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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41682 ***
+
+                       The Youth of Parnassus
+
+                         and Other Stories
+
+                      by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+    London
+    Macmillan and Co.
+    and New York
+    1895
+    _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+          To
+    Philip Morrell
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                                                   Page
+
+    The Youth of Parnassus                            1
+
+    The Will to Live. I.                             79
+
+    The Will to Live. II.                            99
+
+    The Claim of the Past                           125
+
+    A Broken Journey                                143
+
+    The Sub-Warden                                  183
+
+    Idyll                                           201
+
+    Buller Intervening                              243
+
+    The Optimist                                    259
+
+
+
+
+_The Youth of Parnassus_
+
+
+I.
+
+He came straight to Oxford from his American home, Parnassus City, a
+town in the Western State of Indiana.
+
+The first time Foley saw him was one wet October evening, when,
+splashing across the quadrangle towards his rooms, he noticed a large
+umbrella moving through the dripping twilight--an umbrella which, from
+its undecided motion, must belong, he had told himself, to some tourist,
+who, in spite of the rain and darkness, was finishing a day of
+sight-seeing at St. Mary's. But when the umbrella collapsed in front of
+his own staircase, and Foley saw the spectacles and pale face of a young
+man who turned to enter there, he decided that it must be an agent, come
+to collect money for missions or something of the kind. And as he
+followed upstairs, in the wet footprints of the feet he could still hear
+mounting above him, he asked himself with vague annoyance what right
+they had--people like that--to push themselves into the rooms of Oxford
+men.
+
+The melancholy footsteps went on till they reached the top; nor did
+Foley hear them again descend. Soon after he was told that an American
+had come into College, and was living above him; and when he went to
+call, he recognized, in the person who awkwardly rose to receive him,
+the young man he had taken for a mission agent in the rain that evening.
+A thin, small young man, in a long, black broadcloth coat of provincial
+cut, he seemed at first sight nothing but the traditional Western
+American Foley had read of in books, or seen in the theatre sometimes--a
+student who looked curiously out of place in that old panelled room.
+
+The young Englishman talked to him as best he could, asking the
+questions always asked of a new-comer; questions which this one answered
+with the usual shyness, but in a very unusual voice and accent.
+
+He had just come from America; he had left there on the sixth. He had
+come to study under Dr. Joseph at the new Methodist College. Dr. Joseph
+had arranged for him to come to St. Mary's; their own College wasn't
+built yet. Foley asked if he thought he would like Oxford. "Yes, sir,"
+the other replied, drawing a large handkerchief from his coat-tails, "I
+guess I will; though," he added cautiously after a moment, "it does
+seem kind of old and mouldy."
+
+Foley thought he had done his duty in calling, and meant for the future
+to see as little as possible of his new neighbour. And yet there had
+been something pleasant and sensitive in his face, he remembered
+afterwards; and at times he was haunted by the thought of this stranger
+sitting as he had found him, alone and lonely in the room upstairs, with
+two or three books in the empty shelves, a few photographs of home that
+made the mantelpiece and bare walls look all the more homeless and
+unfriendly. Now and then he would hear footsteps above moving vaguely
+about, or he would meet the American on the stairs, or see him walking
+out alone, and at last, out of kindness, he went again to call.
+
+Before long he began to take a certain liking to Sutton, and would
+often go up in the evenings with a cigarette to his rooms. To the young
+Englishman the American was certainly a curious and amusing study. How
+curious were the views and impressions of Oxford, that, breaking through
+his shy reserve, he would once in a while express, in his prim
+middle-aged way! He was a good deal shocked by the wine-drinking,
+card-playing, and Sabbath-breaking that seemed so prevalent there; what
+religion there was, (well, he didn't guess there was much,) he thought
+mechanical and dead. Of course there was a great deal of culture in
+Oxford; but in other things, like telephones and electric lights, why
+England was behind the Mississippi Valley!
+
+
+II.
+
+Foley began to have ideas of his own about this Mississippi Valley. He
+had already read of its rivers and railways and mushroom towns, and he
+remembered some of the proud things that Sutton had said at different
+times of Parnassus City and its importance--it was almost the only
+subject on which the reticent young man ever seemed willing to talk--the
+thought-out comparisons he would draw between that place and Oxford, in
+his attempts to explain to himself what he saw, and account for it all,
+according to his principles.
+
+One evening, in a burst of unusual talkativeness, he described how
+Parnassus City had been laid out twenty years before, on what had been
+till then an unploughed prairie; but now there were thousands of
+inhabitants, rows of business buildings, and elegant residences in the
+outskirts. There were electric trolleys too in the streets; and the
+whole town was lighted by natural gas. Not only had the place grown fast
+in trade and population, but there had been, he explained, a pretty
+rapid growth in culture. Oh, they didn't intend to let the moss grow on
+them out in Indiana! Schools and churches were built--the most elegant
+was the First Methodist, the Reverend Dr. Turnpenny's. It was Dr.
+Turnpenny, he added, who started the Forward Movement among the Indiana
+Methodists which made such a stir. Then, after the churches, they had
+built a lecture hall and library, and, at last, the Parnassus College.
+
+Foley asking more about this college, Sutton explained that though it
+had been built a few years before as a college for Methodist theology
+and liberal learning, it was already larger than the neighbouring
+institute at Corinth Creek, and only second in those parts to the
+University of Miomi. It wasn't of course like the universities in the
+Eastern States, but still they were proud of it there.
+
+He had pinned up on the old panelling of his wall a photograph of this
+Parnassus College: a rather gaunt frame building, standing in a ploughed
+field among a few new-planted trees. About the steps were grouped a
+number of young men and women, many of them wearing spectacles, and all
+with earnest faces and provincial dress. "That's my class," Sutton
+explained, pointing at his own figure in the group. "It's the biggest
+class we've had so far, thirteen gentlemen and seven ladies."
+
+Foley studied the photograph of the college, and the pictures on the
+mantelpiece--several college friends, with lank serious faces; an
+intellectual young lady, her hand resting on a copy of the Bible; and an
+old, mild, white bearded minister--Dr. Turnpenny, no doubt. There was a
+picture too of a wide city street. Then it really existed, this remote
+place, and people lived there! he thought, amused at the curious chance
+which had brought Sutton, the promise and pride, perhaps, of his native
+town, and set him down in so different a world.
+
+But at last Foley turned from the yellow lamplight, the photographs, and
+the voice of the American sawing in his ear. Going to the window he
+opened the lattice and leaned out into the night. Cool, fresh, and dark
+was the air that breathed on his face, while before him, blue and vague
+under the white moon, there grew on his sight the towers, the dome-like
+trees, and shining roofs of Oxford; dim, romantic, and steeped in
+silence, save for the even tinkle of a distant bell. With sudden
+unaffected sentiment, he felt how much he cared for Oxford and all that
+Oxford stood for.
+
+"Do come here," he called out with a friendly impulse, turning his head
+into the yellow light of the room, "I don't think I ever saw such a
+view."
+
+The American came and leaned beside him at the open window. "Yes, it is
+nice," he said at length, and Foley was surprised by a fugitive sound of
+real feeling and appreciation in his voice.
+
+
+III.
+
+Gradually he came to take a more real interest in his neighbour. The
+books that Sutton read, Sutton's love of poetry--surprised him; little
+things he would say now and then seemed to show indications of sensitive
+fancies and shy feelings hardly in accordance with his dry exterior.
+What a thing it would be for him, Foley thought, if the poor young
+man's taste could be really cultivated; if he could only be set free
+from his narrowing ideas and made to look at life for himself, instead
+of seeing it always through the grey fog of Puritan prejudice!
+
+Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the
+well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him,
+and seemed to puzzle him--he would come days afterwards with carefully
+thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read,
+as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert
+him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph
+preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of
+Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a
+want of beauty in the service.
+
+And it was only once that Foley felt even for a moment the least
+uncomfortable about the things he said to his friend--one evening when
+he happened to run upstairs with some specious argument about the
+Apostolic Succession, (for when an idea occurred to him he liked to make
+use of it at once,) and going into the American's room, he found him on
+his knees in prayer.
+
+In that old place--for St. Mary's was not one of the more liberal
+Colleges, but a sleepy, ancient, aristocratic society, very conservative
+of its own beliefs and manners and prejudices--Eliaphet Sutton lived on
+at first, unknown to almost everybody, and only noticed for the oddness
+of his looks, as he went in and out to his lectures or solitary walks.
+But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm
+of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and
+little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint
+unconventionalities of his speech and ways.
+
+A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced
+American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred
+and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with
+its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by
+a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of
+life; concerned, many of them, only with its theoretic problems,
+interested more, perhaps, in the ancient Greeks than in contemporary
+affairs--and, indeed, not unlike the Greeks in their care for the
+clearness and beauty of the mind, the athletic strength of the
+body--surely, Foley thought, the young Methodist could not have found so
+delightful a place in all the world beside.
+
+How much he was really influenced by it Foley could not tell; certainly
+as the months went by he seemed to be more aware of the beauty of
+Oxford; he would stop sometimes of his own accord to look through a blue
+gateway or down a sunlit street, and once Foley saw him standing, a
+quaint figure, under the University Church, and gazing up at the
+spire--at the religious statues there, which seemed to be voyaging
+through the windy sky and among its great white clouds. He started to
+join him, but Sutton, seeing he was noticed, moved hastily away.
+
+Then Foley remembered an evening when, coming out into the quadrangle,
+he saw a figure he recognized as Sutton's standing at a barred gate
+opening on the street. In front of the American, through that one small
+opening in the great dark walls, was the gas-lit yellow of the street,
+the noise of the passing crowd and traffic--for it was the evening of a
+market day--but at his back the deep shadow and silence of the old
+quadrangle.
+
+"It's rather absurd to be locked up in this way," Foley said, joining
+him; but Sutton replied after a moment, "Why, I was just thinking I
+rather liked it! Of course it is absurd, but still--" He stopped, as he
+so often stopped, in the middle of his sentence.
+
+Other times there were when Sutton seemed curiously narrow and stubborn;
+times when some of his dissenting acquaintances had just been to see
+him--the elderly undergraduates, with bald heads and big moustaches,
+whom Foley took to be pupils of Dr. Joseph's when he met them mounting
+the stairs. One of these dissenting friends of the American's, a
+friendly, awkward young man, named Abel, who was assistant tutor to Dr.
+Joseph, and had come with him to Oxford when the college moved there
+from Birmingham, seemed to have a special supervision over the
+American. Abel had no very high idea of Oxford and Oxford people, and
+once, when they met in Sutton's rooms, he and Foley argued a little
+about the University.
+
+Anyhow he envied Sutton, Abel said at last, turning, as he rose to go,
+to the silent American; it wasn't everybody who had the luck to live in
+such a place. But Sutton suddenly coloured, and answered, "You can't
+blame me, Abel, Dr. Turnpenny wanted me...."
+
+"I'm not blaming you, my friend, it's only envy," Abel replied
+good-humouredly. He still lingered a moment, looking at the books, and
+cross-questioning Sutton about his work, and how he spent his time.
+
+Foley, who liked anything new, was interested by this intelligent,
+tactless man, and wondered why Sutton should be so obviously glad when
+at last the young dissenter went his way.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The next day Foley found his friend in a mood of deep depression. He
+would not go out anywhere, he said; he must spend the afternoon--indeed,
+he meant to spend all his afternoons now--on his work; he had been
+neglecting it too long. And though this desperate resolve was often
+broken, yet from this time on he seemed subject now and then to moods of
+troubled conscience--moods in which he would shut himself up, sometimes
+for days, working feverishly alone, or only coming to his friend late at
+night to talk in an uneasy, interrupted way about the sinfulness of the
+world, and its pleasures, and how wrong it was to enjoy yourself. At
+these notions Foley would laugh, or argue seriously against them. That
+Sutton could have any real reason for feeling as he did, Foley never
+suspected, but thought it simply the old moroseness which haunted him,
+the unreasoned hatred of the Puritans for gaiety and life. And Sutton
+had very little to say in answer to his friend. Yes, he was getting on
+with his work well enough, he admitted, and there was nothing really to
+keep him from going out, except--except--somehow he felt it was wrong.
+
+But the wrong thing, Foley declared, was to stay in-doors all those
+beautiful summer days; and then more seriously he added, that he was
+sure what Sutton needed was to see more of the world and life. Living in
+his lonely retired way, what could he know of other people and the
+things they cared for, and how could he ever hope to have any influence
+on them? And, once convinced that it was his duty, Sutton became
+curiously eager to shut up his books and go.
+
+Indeed, for the most part, the poor young man was not hard to influence,
+Foley found; any strong assertion attracted him, and he was often only
+too willing to resign to someone else the responsibility of deciding
+what he ought to do. But then again he would grow suddenly so stubborn
+and prejudiced; and at all times he was so reserved about himself and
+his own feelings, that the young Englishman, in spite of his theories,
+never felt he really understood him. Perhaps, he sometimes fancied,
+Sutton had no very real ideas or impressions of his own; perhaps he was
+not influenced by Oxford in the least, and was not aware of any real
+difference between the ancient town, with its traditions and memories,
+and the new-built Parnassus City.
+
+
+V.
+
+But when Foley had left Oxford and gone abroad that summer, the long
+letters that came to him now and then, written in Sutton's fine
+clerklike hand, surprised and touched him a little. It was odd, he
+thought, that a person who had talked with so much reserve, should write
+him such charming and intimate letters, and he told himself he had
+always believed there were real feelings and tastes behind Sutton's mask
+of awkward silence.
+
+The first of the letters was written in the vacation just after Foley
+had gone abroad. It was Sutton's first summer in Europe; he was staying
+on at Oxford, having friends nowhere else, and not being able, of
+course, to go back to America. But from the way he wrote, America was
+plainly a good deal in his thoughts, and often in those long still days
+he wished himself back there, haunted as he was by the idea that he
+might be wasting his time, that what he was learning in Oxford might not
+be of any use to him out in Indiana after all. But then he really knew,
+he wrote, that he was doing the best thing in staying on. The church out
+there, and indeed the whole country, was growing so rapidly, that there
+would be need in the ministry for young men who were well trained, and
+familiar with the thought and culture of the day. He had come to see
+that Foley was right in saying it was your duty to get familiar with
+modern ideas, and read modern books; he was getting on with the list of
+books Foley had made for him. Of course you ought to understand, or at
+least try to understand, your opponent's views. If you were afraid of
+this, it showed, as Dr. Turnpenny always said, that you could not be
+very sure of yourself. Indeed, when Dr. Turnpenny had advised him to
+come to Oxford, he had felt it would prove to the world that, at any
+rate the Indiana Methodists were quite assured of their position.
+
+In the next letter there was a mention of the American tourists who were
+coming through the summer in such numbers to Oxford. Sutton used to
+watch them when they walked into the quiet College garden, where he sat
+alone, wishing he knew them and could talk to them about America. Their
+voices and ways made them seem like old friends to him there in that
+strange country. Once two ladies had asked him the way to the chapel,
+and he had been delighted to show them the sights of the College. They
+were from Buffalo, New York; he must be sure to call on them, they said,
+if he ever came to Buffalo. They told him how much they would like to
+stay on in Oxford--but they had to go back to America in a month. Sutton
+envied them their quick return; but after all, he added, when the time
+came, probably he might be a little sorry to leave Oxford....
+
+
+VI.
+
+Then in the autumn, Sutton wrote about the coming together of the
+College, the beginning of busy life after the long quiet of the vacation
+days. For the first time he had gone to service in the College chapel.
+He did not like the way of worship, finding it formal and meaningless;
+but gradually, as the twilight faded away, and the great painted windows
+filled with darkness--growing black in the candle-lit walls about
+them--another impression came to him, looking at all those faces in the
+dim light, and listening to their voices--an impression of the unity and
+living spirit of the College, as being a small, ancient commonwealth,
+with a history and traditions of its own. There they all were, just
+themselves, shut in from the world outside, gathered together, as the
+College had gathered together in the same place for five or six hundred
+years. Though he was only there as a spectator, who had chanced to
+wander in from the outside, yet he realized how great an influence such
+a place, with all its old ways and customs, might have on the young
+Englishmen who came there. Indeed, if the influence had not been so
+obviously narrow and deadening he himself might have been a little
+affected by it....
+
+"Yes, you were right," he said in another letter, "when you told me that
+the antiquity of England belongs to us Americans as much as to you....
+Sometimes I fancy I had an ancestor here once; I am sure he was a
+Puritan, and disapproved of the ecclesiasticism and worldliness of the
+place. And yet, poor man, he could not help loving Oxford too. A
+retired, melancholy person, he liked it best in the days like these when
+the buildings and yellow and greenish trees are half veiled in the
+autumn mist. But at last he went over with the Puritans to New England,
+and was much better and more active there, and free from all the dreamy
+influences that held him in Oxford. And it will be much better for me
+too, when I go back next year."
+
+
+VII.
+
+But he had almost decided to go back at once, he wrote in the next
+letter. He saw now, and indeed all along he had felt deep down in his
+soul, that he was doing wrong in staying there; that there was nothing
+really in Oxford to help him. If Foley only knew all the circumstances
+he would understand. And, in any case, it was not wholesome to be always
+living in the past.
+
+And in Oxford you _were_ in the past; the dead were about you
+everywhere; you dwelt in the buildings they had built, you read their
+books, you thought their thoughts, and the weight of their dreary
+traditions crushed down on you, forcing your life into the shape of
+theirs. Surely there was something evil and haunted about the place! And
+during all those dripping autumn days, Sutton's one thought had been a
+longing to be back again under the keen skies of his prairie-home; life
+was new and hopeful there, unshadowed by the gloom of antiquity and
+death....
+
+But soon after Sutton wrote that he had had a talk with Dr. Joseph. "He
+advises me by all means to stay here. He says that all I am getting at
+Oxford will certainly be very useful to me when I go back. I never had
+an idea how strong our position is; I wish you might have a talk with
+him sometime, when you return. He explains that religion is progressive;
+that there is no real antagonism between the new and the old; the one
+has grown out of the other by a natural evolution. Indeed he laughed at
+the idea of being afraid of the Past; one ought to enjoy it, not fear
+it, he said. Then when I asked him if there wasn't a danger in the new
+criticism, and too much reasoning about things, he said that there never
+could be any real danger in following one's best reason, and that we
+need not be the least afraid of what it will lead us to."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Other letters came to Foley now and then. Sutton spoke of his work and
+occupations, the taciturn young man taking a certain pleasure, as it
+seemed, in writing down the ideas and impressions that he found it hard
+to express in any other way.
+
+But Foley at this time was travelling in the East; he could only read
+the American's letters with haste and small attention. Some, however, he
+put aside to keep, and now and then would write back in a disconnected
+way, for he felt a certain friendliness for this assiduous
+correspondent. As time went on, however, the letters grew more
+infrequent, and at last the correspondence died. Foley, with his new
+interests, had almost forgotten Sutton, or would only think of him
+vaguely as a preacher somewhere in America, whither doubtless he had
+returned some time ago.
+
+
+IX.
+
+After Foley had spent a year or two almost entirely abroad, he returned
+to England, began working hard at his profession, and it was some time
+before he found the leisure to go back to Oxford. At last he went one
+mid-summer alone, for an idle visit. It was the vacation; the old
+College was almost deserted, and sometimes in the evening he would go
+into the garden there, and, sitting under one of the great trees, would
+read, or idly watch the fading of the twilight. And now memories of the
+old days, and sentiments towards a place which he had once loved with a
+certain enthusiasm--though half forgetting it afterwards, amid his other
+occupations--came back to him with unexpected vividness. How much more
+delightful it made life, he told himself one evening, as he sat there,
+half lost in sentimental musing, how much more delightful it made life
+to have been at Oxford, to have learned to love the place as one did
+learn to love it--to have it always as a charming memory! It was so
+perfect, that evening, with the sunset still lingering faint and red
+behind the blue trees and towers, up there above the dusky garden
+stretches. And that figure of a cloistered student which Foley could
+vaguely distinguish on the twilight path; it was no real person, surely,
+but a part of the picture, a figure painted into the grey landscape to
+give the final touch of tranquil life! But as the figure drew nearer and
+became more real, Foley began to wonder, who could it be who seemed so
+familiar to him?
+
+"Why, Sutton!" he called out, as he joined him, surprised at finding the
+American still at Oxford, "You still here?"
+
+Sutton started, and then greeting Foley in his old reserved way, they
+paced together slowly on the garden path. After Foley had talked a
+little about his travels and work, he turned to his companion and said
+in a friendly way, "But tell me about yourself, Eliaphet, it's three
+years since I have seen you; what have you been doing, and when are you
+really going back to America?"
+
+Sutton replied with all his old vagueness and reticence that he had
+stayed; he had found it necessary; he had not decided yet about going
+back.
+
+"Probably you will be sorry to leave Oxford when the time comes?" Foley
+suggested, but the American did not answer.
+
+Eliaphet was a good deal changed, Foley thought when they parted; he
+seemed so much thinner and more melancholy looking, and his voice was
+almost like that of another person. What a difference a few years made!
+
+
+X.
+
+Several times in the following days Foley met his friend again--indeed,
+they two just then seemed almost alone together in Oxford--and more than
+once, in the long summer afternoons, they walked together in a desultory
+way among the vacant streets and empty Colleges. Sutton was even more
+reserved than of old, but there was a charm in his silent company and in
+his affectionate, scrupulous knowledge of the place. Each of the
+churches, dim College chapels, and libraries was dear and familiar to
+him now; he had found remnants of Norman architecture, and little early
+Gothic windows in obscure old places which Foley, who had thought he
+knew Oxford so well, was forced to admit he had never visited. And even
+for the despised classicism, Sutton seemed to have a certain fondness,
+for everything that bore the stately quaint mark of the Stuart
+times--Laud's quadrangle at St. John's, and its Italian-looking busts
+and arches; the chapel at Trinity; the little Ashmolean museum, and the
+prim old Botanic garden, with its battered statue of Charles I. over the
+gate, the half neglected formality of its urns and fountain, its walls
+and walks within.
