Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that magic: we were all quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp in his hand and he thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I remember well that he waited at the end of one stanza, and said, “Shall I finish it or would you like to go? Any boy who likes may go.”
Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disapproval), and he went on:
“For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins,
The day that severs lover from lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins.
And Time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”
He came to the end of the chorus and got up.
“You can all be ten minutes late next school,” he said, “because I have kept you.”
Just as I must always think of “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” as being among the masterpieces of blank verse in the English language, so I cannot believe that Beesly was not the finest racket-player who has ever served that fascinating little hard ball into the side-nick of the back-hand court. There was a new racket court just built in the corner of the cricket-field, and here at twelve o’clock on three mornings of the week, Beesly and another master played the two boys who would represent the school in the Public Schools racket competition at Easter. The court, anonymously presented to the school, was announced, when Beesly retired a few years later, to be his gift, and he provided practically all the balls used in these games. Hour after hour I used to watch these matches and began to play myself with the juniors. Beesly often looked on from the gallery, in order to detect new talent, and on one imperishable day, as we came out of the court he said to me, “You’ve got some notion of the game: mind you stick to it.” If I had wanted any encouragement that would have determined me, and I began to think rackets and dream rackets and visualize nick-services and half-volley returns just above the line. Beesly kept a quiet eye on me, and after I had left his form, he would often ask me to walk up towards his house with him, if I was going that way, and would ask me to breakfast on Sunday mornings, and what feasts of the gods were these! Perhaps there would be one of the school representatives there, and Beesly, when the sausages and the kidneys were done, would show us the racket cups he had won, or he would read us something or tend the flowers in his greenhouse. All this sounds trivial, but he never produced a trivial effect, and gradually he established over me a complete hold, morally and mentally, which was as far as I can judge entirely healthy and stimulating. If he had seen me often with someone whom he considered an undesirable companion he would fidget and grunt a little and pull his long whiskers, and then with a glance merry and shy and wholly disarming he said, “Now there are plenty of people it’s good to see a little of, but not too much of.” He would mention no name, but he never failed to convey the sense of his allusion. On the other hand if he thought I was devoting myself too much to games (and in especial rackets) he would say, “Nothing makes you enjoy a game of rackets so much as having done a couple of hours hard work first.” Or if, having watched me playing, he thought I wasn’t taking the game seriously enough, he would stroll away with me from the court, and à propos of nothing at all, he would casually remark, “Better do nothing than do a thing slackly. You’ll find your games fall off, unless you play as hard as you can.”... And then up at his house on one ecstatic morning when I was getting on for seventeen he suddenly said, “You’ll be playing for the school next year if you take pains.” Next moment he had a volume of Browning in his hand and said, “Browning now: ever read any Browning? I thought not. Listen to me for a couple of minutes,” and he read “The Lost Leader.” Once, I remember, I had been to his house in the evening, and he walked back with me across the cricket-field after night had fallen. The sky was clear and a myriad frosty stars burned there. For some little way Beesly walked in silence, then, in his low distinct voice he began:
“See how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.”
I insist on the apparent triviality and fragmentariness of all this, for it was just in these ways, not in heavy discourses or lectures on morality and studiousness and activity, that Beesly gained his ascendency over me. He was never a great talker, but these obiter dicta stamped themselves on my mind like some stroke of a steel die on malleable metal. He was never in the smallest degree demonstrative: he might have been speaking to a blank wall, except just for that glance, merry and intimate, which he occasionally showed me, but for all that I divined a strong affection, which I for my part returned in a glow of hero-worship. The very fact that he never asked for a confidence prompted me to tell him all that perplexed or interested me, in the sure knowledge that he would always throw light in some brief curt sentence. “Stupid thing to do,” was one of his wise comments when I had told him of some row I had got into with my house master. “Go and apologize, and then don’t think anything more about it.” There was the root and kernel of the matter: down came that steel die, sharply impressing itself, whereas discursive and laboured advice would have merely been boring and unconvincing. Off I went, trusting implicitly in his wisdom, and finding it wholly justified.
And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disappointed Beesly. I had, as he prophesied, attained to the dignity of playing for the school at rackets, and had yet another year before I left, and he made up his mind that I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup for Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought home. Certainly two terms before that final event we were an extremely promising pair, but after that we scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about this, and in the Christmas holidays that year I went to stay with him at Torquay, in order to get more practice, whereas what I needed was less practice. Even then we made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till the last day, when he urged me to take a heroic dose of Hunyadi water, continued to cling to the idea that at last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me outside the court, when we came out; he could hardly speak, but he patted me on the shoulder and blurted out, “Well, I know you did your best: I know that,” and walked quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming letter, trying to console me who really cared far less than he did; for it was, I am perfectly convinced, the main ambition of his life that Marlborough should win this cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the instruments through whom that ambition was to be realized.
He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, in some such way as Pindar, who wrote the most magnificent odes the world has ever read in honour of boys who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes centred at Queen’s. The affection I certainly returned, but woe for the manner in which I failed to fulfil the rest of the contract.