THE LAST TERM
Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary’s
tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed
that he was not seen in the sun’s eye. This lapse of enthusiasm
saddened him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision
of speeding youth.
The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that
notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the
other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He
was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice
to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no
good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days
were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came
round, and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the
achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his
friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had
counted upon this bump-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for
this happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them,
and he went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure
Tommy Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not
the bump-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.
Tired of the howling and the horse-play, tired of the fretful
fireworks, he turned into Venner’s just before ten o’clock.
“Why aren’t you with your friends, making a noise?” asked Venner.
“Ought to go home and work,” Michael explained.
“But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to
the fore on these occasions.”
“Don’t feel like it, Venner.”
“You mustn’t work too hard, you know,” said the old man, blinking
kindly at him.
“Oh, it’s not work, Venner. It’s age.”
“Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They’re having a rare time to-night. I
don’t expect the dons’ll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a
bump-supper. Why ever don’t you go out and do your share?”
Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in
his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no
good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of
ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to
the lodge.
“Don’t forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt,” he warned
the porter. “I don’t want to be hauled to-morrow morning for damage
done in my absence.”
The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.
“There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing
your egress, sir,” he said pompously, “and had it registered in my book
before you spoke.”
Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pass out into the
High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary’s bridge, and when
the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood
for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the
shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to
time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman
candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all
as the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to
listen to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people,
small as emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He
regretted sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St.
Giles, roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning.
It was melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy,
but outside its participation; and presently he started to walk quickly
back to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that
before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.
Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael.
Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college
authorities to make him covet a good class: to Alan it was more
important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to
try for the Home Civil Service.
“However, I’ve given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a
Second, I shall be jolly grateful,” he told Michael.
The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be
sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black
clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the
university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four
days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring
and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of
tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had
even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to
the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus
and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black
coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to
the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was
all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended
with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June
evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before,
spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to
enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing
seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever,
and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.
This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her
graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was
not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely
poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about
it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine
autumn day.
It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of
Oxford dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew
Arnold had said she did not need June for beauty’s heightening. That
was true. Her beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with
all the grave consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded
more the loss of this infoliated calm than of any of the people who
were enjoying its amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that
next year would not form themselves, that forever indeed would be
irremediably dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members
scattered did not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that
next year himself would have lost the assurance that he was an organic
part of this tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was
already broken up: the end of the third year had effected that. This
farewell to Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the
very first moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of
a Fellowship. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have
withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth
in the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive,
and worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course.
Now, since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather
opulently fine mocked his exit.
Michael and Alan had decided to stay up for Commemoration. Stella and
Mrs. Fane had been invited: Lonsdale and Wedderburn were coming up:
Maurice was bringing his mother and sisters. For a brief carnival they
would all be reunited, and rooms would be echoing to the voices of
their rightful owners. Yet after all it would be but a pretense of
reviving their merry society. It was not a genuine reunion this, that
was requiring women to justify it. Oxford, as Michael esteemed her, was
already out of his reach. She would be symbolized in the future by
these rooms at 99 St. Giles, and Michael made up his mind that no
intrusion of women should spoil for him their monastic associations. He
would stay here until the last day, and for Commemoration he would try
to borrow his old rooms in college, thus fading from this wide
thoroughfare without a formal leave-taking. He would drop astern from
the bay-window whence for a time he had watched the wrack and spume of
the world drifting toward the horizon in its wake. Himself would recede
so with the world, and without him the bay-window would hold a tranquil
course, unrocked by the loss or gain of him or the transient voyagers
of each new generation. Very few eves and sunsets were still his to
enjoy from this window-seat. Already the books were being stacked in
preparation for their removal to the studio at 173 Cheyne Walk. Dusty
and derelict belongings of him and Alan were already strewn about the
landings outside their bedrooms. Even the golf-bag of Alan’s first
term, woolly now with the accumulated mildew of neglect, had been
dragged from its obscurity. Perhaps it would be impossible to drop
astern as imperceptibly as he would have liked. Too many reminders of
departure littered the rooms with their foreboding of finality.
