The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 41

THE SENIOR FELLOW.

There is at Oxford a small college, with a small bursar's garden that in spring is ablaze with laburnum and scented with lilac; and in the old wall of this garden, just beneath the largest laburnum-tree, you may still find a stone with this inscription: "_Jesus have mercy on Miles Tonken, Fellow. Anno 1545._"

This college, in the days when I knew it, had three marks of distinction:--It turned out, on hunting mornings, more "pinks" for its size than any other in Oxford; its boat was head of the river; and its Senior Fellow was the Rev. Theobald Pumfrey, who knew more of Athenaeus than any man in the world. He seldom lectured; but day by day, year after year, sat in the window above this same small garden, and acc.u.mulated notes for the great edition of his pet author that some day--n.o.body quite knew when--was to make him famous. He was the son of a c.u.mberland farmer; had come up to the University from a local grammar-school; and since then (it was said) had revisited his native village twice only--to bury his father and mother. His mother's death-- and that had happened five-and-twenty years before--left him without a single relative on earth: nor could he be said to have a friend, even among the dons. He rose early, took a solitary walk in the parks, and would spend the rest of the day at his desk by the window. People marvelled sometimes why he had taken Holy Orders. It was hinted that his scout knew, perhaps; but, if so, his scout never divulged the reasons.

The scholar was a man, nevertheless; had a humorously wrinkled mouth, and an eye that twinkled responsive to a jest; and was the best judge of wine in Oxford. On the strength of this undeniable gift the dons had long since elected him steward of Common-room; and he valued the responsibility, abstaining from tobacco--which he loved--to keep pure his taste for vintages, and preserve a discriminating palate among sweets. An utterance of his would hint that even his avoidance of physical exercise was a matter of duty.

"A man," he said, "may work his body, may work his head, and may enjoy his dinner. Any two of these things he may do, but not all three.

For me, I wish to work my head, and _must_ enjoy my dinner." And once, when I dined with him, it was made clear to me that his life was ordered after a plan. It was a summer evening, and he held a gla.s.s of claret against the sunset. "Wife and children!" he cried suddenly, "wife and children!" Then, with a wave of his left hand from the claret to the still lawn below us and the lilacs, "These are my wife and children!"

It was whispered at length that his commentary on the first book of the Deipnosophists was all but ready. All through a golden summer and a quiet Long Vacation it had been maturing, and on the first night of the October term he arranged his piles of notes about him, set a quire of clean ma.n.u.script paper on his table, dipped pen in inkpot, and began to muse on the first sentence.

An hour pa.s.sed, and the page was not soiled. Across the still garden came the sound of cab-wheels rattling over the distant streets.

The undergraduates were coming up for a fresh term. He had heard the sound a hundred times, almost; and it did not concern him. He had no lectures to prepare.

Another hour pa.s.sed, and another. The noise of the cabs had died out, and over him was creeping a sick fear, a certainty, that he could not write a word. The subject was too immense. He had given his life to Athenaeus, and now Athenaeus was a monster that one man's life and knowledge would not suffice for. Having withheld his pen till he might write adequately, he awoke to find that writing was impossible.

A horror took him as he pushed back his chair among the litter of note-books, and, stepping to the window, threw the sash open.

Many stars were shining; and between them and the sleeping garden echoed the clamour of a distant supper-party. He heard no words, only the noise; but it filled his brain with a sense of the many thousand supper-parties that the garden had listened to, of the generations that had come and gone since his own first term, of the boys who had grown into men while he was working at Athenaeus--always Athenaeus.

His forehead was burning, and as he pushed his hand across it, he seemed to read in the darkness under the laburnum-tree, "_Jesus have mercy on Miles Tonken, Fellow. Anno 1545," and found a new meaning--an irony--in the words.

Then, because more and more the task of his life became a hopeless weight, he gave a look at his notebooks and escaped out of the room, downstairs into the fresh air of the quad, and across it towards the porter's lodge. He found the porter napping, and, having a private key, he let himself through the big gate and out into the street. No soul was abroad: only the gas-lamps threw queer shadows of him on the pavement, and the night-breeze struck coldly into him as he hurried along, hating whatever he saw.

Soon, under a window in St. Giles's, he pulled up. There was a party of young men inside--perhaps the same supper-party whose voices he had heard just now. The light from the room flared across the street; but by keeping close under the sill he stood in darkness, and he paused, listening eagerly. Above, they were singing a chorus, noted in those days--

It was pale dawn, and the sun was touching St. Mary's spire into flame when the heavy-eyed porter heard a key turn in the wicket. It was the Senior Fellow, and in about half an hour he appeared again at the lodge, carrying a small bag, and handed the porter a letter addressed to the President of the College. He then stepped out into the street, and hurried off towards the railway station.

For a fortnight we heard nothing of him. Then suddenly he appeared again--on an evening when the College, having won the "Fours," was commemorating its success by a bonfire in the big quad. A certain freshman, stealing down his staircase with a can of colza oil to feed the flames, was confronted by our missing Senior Fellow.

"No," said the great scholar, "don't be afraid, and don't seek to hide that oil-can; but come in here." And he led the way to his room.

This much is mere rumour; for the freshman was always reticent on the encounter, and what followed. But many who were present that night can bear witness that a big portmanteau appeared suddenly on the summit of the bonfire, and blazed merrily to ashes, having clearly been saturated with oil. Not until long after were its contents divined.

The Senior Fellow went back to his window above the bursar's garden, though henceforward he dined but rarely in Common-room; and year by year scholars expected his edition of Athenaeus, until he died and left his desk full of notebooks to the youth who had carried the oil-can, and who in course of years had become junior don. Also his will expressed a wish that this, his favourite pupil, might be elected to succeed him as steward of Common-room.

