Sinister Street Compton Mackenzie (good novels to read in english .TXT) 📖

and always under the protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.

“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked Wedderburn.

“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other to⁠—I mean⁠—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”

“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me. We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J.C.R. four years from now.”

But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.

“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,” said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”

“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my rooms because I like them.”

“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued. “There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For instance, Avery⁠—”

“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.

“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ’Varsity Eleven,” said Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”

“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.

“That’s exactly what he isn’t,” Michael contradicted.

“Damnable poseur,” Wedderburn rumbled.

“Oh, well, so are you,” said Michael.

He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery. Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well. But all the Carthusians at St. Mary’s dressed rather too well and carried about with them the atmosphere of a weekend in a sporting country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to⁠—to what? To some distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale. Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art. Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend forever Ardle’s dusty lectures on Cicero in order that forever he might hear Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause Mr. Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his Plato in a sadler’s shop, where he had found it necessary to complain of a saddle newly made for him.

“But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale.”

“What’s he talking about?” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.

“Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane,” added the Senior Tutor dryly.

Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then seeing by the lecturer’s face that something was still wrong, he assumed a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the situation he laughed very heartily and said:

“Oh, well, after all, it’s very much the same.” Then, as everybody else laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his trousers in gentle self-congratulation.

“Rum old buffer,” he whispered presently to Michael. “His eye gets very glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?”

Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary’s, there might be added to the list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael’s collection as types. There was Grainger, last year’s Captain of the Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the ’Varsity in the spring. Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and listen for