Produced by Marcia Brooks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories by Logan Pearsall Smith London Macmillan and Co. and New York 1895 _All rights reserved_ To Philip Morrell Contents Page The Youth of Parnassus 1 The Will to Live. I. 79 The Will to Live. II. 99 The Claim of the Past 125 A Broken Journey 143 The Sub-Warden 183 Idyll 201 Buller Intervening 243 The Optimist 259 _The Youth of Parnassus_ I. He came straight to Oxford from his American home, Parnassus City, a town in the Western State of Indiana. The first time Foley saw him was one wet October evening, when, splashing across the quadrangle towards his rooms, he noticed a large umbrella moving through the dripping twilight--an umbrella which, from its undecided motion, must belong, he had told himself, to some tourist, who, in spite of the rain and darkness, was finishing a day of sight-seeing at St. Mary's. But when the umbrella collapsed in front of his own staircase, and Foley saw the spectacles and pale face of a young man who turned to enter there, he decided that it must be an agent, come to collect money for missions or something of the kind. And as he followed upstairs, in the wet footprints of the feet he could still hear mounting above him, he asked himself with vague annoyance what right they had--people like that--to push themselves into the rooms of Oxford men. The melancholy footsteps went on till they reached the top; nor did Foley hear them again descend. Soon after he was told that an American had come into College, and was living above him; and when he went to call, he recognized, in the person who awkwardly rose to receive him, the young man he had taken for a mission agent in the rain that evening. A thin, small young man, in a long, black broadcloth coat of provincial cut, he seemed at first sight nothing but the traditional Western American Foley had read of in books, or seen in the theatre sometimes--a student who looked curiously out of place in that old panelled room. The young Englishman talked to him as best he could, asking the questions always asked of a new-comer; questions which this one answered with the usual shyness, but in a very unusual voice and accent. He had just come from America; he had left there on the sixth. He had come to study under Dr. Joseph at the new Methodist College. Dr. Joseph had arranged for him to come to St. Mary's; their own College wasn't built yet. Foley asked if he thought he would like Oxford. "Yes, sir," the other replied, drawing a large handkerchief from his coat-tails, "I guess I will; though," he added cautiously after a moment, "it does seem kind of old and mouldy." Foley thought he had done his duty in calling, and meant for the future to see as little as possible of his new neighbour. And yet there had been something pleasant and sensitive in his face, he remembered afterwards; and at times he was haunted by the thought of this stranger sitting as he had found him, alone and lonely in the room upstairs, with two or three books in the empty shelves, a few photographs of home that made the mantelpiece and bare walls look all the more homeless and unfriendly. Now and then he would hear footsteps above moving vaguely about, or he would meet the American on the stairs, or see him walking out alone, and at last, out of kindness, he went again to call. Before long he began to take a certain liking to Sutton, and would often go up in the evenings with a cigarette to his rooms. To the young Englishman the American was certainly a curious and amusing study. How curious were the views and impressions of Oxford, that, breaking through his shy reserve, he would once in a while express, in his prim middle-aged way! He was a good deal shocked by the wine-drinking, card-playing, and Sabbath-breaking that seemed so prevalent there; what religion there was, (well, he didn't guess there was much,) he thought mechanical and dead. Of course there was a great deal of culture in Oxford; but in other things, like telephones and electric lights, why England was behind the Mississippi Valley! II. Foley began to have ideas of his own about this Mississippi Valley. He had already read of its rivers and railways and mushroom towns, and he remembered some of the proud things that Sutton had said at different times of Parnassus City and its importance--it was almost the only subject on which the reticent young man ever seemed willing to talk--the thought-out comparisons he would draw between that place and Oxford, in his attempts to explain to himself what he saw, and account for it all, according to his principles. One evening, in a burst of unusual talkativeness, he described how Parnassus City had been laid out twenty years before, on what had been till then an unploughed prairie; but now there were thousands of inhabitants, rows of business buildings, and elegant residences in the outskirts. There were electric trolleys too in the streets; and the whole town was lighted by natural gas. Not only had the place grown fast in trade and population, but there had been, he explained, a pretty rapid growth in culture. Oh, they didn't intend to let the moss grow on them out in Indiana! Schools and churches were built--the most elegant was the First Methodist, the Reverend Dr. Turnpenny's. It was Dr. Turnpenny, he added, who started the Forward Movement among the Indiana Methodists which made such a stir. Then, after the churches, they had built a lecture hall and library, and, at last, the Parnassus College. Foley asking more about this college, Sutton explained that though it had been built a few years before as a college for Methodist theology and liberal learning, it was already larger than the neighbouring institute at Corinth Creek, and only second in those parts to the University of Miomi. It wasn't of course like the universities in the Eastern States, but still they were proud of it there. He had pinned up on the old panelling of his wall a photograph of this Parnassus College: a rather gaunt frame building, standing in a ploughed field among a few new-planted trees. About the steps were grouped a number of young men and women, many of them wearing spectacles, and all with earnest faces and provincial dress. "That's my class," Sutton explained, pointing at his own figure in the group. "It's the biggest class we've had so far, thirteen gentlemen and seven ladies." Foley studied the photograph of the college, and the pictures on the mantelpiece--several college friends, with lank serious faces; an intellectual young lady, her hand resting on a copy of the Bible; and an old, mild, white bearded minister--Dr. Turnpenny, no doubt. There was a picture too of a wide city street. Then it really existed, this remote place, and people lived there! he thought, amused at the curious chance which had brought Sutton, the promise and pride, perhaps, of his native town, and set him down in so different a world. But at last Foley turned from the yellow lamplight, the photographs, and the voice of the American sawing in his ear. Going to the window he opened the lattice and leaned out into the night. Cool, fresh, and dark was the air that breathed on his face, while before him, blue and vague under the white moon, there grew on his sight the towers, the dome-like trees, and shining roofs of Oxford; dim, romantic, and steeped in silence, save for the even tinkle of a distant bell. With sudden unaffected sentiment, he felt how much he cared for Oxford and all that Oxford stood for. "Do come here," he called out with a friendly impulse, turning his head into the yellow light of the room, "I don't think I ever saw such a view." The American came and leaned beside him at the open window. "Yes, it is nice," he said at length, and Foley was surprised by a fugitive sound of real feeling and appreciation in his voice. III. Gradually he came to take a more real interest in his neighbour. The books that Sutton read, Sutton's love of poetry--surprised him; little things he would say now and then seemed to show indications of sensitive fancies and shy feelings hardly in accordance with his dry exterior. What a thing it would be for him, Foley thought, if the poor young man's taste could be really cultivated; if he could only be set free from his narrowing ideas and made to look at life for himself, instead of seeing it always through the grey fog of Puritan prejudice! Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him, and seemed to puzzle him--he would come days afterwards with carefully thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read, as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a want of beauty in the service. And it was only once that Foley felt even for a moment the least uncomfortable about the things he said to his friend--one evening when he happened to run upstairs with some specious argument about the Apostolic Succession, (for when an idea occurred to him he liked to make use of it at once,) and going into the American's room, he found him on his knees in prayer. In that old place--for St. Mary's was not one of the more liberal Colleges, but a sleepy, ancient, aristocratic society, very conservative of its own beliefs and manners and prejudices--Eliaphet Sutton lived on at first, unknown to almost everybody, and only noticed for the oddness of his looks, as he went in and out to his lectures or solitary walks. But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint unconventionalities of his speech and ways. A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of life; concerned, many of them, only with its theoretic problems, interested more, perhaps, in the ancient Greeks than in contemporary affairs--and, indeed, not unlike the Greeks in their care for the clearness and beauty of the mind, the athletic strength of the body--surely, Foley thought, the young Methodist could not have found so delightful a place in all the world beside. How much he was really influenced by it Foley could not tell; certainly as the months went by he seemed to be more aware of the beauty of Oxford; he would stop sometimes of his own accord to look through a blue gateway or down a sunlit street, and once Foley saw him standing, a quaint figure, under the University Church, and gazing up at the spire--at the religious statues there, which seemed to be voyaging through the windy sky and among its great white clouds. He started to join him, but Sutton, seeing he was noticed, moved hastily away. Then Foley remembered an evening when, coming out into the quadrangle, he saw a figure he recognized as Sutton's standing at a barred gate opening on the street. In front of the American, through that one small opening in the great dark walls, was the gas-lit yellow of the street, the noise of the passing crowd and traffic--for it was the evening of a market day--but at his back the deep shadow and silence of the old quadrangle. "It's rather absurd to be locked up in this way," Foley said, joining him; but Sutton replied after a moment, "Why, I was just thinking I rather liked it! Of course it is absurd, but still--" He stopped, as he so often stopped, in the middle of his sentence. Other times there were when Sutton seemed curiously narrow and stubborn; times when some of his dissenting