On another occasion Betteridge walked quietly up to him, handed him a Shelley, and without any warning suddenly shrieked out:
"He hath outsoared the shadow of our night."
Finnemore looked at him sadly: "My dear Betteridge, so early in the morning!"
By many little things his life was made wretched for him. But yet he would not have chosen any other profession. He had once started life with very high hopes, but had discovered that the world is not in sympathy with men of ideas who do not prophesy smooth things. And so at an early age he found himself disappointed in all his personal aims. It seemed that he had to harbour only the simplest wish to find it denied. And then he realised that for the loss of youth there can be no compensation, and that in youth alone happiness could be found. And so he had decided to spend his life in company with high hopes and smiling faces. There were times when an immense sadness came over him, when he thought that disillusionment was waiting for so many of them and that there were few who would "carry their looks or their truth to the grave." But on the whole he was as happy as his temperament could allow him, and Gordon, although in a sense he was the very antithesis of all that he admired most, found himself strangely in sympathy with his new master. One day the subject for an essay was "Conventionality," and Gordon unpacked his torrid soul in a wild abuse of all existing governments. After he had written it, he got rather nervous about its reception, but it was returned marked a-, and Finnemore had written at the bottom: "We all think like this when we are young; and, after all, it is good to be young."
Gordon felt that he had found someone who understood him.
Finnemore lived in two rooms over the masters' common room, which had from time immemorial been the possession of the Sixth Form tutor, and in the evenings when Gordon used to have his prose corrected Finnemore would often ask him to stay behind and have some coffee. Then the two would talk about poetry and art and life till the broken bell rang out its cracked imperious summons. Finnemore had once published a small book of verses, a copy of which he gave to Gordon. They had in them all the frail pathos of a wasted career; most of them were songs of spurned affection, and inside was the quotation: "Scribere jussit amor."
"When I look at that book," said Finnemore to Gordon, "I can't associate myself with the author, I seem to have quite outgrown him. And as I recall the verses I say to myself, 'Poor fellow, life was hard to you,' and I wonder if he really was myself."
With him Gordon saw life from a different angle. He presented the spectacle of failure, and it rather sobered Gordon's wild enthusiasm, at times, to feel himself so close to anything so bitterly poignant. But the hour of youth's domination, even if it be but an hour, is too full of excitement and confidence to be overclouded by doubts for very long. Usually Gordon saw in him a pathetic shadow whom he patronised. He did not realise that it was what he himself might become.
Through the long tedious hours in the shadowy class-room Gordon dreamed of wonderful successes, and let others pass him by in the rush for promotion. He began to think that prizes and form lists were not worth worrying about; he said a classical education had such a narrowing effect on character. We can always produce arguments to back up an inclination if we want to. And in Finnemore there was no force to stir anyone to do what they did not want.
Only once a day was Gordon at all industrious, and that was when the Chief took the Lower and Upper Sixth Form combined in Horace and Thucydides.