Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate Part 11

You remind me of a damp squib, all fuss and no result. I am going to dinner," Dennison said, and went out of the room without looking at either Ward or myself.

"I shall do something awful to that brute before I have finished with him. He makes me mad," I said, and Ward walked across the room to me.

"I am most horribly sorry about this," he began, "and I will come back straight from the Sceptre and see you. Be in at nine o'clock."

"You didn't shoot at those people, did you?" I asked.

"No; but well, you see, Dennison is better than I am at getting in for a row, and I am better at getting out of it."

"He's a low-down hound," I a.s.serted, and after promising to be in at nine o'clock I seized my gown and went away. As I went into the hall I met Collier, and during dinner I expressed my opinion of Dennison very freely. There are times at Oxford when you regret most tremendously that you have left school, and this was one of them.

"A fellow like that would be kicked at any decent school," I said.

"He was kicked at Charbury until he managed to become a sort of blood.

He played racquets very well," Collier added, as if by way of an excuse.

"Why do we put up with him?" I asked viciously, for I could see him making Lambert and Webb shout with laughter at the table opposite me.

"I don't know," Collier answered, "I suppose it's his smile. What part of a fowl do you think this is? it looks to me like the neck." He turned it over several times and then called a servant. "Please take this back, and say I have to be very careful what I eat. I keep a list, and this isn't on it. I never saw that joint before," he added to me, and lost all interest in Dennison. I thought it a pity that Collier took so much trouble over what he ate; the sight of that unusual joint made him quite silent and inattentive during the rest of the meal.

I went to his rooms after dinner, as I felt sleepy, and he never did anything on Sunday except sleep, eat, and go to chapel. His room was full of tinted literature, but I never saw him read it, and I believe he bought _The Sporting Times_ on Sat.u.r.days so that he could give it to any man who attacked him with conversation on his day of rest. His table was covered by a most miscellaneous dessert, and I asked him if he expected a lot of men.

"Not a soul," he replied, and sank into a chair by the fire. "I have this every Sunday night, because my people pay my common-room bill, and I have to pay everything else out of my allowance. They told me to do myself well, but after this term I expect they will see that this odd sort of arrangement won't work. I can feed a regiment on almonds and raisins without it costing me a sou. Help yourself to coffee, stick the dish of anchovy toast down between us, and if you want to read there are three Sunday papers and a crowd of old magazines."

I sat by the fire and read four short stories to pa.s.s the time.

Dennison poked his head into the room and withdrew it when he saw me.

I congratulated myself upon that little incident, for I felt that if he understood how I hated the sight of him something would have been gained. At nine o'clock I left Collier and went to my rooms to wait for Ward. I did not expect him to be punctual, because I guessed that a dinner given by Bunny Langham would be difficult to leave. He turned up, however, in about half-an-hour, and said he was jolly glad to get away from the Sceptre. "Bunny's all right," he said, "but some of his friends are too much--even for me."

I replied that Bunny was all wrong, and said why I thought so.

"You don't know him," Ward explained; "he would never leave any one in a hole if he thought for a second. He's the most good-natured, weak kind of man on earth, but he would never do the wrong thing. He goes straight over a precious difficult country, for he hasn't got any more will than a rabbit and is as blind as a bat. He will be in trouble to the end of his days, but he will never make any one ashamed of him."

I thought this was rather a glorified conception of the Bunny I knew, so I said nothing.

"You must see that he is a good sort," Ward said.

"Everybody's a good sort," I answered impatiently. "Collier calls the fellow with the green-baize ap.r.o.n who collects the boots a good sort, and some man I met at home, who talked about emperors and kings as if they were all his cousins, declared that the Sultan of Morocco was the best sort he had ever met--when one got to know him."

"I don't wonder you are sick," he returned. "I should be if any one had done to me what we did to you and Foster this afternoon. It looks pretty rotten on the face of it, and I am as sorry as blazes that you had to have a row with those men."

"I'm not sick about the row," I answered; "that would have been fun if they hadn't got Foster's name."

Ward lay back in his chair, and tried to blow rings of smoke from his cigarette.