+
+Then the old names of places seemed all to have a meaning for him. He
+could trace the remains of the Religious Houses, the Friars Minor, the
+Friar Preachers, the Carmelites, after which some of the more ancient
+streets are called; showing Foley the gateways or ruined arches, bits
+of College buildings which now alone remain of their former stately
+precincts. And on their walks together Sutton often chose by preference
+the little back streets, or those ancient footpaths that wind through
+the old heart of the city, through the mediaeval town whose gables and
+walls and gardens still sleep in the sun, almost untouched, behind the
+modern fronts and the traffic of many of the busy streets.
+
+To Foley in his sentimental mood just then, the quiet of Oxford was very
+pleasant, after the noise of the London season; and there seemed to be
+something almost poetic in the life of this solitary student. How wise
+he was after all, Foley thought, to stay there among the old colleges
+and churches, where the ambitions and obligations of the world could
+scarcely trouble him; nor the noise of its busy life break in on his
+tranquil moods, or disturb the old memories he loved. And yet a vague
+suspicion crossing his mind, once or twice, made him ask himself, was
+Sutton really so happy after all?
+
+
+XI.
+
+One morning this vacation quiet of the College was rather noisily broken
+by the arrival of a number of undergraduates, who had returned to
+prepare for an examination, bringing with them the noise and influences
+of the outside world. Now the American was no longer to be met with in
+the garden or quadrangle, whither he had been wont to come almost every
+day, as if fond of the place and not averse from Foley's company.
+Wondering that he did not see him any more, Foley one evening asked the
+undergraduates if they knew Sutton or had ever heard anything about
+him.
+
+By sight and reputation they knew him very well,--a solitary person, who
+led in Oxford a most melancholy life, without friends or apparent
+occupation; staying there, it was reported, because of something in his
+past which kept him from going back to America.
+
+Foley knew how distorted gossip of this kind would grow in coming
+through the minds of undergraduates; and yet there was enough in what
+they told, to make him uneasy about his friend. Sutton had given up
+studying theology, had tried history, making however a complete failure
+in the schools; he was said to have adopted strange religious ideas and
+had been heard, it was rumoured, groaning and scourging himself at
+night. There was a report too that some Americans had come to Oxford,
+and, after visiting him, had gone to the Warden and accused Sutton of
+keeping some money which was not his own.
+
+
+XII.
+
+As soon as he could, Foley went off to find his friend, getting the
+address from the College books. At last in a dark alley he discovered
+the house. Mr. Sutton had gone away from Oxford the day before, the
+landlady told him, and had not said when he would be back. Perhaps the
+gentleman would like to leave his card? The room was at the top; he must
+be mindful of the stairs. Climbing up with care, Foley opened the door
+and lighted a match in the darkness; the poverty and destitution of the
+little room growing vivid for a moment, and then fading again into
+blackness, affected him somewhat sadly. Just two chairs, a table, a
+bed, and a few signs of human habitation,--several books, a coat hanging
+on the wall, and three photographs over the fireplace, the familiar one
+of Dr. Turnpenny, the dreamy face of Philip Gerard, and a picture that
+Foley was touched to recognize as his own. All the pictures of Parnassus
+City, his class mates, the young lady, the street, and college, had
+disappeared, and a few old religious prints were in their place.
+
+Feeling as if he had intruded where he had no right, Foley turned away;
+lingering on the stairs, however, for he was loth to leave the house
+till he had learned something more definite about his friend. Then in
+the hall below he met the landlady, and began to talk to her about the
+American. Mr. Sutton was such a kind gentleman, she said, and always
+very quiet; but lately he had been, she thought, very lonesome and
+melancholy, and he didn't seem to have any friends in Oxford now. And
+though he had paid her regular, she couldn't complain of that, yet she
+was afraid the poor gentleman had very little money. Indeed, he had
+seemed to be in some trouble, and now he had gone away mysterious-like.
+The voice of this woman, plainly so poor herself, her anxiety on
+Sutton's account, remained in Foley's mind in a haunting way. And yet,
+what could have happened, he asked himself, unable in common sense to
+imagine any definite trouble, and nevertheless disturbed by a sense of
+mystery, as if he had suddenly found himself face to face with something
+more real and sad than most of the sentiments and troubles of his own
+experience.
+
+Certainly the American had greatly changed--the narrow, rustic young man
+who had come there first, and the pale scholar Foley had met years
+afterwards, in the twilight of the garden--there was difference enough
+between the two! he thought, putting them side by side in memory. But
+what this change was Sutton had not told; probably never would tell, for
+in his reserve and reticence he was just the same.
+
+And yet in his letters he had written with much less reserve, Foley
+remembered. He began to wonder whether, if he should read the letters
+again, with more attention, he might not find in them some hint of
+Sutton's trouble. Friendless as the American seemed to be in Oxford, a
+little advice and sympathy from some one who understood his
+circumstances, might make perhaps all the difference to him.
+
+When Foley got back to his own rooms, he began looking through the
+portfolio of papers that he had brought with him from Germany. Yes,
+there they were, the envelopes addressed in Sutton's neat fine writing.
+Arranging them in order of their dates, he began to go through them.
+Letters written during two or three years of his friend's life, in half
+an hour he could read them all.
+
+
+XIII.
+
+First came the letters Foley remembered: Sutton's first Long Vacation;
+his home-sickness in Oxford; his thoughts of Parnassus; the American
+tourists he would watch and speak with sometimes. Then in the autumn his
+impression of the chapel, his growing fondness for Oxford, followed by
+the sudden determination to go home, from which Dr. Joseph had dissuaded
+him, telling him that there was nothing he need be afraid of in Oxford,
+or in the Past.
+
+Then came the letters which had come to Foley in the East, and been
+hardly regarded by him in the hurry of travel. Letters which read
+pleasantly for the most part, as he went through them now, with their
+echoes of charming Oxford life--charming for a time, though troubled
+afterwards. With Dr. Joseph's theology to rely on, and Dr. Joseph's
+approval of his life, Sutton's uneasy conscience had been at rest for a
+while, and he had let himself enjoy life without questioning--just the
+simple human joy of the world and youth, with the weather growing
+warmer, and the Spring blossoming in the gardens of that beautiful old
+city, where he was quite at home now.
+
+"I have so enjoyed the Spring," he wrote "your tardy, veering English
+Spring, with its gusts of snow and black weather, and yet enough warm
+days to woo from the earth the English flowers that till last year I
+only knew of in books. But I greet them as old friends now, the
+primroses, and cowslips, and daffodils.... May is here, the air is
+full of the greenness of leaves and the songs of birds, the lank rose
+trees are budding on the Gothic walls, and when I breathe the fragrant
+air and look about me I rub my eyes, and wonder whether May was ever so
+beautiful at home. Some beautiful days, of course, I can remember
+vividly; but I lived then for the most part, I think, among pale
+thoughts and theories, growing old before I was young, and looking so
+rarely out--indeed, thinking somehow that it was almost wrong to look
+out on the beauty and colour of the world...."
+
+He had written a good deal about Oxford; and really it wasn't true, what
+Foley had told him once, that he didn't deserve to live in so beautiful
+a place; he did care, and was learning more and more to look at things
+and enjoy them. On May morning he had gone to Magdalen to hear them
+salute the rising sun from the tower. "I wish I could describe it all,"
+he wrote, "the streets, as I went out, cold and vacant in the early
+dawn, the pale flames in the street lamps, and the silence of those rows
+of sleeping houses, only broken, as I passed under garden walls, by the
+acute music of the birds awake already in the trees. Birds, millions of
+them! I never heard such a clamour. At the College gate there was a
+group of shivering people; and soon they let us in, to climb the steep
+tower stairs, with its narrow windows here and there in the darkness,
+with views like little old pictures of grey castles and green country.
+On the windy platform at the top we found almost all the College
+gathered, the President, and Fellows, and undergraduates, with the
+group of white choristers. Gradually, as we waited, the formless sky all
+round and above us grew white and blue; the sky-line reddened; and then,
+bringing a sudden hush in the crowded talk, a sudden baring of all our
+heads, the May sun began to blaze in the East; and as it rose into the
+sky the boys, facing the light, chanted loud, with their shrill young
+voices, the old Latin hymn. Well, you can hardly imagine what a solemn
+moment it was, with the slow hymn, the stately yellow sun rising over
+all that great view of green country. Turning toward Oxford we saw black
+figures like dots on the sun-flushed towers and roofs of the other
+Colleges. Our tower, and, indeed, the whole sky, seemed to rock with the
+pealing bells; and the undergraduates, engaging in a wild scuffle, tore
+off each other's caps and gowns, throwing them out into the air, to fall
+with giddy swirls on the roofs, or into the street below. It seemed
+almost an outburst of Pagan turbulence, after the Pagan sun-worship, up
+there on that windy tower-top over the sleeping town! I wrote describing
+it to Dr. Turnpenny; I only hope he won't be shocked!"
+
+
+XIV.
+
+In Sir Philip Gerard, whom Foley had known slightly as a youth, of poor
+and ancient Catholic family, Sutton, it appeared, had found a congenial
+companion; and he described how they would often spend their afternoons
+together on the river; rowing up the windings of the Cherwell, past
+little woods and garden walks, or between the sliding horizons of meadow
+banks, where the tangled edge of grass and flowers fringed the near sky.
+"I lie on luxurious cushions in the bow, and Gerard pushes me along,
+through sleepy sunshine and shadow, and under the unwilling branches of
+trees; and then, anchoring in some secluded place, we read together some
+poet or old book, while the endless afternoon glides by, and boats float
+down the shady river."
+
+"This sounds dreadfully lazy, I'm afraid! But I am taking a rest; I have
+been feeling rather tired, and Dr. Joseph says I had better do nothing
+but enjoy myself for a week or two now...."
+
+"... I discovered the other day the old market. I wonder if you know
+it? It is a delightful place! People from the villages about Oxford have
+stalls there, and you see the ruddy, old-fashioned cottagers' wives,
+seated each one behind a fresh bank of vegetables and flowers she
+herself has grown at home in her quaint garden. Sweet, old-fashioned
+flowers, flags and peonies and roses, made up into tight bouquets and
+set out for sale in trim rows, not unlike, I fancy, the trim rows in
+which they grew in their formal cottage flower beds...." Letters came
+to him from home, he said, telling of all that was going on in Parnassus
+City: the Bryant Literary Society they had started, the church bazaar
+for the missionary work, the Monday evening prayer meetings at the
+College; and he often felt that he ought to be back there, that he was
+dreaming away his time. Yes, it was like a dream in Oxford; but such an
+enchanted dream!...
+
+He wrote, in another letter, of the Oxford bells. More and more he was
+conscious of them, sounding always in the near or distant sky; and if
+ever he woke up in the night, restless with his dreams, he had only to
+wait a little and they would ring out--first the silver voices of the
+Colleges, and then the slow booming tones of the great church, so near
+at hand. And he found a comfort, he said, in the nearness of the
+churches, and their wakefulness through the night.
+
+Although of course he did not approve, he said, of a religion of
+external forms, yet he confessed that he had come to take a certain
+interest in noticing how, almost every time he went out, he discovered
+some new symbol of the old Catholic religion--old stone crosses, statues
+gazing out from the towers, images of the Virgin, hands raised in
+prayer, the adoration of kings and queens in the painted windows; and
+even in the gardens stone fragments, covered with ivy, of old
+saints--everywhere tokens of ancient faith, and intimations of another
+world, shining and immanent, about this world of sense. It was curious,
+but he had never noticed these things when he had first come to Oxford!
+Indeed, he grew to love all the antiquity of the place; was no longer
+oppressed or frightened by it; and for the old portraits in the hall and
+library, the tombstones in the cloisters, with their quaint epitaphs and
+names, he felt a certain fondness, he said, looking on the dead now, not
+as enemies, frowning on his creed and life, but as friends rather, and
+kindly predecessors.
+
+
+XV.
+
+The lives of many of those old scholars and worthies had become familiar
+to him, since he had read Anthony à Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, and he
+had gone sometimes with his friend on antiquarian walks about Oxford,
+and the colleges Wood described. Or Gerard would lend him a horse, and
+they would ride out to visit the historic places and villages that lie
+in the old country about--Woodstock, Cumnor, Abingdon--the names were
+familiar to him of long date; had he not first read of some of them, and
+the scenes they were famous for, in Jones' _Excelsior Reader_, out in
+Indiana as a boy?
+
+He spoke of the village churches, that seemed so beautiful on those June
+afternoons, as they stood among their old trees and flowers, with the
+white clouds in the sky above, a shiver of wind in the long grass over
+the graves. And then, through the scent of roses about the open door,
+the dim interior, with its white Norman arches, and light falling from
+painted windows on the crusaders' tombs--on all the many monuments of
+the dead. The dead! Sutton wrote that he had always known of the times
+gone by, and the faith of the Middle Ages, but only in an unreal way,
+through books. And it made such a difference--to him at least--if he saw
+the proof of a thing, actually existing with the daylight on it!
+
+"Once, Gerard says, these churches were filled in the morning and
+evening light with labouring people kneeling in silent prayer. But that,
+of course, was in the Dark Ages. Gerard thinks that the world has done
+nothing but go back since the Middle Ages; certainly he does hate
+everything that is modern. How he will detest Parnassus City, if he
+comes to see me there, as he says he will. It has been bad for him, I am
+sure, living out of the world, as he has lived, among old memories and
+dreams of his own. He is a Catholic, you know, but he respects my
+religion; he knows, of course, what my views are, and we never talk
+about theology. There is a friend of his I meet sometimes a priest, and
+I suppose a Jesuit. But he seems really quite a cultivated person."
+
+Foley took up another letter: They had ridden out, Sutton wrote, to an
+old country house and park, where Charles I. had stayed once, while
+Parliament was being held in Oxford. The house, all save one wing, now a
+farm-house, had been torn down; but on the hill overlooking the lake, in
+the midst of the green shade of beeches, the chapel was still standing,
+abandoned now, and almost untouched, save by decay and time, since the
+polite court of the Stuarts had said their worldly devotions there. What
+rich brocades, what hushed gallantries and frivolous prayers had once
+rustled and whispered under the graceful high arches of those pews! But
+birds had their nests there now, he said, while through the decaying
+roof the rain dripped down on the frail woodwork, the classic columns
+and fading colours of this deserted place of elegant worship and old
+fashion.
+
+The American Puritan confessed to a certain tenderness for the generous
+lost cause, for the fine futile courage of the gay Cavaliers and lovely
+forgotten ladies. And as they rode homeward through the twilight, his
+companion sang snatches of some old Cavalier songs--tunes with a certain
+pathos and grace in their gallant wistful music.
+
+
+XVI.
+
+Then there was a long letter, dating from the autumn after this
+delightful summer, in which he wrote again about Anthony à Wood, the old
+Oxford antiquary. He had been reading Wood's diaries, finding in them,
+he said, in spite of their old-fashioned pedantry and long genealogies,
+a vivid picture of the University and Wood's life in it, two hundred
+years ago. A calm life, Sutton described it, in curious contrast to the
+times in which Wood lived, when the academic quiet was so often
+disturbed by armies, and royal visits, and great events; and the noise
+of tumults in the Oxford streets, and troops marching by, reaching the
+old antiquary's ears, would draw him from the chronicles of the past, to
+look with blinking eyes from his library window on the turmoil and
+disquiet of contemporary history. For his life was spent in his own
+study, or in "Bodlie's Library," or among the dusty archives of the
+Colleges, reading and transcribing the monastic registers, the old
+manuscripts and histories. Sutton quoted from his diary a sentence in
+which he speaks of the exceeding pleasure he took in "poring on such
+books."
+
+"Heraldry, musick, and painting did so much crowd upon him, that he
+could not avoid them, and could never give a reason why he should
+delight in those studies more than in others, so prevalent was nature."
+"My pen cannot enough describe," he writes in his enthusiasm, when he
+first read Dugdale's _Antiquities of Warwickshire_, "how A. Wood's
+tender affections and insatiable desire of knowledge were ravish'd and
+melted down by the reading of that book. What by music and rare books
+that he found in the public library, his life at this time and after was
+a perfect Elysium."
+
+"Wood often went for long, solitary walks, collecting arms and
+monumental inscriptions from the churches, and visiting all the ruined
+religious Houses and old halls in the country about Oxford. He describes
+in his diary how, as he returned towards Oxford in the evening, 'after
+he had taken his rambles about the country to collect monuments,' he
+would hear the bells of Merton, his own College, ringing clearly in the
+distance."
+
+"Wood had small love for the Puritans," Sutton wrote, "who in his
+lifetime were so long in power; and in his record of contemporary
+events, sudden deaths, and alleged appearances of the devil, he more
+than once mentions their destruction of antiquities, their contempt for
+the Fathers and Schoolmen, and hatred of all authority, and 'everything
+that smelt of an Academy, never rejoicing more than when he could
+trample on the gowne, and bring humane learning and arts into
+disgrace.'"
+
+"Then came the Restoration, and almost the last event that Wood records
+is the revival of Catholicism under James II. Wood himself was suspected
+of being a Papist; his writings had made him enemies, and before he died
+he was expelled from the University, and his book burned by order of the
+Vice-Chancellor's Court."
+
+"And yet, on the whole, his life was a happy one," Sutton said, writing,
+it was plain, with a certain envy for the tranquil occupations and
+lettered tastes of the old Oxford antiquary.
+
+
+XVII.
+
+The next two letters that Foley found (and they were the last) were
+dated in the Long Vacation, nearly a year later. Either Sutton had not
+written again for some time, or Foley had lost the letters. It was the
+American's third summer in England; as before, he had stayed in Oxford.
+He described the quiet afternoons he spent in the College garden; how he
+seemed to be alone with Oxford and the past, and how even the city
+noises, which came in over the walls--the rattle of carts, the shrill,
+faint voices of newsboys, crying the world's events--only added a deeper
+hush to the stillness and solitude within, the sunlight on the grass,
+the shadows of the trees.
+
+He remembered how homesick he had been the first summer he had spent in
+Oxford, and how he had longed to go back. But now that his work was
+almost finished, and he was soon to go to America, he could not help
+admitting that he shrank a little from it--felt a certain reluctance,
+after all. He would watch, as he had watched before, the tourists who
+now and then came into the quiet garden. Then he had enjoyed seeing
+them, and wished he could talk to them; but now!...
+
+And one day some people whom he had known in Indiana came in. He spoke
+to them, showed them about, and tried to be friendly, and yet they
+seemed so far away somehow! He hated himself for it, and tried to
+believe that it was all the fault of Oxford and its fastidious
+standards; he had let himself be too much influenced, but when he got
+back to Parnassus again, he hoped he should see things as he used to see
+them, and feel the same towards the Slocums and all his old friends.
+
+But in the last letter, "It will never be the same now," Sutton had
+written; "I have come too far and stayed too long. At first I was always
+thinking of Parnassus City; I would dream of it at night, and wake in
+the morning to wonder at the strangeness of my dim little windows and
+the voices of the rooks outside. But then it began to fade, and
+gradually everything changed. And yet, poor fool that I was, all the
+time I tried to think that I was preparing myself to go back. Of course
+I _shall_ go back; if I can't be a Minister, I can still teach in their
+university, perhaps--I _must_ do something to help them, it would be
+treachery if I did not. But my heart will be far away from it all, I
+know. I try to think of the excellent people there, and how fatally kind
+they have been to me; but when I shut my eyes, I can see nothing but the
+ugly church, the wooden 'university,' and a great sun-baked street, with
+sparse houses and dusty trees straggling off on the prairie. How can I
+ever live there now? And yet, if I had never come away, I might have
+been happy. Why did they send me to Oxford, I wonder. Yet was it not my
+fate? It seems to me that I _must_ have come here sometime!"
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+With this the letters ended. From the undergraduates Foley had heard how
+Sutton tried to study history, but failed rather badly in it. What had
+happened afterwards he had not heard, save by vague report. He only knew
+that Sutton was still in Oxford.
+
+But no wonder he had stayed there, Foley thought, remembering the
+passion for the place that breathed in Sutton's letters, his growing
+preoccupation with, and interest in, everything that was ecclesiastical
+and ancient. Indeed, the beauty and antiquity of Oxford, the libraries
+and cloisters and old places he haunted, now seemed to have grown into
+an almost necessary part of the American's environment, the needful
+background of his life. As if, like old Anthony à Wood, one could not
+imagine him living anywhere except in Oxford, walking through its almost
+doorless streets, or on the lawns of its College gardens, and ordering
+his studies and ways by the sound of its bells. Why then should he not
+stay there; was it anything more than a false conscience that had made
+him feel he ought to go back to America?
+
+The next morning, as if in answer to this question, Foley received an
+unexpected visit from Abel, Dr. Joseph's assistant. He had come, he
+said, to find out where Sutton was; they were a good deal worried about
+him; they must be allowed to see him again before he took any step.
+Foley was greatly surprised at the way Abel spoke; he knew nothing of
+the American's whereabouts, he said; they had told him at his lodgings
+the night before that he was away from Oxford.
+
+"Yes, I know, I saw your card there. But I supposed you would know where
+he has gone, or would be willing to tell me how I could find out. We
+have heard again from America, and really, for your own sakes you must
+allow us to see him once."
+
+With still greater astonishment Foley protested that he knew nothing; he
+had feared Sutton might be in trouble, but having just returned, after
+two years abroad, he had no idea of what the trouble was. His assurances
+were so evidently sincere, that Abel, who had looked at him suspiciously
+at first, now shut the door and came forward into the room. The trouble
+was that Sutton had absolutely refused to go back to America. They might
+have known it would happen, he added; and, in answer to a question of
+Foley's, he gave his version of all that had occurred.
+
+Sutton had come to Oxford with a letter from Dr. Turnpenny, his pastor
+and guardian, requesting Dr. Joseph to see that he should live under
+some kind of care and protection. Dr. Joseph, as their own buildings
+were not yet finished, had arranged with the Warden of St. Mary's that
+the young man should enter that College and live there, while he
+carried on his theological work with his own tutors.
