t?? te ??? p???? ?????? pa????e?, ?a? ??? ?st?? ?te ?e???as?a?? ?pe?????? t??a ? a??at?? ? ?e?at??, ? ? ???f??? ?? t?? t?? p??e??? ?d?? ?fe???e??, p?ste???te? ?? ta?? pa?as?e?a?? t? p???? ?a? ?p?ta?? ? t? ?f ??? a?t?? ?? t? ???a e????? ?a? ?? ta?? pa?de?a?? ?? ?? ?p?p??? ?s??se? e???? ???? ??te? t? ??d?e??? et?????ta?, ?e?? d? ??e????? d?a?t?e??? ??d?? ?ss?? ?p? t??? ?s?pa?e?? ???d????? ?????e?.—THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.

[Greek: tÊn te gar polin koinÊn parechomen, kai ouk estin hote xenÊlasiais apeirgomen tina Ê mathÊmatos Ê theamatos, ho mÊ kryphthen an tis tÔn polemiÔn idÔn ÔphelÊtheiÊ, pisteuontes ou tais paraskeuais to pleon kai apatais Ê tÔ aph' hÊmÔn autÔn es ta erga eupsychÔ kai en tais paideiais hoi men epiponÔ askÊsei euthys neoi ontes to andreion meterchontai, hÊmeis de aneimenÔs diaitÔmenoi ouden hÊsson epi tous isopaleis kindynous chÔroumen.]—THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.

I

After the tempestuous months consequent on O'Rane's arrival at Melton, the two succeeding terms were a time of slumber and peace. The omnibus study next to Prayer Room became vacant at Christmas, and on our return at the end of January we found Mayhew, Sinclair and O'Rane in possession. We found also an ominous hand-printing-press clamped on to the window-sill, and from this injudicious outcome of an uncle's Christmas largess Mayhew set himself to produce a weekly sheet rivalling "The Times" in authority, the "Spectator" in elegance, and the "Junius Letters" in pointedness of criticism and personality.

Before the term was a month old the Editor had sunk to the thankless and unclean position of compositor, while O'Rane, with his natural taste for ascendancy, poured forth an effervescent stream of leaders, lampoons, parodies, dialogues, stories and poems. It was not easy for anyone of less dominant personality to get his voice heard or his pen's product read during the periods of O'Rane's midsummer madness. At such times he seemed to lose every restraint of sobriety and in a riot of high spirits would be found organizing stupendous practical jokes or subjecting the very stones of Great Court to satirical tirades in facile impromptu verse. Throughout life his vitality was amazing, and from time to time at school and Oxford it seemed as though he must break out or choke.

Thanks to the printing-press, Mayhew found the circulation of the "Junior Mathesonian" rising with each issue. I have a complete set somewhere, and to read again the ebullitions of O'Rane's untiring pen is to see again the wild, black-eyed, lean-faced, Villonesque figure of the author. He was always at enmity with someone, and the last word in each altercation is usually to be found in his weekly "Dialogues of the Damned," in which the enemy of the moment is depicted explaining to the Devil his presence in hell.

Beresford, Second Master, headed the list. As a disciplinarian who had six several times failed to secure a headmastership elsewhere, he was a formidable authority on the rules and traditions of the school and knew to a nicety exactly where Burgess's loose grip and casual methods were lowering the prestige of Melton. Without in any way opposing the existing policy of letting the Sixth run the school, Beresford gladly conceded that the Sixth should at least set an example. This, he held, was not done when one member roamed dreamily along the Southampton road and engaged in conversation with the varied, disreputable, semi-seafaring tramps who begged their way through Melton to London and on whose account the great road was put out of bounds for all juniors. Burgess declined to limit bounds farther, but supported his colleague to the extent of a few words with O'Rane—a course that strengthened Beresford's conviction that Melton was going to the dogs and sowed plentiful resentment in the breast of O'Rane.

I see no purpose in following up in detail the quarrel with Greenwood (Dialogue III) over the Promenade Concert and the unexplained wrecking of No. 1 Music Room; nor with Ponsonby (Dialogue VII-) over the Freedom of the Press. The "J.M.," smudgily printed by Mayhew and ornately illustrated by Draycott, was certainly not intended to enter the shabby, panelled Common Room over Big Gateway. The internecine animosity of the great, however, is sometimes more marked than their discretion, and Hanson, who had not spoken to Grimshaw since their whist quarrel five years earlier, allowed himself to be seen in one of the bursting Common Room arm-chairs with his feet in the fender and his trousers scorching, engaged in delighted perusal of the Grimshaw Dialogue. Inasmuch as Grimshaw favoured the boys of his own house against all comers, he was unpopular, and the Grimshaw number of the "J.M." was received with grateful appreciation by all his colleagues, with the exception of Beresford, who had suffered in silence from an earlier week's attack. Succeeding issues were received with slightly less favour, as the minority of victims grew in number. With the appearance of "J.M. VII," Ponsonby decided to refer the case to Burgess and with the support of six actual fellow-sufferers and a dozen awaiting their turn, he constituted himself a deputation. The Head was sympathetic but not helpful. The paper, he pointed out, was issued only to subscribers and seemingly contained nothing of the blasphemous or obscene.

"If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness," said Burgess, "reason would that I should bear with you."

"I don't feel that any boy—let alone a Sixth-form boy—should be allowed to circulate studied insults to the Staff," rejoined Ponsonby.

"If it be a question of words and names," Burgess advised, "look ye to it."

"O'Rane's in the Sixth," Ponsonby objected. "Unless he's degraded from Sixth-form rank, what am I to do?"

Burgess affected to think deeply.

"The Lord will provide," he said.

The "Dialogues of the Damned" are an incomplete series, arrested in mid-course at No. VII; the "J.M.," however, had a life of more than two years and only died when O'Rane, as captain of the school, had to edit the official "Meltonian."

A remove into the Sixth at Melton marked an epoch in most lives. There was, and is, only one Burgess in the scholastic system, and until you met him five hours a day for six days a week you could form no estimate of the range of his knowledge. Every school has its Under Sixth, its Villiers and its mixed assembly of brilliant boys awaiting their remove, mediocre boys who have come to stay and dull boys charitably piloted and tugged into the haven of rest because their housemasters do not care to make monitors of boys in the Fifth. In my time the lot of Villiers was not to be envied, for the dullards slept, the mediocre ragged, and the scholars had to do their best to snatch instruction from the ruins of Babel, assisted by a man whose boast would never have been that he was a ruler of men or an inspired teacher and whose blood almost audibly rushed to his head as he strove to maintain discipline.

Thirty years before Villiers had taken a first in Mods., and though the fine edge of his mind had lost its keenness, he held to the Mods. tradition that the Classics should be read in bulk. That, indeed, is the best thing I remember about the man or his system. We scampered through the "Odyssey," "Æneid," and plays of Sophocles at a great rate and with no attention to detail. Pure scholarship, if it ever came, was to come later, and in the meantime Villiers saved succeeding generations from the reproach levelled against a classical education—that the fruit of many years' plodding is to be measured by the assimilation of one book of Horace's Odes or a single play by Euripides. Villiers left us, and we left Villiers, with more than a smattering of great literature.

In the Sixth we read as much or as little as we pleased. Most of us had a scholarship in view, and the degree of our unpreparedness was the degree of attention with which we confined ourselves to the text. Beyond that minimum the rule was to sit and encourage Burgess to talk. Sometimes he would forget a book and, for want of fixed work, open a Lexicon and choose a word at random. He would give us the childhood and old age of that word, its parents and uttermost collaterals; and from a single word he would treat of ethnology as revealed by language and comparative civilization as measured by the limits of a vocabulary. And from comparative civilization to the institutions and faiths on which a society is built up—the religion and magic that shroud the dark days of the human mind.

Even to a temperamental iconoclast such as O'Rane, I fancy Burgess came as a revelation. At the term's end he showed me a manuscript book entitled "Notes on Theophrastus." To do Burgess justice we had read three pages in thirteen weeks; the rest of the book was consecrated to obiter dicta: "The Trade Routes of Turkestan"; "Lost Processes in Stained Glass"; "The Origin of Playing Cards"; "The Margin of Error in Modern Field Artillery"; "The Institution of Arbitrage"; "The Minaret as a Feature in Architecture"; "Surgery in MediÆval China"—and a score of other subjects. Theophrastus bored us, and we decided to take him as read. The decision once adopted, there was no difficulty in keeping Burgess away from the text.

