THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS
Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary’s with that scrupulousness of
outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a
discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning
after the attempted adjustment of Appleby’s behavior, a raw and
vaporous November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o’clock ran
collarless, unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at
whose head stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry
matutinal appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name
fairly entered in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started
back on the taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of
his toilet. Crossing the gravel space between Cloisters and Cuther’s
worldly quad, he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one
minute past eight o’clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.
“What on earth.... Are you going to London?” he gasped.
“Rather not. I’m going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G.”
Michael shook his head, sighed compassionately, and passed on. Twenty
minutes later in Common Room he was contemplating distastefully the
kedgeree which with a more hopeful appetite he had ordered on the
evening before, when Maurice planked down beside his place the first
number of The Oxford Looking-Glass.
“There’s a misprint on page thirty-seven, line six. It ought to be
‘yet’ not ‘but.’ Otherwise I think it’s a success. Do you mind reading
my slashing attack on the policy of the Oxford theater? Or perhaps
you’d better begin at the beginning and go right through the whole
paper and give me your absolutely frank opinion of it as a whole. Just
tell me candidly if you think my Reflections are too individual. I want
the effect to be more——”
“Maurice,” Michael interrupted, “do you like kedgeree?”
“Yes, very much,” Maurice answered absently. Then he plunged on again.
“Also don’t forget to tell me if you think that Guy’s skit is too
clever. And if you find any misprints I haven’t noticed, mark them
down. We can’t alter them now, of course, but I’ll speak to the
compositor myself. You like the color? I wonder whether it wouldn’t
have been better to have had dark blue after all. Still——”
“Well, if you like kedgeree,” Michael interrupted again, “do you like
it as much in the morning as you thought you were going to like it the
night before?”
“Oh, how the dickens do I know?” exclaimed Maurice fretfully.
“Well, will you just eat my breakfast and let me know if you think I
ought to have ordered eggs and bacon last night?”
“Aren’t you keen on the success of this paper?” Maurice demanded.
“I’ll tell you later on,” Michael offered. “We’ll lunch together
quietly in my rooms, and the little mulled claret we shall drink to
keep out this filthy fog will also enormously conduce to the
amiableness of my judgment.”
“And you won’t come out with me and Nigel Stewart to watch people
buying copies on their way to leckers?” Maurice suggested in a tone of
disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in
time to prevent Michael’s heart from being softened. The newcomer was
at once invited to remove the editor.
“Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?” Maurice demanded,
unabashed.
“Look here, Moss Avery,” said Lonsdale seriously, “if you promise to
spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing
syrup, I’ll ...”
But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and
left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind
Lonsdale of last night’s encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of
The Oxford Looking-Glass that lay beside his plate.
It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and
perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously
hatched, and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there
among the articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into
the fold by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the
image of Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on
the variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that
Academic Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist
should be praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that
without question was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not
sure. It was a promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael
played with the idea of elaborating his conception in an article for
this very Looking-Glass which she invisibly supported. The Oxford
Looking-Glass might serve her like the ægis of Pallas Athene, an ægis
that would freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the
twentieth century. Michael began to feel that his classical analogies
were enmeshing the original idea, involving it already in complexities
too manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking
dreams at the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the
Academic Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols
of Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the
dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don’s
mind, the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring
destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age
and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by
its harvest of youth, of sobriety sun-kindled to a radiancy of silver
joy, of wisdom, peace, and shelter, and Attic glories.
Michael became so nearly stifled by the net of his fancies that he
almost rose from the table then and there, ambitious to take pen in
hand and test the power of its sharpness to cut him free. He clearly
saw the gray-eyed goddess as the personification of the spirit of the
university: but suddenly all the impulse faded out in
self-depreciation. Guy Hazlewood would solve the problem with his
pranked-out allusiveness, would trace more featly the attributes of the
Academic Muse and establish more convincingly her descent from Apollo
or her identity with Athene. At least, however, he could offer the idea
and if Guy made anything of it, the second number of The Oxford
Looking-Glass would hold more of Michael Fane than the ten pounds he
had laid on the table of its exchequer. Inspired by the zest of his own
fancy, he read on deliberately.
_Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
The editor had really succeeded in reflecting accurately the passing
glance of Oxford, although perhaps the tortuous gilt of the frame with
which he had tried to impart style to his mirror was more personal to
Maurice Avery than general to the university. Moreover, his glass would
certainly never have stood a steady and protracted gaze. Still with all
their faults these paragraphic reflections did show forth admirably the
wit and unmatured cynicism of the various Junior Common Rooms, did
signally flash with all the illusion of an important message, did
suggest a potentiality for durable criticism.
_Socrates at Balliol._ _By Guy Hazlewood._
There was enough of Guy in his article to endear it to Michael, and
there was so much of Oxford in Guy that whatever he wrote spontaneously
would always enrich the magazine with that adventurous gaiety and
childlike intolerance of Athene’s favorites.
_The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._ _By C. St. C. Wedderburn._
Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have
expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.
“Let us turn now to the illustrators of the sixties and seventies, and
we shall see....” Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey
himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became
pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so
much sententiousness.
_Quo Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._
Nigel’s plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the
decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance,
was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical
expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would
greatly serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its
presence in The Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest
magazine was not going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any
other had endowed Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her
poets lacked. Michael himself had since he came up let the practice of
religion slide, but his first fervors had not burned themselves out so
utterly as to make him despise the warmth they once had kindled. His
inclination in any argument was always toward the Catholic point of
view, and though he himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic
speech and agnostic thought, he was always a little impatient of a
skeptical non-age and very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had
never been tried by the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart’s
challenge with its plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would
be effective save for the personality of the writer, who revealed his
formal grace notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and
the tassels of his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of
its verbal cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in
reading it that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost
cause.
Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart’s article, Michael managed to
finish his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common
Room, Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which
he had fortified his place at table.
“Have you been reading that thing of Mossy’s?” he asked incredulously.
Michael nodded.
“Isn’t it most awful rot?”
“Some of it,” Michael assured him.
“I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy,” sighed Lonsdale.
“I suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into
supporting it. By Jove, I’ll write and tell the governor to buy a copy.
I want him to raise my allowance this year, and he’ll think I’m
beginning to take an interest in what he calls ‘affairs.’”
Michael turned into Venner’s before going back to his own rooms.
“Hullo, is that the paper?” asked Venner. “Dear me, this looks very
learned. You should tell him to put some more about sport into it—our
fellows are all so dreadfully wild about sport. They’d be sure to buy
it then. Going to work this morning? That’s right. I’m always advising
the men to work in the morning. But bless you, they don’t pay any
attention to me. They only laugh and say, ‘what’s old Venner know about
it?’”
Michael, sitting snugly in the morning quiet of his room, leaned over
to poke the fire into a blaze, eyed with satisfaction November’s sodden
mists against his window, and settled himself back in the deep chair to
The Oxford Looking-Glass.
_Oxford Liberalism. By Vernon Townsend._ _A Restatement of Tory Ideals.
By William Mowbray._
These two articles Michael decided to take on trust. From their perusal
he would only work himself up into a condition of irritated neutrality.
Indeed, he felt inclined to take all the rest of the magazine on trust.
The tranquillity of his own room was too seductive. Dreaming became a
duty here. It was so delightful to count from where he sat the books on
the shelves and to arrive each time at a different estimate of their
number. It was so restful to stare up at Mona Lisa and traverse without
fatigue that labyrinth of rocks and streams. His desk not yet deranged
by work or correspondence possessed a monumental stability of neatness
that was most soothing to contemplate. It had the restfulness of a
well-composed landscape where every contour took the eye easily onward
and where every tree grew just where it was needed for a moment’s halt.
The olive-green magazine dropped unregarded onto the floor, and there
was no other book within reach. The dancing fire danced on. Far away
sounded the cries of daily life. The chimes in St. Mary’s tower struck
without proclaiming any suggestion of time. How long these roll-call
mornings were and how rapidly dream on dream piled its drowsy outline.
