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Title: The Oxford Circus: A Novel of Oxford and Youth

Author: Hamish Miles

Raymond Mortimer

Illustrator: John Kettelwell

Release date: October 31, 2015 [eBook #50358]

Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OXFORD CIRCUS: A NOVEL OF OXFORD AND YOUTH ***

THE OXFORD CIRCUS

“’ULLO, DEARIE!”

THE OXFORD CIRCUS

A NOVEL OF OXFORD AND YOUTH

by the late ALFRED BUDD

Edited with Memoir but no Portrait by

HAMISH MILES AND

RAYMOND MORTIMER

ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN KETTELWELL

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED

LONDON VIGO STREET W.1.                MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

None of the characters in this book are entirely imaginary.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

PAGE

ALFRED BUDD: A MEMOIR

3

BOOK I: VORTEX

I

INTROIT

13

II

PLINTH

29

III

TOCCATA AND FUGUE

47

IV

CIRCEAN

62

V

GUERRILLA

76

VI

VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE

90

VII

JOSS AND REREDOS

97

VIII

HALLALI

121

BOOK II: APEX

IX

EKLOGOS

137

X

OPEN DIAPASON

151

XI

SPATE

164

XII

FUNAMBULESQUE

181

XIII

CHAMPAIGN

198

XIV

COLOPHON

222

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“’Ullo, Dearie!”

Frontis

FACING PAGE

“Dear Mongo!”

42

“Non à tout,” was Gaveston’s answer

134

Spiritual wrestling with young Bob Limber

184

“Bladge!” came the unanimous cry

214

“Renan,” he replied firmly

234

THE OXFORD CIRCUS

Alfred Budd: A Memoir

Entrusted with the literary remains of the late Alfred Budd, we think it fitting to provide the reading public, however briefly and inadequately, with some particulars of his life. They are, alas, only too few (Fate saw to that), but they may serve to indicate those forces of heredity and environment which worked to produce his remarkable novel, The Oxford Circus.

Alfred, as he was known to his intimates, was himself inclined to believe that, in some bygone age, a noble ancestor of his had founded the South Devon sea-side resort of Budleigh Salterton, where one summer he himself spent a happy fortnight. But our own researches[1] have disclosed no earlier trace of his family until Hosea Budd appears, in mid-Victorian days, as a general dealer in the pretty Flintshire village of Llwynphilly. He prospered, and his only son Albert, soon after taking Orders in the Church of England, took to wife Megan Meard, the daughter of a Shropshire corn-factor. The sole issue of this happy union was a boy, christened Alfred Hosea, after his two grandfathers—the future author of The Oxford Circus. The Meards, it is interesting to note, boasted a Huguenot origin, and from this strain perhaps was derived our author’s keen appreciation of the language and culture of France.

[1] We should like here to acknowledge the devoted help afforded us at the Public Records Office by Miss Agatha Anderleigh, B.Litt., than whom England has no more experienced genealogist.

Too delicate by far to be sent to boarding school, Alfred Budd was educated at home by his father, then and still the perpetual curate of Widdleswick, Salop. The boy’s mother unfortunately died while he was still but twelve summers old, but we understand that her influence lived after her, and that her son paid fitting tribute to her pious memory in his charming pen-portrait of Lady Julia Penhaligon.

The lad showed promise. Through the kindness of Sir Pontefract Gribble, the village Squire, he was enabled to browse in the well-stocked library of Widdleswick Manor. That he did not waste this splendid opportunity of reading both widely and wisely, not least in the domain of the contemporary novel, readers of his own, alas, posthumous, work of fiction will soon feel confident.

But how did Mr. Budd come to write the present volume? the reader may well be tempted to inquire. The circumstances have a melancholy interest all their own.

The Rev. Albert Budd had destined his only son to follow him into the ministry of the Church, and so, at the age of seventeen, the boy (for he was no more) was sent to Oxford to compete for an open exhibition at St. Edmund’s Hall. What happened? Perhaps his fragile health had handicapped him in the stern race; perhaps he had devoted too much attention to Sir Pontefract’s collection of modern fiction, and hardly enough to the more apposite writings of Aristotle and Euclid and Origen. Be that as it may, Alfred was unsuccessful in the examination, and, after three whole days in the University city, he left Oxford, as it turned out, for ever.

But those three days left an indelible impression upon his quick imagination.

The leaven worked, and while studying with a view to a second attempt in the next autumn, he devoted his leisure hours to the composition of The Oxford Circus. His incurable weakness in mathematics, however, asserted itself more and more during these months, and when the time came round he did not feel that his chances of success justified a second visit. The clerical career, then, was closed to him, and he had perforce to search for other employment.

His quest was soon rewarded. An advertisement inserted in The Times newspaper, under the appropriately chosen sobriquet of “Gaveston,” brought him an offer of work from a famous memory-training institute, which required the services of a representative in the Far East. Success seemed well within his grasp, and in due course he sailed from Cardiff to take up his post in Japan.

The rest is soon told.

To the quiet little vicarage at Widdleswick came a few short letters, bearing strange foreign stamps, and posted at Gibraltar, at Brindisi, at Port Said, and later handed over to us as his literary executors. They told, simply and modestly, of his hopes and fears, his ship mates and their ways, and in one he spoke of his plans for a sequel to The Oxford Circus, itself only completed a very few days before sailing. But it was not to be: dis, as he himself had said with reference to his University career, aliter visum.… For during the always trying passage of the Red Sea, poor Alfred disappeared. He supped, but did not take his place for breakfast. Neither his fellow-passengers nor the captain nor the crew could throw any light on his whereabouts, and it was presumed that he had fallen overboard in the darkness. They further presumed that his fall had been accidental.

Alfred Budd is dead. His readers will be at one with us in regarding his loss as a grave one to English letters. He despised coteries and disliked cliques. He was an honest workman of literature, using none but sound materials, none but well-established models. For its wit, its photographic realism and its daring originality, The Oxford Circus is a first novel of which any publisher might be proud. Its sparkling epigrams, and its vivid portrayal of life in many different strata of our modern society, seem almost unexpected from one who lived so quietly as Mr. Budd. Yet somehow his originality of invention leaves no room for doubt: Budd was perhaps the first novelist to introduce the London and North Western Railway station into a novel of Oxford life. Such a writer had no mean future.

Here and there, in preparing Alfred’s MSS. for the press, we have detected discrepancies which, had he lived, he might have adjusted, subtle touches which he might have amplified, luxuriances which he might have pruned. In respect to his memory, however, we have let these stand. If we have done wrong, we look for pardon from those who remember that, where an old and very deep friendship is concerned, the task of literary execution is no easy one.

H. M.

R. M.

BOOK I

VORTEX

THE OXFORD CIRCUS

CHAPTER I

INTROIT

“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.

CHAPTER II

PLINTH

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!”

CHAPTER III

TOCCATA AND FUGUE

And term was really over then!

Gaveston could hardly believe it. But yet—it must be: already the 3.43 from Oxford had slid through the pale December sunlight past Hinksey Halt, Goring-and-Streatley, and Slough (for Windsor). He had unfolded the still ink-perfumed pages of his Daily Telegraph only to crumple the paper up in exasperation at the bourgeois complacency of its intolerable clichés, and it lay forgotten in a corner of the first-class compartment. No, the frore Chiltern Hills and the willow-shadowed water-meadows had been fitter accompaniment for the rhythm of his musings, playing as they were upon two months dappled with such perplexing patterns of sun-warm happiness and frosty disillusionment.…

This had been but his first term. But nevertheless, with Mongo’s help, he had succeeded in getting himself elected to the Union Society without a single blackball; and after that the other clubs, smaller and less exclusive, had hastened to net in this remarkable freshman. Soon no host had felt his party, whether breakfast or cocoa, to be a real social éclat unless one at least of his guests could enliven the discussion, whether it turned upon the beauties of Beowulf or the existence of a Deity, by the apt quotation of Gaveston ffoulis’s opinion on the point at moot. And Gaveston had soon won a name for himself, too, by the quiet and unostentatious entertaining he had done, receiving the nicer sort of undergraduate now in his Wallace pied-à-terre, now in the quaint but distinctive Cadena grill-room; and his meals were voted by the cordons bleus of the University to be worthy of the best modern Luculli and Mæcenasses.

He had made good.

He lit a plump Turkish cigarette, and lay back to ponder both present and future.

Had this Oxford that he loved anything more to give him, he wondered? Who could tell? Maybe an answer would come from the Babylonian sphinx whose smoky breath he could now see besmirching the virgin sky. Who could tell? But, meanwhile, his thoughts could scarcely move beyond the long-looked for pleasure of once again seeing his mother. She would be waiting for him, he felt sure, at Paddington, and as the train rushed thitherwards he let his mind run ahead of it to feast on the exquisite prospect.…

Yes, Julia, Lady Penhaligon had played a more urgent and immediate rôle in her son’s life than is the privilege of most mothers. And she had her reward. He always chose her hats for her now.

The only daughter of Sir Piers ffoulis, one of the last of the English statesmen, she had been married when but twenty-nine to a famous explorer of the Arctic Seas. An altogether unexpected thawing of the Great Krioquhkho pack-ice, which soon after the wedding he went to survey, brought him back to England a year before his return was anticipated, and he found himself obliged to divorce poor Julia directly after, and indeed on account of, her son’s birth.

But she had drawn consolation from the boy’s eyes, which were already remarkable, and had determined that at all costs he should be beautiful and happy.

“And you’ve succeeded, mother dear,” he would often tell her in a burst of grateful confidence.

Her love, she resolved, would be recompense enough for the cruelty of his fate. She would remain young, no matter what the expense (and it was great), to keep him company, and in the meantime she remarried. But, as the autumn came remorselessly round, she was once more divorced. (Gaveston could still remember her tears when she came up to the night-nursery to tell him how absurdly unreasonable the King’s Proctor had threatened to be that time.…) Then for quite a considerable period she lived in singleness, but, just before Gav was going to Eton, a Baronet had proposed to her. He was old. But, as the precocious boy pointed out, the title was older. And so Mrs. Fünck, as Mums then was, had accepted Sir Evan Penhaligon.

Of Gaveston the baronet was as fond as of the mother, perhaps fonder, and there had been long amazing holidays for the boy in his step-father’s house. It was one of the smallest houses in Mayfair, but, as Gav was fond of saying to his less fortunate friends, that was better than the largest in West Kensington. And he remembered——

But there! That was Ealing! And a moment later the train was slowing down as it curved into Paddington.

And yes! His happiness was complete! He found his mother furrily ensconced in the deep-seated mauve Rolls-Royce.

“I’ve come all, yes, all the way to meet you, Gav,” she whispered between her kisses. “And such a long way it’s been. Why ever don’t we live in—is it Bayswaters they call it? So near this, isn’t it?”

“As absurd as ever, mother, and younger I’m certain.” He thought he had never seen his mother radiant with so ethereal a beauty. “You pet,” he went on, taking her hand, “I never dreamed of your meeting me.”

“But what a lovely blue engine they gave your train, dearest,” and she slipped a cushion in Gaveston’s corner.

Gav nodded to the chauffeur.

“I’ll drive,” he said, and then quickly: “No, I won’t. Home, Curzon.”

And he got inside the luxurious coupé beside Lady Penhaligon. For suddenly he had seen his mother’s sombre eyelids fluttering in that faint pathetic way they had. How helpless, how pitiful that look was! And how terribly familiar! It only appeared when her life had reached one of its great crises.

The car sped from the station.

“And now, dearest, you’ll be able to help me,” Gav heard his mother murmuring as she fumbled in the embossed leather pocket on the door of the car. He felt sure something had happened.

“Not again, Mums?” he asked with a gentle but worldly smile.

“Yes: respondent,” she smiled back. “But, seriously, do you think black is really necessary?” and she handed him a folded copy of The Times.

“I must think it over, mother dear,” and he looked down the familiar column of the paper.

DIVORCE AND ADMIRALTY

Dawkins v. Dawkins and Smithers.

Jones v. Jones and another (Pt. Hd.).

Penhaligon v. Penhaligon, Rosenbaum, Litovski, du Val, Spirella, van Houten, Casablanca and Mahmoud Pasha.

“Next Tuesday, I think they said it was,” said Lady Julia Penhaligon, “and it’s going to mean a new step-dad for you, Gav. Do you prefer one nationality to another? They all have their attractions, you know. I love travelling, though I never went to the Arctic.”

Gaveston was never a Jingo, but unhesitatingly he answered, “English.”[5]

[5] The late Mr. Budd took an active interest in the League of Nations. (LIT. EXEC.)

“I suppose you’re right,” she sighed.

“Yes, Joey Rosenbaum’s certainly the dearest of dears, but so’s his wife really, and then that would mean another case, and how expensive things are getting.… I owe Reville thousands as it is.… Oh, Gav,” she coaxed, “would you mind mon petit du Val? He’s so nice at ordering a dinner—oh, you’d love him.”

Curzon was opening the door.

“Justement comme vous voulez, ma chérie,” said Gav with courtly grace as, arm-in-arm, they went up the steps.

Home again!

The first week of Gaveston’s vacation disappeared in a long whirl of consultations with dressmakers, lawyers, furriers and beauty specialists, on his mother’s behalf, and, on his own, in visits to the photographer and tailor. (There was only one Hugh Cecil and Willy Clarkson, wasn’t there?) Indeed, he hardly found time to have his things packed up (they were leaving Half Moon Street, of course) or even to arrange the flowers of a morning. And then, once again, he found himself at that fateful Paddington, seeing his mother off to Bournemouth, after the successful pronouncement of the decree, her grey eyes shining with a new happiness. And suddenly he felt a terrible loneliness.

“But I shall only be away three or four weeks, Gav dear,” she had said. “And I’m always as happy as a bird with Cousin Adolpha——”

“As a mocking-bird?” Gav had queried laughingly to mask his bitter disappointment at missing for the first time his mother’s companionship at the festive season.

But he had promised to be a good boy, and to treat his dear Uncle Wilkinson with tact.

“You’ve such a lot,” she said wistfully, “and anyway it will be nice for you living in the[6] Albany this cold weather. It was sweet of him to ask you to stay with him for your holidays.”

[6] Sic throughout. A more experienced novelist would doubtless have omitted the “the.” (LIT. EXEC.)

And then the train had pulled out in its ruthless way, almost before he had time to find his way to the door of the reserved Pullman saloon-car, heavy with the scent of the winter-roses he had ordered to be sent from Selfridge’s that morning. How poignant was their sweetness amid the smoke and bustle and jangle of the mammoth terminus!

Gaveston drove the Panhard (it was his favourite) back to Half Moon Street. Already the posters of the evening papers were sprawling in the muddy gutters and flapping in the rain-soaked wind——

PENHALIGON CASE: RESULT.

How sad it all really was, he reflected, beneath the glittering surface, and how nerve-racking those months between the nisi and the absolute. Poor Mums.… Was it rain on the wind-screen that dimmed his view of the lighted street as the great Panhard purred down the Edgware Road, or.… He brushed his eyes, and opened the throttle wider.…

He picked up his suit-cases at the house, and drove round without delay to the Albany Yard.

“Sir Wilkinson ffoulis?” he asked the porter.

“C, sir,” came the answer, “on your right, if you please.”

And C, The Albany, was to be Gav’s address for the rest of this vacation.

Gaveston took care only to meet people of whose peculiarness and uniquity he could be proud, and so he always felt a properly nepotal affection for Sir Wilkinson ffoulis, K.V.O. A diplomat, now retired, he had been en poste at Reijkavik, Quito, Adis Ababa, and Cayenne. “And after that,” the veteran would say, casting up his eyes to the Angelica Kauffmann ceiling of the St. James’s Club, “I was fifteen months en disponibilité, pressin’ my claims to a chargéship in Pesth or Janeiro. They offered me Albania. I preferred the Albany.”

Wilkinson had his share of the dry ffoulis wit.

“Milord receives,” said Hekla, the Icelandic valet. He showed Gaveston into a room decorated exclusively with signed photographs of the various royalties whom Sir Wilkinson had been able to serve in those directions for which he had an all but unique talent, and which formed a very frequent subject for his reflection and reminiscence.

“Glad you’ve come, m’ boy,” he said heartily. “I think you’ll be comfortable here while your mother’s away, and, gad! you’ll brighten up the old place for me. I feel so diablement disoccupato, y’ know,” he went on meditatively, “but I’ll enjoy helpin’ you to find your feet in town. Don’t suppose you’ve seen much of the green-rooms yet, eh?”

Gaveston made a deprecating gesture.

“But look here: there’s a little Spanish gal singin’ at the Col. just now … remember once the King of the Belgians, the old ’un … the Ludwigstrasse tried to get hold of her then … ended as a Principessa … but old Leopold sent me that photograph all the same.” And the old fellow chuckled.

Gaveston knew all his uncle’s stories, and only listened at intervals: they were more interesting like that.

“Thanks immensely, Uncle Wilkie,” he replied. “Awfully thoughtful of you. But I want to think things over first.”

“Young devil…! Want to drive your own wagon, eh?”

“Shan’t hitch it to a Star, though,” flashed Gaveston.

“He! he! Good lad! Gad! you’re a ffoulis all right. Quel garçon!” and with a laugh that he had learned from the accounts of those who had known the Marquess of Steyne, the old rake donned his beaver-hat and started on his quotidian round of the more exclusive clubs.

But as he went out of the door he threw Gaveston a latch-key.

“Catch, m’ boy!” he called to him.

CHAPTER IV

CIRCEAN

And then, in glowing crowded processional, there came for Gaveston a marvellous cavalcade of days and nights in the great metropolis of Empire.

Through the cheerful, childlike bustle of Yuletide, through the chilled, sober, resolute days of New Year, and on to the gay bachelor party which Uncle Wilkinson gave (at Verrey’s, of course) to some of his old colleagues on Twelfth Night, the great book of London opened before him, ateem with strange riddles and alembications.

