Читать книгу The Oxford Circus - Raymond Mortimer - Страница 6

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“But I must have a hansom!”

Behind the voice there were centuries of the best breeding, but the tone was perhaps a trifle querulous. From the crowded yard of the Oxford railway station there came no answer save the hoarse, insistent cries of porters and the importunate scuffling of cab-touts.

“Taxi, sir?”

“ ’ere y’are, sir. Taxi, sir?”

But Gaveston ffoulis knew his own mind.

“No,” he insisted, gazing with something like surprise round the cab-ranks. “I must have a hansom.”

“None ’ere, sir,” growled a surly-eyed taxi-driver.

“Then drive to the centre of the city,” ordered the young man, without hesitation, “and fetch me one—instantly!”

Instinctively the driver touched his cap. With a click the flag of his meter fell in symbolic surrender to this new arrival, and the motor, a throbbing anachronism, sped fussily away towards those rotund domes and soaring spires, whence, through the mellow streaming of October sunlight, came already the distant bombilation of crowding, multisonant bells. …

All impatience, Gaveston waited there for his chosen conveyance, and glanced coldly at the unimaginative battalions of undergraduates around him, who, callous to all appropriacy, were noisily flinging themselves and their golf-clubs into humdrum taxicabs. How pitiful, and how plebeian, was their lack of sensibility! To enter Oxford—the Oxford of Bacon and Pater, of Newman and Mackenzie—in these mechanical monstrosities! Rather than that, he had gone afoot.

“I’d as soon enter Paradise on stilts!” he reflected, and smiled at his witty conceit. …

And the smile had not faded from his full, attractive lips, when the bespoken hansom scampered up, guided by the taxi. Ordering the latter to collect his multitudinous luggage, he engaged the former to drive him to his destination.

“Wallace!” he cried, and leapt lightly into the graceful equipage.

With hooves gaily a-clatter over cobbles and causeway, the hansom wended its romantic way through the mazy purlieus which lead the traveller into the heart of this city that men call Oxford and the gods call Youth. Gaveston longed for a cockle-shell in his hat, to symbolize this mystic, dreamed-of wayfaring, and when at long last his driver reined in before a Gothic gateway darkly overhung by a stalwart, sky-crowned tower, he knew that his sense of the fitting had in all sooth been justified. He threw the fare to the jarvey, and crossed the threshold of his historic college, nodding kindly to the bewhiskered porter’s obsequious welcome.

“I must keep this up,” he murmured pensively in the vaulted porch.

He was now a Wallace man. …

Later that evening Gaveston gazed hungrily out over the Wallace quadrangle from the mullioned windows of the rooms allotted to him. “Staircase XVII … staircase XVII,” he kept repeating. What a place it was! Never had his utmost dreams envisaged this romantic reckoning by stairways.

And this was Wallace at last!

His eyes wandered over the beautiful accidents of its profile, clear-cut against the autumnal sky’s violaceous and crepuscular glory. With its myriad pointed turrets and ogive windows and frowning battlements, the college recalled to Gaveston ffoulis’s memory those vast baronial strongholds of Scotland and Touraine which he dimly remembered from the interminable travels of his picaresque infancy. …

“Dear Mums!” he whispered to the listening tree-tops, and a far-away look bedimmed his eyes. For with the memory of those other days came back the ever-fascinating, ever-elusive image of his mother, that dear whisp of frail, ethereal beauty who throughout his waking hours was scarcely ever absent from the gentle background of his thoughts. And, remembering her, he let Time slip silently by with fleet, inaudible steps until——

Why! it was nearly eight o’clock! Too late now to dine in Hall—but what matter? He turned to open the generous hamper which, only that morning, his mother had chosen for him at Fortnum’s. (How far-off already seemed the glittering clinquetis of Piccadilly!) And there, in the quietude of his own room, Gaveston dined simply off a dish of cold Bombay duck, garnished (a bon viveur, he preferred delicacies that were out of season) with some superb bottled peas.

Rising from his second meringue, Gaveston decided to resume his reverie, and walked over to the large cheval-glass that occupied an inglenook formed by a turret—he had ordered the awestruck scout to take it from its packing-case before any of his sixteen suit-cases were unlocked. He looked at himself with some satisfaction. Was it so, he wondered, that Oxford would see him—a svelte, willowy figure, with fair hair and fair skin and fair eyes, whose every trait bore the subtle handwriting of race and breeding, and on whose lips played the most infectious of enigmatic smiles.

“Quel hors d’œuvre!” he exclaimed in involuntary admiration. He was indeed a masterpiece.

But what was that?

Tap, tap. …

Yes, a knock … a visitor already—was it possible? Quickly Gaveston tiptoed over to the Chappel concert grand which had been despatched as advance luggage, and in an instant his room was throbbing with the evanescent, moonlit melancholy of the Chopin nocturne in G-flat minor. He chose that (it was his mother’s favourite, too) because it always seemed to fill a room with just that warm sense of welcome and intimacy which a host should emanate. At the first bars of the scherzo the knocking was repeated, a little louder. He stopped short.

“Pray enter!” he called, with an effective half-turn on the stool.

The door opened. A tall upstanding figure was silhouetted there on the threshold.

“Hullo, Gav!”

“I don’t think I—— Why, David! David! Of all the surprises!” And Gaveston rose, resplendent with welcome.

“I heard you were coming up this term, and I——”

“But, David, I’d no idea you were here!”

“It’s my second year at Wallace, Gav.”

“And I never heard!”

This was splendid! Gaveston stepped back to look at his friend with whole-hearted pleasure.

