Chapter VI: Book TWO: University (1)

I

"These 'ere deemagogues ... it's them as battens on the worker."

Martin woke with a start. He looked round his slovenly 'bedder' vaguely. His scout, Mr Algernon Galer, was slowly pouring out cold water into a bath and continuing last night's conversation. It was typical of Galer that he never dropped a conversation until he considered it completed, until, that is to say, by his fiendish ability to bore he had reduced the other side to silence. At present Martin had no other acquaintance in King's, for he had only come up on the previous evening. On reaching his rooms he found that the cupboard had been filled with a quantity of jam and pickles and other kinds of food, all carefully opened, so that they could not be returned if disliked by the purchaser. Galer pointed them out with pride as though they testified his devotion to Martin's welfare. There was nothing Galer did not know about the ways of looking after a fresher.

This Galer was a small, bunched-up, greasy man with a ragged black moustache, scarlet cheeks, and great watery eyes underhung by bags of loose skin. During the mornings he shuffled about the stair in a pink shirt, green fancy waistcoat, grey flannel trousers, and lurid yellow boots; later on he retired with a large black bag to the Iffley Road, where he was supposed to maintain a timid wife and innumerable children. It was a matter of conjecture among the residents on Galer's stair whether he wrapped up the coal in newspaper or whether the bag contained coal and food exquisitely mingled. By the afternoon the bag had always achieved a certain bulk and wore a swollen look. But it was as a politician that Galer excelled. No truer Tory than Galer ever voted for Valentia or took the Empire to heart. He did not exactly know where the map was red or how it became red; not that that would have mattered, for Galer was not the man to be worried about little points of honesty. But he knew that much of the map was red, and he was genuinely glad about it: it seemed to him a logical inference and a capital idea that the map should be all red.

Of the catch-word he was a master. Few conversations with Galer were allowed to end without some allusion to 'Hands Across the Sea' and the Thickness of Blood (compared with water) and the 'Necessity for a Cash nexus just to symbolise the brother'ood.'

But it was the new type of 'Deemagogue' that really vexed Galer. During the previous evening Galer, after explaining to Martin the ways, the abominably expensive ways of the Oxford world, had gone on to elaborate his favourite theme. And now, before eight o'clock in the morning, he was at it again.

"Clors against Clors," he grunted. "Wot I says is Capital and Labour 'as identical interests. Identical. These 'ere strikes plays the jimmy with both."

Martin yawned, turned over, and pretended to sleep.

"Quarter to eight, sir," continued Galer. "It was orl right when these Unions knew their proper business and kept their contrax. Wot I says is a bargain is a bargain." And with this discovery he went wheezing from the room.

Martin got up at nine, inspected the tin bath which had an inch of icy water on its blackened, paintless bottom, and concluded that it was not inviting. However, moved by his fear of Galer and a desire not to win his scout's contempt at the outset, he splashed feebly with the water. He deferred shaving and went to look at his breakfast. In the fireplace he found two poached eggs beneath a tin cover. They had been standing for over an hour and had become solid, resembling jelly with a tough crust on the edge of it. The fire had been a failure, the kettle sat in obstinate silence, and Martin ultimately made tea with water that had not boiled. The result was a greenish beverage with shoals of tea-leaves floating on the surface. There were four solid boards of toast, once endued, presumably, with the crisp seductions of youth, and an immense roll whose spongy giblets would have beaten the strongest digestion. No one ever ate these monstrous things and what Galer did with them was another matter of conjecture. Some maintained that he fed his family on them neat: others that there was a permanent bread-and-butter pudding on the Galer menu.

Martin had come up to Oxford firmly convinced that he was about to sink into Luxury's softest lap. He found that he had to live in two dingy rooms three storeys from the ground. The "bedder" had a tiny slot of a window opening on to the kitchens of a neighbouring college: the "sitter" was slightly larger but just as dark. All the furniture, for which a heavy rent was charged, had fallen into a state of gloomy squalor suggestive rather of Camberwell than of Mayfair. The carpet, whose flagrant ugliness of colour and design was obscured by the dirt of ages, had actually given way in places and everywhere there was dust. Galer, who, with the aid of a harassed boy, had charge of nine sets of rooms, had neither the time nor the inclination to do any cleaning. He flicked cupboards with a duster in a dilettante way from time to time but further than that he never went.

Martin also discovered that the college did not contain hot baths and that the only method of procuring such a luxury was to heat a large can of water at his 'sitter' fire. All meals, except dinner, were brought through the open air across two quads and arrived in a tepid state; nor was this improved by the fact that Martin lived at the top of his stairs and had to wait till those below had been supplied. There was no service lift and no means of emptying slops on the stairs, and everything had to be carried up and down the tortuous steps, even the bath-water. But Galer would have been the last person to encourage the introduction of lifts; he was at least thorough in his Toryism. Dining in hall meant swallowing four abominably served courses in twenty minutes.

"So this," thought Martin, "is the princely life," and he wondered whether he would suffer the same fate as Uncle Paul, who

"Was driven by excessive gloom,
To drink and debt, and, last of all,
To smoking opium in his room."

