Lambert was hugely tall and walked with a stride which was as long as it was stately. He went in for dressing himself beautifully, strummed on the banjo, and had a playful little habit of arranging his tie in any mirror which he saw. His pride in himself was so monstrously open that no one with a grain of humour could be angry with him. He talked about every game under the sun as if they were all equally easy to him, but I should not think that any one was ever found who believed half of what he said.
Collier's great point was the beam which he kept on his face, he always looked so perfectly delighted to see you that he was a most effective cure for depression. He was fat and did not mind, which persuaded me that he was very easy to please. Nature had prevented him from playing football with any success, but for six or seven overs, on a cool day, he was reported to be a dangerous fast bowler.
As Jack Ward thought that no ball yet made was worth worrying when he could ride, drive, or even be driven, and since I was feeling about as sick with footer as it is possible for any one who had got a love for the game in him to be, I confess that we were a peculiar lot to think much of ourselves.
My room was not made to hold five people, who, with the exception of Dennison, were all either very broad or long, but a good honest squash certainly makes for friendship. We were a fairly rowdy party, because Lambert had brought his banjo and as soon as he had finished tea he wanted to sing; in fact it may be said of him that he was always wanting to sing and could never find any one who wished to listen to him. I had already heard him sing some sentimental rubbish about meeting by moonlight and another thing about stars and souls, and I threw a cushion at his head as soon as he began to make some noise which he called "tuning up." That began a cushion fight, which resulted in two china shepherdesses, a small lamp, and some teacups being smashed, but it persuaded Lambert that he could not sing whenever he felt inclined. We all sat down again, and Ward, who had been hanging on to the standard lamp while cushions had been flying around, said to me—
"You did look down on your luck when I saw you in the quad. I can't think why anybody should take these wretched games so seriously; it seems to me a perfectly rotten thing to do."
"No game is worth playing in which it matters to any one else whether you win or lose," Dennison said before I had a chance to answer Ward; "the only games a self-respecting man can play are court tennis, racquets and golf. Then there is no one to swear at you except yourself."
"That's rubbish," I answered. "Half the fun of the thing is belonging to a side, and a man must be mad to say that golf is a better game than cricket."
"Dennison wasn't trying to make out that golf is better than cricket, but was just saying what games a man can play without being sworn at as if he were a coolie," Ward said.
"I refuse to take amusements seriously," Dennison continued. "I would sooner shout with laughter at a funeral than lose my temper playing a game."
"The sweetest thing on earth," I said, "is to catch a fast half-volley to leg plumb in the middle of the bat."
"It isn't in the same street with a comic opera at the Savoy after a good dinner," Lambert remarked.
"At any rate it doesn't last so long," Dennison, who had a queer idea of what was funny, put in.
"A punt, good cushions, June, and a novel by one of those people who make you feel sleepy, are hard to beat," Collier stated.
"You are a Sybarite," Dennison said, "and you will be a disappointed one before long. All we do here in the summer is to give our relations strawberries and cream and run with our college eight."
"How do you know?" Collier asked, but to so searching a question he got no reply.
"The finest sight in the world is a thoroughbred horse," Ward said.
"You must have gone about with your eyes shut," Dennison declared.
"Don't sit there talking rot," I said. "If anything ever pleases you, tell us what it is."
"My greatest pleasure is in polite conversation," he answered.
"Oh, you are a sarcastic idiot," I retorted, for people who are afflicted by thinking themselves funny when I think they are idiotic always make me rude.
"Dennison never says what he means," Ward explained, "it is a little habit of his."
"Why can't you talk straight, it's much simpler, and doesn't make me feel so horribly uncomfortable?" I asked, turning to Dennison.
"Marten is getting angry," was the only answer I received, and it was so near the truth that I wanted to pick him up and drop him in the passage.
Ward, however, calmed my feelings by saying that he could not imagine any one troubling to be angry with Dennison. "The one thing he prides himself on is getting a rise out of people, and we aren't such fools as he thinks us."
"And he is a much bigger fool than he thinks," Collier said solemnly.
"You are a nice complimentary lot," Dennison remarked, smiling amiably upon us.
"It's your own fault," Collier continued; "you try to be clever and succeed in being confoundedly dull. I was at school with him for five years and I know his only strong point is that the more you abuse him the more he likes you."
"I'm fairly in love with you, Coalheaver," Dennison said.
"Naturally, but you might forget that very witty name."
"I'm going," Lambert declared, "for I'm dining in hall, and if I don't go for a walk those kromeskis and quenelles will choke me."
"Half a minute," and Ward pushed Lambert back into his seat; "now we are all here, I think we had better arrange a freshers' wine. There always is one, and nobody will get it up if we don't, so I vote we do the thing properly."
Every one seemed to approve of the idea, but as I was no use at making arrangements I suggested that Ward should manage the whole business.
"I can order everything, but we must have a committee to choose the people we shall ask and all that part of it. We can't ask everybody," Ward said.
"Half of them won't come if we do. I should think we had better ask the whole lot, and then we shall know what they are made of," Lambert advised.
"We shan't have a room big enough to hold them," Collier said.
After that we all began to talk, and though I had only a hazy notion of what we decided, I heard enough to know that Ward and Dennison meant having this wine in about ten days and only intended to ask the freshers whom they liked.
CHAPTER IV
UNEXPECTED PEOPLE
The idea of working for Mr. Gilbert Edwardes never had much attraction for me, and for the first two or three weeks at Oxford I found it very difficult to satisfy him. However, the excuse that I took a long time to settle down in a fresh place did not seem as reasonable to him as it did to me, so I had to abandon it and try to appease him. The worst of him was that I never knew whether he was pleased or not; he accepted my most determined efforts at scholarship as a matter of course and reserved his eloquence for the occasions on which my work showed symptoms of haste. In less than a fortnight I felt that my tutor and I were watching each other, an element of distrust seemed to have sprung up; he took it for granted that I would do as little