Years of Plenty

by Ivor John Carnegie Brown

XI

In December Martin, who was now seventeen and a half years old, went up to Oxford to compete for a scholarship in Classics. Foskett had encouraged him to wait another year, but John Berrisford held that boys should be free from the pettiness of school life before they were nineteen and advised Martin to go up early: this course would give him another twelve months for Civil Service preparation if necessary. Martin himself had no desire for another year at Elfrey, for, without positively disliking the place, he wanted freedom. His prefecture had brought him more trouble than release, and the Finneys, while they had undoubtedly refined his tastes and broadened his views, had also inevitably rendered him more discontented with the limitations of a society which drove him to silence or to crudity.

Martin was not a remarkable classic and never learned to sympathise with the somewhat pedantic traditions of a classical training, nor had he the imitative faculty necessary for the composition of good prose and verse in Greek or Latin; his work was always sound and often interesting; but he never acquired the infallible dexterity of touch which is the fruit of perfect sympathy with classical modes of thought and expression. His translation into English showed more style than accuracy, and he preferred rather to play loosely with ideas and to follow the literary and social questions arising from a study of the ancient literatures than to apply himself vigorously to pure scholarship. There never had been any doubt about his being an Oxford man. His tastes and abilities, his family connections and his project of entering the Civil Service all pointed in one direction. Moreover, he had somehow been obsessed with a notion that all Cambridge colleges, with the exception of King's and Trinity, were like public schools continued. Had not Heseltine gone to Cambridge? But Oxford would be very different; for how could Oxford, the home of Shelley and Swinburne and Morris, be anything but beautiful and brilliant? Martin was thrilled by the exquisite promise of life: Oxford would be heavenly, and heaven—well, heaven would be all atheism and epigrams. The paradox pleased him and he wondered whether it was the sort of remark he would make to his college debating society next October. But first of all, he sadly remembered, there was this affair of scholarships.

He entered for a small group and gave King's pride of place. It had been his father's college and was in many ways suitable. Its scholarships were neither too hard nor too easy to win. It was a small college in the first rank and commanded universal respect. It prided itself on being successful, not brazenly, like Balliol, but with discretion, unassumingly.

In spite of the opinions of poets, literary gentlemen and writers of guide-books, it is possible to maintain that Oxford is not a nice place in which to live, much less to work. In December it is, on the whole, at its worst, and it was on the second Monday of that month that Martin arrived in the city. Term had ended on the previous Saturday, and only a few undergraduates were to be seen wandering about the deserted streets with a bored and lost expression. Oxford has a double personality: in term it serves efficiently as a crowded pleasure resort; in the vacation it is one of those cities, like Bruges la morte, whose justification is in the past and the memorials of the past. A compromise is fatal and undergraduates must exist in hundreds or not at all. A soft drizzle fell from a yellow, smudgy sky and the streets were covered with a particularly loathsome mud. As he drove down from the station to King's (he was to have rooms in college), Martin was horrified: he felt that he had never seen a more lamentable place. To be rattled in a hansom down George Street and then brought face to face with the front quad of Balliol is not an inspiring method of approach to beauty. But King's was more presentable.

An aged man, who looked dyspeptic and morose, staggered out of the lodge and asked Martin's name: then he summoned a brisk underling, immaculately dressed in a bowler hat and dark blue suit. The underling picked up his bag and guided him up three flights of rickety stairs into a dingy apartment, mainly remarkable for the smallness of its windows. Outside the door Martin had seen the word 'Snutch.'

"Mr Snutch's," said the underling. "These will be yours." Then, to Martin's great surprise and at the expense of his own perfect trousers, he knelt humbly down and lit the fire. It seemed incredible that one so magnificent should stoop to light a fire. Then he said: "Your scout will be in at six, sir," and vanished.

Martin turned to survey the room. On the walls were some extraordinary banners or ribbons, on two of which were the words:

Ahwamkee University.