Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster gave to the new sixth form at the beginning of the September term, was said about duties and responsibilities: if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear without penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, waterproof to such suggestions, if they come from without: he will get his idea of his duties and responsibilities purely from his own instinct, or rather from the collective instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of proper behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely built on what he and they consider to be “good form.” These commandments are the most elusive and variable of decalogues, but usually wholesome, and completely autocratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad form, though language which would have blistered the paint off a sewer, was perfectly permissible, if you wished to indulge in it: bullying was hopelessly beyond the pale, gambling and drinking, which figure so menacingly in those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We (the sixth form generally) were a set of genial and energetic pagans, caring most of all for each other, next for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work; indeed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to be industrious in certain well-defined patches.

  Nobody took the very slightest interest in such subjects as French or mathematics, and considering the way in which they were taught, it would have been truly remarkable if we had. An aged man, mumbling to himself, wrote out equations and made pictures of Euclidian proposition on a blackboard, apparently for his own amusement, without any reference to his audience. When he had had enough of it, he told us to close all books, and write out the proposition he had demonstrated. Sometimes you could, sometimes you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t very frequently, you had to do it twice and show it up next school. If the aged man remembered to ask for it, you had forgotten to do it, but usually he forgot too. But what it was all about was a blank mystery, until it became necessary to find out, because elementary Euclid and algebra formed a part of the Oxford and Cambridge certificate examination. When that approached, we put our heads together and found out for ourselves.

  French was equally hopeless: once a week we prepared a couple of pages of some French history for the headmaster. Whatever French he knew he certainly did not impart: of the spoken language I had picked up enough abroad to be aware that he would have been practically unintelligible to a Frenchman. I believe that both these subjects were admirably taught on the modern side; on the classical side the study of them was a mere farce. But at Latin and Greek we worked quite reasonably and intelligently: it was “good form” to take an interest in them, and it was not thought the least odd if somebody was found reading the Apology of Socrates (in a translation) out of school hours, though it had nothing to do with class-work, or that I treasured a piece of white marble which my sister Nellie on a foreign tour had picked up on the Acropolis.

  The real interest of life centred in “the Alley,” a passage running above a couple of classrooms in the school buildings, out of which on each side opened minute studies inhabited by sixth-form in-college boys. Some of these were double studies shared by two occupants, but most were single; inviolable castles if the owner chose to shut the door. Inside there was room for a table, a hanging bookcase, and perhaps three chairs if you sat close; but who would dream of measuring Paradise by cubic contents? Never surely was there a more harmonious democracy, and it was seldom that doors were shut; the inhabitants, unless tied to their books, drifted up and down and round and round like excited bubbles in some loquacious backwater. Within the limits of “good form” every freedom of action and opinion was allowed, and those limits were really very reasonable ones. It must not be supposed that “good form” was ever discussed at all: it was merely the unwritten, unspoken code, which held things together, and undoubtedly the gravest offense against it was a hint of condescension or superiority. If you were so fortunate as to get into the school fifteen or achieve any distinction, “the Alley” pooled the credit, and woe be to any who showed “side” to the Alleyites. If you liked (hardly anybody did) to be extremely neat in dress, to get yourself up to kill, to wear buttonholes, you were perfectly at liberty to do so; but if you showed the least “swank” over your rosebud, the witnesses of your enormity would probably stroll thoughtfully away and return embellished with dandelions and groundsel. That was sarcasm, popularly called “sarc,” and was a weapon ruthlessly employed towards the superior person. No one could stand a conspiracy of “sarc” for long: it was better to mend your ways and reduce your swollen head. Only one member of the Alley was ever known to resist a continual course of “sarc,” and he, poor fellow, was goaded by the shafts of love, for he adored to distraction one of the masters’ daughters who appeared unaware of his existence. This was unusual conduct, but he was at liberty to squander emotion on her if he wished; what roused the Alley to arms, so that they loaded themselves with “sarc,” as with hand grenades, was that he affected to despise all who were not enslaved by some pretty-faced maiden. Then, as was right, he found hairpins mysteriously appearing on his carpet, and heard his Christian name called in faint girlish falsetto from a neighbouring study, and discovered notes with passionate declarations of love and a wealth of suggestive allusions that I would no longer “pollewt” my pen with describing nestling in his coat-pocket. But such was the innate depravity of his amorous heart that he really didn’t seem to mind the most withering “sarc.”... Games were not compulsory in the sixth, and in consequence, though athletes were in the majority, athleticism was no longer automatic, and now a boy would suffer no loss of esteem, or offend any sense of decency, if he chose not to play any game whatever. A wide tolerance for your fellows was the first lesson of the Alley; liberty, equality, and fraternity were its admirable guides to life.

