_Which, to some extent, discloses the Incident of the Sentimental
Tea-cups_
Anthony, forestalling the youngster’s fretting for the girl’s
companionship, decided to send him up to Oxford at once; but with all
haste it was some months before he could go, and the lad, though he
stuck manfully to his heavy work with the tutor, became languid and
listless and vague. He fretted silently, and was filled with an ugly
distrust of those about him. It had brought to him a sudden revelation
of the need to stand alone--a revelation that is a part of the heritage
of life to all at emergence from youth, but comes to some roughly
enough.
He grimly forbore from asking questions, and fell away from his frank
boyish friendship with his own people--the cheery, intimate, and
open good-fellowship with his father and his mother gave way to a
strange aloofness, and there developed in its place a self-reliance
and a haughty desire to try the wings of his own judgment that bred
much foolishness, as well as strength. His mother sadly put down the
lad’s cubbishness to the coming of manhood, and accepted much of the
brusqueness as being a part of the inevitable period of cubhood when
the whelp is for trying its strength and for leaving the litter.
The lad’s arrival at Oxford started the man’s shadow in him to life.
He moved towards the shadow eagerly, and grasped at the reality which
cast it. Flung suddenly into a sea of youth of his own age, he was at
grips with his own strength at once--tried it, as by instinct, against
the wills of the youths about him, all of whom, also come abroad out of
their homes, were essaying their strength and affections and cunning
upon each other, straining the cords wilfully to the breaking pitch
both of the affections and of the hostilities.
It was the best thing that could have happened to the young blood; the
strain of the life kept him from the fret of the injustice that had
been put upon him, and drew his mind for awhile from brooding on the
blackness of the empty place where his natural mate had until now moved
in dainty harmony with his existence.
He was in a new world.
He suddenly found, to his surprise, that there was that which gave him
position amongst the undergraduates which had been completely ignored
amongst the intellectual Bohemians. These others had taken him on his
merits--he was now taken on the merit of his family. He found that the
important thing was not as to what he was, but as to what his father
was. He was given his place and his measure of pleasantnesses largely
in the degree of his social position. He awoke to the fact that he had
a social position--a rung on a long ladder, reaching up to dignity and
the smiles of the dignified others.
The atmosphere here was wholly different. It was less literary, more
academic; less intellectual, more scholastic; less original, more
conventional; less artistic, more grammatic--life, literature, art,
every human activity was judged, not by the standard of the emotions,
but by the restrictions of the common law, by precedents. The very
pleasures were built upon tradition; he could not amuse himself as he
willed without being looked upon askance. And all this atmosphere, odd
to say, was not created by the professors, but by the youths of his own
age, who were coming up from the great public schools.
The young fellow began at once to win the friendship of such of the
youngsters as had his own frank habits and ways; and it was at this
phase that was born his lifelong friendship with young Horace Malahide.
Everything in the relation of his fellows to him was done through an
atmosphere. His first term threw him into nodding acquaintance with
two or three young peers of his own year, and with youngsters who were
the sons of county magnates--several of them indeed county magnates
themselves. These young fellows he found to be friendly and genial to
a certain point, when suddenly they stepped into another atmosphere
from which he was subtly excluded. It was done by the most delicate of
tricks, and was chiefly made apparent by their manner towards another
in their own atmosphere as in comparison with their manner towards him.
He noticed the youngsters who had been school-friends at the great
public schools, now drifted apart, shifted their affection, stepped
quietly away from their old association and habits, and were swallowed
each into a well-defined set....
When, however, Noll returned to Oxford for his second term he found
himself in a new atmosphere. One of the young peers walked into his
rooms as an intimate friend--accosted him with the heartiness that
showed him he had passed into the set--he was the same youth--the other
was the same youth--something had chanced, and changed the attitude.
Noll bent his big brows upon it, resenting it as an impertinence. But
the others were equally urbane, friendly--yet not a word passed--there
was nothing to make the excuse for a resentment.
He only knew some while afterwards that Lord Wyntwarde had asked the
youth, meeting him in the hunting-field, if a young cousin of his, one
Noll Baddlesmere, were not up at Magdalen with him. The youth had
passed the word quite subtly. Gentlemen should never do vulgar things
vulgarly.
Noll thenceforth moved in _the_ set, and its allied sets. He breathed
_the_ atmosphere. But being an airy person, of kindly and genial
nature, he was not by way of examining into motives, nor of very
strictly carrying out the subtle hints of the others in the Atmosphere;
thus it came about that he dove-tailed several cliques that would
otherwise have practised a more rigid exclusiveness towards each other.
And he carried with him, into the most exclusive groups of young
nobles, amongst whom he was soon well-liked, his genial friend Horace
Malahide....
Noll’s career at Oxford was a short one.
He nearly got through his first year.
A certain superficial cleverness laid the gin for the lad’s fall.
