David Ritchie - The New Warden

The Founders and the Benefactors of Oxford, Princes, wealthy priests, patriotic gentlemen, noble ladies with a taste for learning; any of these as they travelled along the high road, leaving behind them pastures, woods and river, and halted at the gates of the grey sacred city, had they been in melancholy mood, might have pictured to themselves all possible disasters by fire and by siege that could mar this garnered glory of spiritual effort and pious memory. Fire and siege were the disasters of the old days. But a new age has it own disasters – disasters undreamed of in the old days, and none of these lovers of Oxford as they entered that fair city, ever could have foretold that in time to come Oxford would become enclosed and well-nigh stifled by the peaceful encroachment of an endless ocean of friendly red brick, lapping to its very walls.

The wonder is that Oxford still exists, for the free jerry-builder of free England, with his natural right to spoil a landscape or to destroy the beauty of an ancient treasure house, might have forced his cheap villas into the very heart of the city; might have propped his shameless bricks, for the use of Don and of shopkeeper, against the august grey college walls: he might even have insulted and defaced that majestic street whose towers and spires dream above the battlemented roofs and latticed windows of a more artistic age.

But why didn't he? Why didn't he, clothed in the sanctity of cheapness, desecrate the inner shrine?

The Wardens and the Bursars of colleges could tell us much, but the stranger and the pilgrim, coming to worship, feel as if there must have flashed into being some sudden Hand from Nowhere and a commanding Voice saying – "Thus far shalt thou come and no farther," so that the accursed jerry-builder (under the impression that he was moved by some financial reasons of his own) must have obediently picked up his little bag of tools and trotted off to destroy some other place.

Anyhow the real Oxford has been spared – but it is like a fair mystic gem in a coarse setting. No green fields and no rustling woods lead the lover of Oxford gently to her walls.

The Beauty of England lies there – ringed about with a desolation of ugliness – for ever. Still she is there.

Oxford has never been merely a city of learning, it has been a fighting city.

In the twelfth century it sheltered Matilda in that terrible, barbaric struggle of young England.

In the seventeenth century it was a city in arms for the Stuarts. But these were civil wars. Now in the twentieth century Oxford has risen like one man, like Galahad – youthful and knightly – urgent at the Call of Freedom and the Rights of Nations.

And this Oxford is filled with the "sound of the forging of weapons," the desk has become a couch for the wounded, the air is full of the wings of war.

In this Oxford where the black gown has been laid aside and young men hurry to and fro in the dress of the battle-field – in this Oxford no man walked at times more heavily, feeling the grief that cannot be made articulate, than did the Warden of King's College as he went about his work, a lonely man, without wife or child and with poignant memories of the very blossom of young manhood plucked from his hand and gone for ever.

And of the men who passed under his college gates and through the ivy-clad quadrangles, most were strangers – coming and going – learning the arts of war – busy under orders, and the few, a poor remnant of academic youth – foreigners or weaklings. And he, the Warden himself, felt himself almost a stranger – for into his life had surged new thoughts, anxious fears and ambitious hopes – for England, the England of the years to come – an England rising up from her desolation and her mourning and striving to become greater, more splendid and more spiritual than she had been before.

It was a late October afternoon in 1916 and the last rays of autumn sunshine fell through the drawing-room windows of the Warden's lodgings. These rays of sunshine lit up a notable portrait over the stone fireplace. The portrait was of a Warden of the eighteenth century; a fine fleshy face it was, full of the splendid noisy paganism of his time. You can stand where you will in the room, but you cannot escape the sardonic stare that comes from his relentless, wide-open, luminous eyes. He seems as if he challenged you to stop and listen to the secret of his double life – the life of a scholar and divine of easy morals. Words seemed actually upon his lips, thoughts glowing in his eyes – and yet – there is silence.

There was only one person in the room, a tall vigorous woman, still handsome in spite of middle age, and she was looking up at the portrait with her hands clasped behind her back. She was not thinking of the portrait – her thoughts were too intent on something else. Her thoughts indeed had nothing to do with the past – they were about the future, the future of the new Warden, Dr. Middleton, the future of this only brother of hers whom she loved more than anyone in the world – except her own husband; a brother more than ten years younger than herself, to whom she had been a mother till she married and who remained in her eyes a sort of son, all the more precious to her because children had been denied her.

She had come at her brother's call to arrange his new home for him. She had arranged everything with sober economy, because Oxford was mourning. She had retained all that she found endurable of the late Warden's. And now she turned round and looked on her handiwork.

The room wore an air of comfort, it was devoid of all distressful knick-knacks and it was arranged as were French "Salons" of the time of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse for conversation, for groups of talkers, for books and papers; the litter of culture. It was a drawing-room for scholars in their leisure moments and for women to whom they could talk. But there was no complaisance in Lady Dashwood's face as she looked at her brother's drawing-room, just because her thoughts were deeply occupied with his future. What was his future to be like? What was in store for him? And these thoughts led her to give expression to a sudden outspoken remark – unflattering to that future.

"And now, what woman is going to become mistress of this room?"

Lady Dashwood's voice had a harshness in it that startled even herself. "What woman is going to reign here?" she went on, as if daring herself to be gentle and resigned. After she had looked round the room her eye rested upon the portrait over the mantelpiece. He looked as if he had heard her speak and stared back at her with his large persistent selfish eyes – full of cynical wonder. But he remained silent. These were times that he did not understand – but he observed!

"It's on Jim's conscience that he must marry, now that men are so scarce. He's obsessed with the idea," continued Lady Dashwood, thinking to herself. "And being like all really good and great men – absolutely helpless – he is prepared to marry any fool who is presented to him." Then she added, "Any fool – or worse!"

"And," she went on, speaking angrily to herself, "knowing that he is helpless – I stupidly go and introduce into this house, a silly girl with a pretty face whose object in coming is to be – Mrs. Middleton."

Lady Dashwood was mentally lashing herself for this stupidity.

"I go and actually put her in his way – at least," she added swiftly, "I allow her mother to bring her and force her upon us and leave her – for the purpose of entrapping him – and so – I've risked his future! And yet," she went on as her self-accusation became too painful, "I never dreamt that he would think of a girl so young – as eighteen – and he forty – and full of thoughts about the future of Oxford – and the New World. Somehow I imagined some pushing female of thirty would pretend to sympathise with his aspirations and marry him: I never supposed – But I ought to have supposed! It was my business to suppose. Here have I left my husband alone, when he hates being alone, for a whole month, in order to put Jim straight – and then I go and 'don't suppose' – I'm more than a fool – I'm – " The right word did not come to her mind.