  Next year, when, by another intervention of Providence, I suddenly found myself head of my house, with a magnificent apartment next the bathroom for my habitation, the snowstorm of scholarship examinations burst over me. For a suitable inducement in the shape of a scholarship or exhibition, I was prepared to go to New, Magdalen, or Worcester at Oxford, or to King’s College, Cambridge; but not a single one of these ancient (or shall we say antiquated?) seats of learning would, after examining me, put their hands in their pockets in order to secure me. I was very busy at the time, for I was editing The Marlburian and conducting the school “Penny Readings,” and playing football for them and rackets, and not being able to find time for everything I let my school-work slide altogether and, when the depressing results came out, bore failure with admirable fortitude. In other words, I did not care at all; if anything, I was rather pleased, because I began dimly to conceive the possibility of being allowed to stop at school for an extra year, whereas I should normally have left in the summer. But Marlborough was now to me the most amiable of dwellings; there were friends there whom I could not bear the thought of parting with; there were schemes that I could not bear to leave unfulfilled, and I directed all the ingenuity of which I was capable to secure my remaining here for an unheard-of year longer. From being resigned to failure I passed, as my plans matured, into being enraptured with it. A false step, a misplaced interview, might spell ruin, and after much thought I went to the headmaster with a homily all about myself. It was clear that I had not attained a decent standard of scholarship yet; surely my coming years at the University would be more profitable if I was better prepared to take advantage of them? My father was bent on my having a career of some distinction there, and would not he be far more likely to find his ambitions for me realized if I made there the better start that another year at school would give me? Another year now of undiluted classics....

  This scheme enlisted his sympathy, and he said he would talk to my house-master about it, who might not, however, want to keep me in such august seniority. But as to that I had no doubt whatever, for this gentleman had only just come to the house, and his seat in the saddle was at present remarkably unce
rtain. He used to ask members of the sixth, and in especial the head of the house, to go the rounds for him when it was the hour for him to parade the dormitories at night; he would do anything to shirk disciplinary contact if a senior member of the house could accomplish this for him. No senior member of the house felt the slightest nervousness at what so terrified the house-master: we visited the dormitories, sat on a bed here and there, talking to friends, helped a straggler who had not finished a construing lesson for the morning, and eventually went back to the house-master’s room to say good night and report that all was well. Then he gave you a slice of cake, and tried to conceal his pipe, and hoped that nobody in the house smoked (which, as a matter of fact, they didn’t), and everything was very pleasant and comfortable. The house was behaving quite well, because prefects and senior boys had it well in hand; but if I left, my successor as head of the house was bound to be a very mild, spectacled youth, and, without conceit, I felt sure that my house-master would prefer to keep me, who during this last year had managed it quite nicely for him. His attitude came off according to plan, and we had quite an affecting interview.

  Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and I got both him and the headmaster to write to my father urging him to allow me to stop another year, not only for my own good (interview A), but for the well-being of the house (interview B). The double appeal was successful: it was settled that I should stay for another year, and then go up to King’s College, Cambridge. As I would be over nineteen when the next scholarship examination came round, I was ineligible on account of advanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next vexing my contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm on the sunny slopes of antiquity. I had no notion of using this extra year of life (for so it appeared then) for idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at subjects that would eventually “tell.” I meant also, with a suspicion of priggishness, to make the house streak a meteor-like path across the starry sky of school. We were going to be a model of enlightenment (this was the ambition); we were to win the racket house-cup, and the fives cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, and the singing cup (for, like the Meistersingers, every house competed in singing), and two vocal quartettes, triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup. There it was — forty boys were to be drilled into winning every event of this immense pentathlon. A sixth cup, possibly within the range, was the cricket cup; but in the matter of cricket the house generally was no more than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five cups seemed within the limits of probable achievement, and who knew but that a breezy eleven, rather ignorant of cricket, except for the presence of the best left-hand bowler in the school, might not effect some incredible miracle? Never has anybody’s head been so stuffed full of plans as was mine when I went back a year later than was reasonable for this series of inconceivable excitements.

