“There are men here in their sixth, their seventh—yes, even their seventeenth—year. But too late have they realized the potency of Oxford’s spell. They are fading figures distinguished from the dons only by their greater futility. They have no status in the university, no cause to be here. The genius loci demands a raison d’être. Pathetic and spectral, they cannot persuade the callowest undergraduate that they are of his kind, for between them is fixed a great gulph—they have passed their examinations, and they wear the snowy ermine of the Bachelor’s gown.”
“But I,” his voice thrilled, “I shall be ever of the company of the Young, a happy, happy youth, for ever fair, immutable in my sempiternal adolescence.…”
The guests could no longer contain their emotions. And they felt that at such a turning-point, Gaveston should be left alone. Two by two they passed silently out into the garden, Sir Wilkinson with Lady Jordan, David with Lady Blandula, and Mongo with Lady Penhaligon leaning heavily upon his arm. (Was an old friend going to be a new step-father, Gaveston wondered as he found himself alone with his nocturnal thoughts.)
What was it he had planned for his last dawn in Oxford’s walls? To pore with David over the tragical history of Armand and Marguerite? In eau-de-nil calf? But that strangely melancholy experience he would never know, and, solitary now amid the empty glasses and the crumpled napkins, he lost himself in memory.…
And before his eyes there passed in hieratic pageantry all the varied vistas of his life—episodes in the perfume-laden apple-green nursery at Neuilly, where from earliest infancy, with his mother and his Breton nou-nou, he had played the never stale games of cache-cache and chemin-de-fer and then the villes d’eaux of Europe, unwithering in their variegations, Perrier and Apollinaris, Apenta and Hunyadi Janos, and then his appearance as a witness in the Fünck divorce case (he could still hear himself boldly rivalling the Judge’s epigrams in a piping treble), and then his first day as an Oppidan (he had never been to a preparatory school), and that unique exploit which had resulted in his leaving Eton, when he and David had locked the drill sergeant into the pepper-box of the white-walled fives-court, and then long holidays in Norwegian fjords and Central European Tyrols, and at last his entry into the dream-broidered City, in a hansom-cab and with dim chiming bells beckoning, and the view from his rooms over brindled and exfoliated walls to distant and unreal spires, and, one by one, the familiar figures of his terms and vacations, confused in wild fandangos and rigadoons of carnival, the Warden of Rutland and the unspeakable du Val, Sir Nicholas Gomme and Lord Vivian Cosmo, worthy John Thoms and the High Personage at Munich.…
With a start Gaveston drew himself up in his chair. How tranquil it all was around Malmaison Lodge! Only from the Virginy creeper beneath his window-sill a ragged-robin chirped her tremulous aubade to a distant willow-warbler invisible among the reeds. The guests had stolen quietly away to their respective bedrooms, and the short midsummer night had hurried past as silent and fleet-footed as his own reverie. He rose to face a new day, a new life.…
The future held surprises still, no doubt, even in the unchanging City of the spires. But for him it was enough if the delicate rhythms of the past were beautifully perpetuate.
“What more can Life hold than this?” he asked himself, and looked eastward from the casement window over the hollyhocks. With beating veins and mute eyes he gazed out upon a summer sky flushed rosy with the dawn, and around him the quivering air grew suddenly campanulous.…
Widdleswick: Harvest Festival, 1921.