6. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 185-246

XI-XV

_____

Now comes a shift in narrative. Up to now, the narrator has pretty much stayed out of it, but in Chapter XI he decides to tell his own story, and to talk about his omniscience: why he is privy to so much "that passed between the protagonists at private interviews -- aye, and the exact thoughts and emotions that were in their breasts." This is Beerbohm in a little metafictional joke, of course: jostling the novel-reader's complacent acceptance of the conventions of the genre, which he has already tweaked with his hints as to the outcome of the plot.

Zuleika ("The lady after whom I have named this book") is still alive, the narrator informs us, "and well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute." The assumption, then, is that his readers already know about "that episode in her life which caused so great a sensation among the newspaper-reading public a few years ago." Beerbohm is, in short, pretending that his novel is really a history and that he is a servant of history's muse: Clio.

Clio, it seems, has grown bored and frustrated with history. "She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was more philosophic than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been." When the novel was invented, she became a devoted reader, "and after the publication of 'Clarissa Harlowe' she spent practically all her time in reading novels." When Hermes told Zeus about "Clio's secret addiction to novel-reading," he decided to use it to woo her. And then "it occurred to her how fine a thing history might be if the historian had the novelist's privileges." She asked Zeus to bring this about. He argued that letting historians have the power of access to the intimate thoughts and actions of historic figures would put too many novelists out of work, but he agreed to let her try it just once.

So when Clio spotted Zuleika boarding the train for Oxford, she whisked the author to Parnassus, where Zeus "stretched his hand over me, and I was indued with the promised gifts. And then, lo! I was on the platform of Oxford station." So throughout the incidents he has been recording in this book he has been able "to float all unseen, to float all unhampered by any corporeal nonsense" through the events he has recorded. Except that after Zuleika dumped the pitcher of water on the Duke, he betrayed Clio's trust and "gave the Duke of Dorset an hour's grace. What were his thoughts in that interval, what words, if any, he uttered in the night, never will be known. For this, Clio has abused me in language less befitting a Muse than a fishwife. I do not care. I would rather be chidden by Clio than by my own sense of delicacy, any day."

Instead of keeping watch on either the Duke or Zuleika, he floats out to his old college to observe its residents, and watches one of them making out his will, leaving everything to Zuleika, another writing a suicide note to his father. And he reflects on the peculiar character of "the Oxford spirit":

Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to them in their heyday.

The spirit of Oxford is "mysterious, inenubilable." (It means "incapable of being cleared of clouds; inexplicable.") As a consequence, the mass suicide being contemplated by its undergraduates is no threat to it: "Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours would be undone, nor lost a breath of her sacred spirit."

So the narrator floats back to Judas College where, before looking in on the Duke, he visits Noaks's room and finds him lamenting that he's too young to die. "It did not seem to strike him that quite half of the undergraduates who contemplated death -- and contemplated it in a fearless, wholesome, many fashion -- were his juniors." Finally, the narrator sinks through the floor to the Duke's room below and discovers that the Duke has caught a cold. And that he's furious with Zuleika, whom "he must hate with a fathomless hatred." Moreover, the idea of dying for her is odious: "Of all deaths, the bitterest that can befall a man is that he lay down his life to flatter the woman he deems vilest of her sex."

He tries to write in his diary -- amid bouts of sneezing -- but the words fail to come. Suddenly he decides that he won't die after all. That would be the best revenge:

She, she, the hyena woman, would be the fool. No one would have thought of dying for her, had he not set the example. Every one would follow his new example. Yes, he would save Oxford yet. That was his duty. Duty and darling vengeance! And life -- life! 

And he leans out of his window and laughs "outright into the morning; insomuch that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more the Emperors over the way, marvelled greatly."

At eight o'clock in the morning, Katie, the landlady's daughter, is sweeping the steps when Zuleika's maid, Mélisande, arrives with a letter for the Duke. Katie, who takes an instant dislike to Mélisande, refuses to take it up to him -- "His Grace is no called before nine o'clock" -- but offers to put it on his breakfast tray, though she closes the door in Mélisande's face. Undeterred, Mélisande drops the letter through the mail slot.