The new steward, eager to fulfil his duties, made it his first business to inspect the college cellars. He found there abundance of old port, much fair claret, a bin of inestimable Madeira, several casks of more curious wines, and among them one labelled "For the Poor."

It struck him as a pleasant trait in his dead friend, thus to have dispensed in charity that wine which doubtless had gone beyond its age, and become unfit for the Fellows' palates. He drew a gla.s.sful and tasted it.

The first sip was a revelation. He returned to his rooms, wrote a score of letters inviting to dinner all the acknowledged connoisseurs of other colleges. When they had dined with him, and fallen into easy att.i.tudes around the table, he introduced this wine casually among half a dozen others, and watched the result.

Not a man who tasted it would taste any other.

As for the notebooks--those priceless materials for the final edition of Athenaeus--they were empty, mere blank pages! Only in that labelled "No. 1" was there a sc.r.a.p of the old scholar's handwriting, and it began--

"Dulce c.u.m sodalibus Sapit vinum bonum: Osculari virgines Dulcius est donum: Donum est dulcissimum Musica tironum-- Qui tararaboomdeat, Spernit regis thronum!"

BALLAST.

Under the green sh.o.r.e that faces the port, and at a point that, as the meeting-place of river and harbour, may be called indifferently by either name, lay a slim-waisted barque at anchor, with a sand-barge alongside. The time was a soft and sunny morning in early January-- a day that was Nature's breathing s.p.a.ce after a week of sleet and boisterous winds. The gulls were back again from their inland shelters.

Across the upland above the cliff a ploughman drove leisurably forth and back, and always close behind his heels the earth was white with these birds inspecting the fresh-turned furrow. The furze-bushes below him were braided with cobwebs, and the stays, lifts, and braces of the barque might have pa.s.sed also for threads of gossamer spun from her masts and yards, so delicately were the lines indicated against the hillside. In the sand-barge, three men were chanting as they worked; and their song, travelling across still sky and water, rose audibly above the stir of traffic even in the narrow streets of the town.

The barque was taking in ballast; and the three men sang as they shovelled,--for three reasons. It helped them to keep time; it kept each from shirking his share of the work; and lastly, perhaps, the song cheered them. They knew it as "The Long Hundred," and it ran--

"There goes one.

One there is gone.

Oh, the rare one!

And many more to come For to make up the sum Of the hundred so long."

"There goes two--"

--and so on, up to twenty. With each line, a shovelful of ballast was pitched on board by every man; so that, when the twenty six-line stanzas were ended, each man had thrown one hundred and twenty (a "long hundred") shovelfuls of sand. Thereupon they paused, "touched pipe" for a minute or two, and, brushing the back of the hand across their foreheads to wring off the sweat, started afresh.

Along the barque's side ran a narrow line of blue paint, signifying that the vessel was in mourning, that somebody belonging to captain or owner was lately dead. But in this case it was the captain and owner himself: and his chief mourner was a bright-eyed woman with a complexion of cream and roses, who now leant over the bulwarks and looked down contemplatively upon the three labourers. She was a Canadian, and her husband, too, had been a Canadian--rich, more than twice her age, and luxurious. Since his marriage she had accompanied him on all his voyages. Three months ago his vessel had brought him, sick and suffering from congestion of the lungs, into this harbour, where his cargo of timber was to be unloaded: and in this harbour, a week later, he had died, without a doubt of his wife's affection. From the deck where she stood she could see between the elms on the hill above the port the white wall of the cemetery where he lay. The vessel was hers, and a snug little fortune in Quebec: and she was going back to enjoy it.

For the homeward voyage she had deputed the captain's responsibilities to the first mate, and had raised his pay slightly, but the captain's dignity she reserved for herself.

She wore a black gown, of course, but not a widow's cap: and, though in fact a widow of twenty-five, had very much more the appearance of a maid of nineteen as she looked down over the barque's side. Her lips were parted as if to smile at the first provocation. On either side of her temples a short brown curl had rebelled and was kissing her cheek.

The sparkle in her eyes told of capacity to enjoy life. Behind her a coil of smoke rose from the deck-house chimney. She had left the midday meal she was cooking, and ought to be back looking after it.

Instead, she lingered and looked upon the three men at work below.

Two of them were old, round-shouldered with labour, their necks burnt brown with stooping in the sun. The third was a young giant--tall, fair, and straight--with yellowish hair that curled up tightly at the back of his head, and lumbar muscles that swelled and sank in a pretty rhythm as he pitched his ballast and sang--

"There goes nine.

Nine there is gone . . ."

It was upon this man that the woman gazed as she lingered.

His shirt-collar was cut low at the back, and his freckled neck was shining with sweat. She wanted him to look up, and yet she was afraid of his looking up. She wondered if he were married--"at his age," she phrased it to herself--and, if so, what manner of wife he had. She told herself after a while that she really dreaded extremely being caught observing these three labourers; that she hated even in seeming to lose dignity. And still she bent and heard the song to the twentieth and last verse.

The young giant, when the spell was over, leant on his shovel for a moment and then reached out a hand for the cider-keg. One of his comrades pa.s.sed it to him. He wiped the orifice, tilted his head back and drank as a man drinks at midday after a long morning. Some of the cider trickled down his crisp yellow beard and he shook his head, scattering the drops off. Then the keg was tilted again, and suddenly lowered as he was on the point of drinking. His eyes had encountered those of the woman on deck.

As they did so, the woman recovered all her boldness. Without in the least knowing what prompted her, she bent a little further forward and asked--

"What is your name, young man?"

"William Udy, ma'am."

"Do you mind breaking off work for a moment and stepping up here?"

"Cert'nly, ma'am." William Udy laid down his shovel at once.