acquaintances had just been to see him--the elderly undergraduates, with bald heads and big moustaches, whom Foley took to be pupils of Dr. Joseph's when he met them mounting the stairs. One of these dissenting friends of the American's, a friendly, awkward young man, named Abel, who was assistant tutor to Dr. Joseph, and had come with him to Oxford when the college moved there from Birmingham, seemed to have a special supervision over the American. Abel had no very high idea of Oxford and Oxford people, and once, when they met in Sutton's rooms, he and Foley argued a little about the University. Anyhow he envied Sutton, Abel said at last, turning, as he rose to go, to the silent American; it wasn't everybody who had the luck to live in such a place. But Sutton suddenly coloured, and answered, "You can't blame me, Abel, Dr. Turnpenny wanted me...." "I'm not blaming you, my friend, it's only envy," Abel replied good-humouredly. He still lingered a moment, looking at the books, and cross-questioning Sutton about his work, and how he spent his time. Foley, who liked anything new, was interested by this intelligent, tactless man, and wondered why Sutton should be so obviously glad when at last the young dissenter went his way. IV. The next day Foley found his friend in a mood of deep depression. He would not go out anywhere, he said; he must spend the afternoon--indeed, he meant to spend all his afternoons now--on his work; he had been neglecting it too long. And though this desperate resolve was often broken, yet from this time on he seemed subject now and then to moods of troubled conscience--moods in which he would shut himself up, sometimes for days, working feverishly alone, or only coming to his friend late at night to talk in an uneasy, interrupted way about the sinfulness of the world, and its pleasures, and how wrong it was to enjoy yourself. At these notions Foley would laugh, or argue seriously against them. That Sutton could have any real reason for feeling as he did, Foley never suspected, but thought it simply the old moroseness which haunted him, the unreasoned hatred of the Puritans for gaiety and life. And Sutton had very little to say in answer to his friend. Yes, he was getting on with his work well enough, he admitted, and there was nothing really to keep him from going out, except--except--somehow he felt it was wrong. But the wrong thing, Foley declared, was to stay in-doors all those beautiful summer days; and then more seriously he added, that he was sure what Sutton needed was to see more of the world and life. Living in his lonely retired way, what could he know of other people and the things they cared for, and how could he ever hope to have any influence on them? And, once convinced that it was his duty, Sutton became curiously eager to shut up his books and go. Indeed, for the most part, the poor young man was not hard to influence, Foley found; any strong assertion attracted him, and he was often only too willing to resign to someone else the responsibility of deciding what he ought to do. But then again he would grow suddenly so stubborn and prejudiced; and at all times he was so reserved about himself and his own feelings, that the young Englishman, in spite of his theories, never felt he really understood him. Perhaps, he sometimes fancied, Sutton had no very real ideas or impressions of his own; perhaps he was not influenced by Oxford in the least, and was not aware of any real difference between the ancient town, with its traditions and memories, and the new-built Parnassus City. V. But when Foley had left Oxford and gone abroad that summer, the long letters that came to him now and then, written in Sutton's fine clerklike hand, surprised and touched him a little. It was odd, he thought, that a person who had talked with so much reserve, should write him such charming and intimate letters, and he told himself he had always believed there were real feelings and tastes behind Sutton's mask of awkward silence. The first of the letters was written in the vacation just after Foley had gone abroad. It was Sutton's first summer in Europe; he was staying on at Oxford, having friends nowhere else, and not being able, of course, to go back to America. But from the way he wrote, America was plainly a good deal in his thoughts, and often in those long still days he wished himself back there, haunted as he was by the idea that he might be wasting his time, that what he was learning in Oxford might not be of any use to him out in Indiana after all. But then he really knew, he wrote, that he was doing the best thing in staying on. The church out there, and indeed the whole country, was growing so rapidly, that there would be need in the ministry for young men who were well trained, and familiar with the thought and culture of the day. He had come to see that Foley was right in saying it was your duty to get familiar with modern ideas, and read modern books; he was getting on with the list of books Foley had made for him. Of course you ought to understand, or at least try to understand, your opponent's views. If you were afraid of this, it showed, as Dr. Turnpenny always said, that you could not be very sure of yourself. Indeed, when Dr. Turnpenny had advised him to come to Oxford, he had felt it would prove to the world that, at any rate the Indiana Methodists were quite assured of their position. In the next letter there was a mention of the American tourists who were coming through the summer in such numbers to Oxford. Sutton used to watch them when they walked into the quiet College garden, where he sat alone, wishing he knew them and could talk to them about America. Their voices and ways made them seem like old friends to him there in that strange country. Once two ladies had asked him the way to the chapel, and he had been delighted to show them the sights of the College. They were from Buffalo, New York; he must be sure to call on them, they said, if he ever came to Buffalo. They told him how much they would like to stay on in Oxford--but they had to go back to America in a month. Sutton envied them their quick return; but after all, he added, when the time came, probably he might be a little sorry to leave Oxford.... VI. Then in the autumn, Sutton wrote about the coming together of the College, the beginning of busy life after the long quiet of the vacation days. For the first time he had gone to service in the College chapel. He did not like the way of worship, finding it formal and meaningless; but gradually, as the twilight faded away, and the great painted windows filled with darkness--growing black in the candle-lit walls about them--another impression came to him, looking at all those faces in the dim light, and listening to their voices--an impression of the unity and living spirit of the College, as being a small, ancient commonwealth, with a history and traditions of its own. There they all were, just themselves, shut in from the world outside, gathered together, as the College had gathered together in the same place for five or six hundred years. Though he was only there as a spectator, who had chanced to wander in from the outside, yet he realized how great an influence such a place, with all its old ways and customs, might have on the young Englishmen who came there. Indeed, if the influence had not been so obviously narrow and deadening he himself might have been a little affected by it.... "Yes, you were right," he said in another letter, "when you told me that the antiquity of England belongs to us Americans as much as to you.... Sometimes I fancy I had an ancestor here once; I am sure he was a Puritan, and disapproved of the ecclesiasticism and worldliness of the place. And yet, poor man, he could not help loving Oxford too. A retired, melancholy person, he liked it best in the days like these when the buildings and yellow and greenish trees are half veiled in the autumn mist. But at last he went over with the Puritans to New England, and was much better and more active there, and free from all the dreamy influences that held him in Oxford. And it will be much better for me too, when I go back next year." VII. But he had almost decided to go back at once, he wrote in the next letter. He saw now, and indeed all along he had felt deep down in his soul, that he was doing wrong in staying there; that there was nothing really in Oxford to help him. If Foley only knew all the circumstances he would understand. And, in any case, it was not wholesome to be always living in the past. And in Oxford you _were_ in the past; the dead were about you everywhere; you dwelt in the buildings they had built, you read their books, you thought their thoughts, and the weight of their dreary traditions crushed down on you, forcing your life into the shape of theirs. Surely there was something evil and haunted about the place! And during all those dripping autumn days, Sutton's one thought had been a longing to be back again under the keen skies of his prairie-home; life was new and hopeful there, unshadowed by the gloom of antiquity and death.... But soon after Sutton wrote that he had had a talk with Dr. Joseph. "He advises me by all means to stay here. He says that all I am getting at Oxford will certainly be very useful to me when I go back. I never had an idea how strong our position is; I wish you might have a talk with him sometime, when you return. He explains that religion is progressive; that there is no real antagonism between the new and the old; the one has grown out of the other by a natural evolution. Indeed he laughed at the idea of being afraid of the Past; one ought to enjoy it, not fear it, he said. Then when I asked him if there wasn't a danger in the new criticism, and too much reasoning about things, he said that there never could be any real danger in following one's best reason, and that we need not be the least afraid of what it will lead us to." VIII. Other letters came to Foley now and then. Sutton spoke of his work and occupations, the taciturn young man taking a certain pleasure, as it seemed, in writing down the ideas and impressions that he found it hard to express in any other way. But Foley at this time was travelling in the East; he could only read the American's letters with haste and small attention. Some, however, he put aside to keep, and now and then would write back in a disconnected way, for he felt a certain friendliness for this assiduous correspondent. As time went on, however, the letters grew more infrequent, and at last the correspondence died. Foley, with his new interests, had almost forgotten Sutton, or would only think of him vaguely as a preacher somewhere in America, whither doubtless he had returned some time ago. IX. After Foley had spent a year or two almost entirely abroad, he returned to England, began working hard at his profession, and it was some time before he found the leisure to go back to Oxford. At last he went one mid-summer alone, for an idle visit. It was the vacation; the old College was almost deserted, and sometimes in the evening he would go into the garden there, and, sitting under one of the great trees, would read, or idly watch the fading of the twilight. And now memories of the old days, and