Chapter II: The Making of an Englishman (3)

Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality. With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the arrangement of a dinner, as he was then--as always--sublimely indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed 'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member of Senior Common Room.

"_Sacre nom de chien!_" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete, Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! _A bas les snobs!_" He seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. _Conspuez les accapareurs!_" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced. "Come and sing to 'em, George!

As one that for a weary space hath dined
Lulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."

He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed intoxication might be "a good dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."

"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint? Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be 'ick."

I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as a _premier Manqué_. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he went to the Bar, and I"--a little bitterly--"I thought of going to the Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."

When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before," he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish kings before the hapless Norman invasion--utterly wanting in self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed in language of greater splendour than the last.

It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough, nearly broke O'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "He _made_ Oxford for me."

Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford for a good many people. His rooms--in Loring's phrase--were like a gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in him."

Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the formula and parodied it.

"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days, Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."

_Où sont les neiges d'antan?_ Within six weeks we were scattered, and in twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've only got six days more?"

"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.

"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read Law or something?"

I shook my head.

"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be just as bad in a year's time."

We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and one.

"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current. "Damn' _good_ fun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going to do now, George?"

"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.

The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions. Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar--more usually, however, I waited for something to turn up.

"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"

"And bury myself as an extra attaché in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever come back I shall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result with the maximum of effort."

Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.

"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.

"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"

The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.

"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."

"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.

"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.

"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."

He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place, he broke silence to say:

"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an extraordinary thing--frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than let them hear me; so I hung on--sort of biting on the bullet--till it was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends, you were all my blood and breed--not like in the old Chicago days. And then--oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed such utter fools.... Still, I won through."

"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly gentle.

"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good friend to me."

"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."

"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never, never give in till I die!"

Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a paddle and seated himself on the box.

"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go down?"

"Depends."

"What on?"

"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure, I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they're _going_ to do, never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show, something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"

"You've not done badly so far," I put in.

He snorted contemptuously.

"If you've got faith...."

Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.

"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he inquired.

"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."

Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.

"Where do you find his star?--his crazy trust
God knows through what or in what? It's alive
And shines and leads him, and that's all we want."

The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about your tame star, Raney."

O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.

"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough, manual labour's all you're fit for."

"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."

"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'--a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.

VII

Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.

We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men--Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.

The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion--though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty--I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other--till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."

The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.

"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."

"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.

"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."

Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they begged for mercy and sat out.

"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get----I say, Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"

"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen. Not out yet."

"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights. I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."

And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a touring-car drew up outside the digs., and a slim figure in dust-coat and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an elaborate but still unstable coiffure.

"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and I met her at the stair-head.

"You needn't call me _Lord_ Loring even if your hair is up," he answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."

"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"

"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and dress."

I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.

"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."

"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."

I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in--white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change in her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.

As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,--"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "_So_ long, with sapphires _here_ and _here_, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."

At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.

"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph--a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.

"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.

"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.

"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a friend of his, aren't you?"

She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men to inspire.

"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she asked.

"Little bits," I said.

"He told me everything," she answered proudly.

"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young----"

"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."

"And I'm sure a good part of the language was--unparliamentary, Miss Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man----"

"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.

"He's a man; he's little--compared with Jim Loring or myself, for example----"

"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"

"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.

"There's nothing he can't do!"

"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.

"It's nothing to what he _will_ do. After Oxford he's going to set out to seek his fortune,"--Sonia had dropped into the very language of a fairy-story. "And when he comes back----"

"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.

"Yes."

"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.

She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."

"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.

"I don't care if he did," she answered.

"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."

There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time. The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.

"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.

O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.

"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.

"Is it time? I've been telling George----"

He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.

"What's the good of telling _him_? What's the good of telling anyone? _They_ don't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting Lady Amy?"

I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.

"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."

Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.

"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"

"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in defiance.

The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.

"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much more than a boy himself."

"Time will work wonders," I said.

"But will he have anything to marry on?"

"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."

Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.

"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love with him. But----" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."

"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."

"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.

"Yes."

"Or till it's broken off?"

"Raney's not likely to break it off!"

"_She_ may. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."

The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than naturally helpless.