A fresh determination, a renewed conviction of his destiny, filled Gaveston to overflowing when he returned to Oxford at April’s end. This term, he decided, was to be a revelation. He would at last show Oxford what Oxford really should be.
And that was not what was generally supposed, he thought, turning over in his mind the various attitudes which existed. That of the dons, for instance (except, perhaps, Mongo), and that of the miserable exhibitioners and demies and postmasters in the less significant colleges: they, poor bats and moles, thought of Oxford as a place of learning!
“How provincial!” Gav laughed aloud. What did they learn with their concepts and their paradigms, their statutes and their algebra? He knew that in a se’nnight he lived more than they in all their pitiful existence. Three years of profitless study, one week of examination, and fifty years of the Civil Service, or, equally pathetic, of the mumbling, vegetable senescence of tutor or of don!
Was that Life?
Or the rowing men? What of them, denying themselves half the pleasures of Youth and doubling their consumption of steak in their pettifogging pursuit of that emptiest of honoraria, a blue? They were on a righter track, to be sure, but what a motive! And what an unconsciousness!
“Is one young more than once?” Gav would often enquire in soliloquial mood.
And the spring breezes, wandering over from the quickening woods and copses of Wolvercote, heavy with the drowsy scents of hawthorn and maids’-morrow and beggar-my-neighbour, would always answer “No!”
A break with the past, then, there must be. And Gaveston decided that David would be the best confidant for his great discovery. True, the old friends had lost touch with each other a little during the feverishly brilliant passage of Gav’s last few months, but it was not hard to pick up the unravelled skein of so close an affection.