“He used to say that Diogenes was considerably the pleasanter fellow of the two.”
“Poor old Foxey always feared you, I believe, just as did everybody else. You were a gloomy, dreamy sort of chap when you were not merely formidable. I remember once you were nearly superannuated. And do you remember Foxey saying there was nothing you might not do, if only you would apply your mind to it; but as it was, he was sure you would never do anything?”
“I lived in a mental fog in those days,” said Northcote, with a dreary laugh. “There was a thick vapor wrapped all round my brain. I could see and understand nothing. One fact only was borne in upon me with any sort of clearness. It was that I was vastly superior to everybody else. There never was such a colossal self-esteem.”
“Well, you certainly despised everybody in those days. And you must have gone on despising everybody to be capable of doing what you have.”
“I remember I was generally chosen to lead the scrum because I had a big voice,” said Northcote, with the light of reminiscence softening his grim mouth.
“But your voice is so much greater now than it was then, although it was always an immense booming sort of thing that seemed to come out of your boots. But your hands used to impress me more than anything else. I used to think that if I had hands like that I should break ribs for my private amusement. Do you remember standing the three-quarters on their heads? You were a hefty brute in those days.”
“I was always more or less a man of my hands, yet at the same time was always intensely interested in myself. I used to consider that ‘Cad’ Northcote—that was my name at school, although you are too polite to remind me of it—was quite the most wonderful person who had ever been born into this world or into any other. I used to lie awake all night taking myself to pieces as though I had been a watch. Sometimes I dreamed that I was Napoleon, and that it had come to pass that he had been chosen to lead the English pack while he was still at school.”
“Well, that dream came true at any rate,” said his schoolfellow, with an outburst of enthusiasm. “You were still with us when you pushed those Welshmen all over the place.”
The conversation was curtailed at this point by the appearance of the judge’s marshal.
“Mr. Northcote,” said this courteous and nicely dressed official, “Sir Joseph would be very much obliged if you would come round and see him in his room.”