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By Root 2226 0

the wind, you would have said: “There goes a man who has missed all the compensations of life—and knows it.” But that is because you do not yet know Scott-King; no voluptuary surfeited by conquest, no colossus of the drama bruised and rent by doting adolescents, not Alexander, nor Talleyrand, was more blasé than Scott-King. He was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet; he was travel-worn in the large periphery of his own mind, jaded with accumulated experience of his imagination. He was older, it might have been written, than the rocks on which he sat; older, anyway, than his stall in chapel; he had died many times, had Scott-King, had dived deep, had trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. And all this had been but the sound of lyres and flutes to him. Thus musing, he left the chapel and went to his classroom, where for the first hours he had the lowest set.

They coughed and sneezed. One, more ingenious than the rest, attempted at length to draw him out as, it was known, he might sometimes be drawn: “Please, sir, Mr. Griggs says it’s a pure waste of our time learning classics,” but Scott-King merely replied: “It’s a waste of time coming to me and not learning them.”

After Latin gerunds they stumbled through half a page of Thucydides. He said: “These last episodes of the siege have been described as tolling like a great bell,” at which a chorus rose from the back bench—“The bell? Did you say it was the bell, sir?” and books were noisily shut. “There are another twenty minutes. I said the book tolled like a bell.”

“Please, sir, I don’t quite get that, sir, how can a book be like a bell, sir?”

“If you wish to talk, Ambrose, you can start construing.”

“Please, sir, that’s as far as I got, sir.”

“Has anyone done any more?” (Scott-King still attempted to import into the lower school the adult politeness of the Classical Sixth.) “Very well, then, you can all spend the rest of the hour preparing the next twenty lines.”

Silence, of a sort, reigned. There was a low muttering from the back of the room, a perpetual shuffling and snuffling, but no one spoke directly to Scott-King. He gazed through the leaded panes to the leaden sky. He could hear through the wall behind him the strident tones of Griggs, the civics master, extolling the Tolpuddle martyrs. Scott-King put his hand in his coat-pocket and felt the crisp edges of the Neutralian invitation.

He had not been abroad since 1939. He had not tasted wine for a year, and he was filled, suddenly, with deep homesickness for the South. He had not often nor for long visited those enchanted lands; a dozen times perhaps, for a few weeks—for one year in total of his forty-three years of life—but his treasure and his heart lay buried there. Hot oil and garlic and spilled wine; luminous pinnacles above a dusky wall; fireworks at night, fountains at noonday; the impudent, inoffensive hawkers of lottery tickets moving from table to table on to the crowded pavement; the shepherd’s pipe on the scented hillside—all that travel agent ever sought to put in a folder, fumed in Scott-King’s mind that drab morning. He had left his coin in the waters of Trevi; he had wedded the Adriatic; he was a Mediterranean man.

In the midmorning break, on the crested school paper, he wrote his acceptance of the Neutralian invitation. That evening, and on many subsequent evenings, the talk in the common room was about plans for the holidays. All despaired of getting abroad; all save Griggs who was cock-a-hoop about an International Rally of Progressive Youth Leadership in Prague to which he had got himself appointed. Scott-King said nothing even when Neutralia was mentioned.

“I’d like to go somewhere I could get a decent meal,” said one of his colleagues. “Ireland or Neutralia, or somewhere like that.”

“They’d never let you into Neutralia,” said Griggs. “Far too much to hide. They’ve got teams of German physicists making atomic bombs.”

“Civil war raging.”

“Half the population in concentration camps.”

“No decent-minded man would go to Neutralia.”

“Or to Ireland for