Читать книгу The Oxford Circus - Raymond Mortimer - Страница 7

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Next evening, steeped in the puce and russet dusk of an Oxford twilight, Gaveston sat meditatively enframed in his mullioned window. It was well-nigh the hour for his first dinner in his college Hall; already, from the insistent belfries of the remoter colleges the fateful seven strokes were shattering with their clangorous curfew the vespertinal peace of the entranced city.

But his mood was one of delicious recueillement. Unlike so many of his fellow-freshmen, whose savoir-faire was sadly to seek, Gaveston had donned neither dinner jacket nor tails, but over one shoulder of his well-cut Norfolk coat had negligently flung a simple but carefully torn commoner’s gown. He, of all men, could surely face sans apprehension the ordeal of a first public appearance in Wallace.

And the Wallace manner? But Gaveston had no need to worry over how best to acquire the famous manner, at once the jest and paragon of every cabinet since Balfour’s, of every chancellory from Berlin to Uganda. No, that far-flung triumph of the collegiate system was a stuff bred in the very marrow of the ffoulis’s bones. Why, only that morning he had been obliged to remind the President of the college of that fact. And he smiled as he recalled the trifling but significant incident—how the venerable scholar had peered up at him from his pile of matriculation papers.

“I … er … liked your essay, Mr. ffoulis,” he had said, with no doubt the kindliest of intentions, “very much. In fact I almost think … er … you were made for … er … Wallace.”

But Gav had replied with caustic courtesy.

“I almost think Wallace was made for me, sir.”

And in a few well-chosen phrases he had reminded the President that the males of his family on the distaff side had matriculated there ever since the days (he had rightly hesitated to qualify them as spacious) of Elizabeth, that four of his ancestral portraits were hung upon the dark[2] oak panelling of the Wallace Hall, that a slender but conspicuous lancet-window in Wallace Chapel was blazoned with his gules argent, that——

[2] The oak of Wallace Hall is curiously pale (Lit. Exec.).

But enough! That was the bell. Gaveston left his window seat, and slowly crossed the arboreous lawns towards the creeper-clad steps of that historic Hall.

Yes, for him alone amid that nervously jostling crowd of freshmen, to dine in this Hall that had nurtured the rulers and sages of England down the fairest centuries of her fame, was an experience both homely and familiar. It was something as easily acceptable as, say, luncheon in that white-panelled breakfast-room in Half Moon Street, with his own mother’s dear delightful vaguenesses floating musically across the rose-laden table. (“Gav dear, if you weren’t so clever, I’d love you so much more!”—“And if you weren’t so stupid, Mother dearest, I’d love you so much less!”—He remembered their tirelessly enchanting badinage over the gold-rimmed coffee cups down long summer afternoons. …)

For, after all was said and done, the great secret of Wallace was to be surprised at nothing. And Gaveston never was. It was with him an instinct (atavistic, he supposed).

So, even on his first night in Hall, he had finished the four solid but wholesome courses of the College dinner (“commons” weren’t they called?) long before any at the freshmen’s table. For him no need to look about with curiosity or awe, or to gaze with furtive respect at the High Table, with the berserk figure of the President muttering its truncated grace, and still less to attempt acquaintance with the gauche nonentities whom, or “which” as he said to himself with a quiet smile, chance had set upon his either hand.

Unduly reserved? No: Gaveston overflowed with the ffoulis charm, that fastidious and subtle essence which this Hall had savoured so often during the past four centuries. Even the stocky spectacled youth next but one on his right could not but sense that.

“Wonder who that chap is?” Gaveston heard him whisper to his vis-à-vis.

“I think his name is Foulis,” came the low respectful answer.

“ffoulis,” corrected Gav silkily, with the gentlest of smiles. And the incident closed.

But it was enough to show his quality. And the mot was bruited around the whole of Wallace that night before Old Tom had boomed and boomed his hundred strokes and one over the starlit spires and Athenian groves of the dream-bound colleges.[3]

[3] i.e., by 9.15 p.m. (Lit. Exec.)

Gaveston rose, distressed, but not surprised, at the scout’s omission to bring red pepper for his savoury. His neighbours, still toying with the sweet, watched with ill-concealed surprise and some envy the ease with which he drew up his figure from the awkward constriction of the long oaken bench, and the slender but masculine grace of his carriage as he paced alone towards the door.

