Читать книгу Cressage - A. C. Benson - Страница 4

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When Walter Garnet, in his rooms at Stafford College, Oxford, learned from the shouting of an uproarious friend in the quad that he had got his First in Greats, he threw down the book he had been reading, and leaned out of the window, to be greeted by a torrent of congratulation to which he replied, "Thanks very much!"

"I never saw such an old slug!" said his breathless friend. "Aren't you going to do anything?"

"Come up and see!" said Garnet.

Tommy Hobday clattered up the narrow wooden stairs. The room, a pleasant little panelled place, was half dismantled. On the table was a pile of books and a smaller pile of notebooks and papers.

"Hullo," said Tommy, "I didn't know you were going to clear out so quick."

"Yes, I am off to-morrow. I shall just come back to take my degree."

"I don't believe you are a bit pleased!"

"Yes, I am--very much. At least I should have been furious if I hadn't got my First."

"Well, you are the coolest fish! I should have been all over the place by now, if I had been you. But what are we going to do?"

"Well, I'll give you a dinner somewhere to-night if you will order it and get the men."

"Won't I just! Do you run to champagne?" asked Tommy.

"Yes, anything you like."

"Anyone in particular?"

"Oh, Bim and Menzies and any of the old lot, not more than eight beside ourselves."

The irrepressible Tommy looked at him. "What's the matter with you, Walter? You seem to have begun practising to be a Don already. Whence this dejected mien?" and Hobday burst into a few bars of an opera-bouffe.

"Why, 'at such a time as this,' as the Dean said in his sermon on Sunday, 'the mind naturally reverts to its spiritual horizon. What brave designs, what meagre fulfilment!'" and Walter rolled his eyes, and extended a sidelong forefinger at Tommy.

"Come, that's a little better. Now I'll go and rout the guys out. Any preference as to place?"

"Anywhere, anything, anybody--think of it as your party. Come to tea and tell me what you have arranged."

"All right. Walter, you are magnificent, and I shan't spare you--you may be sure of that." And the rapturous Tommy departed headlong.

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Left to himself, Walter Garnet surveyed the scene. He was a tall, slim, active-looking young man, carelessly but effectively dressed. He was not noticeably handsome, but his little round head, perhaps a trifle too small for his body, with its soft brown curly hair, his clear complexion, his large grey-blue eyes, gave him at first sight a rather girlish air. He took up with his long firmly-knit hand a cigarette and lit it, blowing out a cloud of smoke. But now that he was alone a slight look of trouble gathered on his smooth forehead. He was vexed with himself for not having seemed livelier. "Damn it all!" he muttered irritably under his breath.

The fact was that he had been working very hard in his own way, though why he should work hard or want a First he hardly knew. It seemed to be something that lay deeper than his reason that drove him. And now he was feeling the reaction; a real touch of melancholy was upon him. He had been sleeping little of late, waking early and finding life unaccountably futile. He had tried to exorcise the devil by perpetual lawn-tennis and elaborate supper-parties; but life was without relish, and it bewildered him to find it more meaningless every day. He had meant to stay up till the finish, and have a delicious time; but a day or two before he had made up his mind to cut it all and go home. There at least no one would take any notice of his moods.

Walter's father was a small Squire in Shropshire, a pompous, good-natured man who lived very quietly; his mother was a simple, charitable, affectionate woman. He was deeply attached to them both, but he never attempted to share his ideas, of which he had a superabundance, with them. His father indulged him in every way; his mother looked anxiously after his health, and believed him to share her very preferential type of religion.

He had been at Winchester, where he had done well both in work and games. He had the sort of popularity which comes freely to pleasant, competent, modest and good-natured boys, but he had made no very intimate friends. He had gained a scholarship at Oxford, where he had worked hard and played games vigorously. But here again he had few intimates, and his ideas, which had crowded very insistently upon him of late, had been mostly shared with his tutor, a young man, Harry Norton, not many years older than himself, who had a keen intellect, abundant humour and a great sympathy with the dreams of immaturity. Norton was in fact Garnet's only intimate friend.

While he was musing, there came a knock at the door. A young man entered. "Come to see about the books, sir," he said. Walter indicated the table. He had been a considerable buyer of books; but now he had put together on the table all his school and College work-books, and a number of other volumes which he had bought out of curiosity, and thought he would not be likely to read again. The young man looked quickly through the heap, and made an offer of a few pounds, which was heedlessly accepted. Walter asked him if at the same time he would take away and destroy the notebooks and papers which represented all his hours of work at school and College. The young man agreed, and said they should be removed in the course of the afternoon.

The furniture was all to go. Walter had determined to take home only a bureau and a chair, a few books and pictures. Perhaps in a happier mood he would have kept more; but now it was a relief to him to get rid of everything.

