THE FIRST TERM
His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more
intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that
first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which
somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged
a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly
to his own “year.” These trials of personality were conducted with all
the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness
when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous
impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed
sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into
a solitude of books. Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if
he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name
for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and
afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to
tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of
pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been
invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about
half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not
remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous
tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing
hospitality.
Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made
a general observation on the row of Sunday night’s celebration, Michael
proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.
“Were you in that gang?” Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
surprise.
“I was fined,” Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
creating.
“I say,” Carben sneered, “so at last one of the ‘bloods’ is going to
condescend to play Rugger. Jonah,” he called to the captain of the
Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
room, “we’ve got a college blood playing three-quarter for us.”
“Good work,” said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. “Where is he?”
Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.
“No end of a blood,” Carben went on. “Lights bonfires and gets fined
all in his first week.”
The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
wrists and their smug insignificance.
“You were at St. James’, weren’t you?” asked Jones. “Did you know
Mansfield?”
“I didn’t know him—exactly,” said Michael, “but—in fact—we thought him
rather a tick.”
“Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine,
but don’t apologize.”
There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s
guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,”
he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
something positively contemptible.
Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with
cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the
others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college.
“Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded.
“Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you
keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said
Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man
in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s
quite right.”
“Quite right,” a chorus echoed.
Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.;
he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion
of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael.
He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he
thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was
probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.
“These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was
wisely propounding.
“We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael
inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
rebuke.
“Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,”
Carben affirmed.
How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
a dismal genteelness.
“Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put
your name down for the Ugger.”
“The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence.
“The Union.”
Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
sponsorship of Carben.
“I don’t think I’ll join this term.”
He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment
apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St.
Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook
off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a
crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.
In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
along the table to Grainger:
“I say, Tommy, do you know we’ve got a Rugger rough with us?”
Several people murmured in surprise.
“I say, have you really been playing Rugger?”
“Well, great Scott!” exclaimed Michael, “there’s nothing very odd in
that.”
“But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men,” Lonsdale protested.
“Some are,” Michael admitted. “Still, it’s a better game than Socker.”
“But everybody at St. Mary’s plays Socker,” Lonsdale went on.
Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that
even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise
Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians
and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.
And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this
freshmen’s table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that
with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their
traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be
snuffed out ignominiously.
“Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger,” Michael asserted.
“Shall I have a shot?” suggested Lonsdale.
“It’s a most devilish good game,” Michael earnestly avowed.
“Tommy,” Lonsdale shouted, “I’m going to be a Rugger rough myself.”
“I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row,” said
Wedderburn severely.
“My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass,” chuckled the offender.
Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.
“Have you sconced me?” Lonsdale demanded.
The head of the table nodded.
Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown.
Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn’s
room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus
of Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all
very foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and
his auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn’s
return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited
him in his room to enjoy his displeasure.
Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between
two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He
continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with
a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet
many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them
to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his
own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was
content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones,
the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of
his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college.
Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it
seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the
protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a
curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they
lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they
sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they
gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.
“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked
Wedderburn.
“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other
to—I mean—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”
“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more
like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half
the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me.
We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is
a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that
D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books;
and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over
each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette
ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the
nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing
who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R.
four years from now.”
But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was
beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at
Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was
Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and
episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from
flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon
freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to
probe.
“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,”
said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s
a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private
school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for
about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and
how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly
obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had
nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk
about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”
“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my
rooms because I like them.”
“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued.
“There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For
instance, Avery——”
“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.
“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ‘Varsity Eleven,” said
Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”
“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.
“That’s exactly what he isn’t,” Michael contradicted.
“Damnable poseur,” Wedderburn rumbled.
“Oh, well, so are you,” said Michael.
He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery.
Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his
sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well.
But all the Carthusians at St. Mary’s dressed rather too well and
carried about with them the atmosphere of a week-end in a sporting
country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would
gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the
course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to—to what? To some
distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor
he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him
on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he
dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale.
Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art.
Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend for ever
Ardle’s dusty lectures on Cicero in order that for ever he might hear
Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to
glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause
Mr. Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his
Plato in a sadler’s shop, where he had found it necessary to complain
of a saddle newly made for him.
“But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not
delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale.”
“What’s he talking about?” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
“Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane,” added the Senior Tutor dryly.
Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then
seeing by the lecturer’s face that something was still wrong, he
assumed a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the
situation he laughed very heartily and said:
“Oh, well, after all, it’s very much the same.” Then, as everybody else
laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his
trousers in gentle self-congratulation.
“Rum old buffer,” he whispered presently to Michael. “His eye gets very
glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?”
Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered
to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination
was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to
represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary’s, there might be added to the
list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with
charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael’s
collection as types. There was Grainger, last year’s Captain of the
Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the ‘Varsity in the spring.
Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and
listen for an hour at a time to his naïve theories of life. Grainger
seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he
exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to
himself was surprising.
“Great Scott, you are an odd chap,” Grainger once ejaculated.
“Why?”
“Why, you’re a clever devil, aren’t you, and you don’t seem to do
anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?”
“A good deal,” Michael admitted. “At least, it would be rot if I talked
it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way.”
“You _are_ a curious chap. I can’t make you out.”
“Why should you?” asked Michael. “You were never sent into this world
to puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as
you’re sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you’ll go into the
Egyptian Civil Service and you’ll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly
the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite
comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I
can’t imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them
wriggling under me.”
“I suppose you’re a Radical. They say you are,” Grainger lazily
announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.
“I suppose I might be,” said Michael, “if I wanted to proclaim myself
anything at all, but I’d much rather watch you sprawling effectively
and proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I’ve really very
little inclination to criticize people like you. It’s only in books I
think you’re a little boring.”
Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming
vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.
CARLINGTON ROAD,
_November 20th._
_Dearest Michael,_
_I’m so glad you’re still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it
would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you,
though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You’ll be glad
to hear that I’ve got rid of this tiresome house. I’ve sold it to a
retired Colonel—such an objectionable old man, and I’m really so
pleased he’s bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn because the
people next door were continually complaining of Stella’s piano, and
really Carlington Road has become impossible. Such an air of living
next door, and whenever I look out of the window the maid is shaking a
mat and looking up to see if I’m interested. We must try to settle on a
new house when you’re back in town. We’ll stay in a hotel for a while.
Stella has had to take a studio, which I do not approve of her doing,
and I cannot bear to see the piano going continually in and out of the
house. There are so many things I want to talk to you about—money, and
whether you would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we
could find a house at some other time._
_Your loving_
_Mother._
From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.
_My dear old Michael_,
_I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and I’ve
taken a studio here because the man next door—a most_ frightful
_bounder—said the noise I made went through and through his wife. As
she’s nearly as big round as the world, I wasn’t flattered. Mother is
getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange women come to the house
and talk about some society for dealing with Life with a capital
letter. I think we’re going to be rather well off, and Mother wants to
live in a house she’s seen in Park Street, but I want to take a house
in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like Cheyne Walk, because this house has got
a splendid studio in the garden and I thought with some mauve brocades
it would look perfectly lovely. There’s a very good_ paneled _room that
you could have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am
working at a Franck concerto. I’m being painted by rather a nice youth,
at least he would be nice, if he weren’t so much like a corpse. I
suppose you’ll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term._
_Yours ever,_
_Stella._
_P.S.—I’ve come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution
isn’t enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don’t think I
shall appear in public again until I’ve lived a little. I really think
life is rather exciting—unless it’s spelt with a capital letter._
Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation
in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would
have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He
was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the
privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word
to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with
Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.
Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by
giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his
friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had
been casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle
chattering groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought
out and balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal
dinner might, Michael thought, almost become with him a regular
function, so that people would learn to speak with interest and respect
of Fane’s terminal dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming
a club, a club strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as
really to preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate,
putting aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try
the effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided,
since that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward
arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be
Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose
a number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests
would change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he
felt that some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven
as the number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more
must be invited, and Michael without much further consideration
selected five freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness
drew them into prominence. But when he had given all the invitations
Michael was a little depressed by the conventional appearance of his
list. With the exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and
Avery, his list was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn
up by Grainger. As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of
correctness that overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at
the head of the table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed
round the table his terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that
on this occasion he had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe
moment of self-examination he characterized as “snobbishness.” In this
room at the Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun
and steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
eclectic society would have been out of place.
Only Avery’s loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
group.
“_Who’s_ that man wearing a pie-frill?” whispered Alan sternly from
Michael’s right.
Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.
“Avery allows himself a little license,” said Michael. “But, Alan, he’s
really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you
saw him on Sunday you’d think he was perfectly dressed. All Old
Carthusians are.”
But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
in common.
Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the
responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt
grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who
waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief
that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called
Castleton.
Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the
strongest influence in Michael’s year, and his friendship would be good
for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered
Castleton rather over-rated, but there was a superficial similarity
between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and
jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate
Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes
wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more
apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion
in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he
seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he
seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he
became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.
Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more
than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a
detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman,
and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would
certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of
St. Mary’s freshmen as this one might be considered. But a
representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had
intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with
distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne,
and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael’s desire to have
him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However,
it was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went
round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to
see his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.
Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and
smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale
discussed their individual excellencies.
“First of all,” said Lonsdale, “I want to propose the health of our
distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he’s a jolly
good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn’s a jolly good
fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good
fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend
Tommy Grainger—whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we
were boys together—I will here say that I confidently anticipate he
will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he’s a jolly good
fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name—all jolly good
fellows—except our host. He’s given us a good dinner and good wine and
good company, which nobody can deny. So here’s his health.”
Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering
procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were
all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed
through his first terminal dinner.