Alma Mater
Every man, however brief or inglorious may have been his academical
career, must remember with kindness and tenderness the old university
comrades and days. The young man’s life is just beginning: the boy’s
leading-strings are cut, and he has all the novel delights and
dignities of freedom. He has no idea of cares yet, or of bad health, or
of roguery, or poverty, or to-morrow’s disappointment. The play has not
been acted so often as to make him tired. Though the after drink, as we
mechanically go on repeating it, is stale and bitter, how pure and
brilliant was that first sparkling draught of pleasure!—How the boy
rushes at the cup, and with what a wild eagerness he drains it! But old
epicures who are cut off from the delights of the table, and are
restricted to a poached egg and a glass of water, like to see people
with good appetites; and, as the next best thing to being amused at a
pantomime one’s-self is to see one’s children enjoy it, I hope there
may be no degree of age or experience to which mortal may attain, when
he shall become such a glum philosopher as not to be pleased by the
sight of happy youth. Coming back a few weeks since from a brief visit
to the old University of Oxbridge, where my friend Mr. Arthur Pendennis
passed some period of his life, I made the journey in the railroad by
the side of a young fellow at present a student of Saint Boniface. He
had got an exeat somehow, and was bent on a day’s lark in London: he
never stopped rattling and talking from the commencement of the journey
until its close (which was a great deal too soon for me, for I never
was tired of listening to the honest young fellow’s jokes and cheery
laughter); and when we arrived at the terminus nothing would satisfy
him but a hansom cab, so that he might get into town the quicker, and
plunge into the pleasures awaiting him there. Away the young lad went
whirling, with joy lighting up his honest face; and as for the reader’s
humble servant, having but a small carpet-bag, I got up on the outside
of the omnibus, and sate there very contentedly between a Jew-pedlar
smoking bad cigars, and a gentleman’s servant taking care of a
poodle-dog, until we got our fated complement of passengers and boxes,
when the coachman drove leisurely away. We weren’t in a hurry to get to
town. Neither one of us was particularly eager about rushing into that
near smoking Babylon, or thought of dining at the Club that night, or
dancing at the Casino. Yet a few years more, and my young friend of the
railroad will be not a whit more eager.
There were no railroads made when Arthur Pendennis went to the famous
University of Oxbridge; but he drove thither in a well-appointed coach,
filled inside and out with dons, gownsmen, young freshmen about to
enter, and their guardians, who were conducting them to the university.
A fat old gentleman, in grey stockings, from the City, who sate by
Major Pendennis inside the coach, having his pale-faced son opposite,
was frightened beyond measure when he heard that the coach had been
driven for a couple of stages by young Mr. Foker, of Saint Boniface
College, who was the friend of all men, including coachmen, and could
drive as well as Tom Hicks himself. Pen sate on the roof, examining
coach, passengers, and country with great delight and curiosity. His
heart jumped with pleasure as the famous university came in view, and
the magnificent prospect of venerable towers and pinnacles, tall elms
and shining river, spread before him.
Pen had passed a few days with his uncle at the Major’s lodgings, in
Bury Street, before they set out for Oxbridge. Major Pendennis thought
that the lad’s wardrobe wanted renewal; and Arthur was by no means
averse to any plan which was to bring him new coats and waistcoats.
There was no end to the sacrifices which the self-denying uncle made in
the youth’s behalf. London was awfully lonely. The Pall Mall pavement
was deserted; the very red jackets had gone out of town. There was
scarce a face to be seen in the bow-windows of the clubs. The Major
conducted his nephew into one or two of those desert mansions, and
wrote down the lad’s name on the candidate-list of one of them; and
Arthur’s pleasure at this compliment on his guardian’s part was
excessive. He read in the parchment volume his name and titles, as
‘Arthur Pendennis, Esquire, of Fairoaks Lodge, ——shire and Saint
Boniface College, Oxbridge; proposed by Major Pendennis, and seconded
by Viscount Colchicum,’ with a thrill of intense gratification. “You
will come in for ballot in about three years, by which time you will
have taken your degree,” the guardian said. Pen longed for the three
years to be over, and surveyed the stucco-halls, and vast libraries,
and drawing-rooms as already his own property. The Major laughed slyly
to see the pompous airs of the simple young fellow as he strutted out
of the building. He and Foker drove down in the latter’s cab one day to
the Grey Friars, and renewed acquaintance with some of their old
comrades there. The boys came crowding up to the cab as it stood by the
Grey Friars gates, where they were entering, and admired the chestnut
horse, and the tights and livery and gravity of Stoopid, the tiger. The
bell for afternoon-school rang as they were swaggering about the
play-ground talking to their old cronies. The awful Doctor passed into
school with his grammar in his hand. Foker slunk away uneasily at his
presence, but Pen went up blushing, and shook the dignitary by the
hand. He laughed as he thought that well-remembered Latin Grammar had
boxed his ears many a time. He was generous, good-natured, and, in a
word, perfectly conceited and satisfied with himself.
