HALCYONII DIES.
It is a tolerably insane amusement for a foreigner to go tramping over
wild fields and valleys in Northern Norway with no other guide than the
thing they call an ordnance map and a bit of a pocket-compass. And to
do the same without intent to slay the beasts, the birds, or the fish
of the country seems, to my way of thinking, even more mad still.
Perhaps I am peculiarly constituted, but that's the way it strikes me
personally. So I was rather curious to know what make of man it was
that did these things.
Overnight I had seen little of him that was not heavily shadowed. The
stranger preferred to do his own cooking, saying that he was used to
it, and had elected to heat his meat at the doorway of the stove.
Through this gap little radiance escaped. The only matters illuminated
were the slices of venison, the toasting-splinter, and the hands that
held it alternately. These last, being the solitary things one's eyes
could make out, naturally were glanced over more than once. They were
slightly above the medium size for hands, and long in proportion to
their breadth. The fingers were tapered like a woman's. The nails were
filbert-shaped, and grimy with recent climbing. The palms were hard.
The knuckle-side was very brown, and showed the tendons prominently.
They were those lean, nervous sort of hands which you find out at times
can grip like thumbscrews.
My couch was an uneasy one, and I awoke early. The visitor was snoring
away on the log-floor, looking comfortable and contented.
He was a man of about two-and-thirty, dark, tall, and well-built. His
clothes were those of the merchant seamen--that is, they smacked in no
degree whatever of the sea. Indeed, the only outward things which
connected him with the water were certain weather stains. He wore a
moustache cropped somewhat over close, and the teeth then showing
beneath it, though white, were chaotic; and, moreover, there was the
purple ridge of a scar running from the corner of his mouth which might
advantageously have been hidden. A beard also would have become him,
for his chin verged slightly to the cut-away type, and a three-days'
stubble looks merely unkempt. He would never have been a beauty, but
groomed up he would have made a very passable appearance amongst other
men, although the scar near his mouth, and another similar emblem of
roughness over the opposite eye, would have made him a trifle
remarkable.
After staring there dully for pretty nearly an hour, it began to dawn
upon me that I had seen this man before somewhere, though under what
circumstances I could not for the life of me remember. That his outward
person was that of the ordinary deck-hand ashore went for nothing.
Besides, he had spoken overnight of "my boat." That evidently meant
yacht, and might stand for anything from an eight-hundred ton steamer
downwards.
The more I puzzled over his identity the less hope I seemed to have of
guessing it.
At last he woke, yawned, stretched, and sat up. Then he looked at me
and whistled. Then, "Slidey Methuen, by all that's odd! Fancy stumbling
across you here!"
Still I couldn't put a name to the man, and after a bit of hesitation
told him so bluntly.
He laughed, and said he didn't wonder at it. It was only eight years
since last we had met, but in that time he had been about the world a
good deal, and, as he himself expressed it, "got most of the old
landmarks ground off his face, and new ones rubbed in." He was Michael
Cospatric.
I had to take his word for it. There didn't seem to be a trace left of
the man I had known at Cambridge, either of manner or outward form.
However, Cospatric of C---- he was, fast enough; and after the manner
of 'Varsity men, we started on to "shop" there and then, and had the
old days over again in review.
We had both been of the same year, and although in a small college that
argues some knowledge of one another, we were by no means in the same
set. In fact, up there Cospatric had been rather an anomaly: a man in
no clique, a man without a nickname, a man distinguished only by the
halo of his exit. He came up, one of a bunch of fifty-two
undergraduates, joined all the clubs, was tubbed, rowed four at the end
of his first October term in a losing junior trial eight, and was
promptly shelved. He was never in evidence anywhere, but was reported
to be a subscriber of Rolandi's, and to spend his time reading novels
in foreign tongues. As he seldom kept either lectures or chapels, a
chronic gating fostered this occupation. His second October he again
navigated the Cam in a junior trial. He lugged with the arms incurably
and swung like a corkscrew, but we had five trials on that term, and
men were wanted to fill them. So he rowed and raced, and again helped
his crew to lose, and then was shelved as hopeless. He was a man of no
account. Not three men, out of his own year, knew him by name.
At the beginning of his second Easter term he began to distinguish
himself. Of all places, he started to do this at the Union--an
institution few of us C---- men belonged to. There was a debate upon
something connected with Education. An unknown person got up and
savagely attacked existing methods as being useless, impracticable, and
in the interests of the teacher and not of the taught. "Of what use to
society is a College fellow?" he asked, and answering, "Of none, except
to reproduce his species," backed up his case with such cleverness that
a majority grew out of nothing. Johnians howled; Trinity men and Hall
men cheered with delight; Non-Colls hissed and made interruptions; and
as the ragged-gowned crowd trooped out, a universal cry went up of,
"Who the devil is he?"
We undergraduates at C---- were not much moved by this exploit,
because, as I have hinted, the Union was not in our line. We rowed and
danced and drove tandem; never preached, except to election mobs. We
quite agreed with Cospatric that Classics and Mathematics, and Natural
Science as she is taught at Cambridge, are one and all of them useless
burdens, not worth the gathering; but we were not prepared to say with
him that we hungered after the acquisition of French, German, Spanish,
Norsk, and Italian, or eke Lingua Franca or Japanese.
