The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories Part 10

"Oh, don't harp so on modern life!" his friend Ranken, the junior Dean of St. Thomas', often said to him in his acrid way. "Do for pity's sake leave it alone and stick to your Asia Minor."

But then Ranken was absurdly cynical. Craik recalled with amus.e.m.e.nt some of the remarks he had made during the winter, when they walked out together for their Sunday walks; remembering how, as they returned in the dusk through the red fringe of villas between Oxford and the country, Ranken had sometimes paused opposite an uncurtained window, and made merry, with bitter merriment, over the domestic picture they saw in the golden light within,--a family at tea very likely, or an academic parent romping with his children. Craik had always listened in uncontradicting silence; only, standing in the chill gray of the twilight, he would draw his coat about him more tightly; and afterwards, alone in his rooms, these visions would sometimes haunt him, and not unpleasantly.

As he looked down now, it was agreeable to him to see so many ladies in the old garden; he had never quite believed that Ranken had very authentic grounds for his narrow prejudice. For Ranken would have liked to shut ladies out of Oxford altogether; and would have liked to keep it a tranquil home of learning and celibacy, as it used to be before the Royal Commission had granted the Fellows the liberty of marrying. For this unblest liberty, he maintained, had filled the University with frivolity and ladies, and so destroyed the old character of the place that now, as was notorious, the whole of the Summer Term, with a good part of the rest of the academic year, was given over to dances, and picnics, and parties, and other silly and deteriorating trifles. Craik had not been able to contradict his friend, for hitherto the sounds and echoes of this social dissipation had hardly reached his retired corner, save as he had heard them reverberating through the gloomy caverns of Ranken's imagination. But he could not quite believe--here Craik began to laugh, for his eye at that moment was caught by the gargoyle just above him, which was also leaning over and looking into the sunshiny garden. For hundreds of years it had sat there making faces, but now its visage seemed more than ever twisted with a look of Gothic cynicism. As Craik lingered, looking out, himself almost like a second gargoyle, he thought he could see in the garden below two ladies of his acquaintance, Mrs. Cotton and Mrs. Trotter. How ridiculous Ranken was in his views!

almost as grotesque as the gargoyle. Craik took his hat and stick, and started downstairs. He would see for himself.

II.

It was very worldly and very brilliant in the garden. Beside a crowd of ladies and young men, three Professors and two Heads of Houses had already arrived, and others were expected.

Mr. White, Mr. Long, and Mr. Maple Fetters, the young unmarried Fellows who were giving the party, kept glancing toward the gateway, over the shoulders of their arriving guests--all smiles, however, as they greeted their friends with apposite remarks. On tables under the trees white cloths were spread, looking almost blue in the vivid green, and on them were plates of red strawberries, ancient silver bowls of sugar, and dewy jugs of lemonade. Sounds of discreet gaiety, voices and laughter, and the tinkling of gla.s.ses, quickened the sleepy silence of the garden; while from beneath a high and fleecy cloud the rays of the westering sun brightened the tree-tops and walls, lingered on the ladies' dresses, and streaked with blue shadows the old green lawn. It put Craik in mind of old coloured French pictures he had seen, or the courtly fetes he had read of; he thought, too, of the garden party in "_Love's Cottage_," a pretty novel he had looked at lately, the party where Miss Molyneux first meets Pastorel the poet.

He kept smiling as he moved about, but he really felt rather shy and alien; if he only knew more people, and could be seen laughing and talking and moving his hands, like the other young men!

He came across one of his pupils at last, and began to speak to him of the recent boat-races in an animated way. But the undergraduate moved off suddenly, with a hasty excuse, to join some ladies who had just arrived, and Craik heard himself observing to a bush that "Brazenose had rowed very well." The observation, he felt, was not brilliant, even for conversation with a freshman; but as a fragment of soliloquy! He looked round; no one could have overheard him? Soon he met his friend, Mrs.

Cotton, the wife of Professor Cotton, and he begged to be allowed to get her an ice, or some other refreshment. The pink ice and biscuit were inadequate, it struck him, as he carried them with care toward the large presence of Mrs. Cotton; but was not this inadequacy, after all, of a piece with the delicious and conventional unreality of an affair like this? He noticed a brilliant purple feather conspicuously waving from the top of Mrs. Cotton's bonnet, and was glad that everything was so bright. How pleasant it was on a summer day, how pleasant and harmless to play brilliantly at life! And, he thought with a smile, did not old Aristotle himself place Magnificence high among the virtues?

But Maple Fetters still had his anxious eye-gla.s.s fixed on the garden entrance.

"Miss Lamb--has Miss Lamb come?" Craik heard voices murmuring about him.

"No, not yet, but she's coming. Just heard Maple Fetters telling some one."

"Long says he can't understand it. In her note she said--"

"So quiet, so different!"

"They say in London--"

"Oh, yes; and here everybody, Professors, Heads of Houses. It's too amusing--"

"Well, she says she wants to study all the types."

"Ah, look, there she comes!"

