Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (856 page)

‘I say,’ he began, ‘have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?’

‘‘Fat lot of good to us!’ said Stalky. ‘We’ve got to swot ‘em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s your biznai.’ He read swiftly from the school Lear (Act II. Sc. 2) thus

STEWARD:     ‘Never any:

It pleased the King his master, very late.

To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;

When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure.

Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed.

And put upon him such a deal of man.

That worthy’d him, got praises of the King

For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued;

And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit.

Drew on me here again.

‘Now then, my impassioned bard, construez! That’s Shakespeare.’

‘‘Give it up! He’s drunk,’ Beetle declared at the end of a blank half minute.

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Turkey. ‘He’s a steward-on the estate-chattin’ to his employers.’

‘Well-look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.’

‘I’ve not come here to play with ushers,’ was McTurk’s view of the case.

‘I’d do it,’ Beetle protested, ‘only he’d slay me! He don’t love me when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him-tons of it!’ He broke forth into a precis, interspersed with praises, of Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators-especially the latter. He also mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented and promised to approach King next ‘English’ on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack employee that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: ‘I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?’

‘Good God!’ said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. ‘They all say so in Ireland, sir.’

‘Ireland-Ireland-Ireland!’ King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: ‘It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.’ He put it directly, too: ‘An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?’

‘It is not,’ Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of ‘Bonnie Dundee’ on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: ‘Played! Oh, well played, sir!’ at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned, and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and Delia-especially Delia.

‘I told you so!’ said Beetle, proudly, at the end.

‘What? Him! I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his Delia,’ McTurk replied.

Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in the Common Room.

‘Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me indeed. But where did they get it from?’

‘The devil! The young devil,’ the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.

‘I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt faithfully with the Celt, ab initio, this-this would never have happened.’

‘Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.’

‘I’ve told ‘em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own conclusions, in essay form next week.’

Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fairminded Beetle offered to do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking, horse-holding, and errandrunning as Nathaniel had described them; lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as ‘rustic’ and ‘sorry poetaster,’ on which last special hopes were built; and expressed surprise that one so ignorant could have done ‘what he was attributed to.’ His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or two promising ‘subsequently transpireds’ for fear of distracting King.

But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the ‘lie in the soul,’ which was, fundamentally, vulgarity-the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of ‘mere atheism,’ which he said was often no more than mental flatulence-transitory and curable by knowledge of life-in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled-as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.’ So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he ‘need take this exam., sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.’ Mr. King said there was great need-for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.

As far as the Army Class could judge, the Examiner was not worse than his breed, and the written ‘English’ paper ran closely on the lines of King’s mid-term General Knowledge test. Howell played his ‘impassioned Diderot’ to the Richardson lead; Stalky his parson in the wig; McTurk his contemptible Swift; Beetle, Steele’s affectionate notes out of the spunginghouse to ‘Dearest Prue,’ all in due order. There were, however, one or two leading questions about Shakespeare. A boy’s hand shot up from a back bench.

‘In answering Number Seven-reasons for Shakespeare’s dramatic supremacy,’ he said, ‘are we to take it Shakespeare did write the plays he is supposed to have written, sir?’

The Examiner hesitated an instant. ‘It is generally assumed that he did.’ But there was no reproof in his words. Beetle began to sit down slowly.

Another hand and another voice: ‘Have we got to say we believe he did, sir? Even if we do not?’

‘You are not called upon to state your beliefs. But we can go into that at viva voce this afternoon-if it interests you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘What did you do that for?’ Paddy Vernon demanded at dinner.

‘It’s the lost tribes of Israel game, you ass,’ said Howell.

‘To make sure,’ Stalky amplified. ‘If he was like King, he’d have shut up Beetle an’ Turkey at the start, but he’d have thought King gave us the Bacon notion. Well, he didn’t shut ‘em up; so they’re playin’ it again this afternoon. If he stands it then, he’ll be sure King gave us the notion. Either way, it’s dead-safe for us, an’ King.’

At the afternoon’s viva voce, before they sat down to the Augustans, the Examiner wished to hear, ‘with no bearing on the examination, of course,’ from those two candidates who had asked him about Question Seven. Which were they?

‘Take off your gigs, you owl,’ said Stalky between his teeth. Beetle pocketed them and looked into blurred vacancy with a voice coming out of it that asked: ‘Who-what gave you that idea about Shakespeare?’ From Stalky’s kick he knew the question was for him.

