And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disappointed Beesly. I had, as he prophesied, attained to the dignity of playing for the school at rackets, and had yet another year before I left, and he made up his mind that I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup for Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought home. Certainly two terms before that final event we were an extremely promising pair, but after that we scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about this, and in the Christmas holidays that year I went to stay with him at Torquay, in order to get more practice, whereas what I needed was less practice. Even then we made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till the last day, when he urged me to take a heroic dose of Hunyadi water, continued to cling to the idea that at last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me outside the court, when we came out; he could hardly speak, but he patted me on the shoulder and blurted out, “Well, I know you did your best: I know that,” and walked quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming letter, trying to console me who really cared far less than he did; for it was, I am perfectly convinced, the main ambition of his life that Marlborough should win this cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the instruments through whom that ambition was to be realized. He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, in some such way as Pindar, who wrote the most magnificent odes the world has ever read in honour of boys who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes centred at Queen’s. The affection I certainly returned, but woe for the manner in which I failed to fulfil the rest of the contract. I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly a very lonely one, and his loneliness no doubt was accentuated to him by his shy reticence. He kept himself largely apart from other masters; to the best of my knowledge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time he was stewing in the affection which he was incapable of expressing. But he had, out and away, by far the most forcible and attractive personality of any tutor I came across either at school or the University; he was one of those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, and loves for no ostensible reason. CHAPTER VIII LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON