It is easy to argue thus. But a broader mind will appreciate that you cannot ask a man to dine with you, let alone a dean, and then by trickery or violence, or whatever it is that some may lightly recommend, reduce him to a state that is far beyond any that he would willingly cultivate. All the permissible arts of a host I had already exercised. Beyond that I would not go. Meanwhile what was I to do? I felt like Keats’ watcher of the skies when some new planet swims into his ken, and when almost immediately afterwards some trivial obstacle intervenes; a blind is drawn down, a fog comes up, or perhaps a small cloud; and the wonder one knows to be there is invisible. Much I had learned already, and I trust that what I have written has scientific value, but I wanted the whole story. I was no more content than a man would be who had obtained twenty or thirty pages of an ancient codex, if he knew that there were hundreds of pages of it. And what I sought seemed so near, and yet out of my grasp, removed from me by perhaps two small glasses. I never lost my temper with the Dean, and when I found that I could no more question him stimulated, I questioned him sober. This was perhaps the most enraging experience of all; for not only was Dean Spanley extremely reticent, but he did not really know anything. An intense understanding of dogs, a sympathy for their more reputable emotions, and a guess that a strange truth may have been revealed to Hindus, was about all he had to tell. I have said already that I knew he had a secret; and this knowledge was what started me on my researches; but this secret of his amounted to no more knowledge, as a scientist uses the word, than a few exotic shells bought in some old shop, on a trip to the seaside can supply a knowledge of seafaring. Between the Dean sober at the Olympus Club, and the same Dean after his fourth glass of Tokay, was all the difference between some such tripper as I have indicated, and a wanderer familiar with the surf of the boundaries of the very farthest seas. It was annoying, but it was so. And then it seemed to me that perhaps where I had just failed alone I might be able to succeed with the help of example, if I asked one or two others to meet the Dean. I was thinking in the form of a metaphor particularly unsuited to Tokay, ‘You may lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.’ And from thinking of horses I got the idea of a lead out hunting, and so the idea of a little company at dinner easily came to me, one or two of the right kind who could be trusted to give a lead.
And I found the very man. And the moment I found him I decided that no more were necessary; just he and I and the Dean would make a perfect dinner-party, from which I hoped that so much was to be revealed. I found him sitting next to me at a public dinner, a man of the most charming address, and with an appreciation of good wine that was evidently the foremost of all his accomplishments. He was so much a contrast to the man on the other side of me, that I turned to Wrather (that was his name) quite early in the dinner and talked to him for the rest of the evening. The man on the other side of me was not only a teetotaller, which anybody may be, but one that wanted to convert his neighbours; and he started on me as soon as the sherry came round, so that it was a pleasure to hear from Wrather what was almost his first remark to me: ‘Never trust a teetotaller, or a man that wears elastic-sided boots.’ The idea struck me at once that he might be the man I wanted; and when I saw how well he was guided by the spirit of that saying, both in dress and in habits, I decided that he actually was. Later in that evening he put an arm round my shoulders and said:
‘You’re younger than me; not with the whole of your life before you, but some of it; and this advice may be useful to you: Never trust a teetotaller, or a man that wears elastic-sided boots.’
One doesn’t see elastic-sided boots as much now as one used to, and I fancied that he had evolved his saying early in life, or that perhaps it was handed down to him.
We made great friends, and as we went out from the dinner together I tried to help him into his coat. He could not find the arm-hole, and said, ‘Never mind. I shall never find it. Throw the damned thing over my shoulders.’
Which I did. And he added, ‘But for all that, never trust a teetotaller, or a man that wears elastic-sided boots.’
We shared a taxi and, in the darkness of it, he talked as delightfully as he had in the bright hall where we had dined; until, suddenly seeing a policeman, he stopped the cab and leaned out and shouted, ‘Bobby! There’s something I want to tell you; and it’s worth all you’ve ever learnt in Scotland Yard.’
The constable came up slowly.
‘Look here,’ said Wrather. ‘It’s this. Never trust a teetotaller, or a man that wears elastic-sided boots.’
‘We’ve been dining with the Woolgatherers,’ I said through a chink beside Wrather.
And the constable nodded his head and walked slowly away.
‘Sort of thing that will set him up,’ said Wrather; ‘if only he can remember it.’
I called on Wrather the very next day and told him about the dinner with the Dean. I did not talk science or philosophy with Wrather, because he was not interested in science, and as far as I could gather from the talk of a single evening the tenets of transmigration did not appeal to him. But I told him that the Dean kept a dog, and knew a great deal about dogs, and that when he had had a few glasses he thought he was a dog, and told dog-stories that were amusing and instructive. I told Wrather straight out that the Dean went very slow with wine, and that to get any amusement out of him he must be encouraged to take his whack like a reasonable sportsman. Wrather said very little, but there was a twinkle in his eye, that showed me I could rely on him whenever I should be able to get the Dean. And I think that there may have been also in Wrather’s mind, like a dim memory, the idea that I had helped him with a policeman, and he felt grateful. I watched next for the Dean at the club, and soon found him, and said that I hoped he would dine with me one day again, as I particularly wanted to ask him about the Greek strategy at Troy, a subject that I had found out he was keen on. He may have been a little afraid of that Tokay; on the other hand it attracted him. A man of the Dean’s degree of refinement could hardly fail to have been attracted by the Tokay, if he knew anything about wine at all; and Dean Spanley certainly did. He was not unpleased to be consulted by me about the Greek strategy; no man is entirely unmoved by being asked for information upon his particular subject; and he was very anxious to tell me about it. The final touch that may have decided him to accept my invitation was that he had beaten my Tokay last time, and so may well have thought that his fear of it was ungrounded. But an estimate of the Dean’s motives in accepting my invitation to dinner may not be without an element of speculation; the bare fact remains that he did accept it. It was to be for the Wednesday of the following week, and I hurried round to Wrather again and got him to promise to come on that day. I told him now still more about the Dean: I said that I was a writer, and wanted to get some of the Dean’s stories; but there are many different kinds of writers, and I was far from telling Wrather what kind I was, for I knew that, had I told him I was a scientist, I should merely have bored him; I let him therefore suppose that I wanted the Dean’s dog-stories only for what might be humorous in them, and he never at any time had an inkling of the value of what I sought, the Golconda of knowledge that was lying so close to me. I told him that Tokay was the key to what I was after, and that the Dean was rather difficult. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ asked Wrather, ‘a maxim that my old father taught me? Never trust a teetotaller, or a man who wears elastic-sided boots.’
‘Yes, I think you did,’ I answered. ‘But Dean Spanley is not a teetotaller. Only goes a bit slow, you know.’
‘We’ll shove him along,’ said Wrather.
And I saw from a look in his eye that Wrather would do his best.
And certainly Wrather did do his best when the night came. To begin with he appreciated the Tokay for its own sake. But there was a certain whimsical charm about him that almost compelled you to take a glass with him when he urged you to do so in the way that he had. I know that what I am telling you is very silly. Why should a man take a glass of wine for himself because another man is taking one for him self? And yet it is one of those ways of the world that I have not been able to check. Some abler man than I may one day alter it. We did not come to the Tokay at once; we began on champagne. And certainly Dean Spanley went very slow