“What college?” asked Mr. Lampard. “St. Mary’s? Ah, there used to be some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis of Montgomery’s son, was at St. Mary’s, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I published his first volume of poems—of course, you’ve read his books. He was at St. Mary’s. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth. You’ve heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first number, but they’re getting very scarce. All St. Mary’s men and all great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I really don’t know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not selling them.”
Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past, and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.
“Perhaps after all I will take the Pater,” he said. “Only I may not be able to pay you this term.”
The bookseller smiled.
“I don’t think I shall worry you. Do you know this set—Boccaccio, Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered silk. They’ll always keep their price, and of course all the photogravures are included.”
“All right. You might send them too.”
Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson’s bookshop. At Lampard’s he was already a personality.
All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford, but really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools other, than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top of the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his name.
“You’ll be at the second freshmen’s table. On the right, sir. Mr. Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir.”
Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with either of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying the armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his judicial gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his voice.