Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

of time, but gave him enough amusement when Wedderburn arrived to justify the operation. The pictures all disposed, he called for a carpenter to hang Grainger’s triumphal oars and Lonsdale’s hunting trophies of masks, pads and brushes, and surveyed with considerable satisfaction the accumulative effect of the great room now characterized by their joint possessions. Michael was admiring his work when Lonsdale arrived and greeted him boisterously.

“Hullo! I say, are we all straight? How topping! But wait a bit. I’ve got something that’s going to put the jolly old lid on this jolly old room. What’s the name of the joker who keeps these digs? Macpherson?”

He shouted from the landing to the ex-cook.

“I say, send up the packing-case that’s waiting for me downstairs.”

Michael inquired what was inside.

“Wait a bit, my son,” said the beaming owner. “I’ve got something in there that’s going to make old Wedders absolutely green. I’ve thought this out. I told my governor I was going into digs with some of the aesthetic push and didn’t want to be cut out, so he’s lent me this.”

“What on earth is it?” Michael asked on a note of ambiguous welcome.

The packing-case shaped like a coffin had been set down on the floor by the ex-cook and his slave. Lonsdale was wrenching off the top.

“I had a choice between a mummy and a what d’ye call it, and I chose the what d’ye call it,” said Lonsdale.

He had torn the last piece of the cover away, and lying in straw was revealed the complete armor of a Samurai.

“Rum-looking beggar. Worth twenty of those rotten statues of Wedderburn’s. It was a present to the governor from somebody in the East, but as I promised not to go to dances in it, he lent it to me. Rather sporting of him, what? Where shall we put him?”

“I vote we hide it till this evening,” suggested Michael, “and then put it in Wedder’s bed. He’ll think he’s in the wrong room.”

“Ripping!” cried Lonsdale. “In pyjamas, what?”

That Japanese warrior never occupied the aesthetic niche that Lord Cleveden from his son’s proposal may have thought he would occupy. Otherwise he played an important part in the life of Two Hundred and Two. Never did any visitor come to stay for the weekend, but Sammy, as he was soon called, was set to warm his bed. To Lonsdale, returning home mildly drunk from Trinity Clareter or Phoenix Wine, he was always ready to serve as a courteous listener of his rambling account of an evening’s adventures. He was borrowed by other digs to annoy the landladies: he went for drives in motor cars to puzzle country inns. Lonsdale tried to make him into a college mascot, and he drove in state to the St. Mary’s grind on the box seat of the coach. He was put down on the pavement outside the lodge with a plate for pennies and a label “Blind” round his neck. But Sammy’s end was a sad one. He had been sent to call on the Warden, and was last seen leaning in a despondent attitude against the Warden’s gothic door. Whether the butler broke him up when Sammy fell forward onto his toes, or whether he was imprisoned eternally in a coal cellar, no one knew. Lord Cleveden was informed he had been stolen.

If Michael had tried hard to find two people in whose company it would be more difficult to work than with any other pair in the university, he could scarcely have chosen better than Lonsdale and Grainger. Neither of them was reading an Honor School, and the groups called H2 or C3 or X26, that with each term’s climax they were compelled to pass in order to acquire the degree of bachelor of arts, produced about a week before their ordeal a state of irritable industry, but otherwise were unheeded. Michael was not sorry to let his own reading beyond the irreducible minimum slide during this gay third year. He promised himself a fourth year, when he would withdraw from this side of Oxford life and in some cloistered digs work really hard. Meanwhile, he enjoyed 202 High as the quintessence of youth’s amenity.

Some of the most enduring impressions of Oxford were made now, though they were not perhaps impressions that marked any development in himself by intellectual achievements or spiritual crises. In fact, at the time the impressions seemed fleeting enough; and it was only when the third year was over, when Two Hundred and Two was dismantled of every vestige of this transient occupation that Michael in summoning these impressions from the past recaptured, often from merely pictorial recollections, as much of Oxford as was necessary to tell him how much Oxford had meant.

There were misty twilights in November when Lonsdale came back spattered with mud after a day with the Bicester or the V.W.H. At such an hour Michael, who had probably been sitting alone by the roaring fire, was always ready to fling away his book, and, while Lonsdale grunted and labored to pull off his riding-boots to hear the tale of a great run across a great piece of country.

There was the autumn afternoon when Grainger stroked St. Mary’s to victory in the Coxwainless Fours. Another oar was hung in Two Hundred and Two, and a bonfire was made in Cuther’s quad to celebrate the occasion. Afterward Grainger himself triumphantly drunk between Michael and Lonsdale was slowly persuaded along the High and put to bed, while Wedderburn prescribed in his deepest voice a dozen remedies.

There were jovial dinner parties when rowing men from Univ and New College sat gigantically round the table and ate gigantically and laughed gigantically, and were taken upstairs to Wedderburn’s dim-lit room to admire his statues of Apollo, his old embroideries and his Dürer woodcuts. These giants in their baggy blanket trousers, their brass-buttoned coats and Leander ties nearly as pink as their own faces, made Wedderburn’s white Apollos look almost mincing and the embroideries rather insipid. There were