All Saturday he was pestered by invaders who wanted him to row or be a soldier or join the National Service League, or the Men's Political Union, or the Fabian Society, or the Tariff Reform League. In despair he joined everything, except in cases where the man talked about immediate subscriptions: then he boldly refused. But few secretaries had sufficient enthusiasm to collect money. So Martin became a member of numerous societies of the majority of which he heard nothing more. Sometimes he received a printed notice of various meetings which he did not attend. He used to wonder vaguely who paid for all the printing ... certainly he did not.

And so for the first two or three days of his residence he felt pestered and irritable. There were so many things to find out, such as when and where to be gowned, who were freshers and who were unapproachable seniors, what attitude to adopt to one's scout and one's tutor. It was all very perplexing, and although Martin did not suffer the acute agony of apprehension that had made terrible his first few days at Elfrey, he remained, in spite of all the hints given him by his cousin Robert, ashamed of his ignorance and fearful of mistakes.

Soon he was sent for by his future tutor, Mr Reginald Petworth. Martin found him surrounded by undergraduates who called him Reggie and conversed with unconvincing heartiness. He knew that he hadn't ever to say "sir" to a don, but he was not prepared for Christian names. However, that would only begin after a considerable acquaintance. The crowd began to melt away and he was soon the only man left.

"Well," said Petworth cheerily. "Let me see, you're----"

"Leigh."

"Oh yes, of course. You wrote some very jolly hexameters for us in the scholarship exam."

Martin was deeply astonished. Two howlers! "Why, I thought that paper would have done for me," he said.

"Oh, you howled once or twice. But you were jolly, very jolly."

Martin was silent and Petworth produced cigarettes.

"Um, yes. Have a good vac?"

"Splendid, thanks. I was in Devonshire most of the time. Dartmoor way."

"Dartmoor is good, isn't it? I want to go down and dig about in the hut circles. I am sure they haven't done enough. Passingham of Exeter found some awfully jolly bones, besides some arrows and things. Do you like digging?"

Martin confessed that he had never tried: he would have liked to add that he found the hut circles disappointing. But he didn't dare to say so. This conversation was rather trying and he was relieved when Petworth came to business and mapped out his lectures and hours for showing up compositions.

"I'm usually in after ten," concluded the tutor. "Come up and see me and bring any questions. And don't do less than an hour a day."

"That won't kill me," said Martin.

"It's possible not to reach that standard, I find. Oxford is full of things to do. Don't do all of them."

Martin went away with a muddled impression of countless book-shelves, two excellent arm-chairs, some nice prints, a little, bright-eyed urbane man and a general atmosphere of invincible jolliness. He was not at all sure that he liked it.

For the first week or two Martin was the unwilling but abject victim of Galerism. Galer had a way with youths and could handle even the most pronounced, aggressive, 'Damn you, I'm a man of the world' type of fresher. His influence, he knew, would never utterly die, but time would weaken it: and so in the first few days he did his best to train the new-comers on his stair in the best traditions of the college and university. Also he endeavoured to keep them from sowing political wild oats: there was nothing Galer loathed more bitterly than carrying up Radical or Socialist newspapers. Martin soon began to hate the man fervently. He wanted to find out how one could change one's rooms, for he would live in a pigsty to avoid Galer.

"Your cheese, sir," the wheezy voice would say. "I see as 'ow these deemagogues 'ave brought a lot of transport workers out. Wicked I call it. Wot the Gov'ment ought to do is to be firm. 'Ave out the troops and 'and out a bit of sleeping-draught. That's my notion of ruling. One of those there riff-raff killed a loyal worker."

"In other words, a scab," said Martin boldly.

"It's a 'orrid name to give a chap," said Galer. "I don't see no crime in bein' loyal. I 'ope you don't 'old with these paid agitators!"

"I certainly hold with Trade Unionism."

"The Trade Unions aren't wot they were. Oh no! Swelled 'ead too big for their boots and all that."

Martin made no answer and, while Galer rambled on, he saw that the only policy was to declare himself a revolutionary and have done with it. Of course Galer would despise him: but he might cease to argue.

The crisis came at lunch-time two days later.

"By the way, sir," said Galer, bread in hand, "are you 'aving a paper?"

"Yes, I start to-morrow. _Daily Herald_ and _Manchester Guardian_."

Galer sniffed, threw down the food, and left the room in silence.

II

If Baedeker treated of Oxford colleges as he treats of Continental hotels the visitor would probably be informed that King's is 'well spoken of.' King's is small and comfortable but plainly in the first grade. No taint of specialism mars its charming mediocrity. It is not, like Balliol, aggressively successful, cornering the university scholarships and claiming half the important people in Europe as its alumni, nor does it, like New College, combine a gentle attachment to the humaner letters with supremacy on the river. It does not aspire to royalty or rugger Blues. Most class lists contain one or two firsts from King's and the King's eight never falls from the top division. The college has two excellent quads, a garden, a pleasing chapel, and some astonishing beer. Its port, however, is the worst in Oxford.

King's men were essentially Public School men. Few rich young men from Eton came to a foundation which was neither particularly notable nor particularly notorious. Wealth is not scrupulous as to which of those types it favours, but it abhors the mean. Nor did the Grammar Schools or the colonies supply more than a tithe of the college, which drew mainly upon the middle rank of Public Schools. Herein lay both its strength and its weakness. Its strength lay in its freedom from cranks and bores, its weakness lay in its uniformity: a house which is not divided in itself may stand firm, but it is likely to be a dull and gloomy mansion.

