“O Lord, yes. Deuced friendly and polite! That’s the way with gentlefolks—genteel brutality—shaking hands and smiling one at the other, and all the time a knife up the sleeve. Don’t understand gentlefolks myself.�
This rather shocked Lewis, who was accustomed to hearing everybody he knew called a gentleman, and the title insisted upon tenaciously.
“Why, Mr. Bulstrode,� he said diffidently, “ain’t you a gentleman?�
“Lord bless you, no!� cried Bulstrode loudly and frankly. “My father kept a mews, and my mother—God bless her!—I’ll say no more. But look you, Lewis Pryor,� said he, rising, and with a sort of rude dignity, “though I be not a gentleman here,� slapping his body, “I’m a gentleman here,� tapping his forehead. “I’m an aristocrat from my chops upward.�
Lewis had risen too. He thought this was very queer talk, but he did not laugh at it, or feel contempt for Bulstrode, who had straightened himself up, and had actually lost something of his plebeian aspect.
“And,� he added with an ill-suppressed chuckle, “I’m a gentleman when I’m drunk. You see, as long as I’m sober I remember the mews, and my father in his black weepers driving the hearse, and the delight I used to feel when the young sprigs of the nobility and gentry at the university would ask me to their wine parties to hear me spout Ovid and Anacreon, for they knew I wasn’t a gentleman. But when I’m drunk, I only remember that I was a ‘double first’; that every Greek and Latinist in England knows Wat Bulstrode’s name; and when this precious philosopher Skelton was scouring the universities to find a man to help him out with his—ha! ha!—great work, he could not for love or money get any better man than ragged, drunken, out-at-elbows Wat Bulstrode. I tell you, boy, when I’m drunk I’m a king! I’m more—I’m a gentleman! There is something in Greek which provokes an intolerable thirst. You say that Latin is dry; so it is, so it is, my boy—very dry and musty!� and then Bulstrode, in a rich, sweet, rollicking voice, as delicious as his speaking voice, trolled out the fag end of a song that echoed and re-echoed through the green woods:
“I went to Strasburg, when I got drunk,
With the most learned Professor Brunck.
I went to Wortz, where I got more drunken,
With the more learned Professor Bruncken.