May be wholly of silk,
Or of stuff or mohair,
The tie that you wear;
If the pain you can’t bear,
Better bathe it with milk,
The tie that you wear
May be wholly of silk.”
One of the boys who was preparing for Oxford was called Ralli, and he had great facility as a planchette writer. He could not write by himself, but as soon as anyone else put their hands on planchette at the same time as he did, it would write like mad. The things it wrote seemed to be nearly always what he had read and forgotten, sometimes an article from the Figaro, sometimes a passage from a French novel. Sometimes it wrote verse. Ralli was a fluent poet, but wrote better verse without the aid of planchette than with. Sometimes the planchette board answered his questions, but with a flippant inconsequence.
In October I went to Cambridge and passed into Trinity, leaving the Little Go to be tackled later. I had rooms in Trinity Street. Hubert Cornish was at King’s. I was to go in for the Modern Language Tripos, which meant languages about as modern as Le Roman de la Rose and Chaucer. I went to a coach for mathematics, but this was sheer waste of time, as not one word of what I was taught ever entered my brain, nor did I improve one jot.
I belonged to two debating societies—the Magpie and Stump, and the Decemviri—and used to speak at both of them quite often; and to a society where one read out papers, called the Chit-Chat. I also belonged to the A.D.C., and played the part of the butler in Parents and Guardians, and that of the footman in the Duchess of Bayswater.