Martin would have preferred to go to Balliol or New College, but as he was paid eighty pounds a year to go to King's there was no profit in grumbling. And so he set to work to find company, in which respect he was indeed fortunate. While many of the freshers turned out to be good men and dull, some even bad men and dull, the scholars were all interesting. The uniformity of Public School tone naturally drove the more critical together, and in Martin's year the house was saved from gloom by at least a partial cleavage. Necessity aided inclination in forming the Push.

The Push consisted of five men and contained a governing trinity. These were Martin, Lawrence and Rendell. Rendell, the first classical scholar, was attached to what the others called the ineffable effs--Fabianism, Feminism and Faith. His god was paradoxical, but not so exciting as Mr Chesterton's, and more interested in Social Reform and Municipal Trading than in beer and ballads.

Rendell managed to entertain his various faiths without becoming a prig or a Puritan. During his first months of emancipation from school he had shown a suspicious hankering after beans and djibba-clad women, but Martin and Lawrence suppressed such tendencies with a firm hand. Rendell, though not pliable on the subject of religion, yielded on this point and soon declared his complete contempt for the eating of vegetables and drinking of ginger ale.

Lawrence was primarily noticeable for size. He was six foot three and broad in proportion: he had a ruddy and cheerful countenance and prodigious hands and feet. Essentially he believed in violence. He didn't care twopence, he declared, for Fabianism or Construction Policies and professed an intense desire to smash things, especially religion and the social system. He called himself a Neo-Nietzschean, but he certainly could not have distinguished between Neo- and Palaeo-Nietzscheans. To tell the truth, he had, like many followers of that great dyspeptic, never read a word of him. Lawrence hated music, except the Marseillaise (for its associations) and the Barcarole (for its effects) but he was taught at Oxford to like Sullivan. He read the poems of John Davidson and the philosophy of Georges Sorel. In smoking, eating and drinking he did all that might be expected of him, and he could play rugger amazingly well when he was not too lazy to turn out.

The trinity talked to each other all day and all night, and there were soon very few problems of the universe which had not been satisfactorily settled.

The need for a new point of view became apparent.

"Let's have that fellow Chard in," suggested Martin.

"Coffee in my rooms?" said Lawrence.

"Right-o! To-morrow night, if he'll come."

"Oh, he'll come," said Rendell. "He's rather sick of life. Isolated, you know. He only talks to Davenant."

"Shall we have Davenant too?" suggested Martin.

"The ass with the ties?" said Lawrence; "and the cloak! Oh, not him. Oscar Wilde is a bit played out by now."

"He's no fool," said Rendell. "I had a long conversation with him about Pointillism. He knows some of the Camden Town school."

"Post-Impressionism is less rot than most art," Lawrence growled, "so have him in."

Thus the Push was formed.

Chard was the son of a political K.C. and patently marked out for the acquisition of similar honours in the shortest possible space of time: for he believed firmly in the Liberal Party and himself, a quite irresistible combination in these democratic days. He held no opinion on religion or art, because they were not concerned with his career except in so far as an open declaration of atheism was unwise.

Davenant looked sublimely down on politics. Art was his sphere. Having been appropriately named Aubrey, he had undertaken from an early age to know all about Beauty. He had learned the names of all the unknown painters and could make great play with them: how much taste or feeling he really possessed no one ever discovered, for he was one of those disconcerting people who mingle acute with ridiculous judgments. At times he affected a vague interest in the Catholic faith and had been known to attend Mass. Concerning the love of women he was at once mysterious and supercilious. He laid claim to a vast knowledge of the sex, and by reason of a Continental year spent since leaving school his boast of Experience demanded some respect. In England, however, he never spoke to women. One night Lawrence, being tolerably drunk, told him he was afraid of women. Whereupon Davenant said he hated rosebuds and liked his flowers faded. Lawrence called him 'an unnachral beas',' and made a long speech about purity, in the middle of which he upset his beer and swore most filthily.

Davenant's evening cloak, wrought of a dark but flashing blue, caused its owner more trouble than joy. Lawrence stole it one Saturday night and, clad in it, went roaming through the town, to the great joy of the Oxford maidens who like that kind of joke. He made great play with it in the cinema and ultimately left it in The Grapes. When Davenant called for it on the next day it had vanished, and he was not sorry. The cloak had been an embarrassment, nor had he even really cared for it.

But they didn't mind his posing so long as he avowedly posed. He was, after all, amusing, and at bottom he had a great fund of human kindness. Martin firmly believed that if he had to ask a friend for help or advice he would rather have appealed to Davenant, the apparently supercilious, than to Rendell, the faithful feministic Fabian.

It must not be supposed that the Push became a Push in a day. They only worked up to friendship by rather heavy conversations. They would begin on politics or literature, talking at first with reticence and slight suspicion, but soon their relative isolation brought them closer together and made way for clearer statements and more liberal confessions about sex and religion. It was astonishing how soon after the final breaking of ice they established complete intimacy. Davenant, who had aesthetic friends in other colleges, was least merged in the joint personality of the Push. But all wise men need an audience, and Davenant was not going to desert them while there were still points on which he could gain a hearing.

