With a first look you felt sure that Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot bore a brain. You felt equally sure, with a second, that the opinion was shared, even to exaggeration, by Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot himself.
In dress it was his pleasure to affect Bohemianism. On this particular June morning Gaston wore a brown velveteen coat, a spun silk shirt, a white sombrero hat—the well-tailored man becoming only more conspicuous under the disguise. What smaller things shall be said of him? That he had been brought up as a child in Paris, the only son of a valetudinarian American widow, and spoke French to this hour with a better accent than English, rolling his ‘r’s’ and clipping his vowels like a born denizen of the boulevards. Item: that he had a fair English girl for his wife; item: a loyal, rough-hewn Scottish cousin for his friend—the Dinah and Geoffrey who, breakfasting with appetite although their discourse was of sentiment, made up the paradoxical little group under the lime trees at which we have glanced.
Let us turn to Geoffrey next, leaving Dinah, as I see they leave the first actress in the theatrical advertisements, for the bottom of the list.
The cousinship of the Arbuthnots might be divined at a glance, although, reviewed feature by feature, the two men were notably unlike in their likeness. Both were tall, both were wiry of build, both held their heads high, going along life’s road as though the world, taken from whichever point of view you liked, were decidedly a place worth living in. Here the likeness ended. Gaston, indeed, would declare that by virtue of his mother’s Yankee blood, and his own Parisian instincts, they were less related, physically, than any ordinary cousin-germans.
One overwhelming difference between them was patent. Geoffrey was no beauty-man! When he was the freshest of freshmen, five or six years before the morning of this Guernsey breakfast, Geff went in, one November night, for a little bit of guerilla fighting in the Cambridge streets, which, without quenching the guerilla spirit, effectually left a beauty-spoiling brand upon himself for the remainder of his life.
It happened thus. Geoffrey, raw from school, had newly carried off one of the scholarships best worth winning in the University. Although brave, manly, impetuous, the lad’s hours were early, his habits sober. He belonged, indeed, to a class which young gentlemen, fond of their pleasure, and of modest mental gifts, are apt to label during their first two terms of residence under the generic name of smug. Well, with an old schoolmate, less versed in Greek than himself, Geff had been drinking coffee and conning over such portions of Plato as would be wanted by his friend for the coming Little Go. He was midway on his way back to his scholar’s attic in John’s when, turning sharply round a corner of Petty Cury, he found himself in the thick of a small but classic ‘town and gown.’ A brace of undergraduates, raw as himself, held a mob of roughs at bay; stones, oaths, and brickbats flew about with Homeric profusion. A fine Cambridge drizzle gave atmosphere to the scene. Police, bull-dogs, proctors, were beneath the horizon.
With no other weapons than his fists and his Plato, Geff rushed to the fore. In those early days he had neither the weight nor the staying power which on many a well-contested football field have since made his name a terror to the foe and a tower of strength to All England. He had, however, the force born of will, of brain, of generous impulse. Ere twenty seconds had sped Plato, with all the Platonic philosophy, went to the winds, and the biggest, brawniest of the roughs, stoutly gripped about the neck-cloth region, gave tokens of surrender.
Unfortunately for Geff’s beauty, his antagonist’s left hand held a broken stone bottle. As the ruffian felt himself reel to earth he swung the missile, with dastard might, into the Scotch lad’s face, cutting his nose and forehead very literally to the bone. There came a cry of ‘Proctor!’ There was the shuffle of departing feet. Then Geoffrey, blinded, stunned, fell into a bull-dog’s arms and heard the usual proctorial question as to name and college, addressed with the usual calm proctorial courtesy to himself.
It was a week before the Little Go exams.; and Geoffrey Arbuthnot, as soon as the surgeons could strap his face into a grim resemblance of humanity, went down.
The incident in nowise lessened his Cambridge reputation. Although he eventually came out eighth in the Classical Tripos, it is not known that the most foolish tongue called Arbuthnot of John’s a smug again; tacitly, he was recognised, even by pleasure-loving young gentlemen, as one of that queer ‘good-all-round sort’ in whom the defects of bookishness and staid living are condoned by certain sterling natural virtues—glorious muscle, unconquerable pluck. ‘Virtues that a man can’t help, don’t you know, if they are born in him!’ And which, confusing to the pleasure-loving intelligence though such facts may be, do certainly, in the long run, bring public credit to the Alma Mater.