'Have you ever heard of Barry Neville, Westall?' he asked, looking hard at him.
'Neville? Neville?' Westall murmured, turning the name over dubiously. 'Well, no, I don't think so. Of this college?'
'Of this college!' Gillingham echoed contemptuously. 'Of this college indeed! No, not of this college. The ideas of most Durham men seem to be bounded strictly by the four blessed walls of this particular college! I thought you wouldn't know him; I guessed as much. And yet he had once a European reputation. Barry Neville,' raising his voice so that Mr. Plantagenet should hear him distinctly—'Barry Neville was an able essayist, poet and journalist of the middle period of this present century.'
'Well?' Westall went on inquiringly.
'Well,' Gillingham answered, nodding his head with a mysterious look towards the half-awakened drunkard, who had started up at the sound of that familiar name, 'there he lies over on the sofa.'
This last was murmured below his breath to the other lads, so that Mr. Plantagenet didn't catch it in his further corner.
'I'm going to try the effect of a bit of his own writing upon him to-night,' Gillingham continued quietly. 'I'm going to see whether it'll rouse him, or whether he'll even recognise it.—Here, you men, stop your row. I'm thinking of giving you a little recitation.'
'Hear, hear!' Faussett cried, languidly interested in the strange experiment. 'Gillingham for a recitation!—You know, Mr. Plantagenet, our friend Gillingham, the Born Poet, is celebrated as one of the finest and most versatile reciters in all England.'
'What's he going to give us?' Mr. Plantagenet asked, endeavouring to seem quite wide-awake, and to assume a carefully critical attitude.
'A piece from a forgotten author,' Gillingham answered with quiet dignity. And then, mounting upon the table, and ensuring silence by a look or two flung with impartial aim at the heads of all those who still continued to talk or giggle, he began, in his clear, loud, sonorous voice, to deliver with very effective rhetoric a flashy show-piece, which he had long known by heart among his immense repertory, from the 'Collected Essays of Barry Neville.'