On reflection I think that O'Rane may, in his turn, have been a revelation to Burgess as much as to the rest of the form. If omniscience were the order of the day, O'Rane seems to have decided to be omniscient. It was a fixed principle with him never to bring books into form. Burgess would look wearily round and say, "O'Rane, wilt thou read from 'Protinus Aeneas celeri certare sagitta,' laddie?" And Raney, with his hands clasped behind his back and eyes gazing across to the big open fire, would recite thirty, fifty or a hundred lines as Burgess might decide, in a voice that would cause him to be taken untrained on any stage. In part it was a studied pose, in part I believe he never forgot anything he had twice read. And his memory was minutely accurate. I recall a disputation on one of Bentley's emendations of Horace; neither Burgess nor O'Rane had a book, but each was prepared to go to the stake for his own version. Sutcliffe was eventually dispatched to School Library, and a reference to the text showed that Burgess was wrong.

"Where were you before you came here?" Loring asked that evening, when O'Rane and I were sitting in his study after prayers.

"Guess I was in most places," O'Rane answered from the depths of the arm-chair and a book.

"Where were you educated, fathead? And don't 'guess,' it's a vile Americanism."

Loring affected great precision of speech.

"I—fancy—I—received—instruction—from—numerous—persons—in—a—var-i-ety—of—places." And then with a sudden blaze of light in his big eyes:

My God! 'honoured of them all!'" He stopped suddenly.

"The next time you break out, you'll get the cocoa-saucepan at your head," I warned him. "Now answer Jim's question."

O'Rane sat staring at the fire until Loring threw a wastepaper basket at him.

"If you start scrapping——" he began. "Oh, what was your dam' silly question? Dear man, I was born in Prague, and, as I never stayed six months in the same country till I came to England, you can see my education was a bit of mixed grill. Father ..." he hesitated; it was the first time I had heard him mention any relation, " ... father used to teach me a bit himself. And once or twice I had a tutor. And for the most part he used to lay on a local priest. That's why I can hardly understand the way you chaps pronounce Latin and Greek. And then the Great Interregnum, the Wanderjahre...."

"Most of your life's been that," I commented.

"Ah, I did this stunt alone—before I came here. After the war."

"The Greek War?" Loring asked.

"Surely. They killed my father, did the Turks. And when I'd buried him there was nothing much to wait for. He'd given every last penny to the Greeks, so I cleared out and came to England by way of Japan and the States and a few other places. It was all valuable experience," he added, with a concentrated bitterness that made my blood run cold. When O'Rane spoke in that tone, I could imagine him primed and anxious for murder.

he went on. "'Delight of battle'! Oh, my God! These poets and modern war!"

"Did you see anything of it?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I was a kid of thirteen. I saw the—results ... when they brought my father back to the PirÆus."

Loring had been lying on his back with his hands locked under his head. He roused himself now to turn on one side and face O'Rane.

"Was your father Lord O'Rane?" he asked.

Raney's face grew hard and defiant.

"He was."

Loring nodded. "When he was killed the Guv'nor noticed the name. I rather think your property marches with some of ours. You're County Longford, aren't you?"

"The property is. I, Lord Chepstow, am what you would doubtless call a bastard."

Loring sprang to his feet.

"Raney, you damned little swine——!"

"It's true!" O'Rane answered, jumping up and facing him.

"It's not true that I would ...!"

"Oh, perhaps not. But I've been called it—and by lineal descendants of the Unrepentant Thief, too. You've got nickel-plated manners, of course."

"If you were worth a curse, you'd apologize," said Loring, hotly.

O'Rane reflected.

"What for?" he demanded. "I'm not ashamed of my father, Loring."

"You'd be a pretty fair louse if you were. Don't make me lose my temper again, you little beast."

O'Rane held out his hand with a curious, embarrassed smile.

"Sorry, Loring. Is that good enough?"

"We can rub along on that."

Some years later my guardian, Bertrand Oakleigh, appeased my curiosity on the subject of the O'Rane fortunes. "The Liberator," after a crowded boyhood of agitation and intrigue, became so deeply implicated in certain acts of Fenianism that he had to leave Ireland in disguise and live abroad for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wandered from one capital to another, preaching insurrection and being disowned by the Government of his own country. When the Foreign Office papers of the period are made public, his name will be found forming the subject of heated diplomatic dispatches. As a neutral his conduct was far from correct in the Polish rising of '63 and the Balkan trouble of '76. When he lived as the guest of the exiled Louis Kossuth, pressure was brought to bear by the secret police, and he moved north into Switzerland. There he met Mrs. Raynter, one of the famous three beautiful Taverton sisters. The influence of Lord O'Rane's personality was not confined to political audiences: she lived with him for three years, and died in giving birth to a son. When Lord O'Rane himself succumbed to wounds received in the GrÆco-Turkish War, he was only in the fifties. The measure of his power and sway is to be found less in any positive achievement than in the terror he inspired in the less stable Governments of Europe from Russia to Spain.

II

Winter softened into spring, and spring lengthened into the summer that was to be my last at Melton. The few remaining months are engraved deeply on my memory as though I lived an intenser life to capture the last shreds of heritage that the school held out to me. As in a sudden mellowing I found myself on terms of unexpected friendliness with people I had previously disliked or despised. Beresford—lank disciplinarian—invited me to dine in College, and revealed himself unwontedly human and well-informed on Rudyard Kipling; Ponsonby, whom I had lightly written of as a pretentious ass, proved on better acquaintance to be a man of self-paralysing shyness who lived in almost physical dread of his form; Grimshaw, most stolid of men in official life, shone without warning as a raconteur and mimic of his colleagues. I dined or breakfasted with them all, not excluding little Matheson with his unwieldy tribe of children, and we talked unbroken "shop" and disinterred old scandals and parted with a sentimental, "You'll be sorry to leave Melton?" "Very sorry, sir."

The vanity of eighteen is long dead, and I can recall with amusement that I had serious misgivings for the school's future after I should have left. For five years and more it had been all my world. I remembered the veneration with which, as a fag, I had gazed on the gladiators of the Eleven and the Witan of the Sixth—gazed and flushed with self-consciousness and shy gratification when one of them ordered me to carry his books across Great Court. In time I too had made my way into the Sixth; there was at first nothing very wonderful or dignified about the position, but by no immoderate stretch of imagination I could fancy myself venerated as I had venerated the heroes of five years before. And without doubt I looked proudly on my work in the Monitorial Council: we had been strict but not harsh, reserved but not aloof, reformers but not iconoclasts—statesmen to a man. At every point we seemed superior to our immediate predecessors, and the only bitterness in our cup was brought by the reflection that this Golden Age would so soon pass away. It was inconceivable that youngsters like Marlowe, Clayton or Dennis could fill our shoes. They were boys. I remember that Loring and I took Clayton on one side and revealed some few of the secrets of our successful rule; I remember, too, how extraordinarily Clayton resented our patronage....

The recorded history of the last two terms is meagre, but I recollect that O'Rane came twice into conflict with authority before we parted. The first time was an unhappy occasion when the May-Day celebrations of the Melton carpet-makers coincided with one of his periodical outbursts. A plethoric meeting of somnolent workmen was being somewhat furtively held in the more somnolent market square; moist, earnest speakers declaimed under a hot sun to a listless audience. When Dainton and I passed through the square, oratory was getting worsted, and the meeting was summoning resolution to spend the rest of the warm May afternoon in sleep. Then O'Rane appeared galvanically from the West. And soon afterwards from the East, with dragging steps and eyes glued to his book, came Burgess in cap and cassock, his pockets swollen with the books he had bought in Grantham's.

That night O'Rane spent forty-five minutes in the Head's house—an unusual time for anything but sentence of expulsion. Loring and I were walking up and down Great Court with our watches in our hands, prepared to intercede with speeches of incredible eloquence if the worst came to the worst. Through the bright, unblinded library windows we could see Raney pleading; the back of Burgess's white head was visible above his chair, motionless, and seemingly inexorable.

"What's happened?"

The door had opened slowly and shut with a clang. O'Rane was walking towards us with a white face that belied his jaunty step.

