“Why, then you can catch people out!” he riposted, with a peal of laughter which, with David’s answering carillon, woke age-long echoes from the mouldering walls of Queen’s Lane. How magnificent it was just to be alive and young and in Oxford!
“‘Midnight and Youth and Love and Italy,
Love in the Land where Love most lovely seems!’”
he quoted felicitously, and suddenly they emerged on to the glorious vista of the High Street, bent like a bow and flowing majestically between the steep cliff-like colleges. His voice hushed before this imminence of ineluctable beauty, and he went on.
“Oh, David! Don’t you understand? This is the most miraculous moment of all! Here one stands in the very heart of one’s Mater Almissima, with all these crowds about one, and not one of them knows one’s name. And yet to-morrow—why, one feels like a sky before a sudden dawn!”
“This is Carfax,” David interrupted. Their progress was checked by the sauntering couples and the circumambient motor-’buses, and all around glittered the windows of the tobacconists in all the glamour of their gaudy seductiveness.
“One must buy a pipe,” cried Gaveston impulsively. “A pipe is a Man’s smoke!”
David nodded, and together in a rhapsody of silence they walked back past the clangour of Carfax, and, with eyes bemused by the magic of Time, they gazed upon the scalloped gables and gargoyled eaves of Brasenose, and upon the storied front of Oriel, enriched by the sculptor’s art with faint lovely figures of all that is most rememberable in the city’s studious history, of Emperors and Kings and the Builders of Empires. In the long, tenebrous quietude of the Turl they lingered, where, across the empurpled dusk of the narrow street, the lighted windows of rival colleges blinked lazy, kindly eyes at each other. And wandering under the pinnacled soar of Exeter Chapel, past Hertford too, where the winged nudity of cherubim upholds a high-flung Bridge of Sighs, they drew near the elephantine deities of the Indian Institute, and thence in the darkling distance, they could see before them the polychrome of Keble, and beyond, glowing faint and Venetian beneath the decrescent moon and a myriad plangent stars, the patterned diaper of the Parks Museum.
“It is too, too beautiful …” whispered Gaveston, and his voice tailed away.
And then, in the pause after his words, came back the recollection of his mother: she must know, and at once, of his safe advent and his new-found extremity of happiness.