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

"Hullo, Gav!"

"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 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 , 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."

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.

"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:

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."

"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.

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.

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."

The oak of Wallace Hall is curiously pale .

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.

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 .

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.

"I think his name is Foulis," came the low respectful answer.

"ffoulis," corrected Gav silkily, with the gentlest of smiles. And the incident closed.

i.e., by 9.15 p.m.

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.

But Mongo!

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