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SINISTER STREET
BY
COMPTON MACKENZIE
AUTHOR OF “CARNIVAL,” “YOUTH’S ENCOUNTER,” ETC.
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE DREAMING SPIRES
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FIRST DAY 3
II. THE FIRST WEEK 32
III. THE FIRST TERM 47
IV. CHEYNE WALK 63
V. YOUTH’S DOMINATION 84
VI. GRAY AND BLUE 110
VII. VENNER’S 143
VIII. THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS 165
IX. THE LESSON OF SPAIN 183
X. STELLA IN OXFORD 209
XI. SYMPATHY 225
XII. 202 HIGH 245
XIII. PLASHERS MEAD 269
XIV. 99 ST. GILES 288
XV. THE LAST TERM 308
XVI. THE LAST WEEK 319
XVII. THE LAST DAY 333
BOOK TWO ROMANTIC EDUCATION
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OSTIA DITIS 349
II. NEPTUNE CRESCENT 371
III. THE CAFÉ D’ORANGE 401
IV. LEPPARD STREET 427
V. THE INNERMOST CIRCLE 481
VI. TINDERBOX LANE 496
VII. THE GATE OF IVORY 552
VIII. SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE 583
IX. THE GATE OF HORN 602
X. THE OLD WORLD 652
EPILOGICAL LETTER TO JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORADATO 655
BOOK ONE
DREAMING SPIRES
Bright memories of young poetic pleasure In free companionship, the
loving stress Of all life-beauty, lull’d in studious leisure, When
every Muse was jocund with excess Of fine delight and tremulous
happiness; The breath of an indolent unbridled June, When delicate
thought fell from the dreamy moon: But now strange care, sorrow, and
grief oppress. Robert Bridges.
CHAPTER I
THE FIRST DAY
Michael felt glad to think he would start the adventure of Oxford from
Paddington. The simplicity of that railway station might faintly
mitigate alarms which no amount of previous deliberation could entirely
disperse. He remembered how once he had lightly seen off a Cambridge
friend from Liverpool Street and, looking back at the suburban tumult
of the Great Eastern Railway, he was grateful for the simplicity of
Paddington.
Michael had been careful that all his heavy luggage should be sent in
advance; and he had shown himself gravely exacting toward Alan in this
matter of luggage, writing several times to remind him of his promise
not to appear on the platform with more than a portmanteau of moderate
size and a normal kit-bag. Michael hoped this precaution would prevent
at any rate the porters from commenting upon the freshness of him and
his friend.
“Oxford train?” inquired a porter, as the hansom pulled up. Michael
nodded, and made up his mind to show his esteem when he tipped this
promethean.
“Third class?” the porter went on. Michael mentally doubled the tip,
for he had neglected to assure himself beforehand about the etiquette
of class, and nothing could have suited so well his self-consciousness
as this information casually yielded.
“Let me see, you didn’t have any golf-clubs, did you, sir?” asked the
porter.
Michael shook his head regretfully, for as he looked hurriedly up and
down the platform in search of Alan, he perceived golf-clubs
everywhere, and when at last he saw him, actually even he had a
golf-bag slung over his shoulder.
“I never knew you played golf,” said Michael indignantly.
“I don’t. These are the governor’s. He’s given up playing,” Alan
explained.
“Are you going to play?” Michael pursued. He was feeling rather envious
of the appearance of these veteran implements.
“I may have a shot,” Alan admitted.
“You might have told me you were going to bring them,” Michael
grumbled.
“My dear old ass, I never knew I was, until the governor wanged them
into my lap just as I was starting.”
Michael turned aside and bought a number of papers, far too many for
the short journey. Indeed, all the way they lay on the rack unregarded,
while the train crossed and recrossed the silver Thames. At first he
was often conscious of the other undergraduates in the compartment, who
seemed to be eying him with a puzzled contempt; but very soon, when he
perceived that this manner of looking at one’s neighbor was general, he
became reconciled to the attitude and ascribed it to a habit of mind
rather than to the expression of any individual distaste. Then
suddenly, as Michael was gazing out of the window, the pearly sky broke
into spires and pinnacles and domes and towers. He caught his breath
for one bewitched moment, before he busied himself with the luggage on
the rack.
On the platform Michael and Alan decided to part company, as neither of
them felt sure enough whether St. Mary’s or Christ Church were nearer
to the station to risk a joint hansom.
