CHAPTER XXVI
CLOSE OF PLAY
It is remarked of many people, that though they go through life fretting and fuming over trifles, and making scenes out of nothing at all, yet in a real emergency their calmness is quite amazing. It need not amaze anybody who gives the matter a little thought; for a crisis brings its own armour, but a man is naked to the insect enemies of the passing moment, and he may have a tender moral and intellectual skin. This was the trouble with Mr. Haigh—a naturally irritable man, who in long years of chartered tyranny had gradually ceased to control his temper in the absence of some special reason why he should. But fellows in his house used to say that in the worst type of row they could trust Haigh to sort out the sinned against from the sinning, and not to lose his head, though he might still smack theirs for whistling in his quad.
Thus it is scarcely to be doubted that already Mr. Haigh had more sympathy with the serious offender whom he had caught red-handed than with little clods who ended pentameters with adjectives or showed a depraved disregard for the cæsura. But for once he did not wear his heart upon his sleeve, or in his austere eyes and distended nostrils; his very shoulders, as Jan followed them through
305
