I AM not of those who thoroughly disbelieve in British education. I have seen so much of the foreign product that I have come to feel that our school system, if placed on a wider basis, may yet prove best adapted to our national temperament. It is true, of course, that it standardises character and suppresses originality: that it somewhat ruthlessly subordinates the musical to the gymnastic. I am not convinced, however, that this is a bad thing. It provides society with a mass of standardised entities who, although unintelligent, yet do in fact possess τò βovλεvτɩκóv: upon the individual the effect is only rarely disastrous. The physically gifted enjoy for a short space of years a prominence of which it would be ungracious to deprive them: nor do I think it unfitting that during the same period the intellectuals should very frequently and brutally be snubbed. True originality will by such measures merely be pruned to greater florescence; and sham originality will, thank God, be suppressed.
I admit, however, that my own mental development was checked by my education for a period of some ten years. But the circumstances were exceptional. My home life was so unusually exciting, my school life so unusually dull, that a gulf was formed between myself and my education which it took me a decade to bridge. On the one hand was Morocco, disturbing and aromatic, with wide nights beside the campfire, the smell of gum-cistus, the rootling of wild boar in the swamp behind the hill, the boom of a warmed Atlantic on a distant beach. And on the other were “The Grange “(Folkestone) and subsequently Wellington College; the smell of varnished wood and Sunlight soap, the smell of linseed oil in the pavilion, the white light of acetylene gas upon a Latin grammar. Between these two, sundering them by four days of seasickness, came “the journey”; the heavy P. & O. seething past the light of Ushant and out into the cold wet loneliness beyond. Thirty-six times during those years did I either cross or recross the Bay of Biscay, and thirty-six times did I lie for three days in my cabin while my brothers tried to revive me with exhortations and cheap Médoc and little bits of cake.
I think also that both my private and my public school were exceptionally rigid and restrictive. At the Grange we were cold and underfed: we were incessantly being bothered to live up to our moral tone, which, so they assured us, was higher than that of any school in England. Mr. Hussey, the Head Master, would speak to us of “high endeavour” and kick us if we made the slightest noise. I was puzzled by all this and spent my time dreaming about things to eat, dreaming about warm rooms, dreaming constantly about Morocco. Mr. Moore, the Latin master, had a pair of skis in his sitting-room; Mr. Harrison, the man who taught sums, had only four fingers on his left hand; Mr. Reece one summer gave me a nectarine. I was not in the least unhappy, only absent-minded: they cursed me for being untidy, for laughing in form, for drawing pictures. And the impression arose in me that neither the games nor the lessons nor the high moral tone were things in which, somehow, the masters expected me to share.
At Wellington it was different: one ceased so completely to be individual, to have any but a corporate identity, that the question scarcely arose whether one might or might not be odd. One was just a name, or rather a number, on the list. The authorities in their desire to deprive us of all occasion for illicit intercourse deprived us of all occasion for any intercourse at all. We were not allowed to consort with boys not in our own house: a house consisted of thirty boys, of whom ten at least were too old and ten too young for friendship; and thus during those four years my training in human relationships was confined to the ten boys who happened more or less to be my contemporaries. In addition, one was deprived of all initiative of action or occupation. The masters took a pride in feeling that not only did they know what any given boy should be doing at that particular moment, but that they knew exactly what the said boy would be doing at 3.30 p.m. six weeks hence. We had thus no privacy and no leisure, there was never open to us the choice between two possible alternatives. I entered Wellington as a puzzled baby and left it as a puzzled child. And the vices which this system was supposed to repress flourished incessantly and universally, losing in their furtive squalor any educative value which they might otherwise have
I repeat that I was not unhappy. I took everything for granted: I even took for granted the legend that we were all passionately devoted to the school. It seemed natural to me (it still seems natural to me) that being bad at games I should, although head of the house in work, be debarred from all exceptional privileges. I was not, I think, unpopular: I was on excellent terms with all the other boys: at football even I finally evolved a certain prowess by being able, at crucial moments, unerringly to tumble down. I would drop like a shot rabbit in front of an approaching onslaught: “Well played!” Marstock would shout at me: I would rise and rub myself, κὐδεï γαíωv—all aglow. But until I came into direct contact with Doctor Pollock I learnt nothing serious from Wellington; and even then my enlightenment was blurred by the vestiges of my admiration for J. D. Marstock.
