Sinister Street · Book III · Chapter 3 9 (3/3)

“But it lacks individuality,” Michael complained. “It’s so damned inclusive. It’s like The Daily Telegraph. It’s voluminous and undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything, from a man who’s going to be hanged for murder to a new record at cricket. Why can’t you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?”

“The Daily Mail,” Maurice scoffed. “That rag!”

“A man once said to me,” Michael meditatively continued, “that whenever he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all,” he added cheerfully, “nobody does read the O.L.G. The circulation depends on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations by the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor. Is it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found in-that great terra incognita⁠—Queen’s College?”

But Maurice had left him, and Michael strolled down to the lodge to see if there were any letters. Shadbolt handed him an invitation to dinner from the Warden. As he opened it, Lonsdale came up with a torn replica of his own.

“I say, Michael, this is a rum sort of binge for the Wagger to give. I spotted all the notes laid out in a row by old Pumpkin-head’s butler. You. Me. Tommy Grainger. Fitzroy. That ass Appleby. That worm Carben. And Smithers. There may have been some others too. I hope I don’t get planted next the Pumpkinette.”

“Miss Wagger may not be there,” said Michael hopefully. “But if she is, you’re bound to be next her.”

“I say, Shadbolt,” Lonsdale demanded, “is this going to be a big squash at the Wagger’s?”

“The Warden has given me no instruction, sir, about carriages. And so I think we may take it for granted as it will be mostly confined to members of the college, sir. His servant tells me as the Dean is going and the Senior Tutor.”

“And there won’t be any does?”

“Any what, sir?”

“Any ladies?”

“I expect as Miss Crackanthorpe will be present. She very rarely absconds from such proceedings,” said Shadbolt, drawing every word with the sound of popping corks from the depths of his pompousness.

Michael and Lonsdale found out that to the list of guests they had established must be added the names of Maurice, Wedderburn and two freshmen who were already favorably reported through the college as good sportsmen.

Two evenings later, at seven o’clock, Michael, Maurice, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, and Grainger, bowed and starched, stood in Venner’s, drinking peach bitters sharpened by the addition of gin.

“The men have gone in to hall,” said Venner. “You ought to start round to the Warden’s lodgings at ten past seven. Now don’t be late. I expect you’ll have a capital dinner.”

“Champagne, Venner?” asked Lonsdale.

“Oh, bound to be! Bound to be,” said Venner. “The Warden knows how to give a dinner. There’s no doubt of that.”

“Caviar, Venner?” asked Maurice.

“I wouldn’t say for certain. But if you get an opportunity to drink any of that old hock, be sure you don’t forget. It’s a lovely wine. I wish we had a few dozen in the J.C.R. Now don’t go and get tipsy like some of our fellows did once at a dinner given by the Warden.”

“Did they, Venner?” asked everybody, greatly interested.

“It was just after the Transvaal war broke out. Only three or four years ago. There was a man called Castleton, a cousin of our Castleton, but a very different sort of man, such a rowdy fellow. He came out from the Warden’s most dreadfully tipsy, and the men were taking him back to his rooms, when he saw little Barnaby, a Science don, going across New quad. He broke away from his friends and shouted out, ‘there’s a blasted Boer,’ and before they could stop him, he’d knocked poor little Barnaby, a most nervous fellow, down in the wet grass and nearly throttled him. It was hushed up, but Castleton was never asked again you may be sure, and then soon after he volunteered for the front and died of enteric. So you see what comes of getting tipsy. Now you’d better start.”

Arm in arm the five of them strolled through Cloisters until they came to the gothic door of the Warden’s Lodgings. Up the Warden’s majestic staircase they followed the butler into the Warden’s gothic drawing-room where they shook hands with the great moon-faced Warden himself, and with Miss Crackanthorpe, who was very much like her brother, and nearly as round on a much smaller scale. They nodded to the Dean, mentally calculating how many roll-calls they were behind, for the Dean notwithstanding the geniality of his greeting had one gray eye that seemed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded to Mr. Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed nervously in response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed them. The two freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful acknowledgments of their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a gesture of such bland welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with suppressed mortification and rage.

“Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don’t sit next the Pumpkinette?” whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to dinner.

“Not a halfpenny,” laughed Michael. “You will. And I shall get Ardle.”

Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of three dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was to make the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned forerunners had nothing to fear for his own preeminence. Modern life found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which made more than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.

Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness of the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by a magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing some grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many dinners in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden’s great round face inclined slowly now toward Fitzroy with his fair complexion and military rigor of bearing, now toward Wedderburn whose evening dress acquired from the dignity of its owner the richness of black velvet. More directly in the light of the first lamp sat Maurice and Appleby opposite to one another, both imparting to the assemblage a charming worldliness, Maurice by his loose-fronted shirt, Appleby by the self-esteem of his restless blue eyes. The two freshmen on either side of the Dean wonderfully contrasted with his gauntness, and even more did the withered Ardle, who looked like a specimen of humanity dried as plants are dried between heavy books, contrast with the sprawling bulk of Grainger. On the other side, Michael watched with amusement Miss Crackanthorpe with shining apple-face bobbing nervously between Smithers pale and solid and domed like a great cheese, and Lonsdale cool and pink as an ice. In the background from the shadows at either end of the room the sage-green walls materialized in the lamplight: the three dead Wardens stared down at the table: and every fifteen minutes bells chimed in St. Mary’s tower.

