CERTAINLY, after the liveliness of Thames, old Camus seemed to foot it very slowly. Heavy was the fall from the exaltation of the sixth form to the lowliness of the freshman. A needed experience it may have been, as correcting the natural priggishness of boyhood; but it was a change that we little relished while we underwent it.
King’s College, Cambridge, in the early ’seventies, was in a phase of transition from the old-fashioned system, under which it was a mere appanage of Eton, to a new order of things which was gradually throwing its gates open to all comers; much, however, of the ancient pettiness of spirit still remained; the College was small in numbers and small in tone, dominated by a code of unwritten yet vexatious ordinances, which it was waste of time to observe, yet “bad form” to neglect. “King’s always had a tyrant,” was a remark made to me by F. W. Cornish, himself a Kingsman.
The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such merriment must not be indulged in while he was passing by. That he himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility which had not entered his mind.
Next in authority was the dean, a wan and withered-looking clergyman named Churton, who always seemed unhappy himself and infected every one who entered his rooms with a sense of discomfort. He used to invite undergraduates to breakfast with him, a melancholy function in which he often had the aid of Fred Whitting (the name was pronounced Whiting), a bluff and more genial don whose conversation just saved the guests from utter despair; and at these entertainments poor Churton’s one remark, as he helped the fish, was to say with a sour smile of ineffable wretchedness: “Whitting, will you be a cannibal?”
Very different from this chilly dean, and much more interesting, as being genuine relics of the brave old days when Kingsmen had no need to study or to exert themselves, inasmuch as their University career was assured them from the first, were two portly and inseparable bachelors, Messrs. Law and Brocklebank, whose sole employment it seemed to be to reap to the full the emoluments of their life-fellowship, which they had held for a goodly number of years. “Brock” and “Applehead” were their nicknames; both were stout and bulky, but there was a rotundity about Mr. Law’s cranial development which gave him a more imposing appearance. As they ambled side by side about the courts and lawns, it amused us to fancy them a pair of strange survivals from a rude prehistoric age, we ourselves, of course, playing the part of the moderns and intellectuals. When “Applehead” died, we were enjoined in a poetical epitaph, by some anonymous admirer, to deck his grave with pumpkins, gourds, melons, cucumbers and other emblematic fruits.
The literary element was not strong in King’s; but in Henry Bradshaw, one of the senior Fellows, the College could boast a University Librarian of much distinction. He was a kind, but most whimsical and eccentric man, whose friendship was open to any undergraduate who sought it, only it must be sought, and under the conditions imposed by Bradshaw himself, for it was never in any circumstances offered. If you presented yourself uninvited at his rooms—rather an ordeal for a nervous freshman—you were welcomed, perhaps taken to his heart. If you did not present yourself, he never asked you to come; on the contrary, however often he met you on the stairs or elsewhere, he passed with a look of blank and stony indifference on his large and somewhat inexpressive visage. I knew a scholar of King’s who lived on Bradshaw’s staircase, and who for more than a year was thus passed by as non-existent: then, one evening, moved by a sudden impulse, he knocked at the great man’s door, entered, and was immediately admitted to the cheery circle of his acquaintance. It was useless to resent such waywardness on Bradshaw’s part; there was no “ought” in his vocabulary; you had to take him on his own terms, or “go without”; and the great number of University men who came on pilgrimage to his rooms was in itself a proof of his mastery. I recall the following lines from an epigram which some rebellious undergraduate wrote on him:
Throned in supreme indifference, he sees
The growing ardour of his devotees:
He cares not if they come, yet more and more
They throng subservient to the sacred door:
He cares not if they go, yet none the less
His “harvests ripen and his herds increase.”
It was so; and Bradshaw, having a gift of very pungent speech, was well able to keep his “herds” in order when they were assembled: he would at times say a sharp and wholesome word to some conceited or presumptuous visitor. Even his nearest friends could take no liberties with him. It was said that when Mr. G. W. Prothero, then a Fellow of King’s, took to omitting the “Esquire” in the address of letters, and wrote plain “Henry Bradshaw,” the librarian retaliated in his reply by addressing laconically to “Prothero”—nothing more.
To attend lectures and chapel services formed the chief duties of undergraduates; and the lectures were much the less tedious task. It was a chilly business, however, on a cold winter morning, to hear the great Greek scholar, R. Shilleto, hold forth for an hour on his beloved Thucydides; for he was an elderly man with a chronic cough, and his enthusiasm for a Greek idiom hardly compensated his audience for the physical difficulties with which he laboured. He would begin cheerily on a difficult passage, and, overtaken by a bout of coughing, lose the place for a while; then, with a drawling “yes,” catch up the thread of his discourse, till another spasm overwhelmed him; while we, desiring our breakfasts much more than the privilege of listening to a second Porson, fumed and fidgeted, and took notes, or neglected to take notes, till the stroke of the clock released us. Much more popular were some of the lectures which we attended, in other Colleges, given by such skilled exponents of the Classics as Henry Jackson and R. C. Jebb. Jebb was always the same—self-composed, neat and eloquent; Jackson, on the contrary, though not at all less competent, used to work himself into a fever of fretfulness when he could not find the exact word he sought for; and then, to our amusement, he would upbraid himself as “dolt” and “idiot,” even while he was giving a most suggestive address.
The compulsory “chapels” were a great trial to some of us; and each King’s scholar was further liable, in turn, to the function of reading the Lessons for a week. I do not know why this should have seemed more formidable than “speeches” at Eton, but it was an office which we would very thankfully have escaped. It needed some courage to step down from a stall in that spacious chapel—most of all when, as on a Sunday afternoon, there was a large concourse of visitors—and then to mount, by what cragsmen would call an “exposed ridge,” the steps that led up to the big lectern in the middle of the nave. The sensation was one of extreme solitariness and detachment, with little but the lectern itself to give support and protection; so that we could almost sympathize with the plight of that disreputable undergraduate who, according to a current story (which, be it hoped, was fictitious), had essayed to read the Lessons, in some college chapel, when he was not so sober as he should have been. Throwing his arms round the eagle—for his lectern was fashioned in the shape of that pagan bird—he appalled the congregation, it was said, by exclaiming, in a pensive voice: “If it wasn’t for this [something] duck, I’d be down.”