"This is not a smoking-carriage," Mrs. Norman protested, nervously but
very feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young man
jumped in. He seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before it
reached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railway
carriage, with a young man.
She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the
scent-bottle and a novel from Mudie's were both handy (the young man was
standing up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack). She
would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tug
the communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, and
had a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous.
She read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over the
edge to decide the question of safety by the infallible test of
appearance.... She would like to offer him her paper. But do young men
read the Morning Post? She looked to see what he was reading--the Daily
Telegraph.
Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his
face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down,
since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent,
unconscious--as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked out of the
window, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he didn't
notice her. Grave, unconscious... now he looked up, past her... he
seemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an elderly lady... then he
fixed his eyes--which were blue--on the landscape. He had not realized
her presence, she thought. Yet it was none of HER fault that this was
not a smoking-carriage--if that was what he meant.
Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite
a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see
all sorts of things--they see themselves.... Mrs. Norman now read three
pages of one of Mr. Norris's novels. Should she say to the young man
(and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): "If you want to
smoke, don't mind me"? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to her
presence... she did not wish to interrupt.
But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he
was in some way or other--to her at least--nice, handsome, interesting,
distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one
can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It
is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly
what is said, nor yet entirely what is done--for instance, when the
train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put
the lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: "Let
me" very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.
"Who..." said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd
on the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her
sentence. As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the
week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and
round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in
her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well
twirls in the water and disappears for ever.
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked,
exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you
are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower
down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge--anyhow above the
roof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out at sea a great
city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose
the sky, washed into the crevices of King's College Chapel, lighter,
thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not
only into the night, but into the day?
Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as
though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces,
what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots
march under the gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thick
wax candles stand upright; young men rise in white gowns; while the
subservient eagle bears up for inspection the great white book.
An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple
and yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks upon
stone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neither
snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained
glass. As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burns
steady even in the wildest night--burns steady and gravely illumines the
tree-trunks--so inside the Chapel all was orderly. Gravely sounded the
voices; wisely the organ replied, as if buttressing human faith with the
assent of the elements. The white-robed figures crossed from side to
side; now mounted steps, now descended, all very orderly.
... If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest
creeps up to it--a curious assembly, since though they scramble and
swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no
purpose--something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watching
them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for
admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and
shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what's that? A terrifying
volley of pistol-shots rings out--cracks sharply; ripples
spread--silence laps smooth over sound. A tree--a tree has fallen, a
sort of death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds
melancholy.
But this service in King's College Chapel--why allow women to take part
in it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily
vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if
the mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards upon
cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs.
Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense of
individuals--some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansies
and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church.
For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no
disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking,
lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the
blood run cold with horror (should you be one of a congregation--alone,
shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely.
So do these women--though separately devout, distinguished, and vouched
for by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands.
Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they're as ugly as
sin.
Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant's eye;
looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.
"Waverley," the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr.
Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names are
useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they sat
waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there was
talk of names upon gates.
"How tiresome," Mrs. Plumer interrupted impulsively. "Does anybody know
Mr. Flanders?"
Mr. Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said,
awkwardly, something about being sure--looking at Mr. Plumer and
hitching the right leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up and
stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a
straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than
the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being
afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross
the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one
at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled
grey, and the sparrows--there were two sparrows.
"I think," said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite,
while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and
he, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched
the bell.
There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life,
save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the
mutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after
Sunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of
Parliament, business men--if no don ever gave a luncheon party--
"Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?" he
asked the young man next him, to break a silence which had already
lasted five minutes and a half.
"I don't know, sir," said the young man, blushing very vividly.
At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time.
Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second
helping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his
meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or
twice to measure his speed--only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this,
Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind--and the
tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to
give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton.
Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.
It was none of her fault--since how could she control her father
begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once
begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious,
with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an
ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of
the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the
rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer
became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could
only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the
ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the
ladder.
"I was down at the races yesterday," she said, "with my two little
girls."
It was none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in
white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had
inherited her father's cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had,
but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the
Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were
on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-penny
weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots--the weekly creak and
screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry--melancholy papers.
"I don't feel that I know the truth about anything till I've read them
both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her
bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God!" exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates
left the house. "Oh, my God!"