And what a book! The restless cross-currents of its fantastic figurantes flickered against the dim background of streets with cinematographic speed; and the darting limelight of his imagination would pick out by hazard, here some dark Rembrandtesque intaglio, there some half-perceived and evanescent torso, pearls from this hitherto uncharted sea which now he had to plumb with the magic theodolite of Youth, until at last all the mystery of London should stand revealed to his ardent gaze, as clear as was the mystery of that other City of his life, where, dulcet among the listening spires, hovered the plangent, reverberant bells.…

And so, armed only with a copy, bound in soft dove-grey leather, of A Wanderer in London, Gav would sally forth from the Albany of a morning on magnificent explorations of this astounding new world that awaited his conquest, now threading its equatorial jungles, now penetrating to its uttermost poles, now standing Cortes-like on the very summit of Constitution Hill. Until now he had moved only in the circumscribed orbit of his mother’s Mayfair “set.” But now he could freely climb into the handy taxicab, or on to the humble, but oh! how instructive ’bus, and boldly drive whithersoever his daring imagination might suggest.

“All the way, please, my man,” he would say to the conductors, as to the manner born, handing always a new florin. “No, keep the change.” He seldom passed unnoticed.

Wood Green and Newington Butts were startled on one day by the vision of this Apollonian creature striding in his proud beauty adown their dim byways; next day it was the turn of Tulse Hill and Hornsey Rise to know a second dawn, and then perhaps a sudden light brightened the lives of the obscure denizens of Poultry.

His keen eye soon noticed that ’busses had numbers.

“Really? Really? Is that so?” Uncle Wilkie had asked incredulously as they sat together in the Albany waiting to see in the New, and, as it turned out, so eventful, Year.[7]

[7] This would make the exact date of this interesting incident December 31st. (LIT. EXEC.)

“Yes, isn’t it quaint?” nodded Gaveston. “And to-morrow I’m going to take a Number 1, and the day after that a Number 2, and so on till I really know my London.”

And the old rake roared at the lad’s witty caracoling.

One evening, too, when Gaveston, a trifle tired but still alert in every faculty, came back from one of these marvellous expeditions, his uncle greeted him in the Albany colonnade.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t. It’s beyond belief, m’ boy!”

“What can that be, uncle?” asked Gaveston with smiling calm.

“Is it true what they’re saying in the clubs to-day, that you’ve been across every single bridge in London?”

“Quite true,” he replied, with deprecating modesty. “And through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, too,” he added quietly.

And the old adventurer, whose eyes had gazed upon so many and so foreign cities, was silent, seeing of a sudden that youth must have its day nor will be gainsaid.

But despite his triumphs, Gaveston was not completely satisfied. What did it all mean to him, this blazing, roaring Babylon? How was it all to fit into the intricate mosaic of élan and flair and verve that made up the essential ffoulis. London and Oxford.… Oxford and London.…

“They seem irreconcilable,” he whispered to himself one evening as he stood adream by the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, the high tide of humanity plashing in dusky waves about him.

But were they?

And with a touch of elfin phantasy all his own, he interchanged in his robust imagination the two sculptured monuments of these two irreconcilable cities, and hey presto!—below the monacal mullions of Wallace he perceived the ever-tiptoe Eros, aiming his darts with fatal strategy at the haunters of those mediæval shadows and destroying in a night an austerity that was the handiwork of unnumbered centuries—while here, round the transplanted Martyrs’ Memorial the flower-sellers would cease their raucousness, and the struggling painted crowd their Neronian debauchery, awed into silence before the steepling and pinnacled emblem of Oxford’s and England’s rejection of the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills.…

“Vi’lets, sweet vi’lets … all fresh.… Buy a bunch, kind sir!” the shrill cockney voice had floated to his ears from the pedestal behind him.

He threw the poor wretch a sovereign, and hurried over to Regent Street, fearing the embarrassing cordiality of her humble gratitude.[8]

[8] Mr. Budd, when asked to record in his friends’ albums his favourite proverb, would always inscribe Noblesse Oblige. (LIT. EXEC.)

But how was this evening, almost his last before term began, to be spent? He pondered a moment as he stood in the flare of the shouting sky-signs. What a day of rich and original imaginings it had been! Heedless of time, he had wandered round and round the Surrey Docks, watching the ships and the men of the ships. All afternoon his thoughts had set sail with those Levantine brigantines as they fared forth in silence down to the open sea, and had followed them to strange and hidden ports of Cathay and Samarkand; and in imagination he had charged their cavernous holds with who knows what marvellous cargoes of spikenard and julep, attar and bergamot, and with what heavy carven chests of teak and sandalwood, stuffed with the blinding glory of onyx and sard, of beryl and jacinth and peridot, of the girasole shining green in the sun and red in the moon, and the zircon which drives mad the Lybian antelopes that look upon it in the spring, of the wan crapawd, the cabochon and the obsidian, and with carcanets of sapphire and torques of purest spinel.…

But was it safe thus to give free rein to his luxuriant imaginings? Might he not be too utterly original, too bizarre, thus wandering down paths of uncharted beauty until perhaps he find himself bemused and bemazed, lost to the kindly familiar realms of real life?

He might, he reflected, he might. And he remembered how his mother had only taught him the simpler fairy tales, lest the magic lore should pervade his amazing imagination too fully, and make of his very precocity a snare and a gin.

And as he paced the crescent curve of Regent Street in these musings, he reached the Café Régale.

The Café Régale!

To this door, of all doors, had Providence guided him that evening. Here surely was the answer that he sought from the mighty Sphinx! Here, if anywhere, might he find that perfect and subtle synthesis of Oxford and London, of London and Oxford!

Of the Café and its inhabitants, and of its paramount significance in the life of our time, Gaveston had already heard much, and read more. Monty Wytham, most rusé of the Mongoons, had lowered his voice in speaking of it one night in far-away Wallace. Bold must the spirit be, and heedless of bourgeois condemnation, to actually affront so perilous a haunt after dark!

But Gaveston, though alone, was undismayed. Undeceived, true Londoner that he was, by the golden word

NICHOLS

emblazoned above the portal, he gave a determined push to the fateful revolving door. As its well-oiled sweep threw him into the fantastical lobby within, he reflected how often these very panels had revolved before the push of hands famous the world over for their cunning over marble and bronze, for the eloquent pens they wielded, for their intricate mastery of brush and easel, and of hands celebrated alas! only for their own manicured and expensive selves. How often indeed! But now it had known a new revolution! And he laughed at the unspoken quip as he walked towards the smoke-room.

Gaveston pushed open the innermost swing-door, fully realizing that this was perhaps his most crucial entry since that first evening in Mongo’s room, and for a moment he stood there, not indeed in any uncertainty, but in conscious appraisal of the spectacle that met his eyes.

A spectacle indeed!

For lo! athwart a score of rococo mirrored walls the dazzling lights answered each other in optical strophe and antistrophe. Incredible perspectives of painted ceiling with moulded garlands of gold, were upheld by bowed, silent caryatides, about whose bare gilded breasts hovered voluptuously the dim blue smoke of scented cigarettes that rose incense-like from the worshippers of pleasure below. From the thronged marble tables rose the heady, deadly fumes of wine and drugs—a mad clinking of glasses—a fierce rattling of hypodermic syringes—a Babel of tongues—wild hectic laughter—an undercurrent of whispers of dark intrigue and nameless insinuation—and there was a stall where French novels were openly for sale.…

“La Bohème!” he said instinctively to himself. But here reality had surely out-Murgered Puccini or Balfe.

From one plush-covered seat, where half-a-dozen picturesque figures sat, men and women jowl by cheek, he caught the wildest of foreign oaths.

“Certes!”

“Pardi!”

“Je m’en f … de ce b … là!”

“N … d’un n…!”

And many another untranslatable audacity that could only be conveyed by the vitriolic pen of a Zola or a Willy.

From a table on his right came sinister mutterings.

“But how can he quit the country, Bill? D’you think there aren’t any ’tecs at Dover Harbour?”

“My G——! Harry, I wish I’d never touched the stuff!”

Dope, no doubt, reflected Gaveston sadly.

Farther over, near a respectable-looking door labelled GRILL ROOM, sat a group of hideous old satyrs playing, apparently, dominoes. But the deep ravages of time and disease had seared their absinthe-rotted faces too terribly for Gaveston to be deceived by their pretence of childish pastime, and he tiptoed discreetly over to see whether he might not catch some of their conversation, muffled though it obviously was.

Yes, he could hear the raucous whispering of their broken English.

“Oh, dere’s a market all right. And so I took seex of ’em at t’ree t’ousan’ francs—F.O.B., of course.”

“F.O.B., of course,” nodded his accomplice with a smile, and Gaveston looked down at the couple, fascinated by their strange redolence of sin. What vileness, he wondered, were the old traffickers discussing in their thievish cabalistic slang?[9]

[9] Mr. Budd’s sense of picturesque detail occasionally led him astray, though never more than is pardonable in a young novelist. As a close neighbour of the great industrial North of England, he would have been deeply interested to know that the gentlemen he here portrays in a somewhat sinister light are in reality the London representatives of two of the most prominent textile houses of Lille, a city which has been wittily (though not by Mr. Budd) described as the “Manchester of France.” (LIT. EXEC.)

But his reflections were broken with an unexpectedness worthy of the scene. Suddenly he felt a hand touch his shoulder.

Who could it be?

He turned.

CHAPTER V

GUERRILLA

“Why, Monty!” he cried delightedly.

For, yes, it was Monty Wytham, of all people! The fastest of the Mongoons!

“You’re dining here, Gav?” asked the other with easy calm.

“Why, of course, if you are.”

“I always dine here.” Monty spoke with a certain solemnity.

“I’d heard that, Monty, but I didn’t know whether——”

“No,” smiled Monty, a little sadly. “People never will believe the worst of me. That’s my tragedy, Gav.”

“And they never believe the best of me,” said Gaveston. “That’s mine, you know.”

“You’ll go down well in the Café, Gav. Your wit is so Gyp-like, mon brave.”

“Well, oughtn’t we to dine together?” Gav asked.

“Perhaps we ought: it seems an ideal combination somehow. We might work out a synthetic creed of the Best and the Worst,” he added over his shoulder, turning to lead the way towards the dining tables at the further end of the room.

“It would pass the evening, at any rate.”

“And it might amuse Raoul,” said Monty, rather tentatively.

“Might it?”

“Possibly. He needs amusing, especially just now, you know. But I forgot—you don’t know Raoul?”

“Not from Wallace, is he?”

“Heavens, no!” and Monty smiled. “Oh, he’s—well, I’ve known him about the smoke-room for years back.”

Gaveston could scarcely have borne the tone of superiority in his friend’s voice had these words been uttered in less unfamiliar surroundings. But here Monty was evidently a par excellence habitué, and in the frankly Bohemian atmosphere, Gaveston was ready to make allowances.

“I must introduce you then.”

They had come to a corner table where a plump young man of twenty-two or twenty-three was seated, poring over the gilt-edged price-list.[10] As the pair stopped in front of him, he slowly raised his crisp, curly hair, and peered over the top of the card with the characteristic black beady eyes of a Frenchman.

[10] Mr. Budd has employed an expressive anglicization of the customary but hackneyed “menu.” (LIT. EXEC.)

“An Oxford friend of mine, Raoul,” said Wytham. “Mr. Gaveston ffoulis. Monsieur Raoul du Val.…”

A queer prescience made Gaveston refrain from proffering his hand. He only bowed to the rising figure of Monty’s friend. Somehow that name seemed familiar … somehow.… Where could he have heard it? Had Uncle Wilkie got a new story? Or what was it?

They sat down. A waiter hovered expectant. The maître d’hôtel stood near by watching them, stroking his beard in his nervousness. Gav’s personality was compelling in the most unlikely surroundings.

“This is my friend’s first dinner here, Raoul,” said Monty. “So I’d better leave it to you. You’re so good at ordering a dinner, you know.”

And Gaveston remembered. Of course! Of course! Du Val! He saw again his mother’s eyelids fluttering under the lamps of the flitting Bayswater streets as the Rolls Royce purred through the foggy December morning only a few weeks ago. Poor Mums!

Well, he would say nothing. But he could watch; it was a great opportunity. Perhaps he had been too filially swift in acquiescing so easily to his mother’s choice?

“I must think it out carefully, then,” said du Val with a quick smile as he resumed his study of the card.

“Do,” was Gaveston’s neatly ironic reply.

And meantime, while du Val’s attention roved about the amazing dishes set forth for his choice, Monty did not hesitate to point out to Gaveston some few of the famous figures of this new and delirious world upon which he had now stumbled.

“That’s Adolphus Jack, of course, and Aaron Einstein further over. And there’s little Chou-chou Wilkins: such a dear! She always wears those black earrings since she did in poor Boris Zemstvo after the Victory Ball—you remember.”

Gaveston nodded. The ffoulises took pride in their knowledge of things mondains.

“And behind Jack, who’s that?”

“Oh, that’s the painter fellow, Tierra del Fuego—you know.”

Gaveston nodded. He was calm, but it was profoundly moving to a man of his sensitive social perceptibilities thus to see gathered together in so small a space so many of the world’s master minds. Yet already his own personality was making itself felt. From the crowded tables he could hear murmurs of delighted surprise floating across.

“Qui est-ce qui que ça?” came the gay inquiry of a marvellous coquette whose wild capriccii had been the thème of every boulvardier for maint jour.

“Kolossal! Ach, was für gemütlichkeit!” came the guttural answer of her cavalier.

“Chout katinka petroushka!!” muttered a famous Muscovite ikonographer in open-eyed admiration, and pointed a stubby forefinger towards Gaveston in his simple moujik manner.

“Ready yet, Raoul?” asked Monty, raising his voice to be audible above the veritable Babel of praising tongues.

“It’s ze fish I’m puzzled about, Monty,” said du Val. “Ortolans à la Milanaise are excellent here, but isn’t it just a shade early in the year to get zem at zeir best? A fisherman at Capri told me once that before February zey.…”

But Gaveston did not listen to what the fisherman had said. This was enough for him. All he knew was that his mother simply hated ortolans à la Milanaise. (“So cloying, Gav dearest,” he remembered her wistful expression when he had suggested them once in Monte—or was it Mentone—and how the scented wind from the terrace had stirred his golden locks: he couldn’t have been more than four at the time.) No, this must be the test for Raoul du Val. If the fellow were really in love with poor Mums, he could not possibly eat ortolans à la Milanaise. And with stepfathers, reflected Gav, one cannot be too careful.

“Well, let Gaveston decide,” said Monty, and there was a moment of pregnant silence.

Gaveston smiled at his companions.

“Do you like them, Monsieur du Val?” he asked, with every appearance of disinterestedness.

“Passionately, Monsieur ffoulis,” replied the Frenchman.

“I,” said Gaveston, “cannot eat them.” And after a pause he added, simply, “My mother hates them.”

Du Val looked surprised.

“But I zink we’ll risk zem, all ze same,” he said, and gave his order to the waiter.

Instantly Gaveston beckoned to the maître d’hôtel.

“Two telegraph forms and a sheet of carbon paper,” he ordered, with quiet, determined voice.

“Certainly, sir.”

They were brought.

“You excuse me a moment,” said Gaveston, and, adjusting the carbon with his own hands, scribbled a few lines with his gold-mounted pencil.

“Take this,” he said to the maître d’hôtel. “See that it’s sent off at once. Eighteen words—that’ll be one and sixpence. You can keep the change.” He handed him the topmost form, and the borrowed carbon paper, and folding up the duplicate placed it in his breast pocket.

“And now let us proceed with the feast,” he said brightly, as the waiter set out the hors d’œuvres on the table.

The feast proceeded. The fate-laden ortolans appeared in due course, and disappeared. Du Val was delighted with them, and invoked curses upon the foreboding Capriote, but Gaveston contented himself filially with a simple dish of cod. Whilst the party were dallying over the delicious croûte-au-pot which du Val had chosen as a savoury, a broad-shouldered attendant struggled painfully up to their corner, now the cynosure of every eye,[11] bearing the marble top of a table.

[11] The phrase is borrowed from the writings of J. Milton (1608-1674). (LIT. EXEC.)

“For you, sir,” he gasped to Gaveston, who looked up with that indefinable air of one long bred to face the adulations of the public. The fellow held the table-top mirror-wise to the young man.

What was his delight to see pencilled upon it three altogether admirable drawings of himself, profile, full-face and abstract, and signed each, with a few words of homage, by an artist whose slightest brushstroke was law. A simple, but touching, tribute.

“More here, sir,” said another waiter, who bore manfully an even larger marble slab.

Gaveston leaned forward. Yes, it was gratifying. Two poems were pencilled upon it, addressed to the beautiful stranger in the midst, a ballade by a poet whose name had been on every lip full thirty years agone, the other a vers libre, by one whose fame and fortune are safe for full thirty years to come.

Turning, Gaveston smiled and waved a kindly gesture of gratitude to his admirers, and calmly stirred his coffee. The waiter bore off his precious burdens to the cloak-room.

“You must have them packed up and sent down to Lady Penhaligon,” laughed Monty.

Du Val started.

“Lady Penhaligon!” he cried hoarsely, “Lady Penhaligon? And what may she be to you, sir?”

A scene seemed inevitable, but the ffoulis tact came to save the terrifying situation.

“My mother, sir,” Gaveston answered with quiet dignity. “My mother,” he repeated.

Monty’s laugh had frozen when he grasped the position.

“Then you … you … you are my stepson-to-be?” gasped the fortunate one of seven potentials.

“Keep calm, sir, I beg,” said Gaveston sternly. “Let us have no scenes in so public a place.”

“But you are, aren’t you?”

“The relationship is unlikely,” Gav replied, with an oh! how characteristically faint smile. “My mother almost always follows my advice. Would you like to see it? Here it is.”

And drawing from his pocket the duplicate telegram, he passed it to du Val.

Lady Penhaligon Grand Hotel Bournemouth try Spirella instead Du Val wont do passionately fond Ortolans letter follows Love Gav.

