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Read Ebook: The Oxford Circus: A Novel of Oxford and Youth by Miles Hamish Mortimer Raymond Kettelwell John Illustrator
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Ebook has 722 lines and 37056 words, and 15 pages
CHAP. PAGE
ALFRED BUDD: A MEMOIR 3
BOOK I: VORTEX
I INTROIT 13
II PLINTH 29
V GUERRILLA 76
VI VOYAGE EN CYTH?RE 90
BOOK II: APEX
X OPEN DIAPASON 151
FACING PAGE
"Dear Mongo!" 42
"Non ? 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
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 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 rest is soon told.
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
INTROIT
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.
"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....
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....
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. And there, in the quietude of his own room, Gaveston dined simply off a dish of cold Bombay duck, garnished with some superb bottled peas.
But what was that?
"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!"
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