E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 19 [[Page 119]
my general apathy, and also I woke to a violent interest in friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. The last of these I take to have been due to the fructification of the seed sown by Waterfield’s readings, and, with Carrington’s translation of the “Æneid” to help, it is a fact that I produced in an American cloth-covered notebook a complete and rhymed and rhythmical rendering of the third “Æneid” which we were working at in school, without caring one jot for the merits of the original Latin. What I wanted to do was to compose a quantity of English myself, and compose it I did, glorying in the speed of its production, quite careless about the faithfulness of the rendering or the accuracy of the grammar, and the only merit it can possibly have had was that it was a labour of love. Other poems dashed off in the intervals of this epic were connected with friendship, for I conceived a violent adoration for a boy of the same standing as myself, romantic to the highest degree in that I gave him a whole-hearted devotion, but quite devoid of mawkishness or sentimentality. To him I addressed rhymed odes, and then we quarrelled and made it up again, with more odes, for he addressed me also in flowing stanzas. Then there was a parody of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” held to be a devastatingly comic piece; and not less comic I suspect was a blank verse lament by a mother over the death of her only son.
Not very far behind poetry and friendship as objects of existence came steam-engines, my fellow-engineer sitting next me, bottom but one of the form. We got illustrated catalogues from the makers of models, and copied and recopied diagrams of slide-valves, waste pipes, and eccentrics with a zeal and accuracy which, if devoted to lessons, must speedily have pulled us out of the humble positions we so contentedly occupied. A certain geographical jealousy was mixed up in this, since, though we both condemned the engines on the South-Western, on which line was Mortlake, as very poor and flimsy mechanisms, he, whose home was reached by the Great Northern, considered the engines on that line far superior to anything that the Great Western, which took me to and from Truro, had to show. He drew pictures of the Great Northern express engines, and I retorted with sketches of the “Flying Dutchman” (11.45 a.m. from Paddington), which went to Swindon without a stop and ran on a broad gauge, while the Great Northern was only a narrow gauge. Against that he set the fact that Peterborough was a mile further from London than was Swindon.... He was the happy possessor of a model locomotive with slide-valve cylinders and a waste-pipe going up the chimney, and though I could not run to that, by dint of saving up and of my mother’s anticipation of my birthday, I became possessor of another model with a copper boiler and a brass chassis called the “Dart.” The “Dart” had only oscillating cylinders, which, as all the world knows, do not discharge their waste steam up the funnel, but from small holes at their base, and have this further infirmity, that they only have one steam-driven stroke in each revolution of their fly-wheel, whereas a slide-valve cylinder has two. The slide-valve engine, therefore, was of a different class altogether from the “Dart,” but I found that I could get up a very powerful head of steam in the “Dart” by stuffing small pellets of blotting-paper up the safety-valve, so that she held her breath while her rival was letting off steam. Then, when for fear of a burst boiler I said the “Dart” was ready, and turned on the tap that conveyed the steam to the cylinder, she would start off like mad, and for a few yards easily outrun her more powerful rival. But long before she got to the end of the open-air cloisters where these races took place she would be overhauled; and, indeed, the “Dart” usually failed to run a complete course, and had to be bottled up again to develop fresh energy. But inferior as the “Dart” was in staying power, it must be accounted unto her for righteousness that she never burst when her safety-valve was stopped up. There was also a stationary engine (oscillating cylinder) belonging to one of us, but we unfortunately burned its bottom out by neglecting to put any water in the boiler.