Du Val grew sickly pale.

“But it is nineteen words, Monsieur ffoulis. You said eighteen,” he ventured, but he assumed phlegm poorly.

“Duval counts as one,” replied Gaveston frigidly.

It was crushing.

Ortolans … ortolans … the wretched fellow saw his life crashing about him, here in this gilded, glittering Palace of Pleasure.

“Ze boat-train,” he muttered faintly as he rose. He rammed a broad-rimmed sombrero on his head and hurried from the Café.

“Huh!” said Gaveston, looking at his wrist-watch. “He has still time.” And with no tremor of emotion he bade the waiter bring another Bronx.

CHAPTER VI

VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE

Outside the Café door, hard on midnight, Gaveston stood for a moment in delicious hesitation. There had, of course, been hours of dizzily brilliant talk as, one by one, the celebrities of pen and brush and chisel came forward to be presented. And Gaveston had triumphed, superbly. Somehow the evening and its experiences had made life more intricately beautiful, more complex in its manifold possibilities. Would he go back to the Albany by the Vigo Street entrance? Or would he rather walk abroad until dawn came, and then spend an hour in the cold, dim beauty of Covent Garden, watching the great wheeled wains of cauliflowers passing spectral through the morning mists? It was a prospect suddenly seductive in this new mood engendered by the marvellously fin-de-siècle atmosphere of the gilded smoking-room.

“’ullo, dearie!” he heard a timid quavering voice at his elbow. “Waitin’ for anybody in partic’lar?”

He turned quickly.

And the poor draggled little street-walker turned her starved, painted cheeks up to him under the hectic lamplight. A thin rain was drizzling down mercilessly.… A taxicab was cruising slowly along the edge of the pavement.… The street-lamps went on shining impassively.… The darkened houses towered above, secretly, ominously.… How long the night.… How cold the pavement of stone.…

She laid her hand on his arm, wistfully a little, he thought.… Even in those world-weary features there was beauty left.… Something of graciousness and evanescent youth lingered still under the hard Cockney tang of her voice.… What history cowered beneath that monstrous masque of maquillage…?

He would give much to know.…

But afar off, as from some half-forgotten world, he seemed to hear the mellow, golden patterning of bells, bells weaving their intricate spell of beauty about another city than this dark Babel, a City of grave spires and a curving street and quiet immemorial lanes.…

“No, carissima,” he smiled at her with the true ffoulis charm. “No. Your body is beautiful. But my soul is beautiful. We can never, never understand each other.”

He expected to see this flotsam-flower of London shuffle off into the Suburran[12] darkness. But she answered:

[12] Suburban? (LIT. EXEC.).

“Oh, I say!” and there was petulance in her tone. “Don’t try to come that over me! Soma and psyche indeed! D’you think I don’t know my Plotinus Arbiter? You can’t quote that stuff at this child. D’you read him too?”

“Oh, off and on,” Gav replied.

“Fancy that now! This is a bit of luck. Oh, we shall get on all right. You know Joseph de Maistre’s essay, of course?”

“Which?” he asked guardedly. There might be some trap in this.

“Oh, the Arbiter’s influence on the Transcendentalist poets—you know.”

“Afraid I haven’t read it,” confessed Gav.

“You haven’t missed much, rum-ti-tum, as Marie Lloyd used to sing, but I’ll lend it you if you’re keen. I say, you know,” she went on hurriedly, “I’d a bit o’ luck yesterday. You know that 1642 edition—Amsterdam? Picked up a copy of that, tooled leather and all the woodcuts, but the back flyleaf just a bit soiled. Eight quid. Cheap, wasn’t it?”

“He’s your favourite author, I suppose?” he ventured.

“Was once, Mr. Inquisitive. No, I must say I’ve been rather off old Plo since the Bloomsbury push took him up so strong. I’m on the Hellenic tack now—Pelester of Chios, you know, and Xanthus the Younger, and the fragments of the Thracian papyrus that Bötzdorff edited—though I don’t think much of his gloss, str—th I don’t.”

“I must show you my Plotinus,” Gav broke in on her gathering enthusiasm. “It’s a fine copy. 1722, I think.”

“My G—dn—ss! 1722! Printed at Venice, I s’pose: Palestrine fount and borders by Manucci.… I know the sort. Bless your innocent heart! that’s no b——y good! Common as dirt, these are. If that’s all you know about the Arbiter, you’re no good to me. So ta-ta, caro incognito!”

She turned angrily on her heel.

“But here!” he caught her by the sleeve. “Take this, I beg as a favour—a token to remember our little meeting.”

Gaveston slipped from his finger the exquisite cameo of Cypriote turquoise that the old Duchesa da Chianti had bequeathed him, and quickly but tactfully wrapping it in a ten-pound note, he pressed it into her little quivering palm.[13]

[13] See note, page 74. (LIT. EXEC.)

She disappeared.

Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient, smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from the ffoulises.

But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement.

CHAPTER VII

JOSS AND REREDOS

Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped, guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the unopened copy of the University Gazette which he had chosen from the bookstall’s alluring variety.

Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good old Hekla!

And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows, their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured sky.

“Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14]

[14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (LIT. EXEC.)

He looked again.

“But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities, he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of that fugacious country-side.

He knew of a certainty that he had not yet exhausted the surprises prepared for him by Destiny. There had been fairies at his christening (in St. James’s, Piccadilly). And now the memories of that unforgettable night at the Régale were drumming in his veins like some insidious and urgent poison. A new consciousness was dawning upon him, and he gazed on its unfolding contours, like stout Darien in the sonnet, in the mute silence of amazement.

Recovering himself, “New term, new life,” he murmured neatly. And the train picked up the rhythm of the words as it rolled relentlessly onwards.…

That evening Gaveston sat alone in his room, amusedly aware that in another Gothic chamber an eager assemblage of Mongoons were gulping their barley-water in tenterhooked anticipation of his momently arrival. But far different were his thoughts from what those polished Philistines would have expected in their hero.

Sipping in carefully calculated rotation glasses of crême de cacao and vodka and mavrodaphne—somehow the interblend of their hues and aromas seemed that night to chime in tune with the interplay of his own emotions—Gaveston was planning the redecoration of his rooms and his personality. “Each mirrors the other,” he reflected sagaciously. And a becoming blush illumined his cheeks as he realized how insular and barbarian his life had been so far, despite that long childhood of foreign table d’hôtes—how English and ingenuous, despite the many stories long current in Society of his authentic artistic temperament.

“Myths!” he cried aloud. “Myths!”

And with a sort of dull despair he thought how poorly read he really was, how Philistinish the stuff that had so long delighted him—Hope and Hay, Haggard and Merriman, Doyle and Dell.

“Zut!” as he had heard a voice say in the Régale.

And what a gallery of pictures was his! He looked round his walls with eyes very aghast. Those photogravures that had been his pride! Love Locked Out and The Laughing Cavalier and Dante’s Meeting With Beatrice—Watts—Meissonier—Rossetti. Quel galère indeed.…

And just at that moment David Paunceford rushed in, his eyes atwinkle, his Norfolk jacket flying open in his boyish haste to see his friend, and tell him, pell-mell, of vacation exploits in the Oberland and glorious skiing races up the Cresta run. For a moment he hardly realized that his zest was not à propos to Gaveston’s mood.

“But anyway,” he was saying, “we’ve all planned to go back to Interlaken next Christmas and we’ve booked our rooms at the Excelsior and you’ve simply got to come too, Gav—oh! but you can’t imagine how jolly it all is, that topping glow all over you after a good tumble on the bob-run!”

But something in Gaveston’s eye checked his rushing words.

“We have souls, David Paunceford,” said Gaveston.

He replenished his own three glasses, and handed David the whisky decanter. “At least, I have,” he continued.

There was a pregnant pause. David emptied his tumbler, buttoned up his jacket, and came down the familiar staircase. With no eyes for the evasive beauty of the college chapel, its buttresses and architraves now luteously entwined with wreathes of yellow fog, he crossed the dusk-filled quadrangle towards Mongo’s lighted window, puzzled a little.…

What days of rich imaginings these were that now came for Gaveston in this Lenten term! How glad and mad and bad it all was! How crowded these weeks where bizarrerie vied with bizarrerie and whimsey with whimsey!

First there were books to be bought, were there not? Yes, and bound too in silks and skins marblings fitted to their strangely varying contents. And from the gloomy recesses of Chaundy and the mediæval crypts of Gadney, he brought forth sets of Harland and Crackenthorpe, and all the fascinating chronicles of Sherard and Douglas, Ransome and Crosland, in whose controversial lore he soon became an adept. His shelves bent beneath the crowding volumes of Johnson and Davidson and Dowson and the rarer reprints of the Yellow Book, and soon all the erudition of the Symonses (John Addington and Arthur), was mastered by the young neophyte. And at the last, impatient of so much heavy insularity, he added to his arcana the Oriental canticles of Masoch, the infamous Lesbia’s archipelagian lyrics, the voluptuous and untranslatable masterpieces of Maeterlinck and Le Gallienne.

Assiduously too he collected obscure texts from the Silver Age of every tongue, and the declining decades of every century yielded him their rich harvests of perverse and curious fruits. He delighted, for instance, to pore over the Forty-Seven Books of the Eroticks of Kottabos the Syracusan. Recumbent upon a score of Liberty cushions, and meshed in the twining thuriferal fumes of musk and attar and patchouli, Gaveston would ponder upon the corrupt and fetid beauty of the Sicilian’s style, so perfect in its diliquescence that it might almost, he thought, have lain undredged down all these centuries in the green, aqueous silence of some Mediterranean sea-cavern, encrusted by the scum of putrescent molluscs, nibbled by creatures that fantastically goggled, and spawned upon by medusas with transparent tentacular heads. And he remembered how the unique manuscript had been snatched from the flames of fire-doomed Alexandria by the monks of Santa Frustrata in Abyssinia, and lay long concealed in their dove-shaped reliquary of scented cedar-wood, until ’twas ravished from them at the sword’s point by a Borgia, who sought it for the hands of a certain courtesan of Ephesus, and how she, after the fashion of her kind, had bartered it for sables and mummia to a Jew merchant from Novgorod, and how through his trafficking it came to the stockaded palace of the Great Cham of Tartary and thence to the conquering Mpret of Kamschatka. It had later been published in more accessible form by a Mr. Leonard Smithers.

But he began to find a terrifying loneliness in his research for the strange and beautiful. At first, on wet afternoons when his football or hockeystick could not be brought out from his cupboard, David would sometimes steal up to Gav’s room, to drink a glass of Russian tea or smoke a rose-tipped cigarette. But the old intimacy was gone. Always when he came, David would find the black and silver curtains drawn, and the room lighted tremulously by seven candles of green aromatic wax upheld by a Cellinesque Priapus of verdescent bronze.

“Why should I let daylight in, David?” Gaveston responded to his manly remonstrances. “It only stifles the imagination.”

“And fresh air?” queried David with astonishment.

“Only chills,” came the pointed reply. And Gaveston turned to the table heaped high with the rarest etchings of Bakst and Barribal and Beardsley, and resumed his task of passepartouting these sinuous Salomes and fat-fingered Fanfreluches.… After that, David came no more.

But one morning, shortly before six, he was hurrying down the slumberous Woodstock Road, returning from an early bathe at Marston Ferry. Past him hastened a gaunt figure, spare and ascetic, but unmistakably distinguished; in the deep earth-bound eyes shone the glow of an inner fire, and from the wrist dangled a simple rosary of pearls and a neat scapular of plain design; the lips muttered. In the uncertain light of the February morning, David had difficulty in recognizing that once familiar and friendly form.

But yes! It was! It was!

“Gaveston!” he cried out, almost involuntarily, so great was his surprise. “Where on earth are you off to at this time?”

But Gaveston (for such it was) did not stop.

“Terce,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m late.” And through the morning mists he hurried towards the distant spire of SS. Protus and Hyacinth. David stood for a moment watching his retreating figure, and wondering, as was his wont, what new notes were now being tested in the inexhaustible gamut of Gaveston’s soulstrings.

Well might he wonder, for apace discovery was following on discovery, vista too upon vista.…

Gaveston had been brought up (it was his mother’s pride) a strict Church of Englander. Lady Penhaligon, although no bigot, had seen to that, and Sunday after Sunday in his earlier childhood they had punctually repaired to St. George’s, Hanover Square (it held so many poignant associations for her, she always wept a little when the solemn banns were read). And during their foreign journeyings, too, they had always sought out the Anglican places of worship with which the nicer towns of the Continent are so liberally endowed. All four Anglican churches at Cannes knew them well; together they had enjoyed the Christmas sermons of the chaplains at Siena and Seville and Shepheard’s Hotel; and Gav indeed had been confirmed in the Hôtel Ritz-Carlton at Trouville by the Bishop of North-Western Europe. Small wonder, then, if he had almost instinctively come to regard religion as a Sunday habit of the English, like Yorkshire pudding or cold supper. But now the Establishment in its wider aspects had dawned upon his receptive soul. The assistant sacristan of SS. Protus and Hyacinth smiled companionably to him as he passed into the dim doorway.

“Tallis in G to-morrow, Mr. ffoulis,” he said.

“Splendid,” said Gav. “I shan’t fail you.”

And, murmuring a few decades to St. Gilbert of Sempringham and Blessed Thomas Plumtree, whose festas fell during that octave, he reached his accustomed prie-dieu.…

How delightful these early mornings were! After long vigils of sombre brooding over the invaluable histories of Messrs. H. Jackson and Muddiman, how champagne-like was the crisp dry air of an Oxford dawn as he hurried out the Woodstock Road! How infinitely gracious he found the liturgical rhythms of terce and none after debauching his soul all night with deep draughts of the fierce decadent prose of Huysmans or Hichens!

And then there would be the walk homewards from SS. Protus and Hyacinth in the flush of full dawn with his undergraduate fellow-worshippers, as far at any rate as the gates of Keble College. Soon he made close friends from among the “P. and H. push,” as they were irreverently nicknamed in the non-ecclesiastical circles of Wallace, and Gaveston became an active, but never pushing, member of several of the many societies which, in slightly varying combinations, they formed—the Athanasian Club, for instance, and the Syro-Chaldean Society, the O.U.C.U., and the O.S.C.U., and the O.E.C.U., and the In Saecula Saeculorum. On these walks he got to know dear John Minns, of Keble, the man who knew all there was to be known about the Eurasian use of the amice prior to the Tridentine decrees, and good old John Thoms, of Keble, who had once tracked down a little country church in Suffolk where, in accordance with an old Gallican rite, the vicar wore a maniple with its ends cut obliquely!

What fun it all was!

There was John Jones too, of Keble, with his huge giglamp spectacles and fast-thinning hair, famed among the P. and H.’ers as a raconteur, who, if carefully primed, could sometimes be induced to tell his glorious story of the thurifer that simply would not light.… And Jones it was who, during these amazing weeks, became Gaveston’s especial friend.

True, Gav’s Etonian blood never took altogether kindly to John’s somewhat provincial manners, but erudition, he reflected, is thicker than etiquette, and the close bonds of common pieties united them. Together they would wander off to unvernacular and illegal services in clandestine seminaries and remote rebellious rectories. Together they would count up the ceremonial points of every church in the overchurched city; but where John could find but seven, Gaveston was seldom content with less than nine. Together too they addressed their every activity to saints that no other Anglicans had ever heard of, and St. Domenico Theotocopuli and the Bienheureux Stanislas Beulemans were the familiar patrons of their collegiate activities; whilst buying flowers, they invoked St. Rose of Lima, and sitting down to a meal they called upon St. Francis of Borgia to protect them from poisoning; red letter days were given in their Kalendar to St. Veep and St. Deusdedit, and for help in composing their tutorial essays they would put up many a candle to St. John of Beverley; against the danger of madness they called in friendly unison upon Santa Maria Maddalena degli Pazzi, and mayhap it was their gladsome veneration of King Charles (the First and Martyr) that first turned Gaveston’s mind toward the political career which a twelvemonth later was to startle all Oxford.…

But somehow the P. and H.’ers did not all seem to take kindly to the æsthetic side of Gaveston’s remarkable personality. For a ffoulis it was easy to see life steadily and see it whole, but for a Minns or a Jones there seemed to be a curious difficulty in reconciling Dorian Gray with The Ritual Reason Why. It was a bagatelle for Gaveston to haste across the road from a protracted tea-party at Pembroke with the leading Oxford authority on dalmatics to a gay picnic supper at Christ Church, where dancing in pyjama costume would be varied with caviare and liqueurs. Each party would rightly acclaim him as the most enthusiastic and daring spirit present.

“He’s superbly High,” the one host would say as he left.

“He’s so gloriously low, my dears,” the next would proudly whisper.

And both loved him.

But an end had to come. As term drew to its close, Gaveston saw that he had extracted all that either set could give him, and he planned a glorious symposium of both of his sets for the last day of term. John Jones warned him, in honest manly fashion, that he was attempting the impossible. But Gaveston’s mind was made up.

“No, John,” he argued. “This term must end in glowing magnificence—benedictionally—come what may. Life, as they say at Brasenose, must burn with a hard gem-like flame. Besides, it’s an Ember day.”

And John was persuaded to distribute the invitations in Keble.

It was a lunch party. Gaveston spared no pains in arranging the function; and they were needed, for it had to make its appeal to the divergent tastes of all his guests. Six of them were to come on from the Blessing of the Embers at the newly consecrated Uniate Orthodox chapel, affiliated to the mother-church of SS. Protus and Hyacinth, and the remaining half-dozen were to join the party after a breakfast-dance (domino or poudré optional) at the Carlton Club. Gav himself compromised by attending Wallace chapel, but, a scrupulous host, he could not trust the Wallace buttery to provide the viands for such a party. He went in person to Buol’s to order a collation.

“For one o’clock exactly,” he insisted to the astonished caterer. “And remember—the Byzantine touch in everything.”

The famous Swiss remembered. That luncheon was the talk of Oxford for many a day.

