Charley grinned.
He was beginning to feel more at his ease.
“That sounds like a tag out of a dictionary of quotations.”
“It may be,” Simon replied indifferently.
“Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve. A proverb distils the wisdom of the ages and only a fool is scornful of the commonplace.
You don’t suppose I intend to be a foreign correspondent for a London paper or a teacher of English all my life.
These are my Wanderjahre.
I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge.
But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important: an unconquerable will.
I want to mould myself as the Jesuit novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order.
I think I’ve always known myself; there’s nothing that teaches you what you are, like being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your life with people to whom you mean nothing.
But my knowledge was instinctive.
In these two years I’ve been abroad I’ve learnt to know myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid.
I know my strength and my weakness and I’m ready to spend the next five or six years cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness.
I’m going to take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him.
I’ve got a good brain.
There’s no one in the world who can see to the end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and believe me, in the world we live in that’s a great force.
I can talk.
You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric.
The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words, and however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending.
Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I’m through I shall be able to do anything.”
Simon took a long draught of the white wine they were drinking and sitting back in his chair began to laugh.
His face writhed into a grimace of intolerable suffering.
“I must tell you an incident that happened a few months ago here.
They were having a meeting of the British Legion or something like that, I forget what for, war graves or something; my chief was going to speak, but he had a cold in the head and he sent me instead.
You know what our paper is, bloody patriotic as long as it helps our circulation, all the dirt we can get, and a high moral tone.
My chief’s the right man in the right place.
He hasn’t had an idea in his head for twenty years.
He never opens his mouth without saying the obvious and when he tells a dirty story it’s so stale that it doesn’t even stink any more.
But he’s as shrewd as they make ‘em.
He knows what the proprietor wants and he gives it to him.
Well, I made the speech he would have made.
Platitudes dripped from my mouth.
I made the welkin ring with claptrap.
I gave them jokes so hoary that even a judge would have been ashamed to make them.
They roared with laughter.
I gave them pathos so shaming that you would have thought they would vomit.
The tears rolled down their cheeks.
I beat the big drum of patriotism like a Salvation Lass sublimating her repressed sex.
They cheered me to the echo.
It was the speech of the evening.
When it was all over the big-wigs wrung my hand still overwhelmed with emotion.
I got them all right.
And d’you know, I didn’t say a single word that I didn’t know was contemptible balderdash.
Words, words, words!
Poor old Hamlet.”
“It was a damned unscrupulous thing to do,” said Charley.
“After all, I daresay they were just a lot of ordinary, decent fellows who were only wanting to do what they thought was the right thing, and what’s more they were probably prepared to put their hands in their pockets to prove the sincerity of their convictions.”
“You would think that.
In point of fact more money was raised for whatever the damned cause was than had ever been raised before at one of their meetings and the organizers told my chief it was entirely due to my brilliant speech.”