The New Warden

"I have just got your friend Boreham to undertake a job of work," said Bingham. "It'll do him a world of good to have work, a library to catalogue for the use of our prisoners. He wanted to shove off the job to some chaplain. I was to procure the chaplain, just as if all men weren't scarce, even chaplains!"

Composed as the Warden was, he looked at Bingham with something of eager attention on his face, as if relying on him for support and conversation.

"Poor old Boreham, he is a connection of mine by marriage," he said, and as the words fell from his lips, he, in his present sensitive mood, recoiled from them, for they implied that Boreham was not a friend. Why was he posing as one who was too superior to choose Boreham as a friend?

"Talking of chaplains," said Bingham, who knew nothing of what was going on in the Warden's mind, and thought this sudden stop came from dislike of any reference to Boreham – "talking of parsons, why not release all parsons in West End churches for the war?"

A smile came into May's face at the extreme sweetness of Bingham's voice; a warning that he was about to say something biting.

"Release all parsons who have smart congregations," continued Bingham, in honied tones; "parsons with congregations of jolly, well-dressed women, women who enjoy having their naughtiness slanged from the pulpit just as they enjoy having their photographs in the picture papers. Their spiritual necessities would be more than adequately provided for if they were given a dummy priest and a gramophone."

May's smile seemed to stimulate Bingham's imagination.

"To waste on them a real parson with a soul and a rudimentary intellect," he went on, "is like giving a glass of Moselle to an agricultural labourer when he would be happy with a mug of beer. But the Church wastes its energies even in this time of heartbreakings."

"I should like to see you, Bingham," said the Warden, smiling too, and turning his narrow eyes, in his slow deliberate manner, towards his guest, "as chairman to a committee of English bishops, on the Reconstruction of the Church."

"I've no quarrel with our bishops," said Bingham; "I don't want them to extol every new point of view as they pass along. I don't expect them to behave like young men. Nor do I expect them to be like the Absolute, without 'body, parts or passions.' My indictment is not even against that mere drop in the ocean, 'good Christian souls,' but against humanity and human nature!" Bingham looked from one to the other of his listeners. "Until now, the only people we have taken quite seriously are the very well dressed and the – well, the undressed. The two classes overlap continually. But now we've got to take everybody seriously; we are going to have a Democracy. Human nature has got a new tool, and the tool is Democracy. The new tool is to be put into the same foolish old hands, and we shall very soon discover what we shall call 'the sins of Democracy.' What is fundamentally wrong with us is what apparently we can't help: it's that we are ourselves, that we are human beings." Bingham smiled into his plate. "We adopt Christianity, and because we are human beings we make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. We are patronising Democracy, and we shall make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy too – if we don't take care. Everything we handle becomes intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. And yet we still fancy that, if only we could get hold of the right tools, our hands would do the right work."

"The Reconstruction of Human Nature is what you are demanding," said the Warden.

"Yes, that's what we want," sighed Bingham. "When we have got rid of the Huns, we must begin to think about it."

"If you saw the children I have seen, Mr. Bingham," said May, quietly, "you would want to begin at once, and I think you would be hopeful."

There was on the Warden's face a sudden passionate assent that Bingham detected.

"All men," said Bingham, leaning back in his chair and regarding his two listeners with veiled attention – "all men like to hear a woman say sweet, tender, hopeful things, even if they don't believe them. As for myself, Mrs. Dashwood, I admit that your 'higher optimism' haunts me too at times; at rare times when, for instance, the weather in Oxford is dry and bright and bracing."

If he had for a moment doubted it since the afternoon at the Hardings', Bingham was now sure, as sure as a man can be of what is unconfessed in words, that between this man and woman sitting at the table with him was some secret sensitive interest that was not friendship.

How did this conviction affect Bingham and Bingham's spirits? It certainly did not put a stop to his flow of talk. Rather, he talked the more; he was even more sweetly cynical and amiably scintillating than usual. If his heart was wounded, and he himself was not sure whether it was or not, he hid that heart successfully in a sheath of his own sparks.