"It's not to occur again." The anticlimax was an unintentional trick of phrasing. "Well, it won't. I can't work that lay a second time. D'you know he sacked me within five seconds of my entering the room? I—had—to—fight—for—very—life." He breathed hard, linked arms and marched us off for a walk around the Cloisters.

"Drive ahead," said Loring.

"'Laddie, thy portion is with the malefactors. Get thee gone, and walk henceforth in outer darkness.' I say, the old man's formidable when he's angry. I said nothing, and he waved me to the door. I didn't move. 'Get thee gone, laddie,' he thundered, 'and let not the sun of to-morrow rise to find thee in this place.' I asked him what I'd done; he sort of suggested that I really knew all the time. I told him my version." O'Rane stopped and drew back a step with arms outstretched. "I told him I'd found that sweet May-Day meeting with potbellied whimperers gassing over an Eight Hour Day and drinking enough beer to drown 'emselves in. The May-Days I know were the ones where the mob broke up half Turin and were shot down by the soldiery: they were men with something to fight for—and ready to fight for it. These sodden voter vermin! If they'd organize with their cursed votes—if they'd fight—if they'd do anything—if they were in earnest——! My God, your English Labour!" His utterance quickened and his voice grew animated to the point of passion. "I told these scabrous dogs to put their lousy shoulders to the wheel. God knows what I didn't call 'em, but they were too sodden to mind, and I found I was speaking in French half the time. Then they got an idea I'd come over from Paris to champion them, and they cheered no end. So I taught 'em the 'Marseillaise,' and half-way through the second verse Burgess drifted into view. I told him in his library as I'm telling you here...."

"I hope to the Lord you didn't!" Loring interjected.

"I told him every last word." The Cloisters echoed with his excitement. "You bat-ears, you don't understand! He did!"

"What did he say?" I asked.

O'Rane hesitated. "He hinted that I wasn't accountable for my actions."

I burst out laughing. The words were so obviously inadequate.

"That's a curious reason for not sacking you," was Loring's comment.

O'Rane's black eyes, seemingly fixed on a gargoyle over Chapel door, were gazing into infinity.

"He said it was the Call of the Blood. And I—I—I just said nothing." His voice sank to a whisper. "I hardly understood."

The vision was for his eyes alone, and to us, uncomprehending, the rapt expression of his face and tense poise of the body was curiously disconcerting. Awkwardly self-conscious, Loring stepped forward and thrust his arm through O'Rane's.

"Pull yourself together, my son," he said.

O'Rane shook free of his arm. "You don't understand! But he did. He knew it all. There was one crossed to France in the Revolution, and him they guillotined because he was too powerful. And two died for Greece, and one went fighting for the North and the slaves. And one died by the wayside as the king's troops entered Rome. And one tended lepers in a South Pacific island." He strode up to Loring and stared him defiantly in the face. "And some day men will follow me as they never followed one of the others!"

"Come to earth, you lunatic," said Loring; and I was grateful to him for the chill banality of the words.

O'Rane turned disgustedly on his heel.

"You wouldn't understand if you lived to be a thousand," he flung back over his shoulder.

"Come back!" Loring called. "There's nothing to get shirty about."

"You've the soul of a flunkey!"

"All right; so much the worse for me."

"And anyone who's not got your own servants' half spirit you call a lunatic!"

Loring sat down on the stone seat that ran round the inner wall of Cloisters and beckoned to O'Rane to join him.

"Come and cool down a bit, Raney," he urged. "And for the Lord's sake don't make such a row or you'll bring Linden and Smollet out of their rooms."

"You've got a bourgeoise mind, Loring," said O'Rane reflectively.

"Agreed, but don't shout," Loring returned imperturbably. "I want you to tell me—quite quietly—how you prove your nobility of soul by running the risk of getting sacked for the sake of making an idiotic speech to a mob of workmen who didn't particularly want to hear you? You tell me I shall never understand, but do at least tell me what I've missed."

"A soul," O'Rane answered simply.

"It's like trying to argue with a woman," said Loring in despair.

The prayer-bell began to ring in the distance, and we made our way out of the Cloisters and across Great Court. O'Rane, at the last moment, decided to stay behind, and we left him curled up on the stone seat, his thin, clean features white in the moonlight and his great deep-set eyes gazing abstractedly across Fighting Green. He was back in Matheson's for Roll Call and sauntered into my study with his hands in his pockets and a straw in his mouth. The flame of emotion had burnt itself out, and he seemed cold, tired, and a little melancholy.

"Humble apologies and all that sort of thing," he began, holding out his hand to Loring.

"You haven't told us why you did it?" I reminded him.

He wrinkled his brow and shook his head in perplexity.

"Didn't seem as if I could help it. 'Man was born free and is everywhere in chains.' I've been through a bit—trying to get enough to feed and clothe myself—and it was hell. And sometimes it all comes back to me and I want to blow the whole world up.... And sometimes I dream what a glorious thing we could make of life, even for the men who sweep the chimneys and mend the sewers.... To-day...." He shrugged his shoulders. "I'd forgotten the everlasting Press. After the kings, the nobles; after the nobles, the people; and after the people, the Press. So Burgess says. And Melton's not strong enough to stand the racket if every beach-comber with a halfpenny in his pocket can read that a Melton boy led the 'Marseillaise' in Market Square."

"Quite right, too. It gives the school a dam' bad name."

"Oh, I agree—now," he answered limply. "He told me to choose my punishment."

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I said, 'You aren't sacking me then, sir?' He said, 'Sacking, laddie? What strange tongue is this?' And then I knew I was all right. Clayton'll be captain next year. He'd have made me, otherwise. Can't be helped. And I guess I got Melton in my vest pocket most ways. Good-night, bat-ears. I'm going to bed."

As the door closed behind him Loring sighed to himself.

"If he isn't sacked for this, he'll be sacked for something else," he predicted. "I hope it won't be till I'm gone, because he refreshes me. D'you remember his first term?"

"He's extraordinarily popular now," I said.

"He's the most fearless little beast I ever met. And there's such a glorious uncertainty about him. One moment he's your long-lost brother, the next he's slanging you like a pickpocket in about six languages, the next he's apologizing and shaking hands. I suppose he'll be captain the year after next. It'll be an eventful time for the school."

O'Rane's other conflict with authority was less impassioned and on a smaller scale. He had absented himself from Chapel for the better part of the term, and Burgess one day inquired the reason.

"I don't believe all the stuff they hand out there, sir."

"Have I asked thee to believe it, laddie?" demanded Burgess, who had almost ceased to expect polished diction from O'Rane.

"Well, sir, if I pretend to believe it...."

"Have I asked thee to pretend, laddie?"

"But if I go, sir, people naturally assume...."

"And how long has David O'Rane given ear to the vain repetitions of the Synagogue and Market-place?"

For the moment Raney experienced some difficulty in finding an answer. Then he said:

"I'll go if you want me to, sir."

"Laddie, thou art of an age to determine this for thyself. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. Peradventure the wisdom and truth that were taught me while I hanged yet upon my mother's breast no longer charm the ears of the younger men. Peradventure

Herein thou must walk thine own road, laddie.

An thou thinkest thou canst learn aught from the life of the man Christ Jesus, laddie, thy time will not be lost."

Thereafter O'Rane attended Chapel with assiduity until the breaking-up service on the last day.

For weeks we had been saying good-bye to Melton, dismantling our studies, packing our books, seeking our porters and groundmen to press upon them our last tip. The final morning saw us seated betimes at Leaving Breakfast—a quaint Saturnalia whereat all discipline departed and every junior in Hall was compelled to read a rimed criticism of the departing monitors. I recall that Tom Dainton, who had almost single-handed won the Cricket Shield and established Matheson's in a tenth year of unbroken tenure, received a rousing send-off; Loring and I were let down lightly, while Draycott was pointedly informed that his hair was unduly long and his clothes an eyesore.

We were allowed no reply to the chastening criticism, but acerbity was forgotten when we joined hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne" with one foot on the table. For five years to my certain knowledge the long table had collapsed annually under the unwonted strain; to break at least one leg was now part of the accepted ritual, and, though Matheson had spent money and thought on a cunning scheme of underpinning, by dint of concerted rocking and a sword-dance executed by Dainton, we wrung a groan from the ill-used board and doubled all four legs into the attitude of a kneeling camel before the bell sounded for first Roll Call.

