“Yes, it’s bedtime for me. Good night.”
Two mornings later Michael had a letter from his mother in London. He wondered why he should be vaguely surprised by her hurried return. Surely Prescott’s death could not have been a reason to bring her home.
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.My dearest Michael,I’m so dreadfully upset about poor Dick Prescott. I have so few old friends, so very few, that I can’t afford to lose him. His devotion to your father was perfectly wonderful.He gave up everything to us. He remained in society just enough to be of use to your father, but he was nearly always with us. I think he was fond of me, but he worshiped him. Perhaps I was wrong in trying to encourage the idea of marrying Stella. But I console myself by saying that that had nothing to do with this idea of his to take his own life. You see, when your father died, he found himself alone. I’ve been so selfishly interested in reëntering life. He had no wish to do so. Michael, I can’t write anything more about it. Perhaps, dearest boy, you wouldn’t mind giving up some of your time with the Carthews, and will come back earlier to be with me in London for a little time.Your lovingMother.P.S.—I hope the funeral was properly done.
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.
My dearest Michael,
I’m so dreadfully upset about poor Dick Prescott. I have so few old friends, so very few, that I can’t afford to lose him. His devotion to your father was perfectly wonderful.He gave up everything to us. He remained in society just enough to be of use to your father, but he was nearly always with us. I think he was fond of me, but he worshiped him. Perhaps I was wrong in trying to encourage the idea of marrying Stella. But I console myself by saying that that had nothing to do with this idea of his to take his own life. You see, when your father died, he found himself alone. I’ve been so selfishly interested in reëntering life. He had no wish to do so. Michael, I can’t write anything more about it. Perhaps, dearest boy, you wouldn’t mind giving up some of your time with the Carthews, and will come back earlier to be with me in London for a little time.
Your lovingMother.
P.S.—I hope the funeral was properly done.
Michael realized with a start the loneliness of his mother, and in his mood of self-reproachfulness attacked himself for having neglected her ever since the interests of Oxford had arisen to occupy his own life so satisfyingly. He told Mrs. Ross of the letter, and she agreed with him in thinking he ought to go back to London at once. Michael had only time for a very short talk with old Mrs. Carthew before the chaise would arrive.
“There has been a fate upon this visit,” said the old lady. “And I’m sorry for it. I’d promised myself a great many talks with you. Besides, you’ll miss Alan now, and he’ll be disappointed, and as for Nancy, she’ll be miserable.”
“But I must go,” Michael said.
“Of course you must go,” said Mrs. Carthew, thumping with her stick on the gravel path. “You must always think first of your mother.”
“You told me that before on this very path a long timeago,” said Michael thoughtfully. “I didn’t understand so well why at the time. Now, of course,” he added shyly, “I understand everything. I used to wonder what the mystery could be. I used to imagine all sorts of the most extraordinary things. Prisons and lunatic asylums among others.”
Mrs. Carthew chuckled to herself.
“It’s surprising you didn’t imagine a great deal more than you did. How’s Oxford?”
“Ripping,” said Michael. “And so was your advice about Oxford. I’ve never forgotten. It was absolutely right.”
“I always am absolutely right,” said Mrs. Carthew.
The wheels of the chaise were audible; and Michael must go at once.
“If I’m alive in two years, when you go down,” said Mrs. Carthew, “I’d like to give you some advice about the world. I’m even more infallible about the world. Although I married a sailor, I’m a practical and worldly old woman.”
Michael said good-bye to all the family standing by the gate of Cobble Place, to Mrs. Ross with the young Kenneth now in knickerbockers by her side and soon, thought Michael, a subject fit for speculation; to delightful May and Joan; to the smiling Carthew cook; all waving to him in the sunlight with the trim cotoneaster behind them.
It gave Michael a consciousness of a new and most affectionate intimacy to find his mother alone in the house in Cheyne Walk. It was scarcely yet September, and the desolation of London all around seemed the more sharply to intagliate upon his senses the fineness of his mother’s figure set in the frame of that sedate house. They had tea together in her own room, and it struck him with a sudden surprise to see her once again in black. The room with its rose du Barri and clouded pastels sustained her beauty and to her somber attire lent a deeper poignancy; or perhaps itwas something apart from the influence of the room, this so incontestable pathos, and was rather the effect of the imprisonment of her elusiveness by a chain whose power Michael had not suspected. Always, for nearly as many years as he could remember, when he had kissed her she had seemed to evade the statement of any positive and ordinary affection. Her personality had fluttered for a moment to his embrace and fled more than swiftly. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, the years were swept away, and he was sitting up for an extra half hour at the seaside, while she with her face flushed by another August sunset was leaning over him. The river became the sea, and the noise of the people on the Embankment were the people walking on the promenade below. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, her embrace gave to him what it had not given during all the years between—a consciousness that he depended upon her life.
“Dearest boy,” she murmured, “how good of you to come back so quickly from the Carthews!”
“But I would much rather be with you,” said Michael.
Indeed, as he sat beside her holding her hand, he wondered to himself how he had been able to afford to miss so many opportunities of sitting like this, and immediately afterward wondered at himself for being able to sit like this without any secret dread that he was making himself absurd by too much demonstrativeness. After all, it was very easy to show emotion even to one’s mother without being ridiculous.
“Poor Dicky Prescott,” she said, and tears quickly blurred her great gray eyes and hung quivering on the shadowy lashes beneath. Michael held her hand closer when he saw she was beginning to cry. He felt no awe of her grief, as he had when she told him of his father’s death. This simpler sorrow brought her so much nearer to him. Shewas speaking of Prescott’s death as she might have spoken of the loss of a cherished possession, a dog perhaps or some familiar piece of jewelry.
“I shall never get used to not having him to advise me. Besides, he was the only person to whom I could talk about Charles—about your father. Dicky was so bound up with all my life. So long as he was alive, I had some of the past with me.”
Michael nodded with comprehending gravity of assent.
“Darling boy, I don’t mean that you and darling Stella are not of course much more deeply precious to me. You are. But I can’t help thinking of that poor dear man, and the way he and Charles used to walk up and down the quarter-deck, and I remember once Charles lent him a stud. It’s the silly little sentimental memories like that which are so terribly upsetting when they’re suddenly taken away.”
Now she broke down altogether, and Michael with his arms about her, held her while she wept.
“Dearest mother, when you cry I seem to hold you very safely,” he whispered. “I don’t feel you’ll ever again be able to escape.”
She had ceased from her sobbing with a sudden shiver and catch of the breath and looked at him with frightened eyes.
“Michael, he once said that to me ... before you were born. Before ... on a hillside it was ... how terribly well I remember.”
Michael did not want her to speak of his father. He felt too helpless in the presence of that memory. The death of Prescott was another matter, a trivial and pathetic thing. Quickly he brought his mother back to that, until she was tired with the flowing of many tears.
Michael spent the rest of the Long Vacation with his mother in London, and gradually he made himself a companion to her. They went to theaters together, because itgave her a sentimental pleasure to think how much poor Dicky Prescott would have enjoyed this piece once upon a time. Between them was the unspoken thought of how much somebody else would have enjoyed this piece also. Michael teased his mother lightly about her bazaars, until she told him he was turning into a second Prescott himself. He discussed seriously the problem of Stella, but he did not say a word of his hope that she would fall in love with Alan. Alan, however, who was already back in town, came to spend week-ends that were very much like the week-ends spent at Carlington Road in the past. Mrs. Fane enjoyed dining with her son and his friend. She asked the same sort of delightfully foolish questions about Oxford that she used to ask about school. In October Mrs. Carruthers arrived back in town, and by this time Mrs. Fane was ready to begin again to flit from charity to charity, and from fad to fad. Yet, however much she seemed to become again her old elusive, exquisite self, Michael never again let her escape entirely from the intimacy which had been created by the sentimental shock of Prescott’s death, and he went up for his third year at Oxford with a feeling that somehow during this vacation he had grown more sure of himself and to his mother more precious.
