Time and Time Again by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page B

to THINK in French. 'And you have also an ear for accent,' Brunon told him. 'This is important in French as it is in English. Either you must speak French like an Englishman, which is bad but permissible, or you must speak it like the right kind of Frenchman. I myself am not the right kind of Frenchman, so it will be advisable for us soon, Charles, to stop talking French and revert to English.'
    Charles asked what Brunon had meant by saying he was not the right kind of Frenchman.
    'I am from the Midi. Any Parisian hearing me speak would know that.'
    'Does it matter?'
    'A little. Nothing to hinder you from passing examinations here, but still, the accent is not socially correct, and you will soon be copying it so well that you would cause raised eyebrows at the Quai d'Orsay. It would be like a French Ambassador arriving in London and paying his respects to your Foreign Minister in perfect grammatical English but with a set of Cockney vowel-sounds.'
    'Rather amusing to think of.'
    'Yes, but you would wonder where on earth he could have picked them up--and then in your mind there would just be the faintest beginnings of doubt about him. Whereas if he spoke with a slight Scottish burr or a slight Irish lilt, all you would think would be, how charming, he must have had a Scottish or an Irish governess as a child. . . . There is no logic about these matters, but it IS rather odd that the native accent of your capital city is so out of favour. . . . Personally, I LIKE Cockney, it has a real music of its own, but then I also like a made-up bow tie, which saves me trouble, though I was once told that no English gentleman would ever wear one.'
    'Oh, really? I didn't know that.'
    'Do you wear one yourself?'
    'No, I tie my own, but it certainly never occurred to me that . . .' Charles laughed and added: 'Oh, well, André, you listen for danger and give me the signal when we'd better start talking English again.'
    In the summer of 1920 Charles took Part One of the History Tripos, getting a Second in it. He had hoped for a First, but his tutor congratulated him so warmly that the inference might have been drawn that only brilliant people got Firsts. Charles, however, still hoped to do better in Part Two, which he would take a year later. It was a more specialized examination that included the submission of a thesis, and he had already thought of a subject-- 'The Influence of the Arabian Caliphate on the Seljuk Turks during the reign of Toghrul Beg'. Why he chose this he was never quite sure, apart from his general interest in the period. Perhaps a deciding factor was that, so far as he could discover, nobody had ever written a Tripos thesis about the Seljuk Turks before. To his tutor, who approved the idea, there also occurred the comforting thought that a researcher on such a subject would soon reach a point at which he knew more than the examiners.
    Those years at Cambridge immediately after the Armistice were unique, though doubtless if one had said so some don would have brought up conditions after the Napoleonic Wars or the Great Rebellion or the Dissolution of the Monasteries. There was always this flavour in the Cambridge spirit--a willingness to accept the new because it was not really new at all, or at least not as new as an outsider might think. Perhaps it was easier, in this spirit, to welcome the older generation of undergraduates who crowded the colleges in 1919--married men and fathers, strange men, maimed men, and mystery men whose normal lives would not have included Cambridge at all, but whom the war had used and spared and had finally enriched with this unlooked-for experience. Many were from the Dominions--rangy six-footers, to whom even the mildest collegiate discipline was irksome, and who were apt to find snobbery rather than enchantment in all tradition. And along with them, of course, was the usual crop of youngsters fresh from the schools, the handful of Harvard-exchanged Americans, and that winnowing of