AT THE HIGH TABLE

The port was passing at the High Table of St. Zacchaeus’ College in the University of Cambridge, port not as diners at Claridge’s or the Ritz know port, but grand old College port that deceased Bursars, untroubled by wife or work, had spent time and taste laying down in the College cellars in the fifties and sixties. Nobody knew how much of the best survived there, but regularly at the great College Feasts of St. Zacchaeus, such as his Nativitas or the anniversary of the Translation of his Relic from the local Cathedral to the mediæval College founded in his name, as well as on the day marked curiously in the Calendar of the late or pseudo-Lincoln Use, “Sanctus Zacchaeus inter sycamoris,” the best and most wonderful of ports appeared at the High Table. Each of the older Dons sipped the cloistered nectar as though it was his last glass, and guests made gentle inquiry of its abundancy or likelihood of appearance at the Feasts of the following year. There was no certainty, but it was rumoured that a Junior Bursar had boasted—in his cups—that enough remained to flood the front court of the College unto one and three-quarter inches deep. But he was not a mathematician!

The port was passing and three times the hospitable Master of St. Zacchaeus’ had filled his glass and mine. Since the War the College Feasts had been kept very quietly, and the younger Fellows elected since that sanguine deluge were already rising and asking the Master’s leave to return to their studies. They were an entirely new type compared to the mottle-faced old Dons; less human and far more efficient. The Master contemplated their departure good-humouredly. “They are a far harder working lot than we ever were,” he mentioned, “though they do rather resemble hair-dressers’ assistants. Praiseworthy young men and very concentrated in their ways. That young gentleman who has refused port, was, I believe, once a Canadian cowboy, but after a distinguished service in the Army took advantage of the call to ‘Hands across the Sea’ to study Law with us, and so successfully that we made him a Fellow. Though he keeps his hands off the port he is no milkmaid. In fact, I believe he came to one of his colleagues, who had been kind and lent him books, and offered to arrange the disappearance of any person to whom he had most objection in the University.”

The Master was in talking mood and several of us collected round him. “Strange times are upon us, gentlemen, but no doubt we seemed just as strange to the generation that went before us. I have lived to see a race of Undergraduates who do not go to Chapel, and of Dons who have invested their Fellowships in wives or motor-cars. I really feel that the Don who cranks his own car has forded the Rubicon.” And he laughed pleasantly at his own little joke. We laughed hugely.

We sat back against the old red-leathered chairs on the dais under the solemn dust-laden pictures of the holy or unholy founders (according as politics or religion might move the mind of the spectator) and watched the last flicker of the sunset stir through the coloured oriel-window and reflect itself in the great West window of the Chapel. For modern glass it was very beautiful. The Chapel was of course mediæval, but the old stained glass, together with the Relic of Saint Zacchaeus, had been barbarously destroyed by the infamous iconoclast Dowsing in the seventeenth century. But it was piously held that the big sycamore growing in the Fellows’ Garden had sprung from the ashes of the saint and it was solemnly watered and secretly cherished as a rival to Milton’s mulberry and Newton’s apple tree in neighbouring colleges. With the era of Gothic revivals and restorations the glass had been replaced in the mullioned windows. The West window was certainly very magnificent, but the choice of subjects had always puzzled me as an Undergraduate. They seemed such an incongruous selection, but there they were in their full Munich blazonry! Like most Undergraduates it had not been for me to inquire or question. But as the dying light threw them into rainbow splendour, I ventured to ask the Master whether the subjects had been chosen by the Donor or by the College. I always understood the window had been given by some old retired Fellow long deceased. For answer the Master merely passed the port again and asked me whether I had a sufficiently low opinion of Royal Commissioners, who had come to harrow his last years upon earth. I replied that when Commissioners began to inquire into the finances and statutes of Colleges like St. Zacchaeus I regarded them as somewhat above the common run of burglars, but infinitely lower, morally and socially, than the Familiars of the Inquisition. With which reply he seemed far from displeased.