“What have you done this vac?” they asked him in Venner’s on the night of reunion.
“Nothing very much,” he said, and to himself he thought less than usual in fact, and yet really in one way such a very great deal.
The large room at 202 High Street which Michael shared with Grainger and Lonsdale was perhaps in the annals of university lodgings the most famous. According to tradition, the house was originally part of the palace of a cardinal. Whether it had been the habitation of ecclesiastical greatness or not, it had certainly harbored grandeur of some kind; to this testified the two fireplaces surmounted by coats-of-arms in carved oak that enhanced this five-windowed room with a dignity which no other undergraduate lodging could claim. The house at this period was kept by a retired college cook, who produced for dinner parties wonderful old silver which all his tenants believed to have been stolen from the kitchen of his college. The large room of 202 High gave the house its character, but there were many other rooms besides. Wedderburn, for instance had on the third story a sitting-room whose white paneling and Georgian grace had been occupied by generations of the transitory exquisites of art and fashion. Downstairs in the aqueous twilight created by a back garden was the dining-room which the four of them possessed in common. As for the other lodgers, none were St. Mary’s men, and their existence was only alluded to by Michael and his friends when the ex-cook charged them for these strangers’ entertainments.
Michael was the first to arrive at Two Hundred and Two,and he immediately set to work to arrange in the way that pleased him best the decorative and personal adjuncts contributed by Grainger, Lonsdale, and himself. For his own library he found a fine set of cupboards which he completely filled. The books of Grainger and Lonsdale he banished to the dining-room, where their scant numbers competed for space on the shelves with jars of marmalade, egg-cups, and toast-racks. The inconvenience of the confusion was helpfully obviated first by the fact that their collection, or rather their accumulation, was nearly throughout in duplicate owing to the similar literary tastes and intellectual travaux forcés of Grainger and Lonsdale, and secondly by the fact that for a year to neither taste nor intellect was there frequent resort. With their pictures Michael found the same difficulty of duplication, but as there were two fireplaces he took an ingenious delight in supporting each fireplace with similar pictures, so that Thorburn’s grouse, Cecil Aldin’s brilliant billiard-rooms, Sir Galahad and Eton Society were to be found at either end. Elsewhere on the spacious walls he hung his own Blakes and Frederick Walkers, and the engraving of the morning stars singing together he feathered with the photographic souvenirs of Lonsdale’s fagdom. As for the pictures that belonged to the ex-cook, mostly very large photogravures of Marcus Stone such as one sees in the corridors of theaters, these he took upstairs and with them covered Wedderburn’s white-paneled walls after he had removed the carefully hung Dürers to the bathroom. This transference wasted a good deal of time, but gave him enough amusement when Wedderburn arrived to justify the operation. The pictures all disposed, he called for a carpenter to hang Grainger’s triumphal oars and Lonsdale’s hunting trophies of masks, pads and brushes, and surveyed with considerable satisfaction the accumulative effect of the great room now characterized by their joint possessions.Michael was admiring his work when Lonsdale arrived and greeted him boisterously.
“Hullo! I say, are we all straight? How topping! But wait a bit. I’ve got something that’s going to put the jolly old lid on this jolly old room. What’s the name of the joker who keeps these digs? Macpherson?”
He shouted from the landing to the ex-cook.
“I say, send up the packing-case that’s waiting for me downstairs.”
Michael inquired what was inside.
“Wait a bit, my son,” said the beaming owner. “I’ve got something in there that’s going to make old Wedders absolutely green. I’ve thought this out. I told my governor I was going into digs with some of the æsthetic push and didn’t want to be cut out, so he’s lent me this.”
“What on earth is it?” Michael asked on a note of ambiguous welcome.
The packing-case shaped like a coffin had been set down on the floor by the ex-cook and his slave. Lonsdale was wrenching off the top.
“I had a choice between a mummy and a what d’ye call it, and I chose the what d’ye call it,” said Lonsdale.
He had torn the last piece of the cover away, and lying in straw was revealed the complete armor of a Samurai.
“Rum-looking beggar. Worth twenty of those rotten statues of Wedderburn’s. It was a present to the governor from somebody in the East, but as I promised not to go to dances in it, he lent it to me. Rather sporting of him, what? Where shall we put him?”
“I vote we hide it till this evening,” suggested Michael, “and then put it in Wedder’s bed. He’ll think he’s in the wrong room.”
“Ripping!” cried Lonsdale. “In pyjamas, what?”
That Japanese warrior never occupied the æsthetic nichethat Lord Cleveden from his son’s proposal may have thought he would occupy. Otherwise he played an important part in the life of Two Hundred and Two. Never did any visitor come to stay for the week-end, but Sammy, as he was soon called, was set to warm his bed. To Lonsdale, returning home mildly drunk from Trinity Clareter or Phoenix Wine, he was always ready to serve as a courteous listener of his rambling account of an evening’s adventures. He was borrowed by other digs to annoy the landladies: he went for drives in motor cars to puzzle country inns. Lonsdale tried to make him into a college mascot, and he drove in state to the St. Mary’s grind on the box seat of the coach. He was put down on the pavement outside the lodge with a plate for pennies and a label “Blind” round his neck. But Sammy’s end was a sad one. He had been sent to call on the Warden, and was last seen leaning in a despondent attitude against the Warden’s gothic door. Whether the butler broke him up when Sammy fell forward onto his toes, or whether he was imprisoned eternally in a coal cellar, no one knew. Lord Cleveden was informed he had been stolen.
If Michael had tried hard to find two people in whose company it would be more difficult to work than with any other pair in the university, he could scarcely have chosen better than Lonsdale and Grainger. Neither of them was reading an Honor School, and the groups called H2 or C3 or X26, that with each term’s climax they were compelled to pass in order to acquire the degree of bachelor of arts, produced about a week before their ordeal a state of irritable industry, but otherwise were unheeded. Michael was not sorry to let his own reading beyond the irreducible minimum slide during this gay third year. He promised himself a fourth year, when he would withdraw from this side of Oxford life and in some cloistered digs work really hard.Meanwhile, he enjoyed 202 High as the quintessence of youth’s amenity.
Some of the most enduring impressions of Oxford were made now, though they were not perhaps impressions that marked any development in himself by intellectual achievements or spiritual crises. In fact, at the time the impressions seemed fleeting enough; and it was only when the third year was over, when Two Hundred and Two was dismantled of every vestige of this transient occupation that Michael in summoning these impressions from the past recaptured, often from merely pictorial recollections, as much of Oxford as was necessary to tell him how much Oxford had meant.
There were misty twilights in November when Lonsdale came back spattered with mud after a day with the Bicester or the V.W.H. At such an hour Michael, who had probably been sitting alone by the roaring fire, was always ready to fling away his book, and, while Lonsdale grunted and labored to pull off his riding-boots to hear the tale of a great run across a great piece of country.
