The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University

by E. F. Benson

“Settle it among yourselves,” he said, “and tell me when you are ready. I may remark that I am very busy, and that my time is not my own.”

Mr. Sykes meantime was sniffing suspiciously round the heels of the altar, and the altar was getting visibly nervous.

The Babe supposing that his entrance had come, began reciting his first lines in a loud voice, and the stage directors and the conductors made common cause against him.

“If Clytemnestra would kindly be quiet,” said one.

“And take away her horrible dog,” put in the altar.

“The chorus might proceed,” shouted the conductor.

The Babe with a look of injured innocence on his face retired to his chair, followed reluctantly by Sykes, who was not satisfied about the altar, and the practice went on.

But the truce between the conductor and the stage directors was only an armed neutrality. One of them in particular, a bustling little man with a honey-coloured moustache and a Paderewski head of hair, was waiting to fall upon him. He was a student of all branches of what Stewart would have called “delightful and useless knowledge”; on such subjects he has perhaps a wider and more elaborately specialised information than any man in England. He could have told you with the most minute particulars the exact shape of the earrings worn by Greek women of the fifth century B.C., the particular way in which athletes of the fourth century brushed their hair, the conformation of the lobe of the ear in female statues of the third century, or the proportionate length of the little finger nail to the eye-socket in bronzes of the Hadrian epoch. He could have prescribed you the ingredients which made the red in Botticelli’s Tobias, lasting, through the want of which Turner’s sunsets paled almost as fast as the sunsets themselves; he had penetrated into the dens of the forgers at Rome which lie in the street which no one can find between the Via Nazionale and the Capitol; he had been twice round the world, and spoke five dialects of Mexican; he had looked on the city of Mecca, and kodaked the interior of the mosque of the Seven Curses of the Prophet; he had dived for pearls in the Coromandel Sea, and evaded by a hair-breadth the jaws of the blue-nosed shark as it rolled over on its back to snap him in two; he knew intimately a lineal descendant of Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of the Inferno, and asserted that in all probability the forefather was a clumsier workman than his son, or he would never have been detected. And on all these subjects and many others equally abstruse he could give you statistics, as dry as the facts themselves were interesting. Once or twice, it is true, he had been caught in an apparent error, but he had always been able to give a perfectly satisfactory explanation of it afterwards, with hardly any time for reflection. Such qualifications had eminently fitted him for the part of stage-manager in a Greek play, and he certainly added to these, immense zeal and industry. His name was Propert, and his college was Peterhouse.

For some minutes he stood grasping his hair with both hands in an incipient frenzy, as the chorus proceeded, but at last he could stand it no longer, and he clapped his hands loudly.

“It is all wrong,” he said, “you have not got the spirit of it. You do not sound the note of fate. Those last bars should be a long low wail, prophetic of woe, and pianissimo—pianissimo ma con smorgando tremuloso.”