ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, FROM THE BACKS.

THE BABE, B.A.

BEING THE UNEVENTFUL HISTORY OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

By EDWARD F. BENSON AUTHOR OF “DODO” “LIMITATIONS”

WITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON & NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 1897

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

DEDICATION.

Dear Toby:

It is fitting, and I hope you will not feel it otherwise, that your name should appear on the forefront of this little book, for you know best how much good humour went to the making of it, and how when it was read piecemeal, as it was written, to you, your native politeness, which I cannot admire too much, more than once prompted you to laugh. (Advt.) You will remember, too, when I first mentioned the idea of it to you, that with some solemnity we procured a large sheet of foolscap paper, and a blue pencil, and then and there set ourselves to put down all the remarkable and stirring events which happened to us in those four years we spent together at Cambridge; how we failed egregiously to recollect anything remarkable or stirring—pardon me, we remembered one stirring event, but decided not to treat the world to it—which had come within our personal experience, and thereupon cast, or as you said, “speired” about for any remarkable and stirring incident, which had happened, not, alas, to us, but to anybody else soever. Here again I may recall to you that we drew blank, and our sheet of paper was still virgin white, our blue pencil as sharp as ever, and the book no nearer conception than before.

Then it was that the uncomfortable conviction dawned on us, gradually illuminating our minds as some cloudy rain-slanted morning grows clear to half-wakened eyes, that in the majority of cases, remarkable and stirring events do not befall the undergraduate, and that if the book was to be made at all, it must be made of homely, and I hope wholesome, ingredients, a cricket ball, a canoe, a football, a tripos, a don, a croquet mallet, a few undergraduates, a Greek play, some work, and so forth. For it seemed to us that the superficial enquirer—and you, I vow, are even more superficially-minded than I—finds that these things are common to the experience of most men, but that when you begin to deal in spiritualities, heroes, century-making captains of eleven, chess blues, and higher aspirations, you desert the normal plane for the super-normal, where people like you and me have no business to intrude.

So that, now it is complete, you will find therein neither births, deaths, nor marriages, and though the Babe himself may have waxed a little out of proportion to our original scheme—he ought, for instance, never to have played Rugby for his University, as savouring too much of the hero—I have retained for him to the end that futility of mind, and girt him about with that flippant atmosphere, in which the truly heroic chokes and stifles. About the other characters I have no such confessions to make; they have successfully steered clear of all distinctions, bodily or mental; I have even omitted to state Ealing’s place in the tripos, and for this reason. He ought to have done better than the Babe, but the Babe got a second, and this leaves only one class where Ealing’s name would reasonably appear, and I altogether refuse to let him take a first.

Good-bye for the present: but you will be home for leave, will you not, in a month?

Believe me, my dear Toby, Ever your sincere friend, E. F. BENSON.

P. S.—I apologise for what I have said about your superficialness. It is, however, perfectly true.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE BABE, B.A.

I.—To Introduce.

“And I maintain,” said Reggie, flourishing the Britannia-metal teapot (in order, it is supposed, to lend a spurious emphasis to the banalité of his sentiment), “that it’s better to have played and lost than never—”

The teapot—one of those in which the handle is invariably the hottest part—had just been filled up with boiling water, and a clear and fervid amber stream flew bounteously out of its spout on to the bare knees of one of those who had played and lost. Thereupon a confused noise arose, and Reggie’s sentence has never been finished.

After a short but violent interlude, the confused noise ceased by tacit consent, as suddenly as it had begun; Ealing helped Reggie to pick up the broken fragments that remained, and the latter had to drink his tea out of a pint glass.

“To think that a mere game of football should lead to such disastrous consequences,” he remarked. “Why does tea out of a glass taste like hot Gregory powder?”

“I never drank hot Gregory powder; what does it taste like?”

“Why, like tea out of a glass,” said Reggie brilliantly.

“Reggie, if you want to rag again, you’ve only got to say so.”

Ealing threw into a corner the napkin with which he had been drying his knees and stocking after the tea-deluge, and as he had finished, took out a pipe, and proceeded to fill it.

“That pig of a half-back caught me a frightful hack on the shin,” he said.

“Well, you kicked him in the stomach later on,” said Reggie consolingly. “That’s always something to fall back on. Besides he did it by accident, and it certainly looked as if you did it on purpose. Of course it may only have been sheer clumsiness.”

“Dry up. You didn’t funk as much as usual this afternoon.”