"Then you are just angry because you think we ought to have come back,"

he said.

"No, I'm not," I replied, and I felt horribly uncomfortable.

He looked most thoroughly puzzled. "What on earth do you mean?" he asked.

I got up and walked about the room before I spoke. "It's this way," I began. "I wanted you and Foster to like each other, because he is the greatest friend I have, and I like you. And when I had been saying what a good fellow you were, you go and make a most infernal row in a pub on Sunday afternoon and then bolt. I saw you in that confounded cart, and I ought to have told Foster that I knew you were the fellow who bolted. But I didn't."

Ward sat staring in front of him, and did not speak for some time. "I don't think I could ever be friends with Foster," he said at last; "he hated me at sight; but it is deucedly good of you all the same. I will write him a note and tell him I was the man. I was going to do that, anyhow."

"You weren't the man," I a.s.serted; "it was that little brute, Dennison."

"He doesn't count," Ward said.

I was disposed to agree with him on that point, but I thought that he and I had better go round and see Foster in the morning, instead of writing a note. He did not like this at first, but after some talking he said that he would come, and on the next morning we went round to Oriel. We made Foster look a most awful idiot, but that could not be helped. I know that if two men came to me simply bulging with apologies, I should look for the nearest window.

Fred hardly said anything but "All right" and "For goodness' sake don't say a word more about it," but it showed that Ward was not as bad as he thought him. I stayed behind after Ward had gone so that I might put things a little more straight, but Fred would not listen to another word. "You were in a vile temper yesterday afternoon, and now I know the cause. That's enough, so shut up. You seem to have become a kind of guardian to Ward," and then he stopped suddenly, for it struck him that he had said one of those things which funny people say, and he would never have done that on purpose. I a.s.sured him that I knew he had said it accidentally, but it stopped us talking about Ward, because, when you hate puns, it is most discomforting to make one suddenly. I made a pun once--I can still remember it, because if I had performed this feat intentionally I should have deserved all I got.

What I did get was a dig in the ribs from Collier and the remark, "You are a wag," and then I had to repeat it to his three cousins, one of whom was deaf and none of whom understood it, though they all laughed.

It was a Latin pun.

I am one of those people, Oliver Cromwell was another, to whom important things happened on a certain day. Tuesday was my day, I forget which his was, but it does not matter, because it is to be found in histories and almanacs. My day is not a matter of interest to anybody, but all the same I was born on a Tuesday, and things which I have had special reason to remember or regret have generally happened to me--so my mother says--on the same day. And it was on a Tuesday that I lunched with the Warden and began a curious sort of friends.h.i.+p with him. I suppose that I ought not to talk of a friends.h.i.+p between a man like the Warden, who was a mighty man of learning, and myself, but after all he gave me one of his books, and wrote in it, "To my young friend and quondam companion." "Quondam" was rather a pity, perhaps; it sounds pedantic, and the Warden was no pedant, unless he wanted to snub people.

I went to his luncheon, and, having neuralgia, said nothing until he told me that he knew Mr. Prettyman, who was one of the masters at Cliborough. If the Warden knew Prettyman I guessed that he had also heard something about me, and I thought I might as well stick up for myself as far as possible, so I said that Mr. Prettyman was the sort of man who, when you had lost a thing, always asked you where you had put it. He had on one occasion actually done this to me, and annoyed me very much. The Warden took no notice of my remark, and I was left to my neuralgia until the end of the meal. The other men who were there talked a lot; one of them said what he thought of Irving in _Hamlet_, and another criticized the paintings of Watts; the Warden kept his opinions to himself, and at two o'clock asked us what we were going to do in the afternoon. All of us were bent on active employment, but just as I was leaving the dining-room, he called me back and asked me if I would go for a walk with him at three o'clock on the following Thursday afternoon. I was too confused to remember what I said, and I only recollect that I left his house feeling as if something very awful was going to happen. I changed to play for the XX. against the XV. in a kind of daymare, if there is a state of mind which can be so described, and I had a good deal to say to Murray, as we walked down to the Parks together, about my luck. Murray laughed all the way from St.

