THE Army Class ‘English,’ which included the Upper Fifth, was trying to keep awake; for ‘English’ (Literature–Augustan epoch — eighteenth century came at last lesson, and that, on a blazing July afternoon; meant after every one had been bathing. Even Mr. King found it hard to fight against the snore of the tide along the Pebble Ridge, and spurred himself with strong words.

Since, said he, the pearls of English Literature existed only to be wrenched from their settings and cast before young swine rooting for marks, it was his loathed business — in anticipation of the Army Preliminary Examination which, as usual, would be held at the term’s end, under the auspices of an official examiner sent down ad hoc — to prepare for the Form a General Knowledge test-paper, which he would give them next week. It would cover their studies, up to date, of the Augustans and King Lear, which was the selected — and strictly expurgated — Army Exam, play for that year. Now, English Literature, as he might have told them, was not divided into water-tight compartments, but flowed like a river. For example, Samuel Johnson, glory of the Augustans and no mean commentator of Shakespeare, was but one in a mighty procession which —

At this point Beetle’s nodding brows came down with a grunt on the desk. He had been soaking and sunning himself in the open sea-baths built out on the rocks under the cliffs, from two-fifteen to four-forty.

The Army Class took Johnson off their minds. With any luck, Beetle would last King till the tea-bell. King rubbed his hands and began to carve him. He had gone to sleep to show his contempt (a) for Mr. King, who might or might not matter, and (b) for the Augustans, who none the less were not to be sneered at by one whose vast and omnivorous reading, for which such extraordinary facilities had been granted (this was because the Head had allowed Beetle the run of his library), naturally overlooked such epigonoi as Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison, and the like. Harrison Ainsworth and Marryat doubtless appealed —

Even so, Beetle salt-encrusted all over except his spectacles, and steeped in delicious languors, was sliding back to sleep again, when ‘Taffy’ Howell, the leading light of the Form, who knew his Marryat as well as Stalky did his Surtees, began in his patent, noiseless whisper: ‘“Allow me to observe — in the most delicate manner in the world — just to hint —”’

‘Under pretext of studying literature, a desultory and unformed mind would naturally return, like the dog of Scripture —’

‘“You’re a damned trencher-scrapin’, napkin-carryin’, shillin’-seekin’, up-an’-down-stairs.”’ Howell breathed.

Beetle choked aloud on the sudden knowledge that King was the ancient and eternal Chucks — later Count Shucksen — of Peter Simple. He had not realised it before.

‘Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been asleep, sir,’ he sputtered.

The shout of the Army Class diverted the storm. King was grimly glad that Beetle had condescended to honour truth so far. Perhaps he would now lend his awakened ear to a summary of the externals of Dr. Johnson, as limned by Macaulay. And he read, with intention, the just historian’s outline of a grotesque figure with untied shoe-strings, that twitched and grunted, gorged its food, bit its finger-nails, and neglected its ablutions. The Form hailed it as a speaking likeness of Beetle; nor were they corrected.

Then King implored him to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.

Beetle was understood to say that the only thing he could remember was in French.

‘You add, then, the Gallic tongue to your accomplishments? The information plus the accent?’Tis well! Admirable Crichton, proceed!’

And Beetle proceeded with the text of an old Du Maurier drawing in a back-number of Punch:

De tous ces defunts cockolores

Le moral Fenelon.

Michel Ange et Johnson

(Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.’

To which Howell, wooingly, just above his breath:

‘“Oh, won’t you come up, come up?”’

Result, as the tea-bell rang, one hundred lines, to be shown up at seven-forty-five that evening. This was meant to blast the pleasant summer interval between tea and prep. Howell, a favourite in ‘English’ as well as Latin, got off; but the Army Class crashed in to tea with a new Limerick.

The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix the stuff in his memory. After tea; he drew the required amount from his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he did precis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a close — printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (Curiosities of Literature was its name) full of the finest confused feeding — such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of Lycidas) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a Tom-a-Bedlam in Lear, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse — of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds — from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

With a heart of furious fancies
?Whereof I am commander.
With a burning spear and a horse of air.
?To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows
?I summoned am to tourney.
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end —
?Methmks it is no journey.

He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old.

‘Readin’ again,’ said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the pot-house.

‘Look here, I’ve found out something —’ Beetle began. ‘Listen —’

‘No, you don’t — till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.’ This meant it was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout, and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the Horace, justice began to be executed.

‘I’m all right,’ he protested. ‘I swear I heard a lot what Turkey said. Shut up! Oh, shut up! Do shut up, you putrid asses.’ Beetle was speaking from the fender, his head between Turkey’s knees, and Stalky largely over the rest of him.

‘What’s the metre of the beastly thing?’ McTurk waved his Horace. ‘Look it up, Stalky. Twelfth of the Third.’

‘Ionicum a minore,’ Stalky reported, closing his book in turn. ‘Don’t let him forget it’; and Turkey’s Horace marked the metre on Beetle’s skull, with special attention to elisions. It hurt.

‘Miserar’ est neq’ arnori dare ludum neque dulci

Mala vino layer’ aut ex —

Got it? You liar! You’ve no ear at all! Chorus, Stalky!’

Both Horaces strove to impart the measure, which was altogether different from its accompaniment. Presently Howell dashed in from his study below.

‘Look out! If you make this infernal din we’ll have some one up the staircase in a sec.’

‘We’re teachin’ Beetle Horace. He was goin’ to burble us some muck he’d read,’ the tutors explained.

‘‘Twasn’t muck! It was about those Tom-a-Bedlams in Lear.’

‘Oh!’ said Stalky. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘‘Cause you didn’t listen. They had drinkin’-horns an’ badges, and there’s a Johnson note on Shakespeare about the meanin’ of Edgar sayin’ “My horn’s dry.” But Johnson’s dead-wrong about it. Aubrey says —’

‘Who’s Aubrey?’ Howell demanded. ‘Does King know about him?’

‘Dunno. Oh yes, an’ Johnson started to learn Dutch when he was seventy.’

‘What the deuce for?’ Stalky asked.

‘For a change after his Dikker, I suppose,’ Howell suggested.

‘And I looked up a lot of other English stuff, too. I’m goin’ to try it all on King.’

‘Showin’-off as usual,’ said the acid, McTurk, who, like his race, lived and loved to destroy illusions.

‘No. For a draw. He’s an unjust dog! If you read, he says you’re showin’-off. If you don’t, you’re a mark-huntin’ Philistine. What does he want you to do, curse him?’

‘Shut up, Beetle!’ Stalky pronounced. ‘There’s more than draws in this. You’ve cribbed your maths off me ever since you came to Coll. You don’t know what a co-sine is, even now. Turkey does all your Latin.’

‘I like that! Who does both your Picciolas?’

‘French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’ an’ help us. You aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You are so dam’ inaccurate!’

Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to be useful.

The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow, apropos to something or other, used the word ‘della Cruscan’—‘if any of you have the faintest idea of its origin.’ Some one hadn’t caught it correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper ‘Bran-an’ mills’ to Howell, who said, promptly: ‘Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills-an’ bran, sir?’ King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. ‘Oddly enough,’ said he, ‘it has.’

They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment of mediaeval flour-mills. And: ‘How has our Ap–Howell come by his knowledge?’ Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.

‘If that had been me,’ Beetle observed while they were toying with sardines between lessons, ‘he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.’

‘See what we’re savin’ you from,’ Stalky answered. ‘I’m playin’ Johnson, ‘member, this afternoon.’

That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.

‘Why didn’t you say your father told you?’ Beetle asked at tea.

‘My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?’ Stalky collapsed shrieking among the piles of bread and butter. ‘Well, look here. Taffy goes in tomorrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.’

At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many ‘what-do-you-know-abouts’ those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.

‘Dryden. Oh! “Glorious John!” ‘Know that much, anyhow,’ Stalky vaunted.

‘Then lug in Claude Halcro in The Pirate,’ Beetle advised. ‘He’s always sayin’ “Glorious John.” King’s a hog on Scott, too.’

‘No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.’

‘Right. What about Addison, Beetle?’ Howell asked.

‘‘Drank like a giddy fish.’

‘We all know that,’ chorused the gentle children.

‘He said, “See how a Christian can die”; an’ he hadn’t any conversation, ‘cause some one or other —’

‘Guessin’ again, as usual,’ McTurk sneered. ‘Who?’

‘‘Cynical man called Mandeville — said he was a silent parson in a tie-wig.’

‘Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ‘purtenances. Taffy can have the dyin’ Christian,’ Stalky decided.

Howell nodded, and resumed: ‘What about Swift, Beetle?’

‘‘Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: “I shall die at the top.” Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were “ridiculous an’ trivial.”’

Howell shook a wary head. ‘Dunno what that might let me in for with King. You can have it, Stalky.’

‘I’ll take that,’ McTurk yawned. ‘King doesn’t matter a curse to me, an’ he knows it. “Private amusements contemptible.”’ He breathed all Ireland into the last perverted word.

‘Right,’ Howell assented. ‘Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.’

‘‘Cheery lot, these Augustans,’ Stalky sighed. ‘‘Any more of ’em been croakin’ lately, Beetle?’

‘My Hat!’ the far-seeing Howell struck in. ‘King always gives us a stinker half-way down. What about Richardson — that “Clarissa” chap, y’know?’

‘I’ve found out lots about him,’ said Beetle, promptly. ‘He was the “Shakespeare of novelists.”’

‘King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ‘Mustn’t rot about Shakespeare to King,’ Howell objected.

‘An’ he was “always delighted with his own works,”’ Beetle continued.

‘Like you,’ Stalky pointed out.

‘Shut up. Oh yes, an’—’ he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper —‘the — the impassioned Diderot (dunno who he was) broke forth: “O Richardson, thou singular genius!”’

Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged that first.

‘I must have it!’ Howell shouted. ‘King’s never seen me breakin’ forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s got to! Give me Diderot, you impassioned hound!’

‘Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was “fertile and prodigal.”’

‘All right! I don’t mind bein’ “fertile and prodigal” for a change,’ Stalky volunteered. ‘King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the Army Prelim. chap we’d score.’

‘The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,’ Beetle assured them.

‘But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,’ Howell said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. ‘‘Uncle of mine stayin’ with my people last holidays —’

‘Your Uncle Diderot?’ Stalky asked.

‘No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’ books about it.’

‘All Sappers are mad,’ said Stalky. ‘That’s one of the things the guv’nor did tell me.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’course. ‘Said he’d always believed it, too. And so he got nearly top-marks for field-fortification. ‘Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.’

‘Good biznai!’ said Stalky. ‘Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?’

‘Can’t I keep anything for myself?’

‘Not much! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off, an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass. It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?’

Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.

Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal, scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and King Lear.

‘Howell,’ he said, ‘I was not surprised at. He has intelligence. But, frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might believe he occasionally read a book.’

‘And McTurk too?’

‘Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s lighter literary diversions. They are contemptible. And in the “Lear” questions — they were all attracted by Edgar’s character — Stalky had dug up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source. Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.’

‘Stalky among the prophets of “English”! And he didn’t remember where he’d got it either?’

‘No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself discredit. I told them so.’

‘I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine us?’

‘It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett — with me at Balliol — and Hume. They wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse — journeyman work, of course — enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.’ (The Head, by the way, was a Sutton man.)

King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.

‘Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance — apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of Richardson. “The impassioned Diderot broke forth: ‘Richardson, thou singular genius!’”’

It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the ‘impassioned Diderot’ within ‘break forth’ at his peril.

‘Odd,’ said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. ‘Where did Diderot say that?’

‘I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’............