On several matters they were in complete agreement. They were all 'damned if they were going to row.' The secretary of the Boat Club turned out to be the Rhodes scholar, Theo. K. Snutch, whose rooms Martin had occupied during the scholarship exam. He pointed out gently that the tradition of the 'cahlege' laid down that all freshers should be tubbed. Davenant managed to persuade Snutch that he had a weak heart and Snutch, taking stock of Davenant, prudently forbore to demand a doctor's certificate. Chard magnificently refused to go near the river and was henceforward ignored by the college athletes: but he did not mind, for none of them had votes at the Union.

"The thing for us," suggested Lawrence to Martin and Rendell, "is that what-you-may-call-'em strike. Greve perle or something or other. Stay in and rot the show. Catch a crab every other minute."

"How does one catch a crab?" asked Rendell, but no one could tell him.

Like most of Lawrence's intentions (he was rich in schemes), the idea was never put into practice. What eventually occurred was the appearance of the rugger secretary demanding the assistance of Lawrence 'just to stiffen up his pack' and the speedy release of Martin and Rendell owing to their dismal inefficiency. Snutch was entirely charming and Martin, who had feared a terrific, blustering coach, was agreeably surprised at the experience.

Another point of agreement with the Push was the essential loathliness of Hearties. King's had rather more than its fair share of Hearties and the freshers seemed likely to keep up the supply. All Hearties were religious, but all the religious were not Hearties. The Hearties always shouted at one another in the quad, and banged each other on the back. They always called each other Tom and Bill, and when they were not back-banging, they were making arrangements for mission work. They did much solid work for the college athletics, took seconds and thirds in history, and afterwards became schoolmasters and parsons and went to Switzerland in the winter.

Rendell, who had a passion for classification, insisted on distinguishing between neo-cardiacs and palaeo-cardiacs. "Neo-cardiacs," he said, "are more spiritual and more dangerous. They don't shout like the whole-hoggers, but their eyes glitter more and they're keener about the new type of bishop. Look at Steel-Brockley. He's a scholar and a 'mind' and can't swallow all the rot of the old school, but he's more sinister really."

"I suppose that Hodges is the ideal palaeo-cardiac," said Martin.

"Yes, Hodges, the great ass."

"Of course he's out to set up a kingdom of heaven upon earth," said Lawrence. "And can't you imagine his idea of it? It'll be stiff with people like himself, all blustering round and organising things. Football, Rich _v._ Poor. Of course there will still be rich and poor, for our Hodges is a Tory, but there'll be a spirit of fellowship oozing everywhere."

"'Running things' is all these chaps really care about," said Davenant, intervening. "I don't believe they care a straw about their summer camps and boys' brigades as far as the boys go. They like to be in charge of clubs and canteens and order kids about and tell them what a good thing discipline is and how wicked Trades Unions are."

"Those are the neos," added Rendell quickly. "The old ones like to rag about, and there's something to be said for that. Hodges likes ragging. Of course he is an ass, but he's not a dangerous ass. On the whole, we may call him a dear old thing and let him go on shouting. But the bad men are Steel-Brockley's gang. They all suffer from bossing fever and can't live unless they're running something. And they're desperately fair-minded and don't believe in party, which simply means that they are Tory agents, and tell the boys what a sin it is to be discontented with five or six bob for a seventy-hour week."

"And they're dragging in the freshers," said Lawrence. "Ought to be strangled."

So in private they settled the business of the Hearties. But in public, partly because they were freshers and partly because they had not the courage of their convictions, they found themselves being quite polite to these good young men.

Religion had an ever-living appeal for the Push, because it is one of the few subjects about which argument is as fascinating as it is futile. Chard, it is true, couldn't be bothered with metaphysics: he was a history scholar, and his line was a first in history and then the Bar. But the discussions were never metaphysical in the technical sense and it amused him to listen and sum up with an epigram. Davenant used to murmur that he thought Christ rather a beautiful figure and that the Church had saved Art in the Middle Ages, but he did not receive much attention. It became more and more the custom to regard Davenant as a picturesque background to conversations, except when artistic matters were under discussion. Then he held the floor, or rather he stood gracefully before the fire and spoke slowly between puffs of smoke.

They met most often in Lawrence's rooms, which were large and conveniently situated on the ground floor. He had added to the dilapidated furniture some new cushions and a really good arm-chair, and, having no money, he started a colossal bill at Blackwell's, so that his shelves were soon piled with books which he rarely read. But he was not the man to care deeply for his rooms, as did Davenant, who believed in Gordon Craig and used to mess about in the afternoons, putting the light in remote corners or hanging up curtains of a new colour. It was well that Lawrence cared little for his rooms, as he became invariably drunk on Saturday nights, and when drunk he was violent. He would lie on the floor kicking and declaiming Limericks until someone put him to bed: even then he was known to rise again and break things.

Lawrence swilling beer in his rooms was a great spectacle. Usually blasphemous and always obscene, he did everything on such a generous scale and with such a childish innocence and honesty that he was always attractive and rarely repelled even one so fastidious as Davenant.

It was on Sunday nights that the Push talked about religion. Lawrence would pull out the sofa and build up a roaring fire: then with the aid of pipes and much swallowing of beer they would set about it. Every Sunday Rendell was pilloried, but the victim never objected and always returned to the combat. The great point about religious discussion is that you can never be beaten. They treated either with the truth of Christianity or the value of its practical results. In the latter case Lawrence would boom about bishops with fifteen thousand a year, and Martin would demonstrate with irrefutable logic that religion had always resisted freedom and education and had made the world the hole it is. As they both talked interminably Rendell had little opportunity of answering.

