Hamish Miles

“ 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 [242] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [19] fair eyes, whose every trait bore the subtle handwriting of race and breeding, and on whose lips played the most infectious of enigmatic smiles. ”

“ Who didn’t know who Mongo was? Who in Oxford? Who in England? In all Asia and in all Africa? Who indeed? [37] 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [91] watching the great wheeled wains of cauliflowers passing spectral through the morning mists? ”

“ 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! ”

“ The train was the [202] 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! ”

“ 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 [23] men, dons, scouts, clergymen, proctors, shopkeepers and freshmen. ”

“ 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, [215] 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 [139] 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. ”

“ 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 [221] 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. ”

“ 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 [9] 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. ”

“ 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: [83] 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. ”

“ 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. [213] 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. ”

“ 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, [24] woke age-long echoes from the mouldering walls of Queen’s Lane. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
[239]
“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. ”

“ 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 [101] the redecoration of his rooms and his personality. “Each mirrors the other,” he reflected sagaciously. ”

“ Why, yes! It was [214] 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. ”

“ 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 [36] 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. ”

“ 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 [15] taxicabs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [183] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”