"Bloody beastly!" he said, scanning the street for lilac or
bicycle--anything to restore his sense of freedom.
"Bloody beastly," he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort at
the world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing--there
was no doubt about that--but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe
in--Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they
after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never
read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined
against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The
poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was
in him. Those wretched little girls--
The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog.
Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the
elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick
suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow
flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the
composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a
young man of substance.
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as
a shock about the age of twenty--the world of the elderly--thrown up in
such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and
Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth
in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so
intolerably disagreeable--"I am what I am, and intend to be it," for
which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for
himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and
Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every time
he lunches out on Sunday--at dinner parties and tea parties--there will
be this same shock--horror--discomfort--then pleasure, for he draws into
him at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such
reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in
the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy
air of May, the elastic air with its particles--chestnut bloom, pollen,
whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees,
gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at
flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white
drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as
if lavishly caressing them.
Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their
topmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in
the water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real
leaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind--instantly an edge of
sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherries
through the green wedge of leaves, their stalks twinkling as they
wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would go down
red into the green. The meadow was on a level with Jacob's eyes as he
lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thin
green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, but
stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs of
children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, he
heard; then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch,
munch, as they tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him two
white butterflies circled higher and higher round the elm tree.
"Jacob's off," thought Durrant looking up from his novel. He kept
reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical
manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag
and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the
backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now
moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air
between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue--Lady Miller's
picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without getting
up, shoved their boat closer to the bank.
"Oh-h-h-h," groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, and
the white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long and
wavering up the bank.
"Oh-h-h-h!" He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in
his face.
"They're friends of my mother's," said Durrant. "So old Bow took no end
of trouble about the boat."
And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St. Ives Bay, all round the
coast. A larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June,
properly fitted out, Durrant said...
"There's the cash difficulty," said Jacob.
"My people'll see to that," said Durrant (the son of a banker,
deceased).
"I intend to preserve my economic independence," said Jacob stiffly. (He
was getting excited.)
"My mother said something about going to Harrogate," he said with a
little annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters.
"Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?" asked Timmy
Durrant.
Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant's room the night
before.
"I expect he's feeding the sharks, if the truth were known," said Jacob.
"I say, Durrant, there's none left!" he exclaimed, crumpling the bag
which had held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He saw Lady
Miller's picnic party on the island as he threw the bag into the river.
A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes.
"Shall we move on... this beastly crowd..." he said.
So up they went, past the island.
The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the
chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley in
the meadows.
The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards,
from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob's rooms,
however, were in Neville's Court; at the top; so that reaching his door
one went in a little out of breath; but he wasn't there. Dining in Hall,
presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville's Court long before
midnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and the
fountains. A curious effect the gate has, like lace upon pale green.
Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum of talk, too, from the
diners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening and shutting with a
soft thud. Some are late.
Jacob's room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow
flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards
from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and
initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red
margin--an essay, no doubt--"Does History consist of the Biographies of
Great Men?" There were books enough; very few French books; but then any
one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes
him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for
example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek
dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages;
all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats
burnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks,
and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua--all very English. The works of Jane
Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else's standard. Carlyle
was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the
Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual
text-books. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the
curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair
creaks, though no one sits there.
Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seat
talking to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the old
man, with his hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched,
unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then
another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky;
another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were
lit in the dark windows.
If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms;
Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poor
old Huxtable can't walk straight;--Sopwith, too, has praised the sky any
night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories.
It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning,
since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti's on the
wall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or
rusty pipes), how priestly they look! How like a suburb where you go to
see a view and eat a special cake! "We are the sole purveyors of this
cake." Back you go to London; for the treat is over.
Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change
of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his
paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of
his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a
whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old
Huxtable's head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print,
what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly,
quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels,
till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with
ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain. Yet sometimes there
he'll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a man
holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges,
or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk
of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest
silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all
her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction--marvellous illumination.
Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in
the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone
he lay triumphant.
Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fire-place,
cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there
would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve,
sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they
came; Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking--as if
everything could be talked--the soul itself slipped through the lips in
thin silver disks which dissolve in young men's minds like silver, like
moonlight. Oh, far away they'd remember it, and deep in dulness gaze
back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.