Then they drove to the parental brew-house. Foker’s Entire is composed
in an enormous pile of buildings, not far from the Grey Friars, and the
name of that well-known firm is gilded upon innumerable public-house
signs, tenanted by its vassals in the neighbourhood; and the venerable
junior partner and manager did honour to the young lord of the vats and
his friend, and served them with silver flagons of brown-stout, so
strong, that you would have thought, not only the young men, but the
very horse Mr. Harry Foker drove, was affected by the potency of the
drink, for he rushed home to the west-end of the town at a rapid pace,
which endangered the pie-stalls and the women on the crossings, and
brought the cab-steps into collision with the posts at the street
corners, and caused Stoopid to swing fearfully on his board behind.
The Major was quite pleased when Pen was with his young acquaintance;
listened to Mr. Foker’s artless stories with the greatest interest;
gave the two boys a fine dinner at a Covent Garden Coffee-house, whence
they proceeded to the play; but was above all happy when Mr. and Lady
Agnes Foker, who happened to be in London, requested the pleasure of
Major Pendennis and Mr. Arthur Pendennis’s company at dinner in
Grosvenor Street. “Having obtained the entree into Lady Agnes Foker’s
house,” he said to Pen with an affectionate solemnity which befitted
the importance of the occasion, “it behoves you, my dear boy, to keep
it. You must mind and never neglect to call in Grosvenor Street when
you come to London. I recommend you to read up carefully, in Debrett,
the alliances and genealogy of the Earls of Rosherville, and if you
can, to make some trifling allusions to the family, something
historical, neat, and complimentary, and that sort of thing, which you,
who have a poetic fancy, can do pretty well. Mr. Foker himself is a
worthy man, though not of high extraction or indeed much education. He
always makes a point of having some of the family porter served round
after dinner, which you will on no account refuse, and which I shall
drink myself, though all beer disagrees with me confoundedly.” And the
heroic martyr did actually sacrifice himself, as he said he would, on
the day when the dinner took place, and old Mr. Foker, at the head of
his table, made his usual joke about Foker’s Entire. We should all of
us, I am sure, have liked to see the Major’s grin, when the worthy old
gentleman made his time-honoured joke.
Lady Agnes, who, wrapped up in Harry, was the fondest of mothers, and
one of the most good-natured though not the wisest of women, received
her son’s friend with great cordiality: and astonished Pen by accounts
of the severe course of studies which her darling boy was pursuing, and
which she feared might injure his dear health. Foker the elder burst
into a horse-laugh at some of these speeches, and the heir of the house
winked his eye very knowingly at his friend. And Lady Agnes then going
through her son’s history from the earliest time, and recounting his
miraculous sufferings in the measles and hooping-cough, his escape from
drowning, the shocking tyrannies practised upon him at that horrid
school, whither Mr. Foker would send him because he had been brought up
there himself, and she never would forgive that disagreeable Doctor, no
never—Lady Agnes, we say, having prattled away for an hour incessantly
about her son, voted the two Messieurs Pendennis most agreeable men;
and when pheasants came with the second course, which the Major praised
as the very finest birds he ever saw, her ladyship said they came from
Logwood (as the Major knew perfectly well), and hoped that they would
both pay her a visit there—at Christmas, or when dear Harry was at home
for the vacations.
