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 failedabruptly 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 cornerat 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 doorof 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,” continuedAppleby, 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.
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 towatch 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 enmeshingthe 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 tohis 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 pledgedhis 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 readQuo 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 upat 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 tothe 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 tohear 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. Byits 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 muchmore 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 wentup 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 reproachedMichael 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 outsidethe 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.
Perhaps Michael enjoyed more than anything else during his accumulation of books the collection of as many various editions of Don Quixote as possible. He had brought up from London the fat volume illustrated by Doré over which he had fallen asleep long ago and of which owing to Nurse’s disapproval he had in consequence been deprived. Half the pages still showed where they had been bent under the weight of his small body: this honorable scar and the familiar musty smell and the book’s unquestionable if slightly vulgar dignity prevented Michael from banishing it from the shelf that now held so many better editions. However much the zest in Doré’s illustrations had died away in the flavor of Skelton’s English, Michael could not abandon the big volume with what it held of childhood’s first intellectual adventure. The shelf of Don Quixotes became in all his room one of the most cherished objects of contemplation. There was something in the “Q” and the “X” repeated on the back of volume after volume that positively gave Michael an impression in literal design of the Knight’s fantastic personality. The very soul of Spain seemed to be symbolized by those sere quartos of the seventeenth century, nor was it imperceptible even in Smollett’s cockney rendering bound in marbled boards. Staring at the row of Don Quixotes on a dull December afternoon, Michael felt overwhelmingly a desire to go to Spain himself, todrink at the source of Cervantes’ mighty stream of imagination which with every year’s new reading seemed to him to hold more and more certainly all that was most vital to life’s appreciation. He no longer failed to see the humor of Don Quixote, but even now tears came more easily than laughter, and he regretted as poignantly as the Knight himself those times of chivalry which with all the extravagance of their decay were yet in essence superior to the mode that ousted them into ignominy. Something akin to Don Quixote’s impulsive dismay Michael experienced in his own view of the twentieth century. He felt he needed a constructive ideal of conduct to sustain him through the long pilgrimage that must ensue after these hushed Oxford dreams.
Term was nearly over. Michael had heard from Stella that she was going to spend two or three months in Germany. Her Brahms recitals, she wrote, had not been so successful as she ought to have made them. In London she was wasting time. Mother was continually wanting her to come to the theater. It seemed almost as if mother were trying to throw her in the way of marrying Prescott. He had certainly been very good, but she must retreat into Germany, and there again work hard. Would not Michael come too? Why was he so absurdly prejudiced against Germany? It was the only country in which to spend Christmas.
The more Stella praised Germany, the more Michael felt the need of going to a country as utterly different from it as possible. He did not want to spend the vacation in London. He did not want his mother to talk vaguely to him of the advantage for Stella in marrying Prescott. The idea was preposterous. He would be angry with his mother, and he would blurt out to Prescott his dislike of such a notion. He would thereby wound a man whom he admired and display himself in the light of the objectionably fraternal youth. Inthe dreary and wet murk of December the sun-dried volumes of Cervantes spoke to him of Spain.
Maurice Avery came up to his room, fatigued with fame and disappointed that Castleton with whom he had arranged to go to Rome had felt at the last moment he must take his mother to Bath. To him Michael proposed Spain.
“But why not Rome?” Maurice argued. “As I originally settled.”
“Not with me,” Michael pointed out. “I don’t want to go to Rome now. I always feel luxuriously that there will occur the moment in my life when I shall say, ‘I am ready to go to Rome. I must go to Rome.’ It’s a fancy of mine and nothing will induce me to spoil it by going to Rome at the wrong moment.”
Maurice grumbled at him, told him he was affected, unreasonable, and even hinted Michael ought to come to Rome simply for the fact that he himself had been balked of his intention by the absurdly filial Castleton.
“I do think mothers ought not to interfere,” Maurice protested. “My mother never interferes. Even my sisters are allowed to have their own way. Why can’t Mrs. Castleton go to Bath by herself? I’m sure Castleton overdoes this ‘duty’ pose. And now you won’t come to Rome. Well, will you come to Florence?”
