Tom Brown at Rugby
St. Ritz’s isn’t Eton but it is pretty strong on drinkin’. Anthony’s private stock was recruited from all parts of the world.
“What’s ’is pink stuff, Anthony?” asked a fellow dipsomaniac of the fourth form, in the intimacy of intoxication.
“’At’s ole genevieve from Geneva. ‘At green’s grenadine from Grenada, an’ ‘at yellow’s yataghan from Yap. Make a fairish cocktail, if you lace it with l’il ole wood-alcohol. Keeps a fella fit, ’is stuff does.”
He drank liquors of incomparable strength and iridescent beauty, in whose mysterious depths all the lost lures of Mont Marter and of 42nd and Broadway shivered and shimmied languorously in resplendent redundancy. Also he took a shot of hop now and then.
He read enormously. In his first term he accomplished Rousseau’s Confessions, “The Newgate Calendar,” Boswell’s Life of Johnston, “Frank in the Mountains,” Kant’s Critique, The Arabian Nights in fourteen volumes, “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” “The Dutch Twins,” the Memoirs of Cazanova, Petronius, Suetonius, Vitruvius, Vesuvius, Plato, Cato, Keats, Yeats and all the Elsie books.
Incident of the Impudent Headmaster
Clad in an opalescent dressing-gown, the color of peacock’s eyes and emu’s fins, Anthony was lying on a luxurious lounge of mauve satin stuffed with eiderdown and aigrettes, reading Ghunga Dhin and drinking Ghordon Ghin. A timid knock on the door preceded the entrance of the headmaster. He stood in the doorway sheepishly, hat in hand, pulling an obsequious forelock.
“Blaine—er—er—Mister Blaine,” he said.
“Well, Margotson? What is it?”