JOSS AND REREDOS
Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom
up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway
into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang
discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped,
guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus
as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back
in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the
unopened copy of the _University Gazette_ which he had chosen from the
bookstall’s alluring variety.
Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like
a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the
cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good
old Hekla!
And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out
upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the
glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked
here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of
Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and
content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of
half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent
cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows,
their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of
Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured
sky.
“Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14]
[14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this
painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (LIT. EXEC.)
He looked again.
“But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most
distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which
these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities,
he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of
that fugacious country-side.
He knew of a certainty that he had not yet exhausted the surprises
prepared for him by Destiny. There had been fairies at his christening
(in St. James’s, Piccadilly). And now the memories of that
unforgettable night at the Régale were drumming in his veins like some
insidious and urgent poison. A new consciousness was dawning upon him,
and he gazed on its unfolding contours, like stout Darien in the
sonnet, in the mute silence of amazement.
Recovering himself, “New term, new life,” he murmured neatly. And the
train picked up the rhythm of the words as it rolled relentlessly
onwards.…
* * * * *
That evening Gaveston sat alone in his room, amusedly aware that in
another Gothic chamber an eager assemblage of Mongoons were gulping
their barley-water in tenterhooked anticipation of his momently
arrival. But far different were his thoughts from what those polished
Philistines would have expected in their hero.
Sipping in carefully calculated rotation glasses of _crême de cacao_
and _vodka_ and _mavrodaphne_--somehow the interblend of their hues and
aromas seemed that night to chime in tune with the interplay of his
own emotions--Gaveston was planning the redecoration of his rooms and
his personality. “Each mirrors the other,” he reflected sagaciously.
And a becoming blush illumined his cheeks as he realized how insular
and barbarian his life had been so far, despite that long childhood of
foreign _table d’hôtes_--how English and ingenuous, despite the many
stories long current in Society of his authentic artistic temperament.
“Myths!” he cried aloud. “Myths!”
And with a sort of dull despair he thought how poorly read he really
was, how Philistinish the stuff that had so long delighted him--Hope
and Hay, Haggard and Merriman, Doyle and Dell.
“_Zut!_” as he had heard a voice say in the Régale.
And what a gallery of pictures was his! He looked round his walls with
eyes very aghast. Those photogravures that had been his pride! _Love
Locked Out_ and _The Laughing Cavalier_ and _Dante’s Meeting With
Beatrice_--Watts--Meissonier--Rossetti. _Quel galère_ indeed.…
And just at that moment David Paunceford rushed in, his eyes atwinkle,
his Norfolk jacket flying open in his boyish haste to see his friend,
and tell him, pell-mell, of vacation exploits in the Oberland and
glorious skiing races up the Cresta run. For a moment he hardly
realized that his zest was not _à propos_ to Gaveston’s mood.
“But anyway,” he was saying, “we’ve all planned to go back to
Interlaken next Christmas and we’ve booked our rooms at the Excelsior
and you’ve simply _got_ to come too, Gav--oh! but you can’t imagine how
jolly it all is, that topping glow all over you after a good tumble on
the bob-run!”
But something in Gaveston’s eye checked his rushing words.
“We have souls, David Paunceford,” said Gaveston.
He replenished his own three glasses, and handed David the whisky
decanter. “At least, I have,” he continued.
There was a pregnant pause. David emptied his tumbler, buttoned up his
jacket, and came down the familiar staircase. With no eyes for the
evasive beauty of the college chapel, its buttresses and architraves
now luteously entwined with wreathes of yellow fog, he crossed the
dusk-filled quadrangle towards Mongo’s lighted window, puzzled a
little.…
* * * * *
What days of rich imaginings these were that now came for Gaveston in
this Lenten term! How glad and mad and bad it all was! How crowded
these weeks where bizarrerie vied with bizarrerie and whimsey with
whimsey!
First there were books to be bought, were there not? Yes, and bound
too in silks and skins marblings fitted to their strangely varying
contents. And from the gloomy recesses of Chaundy and the mediæval
crypts of Gadney, he brought forth sets of Harland and Crackenthorpe,
and all the fascinating chronicles of Sherard and Douglas, Ransome and
Crosland, in whose controversial lore he soon became an adept. His
shelves bent beneath the crowding volumes of Johnson and Davidson and
Dowson and the rarer reprints of the Yellow Book, and soon all the
erudition of the Symonses (John Addington and Arthur), was mastered
by the young neophyte. And at the last, impatient of so much heavy
insularity, he added to his arcana the Oriental canticles of Masoch,
the infamous Lesbia’s archipelagian lyrics, the voluptuous and
untranslatable masterpieces of Maeterlinck and Le Gallienne.
Assiduously too he collected obscure texts from the Silver Age of
every tongue, and the declining decades of every century yielded him
their rich harvests of perverse and curious fruits. He delighted,
for instance, to pore over the Forty-Seven Books of the Eroticks of
Kottabos the Syracusan. Recumbent upon a score of Liberty cushions, and
meshed in the twining thuriferal fumes of musk and attar and patchouli,
Gaveston would ponder upon the corrupt and fetid beauty of the
Sicilian’s style, so perfect in its diliquescence that it might almost,
he thought, have lain undredged down all these centuries in the green,
aqueous silence of some Mediterranean sea-cavern, encrusted by the
scum of putrescent molluscs, nibbled by creatures that fantastically
goggled, and spawned upon by medusas with transparent tentacular heads.
And he remembered how the unique manuscript had been snatched from the
flames of fire-doomed Alexandria by the monks of Santa Frustrata in
Abyssinia, and lay long concealed in their dove-shaped reliquary of
scented cedar-wood, until ’twas ravished from them at the sword’s point
by a Borgia, who sought it for the hands of a certain courtesan of
Ephesus, and how she, after the fashion of her kind, had bartered it
for sables and mummia to a Jew merchant from Novgorod, and how through
his trafficking it came to the stockaded palace of the Great Cham of
Tartary and thence to the conquering Mpret of Kamschatka. It had later
been published in more accessible form by a Mr. Leonard Smithers.
But he began to find a terrifying loneliness in his research for the
strange and beautiful. At first, on wet afternoons when his football
or hockeystick could not be brought out from his cupboard, David would
sometimes steal up to Gav’s room, to drink a glass of Russian tea or
smoke a rose-tipped cigarette. But the old intimacy was gone. Always
when he came, David would find the black and silver curtains drawn, and
the room lighted tremulously by seven candles of green aromatic wax
upheld by a Cellinesque Priapus of verdescent bronze.
“Why should I let daylight in, David?” Gaveston responded to his manly
remonstrances. “It only stifles the imagination.”
“And fresh air?” queried David with astonishment.
“Only chills,” came the pointed reply. And Gaveston turned to the
table heaped high with the rarest etchings of Bakst and Barribal and
Beardsley, and resumed his task of passepartouting these sinuous
Salomes and fat-fingered Fanfreluches.… After that, David came no more.
But one morning, shortly before six, he was hurrying down the
slumberous Woodstock Road, returning from an early bathe at Marston
Ferry. Past him hastened a gaunt figure, spare and ascetic, but
unmistakably distinguished; in the deep earth-bound eyes shone the
glow of an inner fire, and from the wrist dangled a simple rosary of
pearls and a neat scapular of plain design; the lips muttered. In the
uncertain light of the February morning, David had difficulty in
recognizing that once familiar and friendly form.
But yes! It was! It was!
“Gaveston!” he cried out, almost involuntarily, so great was his
surprise. “Where on earth are you off to at this time?”
But Gaveston (for such it was) did not stop.
“Terce,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m late.” And through the
morning mists he hurried towards the distant spire of SS. Protus and
Hyacinth. David stood for a moment watching his retreating figure, and
wondering, as was his wont, what new notes were now being tested in the
inexhaustible gamut of Gaveston’s soulstrings.
Well might he wonder, for apace discovery was following on discovery,
vista too upon vista.…
Gaveston had been brought up (it was his mother’s pride) a strict
Church of Englander. Lady Penhaligon, although no bigot, had seen
to that, and Sunday after Sunday in his earlier childhood they had
punctually repaired to St. George’s, Hanover Square (it held so many
poignant associations for her, she always wept a little when the solemn
banns were read). And during their foreign journeyings, too, they had
always sought out the Anglican places of worship with which the nicer
towns of the Continent are so liberally endowed. All four Anglican
churches at Cannes knew them well; together they had enjoyed the
Christmas sermons of the chaplains at Siena and Seville and Shepheard’s
Hotel; and Gav indeed had been confirmed in the Hôtel Ritz-Carlton at
Trouville by the Bishop of North-Western Europe. Small wonder, then, if
he had almost instinctively come to regard religion as a Sunday habit
of the English, like Yorkshire pudding or cold supper. But now the
Establishment in its wider aspects had dawned upon his receptive soul.
The assistant sacristan of SS. Protus and Hyacinth smiled companionably
to him as he passed into the dim doorway.
“Tallis in G to-morrow, Mr. ffoulis,” he said.
“Splendid,” said Gav. “I shan’t fail you.”
And, murmuring a few decades to St. Gilbert of Sempringham and Blessed
Thomas Plumtree, whose _festas_ fell during that octave, he reached his
accustomed _prie-dieu_.…
* * * * *
How delightful these early mornings were! After long vigils of sombre
brooding over the invaluable histories of Messrs. H. Jackson and
Muddiman, how champagne-like was the crisp dry air of an Oxford dawn
as he hurried out the Woodstock Road! How infinitely gracious he found
the liturgical rhythms of terce and none after debauching his soul all
night with deep draughts of the fierce decadent prose of Huysmans or
Hichens!
And then there would be the walk homewards from SS. Protus and Hyacinth
in the flush of full dawn with his undergraduate fellow-worshippers,
as far at any rate as the gates of Keble College. Soon he made close
friends from among the “P. and H. push,” as they were irreverently
nicknamed in the non-ecclesiastical circles of Wallace, and Gaveston
became an active, but never pushing, member of several of the many
societies which, in slightly varying combinations, they formed--the
Athanasian Club, for instance, and the Syro-Chaldean Society, the
O.U.C.U., and the O.S.C.U., and the O.E.C.U., and the In Saecula
Saeculorum. On these walks he got to know dear John Minns, of Keble,
the man who knew all there was to be known about the Eurasian use of
the amice prior to the Tridentine decrees, and good old John Thoms, of
Keble, who had once tracked down a little country church in Suffolk
where, in accordance with an old Gallican rite, the vicar wore a
maniple with its ends cut obliquely!
What fun it all was!
There was John Jones too, of Keble, with his huge giglamp spectacles
and fast-thinning hair, famed among the P. and H.’ers as a raconteur,
who, if carefully primed, could sometimes be induced to tell his
glorious story of the thurifer that simply _would_ not light.… And
Jones it was who, during these amazing weeks, became Gaveston’s
especial friend.
True, Gav’s Etonian blood never took altogether kindly to John’s
somewhat provincial manners, but erudition, he reflected, is thicker
than etiquette, and the close bonds of common pieties united them.
Together they would wander off to unvernacular and illegal services
in clandestine seminaries and remote rebellious rectories. Together
they would count up the ceremonial points of every church in the
overchurched city; but where John could find but seven, Gaveston was
seldom content with less than nine. Together too they addressed their
every activity to saints that no other Anglicans had ever heard of,
and St. Domenico Theotocopuli and the Bienheureux Stanislas Beulemans
were the familiar patrons of their collegiate activities; whilst buying
flowers, they invoked St. Rose of Lima, and sitting down to a meal they
called upon St. Francis of Borgia to protect them from poisoning; red
letter days were given in their Kalendar to St. Veep and St. Deusdedit,
and for help in composing their tutorial essays they would put up many
a candle to St. John of Beverley; against the danger of madness they
called in friendly unison upon Santa Maria Maddalena degli Pazzi, and
mayhap it was their gladsome veneration of King Charles (the First and
Martyr) that first turned Gaveston’s mind toward the political career
which a twelvemonth later was to startle all Oxford.…
But somehow the P. and H.’ers did not all seem to take kindly to the
æsthetic side of Gaveston’s remarkable personality. For a ffoulis it
was easy to see life steadily and see it whole, but for a Minns or a
Jones there seemed to be a curious difficulty in reconciling _Dorian
Gray_ with _The Ritual Reason Why_. It was a bagatelle for Gaveston
to haste across the road from a protracted tea-party at Pembroke with
the leading Oxford authority on dalmatics to a gay picnic supper at
Christ Church, where dancing in pyjama costume would be varied with
caviare and liqueurs. Each party would rightly acclaim him as the most
enthusiastic and daring spirit present.
“He’s superbly High,” the one host would say as he left.
“He’s so gloriously low, my dears,” the next would proudly whisper.
And both loved him.
But an end had to come. As term drew to its close, Gaveston saw that
he had extracted all that either set could give him, and he planned a
glorious symposium of both of his sets for the last day of term. John
Jones warned him, in honest manly fashion, that he was attempting the
impossible. But Gaveston’s mind was made up.
“No, John,” he argued. “This term must end in glowing
magnificence--benedictionally--come what may. Life, as they say at
Brasenose, must burn with a hard gem-like flame. Besides, it’s an Ember
day.”
And John was persuaded to distribute the invitations in Keble.
It was a lunch party. Gaveston spared no pains in arranging the
function; and they were needed, for it had to make its appeal to the
divergent tastes of all his guests. Six of them were to come on from
the Blessing of the Embers at the newly consecrated Uniate Orthodox
chapel, affiliated to the mother-church of SS. Protus and Hyacinth, and
the remaining half-dozen were to join the party after a breakfast-dance
(domino or _poudré_ optional) at the Carlton Club. Gav himself
compromised by attending Wallace chapel, but, a scrupulous host, he
could not trust the Wallace buttery to provide the viands for such a
party. He went in person to Buol’s to order a collation.
“For one o’clock exactly,” he insisted to the astonished caterer. “And
remember--the Byzantine touch in everything.”
The famous Swiss remembered. That luncheon was the talk of Oxford for
many a day.
It deserved its fame. The _décor_ of Gaveston’s room, of course, was a
technical masterpiece that an S. Diaghilev or a B. Dean might well have
envied. The richly figured curtains were closely drawn. The air was
pregnant with frankincense and chypre. The apartment was delicately
illuminated, partly by a score of nightlights floating in tall Venetian
glasses abrim with many-hued liqueurs, partly too by the votive tapers
that always burned before Gav’s private altar of St. Symphorosa and his
veiled image of Astarte Mammifera of the Kabbalists.
“Wear which you like!” said the charming host to his arriving guests,
giving them their choice of kimono or cowl. Some chose one, others the
other, but his forethought was appreciated by all.
So too was the rich repast. And when its seven finely modulated courses
were over, Gaveston handed round an exquisite pouncet-box of rather
late Sienese design. Pointing to the two divisions of its elegant
interior, he offered his happy guests their choice.
“Caramels or _coco_?” he asked with a hospitable gesture, and soon the
party was in the fullest swing.
When the merriment was at its height, Gaveston rose abruptly
and recited in poignant _tremolo_ tones two litanies of his own
composition, both of haunting beauty and addressed to Satanas Athanatos
and the Blessed Curé d’Ars respectively. The severed heads of vermilion
poppies were thrown lavishly over the recumbent guests, who, chewing
them appreciatively, were soon transformed into new De Quincies. And
suddenly, from a curtained recess, stole out the sombre, blood-curdling
strains of Sibelius’ Vale Triste and Rachmaninov’s Prelude. The eerie
witchcraft of the concealed gramophone, exacerbating their nerves, made
repose intolerable, and soon half the party was afoot, swinging in
frantic rhythms between the voluptuous divans in the mad inebriation of
the dance.
“_Après nous le déluge!_” cried the host, in a tone that seemed to defy
both Paradise and Limbo, and ecstasy followed ecstasy in orgiastic
sequence.
At last the party dispersed, half fearful perhaps lest some anti-climax
should end the lengthening afternoon. In merry groups the guests went
their ways, to meditative teas in Keble or in Magdalen.
Gaveston was left alone.
With a wry smile he looked round the dishevelled room. Yes, it was
over. A phase had been accomplished. It had all been marvellous beyond
words, rich beyond dreams, but still … but still.… Something had always
seemed missing from all the mysticism and all the revelry.… Oh, if only
David had been there to share it all!
The room was growing darker now. One by one the nightlights were
guttering wearily out in the _crême de menthe_ and the _advokaat_, and
St. Symphorosa herself could hardly be distinguished from Astarte.
The scent of bergamot was grown a little musty, and the divans were
sprinkled with spilt cocaine and melting caramels.
“Now it must end,” he said firmly. Brusquely he pulled aside the heavy
curtains and flung open the long-rusted windows. For a moment he gazed
out across the quadrangle to where a fretted pinnacle was balancing a
stripling moon. Then he turned to his door.
“Perkins!” he cried down to the scout’s pantry. “Perkins! Come up and
pack my things at once. I go down to-night.”
It was a day early.
But nothing could surprise Perkins now.