CHAPTER XVI
CECIL, some five months after his eighteenth birthday, went up to Oxford and entered Balliol. Here he gave the cold shoulder to cricket, and took to the water with the enthusiasm of a man who has the honour of his college to uphold and his blue to get. He also took more kindly to correspondence, and wrote Lee long letters on the tendencies of modern civilisation. His letters struck his friend, used to the lighter mood of Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Brannan, as decidedly priggish, and she worried over the development not a little,—being unaware that the University youth of Great Britain must take priggishness in the regular course of measles, mumps, whooping-cough, Public School wickedness, the overwhelming discovery of his own importance as an atom of the British Empire, and cynicism.
During the second term he became profoundly and theologically religious, and Lee wept at the prospect of being a parson’s wife. His excursions into the vast echoing region of spiritual mysteries nearly addled her brains, and she felt quite miserable at times to think that there was so little of the old Cecil left. But during the spring of his second year there seemed to be a healthy reaction. A letter dated from Maundrell Abbey informed Lee that he had been sent down for breaking windowsand attempting to feed a bonfire in the quadrangle with an objectionable don. He further confided that upon the last hilarious night before his exile he had been discovered by a good Samaritan at the foot of his stairs calling imperiously upon the Almighty to carry him up to his room and put him to bed.
During the months of his exile he travelled on the Continent. His letters at this period were less like essays for posterity, and much of his old self flashed through them. When he returned to Oxford in the autumn he went in bitterly for politics, announced himself a Liberal, and made cutting references to the House of Peers. Indeed, shortly after he had been elected President of the Union, he gave full rein to his eloquence and his new-born convictions, and so scathingly and vituperously assailed the entire territorial system that he finished in a perfect pandemonium of cheers and hisses, and was pestered for months by the enterprising Socialist. During the following vacation he attempted to convert his father, who was a blue-hot Tory; and the fixity and bitterness of his convictions and his arrogant assumption of advanced thinking so irritated Lord Barnstaple that he damned his offspring for a prig; forgetting that in his own time he had been as pretty a prig as Oxford had ever turned out. Cecil’s keynote at this time—frequently quoted to Lee—was Matthew Arnold’s unpleasant arraignment of their common country: “Our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal.” Lord Maundrell was for reforming all three. Unlike thegreat poet who inspired those lines, there was no danger of his being the “passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who, ignorant of the future, and unconsoled by its promises, nevertheless waged against the conservatism of the old impossible world so fiery battle.” To-day the future was quite clear, that is to say, it was to be what its brilliant and determined youth chose to make it.
Lee thought these sentiments simply magnificent, and expressed her approval with such fire and enthusiasm that Cecil wrote with increasing frequency, and assured her that the way her style had improved was really remarkable.
During his last year his fads had pretty well run their course, although he was temporarily interested in “The Influence of Zola on Modern Thought,” and bi-metallism. But his ideals, so he assured Lee, were leaving him. All he really cared for in life was to take a double first in Greats and History, and he was working like a horse. There were long intervals between his letters, and when he wrote it was to apologise on the score of fatigue. He was “dog tired.” So were all the men. If they weren’t drivelling idiots when the thing was over it was because nothing could really knock an Englishman out. Of course he was on the water more or less, and took a turn every day at cricket, which kept him in fair condition, although he was far from fit. Meanwhile Lee was to pray that he was not ploughed. He liked women to pray. Religion had gone with his other ideals, but it was a beautiful thing in a woman.