The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories

by Logan Pearsall Smith

The steam blew again about the train, wrapped his face in its warm breath, and blotted out the view. Inside the shaking carriage was the tobacco smoke, and his luggage. "Where am I going with that man?" he asked himself suddenly, for the picture of Oxford had filled his mind entirely for a moment. The buildings and towers were so near now, the water of the reservoir gleamed slowly past. Arthur took down his luggage from the rack. At the bottom of his mind he had been wanting for a long time to go back to Oxford, and see it all, and see an old friend there; and so, eagerly, almost before the train had stopped, he hailed a porter and got out of the carriage.

"I must stay over here a few hours," he said to Boyle, with apparent calmness. "There is something I have just thought of, and must attend to. I'll telegraph, but you'd better tell them, though, not to meet me." He turned and walked away.

But as he drove up to Oxford, "What a fool I am," he kept saying to himself. Indeed Boyle's surprise, the commonplace platform, the ticket-collector's questions, the sight outside of his own luggage being lifted up on a hansom, had soon made his foolish, helpless impulse fade, like the flame of a candle, taken out into the daylight and windy air. But to go back to the train would have seemed doubly foolish, so, borne on by the impetus of his dead desire, he drove away. The next train was not till half-past six. He would get luncheon, and, after all, it might be pleasant to see the old place. But he was resolved that never again would he act on those stupid, sudden ideas—they made him seem like a fool.

II.

After luncheon Arthur went out—the time had to be spent somehow—and walked idly along the High Street. It was all so familiar: the shops, the windows of the club to which he had belonged, the rooms where his friends had lived. But he knew no one now. The streets were wet with winter mud, there was a commonplace light on the houses, and Arthur looked about him with very little interest and emotion. Walking past the Colleges, he loitered for a little on Magdalen Bridge, and then turned back again. It was still early, and he began to meet now the young men who were starting out of Oxford for the open air and country. Some were dressed for football; three or four in brown coats rode by on horses, talking and laughing as they passed; but the greater number were in flannels, and moving towards the river. These Arthur followed—he had nothing else to do—through the streets and meadows, coming at last to the barges and windy river. Men were calling to each other, boats were pushing out, and the turbid current of the Thames ran swiftly with the winter floods.

But for him there was too much sound about the wind and water, the cold sunshine was too bright and harsh, and he felt doubly weary, as he looked at all that life and activity and health. And yet once he would have delighted in it.

When Arthur Lestrange had come first from school to Oxford, he had entered with eagerness and youthful ambition into the pleasures and activities of university life, wishing to do everything well that he tried to do, and with distinction if he could. And all these ambitions and activities he came to share, in the pleasant, intimate Oxford way, with a friend, slightly older than himself.

But after a while he began to grow discontented; success was not so easy;—and what was the good of it after all? he asked himself, with impatient lassitude. Finding new friends and more exciting pleasures, he gradually drifted away from his old companions. What was the harm? he said impatiently to Austen, resenting his friend's affectionate advice. He would enjoy life as other people enjoyed it; he only wanted to be left alone. So they grew less intimate; and when Lestrange found himself in trouble, serious enough to make him leave Oxford, he had been too angry and proud to see Austen, or answer his friendly letter. "How stupid it has all been," he said to himself, the memory of all this coming over him rather drearily, as he walked back towards Oxford.

But his feeble attempts to make some change in his life—these were the stupidest of all his memories; how, when his father died abroad, he was really frightened, fearing for himself a death like that, and going back to the half-neglected place that was now his own, he remembered his old plans of life, and tried to do his duty there, and be a good landlord and neighbour. But in a few months he grew weary of it all; it was too lonely, too depressing....

And then a year after, when he hoped for a while that a nice girl he knew might care for him; and this last time, when his losses at play had made him mortgage his property still more heavily. Then, sobered for a moment by his uncle's warnings, and by the ruin that seemed not far off, he suddenly resolved to change, to give up playing, to keep away from all those people.