Finally the morning of the marriage arrived, and Michael, feeling that this was an excellent opportunity to have the first of his dramas staged in reality, declined to be present. His refusal was a little less dramatic than he had intended, because Kathleen was too much excited by her own reckless behaviour to act up. While Michael waited for the ceremony’sconclusion, he began a poem called ‘Renunciation.’ Unfortunately the marriage service was very much faster than his Muse, and he never got farther than half the opening line, ‘If I renounce.’ Michael, however, ascribed his failure to a little girl who would persist in bouncing a tennis ball near his seat in the gardens.
The wedding was only concluded just in time, because Mr. and Mrs. McDonnell arrived on the following day and Michael’s expeditions with Kathleen were immediately forbidden. Possibly the equable Miss McDonnell had been faintly alarmed for her sister’s good name. At any rate she had certainly been annoyed by her continuous neglect.
Michael, however, had a long interview with Trimble, and managed to warn Kathleen that her husband was going to present himself after dinner. Trimble and he had thought this was more likely to suit Mr. McDonnell’s digestion than an after-breakfast confession. Michael expressed himself perfectly willing to take all the blame, and privately made up his mind that if Mr. McDonnell tried to be ‘too funny,’ he would summon his mother to ‘polish him off’ with the vision of her manifest superiority.
Somewhat to Michael’s chagrin his share in the matter was overlooked by Mr. McDonnell, and the oration he had prepared to quell the long-lipped Irish father was never delivered. Whatever scenes of domestic strife occurred, occurred without Michael’s assistance, and he was not a little dismayed to be told by Kathleen in the morning that all had passed off well, but that in the circumstances her father had thought they had better leave Bournemouth at once.
“You’re going?” stammered Michael.
“Yes. We must be getting back. It’s all been so sudden, and Walter’s coming into the business, and eh, I’m as happy as the day is long.”Michael watched them all depart, and after a few brave good-byes and three flutters from Kathleen’s handkerchief turned sadly back into the large, unfriendly hotel. He knew the number of Kathleen’s room, and in an access of despair that was, however, not so overwhelming as to preclude all self-consciousness, he wandered down the corridor and peeped into the late haunt of his love. The floor was littered with tissue paper, broken cardboard-boxes, empty toilet-bottles, and all the disarray of departure. Michael caught his breath at the sudden revelation of this abandoned room’s appeal. Here was the end of Kathleen’s maidenhood; here still lingered the allurement of her presence; but Trimble could never see this last virginal abode, this elusive shrine that Michael wished he could hire for sentimental meditations. Along the corridor came the sound of a dustpan. He looked round hastily for one souvenir of Kathleen, and perceived still moist from her last quick ablution a piece of soap. He seized it quickly and surrendered the room to the destructive personality of the housemaid.
“Well, dear,” asked Mrs. Fane at lunch, “did your lady love give you anything to commemorate your help? Darling Michael, you must have made a most delicious knight-errant.”
“Oh, no, she didn’t give me anything,” said Michael. “Why should she?”
Then he blushed, thinking of the soap that was even now enshrined in a drawer and scenting his handkerchiefs and ties. He wondered if Alan would understand the imperishable effluence from that slim cenotaph of soap.
IN the air of the Easter holidays that year there must have been something unusually amorous even for April, for when Michael came back to school he found that most of his friends and contemporaries had been wounded by love’s darts. Alan, to be sure, returned unscathed, but as he had been resting in the comparatively cloistral seclusion of Cobble Place, Michael did not count his whole heart much honour to anything except his lack of opportunity. Everybody else had come back in possession of girls; some even had acquired photographs. There was talk of gloves and handkerchiefs, of flowers and fans, but nobody, as far as Michael could cautiously ascertain, had thought of soap; and he congratulated himself upon his relic. Also, apparently, all his friends in their pursuit of Eastertide nymphs had been successful, and he began to take credit to himself for being unlucky. His refusal (to this already had come Kathleen’s suddenly withdrawn hand) gave him a peculiar interest, and those of his friends in whom he confided looked at him with awe, and listened respectfully to his legend of despair.
Beneath the hawthorns on the golden afternoons and lingering topaz eves of May, Michael would wait for Alan to finish his game of cricket, and between lazily applauded strokes and catches he would tell the tale of Kathleen to his fellows:
“I asked her to wait for me. Of course she was older than me. I said I was ready to marry her when I was twenty-one, but there was another chap, a decent fellow,devilish handsome, too. He was frightfully rich, and so she agreed to elope with him. I helped them no end. I told her father he simply must not attempt to interfere. But, of course, I was frightfully cut up—oh, absolutely knocked out. We’re all of us unlucky in love in our family. My sister was in love with an Austrian who was killed by an avalanche. I don’t suppose I shall ever be in love again. They say you never really fall in love more than once in your life. I feel a good deal older this term. I suppose I look ... oh, well hit indeed—run it out, and again, sir, and again ...!”
So Michael would break off the tale of his love, until one of his listeners would seek to learn more of passion’s frets and fevers.
“But, Bangs, what about the day she eloped? What did you do?”
“I wrote poetry,” Michael would answer.
“Great Scott, that’s a bit of a swat, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s a bit difficult,” Michael would agree. “Only, of course, I only writevers libre. No rhymes or anything.”
And then an argument would arise as to whether poetry without rhymes could fairly be called poetry at all. This argument, or another like it, would last until the cricket stopped, when Michael and his fellows would stroll into the pavilion and examine the scoring-book or criticize the conduct of the game.
It was a pleasant time, that summer term, and life moved on very equably for Michael, notwithstanding his Eastertide heartbreak. Alan caused him a little trouble by his indifference to anything but cricket, and one Sunday, when May had deepened into June, Michael took him to task for his attitude. Alan had asked Michael over to Richmond for the week-end, and the two of them had punted down the river towards Kew. They had moored their boat under a weeping willow about the time when thebells for church, begin to chime across the level water-meadows.
“Alan, aren’t you ever going to fall in love?” Michael began.
“Why should I?” Alan countered in his usual way.
“I don’t know. I think it’s time you did,” said Michael. “You’ve no idea how much older it makes you feel. And I suppose you don’t want to remain a kid for ever. Because, you know, old chap, you are an awful kid beside me.”
“Thanks very much,” said Alan. “I believe you’re exactly one month older, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes, in actual time,” said Michael earnestly. “But in experience I’m years older than you.”
“That must be why you’re such a rotten field,” commented Alan. “After forty the joints get stiff.”
“Oh, chuck being funny,” said Michael severely. “I’m in earnest. Now you know as well as I do that last term and the term before I was miserable. Well, look at me now. I’m absolutely happy.”
“I thought you were so frightfully depressed,” said Alan, twinkling. “I thought you’d had an unlucky love affair. It seems to take you differently from the way it takes most people.”
“Oh, of course, Iwasmiserable,” Michael explained. “But now I’m happy in her happiness. That’s love.”
Alan burst out laughing, and Michael observed that if he intended to receive his confidences in such a flippant way, he would in future take care to be more secretive.
“I’m showing you what a lot I care about you,” Michael went on in tones of deepest injury, “by telling you about myself. I think it’s rather rotten of you to laugh.”
“But you’ve told everybody,” Alan pointed out.
Michael took another tack, and explained to Alan that he wanted the spur of his companionship in everything.
“It would be so ripping if we were both in love,” he sighed. “Honestly, Alan, don’t you feel I’m much more developed since last term? I say, you played awfully well yesterday against Dulford Second. If you go on improving at the rate you are now, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get your Blue at Oxford. By Jove, you know, in eighteen months we shall be at Oxford. Are you keen?”
“Frightfully keen,” said Alan. “Especially if I haven’t got to be in love all the time.”
“I’m not going to argue with you any more,” Michael announced. “But you’re making a jolly big mistake. Still, of course, I do understand about your cricket, and I dare say love might make you a bit boss-eyed. Perhaps when footer begins again next term, I shall get over this perpetual longing I have for Kathleen. You’ve no idea how awful I felt when she said she loved Trimble. He was rather a bounder too, but of course I had to help them. I say, Alan, do you remember Dora and Winnie?”
“Rather,” said Alan, smiling. “We made pretty good asses of ourselves over them. Do you remember how fed up Nancy got?”
So, very easily the conversation drifted into reminiscences of earlier days, until the sky was quilted with rose-tipped pearly clouds. Then they swung a Japanese lantern in the prow and worked up-stream towards Richmond clustering dark against the west, while an ivory moon shimmered on the dying azure of the day behind.
Throughout June the image of Kathleen became gradually fainter and fainter with each materialization that Michael evoked. Then one evening before dinner he found that the maid had forgotten to put a fresh cake of soap in the dish. It was a question of ringing the bell or of callously using Kathleen’s commemorative tablet. Michael went to his drawer and, as he slowly washed his hands, he washed from his mind the few insignificantoutlines of Kathleen that were printed there. The soap was Trèfle Incarnat, and somewhat cynically Michael relished the savour of it, and even made up his mind to buy a full fat cake when this one should be finished. Kathleen, however, even in the fragrant moment of her annihilation, had her revenge, for Michael experienced a return of the old restlessness and discontent that was not mitigated by Alan’s increasing preoccupation with cricket. He did not complain of this, for he respected the quest of School Colours, and was proud for Alan. At the same time something must be done to while away these warm summer evenings until at Basingstead Minor, where his mother had delightfully agreed to take a cottage for the summer, he and Alan could revive old days at Cobble Place.
One evening Michael went out about nine o’clock to post a letter and, finding the evening velvety and calm, strolled on through the enticing streets of twilight. The violet shadows in which the white caps and aprons of gossiping maids took on a moth-like immaterial beauty, the gliding, enraptured lovers, the scent of freshly watered flower-boxes, the stars winking between the chimney-pots, and all the drowsy alertness of a fine London dusk drew him on to turn each new corner as it arrived, until he saw the sky stained with dull gold from the reflection of the lively crater of the Earl’s Court Exhibition, and heard over the vague intervening noises music that was sometimes clearly melodious, sometimes a mere confusion of spasmodic sound.
Michael suddenly thought he would like to spend his evening at the Exhibition, and wondered to himself why he had never thought of going there casually like this, why always he had considered it necessary to devote a hot afternoon and flurried evening to its exploitation. By the entrance he met a fellow-Jacobean, one Drake,whose accentuated mannishness, however disagreeable in the proximity of the school, might be valuable at the Exhibition. Michael therefore accepted his boisterous greeting pleasantly enough, and they passed through the turnstiles together.
“I’ll introduce you to a smart girl, if you like,” Drake offered, as they paused undecided between the attractions of two portions of the Exhibition. “She sells Turkish Delight by the Cave of the Four Winds. Very O.T., my boy,” Drake went on.
“Do you mean——” Michael began.
“What? Rather,” said Drake. “I’ve been home to her place.”
“No joking?” Michael asked.
“Yes,” affirmed Drake with a triumphant inhalation of sibilant breath.
“Rather lucky, wasn’t it?” Michael asked. “I mean to say, it was rather lucky to meet her.”
“She might take you home,” suggested Drake, examining Michael critically.
“But I mightn’t like her,” Michael expostulated.
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Drake, struck by a point of view that was obviously dismaying in its novelty, “you don’t mean to say you’d bother about that, if you could?”
“Well, I rather think I should,” Michael admitted. “I think I’d want to be in love.”
“You are an extraordinary chap,” said Drake. “Now if I were dead nuts on a girl, the last thing I’d think of would be that.”
They walked along silently, each one pondering the other’s incomprehensibleness, until they came to the stall presided over by Miss Mabel Bannerman, who in Michael’s opinion bore a curious resemblance to the Turkish Delight she sold. With the knowledge of her he had obtained from Drake, Michael regarded Miss Bannerman very muchas he would have looked at an animal in the Zoological Gardens with whose habits he had formed a previous acquaintanceship through a book of natural history. He tried to perceive beyond her sachet-like hands and watery blue eyes and spongy hair and full-blown breast the fascination which had made her man’s common property. Then he looked at Drake, and came to the conclusion that the problem was not worth the difficulty of solution.
“I think I’ll be getting back,” said Michael awkwardly.
“Why, it’s not ten,” gasped Drake. “Don’t be an ass. Mabel gets out at eleven, and we can take her home. Can’t we, Mabel?”
“Sauce!” Mabel archly snapped.
This savoury monosyllable disposed of Michael’s hesitation, and, as the personality of Mabel cloyed him with a sudden nausea like her own Turkish Delight, he left her to Drake without another word and went home to bed.
The night was hot and drew Michael from vain attempts at sleep to the open window where, as he sat thinking, a strange visionary survey of the evening, a survey that he himself could scarcely account for, was conjured up. He had not been aware at the time of much more than Drake and the Turkish Delight stall. Now he realized that he too craved for a Mabel, not a peony of a woman who could be flaunted like a vulgar button-hole, but a more shy, a more subtle creature, yet conquerable. Then, as Michael stared out over the housetops at the brooding pavilion of sky which enclosed the hectic city, he began to recall the numberless glances, the countless attitudes, all the sensuous phantasmagoria of the Exhibition’s population. He remembered a slim hand, a slanting eye, lips translucent in a burst of light. He caught at scents that, always fugitive, were now utterly incommunicable; he trembled at the remembrance of some contact in a crowdthat had been at once divinely intimate and unendurably remote. The illusion of all the city’s sleepers calling to him became more and more vivid under each stifling breath of the night. Somewhere beneath that sable diadem of chimney-tops she lay, that lovely girl of his desire. He would not picture her too clearly lest he should destroy the charm of this amazing omnipotence of longing. He would be content to enfold the imagination of her, and at dawn let her slip from his arms like a cloud. He would sit all the night time at his window, aware of kisses. Was this the emotion that prompted poets to their verses? Michael broke his trance to search for paper and pencil, and wrote ecstatically.