“Shall I come and see you this afternoon?” Michael rashly offered.
“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, and they turned away from one another to
secure their cabs.
All the time that Michael was driving to St. Mary’s, he was regretting
he had not urged Alan to visit him first. A growing sensation of shy
dread was making him vow that once safe in his own rooms at St. Mary’s
nothing should drag him forth again that day. What on earth would he
say when he arrived at the college? Would he have to announce himself?
How would he find his rooms? On these points he had pestered several
Old Jacobeans now at Oxford, but none of them could remember the
precise ceremonies of arrival. Michael leaned back in the hansom and
cursed their inefficient memories.
Then the cab pulled up by the St. Mary’s lodge, and events proceeded
with unexpected rapidity. A cheerful man with red hair and a round face
welcomed his luggage. The cabman was paid the double of his correct
fare, and to Michael’s relief drove off instantly. From a sort of glass
case that filled half the interior of the lodge somebody very much like
a family butler inquired richly who Michael was.
“Mr. C. M. S. Fane?” rolled out the unctuous man.
Michael nodded.
“Is there another Fane?” he asked curiously.
“No, sir,” said the head porter, and the negative came out with the
sound of a drawn cork. “No, sir, but I wished to hessateen if I had
your initials down correct in my list. Mr. C. M. S. Fane,” he went on,
looking at a piece of paper. “St. Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.
Your servant is Porcher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you’ll
settle with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.”
The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael’s bag, and Michael was
preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a
warning hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole
labeled Porcher.
“These letters are for you, sir,” he explained pompously. Michael took
them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and
shouted “Porcher!” From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the
scout appeared.
“One of your gentlemen arrived,” said Henry. “Mr. Fane.” Then he
touched his cap and retired.
“Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?” Porcher asked.
“Not much,” said Michael apologetically.
“There’s a nice lot of stuff in your rooms,” Porcher informed him.
“Come in yesterday morning, it did.”
They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors
Michael was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a
water-tap that no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck
in his mind somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.
“These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you’ll shout, of
course. I’m just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale’s wine.”
Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted
with much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was
aware of a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room,
it was a fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction
of a privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
green grass, across the Warden’s garden with its faint gaiety of
autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
leisurely files about the spare sunlight.
It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would
be necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
attention to himself than would be pleasant, and he postponed the
summons in favor of an examination of his letters. One after another he
opened them, and every one was the advertisement of a tailor or
hairdresser or tobacconist. The tailors were the most insistent; they
even went so far as to announce that representatives would call upon
him at his pleasure. Michael made up his mind to order his cap and gown
after lunch. Lunch! How should he obtain lunch? Where should he obtain
lunch? When should he obtain lunch? Obviously there must be some
precise manner of obtaining lunch, some ritual consecrated by
generations of St. Mary’s men. The loneliness came back triumphant, and
plunged him dejectedly down into a surprisingly deep wicker-chair. The
fire crackled in the silence, and the problem of lunch remained
insoluble. The need for Porcher’s advice became more desperate. Other
freshmen before him must have depended upon their scout’s experience.
He began to practice calling Porcher in accents so low that they
acquired a tender and reproachful significance. Michael braced himself
for the performance after these choked and muffled rehearsals, and went
boldly out on to the stone landing. An almost entranced silence held
the staircase, a silence that he could not bring himself to violate. On
the door of the rooms opposite he read his neighbor’s
name—_Mackintosh_. He wished he knew whether Mackintosh were a
freshman. It would be delightful to make him share the responsibility
of summoning Porcher from his task of arranging Lonsdale’s wine. And
who was Lonsdale? _No slops must be emptied here! Mackintosh! Fane!_
Here were three announcements hinting at humanity in a desolation of
stillness. Michael reading his own name gathered confidence and a
volume of breath, leaned over the stone parapet of the landing and,
losing all his courage in a sigh, decided to walk downstairs and take
his chance of meeting Porcher on the way.
