And thus began a friendship that was the most permanent in Gordon's school career.
Every Friday he used to climb up the hill past Rogers's house, and step out down the white London road to Ferrers's cosy little home. Over a cup of tea he read an essay. Ferrers would lie back listening, and then discuss it with him. He sometimes blamed the actual expression of it, but he never found fault on questions of taste. He let Gordon browse at will in the fields of English literature; he suggested books he thought Gordon would like; he did not try to rush him on. There was heaps of time; he would let Gordon develop on his own lines.
From these evenings Gordon derived a pleasure that he found it hard to explain. He was thankful to get away from the footer talk, the inevitable intrigues, scandals, all in fact that went to form the daily curriculum. The world of ideas was far more attractive. Ferrers, although himself a quarter-mile Blue, looked upon games as a recreation, and upon school life as a mud-heap that had to be washed clean. Poetry, drama, the modern novel, these were what Ferrers loved; and Gordon was glad to find someone who thought like this. He felt uplifted after his talks with Ferrers, he walked back to the House buoyant, as it were on wings. Then as the school gates rose before him, and he heard the sound of a football bouncing in the court, the old routine caught him once more. He plunged into the old life with the same zest. He devised a new scheme for avoiding work, thought out an idea for teaching forwards to heel, laughed, discussed athletics and was well content. He tried to analyse his feelings, but could not. He was now two separate persons. At times he was the dreamer, the lover of art and poetry; at another the politician, the fighter who lived every minute of his life deeply to the full, with one fixed aim before him. Gordon wondered if this apparent paradox in himself was in any way an answer of the enigma that an artist's life so frequently was utterly different from the broad outlines of his work. Browning had talked of a man having "two soul-sides." Had he two soul-sides, one for the world, the other for art--and Ferrers? But then Browning had spoken contemptuously of the "one to face the world with." Surely games were as good as poetry? Or weren't they, after all? He felt an unanswerable doubt, and at such times of introspection he would stop trying to think and merely let himself be carried on in whatever course fortune chose to bear him. And so the Jekyll and Hyde business went on.