Alone he descended the Hall steps into the cool evening air. Through the fast-gathering dusk the beetling walls flamed distantly with the fiery Virginia creeper lambent upon their crumbling stone. Underfoot, the first-fallen leaves of October lisped and whispered in a soft-stirring night-wind, and overhead a few late rooks were fluttering darkly from branch to branch. Thus had they fluttered, he reflected, just so long as the golden light had gushed forth from the high windows of Wallace Hall, and so would they flutter, ageless and perennial, over the heads of generations still unweaned and yet unborn. The Wallace rooks … nothing could affright them, nothing surprise them. … They, too, had found the secret.

Dinner was over, but the night held further possibilities. There was still the Dean.

But no one, of course, called him the Dean.

No one of consequence called him by his own name even. The name of Archibald Arundel was all but unknown in Oxford. It appeared occasionally on lecture lists, and sometimes over an article, charged with learning and grace, in one of the quarterlies. Postmen and college porters knew it, and at the foot of staircase XXXIV, which crept spirally up an ivy-clad tower, the surprising legend was still decipherable, in faint letters of an outworn mode, constant amid the ever-changing list above and below it—

6. MR. ARUNDEL.

But Mongo!

Who didn’t know who Mongo was? Who in Oxford? Who in England? In all Asia and in all Africa? Who indeed? And Gaveston of course knew that one ought to call on Mongo well within one’s first week. It was of prime importance for any Wallace fresher to be known from the first as a Mongoon—for such was the name given to the brilliant and elegant group of undergraduates who used Mongo as their confidant and his rooms as their idling-place.

And Gav had been careful, that very afternoon, to obtain from David Paunceford, himself a deservedly popular Mongoon, some essential facts of this celebrated cénacle and its godfather.

But how hard they were to come by!

No one could tell why Archibald Arundel was called Mongo. Even Mongo did not know. And now, of all his contemporaries who might have been able to dissipate the obscuring mists of etymology, none were surviving.

“Men of my year?” Mongo would say, a little sadly, when his freshmen friends asked about old days at Wallace. “But you’re all men of my year.” And his strange elusive smile made every one believe him.

No one knew his age, but the years lay light upon Mongo as dew upon a rose. His round pink face bore scarcely a wrinkle and certainly not one crowsfoot. His curly golden locks had just the faintest flecking of silver about the temples, and his enemies were bitter enough to allege that these few grey hairs were false. His smile was free and open as a young boy’s, and his voice seemed hardly to have lost its adolescent uncertainties for more than a few happy months.

Every day, wet or fine, Mongo might be seen moving blithely about Wallace, the college that had known him in its quadrangles as matriculand and freshman, as fellow and tutor, as junior dean and Rickaby Lecturer, as acting-bursar and at the last as Dean.

Often enough he was mistaken for an undergraduate. It may have been his clothes, with their deceptive air of callowness. Who knows? But innocent strangers who looked through the albums of college groups would often point to one constant figure as the quintessential undergraduate of his period.

“How typical!” they would comment, pointing to Mongo in the group of Hilary term, 1843.

“How typical!” pointing to the, yes, distinctly but temporarily whiskered Mongo of 1879.

“How typical!” as they admired the négligé of his flannel “bags” of 1907.

“Wonder why this young man wasn’t doing his bit,” they would say querulously when they turned over and found him forming, together with the aged President and a neutral student from Liberia, the group of 1917.

Dear Mongo!

David had warned Gaveston that twenty minutes to eleven was generally considered the “right” hour of the evening to knock for the first time at the door of the sempiternal Dean. But for his first visit, modestly postponed until his second night, Gav was careful of effect.

He waited until all the divergent clocks of Oxford had heralded the full three-quarters before he crossed towards the kindly red glow of the curtained embrasure behind which the recognized Mongoons were already gathered. Stopping for a moment by the Hall steps, he rehearsed the intimate smile and the easy hand-wave that would of a surety ingratiate him with Mongo and the Mongoons on this entry into a circle where youth and charm and wit were indeed familiar, but Gaveston ffoulis something new.

It would do. Spirally he climbed the turret staircase.

“Come in!” came the welcoming cry of half a dozen eager guests who responded to his discreet but confident knock.

He obeyed.

So that was Mongo!