When the Duke reads the letter he finds an apology from Zuleika and a plea for him to come around before lunch with The MacQuern. She has added a P.S. -- "Please burn this." The Duke laughs: "Why there was nothing, not one phrase, to compromise her in the eyes of a coroner's jury!" Then he ponders how to reply: "how to administer her punishment the most poignantly." He considers writing a letter in which he will return the two pearl earrings she has given him, but concludes it would be more fun to watch her expression when he returns them. "Yesterday he had been her puppet, her Jumping-Jack; to-day it was as avenging angel that he would appear before her.

As he leaves he meets on the doorstep a telegraph boy. The message says, "Deeply regret inform your grace last night two black owls came and perched on battlements." Though he had been resolved not to die, the omen changes his mind. He sends a reply: "Prepare vault for funeral Monday."

He could not, he told himself, face Zuleika now. As artist, he saw that there was irony enough left over to make the meeting a fine one. As theologian, he did not hold her responsible for his destiny. But as a man, after what she had done to him last night, and before what he had to do for her to-day, he would not go out of his way to meet her.

He considers going straight to the river and taking care of what had to be done. "No, that would be like running away." But then he sees "a female figure coming quickly round the corner." He takes it to be Zuleika, and walks away rapidly. When she quickens her pace, he begins to run, until he slips on a piece of orange peel -- the gods had placed it there to trip up the Master of Balliol -- and falls. The woman, who catches up with him, turns out to be Mélisande with another letter from Zuleika. He tears it up unread and sends Mélisande away.

He goes into a chemist shop where his wounds are tended to. He speculates "that the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid." And then he becomes aware that he has a cold, and wonders, "had he escaped a violent death only to succumb to 'natural causes'?" The chemist mixes up a cold remedy and tells him he should take a teaspoonful every two hours. It makes him feel so much better that he asks if it would be more effective if he took two teaspoonfuls every hour. The chemist cautions him not to do so. "The Duke yielded. He fancied, indeed, that the gods had meant him to die of an overdose." Then he has another brush with death: a speeding butcher's cart, and "smiled a sardonic smile" at this delivery from his fate.

On the street he encounters Oover and "remembered the awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford." He begins to think of it as his mission to dissuade these others from killing themselves, but when he tries to persuade Oover of "the loss that your death would be to America and to Oxford," the Rhodes Scholar is having none of it.

"America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of you can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy yourself.... And you're right, Sir. Love transcends all." 

He suggests to Oover that he might have changed his mind about killing himself, but Oover says it would prove that "all those yarns I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after all. I should aver that you were not a white man." When challenged, the Duke is forced to admit that he is planning to die today, but Oover doesn't have time for further details: "It's just turning eleven o'clock, and I've a lecture. While life lasts, I'm bound to respect Rhodes' intentions." And he hurries off.

The Duke ponders the irony of his situation.

If he could say "Behold, I take back my word. I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life," it was possible that his example would suffice. But now that he could only say "Behold, I spurn Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit suicide, all the same," it was clear that his words would carry very little force.... He must die in the manner that he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none knowing h was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. 

He encounters "an average undergraduate," whom because of his averageness he addresses as Smith, even though the young man says it's not his name. "'Generically it is,' replied the Duke. 'You are Smith to all intents and purposes." And he tries to engage "Smith" in a Socratic dialogue about suicide, until the young man finally just walks away. The Duke "remembered that even Socrates, for all the popular charm of his mock-modesty and his true geniality, had ceased after a while to be tolerable.... The Duke recoiled from what he took to be another pitfall. He almost smelt hemlock."

After more attempts to persuade, even to bribe, undergraduates into not killing themselves, "He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have hesitated to utter." But the crowd seems so hostile to his sermon that he worries that this is "yet another trap laid for him by the gods" and that "he might be dragged down, overwhelmed by number, torn limb from limb."

He meets The MacQuern, "with a large but inexpensive bunch of flowers," and tells him he won't be joining him for lunch, but that as far as he knew Zuleika still planned to be there. Then he realizes that he's hungry and goes to the Junta to order some sandwiches. Then, seeing the portrait of Nellie O'Mora, he decides to order a glass of port instead, forgetting about the sandwiches. But he feels the medicine bottle in his pocket, realizes that he is fifteen minutes overdue for his dosage, and calls for a wineglass and a teaspoon, fearing that his failure to take his medicine promptly might prove fatal: "'Every two hours' -- the directions were explicit. Had he delivered himself into the gods' hands?" He measures the medicine into the wineglass and toasts Nellie O'Mora, making amends for his previous lapse from tradition.