One night Lawrence rushed into his rooms shortly after dinner and found the Push assembled.

"My god!" he said, plunging into the sofa.

"I thought you hadn't one," said Chard.

"Don't be obvious. I'm angry, my god, I'm angry."

He was asked to explain.

"Steel-Brockley asked me to go to coffee in his rooms and when I got there I found he had provided a lecturer gassing about the value of faith for us."

"Well," said Davenant, "that was very considerate of our Brockley."

"Exactly. But he might have warned me. It didn't matter. I couldn't stick it long."

"I should think not. It's barely a half-an-hour since dinner now."

"What happened?" asked Martin.

"It was like this," began Lawrence. "Brockley produced a battered chap from the colonies, all pockmarks and freckles, you know the type. Of course he began, as they always do, by saying that he had seen men die in all parts of the world and they all died the better for their faith. None of them seemed to live, or else he had a morbid mind and likes death. I don't know. Anyhow he had the cheek to say that King's spiritual life wasn't as strong as it had been. He was deeply concerned about us. He whined about us. He thought we were all going to the devil because the scholars have taken to cutting chapel. Just imagine a little tick like that coming here to tell us, whom he doesn't know, that we're not so soulful as the clean young men out West. Thank god we're not. I gave him about ten minutes and cleared out."

There was a murmur of delight.

"I suppose no one heard you leave the room," said Martin, but Lawrence never rose to jests about his bulk and gait.

"And there were all Brockley's gang," he went on, "sitting with all the light of grace in their eyes. And when the pock-marked chap got busy in the impressive line you could fairly hear them thinking, 'God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world.'"

"And a very good thought," said Rendell.

Lawrence would always rise to the religious bait.

"Just the kind of thought that you would expect from a well-fed Liberal poet."

Lawrence opened violently a bottle of Munich beer and drained the contents. Then he gave a vast sigh of relief, pulled out his pipe and stood expansively before the fire, exposing, unconsciously, a large gap of shirt between his waistcoat and the grey flannel trousers whose sole support lay in their tightness.

"It isn't God that matters," he declared. "It's the Godites. They're worse than ever."

"They've at least begun to move with the times."

"Exactly," said Martin, coming in as usual to assist Lawrence. "They swallow everything new and say they meant it all the time. I don't mind good old burn-the-devil bigots, but this up-to-date Interpreting and Restatement and Revaluation and Earnest Wash, it makes me sick. Why can't they give up their tribal deity and do something sensible?"

"You're so beastly crude," answered Rendell. "Oxford isn't exactly a brainless place, and it's full of religion."

"It's full of a washed-out, watery, emasculate ghost of a faith," said Martin. "They daren't say what they really do mean for fear of giving the show away. So they talk about Evolution and the Unknowable and 'may be something in it.'"

"The religion of the Oxford don," said Chard magnificently from his corner, "is the sickly bastard of nervousness and inertia."

"I'll give you a quid to say that at the Union," said Martin. But Chard valued his career at more than a sovereign.

"Aren't you men a little out of date?" interrupted Davenant. "Chivvying priests and kings was about 1870, wasn't it?"

"Exactly," Rendell cried in triumph. "You've done for priests and kings. Nobody believes in them any more. They've collapsed, and by collapsing become infinitely stronger. Bradlaugh's brigade never foresaw that, when you take away nominal power, you begin to create real power. The weakest side always wins in the end."

"Don't talk Chestertonian drivel," growled Lawrence. "Nobody believes it."

"It's quite true. Religion is stronger than ever just because it's weaker."

"The last flicker," said Martin.

Then the conversation, having reached an impasse, turned of necessity and they were off once more upon matters episcopal.

"I don't see why a bishop should get thousands a year while the curates are half starved," said Lawrence.

"They don't spend it on themselves," retorted Rendell.

"Only on palaces and motors and flummery. No, my boy, it's all bunkum. Look at the fortunes they leave." Lawrence had collected a list of episcopal fortunes which he read with glee upon every possible occasion. It was an excellent array of figures, starting well up in the hundred thousands.

"Oh, chuck it," said Rendell. "We've heard all this before."

But Lawrence read irrepressibly on.

"What about your needle's eye now?" he roared.

"Oh, don't be a child," said Rendell.

"That's all you ever say. Childish! You with your Athanasian Creed and incense and swindling priests. Ever been to Notre Dame and seen the advertisements? Forty days' purgatory remitted in return for so many prayers! And you call me childish!" Lawrence had a fine flow of metaphors and expletives. He had been known to continue one sentence for ten minutes, his oratorical method being to substitute copulas for full stops. He began jerkily, it is true. But once the lumbering coach was set moving nothing could withstand its impetus.

Rendell yielded and began to discuss with Davenant the personality of Christ. Lawrence continued roaring at no one in particular. At last he sat heavily down in his arm-chair, so heavily that one of its legs gave way. He tore off the broken member and brandished it wildly, as a symbol of his attitude to all things episcopal.

As usual it was Chard who closed the discussion.

