‘ANTHONY.
‘P.S. – Don’t forget to write to Mrs Foxe, because Foxe says he knows she thinks we are going To Tenby.’
Mr Beavis frowned as he read the letter, and when breakfast was over, sat down at once to write an answer.
‘EARL’S COURT SQUARE,
27.vi.03.
‘DEAREST ANTHONY, – I am disappointed that you should have received what I had hoped was a piece of very exciting news with so little enthusiasm. At your age I should certainly have welcomed the prospect of “going abroad,” especially to Switzerland, with unbounded delight. The arrangements with Mrs Foxe were always of the most indeterminate nature. Needless to say, however, I wrote to her as soon as the golden opportunity for exploring the Bernese Oberland in congenial company turned up, as it did only a few days since, and made me decide to postpone the realization of our vague Tenby plans. If you want to see exactly where we are going, take your map of Switzerland, find Interlaken and the Lake of Brienz, move eastward from the end of the lake to Meiringen and thence in a southerly direction towards Grindelwald. We shall be staying at the foot of the Scheideck Pass, at Rosenlaui, almost in the shadow of such giants as the Jungfrau, Weisshorn and Co. I do not know the spot, but gather from all accounts that it is entirely “spiffing” and paradisal.
‘I am delighted to hear you did so creditably in your match. You must go on, dear boy, from strength to strength. Next year I shall hope to see you sporting the glories of the First Eleven colours.
‘I cannot agree with you in finding Daudet “rotten.” I suspect that his rottenness mainly consists in the difficulties he presents to a tyro. When you have acquired a complete mastery of the language, you will come to appreciate the tender charm of his style and the sharpness of his wit.
‘I hope you are working your hardest to make good your sad weakness in “maths.” I confess that I never shone in the mathematical line myself, so am able to sympathize with your difficulties. But hard work will do wonders, and I am sure that if you really “put your back into” algebra and geometry, you can easily get up to scholarship standards by this time next year. – Ever your most affectionate father,
J.B.’
‘It’s too sickening!’ said Anthony, when he had finished reading his father’s letter. The tears came into his eyes; he was filled with a sense of intolerable grievance.
‘W-what does he s-say?’ Brian asked.
‘It’s all settled. He’s written to your Mater that we’re going to some stinking hole in Switzerland instead of Tenby. Oh, I really am too sick about it!’ He crumpled up the letter and threw it angrily on the ground, then turned away and tried to relieve his feelings by kicking his play-box. ‘Too sick, too sick!’ he kept repeating.
Brian was sick too. They were going to have had such a splendid time at Tenby; it had all been imaginatively foreseen, preconstructed in the most luxuriant detail; and now, crash! the future good time was in bits.
‘S-still,’ he said at last, after a long silence, ‘I exp-pect you’ll enj-joy yourself in S-switzerland.’ And, moved by a sudden impulse, for which he would have found it difficult to offer an explanation, he picked up Mr Beavis’s letter, smoothed out the crumpled pages and handed it back to Anthony. ‘Here’s your l-letter,’ he said.
Anthony looked at it for a moment, opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again, and taking the letter, put it away in his pocket.
The congenial company in which they were to explore the Bernese Oberland turned out, when they reached Rosenlaui, to consist of Miss Gannett and her old school-friend Miss Louie Piper. Mr Beavis always spoke of them as ‘the girls,’ or else, with a touch of that mock-heroic philological jocularity to which he was so partial, ‘the damsels’ – dominicellae, double diminutive of domina. The teeny weeny ladies! He smiled to himself each time he pronounced the word. To Anthony the damsels seemed a pair of tiresome and already elderly females. Piper, the thin one, was like a governess. He preferred fat old Gannett, in spite of that awful mooey, squealing laugh of hers, in spite of the way she puffed and sweated up the hills.
Gannett at least was well-meaning. Luckily, there were two other English boys in the hotel. True, they came from Manchester and spoke rather funnily, but they were decent chaps, and they knew an extraordinary number of dirty stories. Moreover, in the woods behind the hotel they had discovered a cave, where they kept cigarettes. Proudly, when he got back to Bulstrode, Anthony announced that he had smoked every day of the hols.
