Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (855 page)

That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.

‘Why didn’t you say your father told you?’ Beetle asked at tea.

‘My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?’ Stalky collapsed shrieking among the piles of bread and butter. ‘Well, look here. Taffy goes in to-morrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.’

At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many ‘what-do- you-know-abouts’ those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.

‘Dryden. Oh! “Glorious John!” ‘Know that much, anyhow,’ Stalky vaunted.

‘Then lug in Claude Halcro in The Pirate,’ Beetle advised. ‘He’s always sayin’ “Glorious John.” King’s a hog on Scott, too.’

‘No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.’

‘Right. What about Addison, Beetle?’ Howell asked.

‘‘Drank like a giddy fish.’

‘We all know that,’ chorused the gentle children.

‘He said, “See how a Christian can die”; an’ he hadn’t any conversation, ‘cause some one or other — ’

‘Guessin’ again, as usual,’ McTurk sneered. ‘Who?’

‘‘Cynical man called Mandeville-said he was a silent parson in a tie- wig.’

‘Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ‘purtenances. Taffy can have the dyin’ Christian,’ Stalky decided.

Howell nodded, and resumed: ‘What about Swift, Beetle?’

‘‘Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: “I shall die at the top.” Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were “ridiculous an’ trivial.”‘

Howell shook a wary head. ‘Dunno what that might let me in for with King. You can have it, Stalky.’

‘I’ll take that,’ McTurk yawned. ‘King doesn’t matter a curse to me, an’ he knows it. “Private amusements contemptible.”‘ He breathed all Ireland into the last perverted word.

‘Right,’ Howell assented. ‘Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.’

‘‘Cheery lot, these Augustans,’ Stalky sighed. ‘‘Any more of ‘em been croakin’ lately, Beetle?’

‘My Hat!’ the far-seeing Howell struck in. ‘King always gives us a stinker half-way down. What about Richardson-that “Clarissa” chap, y’know?’

‘I’ve found out lots about him,’ said Beetle, promptly. ‘He was the “Shakespeare of novelists.”‘

‘King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ‘Mustn’t rot about Shakespeare to King,’ Howell objected.

‘An’ he was “always delighted with his own works,”‘ Beetle continued.

‘Like you,’ Stalky pointed out.

‘Shut up. Oh yes, an’ — ’ he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper-’the-the impassioned Diderot (dunno who he was) broke forth: “O Richardson, thou singular genius!”‘

Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged that first.

‘I must have it!’ Howell shouted. ‘King’s never seen me breakin’ forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s got to! Give me Diderot, you impassioned hound!’

‘Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was “fertile and prodigal.”‘

‘All right! I don’t mind bein’ “fertile and prodigal” for a change,’ Stalky volunteered. ‘King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the Army Prelim. chap we’d score.’

‘The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,’ Beetle assured them.

‘But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,’ Howell said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. ‘‘Uncle of mine stayin’ with my people last holidays — ’

‘Your Uncle Diderot?’ Stalky asked.

‘No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’ books about it.’

‘All Sappers are mad,’ said Stalky. ‘That’s one of the things the guv’nor did tell me.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’course. ‘Said he’d always believed it, too. And so he got nearly top-marks for field- fortification. ‘Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.’

‘Good biznai!’ said Stalky. ‘Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?’

‘Can’t I keep anything for myself?’

‘Not much! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off, an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass. It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?’

Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.

Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal, scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and King Lear.

‘Howell,’ he said, ‘I was not surprised at. He has intelligence. But, frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might believe he occasionally read a book.’

‘And McTurk too?’

‘Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s lighter literary diversions. They are contemptible. And in the “Lear” questions-they were all attracted by Edgar’s character-Stalky had dug up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source. Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.’

‘Stalky among the prophets of “English”! And he didn’t remember where he’d got it either?’

‘No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself discredit. I told them so.’

‘I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine us?’

‘It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett-with me at Balliol-and Hume. They wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse-journeyman work, of course-enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.’ (The Head, by the way, was a Sutton man.)

King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.

‘Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance-apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of Richardson. “The impassioned Diderot broke forth: ‘Richardson, thou singular genius!’”‘

It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the ‘impassioned Diderot’ within ‘break forth’ at his peril.

‘Odd,’ said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. ‘Where did Diderot say that?’

‘I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the course of holiday reading.’

‘Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with. Oh! How did Beetle do?’

‘The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.’

‘Yes, you told me about that at the time,’ said the Reverend John, hurriedly.

‘And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this precis- writing-whatever that means!-has turned him into a most objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before, and promiscuous cheap fiction-which is all that his type of reading means- aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was simply nowhere.’

‘Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling-specially if one’s sensitive. Luckily, I’m too fat.’ The Reverend John went out to bathe off the Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled from half a mile away.

There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym, certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made a ‘House’ for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them. Beetle led the low, growing reminder: ‘House! House, sir? We’ve got a House now, Padre.’

‘Let it be law as it is desired,’ boomed the Reverend John. On which word they broke forward, hirpling over the unstable pebbles and stripping as they ran, till, when they touched the sands, they were as naked as God had made them, and as happy as He intended them to be.

It was half-flood-dead-smooth, except for the triple line of combers, a mile from wing to wing, that broke evenly with a sound of ripping canvas, while their sleek rear-guards formed up behind. One swam forth, trying to copy the roll, rise, and dig-out of the Reverend John’s sidestroke, and manoeuvred to meet them so that they should crash on one’s head, when for an instant one glanced down arched perspectives of beryl, before all broke in fizzy, electric diamonds, and the pulse of the main surge slung one towards the beach. From a good comber’s crest one was hove up almost to see Lundy on the horizon. In its long cream-streaked trough, when the top had turned over and gone on, one might be alone in mid-Atlantic. Either way it was divine. Then one capered on the sands till one dried off; retrieved scattered flannels, gave thanks in chorus to the Reverend John, and lazily trailed up to five-o’clock call-over, taken on the lower cricket field.

‘Eight this week,’ said Beetle, and thanked Heaven aloud.

‘Bathing seems to have sapped your mind,’ the Reverend John remarked. ‘Why did you do so vilely with the Augustans?’

‘They are vile, Padre. So’s Lear.’

‘The other two did all right, though.’

‘I expect they’ve been swottin’,’ Beetle grinned.

‘I’ve expected that, too, in my time. But I want to hear about the “impassioned Diderot,” please.’

‘Oh, that was Howell, Padre. You mean when Diderot broke forth: “Richardson, thou singular genius”? He’d read it in the holidays somewhere.’

‘I beg your pardon. Naturally, Taffy would read Diderot in the holidays. Well, I’m sorry I can’t lick you for this; but if any one ever finds out anything about it, you’ve only yourself to thank.’

Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had on tap the last of a book called Elsie Venner, by a man called Oliver Wendell Holmes-all about a girl who was interestingly allied to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare was his theme-not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had ‘done’ the essays last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the margins of his book-it was second-hand, and the old label of a public library still adhered-flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous comments by various hands. They ranged from ‘Rot!’ ‘Rubbish!’ and such-like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one had written: ‘This beats Delia.’ One copious annotator dissented, saying: ‘Delia is supreme in this line,’ ‘Delia beats this hollow.’ ‘See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.’ Beetle grieved he could not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with pencilled exclamation- points rocketing all round it, that ‘Delia Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.’ Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.