“God bless you, my dear boy,” Pendennis said to Arthur, as they were
lighting their candles in Bury Street afterwards to go to bed. “You
made that little allusion to Agincourt, where one of the Roshervilles
distinguished himself, very neatly and well, although Lady Agnes did
not quite understand it: but it was exceedingly well for a
beginner—though you oughtn’t to blush so, by the way—and I beseech you,
my dear Arthur, to remember through life, that with an entree—with a
good entree, mind—it is just as easy for you to have good society as
bad, and that it costs a man, when properly introduced, no more trouble
or soins to keep a good footing in the best houses in London than to
dine with a lawyer in Bedford Square. Mind this when you are at
Oxbridge pursuing your studies, and for Heaven’s sake be very
particular in the acquaintances which you make. The premier pas in life
is the most important of all—did you write to your mother
to-day?—No?—well, do, before you go, and call and ask Mr. Foker for a
frank—They like it—Good night. God bless you.”
Pen wrote a droll account of his doings in London, and the play, and
the visit to the old Friars, and the brewery, and the party at Mr.
Foker’s, to his dearest mother, who was saying her prayers at home in
the lonely house at Fairoaks, her heart full of love and tenderness
unutterable for the boy: and she and Laura read that letter and those
which followed, many, many times, and brooded over them as women do. It
was the first step in life that Pen was making—Ah! what a dangerous
journey it is, and how the bravest may stumble and the strongest fail.
Brother wayfarer! may you have a kind arm to support yours on the path,
and a friendly hand to succour those who fall beside you. May truth
guide, mercy forgive at the end, and love accompany always. Without
that lamp how blind the traveller would be, and how black and cheerless
the journey!
So the coach drove up to that ancient and comfortable inn the Trencher,
which stands in Main Street, Oxbridge, and Pen with delight and
eagerness remarked, for the first time, gownsmen going about, chapel
bells clinking (bells in Oxbridge are ringing from morning-tide till
even-song)—towers and pinnacles rising calm and stately over the gables
and antique house-roofs of the homely busy city. Previous
communications had taken place between Dr. Portman on Pen’s part, and
Mr. Buck, Tutor of Boniface, on whose side Pen was entered; and as soon
as Major Pendennis had arranged his personal appearance, so that it
should make a satisfactory impression upon Pen’s tutor, the pair walked
down Main Street, and passed the great gate and belfry-tower of Saint
George’s College, and so came, as they were directed, to Saint
Boniface: where again Pen’s heart began to beat as they entered at the
wicket of the venerable ivy-mantled gate of the College. It is
surmounted with an ancient dome almost covered with creepers, and
adorned with the effigy of the Saint from whom the House takes its
name, and many coats-of-arms of its royal and noble benefactors.
The porter pointed out a queer old tower at the corner of the
quadrangle, by which Mr. Buck’s rooms were approached, and the two
gentlemen walked across the square, the main features of which were at
once and for ever stamped in Pen’s mind—the pretty fountain playing in
the centre of the fair grass plats; the tall chapel windows and
buttresses rising to the right; the hall with its tapering lantern and
oriel window; the lodge, from the doors of which the Master issued with
rustling silks; the lines of the surrounding rooms pleasantly broken by
carved chimneys, grey turrets, and quaint gables—all these Mr. Pen’s
eyes drank in with an eagerness which belongs to first impressions; and
Major Pendennis surveyed with that calmness which belongs to a
gentleman who does not care for the picturesque, and whose eyes have
been somewhat dimmed by the constant glare of the pavement of Pall
Mall.
Saint George’s is the great College of the University of Oxbridge, with
its four vast quadrangles, and its beautiful hall and gardens, and the
Georgians, as the men are called wear gowns of a peculiar cut, and give
themselves no small airs of superiority over all other young men.