+
+It was a mistake; Abel had thought it a mistake all along. With another
+man it might not have mattered; but Sutton, thrown into the society of
+rich young men, who had no sympathy with his ideas, and who ridiculed
+his ways, had not been able to withstand their influence. And just when
+he was on the point of ordination, he had thrown it all over; said he no
+longer believed in Methodism, or wished to be a minister. He had stayed
+for another year in Oxford, studying, or pretending to study, history;
+but he could not have worked very seriously; the examiners said, indeed,
+that his papers were full of the most absurd ideas. And now he refused
+to go back to America at all. Abel didn't know who it was who had tried
+to pervert him; it was reported to be the Jesuits--and there was a man
+called Gerard, Sir Philip Gerard--; but at any rate they ought to know
+what trouble they had made.
+
+Foley said he was certain there had been no deliberate attempt to
+pervert Sutton. If any of his friends had tried to influence him, it was
+probably because they believed in culture, and thought it would help him
+in his work.
+
+"Help him to be a minister out in Indiana! How could the ideas of a
+narrow university set and its expensive tastes help a man for that?"
+
+"But everyone surely was the better for being cultivated!" Foley
+exclaimed.
+
+Even to this Abel could not agree entirely; he admitted that of course
+culture had its charm and value; only in cases it might be dangerous, he
+thought. But how could that be? Foley asked, and for a moment, in their
+discussion of the larger question, they almost forgot Sutton. Abel
+thought that an undue cultivation of taste, of the sense of beauty,
+without an equal training of the reason, would make you into a narrow
+and fastidious person, judging things by the eyes and ears, and caring
+only for what was well-expressed and beautiful. And surely for the most
+part, he said, (and he seemed anxious to be fair and moderate,) for the
+most part it was the ideals of the past, the out-worn, romantic, and
+old-fashioned things, that had had time to be well-expressed, while the
+modern--"But all this has very little to do with Sutton!" he said,
+stopping suddenly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know, isn't he the kind of person you mean--a sensitive
+poetic person--"
+
+"Eliaphet Sutton! he never wrote poetry, did he?"
+
+"No, I don't mean exactly that. Only it seems to me natural enough that
+a man of his temperament, coming to Oxford from an ugly new town,
+should not want to go back."
+
+"Temperament!" Abel exclaimed, as if the word annoyed him. Then more
+quietly he added that he did not think anything could excuse Sutton for
+behaving in the way he had behaved. Why he himself had come to Oxford
+from a new town that was probably as ugly as Parnassus City. They were
+angry enough in Parnassus, you couldn't talk of temperaments out there!
+It had really broken Dr. Turnpenny's heart. "If you could only see his
+letters! No, after spending all the old man's money--"
+
+"His money?" Foley asked.
+
+"Yes, didn't you know? He was sent over on a subscription got up by the
+Methodist church there, and Dr. Turnpenny, who had adopted him and
+brought him up, gave all his savings. He was to go back of course, and
+help support Dr. Turnpenny. He was engaged to a girl out there too. And
+now he says he won't go back. But really he must, it doesn't matter what
+he says. It's the only honest and decent thing for him to do."
+
+"Indeed he must go back," exclaimed Foley. "I hadn't the least idea!--"
+
+
+XIX.
+
+Foley went to Sutton's rooms again, but for several days he could hear
+nothing of him. One evening, however, when he was sitting in the garden,
+happening to look up, he saw the melancholy figure of the American
+coming down the garden path. Now that he actually saw Sutton, and was
+vividly aware of the atmosphere of reserve and solitude that enveloped
+him, Foley shrank from saying the things that he felt he ought to say.
+And yet someone must speak to him; someone must tell him his duty, and
+make him go back to the good simple people who had cared for him,
+supported him, and who relied on him so much!
+
+He had been away, Sutton said, as the two young men walked slowly down
+the garden path. It was very still there in the twilight; and they were
+alone, shut in as it seemed, and very remote from the world outside.
+
+"Have you decided yet when you are going home?" Foley asked.
+
+"Home?"
+
+"Yes; home to America."
+
+"I don't know," Sutton replied. After a moment he added, in the same
+quiet voice, "perhaps I shall never go back."
+
+"Then you have found some occupation in England?"
+
+Sutton shook his head.
+
+But didn't he think he ought to go back then, Foley asked. One had
+duties--and, trying to speak more lightly, he added, "You must have
+learned a great deal, Eliaphet, after studying all these years. Oughtn't
+you to go back and teach them out there?"
+
+"I have nothing to teach them--nothing they would be willing to learn."
+
+"Oh, but surely, if you tried you could find something! It seems to me
+you _ought_ to try."
+
+"Oh, I _have_ tried!" he said, his cheeks flushing with painful emotion;
+"but now they don't want me to come back any more--they never want to
+see me again! I used to pray I might never change;--and when you would
+argue with me,--but now I see it was all wrong, and all my liberal
+ideas--"
+
+"I hope," Foley interrupted, for this had been on his conscience ever
+since his talk with Abel, "I hope your change, whatever it is, has
+nothing to do with anything I ever said; you must have misunderstood
+me," and he went on to explain that he had never been really
+reactionary. He had always believed in compromise, and a conservative,
+reasonable progress.
+
+"Do you know, Eliaphet," he went on, "I think you have made a mistake in
+staying here so long in this old place. It isn't wholesome to live so
+far from real life; you ought to get away, you ought to go home."
+
+But Sutton had only listened to two or three of his friend's words.
+"No," he cried eagerly, "no, we can make no compromise. We must give up
+the human reason, we must go back to the Past, we must submit. Oh,
+Foley," he cried, and there was a strange appeal in his voice, "we have
+been friends, but now we may never see each other again,--let me warn
+you, you must decide whether you will be on the right or the wrong
+side--oh, if you only knew at what peril you refuse to listen!"
+
+For a moment Foley was almost frightened. Then, reminding himself of
+reason and reality, he said, "But, Eliaphet, are you quite sure that you
+yourself are doing what is right in staying here? When so much depends
+on you out there--Dr. Turnpenny and all. And they have sacrificed so
+much too. Have you thought--"
+
+"As if I was not always thinking of it!" Sutton cried; "but I could not
+go back to them a Roman Catholic; they would rather I was dead. And
+Foley, when you judge me, remember that I have had to make sacrifices
+too--I have given up everything, everything! What can I do?"
+
+A Roman Catholic! Of course he could not go back. Foley was dismayed.
+Why had he not foreseen it?
+
+For a moment they stood in silence. Then Sutton turned away.
+
+"You don't understand," he said, in a voice that his friend always
+remembered afterwards; "No one understands," and he went down the path
+alone and out of Foley's sight.
+
+
+XX.
+
+When Foley went the next day to Sutton's lodgings, he was told that
+Sutton had already left Oxford; had gone away early that morning. Where
+he had gone, however, no one seemed to know. Certainly Foley never found
+out; he never saw Sutton again, nor, in spite of all his inquiries, did
+he ever hear anything but the most vague and uncertain news about him.
+Abel said he had never gone back to Parnassus City. And then, years
+after, it was reported that an Oxford man, when visiting some old shrine
+in Italy, had recognized, or thought he recognized, Sutton in the monk
+who showed him about the church.
+
+Foley never got rid of a certain feeling of remorse, a sense that at the
+beginning he had too lightly interfered in the life of the young
+Dissenter.
+
+But then he would tell himself, that it was probably after all nothing
+less than Oxford itself, with its old ways and memories, that had
+gradually changed and influenced the American. Influenced him not for
+good, surely! he thought. And indeed, remembering Sutton's slow
+estrangement from his early ideas and friends, his poor attempts to
+remain faithful, the trouble and mystery in which he had disappeared at
+last, Foley would ask himself, (and he took a strange sort of pleasure
+in the question,) whether there were not something really dangerous in
+the venerable and Gothic beauty of Oxford, a chill in the old shadows,
+an iron sound in the bells.
+
+
+
+
+_The Will to Live_
+
+
+Part One
+
+"Moral Philosophy," notwithstanding all its modern ideas and
+developments, is still taught at Oxford from the Greek texts of Plato
+and Aristotle. Something indeed of the old Academic discipline might be
+said still to exist there, the tradition of it coming down through the
+Schools of the Middle Ages. Certainly the discussions between tutor and
+pupils, by means of which so much of the philosophic training is carried
+on, are not without a certain resemblance to the Socratic dialogues.
+And the young men who are so eager and amusing in Plato's writings--one
+might find the like of these, perhaps, among the English undergraduates,
+as well as the types with which modern novels have made us more
+familiar. The questions they talk and think about would at least be much
+the same as those so eagerly debated in the Athenian garden--the old
+questions about Truth and Justice and Beauty; and then the meaning or
+purpose of Life--that question which is the oldest of all, and which
+each generation of youth tries to solve in some new way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good night, sir"--"Good night"--"Good night"--and their discussion
+ended, the young men took their caps and books, and clattered noisily
+down the stone staircase from the tutor's room. They still lingered a
+moment, outside in the quadrangle, four or five together, vaguely
+talking in the darkness.
+
+"Ames was right, you know--what he said about Pleasure."
+
+"Old Ames! what does he know about it?" Waters interrupted. More than
+once, during the argument that evening, Waters had dropped a book or
+shuffled his feet impatiently; and now, declaring that all such talk was
+great waste of time and "rot" anyhow, he went off, after vainly inviting
+the others to join him, to an interrupted game of cards. In a minute the
+others separated, some to work, one or two to the concert in the college
+hall. Walter Cornish walked away alone across the quadrangle. Finding a
+bench, he sat listlessly down, his hands in his pockets, his feet
+stretched out in front of him. He would do no more work that night; it
+would be better to rest there for a while, listening to the music of the
+concert.
+
+Cornish, with the others, would be in for his last examinations in a few
+weeks; then he would be leaving Oxford. But as he had money enough of
+his own, and belonged moreover to that fortunate class of young Oxford
+men to whom success at everything seems easy, he could look into the
+future, untroubled by most of those commonplace difficulties and
+despairs that beset the ordinary unknown, untried, young man, when he is
+leaving the university to go out into the world.
+
+It seemed very hot that evening; no breath of air was stirring within
+the enclosure of those trees and walls. From the open windows of the
+college hall tinkling piano notes came faintly now and then across the
+darkness; while, drifting in over the roofs of the college, and
+deadening at times the music, there came, like a dim smoke of sound, the
+rumour of city noises, of carts, footsteps, and high faint voices in
+the street outside. But as Cornish sat there lazily, his hands deep in
+his pockets, his eyes fixed on the ground, he soon ceased to hear either
+the music or the sounds of the streets. Vagrant thoughts about himself,
+his own affairs and prospects, were going through his head. Then phrases
+from their argument--Pleasure wasn't the End, and the End wasn't
+Pleasure; but whose pleasure, and the end of what? To his tired mind,
+however, the words were little more than empty sounds. Other things he
+had been studying floated past in large dim masses; he remembered the
+armies, invasions, and old battles of history; the Roman Empire seemed
+to be near him, like something immense and heavy in the night. And
+behind it in the past were the Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian Dominations,
+with the weight of all their millions and millions of lives!
+
+He was going to do well in the examinations, he knew; more or less
+mechanically he repeated over what his tutor had said, and some
+flattering words the Warden had written to his father--"We consider him
+one of our best men; he is certain to distinguish himself."
+
+"But what's the good of it all?" he found himself asking. He looked up
+at the college buildings, dark about him, save for their squares of
+yellow windows. Gradually he began to wake out of his vacant reverie.
+What was the good of doing well?--why, it was an absurd question; of
+course, he wanted to do well, to win honour for himself and his College.
+He assured himself of this, in conventional phrases, but somehow, just
+then, he did not seem to care in the least for success like that, and
+honour. Yet here he had been, all this time, working for nothing else!
+
+He was ashamed of this want of ambition, this deadness of desire. Of
+course, there were other things he cared for, he told himself, and to
+prove this he brought to mind the interests and pleasures of his
+ordinary life--his friendships, the ideas and books he believed in, his
+public speaking, the positions he held in various societies. But somehow
+all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant. In
+desperation he began to think of simpler things--of boating, good
+clothes, and horses, and some riding boots he was having made. But
+everything, even the most universal pleasures of life, struck him now as
+tasteless and absurd. Why did people do such things, and what could they
+find in them to enjoy?
+
+"But it's against common sense to feel this way!" he said to himself. He
+had always thought the disillusions of youth somewhat ridiculous, and
+often had made fun of the modern philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, of
+disenchantment, with its literature of passion and despair. And now, as
+he sat there in the familiar quadrangle, with the rooms of his friends
+about him, all the people he knew so well, in there at the concert, he
+was uncomfortably aware of how absurd they would think it, should they
+know that he too had secretly begun, in the old, foolish, hackneyed way,
+to meditate on the nothingness of life. He of all people, who had always
+taken such sensible, commonplace views of things!
+
+"Well, it will be different soon; I shall have things to work for that
+really are worth while," he told himself. Hitherto, when he had felt any
+futility in his life, he had put it down to the youthfulness of his
+occupations, feeling sure that the world beyond his school or college,
+with its great interests and ambitions, would give endless objects of
+desire. But now, in spite of himself, he could not help asking--what
+were those great interests and ambitions after all?
+
+Almost comically there rose before his mind pictures of all the
+middle-aged people he knew--his relatives, his father's friends--large,
+solemn, successful people, who were thought, and thought themselves,
+very important. And the dull speeches they made, and the way they often
+grew red and angry, as they argued about the Government, or the Eastern
+question! And their houses, their wives and dinner parties, their social
+differences and ambitions, and the way they pushed and struggled for
+money and titles! What was the value of it all; to succeed or fail, what
+difference did it make? He tried to imagine himself at the head of what
+would be his profession, as Lord Chancellor--a fat and bald Lord
+Chancellor in stuffy robes--wasn't that the position that young men were
+supposed to be ambitious of attaining? Or if he should make a fortune,
+or write a famous book, or carry some great reform through Parliament?
+But, somehow, he did not seem to care; and gradually, as he listened to
+the far-off rumour of the city, it came to sound faintly in his ears
+like a voice of blind craving--as if the agitation of the world and life
+were meaningless and vain. And he would go out into it, he knew, would
+struggle and push with the others....
+
+Now from the open windows, sounds of music floated again across the
+quadrangle. He could picture to himself the audience, all those rows of
+young men, sitting there in the hot air and gaslight. Indeed, he could
+almost see, he felt, into the rows of minds--if you could call them
+minds--behind all those heads: the ridiculous images of hope and cheap
+romance wakened by the music, the foolish dreams of the future, and
+false, poetic ideas of life.
+
+Pity the poets and novelists could not invent something a little more
+true to life! Cornish thought. For after all they had but two receipts:
+either they enlarged the world into a glorious and unreal place, full of
+love, success, and eternal sunshine, or else they magnified poor human
+nature, and invented towering, Byronic heroes, who could find nothing in
+a shrunken universe worthy of their passionate souls.
+
+The music finished in a noise of long and loud applause. How all of them
+enjoyed it; how all of them believed in it, he thought; finding
+something foolish and inane in these sounds of clapping hands and
+pounding feet. A little while afterwards the concert ended, and the
+audience, a vague press of people, began to murmur and move down the
+steps of the hall, and pass him in the darkness. But now the sound of
+their footsteps and cheerful retreating voices came back to him almost
+sadly. A whole generation of youth, they seemed to him, as he sat there
+almost like some remote spectator--a whole generation of youth, those
+young men, pouring out of that ancient hall and passing away into the
+silence.
+
+They were all gone at last; one by one the bright windows in the hall
+grew dark. Cornish still sat there alone. These voices and footsteps and
+dim figures, moving past him thus in the darkness, had left his mind
+curiously vibrating. So life went by, he thought, a few careless steps
+together on the brief-trodden path, a few words, a few greetings, and
+then the darkness and silence of death. What a curious mystery it was,
+this life, so vivid and brief in each of those passers by; the life he
+was conscious of in himself, as he sat there alone--the sound of his
+breath, the blood beating at his temples, the "soul" within--what was
+the meaning of it all, and for what reason was it given?
+
+Surely this was the question of philosophy--the very question they had
+discussed that evening! And now, for the first time, he realized that
+the theories and systems he had been studying so long were not mere
+exercises of thought, and abstract speculations, but almost passionate
+attempts to explain the meaning of existence--of his own existence!
+
+But the great solutions of the philosophers--Aristotle's
+"Contemplation," Kant's "Moral Law," the "Calculated Pleasure" of the
+Hedonists, and all the rest--there seemed to be a mortal coldness in
+them all. Surely they could never give a motive, or make life desirable
+to anyone! Vaguely dismayed at this conclusion, he repeated over to
+himself all the words again. Still he could find in them no motive for
+existence; and in a dim way he began to feel half proud of this
+discernment. Yes, Waters had been right after all, (and somehow he
+pitied both Waters and himself), philosophy was but a barren waste. And
+the picture of a great desert filled his mind--a desert of endless sand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he was again conscious of himself, for a moment he wondered where
+he was, confused by the discomfort of his position, and the coolness of
+the air. Then through the darkness he saw, outlined against the starry
+sky, the trees and buildings of the College quadrangle, and remembered
+how he had sat down there to rest after their discussion. He must have
+fallen asleep, and now it was late--the night had grown completely
+silent, and only one or two windows shone yellow in the blackness of the
+walls. What had their argument been about? he began to ask himself; but,
+chancing to look up again, he forgot everything in his wonder at the
+brilliance of the stars. The whole patch of sky, shut in by the dark
+College roofs, quivered and glowed with shining stars; he thought he had
+never seen the vault of heaven so wonderful and luminous.
+
+The long, faint sigh of a passing train on the distant railway brought
+back his thoughts at last, out of their vague wonder, to the earth and
+himself again. His imagination wandered after the train as it went
+through the night towards London. Soon he would be in London himself, he
+thought, smiling. It was not three weeks now. There were some dances he
+was going to, and a cricket match, and the theatre, of course....
+
+But then a vague sense of misfortune weighed him down, and in a moment
+he remembered how, a little while before, he had decided that life was
+altogether inane and meaningless. How was it that he had grown so
+foolishly eager again? No secret had been revealed to him; he had found
+no meaning behind desire, no purpose in existence. Yet here he was,
+looking forward to dances, actually counting the days to a cricket
+match! It was absurd for a self-conscious spirit to desire such things
+as these, especially after surveying life and philosophy, and finding
+there was no reason why you should desire anything at all!
+
+But somehow Cornish did not seem to need a reason now; success, love,
+friendship, and even dances and cricket matches, he desired these things
+for themselves, they shone with their own brightness; no theory, no
+sanction of Greek or German philosophy could possibly make him want
+them more. How was it that there were desires that reason did not give?
+He puzzled over this, till at last he saw the question was rather a
+meaningless one, a question of words only. For desire of life came long
+before reasoning about it; reason did not sit aloft in a purer air,
+creating out of itself the meanings of experience. It could create no
+desires, could give us indeed none of the ultimate facts of life, for
+the ideas it used were all abstracted from things our direct perceptions
+gave us. And the existence of these things themselves--the blue sky, the
+solid earth, the sweetness of youth and sunshine--it could never prove,
+it did not need to prove! When, a little while before, he had felt no
+desire, reason had not helped him. And now he did not want its help.
+
+The striking clocks told Cornish the lateness of the hour, and he got
+up to go in. As he walked across the quadrangle he heard voices and
+laughter in the darkness, and dimly saw a group of young men come out of
+a doorway in front of him.
+
+"Well, have you had a good game, Waters?" he asked, as he joined them.
+
+"Oh, a ripping game. What have you been doing?"
+
+"Nothing much--thinking."
+
+"Thinking! Lord, I'd turn looney if I thought so much. What's the good
+of it? You'd much better have taken a hand."
+
+Cornish laughed. "Well, I believe you're right," he said.
+
+
+
+
+_The Will to Live_
+
+
+Part Two
+
+William Waters had dreamed that the Persians, in a fleet of Canadian
+canoes, had come up the Thames to attack the College barge, and that he
+himself had been sent on foot to demand reinforcements from the Oxford
+examiners at Sparta. And after the weary, breathless running, the
+hopeless search, in his dream, for the right Greek words, it was most
+delightful to open his eyes and find himself comfortably lying in his
+familiar bedroom, with the sunlight glowing on the blinds.
+
+"Why am I so happy?" he asked himself, and then he remembered that it
+was all over now; for the future he would never have to trouble about
+Greek or examinations, or getting up in the morning, or any of their
+stupid rules and worries. For the future! As he lay there, lazily
+opening and shutting his eyes, vague, bright pictures of the life before
+him floated through his mind, and set his heart beating a little
+quicker.
+
+William Waters was the son of a business man in a northern town, who,
+with some sacrifice, had sent him, the eldest son, to the University, in
+order that his education, and the connections he would form, might help
+him on in the world. Now that the young man, after a lucky scramble
+through the examinations, had just finished four pleasant years of
+Oxford life, it was his vague purpose to find some occupation in London,
+something pleasant and gentlemanly, which would enable him to live as
+he liked.
+
+"Of course, sir, I know one can't expect anything very much at first,"
+he said, half aloud, as he imagined himself talking modestly and
+sensibly to his tutor. For he was going to talk about it to Ames; old
+Ames wasn't such a fool about things of that kind. "There is no nonsense
+about that young Waters," Ames would say afterwards; "a modest, sensible
+chap, the kind of man who'll always do well." Waters was determined to
+do well of course; he would get on, he told himself, when people came to
+realize how hard he worked. And as the young man lay there in bed, he
+decided that in the future no one should ever accuse him of laziness and
+neglecting work. By simply making up his mind to it, he thought he would
+entirely change his character, and begin life anew, winning position
+and wealth by his own unremitting industry.
+
+Buller and Antrobus would be in London, he told himself, and Philpotts,
+most likely, and they would belong to the same club, where they would go
+on Sunday mornings to smoke and read the sporting papers. He would work
+tremendously hard, of course, spending laborious nights over his books,
+but he would also go out a great deal into society. He would not be
+dissipated--he didn't care much for that--but still he would not be
+Puritanical either. He meant to be moral and steady, and at the same
+time he would enjoy the pleasures of a man of the world. But he would be
+always kind and popular; people in fashionable society would say that
+William Waters was such a good fellow, and in the Park ladies would
+smile at him from their carriages, and smart young men would walk with
+him arm in arm. And he would live well; but still he would save money,
+and would soon pay off his Oxford bills, and send money to his father.