In the morning, when he read what he had written, he hastily tore it up, and made up his mind that the Earl’s Court Exhibition would feed his fire more satisfactorily than bad verses. Half a guinea would buy a season-ticket, and July should be a pageant of sensations.
Every night Michael went to Earl’s Court, and here a hundred brilliant but evanescent flames were kindled in his heart, just as in the Exhibition gardens every night for three hours the fairy-lamps spangled the edge of the paths in threads of many-tinted lights. Michael always went alone, because he did not desire any but his own discoveries to reward his excited speculation. At first he merely enjoyed the sensation of the slow stream of people that continually went up and down, or strolled backwards and forwards, or circled round the bandstand that was set out like a great gaudy coronet upon the parterres of lobelias and geraniums and calceolarias that with nightfall came to seem brocaded cushions.
It was a time profitable with a thousand reflections, this crowded hour of the promenade. There was always the mesmeric sighing of silk skirts and the ceaseless murmur of conversation; there was the noise of the band and thetapping of canes; there was, in fact, a regularity of sound that was as infinitely soothing as breaking waves or a wind-ruffled wood. There were the sudden provocative glances which flashed as impersonally as precious stones, and yet lanced forth a thrill that no faceted gem could give. There were hands whose white knuckles, as they rippled over Michael’s hands in some momentary pressure of the throng, gave him a sense of being an instrument upon which a chord had been clearly struck. There were strands of hair that floated against his cheeks with a strange, but exquisitely elusive intimacy of communication. It was all very intoxicating and very sensuous; but the spell crept over him as imperceptibly as if he were merely yielding himself to the influence of a beautiful landscape, as if he were lotus-eating in a solitude created by numbers.
Michael, however, was not content to dream away in a crowd these passionate nights of July; and after a while he set out to find adventures in the great bazaar of the Exhibition, wandering through the golden corridors and arcades with a queer sense of suppressed expectancy. So many fantastic trades were carried on here, that it was natural to endow the girls behind the counters with a more romantic life than that of ordinary and anæmic shop-assistants. Even Miss Mabel Bannerman amid her Turkish Delight came to seem less crude in such surroundings, and Michael once or twice had thoughts of prosecuting his acquaintanceship; for as yet he had not been able to bring himself to converse with any of the numerous girls, so much more attractive than Mabel, who were haunting him with their suggestion of a strange potentiality.
Michael wandered on past the palmists who went in and out of their tapestried tents; past the physiognomists and phrenologists and graphologists; past the vendors of scents and silver; past the languid women who spread out their golden rugs from Samarcand; past the Orientalshops fuming with odorous pastilles, where lamps encrusted in deep-hued jewels of glass glimmered richly; past that slant-eyed cigarette-seller with the crimson fez crowning her dark hair.
July was nearing its end; the holidays were in sight; and still Michael had got no farther with his ambitions; still at the last moment he would pass on and neglect some perfect opportunity for speech. He used to rail at his cowardice, and repeat to himself all his academic knowledge of frail womanhood. He even took the trouble to consult the Ars Amatoria, and was so much impressed by Ovid’s prescription for behaviour at a circus that he determined to follow his advice. To put his theory into practice, Michael selected a booth where seals performed for humanity at sixpence a head. But all his resolutions ended in sitting mildly amused by the entertainment in a condition of absolute decorum.
School broke up with the usual explosion of self-congratulatory rhetoric from which Michael, owing to his Exhibition ticket, failed to emerge with any calf-bound souvenir of intellectual achievement. He minded this less than his own pusillanimous behaviour on the brink of experience. It made him desperate to think that in two days he would be at Basingstead with his mother and Alan and Mrs. Ross, utterly remote even from the pretence of temptation.
“Dearest Michael, you really must get your things together,” expostulated Mrs. Fane, when he announced his intention of going round to the Exhibition as usual on the night before they were to leave town.
“Well, mother, I can pack when I come in, and I do want to get all I can out of this ‘season.’ You see it will be absolutely wasted for August and half September.”
“Michael,” said Mrs. Fane suddenly, “you’re not keeping anything from me?”
“Good gracious, no. What makes you ask?” Michael demanded, blushing.
“I was afraid that perhaps some horrid girl might have got hold of you,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Why, would you mind very much?” asked Michael, with a curious hopefulness that his mother would pursue the subject, as if by so doing she would give him an opportunity of regarding himself and his behaviour objectively.
“I don’t know that I should mind very much,” said Mrs. Fane, “if I thought you were quite certain not to do anything foolish.” Then she seemed to correct the laxity of her point of view, and substituted, “anything that you might regret.”
“What could I regret?” asked Michael, seeking to drive his mother on to the rocks of frankness.
“Surely you know what better than I can tell you. Don’t you?” The note of interrogation caught the wind, and Mrs. Fane sailed off on the starboard tack.
“But as long as you’re not keeping anything from me,” she went on, “I don’t mind. So go out, dear child, and enjoy yourself by all means. But don’t be very late.”
“I never am,” said Michael quickly, and a little resentfully as he thought of his very decorous homecomings.
“I know you’re not. You’re really a very dear fellow,” his mother murmured, now safe in port.
So at nine o’clock as usual Michael passed through the turnstiles and began his feverish progress across the Exhibition grounds, trying as he had never tried before to screw himself up to the pitch of the experience he craved.
He was standing by one of the entrances to the Court of Marvels, struggling with his self-consciousness and egging himself on to be bold on this his last night, when he heard himself accosted as Mr. Michael Fane. He looked round and saw a man whom he instantly recognized, but for the moment could not name.
“It is Mr. Michael Fane?” the stranger asked. “You don’t remember me? I met you at Clere Abbey.”
“Brother Aloysius!” Michael exclaimed, and as he uttered the high-sounding religious appellation he almost laughed at the incongruity of it in connection with this slightly overdressed and dissolute-looking person he so entitled.
“Well, not exactly, old chap. At least not in this get-up. Meats is my name.”
“Oh, yes,” said Michael vaguely. There seemed no other comment on such a name, and Mr. Meats himself appeared sensitive to the implication of uncertainty, for he made haste to put Michael at ease by commenting on its oddity.
“I suppose you’re thinking it’s a damned funny exchange for Brother Aloysius. But a fellow can’t help his name, and that’s a fact.”
“You’ve left the Abbey then?” enquired Michael.
“Oh Lord, yes. Soon after you went. It was no place for me. Manners, O.S.B., gave me the push pretty quick. And I don’t blame him. Well, what are you doing? Have a drink? Or have you got to meet your best girl? My, you’ve grown since I saw you last. Quite the Johnny nowadays. But I spotted you all right. Something about your eyes that would be very hard to forget.”
Michael thought that if it came to unforgettable eyes, the eyes of Mr. Meats would stand as much chance of perpetual remembrance as any, since their unholy light would surely set any heart beating with the breathless imagination of sheer wickedness.
“Yes, I have got funny eyes, haven’t I?” said Meats in complacent realization of Michael’s thoughts. And as he spoke he seemed consciously to exercise their vile charm, so that his irises kindled slowly with lambent blue flames.
“Come on, let’s have this drink,” urged Meats, andhe led the way to a scattered group of green tables. They sat down, and Michael ordered a lemon-squash.
“Very good drink too,” commented Meats. “I think I’ll have the same, Rosie,” he said to the girl who served them.
“Do you know that girl?” Michael asked.
“Used to. About three years ago. She’s gone oil though,” said Meats indifferently.
Michael, to hide his astonishment at the contemptuous suggestion of damaged goods, enquired what Meats had been doing since he left the Monastery.
“Want to know?” asked Meats.
Michael assured him that he did.
“You’re rather interested in me, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you a few things and that’s a fact. I don’t suppose that there’s anybody in London who could tell you more. But you might be shocked.”
“Oh, shut up!” scoffed Michael, blushing with indignation.
Then began the shameless narration of the late Brother Aloysius, whom various attainments had enabled to gain an equal profit from religion and vice. Sometimes as Michael listened to the adventures he was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini or Casanova, but almost immediately the comparison would be shattered by a sudden sanctimonious blasphemy which he found nauseating. Moreover, he disliked the sly procurer that continually leered through the man’s personality.
“You seem to have done a lot of dirty work for other people,” Michael bluntly observed at last.
“My dear old chap,” replied Meats, “of course I have. You see, in this world there are lots of people who can always square their own consciences, if the worst of what they want to do is done for them behind the scenes as it were. You never yet heard a man confess that he ruineda girl. Now, did you? Why, I’ve heard the most shocking out-and-outers anyone could wish to meet brag that they’ve done everything, and then turn up their eyes and thank God they’ve always respected real purity. Well, I never respected anything or anybody. And why should I? I never had a chance. Who was my mother? A servant. Who was my father? A minister, a Nonconformist minister in Wales. And what did the old tyke do? Why, he took the case to court and swore my mother was out for blackmail. So she went to prison, and he came smirking home behind the village band; and all the old women in the place hung out Union Jacks to show they believed in him. And then his wife gave a party.”
Michael looked horrified and felt horrified at this revelation of vileness, and yet, all the time he was listening, through some grotesquery of his nerves he was aware of thinking to himself the jingle of Little Bo-peep.
“Ah, that’s touched you up, hasn’t it?” said Meats, eagerly leaning forward. “But wait a bit. What did my mother do when she came out? Went on the streets. Do you hear? On the streets, and mark you, she was a servant, a common village servant, none of your flash Empire goods. Oh, no, she never knew what it was like to go up the river on a Sunday afternoon. And she drank. Well, of course she drank. Gin was as near as she ever got to paradise. And where was I brought up? Not among the buttercups, my friend, you may lay on that. No, I was down underneath, underneath, underneath where a chap like you will never go because you’re a gentleman. And so, though, of course, you’re never likely to ruin a girl, you’ll always have your fun. Why shouldn’t you? Being a nicely brought-up young gentleman, it’s your birthright.”
“But how on earth did you ever become a monk?” asked Michael, anxious to divert the conversation away from himself.
“Well, it does sound a bit improbable, I must say. I was recommended there by a priest—a nice chap called Arbuthnot who’d believe a chimney-sweep was a miller. But Manners was very sharp on to me, and I was very sharp on to Manners. Picking blackberries and emptying slops! What a game! I came with a character and left without one. Probationer was what they called me. Silly mug was what I called myself.”
“You seem to know a lot of priests,” said Michael.
“Oh, I’ve been in with parsons since I was at Sunday-school. Well, don’t look so surprized. You don’t suppose my mother wanted me hanging round all the afternoon! Now I very soon found out that one can always get round a High Church slum parson, and very often a Catholic priest by turning over a new leaf and confessing. It gets them every time, and being by nature generous, it gets their pockets. That’s why I gave up Dissenters and fashionable Vicars. Dissenters want more than they give, and fashionable Vicars are too clever. That’s why they become fashionable Vicars, I suppose,” said Meats pensively.
“But you couldn’t go on taking in even priests for ever,” Michael objected.
“Ah, now I’ll tell you something. I do feel religious sometimes,” Meats declared solemnly. “And I do really want to lead a new life. But it doesn’t last. It’s like love. Never mind, perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to die when I’m working off a religious stretch. I give you my word, Fane, that often in these fits I’ve felt like committing suicide just to cheat the devil. Would you believe that?”
“I don’t think you’re as bad as you make out,” said Michael sententiously.
“Oh, yes, I am,” smiled the other. “I’m rotten bad. But I reckon the first man I meet in hell will be my father, and if it’s possible to hurt anyone down there more than they’re being hurt already, I’ll do it. But look here, I shallget the hump with this blooming conversation you’ve started me off on. Come along, drink up and have another, and tell us something about yourself.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to tell,” Michael sighed. “My existence is pretty dull after yours.”
“I suppose it is,” said Meats, as if struck by a new thought. “Everything has its compensations, as they say.”
“Frightfully dull,” Michael vowed. “Why, here am I still at school! You know I wouldn’t half mind going down underneath, as you call it, for a while. I believe I’d like it.”
“If you knew you could get up again all right,” commented Meats.
“Oh, of course,” Michael answered. “I don’t suppose Æneas would have cared much about going down to hell, if he hadn’t been sure he could come up again quite safely.”
“Well, I don’t know your friend with the Jewish name,” said Meats. “But I’ll lay he didn’t come out much wiser than he went in if he knew he could get out all right by pressing a button and taking the first lift up.”
“Oh, well, I was only speaking figuratively,” Michael explained.
“So was I. The same here, and many of them, old chap,” retorted Meats enigmatically.
“Ah, you don’t think I’m in earnest. You think I’m fooling,” Michael complained.
“Oh, yes, I think you’d like to take a peep without letting go of Nurse’s apron,” sneered Meats.
