The Heir

“I really feel quite guilty,” said the Master of St Saviour’s College to the distinguished foreigner whom he was escorting to the Senate House. “Your time in Cambridge is so short that every moment must be needed for your work.”

“Pray do not reproach yourself, sir,” replied Professor Panagiotis, with the deliberate precision of one who has learned English from books. “What greater honour could be afforded me than permission to observe the contests of your youthful heroes for the rewards of poetry and oratory?”

“You mustn’t expect too much,” said the Master, with some anxiety; “though if it had been merely the usual recitation of prize exercises, I should have left you in peace in the Library. But the subject of the English Poem has such a close connection with that of your great book--not, of course, that it was intentionally chosen; merely a coincidence,” he added conscientiously--“that I felt you ought to be present.”

“I am entirely agreed with you,” responded the author of the famous German work on the fall of the Eastern Empire, wondering why his host was so determined not to let him see a compliment where none was meant. “The subject, then, is historical?”

“The Fall of Czarigrad,” replied the Master, “and the medal has come to a St Saviour’s man, which has not happened for many years. I understand that he studied your book very carefully before writing his poem, and that is my reason for dragging you here.”

It was in the Professor’s mind to wish that his book had not been studied, as he sat in the Senate House and heard various agitated young men, their faces vying sometimes with the white of the M.A. hoods and sometimes with the Doctors’ scarlet, declaim compositions in various languages, with all the grace and dignity to be expected from extreme nervousness subject to the perpetual encouragement of well-meaning friends. Latin the Professor despised, and the Cambridge Greek, from the difference of pronunciation, he scarcely recognised as his own language, but the English Poem roused in him a certain amount of interest, though he felt a mighty longing to relieve the author of the task of reciting it. The medallist was fortunate in being pale, and not red, for Professor Panagiotis considered blushing a purely feminine exercise, but he shared with his fellows the English incapacity for letting himself go. In his most thrilling passages the note of shamed self-consciousness was clearly audible, and he endured the applause accorded him with a stolid resignation that seemed to inquire why he could not be allowed to perform a distasteful duty in peace. This was the more irritating to Professor Panagiotis because the poem, whenever he could catch the words, struck him as remarkable. The author had chosen as his theme the final day in the long struggle of the Cross against the Crescent, when the Moslem tide overflowed at last the grand bulwark of Christendom, and the Emperor John Theophanis fell fighting as a common soldier in the breach. The recital was placed in the mouth of the Emperor, and the description of the night’s vigil, the dawn of the fatal day, the fanatic fury of the assault, the desertion of the Christian cause by its allies, and the last desperate fight, into which Theophanis was to hurl himself, determined to perish, impressed the listener with a curious sense of realism. He had lived for months and years among the records of these scenes, but he could not have described them with the sure hand of this undergraduate. The tale was plain and unvarnished, the telling crude and bald, but as the fragmentary lines, unassisted by any rhetorical graces in the reciter, reached the hearer, he felt such a thrill as the unadorned narrative of an eyewitness might produce. The young man must be a poet of quite unusual power, and Professor Panagiotis forgot the manuscripts awaiting him at the Library in the determination to cultivate his acquaintance.

“But, my dear friend, you have a genius there!” he cried, when the Master rejoined him at the close of the ceremony. “Who is this poet of yours, whose name I could not hear on account of the noise of the envious relatives of his fellow-students?”

An irrepressible smile crossed the Master’s face, but he answered with all gravity. “Teffany--Maurice Teffany--a third-year man. He goes down next week, after he has taken his degree.”

“Teffany! Himmel und Erde, is it possible?” cried the Professor. “And yet I might have known. The thing is the most extraordinary coincidence! Pardon me,” as his host looked at him in surprise, “but I have associations with the name. I am all interest. He is the pride of the college, this young man?”

“Not at all,” said the Master, laughing. “In fact, it’s a curious case. Teffany has always been rather a puzzle to me. He is not what you would call a popular man, but he has exercised a good deal of influence in a quiet way. I must confess I found him a little disappointing, especially in comparison with his sister, a very clever girl. She used to attend my lectures with other Girtham students, and did extremely good work for me, showing a distinct capacity for original research. Teffany worked well, but in a plodding, uninspired sort of way. I was always irritated by the feeling that we had never yet hit on his special line.”

“But now--since this poem--you can have no doubt?” asked Professor Panagiotis quickly.

The Master shook his head. “I am still doubtful,” he said. “I asked his tutor to find out whether he had done anything else in the poetical line--one would expect reams of amateur verse, you know--but there was not a scrap. He had never written verses before, and he seems to have no wish to do it again.”

