He awakens you every morning by playing with your bath, and is a perpetually recurring background to the sweet disquiet of your last half-hour in bed. In serving you, he serves himself; and late in the day he[Pg 323] is to be seen with a wallet on his back, bent under such “learning’s crumbs” as half-empty wine-bottles and jars of Cooper’s marmalade. In these matters he has a neat running hand, without flourishes. No man has the air of being so much as he the right hand of fate. When he drinks your wine and disappoints a joyous company, when he assumes your best cigars, and leaves only those which were provided for the freshman of taste—so inevitable are his ways that you can only hope sarcastically that he liked the fare. He appears to have a noble scorn of cash, when he asks for it; and you are bound to imitate. All the wisdom of the wise is cheap compared with his manner of beginning a speech with, “If you please, sir, it is usual for freshmen to, ...” while he is dusting your photographs. He is blessed with an incapacity to blush. His politics are those of the majority; his religion has something in common with that of all men. He could be conscientiously recommended for a post in a temple niche or a street corner, with the inscription “For twenty years a mate at sea, and blinded in the pursuit of my duties,” or “Crippled in childhood.” He is equalled only by his “boy,” who is perhaps older than himself. I remember one such. I should like to have known his tailor, who must have had a genius for style, for fitting aptest clothes for men. His coat was as many-pocketed as Panurge’s, and as wonderful. Its bulges and creases were an epitome of——; its “hang” might serve as the one true epitaph, if suspended over his tomb. With all his faults, he had that toleration which the vicious[Pg 324] often extend to the good, but do not often receive in return. He was a fellow of infinite wiles that were wasted but not thrown away in a world of three or four quadrangles and a buttery. Full of traditions, he was their master, not their prey; and though he was the shadow of great names, he seemed conscious of being their inheritor too. For he had served men who had got fellowships and even Rugby or rowing Blues. With leading cases out of this mighty past he defended his misdemeanours and supported his proposals. In vain he toiled after time; he was always a generation behind. If a man failed in “Smalls” or Divinity, he was told that Mr.——, the “Varsity three-quarter,” did no less, and Mr.——, who rowed at Henley and was sent down after a bonfire, was ploughed four times. “Lightly like a flower” he wore his honours, tyrannising over men who never got Blues and were never sent down, and smiling away awe and ridicule alike. “I never saw nor shall see such men as Pirithous, ...” he might have said; it mattered little to him; and even Pirithous was only respected after many years, when he had become an investment of the “boy’s.” He quoted wise saws, was full of advice, offered with a kind of humility and yet indifference, because you were so small a factor in his self-satisfaction.
High on your summit, Wisdom’s mimick’d Air
Sits thron’d, with Pedantry her solemn sire.
In every glance and motion you display,
Sage Ignorance her gloom scholastic throws
And stamps o’er all your visage, once so gay,
Unmeaning Gravity’s serene repose.
[Pg 325]
And so he goes through life, with all the pomp of learning—of the reality, none—complacent, imposing, and yet hardly a man.
II
Of the college cook it is easy to say too much. He is a potentate against whom there is no appeal on earth. “Much knavery,” says Ben Jonson, “may be vented in a pudding.” In the days of the Shotover Papers he could offer in exchange for a recipe “an introduction to some country families.” At the monastic door of his kitchen, as he meditates his mysteries, something of the Middle Ages clings to him yet, and he is half an abbot, contemptuous of a generation that makes small demand upon his subtlety and wealth. It is said that he comes of brilliant ancestry and has fallen. What heights there may be in the world from which a man could be said to fall in becoming a college cook, I do not know. For years he made clear the distinction between fancy and imagination. By fancy he lived, and on his fancies generations fed. He could disguise the meanest materials, and make them illustrious, subtle, or exquisitely sweet. He was animal propter convivia natum. In his grey kitchen, with chestnut beams aloft, a visitor seemed to assist at the inauguration of a perpetual spring. On the one hand was the earth—the raw material—the mere flesh or fish; and out of this, with upturned sleeves, like artist or conjuror, he made the flowers flourish and the leaves abound. By the perfume, it was a mysterious indoor Mayday. And so[Pg 326] he lived, and was feared and respected. But it was admitted that he had rivals. Something in a grander style was yet to be done....
It was mid-February. Wherever I looked, I saw first the cold white sky above and the snow beneath, and secondly the red faces of skaters out of doors, and indoors the blaze of great fires and the purple and gold of wine. Winter was to be met in every street—white-haired, it is true, but nevertheless a lusty, red-faced fellow, redder than autumn, with a grip of the hands and a roaring voice. As I passed the kitchen, the cook was silently at work. His hair was like the snow, his face like the fire. The brass, steel, pewter, and silver shone. The kitchen, with its fragrance, lustre, and quietness, was like an altar. There, too, was the priest, with stainless vestment and sacerdotal bearing. And as I left him and mounted the stairs, I seemed unblest. I found Scott tedious, Pater excessive, and Sir Thomas Browne a trifler, and threw them aside. Soon there was a knock at the door, and a man—a throne, domination, princedom, virtue, power—swept magnificently in. A light and a warmth, beyond the power of fire to bestow, accompanied him. He bent down solemnly and laid a little white covered plate upon the hearth. Before I could speak—“the gods themselves are hard to recognise”—he was gone. I uncovered the plate with something of my visitant’s solemnity—
Fair spirit of ethereal birth,
In whom such mysteries and beauties blend!
Still from thine ancient dwelling-place descend,
And idealise our too material earth;[Pg 327]
Still to the Bard thy chaste conceptions lend,
To him thine early purity renew;
Round every image, grace majestic throw;
Till rapturously the living song shall glow
With inspiration as thy being true,
And Poesy’s creations, decked by thee,
Shall wake the tuneful thrill of sensuous ecstasy.
It was the climacteric of his career, and he shall go down to posterity upon the palates of men, not as one who worked out his recipes to three places of decimals, or as a distinguished maker of “bishop” or “posset,” or as one worth his weight in oysters, but as the creator of that necessary which is in fact brown bread, toasted and buttered.