There was the autumn afternoon when Grainger stroked St. Mary’s to victory in the Coxwainless Fours. Another oar was hung in Two Hundred and Two, and a bonfire was made in Cuther’s quad to celebrate the occasion. Afterward Grainger himself triumphantly drunk between Michael and Lonsdale was slowly persuaded along the High and put to bed, while Wedderburn prescribed in his deepest voice a dozen remedies.
There were jovial dinner parties when rowing men from Univ and New College sat gigantically round the table and ate gigantically and laughed gigantically, and were taken upstairs to Wedderburn’s dim-lit room to admire his statues of Apollo, his old embroideries and his Dürer woodcuts. These giants in their baggy blanket trousers, their brass-buttoned coats and Leander ties nearly as pink as theirown faces, made Wedderburn’s white Apollos look almost mincing and the embroideries rather insipid. There were other dinner parties even more jovial when the Palace of Delights, otherwise 202 High, entertained the Hotel de Luxe, otherwise 230 High, the abode of Cuffe, Sterns, and Sinclair, or the Chamber of Horrors, otherwise 61 Longwall, where Maurice and Castleton lived. After dinner the guests and the hosts would march arm in arm down to college and be just in time to make a tremendous noise in Venner’s, after which they would visit some of the second-year men, and with bridge to wind up the evening would march arm in arm up the High and home again.
In the Lent term there were windy afternoons with the St. Mary’s beagles, when after a long run Lonsdale and Michael would lose the college drag and hire a dogcart in which they would come spanking back to Oxford with the March gale dying in their wake and the dusk gathering fast. In the same term there was a hockey cup-match, when St. Mary’s was drawn to play an unfamiliar college on the enemy’s ground. 202 High wondered how on earth such an out-of-the-way ground could possibly be reached, and the end of it was that a coach was ordered in which a dozen people drove the mile or so to the field of play, with Lonsdale blowing the horn all the way down High Street and Cornmarket Street and the Woodstock Road.
Michael during the year at Two Hundred and Two scarcely saw anybody who was not in the heart of the main athletic vortex of the university. In one way, his third year was a retrogression, for he was nearer to the life of his first year than to his second. The Oxford Looking-Glass had created for him a society representing various interests. This was now broken up, partly by the death of the paper, partly by the more highly intensified existence of the founders. Maurice certainly remained the same and was already talkingof starting another paper. But Wedderburn was beginning to think of a degree and was looking forward to entering his father’s office and becoming in another year a prosperous partner in a prosperous firm. Guy Hazlewood had gone down and was away in Macedonia, trying to fulfill a Balliol precept to mix yourself up in the affairs of other nations or your own as much as possible. Townsend and Mowbray thought now of nothing but of being elected President of the Union, and as Michael was not a member and hated politics he scarcely saw them. Nigel Stewart had gone to Ely Theological College. The Oxford Looking-Glass was shattered into many pieces. Alan, however, Michael saw more often than last year, because Alan was very popular at Two Hundred and Two.
Michael more and more began to assume the opinions and the attitude of his companions. He began more and more rigidly to apply their somewhat naïve standards in his judgment of the world. He was as intolerant and contemptuous as his friends of any breach of what he almost stated to himself as the public-school tradition. Oxford was divided into Bad Men and Good Eggs. The Bad Men went up to London and womanized—some even of the worst womanized in Oxford: they dressed in a style that either by its dowdiness or its smartness stamped them: they wore college colors round their straw hats and for their ties: they were quiet, surreptitious, diligent, or blatantly rowdy in small sections, and at least half the colleges in the Varsity contained nothing but Bad Men. The Good Eggs went up to London and got drunk; and if they womanized no one must know anything about it. Drink was the only vice that should be enjoyed communely; in fact, if it were enjoyed secretly, it transformed the victim into the very worst of Bad Men. The Good Eggs never made a mistake in dress: they only wore old school colors or Varsity clubcolors: they were bonhomous, hearty, careless, and rowdy in large groups. Only the men from about eight colleges were presumed to be Good Eggs: the rest of the Varsity had to demonstrate its goodness.
Michael sometimes had misgivings about this narrowly selected paucity of Good Eggs. He never doubted that those chosen were deservedly chosen, but he did sometimes speculate whether in the masses of the Bad Men there might not be a few Good Eggs unrecognized as Eggs, unhonored for their Goodness. Yet whenever he made an excursion into the midst of the Bad Men, he was always bound to admit the refreshment of his very firm prejudice in favor of the Good Eggs. What was so astonishing about Good Eggery was the members’ obvious equipment for citizenship of the world as opposed to the provincialism of Bad Mannery. Unquestionably it was possible to meet the most intelligent, the most widely read Bad Men; but intellect and culture were swamped by their barbarous self-proclamation. They suffered from an even bitterer snobbishness than the Good Eggs. In the latter case, the snobbishness was largely an inherited pride: with the Bad Men it was obviously an acquired vanity. Where, however, Michael found himself at odds with Good Eggery was in the admission to titular respect of the Christ Church blood. This growing toleration was being conspicuously exemplified in the attitude of St. Mary’s, that most securely woven and most intimate nest of Good Eggery.
When Michael had first come up there had been an inclination at his college to regard with as much contemptuous indifference an election to the Bullingdon as an election to the Union. It was tacitly understood at St. Mary’s that nothing was necessary to enhance the glory of being a St. Mary’s man. Gradually, however, the preponderance of Etonian influence outweighed the conventional self-sufficiencyof the Wykehamists, and several men in Michael’s year joined the Bullingdon, one of the earliest of these destroyers of tradition being Lonsdale. The result of this action was very definitely a disproportion in the individual expenditure of members of the college. St. Mary’s had always been a college for relatively rich men, but in accordance with the spirit of the college to form itself into an aristocratic republic, it had for long been considered bad form to spend more than was enough to sustain each member of this republic on an equality with his fellows.
Now Lonsdale was so obviously a Good Egg that it did not matter when he played with equal zest roulette and polo or hunted three times a week or wore clothes of the last extreme of fashion. But Michael and Grainger were not sure they cared very much for all of Lonsdale’s friends from the House. Certainly they were Etonians and members of the Bullingdon, but so many of their names were curiously familiar from the hoardings of advertisements that neither Michael nor Grainger could altogether believe in their assumption of the privilege of exclusion on the ground of inherited names.
“I think these Bullingdon bloods are rather rotters,” protested Michael, after an irritating evening of vacuous wealth.
“Imustask them in sometimes,” apologized Lonsdale.
“Why?” rumbled Wedderburn, and on his note of interrogation the Bullingdon bloods were impaled to swing unannaled.
“I don’t think all this sort of thing is very good for the college,” debated Grainger. “It’s all very well for you, Lonny, but some of the second-year men behave rather stupidly. Personally I hate roulette at St. Mary’s. As for some of the would-be fresher bloods, they’re like a lot of damned cavalry subalterns.”
“You can’t expect the college to be handed over entirely to the rowing push,” said Lonsdale.
“That’s better than turning Venner’s into Tattersall’s,” said Wedderburn.
The effect of enlarging the inclusiveness of Good Eggery was certainly to breed a suspicion that it was largely a matter of externals; and therefore among the St. Mary’s men who disliked the application of money as a social standard an inclination grew up to suppose that Good Eggery might be enlarged on the other side. The feeling of the college, that elusive and indefinable aroma of opinion, declared itself unmistakably in this direction, and many Bad Men became Good Eggs.
