Clere Abbey,Michael Mass.PAX✠Dear Brother,I have been intending to write to you about young Michael Fane ever since he left us, and your letter of enquiry has had the effect of bringing me up to the point.I hardly know what to tell you.He’s a curious youth, very lovable, and with enough brains to make one wish that he might have a vocation for the priesthood.At the same time I noticed while he was with us, especially after the admirable Chator departed, an overwhelming languor which I very much deplored.He spent much of his time with a very bad hat indeed, whom I have just sent away from Clere. If you ever come across Mr. Henry Meats, be careful of him. Arbuthnot of St. Aidan’s, Holloway, sent him to me. You know Arbuthnot’s expansive (and for his friends expensive) Christianity. This last effort of his was a snorter, a soft, nasty, hysterical,little blob of vice. I ought to have seen through the fellow before I did. Heaven knows I get enough of the tag-rag of the Movement trying to be taken on at Clere. I suppose the monastic life will always make an imperishable appeal to the worst, and, thank God, some of the best. I mention this fellow to you because I’m afraid he and Michael may meet again, and I don’t at all like the idea of their acquaintanceship progressing, especially as it was unluckily begun beneath a religious roof. So keep an eye on Mr. Henry Meats. He’s really bad.Another fellow I don’t recommend for Michael is Percy Garrod. Not that I think there is much danger in that direction, for I fancy Michael was very cold with him. Percy is a decent, honest, hard-working, common ass, with a deep respect for the Pope and the Polytechnic. He’s a trifle zealous, however, with bastard information about physical science, and not at all the person I should choose to lecture Michael on the complications of adolescence.We are getting on fairly well at Clere, but it’s hard work trying to make this country believe there is the slightest necessity for the contemplative life. I hope all goes well with you and your work.Yours affectionately in Xt.,Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B.Poor Michael. His will be a difficult position one day. I feel on re-reading this letter that I’ve told you nothing you don’t already know. But he’s one of those elusive boys who have lived within themselves too much and too long.
Clere Abbey,Michael Mass.
PAX✠
Dear Brother,
I have been intending to write to you about young Michael Fane ever since he left us, and your letter of enquiry has had the effect of bringing me up to the point.
I hardly know what to tell you.He’s a curious youth, very lovable, and with enough brains to make one wish that he might have a vocation for the priesthood.At the same time I noticed while he was with us, especially after the admirable Chator departed, an overwhelming languor which I very much deplored.
He spent much of his time with a very bad hat indeed, whom I have just sent away from Clere. If you ever come across Mr. Henry Meats, be careful of him. Arbuthnot of St. Aidan’s, Holloway, sent him to me. You know Arbuthnot’s expansive (and for his friends expensive) Christianity. This last effort of his was a snorter, a soft, nasty, hysterical,little blob of vice. I ought to have seen through the fellow before I did. Heaven knows I get enough of the tag-rag of the Movement trying to be taken on at Clere. I suppose the monastic life will always make an imperishable appeal to the worst, and, thank God, some of the best. I mention this fellow to you because I’m afraid he and Michael may meet again, and I don’t at all like the idea of their acquaintanceship progressing, especially as it was unluckily begun beneath a religious roof. So keep an eye on Mr. Henry Meats. He’s really bad.
Another fellow I don’t recommend for Michael is Percy Garrod. Not that I think there is much danger in that direction, for I fancy Michael was very cold with him. Percy is a decent, honest, hard-working, common ass, with a deep respect for the Pope and the Polytechnic. He’s a trifle zealous, however, with bastard information about physical science, and not at all the person I should choose to lecture Michael on the complications of adolescence.
We are getting on fairly well at Clere, but it’s hard work trying to make this country believe there is the slightest necessity for the contemplative life. I hope all goes well with you and your work.
Yours affectionately in Xt.,Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B.
Poor Michael. His will be a difficult position one day. I feel on re-reading this letter that I’ve told you nothing you don’t already know. But he’s one of those elusive boys who have lived within themselves too much and too long.
Michael put this letter back where he had found it, and wondered how much of the contents would be discussed by Father Viner. He was glad that Brother Aloysius had vanished, because Brother Aloysius had become like a bad dream with which he was unwilling in the future to renew acquaintance. On his own character Dom Cuthberthad not succeeded in throwing very much light—at any rate not in this letter. Father Viner came in to interrupt Michael’s meditations, and began at once to discuss the letter.
“The Lord Abbot of Clere thinks you’re a dreamer,” he began abruptly.
“Does he, Mr. Viner?” echoed Michael, who somehow could never bring himself to the point of addressing the priest as ‘Father.’ Shyness always overcame his will.
“What do you dream about, young Joseph?”
“Oh, I only think about a good many things, and wonder what I’m going to be and all that,” Michael replied. “I don’t want to go into the Indian Civil Service or anything with exams. I’m sick of exams. What I most want to do is to get away from school. I’m sick of school, and the fellows in the Upper Fifth are a greasy crowd of swats always sucking up to Cray.”
“And who is the gentleman with the crustacean name that attracts these barnacles?”
“Cray? Oh, he’s my form-master, and tries to be funny.”
“So do I, Michael,” confessed Mr. Viner.
“Oh, well, that’s different. I’m not bound to listen to you, if I don’t want to. But I have to listen to Cray for eighteen hours every week, and he hates me because I won’t take notes for his beastly essays. I think I’ll ask my mater if I can’t leave school after this term.”
“And then what would you do?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I could settle when I’d left.”
“What about Oxford?”
“Well, I could go to Oxford later on.”
“I don’t think you could quite so easily as you think. Anyway, you’d much better go to Oxford straight from school.”
“Eight more terms before I leave. Phew!” Michaelgroaned. “It’s such a terrible waste of time, and I know Oxford’s ripping.”
“Perhaps something will come along to interest you. And always, dear boy, don’t forget you have your religion.”
“Yes, I know,” said Michael. “But at the Abbey I met some people who were supposed to be religious, and they were pretty good rotters.”
The priest looked at him and seemed inclined to let Michael elaborate this topic, but almost immediately he dismissed it with a commonplace.
“Oh, well,” Michael sighed, “I suppose something will happen soon to buck me up. I hope so. Perhaps the Kensitites will start making rows in churches again,” he went on hopefully. “Will you lend me the Apocryphal Gospels? We’re going to have a discussion about them at the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis.”
“Oh, the society hasn’t broken up?” enquired Mr. Viner.
“Rather not. Only everybody’s changed rather. Chator’s become frightfully Roman. He was Sarum last term, and he thinks I’m frightfully heretical, only of course I say a lot I don’t mean just to rag him. I say, by the way, who wrote ‘In a Garden’?”
“It sounds a very general title,” commented Mr. Viner, with a smile.
“Well, it’s some poem or other.”
“Swinburne wrote a poem in the Second Series of Poems and Ballads called ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ Is that what you mean?”
“Perhaps. Is it a famous poem?”
“Yes, I should say it was distinctly.”
