THE RESULT OF THE FRESHERS' MATCH
If I had to describe in detail the first two or three weeks of my life
at Oxford, I think that accusations might be brought against me of
having eaten too much, or at any rate too often. Fortunately I had a
good digestion, I cannot imagine the fate of a dyspeptic freshman if he
had to attend a series of Oxford breakfasts. I have, however, only
once encountered a fresher who suffered from dyspepsia, and if there
was any other man so afflicted at St. Cuthbert's he probably did not
admit his complaint. For we were supposed to be very cultivated at St.
Cuthbert's, and at that time it was not good form to hold a roll-call
of our diseases at breakfast, to discuss surgical operations at
luncheon, and to provide tales of sea-sickness by way of humour at
dinner. We kept our complaints to ourselves and were in truth more
than a little ashamed of them.
St. Cuthbert's had a reputation of its own. Men in other colleges
criticized us very freely. They said that we were prigs, that the
'Varsity boat would never be any good as long as there was a St.
Cuthbert's man in it, and other pleasant things which did not annoy me,
since I, having been a butt for much personal criticism all my life,
can even get some satisfaction from finding that a crowd of other
people are as bad as I am. Besides, we had nearly one hundred and
fifty men at St. Cuthbert's, and I thought it was absolutely stupid to
say we were all prigs and that none of us could row.
The truth of the matter was, as far as I could judge, that at St.
Cuthbert's there were often a large number of clever men, and clever
men when young can get on one's nerves most terribly. It is all right
for men to be clever when they are old or even middle-aged, then
allowances are made for them and they may be as odd as they please.
But if any one happens to be clever when he is at Oxford, he will have
to watch himself closely or he will be called either a genius or a
lunatic, and the one is almost as fatal as the other.
In a college as large as St. Cuthbert's it was natural that there
should be a number of different sets. We had several men who are best
described by the word "bloods"; two or three of them belonged to the
Bullingdon, a few of them to Vincent's, of which Club most of "the
blues" in the 'Varsity were members, and nearly all had plenty of money
and every one of them lived as if they had plenty. I cannot call them
athletic, though they and the really athletic set were more or less
mixed up together. We had also a very serious set who, I thought, gave
themselves far too many airs. Perhaps serious is not quite the right
word to apply to them, for one of this gang wrote a comic opera and
another wrote a farce; but these were just thrown out in their spare
time, and when I attended a reading of the libretto of the comic opera
I went so fast asleep that I cannot say how comic it was. But if it
had been very funny I should think some one would have laughed loud
enough to wake me up. Generally speaking this set seemed to be bent on
the reformation of England, a thing which has happened once and is
rather a difficult matter for a college debating society to bring about
again. The reformation which they were bent upon was not, however,
religious, for they thought little of the religion which satisfies
ordinary people. One of them told me that religion was merely
emotional and sentimental, a crutch for a weak man, and went on to say
that their scheme was moral and social, a cry for a better life and
against the oppression of the poor. That man bored me terribly, but
since one of his own set had told me that he was the cleverest man in
Oxford I did not like to tell him what I thought. Besides I was only a
fresher who had not yet looked around, and he was the first man I had
met who was the cleverest man in Oxford, though I met several others
afterwards who had arrived at the same peak of distinction. I even got
so weary of meeting this particular brand of man that I asked Jack Ward
to help me along my way by spreading a report that I was a most
promising poet, but he said that no one who had ever seen me would
believe him. He meant to be complimentary, I believe.
It was into this medley of sets that I was plunged headlong. Crowds of
men called upon me and asked me to meals. Some of them wanted to know
me because I played cricket and football, the captain of the college
boat called because he wanted me to row, some of the "bloods" left
cards on me because they had seen me walking about with Jack Ward, whom
they had marked down as one of themselves. A few men called from other
colleges who had known me at Cliborough, or had been asked to see
something of me because their people knew mine. I got to know the
oddest lot of men imaginable, and as long as they looked clean and did
not try to rush me into helping them to reform the world, I liked them
all.
