CHAPTER II.
HALCYONII DIES.
It is a tolerably insane amusement for a foreigner to go tramping overwild fields and valleys in Northern Norway with no other guide than thething they call an ordnance map and a bit of a pocket-compass. And todo the same without intent to slay the beasts, the birds, or the fishof the country seems, to my way of thinking, even more mad still.Perhaps I am peculiarly constituted, but that's the way it strikes mepersonally. So I was rather curious to know what make of man it wasthat did these things.
Overnight I had seen little of him that was not heavily shadowed. Thestranger preferred to do his own cooking, saying that he was used toit, and had elected to heat his meat at the doorway of the stove.Through this gap little radiance escaped. The only matters illuminatedwere the slices of venison, the toasting-splinter, and the hands thatheld it alternately. These last, being the solitary things one's eyescould make out, naturally were glanced over more than once. They wereslightly above the medium size for hands, and long in proportion totheir breadth. The fingers were tapered like a woman's. The nails werefilbert-shaped, and grimy with recent climbing. The palms were hard.The knuckle-side was very brown, and showed the tendons prominently.They were those lean, nervous sort of hands which you find out at timescan grip like thumbscrews.
My couch was an uneasy one, and I awoke early. The visitor was snoringaway on the log-floor, looking comfortable and contented.
He was a man of about two-and-thirty, dark, tall, and well-built. Hisclothes were those of the merchant seamen--that is, they smacked in nodegree whatever of the sea. Indeed, the only outward things whichconnected him with the water were certain weather stains. He wore amoustache cropped somewhat over close, and the teeth then showingbeneath it, though white, were chaotic; and, moreover, there was thepurple ridge of a scar running from the corner of his mouth which mightadvantageously have been hidden. A beard also would have become him,for his chin verged slightly to the cut-away type, and a three-days'stubble looks merely unkempt. He would never have been a beauty, butgroomed up he would have made a very passable appearance amongst othermen, although the scar near his mouth, and another similar emblem ofroughness over the opposite eye, would have made him a trifleremarkable.
After staring there dully for pretty nearly an hour, it began to dawnupon me that I had seen this man before somewhere, though under whatcircumstances I could not for the life of me remember. That his outwardperson was that of the ordinary deck-hand ashore went for nothing.Besides, he had spoken overnight of "my boat." That evidently meantyacht, and might stand for anything from an eight-hundred ton steamerdownwards.
The more I puzzled over his identity the less hope I seemed to have ofguessing it.
At last he woke, yawned, stretched, and sat up. Then he looked at meand whistled. Then, "Slidey Methuen, by all that's odd! Fancy stumblingacross you here!"
Still I couldn't put a name to the man, and after a bit of hesitationtold him so bluntly.
He laughed, and said he didn't wonder at it. It was only eight yearssince last we had met, but in that time he had been about the world agood deal, and, as he himself expressed it, "got most of the oldlandmarks ground off his face, and new ones rubbed in." He was MichaelCospatric.
I had to take his word for it. There didn't seem to be a trace left ofthe man I had known at Cambridge, either of manner or outward form.However, Cospatric of C---- he was, fast enough; and after the mannerof 'Varsity men, we started on to "shop" there and then, and had theold days over again in review.
We had both been of the same year, and although in a small college thatargues some knowledge of one another, we were by no means in the sameset. In fact, up there Cospatric had been rather an anomaly: a man inno clique, a man without a nickname, a man distinguished only by thehalo of his exit. He came up, one of a bunch of fifty-twoundergraduates, joined all the clubs, was tubbed, rowed four at the endof his first October term in a losing junior trial eight, and waspromptly shelved. He was never in evidence anywhere, but was reportedto be a subscriber of Rolandi's, and to spend his time reading novelsin foreign tongues. As he seldom kept either lectures or chapels, achronic gating fostered this occupation. His second October he againnavigated the Cam in a junior trial. He lugged with the arms incurablyand swung like a corkscrew, but we had five trials on that term, andmen were wanted to fill them. So he rowed and raced, and again helpedhis crew to lose, and then was shelved as hopeless. He was a man of noaccount. Not three men, out of his own year, knew him by name.
At the beginning of his second Easter term he began to distinguishhimself. Of all places, he started to do this at the Union--aninstitution few of us C---- men belonged to. There was a debate uponsomething connected with Education. An unknown person got up andsavagely attacked existing methods as being useless, impracticable, andin the interests of the teacher and not of the taught. "Of what use tosociety is a College fellow?" he asked, and answering, "Of none, exceptto reproduce his species," backed up his case with such cleverness thata majority grew out of nothing. Johnians howled; Trinity men and Hallmen cheered with delight; Non-Colls hissed and made interruptions; andas the ragged-gowned crowd trooped out, a universal cry went up of,"Who the devil is he?"
We undergraduates at C---- were not much moved by this exploit,because, as I have hinted, the Union was not in our line. We rowed anddanced and drove tandem; never preached, except to election mobs. Wequite agreed with Cospatric that Classics and Mathematics, and NaturalScience as she is taught at Cambridge, are one and all of them uselessburdens, not worth the gathering; but we were not prepared to say withhim that we hungered after the acquisition of French, German, Spanish,Norsk, and Italian, or eke Lingua Franca or Japanese.
