VENNER’S
The most of Michael’s friends had availed themselves of the right of
seniority to move into more dignified rooms for their second year.
These “extensions of premises,” as Castleton called them, reached the
limit of expansion in the case of Lonsdale who, after a year’s
residence in two small ground-floor rooms of St. Cuthbert’s populous
quad, had acquired the largest suite of three in Cloisters. Exalted by
palatial ambitions, he spent the first week of term in buttonholing
people in the lodge, so that after whatever irrelevant piece of chatter
he had seized upon as excuse he might wind up the conversation by
observing nonchalantly:
“Oh, I say, have you chaps toddled round to my new rooms yet? Rather
decent. I’m quite keen on them. I’ve got a dining-room now. Devilish
convenient. Thought of asking old Wedders to lay in a stock of
pictures. It would buck him up rather.”
“But why do you want these barracks?” Michael asked.
“Oh, binges,” said Lonsdale. “We ought to be able to run some pretty
useful binges here. Besides, I’m thinking of learning the bagpipes.”
Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room
in St. Cuthbert’s tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous
Templeton-Collins on Michael’s staircase, and had brought back with him
from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and
the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael
alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him.
He had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their
participation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for
himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the
Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect
they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative
purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for
himself alone. How intimate and personal that sparse lunch laid for one
on a large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset
bookcase and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his
pleasure! There was not now indeed a single book that did not recall
the charmed idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there
one volume that could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments
eagerly expected all the day long.
It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to
gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds
had proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the
more worshipful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the
miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to
acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they
generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their
material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in
some dead publishing season more extravagant buyers had spent four or
five times as much to partake of their accumulated facts and fortuitous
illustrations. With Michael the passion for remainders was short-lived,
and he soon pushed them ignobly out of the way for the sake of those
stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest
flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to
mercantile elation and depression.
If among these ambassadors of learning and literature was to be
distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had
been extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the
seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though
enriched by the classic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the
eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may
have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a
Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the
universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was
the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their
euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every
night for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a
world of polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual
maladies and minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of
talismans, to fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and
strange influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so
perilously that under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half
contemptuous of thought less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the
present danced by in thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather
perceived as bloodless and irresolute ephemerides. When people
reproached him for his willful prejudice, he pointed out how easy it
would always be to overtake the ideas of the present and how much waste
of intellectual breath would be avoided by letting his three or four
Oxford years account for the most immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed
to him to provide an opportunity, and more than an opportunity—an
inexpugnable command to wave with most reluctant hands farewell to the
backward of time, around whose brink rose up more truthful dreams than
those that floated indeterminate, beckoning through the mist across the
wan mountains of the future.
On the walls Michael’s pictures had been collected to achieve through
another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her
lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams
behind; and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he
sought in a picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room.
One hour of the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always
transform the pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some
diagrammatic significance. Apart from the accumulation of books and
pictures, he had changed the room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers,
chairs and tables, all preserved the character of the room itself as
something that existed outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient
inhabitants who read and laughed and ate and talked for so
comparatively fleeting a space of time between its four walls. With all
that he had imposed of what in the opinion of his contemporaries were
eccentricities of adornment, the rooms remained, as he would observe to
any critic, essentially the same as his own. Instead of college groups
which marked merely by the height of the individual’s waistcoat-opening
the almost intolerable fugacity of their record, there were Leonardo
and Blake and Frederick Walker to preserve the illusion of permanence,
or at least of continuity. Instead of the bleached and desiccated ribs
of momentarily current magazines cast away in sepulchral indignity,
there were a hundred quartos whose calf bindings had the durableness
and sober depth of walnut furniture, furniture, moreover, that was
still in use.
Yet it was in Venner’s office where Michael found the perfect fruit of
time’s infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of
the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his
own rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present
of finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of
those moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through
situations or persons or places, the assurance of immortality. Great
pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always
remain as the most obvious pledge of man’s spiritual potentiality, but
these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress
themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke
of seeing God’s forehead pressed against the window panes, could
believe that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had
struggled in the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable.
To him Blake seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to
attempt the recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith.
Every other writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur.