A pause came when Robinson put out the light over the carving-table and withdrew with Robinson Junior. The dining-room was silent. Bingham drank some wine, the Warden mused, and May Dashwood sat with her eyes on a glass of water by her, looking at it as if she could see some vision in its transparency. The fire was glowing a deep red in the great stone chimney-piece at the further end of the room. A coal fell forward upon the hearth with a strangely solitary sound. Bingham glanced towards the fire and then round the room, and then at his host, and lastly at May Dashwood.

"I heard a rumour," he said, and he took a sip of his claret, "that your college ghost had made an appearance!"

There came another silence in the room.

"One doesn't know how such rumours come about," continued Bingham; "perhaps you hadn't even heard of this one?" He looked across at May and round at the Warden. Neither of them seemed to be aware that a question was being asked.

"I didn't know King's even claimed a ghost," said Bingham again. "I've heard of the ghost of Shelley in the High," he added, smiling. "A ghost for the tourist who comes to see the Shelley Memorial."

May looked down rather closely at the table.

The Warden moved stiffly. "I don't believe Shelley would want to come," he said. "He always despised his Alma Mater."

"He was a bit of an enfant terrible," said Bingham, "from the tutor's point of view."

May raised her eyes with relief; the Warden had parried the question of the ghost with skill.

"And I don't believe," said the Warden, "that any one returns who has merely roystered within our walls," and he smiled.

Bingham was now looking very attentively at the Warden out of his dark eyes.

"Jeremy Bentham," he said, "seems to have been afraid of ghosts, when he was an undergraduate here. He was afraid of barging against them on dark college staircases. It's a fear I can't grasp. I would much rather come into collision with any ghost than with the Stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, whether the staircase was dark or not."

"If there are ghosts," said the Warden, pensively, "I should expect to see Cranmer, on some wild night, wandering near the places where he endured his passion and his death. Or I should expect to see Laud pacing the streets, amazed at the order and discipline of modern Oxford. If personal attachment could bring a man from the grave," he went on, meeting Bingham's eyes with a smile, "why shouldn't that least ghostly of all scholars, your old master, Jowett – why shouldn't he walk at night when Balliol is asleep?"

"Then there was nothing in the rumour," said Bingham, "that your King's ghost has turned up?"

"The Warden doesn't believe in ghosts," said May, looking across the table eagerly. She remembered how he had stood by the bedside of Gwendolen that night. She recalled the room vividly, the gloom of the room and he alone standing in the light thrown upon him by the lamp. She could recall every tone of his voice as he said: "You thought you saw something. You made a mistake. You saw nothing, you imagined that you saw – there was nothing," and how his voice convinced her, as she stood by the fire and listened. How long ago was that – only three days – it seemed like a month.

"No," said the Warden, "I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't believe that our dead" – and he pronounced the last word reverently – "are such that they can return to us in human form, or through the intervention of some hired medium. But if there are ghosts in Oxford," he went on, and now he turned to Bingham, as if he were answering his question – "if there are ghosts in Oxford they will be the ghosts of those who were, in life, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. I am thinking of those men who lived and died in Oxford, recluses who knew no other world, and of whom the world knew nothing – men who used to flit like shadows from their solitary rooms to the Lecture hall and to High table and to the Common room. Those men were monks in all but name; celibates, solitaries – men to whom the laughter of youth was maddening pain."

May's eyes dropped! What the Warden was saying stabbed her, not merely because of the words he said, but because his voice conveyed the sense of that poignant pain.

"Such men as I speak of," he went on, "Oxford must always have possessed, even in the boisterous days when you fellows of All Souls," he said, addressing Bingham, "used to pull your doors off their hinges to make bonfires in honour of the mallard. There always have been these men, students shy and sensitive, shrinking from the rougher side of the ordinary man, shrinking from ordinary social life; men who are only courageous in their devotion to learning and to truth; men who are lonely with that awful loneliness of those who live in the world of thoughts. I knew one such man myself. Those who believe in ghosts may come upon the shades of these men in the passages and in the cloisters at night, or hiding in the dark recesses of our college windows. Why, I can feel them everywhere – and yet I don't believe in ghosts." The Warden placed his elbows upon the table and rested his chin upon his hands, and looked down at the table-cloth.