Craik turned with the others, and saw Miss Lamb coming in through the Gothic archway. Her face was shaded with a large white hat, and her white dress, falling in long plain lines to her feet, brightened with the sun as she walked over the gra.s.s, out of the shadow of the building.

Long and Maple Fetters started forward, and escorted Miss Lamb and her aunt across the lawn. They drew near to Craik and Mrs. Cotton.

"Oh, there is Mrs. Cotton," Miss Lamb exclaimed, and turned towards them. "Dear Mrs. Cotton," she said, "I was so hoping I should see you here!"

Craik looked at Miss Lamb. She rested her eyes on him for a second, then pressing Mrs. Cotton's hand, she stooped down with a graceful impulse and kissed the fat old thing. Craik overheard Mrs. Lyon, the wife of the president of All Saints, talking to the Warden of St. Simon's.

"Dear Miss Lamb!" she said in a deep and sentimental voice; "she is just as nice to women as she is to men."

"She is much nicer, surely," the ancient Warden replied with a cackling laugh; "she never kissed me!"

Miss Lamb had disappeared. And Mrs. Cotton was busy discussing with philanthropic friends the affairs of Oxford charities.

"These Oxford parties are so nice," she said to Craik, as she turned her benevolent spectacles away from him; "they save one writing such heaps of notes."

Again Craik walked about alone, smiling and conspicuous; and although he tried to think that he was enjoying himself, he really wished very much to be up in his tower again, up there in its pleasant green shade and solitude. That, after all, was his place, the only place he was fit for; and he had better stick to it, and stick to his books, and not cast again the gloom of his presence on the social enjoyment of other more fortunate people. For he could not talk agreeably, and laugh and be gay; and, even if he could, which of the ladies who swept so prettily past him on the gra.s.s would ever care to listen to him? Thus resignedly musing, he retreated into the near shade of a laburnum tree, and, ceasing to smile in his fixed and weary way, he watched through the flowering branches the shining colours and placid agitation of the garden party. All the men except himself were moving among the groups of ladies, weaving darker threads into the brilliant pattern. Young Cobbe he saw, the captain of the College boat club, walking with Miss Lamb, walking and talking pleasantly, and he sighed; for although he was Cobbe's tutor, and well versed in his stupidity, he could not help envying the easy manners of the undergraduate.

But the half-real picture ceased to be a mere picture to him, and the sequence of images grew almost too vivid, when he noticed that Miss Lamb and her companion were coming directly to his tree. Could he manage to slip away without being seen? She was coming probably to pick a spray of the yellow flower to put in her white dress, or carry away perhaps as a memory of the party. And if he were found standing there like a policeman, it would be so awkward.

Miss Lamb fortunately met Maple Fetters, and, stopping herself, seemed to be sending him on to the tree alone. When he reached it, he pushed aside the branches and said, with a smile, "I say, Craik, I want to introduce you to Miss Lamb."

"Me?"

"Yes, you. We saw you here; she wants to meet you."

"Wants to meet _me_?"

"Yes, _you_. Come along."

Craik came out from beneath the tree.

"Miss Lamb--does she live in Oxford?"

"You don't mean to tell me you've never heard of Miss Lamb?" Fetters paused in astonishment. "You must be the only man in Oxford then who has not. Miss Lamb is an American!"

"An American?" Craik had heard that American ladies were so brilliant.

"Miss Lamb, let me introduce Mr. Craik, our philosopher."

"Mr. Craik, I am glad to meet you."

Craik bowed; then he saw that Miss Lamb had put out her hand; he tried to take it, but was too late. The American young lady however smiled, and put out her hand again, and gave it to him frankly, almost as if it were a present.

"We ought to shake hands, oughtn't we? It's the English way, isn't it?"

Craik stifled a guffaw, and his awkward sensations began to go.

"Mr. Cobbe, would you mind getting me an ice?"

Cobbe's face wore an odd expression as he bowed and disappeared. Maple Fetters fluttered off to other occupations. Craik and Miss Lamb were left alone, and they began to walk with vague steps, and, on the lady's part, vague, unfinished sc.r.a.ps of conversation, through the sunshine along the garden path. Then stopping, and resting her hands on her parasol, she said, as if they were old friends already, "I wonder--would you take me into your old College cloisters? I have heard so much about them, and it wouldn't be wrong for us to run away from the party for just a few minutes? I should so love to! You won't mind?"

"Oh dear, no!" Craik exclaimed. "Certainly we can go. It's through the quadrangle. But Mr. Cobbe, will he find you?"

"Oh, he'll know where I am; and if he doesn't it's no matter. Come!"

They went under the garden tower, and through the little old quadrangle, into the entrance of the cloisters. Of the history and traditions of the place, and of the whole College, Craik spoke almost with eloquence, while Miss Lamb listened with murmurs and interruptions of enthusiastic interest. The cloisters, as he explained, were once the cloisters of a monastery; the tower was the monastery tower; and the bell that hung there, and twice a day rang the College into chapel, was the bell that once sounded for the matins and vespers of the monks.

"What! monks? Did monks really once live here? Oh, how I should have liked to have seen it then!"

"Ah, but you couldn't, you know. They never allowed ladies inside the gates."

"How silly!"