“Yes, and be worried by you to move on to Rome the very minute we arrive there,” said Michael. “No, thanks. If you don’t want to come to Spain, I’ll try to get someone else. Anyway, I don’t mind going by myself.”
“But what shall we do in Spain?” asked Maurice fretfully.
Michael began to laugh.
“We can dance the fandango,” he pointed out. “Or if the fandango is too hard, there always remains the bolero.”
“If we went to Rome,” Maurice was persisting, but Michael cut him short.
“It’s absolutely useless, Mossy. I am not going to Rome.”
“Then I suppose I shall have to go to Spain,” said Maurice, in a much injured tone.
So in the end it was settled chiefly, Michael always maintained, because Maurice found out it was advisable to travel with a passport. As not by the greatest exaggeration of insecurity could a passport be deemed necessary for Rome, Maurice decided it was an overrated city and became at once fervidly Spanish, even to the extent of saying “gracias” whenever the cruet was passed to him in hall. Wedderburn at the last moment thought he would like to join the expedition: so Maurice with the passport in his breast pocket preferred to call it.
There were two or three days of packing in London, while Maurice stayed at 173 Cheyne Walk and was a great success with Mrs. Fane. The Rugby match against Cambridge was visited in a steady downpour. Wedderburn fetched his luggage, and the last dinner was eaten together at Cheyne Walk. Mrs. Fane was tenderly, if rather vaguely, solicitous for their safety.
“Dearest Michael,” she said, “do be careful not to be gored by a bull. I’ve never been to Spain. One seems to know nothing about it. Mr. Avery, do have some more turkey. I hope you don’t dreadfully dislike garlic. Such a pungent vegetable. Michael darling, why are you laughing? Isn’t it a vegetable? Mr. Wedderburn, do have some more turkey. A friend of mine, Mrs. Carruthers, who is a great believer in Mental Science ... Michael always laughs at me when I try to explain.... Hark, there is the cab, really. I hope it won’t be raining in Spain. ‘Rain, rain, go to Spain.’ So ominous, isn’t it? Good-bye, dearest boy,and write to me at Mrs. Carruthers, High Towers, Godalming.”
“I say, I know Mrs. Carruthers. She lives near us,” Maurice exclaimed.
“Come on,” his friends insisted. “You haven’t time now to explain the complications of Surrey society.”
“I’m so glad,” said Mrs. Fane. “Because you’ll be able to see that Michael remembers the address.”
“I never forget addresses, mother,” protested Michael.
“No, I know. I always think everyone is like me. Merry Christmas, and do send a post card to Stella. She was so hurt you wouldn’t go to Germany.”
In the drench and soak of December weather they drove off in the four-wheeler. On such a night it seemed more than ever romantic to be setting out to Spain, and all the way to Victoria Maurice tried to decide by the occasional gleam of a blurred lamp-light how many pesetas one received for an English sovereign.
The crossing to Dieppe was rough, but all memories of the discomfort were wiped out when next day they saw the Sud Express looking very long and swift and torpedo-like between the high platforms of that white drawing-room, the Gare d’Orleans. Down they went all day through France with rain speckling the windows of their compartment, past the naked poplar trees and rolling fallows until dusk fell sadly on the flooded agriculture. Dawn broke as they were leaving behind them the illimitable Landes. Westward the Atlantic clouds swept in from the Bay of Biscay, parting momentarily to reveal rifts of milky turquoise sky. Wider and wider grew the rifts, and when the train passed close to the green cliffs of St. Jean de Luz, the air was soft and fragrant: the sea was blue. At Irun they were in Spain, and Michael, as he walked up and down the platform waiting for déjeuner, watched, with a thrill of conviction thatthis was indeed a frontier, the red and blue toy soldiers and the black and green toy soldiers dotted about the toy landscape.
Maurice was rather annoyed that nobody demanded their passports and that every official should seem so much more anxious to examine their railway tickets, but when they reached Madrid and found that no bull-fights would be held before the spring, he began to mutter of Rome and was inclined to obliterate the Spaniards from the category of civilization, so earnestly had he applied himself by the jiggling light of the train to the mastery of all the grades from matador to banderillo.
