Watersprings | Page 9

the dim portraits above the panelling, the
gleam of gilded cornices were a pleasant contrast to the lively talk, the
brisk coming and going, the clink and clatter below. It was noisy
indeed, but noisy as a healthy and friendly family party is noisy, with
no turbulence. Once or twice a great shout of laughter rang out from the
tables and died away. There was no sign of discipline, and yet the
whole was orderly enough. The carvers carved, the waiters hurried to
and fro, the swing-doors creaked as the men hurried out. It was a very
business-like, very English scene, without any ceremony or parade, and
yet undeniably stately and vivid.
The undergraduates finished their dinners with inconceivable rapidity,
and the Hall was soon empty, save for the more ceremonious and
deliberate party at the high table. Presently these adjourned in
procession to the Parlour, a big room, comfortably panelled, opening
off the Hall, where the same party sat round the fire at little tables,
sipped a glass of port, and went on to coffee and cigarettes, while the
talk became more general. Howard felt, as he had often felt before, how
little attention even able and intellectual Englishmen paid to the form
of their talk. There was hardly a grammatical sentence uttered, never an
elaborate one; the object was, it seemed, to get the thought uttered as
quickly and unconcernedly as possible, and even the anecdotes were
pared to the bone. A clock struck nine, and Mr. Redmayne rose. The
party broke up, and Howard went off to his rooms.
He settled down to look over a set of compositions. But he was in a
somewhat restless frame of mind to-night, and a not unpleasant mood
of reflection and retrospect came over him. What an easy, full, lively
existence his was! He seemed to himself to be perfectly contented. He
remembered how he, the only son of rather elderly parents, had gone
through Winchester with mild credit. He had never had any difficulties
to contend with, he thought. He had been popular, not distinguished at
anything--a fair athlete, a fair scholar, arousing no jealousies or
enmities. He had been naturally temperate and self-restrained. He had
drifted on to Beaufort as a Scholar, and it had been the same thing over

again--no ambitions, no failures, friends in abundance. Then his father
had died, and it had been so natural for him, on being elected to a
Fellowship, just to carry on the same life; he had to settle to work at
once, as his mother was not well off and much invalided. She had not
long survived his father. He had taught, taken pupils, made a fair
income. He had had no break of travel, no touch with the world; a few
foreign tours in the company of an old friend had given him nothing
but an emotional tincture of recollections and associations--a touch of
varnish, so to speak. Suddenly the remembrance of some of the things
which Jack Sandys had said that morning came back to him; "real
things" the boy had said, so lightly and yet so decisively. He wondered;
had he himself ever had any touch with realities at all? He had been
touched by no adversity or tragedy, he had been devastated by no
disappointed ambitions, shattered by no emotions. His whole life had
been perfectly under his control, and he had grown into a sort of
contempt for all unbalanced people, who were run away with by their
instincts or passions. It had been a very comfortable, sheltered, happy
life; he was sure of that; he had enjoyed his work, his relations with
others, his friendships; but had he ever come near to any fulness of
living at all? Was it not, when all was said and done, a very empty
affair--void of experience, guarded from suffering? "Suffering?" he
hardly knew the meaning of the word. Had he ever felt or suffered or
rebelled? Yes, there was one little thing. He had had a small ambition
once; he had studied comparative religion very carefully at one time to
illustrate some lectures, and a great idea had flashed across him. It was
a big, a fruitful thought; he had surveyed that strange province of
human emotion, the deepest strain of which seemed to be a disgust for
mingling with life, a loathing of bodily processes and instincts, which
drove its votaries to a deliberate sexlessness, and set them at variance
with the whole solid force of Nature, the treacherous and alluring
devices by which she drove men to reproduction with an insatiable
appetite; that mystical strain, which appeared at all times and in all
places, a spiritual rebellion against material bondage, was not that the
desperate cry of the fettered spirit? The conception of sin, by