May said nothing; she was listening, her face bent but expressive even to her eyebrows.

"Neither do I," said Bingham, in an altered voice. "I don't believe in ghosts, and yet, what do we know of this world? We talk of it glibly. But what do we know of the forces which make up the phantasmagoria that we call the World? What do we know of this vast universe? We perceive something of it by touch, by sight, sound and smell. These are the doors through which its forces penetrate the brain of man. These doors are our way of 'being aware' of life. The psychology of man is in its infancy. And remember" – here Bingham leaned over the table and rested his eyes on May – "it is man studying himself! That makes the difficulty!" Bingham was serious now, and he had slipped from slang into the academic form in which his thoughts really moved.

"And we don't even know whether our ways of perceiving are the only ways," said the Warden.

"Anyhow," said Bingham, turning to him, "the ghosts you 'feel,' and which you and I don't believe in, belong to the old Oxford, the Oxford which is gone."

There came a sudden silence in the long room, and May felt that she ought to make a move. She looked at the Warden.

"That Oxford," continued Bingham, "is gone for ever. It began to go when men hedged it round with red brick, and went to live under red-tiled roofs with wives and children."

"Yes, it has gone," said the Warden. "Must you leave us!" he asked, rising, as May looked at him and made a movement to rise.

Bingham rose to his feet, but he stood with his hand holding the foot of his glass and gazing into its crimson depths.

"Pardon, Middleton! Mrs. Dashwood, one moment," he said, and he raised his glass solemnly till it was almost on a level with his dark face. "Will you pledge me?" he asked. "To the old Oxford that is past and gone!"

The Warden and May were both drinking water. They raised their glasses and touched Bingham's wine which glowed in the light from above, almost suggesting something sacramental. And Bingham himself looked like a smooth, swarthy priest of mediæval story, half-serious and half-gay, disguised in modern dress.

"To the Oxford of sacred memory," he said.

They drank.

May was thinking deeply and as she was about to place her glass back upon the table, the thought that was struggling for expression came to her. She lifted her glass: "To the Oxford that is to be," she said gently. She glanced first at Bingham, and then her eyes rested for a moment upon the Warden.

Bingham watched her keenly. He could see that at that moment she had no thought of herself. Her thoughts were of Oxford alone, and, Bingham guessed, with the man with whom she identified Oxford.

Bingham hesitated to raise his glass. Was it a flash of jealousy that went through him? A jealousy of the new Oxford and all that it might mean to the two human beings beside him? If it was jealousy it died out as swiftly as it had come.

He raised his glass.

"To the Oxford of the Future," said the Warden.

"Ad multos annos," said Bingham.

CHAPTER XXX

THE END OF BELINDA AND CO

Lady Dashwood professed to be very much better the next morning when May looked in to see how she had slept.

"I'm a new woman," she said to May; "I slept till seven, and then, my dear, I began to think, and what do you think my thoughts were?"

May shook her head. "You thought it was Sunday morning."

"Quite true," said Lady Dashwood; "I heard the extra bells going on round us. No, what I was thinking of was, what on earth Marian Potten did with Gwendolen yesterday afternoon. I'm quite sure she will have made her useful. I can picture Marian making her guest put on a big apron and some old Potten gloves and taking her out into the garden to gather beans. I can picture them gathering beans till tea-time. Marian is sure to be storing beans, and she wouldn't let the one aged gardener she has got left waste his time on gathering beans. I can see Marian raking the pods into a heap and setting fire to the heap. I imagined that after tea Gwendolen played the 'Reverie' by Slapovski. After dinner: 'Patience.'"

May pondered.

"And now. May," said Lady Dashwood, looking tired in spite of her theory that she had become a new woman, "it's a lovely day; even Louise allows that the sun is shining, and I can't have you staying indoors on my account. I won't allow you in my bedroom to-day. I shall be very busy."

