Sinister Street · Book III · Chapter 3 3 (1/2)

III

The First Term

His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of discovery than from his prefigurative dreams he had expected. He had certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own “year.” These trials of personality were conducted with all the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books. Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.

Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a general observation on the row of Sunday night’s celebration, Michael proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.

“Were you in that gang?” Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous surprise.

“I was fined,” Michael announced, trying to quench the note of exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was creating.

“I say,” Carben sneered, “so at last one of the ‘bloods’ is going to condescend to play Rugger. Jonah,” he called to the captain of the Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the room, “we’ve got a college blood playing three-quarter for us.”

“Good work,” said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. “Where is he?”

Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.

“No end of a blood,” Carben went on. “Lights bonfires and gets fined all in his first week.”

The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red wrists and their smug insignificance.

“You were at St. James’, weren’t you?” asked Jones. “Did you know Mansfield?”

“I didn’t know him⁠—exactly,” said Michael, “but⁠—in fact⁠—we thought him rather a tick.”

“Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine, but don’t apologize.”

There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,” he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was something positively contemptible.

Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college.

“Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded. “Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s quite right.”

“Quite right,” a chorus echoed.

Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J.C.R.; he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael. He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.

“These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was wisely propounding.

“We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed rebuke.

“Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,” Carben affirmed.

How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary, and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with a dismal genteelness.

“Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put your name down for the Ugger.”

“The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence.

“The Union.”

Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the sponsorship of Carben.

“I don’t think I’ll join this term.”

He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.

In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called along the table to Grainger:

“I say, Tommy, do you know we’ve got a Rugger rough with us?”

Several people murmured in surprise.

“I say, have you really been playing Rugger?”

“Well, great Scott!” exclaimed Michael, “there’s nothing very odd in that.”

“But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men,” Lonsdale protested.

“Some are,” Michael admitted. “Still, it’s a better game than Socker.”

“But everybody at St. Mary’s plays Socker,” Lonsdale went on.

Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys. And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this freshmen’s table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be snuffed out ignominiously.

“Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger,” Michael asserted.

“Shall I have a shot?” suggested Lonsdale.

“It’s a most devilish good game,” Michael earnestly avowed.

“Tommy,” Lonsdale shouted, “I’m going to be a Rugger rough myself.”

“I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row,” said Wedderburn severely.

“My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass,” chuckled the offender.

Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.

“Have you sconced me?” Lonsdale demanded.

The head of the table nodded.

Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown. Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn’s room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus of Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all very foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and his auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn’s return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited him in his room to enjoy his displeasure.

Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.

“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked Wedderburn.

“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other to⁠—I mean⁠—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”

“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me. We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J.C.R. four years from now.”

But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.

“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,” said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”

“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my rooms because I like them.”

“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued. “There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For instance, Avery⁠—”

“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.

“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ’Varsity Eleven,” said Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”

“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.

“That’s exactly what he isn’t,” Michael contradicted.

“Damnable poseur,” Wedderburn rumbled.

“Oh, well, so are you,” said Michael.

He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery. Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well. But all the Carthusians at St. Mary’s dressed rather too well and carried about with them the atmosphere of a weekend in a sporting country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to⁠—to what? To some distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale. Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art. Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend forever Ardle’s dusty lectures on Cicero in order that forever he might hear Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause Mr. Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his Plato in a sadler’s shop, where he had found it necessary to complain of a saddle newly made for him.

“But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale.”

“What’s he talking about?” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.

“Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane,” added the Senior Tutor dryly.

Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then seeing by the lecturer’s face that something was still wrong, he assumed a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the situation he laughed very heartily and said:

“Oh, well, after all, it’s very much the same.” Then, as everybody else laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his trousers in gentle self-congratulation.

“Rum old buffer,” he whispered presently to Michael. “His eye gets very glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?”

Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary’s, there might be added to the list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael’s collection as types. There was Grainger, last year’s Captain of the Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the ’Varsity in the spring. Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and listen for an hour at a time to his naive theories of life. Grainger seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to himself was surprising.

“Great Scott, you are an odd chap,” Grainger once ejaculated.

“Why?”

“Why, you’re a clever devil, aren’t you, and you don’t seem to do anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?”

“A good deal,” Michael admitted. “At least, it would be rot if I talked it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way.”

“You are a curious chap. I can’t make you out.”

“Why should you?” asked Michael. “You were never sent into this world to puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as you’re sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you’ll go into the Egyptian Civil Service and you’ll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I can’t imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them wriggling under me.”

“I suppose you’re a Radical. They say you are,” Grainger lazily announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.