Читать книгу The Sins of the Children - Cosmo Hamilton - Страница 5

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This fine big fellow, Peter Murray Guthrie, who had done immensely well at Harvard in athletics and was by no means a fool intellectually, could afford to be amused at the fact that he had been scoffingly referred to as "only a Rhodes scholar." He had been born under a lucky star and he had that wonderful gymnastic faculty of always falling on his feet. If with all his suspicions aroused he had gone up to Oxford in the same rather timid, self-conscious, on-the-defensive manner of the average Rhodes scholar who expected to be treated as a creature quite different from the English undergraduate, he would have found his way to the American Club and stayed there more or less permanently, taking very little part in the glorious multitudinous life of the freshmen of his college, and remained a sort of pariah of his own making. Freshmen themselves, the Lord knows, are forlorn enough. Everything is strange to them, too,—society, rules, customs, unwritten laws and faces. They are solitary creatures in the midst of a bustling crowd. If they do not come from one of the great public schools and meet again the men they knew there their chance of making friends is small and for many dull disappointing weeks they must mope and look-on and envy and find their feet alone, suffering, poor devils, from a hideous sheepishness and wondering, with a sort of morbid self-consciousness, what others are thinking of them. But Peter was unafraid. He stalked into Oxford prepared to find it the finest place on earth—with his imagination stirred at the sight of those old colleges whose quadrangles echoed with the feet of the great dead and rang with those of the younger generation to whom life was a great adventure and who might spring from those old stones into everlasting fame. He strode through the gate of St. John's with his chin high, prepared to serve her with all his strength and all the best of his youth and leave her finally unsullied by his name. He didn't give a single whoop for all this talk about the snobbishness and insularity of English undergraduates. He didn't believe that he would find a college divided and sub-divided into sets; and if the statement proved to be true—well, he intended to break all the barriers down.

Therefore, with such a spirit added to his fine frank, manly personality, irresistible laugh, great big friendly hand and the rumours that came with him of his bull-like rushes on the football field, he became at once a marked man. Second-year and even third-year men nudged each other when he passed. "By Jove!" they said. "That's a useful looking cove! We must get him down to the river." Or, "I wonder if that American can be taught to play cricket?" As for the freshers—all as frightened as a lot of rabbits far away from their warren—they gazed with shy admiration and respect at Peter, who, expecting no rebuffs, received none.

Finding that he could not live in college until he was a second-year man, Peter had looked about him among the freshers for a likely person with whom to share rooms. He had come up in the train with Nicholas Kenyon, whose shell he had insisted upon opening. He, too, was entered at St. John's and was very ready—being impecunious—to share lodgings with the American whose allowance he might share and whose personality was distinctly unusual. These two then gravitated to Beaumont Street, captured a large sitting-room and two bed-rooms on the ground floor, and from the first evening of their arrival were perfectly at home. Peter at once hired a piano from a music shop in the High which he quickly discovered, bought several bottles of whiskey and a thousand cigarettes, besides several pounds of pipe tobacco, threw open his window, and as soon as dinner was over started playing rag-times.

Kenyon had been interested and amused. He had not expected to find himself "herding," as he put it, with a damned Rhodes scholar. He took it for granted that these "foreigners" would live apart from the ordinary undergraduate, as uncouth people should. He had been quick to notice, however,—psychology being his principal stock in trade,—that Peter had made an instant impression; and as he sat on the window-sill listening with what he had to confess to himself was keen pleasure to Peter's masterly manipulation of the piano and saw all the windows within near range of their house open and heads poke out to listen, he was able—without any propheticism—to say that Peter would quickly be the centre of a set. He would certainly not be sulking in the American Club.

Very quickly P. M. Guthrie, of St. John's, became "Peter" to the whole college—and stroke in the freshers' boat. The other Rhodes scholars owed everything that was good to him. He stood by them loyally, made his rooms their headquarters, and all who wanted to know him were obliged to know them. He introduced swipes at the first freshers' concert in the Hall, with enormous success, selecting Forbes Nicholl, of Brasenose; Watson Frick, of Wadham; Baldwin Colgate, of Worcester; and Madison Smith, of Merton, all good Americans, for the purpose. Even Dons stayed to listen on that epoch-making occasion and the fame of their curious and delightful method of singing spread all over the university. It was easy. There was nothing else like it.

