“I won’t be the conventional mother,” she said, “and smooth your pillow for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoe after dinner to see if you’re asleep. But, my darling, I know you’ll be better to-morrow! Won’t you?”
King’s College, Cambridge, whither my father accompanied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years previously, become an open College; for centuries before that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it followed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he obtained in due rotation, without any further examination, a King’s scholarship, when he went up to the University. After that, often while he was still an undergraduate, he became a fellow of King’s, and for the rest of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year provided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent endowment for the encouragement of learning and the education of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachronisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket-boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parliament.
The founder’s idea had been that from year to year the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fineness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely suffered from them. A Fellow of King’s, thus supported for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compulsion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or £400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who might or might not, according to their own inclination, work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his rooms till dusk began to fall: then he would totter, stick in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to himself, “Ah, damn you, you haven’t got me yet!” After this edifying excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no more till dusk next day. All his life since the age of twelve or so, the bounty of Henry VI had supported him, and until the worms finally did “get” him, nothing could deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the intention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be conjectured from the list of the fellows, which from first to last contains no name of the slightest eminence or distinction as a scholar, except that of the late Walter Headlam, who was not an Etonian.
The reconstruction of King’s took place some years before I went up, and no more of these life-fellows were appointed. Henceforth fellowships expired at the end (I think) of six years, though they could be prolonged if the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was engaged in such research as made it proper that his term should be extended. But such men as were already life-fellows were not shorn of their fellowships, and whether or no they were resident, whether or not they were engaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held to be congruous to the intention of the founder, they were still entitled for life to their income, their commons, and dinner, and if they chose to reside in the college to a set of fellows’ rooms. At that time the college buildings would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and freshmen, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings outside college; but in spite of this certain life-fellows still clung to their privileges, and continued to retain sets of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings, which they never occupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic work in London, used to come up for a week or two at the end of the Christmas term, but for the rest of the year his rooms stood vacant, while two others, who to the best of my knowledge never appeared in Cambridge at all, had another set of rooms, which were used merely as guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of survivals such as the founder never contemplated was ancient and dusky in appearance, and never left King’s at all, though he took no part in the academic life of the place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupying himself otherwise with making faint wailings on a violin.... But a friend of mine and I chanced on the discovery that if you whistled as he crossed the court to chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause, proceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle would make him retrace his steps, and it was possible by continuing to whistle, to drive him back to his rooms. This was extremely interesting, but the cause baffled conjecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite seclusion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long believed to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with a leg of cold mutton on the sideboard and a table laid as for dinner, and was induced to play the violin at college concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder) he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared from these haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine that the founder contemplated that the head of the college should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes, though resident, was approaching or had already reached his ninetieth year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the Provost’s Lodge. I am sure I never set eyes on him at all; he took no part whatever in college business, as indeed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but there he had lingered on from year to year without a single thought of resignation entering his venerable head. Though totally past work, he was Provost of King’s and Provost of King’s he remained, a drone apparently imperishable.
Others, however, of these life-fellows justified themselves by a busy existence; there was the Vice-Provost, Augustus Austen Leigh, who performed all the presidential duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J. E. Nixon, Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to undergraduates, and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, who surely made up for these drones who abused the bounty of the founder, by his prodigious activities. In appearance he was the oddest of mortals, a little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows’ Garden, a black tail-coat, and boots of immense length, of which the toes pointed sharply upwards. He had only one hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial, covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only one eye, and that the right, but the other was marvellously sharp. He made a tennis-ball to nestle in the crook of his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his body flung it into the air and severely served it.
His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If it was obviously out of range he would say (running all his words into each other like impressions on blotting paper): “SurelythatsratherhighisthatonlyA?”... Then the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we started again. Where he found all these rounds and catches I cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have heard in Nixon’s room has never reached my ears again, nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended these meetings, who was acquainted with the following catch. It started Lento, and, under the strokes of the paper-knife quickened up to andante and allegro, and ended prestissimo possibile. The words ran thus, starting with a first tenor lead:
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,
I must lengthen the debate,
The debate.
Pray support the chair!
Pray support the chair!
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,
I must lengthen the debate.
Question! question! Order! order!
Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear!
(Da capo: da capo: da capo.)
Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over “Order! Order!” grew louder and louder, until the whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and tried to find “I loved thee beautiful and kind.”
Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called “starting a hare.” He would advance some amazing