VI
Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute 'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said—what was true enough—that life under such conditions was not worth living; we added—what was less true—that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.
Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which—as we were out of College—other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who—so far as I could see—were living solely for pleasure.
In Oxford during springtime, with the chestnuts, lilac and laburnum blazing into colour, it is nothing short of sacrilege to read Select Charters and Documents of Constitutional History. As the evenings lengthened we used to find alfresco coffee-parties being held in a corner of Peck. I made the acquaintance of Summertown, an irrepressible freckled, red-haired little Etonian, the permanent thorn in the side of his father, Lord Marlyn, who was at this time Councillor of Embassy in Paris. It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed. O'Rane would be found at the piano,—or on top of it with a guitar across his knees,—and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early stars shining down from the darkening sky.
I had predicted that Raney's personality would impress itself upon Oxford, though I never underestimated the difficulty in a place so given over to particularism and fierce local jealousies. At this time the only men who had a reputation outside their own colleges were perhaps six in number: Blair of Trinity, who walked round Oxford of an afternoon with a hawk on his wrist; "Pongo" Jerrold, who kept pedigree bloodhounds; Granville, the President of the O.U.D.S.; Johnny Carstairs, who removed the minute hand from the post office clock in St. Aldate's every night of the Michaelmas term; and perhaps two more, of whom O'Rane was one. As so often, the world knew him for his accidents and overlooked his essence. He was quoted as a Union speaker of wild gesticulation and frenzied Celtic eloquence; as a pamphleteer and lampoonist who could seemingly write impromptu verse on any subject, in all metres and most languages; as the author of ninety-five per cent of "The Critic," a short-lived weekly started by Mayhew, who, I am convinced, would establish morning, evening, monthly and quarterly periodicals the day after being washed up on the beach of a desert island.
Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality. With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the arrangement of a dinner, as he was then—as always—sublimely indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed 'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member of Senior Common Room.
"Sacre nom de chien!" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete, Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! A bas les snobs!" He seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. Conspuez les accapareurs!" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced. "Come and sing to 'em, George!
As one that for a weary space hath dined
Lulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed intoxication might be "a good dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."
"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint? Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be 'ick."
I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as a premier Manqué. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he went to the Bar, and I"—a little bitterly—"I thought of going to the Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."
When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before," he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish kings before the hapless Norman invasion—utterly wanting in self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed in language of greater splendour than the last.
It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough, nearly broke O'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "He made Oxford for me."
Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford for a good many people. His rooms—in Loring's phrase—were like a gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in him."
Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the formula and parodied it.
"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days, Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."
Où sont les neiges d'antan? Within six weeks we were scattered, and in twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've only got six days more?"
"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.
"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read Law or something?"
I shook my head.
"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be just as bad in a year's time."
We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and one.
"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current. "Damn' good fun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going to do now, George?"
"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.
The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions. Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar—more usually, however, I waited for something to turn up.
"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"
"And bury myself as an extra attaché in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever come back I shall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result with the maximum of effort."
Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.
"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.
"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"
The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.
"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."
"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.
"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.
"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."
He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place, he broke silence to say:
"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an extraordinary thing—frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than let them hear me; so I hung on—sort of biting on the bullet—till it was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends, you were all my blood and breed—not like in the old Chicago days. And then—oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed such utter fools.... Still, I won through."
"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly gentle.
"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good friend to me."
"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."
"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never, never give in till I die!"
Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a paddle and seated himself on the box.
"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go down?"
"Depends."
"What on?"
"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure, I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they're going to do, never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show, something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"
"You've not done badly so far," I put in.
He snorted contemptuously.
"If you've got faith...."
Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.
"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he inquired.
"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."
Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.
"Where do you find his star?—his crazy trust
God knows through what or in what? It's alive
And shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about your tame star, Raney."
O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.
"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough, manual labour's all you're fit for."
"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."
"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'—a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.