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Sinister Street, vol. 2

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #33798 · 1,131,826 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sinister Street, vol. 2

Author: Compton MacKenzie


        
Release date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33798]
                Most recently updated: November 29, 2023

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SINISTER STREET, VOL. 2 ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)

bookcover




SINISTER STREET


BY

COMPTON MACKENZIE

AUTHOR OF “CARNIVAL,” “YOUTH’S ENCOUNTER,” ETC.

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1919

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY


CONTENTS

BOOK ONE DREAMING SPIRES
CHAPTER   PAGE
I.    THE FIRST DAY 3
II.   THE FIRST WEEK 32
III.  THE FIRST TERM 47
IV.   CHEYNE WALK 63
V.    YOUTH’S DOMINATION 84
VI.   GRAY AND BLUE 110
VII.  VENNER’S 143
VIII. THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS 165
IX.   THE LESSON OF SPAIN 183
X.    STELLA IN OXFORD 209
XI.   SYMPATHY 225
XII.  202 HIGH 245
XIII. PLASHERS MEAD 269
XIV.  99 ST. GILES 288
XV.   THE LAST TERM 308
XVI.  THE LAST WEEK 319
XVII. THE LAST DAY 333
 
BOOK TWO ROMANTIC EDUCATION
CHAPTER   PAGE
I.    OSTIA DITIS 349
II.   NEPTUNE CRESCENT 371
III.  THE CAFÉ D’ORANGE 401
IV.   LEPPARD STREET 427
V.    THE INNERMOST CIRCLE 481
VI.   TINDERBOX LANE 496
VII.  THE GATE OF IVORY 552
VIII. SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE 583
IX.   THE GATE OF HORN 602
X.    THE OLD WORLD 652

EPILOGICAL LETTER TO JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORADATO 655




BOOK ONE
DREAMING SPIRES


Bright memories of young poetic pleasure In free companionship, the
loving stress Of all life-beauty, lull’d in studious leisure, When
every Muse was jocund with excess Of fine delight and tremulous
happiness; The breath of an indolent unbridled June, When delicate
thought fell from the dreamy moon: But now strange care, sorrow, and
grief oppress. Robert Bridges.




CHAPTER I

THE FIRST DAY


Michael felt glad to think he would start the adventure of Oxford from
Paddington. The simplicity of that railway station might faintly
mitigate alarms which no amount of previous deliberation could entirely
disperse. He remembered how once he had lightly seen off a Cambridge
friend from Liverpool Street and, looking back at the suburban tumult
of the Great Eastern Railway, he was grateful for the simplicity of
Paddington.

Michael had been careful that all his heavy luggage should be sent in
advance; and he had shown himself gravely exacting toward Alan in this
matter of luggage, writing several times to remind him of his promise
not to appear on the platform with more than a portmanteau of moderate
size and a normal kit-bag. Michael hoped this precaution would prevent
at any rate the porters from commenting upon the freshness of him and
his friend.

“Oxford train?” inquired a porter, as the hansom pulled up. Michael
nodded, and made up his mind to show his esteem when he tipped this
promethean.

“Third class?” the porter went on. Michael mentally doubled the tip,
for he had neglected to assure himself beforehand about the etiquette
of class, and nothing could have suited so well his self-consciousness
as this information casually yielded.

“Let me see, you didn’t have any golf-clubs, did you, sir?” asked the
porter.

Michael shook his head regretfully, for as he looked hurriedly up and
down the platform in search of Alan, he perceived golf-clubs
everywhere, and when at last he saw him, actually even he had a
golf-bag slung over his shoulder.

“I never knew you played golf,” said Michael indignantly.

“I don’t. These are the governor’s. He’s given up playing,” Alan
explained.

“Are you going to play?” Michael pursued. He was feeling rather envious
of the appearance of these veteran implements.

“I may have a shot,” Alan admitted.

“You might have told me you were going to bring them,” Michael
grumbled.

“My dear old ass, I never knew I was, until the governor wanged them
into my lap just as I was starting.”

Michael turned aside and bought a number of papers, far too many for
the short journey. Indeed, all the way they lay on the rack unregarded,
while the train crossed and recrossed the silver Thames. At first he
was often conscious of the other undergraduates in the compartment, who
seemed to be eying him with a puzzled contempt; but very soon, when he
perceived that this manner of looking at one’s neighbor was general, he
became reconciled to the attitude and ascribed it to a habit of mind
rather than to the expression of any individual distaste. Then
suddenly, as Michael was gazing out of the window, the pearly sky broke
into spires and pinnacles and domes and towers. He caught his breath
for one bewitched moment, before he busied himself with the luggage on
the rack.

On the platform Michael and Alan decided to part company, as neither of
them felt sure enough whether St. Mary’s or Christ Church were nearer
to the station to risk a joint hansom.

“Shall I come and see you this afternoon?” Michael rashly offered.

“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, and they turned away from one another to
secure their cabs.

All the time that Michael was driving to St. Mary’s, he was regretting
he had not urged Alan to visit him first. A growing sensation of shy
dread was making him vow that once safe in his own rooms at St. Mary’s
nothing should drag him forth again that day. What on earth would he
say when he arrived at the college? Would he have to announce himself?
How would he find his rooms? On these points he had pestered several
Old Jacobeans now at Oxford, but none of them could remember the
precise ceremonies of arrival. Michael leaned back in the hansom and
cursed their inefficient memories.

Then the cab pulled up by the St. Mary’s lodge, and events proceeded
with unexpected rapidity. A cheerful man with red hair and a round face
welcomed his luggage. The cabman was paid the double of his correct
fare, and to Michael’s relief drove off instantly. From a sort of glass
case that filled half the interior of the lodge somebody very much like
a family butler inquired richly who Michael was.

“Mr. C. M. S. Fane?” rolled out the unctuous man.

Michael nodded.

“Is there another Fane?” he asked curiously.

“No, sir,” said the head porter, and the negative came out with the
sound of a drawn cork. “No, sir, but I wished to hessateen if I had
your initials down correct in my list. Mr. C. M. S. Fane,” he went on,
looking at a piece of paper. “St. Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.
Your servant is Porcher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you’ll
settle with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.”

The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael’s bag, and Michael was
preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a
warning hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole
labeled Porcher.

“These letters are for you, sir,” he explained pompously. Michael took
them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and
shouted “Porcher!” From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the
scout appeared.

“One of your gentlemen arrived,” said Henry. “Mr. Fane.” Then he
touched his cap and retired.

“Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?” Porcher asked.

“Not much,” said Michael apologetically.

“There’s a nice lot of stuff in your rooms,” Porcher informed him.
“Come in yesterday morning, it did.”

They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors
Michael was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a
water-tap that no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck
in his mind somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.

“These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you’ll shout, of
course. I’m just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale’s wine.”

Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted
with much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was
aware of a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room,
it was a fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction
of a privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
green grass, across the Warden’s garden with its faint gaiety of
autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
leisurely files about the spare sunlight.

It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would
be necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
attention to himself than would be pleasant, and he postponed the
summons in favor of an examination of his letters. One after another he
opened them, and every one was the advertisement of a tailor or
hairdresser or tobacconist. The tailors were the most insistent; they
even went so far as to announce that representatives would call upon
him at his pleasure. Michael made up his mind to order his cap and gown
after lunch. Lunch! How should he obtain lunch? Where should he obtain
lunch? When should he obtain lunch? Obviously there must be some
precise manner of obtaining lunch, some ritual consecrated by
generations of St. Mary’s men. The loneliness came back triumphant, and
plunged him dejectedly down into a surprisingly deep wicker-chair. The
fire crackled in the silence, and the problem of lunch remained
insoluble. The need for Porcher’s advice became more desperate. Other
freshmen before him must have depended upon their scout’s experience.
He began to practice calling Porcher in accents so low that they
acquired a tender and reproachful significance. Michael braced himself
for the performance after these choked and muffled rehearsals, and went
boldly out on to the stone landing. An almost entranced silence held
the staircase, a silence that he could not bring himself to violate. On
the door of the rooms opposite he read his neighbor’s
name—_Mackintosh_. He wished he knew whether Mackintosh were a
freshman. It would be delightful to make him share the responsibility
of summoning Porcher from his task of arranging Lonsdale’s wine. And
who was Lonsdale? _No slops must be emptied here! Mackintosh! Fane!_
Here were three announcements hinting at humanity in a desolation of
stillness. Michael reading his own name gathered confidence and a
volume of breath, leaned over the stone parapet of the landing and,
losing all his courage in a sigh, decided to walk downstairs and take
his chance of meeting Porcher on the way.

On the floor beneath Michael read _Bannerman_ over the left-hand door
and _Templeton-Collins_ over the right-hand door. While he was
pondering the personality and status of Templeton-Collins, presumably
the gentleman himself appeared, stared at Michael very deliberately,
came forward and, leaning over the parapet, yelled in a voice that
combined rage, protest, disappointment and appeal with the maximum of
sound: “Porcher!” After which, Templeton-Collins again stared very
deliberately at Michael and retired into his room, while Michael
hurried down to intercept the scout, hoping his dismay at
Templeton-Collins’ impatience would not be too great to allow him to
pay a moment’s attention to himself.

However, on the ground floor the silence was still unbroken, and
hopelessly Michael read over the right-hand door _Amherst_, over the
left-hand door _Lonsdale_. What critical moment had arrived in the
unpacking of Lonsdale’s wine to make the scout so heedless of
Templeton-Collins’ call? Again it resounded from above, and Michael
looking up involuntarily, caught the downward glance of
Templeton-Collins himself.

“I say, is Porcher down there?” the latter asked fretfully.

“I think he’s unpacking Lonsdale’s wine.”

“Who’s Lonsdale?” demanded Templeton-Collins. “You might sing out and
tell him I want him.”

With this request Templeton-Collins vanished, leaving Michael in a
quandary. There was only one hope of relieving the intolerable
situation, he thought, which was to shout “Porcher” from where he was
standing. This he did at the very moment the scout emerged from
Lonsdale’s rooms.

“Coming, sir,” said Porcher in an aggrieved voice.

“I think Mr. Templeton-Collins is calling you,” Michael explained,
rather lamely he felt, since it must have been obvious to the scout
that Michael himself had been calling him.

“And I say,” he added hurriedly, “you might bring me up a hammer or
something to open my boxes, when you’ve done.”

Leaving Porcher to appease the outraged Templeton-Collins, Michael
retreated to the security of his own rooms, where in a few minutes the
scout appeared to raise the question of lunch.

“Will you take commons, sir?”

Michael looked perplexed.

“Commons is bread and cheese. Most of my gentlemen takes commons. If
you want anything extra, you go to the kitchen and write your name down
for what you want.”

This sounded too difficult, and Michael gratefully chose commons.

“Ale, sir?”

Michael nodded. If the scout had suggested champagne, he would have
assented immediately.

Porcher set to work and undid the cases; he also explained where the
china was kept and the wood and the coal. He expounded the theory of
roll-calls and chapels, and was indeed so generous with information on
every point of college existence that Michael would have been glad to
retain his services for the afternoon.

“And the other men on this staircase?” Michael asked, “are any of them
freshers?”

“Mr. Mackintosh, Mr. Amherst, and the Honorable Lonsdale is all
freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he
don’t improve,” said Porcher meditatively.

“Do you mean on the coach-horn?” Michael asked.

“Don’t improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
He’d shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?”

Michael shook his head.

“Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It’s easier to order it as
you want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?”

Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
there was nothing.

Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time
he had coveted—Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt’s Knight in Armor
and Montegna’s St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
the grave city demanded.

After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael
examined his possessions in critical discontent. They seemed to
symbolize the unpleasant crudity of youth. In the familiar surroundings
of childhood they had seemed on the contrary to testify to his
maturity. Now at Oxford he felt most abominably young again, yet he was
able to console himself with the thought that youth would be no
handicap among his peers. He took down the scenes of Montmartre even
from the walls of his bedroom and pushed them ignominiously out of
sight under the bed.

Michael abandoned the contemplation of his possessions, and looked out
of his sitting-room window at the High. There was something salutary in
the jangle of the trams, in the vision of ordinary people moving
unconsciously about the academic magnificence of Oxford. An
undergraduate with gown wrapped carelessly round his neck flashed past
on a bicycle, and Michael was discouraged by the sense of his diabolic
ease. The luxury of his own rooms, the conviction of his new
independence, the excitement of an undiscovered life all departed from
him, and he was left with nothing but a loneliness more bitter even
than when at Randell House he had first encountered school.

Porcher came in presently with lunch, and the commons of bread and
cheese with the ale foaming in a silver tankard added the final touch
to Michael’s depression. He thought that nothing in the world, could
express the spirit of loneliness so perfectly as a sparse lunch laid
for one on a large table. He wandered away from its melancholy
invitation into the bedroom and looked sadly down into the quad. In
every doorway stood knots of senior men talking: continually came new
arrivals to hail familiarly their friends after the vacation: scouts
hurried to and fro with trays of food: from window to window gossip,
greetings, appointments were merrily shouted. Michael watched this
scene of intimate movement played against the background of elms and
gray walls. The golden fume of the October weather transcended somehow
all impermanence, and he felt with a sudden springing of imagination
that so had this scene been played before, that so forever would it be
played for generations to come. Yet for him as yet outside the picture
remained, fortunately less eternal, that solitary lunch. He ate it
hurriedly and as soon as he had finished set out to find Alan at Christ
Church.

Freedom came back with the elation of walking up the High; and in the
Christ Church lodge Michael was able to ask without a blush for Alan’s
rooms. The great space of Tom quad by absorbing his self-consciousness
allowed him to feel himself an unit of the small and decorative
population that enhanced the architecture there. The scattered, groups
of friends whose voices became part of the very air itself like the
wings of the pigeons and the perpetual tapping of footsteps, the two
dons treading in slow confabulation that wide flagged terrace, even
himself were here forever. Michael captured again in that moment the
crystallized vision of Oxford which had first been vouchsafed to him
long ago by that old print of St. Mary’s tower. He turned reluctantly
away from Tom quad, and going on to seek Alan in Meadows, by mistake
found himself in Peckwater. A tall fair undergraduate was standing
alone in the center of the quad, cracking a whip. Suddenly Michael
realized that his father had been at Christ Church; and this tall fair
whip-cracker served for him as the symbol of his father. He must have
often stood here so, cracking a whip; and Michael never came into
Peckwater without recreating him so occupied on a fine autumn
afternoon, whip in hand, very tall and very fair in the glinting
sunlight.

Dreams faded out, when Michael ran up the staircase to Alan’s rooms;
but he was full-charged again with all that suppressed intellectual
excitement which he had counted upon finding in Oxford, but which he
had failed to find until the wide tranquillity of Tom quad had given
him, as it were, the benediction of the University.

“Hullo, Alan!” he cried. “How are you getting on? I say, why do they
stick ‘Mr.’ in front of your name over the door? At St. Mary’s we drop
the ‘Mr.’ or any other sort of title. Aren’t you unpacked _yet?_ You
are a slacker. Look here, I want you to come out with me at once. I’ve
got to get some more picture-wire and a gown and a picture of Mona
Lisa.”

“Mona how much?” said Alan.

“La Gioconda, you ass.”

“Sorry, my mistake,” said Alan.

“And I saw some rattling book-shops as I came up the High,” Michael
went on. “What did you have for lunch? I had bread and cheese—commons
we call it at St. Mary’s. I say, I think I’m glad I don’t have to wear
a scholar’s gown.”

“I’m an exhibitioner,” said Alan.

“Well, it’s the same thing. I like a commoner’s gown best. Where did
you get that tea-caddy? I don’t believe I’ve got one. Pretty good view
from your window. Mine looks out on the High.”

“Look here,” asked Alan very solemnly, “where shall I hang this picture
my mater gave me?”

He displayed in a green frame The Soul’s Awakening.

“Do you like it?” Michael asked gloomily.

“I prefer these grouse by Thorburn that the governor gave me, but I
like them both in a way,” Alan admitted.

“I don’t think it much matters where you hang it,” Michael said. Then,
thinking Alan looked rather hurt, he added hastily: “You see it’s such
a very square room that practically it might go anywhere.”

“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked, proffering a crowded plate.

“A meringue?” Michael repeated.

“We’re rather famous for our meringues here,” said Alan gravely. “We
make them in the kitchen. I ordered a double lot in case you came in.”

“You seem to have found out a good deal about Christ Church already,”
Michael observed.

“The House,” Alan corrected. “We call it—in fact everybody calls it the
House.”

Michael was inclined to resent this arrogation by a college not his own
of a distinct and slightly affected piece of nomenclature, and he
wished he possessed enough knowledge of his own peculiar college
customs to counter Alan’s display.

“Well, hurry up and come out of the House,” he urged. “You can’t stay
here unpacking all the afternoon.”

“Why do you want to start buying things straight away?” Alan argued.

“Because I know what I want,” Michael insisted.

“Since when?” Alan demanded. “I’m not going to buy anything for a bit.”

“Come on, come on,” Michael urged. He was in a hurry to enjoy the
luxury of traversing the quads of Christ Church in company, of
strolling down the High in company, of looking into shop windows in
company, of finally defeating that first dismal loneliness with Alan
and his company.

It certainly proved to be a lavish afternoon. Michael bought three
straight-grained pipes so substantially silvered that they made his own
old pipes take on an attenuated vulgarity. He bought an obese tobacco
jar blazoned with the arms of his college and, similarly blazoned, a
protuberant utensil for matches. He bought numerous ounces of those
prodigally displayed mixtures of tobacco, every one of which was
vouched for by the vendor as in its own way the perfect blend. He
bought his cap and his gown and was measured by the tailor for a coat
of Harris tweed such as everybody seemed to wear. He found the very
autotype of Mona Lisa he coveted, and farther he was persuaded by the
picture-dealer to buy for two guineas a signed proof of a small
copperplate engraving of the Primavera. This expenditure frightened him
from buying any more pictures that afternoon and seemed a violent and
sudden extravagance. However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after
signing his name several times, he was presented with a check book. In
order to be perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one
then and there, and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as
irreverently as if they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his
new check-book was the purse of Fortunatus.

Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the
purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in
order to assert his independence in the face of Alan’s continuous
dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a
pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the
pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties
of knitted silk.

By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Café in
Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o’clock and neither of
them felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other
back to tea, they went into the café and ate a quantity of hot buttered
toast and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their
enjoyment and faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of
three exquisitely untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the
doorway and surveyed first the crowded café in general, and then more
particularly Michael and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt.
After a prolonged stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:

“Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!”

Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.

Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed
from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress
seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan
paid their bill and went out.

“Are you coming back to my rooms?” Michael asked. Yet secretly he half
hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to
be alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.

Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly,
promising to meet him again to-morrow.

Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers,
for a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street
lured him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man
with a thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed
to Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in
tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against
the shelves of books.

A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good
evening.

“May I look round?” Michael asked.

The bookseller nodded.

“Just come up?” he inquired.

“To-day,” Michael confessed.

“And what sort of books are you interested in?”

“All books,” said Michael.

“This set of Pater for instance,” the bookseller suggested, handing
Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with
a golden monogram. “Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds
fifteen cash.” This information he added in a note of disdainful
tolerance.

Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.

“Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays,” Mr. Lampard went
on. “In the early ‘nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for
books.”

Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.

“Seven pounds ten,” he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid
sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.

“What college?” asked Mr. Lampard. “St. Mary’s? Ah, there used to be
some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis
of Montgomery’s son, was at St. Mary’s, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I
published his first volume of poems—of course, you’ve read his books.
He was at St. Mary’s. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.
You’ve heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first
number, but they’re getting very scarce. All St. Mary’s men and all
great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I
really don’t know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not
selling them.”

Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very
thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some
entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past,
and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.

“Perhaps after all I will take the Pater,” he said. “Only I may not be
able to pay you this term.”

The bookseller smiled.

“I don’t think I shall worry you. Do you know this set—Boccaccio,
Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered
silk. They’ll always keep their price, and of course all the
photogravures are included.”

“All right. You might send them too.”

Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of
the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to
College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling
scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous
those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against
those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a
buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had
certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on
the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy
balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a
pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson’s bookshop. At Lampard’s he
was already a personality.

All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford,
but really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in
comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the
Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar
conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The
list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a
discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools
other, than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed
to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was
responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he
stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound
to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top
of the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his
name.

“You’ll be at the second freshmen’s table. On the right, sir. Mr.
Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir.”

Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and
hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly
placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with
either of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying
the armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his
judicial gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his
voice.

“How do you become head of a table?” Michael’s left-hand neighbor
suddenly asked.

Michael said he really did not know.

“Because what I’m wondering,” the left-hand neighbor continued, “is why
they’ve made that ass Wedderburn head of our table.”

“Why, is he an ass?” Michael inquired.

“Frightful ass,” continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael
perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.
“Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?”

Michael shook his head.

“I thought you were a cousin of my mother,” said the left-hand
neighbor.

Michael looked astonished.

“His name’s Mackintosh. What’s your name?”

Michael told him.

“My name’s Lonsdale. I think we’re on the same staircase—so’s
Mackintosh. It’s a pity he’s an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I’d
look him up.”

Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential
undertone:

“I don’t mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor
lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad—in fact
rather good eggs—but the rest! Well, look at that ass Wedderburn. He’s
typical.”

“I think he looks rather a good sort,” said Michael.

“My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M’ tutor used to like him, but
really—well—I don’t mind telling you, he’s really an æsthete.”

With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor
and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly
audible to Michael:

“I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn’t half bad. I don’t know where
he comes from, His name’s Fane.”

“He’s from St. James’.”

“Where on earth’s that?”

“London.”

“Why, I thought it was a kind of charity school,” said Lonsdale. Then
he turned to Michael again:

“I say, are you really from St. James’?”

Michael replied coldly that he was.

“I say, come and have coffee with me after hall. One or two O. E.’s are
coming in, but you won’t mind?”

“Why, do you want to find out something about St. James’?” demanded
Michael, frowning.

“Oh, I say, don’t be ratty. It’s that ass Tommy. He always talks at the
top of his voice.”

Lonsdale, as he spoke, looked so charmingly apologetic and displayed
such accomplished sang-froid that Michael forgave him immediately and
promised to come to coffee.

“Good egg!” Lonsdale exclaimed with the satisfaction of having smoothed
over an awkward place. “I say,” he offered, “if you’d like to meet
Wedderburn, I’ll ask him, too. He seems to have improved since he’s
been up at the Varsity. Don’t you think that fat man Wedderburn has
improved, Tommy?”

Tommy nodded.

“One day’s done him no end of good.”

“I say,” Lonsdale offered, “you haven’t met Fane. Mr. Fane—Mr.
Grainger. I was just saying to Fane that the Etonians are a rotten lot
this term.”

“One or two are all right,” Grainger admitted with evident reluctance.

“Well, perhaps two,” Lonsdale agreed. “This dinner isn’t bad, what?”

By this time the conversation at the table had become more general, and
Michael gradually realized that some of the alarm he had felt himself
had certainly been felt by his companions. Now at any rate there was a
perceptible relaxation of tension. Still the conversation was only
general in so much as that whenever anybody spoke, the rest of the
table listened. The moment the flow of his information dried up,
somebody else began pumping forth instruction. These slightly nervous
little lectures were delivered without any claim to authority and they
came up prefaced by the third person of legendary narrative.

“They say we shall all have to interview the Warden to-morrow.”

“They say on Sunday afternoon the Wagger makes the same speech to the
freshers that he’s made for twenty years.”

“They say we ought to go head of the river this year.”

“They say the freshers are expected to make a bonner on Sunday night.”

“They say any one can have commons of bread and cheese by sending out
word to the buttery. It’s really included in the two-and-fourpence for
dinner.”

“They say they charge a penny for the napkin every night.”

So the information proceeded, and Michael had just thought to himself
that going up to Oxford was very much like going to school again, when
from the second-year tables crashed the sound of a concerted sneeze.
The dons from high table looked coldly down the hall, expressing a
vague, but seemingly impotent disapproval, for immediately afterward
that sternutation shook the air a second time.

Michael thought the difference between school and Oxford might be
greater than he had supposed.

The slowest eater at the second freshmen’s table had nervously left
half his savory; Wedderburn without apparent embarrassment had received
the Sub-Warden’s permission to rise from dinner; Lonsdale hurriedly
marshaled as many of his acquaintances as he could, and in a large and
noisy group they swarmed through the moonlight toward his rooms.

Michael was interested by Lonsdale’s sitting-room, for he divined at
once that it was typical, just a transplanted Eton study with the
addition of smoking paraphernalia. The overmantel was plumed with small
photographs of pleasant young creatures in the gay nautical costumes of
the Fourth of June and festooned hats of Alexandra or Monarch, of the
same pleasant young creatures at an earlier and chubbier age, of the
same pleasant young creatures with penciled mustaches and the white
waistcoat of Pop. In addition to their individual commemorations the
pleasant young creatures would appear again in house groups, in winning
house elevens, and most exquisitely of all in Eton Society. Michael
always admired the photographs of Pop, for they seemed to him to
epitomize all the traditions of all the public-schools of England, to
epitomize them moreover with something of that immortality of captured
action expressed by great Athenian sculpture. In comparison with Pop
the Harrow Philathletic Society was a barbarous group, with all the
self-consciousness of a deliberate archaism. Besides the personal
photographs in Lonsdale’s room there were studies of grouse by
Thorburn; and Michael, remembering Alan’s grouse, felt in accord with
Lonsdale and with all that Lonsdale stood for. Knowing Alan, he felt
that he knew Lonsdale, and at once he became more at ease with all his
contemporaries in Lonsdale’s room. Michael looked at the colored prints
of Cecil Aldin’s pictures and made up his mind he would buy a set for
Alan: also possibly he would buy for Alan the Sir Galahad of Watts
which was rather better than The Soul’s Awakening.

After Lonsdale’s pictures Michael surveyed Lonsdale’s books, the
brilliantly red volumes of Jorrocks, the two or three odd volumes of
the Badminton library, and the school books tattered and ink-splashed.
More interesting than such a library were the glossy new briars, the
virgin meerschaum, the patent smoking-tables and another table
evidently designed to make drinking easy, but by reason of the
complexity of its machinery actually more likely to discourage one
forever from refreshment. The rest of the space, apart from the
furniture bequeathed by the noisy Templeton-Collins when he moved to
larger rooms above, was crowded with the freshmen whom after hall
Lonsdale had so hastily gathered together unassorted.

“I ordered coffee for sixteen,” announced the host. “I thought it would
be quicker than making it in a new machine that my sister gave me. It
just makes enough for three, and the only time I tried, it took about
an hour to do that ... who’ll drink port?”

Michael thought the scout’s prophecies about the superfluity of
Lonsdale’s wine were rather premature, for it seemed that everybody
intended to drink port.

“I believe this is supposed to be rather good port,” said Lonsdale.

“It is jolly good,” several connoisseurs echoed.

“I don’t know much about it myself. But my governor’s supposed to be
rather a judge. He said ‘this is wasted on you and your friends, but I
haven’t got any bad wine to give you.’”

Here everybody held up their glasses against the light, took another
sip and murmured their approval.

“Do you think this is a good wine, Fane?” demanded Lonsdale, thereby
drawing so much attention to Michael that he blushed to nearly as deep
a color as the port itself.

“I like it very much,” Michael said.

“Do you like it, Wedderburn?” asked Lonsdale, turning to the freshman
who had sat in the armchair at the head of the second table.

“Damned good wine,” pronounced Wedderburn in a voice so rich with
appreciation and so deep with judgment that he immediately established
a reputation for worldly knowledge, and from having been slightly
derided at Eton for his artistic ambitions was ever afterward respected
and consulted. Michael envied his air of authority, but trembled for
Wedderburn’s position when he heard him reproach Lonsdale for his lack
of any good pictures.

“You might stick up one that can be looked at for more than two
seconds,” Wedderburn said severely.

“What sort of picture?” asked Lonsdale.

“Primavera, for instance,” Wedderburn suggested, and Michael’s heart
beat in sympathy.

“Never heard of the horse,” Lonsdale answered. “Who owned her?”

“My god,” Wedderburn rumbled, “I’ll take you to buy one to-morrow,
Lonny. You deserve it after that.”

“Right-O!” Lonsdale cheerfully agreed. “Only I don’t want my room to
look like the Academy, you know.”

Wedderburn shook his head in benevolent contempt, and the conversation
was deflected from Lonsdale’s artistic education by a long-legged
Wykehamist with crisp chestnut hair and a thin florid face of dimpling
smiles.

“Has anybody been into Venner’s yet?” he asked.

“I have,” proclaimed a dumpy Etonian whose down-curving nose hung over
a perpetually open mouth. “Marjoribanks took me in just before hall.
But he advised me not to go in by myself yet awhile.”

“The second-year men don’t like it,” agreed the long-legged Wykehamist
with a wise air. “They say one can begin to go in occasionally in one’s
third term.”

“What is Venner’s?” Michael asked.

“Don’t you know?” sniffed the dumpy Etonian who had already managed to
proclaim his friendship with Marjoribanks, the President of the Junior
Common Room, and therefore presumably had the right to open his mouth a
little wider than usual at Michael.

“I’m not quite sure myself,” said Lonsdale quickly. “I vote that Cuffe
explains.”

“I’m not going to explain,” Cuffe protested, and for some minutes his
mouth was tightly closed.

“Isn’t it just a sort of special part of the J. C. R.?” suggested the
smiling Wykehamist, who seemed to wish to make it pleasant for
everybody, so long as he himself would not have to admit ignorance.
“Old Venables himself is a ripper. They say he’s been steward of the J.
C. R. for fifty years.”

“Thirty-two years,” corrected Wedderburn in his voice of most
reverberant certitude. “Venner’s is practically a club. You aren’t
elected, but somehow you know just when you can go in without being
stared at. There’s nothing in Oxford like that little office of
Venner’s. It’s practically made St. Mary’s what it is.”

All the freshmen, sipping their port and lolling back in their new
gowns, looked very reverent and very conscious of the honor and glory
of St. Mary’s which they themselves hoped soon to affirm more publicly
than they could at present. Upon their meditations sounded very loud
the blast of a coach-horn from above.

“That’s Templeton-Collins,” said Michael.

“Who’s he?” several demanded.

“He’s the man who used to live in these rooms last year,” said Lonsdale
lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these
freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.

“Let’s all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row,” suggested
Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of
a table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.

“To a second-year blood?” whispered somebody in dread surprise.

“Why not take away the coach-horn?” Lonsdale added.

However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with
unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.

“Keep quiet, little boys,” shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.

The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and
the long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going
to be a hot year. “I vote we have a bonner.”

“Will you light it, Sinclair?” asked another Wykehamist in a cynical
drawl.

“Why not?” Sinclair retorted.

“Oh, I don’t know. But you always used to be better at theory than
practice.”

“How these Wykehamists love one another,” laughed an Etonian.

This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in
defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and
bigoted confidence.

“Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner,” said Wedderburn. “After
the first ‘after.’”

“‘After’?” queried another.

“Oh, don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?” several well-informed freshmen
began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of
instruction, and the others gave way.

“Every Sunday after hall,” he explained, “people go up to the J. C. R.
and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the
second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes
round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the ‘after Common
Room.’ People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the
J. C. R. gives the first ‘after’ of the term. The others are usually
given by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and
lemon-squash. They usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport.
They’re much better than private wines, better for everybody. That’s
why we have them on Sunday night,” he concluded rather vaguely.

The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into
bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The
first evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper
than the superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table
was now begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to
intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the
dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of
Etonian tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some
Etonians might exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical,
less odiously serene than the majority of those they had so far only
encountered in summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess
was going to count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists
extended a cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they
never lost an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and
though their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more
debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to
acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these
strange new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might
appear to Wykeham’s adamantine mold.

Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in
the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to
put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless.
Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for
granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a
day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and
disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count.
At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them
credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social
outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense
of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and
the last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the
Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly
it had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose
trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were
ignobly buttoned to the very end.

“An Old Giggleswickian,” commented some one in reference to one of
these disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was
surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such
inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old
Wykehamist colors.

“Why, were you at school with him?” asked Michael quickly.

“Me? At Giggleswick?” stammered the Carthusian.

“Why not?” said Michael. “You seem to know all about him.”

“Isn’t your name Fane?” demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when
Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.

“That’ll help me along a bit, I expect,” Michael prophesied.

“We were in the same form at Randell’s. My name’s Avery.”

“I remember you,” said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how
little Avery’s once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he
thought Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep
blue eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of
Lonsdale’s room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out
with him into the quad.

“I say,” Avery began impulsively. “Did I make an ass of myself just
now? I mean, do you think people were sick with me?”

“What for?”

“I mean did I sound snobbish?” Avery pursued.

“Not more than anybody else,” Michael assured him, and as he watched
Avery’s expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess
and wore combinations instead of pants and vest.

“I say, aren’t you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I’m in Cloisters. Are you
going out? You’ll have to buck up. It’s after nine.”

They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was
ushered out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom
boomed his final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation
sounded here and there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.

Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High
came a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and
more perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
Michael pondered the freshmen’s chatter and apprehended dimly how this
magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of naïve
intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that
morning.

So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until
at last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College
Street and Queen’s Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
forgetting the world.

In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.

It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert’s
quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.

Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
from St. Mary’s tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The
watered silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how
Boccaccio should be read. Michael’s mind was filled with the
imagination of that gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their
gay stories in the sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais
should be read: the very pages seemed to glitter like wine.

Midnight chimed from St. Mary’s tower. One by one the new books went
gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
Michael’s bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room
was full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was
gleaming.




CHAPTER II

THE FIRST WEEK


The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations,
addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action
against her neophytes.

First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a
deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid
and manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to
give the impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in
an otherwise justly modulated existence.

Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle’s room, knocked at
the door and passed in at the don’s bidding to where he sat sighing
amid heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the
room was somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that
crowded the walls.

“Mr.?” queried the Senior Tutor. “Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James’. Your
tutor will be the Dean—please sit down—the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What
school are you proposing to read?”

“History, I imagine,” said Michael. “History!” he repeated, as Mr.
Ardle blinked at him.

“Yes,” said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. “But we
have to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and
Literæ Humaniores.”

“I explained to you that I wanted to read History,” said Michael,
echoing himself involuntarily the don’s tone of patient boredom.

“I have you down as coming from St. James’,” snapped the Senior Tutor.
“A school reputed to send out good classical scholars, I believe.”

“I’m not a scholar,” Michael interrupted. “And I don’t intend to take
Honor Mods.”

“That will be for the college to decide.”

“Supposing the college decided I was to read Chinese?” Michael
inquired.

“There is no need for impertinence. Well, well, for the present I have
put you down for the lectures on Pass Moderations. You will attend my
lectures on Cicero, Mr. Churton on the Apologia, Mr. Carder on Logic,
and Mr. Vereker for Latin Prose. The weekly essay set by the Warden for
freshmen you will read to your tutor Mr. Ambrose.”

Then he went on to give instructions about chapels and roll-calls and
dining in hall and the various regulations of the college, while the
Swiss mountains stared bleakly down at the chilly interview.

“Now you’d better go and see Mr. Ambrose,” said the Senior Tutor, and
Michael left him. On the staircase he passed Lonsdale going up.

“What’s he like?” asked Lonsdale.

“Pretty dull,” said Michael.

“Does he keep you long?”

Michael shook his head.

“Good work,” said Lonsdale cheerfully. “Because I’ve just bought a
dog.” And he whistled his way upstairs.

Michael wondered what the purchase of a dog had got to do with the
Senior Tutor, but relinquished the problem on perceiving Mr. Ambrose’s
name on the floor below.

The Dean’s room was very much like the Senior Tutor’s, and the
interview, save that it was made slightly more tolerable by the help of
a cigarette, was of much the same chilliness owing to Michael’s
reiterated refusal to read Honor Moderations.

“I expected a little keenness,” said Mr. Ambrose.

“I shall be keen enough when I’ve finished with Pass Mods,” said
Michael. “Though what good it will be for me to read the Pro Milone and
the Apology all over again, when I read them at fifteen, I don’t know.”

“Then take Honor Moderations?” the Dean advised.

“I’ve given up classics,” Michael argued, and as the cigarette was
beginning to burn his fingers and the problem of disposing of it in the
Dean’s room seemed insoluble, he hurried out.

Lonsdale was whistling his way downstairs from his interview with Mr.
Ardle.

“Hallo, Fane, what did he say to you?”

“I think all these dons are very much like schoolmasters,” growled
Michael resentfully.

“They can’t help it,” said Lonsdale. “I asked old Ardle if I could keep
a dog in college, and he turned as blue as an owl. Any one would think
I’d asked him if I could breed crocodiles.”

