BY ONE, BY TWO, AND BY THREE
Adrian Ross
"It was while I was at Cambridge that I first came to know Angus
Macbane. We met casually, as undergraduates do, at the breakfast-table of a mutual friend, or rather acquaintance; and I remember
being
struck with the odd cynical remarks my neighbour threw out at rare
intervals, as he watched the argument we had started, about Heaven
knows what or what not, and were maintaining on either side with the
boundless confidence and almost boundless ignorance peculiar to
freshmen. I seem to see him now, leaning back after his meal in a
deep
arm-chair, with his host’s cat purring her contentment on his knee. He
never looked at the semicircle of disputants round the fire, but blew
beautiful rings of cigarette smoke into the air, or gazed with a critical
expression, under half-shut lids, at the photographs of actresses
forming a galaxy of popular beauty above the mantlepiece. Then he
would emit some sentence, sometimes sensible, oftener wildly
nonsensical; but
always original, unexpected—a stone dropped with a
splash and a ripple into the stream of conversation.
"I do not think that he showed any very particular power of mind at the
breakfast-party, or indeed afterwards. What made one notice him was
the faint aroma of oddity that seemed to cling to him, and all his ways
and doings. He was incalculable, indefinable; this was what made a
good many dislike him, and made me, with one or two others, conceive
a queer liking for him. I always had a taste, secret or confessed, for
those delicate degrees of oddity which require a certain natural bent
to appreciate them at all. Extravagance of any kind commands notice,
and compels a choice between admiration and contempt; moreover, it
generally (and not least at a University) invites imitation. No one ever
either admired or despised Macbane, as far as I know; and no one could
ever have imitated him. The singularity lay rather in the man himself than in any special habit. For Macbane was not definably different
from other young men. He was of medium height, slightly made, but
not spare; his face had hardly any colour, and his hair and moustache
were light. His eyes were of
a tint difficult to define—sometimes they
seemed blue, sometimes grey, sometimes greenish; and he had a trick
of keeping them half-shut, and of looking away from any one who was
with him. This peculiarity is popularly supposed to be the sign of a
knave; in his case it was merely a part of the man’s general oddity, and
did not create any special distrust.
"Our
acquaintance, thus casually begun, ripened into a strange sort of
friendship. Macbane and I saw very little of each other;
we did not talk
much, nor go for walks and rows together, nor confide to each other
our doings and plans, as friends are supposed to
do. On rainy
afternoons I would stroll round to his rooms and enter, to find him
generally seated before the fire, caressing his cat. We did not greet each
other; but I generally took up one of the numerous strange and rare
books that he contrived to accumulate, though he spent very little
money. This I would read, occasionally dropping a remark which he
would answer with some cynical, curt sentence; and then both of us
relapsed into silence. Tea would be made and drunk, and we
sometimes sat thus till dinner-time, or later. Yet though I always felt as
if I bored Macbane, I still went to his rooms; and when I did not go for
some time, he would generally, with an air of extreme lassitude and
reluctance, come round to my quarters, there to sit and smoke and turn
over my books in much the same way as I did when I visited him." . . .
