Gerald is the possessor of a bosom friend, an excessively silent and rather saturnine youth of about his own age. His name is Donkin, and he regards Gerald, so far as I can see, with a grim mixture of amusement and compassion. He pays frequent visits to my house, as his father is a soldier in India; and he is much employed by the Twins for corroborating or refuting the more improbable of their brother's reminiscences.
Robin soon made friends with the boys. Like most of their kind, their tests of human probity were few and simple: and having discovered that Robin not only played Rugby football, but had on several occasions represented Edinburgh University thereat, they straightway wrote him down a "decent chap" and took the rest of his virtues for granted.
It came upon them—and me too, as a matter of fact—as rather a shock one evening, when Robin, during the course of a desultory conversation on education in general, suddenly launched forth more suo into a diatribe against the English Public School system.
English boys, he pointed out, were passed through a great machine, which ground up the individual at one end and disgorged a mere type at the other—("Pretty good type too, Robin," from me),—they were taught to worship bodily strength—("Quite right too!" said my herculean brother-in-law),—they were herded together under a monastic system; they were removed from the refining influence of female society—(even the imperturable Donkin snorted at this),—and worst of all, little or nothing was done to eradicate from their minds the youthful idea that it is unmanly to read seriously or think deeply.
I might have said a good deal in reply. I might have dwelt upon the fact that the English Public School system is not so hard upon the stupid boy—which means the average boy—as that of more strenuous forcing-houses of intellect abroad. I might have spoken of one or two moral agents which prevent our schools from being altogether despicable: unquestioning obedience to authority, for instance, or loyalty to tradition. I might have told of characters moulded and fibres stiffened by responsibility—our race bears more responsibility on its shoulders than all the rest of the world put together—or of minds trained to interpret laws and balance justice in the small but exacting world of the prefects' meeting and the games' committee. But it was Gerald, who is no moralist, but a youth of sound common-sense, who closed the argument.
"Mr Fordyce," he said, "it's no use my jawing to you, because you can knock me flat at that game; and of course old Moke there"—this was Master Donkin's unhappy but inevitable designation among his friends—"is too thick to argue with a stuffed rabbit; but you had better come down some time and see the place—that's all."
Robin promised to suspend judgment pending a personal investigation, and the incident closed.
Gerald's verdict on Robin's views, communicated to me privately afterwards, was characteristic but not unfavourable.
"He seems to have perfectly putrid notions about some things, but he's a pretty sound chap on the whole—the best secretary you have had, anyhow, old man. Have you seen him do a straight-arm balance on the billiard-table?"
But I did not fully realise how completely Robin had settled down as an accepted member of my household until one afternoon towards the end of the Christmas holidays.