As to Walter's ideas, he had come, like many men of his generation, very much under the influence of Pater. He did not find much nutriment in Pater's æsthetics, his tortured ecstasies, his resolute confections and concoctions of rapture; but he had been deeply smitten with the idea of bodily and mental temperance as interpreted in Marius the Epicurean, the control of bodily appetites, the clearness of spirit, the high disdain for anything vulgar or gross or materialistic. For commonplace comfort, acceptance of dull conventions, ordinary ambitions, matter-of-fact arrangements for easy living Walter had conceived a great disfavour. The instincts of the herd and the crowd seemed to him utterly tedious and even brutal. He felt that he must live a more intent life of his own in secrecy and without ostentation, and withdraw from the obvious and banal ideas of the people round him. Of course it was all self-centred, individualistic, fastidious, even ungenerous; but there was a purity and a radiance about his visions which seemed to him very real and sacred. The thought of making known these dreams to those about him appeared like a profanation; it was not that he desired to disentangle himself from the world altogether. But he wanted a wider range; he thought he might somewhere find men, even groups of men, to whom such thoughts as rose in his mind would be neither unusual nor extravagant. His idea was rather that he seemed to have discovered the shallowness and the grossness of view which lurked behind the good-humoured eagerness and jollity of his companions. He shuddered to think of the kind of men that they would unconsciously and contentedly become.

The only person he had ever ventured to hint these insistent cravings to had been Norton, but even he had rather laughed at him, and had seemed to suspect him of solemnity.

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Presently he strolled out a little indecisively, passed through the quad and out again into a small, more ancient quad, went up a flight of stairs and knocked at a Gothic door. A voice within called a reply. Opening the door he entered a low-ceilinged room with deep window embrasures, almost lined with books. There was a table stacked with papers, containing a kind of bay or creek where the owner appeared to write. The room was shabbily but not uncomfortably furnished, though the confusion was great.

In a deep chair was lounging a tall, pale, ungainly, rather sickly-looking man, with hay-like hair showing already signs of baldness. He was smoking a pipe and reading a small volume. On seeing his visitor, Norton gave him a smile which irradiated his plain face, one of those large, cordial, personal smiles which win instant confidence by its transparent ingenuousness.

"Ah, Walter," he said, "so you have brought it off!"

"Yes!" said Walter.

"I never saw such a fellow as you for hoodwinking examiners," said Norton; "it's a kind of genius. But of course it isn't an education. You are a very ill-educated man, though you can put every scrap you possess in the shop-window."

"I quite agree it isn't an education," said Walter, "but the imparting of it provides a large number of people like yourself with very comfortable berths!"

"Don't be peevish, dear boy," said Norton. "I had expected a box of alabaster to be broken over my feet after all I have done for you."

"You!" said Walter, smiling. "Why, you have done your level best to prevent my getting a First. You have always tried to make me read things, when all they deserved was to be got up."

Norton shook his head mournfully. "Greats is really a very good education," he said, "if you want to learn to think."

"But to learn to think about one set of things doesn't enable you to think about other sets of things," said Walter. "It's the old fallacy. 'Euclid strengthens the logical faculties'--it doesn't. It only strengthens the logical faculties in dealing with geometry."

"You can't teach everyone everything," said Norton.

"No, but you can offer a larger choice of subjects. The real fact is that you belong to a Trades Union ring. You and your friends have nobbled education, and will only supply one kind, because it is too much trouble for you to acquaint yourselves with other subjects."

"That's a very shallow travesty of my position," said Norton; "besides, I can't think what other subjects you mean."

"Literature, art, music, religion--all the really vital forces. You can't bear anything that is alive, that is the truth! You are not interested in anything till it is dead and stiff and cold and rotten."

"My dear Walter!"

"Oh, yes--I apologize; I won't gas any more. There's something wrong with me. I can't take any interest in ordinary things just now, and when I do get interested I become offensive."

"You are overworked," said Norton. "I have seen it coming on for some time. You must knock off for a bit. What are you going to do? Is it any use my offering to come somewhere with you? I am at a loose end for a bit."

"That would be splendid. I am going home--they expect me to-morrow. I'm the only one, you know. Could I persuade you to come there with me? I have been wanting to ask you for a long time, but I was afraid you might be bored--my people are really quite harmless."

"I'll come like a shot, old man," said Norton. "I can be free this day week."

"I'm going off to-morrow," said Walter, "but will you come to us a week hence? The station is Pendridge. It's rather a pretty part of Shropshire."

"Excellent," said Norton. "It's just what I would like. We will defer these agreeable arguments till then--also the choice of a profession."

"Then I'll say good-bye now," said Walter, "and really I didn't mean what I said a minute ago; it was very rude and quite untrue. You have done everything for me; and the only thing I really mind about going down is that I shall cease to see you. Do you believe that?"

"I believe anything you tell me, dear boy," said Norton, "and I shall miss you too awfully. You can't guess how much--but don't let us become sentimental."