Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary’s tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed that he was not seen in the sun’s eye. This lapse of enthusiasm saddened him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision of speeding youth.

The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came round, and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had counted upon this bump-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for this happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them, and he went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure Tommy Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not the bump-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.

Tired of the howling and the horseplay, tired of the fretful fireworks, he turned into Venner’s just before ten o’clock.

“Why aren’t you with your friends, making a noise?” asked Venner.

“Ought to go home and work,” Michael explained.

“But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to the fore on these occasions.”

“Don’t feel like it, Venner.”

“You mustn’t work too hard, you know,” said the old man, blinking kindly at him.

“Oh, it’s not work, Venner. It’s age.”

“Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They’re having a rare time tonight. I don’t expect the dons’ll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a bump-supper. Why ever don’t you go out and do your share?”

Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to the lodge.

“Don’t forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt,” he warned the porter. “I don’t want to be hauled tomorrow morning for damage done in my absence.”

The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.

“There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing your egress, sir,” he said pompously, “and had it registered in my book before you spoke.”

Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pass out into the High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary’s bridge, and when the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all as the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to listen to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people, small as emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He regretted sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St. Giles, roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning. It was melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy, but outside its participation; and presently he started to walk quickly back to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.

Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael. Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college authorities to make him covet a good class: to Alan it was more important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to try for the Home Civil Service.

“However, I’ve given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a Second, I shall be jolly grateful,” he told Michael.

The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before, spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever, and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.

This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine autumn day.

It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of Oxford dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew Arnold had said she did not need June for beauty’s heightening. That was true. Her beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with all the grave consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded more the loss of this infoliated calm than of any of the people who were enjoying its amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that next year would not form themselves, that forever indeed would be irremediably dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members scattered did not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that next year himself would have lost the assurance that he was an organic part of this tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was already broken up: the end of the third year had effected that. This farewell to Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the very first moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of a Fellowship. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth in the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive, and worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course. Now, since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather opulently fine mocked his exit.

Michael and Alan had decided to stay up for Commemoration. Stella and Mrs. Fane had been invited: Lonsdale and Wedderburn were coming up: Maurice was bringing his mother and sisters. For a brief carnival they would all be reunited, and rooms would be echoing to the voices of their rightful owners. Yet after all it would be but a pretense of reviving their merry society. It was not a genuine reunion this, that was requiring women to justify it. Oxford, as Michael esteemed her, was already out of his reach. She would be symbolized in the future by these rooms at 99 St. Giles, and Michael made up his mind that no intrusion of women should spoil for him their monastic associations. He would stay here until the last day, and for Commemoration he would try to borrow his old rooms in college, thus fading from this wide thoroughfare without a formal leave-taking. He would drop astern from the bay-window whence for a time he had watched the wrack and spume of the world drifting toward the horizon in its wake. Himself would recede so with the world, and without him the bay-window would hold a tranquil course, unrocked by the loss or gain of him or the transient voyagers of each new generation. Very few eves and sunsets were still his to enjoy from this window-seat. Already the books were being stacked in preparation for their removal to the studio at 173 Cheyne Walk. Dusty and derelict belongings of him and Alan were already strewn about the landings outside their bedrooms. Even the golf-bag of Alan’s first term, woolly now with the accumulated mildew of neglect, had been dragged from its obscurity. Perhaps it would be impossible to drop astern as imperceptibly as he would have liked. Too many reminders of departure littered the rooms with their foreboding of finality.

“I’m shore I for one am quite sorry you’re going,” said the landlady. “I never wish to have a nicer norer quieter pair of gentlemen. It’s to be hoped, I’m shore, that next term’s comings-ins from St. John’s will be half as nice. Yerse, I shall be very pleased to have these coverlets⁠—I suppose you would call them coverlets⁠—and you’re leaving the shelves in the dining-room? Yerse, I’m shore they’ll be as handy as anything for the cruets and whatnot. And so you’re going to have a dinner here to eleven gentlemen⁠—oh, eleven in all, yerse, I see.”

It was going to be rather difficult, Michael thought, to find exactly the ten people he wished to invite to this last terminal dinner. Alan, Grainger, and Castleton, of course. Bill Mowbray and Vernon Townsend. And Smithers. Certainly, he would ask Smithers. And why not George Appleby, who was Librarian of the Union this term, and no longer conceivable as that lackadaisical red rag which had fluttered Lonsdale to fury? What about the Dean? And if the Dean, why not Harbottle, his History tutor? And for the tenth place? It was really impossible to choose from the dozen or so acquaintances who had an equal claim upon it. He would leave the tenth place vacant, and just to amuse his own fancy he would fill it with the ghost of himself in the December of his first term.

Michael, when he saw his guests gathered in the sea-green dining-room of 99 St. Giles, knew that this last terminal dinner was an anachronism. After all, the prime and bloom of these eclectic entertainments had been in the two previous years. This was not the intimate and unusual society he had designed to gather round him as representative of his four years at the Varsity. This was merely representative of the tragical incompleteness of Oxford. It was certainly a very urbane evening, but it was somehow not particularly distinctive of Oxford, still less of Michael’s existence there. Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite the two dons. Perhaps everyone was tired under the strain of Schools. Michael was glad when the guests went and he sat alone in the window-seat with Alan.

“Tomorrow, my mother and Stella are coming up,” he reminded Alan. “It’s rather curious my mother shouldn’t have been up all the time, until I’m really down.”

“Is that man Avery coming up?” Alan asked.

Michael nodded.