My last Chapel was Loring's first. Catholic or no he felt the service was not to be missed. We sat side by side, and determined there should be none of the foolish weakness exhibited by other generations of leaving monitors. Yet as the organ started to play the last hymn, he failed to rise, and, as voices all around me began to sing, "Lead, Kindly Light," I found I could not join in.

From Chapel we went to Big School for our last Roll Call. The prize compositions of the year were read aloud, and the scholarship results at Oxford and Cambridge announced. There followed a long distribution of gilt-edged, calf-bound books; three malefactors were led to Bishop Adam's Birch Table and flicked publicly across the back of the hand; there remained but one thing more.

"School Monitors!" Burgess called out.

All ten of us lined up facing the Council with our backs to the school. The birch was handed to Sutcliffe, who reversed it restored it to Burgess and returned—divested of authority—to Second Monitor's seat. The ritual was repeated with the other nine, and Burgess called up the new monitors. To each of them the birch was handed and by each returned. Then Clayton, the Captain-Elect, rose from Sutcliffe's old seat, advanced to the edge of the dais, knelt down in front of the Birch Table, facing the school, and read the old Latin prayers that—despite their taint of popery—Queen Elizabeth had authorized us to continue, always provided we dropped the monkish pronunciation.

The last scene was laid in Burgess's library, where each of us was presented with a copy of Browning's "Men and Women."

"Peradventure ye have heard his words upon my lips ere now," he said. "Laddie, these partings like me not. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world, yet it may be that in this transitory life an old man's counsel may avail you in the dark places of the earth. Come to me, laddies, if ye judge not an old man's arm to be too weak to help you. At this time and in this place will I say but this: Sutcliffe, thou wilt consume thy days weighing the jots and tittles of learning. Therein is thine heart buried, and I do not gainsay thee. Dainton, thou shalt be known in Judah as a mighty man of valour. Thou art ceasing to be a child and must put away childish things. Hearken no more to the voice of children playing in the market-place; gird thee for battle to be a soldier of the Lord. Oakleigh, thine heart melteth away and becometh water all too easily. Thou hast riches and learning, but little singleness of purpose. Not for thee the dust of the arena—thou art too prone to hesitate and weigh thy doubt. Best canst thou serve thy neighbour by girding on the harness of others; thou hast friends and kinsmen in the first places of the Synagogue: succour them."

He looked at Loring and paused. "Laddie, I could have made of thee a scholar, but thou wouldst not. Thou canst be a statesman, but thou wilt not. The illusion of a great position surrounds thee, and thou art content to gather in thy vessels of gold and silver, thine ivory and peacocks, thy choice books and paintings. Anon thou wilt awaken and question thyself, saying, 'Wherefore have I lived?' Ere that day come I counsel thee to journey to a far country on an embassage from thy soveran lord. I charge thee to scorn the delights of Babylon lest, in the empty show of Kingship, the vanity of gorgeous apparel, the uttering of words in thy Council of Elders, thou conceive that thy duty to God and to thy neighbour hath been fulfilled. Laddies, an old man's blessing goeth with you."

III

And thus we were taught and fitted to be rulers of men.

As the London train steamed away from Melton Station, Loring leant out of the carriage window for a last sight of the school buildings clustering white in the July sunshine on the crest of the hill. Secretly I believe we were both feeling what a strange place Melton would be without us.

"Six years, old son!" he observed, drawing his head in. "Dam' good years they were, too. Wonder how long it'll be before you Radicals abolish places like this."

"There are lots of other things I'd abolish first," I said. It was a mental convention with Loring to regard me as a jaundiced, fanatical Marat, and with the argumentativeness of youth I played up to his lead.

"What good has Melton done?" he challenged.

At one time my faith in public schools was such that I generously pitied anyone who had struggled to manhood in outer darkness. Infirmity of judgement or approaching middle age make it daily harder for me to divide the institutions of the world into the Absolutely Good or the Utterly Bad. It is probably wise to raise up a class of men who shall be educated and not technically instructed—wide horizons and an infinite capacity for learning constitute an aim sufficiently exalted. That was the aim of Melton, and we were well educated within narrow limits that excluded modern history, economics, English literature, science and modern languages. We never strove to be practical and had a pathetic belief in the validity of pure scholarship as an equipment for life.

I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy, subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is adequate—conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her public schools.

The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of co-ordination and discipline—as other nations may perhaps learn those same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought up to the public-school standard of conduct.

No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class, will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness and its pragmatical efficiency. I never 'sneaked' though the price of silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor, though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff, though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other, and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the challenge.

There is no Radicalism in schools—I had no business to use the word. After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles, "but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on."

In moments of uncritical pride I judge the tree by its fruit. It is the public school men, grumbling at their work, who—shall we say?—govern the Indian Empire, with resentment of praise from others and no thoughts of praising themselves. Versatile, light-hearted and infinitely resourceful if cholera sweep the land, they will step from one dead man's shoes to another's and leave a village to govern a province. Haggard and drawn with long weeks of eighteen-hour days, they will yet find time to mistrust the man who is not of their race or speech or school and growl at him who offends by his clothes or enthusiasm or aspirates. And the Indian Empire goes afresh to perdition with every new fall in the rupee or change in the colour of the Government minute paper. In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his fellows will come out on strike.

"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.

In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. At eighteen everything seemed so easy: the world was blind but not selfish—except for the high and dry Tories who were to be quietly put out of the way if they proved obdurate; everyone else would yield to reason—and my eloquence.

The favourite vision was a crowded meeting swayed to laughter or tears or passion by my words—a memory of Mr. Gladstone's last public speech on the Armenian atrocities. At other times when my Irish fluency had been too rudely interrupted, I pictured myself as heir to Parnell's heritage of masterful silence. Cold, inflexible, contemptuous—I had seen him in Dublin when I was a boy of seven, and externals counted for so much that will-power seemed a matter of compressed lips and folded arms. I was but eighteen, and my Radicalism a matter of inheritance rather than conviction. It took years of painful disillusionment to discover how much fanaticism is required to shake the resolution of others; and years more to find how completely I was lacking in it. One morning, when I had attempted to catch the Speaker's eye some fourteen times in the course of an all-night sitting, I walked out of the House and spent the day asleep in a Turkish bath; on waking I recalled Burgess's words, "Not for thee the dust of the arena, laddie." The superman vision was at last dispelled.

"Well, I had a dam' good time there," I said to Loring, by way of closing the Melton debate.

In common with many others Loring drew pleadings against Radicalism which would have delighted a lawyer. To begin with, there were no such people as Radicals—he at any rate had never met them. The professed Radicals of his acquaintance were a handful of mere agitators, misleading a too credulous electorate that was not yet fit to exercise the franchise; morally the Radical party was negligible because its sole ambition was, by sheer force of numbers, to take away anything anybody had got—he for one would never acquiesce in confiscation merely because a majority voted it. Then in our arguments I would confront him with the Will of the People—for some strange reason only capable of interpretation by Radicals. The phrase had a curious hypnotic effect on us both, for he would invariably retaliate with the statement that the sole custodians of the People's Will were to be found in the House of Lords. And infallibly we would both lose our tempers over the first Home Rule Bill.

"At heart you're quite sound," he was good enough to say on this occasion.

On reaching London we drove to Loring House, where I spent the night before crossing to Ireland. A month later we met for Horse Show week. Loring stayed with me, and we went to Dublin together to join the Hunter-Oakleighs, who were cousins of mine and at this time head of the Catholic branch of the family. Half-way through September I put in a week at House of Steynes, and was not surprised to find that Loring had included my cousin Violet in the party. In the first week of October we returned to London, picked up Draycott, who had spent a stifling summer, loose-tied and low-collared, in the Quarter Latin, and descended upon Oxford to order the decoration of our rooms.

Draycott had been banished to Old Library, to his present disgust and subsequent reconciliation, and allotted a gloomy first-floor set which for the next three years was the scene of "Planchette" sÉances and roulette parties. Loring and I had been given one of the coveted double suites in Tom, and for the length of an afternoon we condemned furniture and carpets, issued orders to a deferential, tired upholsterer, and finally emerged into the autumn sunlight of the Quad with a feeling of modest triumph that there would be few rooms in Oxford to compare with ours.

