So to that ancient hostelry Baltazar drove down Trumpington Street. It seemed all new and perky until he came to the great landmark, the Fitzwilliam Museum. Then in a flash he recaptured his Cambridge: Peterhouse on his left; Pembroke on his right; the three-sided, low, bricked court of St. Catherine’s facing the dignified stone front and gateway of Corpus; then the amazing grandeur of King’s College Chapel—he craned his head out and drank in its calm loveliness; then the Senate House; on the right the shops of the King’s Parade, just as they used to be; then Caius, and the cab drew up at the “Blue Boar.”
He secured a room and went out again to fill his lungs with the atmosphere of the beloved place, his soul with its beauty and its meaning. He wandered, at first like a man distraught, his eyes far above the pavement, wrapt in the familiar glories of stone and brick; the majesty of Trinity, the twin-towered, blazoned gateway of St. John’s, the venerable round church of the Holy Sepulchre. . . . He walked on past Sidney, Christ’s, Emmanuel; turned up Downing Street. At the sight of the vast piles of modern science buildings, he came down to earthly things. Thenceforward he became aware of something new and strange and alien to the academic spirit that once spread its brooding wings over the town. The quiet streets were filled with soldiery. Khaki, khaki, on roads and pavements; khaki, khaki, in college courts. There seemed to be regiments of rank and file. Officers, gaitered and spurred, clanked along as in a garrison city. Much youth, whose status he could not determine, wearing a white band round its cap, laughed and jested, undergraduate-like, on its way. He wandered through the river-nest of colleges, Queen’s, Clare, Trinity Hall, through courts and gateways, and it was the same story of military occupation. A bevy of nurses flitted about the courts of King’s. A group of men in hospital blue lounged over the balustrade of Clare Bridge.
It was a wondrous metamorphosis. Almost the only young men in civilian attire were a few Indian students. He came across them carrying notebooks under their arms, on their return from morning lecture. Lectures, then, were still going on. College authorities were still in residence; he had, in fact, passed many unmistakable dons. But dons and Indians seemed but the relics of a past civilization. In a spasm of amazement he realized that the University, as he had conceived it, a seat of learning, no longer existed. The three thousand young men, the average undergraduate population, who afforded the University its reason of being, were fighting for their country or being trained in the arts of war. Yet the colleges through which he passed seemed to be alive. No sign anywhere of desolation or decay. Pembroke and Emmanuel had the appearance of barracks. He strode hither and thither, in his impetuous way, his mind exercised with the wonder of it all; saw Midsummer Common filled with troops at drill, found himself on the river. The tow-path was overgrown with grass. War everywhere. The very boat-houses were incorporated into the military system. On the familiar front of his own college boat-house was nailed an inscription. Such and such a regiment. Officers’ mess.
The University was at war. Not for the first time in its glorious history. Troops had garrisoned his college in the Civil Wars. It had melted down its plate for Charles the First. If it had possessed a boat-house it would have given it loyally to the King. Yet that was between two and three hundred years ago. Baltazar had the modern and not the archæological instinct. Conditions were different in those days. But now, in the second decade of the twentieth century, to be confronted with his remote, innocent college boat-house thus drawn, a vital though tiny unit, into the war, spurred his imagination to a newer comprehension of the world-convulsion to which he had been but recently awakened. If the war could reach and grip a pretty balconied shed on the River Cam, in what other infinite ramifications through the whole of the national life did its tentacles not extend? As he retraced his steps to the town, the bombing of Spendale Farm and the commandeering of his college boat-house appealed to him as the two most significant facts of the war.
He stood in the gateway under the groined roof by the porter’s lodge of his own college. The porter on duty, a young, consumptive-looking man, appeared at the door. Baltazar said:
“I am an old member of the college, and I’ve been abroad for many years. I wonder if there’s anybody in residence whom I used to know.”
“It depends upon who you want to see, sir.”
Baltazar searched the young man’s face. “First”—he snapped finger and thumb—“yes, first, where’s Westmacott?”
“My father, sir? He’s feeling his age, and having a bit of a holiday. Did you know him, sir?”