Was there not somewhere at the other end of Oxford a lecture at eleven
o’clock? This raw morning was not suitable for lectures out of college.
Was not Maurice coming to lunch? How deliciously far off was the time
for ordering lunch. He really must get out of the habit of sitting in
this deep wicker-chair, until evening licensed such repose.
Some people had foolishly attended a ten-o’clock lecture at St. John’s.
What a ludicrous idea! They had ridden miserably through the cold on
their bicycles and with numb fingers were now trying to record scraps
of generalization in a notebook that would inevitably be lost long
before the Schools. At the same time it was rather lazy to lie back
like this so early in the morning. Why was it so difficult to abandon
the Sirenian creakings of this chair? He wanted another match for his
second pipe, but even the need for that was not violent enough to break
the luxurious catalepsy of his present condition.
Then suddenly Maurice Avery and Nigel Stewart burst into the room, and
Michael by a supreme effort plunged upward onto his legs to receive
them.
“My hat, what a frowst!” exclaimed Maurice, rushing to the window and
letting in the mist and the noise of the High.
“We’re very hearty this morning,” murmured Stewart. “I heard Mass at
Barney’s for the success of the O.L.G.”
“Nigel and I have walked down the High, rounded the Corn, and back
along the Broad and the Turl,” announced Maurice. “And how many copies
do you think we saw bought by people we didn’t know?”
“None,” guessed Michael maliciously.
“Don’t be an ass. Fifteen. Well, I’ve calculated that at least four
times as many were being sold, while we were making our round. That’s
sixty, and it’s not half-past ten yet. We ought to do another three
hundred easily before lunch. In fact, roughly I calculate we shall do
five hundred and twenty before to-night. Not bad. After two thousand we
shall be making money.”
“Maurice bought twenty-two copies himself,” said Stewart, laughing, and
lest he should seem to be laughing at Maurice thrust an affectionate
arm through his to reassure him.
“Well, I wanted to encourage the boys who were selling them,” Maurice
explained.
“They’ll probably emigrate with the money they’ve made out of you,”
predicted Michael. “And what on earth are you going to do with
twenty-two copies? I find this one copy of mine extraordinarily in the
way.”
“Oh, I shall send them to well-known literary people in town. In fact,
I’m going to write round and get the best-known old Oxford men to give
us contributions from time to time, without payment, of course. I
expect they’ll be rather pleased at being asked.”
“Don’t you think it may turn their heads?” Michael anxiously suggested.
“It would be dreadful to read of the sudden death of Quiller-Couch from
apoplectic pride or to hear that Hilaire Belloc or Max Beerbohm had
burst with exultation in his bath.”
“It’s a pity you can’t be funny in print,” said Maurice severely.
“You’d really be some use on the paper then.”
“But what we’ve really come round to say,” interposed Stewart, “is that
there’s an O.L.G. dinner to-night at the Grid; and then afterward we’re
all going across to my digs opposite.”
“And what about lunch with me?”
Both Maurice and Nigel excused themselves. Maurice intended to spend
all day at the Union. Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with
three hearty Trindogs of Trinity.
“But when did you join the Union?” Michael asked the editor.
“I thought it was policy,” he explained. “After all, though we laugh at
it here, most of the Varsity does belong. Besides, Townsend and Bill
Mowbray were both keen. You see they think the O.L.G. is going to have
an influence in Varsity politics. And, after all, I am editor.”
“You certainly are,” Michael agreed. “Nothing quite so editorial was
ever conceived by the overwrought brain of a disappointed female
contributor.”
Michael always enjoyed dining at the Grid. Of all the Oxford clubs it
seemed to him to display the most completely normal undergraduate
existence. Vincent’s, notwithstanding its acknowledged chieftaincy,
depended ultimately too much on a mechanically apostolic succession. It
was an institution to be admired without affection. It had every
justification for calling itself The Club without any qualifying
prefix, but it produced a type too highly specialized, and was too
definitely Dark Blue and Leander Pink. In a way, too, it belonged as
much to Cambridge, and although violently patriotic had merged its
individuality in brawn. By its substitution of co-option for election,
its Olympic might was now scarcely much more than the self-deification
of Roman Emperors. Vincent’s was the last stronghold of muscular
supremacy. Yet it was dreadfully improbable, as Michael admitted to
himself, that he would have declined the offer of membership.
