Yet The Oxford Looking-Glass reflected another spirit which Michael could not account for and the presence of which he vaguely resented.
“The O.L.G. is getting very priggish and serious and rather dull,” he complained to Maurice.
“Not half so dull as it would be if I depended entirelyon casual contributions,” replied the editor. “I don’t seem to get anything but earnestness.”
“Oxford is becoming the home of living causes,” sighed Michael. “That’s a depressing thought. Do you really think these Rhodes Scholars from America and Australia and Germany are going to affect us?”
“I don’t know,” Maurice said. “But everybody seems keen to speculate on the result.”
“Why don’t you take up a strong line of patronage? Why don’t you threaten these pug-nosed invaders with the thunders of the past?” Michael demanded fiercely.
“Would it be popular?” asked Maurice. “Personally of course I don’t care one way or the other, but I don’t want to let the O.L.G. in for a lot of criticism.”
“You really ought to be a wonderful editor,” said Michael. “You’re so essentially the servant of the public.”
“Well, with all your grumbles,” said Maurice, “ours is the only serious paper that has had any sort of a run of late years.”
“But it lacks individuality,” Michael complained. “It’s so damned inclusive. It’s like The Daily Telegraph. It’s voluminous and undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything, from a man who’s going to be hanged for murder to a new record at cricket. Why can’t you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?”
“The Daily Mail,” Maurice scoffed. “That rag!”
“A man once said to me,” Michael meditatively continued, “that whenever he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all,” he added cheerfully, “nobody does read the O.L.G.The circulation depends on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations by the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor. Is it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found in-that great terra incognita—Queen’s College?”
But Maurice had left him, and Michael strolled down to the lodge to see if there were any letters. Shadbolt handed him an invitation to dinner from the Warden. As he opened it, Lonsdale came up with a torn replica of his own.
“I say, Michael, this is a rum sort of binge for the Wagger to give. I spotted all the notes laid out in a row by old Pumpkin-head’s butler. You. Me. Tommy Grainger. Fitzroy. That ass Appleby. That worm Carben. And Smithers. There may have been some others too. I hope I don’t get planted next the Pumpkinette.”
“Miss Wagger may not be there,” said Michael hopefully. “But if she is, you’re bound to be next her.”
“I say, Shadbolt,” Lonsdale demanded, “is this going to be a big squash at the Wagger’s?”
“The Warden has given me no instruction, sir, about carriages. And so I think we may take it for granted as it will be mostly confined to members of the college, sir. His servant tells me as the Dean is going and the Senior Tutor.”
“And there won’t be any does?”
“Any what, sir?”
“Any ladies?”
“I expect as Miss Crackanthorpe will be present. She very rarely absconds from such proceedings,” said Shadbolt, drawing every word with the sound of popping corks from the depths of his pompousness.
Michael and Lonsdale found out that to the list of guests they had established must be added the names of Maurice, Wedderburn and two freshmen who were already favorably reported through the college as good sportsmen.
Two evenings later, at seven o’clock, Michael, Maurice, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, and Grainger, bowed and starched, stood in Venner’s, drinking peach bitters sharpened by the addition of gin.
“The men have gone in to hall,” said Venner. “You ought to start round to the Warden’s lodgings at ten past seven. Now don’t be late. I expect you’ll have a capital dinner.”
“Champagne, Venner?” asked Lonsdale.
“Oh, bound to be! Bound to be,” said Venner. “The Warden knows how to give a dinner. There’s no doubt of that.”
“Caviare, Venner?” asked Maurice.
“I wouldn’t say for certain. But if you get an opportunity to drink any of that old hock, be sure you don’t forget. It’s a lovely wine. I wish we had a few dozen in the J.C.R. Now don’t go and get tipsy like some of our fellows did once at a dinner given by the Warden.”
“Did they, Venner?” asked everybody, greatly interested.
“It was just after the Transvaal war broke out. Only three or four years ago. There was a man called Castleton, a cousin of our Castleton, but a very different sort of man, such a rowdy fellow. He came out from the Warden’s most dreadfully tipsy, and the men were taking him back to his rooms, when he saw little Barnaby, a Science don, going across New quad. He broke away from his friends and shouted out, ‘there’s a blasted Boer,’ and before they could stop him, he’d knocked poor little Barnaby, a most nervous fellow, down in the wet grass and nearly throttled him. It was hushed up, but Castleton was never asked again you may be sure, and then soon after he volunteered for the front and died of enteric. So you see what comes of getting tipsy. Now you’d better start.”
Arm in arm the five of them strolled through Cloisters until they came to the gothic door of the Warden’s Lodgings.Up the Warden’s majestic staircase they followed the butler into the Warden’s gothic drawing-room where they shook hands with the great moon-faced Warden himself, and with Miss Crackanthorpe, who was very much like her brother, and nearly as round on a much smaller scale. They nodded to the Dean, mentally calculating how many roll-calls they were behind, for the Dean notwithstanding the geniality of his greeting had one gray eye that seemed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded to Mr. Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed nervously in response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed them. The two freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful acknowledgments of their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a gesture of such bland welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with suppressed mortification and rage.
“Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don’t sit next the Pumpkinette?” whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to dinner.
“Not a halfpenny,” laughed Michael. “You will. And I shall get Ardle.”
Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of three dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was to make the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned forerunners had nothing to fear for his own preëminence. Modern life found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which mademore than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.
Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness of the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by a magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing some grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many dinners in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden’s great round face inclined slowly now toward Fitzroy with his fair complexion and military rigor of bearing, now toward Wedderburn whose evening dress acquired from the dignity of its owner the richness of black velvet. More directly in the light of the first lamp sat Maurice and Appleby opposite to one another, both imparting to the assemblage a charming worldliness, Maurice by his loose-fronted shirt, Appleby by the self-esteem of his restless blue eyes. The two freshmen on either side of the Dean wonderfully contrasted with his gauntness, and even more did the withered Ardle, who looked like a specimen of humanity dried as plants are dried between heavy books, contrast with the sprawling bulk of Grainger. On the other side, Michael watched with amusement Miss Crackanthorpe with shining apple-face bobbing nervously between Smithers pale and solid and domed like a great cheese, and Lonsdale cooland pink as an ice. In the background from the shadows at either end of the room the sage-green walls materialized in the lamplight: the three dead Wardens stared down at the table: and every fifteen minutes bells chimed in St. Mary’s tower.
“And how is The Oxford Looking-Glass progressing, Avery?” inquired the Warden, shining full upon the editor in a steady gaze. “No doubt it takes up a great deal of your valuable time?”
The Dean winked his gray decanal eye at the champagne: the Senior Tutor coughed remotely like a grasshopper: Lonsdale prodded Michael with his elbow and murmured that “the Wagger had laid Mossy a stymie.”
Maurice admitted the responsibility of the paper for occupying a considerable amount of hisleisure, but consoled himself for this by the fact that certainly, The Oxford Looking-Glass was progressing very well indeed.
“We don’t altogether know what attitude to take up over the Rhodes Bequest,” said Maurice. Then boldly he demanded from the Warden what would be the effect of these imposed scholars from America and Australia and Africa.
“The speculation is not without interest,” declared the Warden. “What does Fitzroy think?”
Fitzroy threw back his shoulders as if he were going to abuse the Togger and said he thought the athletic qualifications were a mistake. “After all, sir, we don’t want the Tabs—I mean to say we don’t want to beat Cambridge with the help of a lot of foreigners.”
“Foreigners, Fitzroy? Come, come, we can scarcely stigmatize Canadians as foreigners. What would become of the Imperial Idea?”
“I think the Imperial Idea will take a lot of living up to,” said Wedderburn, “when we come face to face with itspractical expression. Personally I loathe Colonials except at the Earl’s Court Exhibition.”
“Ah, Wedderburn,” said the Warden, “you are luckily young enough to be able to be particular. I with increasing age begin to suffer from that terrible disease of age—toleration.”
“But the Warden is not so very old,” whispered Miss Crackanthorpe to Lonsdale and Michael.
“Oh, rather not,” Lonsdale murmured encouragingly.
“I think they’ll wake up Oxford,” announced Smithers; then, as everyone turned to hear what more he would say, Smithers seemed inclined to melt into silence, but with a sudden jerk of defiance, he hardened himself and became volubly opinionative.
“There’s no doubt,” he continued, “that these fellows will make the average undergrad look round him a bit.” As Smithers curtailed undergraduate to the convention of a lady-novelist, a shudder ran round the dinner party. Almost the butler instead of putting ice into the champagne might have slipped it down the backs of the guests.
“In fact, what ho, she bumps,” whispered Lonsdale. “Likewise pip-ip, and tootle-oo.”
“Anyway, he won’t be able to ignore them,” said Smithers.
“We hope not, indeed,” the Warden gravely wished. “What does Lonsdale think? Lord Cleveden wrote to me to say how deeply interested he was by the whole scheme—a most appreciative letter, and your father has had a great experience of colonial conditions.”
“Has he?” said Lonsdale. “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. You mean when he was Governor. Oh, rather. But I never knew him in those days.” Then under his breath he muttered to Michael: “Dive in, dive in, you rotter, I’m getting out of my depth.”
“I think Oxford will change the Rhodes Scholars muchmore profoundly than the Rhodes Scholars will change Oxford,” said Michael. “At least they will if Oxford hasn’t lost anything lately. Sometimes I’m worried by that, and then I’m not, for I do really feel that they must be changed. Civilization must have some power, or we should all revert.”
“And are we to regard these finished oversea products as barbarians?” asked the Warden.
“Oh, yes,” said Michael earnestly. “Just as much barbarians as any freshmen.”
Everybody looked at the two freshmen on either side of the Dean and laughed, while they laughed too and tried to appear pleasantly flattered by the epithet.
“And what will Oxford give them?” asked the Dean dryly. He spoke with that contempt of generalizations of which all dons made a habit.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Michael. “But vaguely I would say that Oxford would cure them of being surprised by themselves or of showing surprise at anybody else. Marcus Aurelius said what I’m trying to say much better than I ever can. Also they will gain a sense of humor, or rather they will ripen whatever sense they already possess. And they’ll have a sense of continuity, too, and perhaps—but of course this will depend very much on their dons—perhaps they’ll take as much interest in the world as in Australia.”
“Why will that depend on their dons?” challenged Mr. Ambrose.
“Oh, well, you know,” explained Michael apologetically, “dons very often haven’t much capacity for inquisitiveness. They get frightened very easily, don’t they?”
“Very true, very true,” said the Warden. “But, my dear Fane, your optimism and your pessimism are both quixotic, immensely quixotic.”
Later on in the quad when the undergraduate members ofthe dinner party discussed the evening, Maurice rallied Michael on his conversation.
“If you can talk your theories, why can’t you write them?” he complained.
“Because they’d be almost indecently diaphanous,” said Michael.
“Good old Fane!” said Grainger. “But, I say, you are an extraordinary chap, you know.”
“He did it for me,” said Lonsdale. “Pumpkin-head would have burst, if I’d let out I didn’t know what part of the jolly old world my governor used to run.”
Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in view a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a blue. Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.
Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors’ match, in which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at the guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the hall, men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as unconcernedly as if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.
“Who is that man just sitting down?” Michael would ask.
“I don’t know,” Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest the implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to be aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
“Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in Peck?” asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
“No, really?” answered Alan indifferently.
After hall as they walked back to Meadows’, Michaeltried to point out to him that the St. Mary’s method of dining in hall was superior to that of the House.
“The dinner itself is better,” Alan admitted. “But I hate your system of all getting up from table at the same time. It’s like school.”
“But if a guest comes to St. Mary’s he sits at his host’s regular table. He’s introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you’d had another guest to-night, you wouldn’t even have introduced me to him. He and I would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of dummies.”
“Rot!” said Alan. “And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening? All the men at the guests’ table were absolute ticks.”
“I’ve never met a House man who didn’t think every other House man impossible outside the four people in his own set,” retorted Michael. “And yet, I suppose, you’ll say it’s the best college?”
“Of course,” Alan agreed.
Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day’s reluctant death, while the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul’s Awakening faintly kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.
“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked. “I expect there’s one in the cupboard.”
“I’m sure there is,” said Michael. “It’s very unlikely that there is a single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all the same.”
They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before him in the smoke.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though of course I wasn’t bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would have looked pretty well. Stillfour for forty-eight isn’t so bad in an innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to another bowler who’s no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail. I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two—first knock. Blob—second. Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in the first trial match.” So Alan voiced his hopes.
“Of course you will,” said Michael. “And at Lord’s. I think I shall ask my mother and sister up for Eights,” he added.
Alan looked rather disconcerted.
“What’s the matter?” Michael asked. “You won’t have to worry about them. I’ll explain you’re busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you in a letter this week.”
During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne Walk, and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and musical people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper interest in his existence.
“Give her my—er—love, when you write,” said Alan very nonchalantly. “And I don’t think I’d say anything about those four wickets for forty-eight. I don’t fancy she’s very keen on cricket. It might bore her.”
No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan announced as usual that “those men will be coming down soon for cocoa.”
“Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at ten?” asked Michael. “And why am I never allowed to meet them?”
“They’d bore you rather,” said Alan. “They’re people who live on this staircase. I don’t see them any other time.”
Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so to his friend’s evident relief he got up to go.
“You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and regularities,” he grumbled.
“Stay, if you like,” said Alan, not very heartily. “But I warn you they’re all awfully dull, and I’ve made a rule to go to bed at half-past ten this term.”
“So long,” said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.
A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his invitation for Eights Week:
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.May 5.My dearest Michael,I wish you’d asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help at the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at Westminster Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think you’d be interested. It’s all about handicrafts. Weren’t you reading a book by William Morris the other day? His name is mentioned a great deal always. I’ve been meeting so many interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask Mrs. Ross to chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about poor Dick Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could understand howmuch muchhappier she would be married to a nice man, even though he may be a little older than herself. This tearing all over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks of going to Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly impossible name beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks of unlearning all she has learned and beginning all over again. This is most absurd,and I’ve tried to explain to her. She should have thought of this man beginning with L before. At her age to start scales and exercises again does seem ridiculous. I really dread Stella’s coming of age. Who knows what she may not take it into her head to do? I can’t think where she gets this curious vein of eccentricity. I’ll write to Mrs. Ross if you like. Stella, of course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that I will not hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she suggests it to you.Your lovingMother.
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.May 5.
My dearest Michael,
I wish you’d asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help at the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at Westminster Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think you’d be interested. It’s all about handicrafts. Weren’t you reading a book by William Morris the other day? His name is mentioned a great deal always. I’ve been meeting so many interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask Mrs. Ross to chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about poor Dick Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could understand howmuch muchhappier she would be married to a nice man, even though he may be a little older than herself. This tearing all over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks of going to Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly impossible name beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks of unlearning all she has learned and beginning all over again. This is most absurd,and I’ve tried to explain to her. She should have thought of this man beginning with L before. At her age to start scales and exercises again does seem ridiculous. I really dread Stella’s coming of age. Who knows what she may not take it into her head to do? I can’t think where she gets this curious vein of eccentricity. I’ll write to Mrs. Ross if you like. Stella, of course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that I will not hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she suggests it to you.
Your lovingMother.
Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at Oxford. He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would never have listened to a word. Stella’s view of the visit came soon after her mother’s.
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.May 8.Dear M.,What’s all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it necessary? At a shot I said to mother, “No, quite unnecessary.” But of course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won’t. Isn’t Mrs. Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn’t she rather object to me smoking cigars?
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.May 8.
Dear M.,
What’s all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it necessary? At a shot I said to mother, “No, quite unnecessary.” But of course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won’t. Isn’t Mrs. Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn’t she rather object to me smoking cigars?
“Great scott!” interjaculated Michael.
I’m going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very charming to your only sister,Stella.P.S.—Do crush mother over Prescott.
I’m going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very charming to your only sister,
Stella.
P.S.—Do crush mother over Prescott.
Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely necessary for Stella’s visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come. Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own attitude toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating it to her. In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured his own behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay on the view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was as much shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year he had been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at Eastbourne. Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to open the door once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter his mind as the sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon present themselves. It would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came up and saw him playing for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was provided to relieve the tedium of too much rowing.
So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs. Ross.
Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every other occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who was threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart spoke mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account he could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the High. Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael went down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.
“I think it was a very bad move bringing me,” said Lonsdale, as they waited on the platform. “Your sister will probably think me an awful ass, and ...”
But the train interrupted Lonsdale’s self-depreciation, and he sustained himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael thought Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as now when tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in the Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved Michael instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might appear in a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a very peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more like a boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide open on the city’s towers and spires, were more than usually gray and pellucid.
“I say, I ordered a car to meet us,” said Lonsdale. “I thought we should buzz along quicker.”
“What you really thought,” said Michael, “was that you would have to drive my sister in a hansom.”
“Oh, no, I say, really,” protested Lonsdale.
“I’m much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me,” Stella declared.
“Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I’m an awful ass, Miss Fane,” said Lonsdale encouragingly. “Hallo, here’s the jolly old car.”
As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.
“You’ll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she’ll have a pretty good notion of the main points of interest in the neighborhood,” said Michael.
“He always rags me,” explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round at the visitors. “I say, isn’t Alan Merivale your nephew?” he asked Mrs. Ross. “He’s playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some very hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after lunch and watch the game for a bit.”
Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale’s rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in Lonsdale’s rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately accorded.
The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of mirthfulness as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.
After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully Alan’s meeting with Stella, watched Alan’s face fall when he saw her beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves. There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan to go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant century so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much there was in him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted tohimself the improbability of Stella realizing anything at all about the importance of cricket. However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw Alan coming gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very first ball he had received.
“Of course, you know, he isn’t played for his batting,” he hastened to explain to Stella.
She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside them, unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond though he was of Maurice.
The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell, they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to Mrs. Ross and Stella:
“My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We can’t bear our digs any longer.”
“Why don’t you give a party there on Monday night,” suggested Wedderburn deeply.
“Let me introduce you to Mrs’sss ... my sissss ... Mr. H’wood,” mumbled Michael in explanation of Wedderburn’s proposal.
“What a charming idea,” drawled Guy. “But isn’t it rather a shame to ask Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren’t.”
“Oh, no,” said Stella. “I should rather like to play in Oxford.”
So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward glance at the trend of the clouds,occurred Guy Hazlewood’s party in Holywell, which might more truly have been called Wedderburn’s party, since he at once assumed all responsibility for it.
The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on account of the Balliol men invited.
“Half Basutoland seems to be here,” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
“Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial, what else can you expect?” replied Michael.
Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to Wedderburn’s suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation with the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for to-morrow. But Michael fancied there was another reason.
Stella played three times and was much applauded.
“Very sporting effort, by Jove,” said Lonsdale, and this was probably the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in such inadequate surroundings.
Michael himself was less moved by Stella’s playing than he had ever been. Nor was this coldness due to any anxiety for her success. He was sure enough of that in this uncritical audience.
“Do you think Stella plays as well as she did?” he asked Mrs. Ross.
“Perhaps this evening she may be a little excited,” Mrs. Ross suggested.
“Perhaps,” said Michael doubtfully. “But what I meanis that, if she isn’t going to advance quite definitely, there really isn’t any longer an excuse for her to arrogate to herself a special code of behavior.”
“Stella says a great deal more than she does,” Mrs. Ross reassured him. “You’d be surprised, as indeed I was surprised, to find how simple and childlike she really is. I think an audience is never good for her.”
“But, after all, her life is going to be one audience after another in quick succession,” Michael pointed out.
“Gradually an audience will cease to rouse her into any violence of thought or accentuation of superficial action—oh, Michael,” Mrs. Ross exclaimed, breaking off, “what dreadfully long words you’re tempting me to use, and why do you make me talk about Stella? I’d really rather talk about you.”
“Stella is becoming a problem to me,” said Michael.
“And you yourself are no longer a problem to yourself?” Mrs. Ross inquired.
“Not in the sense I was, when we last talked together.”
Michael was a little embarrassed by recalling that conversation. It seemed to link him too closely for his pleasure to the behavior which had led up to it, to be a part of himself at the time, farouche and uncontrolled.
“And all worries have passed away?” persisted Mrs. Ross.
“Yes, yes,” said Michael quickly. “For one thing,” he added as if he thought he had been too abrupt, “I’m too comfortably off to worry much about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face. Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of myself as sixteen and seventeen.” Michael was building brick by brick a bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. “I seem to see myself,” he persevered, “with very untidy hair, with very loose joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I blushnow at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say to the second-year table in hall.” Michael paused for a moment, half hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self, but as she said nothing, he continued: “When I came up to Oxford I found that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St. James’, but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, ‘By gad, Valérie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,’ and my mother disagreeing, ‘No, no, I’m sure you were right when you said St. James’.’ That’s so like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James’ and Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any alteration. I’m telling you all this because, you know, you provided as it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I’m perfectly sure I could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, if I’d not been at a London day-school.”
“But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?” asked Mrs. Ross. “Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as normality is concerned, through St. James’.”
“Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman. Possibly he benefited by St. James’. Possibly at Eton, and with a prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. NowI was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn’t always possessed a sort of curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality. No astounding gift of genius, I mean.”
“But, Michael,” interrupted Mrs. Ross, “I don’t fancy the greatest geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or seventeen.”
“No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of Keats’ letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment I try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done.”
“But still, I don’t see why a day-school should have militated against the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty.”
“It did in this way,” said Michael. “It gave me too much with which to sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I was unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I’m sure of that, because since I’ve been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism so very much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say, there’s no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it’s partly due to being older.”
“Really, Michael,” Mrs. Ross protested, “if you talk like this I shall begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up self-confidence seems to me not quite normal either.”
“Ah, that’s only because I’m criticizing my earlier self.I really am now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right mean between the two extremes. I’m enjoying Oxford enormously. I can’t tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a struggle to find that wide normal road on which I’m strolling along now. I’m so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England, and that the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to apply to the world the same standards we tacitly respect—we undergraduates. I believe every problem of life can be solved by the transcendency of the spirit which has transcended us up here. You remember I used to say you were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those qualities in you which made me think of that resemblance I find in Oxford. Don’t ask me to say what they are, because I couldn’t explain.”
“I think you have a great capacity for idealization,” said Mrs. Ross gravely. “I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I wonder what profession you’ll choose.”
“I don’t suppose I shall choose a profession at all,” said Michael. “There’s no financial reason—at any rate—why I should.”
“Well, you won’t have to decide against a profession just yet,” said Mrs. Ross. “And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you think Stella’s playing has deteriorated—if you really think it has.”
“Oh, I didn’t say it had,” Michael contradicted in some dismay. “I merely said that to-night it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she was anxious. Perhaps she felt among all these undergraduates, as I felt in my first week. Perhapsshe’s thinking what schoolboys they all are, and how infinitely youthful they appear beside those wild and worldly-wise Bohemians to whose company she has been accustomed for so long. I long to tell her that these undergraduates are really so much wiser, even if literature means Mr. Soapy Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and art The Soul’s Awakening, and religion putting on a bowler to go and have a hot breakfast at the O.U.D.S. after chapel, and politics the fag-ends of paternal or rather ancestral opinion, and life a hot bath and changing after a fox-hunt or a grouse-drive.”
Farther conversation was stopped by Wedderburn driving everybody down to supper with pastoral exhortations in his deepest bass. Michael, after his talk with Mrs. Ross, was relieved to find himself next to Lonsdale and sheltered by a quivering rampart of jellies from more exacting company.
“These Basutos aren’t so bad when you talk to them,” said Lonsdale. “Comeragh was at m’tutor’s. I wonder if he still collects bugs. I rather like that man Hazlewood. I thought him a bit sidy at first, but he’s rather keen on fishing. I don’t think much of the girl that Trinity man—what’s his name—Stewart has roped in. She looks like something left over from a needlework stall. I say, your sister jolly well knows how to punch a piano. Topping, what? Mossy’s been very much on the spot to-night. He and Wedders are behaving like a couple of theatrical managers. Why didn’t Alan Merivale turn up? I was talking to some of the cricket push at the Club, and it doesn’t look a hundred quid to a tanner on his Blue. Bad luck. He’s a very good egg.”
Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale’s babble. He was watching the passage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven, Stella had let the cigars go by.
The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of gables they stood laughing and talkingfor a moment. Guy Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting guests.
“It’s been awfully ripping,” these murmured to their hosts. The hosts beamed down.
“We’ve been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to Miss Fane.”
“You ought all to get Firsts now,” said Wedderburn.
Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright spaces, into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled along the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died out to whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and midnight began to clang.
“We must hurry,” said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward St. Mary’s, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.
“Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?” Maurice suggested to Michael.
“I’m rather tired,” objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was going to talk at great length about Stella.
He was too jealous of Alan’s absence that evening to want to hear Maurice’s facile enthusiasm.
Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to assert her independence of personality would try to smash the glass of fashion and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed by that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow belied.
Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was in a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.
“These hard wickets have finished me off,” he sighed. “I shall take up golf, I think.”
The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered with gray fluff under the bed.
“Oh, no, don’t play golf,” protested Michael, “you’ve got two more years to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a rotten game and has ruined Varsity cricket.”
“But one can be alone at golf,” said Alan.
“Alone?” repeated Michael. “Why on earth should you want to play an outdoor game alone?”
“Because I get depressed sometimes,” Alan explained. “What good am I?”
Michael began to laugh.
“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said Alan sadly. “I’ve been thinking of my future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan’t even get into the Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk. Playing cricket for a suburban club on Saturday afternoons. That’s all I see before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?”
“I don’t know that she is going,” said Michael. “She always talks a great deal about things which don’t always come off.”
“I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much,” Alan said. “But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about music. I don’t think I care for him.”
“Some people don’t,” Michael admitted. “I think women always like him, though.”