But in spite of Ward, who pretended that Rugby football was an
overrated amusement, I wanted to belong to the athletic set, and I
started by playing footer in a thing which is most correctly called
"The Freshers' Squash." In this struggle any fresher who had never
played rugger in his life, but thought he would like some exercise,
could play, while footer blues dodged round and took your names, if you
were lucky enough to touch the ball, and booked you for the proper
game. On the following day I played back in the real freshers' match,
and was most tremendously encouraged before I started by hearing one
man say to another that I had come up with a big reputation from
Cliborough. Perhaps I was encouraged too much, or possibly I had eaten
too heavy a luncheon, for whatever reputation I might have had before
the game began, was effectually dispersed before we had finished
playing; and Foster, who was playing three-quarters on the other side,
was the man who assisted me in this dismally easy task. Four times he
came right away from everybody, and once he slipped down in front of
me, but on the other three occasions he simply swerved away from me and
I missed him by yards. The man who had been full back to the 'Varsity
XV. the year before had gone down, and Foster had put into my head the
idea that I ought to have a jolly good chance of getting my blue. This
match was a very rude blow, and when I put on my coat and walked out of
the parks I felt that I had been very badly treated. I was not at all
sure with whom I was most angry, but I had a general feeling that
whatever I tried to do went most hopelessly wrong, and that I was much
better fitted to sit in a dog-cart with Jack Ward, than I was to stand
up in a footer-field and be made a fool of by Fred Foster.
As luck would have it the first man I saw when I went into the college
was Ward, and he shouted with laughter when he saw me.
"I went down to the parks to see you," he said, "but for heaven's sake
don't look so down on your luck. I don't see that it matters, there
are other things worth doing besides trying to collar impossible
people. If you don't have to play again I shall think you are
thundering well out of it."
If anybody had said this to me at school I should have thought that he
was mad, but during the few days I had been at Oxford I had somehow or
other got hopelessly mixed up. Foster wanted me to do one thing,
Murray advised me to do another, Ward kept on asking me to slack, and a
fellow called Dennison, whom I had met several times, seemed to think
that Oxford was a tremendous joke and that the most amusing people in
it were the dons.
At any rate I was not in the least angry at Ward's way of taking my
wretched exhibition, so I asked him and Dennison and two or three other
freshers, who were standing around in the quad, to come and have tea
with me, and that tea was the beginning of my first big row. I had not
finished my bath when I was sorry I had asked them, for I remembered
that before the game had begun Foster had asked me to go round
afterwards to see him, and I had a sort of feeling that if he had made
an idiot of himself, and I had caused him to do so, he would have most
certainly not been as angry as I was. However, I had let myself in for
this tea and had to go through with it, and I must say that it was very
good fun.
If, as some wit said, only a dull man can be brilliant at breakfast, it
seems to me that if the converse of this is true St. Cuthbert's must
have contained an extraordinary number of brilliant men. The
amusements of a breakfast given by a senior man to half-a-dozen
freshers were principally food and silence. It is, I think, dreadfully
difficult to talk to a batch of freshers, and only one man, as far as
my experience went, overcame the difficulty. He resorted to the simple
means of telling us what a wonderful man he was. But when we were
alone we chattered like a lot of starlings, every one talked and no one
listened, so we got on well together.
Ward and Dennison came up to my rooms before I was dressed, and two
other men, Lambert and Collier, arrived soon afterwards. It was a
party of which Ward strongly approved. While I was trying to make the
kettle boil, I heard Dennison say that we were the pick of the
freshers, a statement which no one was very likely to deny. I felt
badly in need of some tonic after my afternoon, and I swallowed the one
provided by Dennison without any hesitation, not stopping to wonder how
often he had said the same thing to other men. As a matter-of-fact we
were rather an odd lot to be the pick of anybody.
Dennison looked younger than any boy in the sixth form at Cliborough,
and he could, on occasions, blush most bashfully. His blush was,
however, the only bashful thing about him and he used it very seldom.
Ward had told me that although Dennison looked such a kid he knew a
tremendous lot. I discovered this for myself later on, but I cannot
say that his knowledge was the kind which is difficult to acquire. He
professed a wholesale contempt for any game at which he could get his
mouth full of dirt, and said that he would as soon make mud-pies as
play football.
Lambert was hugely tall and walked with a stride which was as long as
it was stately. He went in for dressing himself beautifully, strummed
on the banjo, and had a playful little habit of arranging his tie in
any mirror which he saw. His pride in himself was so monstrously open
that no one with a grain of humour could be angry with him. He talked
about every game under the sun as if they were all equally easy to him,
but I should not think that any one was ever found who believed half of
what he said.
Collier's great point was the beam which he kept on his face, he always
looked so perfectly delighted to see you that he was a most effective
cure for depression. He was fat and did not mind, which persuaded me
that he was very easy to please. Nature had prevented him from playing
football with any success, but for six or seven overs, on a cool day,
he was reported to be a dangerous fast bowler.
As Jack Ward thought that no ball yet made was worth worrying when he
could ride, drive, or even be driven, and since I was feeling about as
sick with footer as it is possible for any one who had got a love for
the game in him to be, I confess that we were a peculiar lot to think
much of ourselves.