“Well, perhaps one day you’ll see me underneath,” Michael almost threatened.
“No offence, old chap,” said Meats cordially. “It’s no good my giving you an address because it won’t last, but London isn’t very big, and we’ll run up against one another again, that’s a cert. Now I’ve got to toddle off and meet a girl.”
“Have you?” asked Michael, and his enquiry was tinged with a faint longing that the other noticed at once.
“Jealous?” enquired Meats. “Why, look at all the girls round about you. It’s up to you not to feel lonely.”
“I know,” said Michael fretfully. “But how the deuce can I tell whether they want me to talk to them?”
Meats laughed shrilly.
“What are you afraid of? Leading some innocent lamb astray?”
Again to Michael occurred the ridiculous rhyme of Bo-peep. So insistent was it that he could scarcely refrain from humming it aloud.
“Of course I’m not afraid of that,” he protested. “But how am I to tell they won’t think me a brute?”
“What would it matter if they did?” asked Meats.
“Well, I should feel a fool.”
“Oh, dear. You’re very young, aren’t you?”
“It’s nothing to do with being young,” Michael asserted. “I simply don’t want to be a cad.”
“Somebody else is to be the cad first and then it’s all right, eh?” chuckled Meats. “But it’s a shame to teaze a nice chap like you. I dare say Daisy’ll have a friend with her.”
“Is Daisy the girl you’re going to see?”
“You’ve guessed my secret,” said Meats. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
As Michael rose to follow Meats, he felt that he was like Faust with Mephistopheles. But Faust had asked for his youth back again. Michael only demanded the courage not to waste youth while it was his to enjoy. He felt that his situation was essentially different from the other, and he hesitated no longer.
The next half-hour passed in a whirl. Michael was conscious of a slim brunette in black and scarlet, and of a fairy-like figure by her side in a dress of shimmering blue;he was conscious too of a voice insinuating, softly metallic, and of fingers that touched his wrist as lightly as silk. There were whispers and laughters and sudden sweeping embarrassments. There was a horrible sense of publicity, of curious mocking eyes that watched his progress. There was an overwhelming knowledge of money burning in his pocket, of money hard and round and powerful. There were hot waves of remorse and the thought of his heart hammering him on to be brave. A cabman leaned over from his box like a gargoyle. A key clicked.
Then, it seemed a century afterwards, Carlington Road stretched dim, austere, forbidding to Michael’s ingress. A policeman’s deep salutation sounded portentously reproachful. The bloom of dawn was on the windows. The flames in the street-lamps were pale as primroses. At his own house Michael saw the red and amber sparrows in their crude blue vegetation horribly garish against the lighted entrance-hall. The Salve printed funereally upon the mat was the utterance of blackest irony. He hastily turned down the gas, and the stairs caught a chill unreality from the creeping dawn. The balustrade stuck to his parched hands; the stairs creaked grotesquely to his breathless ascent. His mother stood like a ghost in her doorway.
“Michael, how dreadfully late you are.”
“Am I?” said Michael. “I suppose it is rather late. I met a fellow I know.”
He spoke petulantly to conceal his agitation, and his one thought was to avoid kissing her before he went up to his own room.
“It’s all right about my packing,” he murmured hastily. “In the morning I shall have time. I’m sorry I woke you. Good night.”
He had passed; and he looked back compassionately, as she faded in her rosy and indefinite loveliness away to her room.
Then, with the patterns of foulard ties crawling like insects before his strained eyes, with collars coiling and uncoiling like mainsprings, with all his clothes in one large intolerable muddle, Michael pressed the cold sheets to his forehead and tried to imagine that to-morrow he would be in the country.
AS Michael sat opposite to his mother in the railway-carriage on the following morning, he found it hard indeed to realize that an ocean did not stretch between them. He did not feel ashamed; he had no tremors for the straightforward regard; he had no uneasy sensation that possibly even now his mother was perplexing herself on account of his action. He simply felt that he had suffered a profound change and that his action of yesterday called for a readjustment of his entire standpoint. Or rather, he felt that having since yesterday travelled so far and lived so violently, he could now only meet his mother as a friend from whom one has been long parted and whose mental progress during many years must be gradually apprehended.
“Why do you look at me with such a puzzled expression, Michael?” asked Mrs. Fane. “Is my hat crooked?”
Michael assured her that nothing was the matter with her hat.
“Do you want to ask me something?” persisted Mrs. Fane.
Michael shook his head and smiled, wondering whether he did really wish to ask her a question, whether he would be relieved to know what attitude she would adopt towards his adventure. With so stirring a word did he enhance what otherwise would have seemed base. His mother evidently was aware of a tension in this ridiculously circumscribed railway-carriage. Would it be released if he were to inform her frankly of what had happened, or wouldsuch, an admission be an indiscretion from which their relationship would never recover? After all she was his mother, and there must positively exist in her inmost self the power of understanding what he had done. Some part of the impulse which had actuated his behaviour would surely find a root in the heart of the handsome woman who travelled with such becoming repose on the seat opposite to him. He forgot to bother about himself in this sudden new pleasure of observation that seemed to endow him with undreamed-of opportunities of distraction and, what was more important, with a stable sense of his own individuality. How young his mother looked! Until now he had taken her youth for granted, but she must be nearly forty. It was scarcely credible that this tall slim creature with the proud, upcurving mouth and lustrous grey eyes was his own mother. He thought of his friends’ homes that were presided over by dumpy women in black silk with greying hair. Even Alan’s mother, astonishingly pretty though she was, seemed in the picture he conjured of her to look faded beside his own.
And while he was pondering his mother’s beauty, the train reached the station at which they must alight for Basingstead. There was Alan in white flannels on the platform, there too was Mrs. Ross; and as she greeted his mother Michael’s thoughts went back to the day he saw these two come together at Carlington Road, and by their gracious encounter drive away the shadow of Nurse.
“I vote we walk,” said Alan. “Mrs. Fane and Aunt Maud can drive in the pony-chaise, and then your luggage can all come up at once in the cart.”
So it was arranged, and as Michael watched his mother and Mrs. Ross drive off, he was strangely reminded of a picture that he had once dearly loved, a picture by Flaxman of Hera and Athene driving down from Olympus to help the Greeks.Λευκὡλενος Ἡρη—that was his mother,andγλαυκὡπις Ἁθἡνη—that was Mrs. Ross. He could actually remember the line in the Iliad that told of the gates of heaven, where the Hours keep watch, opening for the goddesses’ descent—αὑτὑμαται δἑ πὑλαι μὑκοον οὑρανοι ἁς ἑχον Ὡραι. At the same time for all his high quotations, Michael could not help smiling at the dolefully senescent dun pony being compared to the golden steeds of Hera or at the pleasant old porter who hastened to throw open the white gate of the station-drive serving as a substitute for the Hours.
The country air was still sweet between the hazel hedgerows, although the grass was drouthy and the scabious blooms were already grey with dust. Nothing for Michael could have been more charged with immemorial perfume than this long walk at July’s end. It held the very quintessence of holiday airs through all the marching years of boyhood. It was haunted by the memory of all the glad anticipations of six weeks’ freedom that time after time had succeeded the turmoil of breaking up for the August holidays. The yellow amoret swinging from the tallest shoot of the hedge was the companion of how many summer walks. The acrid smell of nettles by the roadside was prophetic of how many pastoral days. The butterflies, brown and white and tortoiseshell, that danced away to right and left over the green bushes, to what winding paths did they not summon. And surely Alan gave a final grace to this first walk of the holidays. Surely he crystallized all hopes, all memories, all delights of the past in a perfection of present joy.
Yet Michael, as he walked beside him, could only think of Alan as a beautiful inanimate object for whom perception did not exist. Inanimate, however, was scarcely the word to describe one who was so very definitely alive: Michael racked his invention to discover a suitable label for Alan, but he could not find the word. With a shock ofmisgiving he asked himself whether he had outgrown their friendship, and partly to test, but chiefly to allay his dread, he took Alan’s arm with a gesture of almost fierce possession. He was relieved to find that Alan’s touch was still primed with consolation, that companionship with him still soothed the turbulence of his own spirit reaching out to grasp what could never be expressed in words, and therefore could never be grasped. Michael was seized with a longing to urge Alan to grow up more quickly, to make haste lest he should be left behind by his adventurous friend. Michael remembered how he used to dread being moved up, hating to leave Alan in a class below him, how he had deliberately dallied to allow Alan to overtake him. But idleness in school-work was not the same as idleness in experience of life, and unless Alan would quickly grow up, he knew that he must soon leave him irremediably behind. It was distressing to reflect that Alan would be shocked by the confidence which he longed to impose upon him, and it was disquieting to realize that these last summer holidays of school, however complete with the quiet contentment of familiar pleasures, would for himself grow slowly irksome with deferred excitement.
But as the green miles slowly unfolded themselves, as the dauntless yellow amoret still swung from a lissome stem, as Alan spoke of the river and the grey tower on the hill, Michael saw the fretful colours of the Exhibition grow dim; and when dreaming in the haze of the slumberous afternoon they perceived the village and heard the mysterious murmur of human tranquillity, Michael’s heart overflowed with gratitude for the sight of Alan by his side. Then the church-clock that struck a timeless hour sounded for him one of those moments whose significance would resist eternally whatever lying experience should endeavour to assail the truth which had made of one flashing scene a revelation.
Michael was ineffably refreshed by his vision of the imperishable substance of human friendship, and he could not but jeer at himself now for having a little while back put Alan into the domain of objects inanimate.
“There’s your cottage,” said Alan. “It’s practically next door to Cobble Place. Rather decent, eh?”
Michael could not say how decent he thought it, nor how decent he thought Alan.
“I vote we go up the river after tea,” he suggested.
“Rather,” said Alan. “I expect you’ll come round to tea with us. Don’t be long unpacking.”
“I shan’t, you bet,” said Michael.
Nor was he, and after a few minutes he and his mother were sitting in the drawing-room at Cobble Place, eating a tea that must have been very nearly the same as an unforgettable tea of nine years ago. Mrs. Carthew did not seem quite so old; nor indeed did anybody, and as for Joan and May Carthew, they were still girls. Yet even when he and Alan had stayed down here for the wedding only four years ago, Michael had always been conscious of everybody’s age. And now he was curiously aware of everybody’s youth. He supposed vaguely that all this change of outlook was due to his own remarkable precocity and rapid advance; but nevertheless he still ate with all the heartiness of childhood.
After tea Mrs. Ross with much tact took up Michael by himself to see her son and, spared the necessity of comment, Michael solemnly regarded the fair-haired boy of two who was squeaking an india-rubber horse for his mother’s benefit.
“O you attractive son of mine,” Mrs. Ross sighed in a whisper.
“He’s an awfully sporting kid,” Michael said.
Then he suddenly remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Ross since her husband was killed. Yet from thischintz-hung room whose casements were flooded with the amber of the westering sun, how far off seemed fatal Africa. He remembered also that to this very same gay room he had long ago gone with Miss Carthew after tea, that here in a ribboned bed he had first heard the news of her coming to live at 64 Carlington Road.
“We must have a long talk together soon,” said Mrs. Ross, seeming to divine his thoughts. “But I expect you’re anxious to revive old memories and visit old haunts with Alan. I’m going to stay here and talk to Kenneth while Nurse has her tea.”
Michael lingered for a moment in the doorway to watch the two. Then he said abruptly, breathlessly:
“Mrs. Ross, I think painters and sculptors are lucky fellows. I’d like to paint you now. I wish one could understand the way people look, when one’s young. But I’m just beginning to realize how lucky I was when you came to us. And yet I used to be ashamed of having a governess. Still, I believe I did appreciate you, even when I was eight.”
Then he fled, and to cover his retreat sang out loudly for Alan all the way downstairs.
“I say, Aunt Enid wants to talk to you,” said Alan.
“Aunt Enid?” Michael echoed.
“Mrs. Carthew,” Alan explained.
“I vote we go for a walk afterwards, don’t you?” Michael suggested.
“Rather,” said Alan. “I’ll shout for you, when I think you’ve jawed long enough.”
Michael found Mrs. Carthew in her sun-coloured garden, cutting down the withering lupins whose silky seed-pods were strewn all about the paths.
“Can you spare ten minutes for an old friend?” asked Mrs. Carthew.
Michael thought how tremendously wise she looked, and lest he should be held to be staring unduly, he bentdown to sweep together the shimmering seed-pods, while Mrs. Carthew snipped away, talking in sentences that matched the quick snickasnack of her weapon.
“I must say you’ve grown up into an attractive youth. Let me see, you must be seventeen and a half. I suppose you think yourself a man now? Dear me, these lupins should have been cut back a fortnight ago. And now I have destroyed a hollyhock. Tut-tut, I’m getting very blind. What did you think of Maud’s son? A healthy rosy child, and not at all amenable to discipline, I’m glad to say. Well, are you enjoying school?”
The old lady paused with her scissors gaping, and looked shrewdly at Michael.
“I’m getting rather fed up with it,” Michael admitted. “It goes on for such a long time. It wasn’t so bad this term, though.”
Then he remembered that whatever pleasures had mitigated the exasperation of school last term were decidedly unscholastic, and he blushed.
“I simply loathed it for a time,” he added.
