THE whole family went that summer holiday to the Lakes, where my father had taken the Rectory of Easedale, and in that not very commodious house five children, two parents and Beth all managed to shelter themselves from the everlasting rain that deluged those revolting regions. Had not steep muddy hills separated one lake from another, I verily believe that the Lakes must have become one sheet of mournful water with a few Pikes and Ghylls sticking up like Mount Ararat on another occasion that can scarcely have been more rainy. There was fishing to be had, but no fish: you might as well have fished in the rapids of Niagara as cast a fly on the streams, while the lakes themselves are noted for their depths of barren water. Out we used to go in mackintoshes, and back we came in mackintoshes, and I cannot suppose that thirty years later the Rectory at Easedale can have lost its smell of wet india-rubber and drying homespuns. As a special contribution to the general discomfort Nellie discovered and developed a grand sort of ailment called “pleurodynia,” which I suppose is the result of never being dry, and I capped that by cultivating the most orange-coloured jaundice ever seen, and continued being violently sick when you would have thought there was nothing to be sick with.

But these atrocious tempests gave my father unlimited scope for what his irreverent family called “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.” Best of all situations in the holidays he loved to have his entire family sitting close round him busy, silent and slightly unreal to their own sense, while he “did” his Cyprian. There he sat with his books and papers in front of him, at the end of a table in a smallish room, with all of us sitting there, each with his book, speaking very rarely and very quietly, so as not to disturb him, and everybody, alas, except him, slightly constrained. In these holidays, Hugh, owing to inveterate idleness at Eton (where, beating me, he had got a scholarship), had a tutor to whom he paid only the very slightest attention, and on these evenings he would have some piece of Horace to prepare for next day, and would work at it for a little, and then drop his dictionary with a loud slap on the floor. Soon he would begin to fidget, and then catch sight of Arthur reading, and something in his expression would amuse him. He drew nearer him a piece of sermon paper which Nellie’s pen was busy devouring on behalf of the next Saturday Magazine, and began making a caricature. At the same moment perhaps I would observe below lowered eyelids that Arthur was drawing me, and so I began to draw my mother, and Nellie catching the infection, began to draw Maggie. (If you gave her pulled-back hair and a tall forehead, the family would easily recognize it.) And then perhaps my father, pausing in his work, would see Hugh with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth (for that is the posture in which you can draw best) and say:

“Dear boy, have you finished your preparation for to-morrow? What are you doing?”

Hugh would allow he hadn’t quite finished his preparation, not having begun it, and my father would look at his drawing, and his mouth, the most beautiful that ever man had, would uncurl, until perhaps he threw back his head and laughed with that intense merriment that was so infectious. Possibly he might not be amused, and a little grave rebuke followed; he returned to his Cyprian and we all sat quiet again. But the criticism of the family was that this was “Papa’s game, and he made the rules.” For he, unable to get on with his Cyprian, or arriving at the end of a bit of work, would interrupt at will the mumness which was imposed on his behalf. But if Maggie or I finished what we were doing, we might not make general conversation.... And then the door would open, and Beth looked in, and said, “Eh, it’s dressing-time,” and her lovely old face would grow alight with love when she looked on my mother, her child of the elder family, and five more of her children of the second generation. From my father there would always be a delicious word of welcome for her, and he would say:

“Beth, you’re interrupting us all. Go away. Your watch is wrong.”

“Nay, sir, it isn’t,” said Beth—she always said “sir” to him, whatever his title was—“It’s gone half-past seven.” And she beamed and nodded, perfectly at ease in this solemn assembly. With her (who counted of course as one of it) there were eight in that little stuffy room, where we fidgeted and sat and read. And what would not I give, who with one other alone survive from those evenings, to have an hour of them again, in that inconvenient proximity, surrounded by the huge love of a family so devoted and critical of each other, with the two amongst them whom nobody criticized, my mother with her spectacles on her forehead, and Beth looking in at the door?

Then jaundice descended on me like the blur of a London fog, and through the depression of it, there seemed no ray that could penetrate. But my mother managed to effect that entry, as of course she always would, and she came back one dripping afternoon from Grasmere, with a packet in her hand.

“As it’s all so hopeless,” she said, “I bought some lead soldiers. Oh, do let us have a battle.”