Most people, seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would
obtain the finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight
of St. Mary’s tower against a green April afterglow, or of the
moon-parched High Street in frost. Michael, however, found in Venner’s
office, just as he had found in that old print of St. Mary’s tower
rather than in the tower itself, the innermost shrine of Oxford, the
profoundest revelation of the shining truth round which the mysterious
material of Oxford had grown through the Middle Ages.
Michael with others of his year had during the summer term ventured
several times into Venner’s, but the entrance of even a comparatively
obscure senior had always driven them out. They had not yet enjoyed the
atmosphere of security without which a club unlike an orchard never
tastes sweet. Now, with the presence of a new year’s freshmen and with
the lordship of the college in their own hands, since to the
out-of-college men age with merciless finger seemed already to be
beckoning, Michael and his contemporaries in their pride of prime
marched into Venner’s after hall and drank their coffee.
Venner’s office was one of the small ground-floor rooms in Cloisters,
but it had long ago been converted to the present use. An inner
storeroom, to which Venner always retired to make a cup of squash or to
open a bottle of whisky, had once been the bedroom. The office itself
was not luxuriously furnished, and the accommodation was small. A
window-seat with a view of the college kitchens, a square table, and a
couple of Windsor chairs were considered enough for the men who
frequented Venner’s every night after hall, and who on Sunday nights
after wine in J.C.R. clustered there like a swarm of bees. Venner’s own
high chair stood far back in the corner behind his high sloping desk on
which, always spread open, lay the great ledger of J.C.R. accounts. On
the shelves above were the account books of bygone years in which were
indelibly recorded the extravagances of more than thirty years of St.
Mary’s men. Over the fireplace was a gilt mirror of Victorian design
stuck round with the fixture cards of the university and the college,
with notices of grinds and musical clubs and debating societies; in
fact, with all the printed petty news of Oxford. A few photographs of
winning crews, a book-case with stores of college stationery, a
Chippendale sideboard with a glass case of priced cigars on top, and an
interesting drawerful of Venner’s relics above the varnished wainscot
completed the furniture. The wall-paper was of that indefinite brownish
yellow which one finds in the rooms of old-fashioned solicitors, and of
that curious oily texture which seems to produce an impression of great
age and at the same time of perfect modernity.
Yet the office itself, haunted though it was by the accumulated
personalities of every generation at St. Mary’s, would scarcely have
possessed the magical effect of fusion which it did possess, had not
all these personalities endured in a perpetual present through the
conservative force of Venner himself. John Venables had been Steward of
the Junior Common Room for thirty-three years, but he seemed to all
these young men that came within the fragrancy of his charm to be as
much an intrinsic part of the college as the tower itself. The
moon-faced Warden, the dry-voiced dons, the deer park, the elms, the
ancient doors and traceries, the lawns and narrow entries, the
groinings and the lattices, were all subordinate in the estimation of
the undergraduates to Venner. He knew the inner history of every rag;
he realized why each man was popular or unpopular or merely ignored; he
was a treasure-house of wise counsel and kindly advice; he held the
keys of every heart. He was an old man with florid, clean-shaven face,
a pair of benignant eyes intensely blue, a rounded nose, a gentle voice
and most inimitable laugh. Something there was in him of the old family
butler, a little more of the yeoman-farmer, a trace of the head
game-keeper, a suspicion of the trainer of horses, but all these
elements were blended to produce the effect of someone wise and saintly
and simple who could trouble himself to heal the lightest wounds and
could rouse with a look or a gesture undying affection.
With such a tutelary spirit, it was not surprising the freedom of
Venner’s should have been esteemed a privilege that could only be
conferred by the user’s consciousness of his own right. There was no
formal election to Venner’s: there simply happened a moment when the
St. Mary’s man entered unembarrassed that mellow office and basked in
that sunny effluence. In this ripe old room, generous and dry as sherry
wine, how pleasant it was to sit and listen to Venner’s ripe old
stories: how amazingly important seemed the trivial gossip of the
college in this historic atmosphere: how much time was apparently
wasted here between eight and ten at night, and what a thrill it always
was to come into college about half-past nine of a murky evening and
stroll round Cloisters to see if there was anybody in Venner’s. It
could after all scarcely be accounted a waste of time to sit and slowly
mature in Venner’s, and sometimes about half-past nine the old man
would be alone, the fire would be dying down and during the half-hour
that remained of his duty, it would be possible to peel a large apple
very slowly and extract from him more of the essence of social history
than could be gained from a term’s reading of great historians even
with all the extra lucidity imparted by a course of Mr. So-and-So’s
lectures.
Michael found that Venner summed up clearly for him all his own
tentative essays to grasp the meaning of life. He perceived in him the
finest reaction to the prejudice and nobility, the efficiency and folly
of aristocratic thought. He found in him the ideal realization of his
own most cherished opinions. England, and all that was most
inexplicable in the spirit of England, was expressed by Venner. He was
a landscape, a piece of architecture, a simple poem of England. One of
Venner’s applauded tricks was to attach a piece of string to the tongs
for a listener to hold to his ears, while Venner struck the tongs with
the poker and evoked the sound of St. Mary’s chimes. But the poker and
tongs were unnecessary, for in Venner’s own voice was the sound of all
the bells in England. Communion with this gracious, this tranquil, this
mellow presence affected Michael with a sense of the calm certainty of
his own life. It lulled all the discontent and all the unrest. It
indicated for the remainder of his Oxford time a path which, if it did
not lead to any outburst of existence, was at least a straight path,
green bordered and gay with birdsong, with here and there a sight of
ancient towers and faiths, and here and there an arbor in which he and
his friends could sit and talk of their hopes.
“Venner,” said Lonsdale one evening, “do you remember the Bishop of
Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him
in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac.”
“Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow,” Venner began, full of
reminiscence. “But we’ll look him up.”
Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive
evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were
photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed
for the criticism of his irreverent successors.
“There you are,” chuckled Venner triumphantly. “What did I say? One
dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for
there’s another half dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men
are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college
as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop—Stebbing he was then. He
put a cod-fish in the Dean’s bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about
it! The old Warden kicked up such a fuss.”
And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided
from anecdote to anecdote of episcopal youth.
“I thought the old boy liked the governor’s port,” laughed Lonsdale.
“‘What a pity everybody can’t drink in moderation,’ said Gaiters. Next
time he cocks his wicked old eye at me, I shall ask him about that
cod-fish.”
“What’s this they tell me about your bringing out a magazine?” Venner
inquired, turning to Maurice Avery.
“Out next week, Venner,” Maurice announced importantly.
“Why, whatever do you find to write about?” asked Venner. “But I
suppose it’s amusing. I’ve often been asked to write my own life. What
an idea! As if I had any time. I’m glad enough to go to bed when I get
home, though I always smoke a pipe first. We had two men here once who
brought out a paper. Chalfont and Weymouth. I used to have some copies
of it somewhere. They put in a lot of skits of the college dons. The
Warden was quite annoyed. ‘Most scurrilous, Venables,’ he said to me, I
remember. ‘Most scurrilous.’” Venner chuckled at the remembrance of the
Warden’s indignation.
“This is going to be a very serious affair, Venner,” explained
somebody. “It’s going to put the world quite straight again.”
“Ho-ho, I suppose you’re one of these Radicals,” said Venner to the
editor. “Dear me, how anyone can be a Radical I can’t understand. I’ve
always been a Conservative. We had a Socialist come up here to lecture
once in a man’s rooms—a great Radical this man was—Sir Hugh Gaston—a
baronet—there’s a funny thing, fancy a Radical baronet. Well, the men
got to hear of this Socialist coming up and what do you think they
did?” Venner chuckled in anticipatory relish. “Why, they cropped his
hair down to nothing. Sir Hugh Gaston was quite upset about it, and
when he made a fuss, they cut his hair too, though it was quite short
already. There was a terrible rowdy set up then. The men are very much
quieter nowadays.”
The door opened as Venables finished his story, and Smithers came in to
order rather nervously a tin of biscuits. The familiar frequenters of
Venner’s eyed in cold silence his entrance, his blushful wait and his
hurried exit.
“That’s a scholar called Smithers,” Venner explained. “He’s a very
quiet man. I don’t suppose any of you know him even by sight.”
“We ragged him last term,” said Michael, smiling at his friends.