+For he would always be very kind to his people, having his sisters to
+visit him, helping them to marry well (he himself meant to marry someone
+for love who was very rich), and sometimes he would give up parties at
+country houses in order to pay them visits at home. How his fur coat and
+knowledge of the great world would impress all the neighbours!
+
+"But I must get up," Waters said to himself, remembering how he was to
+go and see his tutor and talk over plans. And after luncheon Buller was
+going to drive them out, three of them, with his tandem to Woodstock.
+And thinking vaguely of this drive, and of some new clothes that he
+meant to wear, Waters was just falling off to sleep again, when his
+bull-dog came rushing up the stairs, and began to whine and scratch at
+the door. Rousing himself, Waters jumped up, and went with a call of
+affection to the door to let Lo-Ben in.
+
+After he had bathed and dressed himself in his new fresh-smelling
+clothes, the young man sauntered into the sitting-room of his lodgings,
+and rang the bell for breakfast. The day was bright; Waters felt
+wonderfully fresh and well; there were pleasant aches in his arms and
+legs as he moved, for the whole of the day before he had been rowing on
+the river.
+
+After breakfast he was just sitting down to smoke his pipe comfortably,
+when, looking at his watch, he snatched up his cap and rusty gown, and
+started out towards College. By Jove! what a day it was! He walked along
+through the sunshine, smiling to himself, while Lo-Ben barked and
+bounced from side to side. It was a good world, Waters thought a good
+world, and now he was really going to enjoy it.
+
+As Waters was tying up Lo-Ben in the College porch, he was seized on
+suddenly from behind.
+
+"Come along, fat William," they cried, pulling and pushing him along,
+"we're going to have a little game--you must take a hand."
+
+Twisting himself around, as he struggled, Waters recognized two of his
+friends, and appealed to reason breathlessly; he had to go and see old
+Ames, on his honour he had; he would look in afterwards, in about
+half-an-hour, and stay to luncheon if they liked. So he started across
+the quadrangle, looking back and smiling and shaking his head, as he
+dodged the bits of gravel with which they pelted him. It was a good
+place after all, the old College, Waters thought, when he was out of
+danger and could look about. He remembered the two years he had lived
+in rooms looking out on this quadrangle; the pleasant hours he had
+spent, sitting in the window with his pipe, or lying on the grass whole
+Sunday afternoons, lazily reading, or talking with his friends; he
+thought of the beautiful chapel, and the old hall that was so much
+admired, and how he had sat up a tree one evening and poured water on
+the Dean, and how at night the stealthy bonfires had blazed up red and
+sudden in the dark.
+
+He was really sorry to leave the old place, he thought sentimentally,
+remembering the emotions he had read of as felt by young men in books
+when about to leave their school or college. But then, with healthy
+common-sense, he told himself that all they wrote in books about your
+college days, and life never being so happy afterwards, was damned
+nonsense. Waters knew how men lived in London!
+
+"Sorry I'm late, sir," he said as he entered his tutor's room,
+addressing the spare shining head that was bent over a heap of papers.
+
+Mr. Ames raised his worn, cynical, kind face, and looked at Waters with
+short-sighted eyes. "Oh, no matter, sit down won't you, Waters," and he
+gave a last hurried shuffle to his papers. Waters thought that Ames must
+spend his life looking for lost papers; and although occasionally
+surprised by flashes of almost supernatural knowledge in his tutor, for
+the most part he entertained--as a heathen might towards his helpless,
+yet vaguely awful, idol--a certain good-natured pity for the
+absent-minded, easily outwitted man.
+
+"I thought I'd like to talk things over with you a little," Waters said,
+sitting down in a chair that groaned with his athletic weight. "I must
+decide what I shall choose, what to go in for."
+
+"To go in for?" Ames repeated, looking at him vaguely.
+
+"I mean, I must choose"; Waters found a pleasure in talking, not as an
+undergraduate, but as a serious young man. "One must do something of
+course."
+
+"Of course it _is_ better," Ames assented, though he still looked rather
+puzzled.
+
+"I thought I'd talk to you about the Bar, or something of the kind."
+
+Ames looked at him blankly. "Talk to me about the Bar?"
+
+"Yes, I thought I'd better ask your advice."
+
+"Do you mean for yourself?" Ames asked after a moment, "but I
+supposed--I always supposed you were going into your father's business;
+he has some business, hasn't he, or am I wrong?"
+
+"Into my father's business!" Waters laughed comfortably. "No, I
+shouldn't ever think of that. No, I want to live in London."
+
+"Oh, I see!"
+
+"Yes, of course if anything very good was offered me somewhere
+else,--but no, I think I prefer London. What would you advise?"
+
+"What I should advise!" Ames said, looking at him hopelessly. "I suppose
+you've thought of something for yourself; you have some preference?"
+
+"Preference? Oh no, nothing special. I thought I'd ask you."
+
+Again Ames looked at him with an odd expression. Then in his polite,
+weary, equable voice, he said, "Well, I must try and think. I suppose
+your father--what does he want you to do?"
+
+"My father--!" Waters' voice showed what he thought of fathers. "Oh, he
+said that if I had a university education, there would be something."
+
+"Ah, did he! Well, I suppose he ought to know," Ames said doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't know of anything definite," Waters explained; and then,
+speaking loudly, as if to a deaf man, he added, "It was only what he
+thought."
+
+"Ah, that's quite different, isn't it?" Ames exclaimed, his face
+brightening.
+
+"But surely there is a great deal to do in London," Waters continued.
+
+Yes, there must be a good deal, Ames admitted doubtfully; at least
+everyone seemed very much occupied there.
+
+"All I want is some work, that isn't too much grind, and decent pay."
+
+"Ah, that is all that most people want," Ames observed, with half a
+sigh.
+
+"Of course at first I shouldn't expect anything very much," Waters went
+on, hardly heeding his tutor's vague remarks; and he explained again
+that he only wanted some decent occupation, with pay enough to live on.
+Then he waited, gazing at his tutor's blank face as one might gaze at a
+revolving lighthouse, waiting for its flash of light. As nothing came,
+however, he said, "Surely there are lots of places where they want
+Oxford men?"
+
+"Possibly there were"; Ames looked as if he, however, had never heard of
+them.
+
+"But Grant and Vaughan had got good places, and Sturdy, they said, was
+doing well at the Bar."
+
+"Ah, I see you mean those clever men, who do so well in the Schools and
+all. You're quite right; a man like Cornish for instance; I thought you
+meant more the average man."
+
+No, it wasn't Cornish, Waters meant; it wasn't the average man either.
+"I mean more the man--what you call an all-round-man."
+
+"What I call an all-round-man?" Ames looked bewildered.
+
+"I mean," Waters continued, with desperate efforts to explain himself,
+"I mean the man who is rather good all round, rows, and that sort of
+thing. Perhaps he didn't get a First; didn't care much what he got,
+didn't approve of the system."
+
+Ames seemed busy looking for his glasses.
+
+"There are people who don't approve of the system," Waters went on. "I
+read an article once by someone, Professor something, not approving of
+examinations. I forget just who it was."
+
+"Professor Freeman, perhaps?"
+
+"Yes, that's it! Well now, a man like that, what is he going to do?"
+Waters asked, with renewed confidence.
+
+"But Professor Freeman is dead, you know."
+
+"But,--but,--I'm not speaking of Professor Freeman."
+
+"How would you like to be a solicitor?" Ames asked, putting on his
+glasses.
+
+"A solicitor! oh, I shouldn't care for that," Waters promptly replied.
+"You see it isn't the kind of work I like, and then the vacations are
+too short."
+
+Ames said nothing. He was sitting unusually still, and his large glasses
+reflecting the light, resembled two enormous shining oval eyes in the
+smoothness of his face. What he was really looking at Waters could not
+tell, and he grew more and more uncomfortable. At last, with diminished
+confidence, "There _are_ men who get on well at the Bar?" he said.
+
+"There are."
+
+"And if I were living in London I might do some writing? They do that,
+don't they?"
+
+"They do." Then Ames sighed and shook his head. "I think you had better
+go home, Waters," he added; "I'm afraid there's nothing else. If you had
+spoken to me before, I should have told you this."
+
+"Oh, good Lord, Mr. Ames, you don't mean there's nothing!" Waters sat up
+in his chair, with open mouth, staring at his tutor.
+
+"Well, you know, I'm afraid there isn't."
+
+"Oh but, Mr. Ames, there must be something!"
+
+"Well you can try; but honestly, I think you had--if your father can
+have you--I think you had better go home."
+
+Waters looked at him. "He knows I helped to paint his door red last
+week," the young man muttered to himself, "and now he's furious about
+it."
+
+But the comfort of this ebbed away gradually, as Ames went on to
+describe the different professions, the struggle for success, the cruel
+competition. Ames indeed seemed to have focussed himself, and instead of
+the vague astonished way in which he was wont to speak of practical
+affairs, he now showed a precision, and clearness, and knowledge of life
+that was really appalling. "I am sorry it is so, Waters," he ended. "We
+live pleasantly here, and we almost forget what the world outside is
+like."
+
+"I do think some one might have told me, Mr. Ames; I do indeed." Waters
+could have cried with disappointment.
+
+"You would never have believed it, Waters; we none of us can believe
+that the world doesn't need us. It's hard, but whether we live or die,
+the world doesn't care, can get on perfectly well without us. We each
+have to find it out for ourselves." He sighed as if he too had once
+known youth and hope, and the indifference of the world.
+
+"But, Mr. Ames, I can't go home, indeed I can't. My other brother was
+going into the business, and I always told people,--and everybody
+supposed,--and to think that all my time here is wasted."
+
+"Oh, not exactly wasted," Ames answered kindly. "It will always help
+you, to be an Oxford man, and you will be sure to find it pleasanter at
+home than you expected." Then beginning again to look at his papers, he
+added, more in his old distant way, "I'll see you again, I hope, before
+you go down. They'll miss you in College," he added politely, as Waters
+moved towards the door. "I'm sure the 'Torpid'--"
+
+"I might be a solicitor, Mr. Ames," Waters said in a meek voice, as he
+stood disconsolately, his hand on the door-knob.
+
+"Well, talk it over with your father," Ames replied, without looking up.
+"It takes time and money you know. You think he wouldn't mind?"
+
+"Oh no, he won't mind," Waters said, although he knew his father would
+mind very much indeed.
+
+He walked away slowly through the familiar quadrangle. His father!--how
+would he ever dare tell his father? But no, it couldn't be true that
+there was nothing for him, that nobody wanted him. He was well known in
+College, had played in the football team, and rowed in the "Torpid," and
+people liked him. Besides it was such a thing, they always said, to be
+an English gentleman; and then Oxford culture--and you read of the
+successful careers of rowing men, how they became Cabinet Ministers,
+and Bishops, and things. No, it couldn't be true....
+
+"Poor Lo-Ben," he said, patting his dog tenderly, as he unchained him in
+the porch. "Poor old Lo-Ben, you'll stick to your master, won't you?"
+The dog whined and licked the young man's hand, and they went out into
+the street together.
+
+Well, they would live alone, he and Lo-Ben, and they would go out for
+lonely walks, after the long dreary days of work in his father's office.
+And the people there would see him, and wonder about him; but he would
+always be distant, only coldly polite when they met. Sometimes his old
+College friends would come to stay in the neighbourhood; but they would
+not look him up: all his friends would forget him, though he would
+always remember them. And that afternoon they would all drive off
+without him, probably they would be really glad not to have him. And
+they would be perfectly happy; but he would never be happy again.
+
+For no, it was not true, what Ames had said, about his getting to like
+it at home. He would always hate it, he told himself desperately; and
+life and everything was hateful; there was a chill in the sunshine, the
+streets seemed full of noise and work and ugly working people. What was
+the good of it? he wondered. And Ames said it was all like that. What
+was the good of it, he asked again, when he flung himself down into one
+of the great easy chairs in his lodgings. If you had to live in a dirty
+provincial town, and sit on a stool all day, what was the good? Of
+course some of the men at home seemed happy enough; they had their
+cricket on Saturdays and things; but then they weren't university men.
+For himself, Waters decided, for the first time in his life considering
+in his concrete way the problem of existence, for himself it was all
+finished; there was nothing more in life which could give him pleasure.
+
+The servant brought up luncheon. At first Waters thought he could eat
+nothing, and when he did begin in a melancholy way, he bitterly
+contrasted his lonely meal with the happy party in College. He felt an
+immense pity for himself; he would die young, he was sure; the life
+might even drive him to suicide--such things had happened.
+
+After his luncheon and beer he lit his pipe. By this time Buller and
+Philpotts must have finished their luncheon too, and have started for
+the stables. They would wonder at first why he did not come, but they
+would not really care.
+
+And now they must have started. He had done well not to go with them; he
+would not have enjoyed it, Waters assured himself, repeating the old
+phrases; he would never enjoy anything again. He looked at his watch
+furtively. What! they wouldn't start for three minutes yet. Then he had
+still just time enough to catch them. He seized his hat, and without
+waiting for a reason--he had no time to wait--he hurried out, Lo-Ben
+barking at his heels.
+
+
+
+
+_The Claim of the Past_
+
+
+They had all been to luncheon with Mr. Windus, and now, under his
+guidance, they started out to see the College, walking together across
+the quadrangle through the summer sunshine. Mr. Windus talked to Mrs.
+Ellwood of Dalmouth, the Devonshire town where she lived, and he had
+friends; the others were gossiping of the heat, the Oxford dances, while
+Ruth Ellwood and young Rutherford came last of all.
+
+Rutherford too belonged to Dalmouth, was, indeed, a cousin of the
+Ellwoods--all the Dalmouth families were somehow related; but going
+away early to school, and afterwards to Oxford, he had come at last to
+seem more like a stranger to them than a friend or cousin. And this
+invitation to meet the Ellwoods he had accepted merely out of
+politeness; he was busy with his work, felt in no mood for the Oxford
+gaieties, and anyhow cared, or thought he cared, very little indeed for
+Dalmouth or the Dalmouth people.
+
+But soon he had begun to listen with pleasure and interest to the home
+news, as his charming cousin told it.
+
+"And so the town isn't much changed?" he asked; "and the different
+cousins, what has become of them all?"
+
+With eager interest she went on telling him of all the old families, who
+lived in the different houses; how the young girls had grown up--there
+were so many pretty ones among the cousins!--and the young men had gone
+into the family offices. Some of them were married and settled down
+already.
+
+"And Aunt Warner's house under the beeches, with its lawn, where we used
+to play, is it just the same?"
+
+"Oh, yes, just the same, only the Bartons live there now--Uncle James's
+family; and on Thursdays we meet there--I mean the cousins' Tennis
+Club--and when it rains we dance in the old drawing room. But how
+shocked dear old Aunt Warner would have been to see us!" Then, as they
+went through the gateway into the College garden, she added, "I'm afraid
+all this gossip bores you; it's interesting for us who live at home, but
+for other people--"
+
+"Oh, but I belong to Dalmouth!" he protested.
+
+"Of course you do, only it's so long since you've been there," she said
+in half apology, "and we thought--I thought you didn't care."
+
+It was indeed a long time, it was years since he had been there, he
+remembered with a certain regret for the preoccupation, the youthful
+intolerance, that had made him half despise his home. It was a charming
+place after all, the grey seaport town with its wharves, and shipping,
+and narrow streets, and the pleasant homes and gardens just outside
+where his cousins and uncles, the merchants, lived--where as a boy he
+had lived. How well he remembered watching, on summer afternoons, the
+white sails of the family ships, as they floated up with the tide past
+the green lawns and square old houses. A pleasant life it must be there,
+he thought, and quite untroubled in its tranquil interests by any great
+ambitions or ideas--the echoes of which, indeed, could hardly reach
+them in their quiet old corner of the world.
+
+And, as they talked, the young man began to fancy idly what his own life
+would have been, had he never gone away from the old Devonshire town. It
+had been intended, of course, that he should stay there, and take his
+own part in the family concerns; even yet his uncles were keeping a
+place for him; and although they feared he was quite spoiled by Oxford,
+yet they would welcome him back, he knew, should he only give up those
+ambitions, that to them--and to himself sometimes!--seemed so
+impossible, so dreamy and unreal.
+
+Ruth Ellwood stopped now and then to look at the garden flowers. "What
+lovely irises, and how quaint those roses are, trained so stiffly on the
+old walls."
+
+"Are you fond of gardening?" he asked.
+
+She was very fond of it, she said--not that she knew much about it! But
+she liked planting things and tying them up, and she always gathered the
+flowers for the house. Things grew so well at Dalmouth--roses and
+peonies, and great chrysanthemums in the autumn. Only it made her a
+little sad to see the chrysanthemums; their summers were so lovely!
+
+Rutherford knew the house in which his cousin lived, and now he could
+almost see her there, moving over the sweet grass, hatless, in the
+morning light, to gather roses, filling old china bowls with their
+fragrant leaves; or walking home on rainy evenings past the great cedar,
+the wet lawn, and borders of dripping flowers.
+
+"How beautiful she is!" he thought, looking furtively at her. The
+impression of this beauty, her pleasant voice, the friendly people she
+spoke of, and all the memories that made them seem so intimate together,
+affected him with a curious fresh sense of happiness, coming into his
+life, which had been of late somewhat discouraged and lonely, with a
+charm as real and actual as that of the warmth of the sun, the scent of
+roses.
+
+They had reached the end of the garden, and as they turned back, still
+following the others, he said hesitatingly to his companion something
+about coming to Dalmouth soon for a visit.
+
+"Oh, do come!" she cried, "I'm sure you'll enjoy it, and they will all
+be so glad to see you."
+
+"I hope so--but I'm afraid they must think rather badly of me--will be
+prejudiced against me; you will have to introduce me."
+
+"Oh, I will--only really, they won't be prejudiced against you." Then
+she added, "Oxford is so charming!" in a way that touched Rutherford a
+little. She at least, in spite of all she had heard at home, plainly
+could see nothing so dreadful or dangerous in Oxford, or her cousin,
+after all!
+
+Yes, Oxford was charming, she said again, and not at all what she had
+expected--at first she had been really almost afraid to come! But it was
+all so pleasant; why had people such a prejudice against the
+University?--her two brothers wanted to come, but her father would not
+hear of it. But how could it unfit them for living at home? She had seen
+how the undergraduates lived. And her brothers would have enjoyed it so.
+She had been in several of the Colleges now, and had been on the river,
+and was going out to tea that afternoon, and afterwards, to a dance.
+
+"Tell me," she asked, as they followed the others towards the chapel
+door, "are you going to any of the dances?"
+
+He was afraid he wouldn't have the time, he said.
+
+"Oh, what a pity, you ought to come," she cried; but her voice was
+hushed when, out of the glare and sunshine, they went into the blue
+obscurity, the cool old smell and quiet of the chapel.
+
+The ladies looked at the windows, the religious carving; and their
+movement, as they went about, filled with a rustling sound the vacant
+silence of the place. Then they all gathered in a group while one of the
+Fellows told them something of the history of the chapel: how it had
+been built in the fourteenth century, and how ever since then the
+members of the College had worshipped there, and among them many whose
+names had afterwards grown famous.
+
+"Tell me," Ruth Ellwood whispered, as they walked away, "is this where
+the undergraduates sit; where do you sit?" He showed her the Scholars'
+seats, and the old brass eagle from which they read the lessons, and
+then, when they went through the ante-chapel, she paused a moment,
+looking at the inscriptions and monuments.
+
+"Were there any nice old epitaphs?" she asked. "Do show them to me, if
+there are."
+
+The rest of the party had left the chapel, but could still be seen
+through the open door standing not far off in the sunshine, and the
+gossip of their voices came in faintly now and then.
+
+The old brasses, dating from Gothic times, bore inscriptions in rhyming
+Latin, that Rutherford read and translated to his companion; there were
+monuments of a later time, adorned with urns, cherubs, and
+garlands--old trappings of death that made death itself seem almost
+quaint and charming. But in the seventeenth century the tranquil records
+of the scholars' lives were disturbed by echoes of old war and exile.
+"Reader, look to thy feet! Honest and Loyal men are sleeping under
+Thee," one inscription ran; and the name of more than one was recorded
+"who, when Loyalty and the Church fainted, lay down and Died."
+
+Other monuments were put up to the memory of young men who had died at
+College. Well-born and modest, the old Latin described them, and dead,
+centuries ago, in the flower of their fruitless years. "Vivere dulce
+fuit!" one of them had complained, as four hundred years before, in
+florid Latin, he bade farewell to youth and hope.
+
+Of another it was quaintly said, "Talis erat vita, qualis stylus,
+elegans et pura"; while another undergraduate's virtues were recorded in
+verses ending with the line,
+
+    "Expertus praedico, tutor eram."
+
+Then there was an inscription in English verse, from some Cavalier poet,
+Rutherford thought,
+
+    "Him while fresh and fragrant Time
+    Cherisht in his golden prime;
+    Ere Hebe's hand had overlaid
+    His smooth cheeks with downy shade,
+    The rush of Death's unruly wave
+    Swept him off into his grave.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Eyes are vocall, teares have tongues,
+    And there be words not made with lungs;
+    Sententious showres: Oh let them fall!
+    Their cadence is rhetoricall."
+
+Another of the same date recorded the deeds of the young
+scholar-soldiers "who, at the news of Battle, changed their Gownes for
+Armour, and Faithfully served King Charles I. from Edge Hill fight, to
+the End of those unhappie Wars." But one youth in that early conflict
+had been killed in the pursuit of victory "after Gloriously redeeming,
+with his own hands, the banner Royal of the King."
+
+So they linger there for a few moments, passing from one to another of
+the epitaphs, with their records of knightly effort, of the ideal and
+romantic hopes of youth, completed afterwards, or quenched long ago by
+early death. And to the young man, as he spells them out, they seem at
+last to form a continuing tradition of lives dauntlessly lived and lost,
+and then recorded here, briefly, in this ancient corner of the College.
+His companion, too, was vaguely charmed and touched by the old
+inscriptions, and as they turned at last to go out she stopped in front
+of another tablet. Would he read it? It was too high for her to see.
+
+Rutherford looked at it. "It's a modern one, I don't think it will
+interest you--"
+
+"Oh yes, it will--do read it."