“We’re all growing older,” said Michael to Wedderburn in explanation of the subtle change manifesting itself. “And I suppose a little wiser. Castleton will be elected President of the J.C.R. at the end of this year. Not Tommy Grainger, although he’ll be President of the O.U.B.C., not Sterne, although he’ll be in the Varsity Eleven. Castleton will be elected because he never has believed and he never will believe in mere externals.”
Nevertheless for all of his third year, with whatever fleeting doubts he had about the progress of St. Mary’s along the lines laid down by the Good Eggery of earlier generations, Michael remained a very devoted adherent of the principle. He was able to perceive something more than mere externals in the Best Eggery. This was not merely created by money or correct habiliment or athletic virtuosity. This existed inherently in a large number of contemporary undergraduates. Through this they achieved the right to call themselves the Best. It was less an assertion of snobbishness than of faith. Good Eggery had really become a religion. It was not inconsistent with Christianity: indeed, it probably derived itself from Christianity throughmany mailclad and muscular intercedents. Yet it shrank from anything definitely spiritual as it would have shrunk from the Salvation Army. Men who intended to be parsons were of course exceptions, but parsons were regarded as a facet of the existing social order rather than as trustees for the heirs of universal truth. Social service was encouraged by fashion, so long as it meant no more than the supporting of the College Mission in the slums of Bristol by occasional week-ends. Members of the college would play billiards in the club for dockhands under or over seventeen, would subscribe a guinea a year, and as a great concession would attend the annual report in the J.C.R. There must, however, be no more extravagance in religion and social service than there should be in dress. The priestly caste of Good Eggery was represented not by the parsons, but by the schoolmasters and certain dons. The schoolmasters were the most powerful, and tried to sustain the legend common to all priestly castes that they themselves made the religion rather than that they were mere servants of an idea. Mature Good Eggs affected to laugh at the schoolmasters whose leading-strings they had severed, but an instinctive fear endured, so that in time to come Good Egglets would be handed over for the craft to mold as they had molded their fathers. It could scarcely be denied that schoolmasters like priests were disinclined to face facts: it was indubitable that they lived an essentially artificial life: it was certain that they fostered a clod-headed bigotry, that they were tempted to regard themselves as philanthropists, that they feared dreadfully the intrusion of secular influence. It could scarcely be denied that the Schoolmasterdom of England was a priestcraft as powerful and arrogant as any which had ever been. But they were gentlemen, that is to say they shaved oftener than Neapolitan priests; they took a cold bath in the morning, which probablyCalvin’s ministers never did; they were far more politely restrained than the Bacchantes and not less chaste than the Vestal Virgins. These clean and honest, if generally rather stupid gentlemen, were the wielders of that afflatus, the public-school spirit, and so far as Michael could see at present, Good Eggs were more safe morally with that inspiration than they might have been with any other. And if a touch of mysticism were needed, it might be supplied by Freemasonry at the Apollo Lodge; while the Boy Scouts were beginning to show how admirably this public-school spirit could blow through the most unpromising material of the middle classes.
Michael so much enjoyed the consciousness of merit which is the supreme inducement offered by all successful religions, and more than any by Good Eggery, that he made up his mind quite finally that Good Eggery would carry him through his existence, however much it were complicated by the problem of Bad Mannery. During that year at Two Hundred and Two he grew more and more deeply convinced that to challenge any moral postulate of Good Eggery was merely contumacious self-esteem. One of the great principles of Good Eggery was that the Good Egg must only esteem himself as a valuable unit in Good Eggery. His self-esteem was entitled to rise in proportion with the distance he could run or kick or throw or hit.
Analyzed sharply, Michael admitted that Good Eggery rested on very frail foundations, and it was really surprising with what enthusiasm it managed to sustain the Good Eggs themselves, so that apparently without either spiritual exaltation or despair, without disinterested politics or patriotism, without any deep humanity even, the Good Eggs were still so very obviously good. Certainly the suicide of Prescott made Michael wonder how much that rather ignominious surrender by such a Good Egg might have beenavoided with something profounder than Good Eggery at the back of life’s experience. But suicide was an accident, Michael decided, and could not be used in the arguments against the fundamental soundness of Good Eggery as the finest social nourishment in these days of a bourgeoning century.
Meanwhile, at St. Mary’s the Good Eggs flourished, and time went by with unexampled swiftness. In the last days of the Lent term, after St. Mary’s had been defeated by Christ Church in the final of the Association Cup, Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale determined to drown woe by a triple Twenty-firster. Every contemporary Good Egg in St. Mary’s and several from other colleges were invited. Forty Good Eggs, groomed and polished and starched, sat down at the Clarendon to celebrate this triple majority. Upon that banquet age did not lay one hesitant touch. The attainment of discretion was celebrated in what might almost have been hailed as a debauch of youthfulness. Forty Good Eggs drank forty-eight bottles of Perrier Jouet ’93. They drank indeed the last four dozen gages of that superb summer stored in the J.C.R., the last four dozen lachrymatories of the 1893 sun, nor could it be said that vintage of Champagne had funeral games unworthy of its foam and fire. Forty Good Eggs went swinging out of the Clarendon about half-past nine o’clock, making almost more noise than even the Corn had ever heard. Forty Good Eggs went swinging along toward Carfax, swinging and singing, temporarily deified by the last four dozen of Perrier Jouet ’93. Riotous feats were performed all down the High. Two trams were unhorsed. Hansoms were raced. Bells were rung. Forty Good Eggs, gloriously, ravishingly drunk, surged into the lodge. There was just time to see old Venner. In the quiet office was pandemonium. Good Eggs were dancing hornpipes; Good Eggs were steadying themselves withcognac; Good Eggs were gently herded out of the little office as ten o’clock chimed. “Bonner! Bonner!” the forty Good Eggs shouted, and off they went not to St. Cuthbert’s, but actually to the great lawn in front of New Quad. Third-year men when they did come into college roaring drunk took no half-measures of celebration. Excited freshmen and second-year men came swarming out of Cloisters, out of Parsons’ Quad, out of Cuther’s to support these wild seniors. What a bonfire it was! Thirty-one chairs, three tables, two doors, twelve lavatory seats, every bundle of faggots in college and George Appleby’s bed. Somebody had brought Roman candles. O exquisite blue and emerald stars! Somebody else had brought Chinese crackers as big as red chimneys. O sublime din! Lonsdale was on the roof of Cloisters trying to kill a gargoyle with hurtling syphons. Michael was tossing up all by himself to decide whether he should tell the Senior Tutor or the Warden what he really thought of him. A fat welterweight, a straggler from New College, had been shorn of his coat-tails, and was plunging about like an overgrown Eton boy. With crimson faces and ruffled hair and scorched shirt-fronts the guests of the Twenty-firster acclaimed to-night as the finest tribute ever paid to years of discretion.
Next morning the three hosts paid ten guineas each to the Dean.
“I thought you people were supposed to have come of age,” he said sardonically.
So incomparably slight was the hang-over from Perrier Jouet ’93 that Grainger, Lonsdale, and Michael smiled very cheerfully, produced their check books, and would, if Mr. Ambrose had not been so discouraging, have been really chatty.
After Collections of Lent term, that opportunity accepted by the college authorities to be offensive in bulk, Michael felthis historical studies were scarcely betraying such an impulse toward research as might have been expected of him at this stage. Mr. Harbottle, the History tutor, an abrupt and pleasant man with the appearance of a cat and the manners of a dog, yapped vituperations from where he sat with all the other dons in judgment along the High Table in Hall.
The Warden turned on his orbit and shone full-faced upon Michael.
“A little more work, Mr. Fane, will encourage us all. Your Collection papers have evidently planted a doubt in Mr. Harbottle’s mind.”
“He never does a stroke of honest work, Warden,” yapped the History tutor. “If he stays up ten years he’ll never get a Fourth.”
“In spite of Mr. Harbottle’s discouraging prophecy, we must continue to hope, Mr. Fane, that you will obtain at least a Second next term.”
“Next term!” Michael gasped. “But I was expecting to take Schools next year.”
“I’m afraid,” said the Warden, “that according to Mr. Ambrose the fabric of the college will scarcely survive another year of your residence. I believe I echo your views, Mr. Ambrose?”
The Dean blinked his gray eye and finally said that possibly Mr. Fane would change next term, adding that a more immediately serious matter was a deficit of no less than seven chapels. Michael pointed out that he designed in his fourth year to go as it were into industrious solitude far away from St. Mary’s.
“Are you suggesting Iffley?” inquired the Warden.
“Oh, no, not so far as that; but right away,” said Michael. “Somewhere near Keble. Miles away.”
“But we have to consider next term,” the Warden urged.“Next term, I take it, you will still be occupied with the fashionable distractions of High Street?”
“I’ll make an offer,” barked Mr. Harbottle. “If he likes to do another Collection paper at the beginning of next term, and does it satisfactorily, I will withdraw my opposition, and as far as I’m concerned he can take his Schools next year.”
“What luck?” asked everybody in the lodge when Michael had emerged from the ordeal.
“I had rather a hot time,” said Michael. “Still Harbottle behaved like a gentleman on the whole.”
Maurice arrived in the lodge soon after Michael, and conveyed the impression that he had left the tutorial forces of the college reeling under the effect of his witty cannonade. Then Michael went off to interview the Dean in order to adjust the difficulty which had been created by the arrears of his early rising. With much generosity he admitted the whole seven abstentions, and was willing not merely to stay up a week to correct the deficit, but suggested that he should spend all the Easter vacation working in Oxford.
So it fell out that Michael managed to secure his fourth year, and in the tranquillity of that Easter vacation it seemed to him that he began to love Oxford for the first time with a truly intense passion and that a little learning was the least tribute he could offer in esteem. It was strange how suddenly history became charged with magic. Perhaps the Academic Muse sometimes offered this inspiration, if one spent hours alone with her. Michael was sad when the summer term arrived in its course. So many Good Eggs would be going down for ever after this term, and upon Two Hundred and Two High brooded the shadow of dissolution. Alan again hovered on the edge of the Varsity Eleven, but a freshman who bowled rather better the same sort ofball came up, and it seemed improbable he would get his Blue. However, the disappointment was evidently not so hard for Alan to bear nowadays. He was indeed becoming gravely interested in philosophy, and Michael was forced to admit that he seemed to be acquiring most unexpectedly a real intellectual grasp of life. So much the better for their companionship next year in those rooms in St. Giles’ which Michael had already chosen.
The summer term was going by fast. It was becoming an experience almost too fugitive to be borne, this last summer term at Two Hundred and Two. Michael, Grainger, and Lonsdale had scarcely known how to endure some offensive second-year men from Oriel being shown their room for next year. They resented the thought of these Oriel men leaning out of the window and throwing cushions at their friends and turning to the left to keep a chapel at Oriel, instead of scudding down to St. Mary’s on the right. Wedderburn was always the one who voiced sentimentally the unexpressed regrets of the other three. He it was who spoke of the grime and labor of the paternal office, of Life with a capital letter as large as any lady novelist’s, and of how one would remember these evenings and the leaning-out over a cushioned window-sill and the poring upon this majestic street.
“We don’t realize our good luck until it’s too late really,” said Wedderburn seriously. “We’ve wasted our time, and now we’ve got to go.”
“Well, dash it all, Wedders,” said Lonsdale, “don’t talk as if we were going to bolt for a train before hall. We aren’t going down for three weeks yet, and jolly old Michael and jolly old Tommy aren’t going down for another year.”
“Lucky devils!” sighed Wedderburn. “By gad, if I only had my time at the Varsity all over again.”
But just when Wedderburn had by his solemnity almost managed really to impress the company with a sense of fleeting time, and when even upon Lonsdale was descending the melancholy of the deep-dyed afternoon, across the road they could see sauntering three men whom they all knew well.
“Tally-ho-ho-ho-whooop!” shouted Lonsdale.
The three men saluted thus came upstairs to the big room of Two Hundred and Two, and a bout of amiable ragging and rotting passed away the hour before dinner and restored to the big room itself the wonted air of imperishable good-fellowship.
“Lucky you lads turned up,” said Lonsdale. “Old Wedders has been moping in his window-seat like a half-plucked pigeon. We’re dining in hall to-night, are you?”
The newcomers were dining in hall, and so in a wide line of brilliant ties and ribbons the seven of them strolled down to college.
There were very few people in hall that night, and Venner’s was pleasantly empty. Venner himself was full of anecdotes, and as they sat on the table in the middle of the room, drinking their coffee, it seemed impossible enough to imagine that they would not be forever here drinking their coffee on a fine June evening.
“Going down soon, Venner,” said Wedderburn, who was determined to make somebody sad.
“What a pity you’re not taking a fourth year!” said Venner. “You ought to have read an Honor School. I always advise the men to read for honors. The dons like it, you know.”
“Got to go and earn my living, Venner,” said Wedderburn.
“That’s right,” said Venner cheerfully. “Then you’llbe married all the sooner, or perhaps you’re not a marrying man.”
“Haven’t found the right girl yet, Venner,” said Wedderburn.
“Oh, there’s plenty of time,” chuckled Venner. “You don’t want to be thinking about girls up here. Some of our men go getting engaged before they’ve gone down, and it always messes them up in the Schools.”
Maurice Avery came in while Venner was speaking. He seemed restless and worried, and as Venner went on his restlessness increased.
“But very few of our men have got into trouble here with girls. We had one man once who married a widow. He was dreadfully chaffed about it, and couldn’t stand it any longer. The men never let him alone.”
“Married a widow, while he was still up?” people asked incredulously.
“Why, yes,” said Venner. “And actually brought her down for Eights and introduced her to the Warden on the barge. She was a most severe-looking woman, and old enough to be his mother. There was some trouble once at 202 High—that’s where you are, isn’t it?” He turned to Lonsdale. “But there won’t be any more trouble because Macpherson vowed he wouldn’t have a servant-girl in the house again.”
“I suppose that’s why we have that perspiring boy,” grumbled Wedderburn. “But what happened, Venner?”
“Well, the usual thing, of course. There were five of our men living there that year, and she picked out the quietest one of the lot and said it was him. He had to pay fifty pounds, and when he’d paid it all, the other four came up to him one by one and offered to pay half.”
Everybody laughed, and Maurice suddenly announced that he was in a devil of a fix with a girl.
“A girl at a village near here,” he explained. “There’s no question of her having a baby or anything like that, you know; but her brother followed me home one night, and yesterday her father turned up. I got Castleton to talk to him. But it was damned awkward. He and old Castleton were arguing like hell in our digs.”
Maurice stopped and, lighting a cigarette, looked round him as if expectant of the laughter which had hailed Venner’s story. Nobody seemed to have any comment to make, and Michael felt himself blushing violently for his friend.
“Bit chilly in here to-night, Venner,” said Lonsdale.
