CHAPTER IV
UNEXPECTED PEOPLE
The idea of working for Mr. Gilbert Edwardes never had much attraction for me, and for the first two or three weeks at Oxford I found it very difficult to satisfy him. However, the excuse that I took a long time to settle down in a fresh place did not seem as reasonable to him as it did to me, so I had to abandon it and try to appease him. The worst of him was that I never knew whether he was pleased or not; he accepted my most determined efforts at scholarship as a matter of course and reserved his eloquence for the occasions on which my work showed symptoms of haste. In less than a fortnight I felt that my tutor and I were watching each other, an element of distrust seemed to have sprung up; he took it for granted that I would do as little as possible, while I was searching for something which could tell me that he was human as well as learned.
I could not understand him in the least, for I had been accustomed to masters who talked about things of which I knew a little even if they were bored by doing so; but when I met Mr. Edwardes I felt that he belonged to the ice period, and that he would think the smallest thaw a waste of time.
I do like a human being, I mean a man who lets you know something about him and does not barricade himself against you. But a man who puts up the shutters in front of his virtues and faults bothers me most terribly, and I always seem to be bumping my head against something invisible whenever I see him, which is a most disconcerting performance.
Mr. Edwardes was also Murray's tutor, but Murray was not afflicted, as I was, with the desire to know people more than they wanted to be known, and he told me that if I would only take Edwardes as I found him we should get on together splendidly. In spite of Jack Ward, I saw Murray every day, and the more I knew of him the more I liked him. He was in my room one evening after Ward had arranged that we were to have a freshers' wine, and I asked him if he was coming to it.
"I can't go unless I am asked," he said, "and I shan't go now if I am asked."
I resolved to say a few things to Ward, but I did not know what to say to Murray.
"Ward is asking everybody he wants, isn't he?" he inquired.