GOD SAVE KING RUPERT!
The posters were everywhere—on college gates and sandwichmen, in the windows of the Bodleian, and, at nightfall, vast sky signs were to curve in flashing splendour from Carfax to Magdalen. Round them all day gathered excited groups of townsmen and gownsmen, eagerly discussing the symbolism of the intertwined hammers and roses which formed its tasteful border Such was their absorption that few noticed the aristocratic figure whirling past them in a hansom-cab, who still held on this Thursday afternoon the secrets which Monday was to reveal. For Gaveston the sight of these crowds was moving: and, as he drove up George Street, he remembered that echoing cave on the rock-bound Breton coast, and the warm sand, and David’s questioning “Power?”…
On Friday Gav set to work, and went through the “copy,” as he had already learned to call it. The supply of verse was enormous, political articles were plenteous and violent, and, in anticipation of a regular series of “Oxford Celebrities,” each member of the reading party had anonymously penned a short, witty and highly appreciative autobiography. But Gaveston’s editorial instincts told him that the individual note was somehow missing. Yes, The Mongoose must be something different from all that had gone before—the Letters of Junius, The Yellow Book, The Chameleon, The Spectator, The Palatine Review. All must be outdone, and for a moment the task seemed almost baffling.
But a ffoulis finds a way, and, sporting for the first time his oak, Gav sat down that evening to write unaided the whole of the first issue.
All night the choiring bells heralded the flight of the hours through the Octobral air; all night he kept his fire alight with faggots of his friends’ rejected manuscripts. By five o’clock he had completed an editorial statement of policy; four political leaders—on Jacobites, Democrats, Jacobitic Democrats and Democratic Jacobites; a short, witty, and not unappreciative autobiography; and a list of hockey and O.T.C. fixtures for the term. More, by half-past five he had finished two features designed to appeal to the less intellectual strata of his fellow-undergraduates—a series of pithy personal paragraphs headed “Things We Want To Know,” and a selection of letters on the desirability of a bicycling Blue, signed by such pseudonyms as “Wadhamensis Indignus,” “Ikonoklastes,” “Laudator Pasti,” and “A Friend of W. G. Grace.”
It was a veritable tour de force. But the paper was taking on a more distinctive tone, he felt.
Six o’clock. Only the promised poems were lacking now, and Gaveston determined that, ere seven struck, he would have at least two poems worthy of himself and of the latest of Oxford’s reviews. Iambics or trochees? Sonnet or cæsura? Meditatively he stirred with the poker the charred ashes of his friends’ inadequate versifications, but somehow the divine afflatus lingered.
At last he lit a cigarette, mixed a cocktail, and resorted to a daring expedient. He took down his well-fingered set of the little blue books of Oxford Poetry. Here if anywhere would he find inspiration. Yet no—his brain seemed a trifle weary, and still virgin-white lay the paper before him.…
But, even if the heaven-sent flame did not descend, surely industry and ingenuity could start the fire. Could he not fashion from this corpus of the Oxford tradition, choosing a line here and there, a living, eclectic, synthetic Poem? Surely in this way would emerge something exquisitely pure, embodying the undiluted essence of the Oxford he loved so dearly. And by half-past six he had succeeded. He ran his eye lovingly over it.