On the following Friday we made our first informal appearance.

Writing after sixteen years that have been neither unvaried nor uneventful, I find that Oxford lingers in my memory as an adventure never before experienced even in my first days at Melton, never afterwards repeated even when I lived first in London, or fought my Wiltshire elections, or entered the House. I like to fill a fresh pipe and lean back in my chair, conjuring up a thousand little personal scenes—of no importance in the world to anyone but myself: my first Sunday luncheon, when I was the guest of Jerry Westermark, and if the rest of the company were third-year men like him, entitled to an arm-chair by the fire in Junior Common Room. The first luncheon I myself gave half-way through the term, my anxiety not to leave out even one of my new friends, and my anger with Crabtree of Magdalen who invited himself at the last moment and filled me with eleventh-hour fears that the food would run short. My first "Grind," where I pocketed ten pounds by backing Loring, who won the race at the price of a broken collar-bone. My first Commem. when I lost my heart to Amy Loring. My first appearance in the schools and my confounding ad hoc knowledge of St. Paul's journey. My first....

It is always the first impression that seems to endure longest, but there were friendships I made and lost wherein I can fix no date. Tom Dainton, over the way at Oriel, dropped out of my circle some time or other; we nodded on meeting at the Club, and each would invite the other's assistance in entertaining his relations, but a day came when I felt unworthy of Tom's earnest and muscular Blues. And I have no doubt he shook a puzzled head over the "footlers" with whom I had cast in my lot. Equally there came a day when I found myself using a man's Christian name for the first time, and the last piece of ice drifted out to sea.

I like to recreate the atmosphere of eager activity, of new-won freedom and approaching maturity. Six years at Melton had been a time of bells and chapels, first schools and roll-calls, compulsory games and "Lights Out"; at Oxford I was a man, with liberty in moderation to cut lectures and private hours, go to bed when I liked, organize a banquet and participate from time to time in wholesale destruction of property, no man saying me nay. The differences were great enough to mask the resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new House Standard with more than Meltonian observance of taboo rules and caste distinctions. We wore no College colours, we dressed for the theatre, and the "Rowing Push" were at pains not to know the "Footlers" who beagled or hunted. But we were all unconscious and in deadly earnest, whether we testified to our abhorrence to Balliol, or walked up Headington Hill and back by Mesopotamia discussing the abolition of private property or lounged in chairs round a piled-up fire talking and smoking—and, for variety, smoking and talking.

Not unless I die and be born again shall I a second time know the joy of living in a city of three thousand men, all of them my soul's friends—save such as came from other colleges or the despised quarters of my own.

"Oakum, come and talk to me!"

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.

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."

"It'll cost you a hundred million pounds," I answered. "God knows how many men. And all because the said farmers claim the right to keep their own territory to themselves."

"A hundred million pounds!" he snorted.

"That's what Labouchere said the other night in the House," I retorted, with an undergraduate's faith in the figures and opinions of others.

"Oh, of course, if you believe a man like that! A man who frankly doesn't believe in the Empire. A Little Englander ..."

"I shouldn't be surprised if he was right," I said.

"Just for a few pounds you'd rather like to see us beaten," he cried. To this hour I recall with amazement the passions aroused by that war.

"I'm not in favour of a war against a free people conducted on behalf of Illicit Diamond Buyers. Besides the few pounds there are men's lives—and a little question of right and wrong."

"You ought to support your country right or wrong."

"I beg to differ," I said, and we carried the discussion heatedly back to Majuba and the question whether or no Mr. Gladstone's body should be exhumed and hung in chains.

The war was to come very near home before many weeks had passed. After Black Friday, Roger Dainton raised a troop of horse and took them out; Tom Dainton was given a university commission and followed a few weeks later. In the Easter term "The Earl of Chepstow" was painted out and "The Marquess Loring" substituted. The "damned farmers" had added a very pleasant, easy-going, undistinguished man to the lengthening list of casualties.

IV

To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately—as it seemed—we were busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.

One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some realization of the gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.

The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted, and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death. Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us. After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.

At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men, who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent, returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old party" would be invited, we accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us, and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.

I remember—though it is a petty enough thing to recall—rather resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked—a set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality—Turkish coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan matÉ, Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless apÉritif unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that the plaster casts were hidden.

Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption. He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life, relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office before they were restored to their family.

On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me. In the absence of her husband she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.

"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."

So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.

As soon as I promised to drive over to the school, Sonia announced her intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in the reality of his dreams were Sonia and—the dreamer.

We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one shoulder like a military overcoat.

"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands. "A reed shaken by the wind?"

"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.

He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with his silky white hair.

"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.

"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.

Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back again to me.

"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."

Sonia and I squeezed our way in among two or three hundred parents who had profited by proximity to the Head to inquire how 'Bernard' had fared that term; the giant intellect of Burgess we left to discover unaided who 'Bernard' might be. We listened to the Prize Compositions, the Honours of the year, and the removes of the term. Then Sonia's hand slipped through my arm, and her brown eyes suddenly softened. The prizes were being distributed, and we watched and listened until I, at any rate, grew sore-handed and weary of hearing O'Rane's name called out. I began, too, to pity the fags who would have to stagger across Great Court under the growing burden of that calf-bound, gilt-edged pile. He himself went through the ceremony in a dispirited, listless fashion, his thoughts running forward to the moment when he would have to reverse the birch and hand it back to Burgess, while the new captain slipped into his seat and read prayers over his body.

"In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. I should like all boys who are leaving this term to say good-bye to me in my house. Ire licet."

The school poured out into Great Court and formed up in a double line. O'Rane was cheered from School Steps to the Head's house, as no one to my knowledge had been cheered since Pelham gave up his house and retired after forty-three years. The Leaving Books were handed out,—still "Men and Women" as in my day,—the last hand-shakes exchanged. Outside the library windows the school was waiting for O'Rane's reappearance.

"Be not overmuch puffed up with pride, laddie," said Burgess, when they were alone. "Boy is a creature of simple faith and easy enthusiasm. True, in thine youth thou wast clept 'Spitfire' and 'The Vengeful Celt'——"

"Sir ...?"

Burgess waved away the interruption. "Did I not tell thee of the Unsleeping Eye? Laddie, I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this life, yet it may be that the counsel of age may profit a young man. Yet not with thee. To thee I say not, 'Do this' or 'Do that'; there is nought thou canst not do, laddie—thou also art among the prophets." He held out his hand abruptly, and O'Rane took it.

"Sir, I want to thank you ..." he began.

"For that I forbade thee not when thou didst crave admittance?"

"A thousand things beside that, sir. Everything ..."

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping, laddie," said Burgess gently, disengaging his hand. "And thy father and I were young men together. Thou didst know this thing?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yet thou namedst it not?"

O'Rane hesitated and then burst out with a touch of his old universal defiance.

"I wanted to make you take me on my merits, sir."

"Hard is the way of him who would presume to offer help to David O'Rane!" Burgess answered, with a shake of the head.

"But I'd won through so far, sir; I wanted to see how much longer——"

"I blame thee not, laddie. Well, thou hast endured to the end and hast brought new honour to my kingdom. Counsel I withhold from thee: truly the Lord will provide. Fare thee well, David O'Rane."

On our way back to Crowley Court I put Raney outside, in case he preferred the company of his own thoughts for the present. He sat for a few moments with his chin on his chest, but as the car left the town he engaged the chauffeur in earnest conversation, and as we slowed down in front of the house he jumped out and came to the door with the words, "Simpson damns electricity and steam. He swears by oil. Well, if cars are going to knock out horses and you need petrol to drive your cars, there's going to be a tremendous demand for oil in the near future. I want to get in before the rush, I'm going to study oil——"

"You're a soulless Wall Street punter," I said.

Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history, and—characteristically enough—he was ready to fling the whole blazing vigour of his vitality into the next.

"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.

"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.

Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the other. Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had taken place.

"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing knocked into us."

O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.

"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand! From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted stiffening.' My God!"

"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.

"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't read the foreign papers."

Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the continental Press.

"D'you still do that?" I asked.

"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George. They—simply—hate—us—abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."

"Who wants to attack us?" I asked.

"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia, as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people talking like that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."

He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a savage twist of his heel.

