“But what good was it to the young men afterwards?”

  “Why, don’t you see?” replied Mein Herr. “They became teachers in their turn, and they said all these things over again; and their pupils wrote it all down; and the Examiners accepted it; and nobody had the ghost of an idea what it all meant!”

  “And how did it end?”

  “It ended this way. We woke up one fine day, and found there was no one in the place that knew anything about Moral Philosophy. So we abolished it, teachers, classes, examiners, and all. And if anyone wanted to learn anything about it, he had to make it out for himself; and after another twenty years or so there were several men that really knew something about it! Now tell me another thing. How long do you teach a youth before you examine him, in your Universities?”

  I told him, three or four years.

  “Just so, just what we did!” he exclaimed. “We taught ’em a bit, and, just as they were beginning to take it in, we took it all out again! We pumped our wells dry before they were a quarter full—we stripped our orchards while the apples were still in blossom—we applied the severe logic of arithmetic to our chickens, while peacefully slumbering in their shells! Doubtless it’s the early bird that picks up the worm—but if the bird gets up so outrageously early that the worm is still deep underground, what then is its chance of a breakfast?”

  Not much, I admitted.

  “Now see how that works!” he went on eagerly. “If you want to pump your wells so soon—and I suppose you tell me that is what you must do?”

  “We must,” I said. “In an overcrowded country like this, nothing but Competitive Examinations—”

  Mein Herr threw up his hands wildly. “What, again?” he cried. “I thought it was dead, fifty years ago! Oh this Upas tree of Competitive Examinations! Beneath whose deadly shade all the original genius, all the exhaustive research, all the untiring lifelong diligence by which our forefathers have so advanced human knowledge, must slowly but surely wither away, and give place to a system of Cookery, in which the human mind is a sausage, and all we ask is, how much indigestible stuff can be crammed into it!”

  Always, after these bursts of eloquence, he seemed to forget himself for a moment, and only to hold on to the thread of thought by some single word. “Yes, crammed,” he repeated. “We went through all that stage of the disease—had it bad, I warrant you! Of course, as the Examination was all in all, we tried to put in just what was wanted—and the great thing to aim at was, that the Candidate should know absolutely nothing beyond the needs of the Examination! I don’t say it was ever quite achieved: but one of my own pupils (pardon an old man’s egotism) came very near it. After the Examination, he mentioned to me the few facts which he knew but had not been able to bring in, and I can assure you they were trivial, Sir, absolutely trivial!”

  I feebly expressed my surprise and delight.

  The old man bowed, with a gratified smile, and proceeded. “At that time, no one had hit on the much more rational plan of watching for the individual scintillations of genius, and rewarding them as they occurred. As it was, we made our unfortunate pupil into a Leyden-jar, charged him up to the eyelids—then applied the knob of a Competitive Examination, and drew off one magnificent spark, which very often cracked the jar! What mattered that? We labeled it ‘First Class Spark,’ and put it away on the shelf.”

  “But the more rational system—?” I suggested.

  “Ah, yes! that came next. Instead of giving the whole reward of learning in one lump, we used to pay for every good answer as it occurred. How well I remember lecturing in those days, with a heap of small coins at my elbow! It was ‘A very good answer, Mr. Jones!’ (that meant a shilling, mostly). ‘Bravo, Mr. Robinson!’ (that meant half-a-crown). Now I’ll tell you how that worked. Not one single fact would any of them take in, without a fee! And when a clever boy came up from school, he got paid more for learning than we got paid for teaching him! Then came the wildest craze of all.”

  “What, another craze?” I said.

  “It’s the last one,” said the old man. “I must have tired you out with my long story. Each College wanted to get the clever boys: so we adopted a system which we had heard was very popular in England: the Colleges competed against each other, and the boys let themselves out to the highest bidder! What geese we were! Why, they were bound to come to the University somehow. We needn’t have paid ’em! And all our money went in getting clever boys to come to one College rather than another! The competition was so keen, that at last mere money-payments were not enough. Any College, that wished to secure some specially clever young man, had to waylay him at the Station, and hunt him through the streets. The first who touched him was allowed to have him.”

  “That hunting-down of the scholars, as they arrived, must have been a curious business,” I said. “Could you give me some idea of what it was like?”

  “Willingly!” said the old man. “I will describe to you the very last Hunt that took place, before that form of Sport (for it was actually reckoned among the Sports of the day: we called it ‘Cub-Hunting’) was finally abandoned. I witnessed it myself, as I happened to be passing by at the moment, and was what we called ‘in at the death.’ I can see it now!” he went on in an excited tone, gazing into vacancy with those large dreamy eyes of his. “It seems like yesterday; and yet it happened—” He checked himself hastily, and the remaining words died away into a whisper.

  “How many years ago did you say?” I asked, much interested in the prospect of at last learning some definite fact in his history.

