Behind the voice there were centuries of the best breeding, but the tone was perhaps a trifle querulous. From the crowded yard of the Oxford railway station there came no answer save the hoarse, insistent cries of porters and the importunate scuffling of cab-touts.
“Taxi, sir?”
“’ere y’are, sir. Taxi, sir?”
But Gaveston ffoulis knew his own mind.
“No,” he insisted, gazing with something like surprise round the cab-ranks. “I must have a hansom.”
“None ’ere, sir,” growled a surly-eyed taxi-driver.
“Then drive to the centre of the city,” ordered the young man, without hesitation, “and fetch me one—instantly!”
Instinctively the driver touched his cap. With a click the flag of his meter fell in symbolic surrender to this new arrival, and the motor, a throbbing anachronism, sped fussily away towards those rotund domes and soaring spires, whence, through the mellow streaming of October sunlight, came already the distant bombilation of crowding, multisonant bells.…
All impatience, Gaveston waited there for his chosen conveyance, and glanced coldly at the unimaginative battalions of undergraduates around him, who, callous to all appropriacy, were noisily flinging themselves and their golf-clubs into humdrum taxicabs. How pitiful, and how plebeian, was their lack of sensibility! To enter Oxford—the Oxford of Bacon and Pater, of Newman and Mackenzie—in these mechanical monstrosities! Rather than that, he had gone afoot.