"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"

"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other power."

My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews which it conjured up.

"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want another."

"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to war."

"I doubt it," I said. "The temptation's too great. The first day I was given an air-gun—this is many years ago, Raney—I winged a harmless, necessary milch cow. The alpha and omega of British policy should be to have a navy so efficient that no one can attack us and an army so inefficient that we daren't attack anyone else. If you aim at all-round efficiency, you'll probably have the rest of Europe on your back and you'll certainly go bankrupt."

He was preparing an explosive retort when one of the drawing-room windows opened, and Sonia came toward us.

"Bedtime?" I asked, as she held out her hand.

"Rot, isn't it?" she answered, wrinkling her nose. "I shall be sixteen next birthday, too."

"When I was your age ..." O'Rane began improvingly.

"I used to thrash you two or three times a month," I put in.

Sonia looked at him wonderingly.

"Is that true, David?" she demanded.

He nodded his head.

"You beast, George!" Sonia burst out with a concentrated venom that abashed me.

O'Rane glanced in momentary surprise at the rigid indignant little figure with the clenched fists and bitten lip. Then he caught her up in his arms.

"Bambina, you're the only person in the whole world who loves me. George couldn't help himself, though; I was out for trouble. And I could have knocked him down and broken every bone in his body if I'd wanted to—just as I could now. Only he was right and I was wrong. Kiss me good-night, sweetheart."

He lowered her gently till her feet touched the ground, but sudden shyness had come over her, and she would only hold out a hand.

"Clearly I'm in the way," I said, as I moved towards the house.

"I'm coming too," Sonia called out. "No, David, you're grown up now."

He snorted indignantly.

"That's a rotten reason. Are you never going to kiss me again? This year?" She shook her head. "Next year? Some time?"

"Some time. Perhaps."

She ran into the house, and O'Rane and I took one more turn along the terrace before following her.

"Grown up!" he exclaimed, after a moment's silence.

"That's still rankling?" I asked.

"No, I was just thinking. I fancy I was pretty well grown up before we ever met, George."

"As much as you ever will be," I suggested.

"As much as I ever want to be, old son. It's been like an extraordinary dream, you know, these last four years. Everything topsy-turvy.... I was years and years older than you and Jim when you used to thrash me.... If you can imagine yourself coming to a place like Melton after knocking about all round the world, living from hand to mouth.... The holidays were the time I really worked. Do you remember when you and Jim found me at the Empire Hotel? You've never mentioned it from that day to this. I'm not ashamed of it and, though you two had your eyes bulging out of your head, I don't suppose with all your conventionality you think the worse of me for it. Anyway I don't care a damn if you do." He paused and lit a cigarette. "I'm going to have a holiday now, George. Idle about till October. And then in the holidays—vacations, you call 'em, don't you?—I shall get hold of soft, genteel jobs—private tutor to aristocratic imbeciles——"

"And then?"

He yawned luxuriantly.

"And then I shall settle down to earn a great deal of money. I'm never going through the old mill again, George. And when I've earned it I shall buy a villa at Naples and rot there. Are you going into the drawing-room? I don't think I shall, it's such a grand night out here. I want to think over this amazing country of yours, where a man can drop from the skies—I was junior steward on a 'Three Funnel' liner just before—drop down, find his feet, find people to employ him and weigh him out scholarships.... George, so far as I can make out, after four years here, there's not a damn thing you don't fling open to the veriest dago and pay him handsome to take the job. 'Ejectum litore, egentem excepi....' No, that's a bad omen." He spun round and smote me on the shoulder. "I owe a lot to this rotten country and I shall owe a lot more before I'm through with it. Now I'm going to take charge of the piano and sing songs to you...."

It was O'Rane who went into the drawing-room, and I who stayed outside in enjoyment of the night. Roger Dainton took the opportunity of a quiet stroll and a few moments' conversation. While in London he had been sounded in the matter of a baronetcy. I believed him when he protested that his troop of yeomanry had been raised without any thought of what honours or decorations he might draw from the lucky tub after the war. I almost believed him when he said he thought of accepting the offer because it would gratify his wife. And I felt a certain wonder and pity that in his curiously unfriended state, half-way between two social spheres, he should come for advice to a man less than half his own age.

V

"Lodgings for the October Term"

Square cards inscribed with that device had offered me welcome for three years, and in the last term of my third year Loring and I settled seriously to the task of finding a new home against the day when we should be flung, time-expired, from our loved quarters in Tom. 'Seriously' in spirit if not in method, for we chartered a coach-and-four, invited a dozen men to breakfast and set out from Canterbury Gate with luncheon-baskets sufficient to feed a company. Proceeding impressively up King Edward Street we doubled back into St. Ebbs in search of what Loring called "working-class tenements for virtuous Radicals." Failing to find anything that suited us, we returned by Brewer Street and inspected Micklem Hall, but there was a garden attached, and we should have been constrained to walk a beagle-puppy. Leaving the last question open, I dispossessed Loring of the box-seat and drove for the next half-hour, because he had laid me five to three that there was no such college as Wadham, and seven to two that if there were I could not find it.

I remember we lunched a mile or two north of Woodstock because Crabtree of Magdalen, who had as usual invited himself and assumed direction of our movements, insisted that our last year must be undisturbed. In the late evening we returned triumphantly to Oxford and collided with a tram at the bottom of the Turl. A languid voice from the first-floor window of 93D High Street inquired if we needed anything.

"Lodgings for the October and two succeeding terms," Loring called back.

"These aren't bad digs," answered the voice, and Crabtree was left to sort out the Corporation tram while Loring and I inspected the house opposite.

"They've got the makings of very decent quarters," he admitted handsomely. "Decoration vile," he added in an aside, "but then, what d'you expect of a B.N.C. man?" A furtive creature with obliquity of vision ushered us in. "We must get rid of him, George. Find out whether he is the landlord or a B.N.C. don or merely our young friend's male parent."

I ascertained that the man of repellent aspect was the landlord.

"I suppose we must take your ghastly digs," said Loring between a yawn and a sigh.

The following October we moved in and gave a housewarming—with the town band engaged to play waltzes outside while we dined. It was a bachelor dinner, but Grayes of Trinity and Henderson and Billings of the House chartered rooms at the "Dumb Bell," and came over in Empire gowns, chestnut wigs, cloaks and cigarettes. We danced until the band went home to bed and then led our guests round to inspect and praise our decorations and observe the absence of Pringle, the landlord, who had been exiled to a cottage on Boar's Hill.

"Best bedroom, second-best bedroom," Loring explained. "Spare bedrooms also ran. Bathroom. All that messuage. Lounge. Kitchen. Usual offices. Hot and cold. Electric lights and bells. Gent's eligible town residence."

It was eligible in every way, with window-seats overlooking the High from which we could watch passers-by surreptitiously trying to pick up the half-crown that Loring from time to time glued to the pavement. The house had been repainted inside and out, there were new carpets and furniture, a grand piano in one room and two Siamese kittens in every other. Old Lady Loring used to complain of dust when she came to visit us, but her son assured her that this was but a concession to my democratic spirit. We were certainly comfortable. As Loring observed the first night, "Now we've every excuse for neglecting our work."

He was reading Greats; I, History. We both expected seconds, hoped for firsts and told our friends thirds. What our tutors thought, I have no idea. Loring never consulted his unduly.

"I pay the College eight pounds a term tuition fees," he reasoned. "I'll make it twice that if they'll leave me alone. I want to think. Your society alone, George, is an Undenominational Education."

So he breakfasted at nine, cut lectures till one, lunched at the Club and hacked twenty miles in the afternoon. From tea till dinner he would wander round Oxford buying prints and large-paper editions; after dinner he would take a kitten on his knee and read German metaphysics aloud to it with a wealth of feeling in his voice. At eleven we would pay one or two calls or sit talking till a late hour.

It was Andrew Lang, I believe, who said that the reason why there were no good books on Oxford life was because they were all written by women who had spent one day in—Cambridge. I sometimes fancy that Oxford reformers are really Oxford novelists off duty. We went through the transition from boyhood to man's estate in some of this world's loveliest surroundings. Does it matter what we read or when we read it? A time had to come when each of us had the choice of working uncompelled or not working at all; we could not be given lines and detention all our life, and at Oxford I worked hard. So did Loring, for all his outward pose of idleness. We read seven hours a day for two-thirds of the vacation and were not wholly unoccupied even during term.

