On one occasion he made what turned out to be an unfortunate remark about the river Innerste, which is Hildesheim’s river. He said it was dirty; upon which Professor Timme, much nettled, said: “_Das will ich nicht sagen. Sie ist viel reiner als mancher Fluss, der von einer Grosstadt kommt, und vielleicht ganz rein aussieht._” [I won’t say that; it is much cleaner than many a river that comes from a big town and perhaps _looks_ quite clean.]
There was a delightful German pupil living in the house called Erich Wippern, a brother of Hans Wippern, who had been there before. We arranged to give a _Kneipe_ for him and the other boys in one of the villages. The matter had been publicly discussed and seemed to be settled, but at the last minute, Professor Timme objected to it, and we had a long and painful interview on the subject. He said the _Kneipe_ was not to be, and when I reminded him that he had already given his consent, he lost his temper. We decided after this distressing scene to go away, and we left for Heidelberg, our ultimate objective in any case, the next day.
E. and I had invented a game which I think I enjoyed more than any game I have ever played at, with the exception of a good game of Spankaboo. It was called: “The Game.” You played it like this: One player gave the other player two lines or more of poetry, or a sentence of prose, in any language. The other player was allowed two guesses at the authorship of the quotation, and, if he said it immediately after the second guess, breathlessly so to speak, a third guess; but there must not be a second’s pause between the second and the third. They had to be “double leads.” The third had to come, if at all, helter-skelter after the second guess. If you guessed right you got a mark, and if you guessed wrong you got a nought; the noughts and crosses were entered into a small book, which went on getting fuller and fuller. They were added up at the bottom of every page; but as The Game is eternal, we shall never know who won it, until the Last Day, and then perhaps there won’t be time. We both played it well on the whole, although we both had strange lapses. I never could guess a line out of _Lycidas_ and E. never could guess a line out of _Adonaïs_. I attributed one day one of the finest lines of Milton to the poet Montgomery, and E. made an equally absurd mistake, which happened to have a profound effect on my future, or rather on my future literary aspirations. We were playing the game in the _Biergarten_ at Hildesheim. The band was playing the overture from _Tannhäuser_. Schoolboys were walking round the garden, arm in arm, and when they met an acquaintance took off their hats all together, in time, and by the right, or by the left, as the case might be, held them at an arm’s length and put them back stiffly. At many little tables, groups and families were sitting enjoying the music, drinking beer and eating _Butterbrote_. I said to E.: “Who is this by in _The Game_?” which was the recognised formula for saying you had begun to play, because the game began suddenly in the midst of conversation and circumstance quite remote from it: no matter how inappropriate or inopportune. The lines I quoted were these: