“Of course not, but it’ll leak out somehow. I shall tell Mackenzie and he’ll do the rest. I wonder why the dons object to me so much? At least, I know why. They think I’m pulling their sacred legs. The Ode to the Trousers annoyed them awfully. They thought it was going to be obscene, and suffered a bitter disappointment.”
Robin sat down on the floor.
“Don’t see what you’re playing at,” he said. “It’s perfectly easy to be unpopular, and you take such a lot of trouble about it.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Jelf. “You couldn’t be unpopular if you tried, Birds. Your hair is nice and short and you’ve a clean face and shave every morning, and play cricket and are exactly like everybody else.”
“Sooner be like that than like you,” said Robin politely.
“You couldn’t be like me, if you tried, simply because you can’t think for yourself. You accept all that you’ve been brought up in, like a dear little good boy, eating the dinner that’s given him, and saying his grace afterwards. Being born an Englishman together with Eton and Cambridge has made you precisely what you are, which is exactly the same as Badders and Jim. You do what you’re told without ever asking why. Britannia rules the waves, and church is at eleven on Sunday morning, but you may play lawn-tennis in the afternoon.”
Jelf got up and waved his arms wildly.
“You’re all cast in one mould,” he said, “and Lord, how I should like to break it. Here you sit, you and Badders and Jim, and Badders is going to be a schoolmaster, because his father was, and Jim is going to be a clergyman for the same reason, and you’re going to be a bloody lord. Gosh! That’s why you get on so well, simply because you never think. And you never think because you can’t. Happy England! Our national stupidity is the basis of our national prosperity.”
“That comes out of ‘Intentions,’” remarked Badsley.
“I daresay it does, but anyhow, they’re not good intentions, which are invariably fatal. But none of you have got any intentions at all, except to be smug and comfortable and stereotyped. There’s Badders with his girls, and Birds with his cricket, and Jim—well, I don’t know what Jim’s with. He’s usually with Birds.”