“You have interested me—er—profoundly. May I hope that when you get back to Grosvenor Square, you will sometimes spare a few moments from the fashionable circles in which you move, and write to me?”
I said that it would be a great honour to me to be permitted to do so.
“I hope,” he added, “that you will visit Oxbridge again, and that you will then renew an acquaintance which, though accidental in its origin, has none the less impressed me—er—very much.”
After his departure Willie became hilarious and I became very angry with him. He persisted that everything was all right. I had put up a fine performance and had only to continue it. The Dean would no doubt write to me at Grosvenor Square, and Willie assured me that he had his father’s butler on a string, and that the butler sorted the letters. I would receive the Dean’s epistles at any address I would give him, and would reply on the Grosvenor Square notepaper.
“I’ve got chunks of it in a writing-case at my rooms,” he said, “and I’ll send it round to you.”
I had to consent to this. However, the next day I skipped for London, somewhat to the disappointment of the restaurant that I adorned, and still more to the disappointment of Willie. But, as I wrote to him, he had brought it on himself. I could not take the risk of another accidental meeting with Dr. Benger Horlick.
Nor, as a matter of fact, did we ever meet again. But for three years we corresponded with some frequency; it was a thin-ice, high-wire business, but I pulled it through.
No doubt the task was made easier for me by the fact that the Dean was a singularly simple-minded man. Reverence for the aristocracy had become with him almost a religion. When he was brought—or believed himself to be brought—in contact with the aristocracy, his intellectual vision closed in a swoon of ecstasy. Snob? Oh, dear, no! Of course not. What can have made you think that? It was simply that the aristocracy appealed to him very much as romance did—he was outside it, but liked to get a near view.
The G.E. found that letters, however delightful, bored her when they were scattered through a biography. For that reason she gave one set of letters all together. I do not see myself why, if a thing bores you when you get a little of it at a time, it should bore you less when you get a lot of it. But, determined to follow my brilliant model with simple faith and humility, I now append extracts from the letters I received from Dr. Benger Horlick.
“I wish I could persuade you to be less precise in your language. If you say what your opinion is, you should take care to be beautiful but unintelligible. Commit yourself to nothing. Words were given us to conceal our thoughts, and with a little practice and self-discipline will conceal them even from ourselves. A candid friend once complained to me that in my translation from the Greek it was sometimes impossible for him to know which of two different lectiones I was translating. As a matter of fact, though I did not tell him this, I did not know either. Especially useful is this when one is confronted with a rude, challenging, direct question as to any point in religion or politics; I reply with a sonorous and, I hope, well-balanced sentence, from which the actual meaning has been carefully extracted, and so escape in the fog. It is indeed from one point of view a mercy that most people are too cowardly or too ashamed to say that they have failed to comprehend. Yet if they had my passion for truth it might be better. Truth is very precious to me—sometimes too precious to give away.