Chapter 5

The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he
was the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one
anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern
and enthusiasm for that person's affairs. He went through the
world, as it were, as if he were always on the top of an omnibus or
waiting for a train. Most of these chance acquaintances, of course,
vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here and there got
hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong intimates,
but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they were
windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods train
or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a
veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild
prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young
captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in
the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all
reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from
Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these;
Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel
cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which reduced the
little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the compound
of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an
old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with
each other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I
had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the
National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the weather.
Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for
men always talk about the most important things to total strangers.
It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the
image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of
acquaintances was Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological
world (which is a very interesting world, but a long way off this
one) as the second greatest, if not the greatest, authority on the
relations of savages to language. He was known to the neighbourhood
of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald head,
spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an unaccountable
Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to and fro
between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops,
with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was
never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with