“I’m shore I for one am quite sorry you’re going,” said the landlady.
“I never wish to have a nicer norer quieter pair of gentlemen. It’s to
be hoped, I’m shore, that next term’s comings-ins from St. John’s will
be half as nice. Yerse, I shall be very pleased to have these
coverlets—I suppose you would call them coverlets—and you’re leaving
the shelves in the dining-room? Yerse, I’m shore they’ll be as handy as
anything for the cruets and what not. And so you’re going to have a
dinner here to eleven gentlemen—oh, eleven in all, yerse, I see.”
It was going to be rather difficult, Michael thought, to find exactly
the ten people he wished to invite to this last terminal dinner. Alan,
Grainger, and Castleton, of course. Bill Mowbray and Vernon Townsend.
And Smithers. Certainly, he would ask Smithers. And why not George
Appleby, who was Librarian of the Union this term, and no longer
conceivable as that lackadaisical red rag which had fluttered Lonsdale
to fury? What about the Dean? And if the Dean, why not Harbottle, his
History tutor? And for the tenth place? It was really impossible to
choose from the dozen or so acquaintances who had an equal claim upon
it. He would leave the tenth place vacant, and just to amuse his own
fancy he would fill it with the ghost of himself in the December of his
first term.
Michael, when he saw his guests gathered in the sea-green dining-room
of 99 St. Giles, knew that this last terminal dinner was an
anachronism. After all, the prime and bloom of these eclectic
entertainments had been in the two previous years. This was not the
intimate and unusual society he had designed to gather round him as
representative of his four years at the Varsity. This was merely
representative of the tragical incompleteness of Oxford. It was
certainly a very urbane evening, but it was somehow not particularly
distinctive of Oxford, still less of Michael’s existence there. Perhaps
it had been a mistake to invite the two dons. Perhaps everyone was
tired under the strain of Schools. Michael was glad when the guests
went and he sat alone in the window-seat with Alan.
“To-morrow, my mother and Stella are coming up,” he reminded Alan.
“It’s rather curious my mother shouldn’t have been up all the time,
until I’m really down.”
“Is that man Avery coming up?” Alan asked.
Michael nodded.
“I suppose your people see a good deal of him now he’s in town,” said
Alan, trying to look indifferent to the answer.
“Less than before he went,” said Michael. “Stella’s rather off studios
and the Vie de Bohême.”
“Oh, he has a studio?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t take very much interest in his movements,” Alan loftily
explained.
They smoked on for a while without speaking.
“I must go to bed,” announced Alan at last.
“Not yet, not yet,” Michael urged him. “I don’t think you’ve quite
realized that this is our last night in Ninety-nine.”
“I’ve settled to stay on here during Commem Week,” said Alan. “Your
people are staying at the Randolph?”
Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan
could really have been so far-sighted as to stay on in St. Giles for
the sake of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and
Stella home. “But why aren’t you going into college?” he asked.
“Oh, I thought it would be rather a fag moving in for so short a time.
Besides, it’s been rather ripping in these digs.”
Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his
appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental
enough to dread on Alan’s side a grudging assent to his enthusiasm.
“Yes, it has been awfully ripping,” he agreed.
“I should like to have had another year,” sighed Alan. “I think I was
just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder
how much of it is really applicable?”
“To what? To God?” asked Michael.
“No, the world—the world we live in.”
“I don’t fancy, you know,” said Michael, “that the intellectual part of
Oxford is directly applicable to the world at all. What I mean to say
is, that I think it can only be applied to the world through our
behavior.”
“Well, of course,” said Alan, “that’s a truism.”
Michael was rather disconcerted. The thought in his mind had seemed
more worthy of expression.
“But the point is,” Alan went on, “whether our philosophic education,
our mental training has any effect on our behavior. It seems to me that
Oxford is just as typically Oxford whatever a man reads.”
