Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate Part 1

G.o.dfrey Marten, Undergraduate.

by Charles Turley.

CHAPTER I

OXFORD

The night before I left home for Oxford I had a talk with my father.

He was not of the sentimental kind, but I knew that he had a rare fondness for my brother, my sister Nina and myself, and I have never had a moment when I did not return his affection. He had always been bothered by my lack of seriousness, and he doubted whether I should really get the best out of 'Varsity life. After telling me that the time had come for me to treat things more seriously, he finished up by saying: "I am going to give you two hundred pounds a year, which is more than I can afford, and which, with your exhibition, must be enough for you. I have put that amount to your credit in the bank at Oxford, and I don't expect to hear anything about money from you either during the term or when you are at home. You ought to know by this time what money is worth, and that debt is a thing you must avoid. Be a man, G.o.dfrey, and don't forget that the first step towards becoming one is to behave like a gentleman."

I shook his hand to show that I understood, for he wanted neither promises nor protestations, and if I had been able to be sentimental he would have left the room without listening to me.

He didn't say much, but what he did say was beautifully simple, and on leaving him I felt very solemn and, since I must tell the truth, very important. The idea of having a bank account was one which did not lose its glamour for several days. There was something about my first cheque-book which pleased me immensely, for I had not been brought up in a nest of millionaires, and am glad to confess that until I went to Oxford the possibilities attached to a five-pound note were almost without limit.

Fred Foster--who had been staying with me--and I parted at Oxford railway-station without falling on each other's necks, but although we did not cause any further obstruction on a platform already far too crowded, we understood that the friends.h.i.+p which had prospered during so many years at school was not going to be interrupted because he had got a scholars.h.i.+p at Oriel while I was an exhibitioner of St.

Cuthbert's.

I began by losing my luggage, which was exactly the way some people would have expected me to begin, and when I arrived at the college lodge I must have looked as if I had come to spend a Sat.u.r.day to Monday visit. One miserable bag was all I possessed, and the porter viewed me, as I thought, with suspicion. He was a grumpy old person, and when I told him that I had lost my luggage he grunted, "Gentlemen do, especially when they're fresh," which I thought very fair cheek on his part, though I did not feel at that moment like telling him so.

Then having said that my name was Marten, he hunted in a list and told a man to take my bag to Number VII. staircase in the back quadrangle.

I followed, feeling rather dejected, and I cannot say that the first sight of my rooms tended to raise my spirits. They were small and dismal, the window opened on to a bal.u.s.trade which, if it prevented me from falling into the quadrangle, also managed to shut out both light and air. The furniture can be described correctly by the word adequate; there were some chairs and a table, college furniture for which I was privileged to pay rent. The chairs looked as if nothing could ever wear them out or make them look different. They had been built to defy time and ill-usage.

I went into my bedroom and was more satisfied, by some strange freak it was bigger than my sitting-room, and after I had seen other freshers'

bedrooms I acknowledged my good luck. There was at least room to have a bath without splas.h.i.+ng the bed. I was still looking disconsolately about me when my scout came in and treated me with a calm contempt which immediately raised my spirits. His air was so obviously that of the man who knew all about things, and he told me what to do with a gravity which was intended to be most impressive. His name was Clarkson and I stayed on his staircase during the three years I was in college, though at the end of my first year I moved into larger rooms.

He was in a mild kind of way an endless source of amus.e.m.e.nt to me, because every one knew that under his veil of imperturbability was hidden, not very successfully, a flouris.h.i.+ng crop of failings.

Whenever his chief failing overpowered him his gravity increased, until he became one of the most indescribably comic people I have ever seen.

He told me that chapel was at eight o'clock on the following morning, and asked me if I should be breakfasting in. I found out afterwards that unless I wanted to go to chapel I could go to a roll-call in any garments which looked respectable, and then go back to bed; but I did not hear this from Clarkson. He was far too keen on getting men out of bed and their rooms put straight to give such very unnecessary information. However, he was useful at the beginning, and had he not told me where to go for dinner I don't suppose I should have troubled to ask him.

