Shandygaff Part 10

A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go.

"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be lonely."

This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow of antic.i.p.ation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at night.

On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room shining with firelight and the shabby armchair.

"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.

"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you."

He kissed her and went off.

When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway.

At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, shouting jests, dicing for c.o.c.ktails. Suddenly he turned and ran.

He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly.

At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused.

Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away.

That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a box of crackers.

At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness and cold, he went home.

He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.

"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?"

"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock struck half-past ten and supported him.

"Did you have a good time?"

"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with the boys now and then."

THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE

I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to Horsham, in Suss.e.x, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine.

He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with compet.i.tive shouts of laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging tramp across the Suss.e.x Downs, talking hard all the way.

I

That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.

[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.]

Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother was wounded at Waterloo.

His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by d.i.c.kens and Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an English wife.

The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was called--until 1914.

Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to live in Suss.e.x, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.

In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period:

"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in '83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the s.h.a.ggy kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his instinctive combativeness made him a.s.sume a decidedly French pose, and this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole school career."

In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the pa.s.sage; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that book--everyone should have six copies.

After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol b.u.t.tery, would show a larger quant.i.ty of ale and wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.

Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's.

It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.

But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, her pa.s.sion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpa.s.sable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene.

This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued pa.s.sionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without a.s.sentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.

Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:

"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."

No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind.

TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA

Years ago when I was at Balliol, Balliol men--and I was one-- Swam together in winter rivers, Wrestled together under the sun.

And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, Loved already, but hardly known, Welded us each of us into the others: Called a levy and chose her own.

Here is a House that armours a man With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, And a laughing way in the teeth of the world And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again: And the best of Balliol loved and led me, G.o.d be with you, Balliol men.

I have said it before, and I say it again, There was treason done, and a false word spoken, And England under the dregs of men, And bribes about, and a treaty broken: But angry, lonely, hating it still, I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.

My heart was heavy for c.u.mnor Hill And the hammer of galloping all day long.

Galloping outward into the weather, Hands a-ready and battle in all: Words together and wine together And song together in Balliol Hall.

Rare and single! n.o.ble and few!...

Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!

The only brothers ever I knew, The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again; And the best of Balliol loved and led me, G.o.d be with you, Balliol men.