"Well, I never. That's old Chucky. My dear boy, how's the world treating
you?" And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial,
Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the
other everything, everything, "all I could never be"--yes, though next
day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to
him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing
things up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save every
penny to send his son there.
Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech--things
young men blurted out--plaiting them round his own smooth garland,
making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns,
manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything,
until perhaps he'd grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver
disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple,
and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same--a
Greek boy's head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining the
priest, would, involuntarily, despise.
Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little
man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port,
and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil
and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only--sometimes it
will come over one--what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" he
might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all,
Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for
arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a
French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be
home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little
mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the
dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon his
lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goes
sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously
enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she
reaches Clare Bridge: "But if I met him, what should I wear?"--and then,
taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play
upon other details of men's meeting with women which have never got into
print. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those
of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text
for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught
and the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over,
no longer the representative of Virgil. No, the builder, assessor,
surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors.
Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it
can--the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and
Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known and
things that are about to be known. So that if at night, far out at sea
over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city
illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall
of Trinity where they're still dining, or washing up plates, that would
be the light burning there--the light of Cambridge.
"Let's go round to Simeon's room," said Jacob, and they rolled up the
map, having got the whole thing settled.
All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the
cobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The young
men were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing.
What was it that could DROP like that? And leaning down over a foaming
window-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they went
and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the
hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming,
suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz.
The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young men
still went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now and
then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen,
unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after
dinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books
as the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of
concentration in the air. Behind the grey walls sat so many young men,
some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs,
perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and
writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen
moved--simple young men, these, who would--but there is no need to think
of them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr.
Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl:
"Jo--seph! Jo--seph!" and then he ran as hard as ever he could across
the court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense
pile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this was
a diversion. There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs,
holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that
would see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midland
towns, clergymen's sons. Others read Keats. And those long histories in
many volumes--surely some one was now beginning at the beginning in
order to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must. That was part of
the concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring
night--dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books,
actual chapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared;
or Richard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink
spills from an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and
contented no more, but almost fierce. Why? Only perhaps that Keats died
young--one wants to write poetry too and to love--oh, the brutes! It's
damnably difficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on the next
staircase, in the large room, there are two, three, five young men all
convinced of this--of brutality, that is, and the clear division between
right and wrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the
window being open, one could see how they sat--legs issuing here, one
there crumpled in a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could
not see him, somebody stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who
sat astride a chair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing.
The answer came from the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air,
then replaced. Jacob wheeled round. He had something to say to THAT,
though the sturdy red-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging
his head slowly from side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he
dug the point of it again and again into a knot in the table, as if
affirming that the voice from the fender spoke the truth--which Jacob
could not deny. Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he
might find something to say to it--indeed his lips opened--only then
there broke out a roar of laughter.
The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have
reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the
opposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of
arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room.
Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort?
What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?
A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the
enclosing buildings--chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick
and building for a May night, perhaps. And then before one's eyes would
come the bare hills of Turkey--sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers,
and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in the
stream to beat linen on the stones. The stream made loops of water round
their ankles. But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlings
and blanketings of the Cambridge night. The stroke of the clock even was
muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as if
generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their
ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing,
for the use of the living.
Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the
window and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. He
stood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly
round him. Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied;
indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there,
the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old
buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and
friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it
seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.
Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or
not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with
the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising
from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one
driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they
fell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone with
Masham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon. The others had all gone.
"... Julian the Apostate...." Which of them said that and the other
words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, like
a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flapping
through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. "Julian the
Apostate"--and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow the
sails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot
Indian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again.
So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now
drowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a
pillar.
"Somehow it seems to matter."
The low voice was Simeon's.
The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on
the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said "hum,"
or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the
intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind
indelibly.
"Well, you seem to have studied the subject," said Jacob, rising and
standing over Simeon's chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little.
He appeared extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim and
spill down the sides if Simeon spoke.
Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy--the room was
full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech
it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and
coating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a
light, of Cambridge burning, it's not languages only. It's Julian the
Apostate.
But Jacob moved. He murmured good-night. He went out into the court. He
buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and
being the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his
footsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back
from the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps,
as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: "The young
man--the young man--the young man-back to his rooms."