  The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. We had already been great friends for many terms, and now this friendship ripened into a unique alliance; from morning till night we were together, and seethed in projects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport or industry in which we were not associated. No matter came up within the jurisdiction of either of us in which each did not consult the other. He was going up for a classical scholarship at King’s, Cambridge, for we had quite settled not to have done with each other when school was over. I had to get to learn some classics somehow, and so together we concocted the most delightful plan, namely, that we should neither of us do any French, mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, devoting ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. The headmaster most sensibly saw and sanctioned our point, and consequently we had a whole holiday one day a week, and on two other days only one hour in school. For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, that browsing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me precisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had the flame spread to the language. That for me had always smouldered and smoked under the damp of grammar and accents; now, when I could learn as I chose, it flared up. Prosody and inflexions, moods and cases, all that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be learned by rule; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me merely by incessantly coming across examples of them, and I began to learn under the tuition of admiration. The same thrilled interest invaded Latin also, and it was no longer what could be made of the languages in English that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. Such study did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it gave me what was of much greater value to one who did not mean to spend his life in editing school-books, namely, an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language and joy in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic standpoint it added the stimulus which enabled me not to remain at Cambridge such a hopeless dunce at classics as I had hitherto always been. All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.... With that illumination a great light shone on English also: in the galloping race of composition at home I, at any rate, had much preferred to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into the sea of English literature, reading fast, reading carelessly, but reading rapturously. I bought the six-volume edition of Browning out of the money I won over school-fives, which should have been devoted to the purchase of a silver cup; a successful competition in rackets landed the works of Dickens, and in the hours when I should naturally have done mathematics and French and history, these shared with Juvenal and Aristophanes the honey of the flying minutes. Then came the need to imitate which always besets the budding author, and if you searched in the proper pages of The Marlburian you would surely disinter some specimens that aimed at Addison and stanzas which could never have found their printer, had there not been in my study a well-thumbed copy of Tennyson’s early lyrics.

  There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: four of us were joint editors, producers, and proprietors of that school paper. Who the two others were I have no idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote the greater part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he, and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of its four editors. Domestically he knew something about printing and pulls and proofs, which had escaped the experience of his friend and the family printing press, and that year The Marlburian, as I hope it is now, was a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished tradesman, paid the printing bills, audited the accounts, and flowed back to his collaborators a Pactolus of large silver pieces. We wrote indignant letters signed “A Parent,” and answered them with withering rejoinders signed “Another Parent”; we invented abuses, and firmly denied them; we cut down the habitual drowsy accounts of house matches to the smallest paragraphs and spread a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that football was the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a fragment of “The Princess” was dug up and edited and amended by Dry-as-Dust; or recommended the school generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the football captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it along the road, in order to enliven the stupid act of purposeless running. In this latter point we set the example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops down the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the staff of masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, going out for a run with our hoops, passed the open door of a class-room at an hour when the lower school was at work, on which a demented master sent out two junior boys with orders to capture the hoops and bring them in to him. Now, there was nothing immoral about hoops, nor was there any school rule that forb
ade their employment, and so we went very briskly along down the Bath road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, and when they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. They panted up, and said they had been told to take away the hoops and bring them back to Mr. Sharpe, and so, very politely, we said, “Come and take them.” Naturally they could make no serious attempt to take away the hoops of the head of the school and the captain of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little conversation, we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the hoops of two big boys who happened to choose to bowl hoops? We soon got tired of the habit, but it was great fun to write indignant letters to The Marlburian about hoops signed “Magister,” and scathing replies signed “Discipulus.” It made excellent selling stuff for the paper, and boys who had never dreamed of buying a Marlburian before put their threepence down with a spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that there was a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of “sarc” in it. There were real letters as well from dignified Old Marlburians, beginning “Has it come to this?”...