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Of du Maurier's great friendship with Canon Ainger, which commenced in the seventies, light is to be obtained from Edith Sichel's Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger. "For fifteen years," says Miss Sichel, "they always met once, and generally twice a day. Hampstead knew their figures as every afternoon they walked round the pond on the Heath, deep in conversation.
"You may think it a joke, dear old chap," said Ainger, standing at the door and watching his retreating figure, "but even the captain of Grandcourt will have to sit up by-and-by." Smedley, the brave and impetuous, walked straight from Railsford's to the doctor's. He knew his was a useless mission, but he wasn't going to shirk it.
Nearly two hundred years before Canon Ainger came to this decision, Dean Swift contended that "Conversation might be reduced to perfection; for here we are only to avoid a multitude of errors, which, altho a matter of some difficulty, may be in every man's power.
No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws.
"What I mean is, that no personal feeling must come between us and the duty we all owe to Grandcourt to see this wrong put right; you understand me?" "Yes," said the downright Ainger; "we none of us like Mr Bickers, but we must find out the fellows who scragged him, all the same." "Exactly; and I am glad to hear you say that. There is one other matter.
Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work; he wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves together, he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio. While staying with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his mind, he casually took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb and therein stumbled upon something about the Odyssey.
His quick eye took in each boy as he uttered his "Adsum," dwelling longer on some than on others, and now and then turning his glance to the master and senior prefect. When it was all over and Ainger had handed in the list, the head-master took his eyeglass from his eye, laid the list on the desk before him, and said "Boys, this is an unusual and unpleasant visit.
It may turn men into machines all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest.
Staff, do you mind bringing him?" "The one thing to do," said Barnworth, while the messenger was gone, "is to frighten it out of him. Nothing else will do." "Well," said Ainger, "if you think so. You must back me up, though." After a long interval, Stafford returned to say that Munger was in bed and refused to get up. "Good," said Barnworth; "I like that.
What is it you want to ask?" "You know that as well as we do. Are you going to say what you know, or not?" "I don't know how you got to know anything about it," began Munger; "it's a plot against me, and " "We don't want all that," said Ainger sternly. "What we want to know is, did you do it yourself, and if not who else was in it?" "Of course I couldn't do it myself.
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