“Well, that must be it. Cray tried to be funny about it to-day in form, and said to me, ‘Good heavens, haven’t you read “In a Garden”?’ And I said I’d never heard of it. And then he said in his funny way to the class,‘I suppose you’ve all read it.’ And none of them had, which made him look rather an ass. So he said we’d better read it by next week.”
“I can lend you my Swinburne. Only take care of it,” said Mr. Viner. “It’s a wonderful poem.”
“I say,” exclaimed Michael eagerly, “I never knew Swinburne was a really great poet. And fancy, he’s alive now.”
“Alive, and living at Putney,” said Mr. Viner.
“And yet he wrote what you’ve just said!”
“He wrote that, and many other things too. He wrote:
“Good Lord!” sighed Michael. “And he’s in Putney at this very moment.”
Michael went home clasping close the black volume, and in his room that night, while the gas jet flamed excitably in defiance of rule, he read almost right through the Second Series of Poems and Ballads. It was midnight when he turned down the gas and sank feverishly into bed. For a long while he was saying to himself isolated lines:‘The wet skies harden, the gates are barred on the summer side.’ ‘The rose-red acacia that mocks the rose.’ ‘Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, brother.’ ‘For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, all waters as the shore.’
In school on Monday morning Mr. Cray, to Michael’s regret, did not allude to the command that his class should read ‘In a Garden.’ Michael was desperately anxious at once to tell him how much he had loved the poem and to remind him of the real title, ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ At last he could bear it no longer and went up flushed with enthusiasm to Mr. Cray’s desk, nominally to enquire into an alleged mistake in his Latin Prose, but actually to inform Mr. Cray of his delight in Swinburne. When the grammatical blunder had been discussed, Michael said with as much nonchalance as he could assume:
“I read that poem, sir. I think it’s ripping.”
“What poem?” repeated Mr. Cray vaguely. “Oh, yes, ‘Enoch Arden.’”
“‘Enoch Arden,’” stammered Michael. “I thought you said ‘In a Garden.’ I read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by Swinburne.”
Mr. Cray put on his most patronizing manner.
“My poor Fane, have you never heard of Enoch Arden? Perhaps you’ve never even heard of Tennyson?”
“But Swinburne’s good, isn’t he, sir?”
“Swinburne is very well,” said Mr. Cray. “Oh, yes, Swinburne will do, if you like rose-jam. But I don’t recommend Swinburne for you, Fane.”
Then Mr. Cray addressed his class:
“Did you all read ‘Enoch Arden’?”
“Yes, sir,” twittered the Upper Fifth.
“Fane, however, with that independence of judgment which distinguishes his Latin Prose from, let us say, the prose of Cicero, preferred to read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by one Swinburne.”
The Upper Fifth giggled dutifully.
“Perhaps Fane will recite to us his discovery,” said Mr. Cray, scratching his scurfy head with the gnawed end of a penholder.
Michael blushed resentfully, and walked back to his desk.
“No?” said Mr. Cray with an affectation of great surprise.
Then he and the Upper Fifth, contented with their superiority, began to chew and rend some tough Greek particles which ultimately became digestible enough to be assimilated by the Upper Fifth; while Mr. Cray himself purred over his cubs, looking not very unlike a mangy old lioness.
“Eight more terms,” groaned Michael to himself.
Mr. Cray was not so blind to his pupils’ need for mild intellectual excitement, however much he might scorn the easy emotions of Swinburne. He really grew lyrical over Homeric difficulties, and even spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Mackail’s translation of the Georgics; but always he managed to conceal the nobility of his theme beneath a mass of what he called ‘minor points.’ He would create his own rubbish heap and invite the Upper Fifth to scratch in it for pearls. One day a question arose as to the exact meaning ofοὑλοχὑταιin Homer. Michael would have been perfectly content to believe that it meant ‘whole barleycorns,’ until Mr. Cray suggested that it might be equivalent to the Latin ‘mola,’ meaning ‘grain coarsely ground.’ An exhausting discussion followed, illustrated by examples from every sort of writer, all of which had to be taken down in notes in anticipation of a still more exhausting essay on the subject.
“The meal may be trite,” said Mr. Cray, “but not the subject,” he added, chuckling. “However, I have only touched the fringe of it: you will find the arguments fully set forth in Buttmann’s Lexilogus. Who possesses that invaluable work?”
Nobody in the Upper Fifth possessed it, but all anxiously made a note of it, in order to acquire it over the counter of the Book Room downstairs.
“No use,” said Mr. Cray. “Buttmann’s Lexilogus is now out of print.”
Michael pricked up at this. The phrase leant a curious flavour of Romance to the dull book.
“No doubt, however, you will be able to obtain it second-hand,” added Mr. Cray.
The notion of tracking down Buttmann’s Lexilogus possessed the Upper Fifth. Eagerly after school the diligent ones discussed ways and means. Parties were formed, almost one might say expeditions, to rescue the valuable work from oblivion. Michael stood contemptuously aside from the buzz of self-conscious effort round him, although he had made up his own mind to be one of the first to obtain the book. Levy, however, secured the first copy for fourpence in Farringdon Street, earning for his sharpness much praise. Another boy bought one for three shillings and sixpence in Paddington, the price one would expect to pay, if not a Levy; and there were rumours of a copy in Kensington High Street. To Michael the mart of London from earliest youth had been Hammersmith Broadway, and thither he hurried, hopeful of discovering Buttmann’s dingy Lexilogus, for the purchase of which he had thoughtfully begged a sovereign from his mother. Michael did not greatly covet Buttmann, but he was sure that the surplus from three shillings and sixpence, possibly even from fourpence, would be very welcome.
He found at last in a turning off Hammersmith Broadway a wonderful bookshop, whose rooms upon rooms leading into one another were all lined and loaded with every kind of book. The proprietor soon found a copy of Buttmann, which he sold to Michael for half a crown, leaving him with fifteen shillings for himself, since he decided that it would be as well to return his mother at least half a crown from her sovereign. The purchase completed, Michael began to wander round the shop, taking down a book here,a book there, dipping into them from the top of a ladder, sniffing them, clapping their covers together to drive away the dust, and altogether thoroughly enjoying himself, while the daylight slowly faded and street-lamps came winking into ken outside. At last, just as the shop-boy was putting up the shutters, Michael discovered a volume bound in half-morocco of a crude gay blue, that proved on inspection to contain the complete poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, for the sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence.
What was now left of his golden sovereign that should have bought so much beside Buttmann’s brown and musty Lexilogus?
Michael approached the proprietor with the volume in his hand.
“How much?” he asked, with a queer choking sensation, a throbbing excitement, for he had never before even imagined the expenditure of seventeen shillings and sixpence on one book.
“What’s this?” said the proprietor, putting on his spectacles. “Oh, yes, Swinburne—pirated American edition. Seventeen shillings and sixpence.”
“Couldn’t you take less?” asked Michael, with a vague hope that he might rescue a shilling for his mother, if not for cigarettes.
“Take less?” repeated the bookseller. “Good gracious, young man, do you know what you’d have to pay for Swinburne’s stuff separate? Something like seven or eight pounds, and then they’d be all in different volumes. Whereas here you’ve got—lemme see—Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Poems and Ballads, Songs before Sunrise, Bothwell, Tristram of Lyonesse, Songs of Two Nations, and heaven knows what not. I call seventeen shillings and sixpence very cheap for what you might almost call a man’s life-work. Shall I wrap it up?”
“Yes, please,” said Michael, gasping with the effect of the plunge.
But when that night he read
Swallow, my sister, O fair swift swallow,
he forgot all about the cost.
The more of Swinburne that Michael read, the more impatient he grew of school. The boredom of Mr. Cray’s class became stupendous; and Michael, searching for some way to avoid it, decided to give up Classics and apply for admission to the History Sixth, which was a small association of boys who had drifted into this appendix for the purpose of defeating the ordinary rules of promotion. For instance, when the Captain of the School Eleven had not attained the privileged Sixth, he was often allowed to enter the History Sixth, in order that he might achieve the intellectual dignity which consorted with his athletic prowess.
Michael had for some time envied the leisure of the History Sixth, with its general air of slackness and its form-master, Mr. Kirkham, who, on account of holding many administrative positions important to the athletic life of the school, was so often absent from his class-room. He now racked his brains for an excuse to achieve the idle bliss of these charmed few. Finally he persuaded his mother to write to the Headmaster and apply for his admission, on the grounds of the greater utility of History in his future profession.
“But what are you going to be, Michael?” asked his mother.
“I don’t know, but you can say I’m going to be a barrister or something.”
“Is History better for a barrister?”
“I don’t know, but you can easily say you think it is.”
In the end his mother wrote to Dr. Brownjohn, andone grey November afternoon the Headmaster sailed into the class-room of the Upper Fifth, extricated Michael with a roar, and marched with him up and down the dusky corridor in a ferocious discussion of the proposal.
“Why do you want to give up your Classics?” bellowed Dr. Brownjohn.
In the echoing corridor Michael’s voice sounded painfully weak against his monitor’s.
“I don’t want to give them up, sir. Only I would like to learn History as well,” he explained.
“What’s the good of History?” roared the Doctor.
“I thought I’d like to learn it,” said Michael.
“You shouldn’t think, you infamous young sluggard.”
“And I could go on reading Classics, sir, I could really.”
“Bah!” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Impudent nonsense, you young sloth. Why didn’t you get your Certificate?”
“I failed in Arithmetic, sir.”
“You’ll fail in your whole life, boy,” prophesied Dr. Brownjohn in bull-deep accents of reproach. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“No, sir,” said Michael. “I don’t think I am, because I worked jolly hard.”
“Worked, you abominable little loafer? You’ve never worked in your life. You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you’re merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste. Bah! What do you expect to do when you leave school? Um?”
“I want to go to Oxford.”
“Then get the Balliol Scholarship.”
“I don’t want to be at Balliol,” said Michael.
“Then get the major scholarship at Trinity, Cambridge.”
“I don’t intend to go to Cambridge,” said Michael.
“Good heavens, boy,” roared Dr. Brownjohn, “are you trying to arrange your own career?”
“No, sir,” said Michael. “But I want to go to St. Mary’s, Oxford.”
“Then get a scholarship at St. Mary’s.”
“But I don’t want to be a Scholar of any college. I want to go up as a Commoner.”
The veins on Dr. Brownjohn’s forehead swelled with wrath, astonishment and dismay.
“Get out of my sight,” he thundered. “Get back into your class-room. I’ve done with you; I take no more interest in you. You’re here to earn glory for your school, you’re here to gain a scholarship, not to air your own opinions. Get out of my sight, you young scoundrel. How dare you argue with me? You shan’t go into the History Sixth! You shall stew in your own obstinate juice in the Upper Fifth until I choose to move you out of it. Do you hear? Go back into your class-room. I’ll write to your mother. She’s an idiotic woman, and you’re a slovenly, idle, good-for-nothing cub.”
Overwhelmed with failure and very sensitive to the inquisitive glances of his classmates, Michael sat down in his own desk again as unobtrusively as he could.
Michael’s peace of mind was not increased by the consciousness of Mr. Cray’s knowledge of his appeal to withdraw from the Upper Fifth, and he became exposed to a large amount of sarcasm in allusion to his expressed inclination towards history. He was continually referred to as an authority on Constitutions; he was invited to bring forward comparisons from more modern times to help the elucidation of the Syracusan expedition or the Delian Confederacy.
All that Michael gained from Mr. Cray was a passion for second-hand books—the latest and most fervid of all his collecting hobbies.
One wintry evening in Elson’s Bookshop at Hammersmith he was enjoying himself on the top of a ladder,when he became aware of an interested gaze directed at himself over the dull-gilt edges of a large and expensive work on Greek sculpture. The face that so regarded him was at once fascinating and repulsive. The glittering blue eyes full of laughter were immediately attractive, but something in the pointed ears and curled-back lips, something in the peculiarly white fingers faintly pencilled about the knuckles with fine black hairs, and after a moment something cruel in the bright blue eyes themselves restrained him from an answering smile.
“What is the book, Hyacinthus?” asked the stranger, and his voice was so winning and so melodious in the shadowy bookshop that Michael immediately fell into the easiest of conversations.
“Fond of books?” asked the stranger. “Oh, by the way, my name is Wilmot, Arthur Wilmot.”
Something in Wilmot’s manner made Michael suppose that he ought to be familiar with the name, and he tried to recall it.
“What’s your name?” the stranger went on.
Michael told his name, and also his school, and before very long a good deal about himself.
“I live near you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “We’ll walk along presently. I’d like you to dine with me one night soon. When?”
“Oh, any time,” said Michael, trying to speak as if invitations to dinner occurred to him three or four times a day.
“Here’s my card,” said the stranger. “You’d better show it to your mother—so that she’ll know it’s all right. I’m a writer, you know.”
“Oh, yes,” Michael vaguely agreed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of my stuff. I don’t publish much. Sometimes I read my poems to Interior people.”
Michael looked puzzled.
“Interior is my name for the people who understand. So few do. I should say you’d be sympathetic. You look sympathetic. You remind me of those exquisite boys who in scarlet hose run delicately with beakers of wine or stand in groups about the corners of old Florentine pictures.”
Michael tried to look severe, and yet, after the Upper Fifth, even so direct and embarrassing a compliment was slightly pleasant.
“Shall we go along? To-night the Hammersmith Road is full of mystery. But, first, shall I not buy you a book—some exquisite book full of strange perfumes and passionate courtly gestures? And so you are at school? How wonderful to be at school! How Sicilian! Strange youth, you should have been sung by Theocritus, or, better, been crowned with myrtle by some wonderful unknown Greek, some perfect blossom of the Anthology.”
Michael laughed rather foolishly. There seemed nothing else to do.
