YOUTH’S DOMINATION
On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary’s hymned the rising
sun, Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible
expression of his own mental image of Oxford’s completeness, to pierce
in one dazzling moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts
which had restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful
obscurity about his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the
city, as it were, imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity
of his evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence
of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the
merely outward glory of its repository.
All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily
upon the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the
cold hues and blushes of the sun’s youth, that stood as symbol for so
much here in St. Mary’s, made of the east one great shell of lucent
color. The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of
dawn and sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys
gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic
visitors came half shyly through the portal that was to give such a
sense of time’s rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible:
dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and
at last the tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and
Lonsdale and Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides
equipped in cap and gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding
stairs to the top.
For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the
tower’s top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the
sun mounted into the day.
Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as
emmets at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to
stand. Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent
hurtling outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of
the town scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.
Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the
heart of England. He had refused Maurice’s invitation to a somewhat
mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the
almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he
was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan,
now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning
celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far
afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college
shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign
of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement
of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After
breakfast it would still be only about seven o’clock with a hot-eyed
languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost
decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and
walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the
lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed
incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which
had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate
a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he
extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary
impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.
It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more
typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the
sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double
irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was
glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in
the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at
the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice’s
mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
went back to the river’s bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn’s name, and deliberately he
did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
flowing into the ancestral Thames.
Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.
At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary
inmate. His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat,
but continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on
the table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the
table by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still
fixed upon his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a
cipher and regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in
his silent company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this
strange youth with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately
carved countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing
instead of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his
waistcoat. Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker
up his pale forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate
examined the food on the plate before him.
“I think it’s rather cold by now,” said Michael, unable to keep silence
any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.
“I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
I’d read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you
now, you’d think I was an affected ass,” he drawled.
Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.
“They’re all equally bad,” the poet proclaimed gloomily. “What made you
come to this inn? I didn’t know that anybody else except me had ever
been here. You’re at the Varsity, I suppose?”
Michael with a nod announced his college.
“I’m at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest
undergraduates in Oxford.”
“I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary’s,” Michael suggested.
“Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary’s man. I
refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know.”
“Oh, rather. In fact, he’s rather a friend of mine. He’s keen on
starting a paper just at present.”
“I know. I know,” said the poet. “He’s asked me to be one of the
forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?”
“I was invited to be,” Michael admitted. “But instead I’m going to
subscribe some of the capital required. My name’s Fane.”
“Mine’s Hazlewood. It’s rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.
Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere
else. But they’ve got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go
two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have
you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris
weighing the charms of Helen—no—on second thoughts I’m being forced.
Don’t encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?”
“I don’t know,” said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest
roast chicken he had ever seen. “I think I missed a turning. I’ve been
at Lechlade all day.”
“We may as well ride back together,” Hazlewood proposed.
After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and
then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.
Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.
“Do you know many Balliol people?” he asked.
Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting
in The Merchant of Venice.
“I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my
rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea
they’re keeping a chapel, or else it’s a relief from the unparagoned
brutality of the college architecture.”
Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his
rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how
many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax
candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive
candlesticks of wrought iron.
“Mr. Fane of St. Mary’s,” said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was
dimly aware of multitudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur
of expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.
“I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?” the
chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.
“Forgot all about it,” said Hazlewood. “But I suppose I can bring a
visitor.”
Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied
criticism of the expostulation.
“Sit down,” said Hazlewood peremptorily. “If I can’t bring a visitor I
resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will
have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us
his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediæval Warfare.”
“Don’t be an affected ass, Guy,” said Comeragh. “You know you yourself
are reading a paper on The Sonnet.”
“Rise from the noble lord,” said Hazlewood. “The first I’ve had in a
day’s fishing. I say, Fane, don’t listen to this rot.”
The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host
and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.
Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was
sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the
experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to
whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood’s room was
the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth
for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary’s
he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or
Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood’s, nor would he have
exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in
Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.
He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over
the tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon
their martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the
level voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing
sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco
smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated
loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the
discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green
curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and
with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the
tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the
decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members
of the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and
earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous,
sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more
delightful.
Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most
unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made
up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that
from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with
Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room
would stand as representatives of the college.
“Yes, I should think so,” said Hazlewood. “Why, are you making
exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes
an American to do that really well, you know.”
“But what is the essential Balliol?” Michael demanded.
“Who could say so easily? Perhaps it’s the same sort of spirit,
slightly filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in
Elizabethan England.”
Michael asked for a little more elaboration.
“Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by
birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste
not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be
ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with
Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.”
“Will that description serve for yourself?” Michael asked.
“For me? Oh, great scott, no! I’m utterly deficient in proconsular
ambitions.”
They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend
after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his
acquaintance with Balliol.
When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with
Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford
Looking-Glass. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen
to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his
day.
“_The Oxford Looking-Glass,_” Avery began, “_is intended to reflect
contemporary undergraduate thought._”
“I prefer ‘will reflect,’” Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of
positive opinion.
“I don’t think it very much matters,” said Michael, “as long as you
don’t think that ‘contemporary undergraduate thought’ is too
pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror,
for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate
thought ever reaches toward reality.”
Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism,
and the chief promoter went on:
_“Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will
be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama.”_
“I think that’s a rotten sentence,” Michael interrupted.
“Well, of course, it will be polished,” Avery irritably explained.
“What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as
simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at.”
“Ah!” Michael agreed, smiling. “Now I’m beginning to understand.”
“_It may be assumed_,” Avery went on, “_that the opinion of those who
are ‘knocking at the door_’ (in inverted commas)——”
“I shouldn’t think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a
door in inverted commas,” Michael observed.
“Look here, Michael,” Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously,
“will you shut up, or you won’t be allowed to contribute.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door
in Ibsen?” fretfully demanded Maurice. “_That the opinion of those who
are knocking at the door,_” he continued defiantly, “_is not unworthy
of an audience._”
“But if they’re knocking at a door,” Michael objected, “they can’t be
reflected in a mirror; unless it’s a glass door, and if it’s a glass
door, they oughtn’t to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don’t
knock hard, there isn’t much point——”
“_The Editor in chief_,” pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael’s
attempt to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass,
“_will be M. Avery (St. Mary’s), with whom will be associated C. St. C.
Wedderburn (St. Mary’s), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary’s), V. L. A. Townsend
(B.N.C.)_. I haven’t asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he’s sure
to join because he’s very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill
Mowbray’s very bucked at the scheme. He’s just resigned from the
Russell and joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the
principal speakers are going to follow Chamberlain’s lead for
Protection. _N. R. Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most
tremendously keen, and rather a good man to have, as he’s had two poems
taken by The Saturday Review already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_——”
“That’s the man I’ve come to talk about,” said Michael. “I met him
to-day.”
Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear
he had been considered interesting. “For in his own way,” said Avery
solemnly, “he’s about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I’d sooner
have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you
and Wedders,” he added quickly. “I’m going to take this prospectus
round to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make.”
Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a
large number of suggestions. “And he’s got a sense of humor,” he added
consolingly.
For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the
preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary
discussions gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the
O.U.D.S. or the Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year
men) belonged. Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass
the organ of advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for
Townsend to be as advanced as he chose within the limits of the space
allotted to his progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole
of the magazine to drama, especially since under the expanding
ambitions of editorship he had come to the conclusion he was a critic
himself, and so was the more firmly disinclined to let slip the
trenchant opportunity of pulverizing the four or five musical comedies
that would pass through the Oxford theater every term. However,
Townsend’s demand for the drama and nothing but the drama was mitigated
by his determination as a Liberal that The Oxford Looking-Glass should
not be made the mouthpiece of the New Toryism represented by Mowbray;
and Maurice was able to recover the control of the dramatic criticism
by representing to Townsend the necessity for such unflinching
exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston Club principles as would
balance Mowbray’s torrential leadership of the Tory Democrats. “So
called,” Townsend bitterly observed, “because as he supposed they were
neither Tories nor Democrats.”
Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the
personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had
astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then
just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the
Boer war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always
thronged with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and
whizzed about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but
less dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.
Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried
sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity.
As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity,
whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers’ eggs or keeping an
early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing
tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and
Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with
two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a
ramshorn of snuff and glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
Wedderburn’s Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
Hazlewood’s genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
result into a soufflée of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute,
outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine
along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in
the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he
had hailed from St. Mary’s tower, this dream of youth’s domination set
against the gray background of time’s endurance that was itself spun of
the fabric of dreams.
Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term’s end,
inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding
river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to
destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass
Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted
to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the
text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did
Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by
trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates
have better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most
inaccurate geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held
against the bank by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at
ease, the world became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise
of life no more than the monotony of a river’s lapping, or along the
level water meadows a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when
supper was eaten by figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures
that afterward drifted slowly down to college under the tree-entangled
stars and flitting assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the
rustle of a bird’s wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match
dropped idly over the side of the canoe. This was the season when for a
long while people sat talking at open windows, and from the Warden’s
garden came sweetly up the scent of May flowers.
Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of
the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan’s
room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important
was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to
bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of
leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to
cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect
valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of
the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.
Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that
he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the
festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not
inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by
certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to
her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection
of normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors.
Besides, though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his
self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the
battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage
criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen’s table
was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and
sister.
So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free
to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so
debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and
cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon
mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his
father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent
two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.
“After all, they can only spend the day,” he sighed hopefully to
Michael, “You’ll come and help me through lunch, won’t you, and we’ll
rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is
rowed. I was an ass to ask them. You won’t mind being bored a bit by my
governor? I believe he’s considered quite a clever man.”
Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished
diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son’s estimate.
“They’re arriving devilish early,” said Lonsdale, coming up to
Michael’s room with an anxious face on the night before.
Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as
it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael’s door.
“Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the
station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the
three of them at once. I think you’d better talk about wine to the
governor. It’ll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated.
Tell him how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing
in late from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of
the governor’s port from Tommy’s rooms in Parsons’ Quad.”
Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without
fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next
morning.
“I say, you’ve come frightfully early,” Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and
Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.
“Well, we can walk round my old college,” suggested Lord Cleveden
cheerfully. “I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford
nowadays.”
“I say, I’m awfully sorry to let you in for this,” Lonsdale whispered
to Michael. “Don’t encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around
at the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something.”
Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking
round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of
bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.
“I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?” asked Michael as they
stood in Peckwater.
“Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap,
he died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about
much.”
“Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott,” said Michael hurriedly.
“Dick Prescott? Good gracious!” Lord Cleveden exclaimed, “I haven’t
seen him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his
life, to be sure.”
“Did he?” asked Michael, well aware of the question’s folly, but
incapable of not asking it.
“Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal.”
“Oh,” gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden
about his father.
“I can’t remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this
one. Saxby’s I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.
Let’s go up and ask the present owner to let us look in,” Lord Cleveden
proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.
“Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no,” protested his son. “No, no; he
may have people with him. Really.”
“Ah, to be sure,” Lord Cleveden agreed. “What a pity!”
“And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary’s before lunch,” Lonsdale
announced.
“Do they make meringues here nowadays?” inquired Lord Cleveden
meditatively.
“No, no,” Lonsdale assured him. “They’ve given up since the famous cook
died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary’s. And our
crême caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they’ve got at the
House.”
The tour of St. Mary’s was conducted with almost incredible rapidity,
because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted
everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the
kitchen.
“Why didn’t you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?” Lady
Cleveden inquired.
“My dear mother,” said Arthur, “he’s quite impossible.”
“But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man,” said Lady Cleveden,
“and always asks us to stay with him when we’re in Scotland.”
“Yes, but we never are,” Lonsdale pointed out. “And I’m sorry to hurt
your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is
really absolutely impossible. He’s the very worst type of Harrovian.”
Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that
Mackintosh was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind,
and urged a theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly
have declined rather offensively.
“He’s not a very bonhomous lad,” said Lonsdale, and with that sentence
banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.
After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought
to take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed
down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the
pleasure craft of St. Mary’s bobbed at their moorings.
Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his
sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into
respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse
himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications
of his opinion he disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the
punt. Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with
the air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity
was no longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave
superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the
navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of
the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.
“Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these
toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own.” This comment
was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so
audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull
fury. “Try and get along, please, sir. You’re holding up the whole
river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices’ competition.”
After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back
to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of
sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and
mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea
and then buzz off at once to see the first division row.
“I think we shall go head to-night,” Lonsdale predicted very
confidentially. “I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar
yesterday.”
But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale’s
people to see St. Mary’s bump New College in front of their own barge,
and afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with
the westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox’s blazer and
shine more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his
buttonhole.
“Now you’ve just got time to catch your train,” said Lonsdale, when the
sound of the last pistol-shots and plaudits had died away. And “Phew!”
he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, “how
frightfully tiring one’s people are when imported in bulk!”
Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second;
and without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for
Pass Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the
end of the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of
the most low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the
candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly
blows they had received below their intellectual belts.
It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the
last week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a
good deal of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest
justification, and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had
stayed on the river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great
expense of energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off
indigestion.
On one of these merry nights toward one o’clock somebody suggested that
the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who
had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt
act of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This
derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment
known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park,
and it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so
that surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.
Half a dozen freshmen—Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and
Michael—all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the
amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael
alone possibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been
one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in
the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The
others were more vaguely injured by Smithers’ hitherto undisturbed
existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his
accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was
determined to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to
follow the fashion.
Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers
from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass
and paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm
before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers’ reformation kept
them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of
guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself
might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside
Smithers’ open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first
man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the
sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric
light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the
crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows
of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment
an unworthy impulse in every heart.
The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were
evidently Smithers’ people, photographs like the groups in the parlors
of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid’s mantelpiece.
“I say, look at that fringe,” gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and
Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.
Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers’ room, began
to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that
stood in the background of this splendid “college career” of Percy or
Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded
to counterbalance “Smithers.” No doubt the champagne in gradual
reaction was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn
each tribute from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak
room dedicated for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much
inclined to detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go
to bed. What seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was
that on the evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the
ascetic glories of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently
no classical scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate
for the scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was
at St. Mary’s to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by
competing on behalf of the college and the university in scientific
knowledge with newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham.
Smithers was merely an advertisement of Oxford’s democratic
philanthropy, and would only gain from his university a rather inferior
training in chemistry at a considerably greater personal cost but with
nothing else that Oxford could and did give so prodigally to others
more fortunately born.
At this point in Michael’s meditations Smithers woke up, and from the
bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The
reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a
long nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway
between his two rooms.
“Well, I’m jiggered!” he gasped. “What are you fellers doing in my
sitting-room?”
It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to take down from the wall
what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers’ mother in order to
examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick
with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe’s grasp, and
shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled
through the open window into the deer-park.
Cuffe’s expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very
heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from
damaging Smithers’ humble property and even from annoying any more
Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.
“I say, we can’t let that poor devil run about all night in the park
with that picture,” said Grainger. “Let’s catch him and explain we got
into his rooms by mistake.”
“I hope he won’t throw himself into the river or anything,” murmured
Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his
reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever
lighting upon him personally.
“I say, for goodness’ sake, let’s catch him,” begged Michael, who had
visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street
that her son had died in defending her enlargement.
Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its
verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.
“It’s like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Michael said to
Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers,
running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was
undimmed by boughs.
He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at
once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew,
for by this time the unwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of
voices in the Fellows’ sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who
supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing
against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an
entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead
branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round
tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down
into the rose-beds of the Warden’s garden and by one supreme effort of
endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert’s quad.
“By Jove, that was a topping rag,” puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six
glasses with welcome drink. “I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He
said: ‘It’s no use you putting your coat over your ’ead, sir, because I
knows you by your gait.’”
“I wonder what happened to Smithers,” said Michael.
“Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher,” Avery asserted. “I don’t
know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary’s.”
“A bounder like what?” asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room
during Avery’s expression of opinion.
Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the
evening’s rag was provided for his entertainment.
“But why don’t you let that poor devil alone?” demanded the listener.
At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive
reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted
that men like him were very bad for the college.
Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton,
determined to probe through the medium of Castleton’s common sense and
Wykehamist notions the ethical and æsthetic rights of people like
Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.
“After all, Oxford wasn’t founded to provide an expensive three years
of idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like
Cuffe,” Castleton pointed out.
“No, no,” Michael agreed, “but no institution has ever yet remained
true to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance,
or Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved
into something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may
have departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful
purpose in the scheme of social order.”
“Oh, I’m not grumbling at what Oxford is,” Castleton went on. “I simply
suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority,
to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving
no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are
supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I
should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the
majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way
in with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of
hatred which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all
of us.”
Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m afraid I’m too lazy to do much more than
deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I’m
beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The
Spectator might talk, to bed.”
The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton
to his rooms. St. Mary’s tower against the sky opening like a flower
seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward
immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social
distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and
clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in
beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed,
spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And
suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside
the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the
sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those
who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.
Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to
invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect
that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might
embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself
with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied
that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more
charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the
experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the
doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.