Decline and Fall

Prelude

Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs’s room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College. From the rooms of Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, two staircases away, came a confused roaring and breaking of glass. They alone of the senior members of Scone were at home that evening, for it was the night of the annual dinner of the Bollinger Club. The others were all scattered over Boar’s Hill and North Oxford at gay, contentious little parties, or at other senior common-rooms, or at the meetings of learned societies, for the annual Bollinger dinner is a difficult time for those in authority.

It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting. There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! This was the first meeting since then, and from all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano.

“The fines!” said Mr. Sniggs, gently rubbing his pipe along the side of his nose. “Oh, my! the fines there’ll be after this evening!”

There is some very particular port in the senior common-room cellars that is only brought up when the College fines have reached £50.

“We shall have a week of it at least,” said Mr. Postlethwaite, “a week of Founder’s port.”

A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair’s rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass. Soon they would all be tumbling out into the quad, crimson and roaring in their bottle-green evening coats, for the real romp of the evening.

“Don’t you think it might be wiser if we turned out the light?” said Mr. Sniggs.

In darkness the two dons crept to the window. The quad below was a kaleidoscope of dimly discernible faces.

“There must be fifty of them at least,” said Mr. Postlethwaite. “If only they were all members of the College! Fifty of them at ten pounds each. Oh my!”

“It’ll be more if they attack the Chapel,” said Mr. Sniggs. “Oh, please God, make them attack the Chapel.”

“I wonder who the unpopular undergraduates are this term. They always attack their rooms. I hope they have been wise enough to go out for the evening.”

“I think Partridge will be one; he possesses a painting by Matisse or some such name.”

“And I’m told he has black sheets in his bed.”

“And Sanders went to dinner with Ramsay MacDonald once.”

“And Rending can afford to hunt, but collects china instead.”

“And smokes cigars in the garden after breakfast.”

“Austen has a grand piano.”

“They’ll enjoy smashing that.”

“There’ll be a heavy bill for tonight; just you see! But I confess I should feel easier if the Dean or the Master were in. They can’t see us from here, can they?”

It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr. Austen’s grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending’s cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr. Partridge’s sheets, and threw the Matisse into his water-jug; Mr. Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that. Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond. It was half-past eleven. Soon the evening would come to an end. But there was still a treat to come.

Paul Pennyfeather was reading for the Church. It was his second year of uneventful residence at Scone. He had come there after a creditable career at a small public-school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs, where he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and had, as his report said, “exercised a wholesome influence for good” in the House of which he was head boy. At home he lived in Onslow Square with his guardian, a prosperous solicitor who was proud of his progress and abysmally bored by his company. Both his parents had died in India at the time when he won the essay prize at his preparatory school. For two years he had lived within his allowance, aided by two valuable scholarships. He smoked three ounces of tobacco a week—John Cotton, Medium—and drank a pint and a half of beer a day, the half at luncheon and the pint at dinner, a meal he invariably ate in Hall. He had four friends, three of whom had been at school with him. None of the Bollinger Club had ever heard of Paul Pennyfeather, and he, oddly enough, had not heard of them.

Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness—he had read rather a daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject—but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

Out of the night Lumsden of Strathdrummond swayed across his path like a druidical rocking-stone. Paul tried to pass.

Now it so happened that the tie of Paul’s old school bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club. The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate.

“Here’s an awful man wearing the Boller tie,” said the Laird. It is not for nothing that since pre-Christian times his family has exercised chieftainship over unchartered miles of barren moorland.

Mr. Sniggs was looking rather apprehensively at Mr. Postlethwaite.

“They appear to have caught somebody,” he said. “I hope they don’t do him any serious harm.”

“Dear me, can it be Lord Rending? I think I ought to intervene.”

“No, Sniggs,” said Mr. Postlethwaite, laying a hand on his impetuous colleague’s arm. “No, no, no. It would be unwise. We have the prestige of the senior common-room to consider. In their present state they might not prove amenable to discipline. We must at all costs avoid an outrage.”

At length the crowd parted, and Mr. Sniggs gave a sigh of relief.

“But it’s quite all right. It isn’t Rending. It’s Pennyfeather—someone of no importance.”

“Well, that saves a great deal of trouble. I am glad, Sniggs; I am, really. What a lot of clothes the young man appears to have lost!”

Next morning there was a lovely College meeting.

“Two hundred and thirty pounds,” murmured the Domestic Bursar ecstatically, “not counting the damage! That means five evenings, with what we have already collected. Five evenings of Founder’s port!”

“The case of Pennyfeather,” the Master was saying, “seems to be quite a different matter altogether. He ran the whole length of the quadrangle, you say, without his trousers. It is unseemly. It is more; it is indecent. In fact, I am almost prepared to say that it is flagrantly indecent. It is not the conduct we expect of a scholar.”

“Perhaps if we fined him really heavily?” suggested the Junior Dean.

“I very much doubt whether he could pay. I understand he is not well off. Without trousers, indeed! And at that time of night! I think we should do far better to get rid of him altogether. That sort of young man does the College no good.”

Two hours later, while Paul was packing his three suits in his little leather trunk, the Domestic Bursar sent a message that he wished to see him.

“Ah, Mr. Pennyfeather,” he said, “I have examined your rooms and notice two slight burns, one on the windowsill and the other on the chimneypiece, no doubt from cigarette ends. I am charging you five and sixpence for each of them on your battels. That is all, thank you.”

As he crossed the quad Paul met Mr. Sniggs.

“Just off?” said the Junior Dean brightly.

“Yes, sir,” said Paul.

And a little further on he met the Chaplain.

“Oh, Pennyfeather, before you go, surely you have my copy of Dean Stanley’s Eastern Church?”

“Yes. I left it on your table.”

“Thank you. Well, goodbye, my dear boy. I suppose that after that reprehensible affair last night you will have to think of some other profession. Well, you may congratulate yourself that you discovered your unfitness for the priesthood before it was too late. If a parson does a thing of that sort, you know, all the world knows. And so many do, alas! What do you propose doing?”

“I don’t really know yet.”

“There is always commerce, of course. Perhaps you may be able to bring to the great world of business some of the ideals you have learned at Scone. But it won’t be easy, you know. It is a thing to be lived down with courage. What did Dr. Johnson say about fortitude? … Dear, dear! no trousers!”

At the gates Paul tipped the porter.

“Well, goodbye, Blackall,” he said. “I don’t suppose I shall see you again for some time.”

“No, sir, and very sorry I am to hear about it. I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

“God damn and blast them all to hell,” said Paul meekly to himself as he drove to the station, and then he felt rather ashamed, because he rarely swore.