It deserved its fame. The décor of Gaveston’s room, of course, was a technical masterpiece that an S. Diaghilev or a B. Dean might well have envied. The richly figured curtains were closely drawn. The air was pregnant with frankincense and chypre. The apartment was delicately illuminated, partly by a score of nightlights floating in tall Venetian glasses abrim with many-hued liqueurs, partly too by the votive tapers that always burned before Gav’s private altar of St. Symphorosa and his veiled image of Astarte Mammifera of the Kabbalists.

“Wear which you like!” said the charming host to his arriving guests, giving them their choice of kimono or cowl. Some chose one, others the other, but his forethought was appreciated by all.

So too was the rich repast. And when its seven finely modulated courses were over, Gaveston handed round an exquisite pouncet-box of rather late Sienese design. Pointing to the two divisions of its elegant interior, he offered his happy guests their choice.

“Caramels or coco?” he asked with a hospitable gesture, and soon the party was in the fullest swing.

When the merriment was at its height, Gaveston rose abruptly and recited in poignant tremolo tones two litanies of his own composition, both of haunting beauty and addressed to Satanas Athanatos and the Blessed Curé d’Ars respectively. The severed heads of vermilion poppies were thrown lavishly over the recumbent guests, who, chewing them appreciatively, were soon transformed into new De Quincies. And suddenly, from a curtained recess, stole out the sombre, blood-curdling strains of Sibelius’ Vale Triste and Rachmaninov’s Prelude. The eerie witchcraft of the concealed gramophone, exacerbating their nerves, made repose intolerable, and soon half the party was afoot, swinging in frantic rhythms between the voluptuous divans in the mad inebriation of the dance.

“Après nous le déluge!” cried the host, in a tone that seemed to defy both Paradise and Limbo, and ecstasy followed ecstasy in orgiastic sequence.

At last the party dispersed, half fearful perhaps lest some anti-climax should end the lengthening afternoon. In merry groups the guests went their ways, to meditative teas in Keble or in Magdalen.

Gaveston was left alone.

With a wry smile he looked round the dishevelled room. Yes, it was over. A phase had been accomplished. It had all been marvellous beyond words, rich beyond dreams, but still … but still.… Something had always seemed missing from all the mysticism and all the revelry.… Oh, if only David had been there to share it all!

The room was growing darker now. One by one the nightlights were guttering wearily out in the crême de menthe and the advokaat, and St. Symphorosa herself could hardly be distinguished from Astarte. The scent of bergamot was grown a little musty, and the divans were sprinkled with spilt cocaine and melting caramels.

“Now it must end,” he said firmly. Brusquely he pulled aside the heavy curtains and flung open the long-rusted windows. For a moment he gazed out across the quadrangle to where a fretted pinnacle was balancing a stripling moon. Then he turned to his door.

“Perkins!” he cried down to the scout’s pantry. “Perkins! Come up and pack my things at once. I go down to-night.”

It was a day early.

But nothing could surprise Perkins now.

CHAPTER VIII

HALLALI

So passed the rich pageantry of Gaveston’s second term, and once again he was speeding through the sun-washed river-meadows towards the vast smoky antre of Paddington. While the train curved grandly through beautiful Maidenhead, he took out his pocket-book, a slim wallet of polished eftskin which the Contadina da Chiesa had given him, with her coronet set in sapphires in one corner, as an Eastertide gift. He unfolded a letter on thick mauve notepaper.

Villa des Grues,

Route des Rastaquouères,

Monico.

Valentine’s Day.

Gav dear,—I feel my health coming back to me. The doctor is a Frenchman. Don’t you find beards rather attractive? Becky Stein is in the next villa and we’ve been seeing such a lot of your friend Belijah and the Dick-Worthies—you remember them in the old days, don’t you, Wertheim they were then? Son Altesse is also in residence. I love this place, except for the pigeon-shooting. What a terrible radical you must think I am!

Love from your poor old

MOTHER.

Spi is a perfect companion and does so want to meet you, he says. He’s so grateful to you, you know. Why not come and join us. I saw the Princess de Levi-Malthusi in the Rooms. She was in ermine and did you know she was dear Joey Rosenbaum’s first wife? We have a lot in common. I forget when Cambridge breaks up? Excuse blots, dear.

Gav folded up the letter meditatively. How familiar its Ambre perfume was to him! All the dear memories of childhood were delicately impregnated with its haunting scent, and from his snug first-class carriage now thundering through Hayes he was borne on the magic drugget of its subtle associations to Aix and Montreux and Harrogate and Nauheim and—but scarce a spa of Western Europe that had not once been his boytime’s playground.

But the vacation? A certain weariness crept over his usually flamboyant imagination as he pondered its possibilities. The Riviera? No: he hated all that chromatic monotony: the sky was blue and so was the sea, and the trees were simply green. And then there was all that cruel publicity of press photographers. Decidedly he must find some less unvariegated paesaggio, a land with waters of chrysoprase and topaz trees and, hanging dome-like over all, a firmament of purest jargoon. And through the enchanted pathways of his mind flitted vividly a processional of marvellous cities—Modane and Vallorbe and Hendaye, Domodossola, Bobadilla the beautiful, which no traveller in fair Iberia can leave unvisited, and Poggibonsi with its very name drenched in dear romance.…

PADDINGTON! And the blue-and-gold Renault awaiting him.…

He passed a quiet evening in the Albany (Uncle Wilkie had slipped over to Ostend for the spring races) and next morning found him out and about in Jermyn Street, still undecided, but toying gracefully with a beautiful idea.

“Do you know Calypso’s isle, Prospero’s principality?” he asked the favoured hairdresser to whom he entrusted himself for daily face-massage. “One lies there, you know, on banks of moly, and eats, in lieu of the lotus, the ’khàsscheesh of blank oblivion and the snowy powder of the χοχαινὴ.”

“Yes, m’sieur,” said the barber absently.

“Good,” said Gav. “My favourite emperor and my favourite novelist both elected it as a dwelling-place.”

“I read much of Victor Hugo myself, sir,” said the barber, removing a steaming towel.

“No, no. I meant Capri, not Herm.”

“Quite, m’sieur,” said the barber, applying another.

Pleased with the incident, Gav tipped the fellow with characteristic bravura, and commenced his daily emplettes, as he did not hesitate to call them. That morning saw him in all the most exclusive shops in Town. Perfume he bought in Victoria Street and jewels in the busy Strand; the choice of some new hats kept him for a while in Holborn, but soon he was browsing among the bookshops of Villiers Street. At Owen’s (lest he decide upon Afric adventures) he ordered tropical silks, and (against his wooing the icy mountains of Greenland) he chose marvellous furs at Moss Bros. Extenuate at long last with so much purchasing, he refreshed himself with a light luncheon at one of his clubs, the Times Book, and then taxied to his favourite Turkish Bath, situated, like his barber, in Jermyn Street.

And here, in the equatorial mists of this sumptuous haunt, chance was to decide for him where and how the vacation was to be spent.

For while reclining in the innermost sudatorium, as with a flash of his scholarly and sophisticated wit, he called it, he began, naturally enough, to fashion and recite aloud a poem inspired by his extraordinary Oriental surroundings. Full of the mysterious fascination of the immemorial East, the words fell true and rounded from his lips, like far-off bells sounding in intricate cadence.

“How honey-sweet thy waters, O Khara-kharoum, how long

And lingering my broken years

That drain this cup of exile tears

Far from thy cool delights, Khara-kharoum,

In Youmadong!”

He paused at that plaintive drop in the rhythm of this first ghazel, when suddenly a flute-like voice whispered through the steam.

“Omar reincarnate!” he heard in tones of passionate admiration.

Gav was silent.

“But let that voice resume,” said the delighted interruptor. And just then the veiling vapour lifted a little, and Gaveston was able to introduce himself to his hitherto invisible auditor.

“I’m Gaveston ffoulis, of Wallace.”

“And I,” said the other, “am Vivian Cosmo, St. Mary’s.”

Gaveston was thrilled.

“Is that the face that launched a thousand boats,” he quoted.

And the other made response with an answering thrill.

“And burnt the hopeless town of Ilium.”

It was an introduction, Gav felt, worthy of brother poets, and the friendship thus romantically born of vapour and song was not slow to mature. That same evening Lord Vivian Cosmo took him to dinner in the George Augustus Sala room at Kettner’s.

“Here,” he said, “linger the last enchantments of the yellow ages.” Gaveston relished to the full the fascination of the famous peer.

“Take an olive,” murmured Vivian, putting away his tiny gold-mounted lip-salve, “and tell me how our Alma Mater is standing the ravages of this twentieth century.”

Gaveston took one, and told him. He had by now gathered that his new friend had already gone down some not inconsiderable time. Lord Vivian hardly looked so youthful as he had in that uncertain vaporous light underneath Jermyn Street, but still—the bortsch was excellent, and the skilful host had ordered a cuve of champagne, Veuve Amiot of course.

“Leave your langouste,” he went on, “and describe your friends.”

Gaveston left it, and described them. The escaloppes d’agneau gave place to some épitaphes d’andouilles which justified their name.

“Taste your sorbet,” said Vivian. They were on terms of Christian names by now. “And give me your thoughts on women.”

Gaveston tasted it, and gave them. Seldom, he thought, had anyone found him quite so interesting.

“Have another liqueur, Gavvy, and let me take you to Paris.”

Gavvy had it, and let him.

“We ought to have flown across,” said Lord Vivian a trifle petulantly, as he closed the door of their state-room on the Calais packet.

“I like the Channel,” said Gaveston. “I should hardly believe I were abroad unless I first had that faint emetic odour of engine oil on the boat.”

“Delightful phantast!” laughed the peer. “But you’d be beautiful beyond even my dreams, Gav, suspended in the air betwixt the two most wonderful cities of the world. Not Gaveston, but Ganymede!”

The brilliant pair exchanged their fascinating ripostes throughout the journey. As soon as the white perfidious cliffs above Dover faded from their sight, they naturally fell into the French tongue. Both of course were perfect scholars in that languorous language: Vivian in fact was a past master of idiom: and both preferred when in la belle France (as they wittily called it) to be taken for natives of that vivacious and volatile country.

“Est-ce que vous avez Français sang?” asked Lord Vivian when he first realized how remarkable his young friend’s accent was.

“Qui sait?” Gav had replied enigmatically.

And so, what with esprit and persiflage, conte and shrug, it did not seem long ere the ambient vault of the Gare de Lyons had overarched their arrival with its Rhadamanthine gloom.

And then followed a passionate sequence of sleepless nights and sleepy days, while they visited all that there was of wicked and unvisited in the Ville Lumière, from multitudinous Montmartre to the quaint Quartier Latin, from Batignolles to Passy, from Nord to Sud. Where no other English had ever dared to penetrate, Vivian and Gaveston were often seen. The Comédie Française and the Folies Bergères grew to know them well, and thence they would pass from café to café and bouillon to bouillon, savouring a wild succession of the most Parisian of apéritifs—Dubonnet and Byrrh, Maggi and Thermogene, and in the very darkest of the cabarets of Montparnasse “les deux Anglais” became a familiar patchword.[15]

[15] A blot on Mr. Budd’s MS. here makes it doubtful whether this should not read “watchword,” “catchword,” or even “patchwork.” (LIT. EXEC.)

But so hectic a life could hardly last. Although they ate their meals in the chicest restaurants, and their hotel was the largest and most replete with les conforts home in all the Gay City, Gaveston found himself beset with ennui. He felt very surely that a chapter in his life was drawing to a close; new interests would soon be clamorous for treatment. Besides, what had originally enchanted him in his companion now began to fray his nerves. It was distressing to find that Lord Vivian’s only idea of conversation was to ask questions. At last he felt driven to force a scene.

“Dans la longue course,” complained Gav one morning over their chocolat, “la luxure devient fatiguante.”

Lord Vivian looked at him not without anxiety, and turned the talk on to other lines.

“Vous manquez vos âgés amis à Oxford?” he asked.

“Possiblement,” Gaveston’s voice was cutting.

“Quel est votre chef ami à Oxford?”

“Réellement, je ne connais pas.”

“S’il vous plaît, dites à moi,” Lord Vivian implored.

“Vous me faites fatigué. Vous êtes trop curieux.”

The nobleman was touched to the quick.

“Je pensais que vous me trouviez très plaisant,” he said.

“Non à tout,” was Gaveston’s answer. He was horribly bored, and could not restrain himself from telling his host so. “Vous me forez terriblement.” And so they parted.

But Gaveston soon recovered his mastery of English.

“NON À TOUT,” WAS GAVESTON’S ANSWER

BOOK II

APEX

CHAPTER IX

ἘΚΛΟΓΟΣ

A fresh determination, a renewed conviction of his destiny, filled Gaveston to overflowing when he returned to Oxford at April’s end. This term, he decided, was to be a revelation. He would at last show Oxford what Oxford really should be.

And that was not what was generally supposed, he thought, turning over in his mind the various attitudes which existed. That of the dons, for instance (except, perhaps, Mongo), and that of the miserable exhibitioners and demies and postmasters in the less significant colleges: they, poor bats and moles, thought of Oxford as a place of learning!

“How provincial!” Gav laughed aloud. What did they learn with their concepts and their paradigms, their statutes and their algebra? He knew that in a se’nnight he lived more than they in all their pitiful existence. Three years of profitless study, one week of examination, and fifty years of the Civil Service, or, equally pathetic, of the mumbling, vegetable senescence of tutor or of don!

Was that Life?

Or the rowing men? What of them, denying themselves half the pleasures of Youth and doubling their consumption of steak in their pettifogging pursuit of that emptiest of honoraria, a blue? They were on a righter track, to be sure, but what a motive! And what an unconsciousness!

“Is one young more than once?” Gav would often enquire in soliloquial mood.

And the spring breezes, wandering over from the quickening woods and copses of Wolvercote, heavy with the drowsy scents of hawthorn and maids’-morrow and beggar-my-neighbour, would always answer “No!”

A break with the past, then, there must be. And Gaveston decided that David would be the best confidant for his great discovery. True, the old friends had lost touch with each other a little during the feverishly brilliant passage of Gav’s last few months, but it was not hard to pick up the unravelled skein of so close an affection.

Up the stone stairs of the turret staircase like a whirlwind, and Gav burst tempestuously into David’s room. He was reading quietly by the casement window.

“What’s the book, David?” he asked.

“Baudelaire, Gav,” said David solemnly.

“Oh, that’s all rot!” cried Gaveston with a peal of fresh springlike laughter. And, seizing the exquisitely bound volume of the famous French symboliste, he pitched it far out into the quad. The affrighted rooks cawed and wheeled round it. “Just about fit for them!” laughed Gav.

But poor David was puzzled.

“You gave it me yourself, Gavvy,” he said reproachfully.

“Ages and ages ago, David.”

“It was only——”

“Now listen, boy! That’s dead, that world. We’ve done with being decadent and fin de siècle and all that. Now we’re going to be commencement de siècle. All that London can give, we have got. Paris holds no secrets for us.”

He raised his hands in the attitude of a Corinthian statue of Apollo of the best period as he went on, the spring in his voice, the morning sun flaming on his hair.

“We must have done, David, with the fescennine dimness of artificial things. We must be Pagan now, but Pagan in a new way—savage faun-like creatures, lithe and blithe and primitive, we shall cease to be the jaded votaries of the perverse and we shall hurl inexorably down our grinning unbelieved-in idols!”

“Good,” interrupted David impulsively. “And how do we start?”

“We must free our bodies and our souls,” Gav went on, never at a loss. “We’ll give rein to our instincts and we’ll hire a punt.”

“Yes, let’s!” cried David, ablaze with god-touched enthusiasm.

And then, as April turned into May, and May into June, the handsome pair could be seen on all the rivers of Oxford. The Thames knew them well, as also did the Isis, nor was a nook or creek on Cherwell or on Char left unexplored by their venturous oars. David it was who always plied the scull, while Gaveston lay on the punt’s keel in white flannels, sometimes idly holding the tasselled rudder-cords, his shirt of Tussore well open at the neck, revelling in this strenuous out-of-doors life, and watching, day in, day out, his friend standing sculptured above him against the jade-blue sky and athletically wielding the long, dripping oar.

Sometimes they journeyed far out to the lush sequestered creeks of Windrush and Evenlode, and, passing a score of poet-laden canoes, would anchor in a dreaming silence to watch the curious swimmings of ephemeral moles and the filigree antics of the booming water-beetles. And there, with the blue dimness of evening folding softly in about them, they would sup off rosy prawns and plump white-hearted cherries in deep meadows all prankt with ragged camphire and callow and pied cantharis, and then, in a calm moon-washed silence beyond the ruffling of words or of laughter, they would float slowly, slowly back beneath the orbing planets that overhung the distant towers of Iffley, trailing their fingers coolly in the dimpling eddies of their wake, their ears untroubled, save by the hoarse unearthly wailing of some night-flying fritillary, or by the occasional clearing of each other’s throats.

Once from a tree that darkly reached out over the water came the sudden capitous perfume of syringa, and the night grew unendurably canicular. There was a plop. A discarded cherry-stone had tumbled from the scuppers, and the mirror of the warm tranquil water was shivered by annular ripples broadening sluggishly to either bank. That was all. Nothing stirred. Gaveston was reduced to a state of utter poignancy he had seldom known before.

“David,” he whispered across the rowlocks. “I can’t talk.…”

And, rising from the cushions, he stripped off his clothes there and then in the fickle quicksilver light of the vagarious moon, and plunged, a new Narcissus, into the star-strewn waters of the melancholy stream. David, of course, did the same, and when Gaveston saw the exquisite nakedness of his friend iridescent against the palpitating hornbeams, he could no longer endure the fugacious mockery of the arch-hamadryad, Time, and together they had wandered uneasily back in the querulous silence of mutual, inexplicable exasperation.…

Inebriate though he was with this passionate Pantheism, which in its intensity would have put to shame the great Walden himself in his forest home, Gaveston did not altogether forget those social activities which do so much to make Oxford (and probably Cambridge) a training ground for all that is best in English public life. Profoundly as he believed in Nature, he did not discount the urban amenities.[16]

[16] These words might well have been inscribed as an epitaph on Mr. Budd’s watery tomb. (LIT. EXEC.)

Eights Week came in due course, and Gav was busied with the reception of some offshoots of his family on the Penhaligon side. His mother advised him of their coming in the postscript of a long letter from Mürren, where she was passing the summer. And Gaveston was not slow to close his Tussore collar, don the famous club tie of the Union Society, and engage a suite at the Mitre Inn.

When could a merrier party than Gaveston’s have been seen on Isis’s reedy banks? Seldom, if ever, have more envious glances been thrown than at the superb barge on which, with the aid of the faithful David, he entertained his summer-clad cousins. And never had laughter been freer and more continuous than when, on the first of the eight days of the festival, Gav showed his relatives the sights of the city, annotating the rich book of Oxford’s beauty with comments which, for wit and originality, had never been surpassed.

Immediately on the arrival of his guests, Gaveston’s flow of fresh, untrammelled humour began. Even David was amazed when he pointed to the marmalade factory outside the station and declared to the incredulous cousins that it was Worcester College.[17]

[17] Messrs. Baedekers’ guidebook gives passim an admirably accurate account of the chief features of interest, picturesque viewpoints, etc., of the university and city. It may be cordially recommended to readers of Mr. Budd’s work. (LIT. EXEC.)

“So called after the sauce,” he added. And the quiet old houses of the station yard echoed with the peals of girlish laughter from the magnificent cream-coloured Daimler.

The grim walls of the prison hove in view.

“And what’s this, cousin ffoulis?” asked the Hon. Pamela Penhaligon with an anticipatory laugh hovering on her lips.

“That I always forget,” answered Gav, with masterly affectation of solemnity. “I think it’s either the official residence of the Vice-Chancellor, or the premises of the Labour Club.”

The welkin rang.

Readily may it be imagined how quickly the week passed for the party dowered with such an host. Even the long intervals each morning between the bumping races could not pall Gav’s gaiety.

“Why is it called Eights Week?” asked the Hon. Isidora Penhaligon as they waited patiently between the first and second heats of the Third Divide.

“It isn’t, Is,” was Gav’s retort. “It’s called Waits Week!”

And, in whole-hearted enjoyment of his friend’s pyrotechnics, David had almost choked over his delicious prunes in aspic.

The climax of all was, of course, the Cardinal College Fancy Dress Dance. To the last moment Gaveston succeeded in keeping secret the guise in which he planned to appear at the fashionable function. Not even David was admitted to his councils. Lively was the speculation in every college and hall, and even among the non-collegiate students, for such there are. Even Mongo was intrigued. For all his years, little in the college life escaped him, and he asked one day with a boyish laugh, “Going in woad, Gav?”

The response was instantaneous.

“They can’t debag me, if I do!” The Manchester School face of the President himself had relaxed when the repartee of his pupil had been in good time reported to him.

The great night came. It was quarter to nine. The ball was at its wildest. Never had more daringly original costumes mingled in more unexpected combinations! The society newspapers’ reporters looked on at a loss to convey some impression of how outré, how bizarre, was this spectacle of Pierrots dancing with Dutch girls, Cavaliers with Carmens, Asiatic princes of dusky hue with periwigged Pompadours of a bygone age. But all of the gay assemblage, with all their fantasy and all their strangeness, were eclipsed by the appearance of Gaveston ffoulis, framed in the great Gothic doorway of the oak-lined Hall.

“What is he?” demanded the agog dancers, thronging around him.

“What are you?” asked those of his delighted intimates within speaking distance.

All eyes sparkled to behold his young upstanding body, tanned at the neck by the Oxfordshire sun. And a thrill of that bewilderment which is the sincerest form of flattery ran through the historic Hall when the unimaginable answer rang out:

“A nympholept!”

It was a great night.…

Next morning the Penhaligon party vacated their suite at the Mitre. To the last, Gaveston showed himself abrim with merry conceits, and, with cordial assurances that there was no better way of returning to London, he installed his parting guests in a train at the London and North Western Railway Company’s commodious station. It steamed out with a chorus of grateful farewells, and when it faded from view Gav turned to the still waving David with one parting witticism.

“They’ll have to change at Bletchley,” he said.

Eights Week was over.

CHAPTER X

OPEN DIAPASON

Six weeks later, in the musky fragrance of an August twilight, Gaveston sat on the rocky cliffs above Ploumenar’ch-lez-Quémouk. For there, in a charming old-world cottage of Breton gneiss, a brilliant reading party from Wallace, under Mongo’s supervision, had assembled for the vacation. He gazed out over the dark malachite waste of Atlantic waters, reflecting how successful his choice of a venue had proved, and hummed softly the third act of “Tristan und Isolde.”

“Dear old Wagner!” he murmured.

Discussion over the various possibilities had been lively one night in Mongo’s room during the Commemorative Week which so satisfactorily rounded off that marvellous summer term.

Mongo opted for Minorca, but Monty Wytham vetoed that as too Chopinesque.

“But my uncle might lend us a bothy at Tober-na-Vuolich,” ventured the Marquis of Kirkcudbright (Ch. Ch.), hexametrically enough. But his poetic ambitions and simple tastes were only too well known. There was an uncomfortable silence. He shuffled his feet.

“Connemara?” put in Monty, after a moment’s reflection.

“Or the Lizard?” queried Peter Creek.

“The Broads?” tried Monty again, doubling.

“The Downs?”

“The Lake of Lucerne?”

Hard upon each other came the enterprising suggestions, but for each of them Gaveston had an objection as conclusive as it was witty.[18]

[18] Unhappily these have not been recorded in extenso by Mr. Budd. (LIT. EXEC.)

“But you’re all so hackneyed,” he cried with peals of good-humoured laughter. “These have all been done before, every one of them!”

“Well, tell us your idea, Gav,” smiled Monty, with a touch of defiance.

“I propose Brittany,” he answered quite simply.

There was a ripple of admiring approbation. Brittany was decided on.

Well had the choice been justified. Long had been the bicycle expeditions through that unexplored fringe of glamorous old Celtic seaboard; to St. Malo and Cancale, Rennes and Brest, and many another half-forgotten shrine of old romance had they sped. And healthy had been the life: reading from dawn till breakfast, bathing and romping before luncheon, exploring caves before tea, collecting shells till supper, and taking moonlit or starlit tramps over the neighbouring menhirs and dolmens before going merrily to bed.

Thus the weeks flew past, with the inexorable rapidity of monotonously happy hours. Nature grew rhythmical with the youthful happiness of the Wallace reading party. With elaborate regularity the ebbs and flows coursed over the gleaming sands; up rose the sun, bejewelled the meridian sky, and set once more; each eventide there came an unique and quotidian miracle of colour attendant upon its marine accouchement. And nightly Gaveston stood breathless, hushed, pulsating, beneath the twinkling of little, little stars, so deliberate and glamorous that they seemed like to the remote, liturgical swinging of lanthorns, carven with outlandish birds and belacquered with esoteric fishes, in some half-religious dancing festival of Old Japan.

“I don’t think I was ever so happy!” said David one morning at breakfast.

And no one disagreed with him.

It was with David that Gaveston passed most of his time. He always found him a satisfying companion, ever eager to listen and encourage, and to David one glowing afternoon, lying on the sand in the shady mouth of a stalactitous cave, Gaveston exposed his new determination, his latest programme.

“Power!” he said succinctly.

“Power! Power!” echoed back the stalactites.

“Power?” added David.

“Yes, power,” nodded Gaveston.

There was a silence.

Far off the waves lapped. A sea-mew flashed against the blue. A stalactite dripped.

And Gaveston went on relentlessly to explain himself. Not for such as he the cowardly retirement into the cloister of Art. Not for such as he the perverse pursuit of an unattainable past, or the artificial archaism of creeds outworn. What were these but phases, halts upon the Greater Pilgrimage?

“Oh, quite,” said David, letting the warm sand trickle dreamily through his fingers.

Power! He must impose Truth upon his fellows, the truth about themselves, the truth about the world of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow. That was power. That was life. And how else to do it but by the Pen?

“Mightier than the sword it is, David, you know.”

David agreed.

And so was conceived the new review of politics, art, literature, life, the drama, music, religion and ethnology, which was to galvanize Oxford, and through Oxford, England, in the fast-approaching term. It was daring in conception, but it was characteristic of the man.

Would Mongo contribute?

That was the first question to be decided. And when the great plan was unfolded to him, and his assistance asked, the fresh, rosy face of the aged veteran lit up. But “Can’t be done, I’m afraid, Gav,” he said with a shake of his curious coloured locks. “The senior members might object, you see.” It was a disappointment, but, nothing daunted, the collaborators set out to find a title for their paper which should adequately embody its ideals.

And this proved a harder task than might have been expected from so brilliant a party. Young Oxford was put forward in vain. The New Wallace was ruled out as parochial. David’s suggestion was The University Echo, and The Parnassian did not lack a few supporters. Several showed enthusiasm for The Cherwell, but Gaveston it was who won the unanimous suffrage of all with The Mongoose. Everyone was delighted, and Vere O’Neill, the chartered artist of the party, quickly etched on a scrap of paper lying to hand a clever woodcut of that engaging bird. Gav put the finishing touches to it with a tube of water-colours, and so the title, and the cover of at least the first issue, were ready.

A policy? That was surely the next thing to be gone into, and again there were differences while they sat up late one night over a friendly bowl of absinthe, the national drink of the country. Outside the cottage the Atlantic hurricanes battered upon the shutters.

Mongo considered that the problems of the Near East were perhaps inadequately represented at Oxford. But O’Neill was strong for a judicious blending of socialism and articraftiness.

“Back to Marx!” was his cry. It was a daring appeal, but all felt that perhaps his quick Hibernian imagination might carry them too far. Other tempting suggestions, philanthropic, poetic, imperialist, flashed in the shadowy room, but David brought a refreshing current of cool sanity into the somewhat hectic debate.

“I think Gaveston had better decide,” he said. And they knew he was right.

At once Gaveston rose from his seat and stood by the fireplace. His address was a masterpiece of editorial tact.

“You’re right, Mr. Arundel,” he began; and this revival of an all but forgotten name at such an auspicious moment was recognized as possessing the true ffoulis cachet. “You’re right. Our foreign policy shall centre round the Balkans: they need a rallying point. You’re right too, O’Neill: we shall insist on the importance of Art for the Masses. You shall write an article on Morris Dancing and we shall publish at least two poems in every number. You’re right too, David, decidedly. And so are all of you others. We cannot, as you rightly insist, go on allowing the present social system to stew in its own juice. We certainly must not allow the great Pegasus of the English poetic tradition to be left for ever ambling round Poppin’s Court, or even to be emasculated in Carlyle Square. Nor must we allow the Empire to be neglected.”

The applause was now general.

“But what,” demanded the speaker, “what is the link which will unite all these admittedly various policies? What will give them a driving force and a sacrée union?”

The company had already forgotten their foaming glasses on the table, and were gathering round the handsome orator by the fireplace. They knew that if Gaveston asked a question, it was only because he had an answer ready. The pause was impressive, even agonizing.

“A Jacobite Democracy! The triumph of the People under the ægis of the White Rose!”

No one interrupted, and Gaveston continued con fuoco.

“The ubiquitous support of constitutional monarchy as our foreign policy! A Stuart as governor-general for every colony! A cottage and a white rose garden for every working man! And down, down, down with the Usurper from Germany!”

“And where does your real King live, Gav?” asked Mongo with his inscrutable, and often perhaps unmeaning, smile. But none knew.

“All the laws made since the intrusion of Hanoverian George must be nulled and voided, and we shall have a clean slate to write on. But I must insist on the democratic nature of our programme. The old legitism is worse than useless: we must be Jacobins as well as Jacobites! With such a policy we cut the ground from beneath the feet of Socialists and Conservatives alike. And then our only opponents will be the Liberals, famous only as a discredited and disappearing faction—we shall augment their unenviable fame. And our ensign, you ask?”

The question was rhetorical.

“Our ensign shall be the Hammer of Labour encircled by White Rose!”

While the enthusiastic applause rang among the rafters, O’Neill hurriedly added this device to his cover design. And soon afterwards all retired to their rooms, not, on this night of nights, to sleep, but each to elaborate his first contribution to the new organ.

Only Gaveston and David lingered a little longer over the last glowing embers. The two friends were speechless with emotion. The wind had fallen. The tide was out. The silence was intense around the gneiss walls.

Suddenly Gav rose, crossed the room, and drew open the curtain of the tiny window. There was a dull glow in the dark skies.

“See, David,” he said very softly, “the dawn is breaking over Ploumenar’ch-lez-Quémouk.”

It was.

CHAPTER XI

SPATE

David was deputed to go up to Oxford a few days before Michaelmas term began, to make all necessary arrangements with printers, street vendors, bill-posters and the local representatives of Labour and Jacobite organizations. He went. His honest admixture of generous enthusiasm and British common sense favourably impressed these humble proletarians, and practical details were soon settled.

Gaveston of course had that sure instinct for flairing the right man for the right job which marks the leaders of the twentieth century, and when he stepped from his comfortable first-class carriage on to the Oxford platform, it was no surprise to find that the city bore the imprint of David’s devoted labours. Every available inch of advertising space was covered.

OUT ON MONDAY.

No. 1 of

THE MONGOOSE,

edited by

GAVESTON FFOULIS.

GOD SAVE KING RUPERT!

The posters were everywhere—on college gates and sandwichmen, in the windows of the Bodleian, and, at nightfall, vast sky signs were to curve in flashing splendour from Carfax to Magdalen. Round them all day gathered excited groups of townsmen and gownsmen, eagerly discussing the symbolism of the intertwined hammers and roses which formed its tasteful border Such was their absorption that few noticed the aristocratic figure whirling past them in a hansom-cab, who still held on this Thursday afternoon the secrets which Monday was to reveal. For Gaveston the sight of these crowds was moving: and, as he drove up George Street, he remembered that echoing cave on the rock-bound Breton coast, and the warm sand, and David’s questioning “Power?”…

On Friday Gav set to work, and went through the “copy,” as he had already learned to call it. The supply of verse was enormous, political articles were plenteous and violent, and, in anticipation of a regular series of “Oxford Celebrities,” each member of the reading party had anonymously penned a short, witty and highly appreciative autobiography. But Gaveston’s editorial instincts told him that the individual note was somehow missing. Yes, The Mongoose must be something different from all that had gone before—the Letters of Junius, The Yellow Book, The Chameleon, The Spectator, The Palatine Review. All must be outdone, and for a moment the task seemed almost baffling.

But a ffoulis finds a way, and, sporting for the first time his oak, Gav sat down that evening to write unaided the whole of the first issue.

All night the choiring bells heralded the flight of the hours through the Octobral air; all night he kept his fire alight with faggots of his friends’ rejected manuscripts. By five o’clock he had completed an editorial statement of policy; four political leaders—on Jacobites, Democrats, Jacobitic Democrats and Democratic Jacobites; a short, witty, and not unappreciative autobiography; and a list of hockey and O.T.C. fixtures for the term. More, by half-past five he had finished two features designed to appeal to the less intellectual strata of his fellow-undergraduates—a series of pithy personal paragraphs headed “Things We Want To Know,” and a selection of letters on the desirability of a bicycling Blue, signed by such pseudonyms as “Wadhamensis Indignus,” “Ikonoklastes,” “Laudator Pasti,” and “A Friend of W. G. Grace.”

It was a veritable tour de force. But the paper was taking on a more distinctive tone, he felt.

Six o’clock. Only the promised poems were lacking now, and Gaveston determined that, ere seven struck, he would have at least two poems worthy of himself and of the latest of Oxford’s reviews. Iambics or trochees? Sonnet or cæsura? Meditatively he stirred with the poker the charred ashes of his friends’ inadequate versifications, but somehow the divine afflatus lingered.

At last he lit a cigarette, mixed a cocktail, and resorted to a daring expedient. He took down his well-fingered set of the little blue books of Oxford Poetry. Here if anywhere would he find inspiration. Yet no—his brain seemed a trifle weary, and still virgin-white lay the paper before him.…

But, even if the heaven-sent flame did not descend, surely industry and ingenuity could start the fire. Could he not fashion from this corpus of the Oxford tradition, choosing a line here and there, a living, eclectic, synthetic Poem? Surely in this way would emerge something exquisitely pure, embodying the undiluted essence of the Oxford he loved so dearly. And by half-past six he had succeeded. He ran his eye lovingly over it.

Le Mal

My time in grief and merriment

In low melodious threnodies of Lent,

Of reeds and fanciful psalteries

Has more strings than our stringed instruments,

O Lily Lady of Loveliness,

God’s beauteous innocence!

O fathomless, incurious sea!

Light lips upon the lilied pool,

Sounding her passionate symphony,

Grow fat once more, and seem to be made full!

When you and you sit by the fire,

I would to God thou wert my own good son—

τούτῳ μάλιστα δὴ προσθετέον

O Lord of light and laughter and desire!

He replaced the row of little blue books, where he might find them were they needed, and read over the poem they had given him from their storehouse.

Yes, it was the right stuff, he felt sure—and authentic too. Why, the æsthetic effort had stimulated him. There was one more to do. And he remembered his untasted cocktail, tasted it, and forgot his weariness. For nearly an hour poem after poem flowed incontinent from his pen. There were twenty-two in all, but from the glittering galaxy he chose but one. It was indeed a starry gem—and all his own.

To One Whom and Whither I Wot Not

Since morrow sees our endermost adieu,

I’ll have no crying or sighing haggardly

Out of the dark void. But Gargantuan gauds

I’ll lay on your white body. Lutany

Shall soothe our slumbers. Then for me and you

A knell. And quietude thereafterwards.