"Davenant's faith," he said, "makes me think of a mendicant professor of aesthetics and Rendell's of the first secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Nazareth branch). I move the question be put."

His advice was taken.

"Beer," said Lawrence. "My god, more beer."

And so the evenings would begin.

III

Incredibly the Push were blind to their amazing superficiality. Even had they suffered from an inclination to be serious, life came so easily and so rapidly that it would have been impossible to do anything but play with it. So they trifled with wisdom and trifled rightly. For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream. Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. They talked of great things and small, of God and Woman and sometimes of Man, of futures and careers, of the dons, of the college, of the varsity teams, of books and plays and poets, of the coldness of the pretty girl in this shop and of the wantonness of the plain girl in that.

They lived with an excellent method. In the mornings they lay in bed, thought about breakfast, ate breakfast, and read the papers. In the junior common-room there were all the dailies and on Wednesdays there were _Punch_, _The Tatler_, _The Sketch_, and _The Bystander_, on Saturdays the weekly reviews. They were catholic in the reading, but, if the supply happened to give out, they could always consider what to do in the afternoon. By that time it was one o'clock and they lunched frugally and together. In the afternoon they took their various amusements. Perhaps Lawrence and Martin played rugger, while Chard and Davenant strolled round Addison Walk. Rendell insisted on playing hockey, insisted in the face of opposition.

"You can't play hockey," said Martin. "It's no game for a gentleman."

"It's quite a good game," Rendell apologised.

"It may be all right for internationals who dart about and toss the ball in the air and catch it on the end of their sticks, but it's no game for incapables like you."

"I'm in the team anyhow. And you, by the way, are winning renown as the worst wing three-quarter in Oxford."

"That is probably true," Martin admitted. "But it doesn't destroy my contention that hockey is a scrappy, uncomfortable business and only good enough for men who can't get into any other teams."

"You're a stark old reactionary," retorted Rendell. "Hockey is the game of the future. There'll be a 'full Blue' for it in a year or two. And don't make the obvious remark."

Martin didn't. But he continued to jeer when Rendell went off in the rain and came back with bruised shins and perhaps a black eye. This only encouraged Rendell to take the game very seriously, to turn out always, and to run like a hare down his wing, whereas Martin and Lawrence treated this rugger team with disdain and only played when it pleased them. The secretary, being hard up for players, could not drop them altogether, for even Martin was better than his substitute. In the summer Rendell played cricket as seriously as he had played his hockey, so that he just gained a place in the college eleven. Martin played sometimes for the tennis six and the other three fled, when it was warm enough and at first when it was not--for such is the way of freshers--to navigate the Cherwell in the communal punt.

In the evenings they dined out as often as their college would let them and went to meetings of clubs or, on the rare occasions when there was a play worth seeing, to the theatre. Work they neglected, thoroughly and with a good heart. Chard and Davenant, who were to take modern history, both failed in Pass Mods in March, but passed in the summer after a fortnight's reading. The other three had resolved that Honour Mods could easily be squared in a long vac and two terms: they did not realise that a year of idleness (or nearly two years, for none of them had worked since gaining their scholarships) creates a habit of mind which cannot easily be shaken off. Two stiff terms are easier to contemplate than to achieve. Martin, indeed, had his uncle's blessing, for John Berrisford had told him that the first year was meant to broaden one's point of view: it struck him as a joyous process, this broadening of one's point of view.

His tutor, Reggie Petworth, he did not like. Petworth turned out to be a "neo-cardiac" of the first water: even then he hadn't the decency to be whole-hearted in his heartiness and wavered between complete allegiance with Hodges and the college 'right' and a feeble attempt to conciliate the 'left' as represented by Lawrence and Martin. Petworth had come from Balliol with the Hertford, the Ireland, and a Philosophy of Fun. It was Fun to write jolly compositions and Fun to set proses out of George Meredith which bore no relation to classical thought or idiom and couldn't conceivably be translated into reasonable Latin or Greek. It was Fun to be a High Churchman, Fun to talk about priests and masses, Fun to date your letters by feasts of the Church, Fun to be a Liberal and believe in the people. Fun to have bad cigarettes sent from a remote Oriental town because its monarch was a Balliol man, Fun to collect things without sense or purpose, Fun, in fact, to pretend to be a child.

"One doesn't mind Davenant pretending to be decadent now and then," said Martin to Lawrence, "because decadence always depends on posing for its real point. A man isn't a decadent unless he knows he's a decadent and plays up to it. But childhood is rather different, and I don't see why blighters like Reggie should try and ape it."

"Just the Balliol touch," said Lawrence.

Martin was supposed to show up two compositions a week to Reggie Petworth and to do occasional translation papers. He attended with some regularity to make up for his complete absence from lectures. Petworth exhorted him mildly to make more strenuous efforts and told him what Fun Demosthenes could be if one read the private speeches, about mining rights and water-courses and assaults. Whereupon Martin was coldly polite and retired to renew his conversations about the world at large, while Petworth would find a 'jolly' man and walk out to eat lunch at Beckley, saying 'What Fun!' if he saw a pig with pleasant markings.