On the floor beneath Michael read _Bannerman_ over the left-hand door
and _Templeton-Collins_ over the right-hand door. While he was
pondering the personality and status of Templeton-Collins, presumably
the gentleman himself appeared, stared at Michael very deliberately,
came forward and, leaning over the parapet, yelled in a voice that
combined rage, protest, disappointment and appeal with the maximum of
sound: “Porcher!” After which, Templeton-Collins again stared very
deliberately at Michael and retired into his room, while Michael
hurried down to intercept the scout, hoping his dismay at
Templeton-Collins’ impatience would not be too great to allow him to
pay a moment’s attention to himself.
However, on the ground floor the silence was still unbroken, and
hopelessly Michael read over the right-hand door _Amherst_, over the
left-hand door _Lonsdale_. What critical moment had arrived in the
unpacking of Lonsdale’s wine to make the scout so heedless of
Templeton-Collins’ call? Again it resounded from above, and Michael
looking up involuntarily, caught the downward glance of
Templeton-Collins himself.
“I say, is Porcher down there?” the latter asked fretfully.
“I think he’s unpacking Lonsdale’s wine.”
“Who’s Lonsdale?” demanded Templeton-Collins. “You might sing out and
tell him I want him.”
With this request Templeton-Collins vanished, leaving Michael in a
quandary. There was only one hope of relieving the intolerable
situation, he thought, which was to shout “Porcher” from where he was
standing. This he did at the very moment the scout emerged from
Lonsdale’s rooms.
“Coming, sir,” said Porcher in an aggrieved voice.
“I think Mr. Templeton-Collins is calling you,” Michael explained,
rather lamely he felt, since it must have been obvious to the scout
that Michael himself had been calling him.
“And I say,” he added hurriedly, “you might bring me up a hammer or
something to open my boxes, when you’ve done.”
Leaving Porcher to appease the outraged Templeton-Collins, Michael
retreated to the security of his own rooms, where in a few minutes the
scout appeared to raise the question of lunch.
“Will you take commons, sir?”
Michael looked perplexed.
“Commons is bread and cheese. Most of my gentlemen takes commons. If
you want anything extra, you go to the kitchen and write your name down
for what you want.”
This sounded too difficult, and Michael gratefully chose commons.
“Ale, sir?”
Michael nodded. If the scout had suggested champagne, he would have
assented immediately.
Porcher set to work and undid the cases; he also explained where the
china was kept and the wood and the coal. He expounded the theory of
roll-calls and chapels, and was indeed so generous with information on
every point of college existence that Michael would have been glad to
retain his services for the afternoon.
“And the other men on this staircase?” Michael asked, “are any of them
freshers?”
“Mr. Mackintosh, Mr. Amherst, and the Honorable Lonsdale is all
freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he
don’t improve,” said Porcher meditatively.
“Do you mean on the coach-horn?” Michael asked.
“Don’t improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
He’d shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?”
Michael shook his head.
“Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It’s easier to order it as
you want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?”
Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
there was nothing.
Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time
he had coveted—Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt’s Knight in Armor
and Montegna’s St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
the grave city demanded.
After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael
examined his possessions in critical discontent. They seemed to
symbolize the unpleasant crudity of youth. In the familiar surroundings
of childhood they had seemed on the contrary to testify to his
maturity. Now at Oxford he felt most abominably young again, yet he was
able to console himself with the thought that youth would be no
handicap among his peers. He took down the scenes of Montmartre even
from the walls of his bedroom and pushed them ignominiously out of
sight under the bed.
Michael abandoned the contemplation of his possessions, and looked out
of his sitting-room window at the High. There was something salutary in
the jangle of the trams, in the vision of ordinary people moving
unconsciously about the academic magnificence of Oxford. An
undergraduate with gown wrapped carelessly round his neck flashed past
on a bicycle, and Michael was discouraged by the sense of his diabolic
ease. The luxury of his own rooms, the conviction of his new
independence, the excitement of an undiscovered life all departed from
him, and he was left with nothing but a loneliness more bitter even
than when at Randell House he had first encountered school.
Porcher came in presently with lunch, and the commons of bread and
cheese with the ale foaming in a silver tankard added the final touch
to Michael’s depression. He thought that nothing in the world, could
express the spirit of loneliness so perfectly as a sparse lunch laid
for one on a large table. He wandered away from its melancholy
invitation into the bedroom and looked sadly down into the quad. In
every doorway stood knots of senior men talking: continually came new
arrivals to hail familiarly their friends after the vacation: scouts
hurried to and fro with trays of food: from window to window gossip,
greetings, appointments were merrily shouted. Michael watched this
scene of intimate movement played against the background of elms and
gray walls. The golden fume of the October weather transcended somehow
all impermanence, and he felt with a sudden springing of imagination
that so had this scene been played before, that so forever would it be
played for generations to come. Yet for him as yet outside the picture
remained, fortunately less eternal, that solitary lunch. He ate it
hurriedly and as soon as he had finished set out to find Alan at Christ
Church.
Freedom came back with the elation of walking up the High; and in the
Christ Church lodge Michael was able to ask without a blush for Alan’s
rooms. The great space of Tom quad by absorbing his self-consciousness
allowed him to feel himself an unit of the small and decorative
population that enhanced the architecture there. The scattered, groups
of friends whose voices became part of the very air itself like the
wings of the pigeons and the perpetual tapping of footsteps, the two
dons treading in slow confabulation that wide flagged terrace, even
himself were here forever. Michael captured again in that moment the
crystallized vision of Oxford which had first been vouchsafed to him
long ago by that old print of St. Mary’s tower. He turned reluctantly
away from Tom quad, and going on to seek Alan in Meadows, by mistake
found himself in Peckwater. A tall fair undergraduate was standing
alone in the center of the quad, cracking a whip. Suddenly Michael
realized that his father had been at Christ Church; and this tall fair
whip-cracker served for him as the symbol of his father. He must have
often stood here so, cracking a whip; and Michael never came into
Peckwater without recreating him so occupied on a fine autumn
afternoon, whip in hand, very tall and very fair in the glinting
sunlight.
Dreams faded out, when Michael ran up the staircase to Alan’s rooms;
but he was full-charged again with all that suppressed intellectual
excitement which he had counted upon finding in Oxford, but which he
had failed to find until the wide tranquillity of Tom quad had given
him, as it were, the benediction of the University.
“Hullo, Alan!” he cried. “How are you getting on? I say, why do they
stick ‘Mr.’ in front of your name over the door? At St. Mary’s we drop
the ‘Mr.’ or any other sort of title. Aren’t you unpacked _yet?_ You
are a slacker. Look here, I want you to come out with me at once. I’ve
got to get some more picture-wire and a gown and a picture of Mona
Lisa.”
“Mona how much?” said Alan.
“La Gioconda, you ass.”
“Sorry, my mistake,” said Alan.
“And I saw some rattling book-shops as I came up the High,” Michael
went on. “What did you have for lunch? I had bread and cheese—commons
we call it at St. Mary’s. I say, I think I’m glad I don’t have to wear
a scholar’s gown.”
“I’m an exhibitioner,” said Alan.
“Well, it’s the same thing. I like a commoner’s gown best. Where did
you get that tea-caddy? I don’t believe I’ve got one. Pretty good view
from your window. Mine looks out on the High.”
“Look here,” asked Alan very solemnly, “where shall I hang this picture
my mater gave me?”
He displayed in a green frame The Soul’s Awakening.
“Do you like it?” Michael asked gloomily.
“I prefer these grouse by Thorburn that the governor gave me, but I
like them both in a way,” Alan admitted.
“I don’t think it much matters where you hang it,” Michael said. Then,
thinking Alan looked rather hurt, he added hastily: “You see it’s such
a very square room that practically it might go anywhere.”
“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked, proffering a crowded plate.
“A meringue?” Michael repeated.
“We’re rather famous for our meringues here,” said Alan gravely. “We
make them in the kitchen. I ordered a double lot in case you came in.”
“You seem to have found out a good deal about Christ Church already,”
Michael observed.
“The House,” Alan corrected. “We call it—in fact everybody calls it the
House.”
Michael was inclined to resent this arrogation by a college not his own
of a distinct and slightly affected piece of nomenclature, and he
wished he possessed enough knowledge of his own peculiar college
customs to counter Alan’s display.
“Well, hurry up and come out of the House,” he urged. “You can’t stay
here unpacking all the afternoon.”
“Why do you want to start buying things straight away?” Alan argued.
“Because I know what I want,” Michael insisted.
“Since when?” Alan demanded. “I’m not going to buy anything for a bit.”
“Come on, come on,” Michael urged. He was in a hurry to enjoy the
luxury of traversing the quads of Christ Church in company, of
strolling down the High in company, of looking into shop windows in
company, of finally defeating that first dismal loneliness with Alan
and his company.
It certainly proved to be a lavish afternoon. Michael bought three
straight-grained pipes so substantially silvered that they made his own
old pipes take on an attenuated vulgarity. He bought an obese tobacco
jar blazoned with the arms of his college and, similarly blazoned, a
protuberant utensil for matches. He bought numerous ounces of those
prodigally displayed mixtures of tobacco, every one of which was
vouched for by the vendor as in its own way the perfect blend. He
bought his cap and his gown and was measured by the tailor for a coat
of Harris tweed such as everybody seemed to wear. He found the very
autotype of Mona Lisa he coveted, and farther he was persuaded by the
picture-dealer to buy for two guineas a signed proof of a small
copperplate engraving of the Primavera. This expenditure frightened him
from buying any more pictures that afternoon and seemed a violent and
sudden extravagance. However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after
signing his name several times, he was presented with a check book. In
order to be perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one
then and there, and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as
irreverently as if they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his
new check-book was the purse of Fortunatus.
Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the
purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in
order to assert his independence in the face of Alan’s continuous
dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a
pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the
pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties
of knitted silk.
By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Café in
Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o’clock and neither of
them felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other
back to tea, they went into the café and ate a quantity of hot buttered
toast and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their
enjoyment and faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of
three exquisitely untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the
doorway and surveyed first the crowded café in general, and then more
particularly Michael and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt.
After a prolonged stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:
“Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!”
Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.
Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed
from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress
seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan
paid their bill and went out.
“Are you coming back to my rooms?” Michael asked. Yet secretly he half
hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to
be alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.
Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly,
promising to meet him again to-morrow.
Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers,
for a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street
lured him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man
with a thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed
to Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in
tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against
the shelves of books.
A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good
evening.
“May I look round?” Michael asked.
The bookseller nodded.
“Just come up?” he inquired.
“To-day,” Michael confessed.
“And what sort of books are you interested in?”
“All books,” said Michael.
“This set of Pater for instance,” the bookseller suggested, handing
Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with
a golden monogram. “Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds
fifteen cash.” This information he added in a note of disdainful
tolerance.
Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.
“Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays,” Mr. Lampard went
on. “In the early ‘nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for
books.”
Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.
“Seven pounds ten,” he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid
sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.
“What college?” asked Mr. Lampard. “St. Mary’s? Ah, there used to be
some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis
of Montgomery’s son, was at St. Mary’s, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I
published his first volume of poems—of course, you’ve read his books.
He was at St. Mary’s. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.
You’ve heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first
number, but they’re getting very scarce. All St. Mary’s men and all
great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I
really don’t know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not
selling them.”
Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very
thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some
entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past,
and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.
“Perhaps after all I will take the Pater,” he said. “Only I may not be
able to pay you this term.”
The bookseller smiled.
“I don’t think I shall worry you. Do you know this set—Boccaccio,
Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered
silk. They’ll always keep their price, and of course all the
photogravures are included.”
“All right. You might send them too.”
Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of
the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to
College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling
scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous
those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against
those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a
buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had
certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on
the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy
balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a
pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson’s bookshop. At Lampard’s he
was already a personality.
All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford,
but really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in
comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the
Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar
conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The
list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a
discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools
other, than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed
to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was
responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he
stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound
to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top
of the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his
name.
“You’ll be at the second freshmen’s table. On the right, sir. Mr.
Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir.”
Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and
hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly
placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with
either of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying
the armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his
judicial gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his
voice.
“How do you become head of a table?” Michael’s left-hand neighbor
suddenly asked.
Michael said he really did not know.
“Because what I’m wondering,” the left-hand neighbor continued, “is why
they’ve made that ass Wedderburn head of our table.”
“Why, is he an ass?” Michael inquired.
“Frightful ass,” continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael
perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.
“Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?”
Michael shook his head.
“I thought you were a cousin of my mother,” said the left-hand
neighbor.
Michael looked astonished.
“His name’s Mackintosh. What’s your name?”
Michael told him.
“My name’s Lonsdale. I think we’re on the same staircase—so’s
Mackintosh. It’s a pity he’s an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I’d
look him up.”
Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential
undertone:
“I don’t mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor
lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad—in fact
rather good eggs—but the rest! Well, look at that ass Wedderburn. He’s
typical.”
“I think he looks rather a good sort,” said Michael.
“My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M’ tutor used to like him, but
really—well—I don’t mind telling you, he’s really an æsthete.”
With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor
and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly
audible to Michael:
“I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn’t half bad. I don’t know where
he comes from, His name’s Fane.”
“He’s from St. James’.”
“Where on earth’s that?”
“London.”
“Why, I thought it was a kind of charity school,” said Lonsdale. Then
he turned to Michael again:
“I say, are you really from St. James’?”
Michael replied coldly that he was.
“I say, come and have coffee with me after hall. One or two O. E.’s are
coming in, but you won’t mind?”
“Why, do you want to find out something about St. James’?” demanded
Michael, frowning.
“Oh, I say, don’t be ratty. It’s that ass Tommy. He always talks at the
top of his voice.”
Lonsdale, as he spoke, looked so charmingly apologetic and displayed
such accomplished sang-froid that Michael forgave him immediately and
promised to come to coffee.
“Good egg!” Lonsdale exclaimed with the satisfaction of having smoothed
over an awkward place. “I say,” he offered, “if you’d like to meet
Wedderburn, I’ll ask him, too. He seems to have improved since he’s
been up at the Varsity. Don’t you think that fat man Wedderburn has
improved, Tommy?”
Tommy nodded.
“One day’s done him no end of good.”
“I say,” Lonsdale offered, “you haven’t met Fane. Mr. Fane—Mr.
Grainger. I was just saying to Fane that the Etonians are a rotten lot
this term.”
“One or two are all right,” Grainger admitted with evident reluctance.
“Well, perhaps two,” Lonsdale agreed. “This dinner isn’t bad, what?”
By this time the conversation at the table had become more general, and
Michael gradually realized that some of the alarm he had felt himself
had certainly been felt by his companions. Now at any rate there was a
perceptible relaxation of tension. Still the conversation was only
general in so much as that whenever anybody spoke, the rest of the
table listened. The moment the flow of his information dried up,
somebody else began pumping forth instruction. These slightly nervous
little lectures were delivered without any claim to authority and they
came up prefaced by the third person of legendary narrative.
“They say we shall all have to interview the Warden to-morrow.”
“They say on Sunday afternoon the Wagger makes the same speech to the
freshers that he’s made for twenty years.”
“They say we ought to go head of the river this year.”
“They say the freshers are expected to make a bonner on Sunday night.”
“They say any one can have commons of bread and cheese by sending out
word to the buttery. It’s really included in the two-and-fourpence for
dinner.”
“They say they charge a penny for the napkin every night.”
So the information proceeded, and Michael had just thought to himself
that going up to Oxford was very much like going to school again, when
from the second-year tables crashed the sound of a concerted sneeze.
The dons from high table looked coldly down the hall, expressing a
vague, but seemingly impotent disapproval, for immediately afterward
that sternutation shook the air a second time.
Michael thought the difference between school and Oxford might be
greater than he had supposed.
The slowest eater at the second freshmen’s table had nervously left
half his savory; Wedderburn without apparent embarrassment had received
the Sub-Warden’s permission to rise from dinner; Lonsdale hurriedly
marshaled as many of his acquaintances as he could, and in a large and
noisy group they swarmed through the moonlight toward his rooms.
Michael was interested by Lonsdale’s sitting-room, for he divined at
once that it was typical, just a transplanted Eton study with the
addition of smoking paraphernalia. The overmantel was plumed with small
photographs of pleasant young creatures in the gay nautical costumes of
the Fourth of June and festooned hats of Alexandra or Monarch, of the
same pleasant young creatures at an earlier and chubbier age, of the
same pleasant young creatures with penciled mustaches and the white
waistcoat of Pop. In addition to their individual commemorations the
pleasant young creatures would appear again in house groups, in winning
house elevens, and most exquisitely of all in Eton Society. Michael
always admired the photographs of Pop, for they seemed to him to
epitomize all the traditions of all the public-schools of England, to
epitomize them moreover with something of that immortality of captured
action expressed by great Athenian sculpture. In comparison with Pop
the Harrow Philathletic Society was a barbarous group, with all the
self-consciousness of a deliberate archaism. Besides the personal
photographs in Lonsdale’s room there were studies of grouse by
Thorburn; and Michael, remembering Alan’s grouse, felt in accord with
Lonsdale and with all that Lonsdale stood for. Knowing Alan, he felt
that he knew Lonsdale, and at once he became more at ease with all his
contemporaries in Lonsdale’s room. Michael looked at the colored prints
of Cecil Aldin’s pictures and made up his mind he would buy a set for
Alan: also possibly he would buy for Alan the Sir Galahad of Watts
which was rather better than The Soul’s Awakening.
After Lonsdale’s pictures Michael surveyed Lonsdale’s books, the
brilliantly red volumes of Jorrocks, the two or three odd volumes of
the Badminton library, and the school books tattered and ink-splashed.
More interesting than such a library were the glossy new briars, the
virgin meerschaum, the patent smoking-tables and another table
evidently designed to make drinking easy, but by reason of the
complexity of its machinery actually more likely to discourage one
forever from refreshment. The rest of the space, apart from the
furniture bequeathed by the noisy Templeton-Collins when he moved to
larger rooms above, was crowded with the freshmen whom after hall
Lonsdale had so hastily gathered together unassorted.
“I ordered coffee for sixteen,” announced the host. “I thought it would
be quicker than making it in a new machine that my sister gave me. It
just makes enough for three, and the only time I tried, it took about
an hour to do that ... who’ll drink port?”
Michael thought the scout’s prophecies about the superfluity of
Lonsdale’s wine were rather premature, for it seemed that everybody
intended to drink port.
“I believe this is supposed to be rather good port,” said Lonsdale.
“It is jolly good,” several connoisseurs echoed.
“I don’t know much about it myself. But my governor’s supposed to be
rather a judge. He said ‘this is wasted on you and your friends, but I
haven’t got any bad wine to give you.’”
Here everybody held up their glasses against the light, took another
sip and murmured their approval.
“Do you think this is a good wine, Fane?” demanded Lonsdale, thereby
drawing so much attention to Michael that he blushed to nearly as deep
a color as the port itself.
“I like it very much,” Michael said.
“Do you like it, Wedderburn?” asked Lonsdale, turning to the freshman
who had sat in the armchair at the head of the second table.
“Damned good wine,” pronounced Wedderburn in a voice so rich with
appreciation and so deep with judgment that he immediately established
a reputation for worldly knowledge, and from having been slightly
derided at Eton for his artistic ambitions was ever afterward respected
and consulted. Michael envied his air of authority, but trembled for
Wedderburn’s position when he heard him reproach Lonsdale for his lack
of any good pictures.
“You might stick up one that can be looked at for more than two
seconds,” Wedderburn said severely.
“What sort of picture?” asked Lonsdale.
“Primavera, for instance,” Wedderburn suggested, and Michael’s heart
beat in sympathy.
“Never heard of the horse,” Lonsdale answered. “Who owned her?”
“My god,” Wedderburn rumbled, “I’ll take you to buy one to-morrow,
Lonny. You deserve it after that.”
“Right-O!” Lonsdale cheerfully agreed. “Only I don’t want my room to
look like the Academy, you know.”
Wedderburn shook his head in benevolent contempt, and the conversation
was deflected from Lonsdale’s artistic education by a long-legged
Wykehamist with crisp chestnut hair and a thin florid face of dimpling
smiles.
“Has anybody been into Venner’s yet?” he asked.
“I have,” proclaimed a dumpy Etonian whose down-curving nose hung over
a perpetually open mouth. “Marjoribanks took me in just before hall.
But he advised me not to go in by myself yet awhile.”
“The second-year men don’t like it,” agreed the long-legged Wykehamist
with a wise air. “They say one can begin to go in occasionally in one’s
third term.”
“What is Venner’s?” Michael asked.
“Don’t you know?” sniffed the dumpy Etonian who had already managed to
proclaim his friendship with Marjoribanks, the President of the Junior
Common Room, and therefore presumably had the right to open his mouth a
little wider than usual at Michael.
“I’m not quite sure myself,” said Lonsdale quickly. “I vote that Cuffe
explains.”
“I’m not going to explain,” Cuffe protested, and for some minutes his
mouth was tightly closed.
“Isn’t it just a sort of special part of the J. C. R.?” suggested the
smiling Wykehamist, who seemed to wish to make it pleasant for
everybody, so long as he himself would not have to admit ignorance.
“Old Venables himself is a ripper. They say he’s been steward of the J.
C. R. for fifty years.”
“Thirty-two years,” corrected Wedderburn in his voice of most
reverberant certitude. “Venner’s is practically a club. You aren’t
elected, but somehow you know just when you can go in without being
stared at. There’s nothing in Oxford like that little office of
Venner’s. It’s practically made St. Mary’s what it is.”
All the freshmen, sipping their port and lolling back in their new
gowns, looked very reverent and very conscious of the honor and glory
of St. Mary’s which they themselves hoped soon to affirm more publicly
than they could at present. Upon their meditations sounded very loud
the blast of a coach-horn from above.
“That’s Templeton-Collins,” said Michael.
“Who’s he?” several demanded.
“He’s the man who used to live in these rooms last year,” said Lonsdale
lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these
freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.
“Let’s all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row,” suggested
Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of
a table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.
“To a second-year blood?” whispered somebody in dread surprise.
“Why not take away the coach-horn?” Lonsdale added.
However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with
unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.
“Keep quiet, little boys,” shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.
The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and
the long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going
to be a hot year. “I vote we have a bonner.”
“Will you light it, Sinclair?” asked another Wykehamist in a cynical
drawl.
“Why not?” Sinclair retorted.
“Oh, I don’t know. But you always used to be better at theory than
practice.”
“How these Wykehamists love one another,” laughed an Etonian.
This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in
defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and
bigoted confidence.
“Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner,” said Wedderburn. “After
the first ‘after.’”
“‘After’?” queried another.
“Oh, don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?” several well-informed freshmen
began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of
instruction, and the others gave way.
“Every Sunday after hall,” he explained, “people go up to the J. C. R.
and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the
second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes
round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the ‘after Common
Room.’ People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the
J. C. R. gives the first ‘after’ of the term. The others are usually
given by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and
lemon-squash. They usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport.
They’re much better than private wines, better for everybody. That’s
why we have them on Sunday night,” he concluded rather vaguely.
The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into
bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The
first evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper
than the superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table
was now begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to
intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the
dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of
Etonian tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some
Etonians might exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical,
less odiously serene than the majority of those they had so far only
encountered in summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess
was going to count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists
extended a cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they
never lost an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and
though their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more
debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to
acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these
strange new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might
appear to Wykeham’s adamantine mold.
Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in
the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to
put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless.
Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for
granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a
day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and
disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count.
At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them
credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social
outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense
of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and
the last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the
Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly
it had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose
trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were
ignobly buttoned to the very end.
“An Old Giggleswickian,” commented some one in reference to one of
these disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was
surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such
inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old
Wykehamist colors.
“Why, were you at school with him?” asked Michael quickly.
“Me? At Giggleswick?” stammered the Carthusian.
“Why not?” said Michael. “You seem to know all about him.”
“Isn’t your name Fane?” demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when
Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.
“That’ll help me along a bit, I expect,” Michael prophesied.
“We were in the same form at Randell’s. My name’s Avery.”
“I remember you,” said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how
little Avery’s once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he
thought Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep
blue eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of
Lonsdale’s room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out
with him into the quad.
“I say,” Avery began impulsively. “Did I make an ass of myself just
now? I mean, do you think people were sick with me?”
“What for?”
“I mean did I sound snobbish?” Avery pursued.
“Not more than anybody else,” Michael assured him, and as he watched
Avery’s expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess
and wore combinations instead of pants and vest.
“I say, aren’t you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I’m in Cloisters. Are you
going out? You’ll have to buck up. It’s after nine.”
They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was
ushered out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom
boomed his final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation
sounded here and there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.
Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High
came a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and
more perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
Michael pondered the freshmen’s chatter and apprehended dimly how this
magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of naïve
intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that
morning.
So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until
at last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College
Street and Queen’s Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
forgetting the world.
In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.
It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert’s
quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.
Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
from St. Mary’s tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The
watered silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how
Boccaccio should be read. Michael’s mind was filled with the
imagination of that gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their
gay stories in the sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais
should be read: the very pages seemed to glitter like wine.
Midnight chimed from St. Mary’s tower. One by one the new books went
gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
Michael’s bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room
was full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was
gleaming.