‘Some people say, sir, there’s a good deal of doubt about it nowadays, sir.’

‘Ye-es, that’s true, but — ’

‘It’s his knowin’ so much about legal phrases.’ Turkey was in support- a lone gun barking somewhere to his right.

‘That is a crux, I admit. Of course, whatever one may think privately, officially Shakespeare is Shakespeare. But how have you been taught to look at the question?’

‘Well, Holmes says it’s impossible he could — ’

‘On the legal phraseology alone, sir,’ McTurk chimed in.

‘Ah, but the theory is that Shakespeare’s experiences in the society of that day brought him in contact with all the leading intellects.’ The Examiner’s voice was quite colloquial now.

‘But they didn’t think much of actors then, sir, did they?’ This was Howell cooing like a cushat dove. ‘I mean — ’

The Examiner explained the status of the Elizabethan actor in some detail, ending: ‘And that makes it the more curious, doesn’t it?’

‘And this Shakespeare was supposed to be writin’ plays and actin’ in ‘em all the time?’ McTurk asked, with sinister meaning.

‘Exactly what I-what lots of people have pointed out. Where did he get the time to acquire all his special knowledge?’

‘Then it looks as if there was something in it, doesn’t it, sir?’

‘That,’ said the Examiner, squaring his elbows at ease on the desk, ‘is a very large question which — ’

‘Yes, sir!’-in half-a-dozen eagerly attentive keys...

For decency’s sake a few Augustan questions were crammed in conscience-strickenly, about the last ten minutes. Howell took them since they involved dates, but the answers, though highly marked, were scarcely heeded. When the clock showed six-thirty the Examiner addressed them as ‘Gentlemen’; and said he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors. He passed out: the Form upstanding, as custom was.

‘He’s goin’ to congratulate King,’ said Howell. ‘Don’t make a row! “Don’t-make-a-noise-Or else you’ll wake the Baby!”‘...

Mr. King of Balliol, after Mr. Hume of Sutton had complimented him, as was only just, before all his colleagues in Common Room, was kindly taken by the Reverend John to his study, where he exploded on the hearth-rug.

‘He-he thought I had loosed this-this rancid Baconian rot among them. He complimented me on my breadth of mind-my being abreast of the times! You heard him? That’s how they think at Sutton. It’s an open stye! A lair of bestial! They have a chapel there, Gillett, and they pray for their souls-their souls!’

‘His particular weakness apart, Hume was perfectly sincere about what you’d done for the Army Class. He’ll report in that sense, too. That’s a feather in your cap, and a deserved one. He said their interest in Literature was unusual. That is all your work, King.’

‘But I bowed down in the House of Rimmon while he Baconised all over me!-poor devil of an usher that I am! You heard it! I ought to have spat in his eye! Heaven knows I’m as conscious of my own infirmities as my worst enemy can be; but what have I done to deserve this? What have I done?’

‘That’s just what I was wondering,’ the Reverend John replied. ‘Have you, perchance, done anything?’

‘Where? How?’

‘In the Army Class, for example.’

‘Assuredly not! My Army Class? I couldn’t wish for a better-keen, interested enough to read outside their allotted task-intelligent, receptive! They’re head and shoulders above last year’s. The idea that I, forsooth, should, even by inference, have perverted their minds with this imbecile and unspeakable girls’-school tripe that Hume professes! You at least know that I have my standards; and in Literature and in the Classics, I hold maxima debetur pueris reverentia.’

‘It’s singular, not plural, isn’t it?’ said the Reverend John. ‘But you’re absolutely right as to the principle!...Ours is a deadly calling, King-especially if one happens to be sensitive.’

THE SATISFACTION OF A GENTLEMAN

Long before the days of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ the Coll. knew that you might discuss his red nose with Dickson Quartus in all amity and safety, so long as it did not turn blue, and he did not gnash his teeth and speak with tongues. If that happened—why, anything might happen; and the worst generally happened after long stretches of lean living. For example, ‘Pussy’ Abanazar and Tertius, his study-mates, being the junior sub-prefects of that winter term, were in the field, taking Lower School footer—which, of course, took both of their fags—and Dick coming up from place-kicking found the study fire out, too.