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THE OXFORD CIRCUS




[Illustration: “’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.

[Illustration: 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 _chic_est 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.

[Illustration: “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.

[Illustration: 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 [Illustration] 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.

[Illustration: “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.”

[Illustration: “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._

       *       *       *       *       *

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