The O.U.D.S. was at the opposite pole from Vincent’s, and if it did not
offend by its reactionary encouragement of a supreme but discredited
spirit, it offended even more by fostering a premature worldliness. For
an Oxford club to take in The Stage and The Era was merely an exotic
heresy. On the walls of its very ugly room the pictures of actors that
in Garrick Street would have possessed a romantic dignity produced an
effect of strain, a proclamation of mounte-bank-worship that differed
only in degree from the photographs of actresses on the mantelpiece of
a second-rate room in a second-rate college. The frequenters of the
O.U.D.S. were always very definitely Oxford undergraduates, but they
lacked the serenity of Oxford, and seemed already to have planted a
foot in London. The big modern room over the big cheap shop was a
restless place, and its pretentiousness and modernity were tinged with
Thespianism. Scarcely ever did the Academic Muse enter the O.U.D.S.,
Michael thought. She must greatly dislike Thespianism with all that it
connoted of mildewed statuary in an English garden. Yet it would be
possible to transmute the O.U.D.S., he dreamed. It had the advantage of
a limited membership. It might easily become a grove where Apollo and
Athene could converse without quarreling. Therefore, he could continue
to frequent its halls.
The Bullingdon was always delightful; the gray bowlers and the white
trousers striped with vivid blue displayed its members, in their
costume, at least, as unchanging types, but the archaism made it a club
too conservative to register much more than an effect of peculiarity.
The Bullingdon had too much money, and not enough unhampered humanity
to achieve the universal. The Union, on the other hand, was too
indiscriminate. Personality was here submerged in organization.
Manchester or Birmingham could have produced a result very similar.
The Grid, perhaps for the very fact that it was primarily a
dining-club, was the abode of discreet good-fellowship. Its membership
was very strictly limited, and might seem to have been confined to the
seven or eight colleges that considered themselves the best colleges,
but any man who deserved to be a member could in the end be sure of his
election. The atmosphere was neither political nor sporting nor
literary, nor financial, but it was very peculiarly and very intimately
the elusive atmosphere of Oxford herself. The old rooms looking out on
the converging High had recently been redecorated in a very crude shade
of blue. Members were grumbling at the taste of the executive, but
Michael thought the unabashed ugliness was in keeping with its
character. It was as if unwillingly the club released its hold upon the
externals of Victorianism. Such premises could afford to be
anachronistic, since the frequenters were always so finely sensitive to
fashion’s lightest breath. Eccentricity was not tolerated at the Grid
except in the case of the half-dozen chartered personalities who were
necessary to set off the correctness of the majority. The elective
committee probably never made a mistake, and when somebody like Nigel
Stewart was admitted, it was scrupulously ascertained beforehand that
his presence would evoke affectionate amusement rather than the chill
surprise with which the Grid would have greeted the entrance of someone
who, however superior to the dead level of undergraduate life, lacked
yet the indefinable justification for his humors.
Michael on the evening of the Looking-Glass dinner went up the narrow
stairs of the club in an aroma of pleasant anticipation, which was not
even momentarily dispersed by the sudden occurrence of the fact that he
had forgotten to take his name off hall, and must therefore pay two
shillings and fourpence to the college for a dinner he would not eat.
In the Strangers’ Room were waiting the typical guests of the typical
members. Here and there nods were exchanged, but the general atmosphere
was one of serious expectancy. In the distance the rattle of crockery
told of dinners already in progress. Vernon Townsend came in soon after
Michael, and as Townsend was a member, Michael lost that trifling
malaise of waiting in a club’s guest-room which the undergraduate might
conceal more admirably than any other class of man, but nevertheless
felt acutely.
“Not here yet, I suppose,” said Townsend.
It was unnecessary to mention a name. Nigel Stewart’s habits were
proverbial.
