It will easily be imagined that little sympathy was wasted between the two cousins. Not, indeed, that the desperate poses of the younger could affect the elder with any sense of personal concern. Oxford is a broad stream, in which the varied regatta of life can be managed without jostling. Derek himself was too listless to condemn any form of behaviour; and his friends, though they agreed among themselves that Nigel was the kind of thing which wasn’t done, never dreamed of holding his cousin responsible for him. But the arrival of a namesake in the same college is never welcome; your letters go astray, well-meaning people mix you up, and send invitations to the wrong man. The two were, moreover, somewhat alike; the male strain was strong in the Burtell family, and a resemblance had survived closer than is usual between cousins. Each was dark and rather short; either, in a general way, insipidly good-looking; each had a pink-and-white complexion. It irritated Derek to be addressed, sometimes, as if he were Nigel’s brother; it irritated him still more when Nigel’s casual acquaintances saw him at a distance and saluted him by mistake. He ostentatiously avoided his cousin, and even, as far as he might, the mention of his name.
Nigel, on his part, was not slow to appreciate this neglect in the attitude of his senior, or to devise means of retaliation. He identified his cousin as a centaur, and referred to him sadly as a kind of family failing. All the forms of abstinence he displayed were dictated to him by this repulsion. “I can’t get drunk,” he would say; “people would be certain to mistake me for the Centaur, and I might be too drunk to explain.” “No, I don’t play cards; there is such an intolerable look of Victorian virtue about the Queen of Spades; it would be dreadful to sit opposite her night after night. Besides, the Centaur plays cards.” “I am really going to work this term; then even the Master’s wife will hardly be able to mistake me for the Centaur again.” They say the University is a microcosm, and it is certainly a microphone; remarks like these, not always conceived in the best of taste, came round to Derek, and fanned, from time to time, the dull embers of his resentment.
After a year of this, Derek went down; but the feud did not stop there. Nigel spent his vacations in London; and London is even a worse place than Oxford for avoiding your dislikes. Kind, but imperceptive hostesses threw the two cousins together. Neither had scaled any particular social heights, but each straddled on that uneasy ridge which connects Chelsea with Mayfair. Derek, conscious of his own conversational limitations, was forever being reminded of his cousin’s existence. “Oh yes, charming fellow; but have you met Nigel?” “Do tell me, Mr. Burtell, what is your brilliant cousin Nigel doing now?” These hollow insipidities of conversation were whiplashes to Derek’s self-esteem. But there was worse behind it. In certain subterraneous walks of London society, both cousins were well known; and in that world, careless of principle and greedy of originality, Nigel shone, a precocious proficient. Without heart, without worth, he dazzled feminine eyes with his reputed accomplishments. There was a woman who committed suicide; she was a drugfiend, and nothing was published in the papers; but there were those, and Derek was among them, who believed that Nigel’s callousness had been the cause of the tragedy.
Meanwhile, Nigel was running his course at Oxford: he celebrated his twenty-first birthday by a kind of mock funeral, at which he lay, in ghastly splendour, on a black catafalque, while his friends stood over him and drank absinthe to the memory of his departed youth. Derek was more than two years his senior; was in measurable distance, therefore, of his promised inheritance; and others besides the solicitors began to speculate as to the ultimate destination of the fifty thousand pounds. Derek’s Oxford bills were still largely unpaid; meanwhile, he lived recklessly beyond his modest income, secure in the consciousness of the fortune that awaited him. He ran up bills in London; and, when these new creditors proved more importunate than the old, he applied for financial help to strangers, less Gentile than genteel. More than one promoter of private loans found an excellent business opening in a young man who was no longer a minor, and who had less than two years to wait before he was assured of a substantial capital sum. So things went on, with cordial feelings on both sides, until a faint tremor of apprehension fell upon the creditors’ hearts. The loans were being piled up in a reckless way; already the fifty thousand was almost swallowed up; and Derek, as if conscious that the future had no longer any competence to offer him, was ruining his health in a way which suggested that he would not long survive the accession to his forestalled inheritance. His drinking bouts were now almost continual; rumour whispered that he also drugged. Whether he lived beyond the age of twenty-five was a matter of total indifference to society at large. That he should live until he was twenty-five was the