My first dinner in hall was not a pleasant experience. The senior men came up a day after us, and most freshers, until they settle down, seem to spend their time in waiting for somebody else to say something.

That dinner really made me feel most gloomy; things seemed to have been turned upside down, and in the process I felt as if I had fallen with a thud to the bottom. There were two or three freshers from Cliborough to whom I had scarcely spoken during my last two years at school, and these fellows all sat together and enjoyed themselves, while I counted for nothing whatever.

I began to learn the lesson that being in the Cliborough XI. and XV.

was not a free pa.s.sport to glory. The man opposite to me looked as if he had never heard of W. G. Grace, and when I tried to speak to the fellow on my right about the Australians, he thought that I was talking about any ordinary Australian, and had no notion that I meant the cricket team which had been over in the summer. He was quite nice about it, I must admit, and when he found out what I was driving at, said: "I am afraid I don't know much about cricket; I have been over in Germany the last two or three months, trying to get hold of the language. I want to read Schiller and those other people in the original."

He did not suit me at all, and as I had not the courage to give myself away by asking the names of the other people our conversation dropped.

I was, in fact, dead off colour, and the sight of those three Cliborough fellows almost took away my appet.i.te. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that I had been in the habit of thinking a lot of myself at Cliborough, and in self-defence I must add that I do not see how a public school can prosper unless some of the fellows stick together and try to make things go on properly. Any "side" I may have had was certainly unconscious, but I haven't an idea whether that is the worst or the best kind. I know that I should have felt like having a fit if any one had told me that I was conceited, and apart from that I don't know anything about it, except, as I have said, that I was angry that these fellows did not seem to remember that I had been at Cliborough. I told myself that they had lost their sense of proportion, which was a phrase my father used about any one who argued with him; and I also said vehemently that they were worms; but unless you are quite sure of it, and can get some one to agree with you, there is not much satisfaction to be got from calling people worms.

I went out of the hall and found a tall, dark fellow bowling pebbles aimlessly about the quadrangle. I bowled a pebble, and hitting him on the back, had to apologize. It is rather odd, now I come to think about it, that the first words I ever said to Jack Ward were in the nature of an apology. We strolled out of the quadrangle into the lodge, and after he had looked at me he asked me to come up to his rooms and have some coffee. I was not at all sure that I wanted to go, but I went. He shouted to his scout at the top of a very powerful voice, and I felt that he was much more at home than I was. I determined, moreover, to shout at my scout upon the earliest possible opportunity.

"I had a brother up here," he said as soon as we were sitting by the fire, "and he gave me some tips. One of them was to shout at your scout for at least a week to show that you are not an infant, another was not to row, and the last was not to play cards all day and night.

My brother's an odd kind of chap, the sort of man who doesn't know the ace of spades by sight, but it's as easy to shout as it is not to row.

Your name's Marten, isn't it?"

"Yes," I replied; "how did you know that?"

"I scored when you came over last term to play for Cliborough against Wellingham. I was twelfth man to the XI., though you needn't believe it if you don't want to. It's wonderful what a crop of twelfth men there are kicking around; you may just as well say you are a liar smack out, as tell any one you are a twelfth man."

I told him that I believed him.

"That's only your politeness," he went on; "in a week you will be talking about me as 'that man Ward who says he was twelfth man at Wellingham.'"

I sat in his rooms and listened to him talking until eleven o'clock; for almost the first time in my life I had nothing to say, and that must have been the reason why I felt amused and uncomfortable at the same time. He seemed to know all sorts of people, and he spoke of them by their Christian names, which impressed me, and he referred to London as a place well enough to stay in for a time, but a terrible bore when one got accustomed to it. Now I had only been to London three times, and one of those could hardly be said to count since it was to see a dentist. As I went back to my rooms, I thought that my education had been neglected in many ways, and that Ward had been having a much better time than I had. But I soon changed my mind and decided that he was the kind of fellow whom I should have thought a slacker at Cliborough, and I cannot put up with a man, who when he is doing one thing always wants to be doing another.