Looking back on it all I can find no period of mental development to compare with my last year at Oxford. It was no small thing to read a thousand years of history, however superficially. I began to touch general principles, to discard cherished preconceptions, and little by little to hammer out a philosophy of my own. In political science and economy Loring's school overlapped mine to some extent, and in the rambling 'School shop' we talked lay the germ of the Thursday Club. Every week of term and for a year or two after I came down, some ten of us would meet and dine together. There was a "book of the week"—too long or dull for all to read—which one would undertake to digest and expound. "Saint Simon's Memoirs," the "Contrat Social," the "Paston Letters" were among the works we had served up to us minced and rÉchauffÉ.

Later on, when Loring had dropped out, we became more purely political. Carmichael brought us in touch with socialist writers, and a week-end visit from Baxter Whittingham of Lincoln and Shadwell was responsible for my brief taste of working-class conditions some years later. I cannot hope that everyone nowadays looks at "Thursday Essays," which we published in 1904 as a statement of Young Oxford Liberalism, but, though it had little effect on the outside world, it consolidated its authors. Seddon of Corpus, who wrote on "Unemployment," is now in the Insurance Commission; Terry of Lincoln, the author of "Small Holdings," was private secretary to the President of the Board of Agriculture; Ainger, Mansfield, Gregory and I, who spread ourselves on "Public Economy," "Federation and the National Ideal," "The Tendrils of Socialism," and "The Irish Question Once More," all found our way into the House at the time of the 1906 Election.

Loring, too, matured on lines of his own. It would perhaps be truer to say that he developed that dual personality of which the germs had been existent at Melton. He was a cynic and idealist,—no uncommon union,—a pessimist and a practical reformer, honestly believing that the world was gradually deteriorating, that to cleanse the corruption was beyond man's powers, and yet that it was worth his own while to run the lost race to a finish.

I always fancy I can trace three phases through which he passed, three sources of inspiration. At school his taste for the romantic and picturesque found satisfaction in the Church of which he was a member: Eternal Rome captured his imagination, and, while I aspired to a vague universal brotherhood, he hoped and believed that Temporal Power would some day be once more oecumenical and that the warring world would in time find peace in a new age of faith. Oxford and the society of his fellow Catholics broke into the dream. Doctrinally he was unsettled by the philosophy he read for 'Greats' and the fabric and organization of his Church brought disillusionment when he saw them at close quarters. Old Lord Loring had made the house in Curzon Street a centre for English Catholicism. I remember balls and bazaars, receptions and committee-meetings without end, Catholic marquesses were rare, they had to work hard; they were also valuable as giving social respectability to a persecuted Church. An inconspicuous, undistinguished peer assumed rather an exalted position in a small religious communion where everyone knew everyone else. I imagine more people spoke of 'dear Lord Loring' than would have been the case had his religion been, say, that of the Established Church. His son felt and expressed extreme repugnance for the position he was expected to fill. The Catholic Church in partibus infidelium was not a trading company, and he declined to have his name published on the prospectus to inspire confidence among doubting subscribers.

On ceasing to be a Catholic in anything but name, he had a second bout of mediaevalism, and dreamed, as Disraeli dreamed in the 'Young England' days, of a re-vitalized, ascendant aristocracy. The reality of the dream passed quickly; it is questionable how much faith Disraeli himself put into his vision, though anything was possible while the political revolution of the first Reform Bill was still seething. It is doubtful if Loring ever considered his idealized aristocracy of philosopher-kings otherwise than with a sentimental, unhistorical regret. And when he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated either by the spiritual influence of his Church or the temporal influence of his order, I think he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated at all. Life thereafter became a private, personal matter; he preserved a fastidious sense of what was incumbent on him to do and a pride in not being false to his own standards. What happened to the world outside his gates was an irrelevance with which, in his growing detachment and surface cynicism, he declined to interest himself.

It was at Oxford that he passed from the first to the second of his three phases. We were none of us more than a few months distant from the untravelled world of men's work—sub-consciously we were all striving after a self-expression that should leave its mark on that work. Heaven be thanked! not one of us dreamed how ineffective our personalities were to prove, how unromantic our humdrum work, how meagre our hard-bought results! In the twelve years that passed between these last terms and the outbreak of a war that at least brought spaciousness back to human life, I can think of only one of my friends who failed to become in greater or less degree commonplace. That was O'Rane, and his store of the romantic could never quite be exhausted. He was too fearless of soul. A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not infrequently saves his soul.

O'Rane came up in my last year as one of a mixed draft from Melton. Mayhew and Sam Dainton we knew, but the others were little more than names to us. Dutifully Loring and I gave a couple of Sunday breakfasts and sighed when our guest left us for a walk round the Parks before luncheon. The meals were as difficult as they were long, for the freshmen were shy, and we had outgrown our taste for early morning banquets. When conversation was fanned into life, we found it sadly juvenile. Were we not fourth-year men, a thought jaded, and with difficulty interested in anecdotes of a scout's eccentricities or descriptions of unsuccessful flight from proctors? When the last guest pocketed his half-guinea straight-grained pipe (which we had been forced to admire) and clattered down the stairs to walk a dejected terrier of mixed ancestry through Oxford, Loring shook his head despairingly.

"We were not like that, George," he asserted.

"We were rather a good year, of course," I agreed.

He emptied a succession of ash trays, thoughtfully replaced the cushions on the sofas and straightened the antimacassars.

"Twelve of them, weren't there?" he asked. "And they'll all invite us back, every jack man of them."

"And we shall have to go, too," I also sighed, "and make sport for them, after waiting half an hour in a room full of unknown while our host hurriedly splashes himself next door and apologizes for having forgotten all about the invitation.

"We never did that!"

"Once," I said.

We called on O'Rane the first night of term, and compelled him to dine with us the second. I had not forgotten a slight disappointment of my own early days. One of my best friends at Melton had been Jerry Pinsent: we shared the omnibus-study in Matheson's and stayed with each other in the holidays. I fully expected that, as a second-year man, he would take me by the hand and guide my feet among the pitfalls of etiquette—largely the imagination of a self-conscious freshman—with which I understood Oxford to be set. Pinsent was affable, even kindly. He offered me a seat in his mess and introduced me to his friends. Alas! it was not enough. I found it indecent that he should have surrounded himself so completely and so speedily. I was immoderately jealous of his friends' free-and-easy Christian-name habit, and as two of them were Blues (Pinsent himself was a fine oar until he broke his wrist in a bicycling accident) I decided very unworthily that he was a snob and a faithless friend. With equal self-consciousness I determined that O'Rane should never charge me with aloofness or want of cordiality.

We invited no one to meet him. There would be time for that later, and in any case he was likely to be known all over Oxford before the term was out.

"He shall stand on his hind-legs and do his tricks for us alone," said Loring, who pretended to laugh at O'Rane in order to conceal an admiration not far removed from affection. "The wild beast that has been fed into domesticity."

There was little enough of the wild beast about O'Rane in the year of grace 1902. The starved look had gone out of his face, and his eyes were no longer those of a hunted animal at bay. We leant out of the window to squirt soda-water on to him as he came down the High with light, swinging step and an engaging devil-may-care swagger. He walked bareheaded, and the fine, black hair—ornately parted and brushed for the occasion—blew into disorder as the autumn wind swept down the street with a scent of fallen leaves and a hint of the dying year.

"You know, Raney, you'd have made an extraordinarily beautiful girl," said Loring reflectively as they met.

"If the Almighty'd known the Marquess Loring had any feeling in the matter——" O'Rane began.

"Poets would have immortalized your eyes," Loring pursued with a yawn, "Painters would have died in despair of representing their shadowy, unfathomable depths——" He raised his hand and waved it rhythmically. "'Their shadowy, unfathomable depths,' you can't keep from blank verse! Have a cigarette, little stranger. Being an alleged man, you're a bit undersized and effeminate."

O'Rane caught Loring by one wrist and with a single movement brought him to his knees.

"Effeminate?" he demanded.

Loring attempted to reconcile dignity with a kneeling position.

"Oh, you've got a certain vulgar strength," he admitted, "like most modern girls. But you've got the hands and feet of a professional beauty. Of course you may not have stopped growing yet."

