CHAPTER IX

OXFORD AND GERMANY

The time soon came when I had to go up for my first examination, and before it there was a period of intensive cramming. I had scores of teachers, and spent hour after hour taking private lessons in Latin, German, shorthand, and arithmetic. A great deal of this cramming was quite unnecessary, as it did not really touch the vital necessities of the examination. I read a great deal of German; all Mommsen, a great deal of French, and all Renan; but literary French and German were not what was needed; long lists of technical words were far more necessary. The clichés of political leader-writers; the German for a _belligerent_, and the French for a _Committee on Supply_; an accurate knowledge of where the manufacturing cities of England were situated, and the solution of problems about one tap filling a bath half again as quickly as another emptied it. I spent a great deal of time, but not enough as it turned out, making lists of obscure technical words. I learnt the Latin for _prize-money_, which I was told was a useful word for “prose,” but unfortunately the word prize-money did not occur in the Latin translation paper. The word is _manubiæ_. I am glad to know it. It is indeed unforgettable.

We were examined orally in French, German, and in Italian. When I was confronted with the German examiner, the first thing he asked me was whether I could speak German. I was foolishly modest and answered: “_Ein wenig_” (“A little”). “Very well,” he said, “it will be for another time.” I made up my mind that next time I went up I would say I spoke German as well as Bismarck, and wrote it better than Goethe.

I kept my resolution the last time I went up for the examination, and it was crowned with success.

Here is one of the arithmetic questions from the examination paper set in 1894:

“What vulgar fraction expresses the ratio of 17½ square yards to half an acre?” (I am told this is an easy sum.)

Here is a sentence which had to be translated into German as it was dictated in English:

“Factions are formed upon opinions; which factions become in effect bodies corporate in the state;—nay, factions generate opinions in order to become a centre of union, and to furnish watchwords to parties; and this may make it expedient for government to forbid things in themselves innocent and neutral.”

Here is a geography question of the kind I found most baffling:

“Make a sketch of the country between the Humber and the Mersey on the south, and the Firth of Forth and Clyde on the north.”

When I went up for the examination, I think it was in January 1896, I failed both in geography and arithmetic, and so had to begin the routine of cramming all over again. All the next year I rang the changes again on Florence, Hildesheim, and Scoones. When the examination was over, I went abroad with Claud Russell, and we went to Paris and Monte Carlo. Lord Dufferin was Ambassador in Paris, and we dined with him once or twice.

We saw Guitry and Jeanne Granier perform Maurice Donnay’s exquisite play, _Amants_.

At Monte Carlo we stayed with Sir Edward Mallet in his “Villa White.” A brother of Lord Salisbury, Lord Sackville Cecil, was staying there. He had a passion for mechanics; we had only to say that the sink seemed to be gurgling, or the window rattling, or the door creaking, and in a moment he would have his coat off, and, screwdriver in hand, would set to work plumbing, glazing, or joining.

One night after dinner, just to see what would happen, I said the pedal of the pianoforte seemed to wheeze. In a second he was under the pianoforte and soon had it in pieces. He found many things radically wrong, and he was grateful to me for having given him the opportunity of setting them right. Sir Edward Mallet had retired from the Diplomatic Service. The house where we stayed, and which he had designed himself, was a curious example of design and decoration. It was designed in the German Rococo style, and in the large hall stucco pillars had for capitals, florid, gilded, coloured, and luxuriant moulded festoons which represented flames, and soared into the ceiling.

One afternoon Lord Sackville Cecil said he wanted to see the gambling-rooms. We went for a walk, and on our way back stopped at the rooms. Lord Sackville Cecil was not an elegant dresser; his enormous boots after our walk were covered with dust, and his appearance was so untidy that the attendant refused to let him in. I suggested his showing a card, but his spirit rebelled at such a climb-down, and we went home without seeing the rooms.

From Monte Carlo I went to Florence. I went back to my pension but also stayed for over a week with Vernon Lee at her villa. Her brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who had been on his back a helpless invalid for over twenty years, had suddenly, in a marvellous manner, recovered, and his first act had been to climb up Mount Vesuvius.

