The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle (epub e reader txt) 📖

the sun shining through the chinks of it. A few great drops came pattering loudly down, and then in a moment the steady swish of a brisk shower, with the dripping and dropping of the leaves. Alleyne, glancing round for shelter, saw a thick and lofty holly-bush, so hollowed out beneath that no house could have been drier. Under this canopy of green two men were already squatted, who waved their hands to Alleyne that he should join them. As he approached he saw that they had five dried herrings laid out in front of them, with a great hunch of wheaten bread and a leathern flask full of milk, but instead of setting to at their food they appeared to have forgot all about it, and were disputing together with flushed faces and angry gestures. It was easy to see by their dress and manner that they were two of those wandering students who formed about this time so enormous a multitude in every country in Europe. The one was long and thin, with melancholy features, while the other was fat and sleek, with a loud voice and the air of a man who is not to be gainsaid.

“Come hither, good youth,” he cried, “come hither! Vultus ingenui puer. Heed not the face of my good coz here. Foenum habet in cornu, as Don Horace has it; but I warrant him harmless for all that.”

“Stint your bull's bellowing!” exclaimed the other. “If it come to Horace, I have a line in my mind: Loquaces si sapiat——How doth it run? The English o't being that a man of sense should ever avoid a great talker. That being so, if all were men of sense then thou wouldst be a lonesome man, coz.”

“Alas! Dicon, I fear that your logic is as bad as your philosophy or your divinity—and God wot it would be hard to say a worse word than that for it. For, hark ye: granting, propter argumentum, that I am a talker, then the true reasoning runs that since all men of sense should avoid me, and thou hast not avoided me, but art at the present moment eating herrings with me under a holly-bush, ergo you are no man of sense, which is exactly what I have been dinning into your long ears ever since I first clapped eyes on your sunken chops.”

“Tut, tut!” cried the other. “Your tongue goes like the clapper of a mill-wheel. Sit down here, friend, and partake of this herring. Understand first, however, that there are certain conditions attached to it.”

“I had hoped,” said Alleyne, falling into the humor of the twain, “that a tranchoir of bread and a draught of milk might be attached to it.”

“Hark to him, hark to him!” cried the little fat man. “It is even thus, Dicon! Wit, lad, is a catching thing, like the itch or the sweating sickness. I exude it round me; it is an aura. I tell you, coz, that no man can come within seventeen feet of me without catching a spark. Look at your own case. A duller man never stepped, and yet within the week you have said three things which might pass, and one thing the day we left Fordingbridge which I should not have been ashamed of myself.”

“Enough, rattle-pate, enough!” said the other. “The milk you shall have and the bread also, friend, together with the herring, but you must hold the scales between us.”

“If he hold the herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother,” cried the fat man. “But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at Paris.”

“I have some small stock of learning,” Alleyne answered, picking at his herring, “but I have been at neither of these places. I was bred amongst the Cistercian monks at Beaulieu Abbey.”

“Pooh, pooh!” they cried both together. “What sort of an upbringing is that?”

“Non cuivis contingit adire Corinthum,” quoth Alleyne.

“Come, brother Stephen, he hath some tincture of letters,” said the melancholy man more hopefully. “He may be the better judge, since he hath no call to side with either of us. Now, attention, friend, and let your ears work as well as your nether jaw. Judex damnatur—you know the old saw. Here am I upholding the good fame of the learned Duns Scotus against the foolish quibblings and poor silly reasonings of Willie Ockham.”

“While I,” quoth the other loudly, “do maintain the good sense and extraordinary wisdom of that most learned William against the crack-brained fantasies of the muddy Scotchman, who hath hid such little wit as he has under so vast a pile of words, that it is like one drop of Gascony in a firkin of ditch-water. Solomon his wisdom would not suffice to say what the rogue means.”

“Certes, Stephen Hapgood, his wisdom doth not suffice,” cried the other. “It is as though a mole cried out against the morning star, because he could not see it. But our dispute, friend, is concerning the nature of that subtle essence which we call thought. For I hold with the learned Scotus that thought is in very truth a thing, even as vapor or fumes, or many other substances which our gross bodily eyes are blind to. For, look you, that which produces a thing must be itself a thing, and if a man's thought may produce a written book, then must thought itself be a material thing, even as the book is. Have I expressed it? Do I make it plain?”

“Whereas I hold,” shouted the other, “with my revered preceptor, doctor, praeclarus et excellentissimus, that all things are but thought; for when thought is gone I prythee where are the things then? Here are trees about us, and I see them because I think I see them, but if I have swooned, or sleep, or am in wine, then, my thought having gone forth from me, lo the trees go forth also. How now, coz, have I touched thee on the raw?”

Alleyne sat between them munching his bread, while the twain disputed across his knees, leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor, proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while his opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction. Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of dismay.

“You double thief!” he cried, “you have eaten my herrings, and I without bite or sup since morning.”

“That,” quoth the other complacently, “was my final argument, my crowning effort, or peroratio, as the orators have it. For, coz, since all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down.”

“A brave piece of reasoning,” cried the other, “and I know of but one reply to it.” On which, leaning forward, he caught his comrade a rousing smack across his rosy cheek. “Nay, take it not amiss,” he said, “since all things are but thoughts, then that