The first time I met them was in Hugo’s room at New College. He had a room that looked out on the old wall and a wonderful double cherry tree. It was a clear spring day, and the cherry tree was in full bloom.
It was a big room, and Hugo had had it redecorated. It had white walls and grey paint and no pictures at all (that was a phase that Hugo went through; later on he had pictures again). There were books in a long grey bookcase, and a plain grey carpet, and in one corner a big bronze cast of the Delphic Charioteer. The whole room was planned to suit that, and I think it did. There was a sort of plainness about it, an absence of ornamentation and extras of any sort, that was like the straight folds of the charioteer’s drapery. That was Hugo’s idea, as he explained it.
The curtains were bright Egyptian blue, and the only other colour was from flowers, sometimes blue, sometimes red, as the mood took him, in two tall glass vases on the chimney-piece. Hugo delighted in his room. It was the first time he had designed one for himself, for his room at Yearsly had evolved itself gradually, and was not planned out as a whole.
There were grey arm-chairs, plain to look at but very comfortable, and an oval table of dark mahogany with a blue bowl in the middle.
Later, his pianola was there too, and the room modified its severity a little, but in essentials it remained the same, Even afterwards in London his room was very like it, and I think in its later, more modified form, the room was like Hugo.
Their grandfather had left a special £100 each, to be given to Guy and Hugo on their twenty-first birthdays. Guy had bought a hunter with his; Hugo bought a pianola. He used to play on it a great deal, chiefly Mozart. About the time he was twenty-one Hugo had a passion for Mozart. He would go up to London for Mozart concerts, and sometimes got into trouble for this, and he read everything he could about him. It used to remind me of Sophia Lane Watson and her passion for Shelley. I never had passions of that sort, nor did Guy.
All this, however, was later. That day when I met the Addingtons was in his first year, and he was not yet twenty. Old furniture and Donne, and George Addington, were his chief interests at this time.
I had come up to stay with a Mrs. Peters who had known my mother. Mr. Peters was a Don and had been coaching Guy. It was the first time I had been to Oxford, for before this I had always been at school, and it seemed to me a wonderful place. I don’t know how it is that it seems so different now. Guy and Hugo had been to lunch at the Peters’. Then they took me out and showed me places, and we walked about colleges, and in New College Cloister, and I felt it a place like a dream. It always used to seem like that when I visited Guy and Hugo, and I was often there during the next few years.
Now I try sometimes to see it like that again, but I cannot. I can only remember as a fact that I once felt it so, and I wonder how it was.
Hugo had talked about George Addington at Christmas, and I longed to see him.