dozen people who come in and who don’t let you know who they are, and who never appear again, and you do not arrive at the dramatic part till the last act.
“The story is briefly thus: Léna is staying with Mrs. Broadway, very Sainte Nitouche! everyone admiring her and all the octogenaires in love with her. She (whose passé is not sans tache) is under the power of a certain Jack Fortinbras, who forces her, under the penalty of unveiling her past, to marry a certain Lord Ramsey. Léna has in her possession a letter which Ramsey wrote to a Lady Dower, whose name is also Léna, and the letter is in very affectionate terms. Ramsey is engaged to Beatrice, and Léna shows this letter to Beatrice and says it was to her! Of course, Beatrice thinks Ramsey un lâche and leaves the house, saying her marriage is impossible, and leaving a letter for Ramsey to that effect. Act II. is in Léna’s house. Fortinbras comes and plays cards with a young man and cheats. Ramsey sees this, and Fortinbras is turned out of the house.
“Act III., Monte Carlo.—Léna is staying there with Ramsey, with whom she is now desperately in love. Fortinbras appears and asks for money, which she gives. Ramsey comes in and asks why she is agitated. She says she is helpless, alone. He confesses his love for her, and she, in a nervous excitement, says, “Je t’adore,” and so scheming to marry for money, she finds she is dreadfully in love with him.
“Act IV.—They are married and in Scotland. Fortinbras appears tracked by detectives and asks for 200,000 (pounds or francs?) at once, or he tells of her passé. Then Sarah Bernhardt was superb. It was quite impossible for her to get the money, and she is so happy with her husband. At this crisis Ramsey comes in and half strangles Fortinbras, who, when let go, reveals all Léna’s past. At the words, ‘Cette femme m’aimait une fois,’ Léna jette un cri d’angoisse, I would have given anything for you to have seen her act that scene. Ramsey hears it all, and, when given the proofs that are in letters, throws them into the fire, and Fortinbras is given to the detectives and Ramsey is alone with Léna and tells her that he really believes what the man said. She cannot deny it, and confesses the whole thing. Her acting was supreme, and Ramsey says to her, ‘Et m’avez vous jamais aimé?’ Then she gives way and bursts into sanglots, and implores him to believe her, and that she adored him. He refuses to believe her and goes out. Then all is pantomime. She takes up a knife, throws it down, gets a little bottle of ‘morphine,’ drinks it, sits down with Ramsey’s photograph in her hand; then come seven minutes of silence. All pantomime, but what pantomime; she quietly dies. I have never seen such a splendid bit of acting. It was lovely. As she is dying, Ramsey tries to come in, but the door is locked. He comes in at the window in an agony of grief and forgives her. Just when he is at the door she stretches out her hand and falls back épuisée. It was beautiful.”
I remember a doctor saying, as we went out of the theatre: “Mais ce n’est pas comme cela qu’on meurt de la morphine,”—upon which someone else answered: “Alors, ceux qui ont dit: Voilà une mort réaliste ont dit une sottise. Pourtant elle a été dite.”
We went to the cemetery of the Père Lachaise, and the tombs that I cited in a letter are those of Héloïse and Abelard, Balzac, Alfred de Musset, Bizet, and Géricault.
I went back to Eton for my first summer half, which is said to be the most blissful moment of Eton life, and I think in my case it was. The first thing one had to do was to pass swimming. I had learnt to swim at Eastbourne, and I swam as well as I ever did before or afterwards, but to pass, one had to swim in a peculiar way. The passing was supervised by my tutor, and I failed to pass twice, chiefly, I think, owing to the curious nature of my dive from the boat, which took the form of a high leap into the air and a descent on all-fours into the water. “Swim to the bank,” said my tutor, much to my disappointment. The second time I failed again, but there was soon a third trial, and I passed. I at once hired an outrigged gig with another boy, and then a period of unmixed enjoyment began: rows up to Surley every afternoon and ginger-beer in the garden there, bathes in the evening at Cuckoo Weir, teas at Little Brown’s, where one ordered new potatoes and asparagus, or cold salmon and cucumber, gooseberries and cream, raspberries and cream, and every fresh delicacy of the season in turn. Little Brown’s, the school sock-shop next to Ingalton Drake’s, the stationer’s, which we still called Williams’, was then controlled by Brown, who was a comfortable lady rather like the pictures of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She was assisted by Phœbe, who kept order with great spirit, in a seething mass of unruly boys, all shouting at the top of their voices and clamouring to be served first. Brown’s was open before early school, and if one had the energy, one got up in time to go and have a coffee and a bun there. It was well worth the effort, for the buns were slit open and filled with butter, and then, not toasted, but baked in the oven, and were crisp, hot, and delicious. Brown and Phœbe had the most marvellous memory for faces I have ever come across. They would remember a boy years afterwards, and when I was at Eton I used often to hear Brown say to Phœbe, as some very middle-aged man passed the window, “There’s Mr. So-and-so.”
There was a pandemonium in the front of the shop; in the little room at the back of the shop only swells went. There was another sock-shop called Rowland’s, near Barnes Pool, which had a garden and an arbour, and sold scalloped prawns in winter and wonderful strawberry messes in the summer. Then farther up town there was Califano, who was celebrated for his fiery temper, and in Windsor there was Leighton’s. But Brown’s was the smallest and cosiest of all the sock-shops, and nothing at any of the others could vie with her hot buns in the early morning.
I was now in Remove, and once more under the tuition of Mr. Heygate. We no longer translated Greek stories and epigrams from the delightful collection called Sertum, which was used in the Fourth Form. This book is now out of print, but I fortunately possess a copy. It is a most delightful anthology of short anecdotes and poems. On the other hand, we did Sidgwick’s Greek exercises, a book of very short English stories, which have to be translated into Greek. It is one of the most charming books ever written, and even now I can read it when I can’t read anything else.
I can’t remember what we read in school that half, but I remember reading Monte Cristo out of school. My mother had given me an illustrated edition of it on my birthday. On the afternoon of a whole school day I was reading of Dantès’ escape from the Chateau d’If, and I became oblivious of the passage of time. The school clock chimed the quarters, but I heeded them not. Just before the school hour was ended the boys’ maid came in and told me I was missing school. I flung away my book and ran breathless to upper school, where I found the boys just going out. I had missed school, an unheard-of thing to do, which meant probably writing out endless exercises of Bradley’s Latin prose. Each division had what was called a Prepostor, a boy who kept a book in which he was supposed to note all boys who were absent, and to find out if they were staying out, which meant staying out of lessons, that is to say, staying indoors on account of sickness, in which case the Dame of the house had to sign a statement to that effect in the prepostor’s book, and add also whether they were excused lessons; if they were not excused lessons they had to do written work in the house. On this day the prepostor had not noticed my absence, nor had Mr. Heygate, and I joined the crowd of boys running downstairs as if I had been there all the time.
There were two sorts of masters at Eton—those who could keep order and those who couldn’t. With those who could, there was never any question of ragging. Boys knew at once what was impossible and accepted it. They also knew in a moment when it was possible, and they lost no minute of their opportunities, and at once began to harass the wretched master with importunate, absurd, and impertinent questions, seeing how far they could go in veiled insolence without overstepping the line of danger. It was the masters who taught mathematics and French who had the worst time, with the exception of Monsieur Hua, who was an admirable teacher and stood no nonsense.
In Remove we did science. There were three science masters—Mr. Porter, Mr. Drew, and Mr. Hale (Badger). I was taught by them all in turn. Mr. Drew used to produce a mysterious and rather dirty-looking bit of stony metal or metallic stone,
