_ Not less averse than from dogging the Duke was I from remaining
another instant in the presence of Miss Dobson. There seemed to be no
possible excuse for her. This time she had gone too far. She was
outrageous. As soon as the Duke had had time to get clear away, I
floated out into the night.
I may have consciously reasoned that the best way to forget the
present was in the revival of memories. Or I may have been driven by a
mere homing instinct. Anyhow, it was in the direction of my old
College that I went. Midnight was tolling as I floated in through the
shut grim gate at which I had so often stood knocking for admission.
The man who now occupied my room had sported his oak--my oak. I read
the name on the visiting-card attached thereto--E. J. Craddock--and
went in.
E. J. Craddock, interloper, was sitting at my table, with elbows
squared and head on one side, in the act of literary composition. The
oars and caps on my walls betokened him a rowing-man. Indeed, I
recognised his somewhat heavy face as that of the man whom, from the
Judas barge this afternoon, I had seen rowing "stroke" in my College
Eight.
He ought, therefore, to have been in bed and asleep two hours ago. And
the offence of his vigil was aggravated by a large tumbler that stood
in front of him, containing whisky and soda. From this he took a deep
draught. Then he read over what he had written. I did not care to peer
over his shoulder at MS. which, though written in my room, was not
intended for my eyes. But the writer's brain was open to me; and he
had written "I, the undersigned Edward Joseph Craddock, do hereby
leave and bequeath all my personal and other property to Zuleika
Dobson, spinster. This is my last will and testament."
He gnawed his pen, and presently altered the "hereby leave" to "hereby
and herewith leave." Fool!
I thereby and therewith left him. As I emerged through the floor of
the room above--through the very carpet that had so often been steeped
in wine, and encrusted with smithereens of glass, in the brave old
days of a well-remembered occupant--I found two men, both of them
evidently reading-men. One of them was pacing round the room. "Do you
know," he was saying, "what she reminded me of, all the time? Those
words--aren't they in the Song of Solomon?--'fair as the moon, clear
as the sun, and . . . and . . .'"
"'Terrible as an army with banners,'" supplied his host--rather
testily, for he was writing a letter. It began "My dear Father. By the
time you receive this I shall have taken a step which . . ."
Clearly it was vain to seek distraction in my old College. I floated
out into the untenanted meadows. Over them was the usual coverlet of
white vapour, trailed from the Isis right up to Merton Wall. The scent
of these meadows' moisture is the scent of Oxford. Even in hottest
noon, one feels that the sun has not dried THEM. Always there is
moisture drifting across them, drifting into the Colleges. It, one
suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is
called the Oxford spirit--that gentlest spirit, so lingering and
searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of
it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this
mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the
buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally,
her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The
undergraduate, in his brief periods of residence, is too buoyant to be
mastered by the spirit of the place. He does but salute it, and catch
the manner. It is on him who stays to spend his maturity here that the
spirit will in its fulness gradually descend. The buildings and their
traditions keep astir in his mind whatsoever is gracious; the climate,
enfolding and enfeebling him, lulling him, keeps him careless of the
sharp, harsh, exigent realities of the outer world. Careless? Not
utterly. These realities may be seen by him. He may study them, be
amused or touched by them. But they cannot fire him. Oxford is too
damp for that. The "movements" made there have been no more than
protests against the mobility of others. They have been without the
dynamic quality implied in their name. They have been no more than the
sighs of men gazing at what other men had left behind them; faint,
impossible appeals to the god of retrogression, uttered for their own
sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they should be
heard. Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of
action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the
vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner
which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and
that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of
them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can
be given to them in their heyday. If the Colleges could be transferred
to the dry and bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more
evidently useful to the nation. But let us be glad there is no
engineer or enchanter to compass that task. Egomet, I would liefer
have the rest of England subside into the sea than have Oxford set on
a salubrious level. For there is nothing in England to be matched with
what lurks in the vapours of these meadows, and in the shadows of
these spires--that mysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford.
Oxford! The very sight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is
fraught for me with most actual magic.
And on that moonlit night when I floated among the vapours of these
meadows, myself less than a vapour, I knew and loved Oxford as never
before, as never since. Yonder, in the Colleges, was the fume and fret
of tragedy--Love as Death's decoy, and Youth following her. What then?
Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls
would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours be undone, nor lost a
breath of her sacred spirit.
I floated up into the higher, drier air, that I might, for once, see
the total body of that spirit.
There lay Oxford far beneath me, like a map in grey and black and
silver. All that I had known only as great single things I saw now
outspread in apposition, and tiny; tiny symbols, as it were, of
themselves, greatly symbolising their oneness. There they lay, these
multitudinous and disparate quadrangles, all their rivalries merged in
the making of a great catholic pattern. And the roofs of the buildings
around them seemed level with their lawns. No higher the roofs of the
very towers. Up from their tiny segment of the earth's spinning
surface they stood negligible beneath infinity. And new, too, quite
new, in eternity; transient upstarts. I saw Oxford as a place that had
no more past and no more future than a mining-camp. I smiled down. O
hoary and unassailable mushroom! . . . But if a man carry his sense of
proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he
started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an
instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity. How should
they belittle the things near to him? . . . Oxford was venerable and
magical, after all, and enduring. Aye, and not because she would
endure was it the less lamentable that the young lives within her
walls were like to be taken. My equanimity was gone; and a tear fell
on Oxford.
And then, as though Oxford herself were speaking up to me, the air
vibrated with a sweet noise of music. It was the hour of one; the end
of the Duke's hour of grace. Through the silvery tangle of sounds from
other clocks I floated quickly down to the Broad. _