How fortuitous and yet how formative are the admirations which our school life thrusts upon us! With no man have I had less in common than with J. D. Marstock, and yet for years he exercised upon me an influence which, though negative, was intense. How clean he was, how straight, how manly! How proud we were of him, how modest he was about himself! And then those eyes—those frank and honest eyes! “One can see,” my tutor said, “that Marstock has never had a mean or nasty thought.” It took me six years to realise that Marstock, although stuffed with opinions, had never had a thought at all.
I can visualise him best as he appeared when head of the school, when captain of football. A tall figure, he seemed, in his black and orange jersey striped as a wasp. Upon his carefully oiled hair was stuck a little velvet cap with a gold tassel: he would walk away from the field, his large red hands pendant, a little mud upon his large red knees. He would pause for a moment and speak to a group of lower boys. “Yes, Marstock,—no, Marstock,” they would answer, and then he would smile democratically, and walk on—a slight lilt in his gait betraying that he was not unconscious of how much he was observed. Those wide open eyes that looked life straight, if unseeingly, in the face were fixed in front of him upon that distant clump of wellingtonias, upon the two red towers of the college emerging behind. His cheeks, a little purple in the cold, showed traces of that eczema which so often accompanies adolescent worth. But it was not an ugly face. A large and slightly fleshy nose: a thin mouth: a well-formed chin: a younger and a plumper Viscount Grey.
Under the great gate he went and across the quadrangle. He must first look in upon the Sixth form room, a room reserved apparently for prefects who were seldom in the Sixth. He sank into a deck chair by the fire. The other prefects spoke to him about conditions in the Blucher dormitory, and the date of the pancake run. Yes, he would have to tell the Master about the Blucher, and there was no reason why they should not have the run on Tuesday. And then out under the great gate again and across through pine trees to Mr. Kempthorne’s house. There on the floor would be his basin ready for him and a can of hot water beside it. And he had ordered that seed-cake. The smell of cocoa met him as he entered the passage. Seed-cake, and cocoa, and Pears soap, and the soft hum of a kettle on the gas: then work for two hours and then prayers. He would read the roll-call himself that evening. Oh yes! and afterwards there was a boy to be caned. The basket-work of his armchair creaked as he leant forward for the towel.
When I arrived at Wellington, Marstock, who was my senior by some eighteen months, was already prominent. He took particular pains with me since, as he informed me later, I reminded him of a little cousin who had died of scarlet fever. This painful coincidence earned me his protective affection; and I for my part was awed and flattered. He thought me a good little boy with a healthy influence among my fellows: it was his lack of observation, I suppose, or his inference from the little cousin, which placed him under this misapprehension. My behaviour, however, as distinct from my basic morals, caused him many hours of puzzled anguish. He ascertained one day that I knew the names of only eight members of the school XV. He made me write them all out a hundred times, and repeat them to him after luncheon. I had forgotten to put in their initials, and had to do it again. And then next summer he discovered that I was equally weak on the subject of the XI. My incapacity for games, or “exercise” as they were called at Wellington, filled him with pained dismay. I liked games, and it was obvious that I tried: I used to flounder about and get in the way and shout very hard to the forwards. There was a system called “passing the ball”: it meant that one kicked it to someone in front, warning him by shouting out his name: “Hamilton!” I would yell—but no ball would follow. It would have wriggled off sideways somewhere, and I would pick myself up slowly, conscious that once again I was in disgrace. “But you’re absolutely rotten,” Marstock would say in saddened protest. A lowering grey sky above the white goal-posts and behind them a bank of wellingtonias. “You’re hopeless, you simply can’t be taught.” And then the goal-post and the wellingtonias would swim together in a mist of suppressed tears.
