PLINTH
Next evening, steeped in the puce and russet dusk of an Oxford
twilight, Gaveston sat meditatively enframed in his mullioned window.
It was well-nigh the hour for his first dinner in his college Hall;
already, from the insistent belfries of the remoter colleges the
fateful seven strokes were shattering with their clangorous curfew the
vespertinal peace of the entranced city.
But his mood was one of delicious _recueillement_. Unlike so many of
his fellow-freshmen, whose _savoir-faire_ was sadly to seek, Gaveston
had donned neither dinner jacket nor tails, but over one shoulder
of his well-cut Norfolk coat had negligently flung a simple but
carefully torn commoner’s gown. He, of all men, could surely face sans
apprehension the ordeal of a first public appearance in Wallace.
And the Wallace manner? But Gaveston had no need to worry over how best
to acquire the famous manner, at once the jest and paragon of every
cabinet since Balfour’s, of every chancellory from Berlin to Uganda.
No, that far-flung triumph of the collegiate system was a stuff bred in
the very marrow of the ffoulis’s bones. Why, only that morning he had
been obliged to remind the President of the college of that fact. And
he smiled as he recalled the trifling but significant incident--how the
venerable scholar had peered up at him from his pile of matriculation
papers.
“I … er … liked your essay, Mr. ffoulis,” he had said, with no doubt
the kindliest of intentions, “very much. In fact I almost think … er …
you were made for … er … Wallace.”
But Gav had replied with caustic courtesy.
“I almost think Wallace was made for me, sir.”
And in a few well-chosen phrases he had reminded the President that the
males of his family on the distaff side had matriculated there ever
since the days (he had rightly hesitated to qualify them as spacious)
of Elizabeth, that four of his ancestral portraits were hung upon
the dark[2] oak panelling of the Wallace Hall, that a slender but
conspicuous lancet-window in Wallace Chapel was blazoned with his gules
argent, that----
[2] The oak of Wallace Hall is curiously pale (LIT. EXEC.).
But enough! That was the bell. Gaveston left his window seat, and
slowly crossed the arboreous lawns towards the creeper-clad steps of
that historic Hall.
Yes, for him alone amid that nervously jostling crowd of freshmen, to
dine in this Hall that had nurtured the rulers and sages of England
down the fairest centuries of her fame, was an experience both homely
and familiar. It was something as easily acceptable as, say, luncheon
in that white-panelled breakfast-room in Half Moon Street, with his
own mother’s dear delightful vaguenesses floating musically across the
rose-laden table. (“Gav dear, if you weren’t so clever, I’d love you so
much more!”--“And if you weren’t so stupid, Mother dearest, I’d love
you so much less!”--He remembered their tirelessly enchanting badinage
over the gold-rimmed coffee cups down long summer afternoons.…)
For, after all was said and done, the great secret of Wallace was to
be surprised at nothing. And Gaveston never was. It was with him an
instinct (atavistic, he supposed).
So, even on his first night in Hall, he had finished the four solid
but wholesome courses of the College dinner (“commons” weren’t they
called?) long before any at the freshmen’s table. For him no need to
look about with curiosity or awe, or to gaze with furtive respect at
the High Table, with the berserk figure of the President muttering
its truncated grace, and still less to attempt acquaintance with the
_gauche_ nonentities whom, or “which” as he said to himself with a
quiet smile, chance had set upon his either hand.
Unduly reserved? No: Gaveston overflowed with the ffoulis charm, that
fastidious and subtle essence which this Hall had savoured so often
during the past four centuries. Even the stocky spectacled youth next
but one on his right could not but sense that.
“Wonder who that chap is?” Gaveston heard him whisper to his
_vis-à-vis_.
“I think his name is Foulis,” came the low respectful answer.
“ffoulis,” corrected Gav silkily, with the gentlest of smiles. And the
incident closed.
But it was enough to show his quality. And the _mot_ was bruited around
the whole of Wallace that night before Old Tom had boomed and boomed
his hundred strokes and one over the starlit spires and Athenian groves
of the dream-bound colleges.[3]
[3] i.e., by 9.15 p.m. (LIT. EXEC.)
Gaveston rose, distressed, but not surprised, at the scout’s omission
to bring red pepper for his savoury. His neighbours, still toying with
the sweet, watched with ill-concealed surprise and some envy the ease
with which he drew up his figure from the awkward constriction of the
long oaken bench, and the slender but masculine grace of his carriage
as he paced alone towards the door.
