“Now that poor Mr. Toft’s dead,” I asked as we walked, my mother and I, that afternoon, up and down the little garden behind the house, “isn’t there any one else here who’s keen on morris dancing?” Or were those folky days, I wondered, for ever past?
My mother shook her head. “The enthusiasm for it is gone,” she said sadly. “This generation of undergraduates doesn’t seem to take much interest in that kind of thing. I don’t really know,” she added, “what it is interested in.”
What indeed, I reflected. In my young days it had been Social Service and Fabianism; it had been long hearty walks in the country at four and a half miles an hour, with draughts of Five X beer at the end of them, and Rabelaisian song and conversations with yokels in incredibly picturesque little wayside inns; it had been reading parties in the Lakes and climbing in the Jura; it had been singing in the Bach Choir and even—though somehow I had never been able quite to rise to that—even morris dancing with Mr. Toft.… But Fading is a fine dance, and all these occupations seemed now a little queer. Still, I caught myself envying the being who had lived within my skin and joined in these activities.
“Poor Toft!” I meditated. “Do you remember the way he had of calling great men by little pet names of his own? Just to show that he was on terms of familiarity with them, I suppose. Shakespeare was always Shake-bake, which was short, in its turn, for Shake-Bacon. And Oven, tout court, was Beethoven.”
“And always J. S. B. for Bach,” my mother continued, smiling elegiacally.
“Yes, and Pee Em for Philipp Emanuel Bach. And Madame Dudevant for George Sand, or, alternatively, I remember ‘The Queen’s Monthly Nurse’—because Dickens thought she looked like that the only time he saw her.” I recalled the long-drawn and delighted laughter which used to follow that allusion.
“You were never much of a dancer, dear boy.” My mother sadly shook her head over the past.
“Ah, but at any rate,” I answered, “at any rate I was a Fabian. And I went for hearty long walks in the country. I drank my pint of Five X at the Red Lion.”
“I wish you could have gone without the beer,” said my mother. That I had not chosen to be a total abstainer had always a little distressed her. Moreover, I had a taste for beefsteaks.
“It was my substitute for morris dancing, if you follow me.”