Well and truly had the foundation been laid for the quiet unobtrusive success of his first term at Wallace. He held high his head. And then, passing by the groined door of the Old Library, he flung wide his arms to the stars.
“Youth!” he cried in the stillness. “Youth! Youth! Youth!”
CHAPTER III
TOCCATA AND FUGUE
And term was really over then!
Gaveston could hardly believe it. But yet—it must be: already the 3.43 from Oxford had slid through the pale December sunlight past Hinksey Halt, Goring-and-Streatley, and Slough (for Windsor). He had unfolded the still ink-perfumed pages of his Daily Telegraph only to crumple the paper up in exasperation at the bourgeois complacency of its intolerable clichés, and it lay forgotten in a corner of the first-class compartment. No, the frore Chiltern Hills and the willow-shadowed water-meadows had been fitter accompaniment for the rhythm of his musings, playing as they were upon two months dappled with such perplexing patterns of sun-warm happiness and frosty disillusionment.…
This had been but his first term. But nevertheless, with Mongo’s help, he had succeeded in getting himself elected to the Union Society without a single blackball; and after that the other clubs, smaller and less exclusive, had hastened to net in this remarkable freshman. Soon no host had felt his party, whether breakfast or cocoa, to be a real social éclat unless one at least of his guests could enliven the discussion, whether it turned upon the beauties of Beowulf or the existence of a Deity, by the apt quotation of Gaveston ffoulis’s opinion on the point at moot. And Gaveston had soon won a name for himself, too, by the quiet and unostentatious entertaining he had done, receiving the nicer sort of undergraduate now in his Wallace pied-à-terre, now in the quaint but distinctive Cadena grill-room; and his meals were voted by the cordons bleus of the University to be worthy of the best modern Luculli and Mæcenasses.
He had made good.
He lit a plump Turkish cigarette, and lay back to ponder both present and future.
Had this Oxford that he loved anything more to give him, he wondered? Who could tell? Maybe an answer would come from the Babylonian sphinx whose smoky breath he could now see besmirching the virgin sky. Who could tell? But, meanwhile, his thoughts could scarcely move beyond the long-looked for pleasure of once again seeing his mother. She would be waiting for him, he felt sure, at Paddington, and as the train rushed thitherwards he let his mind run ahead of it to feast on the exquisite prospect.…