There was a long silence.
"Perhaps he never got your letter," I said.
III
We walked up to the school after dinner and joined the staff at dessert. I had gone to Melton to break the news of Loring's disappearance and not to spy the incongruity of O'Rane's self-sought surroundings, but I left without touching on the subject of my visit. O'Rane seemed to be carrying as much sail as he could stand. Being a Saturday night the masters had all dined in Common Room, with the exception, of course, of Burgess. I found them profiting by his absence to compare the ideal way of running a great public school with the way actually adopted at Melton.
So long as a regimental mess devotes every moment of its spare time to discussing regimental politics, so long as three barristers at a dinner-party of twenty-four segregate themselves to discuss the last appointment, so long as Members of Parliament refight in the Smoking-Room the battle they have just left in the Chamber, I suppose it is not surprising that schoolmasters should widen their outlook and refresh their minds for the morrow by returning to the chalk dust and ink of their classrooms.
The criticism of Burgess hung on a peg provided by one Vickers. (I shall never forget his name and some day perhaps I shall meet him.) It seems that Vickers, in the opinion of his form-master Matheson, was ripe for super-annuation on the ground that he knew nothing, learned nothing and was only being injured in health by having to spend his leisure hours in detention-school. Ponsonby, in whose house Vickers spun out his unprofitable existence, disagreed in toto with his good friend Matheson. Vickers was slow, without a doubt; a little patience, however ... And the boy was admirably behaved. And there must be something in the son of a man who had captained Somerset. I was given to understand that the chose Vickers had been under discussion for some while and that the antagonists only agreed in condemning the Head.
Burgess, it seemed, had admitted the boy five years before on the strength of a chance conversation on early Church music. He took the weak line that Melton might do Vickers good and that Vickers could not possibly harm Melton; finally he was believed to attach less than no importance to Matheson's reiterated complaints to the senior Vickers that their son admittedly spent evening preparation in reading oratorio scores. On this last point Ponsonby ventured to say that he paid a personal visit to prep. room every night and could only say that he had never discovered Vickers so employed. Had anyone described to me the conversation of that Common Room, I should have dismissed his account as a cruel parody.
Raney had walked up from the hotel in unbroken silence, but I saw him gradually awakening to the sound of the Common-Room talk, where four conversations were always in progress at once and no one waited to hear what his neighbour had to say.
"Send him to O'Rane," suggested Ponsonby. "If he can't make anything of him ... Hallo, Oakleigh, where have you sprung from?"
"O'Rane is welcome to him," returned Matheson. "But you may remember my contention was that this is a school and not an asylum."