About ten minutes later he gave me a signal proof of his pleasure, for he took up my previous question concerning the West window and said: “Yes, they are very curious and unexpected subjects to find in a College Chapel. It can only be said of them that they are scriptural. But their display there is not meaningless,” and he began unweaving one of those curious stories which lie in the experience or recollection of the wisest and most venerable of us. Beneath the outer crust of stratified anecdote and ordinary gossip there lies some story in almost every man’s life, which he is generally as reluctant to dispense as a cellarer his best port. It is often a ghost story, and most men are unwilling to confess that the inexplicable has ever crossed their plain path of life. Or, like much in Heaven and earth, a streak of the so-called indelicate gives it a taste that is not always agreeable. But in Life and in Literature, in books sacred or profane, in dealing with God or with mankind, these matters must be accepted as an essential part of the Divine dispensation or of human nature. It is not necessary to make them seem the sole circumstance or interest of our minds, but it is difficult to go far in Life or Literature without realising and if possible understanding them. Sex is the quintessence of the Body just as ghosts are distillations of the spirit.

Wise is the man who without seeking either is prepared to meet them spadewise, that is to say knowing how to recognise and describe a spade as a spade. And the old Master from whom I had never heard a word touching either the weird or the sexual side of life began quite simply to talk about both.

“In the old days, before the last Royal Commission interfered with the working of University life, I must admit that a great deal required reform, though reform is one of the words I dislike most in the language. For instance, this was a College of unmarried men entirely; and at the time of the Dissolution, for how else can I describe an era when our Fellows were, not entirely owing to their own fault, very dissolute, I am sorry to say that this College provided not a Boathouse on the River or a Cricket Pavilion nearer home, but frankly a brothel in Barnwell—for the elder members of course.”

The last light of evening sank into the unrecognisable panes of the Chapel window and the porters were lighting the gas jets in the Court. The Master’s words seemed a bitter commentary on the history of this home of peace and learning and spiritual refreshment. It seemed incredible that it could have been so, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries all things were possible in an English University. I waited a little expectantly for him to continue. “Men came up from the great public schools and settled down upon the bounty of the past. There was little competition among them either here or in the outside world. They lived lives of leisure in College like their relations in family livings and squires’ pews, and both their minds and bodies went to seed. Occasionally there was a great flash of scholarship in the void, like Porson—a rare flash in the Academic pan. For the most part they turned queer or stagnant or ridiculous. There was nothing to occupy them. Some sank under the college wines like a rich-flowing river of Lethe. Statutes hedged them and custom prescribed them a rut, which was stupid as well as narrow. But before they became decayed curios they were men like us all, and when they came up and settled down to celibacy without idealism, and study without enthusiasm, and manhood without athletics, well, what could you expect without a certain amount of moral wreckage? The College, which always enjoyed a noble income, allowed them to overstep certain Statutes both human and divine, and handsomely too. Young and vigorous men, cut off from life by rule, were, so to speak, initiated into the mysteries of life by their colleagues. Frankly our Fellows often lived in sin.

“It was all very irregular. Of course, it was not common or general, but no doubt Barnwell had its convenience in saving us from scandal within the College. Whether it was regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the College afforded it. Again I say that those days were far from being our days. Englishmen were freer of speech and action then. I appreciate the great change that has now come for the better. It is right that Dons should be allowed to marry.”

Darkness had fallen upon the beautiful pile of pinnacles and towers outside, and the silver candlesticks on the High Table threw but a feeble and ironical little light into the court so lately deluged with successive hours of sunlight, stark, golden or rubicund in turn. But the hours of sun and sundial had passed, and we were sitting into the hours that are illumined by electric bulbs and counted upon the mechanical faces of clocks. The Master was trying to bring himself back into a forgotten era. His speech flowed precisely. His choice of words did not fail. He was reckoned an accomplished after-dinner speaker, and there were few College Halls whose rafters and gilded lanterns had not rung at some time to laughter and applause evoked by his rich store of the academical anecdote.

He continued: “When the Dons were compelled to be celibate, matters were strangely arranged, as I say. In those days there came to this College one of the finest spirits that have ever been cased in a human body. He was a Greek in body and mind, and he knew his Greek as few of his generation. He came here conquering and to conquer. Mentally and athletically he was capable of anything. But we did not encourage him. If he wished to read for the University prizes, well and good. Nobody prevented him. And if he wished to row in the University boat, well and good. As a matter of fact he did neither. Whatever he touched, we saw him take up with tremendous enthusiasm. And then unfortunately, when it seemed likely that he would remain as a Fellow with us and pass permanently into our Society, he was taken by one of us to this house in Barnwell—not that it was anything unnatural or strange in those days, nor do I suppose that it would be unnatural at any time, but it would be thought nowadays stranger than fiction.

“I believe it was his best friend who took him and introduced and initiated him to those mysteries of creation with which the Creator invested the human race. There he made a liaison with a woman who matched him, not in learning, but certainly in intelligence, and surpassed him in physical powers. When he returned to College he was far from quiescent, and related his adventure rapturously to his friends, concluding with the mediæval snatch, ‘Mihi est propositum in taberna mori.’ He said this several times as though he meant it. He was one of those men who carry out what they take up with all their might. He threw himself into his liaison with the energy of one sex and the intensity of the other. And our College life sped upon its way.

“One night at a very late hour the College porter was roused by the bell at the outside gates, and admitted a member of the College whom he was too sleepy himself to identify. But he was sure that it was the only time the bell was rung after twelve during that night. Under subsequent question no member of the College confessed returning late that night. The College has never been one to retire or rise early, and that night at two o’clock I crossed the Court, and I met the man I have been speaking of. He was walking quietly towards his rooms. His fine brow and athletic tread stamped the encounter in my mind. I was not mistaken, and I never doubted that it was he, and I was afterwards able to swear that I had seen him at that hour. It was about the same hour that the porter opened the front gate.

“The next morning we were informed that our bright companion was lying dead in Barnwell, and that the Borough Police were taking possession of his body. Armed with our special privileges and statutes, several of us, including the dead man’s friend, made our way into that suburb which has never ceased to hold sad associations for me. We identified him lying there with a rapt and, I thought, slightly mocking expression on his face. There was a terrible beauty written upon it, and his friend was deeply affected, for he knelt down and began praying aloud, at least we imagined they were prayers he uttered, though from time to time we overheard like a cruel antiphon the words ‘Mihi est propositum in taberna mori.’ Suddenly we realised how the dead man’s idle wish had come true and smitten him to dust.

“There was no time for weeping and, as we learnt that, after all, the police had not yet been apprised, we decided to cut scandal down in its roots and to transfer the body in a trusty cab to the College. I will never forget our solemn progression through the half-awakening streets of Cambridge with the corpse sitting between us bolt upright, or our arrival at the front gate, which as a rule was only swung open for the Master or the Sovereign—but which was opened full to admit the cab driven by a discreet cabman. As soon as we had laid the body in his rooms we availed ourselves of one of our mediæval privileges to hold the inquest within our own walls. But the police heard rumours, or perhaps the five pounds we gave the discreet cabman led to indiscretions on his part in a public-house, for the scandalised Borough endeavoured to lay sacrilegious hands upon the rights of the College, and demanded the body. Evidence was given that the deceased had returned to the College late the previous night, and presumably had died within academic walls. This, of course, was the curious part of the story. The porter was certain that he had heard the bell at two because it coincided with the striking of the bell in Great St. Mary’s Church, and also that he had admitted a tall gentleman whose name he had omitted to take. There he was at fault. The rest of the College (and we were very small in numbers then) were prepared to swear that they were within the walls of the College before midnight, and finally there was my affirmation that I actually saw the deceased cross the court that night. The Magistrates and police were a good deal troubled, but they had no evidence and only rumours on the other side. The porter’s evidence carried the most weight. The word of the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity might be doubted and even the oath of the Regius Professor of Law might be found to be unsound, but the statement of the Head Porter of St. Zacchaeus stood.

“We held the inquest in the College precincts, and had no difficulty in returning a verdict of heart failure, which was the medical truth. But the wings of scandal began to beat round our academic calm, and it was thought better that the friend of the deceased, who was perhaps answerable for leading him into temptation in the beginning, should go down from the University as quickly and as quietly as the body of his poor friend.... He went, and disappeared. A quarter of a century later he presented the great West window to the College as a peace offering to the living and a secret memorial to the dead. Remembering the circumstances which I have told you in outline, and not forgetting the remarkable vision which I saw in the College court, you may be able to guess for the first time why the subjects in the window were chosen.”

There was a deep silence at the High Table, and the shadows of fifty years seemed to descend upon the gas-lit court and to fill the hall even into the recesses of the great gilded lanterns rising out of the roof. In the distance the outline of the chapel darkened the very night, and I was only sorry that I should have to wait till morning in order to gaze at the coloured glass in the West window with a thrill and a wonder that I had never yet thought possible in contemplating a religious or symbolic object. I could not help asking the Master whose was the mediæval mind that had dared choose the subjects. “I chose them,” he said simply.