The higher authorities saw the matter in a different light. Master and
fellows looked upon Mr. Cospatric as a dangerous heretic--much, in
fact, as Urban VIII. and his cardinals regarded Galileo--and resolved
to make him recant. The senior tutor was chosen as their instrument. He
was an official with what were described as "little ways of his own."
He hauled Cospatric. Union speech and revolutionary sentiments were not
referred to. The delinquent was (amid a cacophony of "Hems") accused,
on the strength of coming up Chapel with surplice unbuttoned, of being
inebriated within the walls of a sacred edifice. He was not allowed to
speak a word in his own defence. He was gated for a week at eight, and
coughed out of the room.
An eminently steady man, and conscious of being at the moment in
question sober as an archangel, the iron of the accusation and
punishment entered into his soul. For gatings as a general thing he
cared not one jot. He had lived his year and a half in an atmosphere of
them. Whether free or chained, he had always stayed in his rooms after
hall, preferring the green-labelled books to any other evening
companionship.
But to this present confinement, a piece of obviously rank injustice,
he determined not to submit; and in consequence spent a dreary evening
parading the streets, not arriving back till close upon twelve.
He kept in College. The porter sent up his name. He was again hauled,
and again, without being allowed to say a word in his own defence,
gated for the remainder of the term, and given to understand that he
would be sent down for good if he cut a single gate.
The sentence was barbarous. A call at the Lodge and a patient
explanation to the Master would probably have set matters right. But
Cospatric was not the man such a course would occur to. Some
long-slumbering demon rose within him, and he indulged heavily in
College Audit in hall. Afterwards he came to my rooms, where there was
a conclave of some sort going on, and made a statement. It was his
first recorded appearance in any one's quarters but his own, and his
first recorded look of excitement, and consequently his words were
listened to. He did not stay long. He told us in forcible language that
as the College authorities had seen fit to take it out of him, he
intended to do the like by them, and we might form ourselves into
umpires of the proceedings. Then he departed, and next morning joined a
knot of us who were gazing with admiration at the stone angels beside
the clock, who, during the hours of darkness, had been helmeted with
obscene earthenware. No ladder in the College could reach that
decorated statuary, and as the porter did not see fit to risk
_his_ neck over such a ghastly climb, decorated they stayed till
mid-day, and our court teemed with ribald undergraduates.
The succeeding morning there was another raree-show. The College
skeleton--framework of a long-passed don, so tradition stated--had
been, by help of a screwdriver and patience, untombed from its dusty
resting-place at the top of the Hall staircase. It had been dressed in
some flashy Scotch tweeds well known as belonging to the junior tutor,
and perched astride of the weather-cock. Again the position was
impregnable, and again the trophy drew delighted crowds till long past
mid-day.
And so one puerile outrage succeeded another, scarcely a day passing
without some new triumph of the kind to report. Cospatric leaped at one
bound into a public character. Of course every soul in the place knew
that he was at the bottom of it all--the dons getting the news through
the gyps--but no one in authority was smart enough to bring anything
home to him. He even took to keeping lectures and chapels, which piece
of pharisaism put, to our mind then, the finishing touch of this comedy
of revenge.
It all seems a great piece of foolery when one looks back, but at the
time we thought it high-minded and justifiable rebellion. We assembled
in the court, and cheered after the senior tutor had been three parts
smothered in his bed by a red-pepper squib dropped down the chimney;
and on the morning after the Master's laundry was raided, and the linen
(belonging to both sexes) distributed amongst the crows' nests in the
avenue, I think special trains must have been running into Cambridge,
so thick was the throng of sight-seers.
There is no doubt about it that Cospatric came to be a young man of
much renown in those days.
Had he been a popular person beforehand, far-seeing friends would have
advised him to retire on his laurels after, say, the first half-dozen
exploits. But as it was, there was no one amongst the newly-formed
acquaintances sufficiently interested in the hero of the moment to
forgo his own personal anticipations of enjoyment. The man was egged on
unthinkingly, although a moment's thought must have pointed to a
certain deluge ahead.
And that deluge came, as usual, from an unlooked-for quarter.
Cospatric, in all his sober senses, was helping an overcome roisterer
across the court late at night. The junior tutor arrived, and ordered
Cospatric to his rooms. Cospatric went obediently, waited in the shadow
of an archway, and returned to the overcome one. Enter once more the
junior tutor; nothing said to the roisterer; Cospatric to pay an
official call at twelve-thirty on the morrow. There is no use giving
detail. They had a College meeting next day, and sent him down for an
offence that was absolutely trivial; and every soul in the College, the
culprit included, saw the justice of the injustice.
He came down the steps from the Combination room in triumph, and we
chaired him round the court in a bath, some hundred and twenty men
forming in procession behind, and singing an idiotic march-song from a
current burlesque. Then we went to his rooms, and he sat on two tables,
one above the other, with a tea-cosy on his head, and held an auction
of his effects, which those of us who happened to possess any ready
cash bought up at long figures. He had no plans for the future, so we
stuck a false moustache on him, corked his eyebrows, and thus disguised
kept him smuggled in our rooms for ten days, during which time Bacchus
created Babel. And then we had him photographed in various
attitudes--singly, and surrounded by groups of admirers--and then we
went out with him to the station, saw him in a train for Liverpool
Street, and--that's all. He was never viewed or heard of again. His
period of brilliance up there was very comet-like.