Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 7

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST TERM

His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own "year." These trials of personality were conducted with all the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books.

Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.

Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a general observation on the row of Sunday night's celebration, Michael proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.

"Were you in that gang?" Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous surprise.

"I was fined," Michael announced, trying to quench the note of exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was creating.

"I say," Carben sneered, "so at last one of the 'bloods' is going to condescend to play Rugger. Jonah," he called to the captain of the Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the room, "we've got a college blood playing three-quarter for us."

"Good work," said Jones, with a toast-enc.u.mbered laugh. "Where is he?"

Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.

"No end of a blood," Carben went on. "Lights bonfires and gets fined all in his first week."

The two freshmen sn.i.g.g.e.red, and Michael made up his mind to consult Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively d.a.m.ned if these two a.s.ses should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red wrists and their smug insignificance.

"You were at St. James', weren't you?" asked Jones. "Did you know Mansfield?"

"I didn't know him--exactly," said Michael, "but--in fact--we thought him rather a tick."

"Thanks very much and all that," said Jones. "He was a friend of mine, but don't apologize."

There was a general laugh at Michael's expense from which Carben's guffaw survived. "Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,"

he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was something positively contemptible.

Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben's face. Meanwhile the others exercised their scornful wit upon the "bloods" of the college.

"Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?" Carben indignantly demanded.

"Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. 'Can't you keep your fat little paunch down? I don't want to look at it,' said Fitzroy.

That's pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold's going to jack rowing, and he's quite right."

"Quite right," a chorus echoed.

Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold's dignity irritated Michael. He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.

"These rowing bloods think they've bought the college," somebody was wisely propounding.

"We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn't we?" Michael inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed rebuke.

"Well, I think it would be a d'd good thing, if we dropped six places,"

Carben affirmed.

How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary, and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose atmosphere of envy and whose castrated d.a.m.ns were shrouding Oxford with a dismal genteelness.

"Oh, by the way, before you go," said Carben, "you'd better let me put your name down for the Ugger."

"The what?" Michael asked, with a faint insolence.

"The Union."

Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the sponsorship of Carben.

"I don't think I'll join this term."

He ran down the stairs from Carben's rooms and stood for a moment apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary's tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the memory of Carben's tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.

In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called along the table to Grainger:

"I say, Tommy, do you know we've got a Rugger rough with us?"

Several people murmured in surprise.

"I say, have you really been playing Rugger?"

"Well, great Scott!" exclaimed Michael, "there's nothing very odd in that."

"But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men," Lonsdale protested.

"Some are," Michael admitted. "Still, it's a better game than Socker."

"But everybody at St. Mary's plays Socker," Lonsdale went on.

Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.

And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this freshmen's table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be snuffed out ignominiously.

"Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger," Michael a.s.serted.

"Shall I have a shot?" suggested Lonsdale.

"It's a most devilish good game," Michael earnestly avowed.

"Tommy," Lonsdale shouted, "I'm going to be a Rugger rough myself."

"I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row," said Wedderburn severely.

"My G.o.d, Wedders, you are a prize a.s.s," chuckled the offender.

Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.

"Have you sconced me?" Lonsdale demanded.