He had been a rank failure at Oxford. He had no one but himself to blame, of course. Perhaps he had not given the place a fair trial, but at the end of his fourth term he had decided that it was no use going on, and removed himself. It was partly, he thought, that he could not endure Tibster, and partly that he had lost all power of concentrating on his work.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but at school there was always something to work for, to get to Oxford. When I got there I seemed to shoot ahead of it, to see beyond it, and in the place itself I could find nothing but Tibster and the Tibsterian mind, cut off from the world outside and annoyed because that world has a voluptuousness which is not in its own little box. I think I changed physically, grew a new kidney or another lobe of the brain. Anyhow, the world shrank and I became very large and unwieldy, and there was nothing positive in my existence except my dislike of Tibster.”
“Did you smoke a great deal?” asked Old Mole.
“Only after the crisis.”
“Did you make a verse translation of the Odyssey?”
“Only the first four books.”
“I imagine, if you had taken your symptoms to Tibster, he would have put you right. The university has that effect on sensitive undergraduates, especially on non-Public School men. A sudden growth, a swift shooting from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood. It is very touching to watch; but Tibster must have seen it happen so often that it would be difficult for him to notice that it was happening to you more violently than usual.”
“I never thought of it from Tibster’s point of view.”
“My dear Panoukian, I am only just beginning to see your affairs from your point of view, or, indeed, to admit that you have a point of view at all. . . . I hope it was not a great disappointment to your father.”
Panoukian said his father had died during his second term. He had been attached to his father and was with him at the end, and perhaps that was what began the crisis. The business had gone to his brothers, but he was left enough to live on, and that was how he came to be in London. For the time being he was acting as secretary, unpaid, to Tyler Harbottle, M. P. for North Thrigsby and an old friend of his father’s. Old Mole remembered Harbottle, a butter merchant in Thrigsby and president of the Literary Society, the Field Society, the Linnæan Society, the Darwin Club, the Old Fogies, and the Ancient Codgers, and formerly a member of the Art Gallery Committee, and, in that capacity, provocative of the outcry on the purchase of a picture by so advanced and startling a painter as Puvis de Chavannes. He asked Panoukian how he liked the House of Commons, and Panoukian said it was full of Tibsters with soap and chemicals and money on their brains instead of Greek and Latin and book philosophy.