In addition to these personal interviews the freshmen had certain
communal experiences to undergo. Among these was their formal reception
into the University, when they trooped after the Senior Tutor through
gothic mazes and in some beautiful and remote room received from the
Vice-Chancellor a bound volume of Statuta et Decreta Universitatis.
This book they carried back with them to college, where in many rooms
it shared with Ruff’s Guide and Soapy Sponge’s Sporting Tour an
intellectual oligarchy. Saturday morning was spent in meeting the
Warden at the Warden’s Lodgings, where they shook hands with him in
nervous quartets. Michael when he discussed this experience with his
fellows fancied that the Warden’s butler had left a deeper impression
than the Warden himself. On Sunday afternoon, however, when they
gathered in the hall to hear the annual address of welcome and
exhortation, the great moon-faced Warden shone undimmed.

“You have come to Oxford,” he concluded, “some of you to hunt foxes,
some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you
to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have
come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen. In after life when you are
ambassadors and proconsuls and members of Parliament you will never
remember this little address which I have the honor now of delivering
to you. That will not matter, so long as you always remember that you
are St. Mary’s men and the heirs of an honorable and ancient
foundation.”

The great moon-faced Warden beamed at them for one moment, and after
thanking them for their polite attention floated out of the hall. The
pictures of cardinals and princes and poets in their high golden frames
seemed in the dusk faintly to nod approval. The bell was ringing for
evening chapel, and the freshmen went murmurously along the cloisters
to take their places, feeling rather proud that the famous quire was
their quire and looking with inquisitive condescension at the visitors
who sat out of sight of those candle-starred singers.

In hall that night the chief topic of conversation was the etiquette
and ritual of the first J. C. R. wine.

Michael to his chagrin found himself seated next to Mackintosh, for
Mackintosh, cousin though he was of the sparkish Lonsdale, was a gloomy
fellow scornful of the general merriment. As somebody had quickly said,
sharpening his young wit, he was more of a wet-blanket than a
Mackintosh.

“I suppose you’re coming to the J. C. R.?” Michael asked.

“Why should I? Why should I waste my time trying to keep sober for the
amusement of all these fools?”

“I expect it will be rather a rag,” said Michael hopefully, but he
found it tantalizing to hear farther down the table snatches of
conversation that heard more completely would have enlightened him on
several points he had not yet mastered in the ceremony of wine in the
J. C. R. However, it was useless to speculate on such subjects in the
company of the lugubrious Mackintosh. So they talked instead of Sandow
exercises and mountain-climbing in Cumberland, neither of which topics
interested Michael very greatly.

Hall was rowdy that evening, and the dons looked petulantly down from
high table, annoyed to think that their distinguished visitors of
Sunday evening should see so many pieces of bread flung by the
second-year men. The moon-faced Warden was deflected from his
intellectual revolutions round a Swedish man of science, and sent the
butler down to whisper a remonstrance to the head of one of the
second-year tables. But no sooner had the butler again taken his place
behind the Warden’s chair than a number of third-year men whose table
had been littered by the ammunition of their juniors retaliated without
apparent loss of dignity, and presently both years combined to bombard
under the Scholars. Meanwhile the freshmen applauded with laughter, and
thought their seniors were wonderful exemplars for the future.

After hall everybody went crowding up the narrow stairs to the J. C.
R., and now most emphatically the J. C. R. presented a cheerful sight,
with the red-shaded lamps casting such a glow that the decanters of
wine stationed before the President’s place looked like a treasure of
rubies. The two long tables were set at right angles to one another,
and the President sat near their apex. All along their shining length
at regular intervals stood great dishes of grapes richly bloomed, of
apples and walnuts and salted almonds and deviled biscuits. The
freshmen by instinct rushed to sit altogether at the end of the table
more remote from the door. As Michael looked at his contemporaries, he
perceived that of the forty odd freshmen scarcely five-and-twenty had
come to this, the first J. C. R. Vaguely he realized that already two
sets were manifest in the college, and he felt depressed by the
dullness of those who had not come and some satisfaction with himself
for coming.

The freshmen stared with awe at Marjoribanks, the President of the J.
C. R., and told one another with reverence that the two men on either
side of him were those famous rowing blues from New College, Permain
and Strutt; while some of them who had known these heroes at school sat
anxiously unaware of their presence and spoke of them familiarly as
Jack Permain and Bingey. There were several other cynosures from New
College and University near the President’s chair, a vivid bunch of
Leander ties. There were also one or two old St. Mary’s men who had
descended to haunt for a swift week-end the place of their renown, and
these were pointed out by knowing freshmen as unconcernedly as
possible.

One by one the President released the decanters, and round and round
they came. Sometimes they would be held up by an interesting
conversation; and when the sherry and the port and the burgundy were
all standing idle, a shout of “pass along the wine” would go up, after
which for a time the decanters would swing vigorously from hand to
hand. Then suddenly Marjoribanks was seen to be bowing to Permain, and
Permain was bowing solemnly back to his host. This was a plain token to
everybody that the moment for drinking healths had arrived. A great
babel of shouted names broke out at the end of the Common Room remote
from the freshmen, so tremendous a din that the freshmen felt the
drinking of their own healths at their end would pass unnoticed. So
they drank to one another, bowing gravely after the manner of their
seniors.

Michael had determined to take nothing but burgundy, and when he had
exchanged sentiments with the most of his year, he congratulated
himself upon the comparative steadiness of his head. Already in the
case of one or two reckless mixers he noticed a difficulty in deciding
how many times it was necessary to clip a cigar, an inclination to
strike the wrong end of a match and a confusion between right and left
when the decanters in their circulation paused before them.

After the first tumult of good wishes had died down, Marjoribanks
lifted his glass, looked along to where the freshmen were sitting and
shouted “Cuffe!” Cuffe hastily lifted his glass and answering
“Marjorie!” drained his salute of acknowledgment. Then he sat back in
his chair with an expression, Michael thought, very like that of an
actress who has been handed a bouquet by the conductor. But Cuffe was
not to be the only recipient of honor, for immediately afterward
Marjoribanks sang out “Lonsdale!” Lonsdale was at the moment trying to
explain to Tommy Grainger some trick with the skin of a banana which
ought to have been an orange and a wooden match which ought to have
been a wax vesta. Michael, who was sitting next to him, prodded
anxiously his ribs.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Lonsdale indignantly. “Can’t you see I’m
doing a trick?”

“Marjoribanks is drinking your health,” whispered Michael in an agony
that Lonsdale would be passed over.

“Hurrah!” shouted Lonsdale, rising to his feet and scandalizing his
fellows by his intoxicated audacity. “Where is the old ripper!” Then
“Mark over!” he shouted and collapsed into Tommy Grainger’s lap.
Everybody laughed, and everybody, even the cynosures from New College
and University, began to drink Lonsdale’s health without heel-taps.

“No heelers, young Lonsdale,” they called mirthfully.

Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with
one hand on Michael’s shoulder, replied:

“No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!” Then he collapsed again.

Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk,
all the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael
and one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors
remained more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a
quizzical face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask
Michael some trifling piece of information, cried “Fane!” raising his
glass. Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and
drank what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other
senior men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks
himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An
immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life,
a conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever.
The wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At
the foot on the right was a little office—the office of Venables, the
steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of
seniority called Venner’s. Wine-chartered though they were, the
freshmen did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but
hurried out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.

Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of mediæval witches.
The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels
and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a
grotesque vivacity, as the vapors curled around them. The wine humming
in his head: the echoing shouts of his companions: the decorative
effect of the gowns: the chiming high above of the bells in the tower:
all combined to create for Michael a nightmare of exultation. He was
aware of a tremendous zest in doing nothing, and there flowed over him
a consciousness that this existence of shout and dance along these
cloisters was really existence lived in a perpetual expression of the
finest energy. The world seemed to be going round so much faster than
usual that in order to keep up with this new pace, it was necessary for
the individual like himself to walk faster, to talk faster, to think
faster, and finally to raise to incoherent speed every coherent
faculty. Another curious effect of the wine, for after all Michael
admitted to himself that his mental exhilaration must be due to
burgundy, was the way in which he found himself at every moment walking
beside a different person. He would scarcely have finished an excited
acceptance of Wedderburn’s offer to go to-morrow and look at some Dürer
woodcuts, when he would suddenly find himself discussing
sympathetically with Lonsdale the iniquity of the dons in refusing to
let him keep his new dog in one of the scouts’ pigeon-holes in the
lodge.

“After all,” Lonsdale pointed out earnestly, “they’re never really
full, and the dog isn’t large—of course I don’t expect to keep him in a
pigeon-hole when he’s full grown, but he’s a puppy.”

“It’s absurd,” Michael agreed.

“That’s the word I’ve been looking for,” Lonsdale exclaimed. “What was
it again? Absurd! You see what I say is, when one scout’s box is full,
move the poor little beast into another. It isn’t likely they’d all be
full at the same time. What was that word you found just now? Absurd!
That’s it. It is absurd. It’s absurd!”

“And anyway,” Michael pointed out, “if they were all full they could
chain him to the leg of the porter’s desk.”

“Of course they could. I say, Fane, you’re a damned good sort,” said
Lonsdale. “I wish you’d come and have lunch with me to-morrow. I don’t
think I’ve asked very many chaps: I want to show you that dog. He’s in
a stable off Holywell at present. Beastly shame! I’m not complaining,
of course, but what I want to ask our dons is how would they like to be
bought by me and shut up in Holywell?”

And just when Michael had a very good answer ready, he found himself
arm-in-arm with Wedderburn again, who was saying in his gravest voice
that over a genuine woodcut by Dürer it was well worth taking trouble.
But before Michael could disengage Wedderburn’s Dürer from Lonsdale’s
dog, he found himself running very fast beside Tommy Grainger who was
shouting:

“Five’s late again! Six, you’re bucketing! Bow, you’re late! Two,
_will_ you get your belly down!”

Then Grainger stopped suddenly and asked Michael in a very solemn tone
whether he knew what was the matter with the crew. Michael shook his
head and watched the others steer their devious course toward him and
Grainger.

“They’re too drunk to row,” said Grainger.

“Much too drunk,” Michael agreed.

When he had pondered for a moment or two his last remark, he discovered
it was extraordinarily funny. So he was seized with a paroxysm of
laughter, and the more he laughed, the more he wanted to laugh. When
somebody asked him what he was laughing at, he replied it was because
he had left the electric light burning in his room. Several people
seemed to think this just as funny as Michael thought it, and they
joined him in his mirth, laughing unquenchably until Wedderburn
observed severely in his deepest voice:

“Buck up, you’re all drunk, and they’re coming out of Venner’s.”

Then like some patient profound countryman he shepherded them all up to
the large room on a corner staircase of Cloisters, where the “after”
was going to be held. The freshmen squeezed themselves together in a
corner and were immensely entertained by the various performers,
applauding with equal rapture a light comedian from Pembroke, a tenor
from Corpus, a comic singer from Oriel and a mimic from professional
London. They drank lemon squashes to steady themselves: they joined in
choruses: they cheered and smoked cigars and grew more and more
conscious as the evening progressed that they belonged to a great
college called St. Mary’s. Their enthusiasm reached its zenith, when
the captain of the Varsity Eleven (a St. Mary’s man even as they were
St. Mary’s men) sang the St. Mary’s song in a voice whose gentleness of
utterance and sighing modesty in no way abashed the noisy appreciation
of the audience. It was a wonderful song, all about the triumphs of the
college on river and cricket-field, in the Schools, in Parliament and
indeed everywhere else. It had a fine rollicking chorus which was
repeated twice after each verse. And as there were about seventeen
verses, by the time the song was half over the freshmen had learned the
words and were able to sing the final chorus with a vigor which
positively detonated against the windows and contrasted divertingly
with the almost inaudible soloist.

Last of all came Auld Lang Syne, when everybody stood up on chairs and
joined hands, seniors, second-year men and freshmen. Auld Lang Syne
ended with perhaps the noisiest moment of all because although Lonsdale
had taken several lemon squashes to steady himself, he had not taken
enough to keep his balance through the ultimate energetic repetition,
when he collapsed headlong into a tray of syphons and glasses, dragging
with him two other freshmen. But nobody seemed to have hurt himself,
and downstairs they all rushed, shouting and hulloaing, into the cool
moonlight.

The guests from New College and University and the “out-of-college” men
hurried home, for it was close upon midnight. In the lodge the freshmen
foregathered for a few minutes with the second-year men, and as they
talked they knew that the moment was come when they must proclaim
themselves free from the restrictions of school, and by the kindling of
a bonfire prove that they were now truly grown up. Bundles of faggots
were seized from the scouts’ holes: in the angle of St. Cuthbert’s quad
where the complexion of the gravel was tanned by the numberless
bonfires of past generations the pile of wood grew taller and taller:
two or three douches of paraffin made the mass readily inflammable: a
match was set, and with a roar the bonfire began. From their windows
second-year men, their faces lighted by the ascending blaze, looked
down with pleasant patronage upon the traditional pastime of their
juniors. The freshmen danced gleefully round the pyre of their boyhood,
feeding it with faggots and sometimes daringly and ostentatiously with
chairs: the heat became intense: the smoke surged upward, obscuring the
bland aspectful moon. Slowly upon the group of law-breakers fell a
silence, as they stood bewitched by the beauty of their own handiwork.
The riotous preparations and annunciatory yells had died away to an
intimate murmur of conversation. From the lodge came Shadbolt the
unctuous head-porter to survey for a moment this mighty bonfire:
conscious of their undergraduate dignity the freshmen chaffed him,
until he retired with muttered protests to summon the Dean.

“What will the Dean do?” asked one or two less audacious ones as they
faded into various doorways, ready to obliterate their presence as soon
as authority should arrive upon the scene.

“What does the Dean matter?” cried others, flinging more faggots on to
the fire until it crackled and spat and bellowed more fiercely than
ever, lighting up with its wavy radiance the great elms beyond the
Warden’s garden and the Palladian fragment of New quad whence the dons
like Georgian squires pondered their prosperity.

Presently against the silvery space framed by the gateway of St.
Cuthbert’s tower appeared the silhouette of the Dean, lank and tall
with college cap tip-tilted down on to his nose and round his neck a
gown wrapped like a shawl. Nearer he came, and involuntarily the
freshmen so lately schoolboys took on in their attitude a certain
anxiety. Somehow the group round the bonfire had become much smaller.
Somehow more windows looking upon the quad were populated with
flickering watchful faces.

“Great Scott! What can Ambrose do?” demanded Lonsdale despairingly, but
when at last the Dean reached the zone of the fire, there only remained
about eight freshmen to ascertain his views and test his power. The
Dean stood for a minute or two, silently warming his hands. In a ring
the presumed leaders eyed him, talking to each other the while with
slightly exaggerated carelessness.

“Well, Mr. Fane?” asked the Dean.

“Well, sir,” Michael replied.

“Damned good,” whispered Lonsdale ecstatically in Michael’s ear. “You
couldn’t have said anything better. That’s damned good.”

Michael under the enthusiastic congratulations of Lonsdale began to
feel he had indeed said something very good, but he hoped he would soon
have an opportunity to say something even better.

“Enjoying yourself, Mr. Lonsdale?” inquired the Dean.

“Yes, sir. Are you?” answered Lonsdale.

“Splendid,” murmured Michael.

A silence followed this exchange of courtesies. The bonfire was
beginning to die down, but nobody ventured under the Dean’s eye to put
on more faggots. Under-porters were seen drawing near with pails of
water, and though a cushion aimed from a window upset one pail, very
soon the bonfire was a miserable mess of smoking ashes and the moon
resumed her glory. From an upper window some second-year men chanted in
a ridiculous monotone:

“The Dean—he was the Dean—he was the Dean—he was the Dean! The Dean—he
was the Dean he was—the Dean he was—the Dean!!”

Mr. Ambrose did not bother to look up in the direction of the glee, but
took another glance at Michael, Lonsdale, Grainger and the other
stalwarts. Then he turned away.

“Good night,” Lonsdale called after the retreating figure of the tall
hunched don, and not being successful in luring him back, he poured his
scorn upon the defaulters safe in their rooms above.

“You are a lot of rotters. Come down and make another.”

But the freshmen were not yet sufficiently hardy to do this. One by one
they melted away, and Lonsdale marked his contempt for their
pusillanimity by throwing two syphons and his gown into the Warden’s
garden. After which he invited Michael and his fellow die-hards to
drink a glass of port in his rooms. Here for an hour they sat,
discussing their contemporaries.

In the morning Shadbolt was asked if anybody had been hauled for last
night’s bonner.

“Mr. Fane, Mr. Grainger and the Honorable Lonsdale,” he informed the
inquirer. Together those three interviewed the Dean.

“Two guineas each,” he announced after a brief homily on the
foolishness and inconvenience of keeping everybody up on the first
Sunday of term. “And if you feel aggrieved, you can get up a
subscription among your co-lunatics to defray your expenses.”

Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look
like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the
other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a
manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same
to-morrow.




CHAPTER III

THE FIRST TERM


His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more
intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that
first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which
somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged
a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly
to his own “year.” These trials of personality were conducted with all
the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness
when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous
impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed
sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into
a solitude of books. Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if
he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name
for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and
afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to
tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of
pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been
invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about
half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not
remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous
tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing
hospitality.

Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made
a general observation on the row of Sunday night’s celebration, Michael
proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.

“Were you in that gang?” Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
surprise.

“I was fined,” Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
creating.

“I say,” Carben sneered, “so at last one of the ‘bloods’ is going to
condescend to play Rugger. Jonah,” he called to the captain of the
Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
room, “we’ve got a college blood playing three-quarter for us.”

“Good work,” said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. “Where is he?”

Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.

“No end of a blood,” Carben went on. “Lights bonfires and gets fined
all in his first week.”

The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
wrists and their smug insignificance.

“You were at St. James’, weren’t you?” asked Jones. “Did you know
Mansfield?”

“I didn’t know him—exactly,” said Michael, “but—in fact—we thought him
rather a tick.”

“Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine,
but don’t apologize.”

There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s
guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,”
he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
something positively contemptible.

Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with
cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the
others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college.

“Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded.
“Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you
keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said
Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man
in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s
quite right.”

“Quite right,” a chorus echoed.

Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.;
he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion
of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael.
He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he
thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was
probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.

“These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was
wisely propounding.

“We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael
inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
rebuke.

“Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,”
Carben affirmed.

How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
a dismal genteelness.

“Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put
your name down for the Ugger.”

“The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence.

“The Union.”

Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
sponsorship of Carben.

“I don’t think I’ll join this term.”

He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment
apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St.
Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook
off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a
crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.

In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
along the table to Grainger:

“I say, Tommy, do you know we’ve got a Rugger rough with us?”

Several people murmured in surprise.

“I say, have you really been playing Rugger?”

“Well, great Scott!” exclaimed Michael, “there’s nothing very odd in
that.”

“But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men,” Lonsdale protested.

“Some are,” Michael admitted. “Still, it’s a better game than Socker.”

“But everybody at St. Mary’s plays Socker,” Lonsdale went on.

Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that
even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise
Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians
and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.
And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this
freshmen’s table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that
with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their
traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be
snuffed out ignominiously.

“Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger,” Michael asserted.

“Shall I have a shot?” suggested Lonsdale.

“It’s a most devilish good game,” Michael earnestly avowed.

“Tommy,” Lonsdale shouted, “I’m going to be a Rugger rough myself.”

“I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row,” said
Wedderburn severely.

“My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass,” chuckled the offender.

Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.

“Have you sconced me?” Lonsdale demanded.

The head of the table nodded.

Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown.
Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn’s
room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus
of Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all
very foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and
his auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn’s
return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited
him in his room to enjoy his displeasure.

Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between
two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He
continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with
a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet
many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them
to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his
own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was
content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones,
the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of
his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college.
Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it
seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the
protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a
curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they
lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they
sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they
gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.

“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked
Wedderburn.

“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other
to—I mean—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”

“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more
like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half
the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me.
We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is
a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that
D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books;
and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over
each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette
ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the
nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing
who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R.
four years from now.”

But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was
beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at
Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was
Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and
episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from
flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon
freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to
probe.

“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,”
said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s
a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private
school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for
about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and
how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly
obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had
nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk
about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”

“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my
rooms because I like them.”

“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued.
“There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For
instance, Avery——”

“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.

“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ‘Varsity Eleven,” said
Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”

“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.

“That’s exactly what he isn’t,” Michael contradicted.

“Damnable poseur,” Wedderburn rumbled.

“Oh, well, so are you,” said Michael.

He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery.
Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his
sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well.
But all the Carthusians at St. Mary’s dressed rather too well and
carried about with them the atmosphere of a week-end in a sporting
country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would
gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the
course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to—to what? To some
distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor
he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him
on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he
dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale.
Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art.
Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend for ever
Ardle’s dusty lectures on Cicero in order that for ever he might hear
Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to
glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause
Mr. Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his
Plato in a sadler’s shop, where he had found it necessary to complain
of a saddle newly made for him.

“But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not
delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale.”

“What’s he talking about?” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.

“Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane,” added the Senior Tutor dryly.

Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then
seeing by the lecturer’s face that something was still wrong, he
assumed a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the
situation he laughed very heartily and said:

“Oh, well, after all, it’s very much the same.” Then, as everybody else
laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his
trousers in gentle self-congratulation.

“Rum old buffer,” he whispered presently to Michael. “His eye gets very
glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?”

Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered
to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination
was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to
represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary’s, there might be added to the
list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with
charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael’s
collection as types. There was Grainger, last year’s Captain of the
Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the ‘Varsity in the spring.
Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and
listen for an hour at a time to his naïve theories of life. Grainger
seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he
exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to
himself was surprising.

“Great Scott, you are an odd chap,” Grainger once ejaculated.

“Why?”

“Why, you’re a clever devil, aren’t you, and you don’t seem to do
anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?”

“A good deal,” Michael admitted. “At least, it would be rot if I talked
it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way.”

“You _are_ a curious chap. I can’t make you out.”

“Why should you?” asked Michael. “You were never sent into this world
to puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as
you’re sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you’ll go into the
Egyptian Civil Service and you’ll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly
the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite
comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I
can’t imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them
wriggling under me.”

“I suppose you’re a Radical. They say you are,” Grainger lazily
announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.

“I suppose I might be,” said Michael, “if I wanted to proclaim myself
anything at all, but I’d much rather watch you sprawling effectively
and proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I’ve really very
little inclination to criticize people like you. It’s only in books I
think you’re a little boring.”

Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming
vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.

CARLINGTON ROAD,
_November 20th._

_Dearest Michael,_

_I’m so glad you’re still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it
would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you,
though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You’ll be glad
to hear that I’ve got rid of this tiresome house. I’ve sold it to a
retired Colonel—such an objectionable old man, and I’m really so
pleased he’s bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn because the
people next door were continually complaining of Stella’s piano, and
really Carlington Road has become impossible. Such an air of living
next door, and whenever I look out of the window the maid is shaking a
mat and looking up to see if I’m interested. We must try to settle on a
new house when you’re back in town. We’ll stay in a hotel for a while.
Stella has had to take a studio, which I do not approve of her doing,
and I cannot bear to see the piano going continually in and out of the
house. There are so many things I want to talk to you about—money, and
whether you would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we
could find a house at some other time._

_Your loving_
_Mother._

From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.

_My dear old Michael_,

_I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and I’ve
taken a studio here because the man next door—a most_ frightful
_bounder—said the noise I made went through and through his wife. As
she’s nearly as big round as the world, I wasn’t flattered. Mother is
getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange women come to the house
and talk about some society for dealing with Life with a capital
letter. I think we’re going to be rather well off, and Mother wants to
live in a house she’s seen in Park Street, but I want to take a house
in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like Cheyne Walk, because this house has got
a splendid studio in the garden and I thought with some mauve brocades
it would look perfectly lovely. There’s a very good_ paneled _room that
you could have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am
working at a Franck concerto. I’m being painted by rather a nice youth,
at least he would be nice, if he weren’t so much like a corpse. I
suppose you’ll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term._

_Yours ever,_
_Stella._

_P.S.—I’ve come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution
isn’t enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don’t think I
shall appear in public again until I’ve lived a little. I really think
life is rather exciting—unless it’s spelt with a capital letter._

Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation
in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would
have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He
was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the
privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word
to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with
Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.

Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by
giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his
friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had
been casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle
chattering groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought
out and balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal
dinner might, Michael thought, almost become with him a regular
function, so that people would learn to speak with interest and respect
of Fane’s terminal dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming
a club, a club strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as
really to preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate,
putting aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try
the effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided,
since that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward
arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be
Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose
a number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests
would change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he
felt that some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven
as the number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more
must be invited, and Michael without much further consideration
selected five freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness
drew them into prominence. But when he had given all the invitations
Michael was a little depressed by the conventional appearance of his
list. With the exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and
Avery, his list was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn
up by Grainger. As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of
correctness that overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at
the head of the table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed
round the table his terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that
on this occasion he had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe
moment of self-examination he characterized as “snobbishness.” In this
room at the Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun
and steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
eclectic society would have been out of place.

Only Avery’s loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
group.

“_Who’s_ that man wearing a pie-frill?” whispered Alan sternly from
Michael’s right.

Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.

“Avery allows himself a little license,” said Michael. “But, Alan, he’s
really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you
saw him on Sunday you’d think he was perfectly dressed. All Old
Carthusians are.”

But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
in common.

Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the
responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt
grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who
waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief
that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called
Castleton.

Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the
strongest influence in Michael’s year, and his friendship would be good
for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered
Castleton rather over-rated, but there was a superficial similarity
between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and
jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate
Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes
wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more
apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion
in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he
seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he
seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he
became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.

Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more
than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a
detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman,
and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would
certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of
St. Mary’s freshmen as this one might be considered. But a
representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had
intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with
distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne,
and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael’s desire to have
him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However,
it was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went
round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to
see his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.

Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and
smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale
discussed their individual excellencies.

“First of all,” said Lonsdale, “I want to propose the health of our
distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he’s a jolly
good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn’s a jolly good
fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good
fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend
Tommy Grainger—whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we
were boys together—I will here say that I confidently anticipate he
will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he’s a jolly good
fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name—all jolly good
fellows—except our host. He’s given us a good dinner and good wine and
good company, which nobody can deny. So here’s his health.”

Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering
procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were
all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed
through his first terminal dinner.




CHAPTER IV

CHEYNE WALK


The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house.
Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last
abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and
postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with
Stella’s support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem
of their new home.

Ultimately they fixed upon Chelsea, indeed upon that very house Stella
had chosen for its large studio separated by the length of a queer
little walled garden from the rest of the house. Certainly 173 Cheyne
Walk was better than 64 Carlington Road, thought Michael as, leaning
back against the parapet of the Embankment, he surveyed the mellow
exterior in the unreal sunlight of the January noon. Empty as it was,
it diffused an atmosphere of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and
peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed
to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil
interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering
indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either
side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the
three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the first story
all gave him much contemplative pleasure. He and his mother and Stella
had in three weeks visited every feasible quarter of London and as
Michael thought of Hampstead’s leaf-haunted by-streets, of the still
squares of Kensington, even of Camden Hill’s sky-crowned freedom, he
was sure he regretted none of them in the presence of this sedate house
looking over the sun-flamed river and the crenated line of the long
Battersea shore.

Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott
was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was
anxious to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend
of his father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years
ago, an intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he
was trying to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only
definite impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into
Michael’s palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and
angular with a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the
door. Michael crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr.
Prescott. Himself explained who he was and, opening the front door, led
the way into the empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after
room to Prescott, that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the
observation of the house than with a desire to achieve in regard to
Michael himself a tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun
that sloped thin golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare
rooms expressed for Michael something of the sensation which Prescott’s
attitude conveyed to him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth
that could most easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused
depths of his heart.

“I suppose you knew my father very well,” said Michael at last,
blushing as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.

“About as well as anybody,” said Prescott nervously. “Like to talk to
you about him some time. Better come to dinner. Live in Albany. Have a
soldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important
you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I’m almost what
you might call your guardian. Of course your mother’s a dear woman.
Known her for years. Always splendid to me. But she mustn’t get too
charitable.”

“Do you mean to people’s failings?” Michael asked.

Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what
Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak
out clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard
shyness of preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover,
this empty house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a
frankness and directness of intercourse that made absurd these
roundabout postponements of actual problems.

“Charitable to societies,” Prescott explained. “I don’t want her to
think she’s got to endow half a dozen committees with money and
occupation.”

“Stella’s a little worried about mother’s charities,” Michael admitted.

“Awful good sort, Stella,” Prescott jerked out. “Frightens me
devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very
much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out
of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father,” he
added vaguely.

“Did you know my father when he first met my mother?” Michael asked
directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong
account.

“Oh, yes, rather. I sent in my papers when he did. Chartered a yacht
and sailed all over the Mediterranean. Good gracious, twenty years ago!
How old we’re all getting. Poor old Saxby was always anxious that no
kind of”—Prescott gibbed at the word for a moment or two—“no kind of
slur should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have
had to meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there
was nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan, and yet he was always a
rattling good sort. Only of course your mother was always cut off from
women’s society. Couldn’t be helped, but I don’t want her now to overdo
it. Glad she’s taken this house, though. What are you going to be?”

Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at
the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house.
Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother’s graceful and elusive
presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich
associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance
to muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived
with Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of
chintz and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration
that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in
a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr.
Prescott listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of
admiring perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by
Mrs. Fane, and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it
would fly with greater certainty, until room by room and window by
window and corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and
appropriately arranged.

“I give full marks to Prescott,” said Stella later in the afternoon to
Michael. “He’s like a nice horse.”

“I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room,” said
Michael.

“Why?” demanded Stella.

And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find
one.

“Well, why not?” he at last very lamely replied.

There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between
Michael and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing,
while Mrs. Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street
Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the
multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael,
however, after the first thrills of selection had died down, must be
thinking about going up again and be content to look forward on the
strength of Stella’s energetic promises to coming down for the Easter
vacation and entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.

Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old
friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had
been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather
guilty because he had never been near his old school nor even walked
over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It
seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and
Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends.
All that Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing
past of old associations and of a sense of transition into a new life
that though as yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger
and worthier experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have
happened in Carlington Road.

On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms
in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the
darkness of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming
table in its center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the
soldier-servant and the half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the
walls of the great square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that
brooded outside the heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany
Michael was immeasurably aware of the life of London that was surging
such a little distance away; but in this modish cloister he felt that
the life he was aware of could never be dated, as if indeed were he to
emerge into Piccadilly and behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered
wigs they would not greatly surprise him. The Albany seemed to have
wrung the spirit from the noisy years that swept on their course
outside, to have snatched from each its heart and in the museum of this
decorous glass arcade to have preserved it immortally, exhibiting the
frozen palpitations to a sensitive observer.

“You’re not talking much,” said Prescott.

“I was thinking of old plays,” said Michael.

Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
perpetual present.

“Don’t often go to the theater nowadays,” said Prescott. “When Saxby
was alive”—Michael fancied that “alive” was substituted for something
that might have hurt his feelings—“we used to go a lot, but it’s dull
going alone.”

“Must you go alone?” asked Michael.

“Oh, no, of course I needn’t. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,”
repeated the host.

Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.

“Oh, yes, I think you are very like,” said Prescott. “Good Lord, what a
pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
more brain than many people thought, but of course,” Prescott hurriedly
added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
equipment, “of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary.”

“I like to be ordinary,” Michael said; “but I’m not.”

“Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
over by a train,” said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. “You
know, I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he added. “Here you are all
provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
sister. Why, you might do anything.”

“What, for example?” queried Michael.

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s the Diplomatic Service. But don’t be in a
hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
hundred a year at St. Mary’s. And when you’re twenty-one you come into
roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you’ll have at
least two thousand a year. But don’t be a young ass. You’ve been
brought up quietly. You haven’t _got_ to cut a dash. Don’t get in a
mess with women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get
out of it.”

“I don’t care much about women,” said Michael. “They’re disappointing.”

“What, already?” exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.

Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to
the attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark
discreet room, and the Albany’s atmosphere of passion squeezed into the
mold of contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of
Thackeray’s books, all combined to affect Michael with the idea that
his life had been lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his
host, and as the rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he
beheld the old impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious,
the sensitive slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the
gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity
to-morrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of
finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the
circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table
he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it
was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the
other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some
of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of
his host was receding farther and farther every moment, and his
conversation reached Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of
light, while finally he was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly
and with a half-defiant independence of precisely what he wished to
say. The evening swam past comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of
the cigar smoke the figure of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy
armchair took on once again a definite corporeal existence. A clock on
the mantelpiece chimed the twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of
silvery apology for obtruding the hour. Michael came back into himself
with a start of confusion.

“I say, I must go.”

Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.

“I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I
think I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night.”

“No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted
Prescott.

And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the
labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would
lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably
have mildly entertained his host.

“Nothing,” he finally decided.

Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle
of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal
and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth
more beautiful.

After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped
endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
before.

Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner
with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his
birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair
before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of
the dinner.

“You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott,”
he affirmed. “I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant.”

“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”

“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should
have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the
silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
third cigar.”

Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his
outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the
terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better
suit his mantelpiece.

“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.

“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery.
“You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the
Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”

“What, for example?” Michael asked.

“Oh, write perhaps.”

“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed
to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy,
what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”

“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling
you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”

Michael laughed.

“And you’ll contribute,” Avery went on eagerly.

“How much?”

“I’m talking about articles. I shall call my paper—well, I haven’t
thought about the title—but I shall get a good one. It won’t be like
the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with
art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won’t be decadent.
It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it
might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass.”

“Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production,” said Michael. “I
should call it The World Turned Upside Down.”

“I’m perfectly serious about this paper,” said Avery reproachfully.

“And I’m taking you very seriously,” said Michael. “That’s why I won’t
write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?”

“We might have one drawing. I’m not quite sure how much it costs to
reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather
advanced stuff.”

“Well, as long as you don’t publish drawings that look as if the
compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at
it, and as long as——”

“Oh, shut up,” interrupted the dreaming editor, “and don’t fall into
that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It’s so young.”

“But I am young,” Michael pointed out with careful gravity. “So are
you. And, Maurice, really you know for me my own ambitions are best.
I’ve got a great sense of responsibility, and if I were to start going
through life trying to do things, I should worry myself all the time.
The only chance for me is to find a sort of negative attitude to life
like Prescott. You’ll do lots of things. I think you’re capable of
them. But I’d rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I’d
give anything to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are.
But I’m not. I’ve got a sister whom you ought to meet. She’s got all
the positive energy in our family. I can’t explain, Maurice, just
exactly what I’m feeling about existence at this moment, unless I tell
you more about myself than I possibly can—anyway yet a while. I don’t
want to do any harm, and I don’t think I could ever feel I was in a
position to do any good. Look here, don’t let’s talk any more. I meant
to dream myself into an attitude to-night, and you’ve made me talk like
an earnest young convert.”

“I think I’ll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper,” said
Avery excitedly.

“He thinks you’re patronizing,” Michael warned him.

Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:

“Does he? I wonder why.”

“But he won’t, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced
drawings.”

“Doesn’t he like me?” persisted Avery. “I’d better not go round to his
rooms.”

“Don’t be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled
vanity.”

When Avery had hesitatingly embarked upon his expedition to Wedderburn,
Michael thought rather regretfully of his presence and wished he had
been more sympathetic in his reception of the great scheme. Yet perhaps
that was the best way to have begun his own scheme for not being
disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to
reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be
no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life,
Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books should give him
his adventures. Actually he almost made up his mind to retire even from
the observation of reality, so much had he felt, all this Christmas
vacation, the dominance of Stella and so deeply had he been impressed
by Prescott’s attitude of inscrutable commentary.

Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled
round to Wedderburn’s rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in
contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford
Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old
lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling
touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm
friendship—so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be
nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the
birth of this undergraduate bantling.

“Though what exactly you want me to do,” protested Michael, “I don’t
quite know.”

“We want money, anyway,” Avery frankly admitted. “Oh, and by the way,
Michael, I’ve asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you
up.”

“What on earth for?” gasped Michael.

“Oh, they’ll want supers. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. Great
sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of
Morocco.”

“But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?”
Michael inquired gently.

In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and
not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary’s freshmen,
including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the
rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though
Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of
seeing Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco
and Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional
actresses who came up from London to take part in the production.

“I think I ought to have played Lorenzo,” said Lonsdale seriously to
Michael, just before the first night. “I think Miss Delacourt would
have preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I’m only a
gondolier, an attendant, and a soldier.”

Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It
seemed to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs.
There had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in “my
Lorenzo.”

