THE OXFORD CIRCUS
[Illustration: “’ULLO, DEARIE!”]
THE OXFORD CIRCUS
A NOVEL OF OXFORD AND YOUTH
by the late ALFRED BUDD
Edited with Memoir but no Portrait by
HAMISH MILES AND
RAYMOND MORTIMER
ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN KETTELWELL
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED
LONDON VIGO STREET W.1. MCMXXII
_Printed in Great Britain by_
Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
None of the characters in this book are entirely imaginary.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
ALFRED BUDD: A MEMOIR 3
BOOK I: VORTEX
I INTROIT 13
II PLINTH 29
III TOCCATA AND FUGUE 47
IV CIRCEAN 62
V GUERRILLA 76
VI VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE 90
VII JOSS AND REREDOS 97
VIII HALLALI 121
BOOK II: APEX
IX EKLOGOS 137
X OPEN DIAPASON 151
XI SPATE 164
XII FUNAMBULESQUE 181
XIII CHAMPAIGN 198
XIV COLOPHON 222
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“’Ullo, Dearie!” _Frontis_
FACING PAGE
“Dear Mongo!” 42
“Non à tout,” was Gaveston’s answer 134
Spiritual wrestling with young Bob Limber 184
“Bladge!” came the unanimous cry 214
“Renan,” he replied firmly 234
THE OXFORD CIRCUS
Alfred Budd: A Memoir
Entrusted with the literary remains of the late Alfred Budd, we
think it fitting to provide the reading public, however briefly and
inadequately, with some particulars of his life. They are, alas, only
too few (Fate saw to that), but they may serve to indicate those forces
of heredity and environment which worked to produce his remarkable
novel, _The Oxford Circus_.
Alfred, as he was known to his intimates, was himself inclined to
believe that, in some bygone age, a noble ancestor of his had founded
the South Devon sea-side resort of Budleigh Salterton, where one
summer he himself spent a happy fortnight. But our own researches[1]
have disclosed no earlier trace of his family until Hosea Budd appears,
in mid-Victorian days, as a general dealer in the pretty Flintshire
village of Llwynphilly. He prospered, and his only son Albert, soon
after taking Orders in the Church of England, took to wife Megan
Meard, the daughter of a Shropshire corn-factor. The sole issue of
this happy union was a boy, christened Alfred Hosea, after his two
grandfathers--the future author of _The Oxford Circus_. The Meards, it
is interesting to note, boasted a Huguenot origin, and from this strain
perhaps was derived our author’s keen appreciation of the language and
culture of France.
[1] We should like here to acknowledge the devoted help
afforded us at the Public Records Office by Miss Agatha
Anderleigh, B.Litt., than whom England has no more experienced
genealogist.
Too delicate by far to be sent to boarding school, Alfred Budd was
educated at home by his father, then and still the perpetual curate
of Widdleswick, Salop. The boy’s mother unfortunately died while he
was still but twelve summers old, but we understand that her influence
lived after her, and that her son paid fitting tribute to her pious
memory in his charming pen-portrait of Lady Julia Penhaligon.
The lad showed promise. Through the kindness of Sir Pontefract Gribble,
the village Squire, he was enabled to browse in the well-stocked
library of Widdleswick Manor. That he did not waste this splendid
opportunity of reading both widely and wisely, not least in the domain
of the contemporary novel, readers of his own, alas, posthumous, work
of fiction will soon feel confident.
But how did Mr. Budd come to write the present volume? the reader
may well be tempted to inquire. The circumstances have a melancholy
interest all their own.
The Rev. Albert Budd had destined his only son to follow him into the
ministry of the Church, and so, at the age of seventeen, the boy (for
he was no more) was sent to Oxford to compete for an open exhibition
at St. Edmund’s Hall. What happened? Perhaps his fragile health had
handicapped him in the stern race; perhaps he had devoted too much
attention to Sir Pontefract’s collection of modern fiction, and hardly
enough to the more apposite writings of Aristotle and Euclid and
Origen. Be that as it may, Alfred was unsuccessful in the examination,
and, after three whole days in the University city, he left Oxford, as
it turned out, for ever.
But those three days left an indelible impression upon his quick
imagination.
The leaven worked, and while studying with a view to a second attempt
in the next autumn, he devoted his leisure hours to the composition of
_The Oxford Circus_. His incurable weakness in mathematics, however,
asserted itself more and more during these months, and when the time
came round he did not feel that his chances of success justified a
second visit. The clerical career, then, was closed to him, and he had
perforce to search for other employment.
