His firm step descended the uncarpeted flight of stairs outside in gradual diminuendo, and Alison, as it was Saturday night, took another glass of “his own,” before going to bed.
“Linnet’s a very attractive fellow,” he said. “I like both him and Lethbridge. But some of those first and second year men are rather a poisonous lot. You know the crew I mean, they run that new paper called Camouflage.”
“Camouflage?” asked Butler.
“Yes, French word, with an allusion to the Cam, I conjecture. I looked it up in a dictionary. It’s the art of concealment with intent to deceive, to put it generally. ‘Evasion,’ you might possibly render it by ‘Evasion.’ Haven’t you come across the paper?”
“I am afraid that my reading does not embrace those usually very callow periodicals,” said Butler. “Pray widen my restricted horizon.”
“Well, I have glanced at a number or two of it. I should suppress it if I was the Vice-Chancellor, but I don’t deny it’s got a good deal of cleverness. It’s all misdirected cleverness. There was a really very neat piece of Platonic dialogue directed against the teaching of classical languages. There was an interview in the style of the Daily Mail with Villon, that French vagabond rhymster, you know. There was also a poem called ‘Ode to a Pair of Trousers’ couched in Swinburnian language of almost licentious passion. The key to it lay in the last stanza, in which you found out that it was supposed to be written by the poet on a frosty morning after a cold bath. That explained the ‘softness of thy warm embrace, the clinging of thy leg,’ and the rest of it. The poet merely wanted to get his clothes on again. Rather neat, rather in the C.S.C. style.”
“I cannot at the moment recall anything of Calverley’s that seems to resemble your very vivid précis,” said Butler icily. “And with your permission, I think I will not invest money or time in the purchase and perusal of Camouflage. But without hearing more I am completely in accord with your inclination to suppress it.”
Alison’s second indulgence in port and water had roused him to a certain Liberalism that usually hibernated.
“I wish sometimes we could get more into touch with the undergraduates,” he said. “We know about their games to some extent, and we know what their classical reading consists of, and we look over their compositions. But there our knowledge of them and their education abruptly ceases, unless they get into trouble through not keeping chapels, or making a row, or smoking in the quadrangle. You, for instance, just now, Butler, wanted to know no more about Camouflage or its authors.”
Butler poured himself out a glass of whisky and soda. This, too, was in celebration of Saturday night.