In Seville, however, Maurice admitted he could not imagine a city more perfectly adapted to express all that he desired from life. Seville with her guitars and lemon-trees, her castanets and oranges and fans, her fountains and carnations and flashing Andalusians, was for him the city to which one day he would return and dream. Here one day he could come when seriously he began to write or paint or take up whatever destiny in art was in store for him. Here he would forget whatever blow life might hold in the future. He would send everybody he knew to Seville, notwithstanding Michael’s objection that such generosity would recoil upon himself in his desire to possess somewhere on earth the opportunity of oblivion. Maurice and Wedderburn both bought Spanish cloaks and hats and went with easels to sit beside the Guadalquiver that sun-stained to the hue of its tawny banks was so contemptuous of their gentlemanly water-colors, as contemptuous as those cigarette-girls that came chattering from the tobacco-factory every noon. Michael preferred to wander over the roofs of the cathedral, until drowsed by the scent of warm stone he would sit for an hour merely conscious that the city lay below and that the sky was blue above.
After Seville they traveled to Granada, to Cadiz and Cordova and other famous cities; and in the train they went slowly through La Mancha where any windmill might indeed be mistaken for Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, and where at the stations the water-carriers even in January cried “agua, agua,” so that already the railway-carriages seemed parched by the fierce summer sun. They traveled to Salamanca and Toledo, and last of all they went to Burgos where Maurice and Wedderburn strove in vain to draw corner after corner of the cathedral, in the dust and shadows of whose more remote chantries Michael heard many Masses. A realization of the power of faith was stirred in him by these Masses that every day of every year were said without the recognition of humanity. These mumblings of ancient priests, these sanctus-bells that rattled like shaken ribs, these interminable and ceremonious shufflings were the outward expression of the force that sustained this fabric of Burgos and had raised in Seville a cathedral that seemed to crush like a stupendous monster the houses scattered about in its path, insignificant as a heap of white shells. Half of these old priests, thought Michael, were probably puppets who did not understand even their own cracked Latinity, yet their ministrations were almost frightening in their efficacy: they were indeed the very stones of Burgos made vocal.
Listening to these Masses, Michael began to regret he had allowed all his interest in religion to peter out in the irritation of compulsory chapel-keeping at Oxford. Here in Burgos, he felt less the elevating power of faith than the unrelenting and disdainful inevitableness of its endurance. At Bournemouth, when he experienced the first thrill of conversion, he had been exultingly aware of a personal friendliness between himself and God. Here in Burgos he was absorbed into the divine purpose neither against hiswill nor his desire, since he was positively aware of the impotency of his individuality to determine anything in the presence of omnipotence. He told himself this sense of inclusion was a sign of the outpouring once more of the grace of God, but he wished with a half whimsical amusement that the sensation were rather less like that of being contemptuously swept by a broom into the main dust-heap. Yet as on the last morning of his stay in Burgos Michael came away from Mass, he came away curiously fortified by his observation of the moldy confessionals worn down by the knees of so many penitents. That much power of impression at least had the individual on this cathedral.
When Michael lay awake in the train going northward he remembered very vividly the sense of subordination which in retrospect suddenly seemed to him to reveal the essential majesty of Spain. The train stopped at some French station. Their carriage was already full enough, but a bilious and fussy Frenchman insisted there was still room, and on top of him broke in a loud-voiced and assertive Englishman with a meek wife. It was intolerable. Michael, Wedderburn, and Maurice displayed their most polite obstructiveness, but in the end each of them found himself upright, stiff-backed and exasperated. Michael thought regretfully of Spain, and remembered those peasants who shared their crusts, those peasants with rank skins of wine and flopping turkeys, those peasants who wrought so inimitably their cigarettes and would sit on the floor of the carriage rather than disarrange the comfort of the three English travelers. Michael went off into an uneasy sleep trying to arrange synthetically his deductions, trying to put Don Quixote and Burgos Cathedral and the grace of God and subordination and feudalism and himself into a working theory of life. And just when the theory really seemed to be shaping itself, he was awakened by the Englishman prodding his wife.
“What is it, dear?” she murmured.
“Did you pack those collars that were in the other chest of drawers?”
“I think so, dear.”
