Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 2

However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after signing his name several times, he was presented with a check book. In order to be perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one then and there, and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as irreverently as if they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his new check-book was the purse of Fortunatus.

Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in order to a.s.sert his independence in the face of Alan's continuous dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties of knitted silk.

By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Cafe in Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o'clock and neither of them felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other back to tea, they went into the cafe and ate a quant.i.ty of hot b.u.t.tered toast and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their enjoyment and faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of three exquisitely untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the doorway and surveyed first the crowded cafe in general, and then more particularly Michael and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt. After a prolonged stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:

"Oh, G.o.d, the place is chock full of d.a.m.ned freshers!"

Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.

Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan paid their bill and went out.

"Are you coming back to my rooms?" Michael asked. Yet secretly he half hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to be alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.

Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly, promising to meet him again to-morrow.

Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers, for a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street lured him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man with a thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed to Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against the shelves of books.

A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good evening.

"May I look round?" Michael asked.

The bookseller nodded.

"Just come up?" he inquired.

"To-day," Michael confessed.

"And what sort of books are you interested in?"

"All books," said Michael.

"This set of Pater for instance," the bookseller suggested, handing Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with a golden monogram. "Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds fifteen cash." This information he added in a note of disdainful tolerance.

Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.

"Of course, n.o.body really cares for books nowadays," Mr. Lampard went on. "In the early 'nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for books."

Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.

"Seven pounds ten," he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.

"What college?" asked Mr. Lampard. "St. Mary's? Ah, there used to be some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis of Montgomery's son, was at St. Mary's, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I published his first volume of poems--of course, you've read his books.

He was at St. Mary's. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.

You've heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first number, but they're getting very scarce. All St. Mary's men and all great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I really don't know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not selling them."

Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past, and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.

"Perhaps after all I will take the Pater," he said. "Only I may not be able to pay you this term."

The bookseller smiled.

"I don't think I shall worry you. Do you know this set--Boccaccio, Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered silk. They'll always keep their price, and of course all the photogravures are included."

"All right. You might send them too."

Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one s.h.i.+lling scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson's bookshop. At Lampard's he was already a personality.

All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford, but really during his whole life was for its embarra.s.sment nothing in comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a discouraging doc.u.ment to those isolated members of public schools other, than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top of the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his name.

"You'll be at the second freshmen's table. On the right, sir. Mr.

Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir."

Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with either of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying the armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his judicial gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his voice.

"How do you become head of a table?" Michael's left-hand neighbor suddenly asked.

Michael said he really did not know.

"Because what I'm wondering," the left-hand neighbor continued, "is why they've made that a.s.s Wedderburn head of our table."

"Why, is he an a.s.s?" Michael inquired.

"Frightful a.s.s," continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.

"Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?"

Michael shook his head.

"I thought you were a cousin of my mother," said the left-hand neighbor.

Michael looked astonished.

"His name's Mackintosh. What's your name?"

Michael told him.

"My name's Lonsdale. I think we're on the same staircase--so's Mackintosh. It's a pity he's an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I'd look him up."

Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential undertone:

"I don't mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad--in fact rather good eggs--but the rest! Well, look at that a.s.s Wedderburn. He's typical."

"I think he looks rather a good sort," said Michael.

"My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M' tutor used to like him, but really--well--I don't mind telling you, he's really an aesthete."

With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly audible to Michael:

"I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn't half bad. I don't know where he comes from, His name's Fane."