What, never been born on a Friday yet,
When your mother wasn’t at home!”
Even Professor Benares Usk, the greatest Homeric scholar in Europe, let himself go under the influence of wine. His bald egg-shaped head perspired profusely. “I don’t mind telling you,” he kept saying. He was one of those self-important pedants who never minded telling anybody. He had made a corner in one fragment of human knowledge; consequently the things which he didn’t mind telling people would fill a library. Just at present he was explaining to Roy Hardcastle, with a sugar bowl for a galley and forks for oars, the technique of Greek rowing as revealed in Homer. Hardcastle repeatedly broke in on him with skittish references to Olympian immoralities. He propounded the theory to the Professor that the Iliad, in its day, had been no more than a bad boy’s book of frisky stories. The Professor was sufficiently not himself to contest the theory warmly.
Flushed faces, eager eyes, gusty laughter! From painted canvases, on paneled walls, grim founders looked down on bacchanalia, some of them sourly, others indifferently, and yet others with envy because, since becoming angels, they could no longer enjoy a glass of port.
The air was getting stifling. Speeches were commencing. The grave old warden was turning to Peter, and addressing him. Hardly a word was audible above the cheers. Hardcastle, as captain of the rowing, rose to reply.
Outside, behind stained-glass windows, the cool dusk of summer drifted noiselessly. Creepers rustled against crumbling masonry. The faint sweet smell of bean fields, far-blown from wide hillsides, met the wistful fragrance of imprisoned rose-gardens; they wandered together like ghostly lovers through the shadowy quiet of the quads.
Peter wanted to be out there—wanted to go to her. For the first time in a year he had seen her. Strange how little he had forgotten! He half-closed his eyes, picturing and remembering: her nun-like trick of carrying her hands against her breast; the way her voice slurred; her meek appearance of gay piety, which the red defiance of her mouth and the challenge of her eyes denied. She was a girl-woman, borrowing the attitudes of sophistication, yet exquisitely young and poignantly ignorant of the world.
He hadn’t been able to say much to her—only, “I heard you, Cherry”; to which she, shy in the presence of his parents, had replied, “I’m glad. I was afraid—so afraid that you wouldn’t win the race.”
They had walked up through the meadows, all of them together; he, with his mother and Kay on either side; she, between his father and the Faun Man. He had heard her tripping footsteps following behind. At the college-gate he had said, “I’ll see you again”; and she, “Perhaps.” No more than that. He had not dared to appoint a place of meeting; his parents didn’t know—they wouldn’t understand. Then he had had to run off to change for dinner.
She might be leaving early to-morrow. Did she care for him? She had seemed more sorry for him, more as though she were trying to be kind to him than in love with him. She was non-committal, elusive. But she was in Oxford to-night. Where, and with whom?