“He’s a bounder,” declared Avery obstinately.
“He hasn’t much money,” said Venner. “But he’s a very nice fellow. You
oughtn’t to rag him. He’s very harmless. Never speaks to anybody. He’ll
get a first, I expect, but there, you don’t think anything of that, I
know. But the dons do. The Warden often has him to dinner. I shouldn’t
rag him any more. He’s a very sensitive fellow. His father’s a
carpenter. What a wonderful thing he should have a son come up to St.
Mary’s.”
The rebuke was so gently administered that only the momentary silence
betrayed its efficacy.
One day Michael brought Alan to be introduced to Venables, and it was a
pleasure to see how immediately the old man appreciated Alan.
“Why ever didn’t you come to St. Mary’s?” asked Venner. “Just the place
for you. Don’t you find Christ Church a bit large? But they’ve got some
very good land. I’ve often done a bit of shooting over the Christ
Church farms. The Bursar knows me well. ‘Pleased to see you, Mr.
Venables, and I hope you’ll have good sport.’ That’s what he said to me
last time I saw him. Oh, he’s a very nice man! Do they still make
meringues at your place? I don’t suppose you ever heard the story of
the St. Mary’s men who broke into Christ Church. It caused quite a stir
at the time. Well, some of our men were very tipsy one night at the
Bullingdon wine, and one of them left his handkerchief in the rooms of
a Christ Church man, and what do you think they did? Why, when they got
back to college, this man said he wasn’t going to bed without his
handkerchief. Did you ever hear of such a thing? So they all climbed
out of St. Mary’s at about two in the morning and actually climbed into
Christ Church. At least they thought it was Christ Church, but it was
really Pembroke. Do you know Pembroke? I don’t suppose you’ve even been
there. Our men always cheer Pembroke in the Eights—Pemmy, as they call
it—because their barge is next to us. But fancy breaking in there at
night to look for a handkerchief. They woke up every man in the
college, and there was a regular set-to in the quad, and the night
porter at Pembroke got a most terrible black eye. The President of the
J.C.R. had to send an apology, and it was all put right, but this man
who lost his handkerchief, Wilberforce his name was, became a regular
nuisance, because for ever afterward, whenever he got drunk, he used to
go looking for this old handkerchief. There you see, that’s what comes
of going to the Bullingdon wine. Are you a member of the Bullingdon?”
“He’s a cricketer, Venner,” Michael explained.
“So was this fellow Wilberforce who lost his handkerchief, and what do
you think? One day when we were playing Winchester—you’re not a
Wykehamist, are you?—he came out to bat so drunk that the first ball he
hit, he went and ran after it himself. It caused quite a scandal. But
you don’t look one of that sort. Will you have a squash and a biscuit?
The men like these biscuits very much. There’s been quite a run on
them.”
Michael was anxious to know how deep an impression Venner had made on
Alan.
“You’ve got nobody like him at the House?” he asked.
Alan was bound to admit there was indeed nobody.
“He’s an extraordinary chap,” said Michael. “He’s always different, and
yet he’s always absolutely the same. For me he represents Oxford. When
one’s in his company, one feels one’s with him for ever, and yet one
knows that people who have gone down can feel just the same, and that
people who haven’t yet come up will feel just the same. You know, I do
really think that what it sets out to do St. Mary’s does better than
any other college. And the reason of that is Venner’s. It’s the only
successful democracy in the world.”
“I shouldn’t have called it a democracy,” said Alan. “Everybody doesn’t
go there.”
“But everybody can go there. It depends entirely on themselves.”
“What about that fellow Smithers you were talking about?” Alan asked.
“He seems barred.”
“But he won’t be,” Michael urged hopefully.
“He’d be happier at the House all the same,” Alan said. “He’d find his
own set there.”
“But so he can at St. Mary’s.”
“Then it isn’t a democracy,” Alan stoutly maintained.
“I say, Alan,” exclaimed Michael, in surprise. “You’re getting quite a
logician.”
“Well, you always persist in treating me like an idiot,” said Alan.
“But I _am_ reading Honor Mods. It’s a swat, but I’ve got to get some
sort of a class.”
“You’ll probably get a first,” said Michael.