“The young man interests me,” said the Professor. “His name alone----” he stopped abruptly, as though he had changed his mind. “Quite independently of his name, I mean.”

“Ah, of course, his subject would appeal to you,” said the Master unsuspiciously. “You would like to meet him, perhaps? I will invite him to dine with us to-night. He has reflected honour on the college, and I shall be glad to mark my sense of it.”

At dinner that evening Professor Panagiotis scanned his neighbour narrowly whenever he found an opportunity. To him, as to the Master, the young man was a disappointment. He was extraordinarily ordinary. Neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, neither foppish nor careless, neither talkative nor silent, he seemed in no way distinguished or distinguishable. It was only on comparing him with the other guests that the Professor arrived at a conclusion which gave him something of a shock. There was a strength and decision about the jaw and chin which did not amount to obstinacy, but suggested that the owner might be difficult to turn aside, and a steady calmness about the eyes which bespoke an indisposition to be hurried.

“The worst type in the world to manage!” was the Professor’s inward groan. “I must do what I can to gain his confidence, but I foresee it will be necessary to approach him through the brilliant sister.”

Presently Maurice Teffany found himself addressed by the distinguished guest, the great Greek man of letters who had made his German university famous all over the world. His previous silence, coupled with his keen glances, had made him appear somewhat formidable, but he now talked pleasantly enough, and the young man became confidential on the subject of the prize poem, which he seemed to his questioner to regard as a huge joke.

“It’s an utter fraud, my getting the medal,” he said. “It ought to have gone to my sister--or perhaps to you, sir. My sister was awfully keen on my trying for it, because there were a lot of old books about Czarigrad which we were very fond of as children, but I hadn’t the slightest idea of it. Then this last winter I sprained my ankle badly at the very beginning of the vac.--only about six weeks before the poems had to be sent in--and couldn’t get out, and she gave me no peace. She had your book, and she translated all the most thrilling bits and read them to me, and then--well, it got hold of me somehow, and I seemed to know all about it. So I just wrote it down, and she criticised it, and copied it out for me, and it got the medal! The Master says it’s brutal and rugged and everything that a poem ought not to be, but that there’s vision in it--whatever he may mean by that.”

“And you agree with him?”

“Oh, I suppose so. Anyhow, he’s sure to know the right thing to say. You see, sir, I don’t feel that I wrote it. It just came--as if I had been there and seen it. My sister and I always call it ‘The Finest Story in the World’ between ourselves--but perhaps you don’t know Kipling?”

“I fear not, if you allude to some English writer on the subject of reincarnation. But I am going to ask you a rude question on a point of psychology. Is it possible that the poem was actually your sister’s composition, but that she impressed it upon your mind, so that you accepted and wrote it as your own?”

Young Teffany considered the matter gravely, and then laughed. “Rather not!” he said. “Zoe’s an awfully clever girl, and writes a good bit, but she has never dabbled in poetry any more than me. She was just as much surprised at the way the thing turned out as I was. And as to making her poem pass into my mind without my knowing it--why, she couldn’t do it. I’m as certain of that as I am of anything, though I think a lot of her--but of course I don’t tell her so.”

“My dear sir, you have already grasped one of the main secrets of the management of the female sex,” said the Professor sententiously. “But may I suggest a variation of your reincarnation theory? I am at present engaged in following up my larger work by tracing the dispersal of the Greeks who survived the fall of Czarigrad, and it occurs to me that your family may be descended from one of them.”

He scanned his companion’s face closely, as though to discover whether the idea was new to him, but the young man only laughed. “A case of inherited memory? I’m afraid it’s no go, sir. There’s nothing in the least Greek about us.”

“Four centuries of English marriages would go far to obliterate racial traits,” was the dry reply. “Your Christian name is Greek, at any rate.”

“All our names are. It’s a kind of tradition in the family. My father was Theodore, and his father and grandfather were both Constantine. However far back you go, it’s always Basil and Gregory and so on for the men, and Dorothea and Katharine and names of that sort for the women.”

“That is very curious,” with repressed eagerness. “And you are sure there is no tradition of a Greek ancestry?”

“None that I know of. But my sister would be a better person to ask. She’s had flu., you know, with a touch of bronchitis, or else she’d have been here to-day, and she said she was going to forget her sorrows in rummaging among the family papers. There are a few at home, and some at the lawyer’s. But really, I’m afraid there’s not much to find out. We have only been settled at our present place for sixty or seventy years--horribly new, you see.”