“Absolutely,” said Augustine.
“And, as we grow older, we see that never can we recapture the old, careless gaiety of our school days. Life was not complex then, Mulliner. Life in that halcyon period was free from problems. We were not faced with the necessity of disappointing our friends.”
“Now listen, Bish,” said Augustine cheerily, “if you’re still worrying about that living, forget it. Look at me. I’m quite chirpy, aren’t I?”
The bishop sighed.
“I wish I had your sunny resilience, Mulliner. How do you manage it?”
“Oh, I keep smiling, and take the Buck-U-Uppo daily.”
“The Buck-U-Uppo?”
“It’s a tonic my uncle Wilfred invented. Works like magic.”
“I must ask you to let me try it one of these days. For somehow, Mulliner, I am finding life a little grey. What on earth,” said the bishop, half to himself and speaking peevishly, “they wanted to put up a statue to old Fatty for, I can’t imagine. A fellow who used to throw inked darts at people. However,” he continued, abruptly abandoning this train of thought, “that is neither here nor there. If the Board of Governors of Harchester College has decided that Lord Hemel of Hempstead has by his services in the public weal earned a statue, it is not for us to cavil. Write to Mr. Entwhistle, Mulliner, and say that I shall be delighted.”
Although, as he had told Augustine, fully twenty years had passed since his last visit to Harchester, the bishop found, somewhat to his surprise, that little or no alteration had taken place in the grounds, buildings, and personnel of the school. It seemed to him almost precisely the same as it had been on the day, forty-three years before, when he had first come there as a new boy.
There was the tuck-shop where, a lissom stripling with bony elbows, he had shoved and pushed so often in order to get near the counter and snaffle a jam-sandwich in the eleven o’clock recess. There were the baths, the fives courts, the football fields, the library, the gymnasium, the gravel, the chestnut trees, all just as they had been when the only thing he knew about bishops was that they wore bootlaces in their hats.
The sole change that he could see was that on the triangle of turf in front of the library there had been erected a granite pedestal surmounted by a shapeless something swathed in a large sheet—the statue to Lord Hemel of Hempstead which he had come down to unveil.
And gradually, as his visit proceeded, there began to steal over him an emotion which defied analysis.
At first he supposed it to be a natural sentimentality. But, had it been that, would it not have been a more pleasurable emotion? For his feelings had begun to be far from unmixedly agreeable. Once, when rounding a corner, he came upon the captain of football in all his majesty, there had swept over him a hideous blend of fear and shame which had made his gaitered legs wobble like jellies. The captain of football doffed his cap respectfully, and the feeling passed as quickly as it had come: but not so soon that the bishop had not recognized it. It was exactly the feeling he had been wont to have forty-odd years ago when, sneaking softly away from football practice, he had encountered one in authority.
The bishop was puzzled. It was as if some fairy had touched him with her wand, sweeping away the years and making him an inky-faced boy again. Day by day this illusion grew, the constant society of the Rev. Trevor Entwhistle doing much to foster it. For young Catsmeat Entwhistle had been the bishop’s particular crony at Harchester, and he seemed to have altered his appearance since those days in no way whatsoever. The bishop had had a nasty shock when, entering the headmaster’s study on the third morning of his visit, he found him sitting in the headmaster’s chair with the headmaster’s cap and gown on. It seemed to him that young Catsmeat, in order to indulge his distorted sense of humour, was taking the most frightful risk. Suppose the Old Man were to come in and cop him!
Altogether, it was a relief to the bishop when the day of the unveiling arrived.
The actual ceremony, however, he found both tedious and irritating. Lord Hemel of Hempstead had not been a favourite of his in their school days, and there was something extremely disagreeable to him in being obliged to roll out sonorous periods in his praise.
In addition to this, he had suffered from the very start of the proceedings from a bad attack of stage fright. He could not help thinking that he must look the most awful chump standing up there in front of all those people and spouting. He half expected one of the prefects in the audience to step up and clout his head and tell him not to be a funny young swine.
However, no disaster of this nature occurred. Indeed, his speech was notably successful.
“My dear Bishop,” said old General Bloodenough, the Chairman of the College Board of Governors, shaking his hand at the conclusion of the unveiling, “your magnificent oration put my own feeble efforts to shame, put them to shame, to shame. You were astounding!”
“Thanks awfully,” mumbled the bishop, blushing and shuffling his feet.
The weariness which had come upon the bishop as the result of the prolonged ceremony seemed to grow as the day wore on. By the time he was seated in the headmaster’s study after dinner he was in the grip of a severe headache.
The Rev. Trevor Entwhistle