  “Many years ago,” he replied. “The scene at the Railway-Station had been (so they told me) one of wild excitement. Eight or nine Heads of Colleges had assembled at the gates (no one was allowed inside), and the Stationmaster had drawn a line on the pavement, and insisted on their all standing behind it. The gates were flung open! The young man darted through them, and fled like lightning down the street, while the Heads of Colleges actually yelled with excitement on catching sight of him! The Proctor gave the word, in the old statutory form, ‘Semel! Bis! Ter! Currite!’, and the Hunt began! Oh, it was a fine sight, believe me! At the first corner he dropped his Greek Lexicon: further on, his railway-rug: then various small articles: then his umbrella: lastly, what I suppose he prized most, his handbag: but the game was up: the spherical Principal of—of—”

  “Of which College?” I said.

  “—of one of the Colleges,” he resumed, “had put into operation the Theory—his own discovery—of Accelerated Velocity, and captured him just opposite to where I stood. I shall never forget that wild breathless struggle! But it was soon over. Once in those great bony hands, escape was impossible!”

  “May I ask why you speak of him as the ‘spherical’ Principal?” I said.

  “The epithet referred to his shape, which was a perfect sphere. You are aware that a bullet, another instance of a perfect sphere, when falling in a perfectly straight line, moves with Accelerated Velocity?”

  I bowed assent.

  “Well, my spherical friend (as I am proud to call him) set himself to investigate the causes of this. He found them to be three. One; that it is a perfect sphere. Two; that it moves in a straight line. Three; that its direction is not upwards. When these three conditions are fulfilled, you get Accelerated Velocity.”

  “Hardly,” I said: “if you will excuse my differing from you. Suppose we apply the theory to horizontal motion. If a bullet is fired horizontally, it—”

  “—it does not move in a straight line,” he quietly finished my sentence for me.

  “I yield the point,” I said. “What did your friend do next?”

  “The next thing was to apply the theory, as you rightly suggest, to horizontal motion. But the moving body, ever tending to fall, needs constant support, if it is to move in a true horizontal line. ‘What, then,’ he asked himself, ‘will give constant support to a moving body?’ And his answer was ‘Human legs!’ That was the discovery that immortalised his name!”

  “His name being—?” I suggested.

  “I had not mentioned it,” was the gentle reply of my most unsatisfactory informant. “His next step was an obvious one. He took to a diet of suet-dumplings, until his body had become a perfect sphere. Then he went out for his first experimental run—which nearly cost him his life!”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, you see, he had no idea of the tremendous new Force in Nature that he was calling into play. He began too fast. In a very few minutes he found himself moving at a hundred miles an hour! And, if he had not had the presence of mind to charge into the middle of a haystack (which he scattered to the four winds) there can be no doubt that he would have left the Planet he belonged to, and gone right away into Space!”

  “And how came that to be the last of the Cub-Hunts?” I enquired.

  “Well, you see, it led to a rather scandalous dispute between two of the Colleges. Another Principal had laid his hand on the young man, so nearly at the same moment as the spherical one, that there was no knowing which had touched him first. The dispute got into print, and did us no credit, and, in short, Cub-Hunts came to an end. Now I’ll tell you what cured us of that wild craze of ours, the bidding against each other, for the clever scholars, just as if they were articles to be sold by auction! Just when the craze had reached its highest point, and when one of the Colleges had actually advertised a Scholarship of one thousand pounds per annum, one of our tourists brought us the manuscript of an old African legend—I happen to have a copy of it in my pocket. Shall I translate it for you?”

  “Pray go on,” I said, though I felt I was getting very sleepy.

  XIII

  What Tottles Meant

  Mein Herr unrolled the manuscript, but, to my great surprise, instead of reading it, he began to sing it, in a rich mellow voice that seemed to ring through the room.

  “One thousand pounds per annum

  Is not so bad a figure, come!”

  Cried Tottles. “And I tell you, flat,

  A man may marry well on that!

  To say ‘the Husband needs the Wife’

  Is not the way to represent it.

  The crowning joy of Woman’s life

  Is Man!” said Tottles (and he meant it).

  The blissful Honeymoon is past:

  The Pair have settled down at last:

  Mamma-in-law their home will share,

  And make their happiness her care.

  “Your income is an ample one;

  Go it, my children!” (And they went it).

  “I rayther think this kind of fun

  Won’t last!” said Tottles (and he meant it).

  They took a little country-box—

  A box at Covent Garden also:

  They lived a life of double-knocks,

  Acquaintances began to call so:

  Their London house was much the same

  (It took three hundred, clear, to rent it):

  “Life is a very jolly game!”

  Cried happy Tottles (and he meant it).

  ‘Contented with a frugal lot’

  (He always used that phrase at Gunter’s),

  He bought a handy little yacht—

  A dozen serviceable hunters—

  The fishing of a Highland Loch—

  A sailing-boat to circumvent it—

  “The sounding of that Gaelic ‘och’

  Beats me!” said Tottles (and he meant it).

  Here, with one of those convulsive starts that wake one up in the very act of dropping off to sleep, I became conscious that the deep musical tones that thrilled me did not belong to Mein Herr, but to the French Count. The old man was still conning the manuscript.

  “I beg your pardon for keeping you waiting!” he said. “I was just making sure that I knew the English for all the words. I am quite ready now.” And he read me the following Legend:—

  “In a city that stands in the very centre of Africa, and is rarely visited by the casual tourist, the people had always bought eggs—a daily necessary in a climate where egg-flip was the usual diet—from a Merchant who came to their gates once a week. And the people always bid wildly against each other: so there was quite a lively auction every time the Merchant came, and the last egg in his basket used to fetch the value of two or three camels, or thereabouts. And eggs got dearer every week. And still they drank their egg-flip, and wondered where all their money went to.

  “And there came a day when they put their heads together. And they understood what donkeys they had been.

  “And next day, when the Merchant came, only one Man went forth. And he said ‘Oh, thou of the hooknose and the goggle-eyes, thou of the measureless beard, how much for that lot of eggs?’

  “And the Merchant answered him ‘I could let thee have that lot at ten thousand piastres the dozen.’

  “And the Man chuckled inwardly, and said ‘Ten piastres the dozen I offer thee, and no more, oh descendant of a distinguished grandfather!’

  “And the Merchant stroked his beard, and said ‘Hum! I will await the coming of thy friends,’ So he waited. And the Man waited with him. And they waited both together.”

  “The manuscript breaks off here,” said Mein Herr, as he rolled it up again; “but it was enough to open our eyes. We saw what simpletons we had been—buying our Scholars much as those ignorant savages bought their eggs—and the ruinous system was abandoned. If only we could have abandoned, along with it, all the other fashions we had borrowed from you, instead of carrying them to their logical results! But it was not to be. What ruined my country, and drove me from my home, was the introduction—into the Army, of all places—of your theory of Political Dichotomy!”

  “Shall I trouble you too much,” I said, “if I ask you to explain what you mean by ‘the Theory of Political Dichotomy’?”

  “No trouble at all!” was Mein Herr’s most courteous reply. “I quite enjoy talking, when I get so good a listener. What started the thing, with us, was the report brought to us, by one of our most eminent statesmen, who had stayed some time in England, of the way affairs were managed there. It was a political necessity (so he assured us, and we believed him, though we had never discovered it till that moment) that there should be two Parties, in every affair and on every subject. In Politics, the two Parties, which you had found it necessary to institute, were called, he told us, ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories.’ ”

  “That must have been some time ago?” I remarked.

  “It was some time ago,” he admitted. “And this was the way the affairs of the British Nation were managed. (You will correct me if I misrepresent it. I do but repeat what our traveler told us.) These two Parties—which were in chronic hostility to each other—took turns in conducting the Government; and the Party, that happened not to be in power, was called the ‘Opposition,’ I believe?”

  “That is the right name,” I said. “There have always been, so long as we have had a Parliament at all, two Parties, one ‘in,’ and one ‘out.’ ”

  “Well, the function of the ‘Ins’ (if I may so call them) was to do the best they could for the national welfare—in such things as making war or peace, commercial treaties, and so forth?”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said.

  “And the function of the ‘Outs’ was (so our traveller assured us, though we were very incredulous at first) to prevent the ‘Ins’ from succeeding in any of these things?”

  “To criticize and to amend their proceedings,” I corrected him. “It would be unpatriotic to hinder the Government in doing what was for the good of the Nation! We have always held a Patriot to be the greatest of heroes, and an unpatriotic spirit to be one of the worst of human ills!”

  “Excuse me for a moment,” the old gentleman courteously replied, taking out his pocketbook. “I have a few memoranda here, of a correspondence I had with our tourist, and, if you will allow me, I’ll just refresh my memory—although I quite agree with you—it is, as you say, one of the worst of human ills—” And, here Mein Herr began singing again:—

  But oh, the worst of human ills

  (Poor Tottles found) are ‘little bills!’

  And, with no balance in the Bank,

  What wonder that his spirits sank?

  Still, as the money flowed away,

  He wondered how on earth she spent it.

  “You cost me twenty pounds a day,

  At least!” cried Tottles (and he meant it).

  She sighed. “Those Drawing Rooms, you know!

  I really never thought about it:

  Mamma declared we ought to go—

  We should be Nobodies without it.

  That diamond-circlet for my brow—

  I quite believed that she had sent it,

  Until the Bill came in just now—”

  “Viper!” cried Tottles (and he meant it).

  Poor Mrs. T. could bear no more,

  But fainted flat upon the floor.