She poured a torrent of these metal warriors on to a table by my bed. There were cannons with springs that shot out peas, and battalions of infantry, and troops of cavalry. It was she, you must understand, who wanted to play soldiers, and to a jaundiced cynic of twenty that necessarily was quite irresistible. Who could have resisted a mother who asked you at her age to play soldiers? We shot down regiments at a time, for when you enfilade a line of lead soldiers with a pea, if you hit the end man, he topples against the next one, and the next against the next, till there are none left standing. The peas flew about the room, rattled against washing-basins and tapped at the window-panes, and I felt much better. Then we bombarded Beth who came to know if I wouldn’t like some dinner, and as I wouldn’t, it was time to go to sleep.

“A nice little bit of beef,” began Beth.

“If you say beef again, I shall be sick,” said the invalid.

“Nay, you won’t,” said Beth hopefully.

Then to my mother:

“Eh, dear, do go and dress,” she said, “or you’ll keep everybody waiting.”

My mother shot a final pea.

“I won’t be the conventional mother,” she said, “and smooth your pillow for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoe after dinner to see if you’re asleep. But, my darling, I know you’ll be better to-morrow! Won’t you?”

King’s College, Cambridge, whither my father accompanied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years previously, become an open College; for centuries before that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it followed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he obtained in due rotation, without any further examination, a King’s scholarship, when he went up to the University. After that, often while he was still an undergraduate, he became a fellow of King’s, and for the rest of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year provided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent endowment for the encouragement of learning and the education of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachronisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket-boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parliament.

The founder’s idea had been that from year to year the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fineness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely suffered from them. A Fellow of King’s, thus supported for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compulsion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or £400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who might or might not, according to their own inclination, work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his rooms till dusk began to fall: then he would totter, stick in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to himself, “Ah, damn you, you haven’t got me yet!” After this edifying excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no more till dusk next day. All his life since the age of twelve or so, the bounty of Henry VI had supported him, and until the worms finally did “get” him, nothing could deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the intention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be conjectured from the list of the fellows, which from first to last contains no name of the slightest eminence or distinction as a scholar, except that of the late Walter Headlam, who was not an Etonian.

The reconstruction of King’s took place some years before I went up, and no more of these life-fellows were appointed. Henceforth fellowships expired at the end (I think) of six years, though they could be prolonged if the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was engaged in such research as made it proper that his term should be extended. But such men as were already life-fellows were not shorn of their fellowships, and whether or no they were resident, whether or not they were engaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held to be congruous to the intention of the founder, they were still entitled for life to their income, their commons, and dinner, and if they chose to reside in the college to a set of fellows’ rooms. At that time the college buildings would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and freshmen, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings outside college; but in spite of this certain life-fellows still clung to their privileges, and continued to retain sets of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings, which they never occupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic work in London, used to come up for a week or two at the end of the Christmas term, but for the rest of the year his rooms stood vacant, while two others, who to the best of my knowledge never appeared in Cambridge at all, had another set of rooms, which were used merely as guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of survivals such as the founder never contemplated was ancient and dusky in appearance, and never left King’s at all, though he took no part in the academic life of the place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupying himself otherwise with making faint wailings on a violin.... But a friend of mine and I chanced on the discovery that if you whistled as he crossed the court to chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause, proceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle would make him retrace his steps, and it was possible by continuing to whistle, to drive him back to his rooms. This was extremely interesting, but the cause baffled conjecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite seclusion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long believed to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with a leg of cold mutton on the sideboard and a table laid as for dinner, and was induced to play the violin at college concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder) he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared from these haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine that the founder contemplated that the head of the college should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes, though resident, was approaching or had already reached his ninetieth year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the Provost’s Lodge. I am sure I never set eyes on him at all; he took no part whatever in college business, as indeed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but there he had lingered on from year to year without a single thought of resignation entering his venerable head. Though totally past work, he was Provost of King’s and Provost of King’s he remained, a drone apparently imperishable.

Others, however, of these life-fellows justified themselves by a busy existence; there was the Vice-Provost, Augustus Austen Leigh, who performed all the presidential duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J. E. Nixon, Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to undergraduates, and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, who surely made up for these drones who abused the bounty of the founder, by his prodigious activities. In appearance he was the oddest of mortals, a little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows’ Garden, a black tail-coat, and boots of immense length, of which the toes pointed sharply upwards. He had only one hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial, covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only one eye, and that the right, but the other was marvellously sharp. He made a tennis-ball to nestle in the crook of his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his body flung it into the air and severely served it.