“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael
observed.

“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,”
Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I
wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign
Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a
chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t
forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she
threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I
never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”

Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice
Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy
all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals
in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping
sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a
gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men
from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the
individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the
individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one
day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to
lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.

“Well, what of it?” said Michael. “He probably wants to borrow your
dog.”

“He says he’s at Lincoln,” Lonsdale stammered.

“So he is.”

“Well, I don’t know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something
of Oxford?”

The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great
success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old
members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told
long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the
auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the
disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their
various Toggers to victory.

Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger
almost swinging the St. Mary’s boat into the apprehensive stern of the
only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening
his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The
Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in
that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and
Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path
beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary’s failed to catch the
boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his
own way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.

Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement
of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his
mother’s particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him,
but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room
in turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.

There was his mother’s own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions
and curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was
Stella’s bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly
mediæval, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room
with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue
and crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.

“I haven’t done anything but just have it whitewashed,” she said. “I
wanted you to choose the scheme, as I’m going to make all the noise.”

The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
his sister entered it.

“But it’s absolutely empty,” he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
in all that space except Stella’s piano, looking now almost as small
and graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.

“You shall decorate the room,” she said. “What will you choose?”

Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries
and blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude
and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples,
with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet,
even as Michael’s fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions,
his mind swiftly returned to the keyboard’s alternations of white and
black, so that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric
significance.

“I don’t think we want anything,” he finally proclaimed. “Just two or
three tall chairs and a mask of somebody—Beethoven perhaps—and black
silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn’t go with elaborate
decorations.”

So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
listen to the muffled sound of Stella’s notes. Never had any entrance
seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the
power and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room
was larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed
chair, Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the
sun, would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these
clear melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the
high-backed chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space
itself. Alan sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played
and played, Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him
the union that already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the
joy of life on the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have
always someone fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.

“By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers,” said
Alan.

Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark’s powerful
wings.

April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had
been none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the
contemporary residents could ever have walked along its moderately
cheerful uniformity.

Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a
visit to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more
depressing than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the
sensation of constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that
was imposed upon his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as
he wandered between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom
of the river Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess
the narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses
did not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost
seeming to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather
the impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of
insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to
the tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble
flaunting of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically
by the dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a
spirit haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former
territory so much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington
Road. When he reached the house itself, he was able to expel his
sentiment for the past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new
owner had dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the
door, the number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him
that this was indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so
hardly with the problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree
that, once an object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction
to the threshold of this house when every area down the road owned a
lime-tree identical in age and growth.

Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
lived.

It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that
never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past.
Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself
the game of vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of
clouds which the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he
had done this a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure
again the vision he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible
ever to remember the exact moment of falling asleep.

After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to
himself with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at
the corner of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of
Ulalume, and Michael found himself murmuring, “Of my most immemorial
year,” half expectant of Lily’s slim form swaying toward him, half
blushful already in breathless anticipation of the meeting.

Down the road a door opened. Michael’s heart jumped annoyingly out of
control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated
in the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed,
and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps.
Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names
of house-agents, that several “to let” boards leaned confidentially
over the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who
was whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew
where Mrs. Haden had gone.

“I wish I did,” said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. “No, sir,
I’m afraid I don’t. Nor anybody else.”

“You mean they went away in a hurry,” said Michael shamefaced.

“Yes, sir.”

“And left no address?”

“Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen’s bills in the hall.”

Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but
glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with
the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably
defeated.

In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room
staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his
discovery.

“I’m glad you’re not going to start that business again,” she said.
“And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall
soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for
me disinterestedly and without prejudice.”

“What sort of difficulties?” Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her
cheeks warm with the evening light.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she half whispered. “But let’s go away together in
the summer and not even take a piano.”




CHAPTER V

YOUTH’S DOMINATION


On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary’s hymned the rising
sun, Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible
expression of his own mental image of Oxford’s completeness, to pierce
in one dazzling moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts
which had restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful
obscurity about his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the
city, as it were, imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity
of his evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence
of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the
merely outward glory of its repository.

All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily
upon the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the
cold hues and blushes of the sun’s youth, that stood as symbol for so
much here in St. Mary’s, made of the east one great shell of lucent
color. The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of
dawn and sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys
gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic
visitors came half shyly through the portal that was to give such a
sense of time’s rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible:
dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and
at last the tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and
Lonsdale and Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides
equipped in cap and gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding
stairs to the top.

For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the
tower’s top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the
sun mounted into the day.

Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as
emmets at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to
stand. Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent
hurtling outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of
the town scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.

Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the
heart of England. He had refused Maurice’s invitation to a somewhat
mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the
almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he
was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan,
now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning
celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far
afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college
shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign
of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement
of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After
breakfast it would still be only about seven o’clock with a hot-eyed
languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost
decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and
walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the
lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed
incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which
had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate
a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he
extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary
impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.

It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more
typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the
sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double
irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was
glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in
the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at
the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice’s
mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
went back to the river’s bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn’s name, and deliberately he
did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
flowing into the ancestral Thames.

Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.

At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary
inmate. His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat,
but continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on
the table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the
table by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still
fixed upon his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a
cipher and regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in
his silent company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this
strange youth with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately
carved countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing
instead of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his
waistcoat. Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker
up his pale forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate
examined the food on the plate before him.

“I think it’s rather cold by now,” said Michael, unable to keep silence
any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.

“I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
I’d read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you
now, you’d think I was an affected ass,” he drawled.

Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.

“They’re all equally bad,” the poet proclaimed gloomily. “What made you
come to this inn? I didn’t know that anybody else except me had ever
been here. You’re at the Varsity, I suppose?”

Michael with a nod announced his college.

“I’m at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest
undergraduates in Oxford.”

“I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary’s,” Michael suggested.

“Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary’s man. I
refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know.”

“Oh, rather. In fact, he’s rather a friend of mine. He’s keen on
starting a paper just at present.”

“I know. I know,” said the poet. “He’s asked me to be one of the
forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?”

“I was invited to be,” Michael admitted. “But instead I’m going to
subscribe some of the capital required. My name’s Fane.”

“Mine’s Hazlewood. It’s rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.
Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere
else. But they’ve got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go
two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have
you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris
weighing the charms of Helen—no—on second thoughts I’m being forced.
Don’t encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?”

“I don’t know,” said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest
roast chicken he had ever seen. “I think I missed a turning. I’ve been
at Lechlade all day.”

“We may as well ride back together,” Hazlewood proposed.

After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and
then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.
Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.

“Do you know many Balliol people?” he asked.

Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting
in The Merchant of Venice.

“I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my
rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea
they’re keeping a chapel, or else it’s a relief from the unparagoned
brutality of the college architecture.”

Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his
rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how
many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax
candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive
candlesticks of wrought iron.

“Mr. Fane of St. Mary’s,” said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was
dimly aware of multitudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur
of expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.

“I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?” the
chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.

“Forgot all about it,” said Hazlewood. “But I suppose I can bring a
visitor.”

Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied
criticism of the expostulation.

“Sit down,” said Hazlewood peremptorily. “If I can’t bring a visitor I
resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will
have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us
his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediæval Warfare.”

“Don’t be an affected ass, Guy,” said Comeragh. “You know you yourself
are reading a paper on The Sonnet.”

“Rise from the noble lord,” said Hazlewood. “The first I’ve had in a
day’s fishing. I say, Fane, don’t listen to this rot.”

The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host
and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.

Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was
sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the
experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to
whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood’s room was
the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth
for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary’s
he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or
Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood’s, nor would he have
exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in
Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.
He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over
the tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon
their martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the
level voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing
sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco
smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated
loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the
discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green
curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and
with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the
tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the
decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members
of the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and
earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous,
sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more
delightful.

Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most
unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made
up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that
from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with
Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room
would stand as representatives of the college.

“Yes, I should think so,” said Hazlewood. “Why, are you making
exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes
an American to do that really well, you know.”

“But what is the essential Balliol?” Michael demanded.

“Who could say so easily? Perhaps it’s the same sort of spirit,
slightly filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in
Elizabethan England.”

Michael asked for a little more elaboration.

“Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by
birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste
not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be
ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with
Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.”

“Will that description serve for yourself?” Michael asked.

“For me? Oh, great scott, no! I’m utterly deficient in proconsular
ambitions.”

They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend
after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his
acquaintance with Balliol.

When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with
Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford
Looking-Glass. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen
to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his
day.

“_The Oxford Looking-Glass,_” Avery began, “_is intended to reflect
contemporary undergraduate thought._”

“I prefer ‘will reflect,’” Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of
positive opinion.

“I don’t think it very much matters,” said Michael, “as long as you
don’t think that ‘contemporary undergraduate thought’ is too
pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror,
for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate
thought ever reaches toward reality.”

Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism,
and the chief promoter went on:

_“Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will
be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama.”_

“I think that’s a rotten sentence,” Michael interrupted.

“Well, of course, it will be polished,” Avery irritably explained.
“What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as
simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at.”

“Ah!” Michael agreed, smiling. “Now I’m beginning to understand.”

“_It may be assumed_,” Avery went on, “_that the opinion of those who
are ‘knocking at the door_’ (in inverted commas)——”

“I shouldn’t think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a
door in inverted commas,” Michael observed.

“Look here, Michael,” Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously,
“will you shut up, or you won’t be allowed to contribute.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door
in Ibsen?” fretfully demanded Maurice. “_That the opinion of those who
are knocking at the door,_” he continued defiantly, “_is not unworthy
of an audience._”

“But if they’re knocking at a door,” Michael objected, “they can’t be
reflected in a mirror; unless it’s a glass door, and if it’s a glass
door, they oughtn’t to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don’t
knock hard, there isn’t much point——”

“_The Editor in chief_,” pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael’s
attempt to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass,
“_will be M. Avery (St. Mary’s), with whom will be associated C. St. C.
Wedderburn (St. Mary’s), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary’s), V. L. A. Townsend
(B.N.C.)_. I haven’t asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he’s sure
to join because he’s very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill
Mowbray’s very bucked at the scheme. He’s just resigned from the
Russell and joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the
principal speakers are going to follow Chamberlain’s lead for
Protection. _N. R. Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most
tremendously keen, and rather a good man to have, as he’s had two poems
taken by The Saturday Review already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_——”

“That’s the man I’ve come to talk about,” said Michael. “I met him
to-day.”

Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear
he had been considered interesting. “For in his own way,” said Avery
solemnly, “he’s about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I’d sooner
have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you
and Wedders,” he added quickly. “I’m going to take this prospectus
round to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make.”

Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a
large number of suggestions. “And he’s got a sense of humor,” he added
consolingly.

For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the
preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary
discussions gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the
O.U.D.S. or the Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year
men) belonged. Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass
the organ of advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for
Townsend to be as advanced as he chose within the limits of the space
allotted to his progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole
of the magazine to drama, especially since under the expanding
ambitions of editorship he had come to the conclusion he was a critic
himself, and so was the more firmly disinclined to let slip the
trenchant opportunity of pulverizing the four or five musical comedies
that would pass through the Oxford theater every term. However,
Townsend’s demand for the drama and nothing but the drama was mitigated
by his determination as a Liberal that The Oxford Looking-Glass should
not be made the mouthpiece of the New Toryism represented by Mowbray;
and Maurice was able to recover the control of the dramatic criticism
by representing to Townsend the necessity for such unflinching
exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston Club principles as would
balance Mowbray’s torrential leadership of the Tory Democrats. “So
called,” Townsend bitterly observed, “because as he supposed they were
neither Tories nor Democrats.”

Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the
personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had
astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then
just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the
Boer war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always
thronged with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and
whizzed about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but
less dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.

Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried
sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity.
As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity,
whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers’ eggs or keeping an
early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing
tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and
Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with
two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a
ramshorn of snuff and glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.

With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
Wedderburn’s Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
Hazlewood’s genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
result into a soufflée of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute,
outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine
along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in
the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he
had hailed from St. Mary’s tower, this dream of youth’s domination set
against the gray background of time’s endurance that was itself spun of
the fabric of dreams.

Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term’s end,
inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding
river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to
destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass
Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted
to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the
text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did
Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by
trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates
have better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most
inaccurate geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held
against the bank by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at
ease, the world became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise
of life no more than the monotony of a river’s lapping, or along the
level water meadows a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when
supper was eaten by figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures
that afterward drifted slowly down to college under the tree-entangled
stars and flitting assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the
rustle of a bird’s wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match
dropped idly over the side of the canoe. This was the season when for a
long while people sat talking at open windows, and from the Warden’s
garden came sweetly up the scent of May flowers.

Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of
the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan’s
room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important
was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to
bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of
leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to
cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect
valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of
the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.

Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that
he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the
festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not
inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by
certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to
her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection
of normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors.
Besides, though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his
self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the
battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage
criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen’s table
was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and
sister.

So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free
to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so
debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and
cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon
mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his
father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent
two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.

“After all, they can only spend the day,” he sighed hopefully to
Michael, “You’ll come and help me through lunch, won’t you, and we’ll
rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is
rowed. I was an ass to ask them. You won’t mind being bored a bit by my
governor? I believe he’s considered quite a clever man.”

Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished
diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son’s estimate.

“They’re arriving devilish early,” said Lonsdale, coming up to
Michael’s room with an anxious face on the night before.

Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as
it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael’s door.

“Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the
station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the
three of them at once. I think you’d better talk about wine to the
governor. It’ll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated.
Tell him how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing
in late from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of
the governor’s port from Tommy’s rooms in Parsons’ Quad.”

Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without
fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next
morning.

“I say, you’ve come frightfully early,” Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and
Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.

“Well, we can walk round my old college,” suggested Lord Cleveden
cheerfully. “I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford
nowadays.”

“I say, I’m awfully sorry to let you in for this,” Lonsdale whispered
to Michael. “Don’t encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around
at the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something.”

Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking
round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of
bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.

“I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?” asked Michael as they
stood in Peckwater.

“Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap,
he died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about
much.”

“Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott,” said Michael hurriedly.

“Dick Prescott? Good gracious!” Lord Cleveden exclaimed, “I haven’t
seen him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his
life, to be sure.”

“Did he?” asked Michael, well aware of the question’s folly, but
incapable of not asking it.

“Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal.”

“Oh,” gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden
about his father.

“I can’t remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this
one. Saxby’s I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.
Let’s go up and ask the present owner to let us look in,” Lord Cleveden
proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.

“Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no,” protested his son. “No, no; he
may have people with him. Really.”

“Ah, to be sure,” Lord Cleveden agreed. “What a pity!”

“And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary’s before lunch,” Lonsdale
announced.

“Do they make meringues here nowadays?” inquired Lord Cleveden
meditatively.

“No, no,” Lonsdale assured him. “They’ve given up since the famous cook
died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary’s. And our
crême caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they’ve got at the
House.”

The tour of St. Mary’s was conducted with almost incredible rapidity,
because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted
everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the
kitchen.

“Why didn’t you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?” Lady
Cleveden inquired.

“My dear mother,” said Arthur, “he’s quite impossible.”

“But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man,” said Lady Cleveden,
“and always asks us to stay with him when we’re in Scotland.”

“Yes, but we never are,” Lonsdale pointed out. “And I’m sorry to hurt
your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is
really absolutely impossible. He’s the very worst type of Harrovian.”

Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that
Mackintosh was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind,
and urged a theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly
have declined rather offensively.

“He’s not a very bonhomous lad,” said Lonsdale, and with that sentence
banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.

After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought
to take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed
down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the
pleasure craft of St. Mary’s bobbed at their moorings.

Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his
sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into
respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse
himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications
of his opinion he disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the
punt. Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with
the air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity
was no longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave
superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the
navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of
the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.

“Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these
toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own.” This comment
was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so
audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull
fury. “Try and get along, please, sir. You’re holding up the whole
river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices’ competition.”

After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back
to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of
sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and
mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea
and then buzz off at once to see the first division row.

“I think we shall go head to-night,” Lonsdale predicted very
confidentially. “I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar
yesterday.”

But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale’s
people to see St. Mary’s bump New College in front of their own barge,
and afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with
the westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox’s blazer and
shine more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his
buttonhole.

“Now you’ve just got time to catch your train,” said Lonsdale, when the
sound of the last pistol-shots and plaudits had died away. And “Phew!”
he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, “how
frightfully tiring one’s people are when imported in bulk!”

Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second;
and without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for
Pass Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the
end of the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of
the most low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the
candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly
blows they had received below their intellectual belts.

It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the
last week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a
good deal of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest
justification, and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had
stayed on the river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great
expense of energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off
indigestion.

On one of these merry nights toward one o’clock somebody suggested that
the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who
had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt
act of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This
derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment
known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park,
and it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so
that surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.

Half a dozen freshmen—Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and
Michael—all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the
amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael
alone possibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been
one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in
the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The
others were more vaguely injured by Smithers’ hitherto undisturbed
existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his
accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was
determined to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to
follow the fashion.

Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers
from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass
and paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm
before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers’ reformation kept
them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of
guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself
might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside
Smithers’ open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first
man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the
sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric
light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the
crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows
of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment
an unworthy impulse in every heart.

The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were
evidently Smithers’ people, photographs like the groups in the parlors
of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid’s mantelpiece.

“I say, look at that fringe,” gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and
Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.

Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers’ room, began
to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that
stood in the background of this splendid “college career” of Percy or
Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded
to counterbalance “Smithers.” No doubt the champagne in gradual
reaction was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn
each tribute from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak
room dedicated for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much
inclined to detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go
to bed. What seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was
that on the evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the
ascetic glories of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently
no classical scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate
for the scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was
at St. Mary’s to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by
competing on behalf of the college and the university in scientific
knowledge with newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham.
Smithers was merely an advertisement of Oxford’s democratic
philanthropy, and would only gain from his university a rather inferior
training in chemistry at a considerably greater personal cost but with
nothing else that Oxford could and did give so prodigally to others
more fortunately born.

At this point in Michael’s meditations Smithers woke up, and from the
bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The
reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a
long nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway
between his two rooms.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” he gasped. “What are you fellers doing in my
sitting-room?”

It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to take down from the wall
what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers’ mother in order to
examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick
with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe’s grasp, and
shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled
through the open window into the deer-park.

Cuffe’s expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very
heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from
damaging Smithers’ humble property and even from annoying any more
Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.

“I say, we can’t let that poor devil run about all night in the park
with that picture,” said Grainger. “Let’s catch him and explain we got
into his rooms by mistake.”

“I hope he won’t throw himself into the river or anything,” murmured
Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his
reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever
lighting upon him personally.

“I say, for goodness’ sake, let’s catch him,” begged Michael, who had
visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street
that her son had died in defending her enlargement.

Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its
verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.

“It’s like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Michael said to
Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers,
running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was
undimmed by boughs.

He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at
once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew,
for by this time the unwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of
voices in the Fellows’ sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who
supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing
against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an
entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead
branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round
tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down
into the rose-beds of the Warden’s garden and by one supreme effort of
endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert’s quad.

“By Jove, that was a topping rag,” puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six
glasses with welcome drink. “I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He
said: ‘It’s no use you putting your coat over your ’ead, sir, because I
knows you by your gait.’”

“I wonder what happened to Smithers,” said Michael.

“Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher,” Avery asserted. “I don’t
know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary’s.”

“A bounder like what?” asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room
during Avery’s expression of opinion.

Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the
evening’s rag was provided for his entertainment.

“But why don’t you let that poor devil alone?” demanded the listener.

At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive
reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted
that men like him were very bad for the college.

Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton,
determined to probe through the medium of Castleton’s common sense and
Wykehamist notions the ethical and æsthetic rights of people like
Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.

“After all, Oxford wasn’t founded to provide an expensive three years
of idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like
Cuffe,” Castleton pointed out.

“No, no,” Michael agreed, “but no institution has ever yet remained
true to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance,
or Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved
into something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may
have departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful
purpose in the scheme of social order.”

“Oh, I’m not grumbling at what Oxford is,” Castleton went on. “I simply
suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority,
to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving
no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are
supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I
should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the
majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way
in with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of
hatred which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all
of us.”

Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m afraid I’m too lazy to do much more than
deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I’m
beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The
Spectator might talk, to bed.”

The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton
to his rooms. St. Mary’s tower against the sky opening like a flower
seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward
immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social
distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and
clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in
beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed,
spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And
suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside
the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the
sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those
who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.

Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to
invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect
that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might
embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself
with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied
that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more
charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the
experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the
doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.




CHAPTER VI

GRAY AND BLUE


When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty
historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic
enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he
found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never
lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as
a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with
which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world
of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability
Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed
exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought
that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the
great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had
been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of
romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the
more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in
Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less
conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized
that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.

Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster
and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of
other women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their
company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with
which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost
as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be
independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to
make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to
society.

“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella
irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for
the whole of a hot summer afternoon.

“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained.
“And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a
rotten time really when she was traveling round.”

“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,” said Michael, “and
now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”

“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think
if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so
utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other
people would make me vague.”

“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.

“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to
make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the
vagueness came after she ran away with father.”

Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.

“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he
said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”

“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I
believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her
past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost
dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little
things, you’d think—however, as I know you have rather a dread of
perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”

“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the
freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though
he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted
child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was
really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him
to turn theories into practice.

“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that
professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you
ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly
sympathetic.”

Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which
made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.

“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael
grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy
so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever
you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”

For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again
the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a
rage.

A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away
into the country.

“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.

Michael sighed.

“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half
promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up
Mental Science—so interesting and quite different from Christian
Science.”

“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.

Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very
much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.

“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has
been quite long enough in London for the present.”

“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking
coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You
grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really
necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”

“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a
matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall,
and I think I’ll go.”

The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice
Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined
them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in
reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of
England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of
Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a
request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the
reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October,
arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much
money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation
not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.

The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and
they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to
pieces.

“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one
evening.

“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.

Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.

“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”

“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,”
Castleton observed. “The sign-posts are like incantations.”

“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects
me profoundly sometimes.”

Hazlewood laughed.

“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by
anything,” he prophesied.

Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.

“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist——”

“Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a
laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”

“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected
sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and
you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I
shall ever come to Cornwall again.”

With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.

“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish
novelists—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”

“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.

“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent
weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to
solve their problems and if Maurice weren’t always so facile with the
right emotion at the right moment.”

“I’ve got a presentiment to-night,” said Michael, and not wishing to
say more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to
admit as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.

Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
or was it merely thunder in the air?

Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:

_join me here rather quickly._

Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.

It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.

“I’m really awfully worried,” he said aloud to himself, as through the
stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
Charing Cross.

Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than
the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken
his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of
half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies
and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine
types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and
those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper
windows.

Stella’s address was near the Quai d’Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
found she was living in rooms over a bookseller’s shop with a view of
the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.

Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist’s
justification. Stella’s chestnut hair streamed down her straight back
like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.

Yet, for all Michael’s relief at finding Stella at least superficially
all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa
Vine whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend
for Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that
he had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning,
and Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to
abandon music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris
come walking.

The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river’s
bank.

“Well,” said Michael at last, “why did you wire for me?”

“I wanted you.”

Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
Stella’s impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
fancy for his company.

Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
she had written to a letter.

“Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
an artist, that there was also life to be lived?”

Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just
how she proposed to put her theory to the test.

“I told you that a youth was painting me.”

“But you also said he looked like a corpse,” Michael quickly
interjected. “You surely haven’t fallen in love with somebody who looks
like a corpse?”

“I’m not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,”
Stella admitted.

Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the
fellow’s presumption.

“I never yet met a painter who had very much inside,” he commented.

“But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you’ll confess that your
acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather
small.”

Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive
hostility.

“And I suppose this chap is in Paris now,” he said. “Well, I can’t do
anything. I suppose for a long time now you’ve been making a fool of
yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?”

He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in
love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom
he had never seen.

“I’ve certainly not been making a fool of myself,” Stella flamed. “But
I thought I would rather you were close at hand.”

“And who’s this Clarissa Vine?” Michael indignantly demanded.

“She’s the girl I traveled with to Paris.”

“But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that
studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk.”

By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all
this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of
the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.

“I can’t bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she’ll
sit and talk hot air till three o’clock in the morning. I shall go
mad,” Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futili

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