Little Saint Boniface is but a petty hermitage in comparison of the
huge consecrated pile alongside of which it lies. But considering its
size it has always kept an excellent name in the university. Its ton is
very good: the best families of certain counties have time out of mind
sent up their young men to Saint Boniface: the college livings are
remarkably good: the fellowships easy; the Boniface men had had more
than their fair share of university honours; their boat was third upon
the river; their chapel-choir is not inferior to Saint George’s itself;
and the Boniface ale the best in Oxbridge. In the comfortable old
wainscoted College-Hall, and round about Roubilliac’s statue of Saint
Boniface (who stands in an attitude of seraphic benediction over the
uncommonly good cheer of the fellows’ table) there are portraits of
many most eminent Bonifacians. There is the learned Doctor Griddle, who
suffered in Henry VIII.’s time, and Archbishop Bush who roasted
him—there is Lord Chief Justice Hicks—the Duke of St. David’s, K.G.,
Chancellor of the University and Member of this College—Sprott the
Poet, of whose fame the college is justly proud—Doctor Blogg, the late
master, and friend of Doctor Johnson, who visited him at Saint
Boniface—and other lawyers, scholars, and divines, whose portraitures
look from the walls, or whose coats-of-arms shine in emerald and ruby,
gold and azure, in the tall windows of the refectory. The venerable
cook of the college is one of the best artists in Oxbridge (his son
took the highest honours in the other University of Camford), and the
wine in the fellows’ room has long been famed for its excellence and
abundance.
Into this certainly not the least snugly sheltered arbour amongst the
groves of Academe, Pen now found his way, leaning on his uncle’s arm,
and they speedily reached Mr. Buck’s rooms, and were conducted into the
apartment of that courteous gentleman.
He had received previous information from Dr. Portman regarding Pen,
with respect to whose family, fortune, and personal merits the honest
Doctor had spoken with no small enthusiasm. Indeed Portman had
described Arthur to the tutor as “a young gentleman of some fortune and
landed estate, of one of the most ancient families in the kingdom, and
possessing such a character and genius as were sure, under the proper
guidance, to make him a credit to the college and the university.”
Under such recommendations the tutor was, of course, most cordial to
the young freshman and his guardian, invited the latter to dine in
hall, where he would have the satisfaction of seeing his nephew wear
his gown and eat his dinner for the first time, and requested the pair
to take wine at his rooms after hall, and in consequence of the highly
favourable report he had received of Mr. Arthur Pendennis, said, he
should be happy to give him the best set of rooms to be had in
college—a gentleman-pensioner’s set, indeed, which were just luckily
vacant. So they parted until dinner-time, which was very near at hand,
and Major Pendennis pronounced Mr. Buck to be uncommonly civil indeed.
Indeed when a College Magnate takes the trouble to be polite, there is
no man more splendidly courteous. Immersed in their books and excluded
from the world by the gravity of their occupations, these reverend men
assume a solemn magnificence of compliment in which they rustle and
swell as in their grand robes of state. Those silks and brocades are
not put on for all comers or every day.
When the two gentlemen had taken leave of the tutor in his study, and
had returned to Mr. Buck’s ante-room, or lecture-room, a very handsome
apartment, turkey-carpeted, and hung with excellent prints and richly
framed pictures, they found the tutor’s servant already in waiting
there, accompanied by a man with a bag full of caps and a number of
gowns, from which Pen might select a cap and gown for himself, and the
servant, no doubt, would get a commission proportionable to the service
done by him. Mr. Pen was all in a tremor of pleasure as the bustling
tailor tried on a gown and pronounced that it was an excellent fit; and
then he put the pretty college cap on, in rather a dandified manner and
somewhat on one side, as he had seen Fiddicombe, the youngest master at
Grey Friars, wear it. And he inspected the entire costume with a great
deal of satisfaction in one of the great gilt mirrors which ornamented
Mr. Buck’s lecture-room: for some of these college divines are no more
above looking-glasses than a lady is, and look to the set of their
gowns and caps quite as anxiously as folks do of the lovelier sex. The
Major smiled as he saw the boy dandifying himself in the glass: the old
gentleman was not displeased with the appearance of the comely lad.