When I got back to my rooms I found a letter from my uncle. He was a bishop, and there had been trouble between us when I was a small boy at Cliborough; he had made jokes about me which I did not bear in silence.

But he had spent a month of the summer holidays with us, and had told my mother that I had greatly improved; I thought the same thing about him, so we got on together very well. I may as well say at once that I had laid siege to the bishop. Instead of waiting for him to go for me I went for him, and my mother said that I had discovered the boy in the bishop. If he was idle I employed him, and on his last day with us I finished off by making one hundred and thirty-six against him at stump cricket. When he went away I had changed my opinion of him, but my father was annoyed that he could behave like a boy when it was time for me to forget that I was one. "You are as silly as the bishop," became one of my father's favourite remarks, until my mother asked him to think of something which was not quite so rude.

The bishop had really been splendid while he was staying with us, because Nina, having arrived at the age of eighteen, was very difficult to please. Some man in my brother's regiment had been down and said that her pug was an angel, and I being unable to reach such heights as that was compared to my disadvantage with this man. I am nearly sure, too, that she wanted to flirt with Fred, quite regardless of the fact that he was no use at flirting, and I should have had something to say if he had been. In a short year she had changed most dreadfully, and was no longer satisfied with being liked very much. She was a puzzle to me, and had it not been for the bishop, who smoothed things over, I should probably have worried her far more than I did.

His letter did not contain one word of cant; he just wished me good luck, and told me to write to him whenever I felt that he could be of use to me. A less sensible man might have preached to me and talked about the "threshold of a career"; but, thank goodness, he knew what I wanted, and that if I had not made up my mind to let Oxford do something for me, I was hopeless from the start.

CHAPTER II

INTERVIEWS

I soon found out that Jack Ward was of a most friendly disposition, for he came over to my rooms before ten o'clock the following morning and bounced in with an air of having known me all my life. At the moment I was talking to a man called Murray, whose acquaintance I had made an hour before. My introduction to Murray could hardly be called formal; he lived in the next rooms to me and at precisely the same time each of us had poked our heads into the pa.s.sage and shouted for our scout. We then looked at each other and laughed, and the deed was done. I wish that I could have made all my friends at Oxford as easily; it would have saved so much time.

Murray was going as Ward came in, and they nodded and said "Good-morning" in the way men do when they don't altogether love one another.

"You seem to know everybody," I said, without much reason, as soon as Murray had disappeared.

"I can't well help knowing that fellow, considering that he was at Wellingham with me for five years."

"He didn't tell me he was at Wellingham."

"He would have in another minute, and that he was captain of the school and the footer fifteen, and what he was fed on as a baby and how many muscles he had got in his big toe," Ward jerked out as he pulled furiously at his pipe, which he had already tried to light two or three times.

"I thought he seemed a nice sort of man," I said.

"I expect you think everybody you see nice sort of men," he replied rather queerly, though he laughed as he spoke.

"I hope so; it is a jolly comfortable state to be in," I answered.

"But a very dangerous one. You must get awfully left."

I picked up _Wisden's Cricket Almanack_, which had been one of the things in my bag, and began to read it, for I had taken a fancy to Murray and did not see much use in listening to what I felt Ward wanted to say about him.

"You will probably be friends with Murray for about a month, and then it will end with a snap," he said.

"I can promise you that if I am friends with him for a month it won't end with a snap, even if his toes simply bulge with muscles," I replied.

"If anybody warned you against a man you would take no notice."

"It depends who warned me, and whom I was warned against. And since it is no use pretending things," I added, "I don't see much wrong in a fellow because he happens to remember something about baby's food."