DINNER
"I am sorry I'm late," said the Warden quietly, and he looked at both
his guests. "I have been with Lady Dashwood. I must apologise, Bingham,
for her absence. I expect Mrs. Dashwood has already told you that she is
not well."
The bow with which the Warden offered his arm to May was one which
included more than the mere formal invitation to go down to dinner, it
meant a greeting after absence and an acknowledgment that she was acting
as his hostess. It was one of those ceremonial bows which men are rarely
able to make without looking pompous. He had the reputation, in Oxford,
of being one of the very few men who, in his tutorial days, could
present men for degrees with academic grace.
"I'm sorry, Bingham," he said; "I have only just returned, or I might
have secured a fourth to dinner--yes, even in war time."
May went downstairs, wondering. Wondering how it was that the worst was
so soon over, and that, after all, instead of feeling a painful pity for
the man whose arm held hers in a light grasp, she felt strangely
timorous of him.
She was profoundly thankful for the presence of Bingham, who was
following behind, cheerful and chatty, having put aside, apparently, all
recollection of the conversation of the evening before. Yes, whatever
his secret thoughts might have been, Bingham appeared to have forgotten
that there were any moonlight nights in the streets of Oxford. For this,
May blessed him.
They entered the long dining-room and, sitting at the Warden's end of
the table, formed a bright living space of light and movement. Outside
that bright space the room gradually sombred to the dark panelled walls.
The Warden, in his high-backed chair, looked the very impersonation of
Oxford. This was what struck Bingham as he glanced at his host, and the
thought suggested that hater of Oxford, the Warden's relative, Bernard
Boreham.
"I have just got your friend Boreham to undertake a job of work," said
Bingham. "It'll do him a world of good to have work, a library to
catalogue for the use of our prisoners. He wanted to shove off the job
to some chaplain. I was to procure the chaplain, just as if all men
weren't scarce, even chaplains!"
Composed as the Warden was, he looked at Bingham with something of eager
attention on his face, as if relying on him for support and
conversation.
"Poor old Boreham, he is a connection of mine by marriage," he said, and
as the words fell from his lips, he, in his present sensitive mood,
recoiled from them, for they implied that Boreham was not a friend. Why
was he posing as one who was too superior to choose Boreham as a friend?
"Talking of chaplains," said Bingham, who knew nothing of what was going
on in the Warden's mind, and thought this sudden stop came from dislike
of any reference to Boreham--"talking of parsons, why not release all
parsons in West End churches for the war?"
A smile came into May's face at the extreme sweetness of Bingham's
voice; a warning that he was about to say something biting.
"Release all parsons who have smart congregations," continued Bingham,
in honied tones; "parsons with congregations of jolly, well-dressed
women, women who enjoy having their naughtiness slanged from the pulpit
just as they enjoy having their photographs in the picture papers. Their
spiritual necessities would be more than adequately provided for if they
were given a dummy priest and a gramophone."
May's smile seemed to stimulate Bingham's imagination.
"To waste on them a real parson with a soul and a rudimentary
intellect," he went on, "is like giving a glass of Moselle to an
agricultural labourer when he would be happy with a mug of beer. But the
Church wastes its energies even in this time of heartbreakings."
"I should like to see you, Bingham," said the Warden, smiling too, and
turning his narrow eyes, in his slow deliberate manner, towards his
guest, "as chairman to a committee of English bishops, on the
Reconstruction of the Church."
"I've no quarrel with our bishops," said Bingham; "I don't want them to
extol every new point of view as they pass along. I don't expect them to
behave like young men. Nor do I expect them to be like the Absolute,
without 'body, parts or passions.' My indictment is not even against
that mere drop in the ocean, 'good Christian souls,' but against
humanity and human nature!" Bingham looked from one to the other of his
listeners. "Until now, the only people we have taken quite seriously are
the very well dressed and the--well, the undressed. The two classes
overlap continually. But now we've got to take everybody seriously; we
are going to have a Democracy. Human nature has got a new tool, and the
tool is Democracy. The new tool is to be put into the same foolish old
hands, and we shall very soon discover what we shall call 'the sins of
Democracy.' What is fundamentally wrong with us is what apparently we
can't help: it's that we are ourselves, that we are human beings."
Bingham smiled into his plate. "We adopt Christianity, and because we
are human beings we make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. We
are patronising Democracy, and we shall make it intellectually rigid and
morally sloppy too--if we don't take care. Everything we handle becomes
intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. And yet we still fancy that, if
only we could get hold of the right tools, our hands would do the right
work."
"The Reconstruction of Human Nature is what you are demanding," said the
Warden.
"Yes, that's what we want," sighed Bingham. "When we have got rid of the
Huns, we must begin to think about it."
"If you saw the children I have seen, Mr. Bingham," said May, quietly,
"you would want to begin at once, and I think you would be hopeful."
There was on the Warden's face a sudden passionate assent that Bingham
detected.
"All men," said Bingham, leaning back in his chair and regarding his two
listeners with veiled attention--"all men like to hear a woman say
sweet, tender, hopeful things, even if they don't believe them. As for
myself, Mrs. Dashwood, I admit that your 'higher optimism' haunts me too
at times; at rare times when, for instance, the weather in Oxford is dry
and bright and bracing."
If he had for a moment doubted it since the afternoon at the Hardings',
Bingham was now sure, as sure as a man can be of what is unconfessed in
words, that between this man and woman sitting at the table with him was
some secret sensitive interest that was not friendship.
How did this conviction affect Bingham and Bingham's spirits? It
certainly did not put a stop to his flow of talk. Rather, he talked the
more; he was even more sweetly cynical and amiably scintillating than
usual. If his heart was wounded, and he himself was not sure whether it
was or not, he hid that heart successfully in a sheath of his own
sparks.
A pause came when Robinson put out the light over the carving-table and
withdrew with Robinson Junior. The dining-room was silent. Bingham drank
some wine, the Warden mused, and May Dashwood sat with her eyes on a
glass of water by her, looking at it as if she could see some vision in
its transparency. The fire was glowing a deep red in the great stone
chimney-piece at the further end of the room. A coal fell forward upon
the hearth with a strangely solitary sound. Bingham glanced towards the
fire and then round the room, and then at his host, and lastly at May
Dashwood.
"I heard a rumour," he said, and he took a sip of his claret, "that your
college ghost had made an appearance!"
There came another silence in the room.
"One doesn't know how such rumours come about," continued Bingham;
"perhaps you hadn't even heard of this one?" He looked across at May and
round at the Warden. Neither of them seemed to be aware that a question
was being asked.
"I didn't know King's even claimed a ghost," said Bingham again. "I've
heard of the ghost of Shelley in the High," he added, smiling. "A ghost
for the tourist who comes to see the Shelley Memorial."
May looked down rather closely at the table.
The Warden moved stiffly. "I don't believe Shelley would want to come,"
he said. "He always despised his Alma Mater."
"He was a bit of an _enfant terrible_," said Bingham, "from the tutor's
point of view."
May raised her eyes with relief; the Warden had parried the question of
the ghost with skill.
"And I don't believe," said the Warden, "that any one returns who has
merely roystered within our walls," and he smiled.
Bingham was now looking very attentively at the Warden out of his dark
eyes.
"Jeremy Bentham," he said, "seems to have been afraid of ghosts, when he
was an undergraduate here. He was afraid of barging against them on dark
college staircases. It's a fear I can't grasp. I would much rather come
into collision with any ghost than with the Stroke of the 'Varsity
Eight, whether the staircase was dark or not."
"If there are ghosts," said the Warden, pensively, "I should expect to
see Cranmer, on some wild night, wandering near the places where he
endured his passion and his death. Or I should expect to see Laud pacing
the streets, amazed at the order and discipline of modern Oxford. If
personal attachment could bring a man from the grave," he went on,
meeting Bingham's eyes with a smile, "why shouldn't that least ghostly
of all scholars, your old master, Jowett--why shouldn't he walk at night
when Balliol is asleep?"
"Then there was nothing in the rumour," said Bingham, "that your King's
ghost has turned up?"
"The Warden doesn't believe in ghosts," said May, looking across the
table eagerly. She remembered how he had stood by the bedside of
Gwendolen that night. She recalled the room vividly, the gloom of the
room and he alone standing in the light thrown upon him by the lamp. She
could recall every tone of his voice as he said: "You thought you saw
something. You made a mistake. You saw nothing, you imagined that you
saw--there was nothing," and how his voice convinced _her_, as she stood
by the fire and listened. How long ago was that--only three days--it
seemed like a month.
"No," said the Warden, "I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't
believe that our dead"--and he pronounced the last word reverently--"are
such that they can return to us in human form, or through the
intervention of some hired medium. But if there are ghosts in Oxford,"
he went on, and now he turned to Bingham, as if he were answering his
question--"if there are ghosts in Oxford they will be the ghosts of
those who were, in life, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. I am
thinking of those men who lived and died in Oxford, recluses who knew no
other world, and of whom the world knew nothing--men who used to flit
like shadows from their solitary rooms to the Lecture hall and to High
table and to the Common room. Those men were monks in all but name;
celibates, solitaries--men to whom the laughter of youth was maddening
pain."
May's eyes dropped! What the Warden was saying stabbed her, not merely
because of the words he said, but because his voice conveyed the sense
of that poignant pain.
"Such men as I speak of," he went on, "Oxford must always have
possessed, even in the boisterous days when you fellows of All Souls,"
he said, addressing Bingham, "used to pull your doors off their hinges
to make bonfires in honour of the mallard. There always have been these
men, students shy and sensitive, shrinking from the rougher side of the
ordinary man, shrinking from ordinary social life; men who are only
courageous in their devotion to learning and to truth; men who are
lonely with that awful loneliness of those who live in the world of
thoughts. I knew one such man myself. Those who believe in ghosts may
come upon the shades of these men in the passages and in the cloisters
at night, or hiding in the dark recesses of our college windows. Why, I
can feel them everywhere--and yet I don't believe in ghosts." The Warden
placed his elbows upon the table and rested his chin upon his hands, and
looked down at the table-cloth.
May said nothing; she was listening, her face bent but expressive even
to her eyebrows.
"Neither do I," said Bingham, in an altered voice. "I don't believe in
ghosts, and yet, what do we know of this world? We talk of it glibly.
But what do we know of the forces which make up the phantasmagoria that
we call the World? What do we know of this vast universe? We perceive
something of it by touch, by sight, sound and smell. These are the doors
through which its forces penetrate the brain of man. These doors are our
way of 'being aware' of life. The psychology of man is in its infancy.
And remember"--here Bingham leaned over the table and rested his eyes on
May--"it is man studying himself! That makes the difficulty!" Bingham
was serious now, and he had slipped from slang into the academic form in
which his thoughts really moved.
"And we don't even know whether our ways of perceiving are the only
ways," said the Warden.
"Anyhow," said Bingham, turning to him, "the ghosts you 'feel,' and
which you and I don't believe in, belong to the old Oxford, the Oxford
which is gone."
There came a sudden silence in the long room, and May felt that she
ought to make a move. She looked at the Warden.
"That Oxford," continued Bingham, "is gone for ever. It began to go when
men hedged it round with red brick, and went to live under red-tiled
roofs with wives and children."
"Yes, it has gone," said the Warden. "Must you leave us!" he asked,
rising, as May looked at him and made a movement to rise.
Bingham rose to his feet, but he stood with his hand holding the foot
of his glass and gazing into its crimson depths.
"Pardon, Middleton! Mrs. Dashwood, one moment," he said, and he raised
his glass solemnly till it was almost on a level with his dark face.
"Will you pledge me?" he asked. "To the old Oxford that is past and
gone!"
The Warden and May were both drinking water. They raised their glasses
and touched Bingham's wine which glowed in the light from above, almost
suggesting something sacramental. And Bingham himself looked like a
smooth, swarthy priest of mediaeval story, half-serious and half-gay,
disguised in modern dress.
"To the Oxford of sacred memory," he said.
They drank.
May was thinking deeply and as she was about to place her glass back
upon the table, the thought that was struggling for expression came to
her. She lifted her glass: "To the Oxford that is to be," she said
gently. She glanced first at Bingham, and then her eyes rested for a
moment upon the Warden.
Bingham watched her keenly. He could see that at that moment she had no
thought of herself. Her thoughts were of Oxford alone, and, Bingham
guessed, with the man with whom she identified Oxford.
Bingham hesitated to raise his glass. Was it a flash of jealousy that
went through him? A jealousy of the new Oxford and all that it might
mean to the two human beings beside him? If it was jealousy it died out
as swiftly as it had come.
He raised his glass.
"To the Oxford of the Future," said the Warden.
"Ad multos annos," said Bingham.