“And how is The Oxford Looking-Glass progressing, Avery?” inquired the Warden, shining full upon the editor in a steady gaze. “No doubt it takes up a great deal of your valuable time?”

The Dean winked his gray decanal eye at the champagne: the Senior Tutor coughed remotely like a grasshopper: Lonsdale prodded Michael with his elbow and murmured that “the Wagger had laid Mossy a stymie.”

Maurice admitted the responsibility of the paper for occupying a considerable amount of his leisure, but consoled himself for this by the fact that certainly, The Oxford Looking-Glass was progressing very well indeed.

“We don’t altogether know what attitude to take up over the Rhodes Bequest,” said Maurice. Then boldly he demanded from the Warden what would be the effect of these imposed scholars from America and Australia and Africa.

“The speculation is not without interest,” declared the Warden. “What does Fitzroy think?”

Fitzroy threw back his shoulders as if he were going to abuse the Togger and said he thought the athletic qualifications were a mistake. “After all, sir, we don’t want the Tabs⁠—I mean to say we don’t want to beat Cambridge with the help of a lot of foreigners.”

“Foreigners, Fitzroy? Come, come, we can scarcely stigmatize Canadians as foreigners. What would become of the Imperial Idea?”

“I think the Imperial Idea will take a lot of living up to,” said Wedderburn, “when we come face to face with its practical expression. Personally I loathe Colonials except at the Earl’s Court Exhibition.”

“Ah, Wedderburn,” said the Warden, “you are luckily young enough to be able to be particular. I with increasing age begin to suffer from that terrible disease of age⁠—toleration.”

“But the Warden is not so very old,” whispered Miss Crackanthorpe to Lonsdale and Michael.

“Oh, rather not,” Lonsdale murmured encouragingly.

“I think they’ll wake up Oxford,” announced Smithers; then, as everyone turned to hear what more he would say, Smithers seemed inclined to melt into silence, but with a sudden jerk of defiance, he hardened himself and became volubly opinionative.

“There’s no doubt,” he continued, “that these fellows will make the average undergrad look round him a bit.” As Smithers curtailed undergraduate to the convention of a lady-novelist, a shudder ran round the dinner party. Almost the butler instead of putting ice into the champagne might have slipped it down the backs of the guests.

“In fact, what ho, she bumps,” whispered Lonsdale. “Likewise pip-ip, and tootle-oo.”

“Anyway, he won’t be able to ignore them,” said Smithers.

“We hope not, indeed,” the Warden gravely wished. “What does Lonsdale think? Lord Cleveden wrote to me to say how deeply interested he was by the whole scheme⁠—a most appreciative letter, and your father has had a great experience of colonial conditions.”

“Has he?” said Lonsdale. “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. You mean when he was Governor. Oh, rather. But I never knew him in those days.” Then under his breath he muttered to Michael: “Dive in, dive in, you rotter, I’m getting out of my depth.”

“I think Oxford will change the Rhodes Scholars much more profoundly than the Rhodes Scholars will change Oxford,” said Michael. “At least they will if Oxford hasn’t lost anything lately. Sometimes I’m worried by that, and then I’m not, for I do really feel that they must be changed. Civilization must have some power, or we should all revert.”

“And are we to regard these finished oversea products as barbarians?” asked the Warden.

“Oh, yes,” said Michael earnestly. “Just as much barbarians as any freshmen.”

Everybody looked at the two freshmen on either side of the Dean and laughed, while they laughed too and tried to appear pleasantly flattered by the epithet.

“And what will Oxford give them?” asked the Dean dryly. He spoke with that contempt of generalizations of which all dons made a habit.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Michael. “But vaguely I would say that Oxford would cure them of being surprised by themselves or of showing surprise at anybody else. Marcus Aurelius said what I’m trying to say much better than I ever can. Also they will gain a sense of humor, or rather they will ripen whatever sense they already possess. And they’ll have a sense of continuity, too, and perhaps⁠—but of course this will depend very much on their dons⁠—perhaps they’ll take as much interest in the world as in Australia.”

“Why will that depend on their dons?” challenged Mr. Ambrose.

“Oh, well, you know,” explained Michael apologetically, “dons very often haven’t much capacity for inquisitiveness. They get frightened very easily, don’t they?”

“Very true, very true,” said the Warden. “But, my dear Fane, your optimism and your pessimism are both quixotic, immensely quixotic.”

Later on in the quad when the undergraduate members of the dinner party discussed the evening, Maurice rallied Michael on his conversation.

“If you can talk your theories, why can’t you write them?” he complained.

“Because they’d be almost indecently diaphanous,” said Michael.

“Good old Fane!” said Grainger. “But, I say, you are an extraordinary chap, you know.”

“He did it for me,” said Lonsdale. “Pumpkin-head would have burst, if I’d let out I didn’t know what part of the jolly old world my governor used to run.”