I had wanted any encouragement that would have determined me, and I began to think rackets and dream rackets and visualize nick-services and half-volley returns just above the line. Beesly kept a quiet eye on me, and after I had left his form, he would often ask me to walk up towards his house with him, if I was going that way, and would ask me to breakfast on Sunday mornings, and what feasts of the gods were these! Perhaps there would be one of the school representatives there, and Beesly, when the sausages and the kidneys were done, would show us the racket cups he had won, or he would read us something or tend the flowers in his greenhouse. All this sounds trivial, but he never produced a trivial effect, and gradually he established over me a complete hold, morally and mentally, which was as far as I can judge entirely healthy and stimulating. If he had seen me often with someone whom he considered an undesirable companion he would fidget and grunt a little and pull his long whiskers, and then with a glance merry and shy and wholly disarming he said, “Now there are plenty of people it’s good to see a little of, but not too much of.” He would mention no name, but he never failed to convey the sense of his allusion. On the other hand if he thought I was devoting myself too much to games (and in especial rackets) he would say, “Nothing makes you enjoy a game of rackets so much as having done a couple of hours hard work first.” Or if, having watched me playing, he thought I wasn’t taking the game seriously enough, he would stroll away with me from the court, and à propos of nothing at all, he would casually remark, “Better do nothing than do a thing slackly. You’ll find your games fall off, unless you play as hard as you can.”... And then up at his house on one ecstatic morning when I was getting on for seventeen he suddenly said, “You’ll be playing for the school next year if you take pains.” Next moment he had a volume ‘of Browning in his hand and said, “Browning now: ever read any Browning? I thought not. Listen to me for a couple of minutes,” and he read “The Lost Leader.” Once, I remember, I had been to his house in the evening, and he walked back with me across the cricket-field after night had fallen. The sky was clear and a myriad frosty stars burned there. For some little way Beesly walked in silence, then, in his low distinct voice he began:

  “See how the floor of heaven

  Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.”

  I insist on the apparent triviality and fragmentariness of all this, for it was just in these ways, not in heavy discourses or lectures on morality and studiousness and activity, that Beesly gained his ascendency over me. He was never a great talker, but these obiter dicta stamped themselves on my mind like some stroke of a steel die on malleable metal. He was never in the smallest degree demonstrative: he might have been speaking to a blank wall, except just for that glance, merry and intimate, which he occasionally showed me, but for all that I divined a strong affection, which I for my part returned in a glow of hero-worship. The very fact that he never asked for a confidence prompted me to tell him all that perplexed or interested me, in the sure knowledge that he would always throw light in some brief curt sentence. “Stupid thing to do,” was one of his wise comments when I had told him of some row I had got into with my house master. “Go and apologize, and then don’t think anything more about it.” There was the root and kernel of the matter: down came that steel die, sharply impressing itself, whereas discursive and laboured advice would have merely been boring and unconvincing. Off I went, trusting implicitly in his wisdom, and finding it wholly justified.

  And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disappointed Beesly. I had, as he prophesied, attained to the dignity of playing for the school at rackets, and had yet another year before I left, and he made up his mind that I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup for Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought home. Certainly two terms before that final event we were an extremely promising pair, but after that we scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about this, and in the Christmas holidays that year I went to stay with him at Torquay, in order to get more practice, whereas what I needed was less practice. Even then we made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till the last day, when he urged me to take a heroic dose of Hunyadi water, continued to cling to the idea that at last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me outside the court, when we came out; he could hardly speak, but he patted me on the shoulder and blurted out, “Well, I know you did your best: I know that,” and walked quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming letter, trying to console me who really cared far less than he did; for it was, I am perfectly convinced, the main ambition of his life that Marlborough should win this cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the instruments through whom that ambition was to be realized.

  He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, in some such way as Pindar, who wrote the most magnificent odes the world has ever read in honour of boys who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes centred at Queen’s. The affection I certainly returned, but woe for the manner in which I failed to fulfil the rest of the contract.

  I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly a very lonely one, and his loneliness no doubt was accentuated to him by his shy reticence. He kept himself largely apart from other masters; to the best of my knowledge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time he was stewing in the affection which he was incapable of expressing. But he had, out and away, by far the most forcible and attractive personality of any tutor I came across either at school or the University, he was one of those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, and loves for no ostensible reason.

  CHAPTER VIII. LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON

  WHILE I was still in my second year at Marlborough a thoroughly exciting and delightful thing happened at home, for my father was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, and up trooped his pleased and approving family to take possession of Lambeth Palace and Addington Park with, so far as I was concerned, a feeling that he had done great credit to us. Delightful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these expanded grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of taking advantage of them to the utmost. How great a man my father had become was most pointedly brought home to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marlborough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, I could, then and there, measure the altitude of his pinnacle by the fact that there appeared on the school notice-board next day an inscription to the effect that His Grace had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the school in honour of his visit. He had just asked for it, so it appeared, and in honour of his visit, it was granted. “Can’t you be confirmed again?” was the gratifying comment of friends. “I say, do be confirmed again.”

  To me, personally, all the splendour and dignity of his office signified nothing: what concerned a boy in the orgy of his holidays, was the new sumptuousness of his surroundings.r />
  Stupendous though my father had become, we knew but little of his work and of its national significance, and it was my mother who to us, far more than he, was exalted into the zenith. Often since has she told me how shy and inadequate she felt on entering London, as she now did for the first time, in such a position, but never can I conceive of her otherwise than as filling it with the supremest enjoyment, which, after all, is the first of a hostess’s qualities. Her wisdom, her conversational brilliance, above all her intense love of people, just as such, nobly filled and fitted the new sphere. The management of the great house, with the added concern of the second house at Addington, appeared in her a natural and effortless instinct: she took the reins and cracked her whip, and the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth along the road. The stables were under her control as well; she arranged all the comings and goings of my father: out rolled his landau with its tall black high-stepping horses and gilded harness to take him to the House of Lords, and scarce had the great gates below Morton’s tower clanged open for him, than Maggie and I set out on our horses for a ride round the Row, very stiff in top-hats, and riding habit and strapped trousers, and then round came my mother’s victoria, and woe be to the carriage-cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the unwavering quality of glass. She would be going to pay a couple of calls and visit a dentist, and while she was there, the victoria would take Hugh and Nellie to the Zoo, and drop them with strict injunctions that in an hour precisely they were to pick her up at a fatal door in Old Burlington Street, and so proceed homewards to tea. Meanwhile the carriage that deposited my father at the House could take Arthur to some other rendezvous, and once at any rate, the hansom containing the Archbishop was prevented from entering the Lambeth Gate, because the Archbishop’s carriage (containing Hugh and me) must be admitted first. Never were children so indulged in the matter of equine locomotion, for the riding horses clattered in and out, and Hugh returning from a straw-hatted visit to the Zoo must in three minutes hurl himself into the top-hatted and black-coated garb which in those days was current in the Row, in order to ride with my father on his return from the House. One of the five of us, at any rate, was kept on tap for a rather stately ride with him whenever during the busy day he found an hour to spare, and it was a pompous pleasure to see the traffic stopped at Hyde Park Corner, so that we might ride past saluting policemen through the arch. Physically I suppose we enjoyed our fraternal scampers more, but it could not help being great fun for a boy of fifteen to steer a rather fretful horse that went sideways across the Street and behaved itself unseemly, while tall buses waited for his esteemed progress. After all, if you happened to be riding with your father, for whose passage in those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well enjoy it....