His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If it was obviously out of range he would say (running all his words into each other like impressions on blotting paper): “SurelythatsratherhighisthatonlyA?”... Then the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we started again. Where he found all these rounds and catches I cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have heard in Nixon’s room has never reached my ears again, nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended these meetings, who was acquainted with the following catch. It started Lento, and, under the strokes of the paper-knife quickened up to andante and allegro, and ended prestissimo possibile. The words ran thus, starting with a first tenor lead:

Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over “Order! Order!” grew louder and louder, until the whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and tried to find “I loved thee beautiful and kind.”

Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called “starting a hare.” He would advance some amazing

proposition, such as “Why shouldn’t we all—no, that wouldn’t do, but why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees in the morning, and work in the evening?” He argued about the most casual topic: if you said, “It’s a fine day,” he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something he was carrying, and said, “It all depends on what you mean by fine. If you mean sun and blue sky, granted; but why shouldn’t you call it fine if there are buckets of rain? It all depends what you mean by ‘fine.’ A fish now——”

“I meant an ordinary fine day,” began his bewildered guest.

“Very well: but I say ‘fish.’ I’m a fish and you’re a fish. To a fish probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, and there you are.”

There you were: long before anybody else Nixon had invented the art of preposterous conversation, which Mr. Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar Wilde. To Nixon it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a science, a product of definite reasoning. He would not change the subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes (often by himself), but would confidently blow on the cinders, expecting some unconjecturable Phoenix to arise from them.

By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar Browning, without mention of whom no adequate idea of Cambridge life in the late eighties and early nineties can possibly be arrived at. Though King’s was in large measure a college quite apart from the rest of the University, giving itself (so said the rest of the University) unwarrantable airs, Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler to designate as O.B. for he was never known otherwise) pervaded not King’s only, but the whole of Cambridge, with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and rotund youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really challenged by the most devout of his competitors, for who except O.B. at the age of forty-five or so, ever bought a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic frame in order to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the Duke of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir-presumptive to the English throne? I was still a junior at Marlborough when these Homeric events happened, but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking about the “awfully jolly” games of hockey he had with Prince Eddy.... Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, which he certainly did, affords a key to the intensity of his activities.

He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and English history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside his enmired tricycle to whom he said:

“Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha!”

“Charlie old boy,” with his face a-shine with smiles, gave the required push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I swooped and swerved along the road in order to go very slowly.

“Charlie is my gyp’s son,” he said. “Such a jolly boy. Thanks awfully, Charlie. Well, there I was, when the Grand Duke’s yacht came into Taormina. And, by the way, do you know the Maloja? The Crown-Princess of Germany came there one year when I was in the hotel, so I dressed myself like a Roman proconsul, in a white toga of bath towels, ha, ha, and—and—really these ruts are most annoying—and a laurel wreath, and went out to meet her Royal Highness. I had a retinue of four young men who were staying at the hotel as lictors, with axes and sticks, and I read a short address to her to welcome her, and we had lunch together, and played lawn-tennis and it was all awfully jolly and friendly and unconventional. Why aren’t we all natural, instead of being afraid of poor Mrs. Grundy, whose husband surely died so long ago? She has never married again, which shows she must be a most unpopular female. Most females, I notice, are so unpopular: they never know when they’re wanted, and their hearts are always bigger than their heads. Not of course your dear mother—those charming Lambeth garden parties—and dear Lady Salisbury. I saw the Queen when I was at Balmoral last year—my bootlace has come undone, so careless of Charlie not to notice it—and how hopelessly benighted is Cambridge altogether! Lord Acton came to stay with me the other day—I think my tricycle wants oiling—and dined with me at the High Table. Nixon was sitting on his other side, propounding conundrums about bed-makers, and hoping that he would sing glees with him. Ha! Ha! Every boy ought to realize his youth, instead of wasting his energies over elegiacs. When the Grand Duke came into Taormina——”

