When the great evening actually did come, only about a dozen sporting clerks, including Mr. Blades and Dicky Travers, dropped in to see the presentation, and Mr. Septimus Trott, in about six well-chosen words, handed me my bat and congratulated me on winning it. In return I merely said: “Thank you, sir. I’m very glad to have had such luck.”
It was like those rather dreadful accounts of hangings, when you read that from the moment of pinioning till the drop fell was a period of less than two minutes. Not one of the meagre handful of clerks who attended the ceremony need have feared to miss his train; and doubtless they were well aware of this before they came to the ceremonial.
On the whole, I wasted a good deal of valuable time and thought on this subject, and shall never regard it as one of the most satisfactory things that happened to me during my first year in London. In fact, it was rather sad in a way, though very satisfactory from a purely sporting point of view.
XIV
Just as my first year in London was drawing to a close I received the gratifying news from Mr. Westonshaugh that I might take a holiday of a week’s duration. Naturally, my first idea was to go out of town, and Aunt Augusta reminded me that Doctor Dunston had said he would like to entertain me as a guest at Merivale when the opportunity offered.
But, strangely enough, I did not feel drawn to Merivale, because it so happened that I had seen the Doctor during the previous spring, when he came to London to buy prizes and attend one or two of the May meetings, which were his solitary annual relaxation. In fact, he had asked me to dine with him at his hotel, “The Bishop’s Keys,” not far from Exeter Hall, and I had gone, and found the Doctor changed. I couldn’t tell how he had changed exactly, for he was still the same man, of course, and still took the same majestic view of life; but somehow he had shrunk, and seeing him at “The Bishop’s Keys” was quite different from seeing him in his study at Merivale, surrounded by all the implements of the scholastic profession. His voice was the same, and his rich vocabulary, and his way of examining a question in all its bearings; but still, he had shrunk, and, a good deal to my surprise and uneasiness, I found myself actually disagreeing with him! He did not thoroughly realise what I had become; but that was my own fault to some extent, because the old fascination under the Doctor’s spell had not entirely perished, and I found myself feeling before him just as I used to feel. Of course I ought to have talked freely to him and described the life I led and the various things of interest that had happened to me in London; but I did not. Instead, I listened to him wandering on about Merivale, and the new boys, and the leak in the swimming-bath, and the scholarship his daughter had got for Girton, and his wife’s neuralgia, and his detection of the gardener’s boy in a series of thefts from the boot-room, and so on. He didn’t like London, and had to take lozenges for his throat every half-hour. He was, in fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bore, and though my conscience stung me for ingratitude, I could not throw myself into the leak in the swimming-bath, or feel that the gardener’s boy or the scholarship at Girton really mattered an atom. It was base on my part, but I could not help it, and, curiously enough, my conversation had the same effect on the Doctor that his had on me. The only difference was that he very soon stopped me when I began saying things he didn’t like, whereas I could not, of course, stop him. Without saying it unkindly, I found that the Doctor had become rather piffling in his interests. He gave me a bottle of ginger beer with my dinner, while he drank a half-bottle of burgundy, and he showed in a good many little ways that he still regarded me merely as Corkey Major, and expected me to regard him as Dr. Dunston. But one must give and take in these matters, and when he began talking about what his old pupils had done in the world, and left me entirely out of the list of those who had made their mark, I began to feel fairly full up with the Doctor, as they say, and knew only too well that in future I should manage to struggle on without seeing any more of him. Because living in London readjusts your perspective, so to speak, and it was rather sad in a way to see such a grand old scholar and large-minded man filling up his fine brain with such gew-gaws and fribbles as the affairs of Merivale. He was, moreover, more Conservative than ever, and I felt really ashamed to find anybody with such wrong ideas on demand and supply and the rights of man. But to have corrected his opinions on these subjects would have been an impossible task; because, as Mr. Blades once neatly said on another subject, you can’t bring a back-number up to date, and the Doctor, while he might have appeared to the old advantage in the scholastic and venerable atmosphere of Merivale, was distinctly of the ancient and honourable order of back-numbers as he appeared at “The Bishop’s Keys” in London.
There was great unrest among the working classes at this time, and Dr. Dunston was very angry with the proletariat. “The sons of labour,” he said, “will soon be the sons of perdition, for, at the rate they are going, they will inevitably dislocate forever the relations between Capital and Labour—with disastrous results to themselves, Corkey; with disastrous results to themselves!”
Of course, to one saturated in the sayings of Mr. Bright and Mr. Walter, these views appeared erroneous; but it would not have done to tell the Doctor that I was now a Radical. He must have felt it as a personal slight in his scheme of education. Still, I had to assert myself to some extent and didn’t hesitate to smoke a cigarette with my coffee. It may be added that the Doctor didn’t hesitate to resent it.
“A stupid habit, even in the adult, Corkey,” he said; “and I regret that you have allowed yourself to acquire it at your tender age. To suck into the system a deadening smoke from the conflagration of a poisonous vegetable has always seemed to me unworthy of a gentleman and a Christian. No doubt your companions have seduced you, but I am sorry the armour of Merivale was not proof against their temptation.”
After this I hid my secret flights toward literature and the boards. His view of the theatre appeared to be that the Greek drama was worthy of all praise, but that the English drama was not. I asked him if he was going to see Hamlet, as performed by Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry, and he said, “No, Corkey. The modern theatre is no place for a preceptor of the young. Shakespeare, in fact, is far too sacred a subject for the modern stage. The spirit evaporates, the poet takes wing, and what is left is not worth going to see. I read my Shakespeare in the privacy of my own chamber, Corkey; and I do not expect that the modern generation of actors can teach me anything I do not already know of the Swan of Avon, either from a poetic or philosophical standpoint.”