“Read my article?” asked Townsend.
“Splendid,” Michael murmured.
“It’s going to get me the Librarianship of the Union,” Townsend
earnestly assured Michael.
Michael was about to congratulate the sanguine author without
disclosing his ignorance of the article’s inside, when Bill Mowbray
rushed breathlessly into the room. Everybody observed his dramatic
entrance, whereupon he turned round and rushed out again, pausing only
for one moment to exclaim in the doorway:
“Good god, that fool will never remember!”
“See that?” asked Townsend darkly, as the Tory Democrat vanished.
Michael admitted that he undoubtedly had.
“Bill Mowbray has become a poseur,” Townsend declared. “Or else he
knows his ridiculous article on Toryism was too badly stashed by mine,”
he added.
“We shan’t see him again to-night,” Michael prophesied.
Townsend shrugged his shoulders.
“We shall, if he can make another effective entrance,” he said a little
bitterly.
Maurice Avery and Wedderburn arrived together. The combination of
having just been elected to the Grid and the birth of the new paper had
given Maurice such an effervescence of good spirits as even he seldom
boasted. Wedderburn in contrast seemed graver, supplying in company
with Maurice a solidity to the pair of them that was undeniably
beneficial to their joint impression. They were followed almost
immediately by Guy Hazlewood, who with his long legs came sloping in as
self-possessed as he always was. Perhaps his left eyelid drooped a
little lower than it was accustomed, and perhaps the sidelong smile
that gave him a superficial resemblance to Michael was drawn down to a
sharper point of mockery, but whatever stored-up flashes of mood and
fancy Guy had to deliver, he always drawled them out in the same
half-tired voice emphasized by the same careless indolence of gesture.
And so this evening he was the same Guy Hazlewood, sure of being with
his clear-cut pallor and effortless distinction of bearing, the
personality that everyone would first observe in whatever company he
found himself.
“Nigel not here, of course,” he drawled. “Let’s have a sweep on what
he’s been doing. Five bob all round. I say he’s just discovered Milton
to be a great poet and is now, reading Lycidas to a spellbound group of
the very heartiest Trindogs in Trinity.”
“I think he saw The Perfect Flapper,” said Maurice “and has been trying
ever since to find out whether she were a don’s daughter or a
theatrical bird of passage.”
“I think he’s forgotten all about it,” pronounced Wedderburn very
deeply indeed.
“I hope he saw that ass Bill Mowbray tearing off in the opposite
direction and went to fetch him back,” said Townsend.
“I think he’s saying Vespers for the week before last,” Michael
proposed as his solution.
Stewart himself came in at that moment, and in answer to an united
demand to know the reason of his lateness embraced in that gentle and
confiding air of his all the company, included them all as it were in
an intimate aside, and with the voice and demeanor of a strayed
archangel explained that the fearful velocity of a pill was responsible
for his unpunctuality.
“But you’re quite all right now, Nigel?” inquired Guy. “You could
almost send a testimonial?”
“Oh, rather,” murmured Nigel, with tender assurance lighting up his
great, innocent eyes. “I expect, you know, dinner’s ready.” Then he
plunged his arm through Guy’s, and led the way toward the private
dining-room he had actually not forgotten to command.
Dinner, owing to Avery’s determined steering of the conversation, was
eaten to the accompaniment of undiluted shop. Never for a moment was
any topic allowed to oust The Oxford Looking-Glass from discussion.
Even Guy was powerless against the editor intoxicated by ambition’s
fulfillment. Maurice sat in triumphant headship with only Mowbray’s
vacant place to qualify very slightly the completeness of his
satisfaction. He hoped they all liked his scheme of inviting
well-known, even celebrated, old Oxford men to contribute from time to
time. He flattered himself they would esteem the honor vouchsafed to
them. He disclaimed the wish to monopolize the paper’s criticism and
nobly invited Townsend to put in their places a series of contemporary
dramatists. He congratulated Guy upon his satiric article and assured
him of his great gifts. He reproached Michael for having written
nothing, and vowed that many of the books for which he had already sent
a printed demand to their publishers must in the December issue be
reviewed by Michael. He arranged with Nigel Stewart and Wedderburn at
least a dozen prospective campaigns to harry advertisers into unwilling
publicity.