Yet how curious it was to think of Alan, whom he still regarded as
chiefly a good-looking and capable athlete, taking a first class in a
school he himself had indolently passed over. Of course he would never
take a first. He was too much occupied with the perfection of new
leg-breaks. And what would he do after his degree, his third in greats?
A third was the utmost Michael mentally allowed him in the Final
Schools.
“I suppose you’ll ultimately try for the Indian Civil?” Michael asked.
“Do you remember when we used to lie awake talking in bed at Carlington
Road? It was always going to be me who did everything intellectual; you
were always the sportsman.”
“I am still. Michael, I think I’ve got a chance of my blue this year.
If I can keep that leg-break,” he added fervidly. “There’s no slow
right-hander of much class in the Varsity. I worked like a navvy at
that leg-break last vac.”
“I thought you were grinding for Mods,” Michael reminded him, with a
smile.
“I worked like a navvy at Mods,” said Alan.
“You’ll be a proconsul, I really believe.” Michael looked admiringly at
his friend. “And do you know, Alan, in appearance you’re turning into a
regular viking.”
“I meant to have my hair cut yesterday,” said Alan, in grave and
reflective self-reproof.
“It’s not your hair,” cried Michael. “It’s your whole personality. I
never appreciated you until this moment.”
“I think you talk more rot nowadays than you used to talk even,” said
Alan. “So long, I must go back and work.”
The tall figure with the dull gold hair curling out from the green cap
of Harris tweed faded away in the November fog that was traveling in
swift and smoky undulations through the Oxford streets. What a
strangely attractive walk Alan had always had, and now it had gained
something of determination, whether from leg-breaks or logic Michael
did not know. But the result was a truer grace in the poise of his
neck; a longer and more supple swing from his tapering flanks.
Michael went on up the High and stood for a moment, watching the
confusion caused by the fog at Carfax, listening to the fretful tinkles
of the numerous bicycles and the jangling of the trams and the shouts
of the paper-boys. Then he walked down Cornmarket Street past the shops
splashing through the humid coils of vapor their lights upon the
townspeople, loiterers and purchasers who thronged the pavements.
Undergraduates strolled along, linked arm in arm and perpetually
staring. How faithfully each group resembled its forerunners and
successors. All had the same fresh complexions, the same ample green
coats of Harris tweed, the same gray flannel trousers. Only in the
casual acknowledgments of his greeting when he recognized acquaintances
was there the least variation, since some would nod or toss their
heads, others would shudder with their chins, and a few would raise
their arms in a fanlike gesture of social benediction. Michael turned
round into the Broad where the fog made mysterious even the tea-tray
gothic of Balliol, and Trinity with its municipal ampelopsis. A
spectral cabman saluted him interrogatively from the murk. A
fox-terrier went yapping down the street at the heels of a don’s wife
hurrying back to Banbury Road. A belated paper-boy yelled, “Varsity and
Blackheath Result,” hastening toward a more profitable traffic. The fog
grew denser every minute, and Michael turned round into Turl Street
past many-windowed Exeter and the monastic silence of Lincoln. There
was time to turn aside and visit Lampard’s bookshop. There was time to
buy that Glossary of Ducange which he must have, and perhaps that red
and golden Dictionary of Welby Pugin which he ought to have, and
ultimately, as it turned out, there was time to buy half a dozen more
great volumes whose connection with mediæval history was not too remote
to give an excuse to Michael, if excuse were needed, for their
purchase. Seven o’clock chimed suddenly, and Michael hurried to
college, snatched a black coat and a gown out of Venner’s and just
avoided the sconce for being more than a quarter of an hour late for
hall.
Michael was glad he had not missed hall that night. In Lampard’s
alluring case of treasures he had been tempted to linger on until too
late, and then to take with him two or three new books and in their
entertainment to eat a solitary and meditative dinner at Buol’s. But it
would have been a pity to have missed hall when the electric light
failed abruptly and when everybody had just helped themselves to baked
potatoes. It would have been sad not to have seen the Scholars’ table
so splendidly wrecked or heard the volleys of laughter resounding
through the darkness.