My room was not made to hold five people, who, with the exception of
Dennison, were all either very broad or long, but a good honest squash
certainly makes for friendship. We were a fairly rowdy party, because
Lambert had brought his banjo and as soon as he had finished tea he
wanted to sing; in fact it may be said of him that he was always
wanting to sing and could never find any one who wished to listen to
him. I had already heard him sing some sentimental rubbish about
meeting by moonlight and another thing about stars and souls, and I
threw a cushion at his head as soon as he began to make some noise
which he called "tuning up." That began a cushion fight, which
resulted in two china shepherdesses, a small lamp, and some teacups
being smashed, but it persuaded Lambert that he could not sing whenever
he felt inclined. We all sat down again, and Ward, who had been
hanging on to the standard lamp while cushions had been flying around,
said to me--
"You did look down on your luck when I saw you in the quad. I can't
think why anybody should take these wretched games so seriously; it
seems to me a perfectly rotten thing to do."
"No game is worth playing in which it matters to any one else whether
you win or lose," Dennison said before I had a chance to answer Ward;
"the only games a self-respecting man can play are court tennis,
racquets and golf. Then there is no one to swear at you except
yourself."
"That's rubbish," I answered. "Half the fun of the thing is belonging
to a side, and a man must be mad to say that golf is a better game than
cricket."
"Dennison wasn't trying to make out that golf is better than cricket,
but was just saying what games a man can play without being sworn at as
if he were a coolie," Ward said.
"I refuse to take amusements seriously," Dennison continued. "I would
sooner shout with laughter at a funeral than lose my temper playing a
game."
"The sweetest thing on earth," I said, "is to catch a fast half-volley
to leg plumb in the middle of the bat."
"It isn't in the same street with a comic opera at the Savoy after a
good dinner," Lambert remarked.
"At any rate it doesn't last so long," Dennison, who had a queer idea
of what was funny, put in.
"A punt, good cushions, June, and a novel by one of those people who
make you feel sleepy, are hard to beat," Collier stated.
"You are a Sybarite," Dennison said, "and you will be a disappointed
one before long. All we do here in the summer is to give our relations
strawberries and cream and run with our college eight."
"How do you know?" Collier asked, but to so searching a question he got
no reply.
"The finest sight in the world is a thoroughbred horse," Ward said.
"You must have gone about with your eyes shut," Dennison declared.
"Don't sit there talking rot," I said. "If anything ever pleases you,
tell us what it is."
"My greatest pleasure is in polite conversation," he answered.
"Oh, you are a sarcastic idiot," I retorted, for people who are
afflicted by thinking themselves funny when I think they are idiotic
always make me rude.
"Dennison never says what he means," Ward explained, "it is a little
habit of his."
"Why can't you talk straight, it's much simpler, and doesn't make me
feel so horribly uncomfortable?" I asked, turning to Dennison.
"Marten is getting angry," was the only answer I received, and it was
so near the truth that I wanted to pick him up and drop him in the
passage.
Ward, however, calmed my feelings by saying that he could not imagine
any one troubling to be angry with Dennison. "The one thing he prides
himself on is getting a rise out of people, and we aren't such fools as
he thinks us."
"And he is a much bigger fool than he thinks," Collier said solemnly.
"You are a nice complimentary lot," Dennison remarked, smiling amiably
upon us.
"It's your own fault," Collier continued; "you try to be clever and
succeed in being confoundedly dull. I was at school with him for five
years and I know his only strong point is that the more you abuse him
the more he likes you."
"I'm fairly in love with you, Coalheaver," Dennison said.
"Naturally, but you might forget that very witty name."
"I'm going," Lambert declared, "for I'm dining in hall, and if I don't
go for a walk those kromeskis and quenelles will choke me."
"Half a minute," and Ward pushed Lambert back into his seat; "now we
are all here, I think we had better arrange a freshers' wine. There
always is one, and nobody will get it up if we don't, so I vote we do
the thing properly."
Every one seemed to approve of the idea, but as I was no use at making
arrangements I suggested that Ward should manage the whole business.
"I can order everything, but we must have a committee to choose the
people we shall ask and all that part of it. We can't ask everybody,"
Ward said.
"Half of them won't come if we do. I should think we had better ask
the whole lot, and then we shall know what they are made of," Lambert
advised.
"We shan't have a room big enough to hold them," Collier said.
After that we all began to talk, and though I had only a hazy notion of
what we decided, I heard enough to know that Ward and Dennison meant
having this wine in about ten days and only intended to ask the
freshers whom they liked.