The term was two-thirds over, and I will make all allowances for rawed nerves. But there was still a note of pathos running through the acrid conversation. Sixteen years had passed since I last entered the smoky Common Room over Big Gateway, and I was then being entertained to a farewell dinner by men who seemed to shed their mannerisms with their gowns and become suddenly human. In the interval I had wandered about the world and tried my hand at many things; O'Rane had wandered farther and made more experiments. Yet the Common Room was hardly changed: there was the same round hole in the carpet by the fireplace; the horsehair was still bursting through the scorched part of the largest chair; the tongs, still in two pieces, were still used as pokers.
The men, too, were hardly changed. Only the younger ones came and went—some to headmasterships, some far away from scholasticism. There were a few science men, imported grudgingly by Burgess to tend the growing but still suspect Modern Side; and each one knew his neighbour too well. They knew their work too well and had corrected the same mistakes too long. I wondered what they made of O'Rane and he of them.
As Headmaster, Burgess stood in a different position; with his enormous range of knowledge he would always be differentiated from his fellows. I tried to see him that night before going, but he was engaged with the Bishop of Minehead, who was preaching in chapel next day. We met, however, in the Cloisters after Roll Call while I was waiting for O'Rane to come out of Early School.
"Behold, I have prepared my dinner," he said, as we shook hands. "My oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready."
I interpreted his words as an invitation to breakfast and asked whether I might bring O'Rane.
"Priests and Levites sit at meat with me this day," he answered, with a warning glance to the end of the Cloisters where the Bishop was reading the inscription on the South African memorial. "An he be not afraid.... Laddie, doth thy memory hold the day when David O'Rane came first among us?"
"I went in fear of my life, sir, for the first term."
"I, too, laddie," said Burgess, stroking his long beard. "Cloven tongues, like as of fire, sat upon him, and he prophesied with strange utterance, saying, 'See here, Dr. Burgess, I propose to come to your old school for a piece. There's my money, every last dime. When that's petered out, I guess I'll have to find more. When do you start anyway, and what are the rules?' Laddie, I spake a word here and a word there. It was not good for a babe to know what he knew. Yet I would not fling him into outer darkness, for he was not without valour."
We left the Cloisters and walked into the sunlight of Great Court.
"You saw him when he came back from France, sir?" I asked.