CHAPTER VII

JOSS AND REREDOS

Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped, guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the unopened copy of the _University Gazette_ which he had chosen from the bookstall’s alluring variety.

Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good old Hekla!

And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows, their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured sky.

“Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14]

[14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (LIT. EXEC.)

He looked again.

“But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities, he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of that fugacious country-side.

He knew of a certainty that he had not yet exhausted the surprises prepared for him by Destiny. There had been fairies at his christening (in St. James’s, Piccadilly). And now the memories of that unforgettable night at the Régale were drumming in his veins like some insidious and urgent poison. A new consciousness was dawning upon him, and he gazed on its unfolding contours, like stout Darien in the sonnet, in the mute silence of amazement.

Recovering himself, “New term, new life,” he murmured neatly. And the train picked up the rhythm of the words as it rolled relentlessly onwards.…

* * * * *

That evening Gaveston sat alone in his room, amusedly aware that in another Gothic chamber an eager assemblage of Mongoons were gulping their barley-water in tenterhooked anticipation of his momently arrival. But far different were his thoughts from what those polished Philistines would have expected in their hero.

Sipping in carefully calculated rotation glasses of _crême de cacao_ and _vodka_ and _mavrodaphne_--somehow the interblend of their hues and aromas seemed that night to chime in tune with the interplay of his own emotions--Gaveston was planning the redecoration of his rooms and his personality. “Each mirrors the other,” he reflected sagaciously. And a becoming blush illumined his cheeks as he realized how insular and barbarian his life had been so far, despite that long childhood of foreign _table d’hôtes_--how English and ingenuous, despite the many stories long current in Society of his authentic artistic temperament.

“Myths!” he cried aloud. “Myths!”

And with a sort of dull despair he thought how poorly read he really was, how Philistinish the stuff that had so long delighted him--Hope and Hay, Haggard and Merriman, Doyle and Dell.

“_Zut!_” as he had heard a voice say in the Régale.

And what a gallery of pictures was his! He looked round his walls with eyes very aghast. Those photogravures that had been his pride! _Love Locked Out_ and _The Laughing Cavalier_ and _Dante’s Meeting With Beatrice_--Watts--Meissonier--Rossetti. _Quel galère_ indeed.…

And just at that moment David Paunceford rushed in, his eyes atwinkle, his Norfolk jacket flying open in his boyish haste to see his friend, and tell him, pell-mell, of vacation exploits in the Oberland and glorious skiing races up the Cresta run. For a moment he hardly realized that his zest was not _à propos_ to Gaveston’s mood.

“But anyway,” he was saying, “we’ve all planned to go back to Interlaken next Christmas and we’ve booked our rooms at the Excelsior and you’ve simply _got_ to come too, Gav--oh! but you can’t imagine how jolly it all is, that topping glow all over you after a good tumble on the bob-run!”

But something in Gaveston’s eye checked his rushing words.

“We have souls, David Paunceford,” said Gaveston.

He replenished his own three glasses, and handed David the whisky decanter. “At least, I have,” he continued.

There was a pregnant pause. David emptied his tumbler, buttoned up his jacket, and came down the familiar staircase. With no eyes for the evasive beauty of the college chapel, its buttresses and architraves now luteously entwined with wreathes of yellow fog, he crossed the dusk-filled quadrangle towards Mongo’s lighted window, puzzled a little.…

* * * * *

What days of rich imaginings these were that now came for Gaveston in this Lenten term! How glad and mad and bad it all was! How crowded these weeks where bizarrerie vied with bizarrerie and whimsey with whimsey!

First there were books to be bought, were there not? Yes, and bound too in silks and skins marblings fitted to their strangely varying contents. And from the gloomy recesses of Chaundy and the mediæval crypts of Gadney, he brought forth sets of Harland and Crackenthorpe, and all the fascinating chronicles of Sherard and Douglas, Ransome and Crosland, in whose controversial lore he soon became an adept. His shelves bent beneath the crowding volumes of Johnson and Davidson and Dowson and the rarer reprints of the Yellow Book, and soon all the erudition of the Symonses (John Addington and Arthur), was mastered by the young neophyte. And at the last, impatient of so much heavy insularity, he added to his arcana the Oriental canticles of Masoch, the infamous Lesbia’s archipelagian lyrics, the voluptuous and untranslatable masterpieces of Maeterlinck and Le Gallienne.