Friendship, engines, and poetry, then, were the safety-valves—not choked with blotting-paper like that of the much-enduring “Dart”—through which my growing vitality discharged itself, and I used to lie awake at night, making rhymes and phrases and thinking of the friend of my heart, and trying to devise some plan by which the “Dart” should generate a more abundant supply of steam. To these objects of existence, when the summer term began, was added cricket, but never did my school work arouse one ounce of latent energy, even though scholarship time was coming near again. If I can recollect my attitude rightly, I was entirely without ambition as regards winning a scholarship, in the sense that I chose to devote myself to Latin and Greek with a view to subsequently obtaining one. It is true that I wanted, rather, to go to Eton, and knew that I should not be sent there unless I got a scholarship, but for that end I did not divert my energies from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. I think I am correct in this recollection, for in all the years that have passed since then I cannot remember ever being nearly so much interested in the future as in the present. The actual interest blazing within me (and there were often several respectable conflagrations going on) has always seemed to me of far vaster importance than a remoter goal. I do not mean that I was fitful in my intentions, because I certainly pursued the same object for years together; only it was not for the ultimate achievement that I pursued it, but because I was continuously interested in the same thing. That the opposite line of action is the most effective and brings the biggest results I do not deny, but, on the other hand, think of the wild and fugitive acquisitions that fall to the lot of the short-range strategist.... But I am not defending my conduct, in any case, but merely describing it.
My own lack of effective ambition must have been terribly disappointing to the elders who had formed and, in a material sense, directed this scholarship campaign. Mr. Edgar and my father agreed on a tremendous programme, which I was to carry out, and the “general idea” was this. There was a scholarship examination at Marlborough in June or perhaps early in July, in which there were offered for competition some half-dozen scholarships, with a great plum at the top called the “House Scholarship.” The House Scholarship was worth, I think, £80 a year, the next six £50, and my father in a letter he wrote me shortly before the event said that he did not think the great plum was out of my reach. His main desire, I know, was that I should achieve a distinction, but I am also sure that he felt I ought to do something to help towards the expenses of my education, since he believed that I was capable of so doing. He was not a rich man; hitherto his sons Martin and Arthur had won scholarships which made their education at Winchester and Eton a matter of small expense, and he did not mean to send me to Eton, as the event proved, unless I got a scholarship, but to a much cheaper but in no way less excellent school. I was, therefore, in the examination at Marlborough to get a scholarship of some sort—the House Scholarship for choice—and then, a few weeks later, to go up for Eton. If I got a scholarship there, I was to be sent there instead of Marlborough, but, failing that, to accept the laurels which Marlborough would no doubt have offered me.
So first I went off to Marlborough and competed there. I didn’t carry off the House Scholarship, nor did I carry off any other scholarship, nor was my name mentioned as having approached to distinction, and so Eton was given its chance without any back-thought at having wiped Marlborough’s eye. Once again, therefore, I competed sadly at Eton, and Eton had precisely the same opinion of me as it had had a year before. The plan of campaign had completely failed, and it was settled that I should unconditionally surrender to Marlborough. I did not in the least want to go there, because I wanted to go to Eton, as far as I wanted anything at all apart from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. Certainly I did not want to remain at Temple Grove any longer, for my greatest friend had won a scholarship at Winchester, and the steam-engine friend was off to Harrow, and another person who mattered had been successful at Eton. But the idea of Marlborough was not without charm, for a year before another friend had gone there, and I looked forward with a certain excitement to seeing him again. We had met during the days of the scholarship examination, and he had aroused in me some shy sort of adoration. He had grown tall and handsome, and asked condescendingly about Temple Grove and the odious habit of keeping stag-beetles, yet with a certain personal interest that he veiled behind a splendid manly brusqueness. I wondered whether he would appreciate a short ode, but decided that he would not. But he called me a “decent little kid,” which I liked as coming from so magnificent a being.
Temple Grove ended very soon after that in a general dämmerung of failure. Faute de mieux I was to be sent to Marlborough, and throwing a Latin dictionary carelessly into my locker, I squashed my gigantic stag-beetle quite flat, and he was as Og the King of Bashan. On the last day of the term I played cricket against a team of Old Templegrovians and lost the match by failing to hold the easiest catch ever spooned up amid a wildly excited circle of contemporaries, having previously got out first ball (or second). But Mr. Edgar was kind, and said that it didn’t matter, though his frenzied sucking of his eyeglass and his dropping it into my lemonade indicated tact rather than sincerity.