“Of course I’ll help you, m’ boy,” the veteran diplomat had said reassuringly. “I’ll give you a lettre de créance that’ll let you have your entrées without any démarches.”
And he had. It seemed that once … an Australian soprano … a pearl … a very High Personage indeed … Regents-theater … schön gemütlich … but, well, a little unpractical.…
Nothing was ever divulged about what happened during the first three weeks of that vacation. Gaveston was always discreet. But Monty Wytham, spending a few days at Heidelberg, had been surprised to see his college friend passing through the station in a special train, with blinds partially drawn, and wearing in his button-hole a tiny rosette, like the légion d’honneur, but white.
There was no secrecy about the second half of that vacation. Gaveston knew he must now test the Great Heart of the People. Whatever his congenital tastes, he never forgot that he styled himself proletarist as well as legitimarian, and the famous University Hostel in Haggerston, E., was the scene of three adventurous weeks of social exploration.
Not of course his first effort in that genre. Gaveston’s strong sense of collegiate duty had led him to visit the Lads’ Club established by Wallace in the poorer quarter of the dream-enwrought city. And many a rich friendship he had formed with the burly lads in its gymnasium, its strictly undenominational conventicle, and its merry week-end sea-side camps. Not soon could he forget his spiritual wrestling with young Bob Limber, for instance, and how one foggy evening, unable longer to support the mustulent odour of damp clothes and the rough-and-tumble hurly-burly of the indoor football room, he had led the promising youngster out of the Club, and had walked and talked him up and down the ash-strewn towpath beside the stagnant crime-inviting water of the canal, while slimy drops of verdigris guttered on their heads from rusty, disused railway-bridges, and round them slowly fell pieces of plaster peeling from the fissured walls of warehouses obscenely stained with damp and eczematous with decay. For three hours he had striven to convince the obstinate but fascinated youth (a butcher’s apprentice, was he not?) of the high moral value of punting. But the bets which poor Bob made owing to a misunderstanding of Gaveston’s meaning, had been lacking in method and ruinous in result.
SPIRITUAL WRESTLING WITH YOUNG BOB LIMBER
Now Gaveston played an even more active part in social reform. Through the murk-bound and desuete alleys of Hoxton, where no policeman (or “copper” as he would ingratiatingly say to the natives) dared venture, Gaveston strolled carolling the popular ditty of the day. He had a way with him, the battered women-folk used to say as he passed them with a kindly wave of his hand. Sometimes as he lay sleepless in the squalider doss-houses, he wondered whether fate might not bring him face to face there with that astonishing woman who, on the pavement outside the Café Régale, had once given him such an astounding glimpse of London’s uttermost underworld.