“Something about literature, eh? ... Oh, do, please!” purred Miss Picksley, making eyes at him. (She was really anxious for him to accept, because she had canvassed in vain seven other speakers.) “Tell me your subject, then it can go down on the fixture-cards.”
Mr. Weston, to his astonishment, lost his head and struck blindly at the first literary name that came into his disordered mind.
“Shakespeare,” he gasped.
Miss Picksley departed, calling blessing upon his head.
§ 2
Now, as Mr. Weston passed the scene of so many of his former labours, he felt not altogether sorry that to-night, in the schoolroom adjoining the chapel, he would address a small but certainly select gathering on the subject of “Shakespeare.” ... He would have liked to have expanded the title of his paper into “Shakespeare, Man or Superman?” after the fashion of a certain Methodist preacher who occasionally visited Bockley. However....
Mr. Weston, it may be remarked, was feeling in quite a tolerably good humour. He was beaming genially at the world in general when a horrible sight met his eyes. Then his brow darkened into a frown. The smile left his face; his lips tightened ominously. He stopped, swung down his umbrella from its jaunty attitude, and stared. His eyes flamed. The slope of his nose became full of menace.
For there, before his eyes, chalked up in scrawly writing on the foundation-stone of the Duke Street Methodist Chapel, was an inscription that excited his horrified attention. “This stone was laid ... to the glory of God ... the Rev. Samuel Smalljohn ...” he read, and “Let your light so shine....” And underneath that, in a space that made it most conspicuous, the brutal legend: “Daddy Weston is a Soppy Fool....”
Entering the Downsland Road Council School in a white heat of indignation, Mr. Weston was just able to hear the sound of suppressed laughter and scurrying feet as he entered the classroom. The conviction forced itself upon him that somebody had been watching at the keyhole....