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Anthony remained with Mr. Pordage for three years, and he was glad, when Septimus became famous, that he had kept all the letters he received from him during that time. Septimus became famous as a one-book author. He wrote nothing after Me, about I, by Ambrose Feend. It was published in 1919, and was at once shouted up as a masterpiece by the cleverest of the recherché critics. They were deeply mortified—indeed, they incredibly began to doubt their own judgment—when the canaille fell upon the book in avid thousands, rejoicing in its outrageous oddity, though perhaps unaware of what Septimus was talking about. It began: “On Quinquagesima Sunday in 1910, as I was walking down the main street of a quaint old Cornish town, I came face to face with Me, emerging from the Angel. ‘Ho there, old Whorson Ape!’ I cried happily, and Me stopped dead in his tracks, regarding I with deep remorse.” For three hundred pages, I and Me had a remarkable day out, ending up by exchanging clothes, I entering the Angel, and Me going off down the street.

This opening paragraph—an average day’s work for Septimus—was written on the morning in 1912 when Anthony saw Captain Freilinghausen for the second and last time. Its excogitation within the labyrinth of its author’s mind could well account for his silence at breakfast. At nine o’clock Anthony went into the dining-room and found him already engaged with a large plate of fried lamb’s liver, toast and coffee. A napkin as big as a hand-towel was tucked under his chubby chin. He was clearly in no communicative mood, and after wishing him good morning—a greeting acknowledged by no more than an inclination of the head—the boy applied himself to his own breakfast. Mr. Pordage was so far advanced through his meal that presently he stood up, exclaimed loudly Benedicamus Domino, and removed his napkin. The action showed that his general pinkness had been emphasized by a woollen tie shining with the new-cut-ham fervour of the Leander Rowing Club. He bowed to Anthony and hurried from the room.

The boy was at a loss. He had been told that his mysterious father, so long missing and so little missed, now in the money in South America, had charged Aunt Jessie with the task of finding an educator to prepare his son for a public school. Anthony’s ideas about education having no basis beyond the practice in the board-school he had attended in Bradford, he was prepared for serious and boring sessions; and to see his master walk calmly from the room, leaving him in the lurch, created a situation that puzzled him. He had, till now, taken his puzzlements to Aunt Jessie in the kitchen; so, piling the breakfast crockery on to a tray, he did the next best thing and carried the tray to Mrs. Toplis.

Mrs. Toplis was eating her breakfast. She wouldn’t have put it that way herself. She would have said that she was snatching a bit o’ summat, for she lived under the delusion that life chivvied her from pillar to post, and that all her sustenance was snatched, like a soldier’s iron rations, in the heat of battle. In fact, when Anthony came in, she was doing herself proud, having just the sort of breakfast that Mr. Pordage had eaten, but rather more of it. But she had not spread a cloth upon her table, though there was no reason why she should not have done so, except the harassed prompting of her obsession. To have spread a cloth and laid her cutlery would have suggested a leisure she was determined to repudiate, so there she sat at an angle to a corner of the bare table, reaching for a knife from a drawer, a cup from the dresser, the sugar from a cupboard—anything to suggest the impromptu and movable nature of her feast.

Her hearty eating—for she was always snatching a bit o’ summat at odd moments between canonical repasts—had failed to make a hearty woman. Mr. Pordage at all events showed the mettle of his pasture in the gloss of his coat; but Mrs. Toplis seemed to be string, bone and parchment. “Put it down there,” she said to Anthony, with no thanks to him for bringing the tray, and she indicated the table at which she sat.

“Hadn’t I better take it to the scullery? I could wash it up while you finish your breakfast.”

“Put it down there,” Mrs. Toplis repeated, not to be baulked of adding to the disorderly look of camping out that surrounded her. “As to finishing my breakfast, I don’t begin and I don’t finish. I just snatches. And as to washing-up, I don’t want no young ruffians in my kitchen creating messes for me to clean up that have plenty to be going on with anyhow.” And to emphasize the way life pressed upon her she got up and wound the clock on the mantelpiece, took a swipe with a duster along a shelf, carried her plate for refilling from the frying-pan, and sat down again. “Maybe I’ll have time to finish some time,” she said, “but I don’t see it in sight just yet. Well, go and wash up if you want to,” she generously ended.

Anthony was a slow washer-up, but when he was through Mrs. Toplis was still snatching. She was kneeling before the fire with bread on a toasting-fork. “Finish this for me,” she said in desperation, “or I won’t have time for so much as a bite.” She handed him the toasting-fork, resumed work on her plate, and when he took the toast to the table, said: “You’d better do another. I suppose this is the only bit of food I’ll snatch this mortal day.”

