mr. jackson, a tall, short-sighted clergyman with the green moustache, and classical tutor at st. stephen’s college, was accustomed to dine en gar?on every saturday night in hall, instead of en famille at home, and after two or three glasses of port, play a rubber of whist in the room of one of his colleagues. to-night the gathering was planned to take place at mr. butler’s rooms in the fellows’ buildings, and it was with great pleasure that he had heard his host ask waters and alison to complete the four. they were all classical dons, tutors and lecturers, and it was completely characteristic of them that they continued to play whist rather than bridge, which they considered a debased and easy variety of dummy whist. all four had minds of the same academic calibre, and they constituted in this very conservative college the stronghold and inner defences of conservatism. chief among its tenets was the doctrine that latin and greek were the sole and essential instruments of education that should be used on the mind of the young, just as cricket and football and rowing were a young man’s proper physical exercises. in later life you could play golf and lawn-tennis and croquet, even as in later life you could learn{28} french and italian, in which, no doubt, there were many light and agreeable pieces of literature to be enjoyed. but until you had attained to maturity all these minor diversions had best be eschewed. “a fellow,” as mr. jackson was fond of saying, “who can write a decent set of greek iambics, or translate a piece of gibbon into thucydidean greek, has a trained mind, which can without difficulty acquire any other subject of human knowledge with which his profession makes it desirable that he should be acquainted.”
this creed mr. jackson put into practice every day of the term. greek was the special subject that he taught, and week by week his pupils, besides attending his lectures, which just now were concerned with the peloponnesian war, made renderings of english verse into iambics and english prose into its possible equivalent in thucydidean or platonic greek. the point of these exercises really was to cram into the rendering as many tags from classical authors as could be dragged in. when a set of iambics were plentifully besprinkled with phrases and unusual usages from ?schylus or sophocles, mr. jackson considered them a good effort of scholarship, and never paused to reflect whether it might not be merely a specimen of the most comical baboo greek.
everything connected with classical greek was an unrivalled instrument of education in his regard, and thus his pupils were also thoroughly instructed in greek history. they might be as ignorant as a sucking child on the subject of french, italian or english history; their claims, as regards history, to be educated rested solely on their knowledge of greek history. similarly it was nice to know dates; he had no objection to anyone being aware of the year in which constantinople fell into the hands of osman, or england into those of{29} william the conqueror. but it was necessary to salvation to have on the tip of your tongue the date of the death of pericles. subsequently, in greek history, the classical age ceased, and that nation and language had not the good luck to interest mr. jackson any further at all.
his loyal conspirator and coadjutor in keeping the greek flag flying was waters, who was to make one of the four to-night, and since his host butler held the same views with regard to latin as he to greek, and had asked alison, his latin fellow-conspirator, to complete the table, jackson felt justified in expecting a pleasant evening. it was not that he intended or expected that anybody would talk “shop” with regard to education; simply he felt happier and more at ease in the presence of classical scholars than in that of mathematicians or natural scientists. with natural scientists he had, however, a bond in common (when they did not bring into prominence their doleful heresy that natural science or natural history could possibly be considered an instrument of education), for he himself had for years been an enthusiastic collector of fresh-water shells. but that was his hobby, over which he unbent his mind, laying no claim to be an educated man because he had a very considerable knowledge of this branch of conchology, any more than butler considered it a title to culture that he had a completer knowledge of handel’s music than any living man, or probably any dead one, including handel himself.
jackson strolled along the broad gravel path towards butler’s rooms, passing groups of undergraduates on the way, to some of whom, his own pupils, he nodded; practically he knew none others, even by sight. jim and birds were among those he knew, who, since smoking in the court was forbidden, discreetly held their{30} cigarettes behind their backs as mr. jackson passed them. but though short-sighted, he had a keen sense of smell, and pleasantly enough made a rather neat latin quotation about incense.
from butler’s room came the loud resonance of a piano, which quite drowned the noise of his knocking, and entering, he found that sardonic colleague deeply engaged at his piano on the last movement of handel’s occasional overture. butler’s method of playing was to put his face very near the music, plant a firm foot on the loud pedal, and add the soft pedal for passages marked piano. he preserved an iron and unshakable tempo, counting the requisite number of beats to each bar in an audible voice, and not stopping till he got to the end of his piece unless the book fell off the music-rest, when he turned the page. when that occurred, he continued counting while he picked it up.
to-night no such interruption occurred, and it was not till he had reached the last loud chord that he observed jackson’s appearance.
“that’s a glorious thing you were playing,” observed he pleasantly, as he put his cap and gown in the window-seat. “glorious. they can’t write such music now.”
butler gave a short sarcastic laugh.
“they can’t indeed,” he said. “modern music is just trash: there’s no other word for it. the other day when i was up in town i went—good evening, waters—i went to a concert in order to hear handel’s violin sonata, and had to sit through a piece of debussy. if it hadn’t been for the question of manners, i should have put back my head and howled like a dog.”
“and had to grin like a dog instead,” suggested waters, stroking his short black beard, which was{31} streaked with grey. the applicability of the classical english epithet “silver-sabled” to his beard consoled him for those signs of the middle years.
“no, i assure you, grinning was beyond me,” said this musical sufferer, “though i admit the neatness of your quotation. it was a mere confused noise like nothing so much as the protracted tuning of the orchestra. but, it’s no use getting angry with stuff that doesn’t merit the faintest attention.”
jackson put his head on one side, his favourite attitude when pronouncing critical judgments.
“i’m not altogether so sure that i agree with you,” he said, “i’m not speaking about debussy because i’ve never heard of him before, but i think some modern music is uncommonly fine. but you’re such a confounded purist, my dear fellow.”
“certainly i can’t find time for the second best,” said butler. “there’s nothing been written in the last fifty years that has a chance of living.”
“a sweeping statement, rather,” said waters. “i was considerably impressed by the festival at bayreuth two years ago: in fact i’m going again in august. there are certain parts of tristan and isolde that are very moving. can’t i persuade you to come with me?”
jackson laughed.
“not if you were peitho herself would you persuade him,” he said. “what was that phrase of yours, butler, when you heard tristan in london. ‘three hours of neurasthenic cacophany,’ i think you called it.”
“i believe i did,” said butler, gratified that his dictum should be remembered. “but if i did, i understated it. ah, here is our coffee: i wonder why alison doesn’t come.”
“he went to see the master about something con{32}nected with the may-week concert,” said waters. “he told us he might be a little late. i can’t quite agree with our host about wagner, but i do cordially agree with him that there’s a cult of the incompetent sprung up, who make up for their want of artistic ability by sheer bizarre impertinence. debussy i make no doubt is one of them (though like jackson i never heard a note of him), and the modern impressionists and post-impressionists and cubists are others. if i may adapt butler’s phrase i should have no hesitation in describing their canvasses as ‘three feet of neurasthenic daubings.’ but of course their scribblings are merely pour rire.”
jackson put his head on one side again.
“i don’t know that there’s much more to be said for any modern art,” he answered. “i myself am unable to give even the most admired modern painters a place in the pictorial tripos. sargent, for instance: i don’t consider his portraits more than mere posters, pieces of scenic painting if you will, dabbed on, without any finish, like a copy of greek prose without any accents. ha, here’s alison: now we’ll get to work.”
it was curious to note now, immediately on the advent of the players to make up their table at whist, all these lesser problems and pronouncements with regard to the position of wagner, sargent and debussy in the realms of art were immediately dismissed for the greater preoccupation. for those middle-aged men, in spite of their gently-fossilized existence, their indulgent contempt for anything that was not immediately “cambridge,” their general pessimism about modern effort, retained a certain streak of boyishness and gusto, in that they were genuinely fond of games, both the milder and more sedentary ones that they themselves{33} played, and those better suited to the robust vigour of their pupils, accepting the importance of them as a clause in the creed that made cambridge just precisely what it was. their theories about them, just as about education, might be all cut and dried, and the sap as completely be gone out of them as out of the pressed flowers in some botancial collection (which they would unanimously have alluded to as a hortus siccus), but they did believe in them.
there was no elasticity or any possible growth or development that could come to those fibrous stems and crackling petals, but they believed in their creed and would have opposed with tooth and nail of conviction any suggested reform or innovation. for cambridge, so long as the forts of classics and cricket stood secure, was to them an institution as abiding as the moon, and no criticism concerning it could be taken seriously, any more than you could take seriously a person who said that he would have preferred the colour of the moon to be pea-green or magenta. but cambridge could only remain a permanent and perfect phenomenon, if it remained exactly as it was. whatever in the world of flux and change might alter and crumble, cambridge must present an unalterable front to the corroding centuries. whatever change came there, must, in the very nature of things, be a change for the worse.
of the great ancient fortress of cambridge, st. stephen’s college was beyond doubt the most impregnable bastion. founded by henry vii., it had had a glorious record of opposition to every reform and innovation that had assaulted its grey walls. when first railways began to knit england together, st. stephen’s had headed every defensive man?uvre to keep their baleful facilities away from the sanctuary.{34} st. stephen’s collective spirit did not wish to “run up” to london in two or three hours: it preferred the sequestering methods of the stage-coach. till some forty years ago it had consisted entirely of fellows and undergraduates who had been scholars of st. stephen’s school, and at the conclusion of their enjoyment of henry vii.’s endowment there, proceeded for the rest of their lives, if so disposed, to be supported by henry vii. at st. stephen’s college. they entered it as scholars, became fellows in due course, and taught to the succeeding generation precisely what they had learned.
then had come that overwhelming assault on the tradition of centuries, which our four whist-players thought bitterly of even till to-day, when the college was thrown open to boys from other schools who, instead of necessarily taking up classics, went in for all sorts of debased subjects such as natural science and medicine. but there was no help for it: that particular gate of the bastion had to be opened, and scientists moral and physical, even students of modern languages, mingled with the white-robed classical choir. but the spirit of the more loyal-hearted portion of the garrison remained unbroken, and sturdily, long after the rest of cambridge blazed with electric light, st. stephen’s, owing chiefly to the determined stand made by jackson and butler, moved in its accustomed dusk of candles and oil lamps.
the introduction of bath-rooms provoked a not less gallant opposition: in the time of henry vii. hot baths were unheard of, and if nowadays you wanted one, you could get a can of hot water from the kitchen. and it was only under the severest pressure that those debasing paraphernalia squeezed their way in. not for a moment is it implied that jackson and his friends{35} were like bats who preferred the dark, or like cats who disliked water, but only that they disliked any change, and preferred things precisely as they were....
the game proceeded in the utmost harmony and with academic calm, and was interspersed with neat quotations. for instance, when at the conclusion of a hand, waters said approvingly to his partner, “you saw my call all right,” jackson without a moment’s thought replied, “yes, waters, one clear call for me.” or when hearts were trumps, and butler proved only to have one of that suit, he paused, without applying his lit match to his pipe, to say, “eructavit cor meum.” as that one happened to be the ace, it was quickly and sharply that alison said, “but your heart is inditing of a good matter.” even when apt quotation failed, something academic was fragrant in their most ordinary remarks, as when, spades being turned up as trumps for the third time running, butler referred to “the prevalence of those agricultural implements,” or when his partner found that his hand contained seven diamonds, he called it “a jewel song.” there was not one atom of pose or desire for effect in those little mots, their minds thought like that, and their tongues faithfully expressed their impressions.
the third of these pleasant rubbers came to an end about a quarter to eleven, and, a “senatus consultum” being taken, it was resolved not to begin a new one, but to relax into conversation.
“non semper arcum,” said butler, rising. “ho, everyone that thirsteth, you will help yourselves, please. i think you said, alison, that when we had finished sarah battling, you wanted to tell us what the master spoke to you about.”
alison was busy making a curious drink that he found refreshing, which was a mixture of port and soda{36} water (called alison’s own) in exactly equal proportions. there must be just as much port as there was water, neither more nor less, else some recondite flavour was missed. he was a man of about forty-five, clean-shaven and alert: his great acquirement was an inward knowledge of cicero’s letters so amazing, that when once he set a piece of latin translation in a college examination, composed not at all by cicero, but by himself, even the master had been deceived, and asked him out of which of cicero’s letters he had taken that piece. in other respects he played lawn-tennis, and was responsible, as precentor, for the music of the college services in chapel.
“yes, it is a matter of some importance,” he said. “the choral society, of course, are giving their annual sacred concert in chapel during may-week, and they have most unfortunately selected elgar’s ‘dream of gerontius’ for performance. the master tells me that he is inclined absolutely to refuse to give permission for it, but asked me first to consult some of you. i told him i should meet you three to-night, and he said that he desired no better subcommittee.”
“is his objection to it on the score of elgar, elgar’s score one might say,” asked butler, “or on that of gerontius? if on that of the composer, i am disposed to agree with him. i know nothing about gerontius, as a literary production, except that a hymn which we occasionally sing in chapel with a vulgar tune, is excerpted from it, i believe.”
jackson chuckled.
“on the score of elgar, elgar’s score,” he repeated. “very neat, butler. i know the hymn you mean, ‘praise to the holiest in the height.’ it goes admirably into greek iambics.{37}”
“equally well into latin elegiacs,” said alison. “no, the master has no feeling against elgar’s music: that wasn’t his point. but he could not see himself permitting the performance in chapel of a libretto so markedly, so pugnaciously roman catholic. i am bound to confess that there’s something to be said for his view. what do you say, jackson? you are our spiritual pastor.”
jackson took his stand by the fire-place, and put his head on one side.
“well, if i’m bound to speak as from a rostrum,” he said, “i shall be disposed to ask for notice of that question. it’s an uncommonly nice point, and the question, of course, on which it all hinges is how far the purpose of a libretto is extinguished by being treated musically. i remember going to see gounod’s faust, of which the libretto contains some frankly intolerable situations. but somehow when treated musically they did not strike me as actually indecent.”
“the indecency of the music would be enough for me,” said butler incisively. “nothing else but that would strike me.”
“ah, there’s our purist again. but just now the question is not so much of purism as puritanism.”
“after all, we sing ‘praise to the holiest’ in chapel,” remarked alison. “i have known the master join in it.”
butler drew in his breath with a hissing inspiration as of pain at that recollection.
“yes, yes, sufficient unto the day—usually trinity sunday—is the master’s singing of that hymn,” he remarked. “if the master proposed to sing the whole of the ‘dream of gerontius’ himself i would be steadfast in prayer that it should not be given at all. but he has not threatened that, i gather.{38}”
waters extracted a few crumbs of biscuit that had fallen in his silver-sabled beard.
“i think jackson has hit the nail on the head,” he remarked. “the question is how far music purges the libretto. in my view it doesn’t: it merely emphasizes it. another appeal, the musical, is added. i admit the inconsistency of singing a hymn that comes out of gerontius, but you do not remedy that inconsistency by adding to it the far greater one of giving, as alison neatly phrased it, a pugnaciously roman catholic work in a church of england chapel.”
“and those who vote for the motion, that is the exclusion of gerontius?” asked alison.
he counted hands.
“the ayes have it,” he announced. “i think we may conclude that gerontius will have to seek another dormitory.”
“to sleep, perchance to dream,” suggested waters.
this point being settled, the unrest in ireland and possible labour troubles were lightly touched on, but such subjects had very little concern for these sheltered lives, and presently, even before alison had drunk his tumbler of alison’s own, more exhilarating topics came under discussion. there was a proposal to be brought by some junior don at the next college meeting that the dinner hour should, during the summer months, be postponed, from 7.30 till 8; this aroused butler’s gloomiest apprehensions.
“that young mackenzie is a most undesirable man,” he said. “we made a great mistake when we elected him to a fellowship.”
“considering the degrees he took,” said jackson. “a first in mathematics one year, a first in mechanical science the next, and a fellowship dissertation which{39} appears to be the most valuable contribution ever made to the subject of engines for aeroplanes, i don’t see what else we could do. i regretted the necessity as much as you.”
“i refuse to admit the necessity,” said butler. “as the greatest classical college of the university, what have we to do with aeroplanes? i hope it is not our business to further the exploitation of mechanical toys.”
jackson assumed the “rostrum” again.
“i don’t altogether agree with you,” he said, “about their being mechanical toys. there may be something in them after all. but i do agree with you that the study and construction of them should be conducted at their proper place and not at a university. one of mackenzie’s gliders, or so i think he calls them, came sailing in yesterday through the open window of my lecture-room, followed a moment afterwards by mackenzie himself without a word of apology. i think, however, he caught my next sentence, ‘after this most unseemly interruption’.... he was meant to in any case. i had a good mind to chuck a thucydides through the window of his lecture-room and see what he made of that.”