“By gad,” said Lonsdale, when the light was restored and the second
year leaned over their table in triumphant exhaustion. “Did you see
that bad man Carben combing the potatoes out of his hair with a fork? I
say, Porcher,” he said to his old scout who was waiting at the table,
“do bring us some baked potatoes.”
“Isn’t there none left?” inquired Porcher. “Mr. Lonsdale, sir, you’d
better keep a bit quiet. The Sub-Warden’s looking very savage—very
savage indeed.”
At this moment Maurice Avery came hurrying in to dinner.
“Oh, sconce him!” shouted everybody. “It’s nearly five-and-twenty
past.”
“Couldn’t help it,” said Maurice very importantly. “Just been seeing
the first number of the O.L.G. through the press.”
“By gad,” said Lonsdale. “It’s a way we have in the Buffs and the Forty
Two’th. Look here, have we all got to buy this rotten paper of yours?
What’s it going to cost?”
“A shilling,” said Maurice modestly.
“A bob!” cried Lonsdale. “But, my dear old ink-slinger, I can buy the
five-o’clock Star for a half-penny.”
Maurice had to put up with a good deal of chaff from everybody that
night.
“Let’s have the program,” Sinclair suggested.
The editor was so much elated at the prospect of to-morrow’s great
event that he rashly produced from his pocket the contents bill, which
Lonsdale seized and immediately began to read out:
“THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS. No. I. _“Some Reflections. By Maurice
Avery._
“What are you reflecting on, Mossy?”
“Oh, politics,” said Maurice lightly, “and other things.”
“My god, he’ll be Prime Minister next week,” said Cuffe.
_“Socrates at Balliol. By Guy Hazlewood._
“And just about where he ought to have been,” commented Lonsdale. “Oh,
listen to this! Whoo-oop!
_“The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
“But wait a minute, who do you think it’s by? C. St. C. Wedderburn!
Jolly old Wedders! The Failure of the Modern Illustrator. Wedders! My
god, I shall cat with laughing. Wedders! A bee-luddy author.”
“Sconce Mr. Lonsdale, please,” said Wedderburn, turning gravely to the
recorder by his chair.
“What, half a crown for not really saying bloody?” Lonsdale protested.
That night after hall there was much to tell Venner of the successful
bombardment with potatoes, and there was some chaff for Avery and
Wedderburn in regard to their forthcoming magazine. Parties of
out-of-college men came in after their dinner, and at half-past eight
o’clock the little office was fuller than usual, with the college
gossip being carried on in a helter-skelter of unceasing babble. Just
when Fitzroy the Varsity bow was enunciating the glories of Wet Bobbery
and the comparative obscurities of Dry Bobbery and just when all the
Dry Bobs present were bowling the contrary arguments at him from every
corner at once, the door opened and a freshman, as fair and floridly
handsome as a young Bacchus, walked with curious tiptoe steps into the
very heart of the assembly.
Fitzroy stopped short in his discourse and thrummed impatiently with
clenched fists upon his inflated chest, as gorillas do. The rest of the
company eyed the entrance of the newcomer in puzzled, faintly hostile
silence.
“Oh, Venner,” said the intruder, in loftiest self-confidence and
unabashed clarity of accent. “I haven’t had those cigars yet.”
He hadn’t had his cigars yet! Confound his impudence, and what right
had he to buy cigars, and what infernal assurance had led him to
suppose he might stroll into Venner’s in the third raw week of his
uncuffed fresherdom? Who was he? What was he? Unvoiced, these questions
quivered in the wrathful silence.
“The boy was told to take them up, sir,” said Venner. Something in
Venner’s manner toward this newcomer indicated to the familiars that he
might have deprecated this deliberate entrance armored in
self-satisfaction. Something there was in Venner’s assumption of
impersonal civility which told the familiars that Venner himself
recognized and sympathized with their as yet unspoken horror of
tradition’s breach.
“I rather want them to-night,” said the newcomer, and then he surveyed
slowly his seniors and even nodded to one or two of them whom
presumably he had known at school. “So if the boy hasn’t taken them
up,” he continued, “you might send up another box. Thanks very much.”
