Sinister Street

"Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?"

"What you require, young Appleby," began Lonsdale.

"You've got it right this time," said Appleby encouragingly.

"What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down."

"Oh, really?" said Appleby, with a suave a.s.sumption of interest.

"Yes," answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for their more eloquent support.

"Tell him he mustn't come into Venner's and put on all that side. It's not done. He's a fresher," gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that absorbing chair.

"All right," agreed Appleby cheerfully. "I'll send the order up to you next time."

Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby's whisky and smoking one of Appleby's cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his resentment to flame, and he sprang up.

"We ought to debag him!" he cried.

Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the divest.i.ture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.

"Hopeless," sighed Lonsdale. "The man's a hopeless a.s.s."

"I think he had the laugh, though," said Michael.

CHAPTER VIII

THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLa.s.s

Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary's with that scrupulousness of outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning after the attempted adjustment of Appleby's behavior, a raw and vaporous November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o'clock ran collarless, unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name fairly entered in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started back on the taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of his toilet.

Crossing the gravel s.p.a.ce between Cloisters and Cuther's worldly quad, he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one minute past eight o'clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.

"What on earth.... Are you going to London?" he gasped.

"Rather not. I'm going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G."

Michael shook his head, sighed compa.s.sionately, and pa.s.sed on. Twenty minutes later in Common Room he was contemplating distastefully the kedgeree which with a more hopeful appet.i.te he had ordered on the evening before, when Maurice planked down beside his place the first number of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s.

"There's a misprint on page thirty-seven, line six. It ought to be 'yet'

not 'but.' Otherwise I think it's a success. Do you mind reading my slas.h.i.+ng attack on the policy of the Oxford theater? Or perhaps you'd better begin at the beginning and go right through the whole paper and give me your absolutely frank opinion of it as a whole. Just tell me candidly if you think my Reflections are too individual. I want the effect to be more----"

"Maurice," Michael interrupted, "do you like kedgeree?"

"Yes, very much," Maurice answered absently. Then he plunged on again.

"Also don't forget to tell me if you think that Guy's skit is too clever. And if you find any misprints I haven't noticed, mark them down.

We can't alter them now, of course, but I'll speak to the compositor myself. You like the color? I wonder whether it wouldn't have been better to have had dark blue after all. Still----"

"Well, if you like kedgeree," Michael interrupted again, "do you like it as much in the morning as you thought you were going to like it the night before?"

"Oh, how the d.i.c.kens do I know?" exclaimed Maurice fretfully.

"Well, will you just eat my breakfast and let me know if you think I ought to have ordered eggs and bacon last night?"

"Aren't you keen on

"I'll tell you later on," Michael offered. "We'll lunch together quietly in my rooms, and the little mulled claret we shall drink to keep out this filthy fog will also enormously conduce to the amiableness of my judgment."

"And you won't come out with me and Nigel Stewart to watch people buying copies on their way to leckers?" Maurice suggested in a tone of disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in time to prevent Michael's heart from being softened. The newcomer was at once invited to remove the editor.

"Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?" Maurice demanded, unabashed.

"Look here, Moss Avery," said Lonsdale seriously, "if you promise to spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing syrup, I'll..."

But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind Lonsdale of last night's encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s that lay beside his plate.

It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously hatched, and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there among the articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into the fold by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the image of Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on the variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that Academic Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist should be praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that without question was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not sure. It was a promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael played with the idea of elaborating his conception in an article for this very Looking-Gla.s.s which she invisibly supported. The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s might serve her like the aegis of Pallas Athene, an aegis that would freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the twentieth century. Michael began to feel that his cla.s.sical a.n.a.logies were enmes.h.i.+ng the original idea, involving it already in complexities too manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking dreams at the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the Academic Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols of Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don's mind, the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by its harvest of youth, of sobriety sun-kindled to a radiancy of silver joy, of wisdom, peace, and shelter, and Attic glories.

Michael became so nearly stifled by the net of his fancies that he almost rose from the table then and there, ambitious to take pen in hand and test the power of its sharpness to cut him free. He clearly saw the gray-eyed G.o.ddess as the personification of the spirit of the university: but suddenly all the impulse faded out in self-depreciation.

Guy Hazlewood would solve the problem with his pranked-out allusiveness, would trace more featly the attributes of the Academic Muse and establish more convincingly her descent from Apollo or her ident.i.ty with Athene. At least, however, he could offer the idea and if Guy made anything of it, the second number of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s would hold more of Michael Fane than the ten pounds he had laid on the table of its exchequer. Inspired by the zest of his own fancy, he read on deliberately.

_Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._

The editor had really succeeded in reflecting accurately the pa.s.sing glance of Oxford, although perhaps the tortuous gilt of the frame with which he had tried to impart style to his mirror was more personal to Maurice Avery than general to the university. Moreover, his gla.s.s would certainly never have stood a steady and protracted gaze. Still with all their faults these paragraphic reflections did show forth admirably the wit and unmatured cynicism of the various Junior Common Rooms, did signally flash with all the illusion of an important message, did suggest a potentiality for durable criticism.

_Socrates at Balliol._ _By Guy Hazlewood._

There was enough of Guy in his article to endear it to Michael, and there was so much of Oxford in Guy that whatever he wrote spontaneously would always enrich the magazine with that adventurous gaiety and childlike intolerance of Athene's favorites.

_The Failure of the Modern Ill.u.s.trator._ _By C. St. C. Wedderburn._

Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.

"Let us turn now to the ill.u.s.trators of the sixties and seventies, and we shall see...." Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so much sententiousness.

_Quo Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._

Nigel's plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance, was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical expression an appealing doc.u.ment. Michael did not think it would greatly serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its presence in The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s was a guarantee that the youngest magazine was not going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any other had endowed Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her poets lacked. Michael himself had since he came up let the practice of religion slide, but his first fervors had not burned themselves out so utterly as to make him despise the warmth they once had kindled. His inclination in any argument was always toward the Catholic point of view, and though he himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic speech and agnostic thought, he was always a little impatient of a skeptical non-age and very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had never been tried by the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart's challenge with its plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would be effective save for the personality of the writer, who revealed his formal grace notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and the ta.s.sels of his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of its verbal cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in reading it that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost cause.

Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart's article, Michael managed to finish his breakfast with an appet.i.te. As he rose to leave the Common Room, Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of ill.u.s.trated papers with which he had fortified his place at table.

"Have you been reading that thing of Mossy's?" he asked incredulously.

Michael nodded.

"Isn't it most awful rot?"