The higher authorities saw the matter in a different light. Master andfellows looked upon Mr. Cospatric as a dangerous heretic--much, infact, as Urban VIII. and his cardinals regarded Galileo--and resolvedto make him recant. The senior tutor was chosen as their instrument. Hewas an official with what were described as "little ways of his own."He hauled Cospatric. Union speech and revolutionary sentiments were notreferred to. The delinquent was (amid a cacophony of "Hems") accused,on the strength of coming up Chapel with surplice unbuttoned, of beinginebriated within the walls of a sacred edifice. He was not allowed tospeak a word in his own defence. He was gated for a week at eight, andcoughed out of the room.
An eminently steady man, and conscious of being at the moment inquestion sober as an archangel, the iron of the accusation andpunishment entered into his soul. For gatings as a general thing hecared not one jot. He had lived his year and a half in an atmosphere ofthem. Whether free or chained, he had always stayed in his rooms afterhall, preferring the green-labelled books to any other eveningcompanionship.
But to this present confinement, a piece of obviously rank injustice,he determined not to submit; and in consequence spent a dreary eveningparading the streets, not arriving back till close upon twelve.
He kept in College. The porter sent up his name. He was again hauled,and again, without being allowed to say a word in his own defence,gated for the remainder of the term, and given to understand that hewould be sent down for good if he cut a single gate.
The sentence was barbarous. A call at the Lodge and a patientexplanation to the Master would probably have set matters right. ButCospatric was not the man such a course would occur to. Somelong-slumbering demon rose within him, and he indulged heavily inCollege Audit in hall. Afterwards he came to my rooms, where there wasa conclave of some sort going on, and made a statement. It was hisfirst recorded appearance in any one's quarters but his own, and hisfirst recorded look of excitement, and consequently his words werelistened to. He did not stay long. He told us in forcible language thatas the College authorities had seen fit to take it out of him, heintended to do the like by them, and we might form ourselves intoumpires of the proceedings. Then he departed, and next morning joined aknot of us who were gazing with admiration at the stone angels besidethe clock, who, during the hours of d
arkness, had been helmeted withobscene earthenware. No ladder in the College could reach thatdecorated statuary, and as the porter did not see fit to risk_his_ neck over such a ghastly climb, decorated they stayed tillmid-day, and our court teemed with ribald undergraduates.
The succeeding morning there was another raree-show. The Collegeskeleton--framework of a long-passed don, so tradition stated--hadbeen, by help of a screwdriver and patience, untombed from its dustyresting-place at the top of the Hall staircase. It had been dressed insome flashy Scotch tweeds well known as belonging to the junior tutor,and perched astride of the weather-cock. Again the position wasimpregnable, and again the trophy drew delighted crowds till long pastmid-day.
And so one puerile outrage succeeded another, scarcely a day passingwithout some new triumph of the kind to report. Cospatric leaped at onebound into a public character. Of course every soul in the place knewthat he was at the bottom of it all--the dons getting the news throughthe gyps--but no one in authority was smart enough to bring anythinghome to him. He even took to keeping lectures and chapels, which pieceof pharisaism put, to our mind then, the finishing touch of this comedyof revenge.
It all seems a great piece of foolery when one looks back, but at thetime we thought it high-minded and justifiable rebellion. We assembledin the court, and cheered after the senior tutor had been three partssmothered in his bed by a red-pepper squib dropped down the chimney;and on the morning after the Master's laundry was raided, and the linen(belonging to both sexes) distributed amongst the crows' nests in theavenue, I think special trains must have been running into Cambridge,so thick was the throng of sight-seers.
There is no doubt about it that Cospatric came to be a young man ofmuch renown in those days.
Had he been a popular person beforehand, far-seeing friends would haveadvised him to retire on his laurels after, say, the first half-dozenexploits. But as it was, there was no one amongst the newly-formedacquaintances sufficiently interested in the hero of the moment toforgo his own personal anticipations of enjoyment. The man was egged onunthinkingly, although a moment's thought must have pointed to acertain deluge ahead.
And that deluge came, as usual, from an unlooked-for quarter.
Cospatric, in all his sober senses, was helping an overcome roistereracross the court late at night. The junior tutor arrived, and orderedCospatric to his rooms. Cospatric went obediently, waited in the shadowof an archway, and returned to the overcome one. Enter once more thejunior tutor; nothing said to the roisterer; Cospatric to pay anofficial call at twelve-thirty on the morrow. There is no use givingdetail. They had a College meeting next day, and sent him down for anoffence that was absolutely trivial; and every soul in the College, theculprit included, saw the justice of the injustice.
He came down the steps from the Combination room in triumph, and wechaired him round the court in a bath, some hundred and twenty menforming in procession behind, and singing an idiotic march-song from acurrent burlesque. Then we went to his rooms, and he sat on two tables,one above the other, with a tea-cosy on his head, and held an auctionof his effects, which those of us who happened to possess any readycash bought up at long figures. He had no plans for the future, so westuck a false moustache on him, corked his eyebrows, and thus disguisedkept him smuggled in our rooms for ten days, during which time Bacchuscreated Babel. And then we had him photographed in variousattitudes--singly, and surrounded by groups of admirers--and then wewent out with him to the station, saw him in a train for LiverpoolStreet, and--that's all. He was never viewed or heard of again. Hisperiod of brilliance up there was very comet-like.
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