He realized, however, that to Zuleika he owed the tenderness he now felt for Miss O'Mora. It was Zuleika that had cured him of his aseity. [i.e., independent existence, like God's]  She it was that had made his heart a warm and negotiable thing.... Now he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual love -- a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die without having ever lived.... Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart would be broken by his dying. 

And then he remembers that Zuleika had told him his landlady's daughter was in love with him. "Here, possibly, was a maiden to mourn him." So he decides to take his lunch in his room. But there he is met by "Zuleika Dobson at his feet, at his knees, clasping him to her, sobbing, laughing, sobbing."

5. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 147-184

IX-X

_____

The Duke and his followers' mad dash seems to have been unnecessary: Zuleika hasn't yet arrived. The Warden explains that she had decided to change dresses. The Duke regards the Warden in a new light:

Here was a man who -- for had he not married and begotten a child? -- must have known, in some degree, the emotion of love. How, after that, could he have gone on thus, year by year, rusting among his books, asking no favour of life, waiting for death without a sign of impatience? Why had he not killed himself long ago? Why cumbered he the earth? 

Meanwhile, an undergraduate is on stage singing a song about a lover who "predicted that only when he were 'laid within the church-yard cold and grey' would his lady begin to pity him." For the Duke, "This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil."

And then Zuleika arrives, "brilliant in black." She leads the audience in an ovation for the singer, who has had to start over because of the sensation caused by her arrival. And then she turns to the Duke to point out the reason for her decision to change her dress: The pearls in her earrings have turned black. It is a sign, she tells him, that she has gone "quite unconsciously into mourning for him." She is so thrilled with the idea of his dying for love of her that she asks, "Will you, please, at the last moment to-morrow, call out my name in a loud voice, so that every one around can hear?" He agrees to do so.

Meanwhile, news of the Duke's plan to take his life has buzzed through the audience, spread by those who had been at the Junta. Everyone is eagerly awaiting his performance on the piano, and although he hadn't decided beforehand what to play, as he sits at the keyboard it comes to him: Chopin's Funeral March. The performance even summons the ghosts of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand. Despite the nature of the music, "he smiled brilliantly through" the performance. "And Zuleika returned his gaze with a smile not less gay. She was not sure what he was playing. But she assumed that it was for her, and that the music had some reference to his impending death." Chopin's ghost is thrilled with the performance, but George Sand warns him that he'll have a headache if they don't leave. Besides, she tells him, he'll be joining them tomorrow.

When they leave the hall, the Duke and Zuleika are greeted by a throng of undergraduates, now convinced that they too must die for love of her.

If any one of the undergraduates had met Miss Dobson in the desert of Sahara, he would have fallen in love with her; but not one in a thousand of them would have wished to die because she did not love him. The Duke's was a peculiar case.... These other, these quite ordinary, young men were the victims less of Zuleika than of the Duke's example, and of one another. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.... To die for Miss Dobson was "the thing to do." The Duke was going to do it. The Junta was going to do it. It is a hateful fact, but we must face the fact that snobbishness was one of the springs to the tragedy here chronicled. 

Zuleika, meanwhile, still has her mind set on retrieving the transformed studs from the Duke's shirtfront as "a keepsake of the tragedy that was to be." But she's startled when she learns that the magnitude of the tragedy now threatens to increase, that the men at the Junta had vowed to follow his example. He assures her, "They will recant their folly. I shall force them to."

The MacQuern approaches them with a handkerchief that he claims Zuleika dropped, though it "was obviously a man's" handkerchief. It's a pretext for an introduction to which the Duke accedes "with sulky grace." The MacQuern -- whom Zuleika decides to call Mr. MacQuern because "'The' would sound so odd in the vocative" -- confirms that they are all determined to die tomorrow, "After the Eights, I suppose; at the same time as the Duke. It wouldn't do to leave the races undecided." Whereupon Zuleika decides that she must do something to "show [her] gratitude" for their devotion. She calls on her maid, Mélisande, to bring the malachite casket in which she keeps her magic tricks.

The second part of the concert is still going on, but the only ones in the hall are the performers, a few dons, and the sisters and cousins of the men who had brought them but had abandoned them to gaze at Zuleika. So Zuleika decides to put on her magic show there in the quad. "She stood with eyes downcast and hands folded behind her, moonlit in the glow of lanterns, modest to the point of pathos, while the Duke gracefully and simply introduced her to the multitude."

Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls? Yet the effect of them in the moonlight was as of one great passive monster. So it was seen by the Duke, as he stood leaning against the wall, behind Zuleika's table. He saw it as a monster couchant and enchanted, a monster that was to die; and its death was in part his own doing.

Zuleika begins her performance, the one that has thrilled audiences on two continents. And we learn that it is cheesy and amateurish, a "stale and narrow repertory" that demonstrates "her marked lack of skill." The truth even dawns on the Duke, "who blushed to think what these men thought of her.... They forgave her -- confound their impudence! -- because of her beauty. The banality of her performance was an added grace. It made her piteous. Damn them, they were sorry for her."

Her final trick is the Magic Canister, into which she asks men in the audience to deposit a watch, a cigarette-case, a necktie and the like. And she asks the Duke for his studs. "There was no help for it. He quickly extricated from his shirt-front the black pearl and the pink." All of the items in the canister then disappear into its hidden compartment. She shows the audience the "empty" canister, then makes them reappear -- all but the two studs. "Would she rob the Duke, and his heir-presumptive, and the Tanville-Tankertons yet unborn? Alas, yes. But what she now did was proof that she had qualms.... With a gesture of her disengaged hand, so swift as to be scarcely visible, she unhooked her earrings and 'passed' them into the canister." It is these she returns to the Duke, keeping his studs. Realizing that he has been tricked, he tells her to keep them.

She acknowledges the applause of the crowd "in the manner of a prima donna -- chin up, eyelids down, all teeth manifest, and hands from the bosom flung ecstatically wide asunder." As the crowd breaks up, the forsaken ladies from the concert inside having "moved down into the quadrangle, spreading their resentment like a miasma," The MacQuern approaches to invite her to lunch with him the next day. She agrees, asking him to bring his friends, which is not what he had planned. "'I had hoped --' he began. 'Vainly,' she cut him short." So he agrees to invite the Duke.

Naturally, the Duke is miffed: "Had it not been arranged that he and she should spend his last day together? Did it mean nothing that she had given him her ear-rings?" He and The MacQuern almost come to blows now over which will walk Zuleika home. "Men had fought for Zuleika, but never in her presence. Her eyes dilated." She wonders if she should "be holding aloft a candelabra of lit tapers; no, that was only done indoors, and in the eighteenth century." But it turns out that "The Duke and The MacQuern would never have come to blows in the presence of a lady. Their conflict was necessarily spiritual. And it was the Scotsman, Scots though he was, who had to yield."

As they walk, she wonders if the black owls are sitting on the battlements of Tankerton. When they reach the door, the Duke seizes her hands, but she angrily twists out of his grip.

He laughed. "You are afraid of me. You are afraid to let me kiss you, because you are afraid of loving me. This afternoon -- here -- I all but kissed you. I mistook you for Death. I was enamoured of Death. I was a fool. That is what you are, you incomparable darling: you are a fool. You are afraid of life. I am not. I love life. I am going to live for you, you hear?" 

Is he going back on his promise? she asks. He insists that she will release him from it because she really loves him. She calls him a coward and goes indoors. "No man had ever dared to lay hands on her," she reflects, noticing the red marks on her wrists. "With a sense of contamination, she proceeded to wash her hands thoroughly with soap and water." As she goes on in this melodramatic manner, it starts to rain, which pleases her because he told her he would wait under her window.

He had told her she was afraid of life. Life! -- to have herself caressed by him; humbly to devote herself to being humbly doted on; to be the slave of a slave; to swim in a private pond of treacle -- ugh! If the thought weren't so cloying and degrading, it would be laughable.

She thinks of leaving Oxford by the first train in the morning, "But this could not be done without slighting all those hundred of other men." So instead she takes the water jug and empties its contents out the window onto the Duke.

4. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 97-146

VII-VIII

_____

The Duke is beginning to take pleasure in the thought of his impending death: "Perhaps she would devote her life to mourning him." And he settles on the means of his demise: "Drowning (he had often heard) was a rather pleasant sensation." But when he realizes that it's half past four and the first race will be over, he proposes that they go back to his rooms and have tea before the next one. He explains that they will be meeting a crowd of people on the way back from the race.

This, however, makes Zuleika the more determined to go on: "Let us meet them." And so they confront "a dense procession of youths -- youths interspersed with maidens whose parasols were as flotsam and jetsam on a seething current of straw hats. Zuleika neither quickened nor slackened her advance. But brightlier and brightlier shone her eyes."