She was liberal with the butter, generous with the marmalade, and took a bite. “If ever the time comes,” she said, “when I can sit down to a meal like other Christian women—and Christian I am though compelled to live like a heathen—then I’ll feel I’m in Heaven, singing with the angels.”

It was a pretty picture, Anthony thought: the immaculate choir in full cry, and Mrs. Toplis, seated at last before a reposeful spread, bringing in a word here and there through her chumbling chops. She would, he supposed, contribute a snatch.

“Mrs. Toplis,” he said nervously, “what am I expected to do?”

“For one thing, you’re expected to keep out of my kitchen.”

“When will Mr. Pordage be starting my lessons?”

“When pigs fly, I should say,” said Mrs. Toplis helpfully, wiping up with a piece of toast a rich deposit of butter and marmalade from her plate. “From what I know of that joker, I shouldn’t expect him to start anything in a hurry, not if it means putting himself out. Anyway, don’t you worry. For a boy to start worrying about lessons—well, that isn’t in accordance with the laws of God or man. Lessons enough will come to you in the course of this mortal life,” she moralised heavily. “There’s no call to go out seeking them. Now where’s that cushion? Well, if it isn’t under my old b.t.m. all the time! That’s how it is when you’re rushed off your feet. You lose sight of everything.”

She pounded the cushion and threw it on to two others that padded a wicker chair by the fire. From beneath them she drew out a copy of Peg’s Paper and relaxed her bony frame into the chair’s embrace. From a pocket she took a pair of pince-nez and snipped them on to her sharp nose. “We all have our rights,” she said, “and we all have our wrongs, and if we don’t look out we’ll have so many wrongs that our rights will look like a row of pins given for a farthing’s change. So if I’m not to have my poor feet worn down to my shinbones, if not farther, I got to have my little rest and my little read at this time of day.” Anthony had begun to stack her breakfast things. “Leave that little lot,” she said. “I’ll snatch a minute to do ’em by and by. But I got to see what happened to Bernice. She was only a bricklayer’s daughter, or thought she was; but if old Lord Tottering wasn’t her father I’ll eat my feather boa. Lessons! If you want lessons, you should read, like me.”

So, while upstairs the pink and chubby Septimus was struggling with Me’s confrontation of I, and down below the haggard Mrs. Toplis, as soon as Anthony was out of sight, was snatching forty winks, well deserved after the exhausting rigours of her breakfast, Anthony himself was strolling disconsolately about the paddock. But what boy could be disconsolate for long on such a day? Or, after he had tasted the joys of stretching his legs on the springtime roads and fells of the West Riding, on the days that followed? It was a week of glory, and at the end of it the postman tootled his horn, and the boy ran out with Mr. Pordage’s daily letter to I, received Me’s reply, and, to his surprise, received also two letters addressed to himself. One, for Mr. A. Bromwich, was in an unknown hand. The other, for Anthony Bromwich, Esquire, was in a hand now known well enough. He put them into his pocket to heighten the joy of the moment when he mounted his stone stairs in the dusk and lit his fire and his hanging paraffin lamp, and watched Cerberus stretch out, tired from the day’s adventures he had shared with the boy, before the ripening warmth. Then he took out his letters and read them.

Dear Anthony Bromwich,—It was kind of you to ask your Aunt Jessie to give me your greetings, and I hope you are settling down and feeling very happy in Mr. Pordage’s house. Your Aunt Jessie told me that your Mr. Pordage is a brother of Mr. Pordage who helps Mr. Dick Hudson in the music-hall. I told Chris Hudson this and he said the less he hears about any Mr. Pordage the better he will be pleased. And I said I sometimes think from what you say, Chris, that you’d rather I didn’t talk about your Father much less any Mr. Pordage as if you were ashamed of him. And he said well come to that why shouldn’t I be and wouldn’t you be if he was your Father. So I said No I’d be proud of a man whose name was printed so big on the music-hall bills. Then Chris Hudson said well, that’s a fat lot to be proud of I must say making an exhibition of himself like that and dressing up and walking along Manningham Lane on a Sunday and making me walk with him. There are times he said when I wouldn’t care if I never saw him again. Who’d pay my mother then I asked, and he said that’s right, rub it in. So I didn’t say anything else because my Mother needs the money and the least said soonest mended. But I don’t get on very well with Chris Hudson, and his French is awful. Well, that’s all the news and I hope you have a very happy time. Yours faithfully Lottie Wayland.

