CHAPTER IV:  MY FATHER OVERHEARS MORE OF HANKY AND PANKY’S CONVERSATION

My father, schooled under adversity, knew that it was never well to press advantage too far.  He took the equivalent of five shillings for three brace, which was somewhat less than the birds would have been worth when things were as he had known them.  Moreover, he consented to take a shilling’s worth of Musical Bank money, which (as he has explained in his book) has no appreciable value outside these banks.  He did this because he knew that it would be respectable to be seen carrying a little Musical Bank money, and also because he wished to give some of it to the British Museum, where he knew that this curious coinage was unrepresented.  But the coins struck him as being much thinner and smaller than he had remembered them.

It was Panky, not Hanky, who had given him the Musical Bank money.  Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug even himself—­a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and yet he was the less successful humbug, for he could humbug no one who was worth humbugging—­not for long.  Hanky’s occasional frankness put people off their guard.  He was the mere common, superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a Professor, would of course profess, but would not lie more than was in the bond; he was log-rolled and log-rolling, but still, in a robust wolfish fashion, human.

Panky, on the other hand, was hardly human; he had thrown himself so earnestly into his work, that he had become a living lie.  If he had had to play the part of Othello he would have blacked himself all over, and very likely smothered his Desdemona in good earnest.  Hanky would hardly have blacked himself behind the ears, and his Desdemona would have been quite safe.

Philosophers are like quails in the respect that they can take two or three flights of imagination, but rarely more without an interval of repose.  The Professors had imagined my father to be a poacher and a ranger; they had imagined the quails to be wanted for Sunday’s banquet; they had imagined that they imagined (at least Panky had) that they were about to eat landrails; they were now exhausted, and cowered down into the grass of their ordinary conversation, paying no more attention to my father than if he had been a log.  He, poor man, drank in every word they said, while seemingly intent on nothing but his quails, each one of which he cut up with a knife borrowed from Hanky.  Two had been plucked already, so he laid these at once upon the clear embers.

“I do not know what we are to do with ourselves,” said Hanky, “till Sunday.  To-day is Thursday—­it is the twenty-ninth, is it not?  Yes, of course it is—­Sunday is the first.  Besides, it is on our permit.  To-morrow we can rest; what, I wonder, can we do on Saturday?  But the others will be here then, and we can tell them about the statues.”