I can still hear the voice echoing through the morning silence of Peck, still see a foreshortened face, chin on hands, and white teeth gripping a straight-grained pipe.
"Hallo, Geoffrey! D'you think I could get one of your windows?"
"Better not try!"
There is a pause in the dialogue while I kick up a handful of small stones and leap nimbly away from the siphon which Geoffrey Hale has just stolen from Rawbones, his neighbor across the landing, and shattered in a thousand pieces not three feet from where I stand. A stone rises.
"Poor shooting!" from Geoffrey.
My next aim is better, and there is the sharp musical note of broken glass. Thirty heads projecting over thirty flower-boxes chant in chorus, "Porter-r-r! Mr. Oakleigh!" while I abandon dignity and hasten to the nearest staircase, to the end that one broken window may be distributed throughout the College and charged to "General Damage Account." Rawbones will bear the undivided charges of his siphon.
In the early months of the war I had occasion to spend a few hours in Oxford. The colleges were filled with soldiers and the Schools had been turned into a hospital, while Belgian refugees looked unfamiliarly down from the choicest rooms in St. Aldates or the High. It was the Oxford of a nightmare, but, though I saw no more than a dozen undergraduates throughout the city, there was hardly college or shop or house that did not hold the spirit of a man I had known. Ghostly, muffled rowing men still ran through the Meadows in the gathering dusk of a winter afternoon; ghostly scholars on bicycles, with tattered gowns wrapped round their necks and square notebooks clutched precariously under their arms, shot tinkling under the very wheels of the sempiternal horse-trams; ghostly hunting men, mud-splashed and weary, cracked conscientious whips in the middle of the Quad. At six-and-thirty the elasticity and abandon are gone, but I would give much to shout one more conversation from one drawing-room window to another, to spend an hour pouring hot sealing-wax into the keyhole of a neighbor's oak, to deck a life-size Apollo Belvedere in cap and gown and deposit him in Draycott's bed. The power and daring have left me, but I thank Heaven that the wish remains.
On the first day Loring and I advanced silently and with sudden shyness through Tom Gate. The knots of men in lodge or street were embarrassingly preoccupied and indifferent to us. Never had I imagined that the great personalities of a public school could count for so little. "The Earl of Chepstow; Mr. G. Oakleigh," picked out in white on a black ground, reminded us reassuringly that we too had a stake in the College, but for an hour we were well content to arrange our books and experiment with the ordering of our furniture, deliberately shrinking from an appearance in public until the time came for us to present ourselves to the Dean. In Hall, and on our way to be admitted by the Vice-Chancellor, we fell in with other Meltonians and offered the effusive friendship of loneliness to men perhaps previously ignored. Here and there I met someone I had not seen since private-school days. Once the alliance was formed under stress of agglomeration, we spent the remainder of the afternoon in a serried mass inspecting each other's rooms, ordering wine, tobacco and bedroom ware in the town and at tea-time valorously venturing into the Junior Common Room.
Within the next two days Loring and I received a number of cards, unceremoniously doled out by a messenger in short-sighted communion with a manuscript list of all freshmen worth knowing, as compiled by an informal committee of second and third year men. A number of Athletic Secretaries wrung from us promises of conditional allegiance which we were too timorous to withhold, and our respective tutors propounded what lectures and private hours we were to attend. Within a week we had returned many of the calls, ceremoniously and in person, returning a second and third time if our host were not at home; breakfast invitations began to be bandied about, and the Clubs in search of new members examined our eligibility.
As the one Liberal in a room full of silent Imperialists who consumed surprising quantities of dessert and paid no attention to the debate beyond applauding perfunctorily at the end of each oration, I remember impassionately haranguing the "Twenty Club" on the unreasonableness of Chamberlain's attitude towards President Kruger. At the "Mermaids," where the consumption of food and drink was even greater, I read the part of "Charles Surface"; nay, more, in a burst of enthusiasm I perpetrated a paper on "Irish Music" for the Essay Club, in those days a despised and persecuted church not infrequently screwed up in the catacombs of Meadow Buildings and left to support life on coffee, walnut cake, pure reason and some astonishingly rich Lowland dialects. Liberalism burned flickeringly in the autumn of '99, and the University Liberal clubs contended with flattering rivalry for my unresisting and largely uninterested body.