His quest was soon rewarded. An advertisement inserted in _The Times_
newspaper, under the appropriately chosen sobriquet of “Gaveston,”
brought him an offer of work from a famous memory-training institute,
which required the services of a representative in the Far East.
Success seemed well within his grasp, and in due course he sailed from
Cardiff to take up his post in Japan.
The rest is soon told.
To the quiet little vicarage at Widdleswick came a few short letters,
bearing strange foreign stamps, and posted at Gibraltar, at Brindisi,
at Port Said, and later handed over to us as his literary executors.
They told, simply and modestly, of his hopes and fears, his ship mates
and their ways, and in one he spoke of his plans for a sequel to _The
Oxford Circus_, itself only completed a very few days before sailing.
But it was not to be: dis, as he himself had said with reference to
his University career, _aliter visum_.… For during the always trying
passage of the Red Sea, poor Alfred disappeared. He supped, but did not
take his place for breakfast. Neither his fellow-passengers nor the
captain nor the crew could throw any light on his whereabouts, and it
was presumed that he had fallen overboard in the darkness. They further
presumed that his fall had been accidental.
Alfred Budd is dead. His readers will be at one with us in regarding
his loss as a grave one to English letters. He despised coteries and
disliked cliques. He was an honest workman of literature, using none
but sound materials, none but well-established models. For its wit, its
photographic realism and its daring originality, _The Oxford Circus_
is a first novel of which any publisher might be proud. Its sparkling
epigrams, and its vivid portrayal of life in many different strata
of our modern society, seem almost unexpected from one who lived so
quietly as Mr. Budd. Yet somehow his originality of invention leaves no
room for doubt: Budd was perhaps the first novelist to introduce the
London and North Western Railway station into a novel of Oxford life.
Such a writer had no mean future.
Here and there, in preparing Alfred’s MSS. for the press, we have
detected discrepancies which, had he lived, he might have adjusted,
subtle touches which he might have amplified, luxuriances which he
might have pruned. In respect to his memory, however, we have let
these stand. If we have done wrong, we look for pardon from those who
remember that, where an old and very deep friendship is concerned, the
task of literary execution is no easy one.
H. M.
R. M.
BOOK I
VORTEX
THE OXFORD CIRCUS
CHAPTER I
INTROIT
“But I _must_ have a hansom!”
Behind the voice there were centuries of the best breeding, but the
tone was perhaps a trifle querulous. From the crowded yard of the
Oxford railway station there came no answer save the hoarse, insistent
cries of porters and the importunate scuffling of cab-touts.
“Taxi, sir?”
“’ere y’are, sir. Taxi, sir?”
But Gaveston ffoulis knew his own mind.
“No,” he insisted, gazing with something like surprise round the
cab-ranks. “I _must_ have a hansom.”
“None ’ere, sir,” growled a surly-eyed taxi-driver.
“Then drive to the centre of the city,” ordered the young man, without
hesitation, “and fetch me one--instantly!”
Instinctively the driver touched his cap. With a click the flag of his
meter fell in symbolic surrender to this new arrival, and the motor,
a throbbing anachronism, sped fussily away towards those rotund domes
and soaring spires, whence, through the mellow streaming of October
sunlight, came already the distant bombilation of crowding, multisonant
bells.…
All impatience, Gaveston waited there for his chosen conveyance, and
glanced coldly at the unimaginative battalions of undergraduates
around him, who, callous to all appropriacy, were noisily flinging
themselves and their golf-clubs into humdrum taxicabs. How pitiful,
and how plebeian, was their lack of sensibility! To enter Oxford--the
Oxford of Bacon and Pater, of Newman and Mackenzie--in these mechanical
monstrosities! Rather than that, he had gone afoot.
“I’d as soon enter Paradise on stilts!” he reflected, and smiled at his
witty conceit.…
And the smile had not faded from his full, attractive lips, when the
bespoken hansom scampered up, guided by the taxi. Ordering the latter
to collect his multitudinous luggage, he engaged the former to drive
him to his destination.
“Wallace!” he cried, and leapt lightly into the graceful equipage.
With hooves gaily a-clatter over cobbles and causeway, the hansom
wended its romantic way through the mazy purlieus which lead the
traveller into the heart of this city that men call Oxford and the
gods call Youth. Gaveston longed for a cockle-shell in his hat, to
symbolize this mystic, dreamed-of wayfaring, and when at long last his
driver reined in before a Gothic gateway darkly overhung by a stalwart,
sky-crowned tower, he knew that his sense of the fitting had in all
sooth been justified. He threw the fare to the jarvey, and crossed the
threshold of his historic college, nodding kindly to the bewhiskered
porter’s obsequious welcome.