“That wasn’t the case at school,” said Michael. “I’m positive for
instance the Modern side was definitely inferior to the Classical
side—in manners and everything else. And though at Oxford other
circumstances interfere to make the contrast less violent, it doesn’t
seem to me one gains the quintessence of the university unless one
reads Greats. Even History only supplies that in the case of men
exceptionally sensitive to the spirit of place. I mean to say sensitive
in such a way that Oxford, quite apart from dons and undergraduates,
can herself educate. I’m tremendously anxious now that Oxford should
become more democratic, but I’m equally anxious that, in proportion as
she offers more willingly the shelter of her learning to the people,
the learning she bestows shall be more than ever rigidly unpractical,
as they say.”
“So you really think philosophy is directly applicable?” said Alan.
“How Socratic you are,” Michael laughed. “Perhaps the Rhodes Scholars
will answer your question. I remember reading somewhere lately that it
was confidently anticipated the advent of the Rhodes Scholars would
transform a provincial university into an imperial one. That may have
been written by a Cambridge man bitterly aware of his own provincial
university. Yet a moment’s reflection should have taught him that
provincialism in academic matters is possibly an advantage. Florence
and Athens were provincial. Rome and London and Oxford are
metropolitan—much more dangerously exposed to the metropolitan snares
of superficiality and of submerged personality with the corollary of
vulgar display. Neither Rome nor London nor Oxford has produced her own
poets. They have always been sung by the envious but happy provincials.
Rome and London would have treated Shelley just as Oxford did.
Cambridge would have disapproved of him, but a bourgeois dread of
interference would have let him alone. As for an imperial university,
the idea is ghastly. I figure something like the Imperial Institute
filled with Colonials eating pemmican. The Eucalyptic Vision, it might
be called.”
“And you’d make a distinction between imperial and metropolitan?” Alan
asked.
“Good gracious, yes. Wouldn’t you distinguish between New York and
London? Imperialism is the worst qualities of the provinces gathered up
and exhibited to the world in the worst way. A metropolis takes
provincialism and skims the cream. It is a disintegrating, but for
itself a civilizing, force. A metropolis doesn’t encourage creative art
by metropolitans. It ought to be engaged all the time in trying to make
the provincials appreciate what they themselves are doing.”
“I think you’re probably talking a good deal of rot,” said Alan
severely. “And we seem to have gone a long way from my question.”
“About the application of philosophy?”
Alan nodded.
“Dear man, as were I a Cantabrian provincial, I should say. Dear man!
Doesn’t it make you shiver? It’s like the ‘Pleased to meet you,’ of
Americans and Tootingians. It’s so terribly and intrusively personal.
So informative and unrestrained, so gushing and——”
“I wish you’d answer my question,” Alan grumbled, “and call me what you
like without talking about it.”
“Now I’ve forgotten my answer,” said Michael. “And it was a wonderful
answer. Oh, I remember now. Of course, your philosophy is applicable to
the world. You coming from a metropolitan university will try to infect
the world with your syllogisms. You will meet Cambridge men much better
educated than yourself, but all of them incompetent to appreciate their
own education. You will gently banter them, trying to allay their
provincial suspicion of your easy manner. You will——”
“_You_ will simply not be serious,” said Alan. “And so I shall go to
bed.”
“My dear chap, I’m only talking like this because if I were serious, I
couldn’t bear to think that to-night is almost the end of our fourth
year. It is, in fact, the end of 99 St. Giles.”
“Well, it isn’t as if we were never going to see each other again,”
said Alan awkwardly.
“But it is,” said Michael. “Don’t you realize, even with all your
researches into philosophy, that after to-night we shall only see each
other in dreams? After to-night we shall never again have identical
interests and obligations.”
“Well, anyway, I’m going to bed,” said Alan, and with a good-night very
typical in its curtness of many earlier ones uttered in similar
accents, he went upstairs.
Michael, when he found himself alone, thought it wiser to follow him.
It was melancholy to watch the moon above the empty thoroughfare, and
to hear the bells echoing through the spaces of the city.