+
+He looked at it in silence for a minute. Faint sounds of music floated
+into the dim chapel from the world outside--music, and distant voices
+calling. Then he read the name and date; a young man who had been
+drowned the year before. "His companions at School and College have
+erected this tablet, wishing to preserve the recollection of one who was
+much beloved, and whose influence for good was greatly felt in this
+place. He was of a courageous and enthusiastic nature; the example, had
+he lived, of his generous ambitions--" But in the middle, Rutherford's
+voice changed a little, and with a shiver his cousin turned and went
+away. Had she guessed that they had been friends, these two, or was it
+merely that she felt at last the chill of the place, and of all the old
+dead about her?
+
+In a moment the young man turns to go out too. But as he looks through
+the dimness of the chapel on the summer and sunlight, and his cousin
+standing there outside the door, how far it all seems, how unreal! Only
+real to him is a sense of the briefness of life, and of the great,
+difficult things that may nevertheless be done or attempted before death
+comes. And as he walks away again with his cousin, he is quite certain,
+now at last, that this is no mere emotion or boyish enthusiasm, but an
+influence that for evil or good must rule his life--must come, at least,
+between him and any choice of ease and the common happiness.
+
+
+
+
+_A Broken Journey_
+
+
+I.
+
+The air tasted fresh; through the sunshiny mist the London houses shone
+beautiful and vague; the passers-by seemed to be whistling and singing
+as they went to their morning work. Already at Paddington cabs were
+arriving; they drove down under the clock in an endless procession; the
+family luggage was unloaded, and the passengers, muffled for winter
+journeys, hurried into the station.
+
+Then a hansom pulled up sharply, and a young man got out, whose air of
+fashion and slim figure, as he stood there paying his driver, drew for a
+moment the notice of the other travellers.
+
+On the platform within, by the waiting trains, all was movement; the
+great adventurous station was full of grey light, and a confusion of
+sounds and echoes. Arthur Lestrange, as he walked across, looked about
+with quick eyes on the orderly tumult, the heaps of moving luggage, the
+hurrying people. They were all starting off on pleasant holiday
+journeys, he fancied; indeed, everything seemed eager and gay that
+morning.
+
+He chose an empty first-class carriage in the train going northwards;
+but in a moment he hurried out back to the bookstall to get a paper, and
+returned with several novels in his hands. On the top of one was
+pictured, in bright tragic colours, a young man suspended over the edge
+of a perilous cliff.
+
+"Why did I buy them?" Arthur wondered, looking at the books with
+amusement.
+
+Settling himself again, he watched through his window the anxious
+procession of people who came peering by, looking for corner seats. Then
+he saw his own luggage passing.
+
+"Oh, you can put those things in here with me," he called out to the
+porter.
+
+"I've labelled them, sir," the porter said, looking up with a stupid
+face.
+
+"Put them in, put them in, don't you see there's plenty of room," Arthur
+said with a certain sharpness and nervous agitation.
+
+There were two young men standing on the platform near his window.
+
+"Well, good-bye," one of them said, as he looked at the other with
+friendly eyes, "you mustn't wait, and you'll come up and see us, won't
+you?"
+
+They were Oxford men, young Lestrange thought, as he watched them,
+feeling envious, and almost lonely for a moment as he remembered the
+times when he had travelled down so often with friends from Paddington
+to Oxford.
+
+But surely it was time for the train to start! The movement on the
+platform seemed to be increasing; the tumult and screaming whistles
+sounded louder and louder in his ears, as he waited, leaning
+uncomfortably forward.
+
+At last all the doors were shut; the platform grew more vacant; a few
+belated people hurried up; a green flag was waved; a whistle blown;
+everything about him seemed to glide backwards, and then, with the
+shaking and noise of travel, the train drew itself slowly out of the
+station. Arthur leaned back with a sensation of immense relief. He was
+really away at last. Away from everybody! He had been almost afraid that
+they might come to the station and try to stop him. But it was absurd,
+he told himself, as he opened the morning paper, it was absurd to make
+so much trouble; for what was there to bother about? He could take care
+of himself; and anyhow his relations had better mind their own business.
+As for talking about ruin! He thought of his pompous uncle and dull pale
+cousins, and then of the people with whom he was going to stay.
+
+"Good old ruin," he said half aloud, running down the news of the day
+with eyes that hardly noticed what he read. In a moment he turned to
+look out of the window.
+
+After making its way through the suburbs, the train had begun at last to
+travel more quickly through the open country. The trees and earth and
+houses near at hand drifted backwards; the more distant fields moved
+back with a slower motion, while the horizon seemed to glide forward
+with the train. The sun shone on the brown earth and mist and leafless
+trees; a young horse galloped the length of his field in a playful race
+with the moving carriages.
+
+Young Lestrange changed his seat restlessly. Then he began to rearrange
+his luggage on the rack; he looked at himself in the mirror, caressing
+his slight moustache. His hair was smooth and dark over his handsome
+young face. Only his straight eyebrows, twitching nervously now and
+then, would give him rather a harassed, anxious look for a moment.
+
+What was the use of bothering, he said to himself, smiling as he turned
+carelessly away. If one was young! Men sowed their wild oats; he would
+settle down soon enough, but in the meantime he would enjoy himself. You
+have only one life to live....
+
+The winter morning seemed unusually bright and clear; the train went
+swiftly; its wheels beat on the rails an unquiet and delicious measure,
+answering and echoing his thoughts. Restless and excited, he again threw
+down the paper, for the bright images of desire, that floated before his
+eyes, made the printed words seem almost meaningless.
+
+He pictured to himself the end of his journey--the trap that would
+probably meet him--a dog-cart, with shining bay horse and man in livery,
+standing in the gravel sweep of a country station. The drive up, and
+then at tea, or just before dinner, he and she would meet in the drawing
+room, greeting each other with pretended indifference. How he hated and
+loved her!
+
+After a while the train, going more slowly now, began to draw into
+Reading. With the beginnings of weariness and headache Arthur looked at
+the waste of railway trucks, the heaps of coal and blackened snow, the
+red factory buildings, and the dreary streets beyond. Biscuit
+factories--who could eat all the biscuits they made? he wondered;
+"Clapper's Restaurant"--suppose you should dine there, they would give
+you nothing but biscuits, probably. Did the train stop at Reading?--he
+could get some spirits at the refreshment room.
+
+At the bar, Lestrange saw the figure and long grey coat of a man he
+thought he recognized; and then, getting sight of Boyle's smooth-shaven
+face, and remembering his supercilious manners and reputation, he felt
+with sudden repulsion how much he hated men of that kind--men of
+pleasure, who were no longer young. When you were young it was
+different--but to go on always....
+
+But when Boyle turned and greeted him in an indifferent, half-friendly
+way, and then walked up and down with him on the platform, Arthur could
+not help feeling, in spite of himself, somewhat flattered and pleased.
+After all, Boyle knew most of the best people, and went everywhere.
+
+"I have an empty carriage; you might as well come in with me, if you are
+by yourself." Boyle seemed not unwilling, and soon appeared at Arthur's
+carriage.
+
+"I'm just on my way to Marcham," Arthur said, as if casually; "the
+Vallences', you know." There was a slight lisp in his pleasant musical
+voice.
+
+Boyle was putting his golf clubs in the rack, but turned round at this
+and glanced at Arthur oddly. However he said nothing, and after a
+moment he sat down, and, lighting a cigarette, began looking at the
+paper.
+
+As the train went out of Reading they began to talk, or rather Arthur
+talked. Soon he was discussing horses and actresses and gambling debts.
+It was a good game, baccarat, Arthur said, but you had to pay for it
+sometimes. He had just dropped a cool thousand or two, which was rather
+a bore. There was a music hall singer to whom Arthur referred more than
+once as "Mamie."
+
+"And how about Lulu, hey?" Boyle asked, with his disagreeable laugh.
+
+"Oh, Lulu--good old Lulu!" Arthur said, but he really had no idea of
+what Boyle meant.
+
+Boyle told a story in his short, indifferent way, and Arthur exclaimed,
+"Capital! capital!" and laughed loudly in the fashion of a popular man
+he knew.
+
+Had he ever been to the Vallences' before? Boyle asked.
+
+No, he had never gone before. Did Boyle know them?--Boyle had been
+there; was going there now, in fact, he said.
+
+"Really, are you going there now? How odd we should meet like this!"
+They talked a little about the place and people. It would be rather a
+lively set, wouldn't it? Arthur asked; and he boasted that his uncle,
+Lord Seabury, had warned him against them. But, good God! what did he
+care if people were amusing. "Do you know who else will be there?"
+
+"Oh, a lot of people. Mrs. Stair (Arthur blushed at this), and that
+young Glass."
+
+"Glass?" Arthur exclaimed; "oh, not really that man! They can't like
+him."
+
+"They like his money."
+
+"You don't mean they ask a man--a stupid boy like that--to get his
+money."
+
+"They don't say they do," and Boyle looked up from his paper with an
+expression that seemed to say, "You young fool, you don't know much."
+
+("Is that what I'm asked for?" Arthur wondered for a second.)
+
+"I say, did you read about that young Hughes?" Boyle was saying. "It
+seems he's gone and played the fool--shot himself; wrote to his mamma he
+was ruined. So he won't be there."
+
+"Used he to go to Marcham?"
+
+"Oh, always there."
+
+"Well, it's the pace that kills," Arthur said sententiously, though his
+hand, as he lighted another cigarette, shook a little. "It isn't
+everyone that can stand the racket."
+
+"If they weren't all such sickening young fools," Boyle replied in a
+short contemptuous way, as if the talk bored him.
+
+"He thinks a damned lot of himself," Arthur thought, looking with a
+sidelong glance at Boyle. His head began to ache again; a sudden disgust
+came over him; he felt he hated Boyle. And he hated himself too, for
+talking and boasting as he had talked and boasted but a few minutes
+before. And they were all like Boyle, all those people; they cared only
+for his name and money. "Name and money, name and money," the wheels
+beat on the rails. Well, soon he would lose them, most likely--his name
+and money--like the young suicide, who had lost them both and his life
+too.
+
+Still he made an effort to ward off the mood that was settling down on
+him--the mood he knew so well! He was not ruined, he told himself, and
+there was nothing ruinous in an ordinary visit. He could take care of
+himself. The chief of his debts were gambling debts, and he was going to
+stop playing soon; would settle down quietly; he would make a
+resolution, and keep to it.
+
+But what was he doing now in that rattling train? Only the day before he
+had resolved not to come; had promised solemnly that he would not come;
+had made a resolution to break with all that set, and not yield to the
+passion which people said would ruin him. Yet here he was, going on to
+it all! There seemed to him something sinister in his journey, something
+fatal in the swiftness of the rattling train, as if he were being
+carried on to a dreadful place, and into misfortune, against his will.
+He leaned away from Boyle, and touched his cheek to the cool pane of the
+window. Masses of steam enveloped the train, but Arthur saw the quiet
+landscape now and then, glimpses of faded green fields with snow, and,
+over the hedges, the shining river, and bluish hills beyond. He saw a
+boat on the river; recognized a bit of wood, a church tower. Those were
+the hills that he had ridden over; the lanes through which he had so
+often walked; the river down which he had floated in the summer
+sunshine, pulling up refreshed and strong after bathing. With an eager,
+almost childish interest he waited for the green visions, through the
+shifting steam, of these familiar places.
+
+He opened the window; the singing air tasted pleasantly cool and fresh.
+Over the flooded fields and the moving trees he saw the spires and
+towers of Oxford. He could well remember the quiet streets there; seemed
+to see himself, indeed, moving through them; and he almost believed that
+in a few minutes he would be driving up, as he had driven up so often
+before, in that procession of racing cabs to the old College, and to all
+his friends.
+
+The steam blew again about the train, wrapped his face in its warm
+breath, and blotted out the view. Inside the shaking carriage was the
+tobacco smoke, and his luggage. "Where am I going with that man?" he
+asked himself suddenly, for the picture of Oxford had filled his mind
+entirely for a moment. The buildings and towers were so near now, the
+water of the reservoir gleamed slowly past. Arthur took down his luggage
+from the rack. At the bottom of his mind he had been wanting for a long
+time to go back to Oxford, and see it all, and see an old friend there;
+and so, eagerly, almost before the train had stopped, he hailed a porter
+and got out of the carriage.
+
+"I must stay over here a few hours," he said to Boyle, with apparent
+calmness. "There is something I have just thought of, and must attend
+to. I'll telegraph, but you'd better tell them, though, not to meet me."
+He turned and walked away.
+
+But as he drove up to Oxford, "What a fool I am," he kept saying to
+himself. Indeed Boyle's surprise, the commonplace platform, the
+ticket-collector's questions, the sight outside of his own luggage being
+lifted up on a hansom, had soon made his foolish, helpless impulse fade,
+like the flame of a candle, taken out into the daylight and windy air.
+But to go back to the train would have seemed doubly foolish, so, borne
+on by the impetus of his dead desire, he drove away. The next train was
+not till half-past six. He would get luncheon, and, after all, it might
+be pleasant to see the old place. But he was resolved that never again
+would he act on those stupid, sudden ideas--they made him seem like a
+fool.
+
+
+II.
+
+After luncheon Arthur went out--the time had to be spent somehow--and
+walked idly along the High Street. It was all so familiar: the shops,
+the windows of the club to which he had belonged, the rooms where his
+friends had lived. But he knew no one now. The streets were wet with
+winter mud, there was a commonplace light on the houses, and Arthur
+looked about him with very little interest and emotion. Walking past the
+Colleges, he loitered for a little on Magdalen Bridge, and then turned
+back again. It was still early, and he began to meet now the young men
+who were starting out of Oxford for the open air and country. Some were
+dressed for football; three or four in brown coats rode by on horses,
+talking and laughing as they passed; but the greater number were in
+flannels, and moving towards the river. These Arthur followed--he had
+nothing else to do--through the streets and meadows, coming at last to
+the barges and windy river. Men were calling to each other, boats were
+pushing out, and the turbid current of the Thames ran swiftly with the
+winter floods.
+
+But for him there was too much sound about the wind and water, the cold
+sunshine was too bright and harsh, and he felt doubly weary, as he
+looked at all that life and activity and health. And yet once he would
+have delighted in it.
+
+When Arthur Lestrange had come first from school to Oxford, he had
+entered with eagerness and youthful ambition into the pleasures and
+activities of university life, wishing to do everything well that he
+tried to do, and with distinction if he could. And all these ambitions
+and activities he came to share, in the pleasant, intimate Oxford way,
+with a friend, slightly older than himself.
+
+But after a while he began to grow discontented; success was not so
+easy;--and what was the good of it after all? he asked himself, with
+impatient lassitude. Finding new friends and more exciting pleasures, he
+gradually drifted away from his old companions. What was the harm? he
+said impatiently to Austen, resenting his friend's affectionate advice.
+He would enjoy life as other people enjoyed it; he only wanted to be
+left alone. So they grew less intimate; and when Lestrange found himself
+in trouble, serious enough to make him leave Oxford, he had been too
+angry and proud to see Austen, or answer his friendly letter. "How
+stupid it has all been," he said to himself, the memory of all this
+coming over him rather drearily, as he walked back towards Oxford.
+
+But his feeble attempts to make some change in his life--these were the
+stupidest of all his memories; how, when his father died abroad, he was
+really frightened, fearing for himself a death like that, and going back
+to the half-neglected place that was now his own, he remembered his old
+plans of life, and tried to do his duty there, and be a good landlord
+and neighbour. But in a few months he grew weary of it all; it was too
+lonely, too depressing....
+
+And then a year after, when he hoped for a while that a nice girl he
+knew might care for him; and this last time, when his losses at play
+had made him mortgage his property still more heavily. Then, sobered for
+a moment by his uncle's warnings, and by the ruin that seemed not far
+off, he suddenly resolved to change, to give up playing, to keep away
+from all those people.
+
+But he had started for Marcham after all. It was no good trying, and no
+one cared. Of course no one cared--why should they? With worldly
+derision he remembered now the foolish, tattered hope he had cherished
+all along--the hope that some day, coming back to Oxford, he would find
+the old life, the old friend, who _had_ cared once. And without stopping
+he walked past his College, the place where Austen was still living. He
+did not want to see any of them, nor would they want to see him.
+
+Oppressed by the slowness of the time, the afternoon quiet of the
+streets, he resolved to go back to the station and wait there, watching
+the railway clock slowly eat up the hours. But passing by chance the
+livery stable where he had always kept his horses, with an aimless
+impulse he sauntered into the open court. One of the stable grooms
+coming up, addressed him by name, and asked him if he wanted to order a
+horse.
+
+"It's a long while since we've seen you in Oxford, sir."
+
+This recognition and friendly look in the man's face, touched Arthur,
+and, with a revival of eagerness, he felt that a ride would be just the
+thing to kill the time. So, ordering a horse to be sent to the hotel
+where he had left his luggage, he hurried back to get ready.
+
+
+III.
+
+As he rode back towards Oxford, two hours afterwards, the light was
+already fading from the winter sky. Sleepily and quietly he jogged along
+now, his horse tired at last after the quick gallop through grass lanes
+and over the wet fields and commons. The young man, too, was tired; but
+with a healthy, physical fatigue, pleasant in all his body. He felt
+almost happy after the motion, the wide light, the freshness of the air.
+And when he rode into the old city, walking his horse through the
+darkening streets, it seemed to him as if he were riding home now, as
+often he had ridden home into Oxford before, at just this hour of the
+twilight. The groups in the doorways, the lighted windows in the dim
+buildings, the sounds about him of bells and footsteps and friendly
+voices, brought back to him confusedly, mixed with the memory of this
+and that, the charm and comfort of that old life--that life of order and
+disciplined ways, and high old-fashioned purposes. How quietly the days
+had gone by: the mornings of work, the rides with friends, or afternoons
+on the river, between the yellowing autumn willows; the evenings with
+the white lamplight and pleasant talk and books. He had quarrelled with
+the restraint, the subordination, sometimes; had thought it too severe,
+too painful, to go out on the river in the wind and rain, to get up so
+early in the cold of winter mornings. But now, after the stale
+dissipation of his life, it was only the friendly warmth, the
+lazily-wasted hours he remembered, the pleasant fatigue after exercise,
+and the taste of the winter air when he had hurried out to chapel
+through the earliest sunlight.
+
+If he could only go back to it all; if, putting up his horse, he could
+walk to his rooms through the twilight, and find his books, and the fire
+burning there, and friends not far off! But things had been against him
+somehow. And yet he had meant it all to be so different. And with half a
+sigh he remembered the summer evenings when he and Austen had walked in
+the old garden, talking of their plans in life--of all they meant to
+do--together! if they could. But then, people never did remain friends
+like that.
+
+When he gave up his horse, however, he looked at his watch, and, after
+standing in hesitation for a moment, he turned with a sudden impulse,
+and walked quickly towards his old College.
+
+In the porch stood a group of undergraduates, just up from the river,
+and vaguely gossiping before they separated. But they were all strangers
+to Arthur, and the porter, who answered his questions, was a stranger
+too. Crossing the darker quadrangle, the young man went into a staircase
+and up two flights of steps. Then he stopped, and stood breathing
+quickly for a moment. There was the door, and the name over it, but he
+had grown suddenly ashamed of his errand. Austen might have forgotten
+him, or might not want to see him.... But, bah! what did he care? and
+his footsteps must have been heard....
+
+"I'm afraid you don't recognize me," Arthur said, in his assured voice,
+as he went forward into the room. "I was in Oxford; I thought I'd look
+you up."
+
+Austen, who was sitting by a lamp, turned round with a puzzled
+expression on his staid, pleasant face. Then, pushing aside a heap of
+papers, he got up and said: "Oh, Lestrange, I didn't recognize you at
+first, it's so dark there. But I'm glad to see you--do sit down; you'll
+have tea, won't you?"
+
+He was passing through Oxford, Arthur said; and having a few hours on
+his hands after riding over Shotover, he had come back, and happened to
+look in at the old College. The plausibility of this explanation, and
+Austen's voice as he said politely, "That's right, that's right, I'm
+delighted to see you again," soon overcame most of the shyness behind
+Arthur's easy, unembarrassed manner. They still talked to each other
+rather formally, however, as men do who have not met for years.
+
+"It's a long time since you've been in Oxford, isn't it?" Austen asked.
+
+"Yes, it is; I've been at home, in London. But I suppose it hasn't
+changed much."
+
+No, there wasn't much change, Austen said; old people went and new
+came.
+
+What had become of all the men who had been with them in College, Arthur
+asked; he had lost sight of them somehow.
+
+Austen said that some were at the Bar; some in the government offices;
+one or two in Parliament already; the most of them seemed to be getting
+on pretty well, he thought, though he had lost sight of many of them, as
+one did.
+
+"And you've been living on here ever since? I heard you had been made a
+Fellow. You like it, I suppose?"
+
+Yes, Austen said, he liked it well enough, the work was tiring
+sometimes; that afternoon he had been going through papers. Arthur
+noticed that he looked fatigued, and a good deal older. It was dry, hard
+work no doubt, but still it was not the kind of thing that changed you.
+
+"I say, you have jolly rooms here, Austen; I envy you living in a place
+like this. Do you remember your old rooms over the garden? I think I
+used to live in them almost."
+
+As the old memories revived they seemed to grow less shy of each other.
+Arthur leaned forward, talking in a vague, intermittent way as he stared
+into the fire. Sometimes he would gaze at nothing, with a vacant, dazed
+look, for minutes together; or he would take the fire-irons and break up
+the coals. Once the tongs slipped and fell with a sudden clatter; he
+started nervously.
+
+"Well," he said at last, rousing himself from a reverie in which he
+seemed conscious of nothing but the warmth and comfort and pleasant,
+physical fatigue, "Well, it seems very jolly here, like old times; I
+almost wish I had never gone away. But then, of course, I couldn't help
+it," he added; "I wasn't asked."
+
+"You had hard luck," Austen said; "I hope it hasn't made any
+difference."
+
+The words sounded friendly and sympathetic to Arthur. Hard luck, yes,
+that was it; he had always had hard luck.
+
+"What have you been doing since?" Austen said politely.