“I must keep this up,” he murmured pensively in the vaulted porch.
He was now a Wallace man.…
* * * * *
Later that evening Gaveston gazed hungrily out over the Wallace
quadrangle from the mullioned windows of the rooms allotted to him.
“Staircase XVII … staircase XVII,” he kept repeating. What a place it
was! Never had his utmost dreams envisaged this romantic reckoning by
stairways.
And this was Wallace at last!
His eyes wandered over the beautiful accidents of its profile,
clear-cut against the autumnal sky’s violaceous and crepuscular
glory. With its myriad pointed turrets and ogive windows and frowning
battlements, the college recalled to Gaveston ffoulis’s memory those
vast baronial strongholds of Scotland and Touraine which he dimly
remembered from the interminable travels of his picaresque infancy.…
“Dear Mums!” he whispered to the listening tree-tops, and a far-away
look bedimmed his eyes. For with the memory of those other days came
back the ever-fascinating, ever-elusive image of his mother, that dear
whisp of frail, ethereal beauty who throughout his waking hours was
scarcely ever absent from the gentle background of his thoughts. And,
remembering her, he let Time slip silently by with fleet, inaudible
steps until----
Why! it was nearly eight o’clock! Too late now to dine in Hall--but
what matter? He turned to open the generous hamper which, only that
morning, his mother had chosen for him at Fortnum’s. (How far-off
already seemed the glittering _clinquetis_ of Piccadilly!) And there,
in the quietude of his own room, Gaveston dined simply off a dish of
cold Bombay duck, garnished (a _bon viveur_, he preferred delicacies
that were out of season) with some superb bottled peas.
Rising from his second _meringue_, Gaveston decided to resume his
reverie, and walked over to the large cheval-glass that occupied an
inglenook formed by a turret--he had ordered the awestruck scout to
take it from its packing-case before any of his sixteen suit-cases were
unlocked. He looked at himself with some satisfaction. Was it so, he
wondered, that Oxford would see him--a svelte, willowy figure, with
fair hair and fair skin and fair eyes, whose every trait bore the
subtle handwriting of race and breeding, and on whose lips played the
most infectious of enigmatic smiles.
“_Quel hors d’œuvre!_” he exclaimed in involuntary admiration. He was
indeed a masterpiece.
But what was that?
_Tap, tap_.…
Yes, a knock … a visitor already--was it possible? Quickly Gaveston
tiptoed over to the Chappel concert grand which had been despatched
as advance luggage, and in an instant his room was throbbing with the
evanescent, moonlit melancholy of the Chopin nocturne in G-flat minor.
He chose that (it was his mother’s favourite, too) because it always
seemed to fill a room with just that warm sense of welcome and intimacy
which a host should emanate. At the first bars of the _scherzo_ the
knocking was repeated, a little louder. He stopped short.
“Pray enter!” he called, with an effective half-turn on the stool.
The door opened. A tall upstanding figure was silhouetted there on the
threshold.
“Hullo, Gav!”
“I don’t think I---- Why, David! David! Of all the surprises!” And
Gaveston rose, resplendent with welcome.
“I heard you were coming up this term, and I----”
“But, David, I’d no idea you were here!”
“It’s my second year at Wallace, Gav.”
“And I never heard!”
This was splendid! Gaveston stepped back to look at his friend with
whole-hearted pleasure.
David Paunceford was a figure of the true Hellenic mould, athletic
in every limb and fibre, flaxen of hair, blue of eye, and aquiline
of nose, sane to the finger-tips, and the heir to at least one of
England’s oldest peerages. Add to this that he was an intense admirer
of Gaveston, and who could better approach the ideal of a friend?
David had entered Eton a year before Gaveston ffoulis, but none
the less they had thenceforward, for several eventful years, been
inseparables. They had been elected to Pop on the same Founder’s Day;
they had been bracketed together for the same prizes, had played the
Wall Game at the self-same wall, and, through many a long afternoon of
drowsy, elm-shadowed cricketing, Agar’s Plough had seen them batting
side by side. Nearly all their uproariously happy holidays they had
spent together, and Gav, of course, was an instant favourite with all
the Paunceford keepers on the Wuthering moors and all the Paunceford
gillies on the island of Eigg. They had received (surest sign of
popularity) the same nickname, and at the last, one cloudy morning
rather before their allotted span of halves, they had left Eton
together, for the same reason but in different cabs.
“And I’m only a freshman!” laughed Gaveston, closing the piano-lid.