He read it, and read it again. Yes, it stood the test. And musing he thought how Hérédia would have liked the shape of it, and how Mallarmé would have loved to attempt just those rhythms, how Rops would have delighted to illustrate it, and how Finden, perhaps, or Finck, would have made music for it in some minor mode and with strange fantastic counterpoints.…

After a light breakfast Gaveston went round in person to the printer. He handed him the fateful packet of manuscript.

“You will have it on sale on Monday? We have promised the public.”

“Of course, sir.”

The die was cast into Rubicon.…

Monday came, and with it of course the unparallelable success of The Mongoose. By nine o’clock the boys and decrepit vendors engaged for its distribution had perforce to be replaced by stalwart commissionaires who could withstand the frantic mobbing of impatient purchasers. All that day, and well on into Tuesday night, the printing-press in Holywell was a-roaring; bales upon bales poured out hot from the linotype; motor-vans dashed serriedly towards the station where the mail-trains stood awaiting the provincial consignments.

Gaveston was not ungratified. He could feel the pulse of Oxford beating in his own. He was universally feted, save in the fast disappearing Liberal Club, which, by Thursday, could only boast its honorary and corresponding members; he was caricatured, but respectfully, in the University Gazette; he was thrice, but in vain, invited to stand as a candidate for the library committee of the Union; and the chairman of the Boating Club offered him an honorary Blue.

But his head was not turned by the exuberance and gusto and brio which surged around him. He remained simple, unaffected, friendly; daily with a laugh he would put all the credit on David’s deprecating shoulders; nightly he would cable reports of his progressive triumphs to his mother, who was passing the winter on Coney Island and making a deep impression on the Wall Street Five Hundred.

Triumphs grew cumulative with the weeks. The fourth number contained a ten-page supplement of Gav’s latest musical compositions (delicious morceaus which aptly combined the piquancy of Lulli with the modernity of Lalo), three coloured reproductions of paintings from his own brush, a direct invitation in leaded type to Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria to return and claim his rightful Throne, and details of a Free Insurance Scheme for Regular Readers. And the fifth number, due next term, was planned to surpass even this.

But meanwhile a pressing need devolved upon his Atlas-like shoulders. The dear room of staircase XVII, with all its associations, was grown too small for him! In the one moment of disloyalty to Wallace that he ever knew, he envied Lord Kirkcudbright his spacious suite in Ch. Ch. Coll. But careful searchings with the faithful David’s aid at length discovered the perfect lodgement.

“What a dream of a place!” was Gaveston’s exclamation when his eye first rested on Malmaison Lodge. And well did it deserve the tribute!

It was a little, low William IV house; over the leaning, whitewashed slopes of its walls wine-dark ivy, passion flowers and celandine, wistaria, magnolia and the cuckoo-haunted Virginy creeper stencilled the careful patterns of their rivalry. The floor sank modestly beneath the level of the tangled, towsled garden, three neat steps curtseyed to the prim Queen Anne doorway, and there was the most comical little mezzanine imaginable. No road led to Malmaison Lodge, for it lay remote in an unfrequented purlieu, and, like the gingerbread cottage in the faery tale, it looked forgotten but not neglected. There was something discreetly morganatic in its air: in such a spot might princes soothe their crown-chafed heads, or cardinals forget awhile the insistent kisses that wear away their jewelled rings. And to crown all, the landlady’s name was Mrs. Grimaldi. When Gav learned that, he declared that no other house would bear the looking at.

And a rare body Mrs. Grimaldi proved herself!

With that well-bred ease which was instinctive in even the farouchest of the ffoulises, Gav drew out her history in the course of their first interview. He began tactfully, by talking of himself for three-quarters of an hour—it gave Mrs. Grimaldi confidence.

“… and so on my advice she got divorced again,” he ended. “She’ll be up next term, I hope, and I know you’ll make friends with her, Mrs. Grimaldi.—But now, I’ve done all the talking so far,” he went on as the good woman appreciatively blushed. “Won’t you tell me something about yourself?”

She curtseyed, and began.

“On the font it was Selina Kensit, sir, they called me, but now it’s Mrs. Puffin really, though me ’usbin’ always called ’isself Grimaldi, perfessional like. I wish as you could ’a’ seen ’im, sir! W’y, ’e could put ’is ’ead through ’is legs and then juggle with lit candles and live ferrets fit to frighten you into pepilipsis. It gave me a fair turn, it did, first time as ever I see ’im. But soon I didn’t so much as turn an ’air. You see, I was an artiste meself.”

She nodded.

“And were you a contortionist too, Mrs. Grimaldi?” Gaveston asked, looking with amazement at her elephantine form, bulging and bursting in every direction from the crimson bombazine that vainly essayed to hold it in.

“Lor’ bless you, sir, I should ’ope not!”

“But what then——?”

“I dove.”

“Dove?”

“From the top of the ’ippodrome, sir.”

Gaveston roared with laughter. “Into a teacup, I know!” he cried.

“You will ’ave your joke, sir, I can see,” smiled Mrs. Grimaldi, preening herself. “Beauty Clegg, the Bermondsey Mermaid, they called me on the programme, and my magenta tights suited me a treat, though I says it as shouldn’t.”

“I believe they still would, Mrs. Grimaldi,” he threw in, winningly.

“But after our marriage, Mr. Puffin was earnin’ good money, and ’e didn’t care about my goin’ on with me divin’, though ’e admitted straight that I ’ad a career in front of me. But besides, I was puttin’ on flesh.” The landlady gave a pathetic heave of her enormous frame. “So I lived like a lady afterwards.”

“And how long have you been here, then?” Gav asked.

“Well, twenty years ago, Mr. Grimaldi, ’e went before; and I was ’ard put to it till I set up ’ere.”

“I’m sorry to think that, Mrs. Grimaldi.”

“Oh, no one can say as ever I was gay meself, though I did ’ave me troubles. But the p’lice are that interfering, reg’lar nosy Parkers, I call ’em—but Lor’ bless you, sir, young gentlemen will be young gentlemen, now won’t they?—and my girls never made no complaints. Reg’lar mothered them, I did, and …”

“I’m sure you did, Mrs. Grimaldi,” Gaveston interrupted, feeling that the ground grew delicate. Henceforward he had better restrict his questionings to the professional period of his landlady’s varied career.

But he was far from narrow-minded, and he took seven of her rooms for the coming term. They would be redecorated, of course, he explained, and an additional bath installed. With a little foresight he might yet make Malmaison Lodge a new and brighter Chequers. For when he had already engaged his rooms, he made an enchanting discovery. Behind the house there was a little lavender-garden, and at its centre a classic gazebo evocatory of the Age of Stucco, in the elegant decay of its caduke and lezarded pilasters, a rocaille fountain, too, that had not played since poor long-dead demi-reps had received by its brink the libertines of the Regency, and round it three moss-clad Cupidons of lead, who must have watched unblushingly the dangerous dalliance of crinoline with pantaloon.

These domestic preparations made a grateful break in a busy public life, and term came to an end almost before Gaveston had realized that November had slipped into December.

But he caught the 8.37 to Paddington on December 10th.

CHAPTER XII

FUNAMBULESQUE

Dinner-time on the 11th found Gaveston complaining about the half-baked condition of a soufflé at the best hotel in Munich.

He never did things by halves, and his Christmas Vacation was to be devoted entirely to the furtherance of The Mongoose’s political aims. This trip abroad had been planned for some weeks, and the strictest Teutonic discipline had been enforced at every frontier-station to keep this most incognito of journeys a secret. In his breast-pocket he carried a letter of introduction: for, although the editor of The Mongoose was of course not unknown at the Bavarian Court, Gaveston knew the value of quickly establishing a personal relationship.

He had been quick to consult Uncle Wilkinson.

“Of course I’ll help you, m’ boy,” the veteran diplomat had said reassuringly. “I’ll give you a lettre de créance that’ll let you have your entrées without any démarches.”

And he had. It seemed that once … an Australian soprano … a pearl … a very High Personage indeed … Regents-theater … schön gemütlich … but, well, a little unpractical.…

Nothing was ever divulged about what happened during the first three weeks of that vacation. Gaveston was always discreet. But Monty Wytham, spending a few days at Heidelberg, had been surprised to see his college friend passing through the station in a special train, with blinds partially drawn, and wearing in his button-hole a tiny rosette, like the légion d’honneur, but white.

There was no secrecy about the second half of that vacation. Gaveston knew he must now test the Great Heart of the People. Whatever his congenital tastes, he never forgot that he styled himself proletarist as well as legitimarian, and the famous University Hostel in Haggerston, E., was the scene of three adventurous weeks of social exploration.

Not of course his first effort in that genre. Gaveston’s strong sense of collegiate duty had led him to visit the Lads’ Club established by Wallace in the poorer quarter of the dream-enwrought city. And many a rich friendship he had formed with the burly lads in its gymnasium, its strictly undenominational conventicle, and its merry week-end sea-side camps. Not soon could he forget his spiritual wrestling with young Bob Limber, for instance, and how one foggy evening, unable longer to support the mustulent odour of damp clothes and the rough-and-tumble hurly-burly of the indoor football room, he had led the promising youngster out of the Club, and had walked and talked him up and down the ash-strewn towpath beside the stagnant crime-inviting water of the canal, while slimy drops of verdigris guttered on their heads from rusty, disused railway-bridges, and round them slowly fell pieces of plaster peeling from the fissured walls of warehouses obscenely stained with damp and eczematous with decay. For three hours he had striven to convince the obstinate but fascinated youth (a butcher’s apprentice, was he not?) of the high moral value of punting. But the bets which poor Bob made owing to a misunderstanding of Gaveston’s meaning, had been lacking in method and ruinous in result.

SPIRITUAL WRESTLING WITH YOUNG BOB LIMBER

Now Gaveston played an even more active part in social reform. Through the murk-bound and desuete alleys of Hoxton, where no policeman (or “copper” as he would ingratiatingly say to the natives) dared venture, Gaveston strolled carolling the popular ditty of the day. He had a way with him, the battered women-folk used to say as he passed them with a kindly wave of his hand. Sometimes as he lay sleepless in the squalider doss-houses, he wondered whether fate might not bring him face to face there with that astonishing woman who, on the pavement outside the Café Régale, had once given him such an astounding glimpse of London’s uttermost underworld.

Gaveston was nothing if not thorough. Food that was not Kosher rarely passed those once fastidious lips of his, and unblenchingly he had gone to spend a night in one of Limehouse’s most notorious dope-dens.

“Terrible,” the hardened Head of the Hostel had cried, when Gaveston had told him of what he had seen. Not that he had tasted there the papaverous poison—that was a phase whose charms he had long since exhausted: no, on the contrary, he had preached to the degenerate denizens more salutary, more British habits of relaxation.

“Muchee lovee opiumee,” the Chinks had protested. But Gaveston was firm.

“Dumbee bellee muchee betteree,” he had insisted.

The ffoulises were all linguists.

He returned to Oxford convinced of the immediate importance of pressing his campaign. Munich and Haggerston had been equally encouraging. The fifth number of The Mongoose was already in the press. It contained a signed interview with a well-known Chinatown bruiser, and an unpublished photograph of The King. On the day before publication the bolt fell. Jade-eyed jealousy had dogged the footsteps of success. Two powers had clashed.

In an ukase of fine Latinity which Gaveston was the first to appreciate, the Vice-Chancellor ordered the suppression of The Mongoose and the rustication of its editor unless its policy were changed.

For a moment Gaveston thought of boldly publishing the dread decree and appealing to the immense force of public opinion. That would be the Areopagitical gesture, wouldn’t it? But should he not rather temper it with the practice of the old school and try diplomacy? With the trusted David he discussed the subject monologically on an afternoon’s tramp over Shotover.

Little was his position to be envied. He stood alone, alone against the most autocratic power left in modern Europe. One by one his collaborators had unobtrusively resigned. Only David remained as business-manager.

“But glory, David,” he said as they reached the summit of Shotover Hill, “glory is ever a solitary apex. I have always found that. And the Vice-Chancellor, though he be only the Warden of Rutland College, must have found it too.”

“I expect he has,” nodded the business manager.

“Then we have common ground, he and I. I shall try diplomacy.”

And he did.

Next morning he repaired to the official residence of the Vice-Chancellor. But not without difficulty, for political feeling had been running high these days. Stout barricades had been erected across both ends of the Turl; the cross-streets were permanently closed to traffic; only senior members of the University who had passed the climacteric age of sixty-three, or such junior members as had certificates of loyal character from the Hebdomadal Council, or one of the non-political clubs, were allowed to pass the barrier. Pickets of chosen men from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, steel-helmeted and armed to the teeth, guarded the venerable Warden of Rutland College from the possible approach of wild-eyed trade-unionists, Chartists or Agnostics—for such abounded, at large in the streets.

Gaveston, however, was known even to the rough soldier lads, and had only to show to their officer the passport which Uncle Wilkie’s diplomatic influence had procured for his last trip to Brittany. He was escorted to the massive gates of Rutland, whence protruded half-a-dozen Stokes guns manned by stalwart Rhodes Scholars who in their home townships had been office-bearers of the Ku-Klux-Klan, and through the barbed wire entanglements which covered the immemorial gravel[19] of the quadrangle.

[19] Alas! no longer. (LIT. EXEC.)

In the ante-ante-chamber he smilingly complied with the senior proctor’s request to allow a search of his person for anarchistical bombs or seditious literature, and in the ante-chamber he signed a solemn affirmation that he possessed no copies of the works of Bernard Shaw, the Grand Guignol dramatists (whose influence was then so profoundly felt), or the early poems of William Wordsworth, and that he had passed Responsions with not less than third-class honours.

At last the innermost portal was unlocked and creaked slowly open. As he entered the sanctum of his formidable rival Gaveston straightened himself instinctively.

But the Vice-Chancellor himself was an anti-climax.

At a glance Gav saw that here at least no elaborate diplomacy would be needed: the characteristic ffoulis charm would suffice. The venerable Warden, for his part, veteran though he was of a thousand such encounters, saw that at last he had met a duellist worthy of a finer Toledo steel than ever he could wield. He glanced out of his armoured window towards the towering dome of the Shelley Memorial, and his lips tightened.

Gaveston, twinkle-eyed, made the opening démarche.

“The Emperor, sir, is come to Canossa,” he said, a charming smile playing about his attractive lips.

And flattered, as he was meant to be, by the happy historical metaphor, the old man let his Machiavellian features relax into a nervous, but sincere, smile.

Gav never let psychological moments slip.

“I don’t think you need repeat that speech you had prepared for me,” he followed up quickly. “I know what you were going to say.”

The sagacious but undiplomatic functionary looked in amazement at the handsome figure before him. His lips struggled to frame a reply, but Gav raised a deprecating hand.

“You were going to say,” he continued sternly, “that my words are read from the Brahmapoutra to the Potomac, that a thousand races in a hundred climes see in them the authentic voice of Oxford. You were going to say that the stability of the Empire was threatened. You were going perhaps to say that I paid my college bills with blood-stained roubles, and, for all I know, that the foremost principle of a university must always be Mens sana in corpore sano. Were you not?”

The old man winced at the last shrewd thrust, and bowed his head.

“Of course you were,” said Gav, a touch of pity in his voice. “But, believe me, you are wrong. Time and truth are on my side.”

Speechless, the Vice-Chancellor nodded.

“It will be easiest if you resign,” said Gav quietly. “I shall see that a fit successor is found for you. But, to save your face, I am prepared to make some slight modification in my policy, if you have one to suggest.”

“Thank you, Mr. ffoulis,” answered the outwitted reactionary. “Thank you. I would suggest.…”

His voice quavered plaintively.

“Yes?”

“Well, let your theory be what it will, Mr. ffoulis, but I would suggest, and most earnestly, that you refrain, so far as you find it possible, from attacking the present Government—if you don’t mind an old man’s advice.”

Gav clapped him on the back.

“Of course not,” he said with a reassuring smile. “That can soon be arranged, and your resignation shall be announced for reasons of health.”

The Warden nodded assent.

“I must go now,” said Gaveston. “I am a busy man.”

The rifest of rumours ran through Oxford that afternoon when the bruit was abroad that the Editor of The Mongoose had interviewed the Vice-Chancellor. The great political clubs were abuzz with conflicting accounts of what had taken place. Even in the deserted halls of the Liberal Club the solitary waiter paced to and fro murmuring rumours to himself. A monster demonstration of local Jacobites with a white flag was held outside the county gaol, where it was believed that Gaveston had that morning been secretly immured. But all dubieties were laid low when, according to antique custom, the tolling bell of the Radcliffe Camera announced that the Vice-Chancellor had resigned office.

The stupefied silence in the city was broken only by the sombre reverberations of that passing bell.

A hurriedly convoked meeting of the Hebdomadal Council issued formal notice before nightfall that the Warden of Rutland had resigned for reasons of ill-health. And profound was the impression when it was announced a little later that the vacant post would be filled by Archibald Arundel, M.A., Dean of Wallace College.

“We have won, David,” said Gav calmly when the news reached him in his quiet inner sitting-room.

But David could make no reply. His eyes glistened in the twilight as he looked out over the darkling quadrangle.…

The Mongoose had won the bitter battle for free speech and generous ideals, and pæans of well-merited praise welled up for Gaveston from every corner of the kingdom. The Press was united in felicitation of its promising contemporary, save only the Rutlandshire Argus, whose petty regionalism no wider idealism could mitigate, and Punch, whose tradition it always is to support the under-dog in public affairs. But very few were moved by its cartoon that week, which showed the ex-Vice-Chancellor seated in a cavern on the banks of a river whose ripples formed the word ISIS, his venerable head bowed over a table on which lay the University mace and a doffed crown of office. Before him stood, not Gaveston, but a female figure whose classic draperies bore the device COMMON SENSE and who held before the old man’s dreaming eyes a great scroll. On it was inscribed the legend: RESURGES: NON CANOSSA SED BARBAROSSA.

But even to a defeated rival a ffoulis keeps troth: the agenda of The Mongoose were honourably modified.