"I'm five feet nine! I admit I've not much fat on me!"

Honour was satisfied, and I separated the combatants. For his height Loring was very well proportioned, but he hated an imputation of fatness almost as much as O'Rane hated being teased about his slightness of body or smallness of bone. He certainly made up into a very beautiful woman when the O.U.D.S. played "Henry V" and he took the part of Katherine. The intention had been to follow the practice of years and invite a professional actress from London; O'Rane's performance, however, was too good to be set aside. I have a photograph of the company with Raney seated in the middle. With his small, sensitive mouth and white teeth, his clean-cut nose and long-lashed, large black eyes, he makes a very attractive girl.

"This is a wonderful place," he said, as we sat down to dinner. "I've been sight-seeing to-day."

"Anything worth seeing?" asked Loring, whose substantially accurate boast it was that he had never been within the walls of a strange college.

We found that O'Rane had been prompt and thorough, ranging from the "Light of the World" in Keble Chapel to the scene of Amy Robsart's death, and from the gardens of Worcester to Addison's Walk. He talked of Grinling Gibbons' carving with a facility I envied when it was my fate to conduct my mother and sister round Oxford.

"Wonderful place," he repeated. "Choked up with the dÉbris of mediaevalism. Atmosphere rather worse than a tropical swamp. Last refuge of dead enthusiasms and hotbed of sprouting affectations."

He jerked out the criticism and turned his attention to the soup.

"You're very disturbing, Raney," I said. "For four years you knocked Melton inside out; can't you leave Oxford alone? I'm rather fond of it."

"So am I—already. I'm fond of any place that picks a man up and sets him on his legs. I'm fond of England as you two can never be."

"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned, Raney."

"If to be grateful is to be old-fashioned." He leant back and gazed at the ceiling. "I think it's a workable philosophy. There are people who can do things I can't do, and there are people who can't do the things I can. It's a long scale—strong, less strong, weak, more weak. If every man helped the man below him.... You fellows would say I'm superstitious. I dare say. If you're the one man to come out of an earthquake alive, you start believing in a special providence.... I've been helped a bit—and I've once or twice helped another man. Whenever I could, in fact. And from the depths of my soul I believe if I said 'no' when I was asked...." He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence unfinished.

"Well, go on!" It was Loring who spoke, not without interest. "What would happen?"

"I should be damned out of hand. I don't mean a bolt from heaven, but I ... I should never be able to do anything again. I should be hamstrung."

"Black superstition," was Loring's comment.

"Not a bit of it! There's a fear of subjective damnation far more vigorous than the outer darkness and worm-that-dies-not nonsense."

"You're on too high a plane for dinner," said Loring. "You should cultivate the pleonectic side of life. I've had two roes on toast, and I'm going to have a third."

VI

Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute 'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said—what was true enough—that life under such conditions was not worth living; we added—what was less true—that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.

Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which—as we were out of College—other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who—so far as I could see—were living solely for pleasure.

In Oxford during springtime, with the chestnuts, lilac and laburnum blazing into colour, it is nothing short of sacrilege to read Select Charters and Documents of Constitutional History. As the evenings lengthened we used to find alfresco coffee-parties being held in a corner of Peck. I made the acquaintance of Summertown, an irrepressible freckled, red-haired little Etonian, the permanent thorn in the side of his father, Lord Marlyn, who was at this time Councillor of Embassy in Paris. It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed. O'Rane would be found at the piano,—or on top of it with a guitar across his knees,—and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early stars shining down from the darkening sky.

I had predicted that Raney's personality would impress itself upon Oxford, though I never underestimated the difficulty in a place so given over to particularism and fierce local jealousies. At this time the only men who had a reputation outside their own colleges were perhaps six in number: Blair of Trinity, who walked round Oxford of an afternoon with a hawk on his wrist; "Pongo" Jerrold, who kept pedigree bloodhounds; Granville, the President of the O.U.D.S.; Johnny Carstairs, who removed the minute hand from the post office clock in St. Aldate's every night of the Michaelmas term; and perhaps two more, of whom O'Rane was one. As so often, the world knew him for his accidents and overlooked his essence. He was quoted as a Union speaker of wild gesticulation and frenzied Celtic eloquence; as a pamphleteer and lampoonist who could seemingly write impromptu verse on any subject, in all metres and most languages; as the author of ninety-five per cent of "The Critic," a short-lived weekly started by Mayhew, who, I am convinced, would establish morning, evening, monthly and quarterly periodicals the day after being washed up on the beach of a desert island.

Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality. With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the arrangement of a dinner, as he was then—as always—sublimely indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed 'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member of Senior Common Room.

"Sacre nom de chien!" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete, Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! A bas les snobs!" He seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. Conspuez les accapareurs!" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced. "Come and sing to 'em, George!

He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed intoxication might be "a good dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."

"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint? Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be 'ick."

I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as a premier ManquÉ. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he went to the Bar, and I"—a little bitterly—"I thought of going to the Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."

When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before," he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish kings before the hapless Norman invasion—utterly wanting in self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed in language of greater splendour than the last.

It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough, nearly broke O'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "He made Oxford for me."

Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford for a good many people. His rooms—in Loring's phrase—were like a gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in him."

Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the formula and parodied it.

"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days, Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."

OÙ sont les neiges d'antan? Within six weeks we were scattered, and in twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've only got six days more?"

"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.

"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read Law or something?"

I shook my head.

"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be just as bad in a year's time."

We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and one.

"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current. "Damn' good fun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going to do now, George?"

"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.

The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions. Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar—more usually, however, I waited for something to turn up.

"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"

"And bury myself as an extra attachÉ in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever come back I shall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result with the maximum of effort."

Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.

"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.

"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"

The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.

"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."

"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.

"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.

"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."

He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place, he broke silence to say:

"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an extraordinary thing—frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than let them hear me; so I hung on—sort of biting on the bullet—till it was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends, you were all my blood and breed—not like in the old Chicago days. And then—oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed such utter fools.... Still, I won through."

"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly gentle.

"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good friend to me."

"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."

"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never, never give in till I die!"

Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a paddle and seated himself on the box.

"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go down?"

"Depends."

"What on?"

"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure, I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they're going to do, never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show, something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"

"You've not done badly so far," I put in.

He snorted contemptuously.

"If you've got faith...."

Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.

"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he inquired.

"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."

Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.

The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about your tame star, Raney."

O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.

"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough, manual labour's all you're fit for."

"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."

"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'—a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.

VII

Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.

We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men—Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.

The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion—though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty—I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other—till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."

The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.

"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."

"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.

"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."

Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they begged for mercy and sat out.

"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get——I say, Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"

"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen. Not out yet."

"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights. I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."

And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a touring-car drew up outside the digs., and a slim figure in dust-coat and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an elaborate but still unstable coiffure.

"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and I met her at the stair-head.

"You needn't call me Lord Loring even if your hair is up," he answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."

"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"

"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and dress."

I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.

"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."

"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."

I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in—white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change in her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.

As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,—"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "So long, with sapphires here and here, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."

At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.

"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph—a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.

"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.

"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.

"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a friend of his, aren't you?"

She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men to inspire.

"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she asked.

"Little bits," I said.

"He told me everything," she answered proudly.

"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young——"

"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."

"And I'm sure a good part of the language was—unparliamentary, Miss Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man——"

"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.

"He's a man; he's little—compared with Jim Loring or myself, for example——"

"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"

"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.

"There's nothing he can't do!"

"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.

"It's nothing to what he will do. After Oxford he's going to set out to seek his fortune,"—Sonia had dropped into the very language of a fairy-story. "And when he comes back——"

"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.

"Yes."

"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.

She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."

"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.

"I don't care if he did," she answered.

"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."

There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time. The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.

"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.

O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.

"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.

"Is it time? I've been telling George——"

He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.

"What's the good of telling him? What's the good of telling anyone? They don't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting Lady Amy?"

I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.

"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."

Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.

"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"

"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in defiance.

The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.

"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much more than a boy himself."

"Time will work wonders," I said.

"But will he have anything to marry on?"

"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."

Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.

"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love with him. But——" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."

"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."

"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.

"Yes."

"Or till it's broken off?"

"Raney's not likely to break it off!"

"She may. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."

The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than naturally helpless.