I recollect the great beauty and the heat of that month of March at Florence. Giotto’s Tower, and the graceful dome of the Cathedral, seen from the plain at the foot of San Gervasio, looked more like flowers than like buildings in the March evenings, across vistas of early green foliage and the delicate pageant of blossom.

We went for many delightful expeditions: to a farmhouse that had belonged to Michael Angelo at Carregi; to the Villa Gamberaia with its long grass terrace and its tall cypresses—a place that belongs to a fairy-tale; and I remember more vividly than all a wine-press in a village with wine-stained vats, large barrels, and a litter of farm instruments under the sun-baked walls—a place that at once conjured up visions of southern ripeness and mellowness. It seemed to embody the dreams of Keats and Chénier, and took me once more to the imaginary Italy which I had built when I read in the _Lays of Ancient Rome_ of “the vats of Luna” and “the harvests of Arretium.”

Then came a summer term at Scoones, distracted and dislocated by many amusements. I went to the Derby that year and backed Persimmon; to the first performance of Mrs. Campbell’s _Magda_ the same night; I saw Duse at Drury Lane and Sarah Bernhardt at Daly’s; I went to Ascot; I went to balls; I stayed at Panshanger; and at Wrest, at the end of the summer, where a constellation of beauty moved in muslin and straw hats and yellow roses on the lawns of gardens designed by Lenôtre, delicious with ripe peaches on old brick walls, with the smell of verbena, and sweet geranium; and stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white temples; and we bicycled in the warm night past ghostly cornfields by the light of a large full moon.

In August I went back to Germany, and heard the _Ring_ at Bayreuth. Mottl conducted. But of all that sound and fury, the only thing that remains in my mind is a French lady who sat next to me, and who, when Siegfried’s body was carried by to the strains of the tremendous funeral march, burst into sobs, and said to me: “Moi aussi j’ai un fils, Monsieur.” Then in London I made a terrific spurt, and worked all day and far into the night to make ready for another examination which took place on November 14. I remember nothing of this long nightmare. As soon as the examination was over, I started with Claud Russell for Egypt. We went by train to Marseilles, and then embarked in a Messagerie steamer. I spent the time reading Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ for the first time. The passengers were nearly all French, and treated us with some disdain; but Fate avenged us, for when we arrived at Alexandria, we were, in obedience to the orders of my uncle (Lord Cromer), allowed to proceed at once, while the rest of the passengers had to wait in quarantine. We went to Cairo, and stayed at the Agency with my uncle. The day we arrived it was pouring with rain which, we were told, was a rare occurrence in Cairo.

We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our bedrooms, off tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas.

At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be present, and usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo that I had failed to pass the examination, in geography and arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think, qualified, and was given a vacancy later.

In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages of abuse about himself in the local press. One phrase which described him as combining the oiliness of a Chadband with the malignity of a fiend delighted him. He gave us the MSS. of his book, _Modern Egypt_, which was then only partly written, to read. He was never tired of discussing books: the Classics, French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century. He could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His admiration for French prose was unbounded and for the French gift of expression in general, their newspaper articles, their speeches, and, above all, their acting.

Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had tea with Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house.

We did not stay long in Cairo; we went up the Nile. The first part of the journey, to a station whose name I forget, was by train; and once, when the train stopped in the desert, the engine-driver brought Claud Russell a copybook and asked him to correct an English exercise he had just done. Claud said how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver brought us an exercise to correct.

Then we embarked in the M.S. _Cleopatra_ and steamed to Luxor, where we saw the sights: the tombs of the kings, the temple of Carnac, the statue of Memnon. We bathed in the Nile, and smoked hashish.

We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas night in the waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess; and when we arrived in London the momentous question arose, what was I to do to pass the examination? We were only allowed three tries, and my next attempt would be my last chance.

The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in despair. I was told I must pass the next time.

The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded by this examination was an elementary standard, and I had now twice attained by cramming a pitch I knew I should never surpass. At Scoones’ they said my only chance lay in getting an easy paper. It was said that my work had been wrong not in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by reading Renan and Mommsen; other candidates, who had never read a German book in their lives, by learning lists of words got more marks than I