"No!" said May, reproachfully. "I shall not allow business."

"I'm just going to write a letter to my dear old John, whom I've treated shamefully for a week, only sending him a scrawl on half a page. Now, I want you to go to church, or else for a walk. I can tell you what the doctor says when you come back."

May said neither "Yes" nor "No." She laughed a little and went out of the room.

In the breakfast-room the Warden was already there. They greeted each other and sat down together, and talked strict commonplaces till the meal was over. He did not ask May what she was going to do, neither did she ask him any questions. They both were following a line of action that they thought was the right one. Neither intended meeting the other unless circumstances compelled the meeting; circumstances like breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was clear to both of them that, except on these occasions, they had no business with each other. The Warden was clear about it because he was a man still ashamed.

May was clear that she had no business to see the Warden except when necessity occasioned it, because each moment made her more unfaithful to the memory of the dead, to the memory of the dead man who could no longer claim her, who had given away his all at the call of duty and who had no power to hold her now. So she, too, being honourably proud, felt ashamed in the presence of the Warden.

All that morning was wasted. The doctor did not come, and May spent the time waiting for him. Lady Dashwood sat up in bed and wrote an apparently interminable letter to her husband. Whenever May appeared she said: "Go away, May!" and then she looked long and wistfully at her niece.

Two or three men came to lunch and went into the library afterwards with the Warden, and May went to her Aunt Lena's room.

"The doctor won't come now till after three, May, so you must go out, or you will really grieve me," said Lady Dashwood. "Jim will take you out. He came in just after you left me before lunch, and I told him you would go out."

"You are supposed to be resting," said May, "and I can't have you making arrangements, dear Aunt Lena. I shall do exactly what I please, and shall not even tell you what I please to do. I do believe," she added, as she shook up the pillows, "that in the next world, dear, you will want to make plans for God, and that will get you into serious trouble."

Lady Dashwood sighed deeply. "Oh dear, oh dear," she said, "I suppose I must go on pretending I'm ill."

May shook her head at her and pulled down the blinds, and left her in the darkness suitable for repose.

The Warden had not mentioned a walk. Perhaps he hadn't found an opportunity with those men present! Should she go for a walk alone? She found herself dressing, putting on her things with a feverish haste. Then she took off her coat and sat down, and took her hat off and held it on her knees.

She thought she heard the sound of a voice in the corridor outside, and she put on her hat with trembling fingers and caught up the coat and scarf and her gloves.

She went out into the corridor and found it empty and still. She went to the head of the stairs. There was no sound coming from the library. But even if the Warden were still there with the other men, she might not hear any sounds of their talk. They might be there or they might not. It was impossible to tell.

Perhaps he had gone to look for her in the drawing-room and, finding no one there, had gone out.

The drawing-room door was open. She glanced in. The room was empty, of course, and the afternoon sunshine was coming in through the windows, falling across the floor towards the fireplace. It would soon creep up to the portrait over the fireplace.

May waited several minutes, walking about the room and listening, and then she went out and closed the door behind her. She went down the staircase into the hall, opened the front door very slowly and went out.

An indescribable loneliness seized her as she walked over the gravelled court to the gates. The afternoon sunshine was less friendly than rain and bitter wind. She took the road to the parks, meeting the signs of the war that had obliterated the old Sunday afternoons of Oxford in the days of peace. Here was suffering, a deliberate preparation for more suffering. Did all this world-suffering make her small personal grief any less? Yes, it did; it would help her to get over the dreary space of time, the days, months, years till she was a grey-haired woman and was resigned, having learned patience and even become thankful!

