Part 8

“Good old Clytemnestra! I’m better now, thank you, after my breakfast, and it’s ‘The Sorrows of Death’ this afternoon. I shall go to chapel again.”

Reggie lit a pipe, and picked out the first few bars on the piano.

“The watchman was a tiresome sort of man to have about,” he said. “When they asked him if it was nearly morning, he only said, ‘Though the morning will come, the night will come also.’ Of course they knew that already, and besides it wasn’t the question. I should have dismissed him on the spot. So the soprano has to tell them, which he does on the top A mainly.”

“When I was a child I could sing the upper upper Z,” said the Babe fatuously. “Then my voice broke, and the moral is ‘Deeper and deeper yet.’ Don’t rag: I apologise.”

Ealing finished breakfast last, and strolled across to the window.

“It’s a heavenly morning,” he said. “Let’s go out. We needn’t go far.”

“I will walk no further than the King’s field,” said the Babe.

“Very well, and we can sit outside the pavilion. I’m lunching out at half-past one.”

“Meals do run together so on Sunday. Sunday is really one long attack of confluent mastication,” said the Babe. “It’s a pity one can’t take them simultaneously.”

Though November had already begun, the air was deliciously warm and mild, and had it not been for the fast yellowing trees, one would have guessed it to be May. But there was a shouting wind overhead, which stripped off the leaves by hundreds and blew the rooks about the sky. Already the tops of the trees were bare, and the nests of last spring swung empty and half ruined high up among the forks of the branches. During the last week a good deal of rain had fallen, and the Cam was swirling down, yellow and turbid. The willow by the river was already quite bare, and its thin feathery branches lashed themselves against the stone coping of the bridge.

They went through the Fellows’ gardens, for Reggie by some means had got hold of a key; there a few bushes of draggled Michaelmas daisies were making pretence that the summer was not quite dead yet, but they only succeeded in calling attention to the long, desolate beds. The grass was growing rank and matted under the autumn rains, and little eddies of leaves had drifted up against the wires of the disused croquet-hoops. But the day itself seemed stolen from off the lap of spring, and two thrushes were singing in the bushes after an excellent breakfast of succulent worms.

“We play you to-morrow at Rugger,” remarked the Babe as they walked across the field, “and we play on this ground. It’s sticky enough, and I shall vex the soul of the half opposite me, because I like a sticky ground, and he is certain not to. In fact,” said he confidently, “I purpose to get two tries off my own bat, and generally to sit on this royal and ancient foundation.”

“The Babe has never yet been called modest,” said Ealing.

“If I have, I am not aware of it,” said the Babe.

“We’ve got three blues,” remarked Reggie.

“I am delighted to hear it,” said the Babe. “You will need them all. And you may tell our mutual friend Hargreave that if he attempts to collar me round the ancles again, I shall make no efforts whatever to avoid kicking him in the face. He did it last time we played you, and I spoke to him about it more in sorrow than in anger.”

“Upon which the referee warned you for using sorrowful language.”

“He did take that liberty,” conceded the Babe. “Let’s sit down outside the pavilion. I wish we could kick about. The Sabbath is made for man, and so is Sunday, and so are footballs.”

“But on Sunday the pavilion is locked up by man, and the footballs put inside.”

“It appears so. English people take Sunday too seriously, just as they take everything else, except me.”

“Anyhow, Stewart says you are a man of the world,” said Ealing.

“He does, and who are we to contradict him? Good Lord, there’s one o’clock striking. I must go home. There’s somebody coming to lunch at half-past. Reggie, get me a ticket for King’s this afternoon, will you?”

XIII.--KING’S CHAPEL.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory. SHELLEY.

Reggie and the Babe got into chapel just after the voluntary had begun, and slow soft notes came floating drowsily down from the echoes in the roof. The chapel and ante-chapel were both full, and from the door in the dim, mellow half-darkness, a sea of heads stretched up to the black wooden screen, through which streamed the light from the chapel itself. In the roof one could just see the delicate fan-shaped lines of vaulting springing across like lotus leaves from wall to wall, and the windows on the south side gleamed with dark, rich colour from the sky already turning red with the southwestern setting sun. As they went up the ante-chapel the Babe saw a seat still unoccupied, and preferred stopping there to going into the chapel.

Reggie’s seat was just east of the choir opposite to the window representing Christ standing in the garden after the resurrection. To the right kneels Mary Magdalene gaudily dressed, just having turned and seeing that he was not, as she supposed, only the gardener. To the left rises a green hill, on the top of which, below a row of brown, ragged rocks, stands the empty tomb, with the women round it. By a quaint but curiously felicitous idea of the artist, the figure of Christ is holding a spade in his hand, as if to give colour to Mary’s mistake. His face is Divine, but graciously human, and he waits for the recognition.