In the superlatively able fifth number, eagerly anticipated from Downing Street to Wilhelmstrasse, a trenchant leader demonstrated that, when the King should come from over the water to establish His proletarian theocracy, no ministers could be found better for His projects than those who made up the present Government.

It was signed with a modest ff.

Consols soared to a firm 51½.

CHAPTER XIII

CHAMPAIGN

As the Lent term moved unimpeded to its prepaschal end, Gaveston was faced with an inevitable query. Where was he to pass the Vacation? Aided by a shelf of Black’s Beautiful Books and the rarer writings of Mr. Edward Hutton, he weighed the relative charms of Cefalu and Auch, Nikchitch and Gijon, Châlons and Charenton, Parknasilla and Portobello. All very well in their foreign way, but he had his future to consider. Should he not rather accept a few of those innumerable invitations to British Country Houses that were stuck in the mirror above the fireplace in his Malmaison Lodge study?

David had often protested against his friend’s wasteful habit of treating invitations as useless but ornamental, not even answering Commands from exiled Royalties. (The fame of The Mongoose had reached Cannes and Twickenham.) But Gaveston would have none of it.

“No, David,” he would always answer, “they aren’t wasted. The only invitations worth having are the second ones.”

Besides, in the dear, far-off days of Karlsbad and Knocke and Karsino his mother had often nonchalantly warned him against the trickeries of foreign titles. (There had been a Polish Prince once whom Gaveston was already learning to call “Daddy” when he turned out to be a Turkish Bath attendant absconding from Arkansas.…)

At first Gaveston intended to put all the invitations into the waste-paper basket, and draw one (or perhaps two) out, leaving the choice of the lucky hostess to chance, but the sight of a letter written in Black Letter on vellum paper made him hesitate. Was it not too dangerous a lottery? He took the letter up and read—

Telegrams: Novena, Wilts.

Stations: Highchurch and Deane.

Minsterby Priory,

Abbot’s Acre,

Wilts, Eng.

Vigil of St. Quinquagesima.

Dear Mr. ffoulis,—

The Baron and I would be happy beyond words if we could count you among our quite tiny party for Holy Week and Eastertide. The Baron, of course, is a cousin of dear Prenderby Rooke (the financier, you know), who had a lot of business with your step-father in the old days. So we aren’t exactly strangers, are we? Do come.

Afftely. yrs.

(Baroness) Leah Finqulestone.

Which step-father, Gaveston wondered; but a glance at Gotha’s Almanack decided him in a trice against acceptance. “Phew!” he said to David, “what an escape!” and the Baroness’s invitation fell heavily back into the “refusals tray.”

But there were others.

It was a gay spring morning. Term was over, but, sitting though he was in a first-class Great Western smoker, Gaveston could hardly realize the fact. For where was the familiar landscape of Berks and Bucks stretching like a sea between his terms and his vacations, his vacations and his terms? Where was deserted Didcot? Where the reasty biscuitries of Reading? And where were Wormwood Scrubbs with their Cyclopean hangar, and their promise of speedy arrival at familiar Paddington? Oh, of course; he remembered now: he had left Oxford from the Down Platform.

And on purpose. The train was the only place (except his bed) where Gaveston was often alone, and cradled by its rhythmical monotone of sound, he always surrendered himself to reflection and revery. With unseeing eyes he gazed upon the expanse of gloomy Drinkwater country which so emphatically was not the usual well-brooked but over-factoried valley of the Thames. How many hours, he thought, one wastes in unmotivated journeyings, in merely purposeless vagulity! How futile the pursuit of action for its own poor sake! For what lay before him at his journey’s end? An English country-house, an English week-end party, with its drinks and its drains, its horses and its carriages, its ghosts and its flirtations, its back-stairs and its back-chat—with no break in its well-bred monotony.

He saw it all stretching prospectively and preposterously before him, all of it: the dormant station on an almost impossibly bifurcated branch-line, its wooden platform bright with Easter Lilies and lanky-Lot’s-wife, and marked Stops by Request in Bradshaw; the rustic gaucherie of the solitary and half-wit porter, and then the glimpse of the perky cockade of the expectant groom; and that predestinedly convergent encounter in the wagonette with the other, but not over-numerous, guests, who, though only too well known to each other, had travelled down in separate, but first-class, compartments; and then that excruciatingly culminative moment of arrival beneath the pompous Georgian portico, with the formalized words of welcome slipping upwards into its stucco recesses, that gossipy tea on the terrace, or, if season or weather proved inclement, in the mauve drawing-room, and that chaste and tapestried bedroom in the bachelors’ wing with (yes) the assertively blue hot-water can ready in the, certainly adequate, but somehow not urbanely inviting, basin.

And already he could see, foreshortened before him in a (should he venture?) prescient perspective, all that weary business of the toilette regulated by a complicated, and never, before the day of departure, fully comprehended, system of gongs, and that winding circuitous descent down gradually broadening and more and more elaborately balustraded staircases to a long, but to Gaveston’s taste (he was a real gourmand) hopelessly agricultural (he could not conscientiously call it a dinner, but rather, a) meal.…

However, he’ld have to go through with it now. He owed that to his mother.

For it was by Lady Penhaligon’s request, cabled from Canterbury, Pa., a fortnight ago, that he had accepted Lord Jordan’s invitation (the fourth) to spend a frankly rather political week-end at Oylecombe Towers. Her wire had decided him.

Gav dear do go Jordans if they ask such old friends of dear Joey how cold here do wrap up well dear spring days so deceptive have you met boy called David Paunceford love Mums

And with the compression of a skilled journalist he had answered.

Been Jonathan years kisses Gav

And here he was.…

The charming cloisonné clock in Gaveston’s dressing-room was busily preparing to strike eight.

He gave a last glimpse in the cheval-glass at his elaborately pleated dress-shirt, in which gleamed three studs of solid amber, each with an embedded fly. In the further distances of Oylecombe Towers clanged a gong, and the young man went down to the great ancestor-hung hall with his usual good intention of being the life and soul of the party.

Lord and Lady Jordan stepped forward to welcome their remarkable guest.

His Lordship’s face was unfamiliar to Gaveston. A slightly older generation had known its fine, hawk-like features extremely well. He had long been conspicuous in the entourage of the late King, but changed traditions at Court had latterly made the first holder of the Jordan Barony an almost unrecognized figure on the Mall. Nowadays, though his town-house was not a hundred miles from Park Lane, he lived in rural seclusion at the Towers, with occasional visits to the City of London itself. His knowledge of the world, however, remained wide. With the same facility and gestures he could talk of shells and bears, eagles and bulls, of Brazil and both the Bethlehems, while the motto SI VIS PACEM, entwined aposiopesically about his escutcheon, well exemplified his Liberal political instincts.

Gaveston touched her ladyship’s hand with his lips.

Considerably younger than her husband, and only comparatively recently married, she too was one of those tantalizingly complex personalities which only an old landed aristocracy can evolve. Born in Latvia, and educated in a pensionnat hard by Warsaw, she was at once mondaine and mystic. Her keen sense of social values would have shamed Debrett or Burke themselves, but at the same time she appeared to be an eager searcher after the greater and more eternal aspects of Truth, an untiring student of Burnt Njal and other Oriental works upon religion, and indefatigable in her study of the lesser-known works of Freud, of which she read even the appendices; (the German language presented few difficulties to her.)

“Delighted,” murmured Gaveston, as the other guests were presented to him. “The usual set!” he said inwardly.

So that was Sir Nicholas Gomme, was it? Gaveston looked at him with interest, for the famous Irish Secretary had been specially asked, he knew, to meet the rising young man from Wallace. How many chapters of contemporary history had not risen Minerva-like from that quasi-Napoleonic cranium! Free Trade legislation, concerti, wars and rumours of wars, sonnets, bridge-debts, and snuff-boxes. Nothing was too modern to appeal to his vivid imagination; he was an admitted adept in New thought and Art Nouveau, and had acquired a deserved reputation in three continents for his philately. A man who had lived! And Gaveston looked at Sir Nicholas’ silvering hair not without respect.

And there was Tierra del Fuego, the painter of the moment. Gaveston had last seen him in the Régale, in those ludicrously far-off days of his Bohemian life in London. He painted everything in curves. In Chelsea they spoke of him reverently as Le père du globisme, but, like many an original theorist, he was a poor conversationalist.

“La ligne droite, voilà l’ennemi!” he would interject repeatedly and ferociously. But fortunately this, his only, constatation usually fitted well into most discussions, artistic, political, or financial.

Close by stood the venerable Bishop of Barset, his shrewd kindly eyes blinking benignly at all around. “Such a favourite of mine,” whispered Lady Jordan to Gaveston. “So broad-minded!”

And there was Major-General Tremullion, ablaze with the decorations of the Irish War. Gav had once pilloried him in an article as “apparently wishing to die as hard as he had lived.” And deep in conversation beside the roaring hearth stood the representatives of contemporary literature: Ermyntrude Tropes, who lived on the novels she published about her friends, and the immaculate figure of Augustus Tollendale, who lived on the novels he was dissuaded from publishing about his.

But the party was apparently still one short.

“I can’t think where Bladge can be, Mr. ffoulis,” said Lady Jordan, who looked a trifle distracted; “I wanted you to take her in. But really we can’t wait.”

Gaveston bowed his surprised regret, and the brilliant house-party swept into the banqueting hall.

Over the substantial viands the guests soon warmed to their favourite topics, and Gav was enabled to see how subtle and intricate was the blending of politicians and artists which made the Jordans’ parties familiar to every reader of the Tatler and the Sketch. He listened appreciatively to the shreds of conversation that floated up the table towards him.

“Ireland!” gasped General Tremullion. “I only asked for fifty tanks, and they——” But the adroit hostess had perceived the warrior’s choleric frustration and changed the subject.

“For Lent reading,” affirmed the Bishop confidently, “I always recommend the ‘Mahabharata.’”

Mr. Tollendale made a hurried note.

And, yes, those were the measured tones of the Irish Secretary himself.

“I admit that I should have liked to change that over-rated North Borneo for their almost untouched Mauritius; and they’d have done it too, if only.…”

“What a coup it would have been!” interrupted Gaveston, his quick imagination kindling at the opening vistas of a new Colonial policy.

“You see, I think they knew I’d been concentrating on Africa for some time now.” The great Statesman continued, “For, as a matter of fact, I can tell you, in confidence of course, that, I’m, er … well, I’m buying Seychelles and Liberia, against a rise.”

Gaveston gasped. What a scoop for The Mongoose!

“And I don’t mind telling you,” the booming voice went on, “that the King himself is jealous of my three-cornered Cape of Good Hopes.”

“Three cornered…?” Gaveston’s head swam. But only for a moment. How it all came back to him! His wits rallied, and he recovered himself. “I hope, Sir Nicholas,” he winged the words down the long table, “you won’t swap a defaced Ireland for a second-hand St. Helena.”

It was a characteristic lightning-flash, and a thunder-clap of delighted laughter broke from all, not least from Sir Nicholas himself; he appreciated the subtle compliment. The Jordans gazed proudly at their promising débutant. Miss Tropes made a hurried note. Seldom had even Gaveston himself felt so sure of himself or so proud of the great ffoulis heritage of wit.

But while the laughter still echoed in the high-flung rafters, Sir Nicholas was seen to be gazing intently towards the door, a charmed delight in his eyes. The late-comer!

“Quelle fille!” he ejaculated with a graceful, old-world bow.

Everyone turned.

“Bladge!” came the unanimous cry. “Bladge!”

And even Gaveston felt that the spot-lime of interest had for a moment shifted from himself. He too turned, and saw, framed there in the noble Tudor doorway, an entrancing vision of loveliness, English and womanly at once, shimmering snake-like in sequins and a picture-hat. Was it—or was it not? Why, yes! It was none other than Lady Blandula Merris! And in their frenzied welcome the guests let their very aspic grow cold.

“Bladge!”—so that was her name among the glittering few whom she counted as her intimates.… He must remember that.

“BLADGE!” CAME THE UNANIMOUS CRY.

Although the daughter of one of our lesser-known marquesses, Lady Blandula was certainly the foremost figure of British womanhood, more wryly chic than any but the most anglicized Parisiennes, more sought after than any Royalty, more daring than any Bohemian, more photographed than any race-horse. No dance could boast itself a ball unless she graced it, no matinée charitable if she did not assist, nor were any theatricals amateur in which she did not perform. Slum missions and night-clubs were as one to her, for NIL ALIENUM PUTO was the proud old Merris motto. Her beauty was rivalled only by her superb audacities. To those who knew her she seemed Virtue incarnate, but dark stories were whispered round the envious suburbs of her more than Paphian orgies.… As she sat down in the vacant place beside him, Gaveston ffoulis felt that at last he had met a woman whom he could respect.

Yet he felt oddly aware that, somewhere or somewhen, he had met her before.… All through the princely meal he watched her discreetly but closely—in what incarnation could it have been … or what æon?… When he was a King in Babylon…?

After dinner a galaxy of intelligentsian entertainment was provided by the experienced hosts; planchette, charades, chamber-music, recitations and auto-suggestion were freely indulged in; and in the Edward VII smoke-room the kindly host grew deliberately reminiscent. But Gav and Lady Blandula, in their unconventional way, were sitting out on one of the greater staircases, sipping liqueurs and bandying witticisms highly characteristic of each other. Suddenly Bladge slipped from her finger a curiously wrought ring of turquoise, and handed it to her surprised, and almost flattered, companion.

“Yours, Gav,” she said with a champagne-like laugh. “I got it on false pretences, you know—and I’ll draw you a cheque for its wrapping.”

Gav looked at her in puzzled silence.

“Oh, stupid!” she rattled on. “And is your soul still so beautiful? My body certainly is!”

“But really——”

“No, I could see all the time you didn’t really know your Plotinus Arbiter, mon petit rat!”

And Gaveston remembered. So that had been another of the famous syren’s tricks! This one at all costs must be kept from the newspapers.… His look spoke for him, and Lady Blandula laughed heartily as she went on.

“Oh, it’s all right, you poor lamb! Innocent relaxation and social research—why shouldn’t I combine them? I did, you know, for quite a week after that night, too.”

Synthesis always appealed to Gaveston.

“Bladge!” he cried, and his voice rang true. “You are wonderful! I see all this century in you!”

But just then a voice was heard behind them. General Tremullion was coming down from the Bezique Gallery with Lady Jordan. He was still talking professionally.

“A whiff of powder soon puts things right,” he was saying.

Bladge looked surprised.

“You too, General!” she cooed, almost hectically, Gav thought. “You very nearly shock me, you know.” And with neat furtiveness she offered him a tiny crystal tabatière encrusted with fire-opals.

“What—what’s this, m’gal?” gasped General Tremullion. Lady Jordan, a skilled hostess of the haute monde, affected to notice nothing.

“But have a whiff, old thing, if it does you good,” answered Bladge cordially. “It’s the right stuff all right. Straight from Chinatown!”

But the old soldier declined.

“You young people!” he smiled, and passed on.

A piqued frown shadowed Lady Blandula’s brow for an instant.

“These b——y Victorians!” she muttered, rising from the step. “G——d, it’s too d——d quiet for me here. H——g it, I’m for bed. Night, Gav.”

A soupçon of Peau d’Espagne, and the modern Circe was gone.

Throughout that week-end the amazing pair tested each the other’s strength, vying from dawn to eve in the audacity of their wit and the originality of their whimsies. If Lady Blandula resolved to sleep on the roof, Gaveston asked for his bed to be made on the lawn. Did Gaveston swim in the river? Lady Blandula was quick to organize a motor-trip to bathe in the sea! If Lady Blandula danced on the dinner-table when the wine was brought, Gaveston slid down the great staircase on a silver tea-tray, whooping and tally-hoing to his heart’s content.

The very footmen, of whom there were ten, entered into the spirit of this breathless competition. All through Sunday the stables rang with “Three to two on Mr. Fooliss!” or “Even bobs on the filly!”

Gav and Bladge—the duet of the day! The thought gave Lady Jordan a comforting sense of security as she lay awake in bed in the early hours of Monday morning, listening to the tea-trays racing in the moonlight down the West terrace steps. Was she not their entremettrice and impresaria? It had cost her years of effort, but it could only be counted a triumph for her diligence. To improve her status, had she not diligently taken a house in Chelsea (a part of London she particularly disliked, having been brought up to believe that it lay low)? Had she not organized endless concerts there (she was unhappily tone-deaf)? Had she not brought numberless cubist pictures (her real taste was for Marcus Stone)? She had.

But now she had achieved! And she fell asleep deliciously, to dream of living once more on the salubrious heights to the North of the Park, of buying another Farquharson, of playing vingt-et-un in the evening. She was secure at last: no post-card of invitation but would evoke enthusiastic acceptance, no satire but would add to her reputation. After many years, Lady Jordan was entering the Promised Land.

And by the time of his departure on Monday afternoon (he travelled to London with Sir Nicholas and the inevitable Miss Tropes) Gaveston knew that Fate had thrown his lines with Lady Blandula’s. Coûte que coûte, he must get her to Oxford next term! What a challenge of emancipation to fling at the callowness of the hidebound university! Lady Blandula Merris! A name to conjure with! Everyone knew it. Everyone knew her fame and her infame. But only he knew her au fond—how mad-a-cap she was!

Bladge!

CHAPTER XIV

COLOPHON

Hilary term was half-spent, and a chain of translucent May evenings enwreathed Malmaison Lodge with a beauty more fragrant and Fragonard than ever. With each successive sundown came a lingering breeze faintly susurrous in the clumps of lavender that leaned their slenderness against the honey-laden hollyhocks; nightjars and crickets chaffered and chattered in the acanthine capitals of the gazebo; and, far away, silent and argentine above the jagged ridge of Headington, the midsummer moon spilt magic from her tilted cup.