“he wouldn’t make much of thucydides,” said butler witheringly. “he said to me the other day that he thanked god he hadn’t wasted a minute of his life in learning greek. latin he appeared to have learned for his own amusement: he liked reading horace, he told me.”
“turning the classics into a mere hobby,” said waters, “and reading, i make no doubt, without notes or a dictionary, much as you read a french novel.”
“amazing!” said jackson, with his head on one side. “and the worst of it all is that he seems to have got some sort of hold over the undergraduates which is{40} altogether irregular and unseemly. they talk to him as if he was a slightly senior undergraduate himself. no sort of good can come out of such relationships. a don is a teacher, and an undergraduate is a learner. they must both keep their proper places or the whole university system is undermined.”
“that’s the danger in having young men as fellows,” said alison, “who have no sense of their positions and dignity. there’s too much of that sort of thing. and it’s the same at other colleges.”
jackson took up his cap and gown.
“well, i think we know how to put a pretty firm foot down on it here,” he said. “master mackenzie will find that his gliders and his dinner at eight aren’t looked very warmly on. by the way, young linnet played a fine innings the other day against middlesex, and he showed me up an uncommonly good piece of greek prose this week. cricket and greek. i wish the undergraduates would stick to them. then we shouldn’t have much bother with fellows like mackenzie.”
waters took his watch from his pocket and absently wound it up, instead of looking at the time.
“i was dipping into a play by that obscene scandinavian dramatist the other day,” he said, “and found a line about the younger generation knocking at the door. hedda gabler was it?—anyhow there was a vast lot of gabble.”
“obscene?” said alison. “isn’t that rather a strong word?”
“it was rather strong stuff: that is why i chose the word.”
“i should have said that piffle was nearer the mark,” said jackson with an air of complete finality.
“i beg to second that motion, if we’re talking about ibsen,” said butler. “but i propose as an amendment{41} that we don’t talk about ibsen. why talk about ibsen?”
“well, we won’t,” said waters. “i delete the obscene scandinavian, and remark on my own account that the younger generation does seem to me to be knocking at the door.”
jackson put on his gown.
“sport your oak, then, my dear fellow,” he said, “and go on with your plato. and shut your windows against mackenzie’s gliders. cambridge is all right, there’s life in the old dog yet, and a good set of teeth too, if there’s going to be any question of its dinner. well, i must go. very pleasant evening, butler. good-night, all of you.”
his firm step descended the uncarpeted flight of stairs outside in gradual diminuendo, and alison, as it was saturday night, took another glass of “his own,” before going to bed.
“linnet’s a very attractive fellow,” he said. “i like both him and lethbridge. but some of those first and second year men are rather a poisonous lot. you know the crew i mean, they run that new paper called camouflage.”
“camouflage?” asked butler.
“yes, french word, with an allusion to the cam, i conjecture. i looked it up in a dictionary. it’s the art of concealment with intent to deceive, to put it generally. ‘evasion,’ you might possibly render it by ‘evasion.’ haven’t you come across the paper?”
“i am afraid that my reading does not embrace those usually very callow periodicals,” said butler. “pray widen my restricted horizon.”
“well, i have glanced at a number or two of it. i should suppress it if i was the vice-chancellor, but i{42} don’t deny it’s got a good deal of cleverness. it’s all misdirected cleverness. there was a really very neat piece of platonic dialogue directed against the teaching of classical languages. there was an interview in the style of the daily mail with villon, that french vagabond rhymster, you know. there was also a poem called ‘ode to a pair of trousers’ couched in swinburnian language of almost licentious passion. the key to it lay in the last stanza, in which you found out that it was supposed to be written by the poet on a frosty morning after a cold bath. that explained the ‘softness of thy warm embrace, the clinging of thy leg,’ and the rest of it. the poet merely wanted to get his clothes on again. rather neat, rather in the c.s.c. style.”
“i cannot at the moment recall anything of calverley’s that seems to resemble your very vivid précis,” said butler icily. “and with your permission, i think i will not invest money or time in the purchase and perusal of camouflage. but without hearing more i am completely in accord with your inclination to suppress it.”
alison’s second indulgence in port and water had roused him to a certain liberalism that usually hibernated.