“You are a confounded lot of prigs!” said Maurice angrily, and he walked out of Venner’s just as Castleton came in.
“My dear old Frank Castleton,” said Lonsdale immediately, “I love you very much and I think your hair is beautifully brushed, but you really must talk to our Mr. Avery very, very seriously. He mustn’t be allowed to make such a bee-luddy fool of himself by talking like a third-rate actor.”
“What do you mean?” asked Castleton gruffly.
Lonsdale explained what Maurice had done, and Castleton looked surprised, but he would not take part in the condemnation.
“You’re all friends of his in here,” he pointed out. “He probably thought it was a funny story.” There was just so much emphasis on the pronoun as made the critics realize that Castleton himself was really more annoyed than he had superficially appeared.
An awkwardness had arisen through the inculpation of Maurice, and everybody found they had work to do that evening. Quickly Venner’s was emptied.
Michael, turning out of Cloisters to stroll for a while on the lawns of New Quad before he gave himself to the generalizations of whatever historian he had chosen to beguilethis summer night, came up to Maurice leaning over the parapet by the Cher.
“Hullo, are you going to condescend to speak to me after the brick I dropped in Venner’s?” asked Maurice bitterly.
“I wish you wouldn’t be so theatrically sarcastic,” complained Michael, who was half-unconsciously pursuing the simile which lately Lonsdale had found for Maurice’s behavior.
“Well, why on earth,” Maurice broke out, “it should be funny when Venner tells a story about some old St. Mary’s man and yet be”—he paused, evidently too vain, thought Michael a little cruelly, to stigmatize himself—“and yet be considered contrary to what isdonewhen I tell a story about myself, I don’t quite know, I must admit.”
“It was the introduction of the personal element which made everybody feel uncomfortable,” said Michael. “Venner’s tale had acquired the impersonality of a legend.”
“Oh, god, Michael, you do talk rot sometimes!” said Maurice fretfully. “It’s nothing on earth but offensive and very youthful priggishness.”
“I wonder if I sounded like you,” said Michael, “when I talked rather like you at about seventeen.”
Maurice spluttered with rage at this, and Michael saw it would be useless to remonstrate with him reasonably. He blamed himself for being so intolerant and for not having with kindlier tact tried to point out why he had made a mistake; and yet with all his self-reproach he could not rid himself of what was something very near to active dislike of Maurice at that moment.
But Maurice went on, unperceiving.
“I hate this silly pretense up here—and particularly at St. Mary’s—that nobody ever looks at a woman. It’s nothing but infernal hypocrisy. Upon my soul, I’m glad I’m going down this term. I really couldn’t have stood anotheryear, playing with the fringe of existence. It seems to me, Michael, if you’re sincere in this attitude of yours, you’ll have a very dismal waking up from your dream. As for all the others, I don’t count them. I’m sick of this schoolboy cant. Castleton’s worth everybody else in this college put together. He was wonderful with that hulking fellow who came banging at the door of our digs. I wonder what you’d have done, if you’d been digging with me.”
“Probably just what Castleton did,” said Michael coldly. “You evidently weren’t at home. Now I must go and work. So long.”
He left Maurice abruptly, angry with him, angry with himself. What could have induced Maurice to make such a fool of himself in Venner’s? Why hadn’t he been able to perceive the difference of his confession from Venner’s legendary narration which, unfettered by the reality of present emotions, had been taken under the protection of the comic spirit? The scene in retrospect appeared improbable, just as improbable in one way, just as shockingly improbable as the arrival of an angry rustic father at some Varsity digs in Longwall. And why had he made the recollection worse for himself by letting Maurice enlarge upon his indignation? It had been bad enough before, but that petulant outbreak had turned an accidental vulgarity into vulgarity itself most cruelly vocal. Back in Two Hundred and Two, Michael heard the comments upon Maurice, and as Grainger and Lonsdale delivered their judgment, he felt they had all this time tolerated the offender merely for a certain capacity he possessed for entertainment. They spoke of him now, as one might speak of a disgraced servant.
“Oh, let Maurice drop,” said Michael wearily. “It was one of those miserable aberrations from tact which can happen to anybody. I’ve done the same sort of thingmyself. It’s an involuntary spasm of bad-manners, like sneezing over a crowded railway-carriage.”
“Well, I suppose one must make allowances,” said Grainger. “These artistic devils are always liable to breaks.”
“That’s right,” said Michael. “Hoist the Union Jack. It’s an extraordinary thing, the calm way in which an Englishman is always ready to make art responsible for everything.”
Next day Maurice overtook Michael on the way to a lecture.
“I say,” he began impetuously, “I made an awful fool of myself yesterday evening. What shall I do?”
“Nothing,” said Michael.
“I was really horribly worried, you know, and I think I rather jumped at the opportunity to get the beastly business off my chest, as a sort of joke.”
“Come and dine at the Palace of Delights this evening,” Michael invited. “And tell Frank Castleton to come.”
“We can’t afford to be critical during the last fortnight of jolly old Two Hundred and Two,” said Michael to Lonsdale and Grainger, when they received rather gloomily at first the news of the invitation.
Maurice in the course of the evening managed to reinstate himself. He so very divertingly drew old Wedders on the subject of going down.
The last week of the summer term arrived, and really it was very depressing that so many Good Eggs were irrevocably going to be lost to the St. Mary’s J.C.R.
“I think my terminal dinner this term will have to be the same as my first one,” said Michael. “Only twice as large.”
So they all came, Cuffe and Sterne and Sinclair and a dozen more. And just because so many of the guests were going down, not a word was said about it. The old amiableragging and rotting went on as if the college jokes of to-night would serve for another lustrum yet, as if Two Hundred and Two would merely be empty of these familiar faces for the short space of a vacation. Not a pipe was gone from its rack; not a picture was as yet deposed; not a hint was given of change, either by the material objects of the big room or by the merry and intimate community that now thronged it. Then the college tenor was called upon for a song, and perhaps without any intention of melancholy he sang O Moon of My Delight. Scarcely was it possible even for these Good Eggs, so rigidly conscious of each other’s rigidity, not to think sentimentally for a moment how well the turning down of that empty glass applied to them. The new mood that descended upon the company expressed itself in reminiscence; and then, as if the sadness must for decency’s sake be driven out, the college jester was called upon for the comic song whose hebdomadal recurrence through nine terms had always provoked the same delirious encore. Everything was going on as usual, and at a few minutes to midnight Auld Lang Syne ought not to have been difficult. It had been sung nearly as often as the comic song, but it was shouted more fervently somehow, less in tune somehow, and the silence at its close was very acute. Twelve o’clock was sounding; the guests went hurrying out; and, leaning from the windows of Two Hundred and Two, Grainger, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, and Michael heard their footsteps clattering down the High.
“I suppose we’d better begin sorting out our things to-morrow,” said Michael.
Stella came back from Vienna for a month in the summer. Indeed she was already arrived, when Michael reached Cheyne Walk. He was rather anxious to insist directly to her that her disinclination to marry Prescott had nothing to do with his death. Michael did not feel it would be good for Stella at nineteen to believe to that extent in her power. One or two of her letters had betrayed an amount of self-interest that Michael considered unhealthy. With this idea in view, he was surprised when she made no allusion to the subject, and resented a little that he must be the one to lead up to it.
“Oh, don’t let’s talk of what happened nearly a year ago,” protested Stella.
“You were very much excited by it at the time,” Michael pointed out.