Then Davis, the skip or attendant, led the way, keys in hand, across
the quadrangle, the Major and Pen following him, the latter blushing,
and pleased with his new academical habiliments, across the quadrangle
to the rooms which were destined for the freshman; and which were
vacated by the retreat of the gentleman-pensioner, Mr. Spicer. The
rooms were very comfortable, with large cross beams, high wainscots,
and small windows in deep embrasures. Mr. Spicer’s furniture was there,
and to be sold at a valuation, and Major Pendennis agreed on his
nephew’s behalf to take the available part of it, laughingly however
declining (as, indeed, Pen did for his own part) six sporting prints,
and four groups of opera-dancers with gauze draperies, which formed the
late occupant’s pictorial collection.
Then they went to hall, where Pen sate down and ate his commons with
his brother freshmen, and the Major took his place at the high-table
along with the college dignitaries and other fathers or guardians of
youth, who had come up with their sons to Oxbridge; and after hall they
went to Mr. Buck’s to take wine; and after wine to chapel, where the
Major sate with great gravity in the upper place, having a fine view of
the Master in his carved throne or stall under the organ-loft, where
that gentleman, the learned Doctor Donne, sate magnificent, with his
great prayer-book before him, an image of statuesque piety and rigid
devotion. All the young freshmen behaved with gravity and decorum, but
Pen was shocked to see that atrocious little Foker, who came in very
late, and half a dozen of his comrades in the gentlemen-pensioners’
seats, giggling and talking as if they had been in so many stalls at
the Opera. But these circumstances, it must be remembered, took place
some years back, when William the Fourth was king. Young men are much
better behaved now, and besides, Saint Boniface was rather a fast
college.
Pen could hardly sleep at night in his bedroom at the Trencher: so
anxious was he to begin his college life, and to get into his own
apartments. What did he think about, as he lay tossing and awake? Was
it about his mother at home; the pious soul whose life was bound up in
his? Yes, let us hope he thought of her a little. Was it about Miss
Fotheringay, and his eternal passion, which had kept him awake so many
nights, and created such wretchedness and such longing? He had a trick
of blushing, and if you had been in the room, and the candle had not
been out, you might have seen the youth’s countenance redden more than
once, as he broke out into passionate incoherent exclamations regarding
that luckless event of his life. His uncle’s lessons had not been
thrown away upon him; the mist of passion had passed from his eyes now,
and he saw her as she was. To think that he, Pendennis, had been
enslaved by such a woman, and then jilted by her! that he should have
stooped so low, to be trampled on the mire! that there was a time in
his life, and that but a few months back, when he was willing to take
Costigan for his father-in-law!
“Poor old Smirke!” Pen presently laughed out—“well, I’ll write and try
and console the poor old boy. He won’t die of his passion, ha, ha!” The
Major, had he been awake, might have heard a score of such ejaculations
uttered by Pen as he lay awake and restless through the first night of
his residence at Oxbridge.
It would, perhaps, have been better for a youth, the battle of whose
life was going to begin on the morrow, to have passed the eve in a
different sort of vigil: but the world had got hold of Pen in the shape
of his selfish old Mentor: and those who have any interest in his
character must have perceived ere now, that this lad was very weak as
well as very impetuous, very vain as well as very frank, and if of a
generous disposition, not a little selfish in the midst of his
profuseness, and also rather fickle, as all eager pursuers of
self-gratification are.
The six months’ passion had aged him very considerably. There was an
immense gulf between Pen the victim of love, and Pen the innocent boy
of eighteen, sighing after it: and so Arthur Pendennis had all the
experience and superiority, besides that command which afterwards
conceit and imperiousness of disposition gave him over the young men
with whom he now began to live.
He and his uncle passed the morning with great satisfaction in making
purchases for the better comfort of the apartments which the lad was
about to occupy. Mr. Spicer’s china and glass was in a dreadfully
dismantled condition, his lamps smashed, and his bookcases by no means
so spacious as those shelves which would be requisite to receive the
contents of the boxes which were lying in the hall at Fairoaks, and
which were addressed to Arthur in the hand of poor Helen.
The boxes arrived in a few days, that his mother had packed with so
much care. Pen was touched as he read the superscriptions in the dear
well-known hand, and he arranged in their proper places all the books,
his old friends, and all the linen and table-cloths which Helen had
selected from the family stock, and all the jam-pots which little Laura
had bound in straw, and the hundred simple gifts of home. Pen had
another Alma Mater now. But it is not all children who take to her
kindly.