“Won’t you smoke? These Chian cigarettes in their diaphanous paper of mildest mauve would suit your oddly remote, your curiously shy glance. You had better not smoke so near to the savage confines of St. James’ School? How ascetic! How stringent! What book shall I buy for you, O greatly to be envied dreamer of Sicilian dreams? Shall I buy you Mademoiselle de Maupin, so that all her rococo soul may dance with gilded limbs across your vision? Or shall I buy you A Rebours, and teach you to live? And yet I think neither would suit you perfectly. So here is a volume of Pater—Imaginary Portraits. You will like to read of Denys l’Auxerrois. One day I myself will write an imaginary portrait of you, wherein your secret, sidelong smile will reveal to the world the whole art of youth.”
“But really—thanks very much,” stammered Michael,who was beginning to suspect the stranger of madness—“it’s awfully kind of you, but, really, I think I’d rather not.”
“Do not be proud,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Pride is for the pure in heart, and you are surely not pure in heart. Or are you? Are you indeed like one of those wonderful white statues of antiquity, unaware of the soul with all its maladies?”
In the end, so urgent was Mr. Wilmot, Michael accepted the volume of Pater, and walked with the stranger through the foggy night. Somehow the conversation was so destructive of all experience that, as Michael and his new friend went by the school-gates and perceived beyond the vast bulk of St. James’ looming, Michael felt himself a stranger to it all, as if he never again would with a crowd of companions surge out from afternoon school. The stranger came as far as the corner of Carlington Road with Michael.
“I will write to your mother and ask her to let you dine with me one night next week. You interest me so much.”
Mr. Wilmot waved a pontifical good-bye and vanished in the direction of Kensington.
At home Michael told his mother of the adventure. She looked a little doubtful at his account of Mr. Wilmot.
“Oh, he’s all right, really, Mother. Only, you know, a little peculiar. But then he’s a poet.”
Next day came a letter from Mr. Wilmot.
205 Edwardes Square, W.November.Dear Mrs. Fane,I must apologize for inviting your son to dinner so unceremoniously. But he made a great appeal to me, sitting on the top of a ladder in Elson’s Bookshop. I have a library, in which he may enjoy himself whenever he likes. Meanwhile,may he come to dinner with me on Friday next? Mr. Johnstone, the Member for West Kensington, is coming with his nephew who may be dull without Michael. Michael tells me he thinks of becoming an ecclesiastical lawyer. In that case Johnstone will be particularly useful, and can give him some hints. He’s a personal friend of old Dr. Brownjohn. With many apologies for my ‘impertinence,’Yours very truly,Arthur Wilmot.
205 Edwardes Square, W.November.
Dear Mrs. Fane,
I must apologize for inviting your son to dinner so unceremoniously. But he made a great appeal to me, sitting on the top of a ladder in Elson’s Bookshop. I have a library, in which he may enjoy himself whenever he likes. Meanwhile,may he come to dinner with me on Friday next? Mr. Johnstone, the Member for West Kensington, is coming with his nephew who may be dull without Michael. Michael tells me he thinks of becoming an ecclesiastical lawyer. In that case Johnstone will be particularly useful, and can give him some hints. He’s a personal friend of old Dr. Brownjohn. With many apologies for my ‘impertinence,’
Yours very truly,Arthur Wilmot.
“This is a perfectly sensible letter,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Perhaps I thought he was funnier than he really was. Does he say anything else except about me sitting on the top of a ladder?”
Somehow Michael was disappointed to hear that this was all.
DINNER with Mr. Arthur Wilmot occupied most of Michael’s thoughts for a week. He was mainly concerned about his costume, and he was strenuously importunate for a tail-coat. Mrs. Fane, however, was sure that a dinner-jacket would better become his youthfulness. Then arose the question of stick-up collars. Michael pointed out that very soon he would be sixteen, and that here was a fine opportunity to leave behind the Polo or Shakespeare collar.
“You’re growing up so quickly, dearest boy,” sighed his mother.
Michael was anxious to have one of the new double collars.
“But don’t they look ratheroutré?” protested Mrs. Fane.
“Well, Abercrombie, the Secretary of the Fifteen, wears one,” observed Michael.
“Have your own way, dear,” said Mrs. Fane gently.
Two or three days before the dinner-party Michael braved everything and wore one of the new double collars to school. Its extravagant advent among the discreet neckwear of the Upper Fifth caused a sensation. Mr. Cray himself looked curiously once or twice at Michael, who assumed in consequence a particularly nonchalant air, and lounged over his desk even more than usual.
“Are you going on the stage, Fane?” enquired Mr. Cray finally, exasperated by Michael’s indolent construing.
“Not that I know of,” said Michael.
“I wasn’t sure whether that collar was part of your get-up as an eccentric comedian.”
The Upper Fifth released its well-worn laugh, and Michael scowled at his master.
However, he endured the sarcasm of the first two days and still wore the new collars, vowing to himself that presently he would make fresh attacks upon the convention of school attire, since apparently he was able thereby to irritate old Cray.
After all, the dinner-party was not so exciting as he had hoped from the sample of his new friend’s conversation. To be sure he was able to smoke as much as he liked, and drink as much champagne as he knew how without warning headshakes; but Mr. Johnstone, the Member for West Kensington, was a moon-faced bore, and his nephew turned out to be a lank nonentity on the despised Modern side. Mr. Johnstone talked a good deal about the Catholic movement, which somehow during the last few weeks was ceasing to interest Michael so much as formerly. Michael himself ascribed this apostasy to his perusal, ladder-high, of Zola’s novel Lourdes with its damaging assaults upon Christian credulity. The Member of Parliament seemed to Michael, after his psychical adventures of the past few months, curiously dull and antique, and he evidently considered Michael affected. However, he encouraged the idea of ecclesiastical law, and promised to talk to Dr. Brownjohn about Michael’s release from the thraldom of Classics. As for the nephew, he seemed to be able to do nothing but stretch the muscles of his chicken-like neck and ask continually whether Michael was going to join the Field Club that some obscure Modern Lower Master was in travail with at the moment. He also invited Michael to join a bicycling club that apparently met at Surbiton every other Saturday afternoon. Mr. Wilmot contented himself with silence and the care of his guests’ entertainment.
Finally the Member for West Kensington with hiscrudely jointed nephew departed into the fog, and Mr. Wilmot, with an exaggerated sigh, shut the front door.
“I must be going too,” said Michael grudgingly.
“My dear boy, the evening has scarcely begun,” objected Mr. Wilmot. “Come upstairs to my library, and tell me all about your opinions, and whether you do not think that everything is an affectation.”
They went up together.
“Every year I redecorate this room,” Mr. Wilmot explained. “Last year it was apple-green set out with cherry-red. Now I am become a mysterious peacock-blue, for lately I have felt terribly old. How well this uncertain tint suits your fresh languor.”
Michael admired the dusky blue chamber with the plain mirrors of tarnished gilt, the gleaming books and exotic engravings, and the heterogeneous finery faintly effeminate. He buried himself in a deep embroidered chair, with an ebony box of cigarettes at his feet, while Mr. Wilmot, after a myriad mincing preliminaries, sought out various highly coloured bottles of liqueurs.
“This is a jolly ripping room,” sighed Michael.
“It represents a year’s moods,” said Mr. Wilmot.
“And then will you change it?” asked Michael.
“Perhaps. The most subtly painted serpent casts ultimately its slough. Crème-de-Menthe?”
“Yes, please,” said Michael, who would have accepted anything in his present receptive condition.
“And what do you think of life?” enquired Mr. Wilmot, taking his place on a divan opposite Michael. “Do you mind if I smoke my Jicky-scented hookah?” he added.
“Not at all,” said Michael. “These cigarettes are jolly ripping. I think life at school is frightfully dull—except, of course, when one goes out. Only I don’t often.”
“Dull?” repeated Mr. Wilmot. “Listen to the amazingcruelty of youth, that finds even his adventurous Sicilian existence dull.”
“Well, it is,” said Michael. “I think I used to like it, but nowadays everything gets fearfully stale almost at once.”
“Already your life has been lived?” queried Mr. Wilmot very anxiously.
“Well, not exactly,” Michael replied, with a quick glance towards his host to make sure he was not joking. “I expect that when I leave school I shall get interested again. Only just lately I’ve given up everything. First I was keen on Footer, and then I got keen on Ragging, and then I got keen on Work even (this was confessed apologetically), and just lately I’ve been keen on the Church—only now I find that’s pretty stale.”
“The Church!” echoed Mr. Wilmot. “How wonderful! The dim Gothic glooms, the sombre hues of stained glass, the incense-wreathèd acolytes, the muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah, elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!”
“Then I got keen on Swinburne,” said Michael.
“You advance along the well-worn path of the Interior and Elect,” said Mr. Wilmot.
“I’m still keen on Swinburne, but he makes me feel hopeless. Sad and hopeless,” said Michael.
“Under the weight of sin?” asked Mr. Wilmot.
“Not exactly—because he seems to have done everything and——”
“You’d like to?”
“Yes, I would,” said Michael. “Only one can’t live like a Roman Emperor at a public school. What I hate is the way everybody thinks you ought to be interested in things that aren’t really interesting at all. What people can’t understand about me is that Icouldbe keener than anybody about things schoolmasters and that kind don’tthink right or at any rate important. I don’t mean to say I want to be dissipated, but——”
“Dissipated?” echoed Mr. Wilmot, raising his eyebrows.
“Well, you know what I mean,” blushed Michael.
“Dissipation is a condition of extreme old age. I might be dissipated, not you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Why not say wanton? How much more beautiful, how much more intense a word.”
“But wanton sounds so beastly affected,” said Michael. “As if it was taken out of the Bible. And you aren’t so very old. Not more than thirty.”
“I think what you’re trying to say is that, under your present mode of life, you find self-expression impossible. Let me diagnose your symptoms.”
Michael leaned forward eagerly at this proposal. Nothing was so entertaining to his egoism just now as diagnosis. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot seemed inclined to take him more seriously than Mr. Viner, or, indeed, any of his spiritual directors so far. Mr. Wilmot prepared himself for the lecture by lighting a very long cigarette wrapped in brittle fawn-coloured paper, whose spirals of smoke Michael followed upward to their ultimate evanescence, as if indeed they typified with their tenuous plumes and convolutions the intricate discourse that begot them.
“In a sense, my dear boy, your charm has waned—the faerie charm, that is, which wraps in heedless silver armour the perfect boyhood of man. You are at present a queer sort of mythical animal whom we for want of a better term call ‘adolescent.’ Intercourse with anything but your own self shocks both you and the world with a sense of extravagance, as if a centaur pursued a nymph or fought with a hero. The soul—or what we call the soul—is struggling in the bondage of your unformed body. Lately you had no soul, you were ethereal and cold, yet withalin some remote way passionate, like your own boy’s voice. Now the silly sun is melting the snow, and what was a little while since crystalline clear virginity is beginning to trickle down towards a headlong course, carrying with it the soiled accumulation of the years to float insignificantly into the wide river of manhood. But I am really being almost intolerably allegorical—or is it metaphorical?”
“Still, I think I understand what you mean,” Michael said encouragingly.
“Thrown back upon your own resources, it is not surprizing that you attempt to allay your own sense of your own incongruity by seeking for its analogy in the decorative excitements of religion or poetry. Love would supply the solution, but you are still too immature for love. And if you do fall in love, you will sigh for some ample and unattainable matron rather than the slim, shy girl that would better become your pastoral graces. At present you lack all sense of proportion. You are only aware of your awkwardness. Your corners have not yet been, as they say, knocked off. You are still somewhat proud of their Gothic angularity. You feel at home in the tropic dawns of Swinburne’s poetry, in the ceremonious exaggerations of Mass, because neither of these conditions of thought and behaviour allow you to become depressed over your oddity, to see yourself crawling with bedraggled wings from the cocoon of mechanical education. The licentious ingenuity of Martial, Petronius and Apuleius with their nightmare comedies and obscene phantasmagoria, Lucian, thatboulevardierof Olympic glades, all these could allow you to feel yourself more at home than does Virgil with his peaceful hexameters or the cold relentless narrations of Thucydides.”
“Yes, that’s all very well,” objected Michael. “But other chaps seem to get on all right without being bored by ordinary things.”
“Already spurning the gifts of Apollo, contemptuous of Artemis, ignorant of Bacchus and Aphrodite, you are bent low before Pallas Athene. Foolish child, do not pray for wisdom in this overwise thin-faced time of ours. Rather demand of the gods folly, and drive ever furiously your temperament like a chariot before you.”
“I met an odd sort of chap the other day,” Michael said thoughtfully. “A monk he was, as a matter of fact—who told me a skit of things—you know—about a bad life. It’s funny, though I hate ugly things and common things, he gave me a feeling that I’d like to go right away from everything and live in one of those horrible streets that you pass in an omnibus when the main road is up. Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean?”
Mr. Wilmot’s eyes glittered through the haze of smoke.
“Why shouldn’t I understand? Squalor is the Parthenope of the true Romantic. You’ll find it in all the poets you love best—if not in their poetry, certainly in their lives. Even romantic critics are not without temptation. One day you shall read of Hazlitt and Sainte-Beuve. And now, dear boy, here is my library which holds as many secrets as the Spintrian books of Elephantis, long ago lost and purified by the sea. I am what the wise world would call about to corrupt your mind, and yet I believe that for one who like you must some day make trial of the uttermost corruption, I am prescribing more wisely than Chiron, that pig-headed or rather horse-bodied old prototype of all schoolmasters, who sent his hero pupils one after another into the world, proof against nothing but a few spear-thrusts. I offer you better than fencing-bouts and wrestling-matches. I offer you a good library. Read every day and all night, and when you are a man full grown, you will smile at the excesses of your contemporaries, at their divorces and disgraces. You will stand aloof like a second Aurelius, coining austere aphorisms andmocking the weakness of your unlearned fellows. Why are priests generally so inept in the confessional? Because they learn their knowledge of life from a frowsy volume of Moral Theology that in the most utterly barbarous Latin emits an abstract of humanity’s immeasurable vice. In the same way most young men encounter wickedness in some sudden shock of depravity from which they retire blushing and mumbling, ‘Who’d have thought it!’ ‘Who’d have thought it!’ they cry, and are immediately empanelled on a jury.