“Alan informs me he acquired his first eleven cap this term and will be in the first fifteen as Lord Treasurer or something,” Mrs. Carthew went on. “Naturally he must enjoy this shower of honours. Alan is decidedly typical of the better class of unthinking young Englishman. He is pleasant to look at—a little colt-like perhaps, but that will soon wear off. My own dear boy was very like him, and Maud’s dear husband was much the same. You, I’m afraid, think too much, Michael.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think very much,” said Michael, disclaiming philosophy, and greatly afraid that Mrs. Carthew was supposing him a prig.
“You needn’t be ashamed of thinking,” she said. “After all, the amount you think now won’t seriously disorganize the world. But you seem to me old for your age, much olderthan Alan for instance, and though your conversation with me at any rate is not mature, nevertheless you convey somehow an impression of maturity that I cannot quite account for.”
Michael could not understand why, when for the first time he was confronted with somebody who gave his precocity its due, he was unable to discuss it eagerly and voluminously, why he should half resent being considered older than Alan.
“Don’t look so cross with me,” Mrs. Carthew commanded. “I am an old woman, and I have a perfect right to say what I please to you. Besides, you and I have had many conversations, and I take a great interest in you. What are you going to be?”
“Well, that’s what I can’t find out,” said Michael desperately. “I know what I’m not going to be, and that’s all.”
“That’s a good deal, I think,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Pray tell me what professions you have condemned.”
“I’m not going into the Army. I’m not going into the Civil Service. I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer.”
“Or a parson?” asked Mrs. Carthew, crunching through so many lupin stalks at once that they fell with a rattle on to the path.
“Well, I have thought about being a parson,” Michael slowly granted. “But I don’t think parsons ought to marry.”
“Good gracious,” exclaimed Mrs. Carthew, “you’re surely not engaged?”
“Oh, no,” said Michael; but he felt extremely flattered by the imputation. “Still, I might want to be.”
“Then you’re in love,” decided Mrs. Carthew. “No wonder you look so careworn. I suppose she’s nearly thirty and has promised to wait until you come of age. I can picture her. If I had my stick with me I could draw heron the gravel. A melon stuck on a bell-glass, I’ll be bound.”
“I’m not in love, and if I were in love,” said Michael with dignity, “I certainly shouldn’t be in love with anyone like that. But I could be in love at any moment, and so I don’t think I shall be a parson.”
“You’ve got plenty of time,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Alan says you’re going to Oxford next year.”
Michael’s heart leapt—next year had never before seemed so imminent.
“I suppose you’ll say that I’m an ignorant and foolish old woman, if I attempt to give you advice about Oxford; but I gave you advice once about school, and I’ll do the same again. To begin with, I think you’ll find having been to St. James’ a handicap. I have an old friend, the wife of a don, who assures me that many of the boys who go up from your school suffer at Oxford from their selfish incubation by Dr. Brownjohn. They’re fit for killing too soon. In fact, they have been forced.”
“Ah, but I saw that for myself,” said Michael. “I had a row with Brownjohn about my future.”
“How delighted I am to hear that!” said Mrs. Carthew. “I think that I’ll cut back the delphiniums also. Then you’re not going in for a scholarship?”
“No,” said Michael. “I don’t want to be hampered, and I think my mother’s got plenty of money. But Alan’s going to get a scholarship.”
“Yes, that is unfortunately necessary,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Still, Alan is sufficiently typical of the public-school spirit—an odious expression yet always unavoidable—to carry off the burden. If you were poor, I should advise you to buy overcoats. Three smart overcoats are an equipment for a poor man. But I needn’t dwell on social ruses in your case. Remember that going to Oxford is like going to school. Be normal and inconspicuous atfirst; and when you have established yourself as an utterly undistinguished young creature, you can career into whatever absurdities of thought, action or attire you will. In your first year establish your sanity; in your second year display your charm; and in your third year do whatever you like. Now there is Alan calling, and we’ll leave the paths strewn with these cut stalks as a Memento Mori to the gardener. What a charming woman your mother is. She has that exquisite vagueness which when allied with good breeding is perfectly irresistible, at any rate to a practical and worldly old woman like me. But then I’ve had an immense amount of time in which to tidy up. Pleasant hours to you down here. It’s delightful to hear about the place the sound of boys laughing and shouting.”
Michael left Mrs. Carthew, rather undecided as to what exactly she thought of him or Alan or anybody else. As he walked over the lawn that went sloping down to the stream, he experienced a revulsion from the interest he took in listening to what people thought about him, and he now began to feel an almost morbid sensitiveness to the opinion of others. This destroyed some of the peace which he had sought and cherished down here in the country. He began to wonder if that wise old lady had been laughing at him, whether all she said had been an implied criticism of his attitude towards existence. Her praise must have been grave irony; her endorsement of his behaviour had been disguised reproof. She really admired Alan, and had only been trying as gently as possible to make him come into line with her nephew. He himself must seem to her eccentric, undignified, a flamboyant sort of creature whom she pitied and whose errors she wished to remedy. Michael was mortified by his retrospect of the conversation, and felt inclined when he saw Alan to make an excuse and retire from his society, until his self-esteem had recovered from the rebuke that had lately been inflicted. Indeed, it calledfor a great effort on Michael’s part to embark in the canoe with his paragon and sit face to face without betraying the wound that was damaging his own sense of personality.
“You had a very long jaw with Aunt Enid,” said Alan. “I thought you were never coming. She polished me off in about three minutes.”
Michael looked darkly at Alan for a moment before he asked with ungracious accentuation what on earth Alan and Mrs. Carthew had talked about.
“She was rather down on me,” said Alan. “I think she must have thought I was putting on side about getting my Eleven.”
Michael was greatly relieved to hear this, and his brow cleared as he enquired what was wrong.
“Well, I can’t remember her exact words,” Alan went on. “But she said I must be careful not to grow up into a strong silent Englishman, because their day was done. She practically told me I was rather an ass, and pretended to be fearfully surprized when she heard I was going to try for a scholarship at Oxford. She was squashing slugs all the time she was talking, and I could do nothing but look a bigger fool than ever and count the slugs. I ventured to remark once that most people thought it was a good thing to be keen on games, and she said half the world was composed of fools which accounted for the preponderation—I mean preponderance—of pink on the map. She said it always looked like an advertizement of successful fox-hunting. And when I carefully pointed out that I’d never all my life had a chance to hunt, she said ‘More’s the pity,’ I couldn’t make out what she was driving at; so, feeling rather a worm, I shot off as soon as I could. What did she say to you?”
“Oh, nothing much,” said Michael triumphantly. “She’s a rum old girl, but rather decent.”
“She’s too clever for me,” said Alan, shaking his head. “It’s like batting to a pro.”