Assiduously too he collected obscure texts from the Silver Age of every tongue, and the declining decades of every century yielded him their rich harvests of perverse and curious fruits. He delighted, for instance, to pore over the Forty-Seven Books of the Eroticks of Kottabos the Syracusan. Recumbent upon a score of Liberty cushions, and meshed in the twining thuriferal fumes of musk and attar and patchouli, Gaveston would ponder upon the corrupt and fetid beauty of the Sicilian’s style, so perfect in its diliquescence that it might almost, he thought, have lain undredged down all these centuries in the green, aqueous silence of some Mediterranean sea-cavern, encrusted by the scum of putrescent molluscs, nibbled by creatures that fantastically goggled, and spawned upon by medusas with transparent tentacular heads. And he remembered how the unique manuscript had been snatched from the flames of fire-doomed Alexandria by the monks of Santa Frustrata in Abyssinia, and lay long concealed in their dove-shaped reliquary of scented cedar-wood, until ’twas ravished from them at the sword’s point by a Borgia, who sought it for the hands of a certain courtesan of Ephesus, and how she, after the fashion of her kind, had bartered it for sables and mummia to a Jew merchant from Novgorod, and how through his trafficking it came to the stockaded palace of the Great Cham of Tartary and thence to the conquering Mpret of Kamschatka. It had later been published in more accessible form by a Mr. Leonard Smithers.

But he began to find a terrifying loneliness in his research for the strange and beautiful. At first, on wet afternoons when his football or hockeystick could not be brought out from his cupboard, David would sometimes steal up to Gav’s room, to drink a glass of Russian tea or smoke a rose-tipped cigarette. But the old intimacy was gone. Always when he came, David would find the black and silver curtains drawn, and the room lighted tremulously by seven candles of green aromatic wax upheld by a Cellinesque Priapus of verdescent bronze.

“Why should I let daylight in, David?” Gaveston responded to his manly remonstrances. “It only stifles the imagination.”

“And fresh air?” queried David with astonishment.

“Only chills,” came the pointed reply. And Gaveston turned to the table heaped high with the rarest etchings of Bakst and Barribal and Beardsley, and resumed his task of passepartouting these sinuous Salomes and fat-fingered Fanfreluches.… After that, David came no more.

But one morning, shortly before six, he was hurrying down the slumberous Woodstock Road, returning from an early bathe at Marston Ferry. Past him hastened a gaunt figure, spare and ascetic, but unmistakably distinguished; in the deep earth-bound eyes shone the glow of an inner fire, and from the wrist dangled a simple rosary of pearls and a neat scapular of plain design; the lips muttered. In the uncertain light of the February morning, David had difficulty in recognizing that once familiar and friendly form.

But yes! It was! It was!

“Gaveston!” he cried out, almost involuntarily, so great was his surprise. “Where on earth are you off to at this time?”

But Gaveston (for such it was) did not stop.

“Terce,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m late.” And through the morning mists he hurried towards the distant spire of SS. Protus and Hyacinth. David stood for a moment watching his retreating figure, and wondering, as was his wont, what new notes were now being tested in the inexhaustible gamut of Gaveston’s soulstrings.

Well might he wonder, for apace discovery was following on discovery, vista too upon vista.…

Gaveston had been brought up (it was his mother’s pride) a strict Church of Englander. Lady Penhaligon, although no bigot, had seen to that, and Sunday after Sunday in his earlier childhood they had punctually repaired to St. George’s, Hanover Square (it held so many poignant associations for her, she always wept a little when the solemn banns were read). And during their foreign journeyings, too, they had always sought out the Anglican places of worship with which the nicer towns of the Continent are so liberally endowed. All four Anglican churches at Cannes knew them well; together they had enjoyed the Christmas sermons of the chaplains at Siena and Seville and Shepheard’s Hotel; and Gav indeed had been confirmed in the Hôtel Ritz-Carlton at Trouville by the Bishop of North-Western Europe. Small wonder, then, if he had almost instinctively come to regard religion as a Sunday habit of the English, like Yorkshire pudding or cold supper. But now the Establishment in its wider aspects had dawned upon his receptive soul. The assistant sacristan of SS. Protus and Hyacinth smiled companionably to him as he passed into the dim doorway.

