“My dear fellow,” he said, “your admirable description of the Ode was quite enough for me as regards Camouflage. I should like it immediately suppressed. As for the authors, you yourself said they were a poisonous lot.”
“I know I did. But I wonder if one could not learn more about the poison, and perhaps supply an antidote. Indeed, what if it isn’t poison?”
“I am content to take your word that it is,” said Butler, yawning. Conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they, to his mind, whom Cambridge connoted. Cambridge meant to him the life lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. Naturally his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary rebuked.
But more advanced ideas still floated vaguely in Alison’s mind, as he rose to go.
“Sometimes I have certain doubts about our educational system,” he observed.
“Get rid of them,” said Butler, booming from his impregnable fortress.
While this decorous pleasure-party of the Olympians was in progress, another by no means less pleasurable, though far less Olympian, had been going on partly in Birds’s room, partly in Jim’s, just across the passage. Two or three people had strolled in to see Birds after Hall, two or three more to see Jim, with the effect that there had been an amalgamation and a game of poker. Those who did not care to play poker, refreshed themselves with cigarettes and conversation and whisky and soda, and a rather neat booby-trap had been set over the door into Birds’s bedroom. Jelf of the poisonous set, and editor of Camouflage, had devised this, and subsequently forgetting about it, and going into Birds’s bedroom to fetch another glass, had got caught by it himself, and was now brushing carbolic tooth powder out of his hair. Then Birds, who at the moment was playing poker in Jim’s room, had come in, and by way of reprisal had thrown the rest of the tooth-powder in Jelf’s face, who had sneezed without intermission for ten minutes.
But the ragging had not gone further than that, and now the party had broken up, leaving only Jelf and Badsley with the owners of the rooms. Jelf was a tall, merry-faced, ugly boy, whose hair when not pink with tooth-powder was black. He wore it long and lanky, with the design, which perfectly succeeded, of annoying those who conformed to the custom of short hair. He wore extraordinarily shabby clothes and professed views of the wildest immorality for analogous reasons.
“And if I find long black hairs in my brush to-morrow,” said Birds, alluding to these incidents, “I shall make you eat them. Why don’t you get your hair cut like ordinary people?”
“Because then I should no longer annoy ordinary people. I say, Camouflage is going to be lovely next week. I’ve written a defence of Polygamy. There’s a polygamous tribe in West Africa whose average length of life is seventy-eight. I attribute that to polygamy.”