Download or read book Old Mole : Being the Surprising Adventures in England of Herbert Jocelyn Beenham written by Gilbert Cannan and published by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. This book was released on with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Mole : Being the Surprising Adventures in England of Herbert Jocelyn Beenham He was called Old Mole because whenever he spied a boy cribbing, or larking, or reading a book that had no reference to the subject in hand, or eating sweets, or passing notes, he would cry out in a voice of thunder: “Ha! Art thou there, old mole?” Thrigsbian fathers who had suffered at his hands would ask their sons about Old Mole, and so his position was fortified by a sort of veneration. He [Pg 4]was one of those men who assume their definite shape and appearance in the early thirties, and thereafter give no clew to their age even to the most curious spinster’s inquisitiveness. Reference to the Calendar of his university shows that at the time of his catastrophe he cannot have been more than forty-eight. He was unmarried, not because he disliked women, but from indolence, obstinacy, combativeness, and a coarse strain in him which made him regard the female body, attire and voice as rather ridiculous. With married women he was ceremonious and polite: with the unmarried he was bantering. When he had been twenty years at the school he began jocularly to speak of it as his bride, and when he came to his twenty-fifth year he regarded it as his silver wedding. He was very proud when his Form presented him with a smoker’s cabinet and his colleagues subscribed for a complete edition of the works of Voltaire bound in vellum. Best of all was the fact that one of his boys, A. Z. Panoukian, an Armenian of the second generation (and therefore a thorough Thrigsbian), had won a scholarship at Balliol, the first since he had had charge of the Sixth. At Speech Day, when the whole school and their female relatives and the male parents of the prize-winners were gathered in the John Bright Hall, the Head Master would make a special reference to Panoukian and possibly to the happy coincidence of his performance with the attainment of Mr. Beenham’s fourth of a century in the service of [Pg 5]the pious and ancient foundation. It was possible, but unlikely, for the Head Master was a sentimentalist who made a point of presenting an arid front to the world lest his dignity should be undermined.