He seemed to debate for a moment with himself whether he should stay,
but finally decided to go. As he reached the door, he said that, by
Jove, his cigarette had gone out, and “You’ve got a light,” he added to
Lonsdale, who was standing nearest to him. “Thanks very much.” The door
of Venner’s slammed behind his imperturbableness, and a sigh of pent-up
stupefaction was let loose.
“Who’s your young friend, Lonny?” cried one.
“He thought Lonny was the Common Room boy,” cried another.
“Venner, give the cigars to Mr. Lonsdale to take up,” shouted a third.
“He’s very daring for a freshman,” said Venner. “Very daring. I thought
he was a fourth year Scholar whom I’d never seen, when he first came in
the other day. Most of the freshmen are very timid at first. They think
the senior men don’t like their coming in too soon. And perhaps it’s
better for them to order what they want when I’m by myself. I can talk
to them more easily that way. With all the men wanting their coffee and
whiskies, I really can’t attend to orders so well just after hall.”
“Who is he, Venner?” demanded half a dozen indignant voices.
“Mr. Appleby. The Honorable George Appleby. But you ought to know him.
He’s an Etonian.”
Several Etonians admitted they knew him, and the Wykehamists present
seized the occasion to point out the impossibility of such manners
belonging to any other school.
“He’s a friend of yours, then?” said Venner to Lonsdale.
“Good lord, no, Venner!” declared Lonsdale.
“He seemed on very familiar terms with you,” Venner chuckled wickedly.
Lonsdale thought very hard for two long exasperated moments and then
announced with conviction that Appleby must be ragged, severely ragged
this very night.
“Now don’t go making a great noise,” Venner advised. “The dons don’t
like it, and the Dean won’t be in a very good temper after that
potato-throwing in hall.”
“He must be ragged, Venner,” persisted Lonsdale inexorably. “There need
be no noise, but I’m hanged if I’m going to have my cigarette taken out
of my hand and used by a damned fresher. Who’s coming with me to rag
this man Appleby?”
The third-year men seemed to think the correction beneath their
dignity, and the duty devolved naturally upon the second-year men.
“I can’t come,” said Avery. “The O.L.G.’s coming out to-morrow.”
“Look here, Mossy, if you say another word about your rotten paper, I
won’t buy a copy,” Lonsdale vowed.
Michael offered to go with Lonsdale and at any rate assist as a
spectator. He was anxious to compare the behavior of Smithers with the
behavior of Appleby in like circumstances. Grainger offered to come if
Lonny would promise to fight sixteen rounds without gloves, and in the
end he, with Lonsdale, Michael, Cuffe, Sinclair, and three or four
others, marched up to Appleby’s rooms.
Lonsdale knocked upon the door, and as he opened it assumed what he
probably supposed to be an expression of ferocity, though he was told
afterward he had merely looked rather more funny than usual.
“Oh, hullo, Lonsdale,” said Appleby, as the party entered. “Come in and
have a smoke. How’s your governor?”
Lonsdale seemed to choke for breath a moment, and then sat down in a
chair so deep that for the person once plunged into its recesses an
offensive movement must have been extremely difficult.
“Come in, you chaps,” Appleby pursued in hospitable serenity. “I don’t
know any of your names, but take pews, take pews. Venner hasn’t sent up
the cigars I ordered.”
“We know,” interrupted Lonsdale severely.
“But I’ve some pretty decent weeds here,” continued Appleby, without a
tremor of embarrassment. “Who’s for whisky?”
“Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you’ve got
to understand is that....”
Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale.
“Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?”
“What you require, young Appleby,” began Lonsdale.
“You’ve got it right this time,” said Appleby encouragingly.
“What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down.”
“Oh, really?” said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest.
“Yes,” answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative
that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably
unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for
their more eloquent support.
“Tell him he mustn’t come into Venner’s and put on all that side. It’s
not done. He’s a fresher,” gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that
absorbing chair.
“All right,” agreed Appleby cheerfully. “I’ll send the order up to you
next time.”
Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could
never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby’s whisky and
smoking one of Appleby’s cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his
resentment to flame, and he sprang up.
“We ought to debag him!” he cried.
Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the
divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense
hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to
be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on
a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was
watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them
to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.
“Hopeless,” sighed Lonsdale. “The man’s a hopeless ass.”
“I think he had the laugh, though,” said Michael.