+
+"What have I been doing, Charles? Oh, nothing much; seeing about things
+at home a little. There were some cottages I had rebuilt. You remember
+we used to talk about it. It isn't so easy though, or I suppose I'm not
+so clever at it. But of course you know a great deal more about those
+things."
+
+"No, oh no! I've been so busy. That sort of thing is good in moderation,
+and I'm glad you keep it up."
+
+"Oh yes, in a way ... but no, what am I saying? I don't really keep it
+up. It was all two years ago. I haven't done much of anything
+since--anything good. Things, you know," he went on, as he stared into
+the fire, "haven't gone just--I mean, it's been rather stupid--stupid,
+and worse, I'm afraid; I don't seem good for much somehow."
+
+The familiar Oxford room, with its order, and books, and shaded light,
+seemed so shut in, so far from the friendless world in which he lived,
+that for the moment Arthur almost forgot the lonely distrust, the
+derision of everything, which his life had taught him. "I suppose it's
+fate," he added, staring into the fire, as if he were half-ashamed of
+what he was saying. "I suppose it _is_ fate--but still, I
+wonder--sometimes it seems if--that if I had had a chance, if anybody--"
+He waited a minute indecisively. But Austen said nothing. Arthur
+glanced at him, and then, flushing slightly, he got up. "But I must be
+going now," he said, with a curious change and coldness in his voice; "I
+have a train to catch."
+
+"Oh, don't go," Austen replied awkwardly, "don't go just yet. I'm sorry
+to hear what you say; but don't you think, if you will allow me to say
+so, don't you think it is a mistake to blame fate for such things? If
+you would tell me more--"
+
+"Oh, thanks," Arthur said, "I think I must be going."
+
+"But you were going to say something," Austen urged, "and if you would
+tell me more, I might be able to help you, or give you advice at least."
+
+Arthur glanced at him quickly. Then suddenly the idea seemed to amuse
+him, and coming back a step or two he said, with a smile, "Tell you
+more, Austen? Oh, I was only going to tell you what everyone knows,
+that I've turned out a bad lot, that's all."
+
+"I'm sorry to hear that," said Austen, in a rather shocked voice; "I
+hope it's not so bad."
+
+Arthur smiled pleasantly. "Oh well, you know, it _is_ pretty bad, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"But what do you mean, Lestrange?"
+
+"What do I mean? Oh, all the usual things--bad company, gambling, and
+women."
+
+Austen looked still more shocked. "But surely you could change if you
+wanted to!"
+
+"I suppose I might, if I wanted to," Arthur said, playing with his
+riding whip. "But I'm afraid I don't want to. What's the good?"
+
+"What's the good?" Austen repeated. "I don't see how you can ask such a
+question; if what you say is true, you ought to want to change."
+
+Arthur mused a moment. Then looking up, with apparent candour, he said,
+"Well, I suppose it is odd; but honestly, you know, I don't want to
+change in the least. You see, your respectable people, they don't want
+to have anything to do with me; and anyhow, the things they care for
+bore me to death, really they do. You only have one life, so why not be
+happy in your own way? that's my principle."
+
+"But surely, Lestrange, you can't go on--"
+
+"No, I suppose I can't for ever; but you try to enjoy it while it lasts;
+and anyhow, my father, you know how he died--I suppose it's fate;
+heredity you call those things, don't you?"
+
+"Really, I'm shocked to hear you talk so recklessly, as if you didn't
+care. You seem very much changed."
+
+"Am I changed? I don't know; I suppose I am. We've both changed a
+little, don't you think? At least, things seem different. I wonder where
+I put my gloves,--I really must be going."
+
+"Well, of course, I can't keep you, Lestrange; I can only give you my
+advice. But I can't believe you're happy."
+
+For a moment Arthur looked at him sullenly.
+
+"Well, what if I ain't?" he asked. "What's that to you?"
+
+"I was only going to say," Austen went on, "I was only going to say that
+it seems to me that if you would try--"
+
+"Try! Good Lord, I've tried enough, but what's the good?" Arthur said,
+with his old calmness and indifference, as he turned away towards the
+door. "I don't care, and no one else does, either. But I must be off.
+Good bye."
+
+He went down the steps quickly, whistling as he walked away through the
+darkness. He was angry at himself, and bitterly ashamed of his visit to
+Austen. They were all like that--he ought to have known. And yet it was
+a pity, too!
+
+
+
+
+_The Sub-Warden_
+
+
+The two old gentlemen walked out of the Common Room, across the
+quadrangle to the porter's lodge: the Vicar of North Mims, who had been
+spending a few hours in Oxford and dining in College, wanted to catch
+the evening train back to North Mims, the College living he had held for
+the last ten years, and the Sub-Warden wanted to see the last of him.
+
+"The point I make is this," the old Vicar said again, frowning with his
+bushy eyebrows in the moonlight; "the point I make is this: There would
+be no trouble at all, if it wasn't for the drinking. If they want
+meetings, let them have Temperance meetings; and I say that those
+Socialist fellows from London have absolutely no business meddling in
+the affairs of my parish. And as for the undergraduates who come out
+from Oxford to speak"--the Vicar's voice grew more solemnly irate--"as
+for those undergraduates, they should be punished. It is, I consider, a
+case in which both college and university authorities should intervene
+with prompt severity."
+
+They walked on for a little in silence, and then the Sub-Warden said, as
+he looked at his companion, "Really, Philpotts, you know, you ought to
+tricycle."
+
+The truth is, that, as they had sat in the Common Room over their port,
+the Rev. Mr. Philpotts had repeated himself a great many times; and, the
+Sub-Warden's mind at last beginning to wander, he had said to himself,
+as he looked at his glass and then at his old friend, "Really, Philpotts
+is getting very heavy! I used to be heavier, and probably should be now,
+if it wasn't for tricycling!" And, his mind being full of the thought,
+he had suddenly said, "Really, Philpotts, you know, you ought to
+tricycle!"
+
+"What!" said the Vicar, in a voice of slow amazement. "What on earth has
+tricycling got to do with it?"
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon!" the Sub-Warden cried, who was the soul of
+good-nature, "I am so absent-minded. You were speaking of the Radicals;
+it is certainly shocking."
+
+"Radicals! Pestilent Socialists I call them," and the Vicar's mind,
+after its jolt, got back into the old groove. "Why, you would hardly
+believe it, but they had the impertinence to advertise some young ninny
+as a member of this College, and they actually posted it on the
+vicarage gate. My wife had to soak it off with a sponge. Now, what I say
+is--"
+
+But they had arrived in the porch, and the Sub-Warden, telling the Vicar
+it was late, hurried him out of College, and then turned and walked back
+to his rooms.
+
+"He certainly is getting heavy," he said to himself. "He has changed
+very much. These country livings! And if I had only started to ride a
+little earlier this afternoon, he wouldn't have caught me. Another time
+when I miss my exercise I mustn't drink port! At my age one begins to
+feel it."
+
+The Sub-Warden reached his staircase, and, resting one hand on the wall
+of the building, he turned and looked at the moon. Then he went
+upstairs, but, instead of sitting down at his table, he went to the
+window and opened the sash. There was a curious look about the trees
+and buildings, as if they had been turning round, and had just stopped.
+It was odd. Poor old Philpotts! What an undergraduate he had been--up to
+anything! What times they had had! And now he was on his way back to his
+wife at North Mims! The Sub-Warden sighed; then smiled, and,
+straightening himself, after a moment's hesitation, he went and put on
+an old coat, and stole with soft steps out of the College. Perhaps it
+was the moonlight; perhaps an old memory or two that had come back to
+him, or the thought of the exercise he had missed; or, again (but this
+is mere conjecture), the glass or two of College port may have done
+something to put his mind in a mood for adventure. Anyhow, he got on his
+tricycle, and started for a ride into the country. He only hoped the
+Bursar had not seen him; not that there was any reason why he shouldn't
+ride at night, but the Bursar made up such funny stories about the
+Sub-Warden and his tricycle rides.
+
+And so he rode lightly along, over the vague roads, barred here and
+there by the blue shadows of the trees--rode lightly along through the
+ancient Oxfordshire country; and he laughed in his genial Tory heart as
+he thought of the Vicar's absurd political panic. No, a ripple of
+Radical excitement in the towns perhaps, but it would hardly touch the
+country. The labourers must know who were their real friends and
+leaders. And yet it was outrageous, he thought, as he began pushing his
+machine up a hill, it was outrageous that anyone should have such views.
+But that members of the University should go and speak at their dreadful
+meetings! The Sub-Warden shook his head and sighed, as he thought of
+the University--its sad change, its evil state. Could it, indeed, be
+still called a University? Ah, in the old days, before the Royal
+Commissions! But when he mounted his machine again at the top of the
+hill, he forgot these black thoughts, and rode quickly down--indeed, he
+almost felt himself on wings--into the village he saw below him, an old
+village, spread out asleep in the moonlight. He went on slow wheels
+through the blue-shadowed streets; he breathed in the night air,
+sweet-scented from the village gardens; he felt young in his soul, and
+would hardly recognize as his own the respectable, fat shadow that
+wheeled after him across each moon-lit space.
+
+All at once, in the midst of the sleeping village, there appeared in
+front of him a square red building, with brightly lighted windows.
+Curious to know what was going on, he rode his machine up to one of the
+windows, and, looking through the glass, misty from the heat and
+perspiration within, he saw vague rows of dark figures, and an upright
+shape moving its arms at the end of the hall. What could it be? Around
+at the door, whither he wheeled himself, there was a big poster, partly
+torn, with the word "Temperance" on it, and something else pinned across
+it. "That's right, that's right!" the Sub-Warden exclaimed, "that's the
+way to cut the ground from under the Radicals! Philpotts was right; it's
+a question of drink, not of politics."
+
+And so he got down from his tricycle and went in for a moment. Dazed by
+the heat and light, he stood still and stared about. The orator also
+stopped and stared at him. There were bright texts of Scripture and
+temperance mottoes on the walls; but the Sub-Warden kept gazing at these
+words, "The Lord is at Hand," hung in large letters over the orator's
+head. But this orator was Thomas Woolley, his own pupil! Soon it all
+seemed clear to him. Woolley was known as a Temperance speaker, and here
+he had come to hold a meeting in a little village. The Sub-Warden
+applauded, and Woolley began to speak again. But as he gasped a good
+deal, and stuttered, the Sub-Warden could only catch phrases here and
+there--cold remnants, they seemed to be, of what must have been written
+as a fiery peroration. "The down-trodden--I mean the inactive ... the
+great heart of humanity--and--and--things--.... Now is the time for
+hand to join in hand, and rush to the banner--I mean, it would be better
+if you would sign your names."
+
+("That's the pledge-book," the Sub-Warden thought. "Yes, I dare say it's
+right; you could not preach moderate drinking to labourers.")
+
+"Deliver yourself from the classes--that--that profit by your
+weakness...."
+
+("That's the public-house keepers," the Sub-Warden reflected. "But why
+does he call them classes?")
+
+Woolley stared hard at the notes which he gripped in his hand, and then
+he turned and pointed at a place at the back of the platform, which he
+called "the Future," and began to speak about a model dwelling, a cow,
+and a vine and fig-tree; then his voice sank, and he wavered and sat
+down.
+
+"He expects a good deal from Temperance," the Sub-Warden thought; "what
+a thing it is to be young!" And he applauded with vigour, such vigour
+that several rustics in the audience turned and fixed him with their
+ruminating eyes. Then the Sub-Warden rose (he never spoke in public, but
+as he had interrupted this meeting!), rose with dignity and internal
+tremors, and made a few smiling remarks; nothing very definite, for,
+after all, he was not a total abstainer; just his sympathy with the
+speech of his young friend, his entire approval of the objects of the
+meeting, his regret that academic duties held him back from a more
+active participation in the work.... But if there was anything that
+he or the College authorities could do to forward the cause--he believed
+that their College owned land in the neighbourhood--they must not
+hesitate to call upon him. Then a mild joke, and he sat down and wiped
+his face.
+
+Certainly his speech was a great success. Woolley stared wildly at him,
+but the audience applauded with vigour, and, as they were giving three
+cheers for "the old College gentleman," the Sub-Warden slipped modestly
+out. It was hot in there, and they might be handing pledge-books about.
+
+The mood in which he rode home was a pleasant one. Really he had never
+heard applause that was quite so warm, so evidently sincere, so
+spontaneous. There had been nothing like it when the Warden of St.
+Mary's had spoken at the Corn Exchange. And Temperance was such a dull
+subject! It was a bore, of course, for a man who loved his quiet to find
+he had the power of moving an audience; but still, if the Radicals were
+working so hard, the other side must come forward.
+
+The Sub-Warden went back into College, and, as he was walking across the
+quadrangle, he heard a tumult of cheers and cries burst out on the
+moon-lit stillness of the night. He started--the sounds fitted in so
+well with his dreams! But, of course, it was a Debating Society; and the
+window being open, the Sub-Warden went up and listened in his new
+quality of an amateur. A small young man, with a round face and deep
+voice, was thumping on a table. "What is the meaning, the outcome of
+this agitation? It is putting blood into the mouth of a
+tiger"--(applause)--"and when once the tiger has tasted blood, has
+tasted property that is not his own, it demands more, and it will have
+it! Yes, sir," he said, turning with a fierce look at the good-natured
+president of the society, "mark my words, when the poor have divided,
+like the tiger, everything there is to be divided; when there is nothing
+left to feed their rage, then, sir, they will turn and rend
+themselves--like the tiger!"
+
+Great shouts of applause roared through the window, and the bald-headed
+old gentleman listening outside smiled an indulgent smile. But as the
+speaker went on, denouncing more definitely the Radical agitators, and
+even Woolley, by name, the smile faded from the Sub-Warden's face. It
+must have been a Temperance meeting; and yet--and yet--"Temperance" had
+been printed on the poster--but hadn't there been something pinned over
+that, something which he hadn't read? The Sub-Warden looked about. He
+could see one or two towers against the faint sky, and near each College
+tower was a Common Room, and in each Common Room the Fellows sat after
+dinner, telling stories. But suppose he had really spoken at a meeting
+which--which wasn't a Temperance meeting, and the Bursar should hear of
+it!
+
+The Sub-Warden lurked about in the quadrangle, holding his hat in his
+hand, and spying out for Woolley. He came at last.
+
+"Good evening, Woolley," he said, "you have come from the Temperance
+meeting?"
+
+"Oh, sir, it wasn't a Temperance meeting, that was the night before!"
+
+"Oh!" said the Sub-Warden, coldly.
+
+"No, sir, it was a different meeting; in fact, the Radical League. I was
+so afraid--"
+
+"What! Then it was very wrong of you, Woolley, to give me to understand
+it was a Temperance meeting."
+
+"Oh, please, sir--"
+
+"Don't try to explain it, it admits of no explanation," the Sub-Warden
+said severely. "I should be sorry to get you into trouble, Woolley, but
+if this should get to be known, I couldn't answer for the consequences.
+I shall take no steps personally to make it known, and I should advise
+you to mention it to no one--to no one at all, do you understand?
+It's--it's nothing to be proud of."
+
+He walked indignantly away; and, indeed, for the moment his words had
+made him feel really indignant. But when, on turning a corner, he
+glanced back and saw the honest Woolley still standing there, he
+hesitated. Should he return and explain? He took a step back, then he
+thought of the Bursar, and, with a sudden, sinking fear he went quickly
+to his room.
+
+
+
+
+_Idyll_
+
+
+I.
+
+"I wish they hadn't asked me," said Matthew Craik, the Logic tutor of
+St. Mary's, as he looked down at the party in the old secluded College
+garden. "I wonder," he added, glancing at the reflection of his red tie
+in the glass, his new tie, his black coat, his young and scholarly face,
+"I wonder--but no, it isn't too red; they wear them red," he continued,
+with attempted cheerfulness. "No--," but hearing the laughter of ladies
+below his window, he scuttled back hastily.
+
+His rooms were high up in the garden tower, almost up amongst the
+topmost boughs of the College elms; and when, after a moment, he
+returned to his window and peered down, he could see, through the green
+of the trees, the white and pink of ladies' dresses, dappling the lawn,
+and moving and meeting on the College paths. Among the summer leaves the
+summer wind was breathing; now and then it blew in at the window, laden
+with scents from the garden, and the happy stir and hum of human voices;
+and Matthew Craik, or the Corn-Craik, as the undergraduates called him,
+felt his heart beating high with an unwonted emotion of youth and
+excitement.
+
+The early philosophers of Asia Minor were very remarkable and suggestive
+men; but they had lived a long while ago, and now that he had finished
+and published his book about them, he meant to enjoy himself a little.
+And what shallow wisdom it was, moreover, to live in the almost solitary
+way he had been living all the winter. All the winter! All his life
+really; wasting his youth among books, and almost shut out from
+everything that is light and amiable in experience. Why, the greenest of
+his undergraduate pupils might easily know more of modern life than he
+did.
+
+"Oh, don't harp so on modern life!" his friend Ranken, the junior Dean
+of St. Thomas', often said to him in his acrid way. "Do for pity's sake
+leave it alone and stick to your Asia Minor."
+
+But then Ranken was absurdly cynical. Craik recalled with amusement some
+of the remarks he had made during the winter, when they walked out
+together for their Sunday walks; remembering how, as they returned in
+the dusk through the red fringe of villas between Oxford and the
+country, Ranken had sometimes paused opposite an uncurtained window, and
+made merry, with bitter merriment, over the domestic picture they saw in
+the golden light within,--a family at tea very likely, or an academic
+parent romping with his children. Craik had always listened in
+uncontradicting silence; only, standing in the chill gray of the
+twilight, he would draw his coat about him more tightly; and afterwards,
+alone in his rooms, these visions would sometimes haunt him, and not
+unpleasantly.
+
+As he looked down now, it was agreeable to him to see so many ladies in
+the old garden; he had never quite believed that Ranken had very
+authentic grounds for his narrow prejudice. For Ranken would have liked
+to shut ladies out of Oxford altogether; and would have liked to keep it
+a tranquil home of learning and celibacy, as it used to be before the
+Royal Commission had granted the Fellows the liberty of marrying. For
+this unblest liberty, he maintained, had filled the University with
+frivolity and ladies, and so destroyed the old character of the place
+that now, as was notorious, the whole of the Summer Term, with a good
+part of the rest of the academic year, was given over to dances, and
+picnics, and parties, and other silly and deteriorating trifles. Craik
+had not been able to contradict his friend, for hitherto the sounds and
+echoes of this social dissipation had hardly reached his retired corner,
+save as he had heard them reverberating through the gloomy caverns of
+Ranken's imagination. But he could not quite believe--here Craik began
+to laugh, for his eye at that moment was caught by the gargoyle just
+above him, which was also leaning over and looking into the sunshiny
+garden. For hundreds of years it had sat there making faces, but now its
+visage seemed more than ever twisted with a look of Gothic cynicism. As
+Craik lingered, looking out, himself almost like a second gargoyle, he
+thought he could see in the garden below two ladies of his acquaintance,
+Mrs. Cotton and Mrs. Trotter. How ridiculous Ranken was in his views!
+almost as grotesque as the gargoyle. Craik took his hat and stick, and
+started downstairs. He would see for himself.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was very worldly and very brilliant in the garden. Beside a crowd of
+ladies and young men, three Professors and two Heads of Houses had
+already arrived, and others were expected.
+
+Mr. White, Mr. Long, and Mr. Maple Fetters, the young unmarried Fellows
+who were giving the party, kept glancing toward the gateway, over the
+shoulders of their arriving guests--all smiles, however, as they greeted
+their friends with apposite remarks. On tables under the trees white
+cloths were spread, looking almost blue in the vivid green, and on them
+were plates of red strawberries, ancient silver bowls of sugar, and dewy
+jugs of lemonade. Sounds of discreet gaiety, voices and laughter, and
+the tinkling of glasses, quickened the sleepy silence of the garden;
+while from beneath a high and fleecy cloud the rays of the westering sun
+brightened the tree-tops and walls, lingered on the ladies' dresses, and
+streaked with blue shadows the old green lawn. It put Craik in mind of
+old coloured French pictures he had seen, or the courtly fêtes he had
+read of; he thought, too, of the garden party in "_Love's Cottage_," a
+pretty novel he had looked at lately, the party where Miss Molyneux
+first meets Pastorel the poet.
+
+He kept smiling as he moved about, but he really felt rather shy and
+alien; if he only knew more people, and could be seen laughing and
+talking and moving his hands, like the other young men!
+
+He came across one of his pupils at last, and began to speak to him of
+the recent boat-races in an animated way. But the undergraduate moved
+off suddenly, with a hasty excuse, to join some ladies who had just
+arrived, and Craik heard himself observing to a bush that "Brazenose had
+rowed very well." The observation, he felt, was not brilliant, even for
+conversation with a freshman; but as a fragment of soliloquy! He looked
+round; no one could have overheard him? Soon he met his friend, Mrs.
+Cotton, the wife of Professor Cotton, and he begged to be allowed to get
+her an ice, or some other refreshment. The pink ice and biscuit were
+inadequate, it struck him, as he carried them with care toward the large
+presence of Mrs. Cotton; but was not this inadequacy, after all, of a
+piece with the delicious and conventional unreality of an affair like
+this? He noticed a brilliant purple feather conspicuously waving from
+the top of Mrs. Cotton's bonnet, and was glad that everything was so
+bright. How pleasant it was on a summer day, how pleasant and harmless
+to play brilliantly at life! And, he thought with a smile, did not old
+Aristotle himself place Magnificence high among the virtues?
+
+But Maple Fetters still had his anxious eye-glass fixed on the garden
+entrance.
+
+"Miss Lamb--has Miss Lamb come?" Craik heard voices murmuring about
+him.
+
+"No, not yet, but she's coming. Just heard Maple Fetters telling some
+one."
+
+"Long says he can't understand it. In her note she said--"
+
+"So quiet, so different!"
+
+"They say in London--"
+
+"Oh, yes; and here everybody, Professors, Heads of Houses. It's too
+amusing--"
+
+"Well, she says she wants to study all the types."
+
+"Ah, look, there she comes!"
+
+Craik turned with the others, and saw Miss Lamb coming in through the
+Gothic archway. Her face was shaded with a large white hat, and her
+white dress, falling in long plain lines to her feet, brightened with
+the sun as she walked over the grass, out of the shadow of the building.