To Martin, as he lazily reclined one September morning in the black woods behind The Steading, the past was a vision of undimmed radiance. Oxford had threatened but it had not fulfilled: rather it had grudged him nothing of its plenty. It had given him friends (miraculously the Push had not quarrelled) and views and a year of fine living. He knew now how tainted by the poison of exams had been his first impressions of that grey and gracious city, he knew that it was not just a Midland town with a liability to fogs and floods. Also he knew that his uncle had been wrong when he said that the place didn't matter and only the institution counted. For he had even learned to love the lambent tongues of mist that crept stealthily from the river to the walls of Corpus and Merton and drifted over roofs and towers to the noise and splendour of the High. The myriad lights of rooms piled on rooms flashing out into a blue dusk of winter, the reds and greys of Holywell, the clatter of the Corn and the bells that told unfailingly the hours of the night were now in his memory the blended symbols of a growing intimacy. He had found out Cumnor Hurst and Besselsleigh, and the sweep of the downs clear-cut against the sky, and the old towns to the West, Burford and Fairford and all the Chippings of the Wolds. But clearest of all in his memory were the canoe voyages made by Rendell and Lawrence and himself at the close of the summer term. Then, while a horde of wealthy trippers came to Oxford to dance and flirt and hold sumptuous revel, they pierced every dim recess of the upper river and probed the secrets of the Evenlode. They had bathed in the morning and in the afternoon and again by moonlight, running in wild nakedness over strewn hay to recover warmth. At Bablock Hythe they had eaten cold ducks and drunk cider in gallons: they had lain for hours on the Long Leas gazing into an infinite dome of stars and waiting for the idle nightingale. And Lawrence had nearly murdered Rendell for quoting Matthew Arnold.

Martin was eager to be back, despite the prospect of two stiff terms. And when he was back once more in Oxford, no longer the leaf-clad city of pleasant waters but grey and dripping with the autumn mists, he found that both he himself and his friends had far too much to say. They were all in new and more desirable rooms and Martin was free from the domination of Galer. He had chosen to dwell high up in the back quad, where the windows were large and the rooms airy, and lately he had revised his pictures. This term he purchased some quaintly luminous and misty landscapes which were the fruit either of startling genius or blank incompetence. As to which was the case there was great argument. Rendell, being senior scholar of his year, had been able to claim the famous rooms of the college, oak-panelled and majestically dark. For Art he relied upon Rembrandt and Duerer: but then Rendell never risked anything.

Undoubtedly they had all a great deal to recount, for sixteen weeks of vacation could hardly fail to bring new friends and new experience, new books and new ideas. And the Push knew that there is no satisfaction in mere discovery: it is the telling of a tale that makes for pleasure. So night after night Martin neglected to settle down after dinner, began to tell tales, and concluded, somewhere about twelve, that it was too late to begin now. Then they would play a rubber of sixpenny auction just to make them sleepy and, playing till three or four, would so succeed in their ambition that they could not breakfast till eleven. Only Rendell refused to be tempted and went dutifully to his books.

Before long Martin quarrelled with Reggie Petworth, sulked foolishly, despaired of the term, and began to rely on the winter vacation and the subsequent six weeks of term to grapple with the problem of Mods. He spent a miserable Christmas at The Steading and came to the conclusion on New Year's Eve that he had forgotten nearly every word of Greek and Latin that he had ever known. He did not look forward to the term, and on January the fifteenth he went to Oxford as a lamb to the slaughter.

It was a term of infinite depression. The early months of the year, everywhere unkind, are singularly uncharitable to Oxford: the glamour of autumn had departed and winter has no majesty in muddy streets. The days were yellow with a sticky warmth that brought exhaustion and despair. Martin, passing from book to book, felt always, at whatever time of day, as though he had eaten too much lunch and would die if he didn't soon have tea: it was that kind of weather. He gave up football because it made him sleep after tea: and then, being without exercise or diversion, yawned all morning and read garbage after lunch. Rendell had his work well in hand and was, men said, sure to get a first. Lawrence had manfully abandoned hope and sought consolation in beer and bridge. Martin, foolishly but characteristically, took the middle path. He had neither the energy to work nor the courage to be idle, but sat mournfully with his books, gazing blankly at the pages and wondering why it was all so new to him. Then he would consult recent papers, and his heart would sink yet lower as he realised his amazing ignorance.

As the weeks slipped away he took to learning up lists of hard words and legal technicalities. He became a master of the Virgilian vegetable and the Demosthenic demurrer, and though he knew the Latin for burrs and calthrops and succory and bogwort, he would have been quite incapable of distinguishing those herbs from one another. Thus do we study the poets and orators. But it was distressing work.

And then he became aware of Pink Roses. He noticed her because of her ubiquity and partly, perhaps, because she was always alone: he noticed her in the Broad, in the High, at a football match in the parks, once in the cinema. She was not beautiful, not even pretty: otherwise she need scarcely have remained alone in a community so rapacious. Usually she wore a coat and skirt of dark blue and a little black hat with pink roses. Beneath her hat Martin had observed light fluffy hair done witchingly about her ears and he had been able to notice that she had a pleasing smile and the tiniest of dimples. But her features, too heavy to be piquant, were not strong enough to be striking.

He pointed her out one day to Lawrence and demanded his opinion.

"Oh, that's your Pink Roses," he said critically. "Pretty poor stuff."

"She may be all right," answered Martin meekly.

"She walks all right, but she has got a face like a milk pudding."

Martin did not attempt to argue against this higher criticism. Lawrence, he thought, was an old dear but he certainly lacked perception. There was something about Pink Roses.

