'It's a Long Worm..
WHEN we were newly married over forty years ago and a dinner party was a thing we went to because we had to, the conversation, in the rather solemn Scotch circles in which we inconspicuously revolved, was trying to me.
Fairly often we used to meet a Dean with a prodigious memory. On the slightest provocation — and sometimes, I thought, on no provocation at all — he would embark on quotations that went on in a truly Tennysonian manner. My husband, a shrewder observer than I, used to point out to me how cleverly the Dean led the conversation to the diving board, from which, later on, he would spring so elegantly.
It used to amaze me to hear the Dean say: ‘Dear me — yes — that reminds me of those wonderful lines by Drayton. Let me see — Thompson, can you help me out? The poem begins, you remember — “Fair stood the wind for France.’”
And as Thompson just wriggled, glared, and was silent, the Dean (not of the University, but of the Episcopal Church) would embark on ‘The Ballad of Agincourt,’ and, as likely as not, would finish it.
Thompson was a school inspector, a newcomer, with a memory of his own, and he began to dislike the way things were going. He was not impressed by the Dean, nor did he consider him, as the local hostesses did, ‘such an addition to a dinner party.’ He thought him a pompous old windbag, and yearned to deflate him. He himself was a Scotchman without mercy.
And one day the Dean was delivered into his hands.
Thompson called on the Dean one afternoon on business, and was shown into an empty library. An open book was lying on a table by the chair on which he sat down; the inspector idly picked up the book, and the title of the poem caught his attention, for it had something to do with his work.
Their business finished, the Dean and the inspector gossiped for a while, and it turned out that they were both going to dine at the same house the following evening. The inspector went straight from the Dean’s house to the public library.
The following evening, as we afterwards remembered, the talk seemed to float towards children as the salmon was handed, and the Dean, leaning back and sipping his hock, murmured dreamily: —
‘That reminds me. Let me see — Thompson, this is in your line, Walt Whitman, that grand old American — “There was a child” — how does it go?’
And Thompson, waving away the salmon, answered: —
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.’
Never shall I forget that scene; we all sat gazing at the inspector monotonously chanting his Walt: —
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there . . . all became part of him.’
The dinner went on, and so did the inspector: —
There was the stunned Dean trying to interrupt him, to assure him he had only meant to repeat a line or two.
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of nighttime — the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?’
inquired the inspector, whose mother must have been a Fighting MacGregor.
The quicker-witted were by now enjoying themselves as the quicker-witted seldom had a chance of doing at a dinner party in Scotland forty years ago; the quickest-witted were looking as if they were not there; the hostess was looking annoyed; the inspector alone was at his ease.
These became part of that child who then went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day,’
he crooned genially, looking at the nearly demented Dean through his spectacles. Then he leaned back and took a sip of Burgundy.
The dinner party broke up early. The Dean and the inspector went home, presumably to bed, but the other men, host included, talked it out at the club. Next day the town rang with the story, and the inspector was hailed as the savior of diners-out. But the Dean was a broken man, and nobody ever heard him mention a poet after that night.
LADY ADAMS