His taste in literary expression had been cultivated to a brilliancy
beyond his years by association with the witty Bohemians, and by the
reading of good work; it had, above all, been developed by the artistic
guidance of Eustace Lovegood. The lad therefore now found it difficult
to wade through the cheap academic facetiousness and thin style of the
literary ventures that exploited in dullard local reviews the anæmic
wit which passed for fiery originality amongst the undergraduates, and
mistook itself for a revolutionary upheaval in their puerile and stupid
magazines.
It was natural that he should write, with an almost uncanny facility, a
sketch, daring, skilful, and precocious enough to stand out amidst this
dead level of the commonplace. He at once made a mark which exaggerated
his powers, judged only by comparison with much that was colourless and
bloodless and vapid and weak.
As a sure result, having caught the eye of the others, and hearing
himself quoted, he wrote again; and by the greatest misfortune and not
in the least realizing that he was stirring the most offensive of mud
in the otherwise healthy stream of the life of the schools, he wrote a
satiric sketch on the Greek friendship of two notorious youths, that
sent spluttering laughter through the halls and common-rooms, and
made the position of the two young nobles at the university wholly
untenable. The laughter that greeted _The Eton Marriage_ was not run
down when Horace Malahide followed with a satiric newspaper report of
the divorce of the two youths, in which dons were solemnly trotted
out as chaperons and society beauties and lawyers and officers of
the court; whilst a ridiculous series of questions and answers, in
examination and cross examination, aired the foibles and cranks and
eccentricities and confirmed waggeries of the more pronounced local
celebrities.
Written as a mere whimsical squib on the seemingly ill-assorted
friendship of a burly athletic youth for a dandified effeminate
lordling of almost womanly beauty and æsthetic pretensions, the squib
burst and discovered an awful and ugly state of affairs. To none did it
bring more startling illumination than to the makers of the squib.
Both Noll and Horace were staggered at the scandals their somewhat
tasteless fooling disclosed. There was much hushing up to be done. The
two young nobles would soon be assisting to govern the country; and
they must be saved--thus the tradition worked. They found life at the
university wholly impossible, and retired to the House of Lords--to
their peers, so runs the quaint phrase.
Noll and Horace hammered out the business, and came to the conclusion
that a certain lack of good-taste on their own part had cost their
beloved university a very ugly blow; they withdrew their names at the
hint of the solemn faces of their masters and superiors who ruled over
them, and gave their farewell reception.
They purged their contempt in tea.
Noll, in a fit of retrenchment, said it must be tea; having discovered
that he had run through his whole three years’ allowances. Horace,
always shy of displaying his wealth, on the theory that it was against
good taste in the newly enriched, supported the decision for economy
and tea--and ordered the most exquisite Limoges service for the
solemnities.
In far London, Bartholomew Doome, scenting aroma of naughtiness in the
air, hastened down to Horace and Oxford for the day, fearing to be out
of the scandal, and added his Byronic gloom and atmosphere of tragic
wickedness to the smoke-filled rooms. He made a profound impression
and many friends; indeed, it may be admitted without exaggerating his
success that he was betrayed into no slightest hint of a decent emotion.
The tea being drunk, and the kindly farewells taken, the roomful of
youths solemnly stood up, and Noll and Horace as solemnly broke their
cups that none should again drink from them or sully the memory of the
glorious days they had all spent together. The pieces were flung into
the street.
The others, each taking a cup and saucer with them, in memory of their
friendship, shook hands and filed slowly out.
As youth broke sentimental tea-cups, the Oxford tradesman who owned
the debt for them, sitting in his little counting-house, was reading a
letter from a Hebrew friend in the offices of The Tradesmen’s Defence
League in London.
This letter, after various facetious references to the tradesman’s
family, proceeds to display the very shrewdest knowledge of the details
that made up Noll’s family history--his connections, his prospects--not
wholly unmixed with some sly wit and comical allusions. The writer
thinks that Noll may be a coming man, he has done so badly at Oxford;
considers that he is not devoid of generous and honourable instincts;
is of opinion that any debt he may contract will eventually be paid;
and ends with the personal note as thus:
“I like a man as can slop the gilders about a bit, myself. And as
for academic honours, why, you and me was neither of us strong in
book-learning, but we’ve kept our noses above the water, and the
seats of our trousers off the hospitable benches, and our integrity
outside the doors of, the bankruptcy receiving-houses; and we could
teach the Government a thing or two in raising the wind and the
mysteries of profitable taxation, Samuel.... Let the young ass eat
his thistles--only see to it that you have a mortgage on the crop.
I hold out my homely fist.
REUBEN MCCUBBIE.
P.S.--This here Oliver Baddlesmere ain’t so far off the peerage as
some. I have heard it whispered that he is nearer to it than what
even you or me is.
They do say, too, that the cub has found a girl. Early marriage,
Samuel, gives hostages against the most gentlemanly blackguardism.
But I garrule.
Again I hold out the aforesaid fist.
Be good.
This letter seems to be all about money. I sometimes think I’m a
damned Jew.
Nevertheless, be good.
Bless my soul, how these boys do get through the unearned increment!”