“I wish you’d know something for a change,” the husband grumbled.
The Frenchman ground his teeth in swollen sleep, exhaling himself upon the stale air of the compartment. Maurice was turning over the pages of a comic paper. Wedderburn snored. It was difficult to achieve subordination of one’s personality in the presence of other personalities so insistently irritating.
Stella had not come back from Germany when Michael reached home, which was a disappointment as he had looked forward to planning with her a journey back to Spain as soon as possible. His mother during this vacation had lapsed from Mental Science into an association to prevent premature burial.
“My dearest boy, you have no idea of the numbers of people buried alive every year,” she said. “I have been talking to Dick Prescott about it. I cannot understand his indifference. I intend to devote all my time to it. We are going to organize a large bazaar next season. Banging their foreheads against the coffins! It’s dreadful to think of. Do be careful, Michael. I have written a long letter to Stella explaining all the precautions she ought to take. Who knows what may happen in Germany? Such an impulsive nation. At least the Kaiser is. Don’t laugh, my dear boy, it’s so much more serious than you think. Would you like to come with me to Mrs. Carruthers’ and hear some of the statistics? Gruesome, but most instructive. At three o’clock. You needn’t wait for tea, if you’re busy. The lecturer is an Eurasian. WhereisEurasia, by the by?”
Michael kissed his mother with affectionate amusement.
“Will you wear the mantilla I brought you from Spain? Look, it’s as light as burnt tissue paper.”
“Dearest Michael,” she murmured reproachfully, “you ought not to laugh about sacred subjects.... I don’t really see why we shouldn’t have a car. We must have a consultation with Dick Prescott.”
After dinner that night Michael wrapped up some stained and faded vestments he had brought for Viner and went off to see him at Netting Hill. He told himself guiltily in the hansom that it was more than a year since he had been to see old Viner, but the priest was so heartily glad to welcome him and accepted so enthusiastically his propitiatory gifts, that he felt as much at ease as ever in the smoke-hung room.
“Well, how’s Oxford? I was coming up last term, but I couldn’t get away. Have you been to see Sandifer yet? Or Pallant at Cowley, or Canon Harrowell?”
Michael said he had not yet taken advantage of Viner’s letters of introduction to these dignitaries. He had indeed heard Pallant preach at the church of the Cowley Fathers, but he had thought him too much inclined to sacrifice on the altar of empirical science.
“I hate compromise,” said Michael.
“I don’t think Pallant compromises, but I think he does get hold of men by offering them Catholic doctrine in terms of the present.”
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
“This visit to Spain seems to have made you very bigoted,” Viner observed, smiling.
“I haven’t made up my mind one way or the other about Christianity,” Michael said. “But when I do I won’t try to include everybody, to say to every talkative young Pragmatist with Schiller’s last book in his pocket, ‘come inside, you’re really one of us.’ I shan’t invite every callow biologistto hear Mass just because a Cowley Dad sees nothing in the last article on spontaneous generation that need dismay the faithful. I’m getting rather fed up with toleration, really; the only people with any fanaticism now are the rationalists. It’s quite exhilarating sometimes to see the fire of disbelief glowing in the eyes of a passionate agnostic.”
“Our Lord Himself was very tolerant,” said Viner.
“Yes, tolerant to the weaknesses of the flesh, tolerant to the woman taken in adultery, tolerant to the people without wine at Cana, but he hadn’t much use for people who didn’t believe just as He believed.”
“Isn’t it rather risky to slam the door in the face of the modern man?”
“But, Mr. Viner,” Michael protested, “you can’t betray the myriads of the past because the individual of to-day finds his faith too weak to sustain him in their company, because the modern man wants to reëdit spiritual truths just as he has been able to reëdit a few physical facts that apparently stand the test of practical experiment. While men have been rolling along intoxicated by the theory of physical evolution, they may have retrograded spiritually.”
“Of course, of course,” the priest agreed. “By the way, your faith seems to be resisting the batterings of external progress very stoutly. I’m glad, old chap.”