“Why, you’ll have to put me up to everything, David. Come on, take me
for a walker.” He already knew his ’Varsity slang.…
Donning cap and gown (for the hour grew late), the two friends
descended into the quadrangle, and out into the noisy swirl of Broad
Street. In a moment Gaveston found his imagination kindled by his novel
surroundings, and, with all the enchanting ardour of adolescence, began
to explain to David what Oxford really meant to the world, what ideals
its architecture symbolized, and in what respects its traditions needed
revision; gracefully, too, he sketched his own tremendous projects,
and the methods he planned to achieve them, nor was he slow to advise
on the right way of dealing with fourth-year men, dons, scouts,
clergymen, proctors, shopkeepers and freshmen.
David listened with astonished admiration on every contour of his
superb profile.
“What a wonderful chap you are, Gavvy!” he said affectionately.
“Oh, nothing to what I shall be!” came the laughing answer. Already Gav
could feel the keen Oxford air whetting that wit of his which had been
the fear and admiration of Eton.
“Oh, how I wish I were clever--really clever, I mean, like you, Gav!”
and David sighed as he marvelled yet again at his friend’s uncanny
perspicacity.
“But you are, David, without knowing it.”
“What nonsense! What’s the good of being just a crack cricketer or
a----”
Gaveston was quick as a flash.
“Why, then you can catch people out!” he riposted, with a peal of
laughter which, with David’s answering carillon, woke age-long echoes
from the mouldering walls of Queen’s Lane. How magnificent it was just
to be alive and young and in Oxford!
“‘Midnight and Youth and Love and Italy,
Love in the Land where Love most lovely seems!’”
he quoted felicitously, and suddenly they emerged on to the glorious
vista of the High Street, bent like a bow and flowing majestically
between the steep cliff-like colleges. His voice hushed before this
imminence of ineluctable beauty, and he went on.
“Oh, David! Don’t you understand? This is the most miraculous moment of
all! Here one stands in the very heart of one’s Mater Almissima, with
all these crowds about one, and not one of them knows one’s name. And
yet to-morrow--why, one feels like a sky before a sudden dawn!”
“This is Carfax,” David interrupted. Their progress was checked by the
sauntering couples and the circumambient motor-’buses, and all around
glittered the windows of the tobacconists in all the glamour of their
gaudy seductiveness.
“One must buy a pipe,” cried Gaveston impulsively. “A pipe is a Man’s
smoke!”
David nodded, and together in a rhapsody of silence they walked
back past the clangour of Carfax, and, with eyes bemused by the
magic of Time, they gazed upon the scalloped gables and gargoyled
eaves of Brasenose, and upon the storied front of Oriel, enriched
by the sculptor’s art with faint lovely figures of all that is most
rememberable in the city’s studious history, of Emperors and Kings and
the Builders of Empires. In the long, tenebrous quietude of the Turl
they lingered, where, across the empurpled dusk of the narrow street,
the lighted windows of rival colleges blinked lazy, kindly eyes at each
other. And wandering under the pinnacled soar of Exeter Chapel, past
Hertford too, where the winged nudity of cherubim upholds a high-flung
Bridge of Sighs, they drew near the elephantine deities of the Indian
Institute, and thence in the darkling distance, they could see before
them the polychrome of Keble, and beyond, glowing faint and Venetian
beneath the decrescent moon and a myriad plangent stars, the patterned
diaper of the Parks Museum.
“It is too, too beautiful …” whispered Gaveston, and his voice tailed
away.
And then, in the pause after his words, came back the recollection of
his mother: _she_ must know, and at once, of his safe advent and his
new-found extremity of happiness.
“But where is the Post Office?” he asked, and, turning on their tracks,
David led his friend in a silence that was too deep for words to what
he sought. Gaveston looked up with delight at its grim Gothic facade
as they passed through its portal. What a city! Even the post offices
here were beautiful, he reflected, and dim.
Without hesitation he demanded a telegraph form, and wrote:
_Lady Penhaligon 99 Half Moon Street Mayfair. The Spires are
still dreaming Gav._
He handed it to the girl. She glanced askance at the clock.
“It’s the last telegram we’re taking to-night,” she said.
“And the most beautiful, is it not?” added Gav, while she ticked over
the jewelled words with her lamentably workaday pencil.
“Twelve,” she murmured with the most engaging of lisps. “That will be a
shilling.”
“Oh, Half Moon _without_ a hyphen, please,” corrected Gaveston
beseechingly.
“But that’ll make it one and a penny,” she looked up with surprise.
“Quite,” said Gav conclusively, and paid. And as the two friends
strolled back towards their college, he explained to David how it
had long been a principle with him always to exceed the authorized
allowance of words.
He was that sort of person.