Francis passed by without deigning to notice him. His head was high, his eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. He was gone, and for Dick all the light was out, the beloved quadrangle was a prison-yard, the pigeons a loathsome flock of carrion eaters. Gay and Partington came up behind him with shouts of invitation. Dick walked rudely away. God! how he hated them and their wretched, silly talk and their yellow, ugly faces.
The weeks that followed were full of strangeness. For the first time in his life Dick took to writing poetry. There was one sonnet which began :
Is it a vision or a waking dream? Or is it truly Apollo that I see, Come from his sylvan haunts in Arcady to laugh and loiter, sing and saunter by an English stream. . . .
He kept on repeating the words to himself, «Sylvan haunts in Arcady,» «laugh and loiter «(after much thought he had adopted that as more liquidly melodious than «sing and saunter «). How beautiful they sounded!—as beautiful as Keats—more beautiful, for they were his own.
He avoided the company of Gay and Fletton and Partington; they had become odious to him, and their conversation, when he could bring himself to listen to it, was, somehow, almost incomprehensible. He would sit for hours alone in his study; not working—for he could not understand the mathematical problems on which he had been engaged before the fateful day in the quadrangle—but reading novels and the poetry of Mrs. Browning, and at intervals writing something rather ecstatic of his own. After a long preparatory screwing up of his courage, he dared at last to send a fag with a note to Francis, asking him to tea; and when Francis rather frigidly refused, he actually burst into tears. He had not cried like that since he was a child.
He became suddenly very religious. He would spend an hour on his knees every night, praying, praying with frenzy.
He mortified the flesh with fasting and watching. He even went so far as to flagellate himself—or at least tried to; for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself adequately with a cane in a room so small that any violent gesture imperils the bric-a-brac. He would pass half the night stark naked, in absurd postures, trying to hurt himself. And then, after the dolorously pleasant process of self-maceration was over, he used to lean out of the window and listen to the murmurs of the night and fill his spirit with the warm velvet darkness of midsummer. Copthorne-Slazenger, coming back by the late train from town one night, happened to see his moon-pale face hanging out of window and was delighted to be able to give him two hundred Greek lines to remind him that even a member of the Sixth Form requires sleep sometimes.
The fit lasted three weeks. «I can’t think what’s the matter with you, Greenow,» complained Mr. Skewbauld snufflingly. «You seem incapable or unwilling to do anything at all. I suspect the cause is constipation. If only everyone would take a little paraffin every night before going to bed! . . .» Mr. Skewbauld’s self-imposed mission in life was the propagation of the paraffin habit. It was the universal panacea—the cure for every ill.
His friends of before the crisis shook their heads and could only suppose him mad. And then the fit ended as suddenly as it had begun.
It happened at a dinner-party given by the Cravisters. Dr. Cravister was the Headmaster of Aesop—a good, gentle, learned old man, with snow-white hair and a saintly face which the spirit of comic irony had embellished with a nose that might, so red and bulbous it was, have been borrowed from the properties of a music-hall funny man. And then there was Mrs. Cravister, large and stately as a galleon with all sails set. Those who met her for the first time might be awed by the dignity of what an Elizabethan would have called her «swelling port.» But those who knew her well went in terror of the fantastic spirit which lurked behind the outward majesty.
They were afraid of what that richly modulated voice of hers might utter. It was not merely that she was malicious—and she had a gift of ever-ready irony; no, what was alarming in all her conversation was the element of the unexpected. With most people one feels comfortably secure that they will always say the obvious and ordinary things; with Mrs. Cravister, never. The best one could do was to be on guard and to try and look, when she made a more than usually characteristic remark, less of a bewildered fool than one felt.
Mrs. Cravister received her guests— they were all of them boys — with stately courtesy. They found it pleasant to be taken so seriously, to be treated as perfectly grown men; but at the same time, they always had with Mrs. Cravister a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all her politeness was an irony so exquisite as to be practically undistinguishable from ingenuousness.
«Good evening, Mr. Gay,» she said, holding out her hand and shutting her eyes; it was one of her disconcerting habits, this shutting of the eyes. «What a pleasure it will be to hear you talking to us again about eschatology.»
Gay, who had never talked about eschatology and did not know the meaning of the word, smiled a little dimly and made a protesting noise.
«Eschatology? What a charming subject!» The fluty voice belonged to Henry Cravister, the Headmaster’s son, a man of about forty who worked in the British Museum. He was almost too cultured, too erudite.
«But I don’t know anything about it,» said Gay desperately.
«Spare us your modesty,» Henry Cravister protested.
His mother shook hands with the other guests, putting some at their ease with a charming phrase and embarrassing others by saying something baffling and unexpected that would have dismayed even the hardiest diner-out, much more a schoolboy tremblingly on his good behaviour. At the tail end of the group of boys stood Dick and Francis Quarles. Mrs. Cravister slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and regarded them a moment in silence.
«The Graeco-Roman and the Gothic side by side!» she exclaimed. «Lord Francis is something in the Vatican, a rather late piece of work; and Mr. Greenow is a little gargoyle from the roof of Notre Dame de Paris. Two epochs of art—how clearly one sees the difference. And my husband, I always think, is purely Malayan in design— purely Malayan,» she repeated as she shook hands with the two boys.
Dick blushed to the roots of his hair, but Francis’ impassive arrogance remained unmoved. Dick stole a glance in his direction, and at the sight of his calm face he felt a new wave of adoring admiration sweeping through him.
The company was assembled and complete, Mrs. Cravister looked round the room and remarking, «We won’t wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger,» sailed majestically in the direction of the door. She particularly disliked this member of her husband’s staff, and lost no opportunity of being rude to him. Thus, where an ordinary hostess might have said, «Shall we come in to dinner «: Mrs. Cravister employed the formula, «We won’t wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger»; and a guest unacquainted with Mrs. Cravister’s habits would be surprised on entering the dining-room to find that all the seats at the table were filled, and that the meal proceeded smoothly without a single further reference to the missing Copthorne, who never turned up at all, for the good reason that he had never been invited.
Dinner began a little nervously and uncomfortably. At one end of the table the Headmaster was telling anecdotes of Aesop in the sixties, at which the boys in his neighbourhood laughed with a violent nervous insincerity. Henry Cravister, still talking about eschatology, was quoting from Sidonius Apollinarius and Commodianus of Gaza. Mrs. Cravister, who had been engaged in a long colloquy with the butler, suddenly turned on Dick with the remark, «And so you have a deep, passionate fondness for cats,» as though they had been intimately discussing the subject for the last hour. Dick had enough presence of mind to say that, yes, he did like cats— all except those Manx ones that had no tails.
«No tails,» Mrs. Cravister repeated— «no tails. Like men. How symbolical everything is! «
Francis Quarles was sitting opposite him, so that Dick had Cample opportunity to look at his idol. How perfectly he did everything, down to eating his soup! The first lines of a new poem began to buzz in Dick’s head:
«All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet— My heart, my love and all my future days. Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze, For ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet. . .»
Would he be able to find enough rhymes to make it into a sonnet? Mrs. Cravister, who had been leaning back in her chair for the last few minutes in a state of exhausted abstraction, opened her eyes and said to nobody in particular:
«Ah, how I envy the calm of those Chinese dynasties!»
«Which Chinese dynasties?» a well-meaning youth inquired.
«Any Chinese dynasty, the more remote the better. Henry, tell us the names of some Chinese dynasties.»
In obedience to his mother, Henry delivered a brief disquisition on the