“Not so you, O more subtle youth, with the large deep eyes and secret sidelong smile.
“There on my shelves are all the ages. I have spoken to you of Petronius, of Lucian and Apuleius. There is Suetonius, with his incredibly improper tales that show how beastliness takes root and flowers from the deposited muck of a gossip’s mind. There is Tacitus, ever willing to sacrifice decency to antithesis, and Ausonius, whose ribald verses are like monkish recreation; yet he had withal a pretty currency of honest silver Latin, Christian though he was. You must read your Latin authors well, for, since you must be decadent, it is better to decay from a good source. And neglect not the Middle Ages. You will glide most easily into them from the witches and robbers of Apuleius. You will read Boccaccio, whose tales are intaglios carved with exquisitely licentious and Lilliputian scenes. Neither forget Villon, whose light ladies seem ever to move elusively in close-cut gowns of cloth-of-gold and incredibly tall steeple-hats. But even with Villon the world becomes complicated, and you will soon reach the temperamental entanglements of the nineteenth century, for you may avoid the coarse, the beery and besotted obviousness of the Georgian age.
“But I like the eighteenth century almost best of all,” protested Michael.
“Then cure yourself of that most lamentable and most démodé taste, or I shall presently believe that you read a page or two of Boswell’s Life of Johnson every morning, while the water is running into your bath. You can never be a true decadent, treading delicately over the garnered perfection of the world’s art, if you really admire and enjoy the eighteenth century.”
Michael, however, looked very doubtful over his demanded apostasy.
“But, never mind,” Mr. Wilmot went on. “When you have read Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Catulle Mendès and Verhaeren, when the Parnassians and Symbolists have illuminated you, and you become an Interior person, when Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rops have printed their fierce debauchery upon your imagination, then you will be glad you have forsaken the eighteenth century. How crude is the actual number eighteen, how far from the passionate mystery of seventeen or the tired wisdom of nineteen! O wonderful nineteenth century, in whose grey humid dusk you and I are lucky enough to live!”
“But what about the twentieth century?” asked Michael.
Mr. Wilmot started.
“Listen, and I will tell you my intention. Two more years have yet to run before that garish and hideous date, prophetic of all that is bright and new and abominably raw. But I shall have fled, how I know not; haply mandragora will lure my weary mind to rest. I think I should like to die as La Gioconda was painted, listening to flute-players in a curtained alcove; or you, Michael, shall read to me some diabolic and funereal song of Baudelaire, so that I may fearfully pass away.”
Michael, sitting in the dim room of peacock-blue made tremendously nocturnal by the heavy smoke of all the cigarettes, did not much care for the turn the conversationof Mr. Wilmot had taken. It had been interesting enough, while the discussion applied directly to himself; but all this vague effusion of learning meant very little to him. At the same time, there was an undeniable eccentricity in a member of the Upper Fifth sitting thus in fantastic communion with a figure completely outside the imagination of Mr. Cray or any of his inky groundlings. Michael began to feel a contemptuous pity for his fellows now buried in bedclothes, hot and heavy with Ciceronian sentences and pious preparation. He began to believe that if he wished to keep pace with this new friendship, he must acquire something of Mr. Wilmot’s heightened air. And however mad he might seem, there stood the books, and there stood the cigarettes for Michael’s pleasure. It was all very exciting, and it would not have been possible to say that before he met Wilmot.
The friendship progressed through the rest of the autumn-term, and Michael drifted farther away from the normal life of the school than even his incursion into Catholicism had taken him. That phase of his development had penetrated deeper than any other, and from time to time Michael knew bitter repentances and made grim resolutions. From time to time letters would arrive from Dom Cuthbert asking him down to Clere Abbey; Mr. Viner, too, would question him narrowly about his new set of friends, and Michael’s replies never seemed perfectly satisfactory to the shrewd priest.
It was by his costume more than by anything else that Michael expressed at first his sense of emancipation. He took to coming to school in vivid bow-ties that raised Mr. Cray’s most sarcastic comments.
“The sooner you go to the History Sixth, Fane, and take that loathsome ribbon with you, the better for us all. Where did you get it? Out of the housemaid’s trunk, one would say, by its appearance.”
“It happens to be a tie,” said Michael with insolence in his tone.
“Oh, it happens to be a tie, does it? Well, it also happens to be an excellent rule of St. James’ School that all boys, however clever, wear dark suits and black ties. There also happens to be an excellent cure for pretentious and flamboyant youths who disregard this rule. There happens to be a play by one Euripides called the Alcestis. I suggest you write me out the first two hundred lines of it.”
Michael’s next encounter was with Mr. Viner, on the occasion of his producing in the priest’s pipe-seasoned sitting-room a handkerchief inordinately perfumed with an Eastern scent lately discovered by Wilmot.
“Good heavens, Michael, what Piccadilly breezes are you wafting into my respectable and sacerdotal apartment?”
“I rather like scent,” explained Michael lamely.
“Well, I don’t, so, for goodness’ sake don’t bring any more of it in here. Pah! Phew! It’s worse than a Lenten address at a fashionable church. Really, you know, these people you’re in with now are not at all good for you, Michael.”
“They’re more interesting than any of the chaps at school.”
“Are they? There used to be a saying in my undergraduate days, ‘Distrust a freshman that’s always seen with third-year men.’ No doubt the inference is often unjust, but still the proverb remains.”
“Ah, but these people aren’t at school with me,” Michael observed.
“No, I wish they were. They might be licked into better shape, if they were,” retorted the priest.
“I think you’re awfully down on Wilmot just because I didn’t meet him in some churchy set. If it comes tothat, I met some much bigger rotters than him at Clere.”
“My dear Michael,” argued Father Viner, “the last place I should have been surprized to see Master Wilmot would be in a churchy set. Don’t forget that if religion is a saving grace, religiosity is a constitutional weakness. Can’t you understand that a priest like myself who has taken the average course, public-school, ‘varsity, and theological college, meets a thundering lot of Wilmots by the way? My dear fellow, many of my best friends, many of the priests you’ve met in my rooms, were once upon a time every bit as decadent as the lilified Wilmot. They took it like scarlet fever or chicken-pox, and feel all the more secure now for having had it. Decadence, as our friend knows it, is only a new-fangled name for green-sickness. It’s a healthy enough mental condition for the young, but it’s confoundedly dangerous for the grown-up. The first pretty girl that looks his way cures it in a boy, if he’s a normal decent boy. I shouldn’t offer any objection to your behaviour, if you were being decadent with Mark Chator or Martindale or Rigg. Good heavens, the senior curate at the best East-end Mission, when he was at Oxford, used to walk down the High leading a lobster on a silver chain, and even that wasn’t original, for he stole the poor little fantastic idea from some precious French poet. But that senior curate is a very fine fellow to-day. No, no, this fellow Wilmot and all his set are very bad company for you, and I do not like your being decadent with these half-baked fancy-cakes.”