“I’m not sure that I have much faith, but I certainly haven’t given up hope,” Michael said gravely. “I think, you know, that hope, which is after all a theological virtue, has never had justice at the hands of the theologians. Oh, lord, I wish earnest young believers weren’t so smug and timid. Or else I wish that I didn’t feel the necessity of coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of fanciful private beliefs. But I wantto force everything within the convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue. If only earnest young believers wouldn’t treat Almighty God with the same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite mistress.”
“Michael, Michael!” cried Viner, “where are you taking me with your coördinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against me? Remember, I’ve been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn mental somersaults. I thought you impliedyouwere a believer.”
“Oh, no, I’m watching and hoping. And just now I’m afraid the anchor is dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn’t she? I’m not asking, you know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The psychologists have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But I’m hoping with all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away except faith. Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical moods ... I’m groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination. That’s something, you know. But I haven’t found my own place in the scheme.”
“You see you’re very modern, after all,” said Viner, “with your coördinations and subordinations.”
“But I don’t want to assert myself,” Michael explained. “I want to surrender myself, and I’m not going to surrender anything until I am sure by faith that I’m not merely surrendering the wastage of myself.”
Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic samenessof the mission-priest’s existence. He had known so well before he went that, because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair, smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to year, from month to month, never changed in general character, but always gave the same impression of shrill cockney, of boisterous familiarity, of self-satisfied election. To-morrow morning he would say Mass to the same sparse congregation of sacristan and sisters-of-mercy and devout old maids. The same red-wristed server would stump about his liturgical business in Viner’s wake, and the same coffee pot put in the same place on the same table by the same landlady would await his return. There was a dreariness about the ministrations of this Notting Hill Mission which had been absent from the atmosphere of Burgos Cathedral. No doubt superficially even at Burgos there was a sameness, but it was a glorious sameness, a sameness that approximated to eternity. Long ago had the priests learned subordination. They had been absorbed into the omnipotence of the church against which the gates of hell could not prevail. Viner remained, however much as he might have surrendered of himself to his mission work, essentially an isolated, a pathetic individual.
As usual, Michael met Alan at Paddington, and he was concerned to see that Alan looked rather pale and worried.
“What problems have you been solving this vac?” Michael asked.
“Oh, I’ve been swatting like a pig for Mods,” said Alan hopelessly. “You are a lucky lazy devil.”
Even during the short journey to Oxford Alan furtively fingered his text-books, while he talked to Michael about a depressing January in London.
“Never mind. Perhaps you’ll get your Blue next term,” said Michael. “And if you aren’t determined to play cricket all the Long, we’ll go away and have a really sporting vac somewhere.”
“If I’m plowed,” said Alan gloomily, “I’ve settled to become a chartered accountant.”
Michael enjoyed his second Lent term. With an easy conscience he relegated Rugby football into the limbo of the past. He decided such violent exercise was no longer necessary, and he was getting to know so many people at other colleges that the cultivation of new personalities occupied all his leisure. After Maurice and Wedderburn came back from Spain, they devoted much of their time to painting, and The Oxford Looking-Glass became a very expensive business on account of the reproduction of their drawings. Moreover, the circulation decreased in ratio with the increase of these drawings, and the five promoters who did not wish to practice art in the pages of their magazine convoked several meetings of protest. Finally Maurice was allowed to remain editor only on condition that he abstained from publishing any more drawings.
Nigel Stewart’s meeting of the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis together with the visit to Spain induced Michael to turn his attention to that side of undergraduate life interested in religion. He went to see Canon Harrowell, and even accepted from him an invitation to a breakfast at which he met about half a dozen Klebe men who talked about bishops. Afterward Canon Harrowell seemed anxious to have a quiet talk with him in the library, but Michael made an excuse, not feeling inclined for self-revelation so quickly on top of six Klebe men and the eggs and bacon. He went to see Father Pallant at Cowley, but Father Pallant appeared so disappointed that he had brought him no scientific problems to reconcile with Catholic dogma, and was moreover socontemptuous of Dom Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B. and Clere Abbey that Michael never went to see him again. He preferred old Sandifer, who with all the worldly benefits of good wine, good food, and pleasant company, offered in addition his own courtly Caroline presence that added to wit and learning and trenchant theology made Michael regret he had not called upon him sooner.