“Tallis in G to-morrow, Mr. ffoulis,” he said.

“Splendid,” said Gav. “I shan’t fail you.”

And, murmuring a few decades to St. Gilbert of Sempringham and Blessed Thomas Plumtree, whose _festas_ fell during that octave, he reached his accustomed _prie-dieu_.…

* * * * *

How delightful these early mornings were! After long vigils of sombre brooding over the invaluable histories of Messrs. H. Jackson and Muddiman, how champagne-like was the crisp dry air of an Oxford dawn as he hurried out the Woodstock Road! How infinitely gracious he found the liturgical rhythms of terce and none after debauching his soul all night with deep draughts of the fierce decadent prose of Huysmans or Hichens!

And then there would be the walk homewards from SS. Protus and Hyacinth in the flush of full dawn with his undergraduate fellow-worshippers, as far at any rate as the gates of Keble College. Soon he made close friends from among the “P. and H. push,” as they were irreverently nicknamed in the non-ecclesiastical circles of Wallace, and Gaveston became an active, but never pushing, member of several of the many societies which, in slightly varying combinations, they formed--the Athanasian Club, for instance, and the Syro-Chaldean Society, the O.U.C.U., and the O.S.C.U., and the O.E.C.U., and the In Saecula Saeculorum. On these walks he got to know dear John Minns, of Keble, the man who knew all there was to be known about the Eurasian use of the amice prior to the Tridentine decrees, and good old John Thoms, of Keble, who had once tracked down a little country church in Suffolk where, in accordance with an old Gallican rite, the vicar wore a maniple with its ends cut obliquely!

What fun it all was!

There was John Jones too, of Keble, with his huge giglamp spectacles and fast-thinning hair, famed among the P. and H.’ers as a raconteur, who, if carefully primed, could sometimes be induced to tell his glorious story of the thurifer that simply _would_ not light.… And Jones it was who, during these amazing weeks, became Gaveston’s especial friend.

True, Gav’s Etonian blood never took altogether kindly to John’s somewhat provincial manners, but erudition, he reflected, is thicker than etiquette, and the close bonds of common pieties united them. Together they would wander off to unvernacular and illegal services in clandestine seminaries and remote rebellious rectories. Together they would count up the ceremonial points of every church in the overchurched city; but where John could find but seven, Gaveston was seldom content with less than nine. Together too they addressed their every activity to saints that no other Anglicans had ever heard of, and St. Domenico Theotocopuli and the Bienheureux Stanislas Beulemans were the familiar patrons of their collegiate activities; whilst buying flowers, they invoked St. Rose of Lima, and sitting down to a meal they called upon St. Francis of Borgia to protect them from poisoning; red letter days were given in their Kalendar to St. Veep and St. Deusdedit, and for help in composing their tutorial essays they would put up many a candle to St. John of Beverley; against the danger of madness they called in friendly unison upon Santa Maria Maddalena degli Pazzi, and mayhap it was their gladsome veneration of King Charles (the First and Martyr) that first turned Gaveston’s mind toward the political career which a twelvemonth later was to startle all Oxford.…

But somehow the P. and H.’ers did not all seem to take kindly to the æsthetic side of Gaveston’s remarkable personality. For a ffoulis it was easy to see life steadily and see it whole, but for a Minns or a Jones there seemed to be a curious difficulty in reconciling _Dorian Gray_ with _The Ritual Reason Why_. It was a bagatelle for Gaveston to haste across the road from a protracted tea-party at Pembroke with the leading Oxford authority on dalmatics to a gay picnic supper at Christ Church, where dancing in pyjama costume would be varied with caviare and liqueurs. Each party would rightly acclaim him as the most enthusiastic and daring spirit present.

“He’s superbly High,” the one host would say as he left.

“He’s so gloriously low, my dears,” the next would proudly whisper.

And both loved him.