The whole place had an air of tranquil repose, of remoteness from worldliness, hurry, and unprofitable strivings that perhaps has a certain value, which is not necessarily diminished because it is impossible to account for it statistically or categorically. There is something in spacious grey buildings and perfect Gothic architecture, shared too by broad grass lawns and studious, quiet places and uneventful lives, that cannot be altogether left out of the reckoning when one adds up the total value of a University as compared with a modern endowed plan of education, or the admirable schemes of University extension.

And the choir which walked slowly up the aisle into their places, though composed of ordinary little boys, lay clerks, and undergraduates, somehow brought themselves into harmony with it. On week days the little boys no doubt were entirely human, and probably concealed surreptitious sweet stuff in their pockets; the lay clerks wore bowler hats and tail coats, and belonged to the most unprepossessing class which England produces, and the undergraduates were only undergraduates. But for the time they were part of a wonderful idea, and were performing the office set apart for them by a royal founder.

The last echo from the roof died away, and the service began, and though Reggie was not conscious of attending very closely to it, he was still aware of the good and kindly atmosphere about him, an atmosphere which soothed and quieted, and drove the thoughts inward. He had often felt it before, on other winter afternoons in chapel, and as far as he knew, for he did not consciously think about it, it had made no difference to him. But as no impression is without its effects, we must presume that it had made a difference to him, though he had not been aware of it.

Not long before, the organ had been repaired, and in great part renewed, and it was worthy of its surroundings and its appearance. Golden sheaves of pipes gleamed out between the dark wooden case, and on top of the two turrets looking west, stood two great angels with brazen trumpets to their mouths, and when the “tuba” speaks, one cannot help imagining that it is their trumpets which are sounding. To-day “The Lord thundered out of heaven,” and one could think that the air for a moment grew thick with sound, which increased till it shattered the growing darkness, splitting it with lightning made audible.

By the end of the Psalms it had grown quite dark outside, and the windows showed black between the delicate tracery. From the lectern came the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, “of the watcher and the Holy One,” and afterwards of the Holy One who watched alone among the olives in the Garden of Gethsemane, a king, not of Babylon, but of the whole earth, who had not where to lay his head.

The stalls and sub-stalls were all full of members of the college, in surplices, but the black crowd beyond stretched up to the steps of the altar, and when the three bars of introduction to the solo began, every one stood up. Mendelssohn, so often only correct, so often ruined by his fatal prettiness, has here struck the right note, full and firm. Even Reggie ceased to think of the evasiveness of the watchman, and only listened, till the repeated call of the minor died away into a long pause before the soprano answered, and the choir took up the full chorus.

Outside in the ante-chapel, though only for a little while, the Babe ceased from his customary futility of thought, and the slow opening of the carved wooden doors in the screen, and the drawing of the crimson curtain, at the end of service, still found him meditative.

As the choir came out, framed in a long shaft of light, the organ was played quietly, and then paused for a moment, while a great pedal note made the air shake and quiver in sensation rather than sound. Then the full organ burst out with the _Occasional Overture_, as the congregation from the chapel streamed out after the members of the college. The first movement marched, and marching marshalled whole armies of sound, which stood waiting while the second rippled and laughed and sang with all the breezes of heaven behind it, and the third dwelt dreamily on what had gone, and thought of what was to come.

Then in the last movement, battalion after battalion of major chords, from choir and swell and great organ, grew and multiplied in all their forces, the flutes and piccolos, the twelfths and fifteenths as flying squadrons on the wings, and the diapasons the lords of sound in the centre, an exceeding great army. Then at the second repeat the “tuba” woke in the “huge house of sounds,” and the thing was complete, a fixed star for ever in the heavens of harmony.

XIV.--A VARIETY ENTERTAINMENT.

In truth I know of noone so adaptable. OLD PLAY.

That evening the Babe dined as a guest with the T.A.F. (which means Twice A Fortnight, and is a synonym for O.A.W. or Once A Week, and implies a frankly purposeless and purely social club consisting of about a dozen members, chiefly undergraduates, who dined together every Sunday night) and spent a pleasant evening of innocent mirth and a little music. After dinner one member sang some Scotch songs in a baritone voice, another played the Pilgrim’s March in _Tannhäuser_ exceedingly badly, omitting the Venus motif, but repeating the Chorus in a palpitating manner in the higher octave, to make up for it, and two others recalled to their minds the _Occasional Overture_ which had been played in chapel that afternoon. A fifth imitated in the most natural and life-like manner the speech and manners of a don of the college, three or four read books gloomily in corners, being of a more serious turn of mind, and the wilder section of the party pressed the Babe to give them a little skirt-dancing, which he very properly refused to do, feeling justly enough that it would not be in keeping with the general character of the proceedings. Later he very unwisely offered to play picquet with anybody, a proposition which was received in awkward silence, and hurriedly covered with a buzz of conversation. Another guest, however, contributed to the harmony of the evening by describing at great length, the state of the lower classes in Russia, Germany, Austria, and Turkey in Asia, with realistic and revolting details. By degrees the other members of the party left their books and their music, and sat round him in enthusiastic silence. For so stirring a man, so thought the Babe, there was no excuse and no hope, for he was not less than thirty years old, and should have known better. Then he reverted, also at length, to the vastly superior conditions of our own agricultural labourers and proceeded, still monologising, by easy transitions, to the prospect of an European war. On this point his prophecies were most patriotic, and went perfectly to the tune of “Rule Britannia,” and so afforded everyone present the greatest satisfaction when they reflected that they were Englishmen. Metaphorically speaking he slapped them on the back, and filled them full of roast beef and racial admiration. All his sentiments were worthy of the highest praise, and it may only have been the personality of the speaker that inspired the Babe with such speechless horror. He was just describing the apparatus for shooting torpedoes from submerged tubes on the _Majestic_, which, in some obscure manner the passport of Prince Niktivoffski, which he happened to have about him, had enabled him to inspect, and was saying that no other nation had got anything of the kind and that they would blow all other navies of the world into a million of atoms in a moment of time, when the breaking point came for the Babe, and he rose and said good-night.

He had not got more than half way across the court, when he heard other sounds of revelry from some rooms on the right, belonging as he knew to a don of his acquaintance, who was widely and justly famed for his Sunday evenings at home, and the pleasure-seeking Babe determined to go in for a few minutes, for like the rest of the University, he had a standing invitation to come as often as he could. He found himself in a luxuriously furnished room, quite full of people and of mixed tobacco smoke. His host greeted him effusively, and gave him to understand that his cup of happiness was now quite full.

The gathering was meant to be, and succeeded in being, altogether heterogeneous, and though eminently respectable, had a curious but unmistakable flavour of ultra-Bohemianism about it. Mr. Swotcham was sitting on the sofa near the fire talking excitedly to two shaggy individuals, whom the Babe rightly guessed to be members of the club, which he had libellously informed the world was the modern representative of the Hell-fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. He smiled benignantly at Swotcham, and as he turned away caught the words “standpoint of determinism.” He had not the slightest idea what they meant, but they sounded bad. By the table, nibbling biscuits and helping themselves to tea out of a brass Russian samovar, were standing three little men, with little moustaches, talking earnestly together, whose only characteristic seemed to be entire ineffectiveness. Further on a highly-coloured Italian was expressing fervid thoughts in bad English, to two young gentlemen who wore their hair in a great frizzled tuft over their foreheads. This latter type was familiar to the Babe, and afforded him almost infinite delight; it went to the stalls in the theatre, where, dressed in Norfolk jackets, it talked together in dark allusiveness of music-hall _artistes_. It might also be seen in the streets, in a very short and ragged gown, a broken-backed cap with the cardboard showing at the edges, not the result of age, but of fell and evil design, smoking pipes. It gave the world to understand that it was the very devil of a type, but the world, with a charity that is rare, considered that though odious, it was not morally so black as its self-depreciation led it to paint itself.

Arundel prints hung on the walls, and somehow looked as incongruous there as Mrs. Chant at a music-hall, for the whole atmosphere was quite extraordinarily secular. Against the wall stood three or four large bookcases, on the top of which were arranged several admirable reproductions of antique bronzes and marbles. In one corner on the top of a scagliola pedestal stood the bust of the young Augustus in marble, and close to him a bronze Narcissus leaned and held up a listening finger. On each side of the clock on the mantel-piece was a nude figure of a youth in bronze, and Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat looked down at them in mild surprise and seemed to be wondering to what sort of a place she had come. From a door on the right came the sounds of the slow movement of Beethoven’s _Sonata Pathétique_, arranged not as the composer mean it to be played, but for a cello, a violin and a piano; the piano was a little ahead, but the violin and cello which were running neck to neck, caught up to it in the scherzo that followed, and they all finished up amid indescribable indifference on the part of all present, a dead heat. Everyone talked loudly during the performance, and took not the slightest notice when it was over, with the exception of the genial host, who patted all three executants on the back and said “Awfully jolly, Charlie,” to the cellist. The duty of a good host, without doubt, is to make everybody talk, and certainly the musicians and Mr. Waddilove between them succeeded to admiration. The latter was as ubiquitous and as deft as Mr. Maskelyne’s hands when he is spinning plates, now giving a touch to the discussion on the standpoint of determinism, now spurring the Italian on to fresh deeds of violence towards the Queen’s English, now telling the Babe how he too, in his earlier years, once acted Clytemnestra with unparalleled success, and now persuading Charlie to give him another taste of his cello. In fact, the only group he did not speak to was that of the three earnest biscuit-nibblers, who had been joined by a fourth, and who appeared to be of no consequence whatever, as indeed they were not.

