"Awfully sorry, Christy, old fellow ... been kept ... new lot of books from Methuen's ... had to take one up to my wife ... rather ill, you know.... Fire away, Burgess."
All his remarks were flung off in jerks at a terrific rate. The abashed orator concluded rather prematurely and rather wildly; such an incursion was most irregular and very perplexing.
"I will now call on Mr Ferrers to speak."
Up leapt Ferrers and began at once firing off his speech at the pace of a cinematograph. He was full of mannerisms. He would clap his hand over his eyes when he wanted to think of something, and would then spread it out straight before him. It was rather dangerous to get close. He would pick up one of his books and shake it in the face of Christy.
"This is what Mackenzie says ... in Sinister Street ... fine book ... smashes up everything, shows the shallowness of our education ... this is what he says...."
After he had read a few words, he would bang the book down on the table and continue pouring forth inextricable anacolutha. Everyone was listening; they had never heard anything like this before. It was a revelation. Christy chewed his finger-nails. Burgess assumed an air of Olympian content. The flood of rhetoric rolled on:
"It is like this, you see; the classical education makes you imitate all the time ... Greek Prose like Sophocles ... Latin Verse like Petronius.... I don't know if I have got the names right ... probably not ... never could stick doing it. There is no free thought. Classics men do very well in the Foreign Offices, but they can't think.... What do classics do in the literary world? Nothing. Bennett, Lloyd George, Wells—the best men never went to a Public School.... We want originality; and the classics don't give it. They are all right for a year or so to give a grounding of taste ... though they don't give that to the average boy ... but no more. What did I learn from classics?—only to devise a new way of bringing a crib into form.... Is that an education? No, we want French, jolly few cribs to be got of Daudet that are any use to the Lower Fifth ... Maths, that's the stuff ... makes them think.... Riders ... get them out your own way—not Vergil's way or Socrates' way—your own way—originality...."
In this strain he talked for a quarter of an hour, and held the audience spellbound. He had really interested them. Here was something new, something worth listening to. He was received with a roar of clapping.
After his speech everything else fell flat. Christy made one or two super-subtle remarks which no one understood. There was nothing left for Pothering to say; the motion was then put before the House and the debate developed into a farce. Idiot after idiot got up and made some infantile qualification of an earlier statement—all of them talked off the point. So much so, in fact, that Turner was beginning a tale of a fight he had had with a coster down Cheap Street when Christy called him to order.
Gordon at once rose in protest.