Why was life so full of silliness, of waste and bungling? Why ... but one thing was certain—he would never, never forget her.
BOOK TWO
UNIVERSITY
I
"These 'ere deemagogues ... it's them as battens on the worker."
Martin woke with a start. He looked round his slovenly 'bedder' vaguely. His scout, Mr Algernon Galer, was slowly pouring out cold water into a bath and continuing last night's conversation. It was typical of Galer that he never dropped a conversation until he considered it completed, until, that is to say, by his fiendish ability to bore he had reduced the other side to silence. At present Martin had no other acquaintance in King's, for he had only come up on the previous evening. On reaching his rooms he found that the cupboard had been filled with a quantity of jam and pickles and other kinds of food, all carefully opened, so that they could not be returned if disliked by the purchaser. Galer pointed them out with pride as though they testified his devotion to Martin's welfare. There was nothing Galer did not know about the ways of looking after a fresher.
This Galer was a small, bunched-up, greasy man with a ragged black moustache, scarlet cheeks, and great watery eyes underhung by bags of loose skin. During the mornings he shuffled about the stair in a pink shirt, green fancy waistcoat, grey flannel trousers, and lurid yellow boots; later on he retired with a large black bag to the Iffley Road, where he was supposed to maintain a timid wife and innumerable children. It was a matter of conjecture among the residents on Galer's stair whether he wrapped up the coal in newspaper or whether the bag contained coal and food exquisitely mingled. By the afternoon the bag had always achieved a certain bulk and wore a swollen look. But it was as a politician that Galer excelled. No truer Tory than Galer ever voted for Valentia or took the Empire to heart. He did not exactly know where the map was red or how it became red; not that that would have mattered, for Galer was not the man to be worried about little points of honesty. But he knew that much of the map was red, and he was genuinely glad about it: it seemed to him a logical inference and a capital idea that the map should be all red.
Of the catch-word he was a master. Few conversations with Galer were allowed to end without some allusion to 'Hands Across the Sea' and the Thickness of Blood (compared with water) and the 'Necessity for a Cash nexus just to symbolise the brother'ood.'