On such evenings (and they were many) Gaveston and David would lie almost prone in their deck chairs, now listening enraptured to the thronging nightingales, now idly tossing their gay-coloured cummerbunds to startle the encircling flitter-mice. Often enough they would talk, sometimes both would sit in profound silence, and not seldom, as term drew on, Gaveston would dictate to his friend his compositions for the Newdigate Prize Poem (the set subject was “University Reform,” the couplets heroic), for the Chancellor’s Essay in Latin Prose (it was _De Complice Oedipi_ this year), for the Disputation in Middle Aramaic, the impromptu cuneiform inscriptions, for the French epigrams and the Postlethwaite Allocution, and many another blue riband of scholarship. Yet sometimes, during these weeks of sultry splendour, a faint _ennui_ seemed almost to overtake Gaveston.
“You’ve sent in my stuff for the Craven?” he asked David one night, flinging away his rhyming dictionary on to the gazebo steps.
“Yesterday, Gav. And first-rate those iambics were!”
“Well, that’s enough for to-day. Let’s finish the Newdigate to-morrow after brekker.” He rose. “I’m going down to the post office now.”
Something in Gav’s voice made David feel sure that a climax in his friend’s already supernal career was hard at hand, and in delighted wonder he watched him stride towards Oxford across the bee-loud clover meadows wherein Malmaison Lodge lay demurely perdue.
Gaveston walked apace, and ere long he was breasting the slope of St. Aldate’s towards the post office and Christ Church. Here he was, and the lisping telegraph girl (an old friend by now) smiled appreciatively as he slipped his pencilled form under the grating.
_Penhaligon Knickerbocker Hotel Reno Nevada USA you will find Oxford in May becoming expect you this day fortnight Peroxic sails on fourth kisses Gav alone please._
“Is that order all right?” she asked doubtfully.
“Perfectly,” he answered. “It is the first telegram with a postscript.”
She looked at him with questioning surprise.
“Emphasis,” he explained, and came out into St. Aldate’s and turned his footsteps towards Wallace.
A crisis in the tide of his life always brought Gaveston to Mongo’s room. He usually came on there from the post office. How soothing still he found that room with its unchanging and immutable sameness, how orderly in its permanent untidiness! As he knocked and entered there were those same young voices laughing (how strange to think that they were fully a year his junior!), and there, on the same accustomed hob, crouched the same Mongo. Nowadays there were a few photographs the more, and the vice-cancellarian mace now occupied the corner where formerly Mongo’s spokeless umbrella had immemorially leaned, but otherwise all was as before. But somehow, with a shiver, Gaveston suddenly felt himself grown old.