Beyond the room where the music was going on, lay another smaller one, entirely lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling. In one corner stood a screen, and the Babe having the curiosity to peep over it, saw behind, Mr. Waddilove’s bed, presided over by a bronze reproduction of the head of “Sleep” from the British Museum. On the table stood a liqueur decanter containing a pale pink fluid of which the Babe took a glass. It reminded him vaguely of almonds and orange peel dissolved in cherry blossom scent, and Mr. Waddilove entering at the moment told him it was made exclusively on the estate of Count Zamboletto near Taormina in Sicily, where he himself had often stayed.

Fresh arrivals kept streaming in; among them two or three members of the T.A.F., who wandered about looking as if they did not know why they had come, including the performer of the overture to _Tannhaüser_, who sat down at the piano, without being asked, and did it again. He appeared to rouse little or no enthusiasm, and left immediately afterwards.

In the music-room the President of the Union had got hold of Mr. Waddilove for a moment, and was discussing the sanitary arrangements of the Union with him, and particularly whether it was possible to stop the thefts of nail-scissors which went on so extensively in the lavatory, and which for no explicable reason, he was inclined to hold the Indians responsible for. He thought that perhaps they collected them, in order to barter with them among savage tribes when they went home. Mr. Waddilove seemed to take but a faint interest in these petty larcenies, but humourously suggested that they should employ some lady bicyclists from Slater’s detective agency to see if they could catch the thieves. That failing, he suggested that they should try chaining the scissors to the table or to the looking-glass, after the manner of Bibles in old churches. Close beside them stood the Senior Wrangler of the last year, talking Psychical Research with the sub-organist of Trinity. An archdeacon, who looked like a sheep that had gone very badly astray, was turning over the pages of Max Nordau’s _Degeneration_, and close to him an undergraduate, with eyebrows meeting over his nose and the face of a truculent rabbit, was demonstrating the absurdity of the Christian Faith to two frightened Freshmen, who seemed willing to agree to anything he might suggest. As the Babe passed, he heard the words “so-called Resurrection,” and his smile grew a shade more seraphic.

The Babe wandered back to the outer room, where the discussion on the standpoint of determinism or some similar subject was still proceeding shrilly. Mr. Swotcham for the moment had the ear of the house, and he was speaking rapidly and excitedly in a sort of cracked treble voice, and apparently endeavouring to tie his fingers into hard knots. They had been joined by three more disputants whom the Babe conjectured to be in the running for the Apostles, for the other three evidently regarded them as promising amateurs rather than professionals.

He made his way across to the window, where he saw Mr. Stewart sitting with a somewhat isolated air.

“This is a very interesting sight, Babe,” he said, “and I was looking out for someone to whom I could talk about it. I feel a trifle like St. Anthony in the desert, with all sorts of half-understood temptations beckoning to me. On one side I hear the siren voice of philosophy calling me to leave the world, and live in the realms of pure theory; on the other side of the table stand three joyous Freshmen in the heyday of youth and animal spirits drinking whisky and water, and a fourth, with a temerity which I envy, a curious pink liqueur; on the right you may observe two members of the Footlights Club, who are slaves, so they tell each other, to their divine mistress, Art, to whom they offer sacrificial burlesques twice a year. An archdeacon, with the face of a mediæval saint from a painted glass window, has just gone through into the next room, where he will hear a pupil of mine preaching atheism--”

“I heard someone just now allude to the ‘so-called Resurrection.’”

“The chances are a thousand to one that that was he,” said Stewart. “Just behind you an Italian is singing the joys of the back streets of Naples to two tuft-haired absurdities, who are sighing to see a little ‘life.’ Meantime, through the open door I can hear our sub-organist playing the overture to _Parsifal_. He thinks that if he goes on long enough and plays loud enough the conversation will get a little lower. He is wrong. The louder he plays, the louder will everybody talk. In fact he is laying up for them all a store of sore throats to-morrow morning. And our host, whose moral digestion most surely resembles that of an ostrich, turns from one to another, and is appropriate to all. There was also a member of the Upper House here just now, but he did not stop. He had mistaken the character of the entertainment and had come in evening clothes like you, but unlike you had brought his wife décolletée. His entry was pompous, his exit precipitous. As for you, I have long ceased to be surprised at anything you do. But do tell me why you are here?”

The Babe looked round appreciatively.

“I don’t know, I’m sure. I came here because I had been dining at the T.A.F. in King’s.”

“Ah, purely antidotal,” said Mr. Stewart.

“Not consciously; and I stopped, I suppose, because it amused me. Surely that is a very good reason.”