On such evenings (and they were many) Gaveston and David would lie almost prone in their deck chairs, now listening enraptured to the thronging nightingales, now idly tossing their gay-coloured cummerbunds to startle the encircling flitter-mice. Often enough they would talk, sometimes both would sit in profound silence, and not seldom, as term drew on, Gaveston would dictate to his friend his compositions for the Newdigate Prize Poem (the set subject was “University Reform,” the couplets heroic), for the Chancellor’s Essay in Latin Prose (it was De Complice Oedipi this year), for the Disputation in Middle Aramaic, the impromptu cuneiform inscriptions, for the French epigrams and the Postlethwaite Allocution, and many another blue riband of scholarship. Yet sometimes, during these weeks of sultry splendour, a faint ennui seemed almost to overtake Gaveston.

“You’ve sent in my stuff for the Craven?” he asked David one night, flinging away his rhyming dictionary on to the gazebo steps.

“Yesterday, Gav. And first-rate those iambics were!”

“Well, that’s enough for to-day. Let’s finish the Newdigate to-morrow after brekker.” He rose. “I’m going down to the post office now.”

Something in Gav’s voice made David feel sure that a climax in his friend’s already supernal career was hard at hand, and in delighted wonder he watched him stride towards Oxford across the bee-loud clover meadows wherein Malmaison Lodge lay demurely perdue.

Gaveston walked apace, and ere long he was breasting the slope of St. Aldate’s towards the post office and Christ Church. Here he was, and the lisping telegraph girl (an old friend by now) smiled appreciatively as he slipped his pencilled form under the grating.

“Press rates?” she asked brightly.

“No, not for this,” answered Gav.

Penhaligon Knickerbocker Hotel Reno Nevada USA you will find Oxford in May becoming expect you this day fortnight Peroxic sails on fourth kisses Gav alone please.

“Is that order all right?” she asked doubtfully.

“Perfectly,” he answered. “It is the first telegram with a postscript.”

She looked at him with questioning surprise.

“Emphasis,” he explained, and came out into St. Aldate’s and turned his footsteps towards Wallace.

A crisis in the tide of his life always brought Gaveston to Mongo’s room. He usually came on there from the post office. How soothing still he found that room with its unchanging and immutable sameness, how orderly in its permanent untidiness! As he knocked and entered there were those same young voices laughing (how strange to think that they were fully a year his junior!), and there, on the same accustomed hob, crouched the same Mongo. Nowadays there were a few photographs the more, and the vice-cancellarian mace now occupied the corner where formerly Mongo’s spokeless umbrella had immemorially leaned, but otherwise all was as before. But somehow, with a shiver, Gaveston suddenly felt himself grown old.

“Something wrong, Gav?” asked Mongo, noticing his tremor.

But Gaveston only smiled enigmatically, and Mongo, with quick perceptiveness, hinted successfully to his other visitors that there was another common-room for junior members of the college somewhere about.

“Not overworking, Gav?”

“Well, I don’t know, Mongo. You see——” He stopped as if to collect his thoughts, and at once Mongo saw that something was seriously wrong.

“I—I think I see, Gav.” The old man laid a hand on his shoulder as he spoke. “You’ve rushed things a little, haven’t you? Oxford doesn’t stand that, you know.”

“Youth can stand a lot, Mongo.”

“But you’ve drunk the draught too quickly, Gav.”

“That’s what it is. And now … well, it simply can’t go on.… No lees for me!” His voice quavered a little.

“You mean you’re going down?”

“This term, Mongo,” he nodded.

“And for good?”

“For good.”

His voice was firm again. He blew his nose. Mongo blew his. Both gulped.

“It’s beastly saying good-bye.…”

“Beastly,” nodded the Dean.

“But still, term’s not over yet. I’ve time for new plans, and I’ll certainly give a party for Commem. You’ll come, Mongo?”

“Why, of course, Gav.” The Dean was recovering his youthful spirits again. And Gav too felt happier when he came across the quadrangle once more. After all, there was a world outside Wallace, and it needed conquering.…

And the first step?

He was passing Daunchey the bookseller’s window as he wondered. A card caught his eye.

GENTLEMEN’S LIBRARIES PURCHASED.

It would have to be done. His mind was made up, and he stepped into the shop. He was welcomed. Old Mr. Daunchey himself hurried forward from his counting-house, rubbing his hands.

“I want you to buy my books, Daunchey.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll send a man round, sir.”

“Right away, please.”

“Certainly, sir. And if I might suggest it, sir, your name in them would increase their value. We might even issue a special catalogue.…”

But the thought gave Gaveston pause. He rather shuddered. And he glanced at the long lines of second- and even third-hand books, ranged there in penitential rows, drilled into anonymity, like lost dogs or waifs and strays … each once the darling purchase of some eager Oxonian, each.… Before his eyes rose the phantasms and sosias of generation upon dead generation of his predecessors, buyers at first and sellers at last of books, thronging the air with their insistent presences, pleading with poor withered fingers for their possessions. A charnel house of books, a morgue of literature! No! Impossible!

“Perhaps, Daunchey, you’d better not send just yet,” he said quickly. And partly to assuage the aged bookseller’s disappointment, partly to ward off that too often told anecdote of how the P … of W … had entered once to ask for the copy of the (current) Sporting Times, Gaveston ordered two copies of La Dame aux Camelias, in its most unexpurgated form.

“One to myself, Daunchey. And one to Mr. Paunceford, at my address. And bind them both in that eau-de-nil calf I had before.”

Side by side, he planned, David and he would read them while dawn broke upon their last dear day as clerks of Oxenford.…

Commemoration Week, as may be expected, did not linger. Lady Penhaligon, obedient and rejuvenated as ever, arrived from Reno, Nev., on the very day before the river-side festivities.

“Such a lonesome trip home, dearest Gav,” she murmured at the station. “Don’t you like this toque, darling? I got it at New Orleans—oh, you should have seen the central heating we had there last fall.…”

“But how topping to get you back, Mums,” he said, “and you’re just in time for to-morrow!”

“But am I late for something to-day, dear?” she asked so wistfully that her son had to burst out laughing.

“You’re never that, Mums!” he cried, and kissed her.

“I don’t understand it all, Gavvy,” and she smiled in her deliciously puzzled fashion. “But you always seem to get the last word nowadays.”

Dear Lady Julia! She spoke more truthfully than she knew, more truthfully than even Gaveston could have foreseen.…

But once at Malmaison Lodge, Gaveston had to rush back to the station to meet Lady Blandula and Lady Jordan and Uncle Wilkinson who were to make up the house party.…

Hard on the heels of each day followed another. Between the college balls which Gav and his mother and Lady Blandula nightly graced, there seemed scarcely a few fleeting hours for river parties under the wine-red hawthorns of Islip or Newnham, and almost before anyone had realized it—the last day of all had come! At last it was there, that fateful Thursday when Gaveston would have to face the examiners in Divinity Moderations and place the crown on his academic career.

“You’ll all come to my viva, of course,” Gav had said to the assembled house party at Malmaison Lodge. “David will give you the tickets. It’s at six o’clock (do be punctual, Mums!)—and it’ll all be over in time for us to change before dinner here at seven.”

“You’re sure it won’t last too long, Gav darling. You mustn’t tire yourself,” Lady Penhaligon’s voice was heard above the delighted murmurs of assent.

“No, mother dear,” Gav laughed, “I’m seeing to that.”

And certainly all felt that, for one who had easily borne off the palm in all his university contests, this examination could be no more than a quaint scholastic formality. Else indeed it had been an insult for the winner of Craven and Brackenbury to be cross-examined in the lamentably late Greek of Peter and Paul. And everyone looked forward to the party which was to follow the ordeal. Breakfast was hardly over, but already they could hear Mrs. Grimaldi, eager to show her mettle, cluttering busily about her tiny Carolean scullery, and already the most seductive odours of mayonnaise and cucumber salad were floating gradually upwards.

Six o’clock came, and before the eyes of friends and family and many unknown admirers, Gaveston faced his examiners.

“Your papers on the Gospels were excellent, Mr. ffoulis,” said their spokesman, a former Bishop of Tristan da Cunha obliged to retire for his toleration of ritualistic practices in Outer Polynesia. “And on the Acts also. But there is one little point which—hm—I should like you to elucidate for us. That is—hm—what is your, shall I say?—authority for the statement that Festus and Felix are the same person?”

For a moment Gaveston paused, as if thoroughly weighing the significance of his answer.

“Renan,” he replied firmly. “Ernest Renan. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

And lo! he was gone before the bewildered examiners had recovered from the appalling shock. Only the ex-Bishop of Tristan da Cunha, long inured to the wildest heresies, kept his head. Over the confused sound of protesting voices his stern tones were only too audible.

“You have failed to satisfy the examiners, Mr. ffoulis.”

“RENAN,” HE REPLIED FIRMLY

Gaveston ffoulis had failed in Divvers! Was it possible? There was an uproar. Mongo, seated with the privileged spectators, had difficulty in preventing Lady Julia from making a personal appeal to the examiners, and David was similarly engaged with Lady Blandula.

But, meanwhile, Gaveston himself was strolling back to Malmaison Lodge, with the glow of conscious triumph all over his distinguished features.…

Seven o’clock also came. But it was a desolate company that sate them down to the toothsome viands and victuals which Mrs. Grimaldi, all unwitting of the catastrophe, had prepared. Conversation was faltering in the extreme, and all Mongo’s talk of the successes of Newdigate and Postlethwaite fell on empty air—who could forget that these triumphs were all obfuscated by the disaster of that evening. The party, so long anticipated as the social event of the Oxford year, limped along until at last the iced melon was removed.

At last Mongo broached the dread topic.

“Gaveston,” he began almost nervously, “of course it’s impossible now, after—well, after what’s happened. But I should tell you that the College had empowered me to offer you a fellowship.”

Gaveston bowed across the table in silence.

“You might,” said the aged Dean, “you might, like me, have captured the secret of unending youth and continued here in Oxford for ever, while Lent followed Michaelmas, and Michaelmas Trinity, and Trinity Hilary, and Hilary Lent—eternal among the transitory, my disciple and my successor. But now.…”

Poor Mongo broke down.… And then Gaveston rose in his place, unable any longer to keep the party in this unhappy suspense.

“Don’t, Mongo, don’t,” he started. “I owe you all an explanation. But after all—you might have known.… This was not a failure. This was not a débâcle. This was my greatest day! This was my greatest triumph!”

His manner grew animated.

“I thought I could no longer continue in Oxford. I thought I had drained the cup dry. Uncle Wilkinson” (he bowed to his uncle, who had been unsuccessfully trying to shock Lady Blandula with a tale about Félix Faure), “Uncle Wilkinson had procured for me from the Mikado, to whom on occasion he has been useful, the offer of an excellent educational post in his country. But I have refused it, by cablegram this morning. Mr. Arundel’s offer on behalf of Wallace College I have put out of court. No, I remain free, untrammelled. I can never graduate now.”

“Oh, what does the boy mean, Wilkie? Doesn’t he like the dear Mikado?” Lady Penhaligon was whispering. “He’s too clever for me, really.”

“Nonsense, Julia,” answered Uncle Wilkie. “If he can’t pass this Divvers, egad, he can’t take a degree, y’ know.”

“Don’t you realize?” Gav was continuing, “I have found the secret of eternal Youth. Summer will follow summer, and each year when the cuckoo leaves us, I shall go up again for Divvers. But never, never shall I allow myself to satisfy those examiners. No—year after year that magic Sesame of ‘Renan, Ernest Renan!’ will keep open for me the portals of the enchanted palace of Youth.”

Mongo was looking distinctly brighter.

“There are men here in their sixth, their seventh—yes, even their seventeenth—year. But too late have they realized the potency of Oxford’s spell. They are fading figures distinguished from the dons only by their greater futility. They have no status in the university, no cause to be here. The genius loci demands a raison d’être. Pathetic and spectral, they cannot persuade the callowest undergraduate that they are of his kind, for between them is fixed a great gulph—they have passed their examinations, and they wear the snowy ermine of the Bachelor’s gown.”

“But I,” his voice thrilled, “I shall be ever of the company of the Young, a happy, happy youth, for ever fair, immutable in my sempiternal adolescence.…”

The guests could no longer contain their emotions. And they felt that at such a turning-point, Gaveston should be left alone. Two by two they passed silently out into the garden, Sir Wilkinson with Lady Jordan, David with Lady Blandula, and Mongo with Lady Penhaligon leaning heavily upon his arm. (Was an old friend going to be a new step-father, Gaveston wondered as he found himself alone with his nocturnal thoughts.)

What was it he had planned for his last dawn in Oxford’s walls? To pore with David over the tragical history of Armand and Marguerite? In eau-de-nil calf? But that strangely melancholy experience he would never know, and, solitary now amid the empty glasses and the crumpled napkins, he lost himself in memory.…

And before his eyes there passed in hieratic pageantry all the varied vistas of his life—episodes in the perfume-laden apple-green nursery at Neuilly, where from earliest infancy, with his mother and his Breton nou-nou, he had played the never stale games of cache-cache and chemin-de-fer and then the villes d’eaux of Europe, unwithering in their variegations, Perrier and Apollinaris, Apenta and Hunyadi Janos, and then his appearance as a witness in the Fünck divorce case (he could still hear himself boldly rivalling the Judge’s epigrams in a piping treble), and then his first day as an Oppidan (he had never been to a preparatory school), and that unique exploit which had resulted in his leaving Eton, when he and David had locked the drill sergeant into the pepper-box of the white-walled fives-court, and then long holidays in Norwegian fjords and Central European Tyrols, and at last his entry into the dream-broidered City, in a hansom-cab and with dim chiming bells beckoning, and the view from his rooms over brindled and exfoliated walls to distant and unreal spires, and, one by one, the familiar figures of his terms and vacations, confused in wild fandangos and rigadoons of carnival, the Warden of Rutland and the unspeakable du Val, Sir Nicholas Gomme and Lord Vivian Cosmo, worthy John Thoms and the High Personage at Munich.…

With a start Gaveston drew himself up in his chair. How tranquil it all was around Malmaison Lodge! Only from the Virginy creeper beneath his window-sill a ragged-robin chirped her tremulous aubade to a distant willow-warbler invisible among the reeds. The guests had stolen quietly away to their respective bedrooms, and the short midsummer night had hurried past as silent and fleet-footed as his own reverie. He rose to face a new day, a new life.…

The future held surprises still, no doubt, even in the unchanging City of the spires. But for him it was enough if the delicate rhythms of the past were beautifully perpetuate.

“What more can Life hold than this?” he asked himself, and looked eastward from the casement window over the hollyhocks. With beating veins and mute eyes he gazed out upon a summer sky flushed rosy with the dawn, and around him the quivering air grew suddenly campanulous.…

Widdleswick: Harvest Festival, 1921.

Cardiff: Empire Day, 1922.

MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND

A NEW HUMOROUS BOOK

By STEPHEN LEACOCK

Second Edition.                5s. net.

“To be a humorist is a desperate enterprise. Let it be said at once that Mr. Leacock’s achievement is assured and triumphant.”—Morning Post.

“Mr. Stephen Leacock is a lucky man. Like Mark Twain and O. Henry, he can make Englishmen laugh just as hard as Americans.”—Times.

“This very sagacious and amusing volume. These gay and alert pages are full of wisdom and acuteness, shot through with the author’s high spirits and fun.”—Punch.

“It is to be hoped that we shall prove Mr. Leacock in the right by buying his latest book, and when our friends have stolen it buying another copy.”—Evening News.

“I formally declare that ‘My Discovery of England’ is one of the most delightful amusing books I have read for many a day, Mr. Leacock is more than a fellow of infinite jest. He is a man of ideas. He has something to say about pretty nearly everything.”—Sunday Chronicle.

“What a splendid and healthy thing is a real laughing philosopher. Mr. Leacock is as ‘bracing’ as the sea-side place of John Hassall’s famous poster. His wisdom is always humorous, as his humour is always wise. It is all delightful reading.”—Sunday Times.

“Another book in which Professor Stephen Leacock gives free rein to his humour, which is quite at its best.”—Westminster Gazette.

“There is a laugh on every page.”—Daily Sketch.

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LTD, VIGO ST., W.1.

A SCARCE COMMODITY.

“Humour is a scarce commodity in Noveldom”—Glasgow Herald.

A CUCKOO IN THE NEST

By BEN TRAVERS

Author of “The Dippers.”

Third Edition.                7s. 6d. net.

“A really funny book, a naturally funny book. One of those ridiculously funny books that provoke spontaneous laughter like the rapid recurring barks of a quick firing gun.… It gurgles and dances and prances with frolicsome fun. It is pure farce from beginning to end, that is to say from Chapter II. to the end. The first Chapter must be winked at, the wrapper cremated, and the rest follows as spontaneously and joyously as a ring of bells.”—Winifred Blatchford in the Clarion.

“If you want to laugh out loud until your sides ache, read these adventures. Not only are we given all the joys of a French farce without a touch of indelicacy or vulgarity, but we meet a more refreshing crowd of comedians than I have read of for a long time.”—S. P. B. Mais in the Daily Express.

THE DIPPERS

Crown 8vo.                7s. 6d. net.

“The Dippers” has just been dramatised and is now being played by Cyril Maude.

“A capital farce in which the absurdities are made really amusing. Mr. Ben Travers is a joker to be thankful for.… His audacity is justified by his humour.”—Daily Mail.

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LTD, VIGO ST., W.1.

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Table of Contents

THE OXFORD CIRCUS

Alfred Budd: A Memoir

BOOK I VORTEX

CHAPTER I INTROIT

CHAPTER II PLINTH

CHAPTER III TOCCATA AND FUGUE

CHAPTER IV CIRCEAN

CHAPTER V GUERRILLA

CHAPTER VI VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE

CHAPTER VII JOSS AND REREDOS

CHAPTER VIII HALLALI

BOOK II APEX

CHAPTER IX ἘΚΛΟΓΟΣ

CHAPTER X OPEN DIAPASON

CHAPTER XI SPATE

CHAPTER XII FUNAMBULESQUE

CHAPTER XIII CHAMPAIGN

CHAPTER XIV COLOPHON

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE