“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael observed.
“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,” Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”
Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.
“Well, what of it?” said Michael. “He probably wants to borrow your dog.”
“He says he’s at Lincoln,” Lonsdale stammered.
“So he is.”
“Well, I don’t know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something of Oxford?”
The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their various Toggers to victory.
Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger almost swinging the St. Mary’s boat into the apprehensive stern of the only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary’s failed to catch the boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his own way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.
Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his mother’s particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him, but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room in turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.
There was his mother’s own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions and curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was Stella’s bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly mediæval, andthe dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue and crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.
“I haven’t done anything but just have it whitewashed,” she said. “I wanted you to choose the scheme, as I’m going to make all the noise.”
The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and his sister entered it.
“But it’s absolutely empty,” he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing in all that space except Stella’s piano, looking now almost as small and graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.
“You shall decorate the room,” she said. “What will you choose?”
Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries and blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even as Michael’s fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions, his mind swiftly returned to the keyboard’s alternations of white and black, so that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric significance.
“I don’t think we want anything,” he finally proclaimed. “Just two or three tall chairs and a mask of somebody—Beethoven perhaps—and black silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn’t go with elaborate decorations.”
So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and, crossing the little walledrectangle of pallid grass, to pause and listen to the muffled sound of Stella’s notes. Never had any entrance seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the power and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room was larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed chair, Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the sun, would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these clear melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the high-backed chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space itself. Alan sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played and played, Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him the union that already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the joy of life on the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have always someone fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.
“By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers,” said Alan.
Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark’s powerful wings.
April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had been none of this communion with the past. Nobody outsidethe contemporary residents could ever have walked along its moderately cheerful uniformity.
Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a visit to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more depressing than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the sensation of constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that was imposed upon his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as he wandered between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom of the river Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess the narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses did not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost seeming to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather the impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to the tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble flaunting of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically by the dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a spirit haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former territory so much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington Road. When he reached the house itself, he was able to expel his sentiment for the past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the newowner had dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the door, the number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him that this was indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so hardly with the problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree that, once an object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction to the threshold of this house when every area down the road owned a lime-tree identical in age and growth.
Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door, inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden lived.
It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory, or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of clouds which the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he had done this a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure again the vision he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible ever to remember the exact moment of falling asleep.
After all, however, Lily could not have taken her placewith these moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to himself with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at the corner of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of Ulalume, and Michael found himself murmuring, “Of my most immemorial year,” half expectant of Lily’s slim form swaying toward him, half blushful already in breathless anticipation of the meeting.
Down the road a door opened. Michael’s heart jumped annoyingly out of control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated in the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed, and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps. Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names of house-agents, that several “to let” boards leaned confidentially over the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who was whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew where Mrs. Haden had gone.
“I wish I did,” said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t. Nor anybody else.”
“You mean they went away in a hurry,” said Michael shamefaced.
“Yes, sir.”
“And left no address?”
“Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen’s bills in the hall.”
Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably defeated.
In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his discovery.
“I’m glad you’re not going to start that business again,” she said. “And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for me disinterestedly and without prejudice.”
“What sort of difficulties?” Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her cheeks warm with the evening light.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she half whispered. “But let’s go away together in the summer and not even take a piano.”
On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary’s hymned the rising sun, Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible expression of his own mental image of Oxford’s completeness, to pierce in one dazzling moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts which had restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful obscurity about his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were, imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of its repository.
All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily upon the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the cold hues and blushes of the sun’s youth, that stood as symbol for so much here inSt. Mary’s, made of the east one great shell of lucent color. The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of dawn and sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic visitors came half shyly through the portal that was to give such a sense of time’s rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible: dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and at last the tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and Lonsdale and Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides equipped in cap and gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding stairs to the top.
For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the tower’s top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the sun mounted into the day.
Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as emmets at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to stand. Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent hurtling outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of the townscrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.
Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the heart of England. He had refused Maurice’s invitation to a somewhat mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan, now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After breakfast it would still be only about seven o’clock with a hot-eyed languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.
It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused toattend Maurice’s mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he went back to the river’s bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn’s name, and deliberately he did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was flowing into the ancestral Thames.
Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.
At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary inmate. His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat, but continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on the table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the table by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still fixed upon his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a cipher and regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in his silent company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this strange youthwith the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately carved countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing instead of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his waistcoat. Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker up his pale forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate examined the food on the plate before him.
“I think it’s rather cold by now,” said Michael, unable to keep silence any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.
“I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better, I’d read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you now, you’d think I was an affected ass,” he drawled.
Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.
“They’re all equally bad,” the poet proclaimed gloomily. “What made you come to this inn? I didn’t know that anybody else except me had ever been here. You’re at the Varsity, I suppose?”
Michael with a nod announced his college.
“I’m at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest undergraduates in Oxford.”
“I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary’s,” Michael suggested.
“Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary’s man. I refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know.”
“Oh, rather. In fact, he’s rather a friend of mine. He’s keen on starting a paper just at present.”
“I know. I know,” said the poet. “He’s asked me to be one of the forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?”
“I was invited to be,” Michael admitted. “But instead I’m going to subscribe some of the capital required. My name’s Fane.”
“Mine’s Hazlewood. It’s rather jolly to meet a person in this inn. Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere else. But they’ve got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris weighing the charms of Helen—no—on second thoughts I’m being forced. Don’t encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?”
“I don’t know,” said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest roast chicken he had ever seen. “I think I missed a turning. I’ve been at Lechlade all day.”
“We may as well ride back together,” Hazlewood proposed.
After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford. Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.
“Do you know many Balliol people?” he asked.
Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting in The Merchant of Venice.
“I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea they’re keeping a chapel, or else it’s a relief from the unparagoned brutality of the college architecture.”
Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive candlesticks of wrought iron.
“Mr. Fane of St. Mary’s,” said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was dimly aware of multitudinous nods of greetingand an unanimous murmur of expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.
“I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?” the chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.
“Forgot all about it,” said Hazlewood. “But I suppose I can bring a visitor.”
Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied criticism of the expostulation.
“Sit down,” said Hazlewood peremptorily. “If I can’t bring a visitor I resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediæval Warfare.”
“Don’t be an affected ass, Guy,” said Comeragh. “You know you yourself are reading a paper on The Sonnet.”
“Rise from the noble lord,” said Hazlewood. “The first I’ve had in a day’s fishing. I say, Fane, don’t listen to this rot.”
The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.
Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood’s room was the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary’s he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood’s, nor would he have exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his roomsexisted. He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over the tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon their martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the level voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members of the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous, sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more delightful.
Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room would stand as representatives of the college.
“Yes, I should think so,” said Hazlewood. “Why, are you making exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes an American to do that really well, you know.”
“But what is the essential Balliol?” Michael demanded.
“Who could say so easily? Perhaps it’s the same sort of spirit, slightly filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in Elizabethan England.”
Michael asked for a little more elaboration.
“Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.”
“Will that description serve for yourself?” Michael asked.
“For me? Oh, great scott, no! I’m utterly deficient in proconsular ambitions.”
They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his acquaintance with Balliol.
When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his day.
“The Oxford Looking-Glass,” Avery began, “is intended to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought.”
“I prefer ‘will reflect,’” Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of positive opinion.
“I don’t think it very much matters,” said Michael, “as long as you don’t think that ‘contemporary undergraduate thought’ is too pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror, for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate thought ever reaches toward reality.”
Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism, and the chief promoter went on:
“Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama.”
“I think that’s a rotten sentence,” Michael interrupted.
“Well, of course, it will be polished,” Avery irritably explained. “What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at.”
“Ah!” Michael agreed, smiling. “Now I’m beginning to understand.”
“It may be assumed,” Avery went on, “that the opinion of those who are ‘knocking at the door’ (in inverted commas)——”
“I shouldn’t think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a door in inverted commas,” Michael observed.
“Look here, Michael,” Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously, “will you shut up, or you won’t be allowed to contribute.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door in Ibsen?” fretfully demanded Maurice. “That the opinion of those who are knocking at the door,” he continued defiantly, “is not unworthy of an audience.”
“But if they’re knocking at a door,” Michael objected, “they can’t be reflected in a mirror; unless it’s a glass door, and if it’s a glass door, they oughtn’t to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don’t knock hard, there isn’t much point——”
“The Editor in chief,” pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael’s attempt to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass, “will be M. Avery (St. Mary’s), with whom will be associated C. St. C. Wedderburn (St. Mary’s), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary’s), V. L. A. Townsend (B.N.C.). I haven’t asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he’s sure to join because he’s very keen on Ibsen.W. Mowbray (Univ.).Bill Mowbray’s very bucked at the scheme. He’s just resigned from the Russell and joinedthe Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the principal speakers are going to follow Chamberlain’s lead for Protection.N. R. Stewart (Trinity).Nigel Stewart is most tremendously keen, and rather a good man to have, as he’s had two poems taken by The Saturday Review already.G. Hazlewood (Balliol)——”
“That’s the man I’ve come to talk about,” said Michael. “I met him to-day.”
Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear he had been considered interesting. “For in his own way,” said Avery solemnly, “he’s about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I’d sooner have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you and Wedders,” he added quickly. “I’m going to take this prospectus round to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make.”
Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a large number of suggestions. “And he’s got a sense of humor,” he added consolingly.
For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary discussions gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the O.U.D.S. or the Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year men) belonged. Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass the organ of advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for Townsend to be as advanced as he chose within the limits of the space allotted to his progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole of the magazine to drama, especially since under the expanding ambitions of editorship he had come to the conclusion he was a critic himself, and so was the more firmly disinclined to let slip the trenchant opportunity of pulverizing the four or five musical comedies that would pass through the Oxford theater every term.However, Townsend’s demand for the drama and nothing but the drama was mitigated by his determination as a Liberal that The Oxford Looking-Glass should not be made the mouthpiece of the New Toryism represented by Mowbray; and Maurice was able to recover the control of the dramatic criticism by representing to Townsend the necessity for such unflinching exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston Club principles as would balance Mowbray’s torrential leadership of the Tory Democrats. “So called,” Townsend bitterly observed, “because as he supposed they were neither Tories nor Democrats.”
Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the Boer war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always thronged with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and whizzed about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but less dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.
Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism. Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity. As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity, whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers’ eggs or keeping an early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a ramshorn of snuff and glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to Wedderburn’s Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to Hazlewood’s genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the result into a soufflée of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute, outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he had hailed from St. Mary’s tower,this dream of youth’s domination set against the gray background of time’s endurance that was itself spun of the fabric of dreams.
Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term’s end, inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates have better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most inaccurate geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held against the bank by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at ease, the world became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise of life no more than the monotony of a river’s lapping, or along the level water meadows a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when supper was eaten by figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures that afterward drifted slowly down to college under the tree-entangled stars and flitting assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the rustle of a bird’s wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match dropped idly over the side of the canoe. This was the season when for a long while people sat talking at open windows, and from the Warden’s garden came sweetly up the scent of May flowers.
Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan’s room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael triedto bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.
Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection of normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors. Besides, though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen’s table was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and sister.
So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.
“After all, they can only spend the day,” he sighed hopefully to Michael, “You’ll come and help me through lunch, won’t you, and we’ll rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is rowed. I was an ass to askthem. You won’t mind being bored a bit by my governor? I believe he’s considered quite a clever man.”
Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son’s estimate.
“They’re arriving devilish early,” said Lonsdale, coming up to Michael’s room with an anxious face on the night before.
Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael’s door.
“Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the three of them at once. I think you’d better talk about wine to the governor. It’ll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated. Tell him how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing in late from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of the governor’s port from Tommy’s rooms in Parsons’ Quad.”
Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next morning.
“I say, you’ve come frightfully early,” Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.
“Well, we can walk round my old college,” suggested Lord Cleveden cheerfully. “I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford nowadays.”
“I say, I’m awfully sorry to let you in for this,” Lonsdale whispered to Michael. “Don’t encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around at the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something.”
Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael ratherenjoyed walking round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.
“I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?” asked Michael as they stood in Peckwater.
“Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap, he died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about much.”
“Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott,” said Michael hurriedly.
“Dick Prescott? Good gracious!” Lord Cleveden exclaimed, “I haven’t seen him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his life, to be sure.”
“Did he?” asked Michael, well aware of the question’s folly, but incapable of not asking it.
“Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal.”
“Oh,” gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden about his father.
“I can’t remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this one. Saxby’s I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one. Let’s go up and ask the present owner to let us look in,” Lord Cleveden proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.
“Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no,” protested his son. “No, no; he may have people with him. Really.”
“Ah, to be sure,” Lord Cleveden agreed. “What a pity!”
“And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary’s before lunch,” Lonsdale announced.
“Do they make meringues here nowadays?” inquired Lord Cleveden meditatively.
“No, no,” Lonsdale assured him. “They’ve given up since the famous cook died. Look here, we absolutely mustbuzz round St. Mary’s. And our crême caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they’ve got at the House.”
The tour of St. Mary’s was conducted with almost incredible rapidity, because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the kitchen.
“Why didn’t you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?” Lady Cleveden inquired.
“My dear mother,” said Arthur, “he’s quite impossible.”
“But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man,” said Lady Cleveden, “and always asks us to stay with him when we’re in Scotland.”
“Yes, but we never are,” Lonsdale pointed out. “And I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is really absolutely impossible. He’s the very worst type of Harrovian.”
Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that Mackintosh was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind, and urged a theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly have declined rather offensively.
“He’s not a very bonhomous lad,” said Lonsdale, and with that sentence banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.
After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought to take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the pleasure craft of St. Mary’s bobbed at their moorings.
Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications of his opinionhe disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the punt. Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with the air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity was no longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.
“Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own.” This comment was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull fury. “Try and get along, please, sir. You’re holding up the whole river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices’ competition.”
After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea and then buzz off at once to see the first division row.
“I think we shall go head to-night,” Lonsdale predicted very confidentially. “I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar yesterday.”
But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale’s people to see St. Mary’s bump New College in front of their own barge, and afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with the westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox’s blazer and shine more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his buttonhole.
“Now you’ve just got time to catch your train,” said Lonsdale, when the sound of the last pistol-shots and plauditshad died away. And “Phew!” he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, “how frightfully tiring one’s people are when imported in bulk!”
Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second; and without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for Pass Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the end of the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of the most low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly blows they had received below their intellectual belts.
It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the last week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a good deal of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest justification, and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had stayed on the river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great expense of energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off indigestion.
On one of these merry nights toward one o’clock somebody suggested that the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt act of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park, and it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so that surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.
Half a dozen freshmen—Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and Michael—all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael alonepossibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The others were more vaguely injured by Smithers’ hitherto undisturbed existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was determined to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to follow the fashion.
Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass and paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers’ reformation kept them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside Smithers’ open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment an unworthy impulse in every heart.
The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were evidently Smithers’ people, photographs like the groups in the parlors of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid’s mantelpiece.
“I say, look at that fringe,” gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.
Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers’room, began to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that stood in the background of this splendid “college career” of Percy or Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded to counterbalance “Smithers.” No doubt the champagne in gradual reaction was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn each tribute from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak room dedicated for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much inclined to detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go to bed. What seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was that on the evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the ascetic glories of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently no classical scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate for the scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was at St. Mary’s to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by competing on behalf of the college and the university in scientific knowledge with newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham. Smithers was merely an advertisement of Oxford’s democratic philanthropy, and would only gain from his university a rather inferior training in chemistry at a considerably greater personal cost but with nothing else that Oxford could and did give so prodigally to others more fortunately born.
At this point in Michael’s meditations Smithers woke up, and from the bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a long nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway between his two rooms.
“Well, I’m jiggered!” he gasped. “What are you fellers doing in my sitting-room?”
It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to takedown from the wall what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers’ mother in order to examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe’s grasp, and shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled through the open window into the deer-park.
Cuffe’s expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from damaging Smithers’ humble property and even from annoying any more Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.
“I say, we can’t let that poor devil run about all night in the park with that picture,” said Grainger. “Let’s catch him and explain we got into his rooms by mistake.”
“I hope he won’t throw himself into the river or anything,” murmured Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever lighting upon him personally.
“I say, for goodness’ sake, let’s catch him,” begged Michael, who had visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street that her son had died in defending her enlargement.
Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.
“It’s like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Michael said to Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers, running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was undimmed by boughs.
He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew, for by this time theunwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of voices in the Fellows’ sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down into the rose-beds of the Warden’s garden and by one supreme effort of endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert’s quad.
“By Jove, that was a topping rag,” puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six glasses with welcome drink. “I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He said: ‘It’s no use you putting your coat over your ’ead, sir, because I knows you by your gait.’”
“I wonder what happened to Smithers,” said Michael.
“Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher,” Avery asserted. “I don’t know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary’s.”
“A bounder like what?” asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room during Avery’s expression of opinion.
Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the evening’s rag was provided for his entertainment.
“But why don’t you let that poor devil alone?” demanded the listener.
At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted that men like him were very bad for the college.
Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton, determined to probe through the medium of Castleton’s common sense and Wykehamist notions theethical and æsthetic rights of people like Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.
“After all, Oxford wasn’t founded to provide an expensive three years of idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like Cuffe,” Castleton pointed out.
“No, no,” Michael agreed, “but no institution has ever yet remained true to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance, or Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved into something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may have departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful purpose in the scheme of social order.”
“Oh, I’m not grumbling at what Oxford is,” Castleton went on. “I simply suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority, to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way in with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of hatred which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all of us.”
Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m afraid I’m too lazy to do much more than deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I’m beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The Spectator might talk, to bed.”
The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton to his rooms. St. Mary’s tower against the sky opening like a flower seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social distinctions, allprejudices and vulgarities became the base and clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed, spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.
Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.
When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.
Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of other women had now been replacedby an exaggerated pleasure in their company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to society.
“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for the whole of a hot summer afternoon.
“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained. “And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a rotten time really when she was traveling round.”
“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,” said Michael, “and now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”
“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other people would make me vague.”
“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.
“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the vagueness came after she ran away with father.”
Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.
“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”
“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little things, you’d think—however, as I know you have rather a dread of perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”
“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him to turn theories into practice.
“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly sympathetic.”
Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”
For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a rage.
A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into the country.
“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.
Michael sighed.
“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up Mental Science—so interesting and quite different from Christian Science.”
“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.
Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.
“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has been quite long enough in London for the present.”
“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”
“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall, and I think I’ll go.”
The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October, arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.
The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse nearthe Lizard; and they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing, cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.
“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one evening.
“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.
Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.
“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”
“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,” Castleton observed. “The sign-posts are like incantations.”
“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects me profoundly sometimes.”
Hazlewood laughed.
“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by anything,” he prophesied.
Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist——”
“Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”
“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I shall ever come to Cornwall again.”
With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish novelists—the sort of people who writeabout over-emotionalized young men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”
“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.
“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to solve their problems and if Maurice weren’t always so facile with the right emotion at the right moment.”
“I’ve got a presentiment to-night,” said Michael, and not wishing to say more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to admit as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.
Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt, or was it merely thunder in the air?
Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:
join me here rather quickly.
Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.
It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.
“I’m really awfully worried,” he said aloud to himself, as through the stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to Charing Cross.
Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning, and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers, something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.
Stella’s address was near the Quai d’Orsay; and when Michael arrived he found she was living in rooms over a bookseller’s shop with a view of the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.
Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist’s justification. Stella’s chestnut hair streamed down her straight back like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet, and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and before an easel stood a girl inlong unsmocked gown of green linen. This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers, pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.