The term was still young when Loring was elected a members of the Loders, and soon afterwards he joined the Bullingdon. As he now dined at the Club table in Hall, I gathered Draycott and Mowbray, a Wykehamist named Finck-Boynton and two Etonians, Bertie Grainger and Mark Seton, and founded a mess next to the Guest Table, whence we could throw bread at almost any friend in Hall. There we sat and criticized the kitchen, the High Table and our neighbors, decided a hundred knotty points of conduct and elaborated a pose which should mark us out as men of originality, fearlessness and distinction without any of the distressing immaturity of mind betrayed by our fellow-freshmen.
In looking back on the early days I find something very ingenuous and engaging in our delusion of originality. Whether we ragged the rooms of the meek, hysterical Ainsworth (who was alleged to hold private prayer-meetings and intercede by name for the souls of lost undergraduates), whether we serenaded Greatorex, the mathematical tutor, on the night he had a Colonial Bishop staying with him, whether we established an informal breakfast club at the Clarendon because we could get no hot food in College on Sundays, we were soberly and seriously convinced that earlier generations had never thought of doing such things before. For three years I watched with mild exasperation three successive drafts of amazingly juvenile men clumsily aping the achievements of us, their seniors.
New prejudices grew to a rank birth, but one or two old convictions came to be shaken. I no longer looked on Eton as a forcing-house of ineffective snobbery, nor on Winchester as the home of well-bred, uniform inertia; I ceased to say that while one Carthusian was occasionally tolerable, more than one would dominate and scatter the most varied society; gradually I found that something might be said even for men who had never been to a public school. Loring shook his head in puzzled and not entirely affected disapproval of my social adventures and, though punctiliously courteous to my guests, would not infrequently condemn them categorically as "stumers" when they were gone.
Yet on reflection I learned more of men and books from a reserved and aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch graduates than from many a more decorative sect in the first-floor rooms of Canterbury. McBain, a threadbare Aberdonian, would drift in on a Sunday night, when Loring was away dining with the Loders, and we would sit till the small hours talking of Renan and a non-miraculous Christianity. Frazar, who was taking the Modern Language School, would lie back sipping whisky and filling the grate with half-smoked cigarettes as he talked of life at the Sorbonne and the wonderful appreciation of modern French poetry that he would one day publish. Carmichael, an embittered, one-idea revolutionary, would throw Marx at my head and give fierce descriptions of his Board-school struggles before a scholarship set him free to peddle his brains in the market on equal terms with his fellows. At Melton we seemed all drawn from one class, brought up in the same channels of thought, given the same books to read.
When educational reformers fill "The Times" with their screeds, I am tempted to wonder whether it much matters what a man be taught so long as he meet enough men who have been taught something else. I worked hard at Oxford and did tolerably well in the Schools: perhaps they taught me how to learn, but the gaps in my knowledge when I came down make me look on the curriculum as "a chaos upheld by Providence." And then I think of three thousand men from a hundred schools and a thousand homes, flung behind the enchanted, crumbling walls to bring their theories, ethics, enthusiasms and limitations into the common stock; and at such times I wonder what better schooling a Royal Commission could secure for the plastic imagination of nineteen.
For all our poses Oxford gave us a taste of that world in which most of us were to pass our lives—an obsolete, artificial, inadequate world if you will, but the one wherein we had to find social and administrative salvation. We felt the heavy democratic control of public opinion when the notoriety-hunting Glynne was ducked in Mercury for giving luncheons in his rooms to the too-well-known Gracie (I never discovered her surname) from the florists in the Broad; we saw something of the ideal Equality of Opportunity when Carmichael went from a scholarship to a fellowship and then to a provincial Professorship of Economics and ultimately to an exalted position in, I think, the Board of Education; by the College cliques and fashions, the social mistrust and jealousies, the canons and taboos, we were in some sort forearmed against the absurdities, the unworthiness and irreconcilabilities that awaited us outside Oxford.
A fruitful lesson of my first term was furnished by the Duke of Flint. He was a freshman, an Etonian, a "Gourmet" and a member of the Bullingdon. Any week in which he was drunk less than five times was no ordinary week; any story that could be repeated in decent company was not from his hiccoughing lips. Without question the most unmitigated degenerate I have ever met, the sole excuse to be made for him was that by inheritance his blood was sufficiently tainted to infect a dozen generations. Yet I cannot think it was in a spirit of commiseration that Oxford took the little ruffian to its bosom, inviting him to its luncheons and electing him to its clubs; there was something at once shamefaced and defiant in the way his friends proclaimed—without challenge—that he was "not at all a bad fellow, really; rather fun, in fact." From the night when he staggered down the High in the purple dress coat of the "Gourmets," breaking the shop windows with his bare hand and I bound him up and put him to bed, to the day not many weeks ago when he died of general paralysis, I watched his social career with interest.
We none of us had much time for introspection in those eager, early days. I was swearing rapid friendships, eating aldermanic banquets and conscientiously flitting from one to another of my new clubs with the zeal of a neophyte and the greed of a man who knows that after the dull, inadequate dinner of Hall an unlimited dessert awaits him. Loring and I had refused to compete for the Melton close scholarships, as the money was not essential to us, and we could now idle for a twelvemonth over Pass Mods. and leave three serious years for our final schools. A minimum of lectures satisfied our tutors, and the rest of the time we could argue and read and smoke eternally new and expensive mixtures, which we backed against all comers and changed perhaps thrice in a term.
Once I came near my sole acquaintance with martyrdom. It was in the early weeks of the South African War, when to be a pro-Boer was not healthy. The wholeness of my skin and the peace of our rooms were due in equal measure to the fact that I had many friends and that those who knew me not agreed with Loring that I could not really mean what I said. My fellow-rebel Manders, who knew no one and only left his garret in Meadows to bicycle hotly round outlying Oxfordshire villages preaching sedition, was incontinently divested of his trousers and hurled into Mercury.
"These damned farmers!" Loring exclaimed, as he returned to our rooms, leaving Manders to retrieve his spectacles and wade inshore. "They've got to be taught a lesson."