Nigel Stewart took Michael to a meeting of De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, at which he met not only the six Keble men who had talked about bishops at Canon Harrowell’s breakfast, but about twenty more members of the same college, all equally fervid and in his opinion equally objectionable. Michael also went with Nigel Stewart to Mass at St. Barnabas’, where he saw the same Keble men all singing conspicuously and all conveying the impression that every Sunday they occupied the same place. By the end of the term Michael’s aroused interest in religion at Oxford died out. He disliked the sensation of belonging to a particular school of thought within a university. The ecclesiastical people were like the ampelopsis at Trinity: they were highly colored, but so inappropriate to Oxford, that they seemed almost vulgar. It was ridiculous they should have to worship in Oxford at a very ugly modern church in the middle of very ugly modern slums, as ridiculous as it was to call in the aid of American creepers to cover up the sins of modern architects.
Yet Michael was at a loss to explain to himself why the ecclesiastical people were so obviously out of place in Oxford. After all, they were the heirs of a force which had persisted there for many years almost in its present aspect: they were the heirs after a fashion of the force that kept the Royal Standard flying against the Parliament. But they had not inherited the spirit of mediæval Oxford. They were too self-conscious, too congregational. As individuals, perhaps they were in tone with Oxford, but, eating bacon andeggs and talking about bishops, they belonged evidently to Keble, and Michael could not help feeling that Keble like Mansfield and Ruskin Hall was in Oxford, but not in the least of Oxford. The spirit of mediæval Oxford was more typically preserved in the ordinary life of the ordinary graduate; and yet it was a mistake to think of the spirit of Oxford at any date. That spirit was dateless and indefinable, and each new manifestation which Michael was inclined to seize upon, even a manifestation so satisfying as Venner’s, became with the very moment that he was aware of it as impossible to determine as a dream which leaves nothing behind but the almost violent knowledge that it was and exasperatingly still is.
The revived interest lasted a very short time in its communal aspect, and Michael retreated into his mediæval history, still solicitous of Catholicism in so far as to support the papacy against the Empire in the balance of his judgment, but no longer mingling with the Anglican adherents of the theory, nor even indeed committing himself openly to Christianity as a general creed. Indeed, his whole attitude to religion was the result of a reactionary bias rather than of any impulse toward constructive progression. He would have liked to urge himself forward confidently to proclaim his belief in Christianity, but he could acquire nothing more positive than a gentle skepticism of the value of every other form of thought, a gentleness that only became scornfully intolerant when provoked by ignorance or pretentious statement.
Meanwhile, The Oxford Looking-Glass, though inclining officially to neither political party, was reflecting a widespread interest in social reform. Michael woke up to this phenomenon as he read through the sixth number on a withering March day toward the end of term. Knowing Maurice to be a chameleon who unconsciously acquired thehue of his surroundings, Michael was sure that The Oxford Looking-Glass by this earnest tone indicated the probable tendency of undergraduate energy in the hear future. Yet himself, as he surveyed his acquaintances, could not perceive in their attitude any hint of change. In St. Mary’s the debating clubs were still debating the existence of ghosts: the essay clubs were still listening to papers that took them along the by-ways of archæology or sport. Throughout the university the old habit of mind persisted apparently. The New College manner that London journalists miscalled the Oxford manner still prevailed in the discussion of intellectual subjects. In Balliol when any remark trembled on the edge of a generalization, somebody in a corner would protest, “Oh, shut up, fish-face!” and the conversation at once veered sharply back to golf or scandal, while the intellectual kitten who had been playing with his mental tail would be suddenly conscious of himself or his dignity and sit still. In Exeter the members of the Literary Society were still called the Bloody Lits. Nothing anywhere seemed as yet to hint that the traditional flippancy of Oxford which was merely an extension of the public-school spirit was in danger of dying out. Oxford was still the apotheosis of the amateur. It was still surprising when the Head of a House or a don or an undergraduate achieved anything in a manner that did not savor of happy chance. It was still natural to regard Cambridge as a provincial university, and to take pleasure in shocking the earnest young Cambridge man with the metropolitan humors and airy self-assurance of Oxford.