Of course, it's a triumph for Zuleika: "Nothing at all like her had ever been seen in Oxford." There were girls at the university now, "but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied." And as for the wives and daughters of dons, "the indignant shade of shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it." And here we have the explanation for the Warden's animosity toward Zuleika's parents: His son, "that unhappy curate," had married a circus-rider from whom Zuleika had inherited her beauty.

The result of fronting the crowd of returnees from the race is that "Not only was the whole throng of youths drawing asunder before her: much of it, as she passed, was forming up in her wake." So they are followed but not touched by the eddy they create in the crowd. They arrive at and board the Judas College barge where they take tea. Among the Judas men who have also made it onto the barge are the two with whom the Duke had talked earlier. "Zuleika was aware of the special persistence of their gaze," so she asks to have them introduced to her. The Duke refuses: "That I shall not do. I am your victim: not your pander. Those two men stand on the threshold of a possibly useful and agreeable career. I am not going to trip them up for you."

Zuleika scoffs at his reluctance. She doesn't believe that her charms can be fatal: "Certainly a young man doesn't waste away for love of some particular young woman. He very soon makes love to some other one.... All the most ardent my past adorers have married." The Duke is astonished that she hasn't learned of "the love that corrodes, the love that ruins" from "the Greek pastoral poets" or "the Elizabethan sonneteers." She replies, "You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself." When he protests that her "way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavor,'" she explains that it's "an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere."

The Duke begins to savor the irony of his still-secret plan: "While she chattered on, without an inkling that he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to present two quite ordinary young men to her, he held over her the revelation that he for love of her was about to die." He proclaims, "So long as I live, ... you will address no one but me." She replies that his last moment must be at hand, and when he vows that it is, she begins to suspect what he's up to. He contemplates the river in which he plans to drown, and believes that his death will serve as a deterrent to other young men's infatuation with her. "He was glad that his death would be a public service to the University."

When he asks if she will mourn him, her suspicions grow stronger, but she continues to reply that she can't love him. "The black pearl and the pink, quivering, gave stress to her ultimatum. But the violet of her eyes was all but hidden by the dilation of her pupils." She protests that she would never forgive herself for his death and would mourn him, and pleads with him to reconsider. "She only didn't say she could love him. She never hinted that."

As he prepares to take the plunge, the sound of the starting gun for the next race causes her to grab at his arm. He tries to get her to loosen her grip, telling her that perhaps as the boats pass over his head, he "shall be able to gurgle a cheer for Judas." She has had men say they would die for her, but none of them had. "But she knew that now he must not die -- not yet!" She urges him, "to-morrow, if you will. Not yet!" And he gives in to her wish as the boats pass the barge.

"So be it!" he cried into Zuleika's ear -- cried loudly, for it seemed as though all the Wagnerian orchestras of Europe, with the Straussian ones thrown in, were here to clash in unison the full volume of right music for the glory of the reprieve. 

As for Zuleika, "It was as if she stood alone with her lover on some silent pinnacle of the world. It was as if she were a little girl with a brand-new and very expensive doll which had banished all the little other old toys from her mind." But the sight of her standing there holding tightly to the Duke puzzles the crowd. "For already the news that the Duke loved Zuleika, and that she loved him not, and would stoop to no man who loved her, had spread like wild-fire among the undergraduates."

She invites him to dine with her and her grandfather, but he tells her that he has to dine at his club, the Junta, to which he can't take a woman, "not even if, as she suggested, she dressed herself up as a man." Anyway, he has invited a guest, and when she protests that he didn't think about his guest when he was about to kill himself, he replies that he did: "Death cancels all engagements." When they part, she makes him promise that he will spend all of tomorrow with her.

Wearing "a mulberry-coloured coat, with brass buttons" and a black pearl and a pink on in his shirtfront, the Duke goes to his dinner with the Junta. The club has only two other members, but each is allowed to bring a guest. When the Duke was elected to it at the end of his second term, there were four other members, but they left at the end of the summer term, leaving him the sole member of the club. And because he blackballed the two members he had both proposed and seconded, the next year he had been the sole member. He lowered his standards for the third year and "elected The MacQuern, of Balliol, and Sir John Marraby, of Brasenose." Tonight The MacQuern has brought Mr. Trent-Garby, of Christ Church, and Sir John's guest is Lord Sayes, of Magdalen. When "A Herculean figure filled the doorway," the Duke's guest has arrived. He is Mr. Abimelech V. Oover, of Trinity, an American Rhodes Scholar.

