First came the letters Foley remembered: Sutton's first Long Vacation;
his home-sickness in Oxford; his thoughts of Parnassus; the American
tourists he would watch and speak with sometimes. Then in the autumn his
impression of the chapel, his growing fondness for Oxford, followed by
the sudden determination to go home, from which Dr. Joseph had dissuaded
him, telling him that there was nothing he need be afraid of in Oxford,
or in the Past.
Then came the letters which had come to Foley in the East, and been
hardly regarded by him in the hurry of travel. Letters which read
pleasantly for the most part, as he went through them now, with their
echoes of charming Oxford life--charming for a time, though troubled
afterwards. With Dr. Joseph's theology to rely on, and Dr. Joseph's
approval of his life, Sutton's uneasy conscience had been at rest for a
while, and he had let himself enjoy life without questioning--just the
simple human joy of the world and youth, with the weather growing
warmer, and the Spring blossoming in the gardens of that beautiful old
city, where he was quite at home now.
"I have so enjoyed the Spring," he wrote "your tardy, veering English
Spring, with its gusts of snow and black weather, and yet enough warm
days to woo from the earth the English flowers that till last year I
only knew of in books. But I greet them as old friends now, the
primroses, and cowslips, and daffodils.... May is here, the air is
full of the greenness of leaves and the songs of birds, the lank rose
trees are budding on the Gothic walls, and when I breathe the fragrant
air and look about me I rub my eyes, and wonder whether May was ever so
beautiful at home. Some beautiful days, of course, I can remember
vividly; but I lived then for the most part, I think, among pale
thoughts and theories, growing old before I was young, and looking so
rarely out--indeed, thinking somehow that it was almost wrong to look
out on the beauty and colour of the world...."
He had written a good deal about Oxford; and really it wasn't true, what
Foley had told him once, that he didn't deserve to live in so beautiful
a place; he did care, and was learning more and more to look at things
and enjoy them. On May morning he had gone to Magdalen to hear them
salute the rising sun from the tower. "I wish I could describe it all,"
he wrote, "the streets, as I went out, cold and vacant in the early
dawn, the pale flames in the street lamps, and the silence of those rows
of sleeping houses, only broken, as I passed under garden walls, by the
acute music of the birds awake already in the trees. Birds, millions of
them! I never heard such a clamour. At the College gate there was a
group of shivering people; and soon they let us in, to climb the steep
tower stairs, with its narrow windows here and there in the darkness,
with views like little old pictures of grey castles and green country.
On the windy platform at the top we found almost all the College
gathered, the President, and Fellows, and undergraduates, with the
group of white choristers. Gradually, as we waited, the formless sky all
round and above us grew white and blue; the sky-line reddened; and then,
bringing a sudden hush in the crowded talk, a sudden baring of all our
heads, the May sun began to blaze in the East; and as it rose into the
sky the boys, facing the light, chanted loud, with their shrill young
voices, the old Latin hymn. Well, you can hardly imagine what a solemn
moment it was, with the slow hymn, the stately yellow sun rising over
all that great view of green country. Turning toward Oxford we saw black
figures like dots on the sun-flushed towers and roofs of the other
Colleges. Our tower, and, indeed, the whole sky, seemed to rock with the
pealing bells; and the undergraduates, engaging in a wild scuffle, tore
off each other's caps and gowns, throwing them out into the air, to fall
with giddy swirls on the roofs, or into the street below. It seemed
almost an outburst of Pagan turbulence, after the Pagan sun-worship, up
there on that windy tower-top over the sleeping town! I wrote describing
it to Dr. Turnpenny; I only hope he won't be shocked!"