After coffee more men fall off to their books; but the faithful are likely to spend the evening talking or playing cards—bridge, loo, napp, and whist, with the German importation of skat and the American importation of poker. In one college I knew, there was a nomadic roulette wheel that wandered from room to room pursued by the shadow of the dean, but seldom failed of an evening to gather its flock about it.
V
In the evening, when the season permits, the fellows sit out of doors after dinner, smoking and playing bowls. There is no place in which the spring comes more sweetly than in an Oxford garden. The high walls are at once a trap for the first warm rays of the sun and a barrier against the winds of March. The daffodils and crocuses spring up with joy as the gardener bids; and the apple and cherry trees coddle against the warm north walls, spreading out their early buds gratefully to the mild English sun. For long, quiet hours after dinner they flaunt their beauty to the fellows smoking, and breathe their sweetness to the fellows playing bowls. "No man," exclaims the American visitor, "could live four years in these gardens of delight and not be made gentler and nobler!" Perhaps! though not altogether in the way the visitor imagines. When the flush of summer is on, the loiterers loll on the lawn full length; and as they watch the insects crawl among the grass they make bets on them, just as the gravest and most reverend seniors have been known to do in America.
In the windows overlooking the quadrangle are boxes of brilliant flowers, above which the smoke of a pipe comes curling out. At Harvard some fellows have geraniums in their windows, but only the very rich; and when they began the custom an ancient graduate wrote one of those communications to the "Crimson," saying that if men put unmanly boxes of flowers in the window, how can they expect to beat Yale? Flower boxes, no sand. At Oxford they manage things so that anybody may have flower boxes; and their associations are by no means unmanly. This is the way they do it. In the early summer a gardener's wagon from the country draws up by the college gate, and the driver cries, "Flowers! Flowers for a pair of old bags, sir." Bags is of course the fitting term for English trousers—which don't fit; and I should like to inform that ancient graduate that the window boxes of Oxford suggest the very badge of manhood.
As long as the English twilight lingers, the men will sit and talk and sing to the mandolin; and I have heard of fellows sitting and talking all night, not turning in until the porter appeared to take their names at roll-call. On the eve of May day it is quite the custom to sit out, for at dawn one may go to see the pretty ceremony of heralding the May on Magdalen Tower. The Magdalen choir boys—the sweetest songsters in all Oxford—mount to the top of that most beautiful of Gothic towers, and, standing among the pinnacles,—pinnacles afire with the spirituality of the Middle Ages, that warms all the senses with purity and beauty,—those boys, I say, on that tower and among those pinnacles, open their mouths and sing a Latin song to greet the May. Meantime, the fellows who have come out to listen in the street below make catcalls and blow fish horns. The song above is the survival of a Romish, perhaps a Druidical, custom; the racket below is the survival of a Puritan protest. That is Oxford in symbol! Its dignity and mellowness are not so much a matter of flowering gardens and crumbling walls as of the traditions of the centuries in which the whole life of the place has deep sources; and the noblest of its institutions are fringed with survivals that run riot in the grotesque.
MAGDALEN TOWER FROM THE BRIDGE
If a man intends to spend the evening out of college, he has to make a dash before nine o'clock; for love or for money the porter may not let an inmate out after nine. One man I knew was able to escape by guile. He had a brother in Trinity whom he very much resembled, and whenever he wanted to go out, he would tilt his mortarboard forward, wrap his gown high about his neck, as it is usually worn of an evening, and bidding the porter a polite good-night, say, "Charge me to my brother, Hancock, if you please." The charge is the inconsiderable sum of one penny, and is the penalty of having a late guest. Having profited by my experience with the similar charge for keeping my name on the college books, I never asked its why and wherefore. Both are no doubt survivals of some mediæval custom, the authority of which no college employee—or don, for the matter of that—would question. Such matters interest the Oxford man quite as little as the question how he comes by a tonsil or a vermiform appendix. They are there, and he makes the best of them.