“I suppose your people see a good deal of him now he’s in town,” said Alan, trying to look indifferent to the answer.

“Less than before he went,” said Michael. “Stella’s rather off studios and the Vie de Bohême.”

“Oh, he has a studio?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t take very much interest in his movements,” Alan loftily explained.

They smoked on for a while without speaking.

“I must go to bed,” announced Alan at last.

“Not yet, not yet,” Michael urged him. “I don’t think you’ve quite realized that this is our last night in Ninety-nine.”

“I’ve settled to stay on here during Commem Week,” said Alan. “Your people are staying at the Randolph?”

Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan could really have been so farsighted as to stay on in St. Giles for the sake of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and Stella home. “But why aren’t you going into college?” he asked.

“Oh, I thought it would be rather a fag moving in for so short a time. Besides, it’s been rather ripping in these digs.”

Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental enough to dread on Alan’s side a grudging assent to his enthusiasm.

“Yes, it has been awfully ripping,” he agreed.

“I should like to have had another year,” sighed Alan. “I think I was just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder how much of it is really applicable?”

“To what? To God?” asked Michael.

“No, the world⁠—the world we live in.”

“I don’t fancy, you know,” said Michael, “that the intellectual part of Oxford is directly applicable to the world at all. What I mean to say is, that I think it can only be applied to the world through our behavior.”

“Well, of course,” said Alan, “that’s a truism.”

Michael was rather disconcerted. The thought in his mind had seemed more worthy of expression.

“But the point is,” Alan went on, “whether our philosophic education, our mental training has any effect on our behavior. It seems to me that Oxford is just as typically Oxford whatever a man reads.”

“That wasn’t the case at school,” said Michael. “I’m positive for instance the Modern side was definitely inferior to the Classical side⁠—in manners and everything else. And though at Oxford other circumstances interfere to make the contrast less violent, it doesn’t seem to me one gains the quintessence of the university unless one reads Greats. Even History only supplies that in the case of men exceptionally sensitive to the spirit of place. I mean to say sensitive in such a way that Oxford, quite apart from dons and undergraduates, can herself educate. I’m tremendously anxious now that Oxford should become more democratic, but I’m equally anxious that, in proportion as she offers more willingly the shelter of her learning to the people, the learning she bestows shall be more than ever rigidly unpractical, as they say.”

“So you really think philosophy is directly applicable?” said Alan.

“How Socratic you are,” Michael laughed. “Perhaps the Rhodes Scholars will answer your question. I remember reading somewhere lately that it was confidently anticipated the advent of the Rhodes Scholars would transform a provincial university into an imperial one. That may have been written by a Cambridge man bitterly aware of his own provincial university. Yet a moment’s reflection should have taught him that provincialism in academic matters is possibly an advantage. Florence and Athens were provincial. Rome and London and Oxford are metropolitan⁠—much more dangerously exposed to the metropolitan snares of superficiality and of submerged personality with the corollary of vulgar display. Neither Rome nor London nor Oxford has produced her own poets. They have always been sung by the envious but happy provincials. Rome and London would have treated Shelley just as Oxford did. Cambridge would have disapproved of him, but a bourgeois dread of interference would have let him alone. As for an imperial university, the idea is ghastly. I figure something like the Imperial Institute filled with Colonials eating pemmican. The Eucalyptic Vision, it might be called.”

“And you’d make a distinction between imperial and metropolitan?” Alan asked.

“Good gracious, yes. Wouldn’t you distinguish between New York and London? Imperialism is the worst qualities of the provinces gathered up and exhibited to the world in the worst way. A metropolis takes provincialism and skims the cream. It is a disintegrating, but for itself a civilizing, force. A metropolis doesn’t encourage creative art by metropolitans. It ought to be engaged all the time in trying to make the provincials appreciate what they themselves are doing.”

“I think you’re probably talking a good deal of rot,” said Alan severely. “And we seem to have gone a long way from my question.”

“About the application of philosophy?”

Alan nodded.

“Dear man, as were I a Cantabrian provincial, I should say. Dear man! Doesn’t it make you shiver? It’s like the ‘Pleased to meet you,’ of Americans and Tootingians. It’s so terribly and intrusively personal. So informative and unrestrained, so gushing and⁠—”

“I wish you’d answer my question,” Alan grumbled, “and call me what you like without talking about it.”

“Now I’ve forgotten my answer,” said Michael. “And it was a wonderful answer. Oh, I remember now. Of course, your philosophy is applicable to the world. You coming from a metropolitan university will try to infect the world with your syllogisms. You will meet Cambridge men much better educated than yourself, but all of them incompetent to appreciate their own education. You will gently banter them, trying to allay their provincial suspicion of your easy manner. You will⁠—”

“You will simply not be serious,” said Alan. “And so I shall go to bed.”

“My dear chap, I’m only talking like this because if I were serious, I couldn’t bear to think that tonight is almost the end of our fourth year. It is, in fact, the end of 99 St. Giles.”

“Well, it isn’t as if we were never going to see each other again,” said Alan awkwardly.

“But it is,” said Michael. “Don’t you realize, even with all your researches into philosophy, that after tonight we shall only see each other in dreams? After tonight we shall never again have identical interests and obligations.”

“Well, anyway, I’m going to bed,” said Alan, and with a good night very typical in its curtness of many earlier ones uttered in similar accents, he went upstairs.

Michael, when he found himself alone, thought it wiser to follow him. It was melancholy to watch the moon above the empty thoroughfare, and to hear the bells echoing through the spaces of the city.