Cuthbert's to Keble; he kept on breaking out into small cackles, which, of all the bad ways of laughing, must be the worst.

I started to play footer that afternoon without troubling to think how I should play. I could see myself marching slowly along the Woodstock road with the Warden, and however badly I played did not seem to matter much, for there was something far more awful to come. The XV. began to press at once, and I, as full-back, had plenty to do. What I did was reckless; I simply did not care what happened, and everything I tried seemed to come off. Everybody who plays games has an occasional day when things get twisted round, and it is easier to do right than wrong.

Those are the days for which we live in hope, and one of mine came on that Tuesday. I knew the whole thing was a fluke, and I told Murray and Foster so after the game, but they both said that I had given Sykes of Merton, who was playing back for the XV., something to think about.

During the next day, visions of my blue floated before me, and the prospect of walking with the Warden lost its terrors, until I went round to see Fred on Thursday morning. I wanted him to give me some hints, but I am sorry so say he saw only the humorous side of my engagement, and was very exasperating when he might have been extremely useful.

CHAPTER IX

A SURPRISE

When I left my rooms to walk with the Warden, I imagined that every one I met was laughing at me, and being intensely on the alert for insults, I was very displeased with the butler when he came to the door, and surveyed me. "What can you want with the Warden?" was written plainly over his face. I have never met a man who could be more gravely condescending than the Warden's butler, and I know several first-cla.s.s cricketers, two headmasters, a popular novelist, and a rising politician aged twenty-four. I should have enjoyed telling that man what I thought of him, but a doorstep is a poor place for an altercation, unless it is with a cabman, and I saw the Warden advancing upon me clad in a cloak, and carrying a most useful umbrella, which must have been rolled up by himself.

The appearance of the Warden might have surprised any one, but it could have impressed n.o.body. You had to know that he was a Warden, and wrote books about religion and philosophy, before you could feel afraid of him. If he was a precisian in the choice of words, he certainly was not one in the matter of dress.

"I think," he said, with just a glance at me to see if I was the right man, "that we will enter the Parks by the gates opposite to Keble College; we shall be more or less interrupted by the noisy, if necessary, shouts of football players, but we shall escape the authoritative note of the bicycle bell."

There wasn't much that I could say in answer to this, so I walked down the Broad in silence, and tried in vain to keep step with my companion.

Before we had reached Wadham his shuffle had got upon my nerves, and I wished furiously that he would say something to me. He seemed to have tucked his head into his neck, and to have retired into the world of contemplation. As we entered the Parks I was seized with a wild desire to run away. I had not uttered a word, and I had arrived at a state of mind which prompted me to give a terrific yell, just to see what would happen next. When I feel like that I must speak at least, so I said that it looked as if it might rain. It is not likely that I should have made such a remark if I could have thought of any other, and it had the merit of not being startling and also of being true. But if I had given the yell which I wished to give, I could not have produced a greater effect upon the Warden. I think that he had forgotten my existence, and for a moment he could not remember why I was with him.

He poked his head forward, and looked at me until I regretted my effort at conversation, and was dreadfully afraid I should have to repeat it; a remark about the weather in some way or other seems to lose all its sparkle when it is repeated.

The Warden, however, had heard what I said, and when he had detached himself from whatever he was thinking about, he answered me.

"I am not one of those who pretend to any extraordinary knowledge of weather symptoms," he began, and he stood in the middle of the path, while a gardener leant on his spade and watched us; "indeed, I have often noticed that those who make the greatest pretensions of that kind are themselves most frequently mistaken. In fact, my friend Dr.

Marshall, who wrote the meteorological reports for _The Times_ newspaper, was frequently himself in doubt whether or no to take out an umbrella for a walk."

I did not venture to interrupt him again for some time, and my next outbreak was quite unpremeditated. We were pa.s.sing a college rugger match, and a pa.s.s which was palpably forward escaped the notice of the referee. I joined in the cry of "forward" which was raised, and the Warden stopped once more and actually smiled. On this occasion I had forgotten all about him, and my shout probably surprised him as much as me.