The famous don, as usual, was curled like a beautiful cat[4] on the hob. With soft plump hands he clasped his dilapidated slippers, his golden head was bowed over his chest, his frayed shirt-sleeves delightfully visible, his chubby knees showed through the worn flannel trousers which had looked so smart in the mid-Edwardian groups.

[4] Other novelists have respectively described this invaluable character as crouching like an opossum, a satyr, a panther, or perched like a canary, a vulture, an angel. A few, less successful, have denied or pretended to ignore his existence. Mr. Budd has found a singularly happy mean. (Lit. Exec.)

“Dear Mongo!” called Gaveston, picking his way over the outstretched legs of four fifth-year Mongoons on the shabby sofa.

Mongo uncurled.

“Gaveston,” he answered, with a quick amber light in his eyes. “Welcome, thrice welcome. You all know each other, of course.” And he waved a vague hand round the circle of the Mongoons.

There was a silence as Gav sat down beside the others on the sofa. But he felt no shyness—he even poured out for himself a glass of his host’s famous barley-water, a drink which the Mongoons for years had loyally affected to enjoy. And the brilliant conversation resumed its nightly flow as he held up his glass to the light, sipped it, and lay back to survey this room which he was at last seeing in all its reality.

Yes, it was all even as had been foretold him. There they were, the myriad profile photographs of Mongoons past and present, crowding the wall space from floor to ceiling, but still (Gav was pleased to notice) with a few vacant places; and there the serried rows of lendable books; there, too, the great expanse of writing table stacked shoulder-high with letters from still-living Mongoons in every embassy, legation and consulate of the civilized world.

DEAR MONGO

The talk buzzed on around him. How redolent of Wallace it seemed, virile, hard-hitting and pithy, generous, too, and all-embracing. Several of the older school of epigrammatists seemed to be of the party; their rapier wits flashed across the shadowy room.

“I hear Bill Wallingford’s standing for the Tories in this Yorkshire election,” some one threw out, apparently at random.

The world of high politics was obviously a preserve of the Mongoons.

“Easy enough to stand,” came the lightning reply from some one else in deep shadow, “it’s to sit that’s the difficulty.”

“Splendid,” Gav murmured in fine appreciation. He was feeling even more at home now. Somehow he felt he could show his mettle in this company. And he did.

For a time Mongo said little. But at last he turned to his modest guest.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you since you were being coached for Eton, Gaveston. Years and years ago. But you haven’t changed.” It was a long speech for Mongo, but Gav was awake to its possibilities. Rising, he faced the crowded Mongoons, his back to the blazing hearth, a memorable figure. It was obvious that he was about to speak.

“No, Mongo,” he began, in firm even tones. “Not changed. …” And with all the exquisite modulations and gestures of a born conversationalist, he went on. “For beauty is something constant and unchanging, is it not? Aspects may come and aspects may go, but the essence of beauty is stable and established, indestructible and indeciduous, in art or in life, in life or in art, and indeed in both.”

It was a daring thesis. The ghost of a shudder rose from the most hardened Mongoons. But the ffoulis charm carried it off, and with graceful learning he developed his theme.

“There is fashion in the beauty of women, is there not? Now it is fixed by Angelo or Angelico, now by Cimabue or Ruysdael, Augustus John or Augustus Egg—all have their day, but beneath the shifting sands lies always the eternal lodestone.”

And without a pause, without a flaw, he kept the even tenour of his delightful argument, his hearers sitting in enraptured complaisance. Occasionally from the hob came the subtle encouragements of dear Mongo, every ten minutes perhaps, or even more seldom after two o’clock had clanged out over the sleeping roofs of this wonderful city. …

“Delightful, Gaveston!”

“Wonderful, Gav!”

The eager congratulations of the Mongoons still rang gratefully in his ears as he felt his way down the turret staircase of XXXIV. Only five hours ago he had climbed it, an unknown potentiality in Wallace: he descended to find himself a Mongoon and famous. And now, how quiet and dark lay the quad before him! It seemed almost to be expectant, to be waiting for something astounding and prodigious to break in upon its alabaster dream. The dawn? Gaveston wondered as he walked back to his rooms, or … or … ?

What a night it had been!

The manner! And Mongo!

Well and truly had the foundation been laid for the quiet unobtrusive success of his first term at Wallace. He held high his head. And then, passing by the groined door of the Old Library, he flung wide his arms to the stars.

“Youth!” he cried in the stillness. “Youth! Youth! Youth!”