“Ah, but lots of things have happened since then.”
“What sort of things?”
He disapproved of the suggestion that the suicide of a lifelong friend was a drop in the ocean of incident that swayed round Stella.
“Oh, loves and deaths and jealousies and ambitions,” said she lightly. “Things do happen in Vienna. It’s much more eventful than Paris. I don’t know what made me come back to London. I’m missing so much fun.”
This implication that he and his mother were dull company for her was really rather irritating.
“You’d better go and look up some of your Bohemian friends,” he advised severely. “They’re probably all hanging about Chelsea still. It’s not likely that any of them is farther on with his art than he was two years ago. Who was that bounder you were so fond of, and that girl who painted? Clarissa Vine, wasn’t she called? What about her?”
“Poor old George,” said Stella. “I really must try and get hold of him. I haven’t seen Clarie for some time. She made a fool of herself over some man.”
The result of Michael’s sarcastic challenge was actually a tea-party in the big studio at 173 Cheyne Walk, which Stella herself described as being like turning out a lumber-room of untidy emotions.
“They’re as queer as old-fashioned clothes,” she said. “But rather touching, don’t you think, Michael? Though after all,” she added pensively, “I haven’t gone marching at a very great pace along that triumphant career of mine. I don’t know that I’ve much reason to laugh at them. Really in one way poor Clarie is in a better position than me. At least she can afford to keep the man she’s living with. As for George Ayliffe, since he gave up trying to paint the girls he was in love with, he has become ‘one of our most promising realists.’”
“He looks it,” said Michael sourly.
What had happened to Stella during this last year? She had lost nearly all her old air of detachment. Formerly a radiance of gloriously unpassionate energy had shielded her from any close contact with the vulgar or hectic or merely ordinary life round her. Michael had doubted once or twice the wisdom of smoking cigars and had feared that artistic license of speech and action might be carried too far, but,looking back on his earlier opinion of Stella, he realized he had only been doubtful on his own account. He had never really thought she ran the least danger of doing anything more serious in its consequence than would have been enough to involve him or his mother in a brief embarrassment. Now, though he was at a loss to explain how he was aware of the change, she had become vulnerable. With this new aspect of her suddenly presented, he began to watch Stella with a trace of anxiety. He was worried that she seemed so restless, so steadily bored in London. He mistrusted the brightening of her eyes, when she spoke of soon going back to Vienna. Then came a week when Stella was much occupied with speculations about the Austrian post, and another week when she was perturbed by what she seemed anxious to suppose its vagaries. A hint from Michael that there was something more attractive in Vienna than a new technique of the piano made her very angry; and since she had always taken him into her confidence before, he tried to persuade himself that his suspicion was absurd and to feel tremendously at ease when Stella packed up in a hurry and went back with scarcely two days’ warning of her departure to Vienna.
It was a sign of the new intimacy of relation between himself and his mother that Michael was able to approach naturally the subject of Stella’s inquietude.
“My dear boy, I’m just as much worried as you are,” Mrs. Fane assured him. “I suppose I ought to have been much more unpleasant than I can ever bear to make myself. No doubt I ought to have forbidden her quite definitely to go back—or perhaps I should have insisted on going back with her. Though I don’t know what I would have done in Vienna. They make pastry there, don’t they? I daresay there are very good tea-shops.”
“I think it would have been better,” said Michael firmly. Mrs. Fane turned to him with a shrug of helplessness.
“My dear boy, you know how very unpleasant Stella can be when she is crossed. Really very unpleasant indeed. Girls are so much more difficult to manage than boys. And they begin by being so easy. But after eighteen every month brings a new problem. Their clothes, you know. And of course their behavior.”
“It’s quite obvious what’s the matter,” said Michael. “Funny thing. I’ve never concerned myself very much with Stella’s love-affairs before, but this time she seemed less capable of looking after herself.”
“Would you like to go out to Vienna?” she suggested.
“Oh, no, really, I must go away and work. Besides I shouldn’t do any good. Nor would you,” Michael added abruptly.
“I wish Dick Prescott were alive,” his mother sighed. “Really, you know, Michael, I was shocked at Stella’s callousness over that business.”
“Well, my dear mother, be fair. It wasn’t anything to do with Stella, and she has no conventional affections. That’s one comfort—you do know where you are with her. Now, let’s leave Stella alone and talk about your plans. You’re sure you don’t mind my burying myself in the country? I must work. I’m going down into Oxfordshire with Guy Hazlewood.”
Michael had met Guy the other evening in the lobby of a theater. He had come back from Macedonia with the intention of settling somewhere in the country. He was going to devote himself to poetry, although he exacted Michael’s pledge not to say a word of this plan for fear that people would accuse him of an affected withdrawal. He was sensitive to the strenuous creed of his old college, to that atmosphere of faint contempt which surrounded a man who was not on the way toward administering mankind or acres. He had not yet chosen his retreat. That would be revealedin a flash, if his prayer were to be granted. Meanwhile why should not Michael accompany him to some Cotswold village? They would ride out from Oxford on bicycles and when they had found the ideal inn, they would stay there through August and September, prospecting the country round. Michael was flattered by Guy’s desire for his companionship. Of all the men he had known, he used to admire Guy the most. Two months with him would be a pleasure he would not care to forego, and it was easy enough to convince himself that he would be powerless to influence Stella in any direction and that anyway, whether he could or could not, it would be more serviceable for her character to win or lose her own battles.
Michael and Guy left Oxford in the mellow time of an afternoon in earliest August and rode lazily along the Cheltenham road. At nightfall, just as the stripling moon sank behind a spinney of firs that crowned the farthest visible dip of that rolling way ahead across the wold, they turned down into Wychford. The wide street of the town sloped very rapidly to a valley of intertwining streams whence the air met them still warm with the stored heat of the day, yet humid and languorous after the dry upland. On either side, as they dipped luxuriously down with their brakes gently whirring, mostly they were aware of many white hollyhocks against the gray houses that were already bloomed with dusk and often tremulous with the voyaging shadows of candle-light. At the Stag Inn they found a great vaulted parlor, a delicate roast of lamb, a salad very fragrant with mint and thyme, cream and gooseberries and ale.
“This is particularly good ale,” said Guy.
“Wonderful ale,” Michael echoed.
Once again they filled their pewter mugs.
“It seems to me exceptionally rich and tawny,” said Guy.
“And it has a very individual tang,” said Michael. “Another quart, I think, don’t you?”
“Two, almost,” Guy suggested, and Michael agreed at once.
“I vote we stay here,” said Guy.
“I’ll wire them to send along my books to-morrow,” decided Michael.
After supper they went on down the street and came to the low parapet of a bridge in one of whose triangular bays they stood, leaning over to count in the stream below the blurred and jigging stars. Behind them in the darkness was the melodious roar of falling water, and close at hand the dusty smell of ivy. Farther exploration might have broken the spell of mystery; so in silence they pored upon the gloom, until the rhythmic calm and contemplation were destroyed by a belated wagon passing over the bridge behind them. They went back to the Stag and that night in four-posters slept soundly.
