Now there was nothing left to do but to make every moment seem as long as possible and to say good-bye. Good-bye to the School Library, my favourite haunt at Eton, the scene of so much hurried, scrambled work, of such minute consultations of ecclesiastical authorities for Sunday Questions, or of translations of Virgil and Horace, and the Greeks; of such long and serious discussions of future and present plans and literary topics, schemes and dreams, poems, plays, operas, novels, romances, with Willie Coventry and Gerald Cornish. Good-bye to the leather tables where numberless poems had been copied out on the grey Library foolscap paper, which for some reason we used to call electric-light paper; tables over which we had leapt in wild steeplechases, while Burcher protested, where so many construes had been prepared, and so many punishments scribbled, and where the great poets of England had been surreptitiously discovered, and the accents of Milton and Keats overheard for the first time, and the visions of Shelley and Coleridge discerned through the dust of the daily work and above the din of chattering boys. Good-bye to the playing fields, to South Meadow, the Field, to Upper School, and to Williams’ inner room, full of prizes and redolent with the smell of tree-calf and morocco, where I had so often dreamt of getting prizes and wondered what I should choose if I ever managed to get the Prince Consort’s prize. Good-bye to the Brocas, to Upper Hope and Athens and Romney Weir,
“Where the lock-stream gushes,
Where the cygnet feeds,”
and to all the reaches of the river. Good-bye to Windsor and Norman Tower, and to the chimes of the inexorable school clock; to my little room with its sock cupboard, bureau, and ottoman, to Little Brown’s and to Phœbe, and then to one’s friends: to my Dame and to my tutor, and to Arthur Benson, and the unforgettable readings and talks in his house.
I went to Williams’ to choose my prize, and while I was there Mr. Cornish strolled in, and seeing what I was doing, he said: “Of course you will choose a lot of little books—boys always do—but what you ought to do is to get Littré’s Dictionary or all Sainte Beuve.” This was asking too much in the way of sense, and I compromised. I chose a Shakespeare in twelve volumes, bound in tree calf, a Milton in three volumes, and a few other small books. My tutor gave me two volumes of Ruskin; Mr. Luxmoore gave me a volume of Ruskin as well. Arthur Benson gave me Ionica. Just before leaving I had the honour of dining with my tutor, which made one feel already as if one was entering a new world. The hour struck when I was actually leaving Eton. Up to that last moment all had been excitement and fun, but when I was actually sitting in the train and crossing the fifteen arches railway bridge, and Windsor Castle and the trees of the Brocas came into sight, the whole of the past, the Eton past, surged up and overwhelmed me like a flood, and I realised in that last fleeting glimpse of the trees, the river, and the grey Castle all that Eton life had meant, and what it was that in leaving Eton I was saying good-bye to.
CHAPTER VII
GERMANY
I spent the Christmas holidays, after leaving Eton, at Membland. I had had another little book of poems printed privately as a Christmas present for my mother, and I was still making discoveries in English literature, and of these the most important of all: Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. We travelled up in January to London, and it was settled that I was to go to Germany to learn German. My father heard of a family in Hanover where English boys were taken, but there was no room there. Someone then gave him the address of a Dr. Timme who lived at Hildesheim, near Hanover, and also took in Englishmen. It was settled that I was to go there. I started at the end of the month, and at Victoria Station I met Hubert Cornish, who was going to Dresden to learn German. We travelled together to Hanover via Flushing, and we were both of us seasick, and both swore that we would never cross the Channel again. We arrived at Hanover the next evening and stayed at Kasten’s Hotel. The next morning we went on by the same train. I got out at Hildesheim, and Hubert Cornish went on to Dresden. Hubert Cornish had just left Eton, but he was older than I was, and I had only seen him in the distance, and at his father’s house at picnics. We made great friends at once. Hildesheim was a charming little old town. One part of it was really old, and straight out of a fairy-tale, with houses with high gabled roofs, and mediæval carvings on them, and there were many quaint and interesting churches, including the old cathedral with its ravishingly beautiful cloister behind it, and a rose-tree said to be a thousand years old. Dr. Timme had a small house in the Weissenburger-Strasse on the edge of the modern town. It was a two-storied, square, grey house with a flat roof, looking out on to the street on one side, and on to a garden at the back. I was received by Frau Doktor Timme. Her husband was a master at the Real Gymnasium, and he was at school when I arrived. I could not speak a word of German. It was a curious sensation to live with a family and partake of their daily life and not to be able to understand a word they said; to go out for walks and pretend to be joining in and following a conversation when one had not the remotest idea of the drift of it. I started lessons at once, and bought a small Heine, which I used to read to myself, and I soon understood that. It was bitterly cold. There was still snow on the ground.
There were three children in the house: a dear little girl called Aenna, and a little boy called Kurt, and an older boy, about twelve, called Atho. Dr. Timme had two spinster sisters who lived in a house not far off with another old lady who was called Die Alte Tante, and Frau Timme had a brother who was called Onkel Adolf, and who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War, and her mother was alive.