sentiments towards a place which he had once loved with a certain enthusiasm--though half forgetting it afterwards, amid his other occupations--came back to him with unexpected vividness. How much more delightful it made life, he told himself one evening, as he sat there, half lost in sentimental musing, how much more delightful it made life to have been at Oxford, to have learned to love the place as one did learn to love it--to have it always as a charming memory! It was so perfect, that evening, with the sunset still lingering faint and red behind the blue trees and towers, up there above the dusky garden stretches. And that figure of a cloistered student which Foley could vaguely distinguish on the twilight path; it was no real person, surely, but a part of the picture, a figure painted into the grey landscape to give the final touch of tranquil life! But as the figure drew nearer and became more real, Foley began to wonder, who could it be who seemed so familiar to him? "Why, Sutton!" he called out, as he joined him, surprised at finding the American still at Oxford, "You still here?" Sutton started, and then greeting Foley in his old reserved way, they paced together slowly on the garden path. After Foley had talked a little about his travels and work, he turned to his companion and said in a friendly way, "But tell me about yourself, Eliaphet, it's three years since I have seen you; what have you been doing, and when are you really going back to America?" Sutton replied with all his old vagueness and reticence that he had stayed; he had found it necessary; he had not decided yet about going back. "Probably you will be sorry to leave Oxford when the time comes?" Foley suggested, but the American did not answer. Eliaphet was a good deal changed, Foley thought when they parted; he seemed so much thinner and more melancholy looking, and his voice was almost like that of another person. What a difference a few years made! X. Several times in the following days Foley met his friend again--indeed, they two just then seemed almost alone together in Oxford--and more than once, in the long summer afternoons, they walked together in a desultory way among the vacant streets and empty Colleges. Sutton was even more reserved than of old, but there was a charm in his silent company and in his affectionate, scrupulous knowledge of the place. Each of the churches, dim College chapels, and libraries was dear and familiar to him now; he had found remnants of Norman architecture, and little early Gothic windows in obscure old places which Foley, who had thought he knew Oxford so well, was forced to admit he had never visited. And even for the despised classicism, Sutton seemed to have a certain fondness, for everything that bore the stately quaint mark of the Stuart times--Laud's quadrangle at St. John's, and its Italian-looking busts and arches; the chapel at Trinity; the little Ashmolean museum, and the prim old Botanic garden, with its battered statue of Charles I. over the gate, the half neglected formality of its urns and fountain, its walls and walks within. Then the old names of places seemed all to have a meaning for him. He could trace the remains of the Religious Houses, the Friars Minor, the Friar Preachers, the Carmelites, after which some of the more ancient streets are called; showing Foley the gateways or ruined arches, bits of College buildings which now alone remain of their former stately precincts. And on their walks together Sutton often chose by preference the little back streets, or those ancient footpaths that wind through the old heart of the city, through the mediaeval town whose gables and walls and gardens still sleep in the sun, almost untouched, behind the modern fronts and the traffic of many of the busy streets. To Foley in his sentimental mood just then, the quiet of Oxford was very pleasant, after the noise of the London season; and there seemed to be something almost poetic in the life of this solitary student. How wise he was after all, Foley thought, to stay there among the old colleges and churches, where the ambitions and obligations of the world could scarcely trouble him; nor the noise of its busy life break in on his tranquil moods, or disturb the old memories he loved. And yet a vague suspicion crossing his mind, once or twice, made him ask himself, was Sutton really so happy after all? XI. One morning this vacation quiet of the College was rather noisily broken by the arrival of a number of undergraduates, who had returned to prepare for an examination, bringing with them the noise and influences of the outside world. Now the American was no longer to be met with in the garden or quadrangle, whither he had been wont to come almost every day, as if fond of the place and not averse from Foley's company. Wondering that he did not see him any more, Foley one evening asked the undergraduates if they knew Sutton or had ever heard anything about him. By sight and reputation they knew him very well,--a solitary person, who led in Oxford a most melancholy life, without friends or apparent occupation; staying there, it was reported, because of something in his past which kept him from going back to America. Foley knew how distorted gossip of this kind would grow in coming through the minds of undergraduates; and yet there was enough in what they told, to make him uneasy about his friend. Sutton had given up studying theology, had tried history, making however a complete failure in the schools; he was said to have adopted strange religious ideas and had been heard, it was rumoured, groaning and scourging himself at night. There was a report too that some Americans had come to Oxford, and, after visiting him, had gone to the Warden and accused Sutton of keeping some money which was not his own. XII. As soon as he could, Foley went off to find his friend, getting the address from the College books. At last in a dark alley he discovered the house. Mr. Sutton had gone away from Oxford the day before, the landlady told him, and had not said when he would be back. Perhaps the gentleman would like to leave his card? The room was at the top; he must be mindful of the stairs. Climbing up with care, Foley opened the door and lighted a match in the darkness; the poverty and destitution of the little room growing vivid for a moment, and then fading again into blackness, affected him somewhat sadly. Just two chairs, a table, a bed, and a few signs of human habitation,--several books, a coat hanging on the wall, and three photographs over the fireplace, the familiar one of Dr. Turnpenny, the dreamy face of Philip Gerard, and a picture that Foley was touched to recognize as his own. All the pictures of Parnassus City, his class mates, the young lady, the street, and college, had disappeared, and a few old religious prints were in their place. Feeling as if he had intruded where he had no right, Foley turned away; lingering on the stairs, however, for he was loth to leave the house till he had learned something more definite about his friend. Then in the hall below he met the landlady, and began to talk to her about the American. Mr. Sutton was such a kind gentleman, she said, and always very quiet; but lately he had been, she thought, very lonesome and melancholy, and he didn't seem to have any friends in Oxford now. And though he had paid her regular, she couldn't complain of that, yet she was afraid the poor gentleman had very little money. Indeed, he had seemed to be in some trouble, and now he had gone away mysterious-like. The voice of this woman, plainly so poor herself, her anxiety on Sutton's account, remained in Foley's mind in a haunting way. And yet, what could have happened, he asked himself, unable in common sense to imagine any definite trouble, and nevertheless disturbed by a sense of mystery, as if he had suddenly found himself face to face with something more real and sad than most of the sentiments and troubles of his own experience. Certainly the American had greatly changed--the narrow, rustic young man who had come there first, and the pale scholar Foley had met years afterwards, in the twilight of the garden--there was difference enough between the two! he thought, putting them side by side in memory. But what this change was Sutton had not told; probably never would tell, for in his reserve and reticence he was just the same. And yet in his letters he had written with much less reserve, Foley remembered. He began to wonder whether, if he should read the letters again, with more attention, he might not find in them some hint of Sutton's trouble. Friendless as the American seemed to be in Oxford, a little advice and sympathy from some one who understood his circumstances, might make perhaps all the difference to him. When Foley got back to his own rooms, he began looking through the portfolio of papers that he had brought with him from Germany. Yes, there they were, the envelopes addressed in Sutton's neat fine writing. Arranging them in order of their dates, he began to go through them. Letters written during two or three years of his friend's life, in half an hour he could read them all. XIII. First came the letters Foley remembered: Sutton's first Long Vacation; his home-sickness in Oxford; his thoughts of Parnassus; the American tourists he would watch and speak with sometimes. Then in the autumn his impression of the chapel, his growing fondness for Oxford, followed by the sudden determination to go home, from which Dr. Joseph had dissuaded him, telling him that there was nothing he need be afraid of in Oxford, or in the Past. Then came the letters which had come to Foley in the East, and been hardly regarded by him in the hurry of travel. Letters which read pleasantly for the most part, as he went through them now, with their echoes of charming Oxford life--charming for a time, though troubled afterwards. With Dr. Joseph's theology to rely on, and Dr. Joseph's approval of his life, Sutton's uneasy conscience had been at rest for a while, and he had let himself enjoy life without questioning--just the simple human joy of the world and youth, with the weather growing warmer, and the Spring blossoming in the gardens of that beautiful old city, where he was quite at home now. "I have so enjoyed the Spring," he wrote "your tardy, veering English Spring, with its gusts of snow and black weather, and yet enough warm days to woo from the earth the English flowers that till last year I only knew of in books. But I greet them as old friends now, the primroses, and cowslips, and daffodils.... May is here, the air is full of the greenness of leaves and the songs of birds, the lank rose trees are budding on the Gothic walls, and when I breathe the fragrant air and look about me I rub my eyes, and wonder whether May was ever so beautiful at home. Some beautiful days, of course, I can remember vividly; but I lived then for the most part, I think, among pale thoughts and theories, growing old before I was young, and looking so rarely out--indeed, thinking somehow that it was almost wrong to look out on the beauty and colour of the world...." He had written a good deal about Oxford; and really it wasn't true, what Foley had told him once, that he didn't deserve to live in so beautiful a place; he did care, and was learning more and more to look at things and enjoy them. On May morning he had gone to Magdalen to hear them salute the rising sun from the tower. "I wish I could describe it all," he wrote, "the streets, as I went out, cold and vacant in the early dawn, the pale flames in the street lamps, and the silence of those rows of sleeping houses, only broken, as I passed under garden walls, by the acute music of the birds awake already in the trees. Birds, millions of them! I never heard such a clamour. At the College gate there was a group of shivering people; and soon they let us in, to climb the steep tower stairs, with its narrow windows here and there in the darkness, with views like little old pictures of grey castles and green country. On the windy platform at the top we found almost all the College gathered, the President, and Fellows, and undergraduates, with the group of white choristers. Gradually, as we waited, the formless sky all round and above us grew white and blue; the sky-line reddened; and then, bringing a sudden hush in the crowded talk, a sudden baring of all our heads, the May sun began to blaze in the East; and as it rose into the sky the boys, facing the light, chanted loud, with their shrill young voices, the old Latin hymn. Well, you can hardly imagine what a solemn moment it was, with the slow hymn, the stately yellow sun rising over all that great view of green country. Turning toward Oxford we saw black figures like dots on the sun-flushed towers and roofs of the other Colleges. Our tower, and, indeed, the whole sky, seemed to rock with the pealing bells; and the undergraduates, engaging in a wild scuffle, tore off each other's caps and gowns, throwing them out into the air, to fall with giddy swirls on the roofs, or into the street below. It seemed almost an outburst of Pagan turbulence, after the Pagan sun-worship, up there on that windy tower-top over the sleeping town! I wrote describing it to Dr. Turnpenny; I only hope he won't be shocked!" XIV. In Sir Philip Gerard, whom Foley had known slightly as a youth, of poor and ancient Catholic family, Sutton, it appeared, had found a congenial companion; and he described how they would often spend their afternoons together on the river; rowing up the windings of the Cherwell, past little woods and garden walks, or between the sliding horizons of meadow banks, where the tangled edge of grass and flowers fringed the near sky. "I lie on luxurious cushions in the bow, and Gerard pushes me along, through sleepy sunshine and shadow, and under the unwilling branches of trees; and then, anchoring in some secluded place, we read together some poet or old book, while the endless afternoon glides by, and boats float down the shady river." "This sounds dreadfully lazy, I'm afraid! But I am taking a rest; I have been feeling rather tired, and Dr. Joseph says I had better do nothing but enjoy myself for a week or two now...." "... I discovered the other day the old market. I wonder if you know it? It is a delightful place! People from the villages about Oxford have stalls there, and you see the ruddy, old-fashioned cottagers' wives, seated each one behind a fresh bank of vegetables and flowers she herself has grown at home in her quaint garden. Sweet, old-fashioned flowers, flags and peonies and roses, made up into tight bouquets and set out for sale in trim rows, not unlike, I fancy, the trim rows in which they grew in their formal cottage flower beds...." Letters came to him from home, he said, telling of all that was going on in Parnassus City: the Bryant Literary Society they had started, the church bazaar for the missionary work, the Monday evening prayer meetings at the College; and he often felt that he ought to be back there, that he was dreaming away his time. Yes, it was like a dream in Oxford; but such an enchanted dream!... He wrote, in another letter, of the Oxford bells. More and more he was conscious of them, sounding always in the near or distant sky; and if ever he woke up in the night, restless with his dreams, he had only to wait a little and they would ring out--first the silver voices of the Colleges, and then the slow booming tones of the great church, so near at hand. And he found a comfort, he said, in the nearness of the churches, and their wakefulness through the night. Although of course he did not approve, he said, of a religion of external forms, yet he confessed that he had come to take a certain interest in noticing how, almost every time he went out, he discovered some new symbol of the old Catholic religion--old stone crosses, statues gazing out from the towers, images of the Virgin, hands raised in prayer, the adoration of kings and queens in the painted windows; and even in the gardens stone fragments, covered with ivy, of old saints--everywhere tokens of ancient faith, and intimations of another world, shining and immanent, about this world of sense. It was curious, but he had never noticed these things when he had first come to Oxford! Indeed, he grew to love all the antiquity of the place; was no longer oppressed or frightened by it; and for the old portraits in the hall and library, the tombstones in the cloisters, with their quaint epitaphs and names, he felt a certain fondness, he said, looking on the dead now, not as enemies, frowning on his creed and life, but as friends rather, and kindly predecessors. XV. The lives of many of those old scholars and worthies had become familiar to him, since he had read Anthony à Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, and he had gone sometimes with his friend on antiquarian walks about Oxford, and the colleges Wood described. Or Gerard would lend him a horse, and they would ride out to visit the historic places and villages that lie in the old country about--Woodstock, Cumnor, Abingdon--the names were familiar to him of long date; had he not first read of some of them, and the scenes they were famous for, in Jones' _Excelsior Reader_, out in Indiana as a boy? He spoke of the village churches, that seemed so beautiful on those June afternoons, as they stood among their old trees and flowers, with the white clouds in the sky above, a shiver of wind in the long grass over the graves. And then, through the scent of roses about the open door, the dim interior, with its white Norman arches, and light falling from painted windows on the crusaders' tombs--on all the many monuments of the dead. The dead! Sutton wrote that he had always known of the times gone by, and the faith of the Middle Ages, but only in an unreal way, through books. And it made such a difference--to him at least--if he saw the proof of a thing, actually existing with the daylight on it! "Once, Gerard says, these churches were filled in the morning and evening light with labouring people kneeling in silent prayer. But that, of course, was in the Dark Ages. Gerard thinks that the world has done nothing but go back since the Middle Ages; certainly he does hate everything that is modern. How he will detest Parnassus City, if he comes to see me there, as he says he will. It has been bad for him, I am sure, living out of the world, as he has lived, among old memories and dreams of his own. He is a Catholic, you know, but he respects my religion; he knows, of course, what my views are, and we never talk about theology. There is a friend of his I meet sometimes a priest, and I suppose a Jesuit. But he seems really quite a cultivated person." Foley took up another letter: They had ridden out, Sutton wrote, to an old country house and park, where Charles I. had stayed once, while Parliament was being held in Oxford. The house, all save one wing, now a farm-house, had been torn down; but on the hill overlooking the lake, in the midst of the green shade of beeches, the chapel was still standing, abandoned now, and almost untouched, save by decay and time, since the polite court of the Stuarts had said their worldly devotions there. What rich brocades, what hushed gallantries and frivolous prayers had once rustled and whispered under the graceful high arches of those pews! But birds had their nests there now, he said, while through the decaying roof the rain dripped down on the frail woodwork, the classic columns and fading colours of this deserted place of elegant worship and old fashion. The American Puritan confessed to a certain tenderness for the generous lost cause, for the fine futile courage of the gay Cavaliers and lovely forgotten ladies. And as they rode homeward through the twilight, his companion sang snatches of some old Cavalier songs--tunes with a certain pathos and grace in their gallant wistful music. XVI. Then there was a long letter, dating from the autumn after this delightful summer, in which he wrote again about Anthony à Wood, the old Oxford antiquary. He had been reading Wood's diaries, finding in them, he said, in spite of their old-fashioned pedantry and long genealogies, a vivid picture of the University and Wood's life in it, two hundred years ago. A calm life, Sutton described it, in curious contrast to the times in which Wood lived, when the academic quiet was so often disturbed by armies, and royal visits, and great events; and the noise of tumults in the Oxford streets, and troops marching by, reaching the old antiquary's ears, would draw him from the chronicles of the past, to look with blinking eyes from his library window on the turmoil and disquiet of contemporary history. For his life was spent in his own study, or in "Bodlie's Library," or among the dusty archives of the Colleges, reading and transcribing the monastic registers, the old manuscripts and histories. Sutton quoted from his diary a sentence in which he speaks of the exceeding pleasure he took in "poring on such books." "Heraldry, musick, and painting did so much crowd upon him, that he could not avoid them, and could never give a reason why he should delight in those studies more than in others, so prevalent was nature." "My pen cannot enough describe," he writes in his enthusiasm, when he first read Dugdale's _Antiquities of Warwickshire_, "how A. Wood's tender affections and insatiable desire of knowledge were ravish'd and melted down by the reading of that book. What by music and rare books that he found in the public library, his life at this time and after was a perfect Elysium." "Wood often went for long, solitary walks, collecting arms and monumental inscriptions from the churches, and visiting all the ruined religious Houses and old halls in the country about Oxford. He describes in his diary how, as he returned towards Oxford in the evening, 'after he had taken his rambles about the country to collect monuments,' he would hear the bells of Merton, his own College, ringing clearly in the distance." "Wood had small love for the Puritans," Sutton wrote, "who in his lifetime were so long in power; and in his record of contemporary events, sudden deaths, and alleged appearances of the devil, he more than once mentions their destruction of antiquities, their contempt for the Fathers and Schoolmen, and
{'title': 'The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories by Logan Pearsall Smith', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}