Next morning Michael and Guy went after breakfast to visit the bridge on which they had stood in the starlight. It managed curiously to sustain the romantic associations with which they had endowed it on the night before. A mighty sycamore, whose roots in their contest with the floods had long grappled in desperate convolutions with the shelving bank of the stream below, overshadowed the farther end: here also at right angles was a line of gabled cottages crumbling into ruin and much overgrown with creepers. They may have been old almshouses, but there was no sign of habitation, and they seemed abandoned to chattering sparrows whose draggled nests were everywhere visible in the ivy. Beyond on the other side of the bridge the stream gurgled toward a sluice that was now silent; and beyond this, gray buildings deep embowered in elms and sycamores surrounded what was evidently a mill pool. They walkedon to where the bridge became a road that in contrast with the massed trees all round them shone dazzlingly in the sunshine. A high gray wall bounded the easterly side; on the west the road was bordered by a low quickset hedge that allowed a view of a wide valley through which the river, having gathered once more its vagrant streams and brooks, flowed in prodigal curves of silver as far as the eye could follow. The hills that rose to right and left of the valley in bald curves were at this season colorless beside the vivider green of the water-meadows at their base, which was generally indeterminate on account of plantations whence at long intervals the smoke of hidden mills and cottages ascended. When the road had traversed the width of the valley, it trifurcated. One branch followed westward the gentle undulations of the valley; a second ran straight up the hill, disappearing over a stark sky-line almost marine in its hint of space beyond. The main branch climbed the hill diagonally to the right and conveyed a sense of adventure with a milestone which said fifty miles to an undecipherable town.
Michael and Guy took this widest road for a while, but they soon paused by a gate to look back at Wychford. The sun shone high, and the beams slanting transversely through the smoke of the chimneys in tier upon tier gave the clustered gray roofs a superficial translucence like that of an uncut gem. The little town built against the hill nowhere straggled, and in its fortified economy and simplicity of line it might have been cut on wood by a mediæval engraver. Higher up along the hill’s ridge went rocketing east and west the windswept highway from Oxford over the wold to Gloucestershire. They traced its course by the telegraph-poles whose inclinations had so long been governed by the wind that the mechanic trunks were as much a natural feature of the landscape as the trees, themselves not much less lean and sparse. It was a view of such extension that roadsmore remote were faint scars on the hills, and the streams of the valley narrowed ultimately to thin blades of steel. The traffic of generations might be thought to have converged upon this town, so much did it produce the effect of waiting upon that hillside, so little sense did it have of seeming to obtrude its presence upon the surroundings.
Gradually the glances of Guy and Michael came back from the fading horizons of this wide country to concentrate first upon the town and then upon the spire that with glittering weather-vane rose lightly as smoke from the gray fabric of its church, until finally they must have rested simultaneously upon a long low house washed by one stream and by another imprisoned within a small green island.
“It’s to let,” said Michael.
“I know,” said Guy.
The unspoken thought that went sailing off upon the painted board was only expressed by the eagerness with which they stared at the proffered house.
“I might be able to take it,” said Guy at last.
Michael looked at him in admiration. Such a project conceived in his company did very definitely mark an altogether new stage and, as it seemed to him, a somewhat advanced stage in his relationship with the world.
They discovered the entrance immediately behind the almshouses in the smell of whose ivy they had lingered on the bridge last night. They passed through a wooden gateway in a high gray wall and, walking down a stained gravel path between a number of gnarled fruit trees trimmed as espaliers to conform with an antique mode of insuring fertility, they came at last round an overgrown corner close against the house. Seen from the hillside, it had quickly refined itself to be for them at least the intention of that great view, of that wide country of etched-in detail. The just background had been given, the only background thatwould have enabled them to esteem all that was offered here in this form of stone well-ordered, gray, indigenous, the sober crown of the valley.
Guy from the moment he saw it had determined to take this house: his inquiries about the rent and the drains, his discussion of the terms of the agreement, of the dampness within, of the size of the garden were the merest conventions of the house-hunter, empty questions whose answers really had very slight bearing on the matter in hand. Here he said to Michael he would retire: here he would live and write poetry: here life would be escorted to the tread of great verse: here an eremite of art he would show forth the austerity of his vocation.
Meanwhile, Michael’s books arrived, and at Guy’s exhortation he worked in the orchard of Plashers Mead—so the small property of some twenty acres was called. Guy was busy all day with decorators and carpenters and masons. The old landlord had immediately surrendered his house to so enterprising a tenant; an agreement for three years had been signed; and Guy was going to make all ready in summer that this very autumn with what furniture he had he might inhabit his own house set among these singing streams.
Michael found it a little hard to pay the keenest attention to Anson’s or to Dicey’s entertainment of his curiosity about the Constitution, too much did the idea of Guy’s emancipation alluringly rustle as it were in the tree-tops, too much did the thought of Guy’s unvexed life draw Michael away from his books. And even if he could blot out Guy’s prospect, it was impossible not to follow in fancy the goldfinches to their thistle-fields remote and sunny, the goldfinches with their flighted song.
Summer passed, and Michael did not find that the amount of information he had absorbed quite outweighed a powerful impression, that was shaping in his mind, of having wasteda good deal of time in staring at trees and the funnels of light between them, in listening to the wind and the stream, to the reapers and the progress of time.
One evening in mid-September he and Guy went after supper to see how some newly painted room looked by candlelight. They sat on a couple of borrowed windsor chairs in the whitewashed room that Guy had chosen for his own. Two candles stuck on the mantelpiece burned with motionless spearheads of gold, and showed to their great satisfaction that by candlelight as well as by day the green shelves freshly painted were exactly the green they had expected. When they blew out the candles, they realized, such a plenitude of silver light was left behind, that the full moon of harvest was shining straight in through the easterly bow window which overhung the stream.
“By gad, what a glorious night!” sighed Guy, staring out at the orchard. “We’ll take a walk, shall we?”
They went through the orchard where the pears and pippins were lustered by the sheen and glister of the moon. They walked on over grass that sobbed in the dewfall beneath their footsteps. They faded from the world into a web of mist when trees rose suddenly like giants before them and in the depths of whose white glooms on either side they could hear the ceaseless munching of bullocks at nocturnal pasturage. Then in a moment they had left the mist behind them and stood in the heart of the valley, watching for a while the willows jet black against the moon, and the gleaming water at their base.
“I wish you were going to be up next term,” said Michael. “I really can hardly bear to think of you here. You are a lucky devil.”
“Why don’t you come and join me?” Guy suggested,
“I wish I could. Perhaps I will after next year. And yet what should I do? I’ve dreamed enough. I must decidewhat I’m going totryto do, at any rate. You see, I’m not a poet. Guy, you ought to start a sort of lay monastery—a house for people to retreat into for the purpose of meditation upon their careers.”
“As a matter of fact, it would be a jolly good thing if some people did do that.”
“I don’t know,” said Michael. “I should get caught in the web of the meditation. I should hear the world as just now we heard those bullocks. Guy, Wychford is a place of dreams. You’ll find that. You’ll live on and on at Plashers Mead until everything about you turns into the sort of radiant unreality we’ve seen to-night.”
The church-clock with raucous whizz and clangor sounded ten strokes.
“And time,” Michael went on, “will come to mean no more than a brief disturbance of sound. Really I’m under the enchantment already. I’m beginning to wonder if life really does hold a single problem that could not be dissolved at once by this powerful moonshine.”
Next day Michael said he must go back to London to-morrow since he feared that if he dallied he would never go back. Guy could not dissuade him from his resolve.
“I don’t want to spoil my picture of you in this valley,” Michael explained. “You know, I feel inclined to put Plashers Mead into the farthest recesses of my heart, so that whatever happens when I go down next year, it will be so securely hidden that I shall have the mere thought of it for a refuge.”
“And more than the thought of it, you silly ass,” Guy drawled.