And then one evening, when he was turning into a main street, he walked right into her. He smiled vaguely and apologised, but she had hurried past him and did not hear. He turned and watched her. She stopped outside the cinema and studied the programme: eventually she went in. Martin had meant to do an hour's work before dinner and began walking back to college. Soon he stopped again and stood vaguely on the pavement, gazing at the passing crowd. At last resolvedly he resumed his journey to the college and the poets. Five minutes later he was passing a shilling through the grille of the cinema ticket office. It seemed an age before a film ended and the light went up. Then he saw the Pink Roses flowering alone in the sixpenny seats. As soon as the pictures began he would go in her direction. But when the time came he felt self-conscious and afraid. 'Ridiculous ass,' he said to himself. "You desert Lucretius for Pink Roses and now you don't even gather the rose-buds." And then again: 'Who is the silly girl--after all? Here am I, a scholar of a college, deserting Lucretius for that funny little person! It's too childish.' So he rose to go out and walked instead to the sixpenny seats.

The girl looked round to see who was coming next to her.

"Hullo!" whispered Martin as though surprised. "Didn't I nearly knock you over in the street just now?"

"Someone ran into me," she answered. "I didn't notice who it was."

"I think it was me. I'm so sorry."

"Oh, it didn't matter, thank you."

She said it very nicely and Martin was encouraged to go on. It was rather difficult and he wished he was fortified by a sound dinner.

"You come here a good lot?" he said at last.

"Yes. Nearly every time the pictures change."

"Don't you get bored?"

"It's better than doing nothing."

"But the pictures are so silly as a rule."

"Oh, I like the pictures. 'Sixty Years a Queen'--that was lovely. The girl that did Queen Victoria was just sweet."

To his own surprise Martin did not object to her taste: he would have loathed any other admirer of "Sixty Years a Queen."

"Do you know many people here?" he asked.

"I know some girls I was at school with."

"No men?"

"Not many. I know Mr Carter; Brasenose, isn't he? Do you know him?"

"Only by sight. He's going to be chucked out of the varsity boat."

"Is he? I'm so sorry. He's awfully nice."

"Do you know him well?"

"Only a little. I met him in here. He asked me to have tea in his rooms in Beaumont Street, but of course I couldn't."

So she had ideas about propriety. There was a silence.

"Do you always live in Oxford?" asked Martin.

"We live out at Botley."

"Pretty deadly spot, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's something awful. I want to go to London only my family won't let me go into business. I'm awfully bored."

"So am I."

"Why are you bored?"

"I've got an exam coming on."

"Oh, you poor thing! I could never do exams. I think they're horrid. I do hope you'll get on all right!"

"Thanks very much!" It pleased Martin to have her sympathy.

They chattered on. Her name was May Williams and she seemed to be very, very tired of Botley and her own company. Before Martin went away to dinner he asked her to meet him at the same time the next evening.

"It's Wednesday," he said. "So you'll get your new pictures. I think it's nicer at this time: there's such a crush in here after dinner."

May agreed with evident pleasure and Martin went back to dinner rejoicing in his courage and his first steps to adventure. He had been right: there was something about Pink Roses, indefinable perhaps, but plainly something. She wasn't just one of the Oxford girls.

So they met again and on Saturday night they drove out in a taxi to Abingdon and dined in rather squalid pomp. Henceforward they saw much of one another and had more drives and dinners and were happy: for both had won a release.

They did not at all know what they wanted, but both knew quite plainly from what they wanted to escape. Martin wanted to throw off for a few hours the burden of his work, which was neither mere routine, like copying addresses, nor definite creation, like the making of a poem or a good mashie shot. This minute preparation of books and this learning by rote of variant readings and emendations seemed so appalling just because they defied both a mechanical application and a vivid interest. And May wanted to escape from the frigid respectability of a red-brick villa at Botley, where she lived with her father, a retired Oxford tradesman: she wanted to escape from an existence which contained nothing but meals, a bicycle, _The Daily Mirror_, and walks with the girl next door. So she invented an old school friend who had jolly evenings in Walton Street. Her father had the virtue of credulity and allowed her to go her own way, and Martin's.

So much they knew and nothing more. Martin never discovered whether he actually felt any enthusiasm for May as a real person abstracted from Mods and his own despair and the black mass of circumstance: he didn't think about it, but just took her as she was. There were times when she amused him and gave him pleasure, and times when he thought that the satisfaction of her kisses was as nothing to the boredom of her conversation. Yet, because he was young and simple and far more conscientious than he would have cared to admit to the advanced young men of the Push, he was not prepared to confess to himself that she was just an amusement. The Martin who talked so airily in Lawrence's rooms about women and the world was an innocent impostor: as a matter of fact the Push, also conscious and a little ashamed of their own excessive virtue, were not taken in by his magniloquence. May was equally ignorant about her own attitude and intentions. She was not at all a fast or desperate young woman: an impartial critic might even have noticed in her a leaden morality. But her conscience did not forbid the unaccustomed thrill of a lover's attendance and the subsequent lie of convenience. No one had ever encouraged her to think things out or to formulate her purposes. Consequently she drifted placidly, and if conscience whispered or Martin suggested another evening's pleasure, it was too much trouble to listen to the one or refuse the other.