The Friday in the Week next

before Easter: 1912

To our well-beloved Anthony, greeting! What a sluggish toad you are. All about you the springtime world is full of creative energy. Birds are building nests in the hawthorn hedge; ewes are dropping their jolly little lambs in the fields; the fish, for all I know, are doing whatever fish do to perpetuate their species in my Abana; Mrs. Toplis is snatching away like mad at her daily avocations; and I am deeply engaged on a work which could well cause the Blessed Damosel herself to lean so far out over the gold bar of Heaven, in order to have a peep, that one extra exertion could have her down among us, to our infinite confusion and dismay. And what are you doing? So far as I can make out, nothing but exercise a dog well able to give his own legs that limbering up which I had expected you would, long before this, have been applying to your mind.

We, Septimus Pordage, have no doubt at all that this letter will be read before your evening fire, for it appears that you do nothing unless wrapped in circumstances of indolence and sloth. Put down the letter, then, and walk to the book-cases which our foreseeing mind provided. Cast your eye along the shelves and make the effort to perceive that here is no haphazard collection of printed pages but a Royal Road. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise; but stop short of entering my Presence imbrued with formic acid.

You came here to acquire certain Rudiments; and in my innocence I assumed that you would understand books to be footholds. But Oh dear, no! It seems that wisdom is to be acquired by gallivanting through the daisies with a dog-headed pal.

Quousque tandem abutere, O my Antonio, patientia nostra? I suppose you don’t know what this means; but then what do you know, and what steps are you taking to make yourself know anything?

Pursue the primrose path, dear Mr. Bromwich, if it so please you. Dally in the dales, linger on the leas, frolic on the fells, revel in the river. What cares Septimus, who has his own fish to fry? But if some day it should occur to you that the great teachers, from Plato to Pordage, imparted their wisdom in answer to questions, then you will find me ready.

Written with the quill of a peregrine falcon, and given under the hand of

Septimus Pordage, D.Litt., M.A., B.D., D.C.L.,

and all that sort of thing, ad nauseam.

It was eight o’clock. Anthony sat with the letter in his hand, aware of its being a reproach, but not of much else. Presently he got up and walked down to the house. He found Septimus in the sitting-room, slippered by the fireside and happy with the pages of Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab, thus setting a taste in reading matter that was to be followed by dons and academics for generations to come.

“Sir,” said Anthony, “I have just read your letter. I think I see what you mean.”

“Astarte,” said Mr. Pordage to his tortoiseshell cat, “here we have a rare phenomenon: a thinking boy.” Astarte turned upon Anthony a look that combined disinterest and disbelief. She yawned at the fire, turned round three times, and went to sleep.

“Sir,” Anthony continued, “I think I ought to have invited you to my room long ago. Would you care to come now?”

“I would, I could, and I shall,” said Septimus.

“Why do you call your cat Astarte?”

“Because, like all cats of feminine gender, Astarte is a queen. Her temple, Milton reminds us, was built

By that uxorious King, whose heart, though large,

Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell

To idols foul.

Where Astarte is concerned, I am uxorious, and though I refuse to call her foul, she is an idol I have fallen for. I have sometimes thought of keeping a Jersey cow. They have such lovely eyes. I should call her Hera, for Hera, who also was known as Juno, was called ox-eyed. She must have been a remarkable woman.

He, in delight,

Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter

On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds

That shed May flowers.

However, there would be the question of milking. Would you care to milk a cow?”

“No, sir.”

“Then that is that,” said Mr. Pordage, “for nothing on earth would induce me to sit on a three-legged stool behind a four-legged beast, saying ‘Get over, Hera.’ ”

Mrs. Toplis came in with a tray on which were two silver pots, one containing hot milk and the other hot coffee. “If you will bring another cup and saucer, Mrs. Toplis,” Septimus said, “we will carry the tray up to Master Bromwich’s eyrie, where the eaglet is anxious, I understand, to peep over the brink into the giddy abyss of knowledge.” And when Mrs. Toplis was gone, he said to Anthony: “We shall also, this being a red letter day, stand ourself one of the cigars I sent me at Christmas. They are rather outsize and lethal-looking. Indeed, Me thought I was rather ostentatious. Still——

On such an occasion as this,

All time and nonsense scorning,

Nothing shall come amiss,

And we won’t go home till morning.”

He went home long before morning, for ten o’clock was his bedtime, and if the last trump had sounded at that hour he would, all the same, have put on his nightshirt, got into bed, and there awaited the outcome. But it was an eye-opening visit for Anthony, who didn’t need to wonder thereafter what to do with his books and his time.