Nor was it games alone which showed Marstock that as a pupil I was unsatisfactory. I see myself in retrospect as the most resigned and normal of little boys, and yet I can recollect his chiding me for being mad. The particular occasion for this outburst, the actual manifestation on my part of paranoia, was an ink-pot shaped in the semblance of the Temple of Vesta at Rome. We were not, and with justice, allowed fountain pens: for some strange reason, ink was not provided in the class-rooms: at the beginning of each term we were given a portable safety ink-pot, a red or blue little affair, with a double lid which pressed hard upon the aperture by dint of a round rubber pad and spring. I used to lose my ink-pots. I used to lose them at the very moment when it was time to rush to school. I had had particular trouble on this score with Mr. Elton, who taught me algebra. He told me that if I forgot again I should be whipped. So that morning when I lost my ink-pot I realised how needful it was to replace it by another.
The boy who had the cubicle next to mine was called Juniper. His real name, I think, was McEuan, but he lived at Juniper House, Guildford. I therefore darted into his room to look for an ink-pot. There was none to be found, but on his table was a small brass model of the Temple of Vesta, which opened at the top. It was an ink-stand rather than an ink-pot, it was clearly liable to slop or spill, but it would do. I proceeded with it up to college, gingerly and yet hurriedly as a man wheeling a barrow on a tight-rope. It served its purpose well enough; it was only on my return, my very inky but equally gingerly return, that I was stopped by Marstock. “What on earth,” he said, “are you doing with that?” “It’s an ink-stand, Marstock.” I held out the Temple of Vesta, down the columns of which the ink had poured in shining runnels. “An ink-stand!” he snorted, “who but you would take an ink-stand up to college? And a model of St. Paul’s, too! Oh, why, oh, why will you persist in being different to other people? I give you up; you simply refuse to be the same.” He paused and looked at me with real perplexity in those open eyes. “I think you must be mad,” he concluded solemnly.
I went to my room determined, at whatever cost, not to surrender to this creeping dementia: I must pull myself together: it was only a question of being careful: if one was terribly careful one could succeed in being exactly the same. My whole energy during the terms that followed was concentrated on achieving uniformity.
The terms passed. Marstock became head of the house, then captain of the XV, then school-prefect and then head of the school. I also had crept upwards and was in the Lower Sixth. But this my own prowess was of no avail to me: I was not even a dormitory prefect: I had not yet attained the privilege of leaving my house-cap in the ante-Chapel: I was contented but obscure. And I still feel that all this was very fitting: I have had my fun since: they haven’t. Marstock at this stage was, in spite of his glory, very gracious to me: he had given me up as an athlete, but he felt that none the less the school, the spirit which he had infused into Kempthorne’s house, had done me worlds of good. He would come into my room sometimes for tea: he would talk about our prospects against Marlborough: I showed a sycophantic but not an unintelligent interest. “Good God!” he would say, “you are a freak, but you’re less of a freak than you were.” And then during his last term there occurred that awful incident which finally shattered in him all belief that I had come to possess, at bottom, some of the right stuff.
The great event of the summer was the match against Charterhouse. Some years we went to Charterhouse, and some years they came to us. That year it was our turn to receive and combat the visiting team. The afternoon, I remember, was hot but overcast: the warm grey clouds spread widely over the wide playing fields—a sheet of shadowed green below, a sheet above of shadowed grey: and against this background clustered little dots of white—five hundred straw hats, white cricket pads, flannels, the scoring board, the staring face of the pavilion dock, the masters’ wives and daughters;—some parents, over there under the trees. Reggie Cooper and I had brought a paper bag of cherries and we sat on the grass together—watching carefully lest the other should exceed his share. Reggie then as now was the most stimulating of companions, and it was for me a stroke of fortune that had brought him to Kempthorne’s. We had become inseparable; but at least once a week we ceased for a while to be on speaking terms, for several consecutive hours each would avoid the other with averted eyes. The Charterhouse match, the bag of cherries, coincided with one of our moments of reconciliation: we had not spoken to each other for at least twelve hours: we had therefore a great deal to say. The match dragged on around us as we talked: the little white figures on the wide expanse of green would cross and recross slowly, or make sudden galvanic motions with their arms and thighs: a great silence brooded over earth and sky, broken at intervals by the dry tock of ball on bat, by some sharp and distant voice calling directions, by a sudden rattling wave of clapping and applause. Reggie and I joined in the applause with abstracted fervour: we had no idea in reality of what was happening: we clapped our hands when the others clapped, and when the others cheered, we cheered: the bag was getting emptier and emptier; we had already had two arguments which threatened to be of a heated nature, and finally we embarked on the third.
We had scarcely become immersed in this discussion when we observed a ripple passing up the fringe of boys who lined the field. They were standing up and taking off their hats and then sitting down again. Behind them, causing this jagged and rippling edge in the flat line of recumbent figures, slowly walked a group of five people. There was the Duke of Connaught in a grey top-hat, the Master in his robes, the senior tutor, an equerry, and the Head of the School. Marstock, who was not in the eleven, walked behind talking to the equerry, giving him doubtless the name and initials of the boy who was bowling, of that boy over there who had so miraculously caught the ball. Reggie and I were lying at the extreme edge of the field, the edge nearest the college. We stood up as they passed us and took off our hats. We watched them enter the Master’s Lodge. “That means,” said Reggie, “that it’s nearly over. They have gone to have tea.” We sat down again and continued our discussion. The college clock struck half-past five—surely the beastly match would soon be finished.
Reggie was describing the most exciting day he had ever had. I had already described to him my own most exciting day, giving a slightly coloured version of an attack by Shereefian troops upon a village in the lower Anjera. We had watched from a neighbouring hill: the bullets, in my story, had sung above our heads “like this, sizzz …”; the smoke of the burning village had for a moment obscured our vision of the attacking forces: then suddenly it had blown to the west again and the meadow below was dotted with little writhing figures of the wounded and dying. Reggie had been rather bored by my story, supposing, and unjustly, that it was wholly untrue; impatient also to embark on his own. “It was,” he began, “the most beautiful morning that I have ever seen. The sea was absolutely blue, and the snow on the distant Alps glittered in the sun. As our yacht steamed into Nice there was first the excitement of seeing whether we were the largest in the harbour. We landed about eleven …” I was rather impressed by Reggie’s story, regretting somewhat that my father for his part should have failed to be tremendously rich. Reggie’s most exciting day, I remember, ended with a visit to the opera. “It was Tannhauser,” said Reggie. “Not Tannhauser,” I remarked, “Tannhäuser. I thought everyone knew that.”
“No, it’s Tannhauser.”
“It isn’t Tannhauser. It’s Tannhäuser. There’s a di … there are two dots over the ‘a’ which makes it ‘oi.’”
“You’re wrong, as usual. It’s Tannhauser. After all you don’t do German, and I do.”
“But, you silly ass, whoever heard it called Tannhauser? Besides, I know German for better than you do. I learnt it as a kid in Buda Pesth.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did …”
There was a wild burst of cheering from the field in which we joined. People were waving their hats, the little white figures of the players trooped suddenly towards the Pavilion. “It’s over,” said Reggie, “let’s do a bunk.” We turned and started to run towards the college. As we approached the Master’s Lodge we saw a figure running towards us down the drive. It was Marstock. “Well,” he panted when he reached us, “what did they score?” I looked at Reggie: Reggie looked at me. “Well, at least,” said Marstock impatiently, “they can’t have beaten our 278?” I looked at Reggie: Reggie looked at me. “Well, at least we won?” Marstock shouted. We both got very red. “I think we must have, Marstock, everybody seemed very pleased.” He snorted and left us. And that evening we both descended to the boot-room and were caned.
I bear no resentment towards Marstock for exacting this reparation. We had committed an enormity, and it was right that the traditions of the college should be maintained. And then it was so obvious that he was deeply and sincerely distressed. He came to my room after the operation and sat upon the settee. “I can’t make it out,” he said. “I wish I knew what to do.” He scarcely spoke to me during the weeks that followed. Speech-day came and he received, as was inevitable, the King’s medal. We all cheered wildly: he stood there with his back to us, while Princess Henry of Battenberg handed him his badge of honour. I had a lump in my throat: my admiration for him welled up and stung my eyes. And at the end of the term he called me into his room to say good-bye. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You promise,” he said to me, “that during the next year you will try.’ I said I would, Marstock, yes, I really would. I left his room hurriedly and on the verge of tears.
The next term I was moved into the Upper Sixth. This meant a small but somewhat glorified class-room; the desks were of a different shape, there was actually a carpet, there were photographs around the room of the Niké Apteros and of Mycenæ, there was a large plaster cast above the mantelpiece of a Centaur struggling with one of the Lapithæ; there was above all constant and continuous contact with Dr. Pollock. The Master hitherto had been for me a remote and rather alarming mystery; my feeling in regard to him were a mixture of fearful curiosity and religious awe: there was something emotionally magnificent about him, something theocratic. His tall slim figure billowed in a silken gown as he glided rapidly through the cloisters, leaving behind a faint but pleasant smell of hair-wash, an impression of something rich and luxurious and mundane: a striking contrast to the drab penury of our existence: a touch of the great coloured world beyond. The other masters cowered visibly at his approach: they seemed, when standing beside him, to become moth-eaten and affable and unimportant: the boys, as he spoke to them in his quick and gentle voice, were somehow more natural and less afraid. My worship for him had hitherto been uncoloured by the richer tone of personal intimacy: the Upper Sixth became for me a large excitement, a rapid intellectual and above all emotional fermentation. To a large extent, of course, this expansion was due to the adjustments of puberty, but its development was hastened and controlled by the subtlety and sympathy of Dr. Pollock. He was so intelligent, he was so human, he was so gently amused: gradually it dawned upon me that what had hitherto been merely lessons, were in fact my lessons, bore a distinct personal relation to myself The school, my house, the games, my efforts to become “the same” remained, as before, inevitable and detached: but the work, The Master, the class-room of the Upper Sixth, became gradually a part of my central consciousness, fused gradually with such secret feelings as my people, and the yearning for Morocco, and the novels of Mr. Anthony Hope, and the smell of pines on summer evenings.
I realise, on looking back, that his methods, for all their subtlety, were perfectly calculated and deliberate. He knew that the system of the school had scored upon our brains a few deep grooves of habit which were in danger of becoming rigid: he set himself to render these grooves more flexible, to create new channels and associations in our minds. For the purposes of scholarship, for the needs, that is, of examinations, the Upper Sixth were entrusted to Mr. Perkins, most exact of hellenists, most meticulous of scholiasts. Dr. Pollock, for his part, appeared to devote his energies to destroying all the educational convictions which we had hitherto absorbed: he taught us that the mere avoidance of howlers was a means only and not an end: he taught us that the greater proportion of classical literature as it figured in the school curriculum was not only dull but silly: that the really jolly bits were yet to come: he taught us that life was more than scholarship, and literature more than books: he taught us to feel, and even to think, for ourselves. The greed with which I absorbed these lessons was voracious: whatever projects I may have had of becoming an exact scholar were destroyed for ever in the space of a few gay weeks; but if I have since understood in any way the meaning and the purposes of culture, my understanding is due entirely and absolutely to Dr. Pollock. And I render thanks.
For him indeed the classic letters were more human. He dislocated even the setting in which instruction had been conveyed. We would sprawl on pine-needles in his garden, we would lounge beside the fire on his floor. He would give us coffee, strong and redolent, and granulated sugar and little cakes: the two footmen would appear with the Georgian silver and the Wedgwood cups: the contrast with the scrubbed boards and chipped enamel of our school life spread a sense of Olympic ease and privilege; and in his gentle voice he would read to us some lines from Lucretius, a page of Shelley, a passage in Walter Pater, an article even by Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review.
The conflict between my admiration of the Master and my admiration of J. D. Marstock was still unrealised. The latter, although now at Magdalen, continued by his remembered example to inspire and direct my daily life at school. I was now a dormitory prefect, and I would give to the younger boys such advice and counsel as Marstock in his time had given to me. I taught them with firm but not ungentle insistence that they must all strive to be alike.
It was only in my last term that a slight doubt assailed me regarding the efficacy and necessity of Marstock’s ideals. The flash which then illumined my lowering sky was evoked, indirectly, by Dr. Pollock. The contrast between my two allegiances became a conflict and culminated in an explosion.
It was a Saturday evening, and we were sitting under the pine trees reading the Journey to Brundisium. The Master had pointed out to us how indelicate this story was, how gross, in fact, were the sensibilities of the poet: how, in fact, with acquired success, the fingers of Horace had all become thumbs. It was a stimulating theory, and in the middle of it the footman appeared leading a young man in a brown suit across the lawn. I did not recognise Marstock at first, he seemed to have lost something both in height and colour: the eczema was very bad indeed. The Master greeted him warmly and made him join us. We had gone back to that passage about Virgil refusing to play tennis because he had sore eyes. The Master closed the book and began to talk of Virgil, of his gawky nervousness, of his shy provincialism, of how much he had disliked being made to write the Æneid. Marstock watched him with straight but puzzled eyes. “I loathe the Æneid,” I remarked with sudden conviction. Marstock turned his eyes in my direction: they were not only puzzled but disapproving. “But you’re wrong,” said Doctor Pollock, and then, in that soft and rapid voice, he began to intone:—
“Tum pater Anchises, lacrimis ingressus obortis …”
The warm July sun was slanting through the pine trees. The soft and solemn hexameters rolled onwards.
“manibus date lilia plenis …
His saltem accumulem donis et fungar inani
Munere….”
The Master stopped intoning and leant down towards me. “As a punishment for a pert and unsolicited remark you will learn that passage by heart. Whenever in after life we meet again, I shall ask you to repeat it.” I glanced at Marstock: his face wore a contented but reserved expression, such as a guest’s face should wear when a spoilt, an intolerable, child receives at last the merited rebuke. I looked up at the Master. He smiled back at me with friendly humour; there was a touch of unusual meaning in his smile and he gave just the slightest side-glance at Marstock. I felt my cheeks flaming as from a sudden emotional shock: was it possible, was it conceivable, that the Master could have had an eye-meet with me behind Marstock’s back? Was it possible that Dr. Pollock should have found Marstock, even for a moment, even in a little thing, absurd? I walked back under the stars buoyant with some strange delight of liberation. I did not fully comprehend the nature of this winged exultancy: I thought it came merely from the pleasure of that evening, the warm pine-needles, the coffee-sugar, the beauty of those resonant lines. The rows of windows in Kempthorne’s house were ablaze between the wellingtonias: I paused in the shadow of the rhododendrons. Three weeks more and I should be free. It was mere humbug to pretend regret. I should be free, free, free…. I looked up at the house which for four years had been my prison. The figure of Marstock seemed to rise from it, to assume gigantic shape, to quiver for a moment and then to fall a crumbling idol among the pines. “Poor old Marstock,” I murmured, as I climbed the dark and smelling stairs.
On leaving Wellington I spent nearly a year in Germany. When I reached Oxford Dr. Pollock had been appointed Bishop of Norwich, and Marstock was already preparing for his final schools. He had failed somehow to be given his football blue and had therefore concentrated his whole energies on obtaining a first. No one has ever worked as Marstock worked, and in the process his straight and open eyes became emptied of all but a forlorn bewilderment. When the examination approached, he funked it. He would stay on at Oxford and work another year: he would make it a certainty. “You see,” he explained, “people never know afterwards whether one gets a good second or a bad first. They merely say—‘he got a first at Oxford,’ or ‘at Oxford he only got a second.’” So for another year Marstock slaved in his rooms in Beaumont Street and succeeded in obtaining a very creditable third. He then decided to enter the Foreign Office. But here again he thought it wiser to take his time. And thus when I also on leaving Balliol devoted two years to acquiring foreign tongues, I would find Marstock working away in the various pensions which we frequented. I went to Jeanne de Hénaut—Marstock was there: at Hanover, Marstock: at Pisa, Marstock again. His mind, in all those years, had become a trifle rigid; but his affection, the memory of the little cousin who had died of scarlet fever, was wholly to be depended upon. It was solid and all of a piece: it was like Portland cement: it was exceedingly difficult either to evade it or to push it aside. He would come walks with me among the Tuscan hills and wonder what had happened to J. L. Wallace of the Hopetown, or R. B. Brinsmead of Toyes. I remember in particular a summer evening in Paris: we had walked across the river and looked for books under the arcades of the Odéon: I had shown him the hotel where Wilde had died, and we had emerged on the Quay at a moment when every window in Paris and Montmartre was flaming back at a low red sun. We leant over the parapet and looked at the purple river swirling below us. The hum of life reached us in the hot air; behind us was the Quartier Latin, in front those myriad flaming windows. I showed him the two sphinxes at the end of the bridge and told him how Wilde in those last shambling years would tell how that sphinx there on the right was the only person who returned his smile. “But why,” said Marstock, “the one on the right? They’re both exactly the same!” I was silent at this, looking into the river and thinking vaguely of mighty poets in their misery dead. “Do you remember,” said Marstock, “how after footer one would come back to the house and one would brew and read a book?” I said that I remembered very well.
It was only when Marstock had failed for the third time in the Foreign Office examination that he passed definitely out of my life. Fifteen years went by before I saw him again. The occasion was a public luncheon given in honour of the Byron centenary. I was late for the luncheon and found my place with difficulty. When it was over we crowded into the ante-room. I suddenly felt my arm seized from behind.
“Well, I’m blowed,” said Marstock, “fancy meeting you here!” I did not myself feel that my attendance at that luncheon was in any way a startling coincidence, but I forbore to say so. I was pleased to see Marstock again, pleased to notice how slightly he had changed. There was a touch of grey about the carefully combed hair, he was a little thinner, and his eyes had given up being merely open and had become just blank. But it was the same good old Marstock in his brown suit and old Wellingtonian tie.
I asked him what he was doing now. He said that he was an underwriter at Lloyd’s. I asked him whether he was married. He laughed a little shyly. “No,” he said; “you see it’s the wimskies.” I put on a serious and condoling expression, imagining that he had mentioned some obscure disease. “The wimskies?” I inquired considerately. “The women, you know—I always call them that. They’re all so fascinating, I can’t make up my mind.” I assured him that, to my mind also, women were delightful and perplexing little things.
I have not seen Marstock since, except once on the Embankment when I passed him in a taxi. But that Byron luncheon is memorable to me for yet another and far more emotional encounter. The crowd had parted suddenly, and in front of me, sitting on a sofa, I saw the Bishop of Norwich. My pulses raced suddenly with a return of the old excitement. I went up to him. “Do you remember me?” I said. He looked up and smiled. He remembered me perfectly. He remembered—ah, yes—“Turn pater Anchises” … would I please continue? I hesitated and flushed: not a week had passed during the long years since that evening at Wellington without my repeating to myself those lines, preparing for such an encounter. I knew them perfectly. But for the moment they wouldn’t come.
“I am afraid,” I stammered, “that I have forgotten.”