+
+Long and Maple Fetters started forward, and escorted Miss Lamb and her
+aunt across the lawn. They drew near to Craik and Mrs. Cotton.
+
+"Oh, there is Mrs. Cotton," Miss Lamb exclaimed, and turned towards
+them. "Dear Mrs. Cotton," she said, "I was so hoping I should see you
+here!"
+
+Craik looked at Miss Lamb. She rested her eyes on him for a second, then
+pressing Mrs. Cotton's hand, she stooped down with a graceful impulse
+and kissed the fat old thing. Craik overheard Mrs. Lyon, the wife of the
+president of All Saints, talking to the Warden of St. Simon's.
+
+"Dear Miss Lamb!" she said in a deep and sentimental voice; "she is just
+as nice to women as she is to men."
+
+"She is much nicer, surely," the ancient Warden replied with a cackling
+laugh; "she never kissed me!"
+
+Miss Lamb had disappeared. And Mrs. Cotton was busy discussing with
+philanthropic friends the affairs of Oxford charities.
+
+"These Oxford parties are so nice," she said to Craik, as she turned her
+benevolent spectacles away from him; "they save one writing such heaps
+of notes."
+
+Again Craik walked about alone, smiling and conspicuous; and although he
+tried to think that he was enjoying himself, he really wished very much
+to be up in his tower again, up there in its pleasant green shade and
+solitude. That, after all, was his place, the only place he was fit for;
+and he had better stick to it, and stick to his books, and not cast
+again the gloom of his presence on the social enjoyment of other more
+fortunate people. For he could not talk agreeably, and laugh and be gay;
+and, even if he could, which of the ladies who swept so prettily past
+him on the grass would ever care to listen to him? Thus resignedly
+musing, he retreated into the near shade of a laburnum tree, and,
+ceasing to smile in his fixed and weary way, he watched through the
+flowering branches the shining colours and placid agitation of the
+garden party. All the men except himself were moving among the groups of
+ladies, weaving darker threads into the brilliant pattern. Young Cobbe
+he saw, the captain of the College boat club, walking with Miss Lamb,
+walking and talking pleasantly, and he sighed; for although he was
+Cobbe's tutor, and well versed in his stupidity, he could not help
+envying the easy manners of the undergraduate.
+
+But the half-real picture ceased to be a mere picture to him, and the
+sequence of images grew almost too vivid, when he noticed that Miss Lamb
+and her companion were coming directly to his tree. Could he manage to
+slip away without being seen? She was coming probably to pick a spray of
+the yellow flower to put in her white dress, or carry away perhaps as a
+memory of the party. And if he were found standing there like a
+policeman, it would be so awkward.
+
+Miss Lamb fortunately met Maple Fetters, and, stopping herself, seemed
+to be sending him on to the tree alone. When he reached it, he pushed
+aside the branches and said, with a smile, "I say, Craik, I want to
+introduce you to Miss Lamb."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes, you. We saw you here; she wants to meet you."
+
+"Wants to meet _me_?"
+
+"Yes, _you_. Come along."
+
+Craik came out from beneath the tree.
+
+"Miss Lamb--does she live in Oxford?"
+
+"You don't mean to tell me you've never heard of Miss Lamb?" Fetters
+paused in astonishment. "You must be the only man in Oxford then who has
+not. Miss Lamb is an American!"
+
+"An American?" Craik had heard that American ladies were so brilliant.
+
+"Miss Lamb, let me introduce Mr. Craik, our philosopher."
+
+"Mr. Craik, I am glad to meet you."
+
+Craik bowed; then he saw that Miss Lamb had put out her hand; he tried
+to take it, but was too late. The American young lady however smiled,
+and put out her hand again, and gave it to him frankly, almost as if it
+were a present.
+
+"We ought to shake hands, oughtn't we? It's the English way, isn't it?"
+
+Craik stifled a guffaw, and his awkward sensations began to go.
+
+"Mr. Cobbe, would you mind getting me an ice?"
+
+Cobbe's face wore an odd expression as he bowed and disappeared. Maple
+Fetters fluttered off to other occupations. Craik and Miss Lamb were
+left alone, and they began to walk with vague steps, and, on the lady's
+part, vague, unfinished scraps of conversation, through the sunshine
+along the garden path. Then stopping, and resting her hands on her
+parasol, she said, as if they were old friends already, "I wonder--would
+you take me into your old College cloisters? I have heard so much about
+them, and it wouldn't be wrong for us to run away from the party for
+just a few minutes? I should so love to! You won't mind?"
+
+"Oh dear, no!" Craik exclaimed. "Certainly we can go. It's through the
+quadrangle. But Mr. Cobbe, will he find you?"
+
+"Oh, he'll know where I am; and if he doesn't it's no matter. Come!"
+
+They went under the garden tower, and through the little old quadrangle,
+into the entrance of the cloisters. Of the history and traditions of the
+place, and of the whole College, Craik spoke almost with eloquence,
+while Miss Lamb listened with murmurs and interruptions of enthusiastic
+interest. The cloisters, as he explained, were once the cloisters of a
+monastery; the tower was the monastery tower; and the bell that hung
+there, and twice a day rang the College into chapel, was the bell that
+once sounded for the matins and vespers of the monks.
+
+"What! monks? Did monks really once live here? Oh, how I should have
+liked to have seen it then!"
+
+"Ah, but you couldn't, you know. They never allowed ladies inside the
+gates."
+
+"How silly!"
+
+"Yes," Craik said, smiling, "wasn't it silly?"
+
+They walked with slow steps around the shadowed cloisters, and Miss Lamb
+talked idly of the party. It was such a pretty party, so amusing. Did he
+often go to garden parties? No! How odd! She did--to ever so many, in
+America, in London, and now in Oxford. The Oxford parties were the best
+though. Then suddenly she cried in a changed voice, "But how frivolous I
+am, Mr. Craik! I can see that you are quite shocked."
+
+"Shocked! oh no, not at all."
+
+"Well, then, you ought to be! Imagine being so frivolous in a solemn
+place like this. Tell me, you study philosophy, don't you? It must be
+splendid; I do envy you so! When I am in a place like Oxford I feel so
+frivolous, somehow, and ignorant. Why, I feel afraid--" Then after a
+moment's charming hesitation, "Yes, quite afraid to talk to clever
+people. You mustn't mind what I say, will you?"
+
+"But I'm not clever!" he exclaimed. "Why--"
+
+"Oh, but Mr. Craik! Why, you've written a book!"
+
+"But that's nothing. And it's only a sort of study, nothing really."
+
+"I wish I could read it."
+
+"Oh no! don't try; it's a stupid thing, only meant for students."
+
+Miss Lamb paused, and, turning her eyes to Craik with a look full of
+reproach, she said: "Ah! you are like the others, you don't think I am
+serious; you think I would not understand it!"
+
+"Oh no, not that!" Craik urged in quick distress. "You would understand
+it, of course, what there is to understand. I only meant," he
+stammered, "I only meant that it was not well written, not
+interesting--not really worth reading, I mean."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure it is worth reading, and I hear it's so clever. It is
+about Asia Minor, isn't it. Asia Minor is so interesting; I wish you
+would tell me something about it, and about your work. Do you like it
+here? Of course you do. Have you been in Oxford long?"
+
+For a third time they passed round the cloister square, loitering with
+slow footsteps, through the old arches and past the epitaphs of the
+ancient celibate Fellows, and Craik, talking with an unreserve that was
+intimate and sudden, and yet somehow seemed quite natural to him, told
+about his work, and the writing of his book. Then, in answer to a
+question of Miss Lamb's, he described his quiet bringing up in an
+obsolete old town where his parents were tradespeople; his early
+schooling, how he had come to Oxford on a scholarship, and how he had
+stayed there ever since, living in the same College, his parents having
+died, and the Logic tutorship being offered to him just when he had
+taken his degree. So he seemed to have lived a long while there, in that
+sleepy old College, within its high walls and buildings: as an
+undergraduate first, busy and almost solitary, save for a few friends
+similar to himself; then as a tutor, still more busy with his work, and
+still more solitary; and above all, during the last few years, when all
+his thought and leisure had been given to his book on Ionic
+philosophers. How many years was it altogether? Eight; no, ten. And
+then, as she seemed to be really interested, he gave a sketch, half
+humorous and half serious, of his life in College, his amusements, his
+walks with Ranken. A bare, monastic life it seemed to himself when he
+came to describe it. So little to tell of in so many years; and how long
+ago it seemed!
+
+"But dear me!" Craik exclaimed at last, with a blush, "I don't think I
+have ever talked so much of myself before. It sounds rather dull, I'm
+afraid."
+
+Miss Lamb stopped for a moment.
+
+"Dull, Mr. Craik," she cried, "oh no, I think it is noble! To have
+achieved so much already. You don't know how I have been interested!
+Only it is so--I mean it makes me seem so--so--. I suppose you hate
+women."
+
+"Oh no--_no_!"
+
+"I mean look down on them, despise them."
+
+"No! why I--"
+
+"I'm afraid you really do, only you're too polite to say so. You don't
+think, do you, that they could understand philosophy?"
+
+"Of course they could, quite as well as we do, if they would only try."
+
+"Do you think it would be any use my trying? Really, do you really? I
+should so love to, if it would be of any use. You know, I have always
+wanted to understand about it, and there is hardly anyone in the world I
+admire so much as the philosophers. They are the real leaders of the
+world--Socrates, and Emerson, and Herbert Spencer. And a frivolous life
+like mine seems sometimes so--; But then people will never believe I am
+in earnest, and they all make fun of me and discourage me so. Perhaps
+they are right; but I have never had any one to help me."
+
+"Oh, I am sure they are wrong!" Craik cried. "If you would only try. Do
+you think I could--could help you?"
+
+"Oh, you are too kind! And perhaps, if you wouldn't mind coming to see
+me some afternoon to talk to me about it. And maybe you would bring
+your book; I should so love to see it! And then if you would let me look
+at one or two of your lectures, those you have for just the stupidest of
+your pupils. No! don't tell me I'm not stupid, for I am, I assure you.
+And I have no right to ask you to come; you are so busy."
+
+"Oh, but I should be only too delighted! If I may; if you don't think I
+should be a--with ladies, you know, I am always so afraid of being a
+bore."
+
+She smiled at him.
+
+"Ah, you do yourself injustice, Mr. Craik. Indeed you do! But come," she
+added suddenly, "we must be going back to the garden. How I hate to
+leave this dear old cloister!"
+
+"Must we really go?"
+
+"Yes, we really must. Isn't it horrid, when you have had such an
+interesting talk, to have to go back and say stupid and silly things to
+stupid and silly people?"
+
+They left the cloisters and, crossing the quadrangle, they stopped for a
+moment, and looked at the blue picture set in an archway of grey walls,
+the blue picture of the afternoon light and air in the depth and
+distance of the garden.
+
+"How pretty! It's like,--what is it like?"
+
+"Like standing in the past, and looking into the present?" Craik
+romantically suggested.
+
+"Yes, it's like that. But I mean the people, the way they look so far
+off and blue, as if they were under water. There's something else it
+reminds me of."
+
+"A tank at an aquarium, when you look through the plate glass?"
+
+"Yes, it _is_ like that, really!"
+
+"With Professors and Heads of Houses swimming about like old fat carp."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Craik, how can you? For shame!"
+
+She paused again when she got through the archway.
+
+"Tell me, Mr. Craik," she said, "is this the tower you live in? And
+the gargoyle you told me about? I should so like to see him. He
+must be charming. That face up there, peering over the roof? Oh yes,
+I see. How too delightful! My! isn't that quaint? Just think, he
+looks back on the past, and on the present, and on the town; and it
+symbolizes--symbolizes--Life, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes,--perhaps it does," Craik said rather dubiously.
+
+"He hasn't exactly a kind expression," said Miss Lamb, looking up
+again.
+
+"No," Craik answered, looking up himself and laughing. "That's his way.
+Then to-day he's shocked at seeing so many ladies here. He doesn't like
+ladies, you know."
+
+"How horrid of him! Why, what harm can we do here?"
+
+"Harm! Why, Miss Lamb," Craik said with quaint politeness, "your visits
+are our greatest blessings!"
+
+Craik knew the old garden well, he thought, and he had certainly been in
+it in all weathers. But to-day it came over him that he had never seen
+the place before looking so oddly green and shining. Certainly, when he
+and Ranken had walked there--poor Ranken! Craik smiled a little.
+
+"What are you smiling at?" Miss Lamb asked.
+
+"Smiling?" Craik said in embarrassment. "Why, was I smiling?"
+
+"Certainly you were. It is strange, really it is, how much you are like
+a friend of mine in America. The way you smile reminds me so much of
+him. Really it is quite funny, the resemblance. But perhaps you don't
+like to be told you look like other people?"
+
+"Oh yes, I do." Then he added, after a pause, with desperate and awkward
+courage, "if they are friends of yours."
+
+Miss Lamb did not seem to notice either his compliment or his blush.
+
+"How odd you should know Mr. Ranken," she said musingly. "I've not seen
+him lately. Is he as sentimental as ever?"
+
+"Ranken of St. Thomas'! Why, he's not sentimental. It must be someone
+else."
+
+"He used to be then; I'm sure it is Mr. Ranken of St. Thomas'. I met him
+last summer at Dieppe. We went on picnics. But, Mr. Craik," she added,
+laughing, "really this garden is like Paradise! The undergraduates must
+fancy they have got back into the Garden of Eden."
+
+"Indeed you would think so," said Craik, "from the way they avoid the
+tree of knowledge! They are so much cleverer than Adam."
+
+They were in the midst of the party now, and Craik was proud, though
+somewhat embarrassed, with the attention they attracted, and Mrs.
+Cotton's smiles of obvious encouragement. Indeed he was almost glad when
+Cobbe joined them and, planting himself in front of Miss Lamb,
+exclaimed, "Well, Miss Lamb, well! Here I've been waiting half-an-hour
+with this ice, it's melted into soup."
+
+"I'm so sorry," Miss Lamb cried. "Come, let's get another." Then she
+turned her eyes to Craik and said, giving him her hand in her friendly
+manner, "Good-bye, Mr. Craik, good-bye; you won't forget? To-morrow,
+isn't it?"
+
+
+III.
+
+Craik took off his hat; wiped his forehead; tried to get rid of some of
+the dust on his boots, and then he rang the bell.
+
+"Is Miss Lamb at home?"
+
+"Yes, sir; Miss Lamb is in the garden."
+
+Entering, Craik saw a number of hats and sticks in the hall. Miss Lamb,
+he thought, must have several brothers. He put down his stick, and the
+book with it, after a moment's hesitation; that was better, he would
+leave it there and would come and fetch it when the conversation turned
+that way. Then, buttoning up his black coat over the lecture notes that
+filled his pocket, he followed the servant through the house out into
+the little garden. It was full of strong sunlight, and there were
+several undergraduates there. One was up in a tree; Cobbe lay in a
+hammock smoking, and another of Craik's pupils lay on the grass at Miss
+Lamb's feet, rolling lemons. He stopped for a moment.
+
+"Oh Mr. Corn--Mr. Craik, I mean," Miss Lamb called out in a friendly
+voice, "I am so glad to see you."
+
+Craik advanced with an awkward smile, and Miss Lamb reached out her
+right hand most cordially. In her left hand she held a lemon-squeezer.
+
+"How good of you to come! And isn't it hot? Exactly like America, I've
+been saying. We've just come out into the garden without our hats. Won't
+you sit down on that rug, if you don't mind? Oh, I nearly forgot; let me
+introduce you to my aunt, Mrs. Stacey. I guess you know everybody else."
+
+Craik shook hands with a lady who was sitting and knitting in an arbour,
+nodded to the undergraduates, and then settled down on a rug in the
+sunshine. How he wished that he had not decided at the last moment to
+wear a tall hat and a long coat! The undergraduates were all in
+flannels.
+
+Miss Lamb spoke of the garden party.
+
+"Your lovely college! It is _too_ ideal; it is like a dream. And the
+cloisters too! You don't know how solemn it made me feel. Now, you
+needn't laugh, Mr. Cobbe, I really did feel solemn--more solemn, I
+guess, than you have ever been. Gracious, it _is_ hot!" she added, with
+a sudden change of subject. "Mr. Craik, let me give you some of this
+lemon squash; I made it myself."
+
+"Thanks! I shall be most pleased to have some." Craik's voice seemed to
+himself to be formal, and his phrase pedantic.
+
+"Oh, but what was I saying?" Miss Lamb went on, looking at the company
+generally.
+
+"You were telling us how solemn you were," Cobbe suggested. "Wasn't it
+rather a new experience?"
+
+"Now, Mr. Cobbe, what a horrid thing to say," she replied, with great
+good-nature. "You're his tutor, Mr. Craik, aren't you? Well, next time
+you have a chance, I hope you'll set him some real horrid work to do.
+I'm sure he needs it."
+
+Miss Lamb said this casually, with a pleasant laugh, as she fanned
+herself. No one answered; Craik, and even Cobbe coloured, and the
+undergraduate in the tree suppressed a titter.
+
+But Mrs. Stacey at this moment asked by happy chance some question of
+Craik, addressing him as "Professor Craik," in her high American voice,
+and he hastened to answer her with effusion.
+
+"Oh, I say," one of the undergraduates exclaimed, "that was a splendid
+score of yours, Miss Lamb, off the Warden. Perhaps you've not heard it,
+Mr. Craik, the joke about the Garden of Eden?" he said, turning to
+Craik, who had come to an end of his conversation with Mrs. Stacey. "The
+Warden was showing Miss Lamb the garden, when she said to him, 'Why it
+is like the Garden of Eden here, Mr. Warden; only I suppose you are
+wiser than Adam, and don't disturb the Tree of Knowledge.'"
+
+"My dear," Mrs. Stacey cried, "you didn't really speak so to the sweet
+old Warden?"
+
+"But, I say," Cobbe exclaimed, "how's this, Miss Lamb? Long and Maple
+Fetters tell that story as having been got off them, and they seemed to
+think that they rather scored off you."
+
+"They didn't a bit; they were only silly!"
+
+"Then you did get it off on them?"
+
+"No, I didn't."
+
+"Oh, now, that explains," another undergraduate interposed, "that
+explains the story Mrs. Cotton was trying to tell. It seemed, as she
+told it, to have no point at all. 'Mr. Warden,' she made you say, 'Mr.
+Warden, you have a lovely garden here, but I am told you never pick the
+fruit.' 'The Warden, you know, is so particular about his figs,' Mrs.
+Cotton added, 'it is quite a joke with all the Fellows.'"
+
+Miss Lamb was silent. After a little while, however, when a few other
+anecdotes of Mrs. Cotton had been told, and they came to the well-known
+story of that lady and the cow in St. Giles's, she began to smile, and
+before long was quite consumed with merriment, for a siphon of
+soda-water, fizzing off by mistake in the hands of one of the
+undergraduates, had sprinkled itself over Cobbe.
+
+"You did that on purpose, Galpin, I know you did," he cried, jumping out
+of the hammock and shaking himself.
+
+"Oh, no, he didn't!" Miss Lamb said, shaking with laughter. "Indeed, I'm
+sure he wouldn't for worlds!"
+
+Her attention was then taken by the youth up in the tree, who had been
+throwing down leaves and bits of sticks on the heads of the party below.
+A piece of bark falling into the jug of lemon squash, Miss Lamb feigned
+great wrath and indignation.
+
+"I wanted to give Mr. Craik some more; but oh, you haven't drunk what
+you have! Isn't it sweet enough for you?"
+
+"It is just right, thank you," he said, and he took up the glass, tepid
+now from standing in the sun, and was just going to drink it, when the
+young lady cried: "Oh, wait a moment, please; there's a poor little
+insect tumbled into it. Dear little thing! Do take it out--oh, be
+careful! I can't bear to see anything suffer."
+
+Craik fished the insect out of the lemonade with a blade of grass, and
+Miss Lamb, putting it down on the ground, poked it tenderly in aid of
+its moist attempts to crawl away. Ultimately Craik rose from his
+uncomfortable posture on the ground. It was a long while, it seemed to
+him, that he had been sitting there, smiling and solemn in the sunshine,
+and casting about in his mind for an excuse to go; while the others he
+envied so--the youth perched up in the tree, Miss Lamb fanning herself
+and squeezing lemons, Cobbe smoking and slowly swinging in the hammock,
+laughed and lazily talked, as if their life was one afternoon of endless
+Arcadian leisure. But Craik had a morbid sense that his shadow, which he
+glanced at now and then, had been growing, almost as if he were
+swelling, he and his top hat, and casting a larger shade on the little
+garden.
+
+"Well, I must be going! We college tutors, you know," he said, feeling
+pretty stiff in body and mind, but attempting nevertheless a little
+jauntiness of air.
+
+"Oh, but, Mr. Craik, you mustn't go now!" Miss Lamb cried, "really you
+mustn't. Why, we're all going up the river to have late tea at Godstow,
+and come home by moonlight; and I'm going to take my banjo. I hoped you
+would come with us!"
+
+"I'm sorry, but I must be back."
+
+"Well, I'm really sorry, too; I am, indeed. You must come again." She
+held his hand in hers for a second, and there was something appealing in
+her manner. "Now you will come again, won't you? It's--it's rather hot
+just to-day for philosophy, isn't it?" she added, her face brightening
+with a friendly and apologetic smile.
+
+Craik found his hat and stick, but not his book, in the hall.
+
+"I've left a book here," he said to the maid.
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, I thought it was for Miss Lamb, so I put it
+on the shelf where she puts the other university gentlemen's books that
+they sends. I'll go and bring it, sir."
+
+"Is this it?" she called from a neighbouring room--"'Elements of
+Pishcology?'"
+
+"No," said Craik, hurriedly; "it's about Asia Minor. 'Life and Thought
+in--'"
+
+"'In Hearly Asia Minor,' sir?"
+
+"Yes, that's mine," Craik answered, in a voice that was not without a
+touch of melancholy.
+
+
+
+
+_Buller Intervening_
+
+
+As Vaughan was walking towards the underground station one of those
+bleak mornings last winter, he saw, coming the same way, a man who had
+been at College in his time--one Buller by name; and Buller, when he
+caught sight of Vaughan, began to smile, but when they met, he
+exclaimed, in a mock mournful voice, "I say, have you heard about poor
+Crabbe?"