It is really impossible to render the variety of O.B.’s general conversation, of which the foregoing is but a dim reproduction. His performances, too (the expression of himself in deeds), were just as various, and yet everyone in Cambridge was aware that behind this garish behaviour there was a real, a forcible and a big personality. His performances chiefly expressed themselves in tricyclings and bathings, in lectures on English history, which nobody attended, and in At-Homes on Sunday evening, which everybody attended. He had a set of four rooms (the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open to anybody, and if you had said you wanted a bath in the middle of the party, O.B. would certainly have said, “Ha, ha! awfully jolly,” have given you a sponge and a towel and have come in to help. Next to that came his bedroom, lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, with a bronze reproduction of the Greek “Winged Sleep” over his bed; then, not a whit more public than these apartments came two big sitting-rooms, in one of which was a grand piano, and four small harmoniums of various tones, one flute-like, one more brazen in quality, and two faintly resembling wheezy and unripe violins. On these—each with its performer and a miniature score—O.B. and Bobby, and Dicky and Tommy would execute some deliberate quartette, or with the piano to keep them all moderately together would plunge with gay, foolhardy courage into the Schumann quintette. Never was there a more incredible sight (you could hardly believe you saw it) than that of O.B. pedalling away at this Obeophone (for thus this curious harmonium was aptly named) with his great body swaying to and fro and strange crooning sounds coming out of his classical mouth to reinforce the flutings of his melody, while Bobby and Dicky and Tommy, nimble-fingered members of the Cambridge Musical Society, sat with brows corrugated by their anxiety to keep in time with O.B. They never learned that they were attempting an impossibility, but followed him faint yet pursuing as he galloped along a few bars ahead, or suddenly slowed down so that they shot in front of him. At the conclusion he would pat them all on the back, and say, “Awfully jolly Brahms is, or was it Beethoven?” and proceed to sing, “Funiculi, funicula” himself.... Groups formed and reformed; here would be a couple of members of the secret and thoughtful society known as “The Apostles” with white careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing the ethical limits of Determinism; there the President of the Union playing noughts and crosses with a Cricket Blue; there an assembly of daring young men who tore their gowns, and took the board out of their caps, in order to present a more libertine and Bohemian appearance, when they conversed with the young lady in the tobacconist’s. Dons from King’s or other colleges fluttered in and out like moths, and the room grew ever thicker with the smoke of innumerable cigarettes. But O.B., however mixed and incongruous was the gathering, never lost his own hospitable identity in the crowd; waving bottles of curious hock he would spur on the pianist to fresh deeds of violence, making some contribution to the discussion on Determinism, and promise to speak at the next debate at the Union, as he wandered from room to room, bald and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good-humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordinary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.

A small college as King’s then was, splits up into far more sharply defined cliques than a large one, and it was not long before I found myself firmly attached to a small group consisting in the main of Etonians belonging either to King’s or Trinity. The younger fellows of the college mixed very democratically with undergraduates of all years, and the head of this vivid group was certainly Monty James, subsequently Provost of King’s and now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, and Lionel Ford, now headmaster of Harrow, both of them having lately taken their degrees, were of the company, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working for a degree in music, and a little later among junior members R. Carr Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We were all members of the Pitt Club, that delightful and unique institution where, to the end of your life, once being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members of a literary society called “The Chitchat,” in which on Saturday night each in rotation entertained the society at his rooms with an original paper on any subject as intellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup, anchovy toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, for physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went round too early, awful reverberations of sneezing from the unaccustomed punctuated the intellectual fare, and I remember (still with pain) reading a paper on Marlowe’s Faustus, during which embarrassing explosions unnerved me. I had reason to quote (at a very impressive stage of this essay) certain lines from that tragedy, which with stage directions came out as follows:

On another occasion a prominent philologist whose turn it was to regale us, found that he had not had leisure to write his paper on “Manners” and proposed to address us on the subject instead. He strode about the room gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearthrug, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away instead of his match, while he harangued us on this interesting ethical topic, with interspersed phrases of French and German, and odd English words like “cocksuredom.” As this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled down on “The Chitchat”; its decorous members bit their lips, and prudently refrained from looking each other in the face, and there were little stifled noises like hiccups or birds in bushes going about the room, and the sofa where three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then he diverged, via, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the ancient Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a practical illustration to throw himself into the attitude of Discobolus. At that precise moment, Dr. Cunningham of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a great deal, completely lost control of himself. Claret-cup spurted from his nose and mouth; I should not have thought a man could have so violently choked and laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to himself. That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round the entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. Cunningham, finding he could not stop laughing at all, seized his cap and gown and left the room with a rapid and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the open windows as he crossed the court....

But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, when in rotation, they dined in each other’s rooms. This institution (known as the “T.A.F.” or “Twice a Fortnight”) had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen, that brilliant and erratic genius, then in London, editing The Mirror and astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two later returned to Cambridge again, and, until his final and melancholy eclipse, diffused over everyone who came across him the beam of his intellect and personality. Of him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends met, so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty James. Intellectually (or perhaps Æsthetically) I, like many others, made an unconditional surrender to his tastes, and, with a strong prepossession already in that direction, I became convinced for the time—and the time was long—that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the keys of the heavenly kingdom of literature. When dinner at the T.A.F. was over, Monty James might be induced to read about the birthday-party of the Kenwigses, with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter on the reader’s part over Mr. Lillyvick’s glass of grog, cast it forth on to the hearth-rug. He almost made me dethrone Bach from his legitimate seat, and by a revolutionary movement place Handel there instead, so magnificent were the effects produced, when with him playing the bass, and me the treble from a pianoforte arrangement for two hands, we thundered forth the “Occasional Overture.” He was a superb mimic, and at the T.A.F. and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in which the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridiculous yet. And when on these Sunday evenings the Dickens reading, and the “Occasional Overture,” and some singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F. would go to O.B.’s “at home,” and mingle with inferior mortals.

Another society common to many members of the T.A.F. was the Decemviri Debating Society. To this, some time during my undergraduate days, I was elected, though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to belong to it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, then as now, invariably deprived me of coherent utterance, and a rich silence was all that I felt capable of contributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never attended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was that if any member absented himself for a term (or was it two?) from the debates, he should be deprived of the privileges of membership, I received one day a notice of the next debate, at which there was private business to be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion. Unjustifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to flight, and I was allowed to open another debate in the place of that already arranged for, and to make a speech to show reason why I should not be expelled. My motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a meeting of the Decemviri again.

I suppose it must have been that belated year of voluntary reading at Marlborough, which enabled me to win an exhibition at King’s at the end of my first term; after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid of all interest in classical subjects. There was not the smallest spur to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or lecturers: if you attended lectures and were duly marked off as present, you had conformed to the rite, but nothing you heard could conceivably stimulate your zeal. The classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we followed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War stood on a daÏs at the end of the lecture room, and indecently denuded his subject of any appeal to interest. He put his head on one side and said, “Then came Sphacteria: I don’t know what Sphodrias was about,” and so nobody knew what either Sphodrias or Mr. X—— was about. He looked over exercises in Greek prose as well: on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and received, for the only time, his warm approval. A piece of Greek prose, according to academic standards, appeared to be good, in proportion as it “brought in” quotations and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo English was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags and unusual words and crabbed constructions from the most obscure passages were supposed to constitute good Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee represented an example of dignified English. To quote from that immortal and neglected work, “Having said these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open them again. He became sotto voce for a few hours, and he went to God about 6 p.m.” As this sublime death-bed scene appears to the ordinary Englishman, so would the prose which Mr. X—— approved have appeared to the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles.... But he had been Senior Classic, and carried on the wonderful tradition, and in other respects was classical tutor and an eager but inefficient whist-player. Nixon, an equally traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. Any dawning of love for classical language receded, as far as I was concerned, into murk midnight again, and having temporarily justified my existence by winning an exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year and a half to follow more attractive studies. A year’s hard work on the approved Baboo lines, I calculated, would be sufficient to secure success in the Classical Tripos, which was the next event of any importance.

Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new University magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as myself was joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two or three years our senior, and some B.A. whose name I cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly drew the illustration on the cover of the Cambridge Fortnightly, which represented a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College Chapel. O.B. contributed a poem to it, so also did my brother Arthur, and Mr. Barry Pain sent us one of the best parodies in the language, called “The Poets at Tea,” in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously characteristic of themselves. He also tried to galvanize the Cambridge Fortnightly into life by one or more admirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson applied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant was clearly stillborn, and considering the extreme feebleness of most of its organs, I do not wonder that it was, after the lapse of a term or so, quite despaired of. It had really never lived: it had merely appeared. My share in the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was already too busy writing Sketches from Marlborough, which was duly and magnificently published within a year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be told that I had better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform my father of this literary adventure; then, when a local printer and publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, undertook its production, I thought he would consider it very odd that I had not told him of it before and so I did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached him, and he wrote me the most loving letter of remonstrance at my having kept it from him. There was no word of blame for this amateur expenditure of time and energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still felt that if he had known I was working at it, he certainly would have suggested that I might have been better occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I knew to what entrancing occupation I had really determined to devote my life, and though I might have made a better choice, I could not, my choice being really made, have been better occupied than in practising for it. The book in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part about it (of which the omens have been amply fulfilled) being the extreme facility with which it was produced.

Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of reverent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of King’s decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the organ, a “huge house of sounds” with walls of gilded pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on Sunday afternoons in the short days of winter would be nearly dark, but for the soft glow of the innumerable wax candles with which the choir was lit, flowing over the organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those Sunday afternoon services, there would still be a little light outside, though that would have faded altogether before service was over, and just opposite where I sat was the window that I love best in all the world. The Saviour has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress of sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She had been weeping and had heard behind her the question, “Woman, why weepest thou?” Her bereaved heart had answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener had said, “Mary.” It was then, in that window, that she knew him, and turning, she bowed herself to the ground, with one hand stretched out to him, and said, “Rabboni!” In the garden of the Resurrection He stood, with the flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spikenard, very precious, with which she had anointed them for his burial.... During the Psalms for the twenty-seventh evening of the month, when she who sowed in tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark against the faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candle-light spread like a luminous fog to the cells of the vaulting above. At the end of the service, the red curtain across the arch in the screen was drawn back, and you peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the night....

Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill of fare on the chapel door would bring you, a little before anthem time, into the nave, for Wesley’s “Wilderness” was soon to be sung. The choir, when service was going on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but the candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made visible the roof, and the black silhouettes of the trumpeting angels on the organ. Then the solo bass began: there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and the treble solo and chorus of the flight of sorrow and sighing. Perhaps you waited for the conclusion of inaudible prayers, on the chance that Dr. Mann would play a Bach-fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain had been drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries. There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the gamba on the swell started the melodious discussion, and its soliloquy provoked an answer in the same words but with another voice. The duet “thickened and broadened,” fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, and gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one keyboard, silent as yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. What the gamba had stated, the diapason now proclaimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, for what but the Tubas could so have imposed themselves and penetrated that immense and melodious rioting of sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four corners of the organ, “opened their mouths and drew in their breath,” and spoke through their celestial trumpets.

It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology the infinity of interests that interweaved themselves with these three undergraduate years, and the reader must sympathetically partake of a macedoine of memories, that were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had the emotional experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson double the part of Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and fell violently in love with her. Never surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, never did another actress make such music of the tale of the flowers she had gathered. No sculptor’s skill or whiteness of Pentelic marble ever approached the glory of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of joy I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving of lovely arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was no statue any more but the queen, living and moving again. I bought a photograph of her, carried it about with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover it, for he would not have cared much about this experience of mine. Not for nearly thirty years later did I meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated homage before her.

Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, as must needs be, of lesser magnitude, now that new constellations directed my voyagings, but, being granted an exeat of two nights in order to witness the opening of Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get half a day at my school. Already the old order had changed; the values were different, and even as I had once suspected, a few months had sufficed to do that. Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed and assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which was imperishably part of my personality: my very identity would have been something other than it was, had I not lived and grown up there. But many ties which had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I saw which were the closest of all, and they, just one or two of them, were as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still merry-eyed behind the pince-nez to which he had taken, and that of the friend who on the last day of term had sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He absented himself from an hour of morning-school, and met me, dishevelled with a night journey, at the station. As we passed through the town we bought rolls and sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, making breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, and for that hour it was as if the rind of the last months had been peeled off, and the old friendship glowed like the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little impression I had made on that shining shore was already washed by the advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a little higher up the beach, the sand-castles of others were growing tall and turreted under vigorous spades....