We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas night in the waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess; and when we arrived in London the momentous question arose, what was I to do to pass the examination? We were only allowed three tries, and my next attempt would be my last chance.
The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in despair. I was told I must pass the next time.
The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded by this examination was an elementary standard, and I had now twice attained by cramming a pitch I knew I should never surpass. At Scoones’ they said my only chance lay in getting an easy paper. It was said that my work had been wrong not in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by reading Renan and Mommsen; other candidates, who had never read a German book in their lives, by learning lists of words got more marks than I did. Herr Dittel, who gave me private lessons in German, said that he could have sent a German essay of mine to a German magazine. But not knowing the German for “belligerent,” I was beaten by others who knew the language less well. The same applied to the French in which I was only second, although perhaps in some ways the best French scholar among the candidates.
It seemed useless for me to go back to Scoones’ and useless to go abroad. After much debate and discussion the matter was settled by chance. I made the acquaintance of Auberon Herbert in the winter, and instead of going to a crammer’s I settled to go and live at Oxford, and I took rooms at King Edward Street and went to coaches in Latin and arithmetic. For two terms I lived exactly as an undergraduate, and there was no difference between my life and that of a member of Balliol except that I was not subject to College authority.
Then began an interlude of perfect happiness. I did a little work but felt no need of doing any more, as, if anything, I had been overcrammed and was simply in need of digestion. I rediscovered English literature with Bron, and shared in his College life and in the lives of others. Life was a long series of small dramas. One night Bron pulled the master’s bath-chair round the Quad, and the matter was taken with the utmost seriousness by the College authorities. A College meeting was held, and Bron was nearly sent down. Old Balliol men would come from London and stay the night: Claud Russell and Antony Henley. Arnold Ward was engrossed in Turgenev; Cubby Medd,—or was that later?—who gave promise of great brilliance, was spellbound by Rossetti. And then there were the long, the endlessly long, serious conversations about the events of the College life and athletics and the Toggers and the Anna and the Devor. It was like being at Eton again. Indeed, I never could see any difference between Eton and Balliol. Balliol seemed to me an older edition of Eton, whereas Cambridge was to me a slightly different world, different in kind, although in many ways like Oxford; and, although neither of them know it, and each would deny it vehemently, they are startlingly like each other all the same.
I knew undergraduates at other Colleges as well as at Balliol and a certain number of the Dons as well.
I also knew a good many of the old Balliol men who used to come down to Oxford and sometimes stay in King Edward Street.
Then came the summer term. We had a punt, and Bron Herbert, myself, and others would go out in it and read aloud Wells’ Plattner Story and sometimes Alice in Wonderland, and sometimes from a volume of Swinburne bound in green shagreen—an American edition which contained “Atalanta in Calydon” and the “Poems and Ballads.” That summer I made friends with Hilary Belloc, who lived at Oxford in Holywell and was coaching young pupils.
I had met him once before with Basil Blackwood, but all he had said to me was that I would most certainly go to hell, and so I had not thought it likely that we should ever make friends, although I recognised the first moment I saw him that he was a remarkable man.