Well, I don’t know what you fellows think, but as far as I’m concerned,’ Trevor Gillingham remarked, with an expansive wave of his delicate white hand, ‘my verdict on the Last of the Plantagenets is simply this: the Prince of the Blood has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
It was a fortnight later, in Faussett’s rooms in the Chapel Quad at Durham (Chapel Quad is the most fashionably expensive quarter), and a party of raw lads, who took themselves for men, all gathered round their dessert, were engaged in discussing their fellow-undergraduate. The table groaned with dried fruits and mandarin oranges. Faussett himself raised to his lips a glass of Oxford wine-merchant’s sherry— ‘our famous Amontillado as imported, thirty-six shillings the dozen’ — and observed in a tone of the severest criticism: ‘Oh, the man’s a smug; a most unmitigated smug: that’s the long and the short of it.’
Now, to be a smug is, in Oxford undergraduate circles, the unpardonable sin. It means, to stop in your own rooms and moil and toil, or to lurk and do nothing, while other men in shoals are out and enjoying themselves. It means to avoid the river and the boats; to shun the bump-supper; to decline the wine-party. Sometimes, it is true, the smug is a curmudgeon; but sometimes he is merely a poor and hard-working fellow, the sort of person whom at forty we call a man of ability.
‘Well, I won’t go quite so far as that,’ one of the other lads observed, smacking his lips with an ostentatious air of judicial candour, about equally divided between Dick and the claret. ‘I won’t quite condemn him as a smug, unheard. But it’s certainly odd he shouldn’t join the wine-club.’
He was a second-year man, the speaker, one Westall by name, who had rowed in the Torpids; and as the rest were mostly freshmen of that term, his opinion naturally carried weight with all except Gillingham. He, indeed, as a Born Poet, was of course allowed a little more license in such matters than his even Christians.
‘Up till now,’ Faussett put in, with a candid air of historical inquiry, ‘you see every Durham man has always as a matter of course subscribed to the wine-club. Senior men tell me they never knew an exception.’
Gillingham looked up from his easy-chair with a superior smile. ‘I don’t object to his not joining it,’ he said, with a curl of the cultured lip, for the Born Poet of course represented culture in this scratch collection of ardent young Philistines; ‘but why, in the name of goodness, didn’t he say outright like a man he couldn’t afford it? It’s the base hypocrisy of his putting his refusal upon moral grounds, and calling himself a total abstainer, that sets my back up. If a man’s poor in this world’s goods, and can’t afford to drink a decent wine, in heaven’s name let him say so; but don’t let him go snuffling about, pretending he doesn’t care for it, or he doesn’t want it, or he doesn’t like it, or he wouldn’t take it if he could get it. I call that foolish and degrading, as well as unmanly. Even Shakespeare himself used to frequent the Mermaid tavern. Why, where would all our poetry be, I should like to know, if it weren’t for Bacchus? Bacchus, ever fair and ever young? “War, he sang, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble; Never ending, still beginning; Fighting still, and still destroying; If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh, think it worth enjoying.”’
And Gillingham closed his eyes ecstatically as he spoke, and took another sip at the thirty-six Amontillado, in a rapture of divine poesy.
‘Hear, hear!’ Faussett cried, clapping his hands with delight. ‘The Born Poet for a song! The Born Poet for a recitation! You men should just hear him spout “Alexander’s Feast.” It’s a thing to remember! He’s famous as a spouter, don’t you know, at Rugby. Why, he’s got half the British poets or more by heart, and a quarter of the prose authors. He can speak whole pages. But “Alexander’s Feast” is the thing he does the very best of all. Whenever he recites it he brings the house down.’
‘Respect for an ancient and picturesque seat of learning prevents me from bringing down the roof of Durham College, then,’ Gillingham answered lightly, with a slight sneer for his friend’s boyish enthusiasm. ‘Besides, my dear boy, you wander from the subject. When the French farmer asked his barn-door fowls to decide with what sauce they would wish to be eaten, they held a meeting of their own in the barton-yard, and sent their spokesman to say, “If you please, M. le Propriétaire, we very much prefer not to be eaten.”
“Mes amis,” said the farmer, “vous vous écartez de la question.” And that’s your case, Faussett. The business before the house is the moral turpitude and mental obliquity of the man Plantagenet, who refuses — as he says, on conscientious grounds — to join the college wine-club. Now, I take that as an insult to a society of gentlemen.’
‘What a lark it would be,’ Faussett cried, ‘if we were to get him up here just now, offer him some wine, to which he pretends he has a conscientious objection — unless somebody else pays for it — make him drink success to the cause of total abstinence, keep filling up his glass till we make him dead drunk, and then set him at the window in a paper cap to sing “John Barleycorn.”’
Gillingham’s thin lip curled visibly. ‘Your humour, my dear boy,’ he said, patting Faussett on the back, ’is English — English — essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties — loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of François Coppée’s every night and morning.’
‘But if Plantagenet’s poor,’ one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, ‘it’s natural enough, after all, he shouldn’t want to join the club. It’s precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.’
The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness.
‘To be poor, my dear Matthews,’ he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, ‘as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one’s coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I’m concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn’t care for wine — that’s quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in — the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.’ He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. ‘Now give the hautboys breath,’ he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of fine dithyrambic inspiration; ‘he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and ever young, Drinking joys did first ordain. Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure; Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure. Rich the tr-r-reasure. Sweet the pleasure. Sweet is pleasure after pain.’
And when Gillingham said that, with his studiously unstudied air of profound afflatus, everybody in the company felt convinced at once that Plantagenet’s teetotalism, real or hypocritical, simply hadn’t got a leg left to stand upon. They turned for consolation to the Carlsbad plums and the candied cherries.