But an end had to come. As term drew to its close, Gaveston saw that he had extracted all that either set could give him, and he planned a glorious symposium of both of his sets for the last day of term. John Jones warned him, in honest manly fashion, that he was attempting the impossible. But Gaveston’s mind was made up.

“No, John,” he argued. “This term must end in glowing magnificence--benedictionally--come what may. Life, as they say at Brasenose, must burn with a hard gem-like flame. Besides, it’s an Ember day.”

And John was persuaded to distribute the invitations in Keble.

It was a lunch party. Gaveston spared no pains in arranging the function; and they were needed, for it had to make its appeal to the divergent tastes of all his guests. Six of them were to come on from the Blessing of the Embers at the newly consecrated Uniate Orthodox chapel, affiliated to the mother-church of SS. Protus and Hyacinth, and the remaining half-dozen were to join the party after a breakfast-dance (domino or _poudré_ optional) at the Carlton Club. Gav himself compromised by attending Wallace chapel, but, a scrupulous host, he could not trust the Wallace buttery to provide the viands for such a party. He went in person to Buol’s to order a collation.

“For one o’clock exactly,” he insisted to the astonished caterer. “And remember--the Byzantine touch in everything.”

The famous Swiss remembered. That luncheon was the talk of Oxford for many a day.

It deserved its fame. The _décor_ of Gaveston’s room, of course, was a technical masterpiece that an S. Diaghilev or a B. Dean might well have envied. The richly figured curtains were closely drawn. The air was pregnant with frankincense and chypre. The apartment was delicately illuminated, partly by a score of nightlights floating in tall Venetian glasses abrim with many-hued liqueurs, partly too by the votive tapers that always burned before Gav’s private altar of St. Symphorosa and his veiled image of Astarte Mammifera of the Kabbalists.

“Wear which you like!” said the charming host to his arriving guests, giving them their choice of kimono or cowl. Some chose one, others the other, but his forethought was appreciated by all.

So too was the rich repast. And when its seven finely modulated courses were over, Gaveston handed round an exquisite pouncet-box of rather late Sienese design. Pointing to the two divisions of its elegant interior, he offered his happy guests their choice.

“Caramels or _coco_?” he asked with a hospitable gesture, and soon the party was in the fullest swing.

When the merriment was at its height, Gaveston rose abruptly and recited in poignant _tremolo_ tones two litanies of his own composition, both of haunting beauty and addressed to Satanas Athanatos and the Blessed Curé d’Ars respectively. The severed heads of vermilion poppies were thrown lavishly over the recumbent guests, who, chewing them appreciatively, were soon transformed into new De Quincies. And suddenly, from a curtained recess, stole out the sombre, blood-curdling strains of Sibelius’ Vale Triste and Rachmaninov’s Prelude. The eerie witchcraft of the concealed gramophone, exacerbating their nerves, made repose intolerable, and soon half the party was afoot, swinging in frantic rhythms between the voluptuous divans in the mad inebriation of the dance.

“_Après nous le déluge!_” cried the host, in a tone that seemed to defy both Paradise and Limbo, and ecstasy followed ecstasy in orgiastic sequence.

At last the party dispersed, half fearful perhaps lest some anti-climax should end the lengthening afternoon. In merry groups the guests went their ways, to meditative teas in Keble or in Magdalen.

Gaveston was left alone.

With a wry smile he looked round the dishevelled room. Yes, it was over. A phase had been accomplished. It had all been marvellous beyond words, rich beyond dreams, but still … but still.… Something had always seemed missing from all the mysticism and all the revelry.… Oh, if only David had been there to share it all!

The room was growing darker now. One by one the nightlights were guttering wearily out in the _crême de menthe_ and the _advokaat_, and St. Symphorosa herself could hardly be distinguished from Astarte. The scent of bergamot was grown a little musty, and the divans were sprinkled with spilt cocaine and melting caramels.

“Now it must end,” he said firmly. Brusquely he pulled aside the heavy curtains and flung open the long-rusted windows. For a moment he gazed out across the quadrangle to where a fretted pinnacle was balancing a stripling moon. Then he turned to his door.

“Perkins!” he cried down to the scout’s pantry. “Perkins! Come up and pack my things at once. I go down to-night.”

It was a day early.

But nothing could surprise Perkins now.