“Yes, I should think they did,” Alan agreed bitterly. “Sorry I’m so depressing. Have a meringue or something.”
“Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?” Michael challenged.
“What made you think I was?” countered Alan, looking alarmed.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Michael said. “And curiously enough I can quite understand it. Generally, of course, a brother finds it difficult to understand what other people can see in his sister, but I’m never surprised when they fall in love with Stella.”
“A good many have?” asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his bowling.
Michael nodded.
“Oh, I’ve realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,” Alan sighed. “I’m evidently going to be a failure.”
“Would you care for some advice?” inquired Michael very tentatively.
“What sort of advice?” Alan asked.
Michael took this for assent, and plunged in.
“Let her alone,” he adjured his friend. “Let her absolutely alone. She’s very young, you know, and you’re not very old. Let her alone for at least a year. I suggest two years. Don’t see much of her, and don’t let her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really, Alan, it’s not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love with her. I don’t mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned down.”
“Would he be?” demanded Alan gloomily.
“Of course, of course ... it seems funny to be talking to you about love ... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know you’ll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I’m frightfully keen you should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don’t let her interfere with your cricket. Don’t take up golf on account of her.”
Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.
“It’s funny,” said Michael, “that I should have an opportunity now of talking to you about love and cricket.”
“Funny?” Alan repeated.
“Don’t you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for cricket?”
“I believe I do remember vaguely,” said Alan.
Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique, the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects of next term.
Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college. Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs. Alan offered his fourth year to companionship with Michael, but nothing would induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place, and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.
It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until Michael seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had invited him to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as well, but they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially sharing, that is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in the same house and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to be thought of. Maurice was a very good fellow but—Maurice was—but—and Michael in asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company, asked himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging with Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could, and for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael’s choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice’s sensitiveness that it could not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him? Soon it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not want to dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his feelings, and Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had receded into the background of casual encountership, he would take pleasure in his company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as if Maurice were losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael wondered why he had never before noticed how infallibly he ran after each new and petty phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy. It was intolerable to think of spending a year’s close associationwith all those paint-boxes and all that modeling wax and all those undestroyed proof-sheets of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Finally, he had never noticed before how many cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what skill he concealed in every sort of receptacle the stained and twisted stumps that were left over. That habit would be disastrous to their friendship, and Michael knew that each fresh cigarette lighted by him would consume a trace more of the friendship, until at last he would come to the state of observing him with a cold and mute resentment. He was in this attitude of mind toward his prospective companion, when Maurice came to see him. He seemed nervous, lighting and concealing even more cigarettes than usual.
“About digs in Longwall,” he began.
“I won’t live in Longwall,” affirmed Michael.
“Do you think you could find anybody else?”
“Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?” asked Michael hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
Maurice seemed embarrassed.
“No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me. The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but of course I said I was digging with you, and there’s no room for a third.”
“I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny,” said Michael quickly.
Maurice looked much relieved.
“As long as you don’t feel I’ve treated you badly,” he began.
“That’s all right,” said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice’s obvious idea that he was losing somethingby the defection. But as soon as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice’s invitation to stay at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the penitence which had prompted it.
Stella’s unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery’s adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram. Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully pressed trousers.
“Dear Mrs. Avery,” he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to France. “I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery.”
“Thank Heaven that’s done!” he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South Wales.
The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London between his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at Cressingham Hall—a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad Midlands. It was mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb the pastoral calm. Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden’s remonstrances to obtain a grasp of rural administration. So he and his sister Sylvia with Michael drove every day in a high dogcart to various outlying farms of the estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very popular, and after all as he confided to Michael that was the main thing.
“And how’s his lordship, sir?” the tenant would inquire.
“Oh, very fit,” Lonsdale would reply. “I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a good deal about it.”
In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife’s raspberries and gooseberries.
“I envy your life,” said Michael.
“A bit on the slow side, don’t you think?”
“Plenty of time for thinking.”
“Ah,” said Lonsdale. “But then I’ve got no brains. I really haven’t, you know. The poor old governor’s quite worried about it.”
However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest draw up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port, he delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and notorieties, Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry him verymuch, not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of brains in his only son.
“Dear Lady Cleveden,” he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty house in Cheyne Walk. “London is quite impossible after Cressingham.”
And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the Embankment, the oily river and a lack-luster moon.
Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott, inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot London weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more solicitude than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace for some time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while Prescott lent him a grave attention. At last Michael’s conversation exhausted itself, and for a few minutes there was silence, while Prescott betrayed his nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his cigar. At last he burnt himself and throwing away the cigar leaped forthwith into the tide of emotion that was deepening rapidly around his solitary figure.
“Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella told you. Of course, I realize it’s quite absurd. Said so at once, and of course it’s all over now. Phew! it’s fearfully hot to-night. Always feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that’s the same with most people.”
Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment later the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott’s confidence Michael felt himself committed to a participation in his existence that called for some response. But he could not with any sincerity express a regret for Stella’s point of view.
“Mother was very anxious she should accept you,” saidMichael, and immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella’s stilted declaration of her refusal.
“Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of course I’m a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very ridiculous.”
“I don’t think Stella is old enough to marry,” said Michael.
“But don’t you think it’s better for girls to marry when they’re young?” asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes were very bright and his actions feverish. “I’ve noticed that tendencies recur in families. Time after time. I don’t like this Viennese business, yet if Stella had married me I shouldn’t have interfered with her,” he added, with a wistfulness that was out of keeping with his severely conventional appearance. “Still, I should have always been in the background.”
“Yes, I expect that was what she felt,” said Michael.
He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any longer, he rose and said he must go.
As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved August journals “Suicide of a Man About Town.” At Cobble Place newspapers were read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on the day after that above a short paragraph the headline “Tragedy in the Albany” led him on to learn that actually Prescott was the man about town who had killed himself.
Michael’s first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable coincidence. Itwas only after he had had to return to London and attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner’s summing up of the evidence of depression and the perspiring jury’s delivery of their verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of a man’s life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up the thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August journals he read now with a sharp interest “Cat Saves Household in Whitechapel Fire.” This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the journey down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family from an inquest’s futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would have been awarded the commendatory platitudes of the coroner.
Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for evening. By this time the irony of the cat’s fortuitous interference was blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to the fact of Prescott’s death. He was no longer occupied by the strange sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott’s life was surely a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in London, or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to the very portals of the Albany.
Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had first obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having given away to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead man’s confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting to think of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making this hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the public, so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals, the soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of restraint whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in unrelaxing guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought about the business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an earlier mood of self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to whose almost contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately aspire. He had often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of thought and action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered into himself the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence. And now he must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a spiritual encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up pitiably into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the force of its squalid associations. The fresh dust of the Hampshire lanes became a gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his progress so that he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges were somber and monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected rags of a tramp. The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost their intimations of sane humanity, and turned tohorrible abstractions of the dead life of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot. The comfortable assurance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling away to right and left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed along through the twilight. “My nerves are in a rotten state,” he told himself, and he was very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the night below, while himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly dusk.
In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew’s serene old age drove out the last memory of the coroner’s court, and here was Mrs. Ross coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in Cobble Place was her small son sleeping.
“You look tired and pale, Michael,” said Mrs. Ross. “Why didn’t you wire which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the chaise.”
“Poor fellow, of course he’s tired!” said Mrs. Carthew. “A most disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good.”
The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played at backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of a parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the lamplight, met from time to time Michael’s glances with a concern that never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock, to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him company.
“Unless you want to work?” she added.
Michael shook his head.
When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:
“Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott’s death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarrassed and came away.”
“Oh, my dear Michael, I think you’re probably accusing yourself most unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your dinner?”
“That’s just it. I believe I did know.”
“You thought he was going to kill himself?”
“No, I didn’t think anything so definite as that, but I had an intuition to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he’d think it rather cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe I’ve got the gift of understanding people, and yet I’m afraid to use it. Shall I ever learn?”
Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own futility. He went on to rail at himself.
“The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness wrecks the first decent chance I’ve had to turn it to account.”
They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was hinting.
“My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything,” she affirmed.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamationsof your willingness to do anything that you’re positive you can do better than anything else, I’m quite, quite sure you’re still the rather perverse Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I think you’re going to do—I almost said when you’re grown up—but I mean when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of saying, ‘I knew it.’”
“I suppose really I know what you think I shall do,” said Michael slowly. “But you’re wrong—at least, I think you’re wrong. I lack the mainspring of the parson’s life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of myself. How’s he getting on?”
“Oh, he’s splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something more than I ever managed to give you.”
“Naturally,” said Michael, smiling. “He’s your son.”
“Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of....” Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. “No, I won’t tell you yet.”
“You’re full of unrevealed mysteries,” said Michael.