“No heelers, young Lonsdale,” they called mirthfully.
Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with one hand on Michael’s shoulder, replied:
“No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!” Then he collapsed again.
Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk, all the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael and one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors remained more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a quizzical face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask Michael some trifling piece of information, cried “Fane!” raising his glass. Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and drank what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other senior men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life, a conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever. The wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At the foot on the right was a little office—the office of Venables, the steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of seniority called Venner’s. Wine-chartered though they were, the freshmen did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but hurried out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.
Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of mediæval witches. The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a grotesque vivacity, as the vapors curled around them. The wine humming in his head: the echoing shouts of his companions: the decorative effect of the gowns: the chiming high above of the bells in the tower: all combined to create for Michael a nightmare of exultation. He was aware of a tremendous zest in doing nothing, and there flowed over him a consciousness that this existence of shout and dance along these cloisters was really existence lived in a perpetual expression of the finest energy. The world seemed to be going round so much faster than usual that in order to keep up with this new pace, it was necessary for the individual like himself to walk faster, to talk faster, to think faster, and finally to raise to incoherent speed every coherent faculty. Another curious effect of the wine, for after all Michael admitted to himself that his mental exhilaration must be due to burgundy, was the way in which he found himself at every moment walking beside a different person. He would scarcely have finished an excited acceptance of Wedderburn’s offer to go to-morrow and look at some Dürer woodcuts, when he would suddenly find himself discussing sympathetically with Lonsdale the iniquity of the dons in refusing to let him keep his new dog in one of the scouts’ pigeon-holes in the lodge.
“After all,” Lonsdale pointed out earnestly, “they’re never really full, and the dog isn’t large—of course I don’t expect to keep him in a pigeon-hole when he’s full grown, but he’s a puppy.”
“It’s absurd,” Michael agreed.
“That’s the word I’ve been looking for,” Lonsdale exclaimed. “What was it again? Absurd! You see what I say is, when one scout’s box is full, move the poor little beast into another. It isn’t likely they’d all be full at the same time. What was that word you found just now? Absurd! That’s it. It is absurd. It’s absurd!”
“And anyway,” Michael pointed out, “if they were all full they could chain him to the leg of the porter’s desk.”
“Of course they could. I say, Fane, you’re a damned good sort,” said Lonsdale. “I wish you’d come and have lunch with me to-morrow. I don’t think I’ve asked very many chaps: I want to show you that dog. He’s in a stable off Holywell at present. Beastly shame! I’m not complaining, of course, but what I want to ask our dons is how would they like to be bought by me and shut up in Holywell?”