Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (723 page)

‘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.

‘I say,’ he began, ‘have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?’

‘‘Fat lot of good to us!’ said Stalky. ‘We’ve got to swot ‘em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s your biznai.’ He read swiftly from the school Lear (Act II. Sc. 2) thus

STEWARD:     ‘Never any:

It pleased the King his master, very late.

To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;

When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure.

Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed.

And put upon him such a deal of man.

That worthy’d him, got praises of the King

For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued;

And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit.

Drew on me here again.

‘Now then, my impassioned bard, construez! That’s Shakespeare.’

‘‘Give it up! He’s drunk,’ Beetle declared at the end of a blank half minute.

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Turkey. ‘He’s a steward-on the estate-chattin’ to his employers.’

‘Well-look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.’

‘I’ve not come here to play with ushers,’ was McTurk’s view of the case.

‘I’d do it,’ Beetle protested, ‘only he’d slay me! He don’t love me when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him-tons of it!’ He broke forth into a precis, interspersed with praises, of Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators-especially the latter. He also mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented and promised to approach King next ‘English’ on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack employee that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: ‘I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?’

‘Good God!’ said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. ‘They all say so in Ireland, sir.’

‘Ireland-Ireland-Ireland!’ King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: ‘It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.’ He put it directly, too: ‘An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?’

‘It is not,’ Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of ‘Bonnie Dundee’ on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: ‘Played! Oh, well played, sir!’ at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned, and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and Delia-especially Delia.

‘I told you so!’ said Beetle, proudly, at the end.

‘What? Him! I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his Delia,’ McTurk replied.

Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in the Common Room.

‘Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me indeed. But where did they get it from?’

‘The devil! The young devil,’ the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.

‘I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt faithfully with the Celt, ab initio, this-this would never have happened.’

‘Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.’

‘I’ve told ‘em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own conclusions, in essay form next week.’

Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fairminded Beetle offered to do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking, horse-holding, and errandrunning as Nathaniel had described them; lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as ‘rustic’ and ‘sorry poetaster,’ on which last special hopes were built; and expressed surprise that one so ignorant could have done ‘what he was attributed to.’ His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or two promising ‘subsequently transpireds’ for fear of distracting King.

But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the ‘lie in the soul,’ which was, fundamentally, vulgarity-the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of ‘mere atheism,’ which he said was often no more than mental flatulence-transitory and curable by knowledge of life-in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled-as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.’ So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he ‘need take this exam., sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.’ Mr. King said there was great need-for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.