Michael, however, would not admit that Mr. Viner was right, and frequented the dangerous peacock-blue room in Edwardes Square more than ever. He took Chator there amongst others, and was immensely gratified to be solemnly warned at the end of the visit that he was playing with Hell-fire. This seemed to him an interesting andoriginal pastime, and he hinted to solemn, simple, spluttering old Chator of more truly Satanic mysteries.
After Christmas Michael had his way and was moved into the History Sixth, mainly owing to the intervention of the Member for West Kensington. The History Sixth was presided over by Mr. Kirkham, whose nominal aim in life was the amelioration of Jacobean athletics. From the fact that he wore an M.C.C. ribbon round his straw hat, and an Oxford University Authentic tie, it is probable that the legend of his former skill at cricket was justified. In reality he was much more interested in Liberalism than anything else, and persistently read Blue Books, under-lining the dramatic moments of Royal Commissions and chewing his moustache through pages of dialogue hostile to his opinions. A rumour sped round the school that he had been invited to stand for Parliament, a rumour which Michael, on the strength of dining with the Member for West Kensington, flatly contradicted.
The History Sixth class-room was a pleasant place, the only class-room in the school that ever saw the sun. Its windows looked out on the great green expanse of the school ground, where during the deserted hours of work the solitary roller moved sedately and ancient women weeded the pitches.
There were only seven boys in the History Sixth. There was Strang, the Captain of the Eleven, who lounged through the dull Lent term and seemed, as he spread his bulk over the small desk, like a half-finished statue to which still adhered a fragment of uncarved stone. There was Terry, the Vice-Captain of the Fifteen and most dapper half-back that ever cursed forwards. He spent his time trying to persuade Strang to take an interest in Noughts and Crosses. There was beak-nosed Thomson who had gained an Exhibition at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and dark-eyed Mallock, whose father wrote columnar lettersto The Times. Burnaby, who shocked Michael very much by prophesying that a certain H. G. Wells, now writing about Martian invasions, was the coming man, and Railton, a weedy and disconsolate recluse, made up with Michael himself the class-list.
There was an atmosphere of rest about the History Sixth, a leisured dignity that contrasted very delightfully with the spectacled industry of the Upper Fifth. To begin with, Mr. Kirkham was always ten minutes after every other master in entering his class-room. This habit allowed the members of his form to stroll gracefully along the corridors and watch one by one the cavernous doors of other class-rooms absorb their victims. Michael would often go out of his way to pass Mr. Cray’s room, in order to see with a luxurious sense of relief the intellectual convicts of the Upper Fifth hurrying to their prison. Many other conventions of school-life were slackened in the History Sixth. A slight eccentricity of attire was not considered unbecoming in what was, at any rate in its own opinion, a faintly literary society. The room was always open between morning and afternoon school, and it was not an uncommon sight to see members of the form reading novels in tip-tilted chairs. Most of the home work was set a week in advance, which did away with the unpleasant necessity of speculating on the ‘construe’ or hurriedly cribbing with a hastily peppered variety of mistakes the composition of one’s neighbour. Much of the work was simple reading, and as for the essays, by a legal fiction they were always written during the three hours devoted to Mathematics. Tradition forbade any member of the History Sixth to take Mathematics seriously, and Mr. Gaskell, the overworked Mathematical master, was not inclined to break this tradition. He used to write out a problem or two on the blackboard for the sake of appearances, and then settle down to the correction of hismore serious pupils’ work, while the History Sixth devoted themselves to their more serious work. One of the great social earthquakes that occasionally devastate all precedent occurred when Mr. Gaskell was away with influenza, and his substitute, an earnest young novice, tried to make Strang and Terry do a Quadratic Equation.
“But, sir, we never do Mathematics.”
“Well, what are you here for?” asked the novice. “What amIhere for?”
“We don’t know,” replied the History Sixth in unison; and the vendetta that followed the complaint of their behaviour to Mr. Kirkham made the novice’s mastership a burden to him during Mr. Gaskell’s illness. Enraged conservatism called for reprisals, until Mr. Kirkham pointed out with a felicity acquired from long perusal of Parliamentary humour, “You are Jacobeans, not Jacobins,” and with this mild joke quenched the feud.
The effect of his transference to the History Sixth made Michael more decadent than ever, for the atmosphere of his new class encouraged him along the orchidaceous path pointed out by Arthur Wilmot. He was not now decadent from any feeling of opposition to established things, but he was decadent from conviction of the inherent rightness of such a state. At first the phase had manifested itself in outward signs, a little absurdly; now his actual point of view was veering into accord with the externals.
Sunday was a day at Edwardes Square from which Michael returned almost phosphorescent with decay. Sunday was the day on which Mr. Wilmot gathered from all over London specimens of corruption that fascinated Michael with their exotic and elaborate behaviour. Nothing seemed worth while in such an assembly except a novel affectation. Everything was a pose. It was a pose to be effeminate in speech and gesture; it was a pose todrink absinthe; it was a pose to worship the devil; it was a pose to buy attenuated volumes of verse at an unnatural price, for the sake of owning a sonnet that was left out in the ordinary edition; it was a pose to admire pictures that to Michael at first were more like wall-papers than pictures; it was really a pose to live at all. Conversation at these delicate entertainments was like the conversations overheard in the anterooms of private asylums. Everyone was very willowy in his movements, whether he were smoking or drinking or looking for a box of matches. Michael attempted to be willowy at school once, but gave it up on being asked if he had fleas.
One of the main charms at first of these Sunday afternoon gatherings was the way in which, one after another, every one of the guests would take Michael aside and explain how different he (the guest) was from all the rest of humanity. Michael was flattered, and used to become very intense and look very soul-searching, and interject sympathetic exclamations until he discovered that the confidant usually proceeded to another corner of the room to entrust someone else with his innermost heart. He became cynical after a while, especially when he found that the principal points of difference from the rest of the world were identical in every one of the numerous guests who sought his counsel and his sympathy.
However, he never became cynical enough to distrust the whole school of thought and admit that Father Viner’s contempt was justifiable. If ever he had any doubts, he was consoled by assuring himself that at any rate these new friends were very artistic, and how important it was to be artistic no one could realize who was not at school.
Under the pressure of his insistent temperament, Michael found his collection of statuettes and ecclesiastical bric-à-brac very depressing. As a youth of the Florentine Renaissancehe could not congratulate himself upon his room, which was much too much unlike either a Carpaccio interior or an Aubrey Beardsley bedroom. Between these two his ambition wavered.
