Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 34

Once the ice had been broken between them, Septimus and Anthony met often, inviting one another, as though they were contemporaries, now to the downy old bird’s nest, now to the eaglet’s eyrie. For a year, Anthony did not return to Megson Street. Septimus, who had never had a lone pupil before, and who believed that he could create something special by the method that he called conversation and contagion, did not want his influence to be dissipated in long holidays; and as for Anthony, working when he liked, and playing when he liked, and seeing his educator when he liked: this seemed to him so agreeable a way of carrying on that he was content to stay where he was. His memory of school as a pupil, like Septimus’s memory of school as a master, was strong and repulsive. Each thought that here was something better.

Letters from Septimus became fewer now that the working method was established; but special occasions still called them forth, and on an April day in 1913 Anthony read this:

The Feast of the Anniversary of our well-beloved

Anthony’s arrival at Easter How, 1913

Salutatio Septimo Pordago! The contagion of the world’s slow stain is about to seep into our Eden. Pordage has received a letter from his brother Harry, henchman and fiddle-de-dee in general to one Richard Hudson, known, like Alexander, as the Great. Greatness in this world—especially greatness self-announced like this—takes ostentation for its ally, and so Hudson is to shatter our serenity with what is known as a motor-car and smells like the bowels of that underworld whence its means of propulsion are obtained. The fiery steeds of Phoebus would perhaps affright Valpy, and the pards of Bacchus have Cerberus on the run; but better they than what we are promised. Prepare, then, to meet thy God, for if petrol be not the God of the age now sadly dawning, the prescient eye of Pordage misreads the signs. The eye observes that Pluto’s bowels spew forth petrol in desert places. The earth’s desert places are wide and occupied by beggarly tribes, and beggarly tribes are not long left in possession of this world’s riches. So petrol comes, like Cowper’s “herald of a noisy world,” with “news of all nations lumb’ring at his back.”

Pordage’s mind is cast down and bleak, but it must put on hospitality’s smiling face, as you will do, he trusts, to the infantile companions of the main offenders: a Christopher Hudson and a Lottie Wayland. Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri.

Under the hand of Septimus Pordage, deeply wailing.