Then from the complexities of feminine judgment, the conversation glided easily like the canoe towards a discussion of the umpire’s decision last term in giving Alan out l.b.w. to a ball that pitched at least two feet away from the off stump.
“It was rotten,” said Alan fervidly.
“It was putrid,” Michael agreed.
To avoid the difficulty of a first night in a strange cottage, Mrs. Fane and Michael had supper at Cobble Place; and after a jolly evening spent in looking for pencils to play games that nobody could ever recollect in all their rich perfection of potential incidents, Michael and Mrs. Fane walked with leisurely paces back to Woodbine Cottage through a sweet-savoured moonless night.
Michael enjoyed the intimate good night beneath so small a roof, and wished that Stella were with them. He lay awake, reading from each in turn of the tower of books he had erected by his bedside to fortify himself against sleeplessness. It was a queer enough mixture—Swinburne, Keats, Matthew Arnold, Robinson Crusoe, Half-hours with the Mystics, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Daudet’s Sappho, the second volume of The Savoy, The Green Carnation, Holy Living and Dying; and as each time he changed his mind and took another volume, on the gabled ceiling the monstrous shadow that was himself filled him with a dreadful uncertainty. After an hour or so, he went to sit by the low window, leaning out and seeming to hear the dark world revolve in its course. Stars shook themselves clear from great rustling trees, and were in time enmeshed by others. The waning moon came up behind a rounded hill. A breeze fluttered down the dusty road, and was silent.
Michael fell to wondering whether he could ever bringhimself in tune with these slow progressions of nature, whether he could renounce after one haggard spell of experience the mazy stir of transitory emotions that danced always beyond this dream. An Half-hour with St. John of the Cross made him ask himself whether this were the dark night of the soul through which he was passing. But he had never travelled yet, nor was he travelling now. He was simply sitting quiescent, allowing himself to be passed. These calm and stately figures of humanity whom he admired in their seclusion had only reached it after long strife. Mrs. Carthew had lost a husband and a son, had seen her daughter leave her house as a governess. Joan and May had for many years sunk their hopes in tending their mother. Nancy was away earning money, and would be entitled to retire here one day. Mrs. Ross had endured himself and Stella for several years, had married and lost her husband, and had borne a child. All these had won their timeless repose and their serene uncloying ease. They were not fossils, but perdurable images of stone. And his mother, she was—he stopped his reverie. Of his mother he knew nothing. Outside the dust stirred in the road fretfully; a malaise was in the night air. Michael shivered and went back to bed, and as he turned to blow out his candle he saw above him huge and menacing his own shadow. A cock crowed.
“Silly ass,” muttered Michael, “he thinks it’s already morning,” and turning over after a dreamless sleep he found it was morning. So he rose and dressed himself serenely for a long sunburnt day.
On his way up the road to call for Alan he met the postman, who in answer to his enquiries handed him a letter from South Africa stamped all over with mysterious official abbreviations. He took it up to his mother curiously.
At lunch he asked her about the news from the war.
“Yes, dear, I had a letter,” she murmured.
“From Lord Saxby, I suppose?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Anything interesting?” Michael persisted.
“Oh, no, it’s only about marches and not being able to wash properly.”
“I thought it might be interesting,” Michael speculated.
“No, dear. It wouldn’t interest you,” said Mrs. Fane in her tone of gentle discouragement.
“I don’t want to be inquisitive,” said Michael resentfully.
“No, dear, I’m sure you don’t,” his mother softly agreed.
The holidays ran their pastoral course of sun and rain, of clouds and winds, until the last week arrived with September in her most majestic mood of flawless halcyon. These were days that more than any hitherto enhanced for Michael the reverence he felt for the household of Cobble Place. These were days when Mrs. Carthew stepped wisely along her flowery enclosure, pondering the plums and peaches on the warm walls that in a transcendency of mellow sunlight almost took on the texture of living sunburnt flesh. These were days when Joan and May Carthew went down the village street with great bunches of Michaelmas daisies, of phloxes and Japanese anemones, or sat beneath the mulberry tree, sewing in the bee-drowsed air.
At the foot of the hill beyond the stream was a straggling wind-frayed apple-orchard, fresh pasturage for lambs in spring, and now in September a jolly haunt for the young son of Mrs. Ross. Here one afternoon, when Alan was away at Basingstead Major playing the last cricket match of the year, Michael plunged down in the grass beside her.
They sat for a while in silence, and Mrs. Ross seemed to Michael to be waiting for him to speak first, as if by herown attitude of mute expectation she could lure him on to express himself more openly than by direct question and shy answer. He felt the air pregnant with confidences, and kept urging himself on to begin the statement and revelation of his character, sure that whatever he desired to ask must be asked now while he was perhaps for the last time liable to this grave woman’s influence, conscious of the security of goodness, envious of the maternity of peace. This grey-eyed woman seemed to sit above him like a proud eagle, careless of homage, never to be caught, never to be tamed, a figure for worship and inspiration. Michael wondered why all the women who awed him had grey eyes. Blue eyes fired his senses, striking sparks and kindling answering flames from his own blue eyes. Brown eyes left him indifferent. But grey eyes absorbed his very being, whether they were lustrous and violet-shaded like his mother’s and Stella’s, or whether, like Mrs. Ross’s, they were soft as grey sea-water that in a moment could change to the iron-bound rocks they were so near.
Still Michael did not speak, but watched Mrs. Ross solemnly hand back to the rosy child sitting beside her in the grass the fallen apples that he would always fling from him exuberantly, panting the while at laughter’s highest pitch.
“I wonder if I ever laughed like that,” said Michael.
“You were a very serious little boy, when I first knew you,” Mrs. Ross told him.
“I must have been rather depressing,” Michael sighed.
“No, indeed you were not, dear Michael,” she answered. “You had much too much personality.”
“Have I now?” Michael asked sharply.
“Yes, of course you have.”
“Well, what gives it to me?”
“Surely personality is something that is born with one. Personality can’t be made,” said Mrs. Ross.
“You don’t think experience has got anything to do with it?” Michael pressed.
“I think experience makes the setting, and according to the experience the personality is perfected or debased, but nothing can destroy personality, not even death,” she murmured, far away for a moment from this orchard.
“Which would you say had the stronger personality—Alan or I?” asked Michael.
“I should say you had,” said Mrs. Ross. “Or at any rate you have a personality that will affect a larger number of people, either favourably or unfavourably.”
“But Alan influences me more than I influence him,” Michael argued.
“That may be,” Mrs. Ross admitted. “Though I think your influence over Alan is very strong in this way. I think Alan is always very eager to see you at your best, and probably as your friendship goes on he will be more solicitous for you than for himself. I should say that he would be likely to sink himself in you. I wonder if you realize what a passionately loyal soul he is.”