“i wish sometimes we could get more into touch with the undergraduates,” he said. “we know about their games to some extent, and we know what their classical reading consists of, and we look over their compositions. but there our knowledge of them and their education abruptly ceases, unless they get into trouble through not keeping chapels, or making a row, or smoking in the quadrangle. you, for instance, just now, butler, wanted to know no more about camouflage or its authors.{43}”
butler poured himself out a glass of whisky and soda. this, too, was in celebration of saturday night.
“my dear fellow,” he said, “your admirable description of the ode was quite enough for me as regards camouflage. i should like it immediately suppressed. as for the authors, you yourself said they were a poisonous lot.”
“i know i did. but i wonder if one could not learn more about the poison, and perhaps supply an antidote. indeed, what if it isn’t poison?”
“i am content to take your word that it is,” said butler, yawning. conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they, to his mind, whom cambridge connoted. cambridge meant to him the life lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. naturally his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary rebuked.
but more advanced ideas still floated vaguely in alison’s mind, as he rose to go.
“sometimes i have certain doubts about our educational system,” he observed.
“get rid of them,” said butler, booming from his impregnable fortress.
while this decorous pleasure-party of the olympians was in progress, another by no means less pleasurable, though far less olympian, had been going on partly in birds’s room, partly in jim’s, just across the passage. two or three people had strolled in to see birds after hall, two or three more to see jim, with the effect that there had been an amalgamation and a game of poker.{44} those who did not care to play poker, refreshed themselves with cigarettes and conversation and whisky and soda, and a rather neat booby-trap had been set over the door into birds’s bedroom. jelf of the poisonous set, and editor of camouflage, had devised this, and subsequently forgetting about it, and going into birds’s bedroom to fetch another glass, had got caught by it himself, and was now brushing carbolic tooth powder out of his hair. then birds, who at the moment was playing poker in jim’s room, had come in, and by way of reprisal had thrown the rest of the tooth-powder in jelf’s face, who had sneezed without intermission for ten minutes.
but the ragging had not gone further than that, and now the party had broken up, leaving only jelf and badsley with the owners of the rooms. jelf was a tall, merry-faced, ugly boy, whose hair when not pink with tooth-powder was black. he wore it long and lanky, with the design, which perfectly succeeded, of annoying those who conformed to the custom of short hair. he wore extraordinarily shabby clothes and professed views of the wildest immorality for analogous reasons.
“and if i find long black hairs in my brush to-morrow,” said birds, alluding to these incidents, “i shall make you eat them. why don’t you get your hair cut like ordinary people?”
“because then i should no longer annoy ordinary people. i say, camouflage is going to be lovely next week. i’ve written a defence of polygamy. there’s a polygamous tribe in west africa whose average length of life is seventy-eight. i attribute that to polygamy.”
“don’t believe it,” said birds.
“you haven’t read my article yet, so you do{45}n’t know. it’s style that makes you believe things, and i’ve put it very convincingly with quotations from taylor’s ‘anthropology’ and the ‘golden bough,’ and legros’ travels. no one will turn the passages up, and if they did they wouldn’t find them, because they don’t exist. but it’s all damned scientifically put.”
“do you mean you made the whole thing up?” asked jim.
“yes, my child. as i say, it’s all a question of style. you’ll believe it all right. and then there’s another rather neat rag, if you’ll promise not to tell anybody.”
“right.”
“i’ve printed a french poem by victor hugo, and signed it with my initials.”
“what’s the point?”
“why, i shall take a copy very diffidently to butler, and ask him what he thinks of my french. and i bet you five to one that he says that i had better learn prosody before i attempt to write french verse, or words to that effect. anyone take it?”
it seemed so perfectly certain that butler would say words to that effect that not the wildest gambler would entertain such a hazard.
“and then you’ll tell him?” asked jim.
“of course not, but it’ll leak out somehow. i shall tell mackenzie and he’ll do the rest. i wonder why the dons object to me so much? at least, i know why. they think i’m pulling their sacred legs. the ode to the trousers annoyed them awfully. they thought it was going to be obscene, and suffered a bitter disappointment.”
robin sat down on the floor.
“don’t see what you’re playing at,” he said. “i{46}t’s perfectly easy to be unpopular, and you take such a lot of trouble about it.”