One Saturday in November Mr Beavis came down to Bulstrode for the afternoon. They watched the football for a bit, then went for a depressing walk that ended, however, at the King’s Arms. Mr Beavis ordered crumpets ‘and buttered eggs for this young stalwart’ (with a conspiratorial twinkle at the waitress, as though she also knew that the word meant ‘foundation-worthy’), ‘and cherry jam to follow – isn’t cherry the favourite?’
Anthony nodded. Cherry was the favourite. But so much solicitude made him feel rather suspicious. What could it all be for? Was he going to say something about his work? About going in for the scholarship next summer? About . . . ? He blushed. But after all, his father couldn’t possibly know anything about that. Not possibly. In the end he gave it up; he couldn’t imagine what it was.
But when, after an unusually long silence, his father leaned forward and said, ‘I’ve got an interesting piece of news for you, dear boy,’ Anthony knew, in a sudden flash of illumination, exactly what was coming.
‘He’s going to marry the Gannett female,’ he said to himself.
And so he was. In the middle of December.
‘A companion for you,’ Mr Beavis was saying. That youthfulness, those fresh and girlish high spirits! ‘A companion as well as a second mother.’
Anthony nodded. But ‘companion’ – what did he mean? He thought of the fat old Gannett, toiling up the slopes behind Rosenlaui, red-faced, smelling of sweat, reeking . . . And suddenly his mother’s voice was sounding in his ears.
‘Pauline wants you to call her by her Christian name,’ Mr Beavis went on. ‘It’ll be . . . well, jollier, don’t you think?’
Anthony said ‘Yes,’ because there was obviously nothing else for him to say, and helped himself to more cherry jam.
‘Third person singular aorist of τἰθημι?’ questioned Anthony.
Horse-Face got it wrong. It was Staithes who answered correctly.
‘Second plural pluperfect of έρχομαι?’
Brian’s hesitation was due to something graver than his stammer.
‘You’re putrid tonight, Horse-Face,’ said Anthony and pointed his finger at Staithes, who gave him the right answer again. ‘Good for you, Staithes.’ And repeating Jimbug’s stalest joke, ‘The sediment sinks to the bottom, Horse-Face,’ he rumbled in a parody of Jimbug’s deep voice.
‘Poor old Horse-Face!’ said Staithes, slapping the other on the back. Now that Horse-Face had given him the pleasure of knowing less Greek grammar than he did, Staithes almost loved him.
It was nearly eleven, long after lights-out, and the three of them were crowded into the W.C., Anthony in his capacity of examiner sitting majestically on the seat, and the other two squatting on their heels below him, on the floor. The May night was still and warm; in less than six weeks they would be sitting for their scholarship examinations, Brian and Anthony at Eton, Mark Staithes at Rugby.
It was after the previous Christmas holidays that Staithes had come back to Bulstrode with the announcement that he was going in for a scholarship. Astonishing news and, for his courtiers and followers, appalling! That work was idiotic, and that those who worked were contemptible, had been axiomatic among them. And now here was Staithes going in for a schol with the other swots – with Benger Beavis, with old Horse-Face, with that horrible little tick, Goggler Ledwidge. It had seemed a betrayal of all that was most sacred.
By his words first of all, and afterwards, more effectively, by his actions, Staithes had reassured them. The scholarship idea was his Pater’s. Not because of the money, he had hastened to add. His Pater didn’t care a damn about the money. But for the honour and glory, because it was a tradition in the Family. His Pater himself and his Uncles, his Fraters – they had all got schols. It wouldn’t do to let the Family down. Which didn’t change the fact that swotting was a stinking bore and that all swotters who swotted because they liked it, as Horse-Face and Beavis seemed to do, or for the sake of the money, like the miserable Goggler, were absolute worms.
And to prove it he had ragged old Horse-Face about his stammer and his piddle-warblers, he had organized a campaign against Goggler for funking at football, he had stuck nibs into Beavis’s bottom during prep; and, though working very hard himself, he had made up for it by playing harder than ever and by missing no opportunity of telling everyone how beastly