+
+"You mean his political speech, when his spectacles were smashed, and he
+had to take to the woods?" asked Vaughan, beating his hands and
+stamping, for the cold was bitter.
+
+"Oh no, that's ancient. I mean"--and Buller's voice broke with
+laughter--"I mean his engagement!"
+
+"Crabbe! oh, nonsense!"
+
+"Gospel fact, I'll take my oath on it. Fancy Crabbe!" and again his
+laughter froze into white puffs of breath about his head. They went into
+the station together, and bought their tickets. Crabbe engaged! Vaughan
+tried to picture him as an accepted lover. Poor Crabbe! They had all
+hoped that his Fellowship and his work on the metres of Catullus would
+keep him out of mischief. But they might have known--those prize
+fellows, with so much time on their hands; and Crabbe above all, with
+his fixed idea that he was cut out for a man of action!
+
+"But tell me about Crabbe," Vaughan said, as they waited on the
+platform; "have you seen him?"
+
+"Oh yes. The other day I ran up to have a look at the 'Torpid.' It's all
+right now."
+
+"The Torpid?"
+
+"No; I mean about Crabbe."
+
+"You think it's a good match, then?"
+
+"Good match! No, I mean that I went and talked to him myself."
+
+"And he was engaged?"
+
+"He _was_," said Buller, laughing; "poor old beast!" The train drew in,
+and when they had taken their seats, Buller leaned over, and, with a low
+voice, went on telling his story in Vaughan's ear. "You see, I went up
+to Oxford, and down at the barge Blunt tells me about old Crabbe; and
+when I go into College the first person I meet is the Dean, looking as
+chirpy as ever. How those old parsons do keep it up!
+
+"'Well, sir,' says I, 'and what do you think of Crabbe's engagement?'
+
+"'Perfect rot,' says the Dean. 'The girl had no money; how were they
+going to live? Crabbe would have to chuck his Catullus--everything.'
+
+"'How did it happen?' I asked. 'Crabbe never used to be sweet on the
+ladies.' 'No; but in reading Catullus, Crabbe had got some ideas,' the
+Dean said, with a kind of wink."
+
+Here Vaughan could not help interrupting the story. "Come, Buller," he
+whispered, "it must have been Blunt who said that. The old Dean couldn't
+talk in that way."
+
+But Buller felt sure it was the Dean. "You see, you don't know the old
+boy; he's quite another person with me. Anyhow, that's the way Crabbe
+got into it. And he went on, the Dean said, to read all sorts of other
+poetry, especially that man--what you may call him? They had a
+society--"
+
+"Browning?"
+
+"Yes, that's the man. Well, Crabbe thought it all very fine and
+exciting, the Dean said; he used to read them Browning in the Common
+Room, and there was one thing he seemed specially taken with--Browning's
+theory of love."
+
+"What was that?" Vaughan asked, for it was a joy to hear Buller talking
+of literature.
+
+"Well," Buller whispered, "you see this man Browning hates all your
+shilly-shallying about; he thinks that when you fall in love, you ought
+to go your whole pile, even if you come a cropper after. It's all rot,
+of course, the Dean said; but poor Crabbe thought it was real, and went
+and proposed to a young woman he had met once or twice. So there he
+was, engaged! And he seemed to think himself the hell of a duke, the
+Dean said; but everyone else in Oxford thought he was making a bl--"
+
+"Oh, Buller," Vaughan interposed, "really, you mustn't put such words
+into the Dean's mouth!"
+
+"Well, I don't quite remember the old boy's lingo, but, at any rate, the
+Dean thought Crabbe was making a fool of himself. 'I think I can settle
+it,' says I to the Dean. 'I wish you would,' said the Dean; so off I go
+to Crabbe's rooms. He came in just as I got there; I wish you could have
+seen him--a frock-coat, top-hat, flower in his button-hole, his hair
+plastered down. And only last year, it was, that he got up as a
+Socialist, with a red silk handkerchief in his hat! But now he shook
+hands with me up in the air; was most affable and condescending; assured
+me he was glad to see his old pals--especially friends from London.
+Oxford people were very well in their way, but narrow, and rather
+donnish. Didn't I notice it in coming from London?
+
+"Well, this was almost too much from Crabbe, but I thought it would be
+more sport to draw him out a bit. So we got to talking; I didn't let on
+I knew he was engaged, but after a bit I began to talk about marriage
+and love and all that in a general sort of way. Old Crabbe swallows it
+all, talks a lot of literary stuff. 'Fall in love, Buller,' says he,
+'fall in love, and live! Let me read you what thing-a-majig says,' and
+he gets down a book--who did you say he was? Browning, yes, that's the
+man--he gets down a book of Browning's and begins to read--you ought to
+have seen him, his face got pink; and at the end he says, with a proud
+smile, as if the poem was all about him, 'Isn't that ripping, Buller,
+isn't that brave, isn't that the way to take life!'
+
+"'Do you mind if I smoke?' said I.
+
+"'Smoke? Oh, do certainly,' and Crabbe sits down looking rather foolish.
+But after a moment, he says in an easy sort of way, 'Ah, I meant to ask
+you about all the chaps in London--getting on all right? any of them
+married?'
+
+"'Married!' says I, 'O Lord, no; _they_ don't want to dish themselves.'
+
+"'Dish themselves,' says Crabbe, 'why, what do you mean?'
+
+"'I mean what I say; if you get married without any money, you're
+dished, that's all--I mean practical people, who want to get on.'
+
+"Then Crabbe began to talk big; one shouldn't care only for success--it
+might be practical, perhaps, but he did not mean to sacrifice the
+greatest thing in life for money.
+
+"'The greatest thing in life--what's that?'"
+
+Buller laughed so loudly at this part of his story, that the other
+people in the carriage began to stare at him and Vaughan. So he went on
+in a lower whisper. "'What's that?' says I.
+
+"'I mean,' says Crabbe, 'why, what I have been talking about.'
+
+"'Well, what is it?'
+
+"'What I was saying a little while ago.'
+
+"'But you talked too fast--I couldn't catch it; give us the tip, out
+with it.'
+
+"'I mean love, passion,' says he.
+
+"'What? say it again.'
+
+"'Well, I mean--and it's always said that love--the poets--'
+
+"'The who?'
+
+"'The poets.'" Again Buller laughed out loud.
+
+"'Oh, poets!' says I, 'I thought you said porters. Poets! so you've
+been reading poets, have you? but you oughtn't to believe all that--why,
+they don't mean it themselves; they write it because they're expected
+to, but it's all faked up--I know how it's done.'
+
+"Old Crabbe begins to talk in his big way. I let him go on for a while,
+but then I said, 'See here, Crabbe, it's all very well to read that
+literary stuff, and I suppose it's what you're paid for doing. But don't
+go and think it's all true, because it isn't, and the sooner you know it
+the better.' 'There was a man I knew once,' says I, 'who got fearfully
+let in by just this sort of thing; Oxford don too, Fellow of Queen's
+named Peake; took to reading poetry; he went to Brighton in the Long,
+with his head full of it all. Wild sea waves, the moon and all the rest
+of it; and back comes Peake married; had to turn out of his College
+rooms, went to live at the other end of nowhere, stuffy little house,
+full of babies, had to work like a nigger, beastly work too; coached me
+for Smalls, that's how I know him; no time for moon and sea waves now;
+and it all came from reading poetry.'
+
+"Old Crabbe begins to sit up at this. 'But I don't see,' he says, 'I
+don't see why--didn't he have his Fellowship money?'
+
+"'But you don't suppose that's going to support a wife and a lot of
+children.'
+
+"'Oh, if he had children,' says Crabbe, and the old boy begins to blush
+and says, 'I don't see the need.'
+
+"'Much you know about it, Crabbe,' says I, and I couldn't help laughing,
+he looked such an idiot.
+
+"'Well, anyhow,' he says, 'your friend may have been unfortunate, but I
+respect him all the same; he was bold, he lived.'
+
+"'What does all that mean?--he didn't die, of course!'
+
+"'I mean he loved--he had that.'
+
+"'Oh yes, he had, but I rather think he wished he hadn't. He said it
+didn't come to much--and even when he was engaged she used to bore him
+sometimes.'
+
+"'Really!' says old Crabbe, 'that's odd now,' and then he goes on, as if
+he was talking to himself, 'I wonder if everyone feels like that?'
+
+"'Of course they do! But after you're married, just think of it--never
+quiet, never alone; Peake said it nearly drove him wild. And to think he
+was tied up like that for the rest of his life!'
+
+"'Yes, it is a long time.' Crabbe began to look rather green. 'Your
+friend--his name was Peake, I think you said--I suppose he couldn't have
+broken off the engagement?' and he smiled in a sort of sea-sick way.
+
+"'Of course he could,' says I, as I got up to go. 'Perfect ass not
+to--but good-bye, Crabbe, you've got jolly rooms here.'
+
+"'Yes, they are nice,' says Crabbe in a kind of sinking voice.
+
+"So, a day or two after, I meet the Dean; the old boy seems very much
+pleased. 'Well Buller, I think you've done the biz,' says he; 'I don't
+believe old Crabbe will do it after all.'"
+
+When he had finished his story, Buller leaned comfortably back. "I felt
+sure he would get out of it somehow," he said aloud, "I think that story
+finished him." "You know what I mean," he added, nodding significantly,
+"that story of Peake."
+
+"I don't believe Peake ever existed!" Vaughan answered, as low as he
+could.
+
+Buller leaned forward again, he was almost bursting with laughter. "Of
+course he didn't!" he hissed in Vaughan's ear. "But wasn't Crabbe in a
+blue funk though!"
+
+"Oh, I don't believe Crabbe minded you a bit. I'm sure he won't break it
+off," Vaughan whispered indignantly. "And what right had you to talk
+that way? I never heard of such impertinent meddling!"
+
+"Bet you three to one he does," Buller whispered back. "Come, man, make
+it a bet!" The train drew into the Temple station and Vaughan got up.
+
+"I won't bet on anything of the kind," he said, as he stood at the door.
+"And what do you know about love anyhow, Buller? Then think of the poor
+girl, she probably believes that Crabbe is a hero, a god--"
+
+"Well, she won't for long," Buller chuckled.
+
+
+
+
+_The Optimist_
+
+
+What was he doing there? why didn't he ride on? Mrs. Ross wondered, as
+she watched with some astonishment the tall young man who was staring in
+at the gate. But in a moment her husband left the hedge he was trimming,
+and waved his shears at the stranger, who thereupon came in, pushing his
+bicycle with him along the drive. When the two young men met, they
+seemed to greet each other like old acquaintances. Probably he was one
+of George's Oxford friends, she thought, beginning to feel a little shy,
+as they walked towards her across the grass. The bicyclist was thin and
+very tall; his shadow, in the late sunshine, seemed to stretch endlessly
+over the grass. His face was bathed in perspiration; he was grey with
+dust, and altogether he looked very shabby by the side of her
+good-looking husband.
+
+"Mary, I want to introduce my friend, Mr. Allen, to you." Mrs. Ross was
+always a little afraid of her husband's friends; then Allen was a don at
+Oxford, and she knew he was considered extremely clever. However she
+greeted him in her friendly, charming way. He would have tea, of course?
+
+Allen gripped her hand, smiling awkwardly. No, he wouldn't have tea, and
+he was afraid it was very late for calling; he must apologize; indeed,
+when he got to the gate, he had hesitated about coming in.
+
+Oh, no! it wasn't late, she assured him; and her husband declared he
+must stay to dinner. He had never seen the Grange before and, of course,
+they must show him everything.
+
+"Oh, I don't think I can stay to dinner," Allen murmured, looking
+through his spectacles at his dusty clothes. But at last he consented
+though doubtfully; he was staying at Sunbridge, he explained, and it was
+rather a long ride over.
+
+Ross took him to the house; soon he reappeared, well brushed, his pale
+and thoughtful face pink with scrubbing. They walked with him about the
+gardens, then they went to their little farm, showing him the cows and
+horses, and the new-built hayrick.
+
+George Ross was a young land agent who, not long after leaving Oxford,
+had had the luck to get a good appointment; and for more than a year he
+and his young wife had been living here in the most absurdly happy way.
+Now and then his Oxford friends would come to visit him, and it filled
+Ross with delight and pride to show them over his new domain.
+
+As they came back from the farm through the garden, Ross stopped a
+moment. "Doesn't the house look well from here!" he said to Allen. The
+roofs, gables, and trees stood out dark against the golden west; the
+garden, with its old red walls, sweet peas, and roses, was filled with
+mellow light.
+
+Allen gazed at the view through his spectacles, and expressed a proper
+admiration. But of himself he seemed to notice nothing, and Mrs. Ross
+was rather hurt by the way he went past her borders of flowers without
+ever looking at them.
+
+"You see it's just the kind of life that suits me--suits both of us,"
+Ross explained; "I don't see how I could have found anything better. Of
+course," he added modestly, "of course some men might not think much of
+work like this. But I consider myself tremendously fortunate--I didn't
+really deserve such luck."
+
+"Quite so," Allen assented in a way that Mrs. Ross thought rather odd,
+till she decided that it was merely absent-mindedness. Every now and
+then she would look at Allen--the tall, thin, threadbare young man
+puzzled her a little; he seemed so extremely dull and embarrassed; and
+yet there was a thoughtful, kind look in his eyes that she liked. And
+anyhow he was George's friend; so, as they walked rather silently and
+awkwardly about, waiting for dinner, she tried to talk to him, making
+remarks in her eager way, and glancing sometimes at her husband for fear
+he might be laughing at her. Such subjects as bicycling, the roads, the
+weather, and life in Oxford, were started, and they both talked to their
+guest with the exaggerated politeness of newly married people, who would
+much rather be talking to each other. Yes, the road over was very
+pretty, Allen agreed. But was there a river? He remembered noticing how
+pretty the road was, but he had not noticed that it ran by any river.
+And all their questions he answered with a certain eagerness, but in a
+way that somehow made the subject drop.
+
+"Well, I finished the hedge," Ross said at last, turning to his wife.
+"You said I wouldn't."
+
+"Oh, but wait till I see it for myself!"
+
+The young man looked at her gloomily. "You see how it is, Allen, she
+doesn't believe her husband's word!"
+
+"Oh, hush, George," she said, and they both began to laugh like
+children. Then they turned to Allen again. Was he comfortable where he
+was staying? she asked.
+
+Well no, honestly, it wasn't very comfortable, Allen replied. To tell
+the truth, he was rather disappointed in the place. He had gone there
+after hearing some undergraduates describe it, and tell how amusing they
+had found the people. But, somehow, he had not found the people
+different from people anywhere else. But then he had only made the
+acquaintance of one man--
+
+"Well, didn't he turn out to be an old poacher, or a gipsy, or something
+romantic?" asked Mrs. Ross.
+
+"No, not at all--he was a Methodist Calvinist deacon, who gave me a lift
+one wet afternoon, and lectured me all the way about Temperance. And, of
+course," Allen added, with rather a comic smile, "and, of course, I was
+already a total abstainer." They all laughed at this.
+
+What was he working at over there? Ross asked him a few minutes
+afterwards. He was writing a paper, Allen replied; but what it was about
+Mrs. Ross did not understand. She hoped her husband would ask something
+more, but he merely said, "I see," without much interest, adding that he
+had not read any philosophy for years.
+
+When they sat down to dinner, the lady's evening dress, the silver and
+flowers on the table, seemed to make Allen all the more awkward and
+conscious of his appearance. However, he plainly meant to do his best to
+talk, and, after a moment's silence, he remarked that he supposed the
+theory of farming was very interesting.
+
+"Yes, it is," said Mrs. Ross, "and it's such fun ploughing in the
+autumn, and in the spring seeing the young green things come up."
+
+"I suppose the climate is a great factor in the problem."
+
+"Oh, of course, everything depends on that; suppose it comes on to rain
+just when you've cut your hay!"
+
+Ross began to laugh. "I believe my wife thinks of nothing but hay now."
+
+"You farm yourself, don't you?" Allen asked, looking at her rather
+timidly.
+
+"Oh, a little; I always say I manage our little farm, and I'm going to
+learn to plough. And I keep chickens--this is one of mine--poor little
+thing!" she added.
+
+"She pretends to be sorry now, but when she has a chance to sell her
+chickens I never saw anyone so bloodthirsty."
+
+"Oh, George, how can you say such things? Don't believe him, Mr. Allen.
+And anyhow," she added (it seemed a platitude, but platitudes were
+better than absolute silence), "anyhow, I suppose it is what the
+chickens are meant for."
+
+To her surprise this mild remark led to an animated argument. For Allen,
+in agreeing with her, said something about "the general scheme of
+things." Ross began to laugh at this, and asked Allen if he still held
+to that old system of his. Allen answered this question so earnestly,
+that the lady looked at him with wonder.
+
+Yes! he held to it more firmly than ever; he was sure it could be
+maintained! Indeed, seriously he had come to feel more and more that you
+must accept something of the kind. Ross dissented in a joking way, but
+Allen would not be put off; he began talking rapidly and eagerly, almost
+forgetting his dinner as he argued. He drank a great deal of cold water,
+and his thin face grew quite flushed with excitement.
+
+Mrs. Ross looked from one to the other with puzzled eyes; probably that
+was the way they had been used to talk at Oxford, but what it was about
+she could not understand. She only felt sorry for Allen, he evidently
+cared so much, was as anxious to prove his point as if his whole life
+depended on it, while her husband seemed to treat the whole thing rather
+as a joke.
+
+Soon she gave up trying to listen, and though the sound of their voices
+was in her ears, her mind wandered out into the garden, to the farm and
+meadows. But Allen's voice, appealing to her, called her suddenly back.
+"I'm sure you agree with me, Mrs. Ross," he said, without the least
+shyness. He plainly looked on her now as nothing but a mind which might
+agree or disagree. "I'm sure you must regard it as existing for rational
+ends."
+
+"But what do you mean by 'It,' Mr. Allen?" she asked, very much puzzled.
+
+"Why, the universe, of course."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she said, shaking her head and laughing. "It makes
+me dizzy to think of it. As for George, I wouldn't mind what he says,
+Mr. Allen; he believes all sorts of dreadful things, and he's always
+making fun--look how he's laughing at me now. George, will you have your
+coffee in here, or in the drawing-room?"
+
+"Oh, in the drawing-room--we'll come in a minute, when we've settled the
+universe." As she went out, she heard them still arguing.
+
+And they had not ended it when they came into the drawing-room a little
+later.
+
+"But I deny that pain is an evil. I appeal to you," Allen said, turning
+to Mrs. Ross; "don't you think that pain is necessary?"
+
+"But necessary for what, Mr. Allen?"
+
+"Why, if we want to be really happy, I mean," he went on, trying to make
+himself quite clear, "I mean, suppose we lived as they do in the
+Tropics, sitting under trees all day."
+
+Ross also turned to her, "Well, Mary, tell us what you think?"
+
+Mrs. Ross laughed. "I'm afraid I'm not a fair judge, Mr. Allen, I'm so
+fond of sitting under trees, and I must say I think it sounds rather
+nice. Do you have sugar in your coffee?"
+
+"No sugar, thanks. But surely," he went on as if he had an argument now
+that would be certain to convince a lady. "Surely a certain amount of
+discomfort is an advantage! Now, take a child for instance, to educate
+it you have to make it suffer."
+
+"Oh, indeed you don't, Mr. Allen," she said so promptly, and in such a
+voice, that Allen seemed a little disconcerted.
+
+Ross begged for a little music. She sat down to the piano and began to
+play--with a little emotion at first, which soon died out of the quiet
+sounds. The window was open on the lawn; the faint light, the odours of
+the garden, mingled with the soft music.
+
+They sat in silence for a moment. At last Allen rose; he must be going,
+he said, he had his paper to finish.
+
+"But it is nice here," he added, with half a sigh, as if vaguely aware,
+for a moment, of the romantic happiness about him. Then his mind seemed
+to revert to the argument; if Ross would only read Hegel's _Logic_--
+
+"Well, we might read it aloud in the evenings perhaps," the young man
+answered, laughing. "Have you got a lamp on your machine?" "Yes, I think
+there is." They went out to the gate and, lighting his lamp, they sent
+him off into the twilight. Then they walked slowly back towards the
+house. A few stars were kindled above the dim trees; the air was
+fragrant with the scent of the hay, and through the stillness the faint
+noise of life came across the meadows--a woman singing, the voices of
+children, and sleepy sounds of cattle.
+
+"How good it is!" the young man said, drawing his companion closer to
+him. "But people are always coming, aren't they? It's dreadful! we never
+do seem to see anything of each other."
+
+"No, do we! But he's a nice man, Mr. Allen. I liked him."
+
+"Oh, old Allen's a good sort."
+
+"What does he do--how does he live in Oxford?"
+
+"He teaches philosophy, and lives on bread and tea in little lodgings."
+
+"It sounds awfully dreary--"
+
+"Well, it is rather dreary for him, poor man. I wouldn't be there for a
+good deal."
+
+"But, tell me, what was that he was arguing about?"
+
+"Oh, that's his philosophy; he's always arguing about it. He believes in
+a kind of Hegelianism."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Oh, it's a view of things; he's what you call an Optimist."
+
+"But I thought an Optimist was a person who was very happy?"
+
+"No; it only means a man who believes that you ought to be happy, that
+you are meant to enjoy life--that the world is good."
+
+"But you don't mean that he was trying to _prove_ that?"
+
+"Why, yes, you heard him; he's always at it when you give him a chance.
+He thinks it must be so, that you can deduce it from the first
+principles of things."
+
+But Mrs. Ross could not be made to understand it. To her it seemed that
+either you were happy or you weren't. "And, then, fancy trying to prove
+it to us!" she kept saying.
+
+At last she took her husband's arm to go in; but still stood for a
+moment in silence thinking it over. "That poor Mr. Allen!" she exclaimed
+at last, "an Optimist, you said he was?"
+
+
+Glasgow: Printed at the University Press by Robert MacLehose & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Youth of Parnassus and Other
+Stories, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41682 ***