“there you’re wrong,” said jelf. “you couldn’t be unpopular if you tried, birds. your hair is nice and short and you’ve a clean face and shave every morning, and play cricket and are exactly like everybody else.”
“sooner be like that than like you,” said robin politely.
“you couldn’t be like me, if you tried, simply because you can’t think for yourself. you accept all that you’ve been brought up in, like a dear little good boy, eating the dinner that’s given him, and saying his grace afterwards. being born an englishman together with eton and cambridge has made you precisely what you are, which is exactly the same as badders and jim. you do what you’re told without ever asking why. britannia rules the waves, and church is at eleven on sunday morning, but you may play lawn-tennis in the afternoon.”
jelf got up and waved his arms wildly.
“you’re all cast in one mould,” he said, “and lord, how i should like to break it. here you sit, you and badders and jim, and badders is going to be a schoolmaster, because his father was, and jim is going to be a clergyman for the same reason, and you’re going to be a bloody lord. gosh! that’s why you get on so well, simply because you never think. and you never think because you can’t. happy england! our national stupidity is the basis of our national prosperity.”
“that comes out of ‘intentions,’” remarked badsley.
“i daresay it does, but anyhow, they’re not good intentions, which are invariably fatal. but none of you have got any intentions at all, except to be smug{47} and comfortable and stereotyped. there’s badders with his girls, and birds with his cricket, and jim—well, i don’t know what jim’s with. he’s usually with birds.”
“after all, we seem to annoy you without taking any trouble about it,” remarked badsley, “and you have to take a great deal of trouble to annoy anybody. you’ve got to grow your hair long, and copy out victor hugo, and run a paper that nobody reads.”
“but i can’t help it: i must make a protest against respectability. respectability carried to such a pitch as st. stephen’s carries it to is simply indecent. nobody ever gets drunk except me, and i not frequently because i hate feeling unwell afterwards. it’s so degrading to be sick even in a good cause. why don’t we keep mistresses? why does nobody do anything that he shouldn’t according to collegiate standards? atheism too: why no atheists? and all the time i’ve got a horrible feeling that i’m really just the same as any of you.”
“you need not, i assure you,” said birds in the butler voice, “be under any mistaken misapprehensions about that.”
“but i am. i argue and protest, but at bottom——”
“oh, kick it, somebody,” said badsley.
jim went and stood in front of the fireplace with his head on one side.
“the question is how we shall make jelf more like us,” he said. “shall we begin by cutting his hair or shaving him, or——”
there was a wild rush across the room and jelf jumped out of the window on to the grass outside.
“cowards!” he said, and ran to his room and locked himself in.
birds, who had just failed to catch jelf before he{48} jumped out of the window, came back into the room.
“and the rum thing is that though he talks such awful piffle, he’s about right,” he said. “we don’t think. i say, his victor hugo rag is rather a good one.”
“top-hole. but what is there to think about except the things that everybody thinks about?”
“dunno. but somehow he finds them. do you remember when there was flue here before easter, and he went round with a handcart and a bell, calling out, ‘bring out your dead’? that did me a lot of good.”
badsley yawned.
“i’m going to be a schoolmaster because the governor is,” he remarked, “and jim’s going to be a clergyman, and birds is going to be a lord. jelf’s about right. and to-morrow will be sunday, so i’m going to bed to-day!”
birds and jim were left alone, and birds began undressing.
“i think i shall begin by being an atheist,” he said. “how am i to start? but it is true that we all do what everybody else does. are you going to breakfast with me to-morrow, or i with you? i forget whose turn it is.”
“yours. and we can’t think, at least i can’t. if i sat down to think i shouldn’t know what to think about. all the same——”
jim took a turn up and down the room, trying to frame words to the idea in his mind.
“he’s rather puck-like, is jelf,” he said. “i don’t think he’s really human. he thinks that people who aren’t epigrammatic, don’t feel. i doubt if he likes anybody—really likes, i mean. you aren’t good for much if you don’t.{49}”
“that’s what makes him want to pull things down,” said birds, following vaguely the train of thought. “he can destroy all right; he makes you think nothing’s up to much. but he doesn’t give you anything instead. lord! i wish i’d been a bit quicker and caught him before he went through the window.”
he strolled whistling away into his own room.