At nine-o’clock, the staff of The Oxford Looking-Glass, reflecting now
a very roseate world, marched across the High to wind up the evening in
Stewart’s digs. On the threshold the host paused in sudden dismay.
“Good lord, I quite forgot. There’s a meeting of the De Rebus
Ecclesiasticis in my digs to-night. They’ll all be there; what shall I
do?”
“You can’t possibly go,” declared everybody.
“Mrs. Arbour,” Nigel called out, hurriedly dipping into the landlady’s
quarters. “Mrs. Arbour.”
Mrs. Arbour assured him comfortably of her existence as she emerged to
confer with him in the passage.
“There may be one or two men waiting in my rooms. Will you put out
syphons and whisky and explain that I shan’t be coming.”
“Any reason to give, sir?” asked Mrs. Arbour.
The recalcitrant shook his seraphic head.
“No, sir,” said Mrs. Arbour cheerfully, “quite so. Just say you’re not
coming? Yes, sir. Oh, they’ll make themselves at home without you, I’ll
be bound. It’s not likely to be a very noisy party, is it, sir?”
“Oh, no. It’s the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, Mrs. Arbour.”
“I see, sir. Foreigners. I’ll look after them.”
Nigel having disposed of the pious debaters, joined his friends again,
and it was decided to adjourn to Guy’s digs in Holywell. Arm in arm the
six journalists marched down the misted High. Arm in arm they turned
into Catherine Street, and arm in arm they walked into the Proctor
outside the Ratcliffe Camera. To him they admitted their membership of
the university. To him they proffered very politely their names and the
names of their colleges, and with the same politeness agreed to visit
him next morning. The Proctor raised his cap and with his escort faded
into the fog. Arm in arm the six journalists continued their progress
into Holywell. Guy had digs in an old house whose gabled front leaned
outward, whose oriel windows were supported by oaken beams worm-eaten
and grotesquely carved. Within, a wide balustraded staircase went
billowing upward unevenly. Guy’s room that he shared with two
intellectual athletes from his own college was very large. It was
paneled all round up to the ceiling, and it contained at least a dozen
very comfortable armchairs. He had imposed upon his partners his own
tastes and with that privilege had cut off electric light and gas, so
that lit only by two Pompeian lamps, the room was very shadowy when
they all came in.
“Comeragh and Anstruther are working downstairs, I expect,” Guy
explained, as one by one, while his guests waited in the dim light, he
made a great illumination with wax candles. Then he poked up the fire
and set glasses ready for anyone’s need. Great armchairs were pulled
round in a semicircle: pipes were lit: the stillness and mystery of the
Oxford night crept along the ancient street, a stillness which at
regular intervals was broken by multitudinous chimes, or faintly now
and then by passing footfalls. Unexcited by argument the talk rippled
in murmurous contentment.
Michael was in no mood himself for talking, and he sat back listening
now and then, but mostly dreaming. He thought of the conversation in
that long riverside room in Paris with its extravagance and
pretentiousness. Here in this time-haunted Holywell Street was neither.
To be sure, Christianity and the soul’s immortality and the future of
England and contemporary art were running the gauntlet of youth’s
examination, but the Academic Muse had shown the company her ægis, had
turned everything to unpassionate stone, and softened all presumption
with her guarded glances. It was extraordinary how under her guidance
every subject was stripped of obtrusive reality, how even women,
discussed never so grossly, remained untarnished; since they ceased to
be real women, but mere abstractions wanton or chaste in accordance
with the demands of wit. The ribaldry was Aristophanic or Rabelaisian
with as little power to offend, so much was it consecrated and refined
by immemorial usages. Michael wished that all the world could be
touched by the magical freedom and equally magical restraint of the
Academic Muse, and as he sat here in this ancient room, hoped almost
violently that never again would he be compelled to smirch the present
clarity and steadiness of his vision.