Quite unconsciously Peter was for a little while the whole topic of conversation at Dons' dinners. These hide-bound professors were really quite surprised at the remarkable way in which, at one fell swoop, this man Peter Guthrie had managed to weld together the English and American undergraduates for the first time in their knowledge. Some of them put it all down to his piano playing—and were very nearly right. Others conceived his great laugh to be mainly responsible—and were not far short of the mark. But it was Nicholas Kenyon, the psychologist, who put his finger on the whole truth of this swift and unbelievable success. He said that it was Peter's humanity which had conquered Oxford, and in so doing proved—impecunious only son of an absolutely broke peer as he was—that he would be able to make a very fair living in the future on his wits. It may be said that he never intended to work.

It was part of Peter's honesty and simplicity to remain American. He made no effort to ape the Oxford manner of speech. He would see himself shot before he got into the rather effeminate clothes affected by the Oxford man. He continued to be natural, to remain himself, and not to take on the colors chameleon-wise of those about him. His Stetson hat was the standing joke of St. John's. Nevertheless, there was not one man in the college who would not have hit hard if any derogatory remarks had been thrown at the head inside it. His padded shoulders, upholstered ties and narrow belt were all frequently caricatured, but the sound of Peter's laugh gathered men together like the music of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was just that this man Peter Guthrie was a man that made him not only accepted in a place seething with quaint and foolish habits, out-of-date shibboleths and curious unwritten laws, but loved and respected. Here was one to whom merely to live was a joy. To the despondent he came therefore as a tonic. He exuded breeziness filled with ozone. His continuous high spirits infected even those foolish boys who were encrusted with affectation and stuccoed with the petty side and insolence of Eton. He worked hard and played hard and slept like a dog, ate hearty and drank like a thirsty plant. Also he smoked like a factory chimney. He had no crankish views—no tolerance for "isms," and was not ashamed to stride into chapel and say his prayers like a simple boy. In short, "unashamed" was his watchword, and he had been endowed with the rare gift of saying "No," and sticking to it. And to Nicholas Kenyon, who frequented the rooms of the so-called intellectuals—those "little dreadful clever people" who parroted and perverted other men's thoughts and possessed no originality of their own—it was a stroke of genius on Peter's part to have nothing but the photographs of his family all over his rooms. He must be a big man, Nicholas said to himself, who could afford, among the very young, to dispense with the female form divine in his frames—the nudes so generally placed in them—in order to convey the impression of being devilish wise and bad. Also it showed, according to this human merchant, a peculiar strength of character on Peter's part to bolt his door regularly one evening a week so that he might sit down uninterrupted and write a tremendous screed to his mother. However, that was Peter the man-boy—Peter the Rhodes scholar—Peter the Oxford man—who always wound up his musical evenings with the "Star Spangled Banner." And there was just one other side to this big, simple fellow's character which puzzled and annoyed the bloodless, clever parasite who lived with him and upon him,—women.

Now, Nicholas Kenyon—the Honourable Nicholas Augustus Fitzhugh Kenyon—was a patron of the drama. That is to say, he had the right somehow to enter the stage door of the Theatre Royal at all times, and did so whenever the theatre was visited by a musical comedy company. He was known to innumerable chorus girls as "Boy-dear," and made a point of entertaining them at luncheon and supper during their visits to the university town. He brought choice specimens of this breed to Beaumont Street for tea and tittle-tattle and introduced them to Peter, who liked them very much and would have staked his life upon their being angels. But when it came to driving out to small unnoticeable inns, Peter squared his shoulders and stayed at home.

"The devil take it!" said Nicholas one night, with frightful frankness which was devoid of any intentional insolence. "What's this cursed provincialism that hangs to you? I suppose it comes from the fact that you were born in a shack to the tinkle of the trolley-car!"

Peter's howl of laughter made the piano play an immaculate tune. "Wrong," he said. "Gee! but you're absolutely wrong. The whole thing comes to this, Nick: One of these fine days I'm going to be married. The girl I marry is going to be clean. I believe in fairness. I'm going to be clean. That's all there is to it."

So that, one way and another, Dr. Hunter G. Guthrie, of New York, as well as St. John's College, Oxford, had several reasons to be rather proud of this man Peter.