Alone he descended the Hall steps into the cool evening air. Through
the fast-gathering dusk the beetling walls flamed distantly with
the fiery Virginia creeper lambent upon their crumbling stone.
Underfoot, the first-fallen leaves of October lisped and whispered in a
soft-stirring night-wind, and overhead a few late rooks were fluttering
darkly from branch to branch. Thus had they fluttered, he reflected,
just so long as the golden light had gushed forth from the high windows
of Wallace Hall, and so would they flutter, ageless and perennial, over
the heads of generations still unweaned and yet unborn. The Wallace
rooks … nothing could affright them, nothing surprise them.… They, too,
had found the secret.
* * * * *
Dinner was over, but the night held further possibilities. There was
still the Dean.
But no one, of course, called him the Dean.
No one of consequence called him by his own name even. The name
of Archibald Arundel was all but unknown in Oxford. It appeared
occasionally on lecture lists, and sometimes over an article, charged
with learning and grace, in one of the quarterlies. Postmen and
college porters knew it, and at the foot of staircase XXXIV, which
crept spirally up an ivy-clad tower, the surprising legend was still
decipherable, in faint letters of an outworn mode, constant amid the
ever-changing list above and below it--
6. MR. ARUNDEL.
But Mongo!
Who didn’t know who Mongo was? Who in Oxford? Who in England? In all
Asia and in all Africa? Who indeed? And Gaveston of course knew that
one ought to call on Mongo well within one’s first week. It was of
prime importance for any Wallace fresher to be known from the first as
a Mongoon--for such was the name given to the brilliant and elegant
group of undergraduates who used Mongo as their confidant and his rooms
as their idling-place.
And Gav had been careful, that very afternoon, to obtain from David
Paunceford, himself a deservedly popular Mongoon, some essential facts
of this celebrated _cénacle_ and its godfather.
But how hard they were to come by!
No one could tell why Archibald Arundel was called Mongo. Even Mongo
did not know. And now, of all his contemporaries who might have been
able to dissipate the obscuring mists of etymology, none were surviving.
“Men of _my_ year?” Mongo would say, a little sadly, when his freshmen
friends asked about old days at Wallace. “But you’re all men of my
year.” And his strange elusive smile made every one believe him.
No one knew his age, but the years lay light upon Mongo as dew upon a
rose. His round pink face bore scarcely a wrinkle and certainly not one
crowsfoot. His curly golden locks had just the faintest flecking of
silver about the temples, and his enemies were bitter enough to allege
that these few grey hairs were false. His smile was free and open as a
young boy’s, and his voice seemed hardly to have lost its adolescent
uncertainties for more than a few happy months.
Every day, wet or fine, Mongo might be seen moving blithely about
Wallace, the college that had known him in its quadrangles as
matriculand and freshman, as fellow and tutor, as junior dean and
Rickaby Lecturer, as acting-bursar and at the last as Dean.
Often enough he was mistaken for an undergraduate. It may have been
his clothes, with their deceptive air of callowness. Who knows? But
innocent strangers who looked through the albums of college groups
would often point to one constant figure as the quintessential
undergraduate of his period.
“How typical!” they would comment, pointing to Mongo in the group of
Hilary term, 1843.
“How typical!” pointing to the, yes, distinctly but temporarily
whiskered Mongo of 1879.
“How typical!” as they admired the _négligé_ of his flannel “bags” of
1907.
“Wonder why this young man wasn’t doing his bit,” they would say
querulously when they turned over and found him forming, together with
the aged President and a neutral student from Liberia, the group of
1917.
Dear Mongo!
David had warned Gaveston that twenty minutes to eleven was generally
considered the “right” hour of the evening to knock for the first time
at the door of the sempiternal Dean. But for his first visit, modestly
postponed until his second night, Gav was careful of effect.
He waited until all the divergent clocks of Oxford had heralded the
full three-quarters before he crossed towards the kindly red glow
of the curtained embrasure behind which the recognized Mongoons
were already gathered. Stopping for a moment by the Hall steps, he
rehearsed the intimate smile and the easy hand-wave that would of a
surety ingratiate him with Mongo and the Mongoons on this entry into a
circle where youth and charm and wit were indeed familiar, but Gaveston
ffoulis something new.
It would do. Spirally he climbed the turret staircase.
“Come in!” came the welcoming cry of half a dozen eager guests who
responded to his discreet but confident knock.
He obeyed.
So _that_ was Mongo!
The famous don, as usual, was curled like a beautiful cat[4] on the
hob. With soft plump hands he clasped his dilapidated slippers,
his golden head was bowed over his chest, his frayed shirt-sleeves
delightfully visible, his chubby knees showed through the worn flannel
trousers which had looked so smart in the mid-Edwardian groups.
[4] Other novelists have respectively described this invaluable
character as crouching like an _opossum_, a _satyr_, a
_panther_, or perched like a _canary_, a _vulture_, an _angel_.
A few, less successful, have denied or pretended to ignore his
existence. Mr. Budd has found a singularly happy mean. (LIT.
EXEC.)
“Dear Mongo!” called Gaveston, picking his way over the outstretched
legs of four fifth-year Mongoons on the shabby sofa.
Mongo uncurled.
“Gaveston,” he answered, with a quick amber light in his eyes.
“Welcome, thrice welcome. You all know each other, of course.” And he
waved a vague hand round the circle of the Mongoons.
There was a silence as Gav sat down beside the others on the sofa.
But he felt no shyness--he even poured out for himself a glass of his
host’s famous barley-water, a drink which the Mongoons for years had
loyally affected to enjoy. And the brilliant conversation resumed its
nightly flow as he held up his glass to the light, sipped it, and lay
back to survey this room which he was at last seeing in all its reality.
Yes, it was all even as had been foretold him. There they were, the
myriad profile photographs of Mongoons past and present, crowding the
wall space from floor to ceiling, but still (Gav was pleased to notice)
with a few vacant places; and there the serried rows of lendable books;
there, too, the great expanse of writing table stacked shoulder-high
with letters from still-living Mongoons in every embassy, legation and
consulate of the civilized world.
[Illustration: DEAR MONGO]
The talk buzzed on around him. How redolent of Wallace it seemed,
virile, hard-hitting and pithy, generous, too, and all-embracing.
Several of the older school of epigrammatists seemed to be of the
party; their rapier wits flashed across the shadowy room.
“I hear Bill Wallingford’s standing for the Tories in this Yorkshire
election,” some one threw out, apparently at random.
The world of high politics was obviously a preserve of the Mongoons.
“Easy enough to stand,” came the lightning reply from some one else in
deep shadow, “it’s to sit that’s the difficulty.”
“Splendid,” Gav murmured in fine appreciation. He was feeling even more
at home now. Somehow he felt he could show his mettle in this company.
And he did.
For a time Mongo said little. But at last he turned to his modest guest.
“I don’t believe I’ve seen you since you were being coached for Eton,
Gaveston. Years and years ago. But you haven’t changed.” It was a long
speech for Mongo, but Gav was awake to its possibilities. Rising, he
faced the crowded Mongoons, his back to the blazing hearth, a memorable
figure. It was obvious that he was about to speak.
“No, Mongo,” he began, in firm even tones. “Not changed.…” And with all
the exquisite modulations and gestures of a born conversationalist,
he went on. “For beauty is something constant and unchanging, is it
not? Aspects may come and aspects may go, but the essence of beauty is
stable and established, indestructible and indeciduous, in art or in
life, in life or in art, and indeed in both.”
It was a daring thesis. The ghost of a shudder rose from the most
hardened Mongoons. But the ffoulis charm carried it off, and with
graceful learning he developed his theme.
“There is fashion in the beauty of women, is there not? Now it is fixed
by Angelo or Angelico, now by Cimabue or Ruysdael, Augustus John or
Augustus Egg--all have their day, but beneath the shifting sands lies
always the eternal lodestone.”
And without a pause, without a flaw, he kept the even tenour of his
delightful argument, his hearers sitting in enraptured complaisance.
Occasionally from the hob came the subtle encouragements of dear Mongo,
every ten minutes perhaps, or even more seldom after two o’clock had
clanged out over the sleeping roofs of this wonderful city.…
“Delightful, Gaveston!”
“Wonderful, Gav!”
The eager congratulations of the Mongoons still rang gratefully in his
ears as he felt his way down the turret staircase of XXXIV. Only five
hours ago he had climbed it, an unknown potentiality in Wallace: he
descended to find himself a Mongoon and famous. And now, how quiet and
dark lay the quad before him! It seemed almost to be expectant, to be
waiting for something astounding and prodigious to break in upon its
alabaster dream. The dawn? Gaveston wondered as he walked back to his
rooms, or … or…?
What a night it had been!
The manner! And Mongo!
Well and truly had the foundation been laid for the quiet unobtrusive
success of his first term at Wallace. He held high his head. And then,
passing by the groined door of the Old Library, he flung wide his arms
to the stars.
“Youth!” he cried in the stillness. “Youth! Youth! Youth!”