One by one the statuettes were moved to the top of a wardrobe where for a while they huddled, a dusty and devoted crowd, until one by one they met martyrdom at the hands of the housemaid. In their place appeared Della Robbia reliefs and terra-cotta statuettes of this or that famous Greek youth. The muscular and tearful pictures of Guido Reni, the bland insipidities of Bouguereau soon followed the statuettes, meeting a comparable martyrdom by being hung in the servants’ bedroom. The walls of Michael’s room were papered with a brown paper, which was intended to be very artistic, but was really merely sad. It was lightened, however, by various daring pictures in black and red that after only a very short regard really did take shape as scenes of Montmartre. There were landscapes of the Sussex downs, with a slight atmosphere of Japan and landscapes of Japan that were not at all like Japan, but none the less beautiful for that. The books of devotion were banished to the company of superannuated Latin and Greek textbooks on the lower shelf of a cupboard in the morning-room, whose upper shelf was stacked with tinned fruits. Incense was still burnt, not as once to induce prayers to ascend, but to stupefy Michael with scent and warmth into an imitation of a drug-taker’s listless paradise. This condition was accentuated by erecting over the head of his bed a canopy of faded green satin, which gave him acute æsthetic pleasure, until one night it collapsed upon him in the middle of the night. Every piece of upholstery in the room was covered with art linens that with the marching years had ousted the art muslins of Michael’s childhood. He also covered with squares of the same material the gas brackets, pushing themback against the wall and relying for light upon candles only. Notwithstanding Wilmot’s talk about literature, the influence of Wilmot’s friends was too strong, and Michael could not resist the deckle-edges of negligible poets. As these were expensive, Michael’s library lacked scope, and he himself, reflecting his pastime, came to believe in the bitterness and sweetness and bitter-sweetness of the plaintive sinners who printed so elegantly on such permanent paper the versification of their irregularity.
Irregularity was now being subjected to Michael’s process of idealistic alchemy, and since his conception of irregularity was essentially romantic, and since he shrank from sentiment, he was able to save himself, when presently all this decoration fell to pieces, and revealed naked unpleasantness. Nothing in his present phase had yet moved him so actually as his brief encounter with Brother Aloysius. That glimpse of a fearful and vital underworld had been to him romantic without trappings; it was a glimpse into an underworld to which one day he might descend, since it asked no sighing for the vanished joys of the past, for the rose-gardens of Rome. He began to play with the idea of departing suddenly from his present life and entering the spectral reality of the Seven Sisters Road, treading whatever raffish raddled pavement knew the hollow steps of a city’s prowlers. Going home on Sunday nights from the perfumed house in Edwardes Square and passing quickly and apprehensively figures that materialized in a circle of lamplight, he would contrast their existence with what remained in his senses of stale cigarette-smoke and self-conscious airs and attitudes. Yet the very picture he conjured of the possibility that haunted him made him the more anxious to substitute for the stark descent to hell the Sicilian or Satanic affectations of the luxurious mimes who postured against a background of art. Much of the talk at Edwardes Squareconcerned itself with the pastoral side of school-life, and Michael found himself being cross-questioned by elderly faun-like men who had a conception of an English public-school that was more Oriental than correct. Michael vainly tried to dispel these illusions, which made him resentful and for the moment crudely normal. He felt towards them much as he felt towards Garrod’s attempt to cure his ignorance at Clere. These were excellent fellows from whom to accept a cigarette or sometimes even an invitation to lunch at a Soho restaurant, but when they presumed upon his condescension and dared to include in their tainted outlook himself as a personal factor, Michael shrivelled with a virginal disdain.
Unreasonably to the others, Michael did not object very much to Wilmot’s oracular addresses on the delights of youth. He felt that so much of Wilmot was in the mere word, and he admired so frankly his embroideries of any subject, and above all he liked Wilmot so much personally, that he listened to him, and was even so far influenced by him as to try to read into the commonplace of a summer term all that Wilmot would suggest.
“O fortunate shepherd, to whom will you pipe to-morrow, or what slim and agile companion will you crown for his prowess? O lucky youth, able to drowse in the tempered sunlight that the elm-trees give, while your friend splendidly cool in his white flannels bats and bowls for your delight!”
“But I haven’t got any particular friend that I can watch,” objected Michael.
“One day you will terribly regret the privileges of your pastoral life.”
“Do you really think I am not getting all I can out of school?” demanded Michael.
“I’m sure you’re not,” said Wilmot.
Michael began to trouble himself over Wilmot’s warning,and also he began to look back with sentimental regret to what had really been his happiest time, his friendship with Alan. Pride kept him from approaching Alan with nothing to offer for nearly two years’ indifference. There had been no quarrel. They had merely gradually drifted apart, yet it was with a deep pang of remorse that one day he realized in passing the dusty Upper Fifth that Alan was now wrestling with that imprisonment. Michael racked his brains to think of some way by which he and Alan might come together in their old amity, their perfect fellowship. He sought some way that would make it natural and inevitable, but no way presented itself. He could, so deep was his sudden regret, have stifled his own pride and deliberately invited Alan to be friends; he would even have risked a repulse; but with the renewal of his longing for the friendship came a renewal of the old sympathy and utter comprehension of Alan’s most secret moods, and Michael realized that his old friend would be too shy to accept this strange, inexplicable revival, unless it were renewed, as it was begun, by careless, artless intercourse.
The immediate result of this looking back to an earlier period was to arouse in Michael an interest in boys younger than himself, and through his idealism to endow them with a conscious joy of life which he fell to envying. He had a desire to warn them of the enchantment under whose benign and dulcet influence they lived, to warn them that soon the lovely spell would be broken, and bid them make the most of their stripling time. Continually he was seeing boys in the lower forms whose friendship blooming like two flowers on a spray shed a fragrance so poignant that tears came springing to his eyes. He began to imagine himself very old, to feel that by some unkind gift of temperament he had nothing left to live for. It chanced that summer term the History Sixth learned for repetitionthe Odes of Keats, and in the Ode on a Grecian Urn Michael found the expression of his mood:
These lines were learnt in June, and for Michael they enshrined immortally his yearning. Never had the fugitive summer glided so fast, since never before had he sat in contemplation of its flight. Until this moment he had been one with the season’s joy like a bird or a sunbeam, but now for the first time he had the opportunity of regarding the empty field during the hours of school, and of populating it with the merry ghosts of the year with Caryll. All through schooltime the mowing-machine hummed its low harmony of perishable minutes and wasted sunlight. The green field was scattered with the wickets of games in progress that stood luminously in golden trios, so brightly did the sunny weather enhance their wood. The scoring-board of the principal match stared like a stopped clock with the record of the last breathless run, and as if to mock the stillness from a distant corner came a sound of batting, where at the nets the two professionals practised idly. A bluebottle buzzed upon the window-pane; pigeons flapped from pinnacle to pinnacle of the chapel; sparrows cheeped on a persistent note; pens scratched paper; Mr. Kirkham turned a Blue Book’s page at regular intervals.