“HER GRACE” (A DOMESTIC CARICATURE) [[Page 219]
proposition, such as “Why shouldn’t we all—no, that wouldn’t do, but why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees in the morning, and work in the evening?” He argued about the most casual topic: if you said, “It’s a fine day,” he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something he was carrying, and said, “It all depends on what you mean by fine. If you mean sun and blue sky, granted; but why shouldn’t you call it fine if there are buckets of rain? It all depends what you mean by ‘fine.’ A fish now——”
“I meant an ordinary fine day,” began his bewildered guest.
“Very well: but I say ‘fish.’ I’m a fish and you’re a fish. To a fish probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, and there you are.”
There you were: long before anybody else Nixon had invented the art of preposterous conversation, which Mr. Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar Wilde. To Nixon it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a science, a product of definite reasoning. He would not change the subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes (often by himself), but would confidently blow on the cinders, expecting some unconjecturable Phœnix to arise from them.
By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar Browning, without mention of whom no adequate idea of Cambridge life in the late eighties and early nineties can possibly be arrived at. Though King’s was in large measure a college quite apart from the rest of the University, giving itself (so said the rest of the University) unwarrantable airs, Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler to designate as O.B. for he was never known otherwise) pervaded not King’s only, but the whole of Cambridge, with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and rotund youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really challenged by the most devout of his competitors, for who except O.B. at the age of forty-five or so, ever bought a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic frame in order to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the Duke of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir-presumptive to the English throne? I was still a junior at Marlborough when these Homeric events happened, but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking about the “awfully jolly” games of hockey he had with Prince Eddy.... Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, which he certainly did, affords a key to the intensity of his activities.
He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and English history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside his enmired tricycle to whom he said: