Zuleika Dobson Or, An Oxford Love Story by Sir Max Beerbohm

  XII

  Not less averse than from dogging the Duke was I from remaining anotherinstant in the presence of Miss Dobson. There seemed to be no possibleexcuse for her. This time she had gone too far. She was outrageous. Assoon as the Duke had had time to get clear away, I floated out into thenight.

  I may have consciously reasoned that the best way to forget the presentwas in the revival of memories. Or I may have been driven by a merehoming instinct. Anyhow, it was in the direction of my old College thatI went. Midnight was tolling as I floated in through the shut grim gateat which I had so often stood knocking for admission.

  The man who now occupied my room had sported his oak--my oak. I read thename on the visiting-card attached thereto--E. J. Craddock--and went in.

  E. J. Craddock, interloper, was sitting at my table, with elbows squaredand head on one side, in the act of literary composition. The oars andcaps on my walls betokened him a rowing-man. Indeed, I recognised hissomewhat heavy face as that of the man whom, from the Judas barge thisafternoon, I had seen rowing "stroke" in my College Eight.

  He ought, therefore, to have been in bed and asleep two hours ago. Andthe offence of his vigil was aggravated by a large tumbler that stoodin front of him, containing whisky and soda. From this he took a deepdraught. Then he read over what he had written. I did not care to peerover his shoulder at MS. which, though written in my room, was notintended for my eyes. But the writer's brain was open to me; and he hadwritten "I, the undersigned Edward Joseph Craddock, do hereby leave andbequeath all my personal and other property to Zuleika Dobson, spinster.This is my last will and testament."

  He gnawed his pen, and presently altered the "hereby leave" to "herebyand herewith leave." Fool!

  I thereby and therewith left him. As I emerged through the floor of theroom above--through the very carpet that had so often been steeped inwine, and encrusted with smithereens of glass, in the brave old daysof a well-remembered occupant--I found two men, both of them evidentlyreading-men. One of them was pacing round the room. "Do you know," hewas saying, "what she reminded me of, all the time? Those words--aren'tthey in the Song of Solomon?--'fair as the moon, clear as the sun,and... and...'"

  "'Terrible as an army with banners,'" supplied his host--rather testily,for he was writing a letter. It began "My dear Father. By the time youreceive this I shall have taken a step which..."

  Clearly it was vain to seek distraction in my old College. I floated outinto the untenanted meadows. Over them was the usual coverlet of whitevapour, trailed from the Isis right up to Merton Wall. The scent ofthese meadows' moisture is the scent of Oxford. Even in hottest noon,one feels that the sun has not dried THEM. Always there is moisturedrifting across them, drifting into the Colleges. It, one suspects,must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxfordspirit--that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear tothem who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to themwho were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not lessthan the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helpedOxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race ofartist-scholars, scholar-artists. The undergraduate, in his briefperiods of residence, is too buoyant to be mastered by the spirit ofthe place. He does but salute it, and catch the manner. It is on himwho stays to spend his maturity here that the spirit will in its fulnessgradually descend. The buildings and their traditions keep astir in hismind whatsoever is gracious; the climate, enfolding and enfeebling him,lulling him, keeps him careless of the sharp, harsh, exigent realitiesof the outer world. Careless? Not utterly. These realities may be seenby him. He may study them, be amused or touched by them. But they cannotfire him. Oxford is too damp for that. The "movements" made there havebeen no more than protests against the mobility of others. They havebeen without the dynamic quality implied in their name. They have beenno more than the sighs of men gazing at what other men had left behindthem; faint, impossible appeals to the god of retrogression, uttered fortheir own sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they shouldbe heard. Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the powerof action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger thevision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of mannerwhich comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and thatnot even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slainseem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given tothem in their heyday. If the Colleges could be transferred to the dryand bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more evidentlyuseful to the nation. But let us be glad there is no engineer orenchanter to compass that task. Egomet, I would liefer have the rest ofEngland subside into the sea than have Oxford set on a salubrious level.For there is nothing in England to be matched with what lurks in thevapours of these meadows, and in the shadows of these spires--thatmysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford. Oxford! The verysight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me withmost actual magic.

  And on that moonlit night when I floated among the vapours of thesemeadows, myself less than a vapour, I knew and loved Oxford as neverbefore, as never since. Yonder, in the Colleges, was the fume and fretof tragedy--Love as Death's decoy, and Youth following her. What then?Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's wallswould be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours be undone, nor lost abreath of her sacred spirit.

  I floated up into the higher, drier air, that I might, for once, see thetotal body of that spirit.

  There lay Oxford far beneath me, like a map in grey and black andsilver. All that I had known only as great single things I saw nowoutspread in apposition, and tiny; tiny symbols, as it were, ofthemselves, greatly symbolising their oneness. There they lay, thesemultitudinous and disparate quadrangles, all their rivalries merged inthe making of a great catholic pattern. And the roofs of the buildingsaround them seemed level with their lawns. No higher the roofs of thevery towers. Up from their tiny segment of the earth's spinning surfacethey stood negligible beneath infinity. And new, too, quite new, ineternity; transient upstarts. I saw Oxford as a place that had no morepast and no more future than a mining-camp. I smiled down. O hoary andunassailable mushroom!... But if a man carry his sense of proportion farenough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knowsthat eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, andinfinity but a speck in infinity. How should they belittle the thingsnear to him?... Oxford was venerable and magical, after all, andenduring. Aye, and not because she would endure was it the lesslamentable that the young lives within her walls were like to be taken.My equanimity was gone; and a tear fell on Oxford.

  And then, as though Oxford herself were speaking up to me, the airvibrated with a sweet noise of music. It was the hour of one; the endof the Duke's hour of grace. Through the silvery tangle of sounds fromother clocks I floated quickly down to the Broad.