The Ship of Stars Part 26

Two old gentlemen stepped out from the wicket of the Meadow Buildings, and pa.s.sed him, talking together. The taller--a lean man, with a stoop--was clearly a clergyman. The other wore cap and gown, and Taffy remarked, as he went by, that his cap was of velvet; and also that he walked with his arms crossed just above the wrists, his right hand clutching his left cuff, and his left hand his right cuff, his elbows hugged close to his sides.

After a few paces the clergyman paused, said something to his companion, and the two turned back towards the boy.

"Were you wanting to know your way?"

"I was looking for the river," Taffy answered. He was thinking that he had never in his life seen a face so full of goodness.

"Then this is your first visit to Oxford? Suppose, now, you come with us? and we will take you by the river and tell you the names of the barges. There is not much else to see, I'm afraid, in Vacation time."

He glanced at his companion in the velvet cap, who drew down an extraordinary bushy pair of eyebrows (yet he, too, had a beautiful face) and seemed to come out of a dream.

"So much the better, boy, if you come up to Oxford to wors.h.i.+p false G.o.ds."

Taffy was taken aback.

"Eight false G.o.ds in little blue caps, seated in a trough and tugging at eight poles; and all to discover if they can get from Putney to Mortlake sooner than eight others in little blue caps of a lighter shade. What do they _do_ at Mortlake when they get there in such a hurry? Eh, boy?"

"I--I'm sure I don't know," stammered Taffy.

The clergyman broke out laughing, and turned to him. "Are you going to tell us your name?"

"Raymond, sir. My father used to be at Christ Church."

"What? Are you Sam Raymond's son?"

"You knew my father?"

"A very little. I was his senior by a year or two. But I know something about him." He turned to the other. "Let me introduce the son of a man after your own heart--of a man fighting for G.o.d in the wilds, and building an altar there with his own hands and by the lamp of sacrifice."

"But how do you know all this?" cried Taffy.

"Oh," the old clergyman smiled, "we are not so ignorant up here as you suppose."

They walked by the river bank, and there Taffy saw the college barges and was told the name of each. Also he saw a racing eight go by: it belonged to the Vacation Rowing Club. From the barges they turned aside and followed the windings of the Cherwell. The clergyman did most of the talking; but now and then the old gentleman in the velvet cap interposed a question about the church at home, its architecture, the materials it was built of, and so forth; or about Taffy's own work, his carpentry, his apprentices.h.i.+p with Mendarva the Smith.

And to all these questions the boy found himself replying with an ease which astonished him.

Suddenly the old clergyman said, "There is your College!"

And unperceived by Taffy a pair of kindly eyes watched his own as they met the first vision of that lovely tower rising above the trees and (so like a thing of life it seemed) lifting its pinnacles exultantly into the blue heaven.

"Well?"

All three had come to a halt. The boy turned, blus.h.i.+ng furiously.

"This is the best of all, sir."

"Boy," said old Velvet-cap, "do you know the meaning of 'edification'? There stands your lesson for four years to come, if you can learn it in that time. Do you think it easy? Come and see how it has been learnt by men who have spent their lives face to face with it."

They crossed the street by Magdalen bridge, and pa.s.sed under Pugin's gateway, by the Chapel door and into the famous cloisters. All was quiet here; so quiet that even the voices of the sparrows chattering in the ivy seemed but a part of the silence. The shadow of the great tower fell across the gra.s.s.

"This is how one generation read the lesson. Come and see how another, and a later, read it."

A narrow pa.s.sage led them out of gloom into sudden sunlight; and the sunlight spread itself on fair gra.s.s-plots and gravelled walks, flower-beds and the pale yellow facade of a block of buildings in the cla.s.sical style, stately and elegant, with a colonnade which only needed a few promenading figures in laced coats and tie-wigs to complete the agreeable picture.

"What do you make of that?"

As a matter of fact Taffy's thoughts had run back to the theatre at Plymouth with its sudden changes of scenery. And he stood for a moment while he collected them.

"It's different: I mean," he added, feeling that this was intolerably lame, "it means something different; I cannot tell what."

"It means the difference between G.o.dly fear and civil ease, between a house of prayer and one of no prayer. It spells the moral change which came over this University when religion, the spring and source of collegiate life, was discarded. The cloisters behind you were built for men who walked with G.o.d."

"But why," objected Taffy, plucking up courage, "couldn't they do that in the sunlight?"

Velvet-cap opened his mouth. The boy felt he was going to be denounced; when a merry laugh from the old clergyman averted the storm.

"Be content," he said to his companion; "we are Gothic enough in Oxford nowadays. And the lad is right too. There was hope even for eighteenth-century Magdalen while its buildings looked on sunlight and on that tower. You and the rest of us lay too much stress on prayer. The lesson of that tower (with all deference to your amazing discernment and equally amazing whims) is not prayer, but praise.

And when all men unite to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d, it'll be praise, not prayer, that brings them together.

"'Praise is devotion fit for n.o.ble minds, The differing world's agreeing sacrifice.'"

"Oh, if you're going to fling quotations from a tapster's son at my head. . . . Let me see . . . how does it go on? . . . Where-- something or other--different faiths--

"'Where Heaven divided faiths united finds. . . .'"

And in a moment the pair were in hot pursuit after the quotation, tripping each other up like two schoolboys at a game. Taffy never forgot the final stanza, the last line of which they recovered exactly in the middle of the street, Velvet-cap standing between two tram-lines, right in the path of an advancing car, while he declaimed--

"'By penitence when we ourselves forsake, 'Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven; In praise--'"

(The gesture was magnificent)

"'In praise we n.o.bly give what G.o.d may take, And are without a beggar's blush forgiven.'

"--Confound these trams!"

The old clergyman shook hands with Taffy in some haste. "And when you reach home give my respects to your father. Stay, you don't know my name. Here is my card, or you'll forget it."

"Mine, too," said Velvet-cap.

Taffy stood staring after them as they walked off down the lane which skirts the Botanical Gardens. The names on the two cards were famous ones, as even he knew. He walked back toward Trinity a proud and happy boy. Half-way up Queen's Lane, finding himself between blank walls, with n.o.body in sight, he even skipped.

CHAPTER XX.

TAFFY GIVES A PROMISE.