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Read Ebook: Limitations: A Novel by Benson E F Edward Frederic
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Ebook has 2174 lines and 95200 words, and 44 pages
LIMITATIONS.
"Is it," he asked, "because of the little tiny spark of the Divine which men have within them that we care for them, or because they are human not divine, limited not immeasurable, faulty not perfect?"
And the Professor of Ignorance, as usual, sat silent, wishing to hear what the others had to say about it, rather than to speak himself.
Limitations.
E. F. BENSON,
THIRD EDITION.
LONDON:
A. D. INNES & CO.,
BEDFORD STREET.
LIMITATIONS.
"This is a red-letter day for Wagner," he remarked. "What do you do with pipes when they get leprous, Teddy?" he asked, looking dubiously at the meerschaum bowl.
"I sit down and do Herodotus," remarked a slightly irritated voice from the window-seat, behind the lamp.
"I don't think that's any use," said Tom.
"Perhaps you've never tried it. I wish to goodness you'd sit quiet for ten minutes, and let me work!"
Tom walked up to the lamp, and examined the pipe more closely.
"It is as spotted and ringstraked as Jacob's oxen," he remarked. "Teddy, do stop working! It's after eleven, and you said you'd stop at eleven."
"I never inquired the reason," interrupted Tom. "I don't want to know. Do stop! You're awfully unsociable!"
"Five minutes more," said Ted inexorably.
Tom took a turn up and down the room, and whistled a few bars of a popular tune. Then he took up a book, yawned prodigiously, and read for the space of a minute and a quarter, lying back in a long basket-chair.
"What the use of my learning classics is, I don't know," he remarked. "I'm not going to be a schoolmaster or a frowsy don."
"No, we can't all be schoolmasters or frowsy dons, any more than we can all be sculptors," said the voice from the window-seat vindictively.
Tom laughed.
"Dear old boy, I mean no reflection on you. You'll be a capital don, if you succeed in getting a fellowship, and it will always be a consolation to you to know that you probably won't be as frowsy as some of your colleagues. I can't think how you can possibly contemplate teaching Latin prose to a lot of silly oafs like me for the remainder of your mortal life."
"You must remember that all undergraduates aren't such fools as you."
"That's quite true; but some are much more unpleasant. They are, really; it's no use denying it."
Ted shut his books, and looked meditatively out on to the court through the intervening flower-box, filling his pipe the while, and Tom, finding he got no answer, continued--
"No; but it doesn't matter," said Ted. "Go on."
"How a sensible man can contemplate spending his life in a place like this, I cannot conceive," said Tom. "It's the duty of every man to knock about a bit, and learn that the outer darkness does not begin at Cambridge Station. There is a place called London, and there are other places called Europe, Asia, Africa, and America."
"And Australia. Do you propose to go to them all?" asked Ted. "It's a new idea, isn't it? Yesterday you said that, as soon as you went down, you were going to bury yourself at home for five years, and work. Why is Applethorpe so much better than Cambridge?"
"Why?" said Tom. "The difference lies in me. I shall continue to be aware of the existence of other countries, and other interests. Great heavens! I asked Marshall to-day, in an unreflective moment, if he knew Thomas Hardy, and he said, 'No; when did he come up?' And Marshall is a successful, valuable man, according to their lights here. He's a tutor, and he collects postmarks. That's what you may become some day. My hat, what a brute you will be!"
Ted Markham left the window-seat, and came and stood on the hearth-rug.
"You don't understand," he said. "It's not necessary to vegetate because you live here, and it's not necessary to be unaware of the existence of Hardy because you know Thucydides. I don't want fame in the way you want it in the least. I haven't the least desire to make a splash, as you call it. It seems to me that one can become educated, in your sense of the word, simply by living and seeing people. It doesn't really help you to live in a big town, and have five hundred acquaintances instead of fifty."
Markham did not reply for a moment.
"No one supposes it would," he said, after a pause, "but you must remember that grammar is not necessarily uninteresting because it doesn't interest you. In any case let's walk down to the bridge."
"All right. Where are my shoes, and my coat? Ah, I'm sitting on it!"
Tom's rooms were on the ground floor on the side of the court facing the chapel. The moon had risen in a soft blue sky, and as they stepped into the open air they paused a moment.
The side of the chapel opposite them was bathed in whitest light, cast obliquely on to it, and buttresses and pinnacles were outlined with shadows. The great shield-bearing dragons perched high above the little side-chapels stood out clear-lined and fantastic from their backgrounds, and the great crowned roses and portcullis beneath them looked as if they were cut in ivory and ebony. The moon caught a hundred uneven points in the windows, giving almost the impression that the chapel was lighted inside. To the east and west rose the four pinnacles dreamlike into the vault of the sky. In front of them stretched the level close-cut lawn looking black beneath the moonlight, and from the centre came the gentle metallic drip of the fountain into its stone basin. Towards the town the gas-lit streets shot a reddish glare through the white light, and now and then a late cab rattled across the stone-lined rails of the tramway. From the left there came from the rooms of some musically minded undergraduate the sound of a rich, fruity voice, singing, "I want no star in heaven to guide me," followed by "a confused noise within," exactly as if some one had sat down on the piano.
Tom murmured, "I want no songs by Mr. Tosti," drew his hand through Markham's arm, and they strolled down together towards the river.
"Of course I don't mean that you'll become like Marshall," he said, "but it does make me wild to think of the lives some of these people lead. They don't care for anything they should care about, and even if they do care about it, they never let you know it, or talk of it. Oh, Teddy, don't become a vegetable!"
"And yet when I came up," said Markham, "my father used to write me letters, asking me about my new impressions, and this fresh world that was opening round me, and there really wasn't any fresh world opening round me, and I didn't have any new impressions of any sort. It seemed to me like any other place--and I was expected to feel the bustle and the stir, and the active thought, and temptations, and I don't know what beside."
"I don't know how it is," said Ted, "but whenever people write books about Cambridge, they make the bad undergraduates go to gambling hells on the Chesterton Road, and the good ones be filled with ennobling thoughts when they contemplate their stately chapel. Did you ever go to a gambling hell on the Chesterton Road, Tom?"
"No; do you ever have ennobling thoughts when you look at the stately chapel? Of course you don't. You think it's deuced pretty, and so do I, and we both play whist with threepenny points; and as a matter of fact we don't fall in love with each other's cousins at the May races, nor do we sport deans into their rooms, nor do deans marry bedmakers. Oh, we are very ordinary!"
"I feel a temptation to walk across the grass," said Ted.
"Yes, you're the wicked B.A. who leads the fresh, bright undergraduate--that's me--into all sorts of snares. What fools people are!"
Tom sat on the balustrade of the bridge and lit a pipe. The match burned steadily in the still night air.
"Now, Teddy, listen," he said, and he dropped it over into the black water. There was a moment's silence as it fell through the air; then a sudden subdued hiss as the red-hot dottel was quenched.
"I wonder if you know how nice that is," said Tom. "I don't believe you enjoy that sort of thing a bit."
"Dropping matches into the river?" asked Markham. "No, I don't know that I care for it very much."
"Oh, it's awfully nice," said Tom. "Here goes another. There--that little hiss after the silence. Fusees would be even better. No; you haven't got an artistic soul. Never mind; it would be dreadfully in your way up here. Teddy, stop up here till the end of the month, and then come and stay with us a bit. You needn't shoot unless you like."
"Yes, I shall stop up till the end, but I don't know whether I can come home with you. I ought to work."
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