CHAPTER XIV
COLOPHON
Hilary term was half-spent, and a chain of translucent May evenings enwreathed Malmaison Lodge with a beauty more fragrant and Fragonard than ever. With each successive sundown came a lingering breeze faintly susurrous in the clumps of lavender that leaned their slenderness against the honey-laden hollyhocks; nightjars and crickets chaffered and chattered in the acanthine capitals of the gazebo; and, far away, silent and argentine above the jagged ridge of Headington, the midsummer moon spilt magic from her tilted cup.
On such evenings (and they were many) Gaveston and David would lie almost prone in their deck chairs, now listening enraptured to the thronging nightingales, now idly tossing their gay-coloured cummerbunds to startle the encircling flitter-mice. Often enough they would talk, sometimes both would sit in profound silence, and not seldom, as term drew on, Gaveston would dictate to his friend his compositions for the Newdigate Prize Poem (the set subject was “University Reform,” the couplets heroic), for the Chancellor’s Essay in Latin Prose (it was De Complice Oedipi this year), for the Disputation in Middle Aramaic, the impromptu cuneiform inscriptions, for the French epigrams and the Postlethwaite Allocution, and many another blue riband of scholarship. Yet sometimes, during these weeks of sultry splendour, a faint ennui seemed almost to overtake Gaveston.
“You’ve sent in my stuff for the Craven?” he asked David one night, flinging away his rhyming dictionary on to the gazebo steps.
“Yesterday, Gav. And first-rate those iambics were!”
“Well, that’s enough for to-day. Let’s finish the Newdigate to-morrow after brekker.” He rose. “I’m going down to the post office now.”
Something in Gav’s voice made David feel sure that a climax in his friend’s already supernal career was hard at hand, and in delighted wonder he watched him stride towards Oxford across the bee-loud clover meadows wherein Malmaison Lodge lay demurely perdue.
Gaveston walked apace, and ere long he was breasting the slope of St. Aldate’s towards the post office and Christ Church. Here he was, and the lisping telegraph girl (an old friend by now) smiled appreciatively as he slipped his pencilled form under the grating.
“Press rates?” she asked brightly.