Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 13

Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism, and the chief promoter went on:

_"Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s will reflect will be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama."_

"I think that's a rotten sentence," Michael interrupted.

"Well, of course, it will be polished," Avery irritably explained. "What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at."

"Ah!" Michael agreed, smiling. "Now I'm beginning to understand."

"_It may be a.s.sumed_," Avery went on, "_that the opinion of those who are 'knocking at the door_' (in inverted commas)----"

"I shouldn't think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a door in inverted commas," Michael observed.

"Look here, Michael," Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously, "will you shut up, or you won't be allowed to contribute."

"Haven't you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door in Ibsen?" fretfully demanded Maurice. _"That the opinion of those who are knocking at the door," he continued defiantly, "is not unworthy of an audience."_

"But if they're knocking at a door," Michael objected, "they can't be reflected in a mirror; unless it's a gla.s.s door, and if it's a gla.s.s door, they oughtn't to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don't knock hard, there isn't much point----"

"_The Editor in chief_," pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael's attempt to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s, "_will be M. Avery (St. Mary's), with whom will be a.s.sociated C. St. C. Wedderburn (St. Mary's), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary's), V. L. A. Townsend (B.N.C.)_. I haven't asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he's sure to join because he's very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill Mowbray's very bucked at the scheme. He's just resigned from the Russell and joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the princ.i.p.al speakers are going to follow Chamberlain's lead for Protection. _N. R.

Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most tremendously keen, and rather a good man to have, as he's had two poems taken by The Sat.u.r.day Review already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_----"

"That's the man I've come to talk about," said Michael. "I met him to-day."

Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear he had been considered interesting. "For in his own way," said Avery solemnly, "he's about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I'd sooner have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you and Wedders," he added quickly. "I'm going to take this prospectus round to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make."

Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a large number of suggestions. "And he's got a sense of humor," he added consolingly.

For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s, and the necessary discussions gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the O.U.D.S. or the Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year men) belonged.

Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s the organ of advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for Townsend to be as advanced as he chose within the limits of the s.p.a.ce allotted to his progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole of the magazine to drama, especially since under the expanding ambitions of editorship he had come to the conclusion he was a critic himself, and so was the more firmly disinclined to let slip the trenchant opportunity of pulverizing the four or five musical comedies that would pa.s.s through the Oxford theater every term. However, Townsend's demand for the drama and nothing but the drama was mitigated by his determination as a Liberal that The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s should not be made the mouthpiece of the New Toryism represented by Mowbray; and Maurice was able to recover the control of the dramatic criticism by representing to Townsend the necessity for such unflinching exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston Club principles as would balance Mowbray's torrential leadership of the Tory Democrats. "So called," Townsend bitterly observed, "because as he supposed they were neither Tories nor Democrats."

Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the Boer war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s without feeling they should all a.s.sume cloaks and masks and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s was only a small item in his plot to overthrow Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always thronged with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and whizzed about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but less dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.

Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.

Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity. As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity, whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers' eggs or keeping an early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a ramshorn of snuff and gla.s.ses of mead waiting for casual callers.

With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to Wedderburn's Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to Hazlewood's genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the result into a soufflee of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed as if The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s might run for at least a year. But what exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute, outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he had hailed from St. Mary's tower, this dream of youth's domination set against the gray background of time's endurance that was itself spun of the fabric of dreams.

Divinity and Pa.s.s Moderations would occur some time at the term's end, inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pa.s.s Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool m.u.f.fled from sight by trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates have better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most inaccurate geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held against the bank by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at ease, the world became a world of tall-growing gra.s.ses, and the noise of life no more than the monotony of a river's lapping, or along the level water meadows a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when supper was eaten by figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures that afterward drifted slowly down to college under the tree-entangled stars and flitting a.s.siduous bats, with no sound all the way but the rustle of a bird's wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match dropped idly over the side of the canoe. This was the season when for a long while people sat talking at open windows, and from the Warden's garden came sweetly up the scent of May flowers.

Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan's room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.

Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection of normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous compet.i.tors. Besides, though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen's table was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and sister.

So Eights Week arrived with Michael unenc.u.mbered and delightfully free to stand in the lodge and watch the embarra.s.sed youth, usually so debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.

"After all, they can only spend the day," he sighed hopefully to Michael, "You'll come and help me through lunch, won't you, and we'll rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is rowed. I was an a.s.s to ask them. You won't mind being bored a bit by my governor? I believe he's considered quite a clever man."

Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son's estimate.

"They're arriving devilish early," said Lonsdale, coming up to Michael's room with an anxious face on the night before.

Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael's door.

"Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the three of them at once. I think you'd better talk about wine to the governor.

It'll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated. Tell him how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing in late from that binge on the Cher, and let down gla.s.s after gla.s.s of the governor's port from Tommy's rooms in Parsons' Quad."

Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next morning.

"I say, you've come frightfully early," Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.

"Well, we can walk round my old college," suggested Lord Cleveden cheerfully. "I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford nowadays."

"I say, I'm awfully sorry to let you in for this," Lonsdale whispered to Michael. "Don't encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around at the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something."

Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.

"I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?" asked Michael as they stood in Peckwater.

"Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap, he died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about much."

"Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott," said Michael hurriedly.

"d.i.c.k Prescott? Good gracious!" Lord Cleveden exclaimed, "I haven't seen him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his life, to be sure."

"Did he?" asked Michael, well aware of the question's folly, but incapable of not asking it.

"Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal."

"Oh," gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden about his father.

"I can't remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this one. Saxby's I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.

Let's go up and ask the present owner to let us look in," Lord Cleveden proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.

"Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no," protested his son. "No, no; he may have people with him. Really."

"Ah, to be sure," Lord Cleveden agreed. "What a pity!"

"And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary's before lunch," Lonsdale announced.

"Do they make meringues here nowadays?" inquired Lord Cleveden meditatively.

"No, no," Lonsdale a.s.sured him. "They've given up since the famous cook died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary's. And our creme caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they've got at the House."

The tour of St. Mary's was conducted with almost incredible rapidity, because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the b.u.t.tery and the kitchen.

"Why didn't you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?" Lady Cleveden inquired.

"My dear mother," said Arthur, "he's quite impossible."