David Paunceford was a figure of the true Hellenic mould, athletic in every limb and fibre, flaxen of hair, blue of eye, and aquiline of nose, sane to the finger-tips, and the heir to at least one of England’s oldest peerages. Add to this that he was an intense admirer of Gaveston, and who could better approach the ideal of a friend?

David had entered Eton a year before Gaveston ffoulis, but none the less they had thenceforward, for several eventful years, been inseparables. They had been elected to Pop on the same Founder’s Day; they had been bracketed together for the same prizes, had played the Wall Game at the self-same wall, and, through many a long afternoon of drowsy, elm-shadowed cricketing, Agar’s Plough had seen them batting side by side. Nearly all their uproariously happy holidays they had spent together, and Gav, of course, was an instant favourite with all the Paunceford keepers on the Wuthering moors and all the Paunceford gillies on the island of Eigg. They had received (surest sign of popularity) the same nickname, and at the last, one cloudy morning rather before their allotted span of halves, they had left Eton together, for the same reason but in different cabs.

“And I’m only a freshman!” laughed Gaveston, closing the piano-lid. “Why, you’ll have to put me up to everything, David. Come on, take me for a walker.” He already knew his ’Varsity slang. …

Donning cap and gown (for the hour grew late), the two friends descended into the quadrangle, and out into the noisy swirl of Broad Street. In a moment Gaveston found his imagination kindled by his novel surroundings, and, with all the enchanting ardour of adolescence, began to explain to David what Oxford really meant to the world, what ideals its architecture symbolized, and in what respects its traditions needed revision; gracefully, too, he sketched his own tremendous projects, and the methods he planned to achieve them, nor was he slow to advise on the right way of dealing with fourth-year men, dons, scouts, clergymen, proctors, shopkeepers and freshmen.

David listened with astonished admiration on every contour of his superb profile.

“What a wonderful chap you are, Gavvy!” he said affectionately.

“Oh, nothing to what I shall be!” came the laughing answer. Already Gav could feel the keen Oxford air whetting that wit of his which had been the fear and admiration of Eton.

“Oh, how I wish I were clever—really clever, I mean, like you, Gav!” and David sighed as he marvelled yet again at his friend’s uncanny perspicacity.

“But you are, David, without knowing it.”

“What nonsense! What’s the good of being just a crack cricketer or a——”

Gaveston was quick as a flash.

“Why, then you can catch people out!” he riposted, with a peal of laughter which, with David’s answering carillon, woke age-long echoes from the mouldering walls of Queen’s Lane. How magnificent it was just to be alive and young and in Oxford!

“ ‘Midnight and Youth and Love and Italy,

Love in the Land where Love most lovely seems!’ ”

he quoted felicitously, and suddenly they emerged on to the glorious vista of the High Street, bent like a bow and flowing majestically between the steep cliff-like colleges. His voice hushed before this imminence of ineluctable beauty, and he went on.

“Oh, David! Don’t you understand? This is the most miraculous moment of all! Here one stands in the very heart of one’s Mater Almissima, with all these crowds about one, and not one of them knows one’s name. And yet to-morrow—why, one feels like a sky before a sudden dawn!”

“This is Carfax,” David interrupted. Their progress was checked by the sauntering couples and the circumambient motor-’buses, and all around glittered the windows of the tobacconists in all the glamour of their gaudy seductiveness.

“One must buy a pipe,” cried Gaveston impulsively. “A pipe is a Man’s smoke!”

David nodded, and together in a rhapsody of silence they walked back past the clangour of Carfax, and, with eyes bemused by the magic of Time, they gazed upon the scalloped gables and gargoyled eaves of Brasenose, and upon the storied front of Oriel, enriched by the sculptor’s art with faint lovely figures of all that is most rememberable in the city’s studious history, of Emperors and Kings and the Builders of Empires. In the long, tenebrous quietude of the Turl they lingered, where, across the empurpled dusk of the narrow street, the lighted windows of rival colleges blinked lazy, kindly eyes at each other. And wandering under the pinnacled soar of Exeter Chapel, past Hertford too, where the winged nudity of cherubim upholds a high-flung Bridge of Sighs, they drew near the elephantine deities of the Indian Institute, and thence in the darkling distance, they could see before them the polychrome of Keble, and beyond, glowing faint and Venetian beneath the decrescent moon and a myriad plangent stars, the patterned diaper of the Parks Museum.

“It is too, too beautiful …” whispered Gaveston, and his voice tailed away.

And then, in the pause after his words, came back the recollection of his mother: she must know, and at once, of his safe advent and his new-found extremity of happiness.

“But where is the Post Office?” he asked, and, turning on their tracks, David led his friend in a silence that was too deep for words to what he sought. Gaveston looked up with delight at its grim Gothic facade as they passed through its portal. What a city! Even the post offices here were beautiful, he reflected, and dim.

Without hesitation he demanded a telegraph form, and wrote:

Lady Penhaligon 99 Half Moon Street Mayfair. The Spires are still dreaming Gav.

He handed it to the girl. She glanced askance at the clock.

“It’s the last telegram we’re taking to-night,” she said.

“And the most beautiful, is it not?” added Gav, while she ticked over the jewelled words with her lamentably workaday pencil.

“Twelve,” she murmured with the most engaging of lisps. “That will be a shilling.”

“Oh, Half Moon without a hyphen, please,” corrected Gaveston beseechingly.

“But that’ll make it one and a penny,” she looked up with surprise.

“Quite,” said Gav conclusively, and paid. And as the two friends strolled back towards their college, he explained to David how it had long been a principle with him always to exceed the authorized allowance of words.

He was that sort of person.