Once she thought she saw the figure of the Warden in the distance, and then her heart beat suffocatingly, but it was not he. Once she thought she saw Bingham walking with some other man. He rounded the walk by the river and – no, it was not Mr. Bingham – the face was different. She began asking herself questions that had begun to disturb her. Was the real tragedy of the Warden's engagement to him not the discovery that Gwendolen was silly and weak, but that she was not honourable? Had he suspected something of the kind before he received that letter? Wasn't it a suspicion of the kind that had made him speak as he did in the drawing-room after they had returned from Christ Church? Might he not have been contented with Gwendolen if she had been straight and true, however weak and foolish? Was he the sort of man who demands sympathy and understanding from friends, men and women, but something very different from a wife? Was the Warden one of those men who prefer a wife to be shallow because they shrink from any permanent demand being made upon their moral nature or their intellect? Perhaps the Warden craved a wife who was thoughtless, and, choosing Gwendolen, was disappointed in her, solely because he found she was not trustworthy. That suspicion was a bitter one. Was it an unjust suspicion?

As May walked, the river beside her slipped along slowly under the melancholy willows. The surface of the water was laden with fallen leaves and the wreckage of an almost forgotten summer. It was strangely sad, this river!

May turned away and began walking back to the Lodgings. There was a deepening sunshine in the west, a glow was coming into the sky. Oh, the sadness of that glorious sunset!

May was glad to hide away from it in the narrow streets. She was glad to get back to the court and to enter the darkened house, and yet there was no rest for her there. Soon, very soon, she would say good-bye to this calm secluded home and go out alone into the wilderness!

She walked straight to her room and took off her things, and then went into Lady Dashwood's room. Louise was arranging a little table for tea between the bed and the windows.

"Well!" cried Lady Dashwood. "So you have had a good walk!"

"It was a lovely afternoon," said May. She looked out of the window and could see the colour of the sunset reflected on the roof opposite.

Lady Dashwood watched Louise putting a cloth on the table, and remarked that "poor Jim" would be having tea all alone!

"I think the Warden is out," said May, as she stood at the window.

"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Dashwood, but at that moment the doctor was ushered into the room. He apologised for coming so late in the day, he had been pressed with work. "I'm perfectly well," said Lady Dashwood; "I don't need a doctor, you are simply wasted on me. I can come down to dinner."

There was no doubt that she was better. The doctor admitted it and praised her, but he refused to let her get up till the next day, and then only for tea in the drawing-room; and, strange to say, Lady Dashwood did not argue the point, merely remarking that she wasn't sure whether she could be trusted to remain in bed. She wouldn't promise that she could be trusted.

When the doctor left May slipped out with him, and they went along the corridor together.

"How much better is she?" she asked. "Is she really on the road to being quite well?"

"She's all right," said the doctor, as they went down the staircase, "but she mustn't be allowed to get as low as she was yesterday, or there will be trouble."

"And," said May, "what about me?" and she explained to him that she was only in Oxford on a visit and had work in London that oughtn't to be left.

"Has she got a good maid?" asked the doctor.

"An excitable Frenchwoman, but otherwise useful." They were at the front door now.

"And you really ought to go to-morrow?"

"I ought," said May, and her heart seemed to be sinking low down – lower and lower.

"Very well," said the doctor, "I suppose we must let you go, Mrs. Dashwood," and as he spoke he pulled the door wide open. "Here is the Warden!" he said.

There was the Warden coming in at the gate. May was standing so that she could not see into the court. She started at the doctor's remark.

"I'll speak to him," he said, and, bowing, he went down the steps, leaving the door open behind him. May turned away and walked upstairs. She wouldn't have to tell the Warden that she was going to-morrow; the doctor would tell him, of course. Would he care?

She went back to the bedroom, and Lady Dashwood looked round eagerly at her, but did not ask her any questions.

"Now, dear, pour out the tea," she said. "The doctor was a great interruption. My dear May, I wish I wasn't such an egotist."

"You aren't," said May, sitting down and pouring out two cups of tea.

"I am," said Lady Dashwood.

"Why?" asked May.

"Well, you see," said Lady Dashwood, "I was terribly upset about Belinda and Co., because Belinda and Co. had pushed her foot in at my front door, or rather at Jim's front door; but she's gone now, as far as I'm personally concerned. She's a thing of the past. But, and here it comes, Belindas are still rampant in the world, and there are male as well as female Belindas; and I bear it wonderfully. I shall quite enjoy a cup of tea. Thanks, darling."