“The case of Pennyfeather seems to be quite a different matter altogether. He ran the whole length of the quadruple, you say, without his trousers. It is unseemly. It is more: it is indecent. In fact, I almost prepared to say that it is flagrantly indecent. It is not the conduct we expect of a scholar.”
The incident described here by the Master of Scone College at Oxford is the point on which the life of the novel’s protagonist turns. Pual Pennyfeather has fallen in with some typical college jerks at the college of theology who have gotten him drunk and set him for typically egregious college hijinks also know as bullying. Because of this indecent behavior—by a young man who is actually more decent than anyone else in the novel. He is “sent down” for flouting his indecency and informed that the only possible future he has in light of this singularly defining moment of his youth is that of schoolmaster. An entire is set for the course by the hands of others looking for nothing but a jolly good time.
“The police are after me. That suicide didn’t go down well. I was afraid it wouldn’t. They began to fuss a bit about no body being found and about my game leg. And then my other wife turned up, and that set them thinking.”
Among the character who are more indecent than Pennyfeather is that old can of fruit, Grimes, who seems to always find himself in the soup. When finding the soup—his homosexuality, fake marriage, and involvement in white slavery—has finally gotten too deep, chunky and spicy, his plan to extricate himself is to fake a suicide. Obviously, it doesn’t go quite as well as planned. By the end, however, that may have changed. It is difficult to be sure as the ultimate fate of the Captain remains as murky as the fog in which he was last seen escaping from prison.
“There used to be another Mr. Pennyfeather on this staircase once, a very queer gentlemen indeed. Would you believe, sir, that used to take off all his clothes and go out and dance in the quad at night. Nice quiet gentleman, too, he was, except for his dancing. He must have been a little queer in his head, I suppose. I don’t know what became of him. They say he died in prison.”
The Chaplain is installed at Scone College of Oxford. And the person he is talking to is named Pennyfeather, a man who says he believes a distant cousin of his attended the same school not too long ago. The Chaplain then commences to bring up the moment which has defined the entire life forever of that distant cousin. What the Chaplain does not know is that those who say Paul Pennyfeather died in prison are not in command of all the facts. What nobody involved in the singularly defining moment that ruined Paul’s life is that the man to whom the Chaplain is talking is none other Paul Pennyfeather himself, returned to the scene of his destruction, intent on reclaiming a second chance of defining his own life on his own terms.
