Gillingham's thin lip curled visibly. 'Your humour, my dear boy,' he said, patting Faussett on the back, 'is English—English—essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties—loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of François Coppée's every night and morning.'
'But if Plantagenet's poor,' one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, 'it's natural enough, after all, he shouldn't want to join the club. It's precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.'
The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness.
'To be poor, my dear Matthews,' he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, 'as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one's coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I'm concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn't care for wine—that's quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in—the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.' He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. 'Now give the hautboys breath,' he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of fine dithyrambic inspiration; 'he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and ever young, Drinking joys did first ordain. Bacchus' blessings are a treasure; Drinking is the soldier's pleasure. Rich the tr-r-reasure. Sweet the pleasure. Sweet is pleasure after pain.'
And when Gillingham said that, with his studiously unstudied air of profound afflatus, everybody in the company felt convinced at once that Plantagenet's teetotalism, real or hypocritical, simply hadn't got a leg left to stand upon. They turned for consolation to the Carlsbad plums and the candied cherries.
But at the very same moment, in those more modest rooms, up two pair of stairs in the Back Quad, which Dick had selected for himself as being the cheapest then vacant, the Prince of the Blood himself sat in an old stuffed chair, in a striped college boating coat, engaged in discussing his critic Gillingham in a more friendly spirit with a second-year man, who, though not a smug, was a reader and a worker, by name Gillespie, a solid Glasgow Scotchman. They had rowed together that afternoon in a canvas pair to Sandford, and now they were working in unison on a chapter or two of Aristotle.
'For my own part,' Dick said, 'when I hear Gillingham talk, I'm so overwhelmed with his knowledge of life and his knowledge of history, and his extraordinary reading, that I feel quite ashamed to have carried off the Scholarship against him. I feel the examiners must surely have made a mistake, and some day they'll find it out, and be sorry they elected me.'
'You needn't be afraid of that,' Gillespie answered, smiling, and filling his pipe. 'You lack the fine quality of a “guid conceit o' yoursel,” Plantagenet. I've talked a bit with Gillingham now and again, and I don't think very much of him. He's not troubled that way. He's got an extraordinary memory, and a still more extraordinary opinion of his own high merits; but I don't see, bar those two, that there's anything particularly brilliant or original about him. He's a poet, of course, and he writes good verses. Every fellow can write good verses nowadays. The trick's been published. All can raise the flower now, as Tennyson puts it, for all have got the seed. But, as far as I can judge Gillingham, his memory's just about the best thing about him. He has a fine confused lot of undigested historical knowledge packed away in his head loose; but he hasn't any judgment; and judgment is ability. The examiners were quite right, my dear fellow; you know less than Gillingham in a way; but you know it more surely, and you can make better use of it. His work's showy and flashy; yours is solid and serviceable.'
And Gillespie spoke the truth. Gradually, as Dick got to see more of the Born Poet's method, he found Gillingham out; he discovered that the great genius was essentially a poseur. He posed about everything. His rôle in life, he said himself, was to be the typical poet; and he never forgot it. He dressed the part; he acted it; he ate and drank poetically. He looked at everything from the point of view of a budding Shakespeare, with just a dash of Shelley thrown in, and a suspicion of Matthew Arnold to give modern flavour. Add a tinge of Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, for cosmopolitan interest, and you have your bard complete. He was a spectator of the drama of human action, he loved to remark; he watched the poor creatures and the pretty creatures at their changeful game—doing, loving, and suffering. He saw in it all good material for his art, the raw stuff for future plays to astonish humanity. Meanwhile, he lay low at Durham College, Oxford, and let the undergraduate world deploy itself before him in simple Bacchic guise or Heraclean feats of strength and skill.
Dick saw more of Gillespie those first few terms than of anyone else in college. He was a thorough good fellow, Archibald Gillespie, and he had just enough of that ballast of common-sense and knowledge of the world which was a trifle lacking to the romantic country-bred lad fresh up from Chiddingwick. He helped Dick much with his work, and went much with him on the river. And Dick worked with a will at his history all that year, and pulled an oar with the best of them; though he found time, too, to coach a fellow-undergraduate going in for 'Smalls,' which increased his income by ten whole pounds—an incredible sum to him. When he thought of how hard it used to be to earn ten pounds at Mr. Wells's in the High Street at Chiddingwick, no wonder Oxford seemed to him a veritable Eldorado.