'Well, Mr. Parson, you can imagine what happened when these conflicting elements of heredity were brought together. In the language of science, there was one negative result and two positive. The first mentioned is a son Malcolm, whom I have not met. He has a commission in the cavalry, is a devil at billiards, can't read a map, and rides like a Centaur.
'Of the positive results it seems to me I may have already mentioned one—Elise. The other is Richard, the tragedy of the family. Poor Dick was practically kicked out of Eton for drunkenness when he was about sixteen. For the past year or so he has been at Cambridge, but he got in with a bad set there, and after several warnings has been "sent down"—or, in ordinary language, expelled. It appears that the old combination of "booze" and women got the better of him, though there's something oddly fine about the fellow too. He was hitting an awful pace at Cambridge, and when he tried to pass off a fourth-rate chorus-girl as the Duchess of Turveydrop, the axe descended. As the masquerading duchess was rather noisy and very "elevated," you can see that there must have been complications.
'Of course, his governor was furious, and, settling a very small allowance on the poor beggar, turned him out of the family home, and forbade him to ever darken, &c., &c. (see, split infinitive and all, any "best seller" of a few years back).
'Does this seem at all incongruous to you? These so-called aristocrats bring a son into existence, and, providing he's a decent-living, rule-abiding chap, he is sheltered from the world and kept for the enriching of their own hot-house of respectability. But—if one of them upsets the ash-can and otherwise messes up the family escutcheon, the father says, "You have disgraced our traditions. Get thee hence into the cold, outside world. After this you belong to it."
'Damned generous of paterfamilias, isn't it? Only, as one of the cold, outside world, I can't help wondering why, if Milord is going to keep his good apples for himself, we should have to accept the rotten ones.
'Concerning Cambridge—I spent a weekend there recently with Doug Watson of Boston, who is taking Engineering. Cambridge is quite a little community, as separate from the rest of England as the Channel Islands. On the Saturday evening I was there Watson took a punt, and with considerable dexterity piloted me along the Cam, with its green velvet banks and overhanging trees. The river is an exquisite thing, and there was a sensuous drowsiness in the beauty of the hour before dark.
'The lawns from the backs of the colleges slope down to the river, and as we passed along we noticed group after group of students drinking coffee made in percolators in their possession. There was something almost pastoral in the sight of those young Britishers in such complete repose. Perhaps I should have enjoyed it all without question if it had not been that, a week before, I had visited a poor little Nonconformist preacher who labours on an empty stomach to a little congregation in a chain-making district. Edge, the sights I saw there were not good for any man to see and remain quiet. Women work at the fires when pregnant, and fuddle themselves with beer at night; the men are a shiftless lot, who spend their lives hand-in-hand with poverty and think only of beer, "baccy," and loafing. You know I'm no prohibitionist, but I hate to see beer the goal of men's ambitions. In one school there was a class with forty "backward" children. That's the kinder word, Edge, but the real one is "imbecile." Think of it—forty human destinies that must be lived out to a finish! They tell me that conditions are improving there. I hope so, in Heaven's name.
'It was that visit I had in mind when punting along the Cam. A man is a fool to pit his little mind against so vast and wonderful an edifice as a great university like Cambridge, but one thought which occurred more than once to me was whether or not a man can be considered educated if he be ignorant of human misery existing beyond the college gates. In the Scottish universities the Professor of Latin is called Professor of Humanity. I wonder, Edge, if the time is not ripe for a chair of Humanity in a wider sense in all universities.
'On Sunday we went to one of the churches, and, with eleven others, managed to present a formidable congregation of thirteen. The preacher's prayer, which he read, was a superb piece of work. He started off with the King and the Royal Family, passed on to titled and landed gentry, after them the higher orders of the clergy, leaders of the navy, the army, and all those in more or less authority, then the lower orders of the clergy, and after several categories I have forgotten, he reached the commoners, and (in an appropriate tone of voice) hoped we should live in peace, one with another.
'Think of it, Edge, in this enlightened age! I wanted to go up to him after the service and ask him why he had left out the minor poets, but Doug stopped me—which is perhaps just as well. He might have added a prayer for Americans after the commoners.