The Duke's courtesy to Rhodes Scholars is a matter of noblesse oblige.

He found these Scholars, good fellows though they were, rather oppressive. They had not -- how could they have? -- the undergraduate's virtue of taking Oxford as a matter of course. The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much. The Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome -- as being the most troubled -- of the whole lot.... They were so awfully afraid of having their strenuous native characters undermined by their delight in the place. They held that the future was theirs, a glorious asset, far more glorious than the past.

They also had a "constant fear that they are being corrupted."

A gathering of the Junta is, of course, a matter of following antique rituals, and also of "drinking rather more champagne than was good for [them]. Maybe, these youths sowed in themselves, on this night, the seeds of lifetime intemperance. We cannot tell. They did not live long enough for us to know."

Watching over the six men is a ghost, Humphrey Greddon, "founder and first president of the club." His portrait hangs in the room along with a miniature of Nellie O'Mora, who "drowned herself in a millpond" when Humphrey broke her heart. The Junta always toasted her memory after dinner: "Here's to Nellie O'Mora, the fairest witch that ever was or will be!" But when Mr. Oover hears her story, he denounces Humphrey Greddon as "an unmitigated scoundrel. I say he was not a white man." The enraged ghost of Humphrey Greddon seizes his sword and runs Mr. Oover through, but then "remembered he was only a ghost impalpable, impotent, of no account. 'But I shall meet you in Hell to-morrow,' he hissed in Oover's face. And there he was wrong. It is quite certain that Oover went to Heaven."

The ghost departs "With a volley of the most appalling eighteenth-century oaths" before the Junta joins the first of the night's tradition toasts, "Gentlemen, I give you Church and State." All honor the toast, "none with a richer reverence than ... Oover, despite his passionate mental reservation in favour of Pittsburg-Anabaptism and the Republican Ideal." But then the Duke shocks the company by refusing to propose the toast to Nellie O'Mora, which is his duty as the club's president. He thereby resigns his position and announces that The MacQuern is president and should propose the toast. The MacQuern, too, declines, leaving it to Marraby, who, having proclaimed that he won't lie, violates tradition and cries, "I give you Zuleika Dobson, the fairest witch that ever was or will be!" All join in the toast.

Fortunately, there is also a rule that "a member of the Junta can do no wrong," so the grave offense to tradition goes unpunished. But they all feel rather guilty about it, even Oover:

All the antiquarian in him deplored the sudden rupture of a fine old Oxford tradition. All the chivalrous American in him resented the slight on that fair victim of the feudal system, Miss O'Mora. And at the same time, all the Abimelech V. in him rejoiced at having honoured by word and act the one woman in the world.

Realizing that here were five other men "deeply under the spell of Zuleika," the Duke knows he must do something to save them. He tries to convince them of the hopelessness of their situation, but he is unsuccessful. They vow that they will love her nonetheless, Oover proclaiming, "We love her, and -- shall, and -- will, Sir, with -- our latest breath." The Duke observes that "the noise you have just made around this table was very like to the noise made on the verge of the Boer War." But what if, "on the verge of the aforesaid war, some orator had said to the British people 'It is going to be a walk-over for our enemy in the field.'... [I]s it possible that Britannia would have thrown her helmet in the air, shrieking 'Slavery for ever'?" He has been enslaved by Zuleika, he tells them. "Your fetters have not galled you yet. My wrists, my ankles, are excoriated.... The sun mocks me. The moon titters in my face. I can stand it no longer. I will no more of it. To-morrow I die."

He assures them that he is serious and that Zuleika knows of his intent. "Take warning by me. Muster all your will-power, and forget Miss Dobson. ... Put all Oxford on its guard against this woman who can love no lover." But they reject his counsel, and all five vow that they will die, too.

Then the Duke realizes that it's time for the concert in which he is performing and at which he will see Zuleika. in his hurry, he jumps out of the window. "(The façade of the house is called, to this day, Dorset's Leap.)" Oover follows suit, demolishing a window-box in his leap, and the others crowd around the window -- except for The MacQuern, who, blocked by the crowd, runs downstairs. Marraby, who twists his ankle in the leap, is followed by Lord Sayes and then by Trent-Garby, "who, catching his foot in the ruined flower-box, fell headlong, and was, I regret to say, killed." The survivors race to the concert.