"Why not?" asked Arthur, opening his blue eyes. "Heaven intended that stuffy old parrot" (he had drawn this learned man as a dilapidated fowl of that species) "to be caricatured. Observe that his nose is already half a beak. Or perhaps it is a beak developing into a nose; it depends whether he is on the downward or upward path of evolution."
"Because you made me laugh," replied Godfrey, "whereby I lost at least eighteenpennyworth of information."
"A laugh is worth eighteenpence," suggested Arthur.
"That depends upon how many eighteenpences one possesses. You may have lots, some people are short of them."
"Quite true. I never looked at it in that way before. I am obliged to you for putting it so plainly," said Arthur with his charming smile.
Such was the beginning of the acquaintance of these two, and in some cases might have been its end. But with them it was not so. Arthur conceived a sincere admiration for Godfrey who could speak like this to a stranger, and at Scoones' and as much as possible outside, haunted him like a shadow. Soon it was a regular thing for Godfrey to go to dine at the old Georgian house in Queen Anne's Gate upon Sunday evenings, where he became popular with the rather magnificent early-
Victorian aunt who thought that he exercised a good influence upon her nephew. Sometimes, too, Arthur would accompany Godfrey to Hampstead and sit smoking and making furtive caricatures of him and Mrs.
Parsons, while he worked and she beamed admiration. The occupation sounds dull, but somehow Arthur did not find it so; he said that it rested his overwrought brain.
"Look here, old fellow," said Godfrey at length, "have you any intention of passing that examination of yours?"
"In the interests of the Diplomatic Service and of the country I think not," replied Arthur reflectively. "I feel that it is a case where true altruism becomes a duty."
"Then what do you mean to do with yourself?"
"Don't know. Live on my money, I suppose, and on that of my respected aunt after her lamented decease which, although I see no signs of it, she tells me she considers imminent."
"I don't wonder, Arthur, with you hanging about the house. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A man is made to work his way through the world, not to idle."
"Like a beetle boring through wood, not like a butterfly flitting over flowers; that's what you mean, isn't it? Well, butterflies are nicer than beetles, and some of us like flowers better than dead wood. But, I say, old chap, do you mean it?"
"I do, and so does your aunt."
"Let us waive my aunt. Like the poor she is always with us, and I, alas! am well acquainted with her views, which are those of a past epoch. But I am not obstinate; tell me what to do and I'll do it--@@anything except enter the Diplomatic Service, to lie abroad for the benefit of my country, in the words of the ancient saying."
"There is no fear of that, for you would never pass the examination,"@@said the practical Godfrey. "You see, you are too clever," he added by way of explanation, "and too much occupied with a dozen things of which examiners take no account, the merits of the various religious systems, for instance."
"So are you," interrupted Arthur.
"I know I am; I love them. I'd like to talk to you about reincarnation and astronomy, of which I know something, and even astrology and the survival of the dead and lots of other things. But I have got to make my way in the world, and I've no time. You think me a heavy bore and an old fogey because I won't go to parties to which lots of those nice fellows ask me. Do you suppose I shouldn't like the parties and all the larks afterwards and the jolly actresses and the rest? Of course I should, for I'm a man like others. But I tell you I haven't time. I've flouted my father, and I'm on my honour, so to speak, to justify myself and get on. So I mean to pass that tomfool examination and to cram down a lot of stuff in order to do so, which is of no more use to me than though I had swallowed so much brown paper. Fool-stuff, pulped by fools to be the food of fools--that's what it is. And now I'm going to shove some spoonfuls of it down my throat, so light your pipe, and please be quiet."
"One moment more of your precious time," interrupted Arthur. "What is the exact career that you propose to adorn? Something foreign, I think --Indian Civil Service?"
"No, as I have told you a dozen times, Indian Army."
"The army has points--possibly in the future it might give a man an opportunity of departing from the world in a fashion that is generally, if in error, considered to be decent. India, too, has still more points, for there anyone with intelligence might study the beginnings of civilisation, which, perhaps, are also its end. My friend, I, too, will enter the Indian Army, that is if I can pass the examination. Provide me at once with the necessary books and, Mrs.
Parsons, be good-hearted enough to bring some of your excellent coffee, brewed double strong. Do not imagine, young man, who ought, by the way, to have been born fifty years earlier and married my aunt, that you are the only one who can face and conquer facts, even those advanced by that most accursed of empty-headed bores, the man or the maniac called Euclid."
So the pair of them studied together, and by dint of private tuition in the evening, for at Scoones' where his talent for caricature was too much for him, Arthur would do little or nothing, Godfrey dragged his friend through the examination, the last but one in the list. Even then a miracle intervened to save him. Arthur's Euclid was hopeless.
He hated the whole business of squares and angles and parallelograms with such intensity that it made him mentally and morally sick. To his, as to some other minds, it was utter nonsense devised by a semi-@@lunatic for the bewilderment of mankind, and adopted by other lunatics as an appropriate form of torture of the young.