But at the very same moment, in those more modest rooms, up two pair of stairs in the Back Quad, which Dick had selected for himself as being the cheapest then vacant, the Prince of the Blood himself sat in an old stuffed chair, in a striped college boating coat, engaged in discussing his critic Gillingham in a more friendly spirit with a second-year man, who, though not a smug, was a reader and a worker, by name Gillespie, a solid Glasgow Scotchman. They had rowed together that afternoon in a canvas pair to Sandford, and now they were working in unison on a chapter or two of Aristotle.
‘For my own part,’ Dick said, ‘when I hear Gillingham talk, I’m so overwhelmed with his knowledge of life and his knowledge of history, and his extraordinary reading, that I feel quite ashamed to have carried off the Scholarship against him. I feel the examiners must surely have made a mistake, and some day they’ll find it out, and be sorry they elected me.’
‘You needn’t be afraid of that,’ Gillespie answered, smiling, and filling his pipe. ‘You lack the fine quality of a “guid conceit o’ yoursel,” Plantagenet. I’ve talked a bit with Gillingham now and again, and I don’t think very much of him. He’s not troubled that way. He’s got an extraordinary memory, and a still more extraordinary opinion of his own high merits; but I don’t see, bar those two, that there’s anything particularly brilliant or original about him. He’s a poet, of course, and he writes good verses. Every fellow can write good verses nowadays. The trick’s been published. All can raise the flower now, as Tennyson puts it, for all have got the seed. But, as far as I can judge Gillingham, his memory’s just about the best thing about him. He has a fine confused lot of undigested historical knowledge packed away in his head loose; but he hasn’t any judgment; and judgment is ability. The examiners were quite right, my dear fellow; you know less than Gillingham in a way; but you know it more surely, and you can make better use of it. His work’s showy and flashy; yours is solid and serviceable.’
And Gillespie spoke the truth. Gradually, as Dick got to see more of the Born Poet’s method, he found Gillingham out; he discovered that the great genius was essentially a poseur. He posed about everything. His rôle in life, he said himself, was to be the typical poet; and he never forgot it. He dressed the part; he acted it; he ate and drank poetically. He looked at everything from the point of view of a budding Shakespeare, with just a dash of Shelley thrown in, and a suspicion of Matthew Arnold to give modern flavour. Add a tinge of Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, for cosmopolitan interest, and you have your bard complete. He was a spectator of the drama of human action, he loved to remark; he watched the poor creatures and the pretty creatures at their changeful game — doing, loving, and suffering. He saw in it all good material for his art, the raw stuff for future plays to astonish humanity. Meanwhile, he lay low at Durham College, Oxford, and let the undergraduate world deploy itself before him in simple Bacchic guise or Heraclean feats of strength and skill.
Dick saw more of Gillespie those first few terms than of anyone else in college. He was a thorough good fellow, Archibald Gillespie, and he had just enough of that ballast of common-sense and knowledge of the world which was a trifle lacking to the romantic country-bred lad fresh up from Chiddingwick. He helped Dick much with his work, and went much with him on the river. And Dick worked with a will at his history all that year, and pulled an oar with the best of them; though he found time, too, to coach a fellow-undergraduate going in for ‘Smalls,’ which increased his income by ten whole pounds — an incredible sum to him. When he thought of how hard it used to be to earn ten pounds at Mr. Wells’s in the High Street at Chiddingwick, no wonder Oxford seemed to him a veritable Eldorado.
In spite of hard work, however, and frequent tight places, that first term at Oxford was a genuine delight to him. Who that has known it does not look back upon his freshman year, even in middle life, with regretful enjoyment? Those long mornings in great lecture-rooms, lighted up with dim light from stained-glass windows; those golden afternoons on the gleaming river or among the fields towards Iffey; those strolls round the leafy avenues of Christ Church walks; those loitering moments in Magdalen cloisters! What lounging in a punt under the chestnuts by the Cherwell; what spurts against the stream on the river by Godstow! All, all is delightful to the merest full-blooded boy; to Richard Plantagenet’s romantic mind, stored with images of the past, ’twas a perpetual feast of fantastic pleasure.
He wrote to Mary twice a week. He would have written every day, indeed, if Mary had allowed him; but the lady of his love more prudently remarked that Mrs. Tradescant would be tempted to inquire in that case as to the name and business of her constant correspondent: He wrote her frankly all his joys and griefs, and she in return quite as frankly sympathized with him. Boy and girl as they were, it was all very pleasant. To be sure, it was understood and arranged on both sides beforehand by the high contracting parties that these letters were to be taken as written on purely friendly grounds, and, as the lawyers say, ‘without prejudice’; still, as time went on, they grew more and more friendly, until at last it would have required the critical eye of an expert in breach-of-promise cases to distinguish them at first sight from ordinary love-letters. Indeed, just once, towards the end of term, Dick went so far as to begin one short note, ‘Dearest Mary,’ which was precisely what he always called her to himself in his own pleasant day-dreams; and then he had the temerity to justify his action in so many words by pleading the precedent of this purely mental usage. But Mary promptly put a stop to such advances by severely beginning her reply, ‘Dear Mr. Plantagenet’; though, to be sure, she somewhat spoilt the moral effect of so stern a commencement by confessing at once in the sequel that she had headed her first draught with a frank ‘Dear Dick,’ and then torn it up, after all, being ashamed to send it.
When Dick read that deliciously feminine confession, consigned in blushing ink to fair white maiden notepaper, his heart gave a jump that might have been heard in Tom Quad, and his face grew as red as Mary’s own when she penned it.