Michael and Alan had decided to stay up for Commemoration. Stella and Mrs. Fane had been invited: Lonsdale and Wedderburn were coming up: Maurice was bringing his mother and sisters. For a brief carnival they would all be reunited, and rooms would be echoing to the voices of their rightful owners. Yet after all it would be but a pretense of reviving their merry society. It was not a genuine reunion this, that was requiring women to justify it. Oxford, as Michael esteemed her, was already out of his reach. She would be symbolized in the future by these rooms at 99 St. Giles, and Michael made up his mind that no intrusion of women should spoil for him their monastic associations. He would stay here until the last day, and for Commemoration he would try to borrow his old rooms in college, thus fading from this wide thoroughfare without a formal leave-taking. He would drop astern from the bay-window whence for a time he had watched the wrack and spume of the world drifting toward the horizon in its wake. Himself would recede so with the world, and without him the bay-window would hold a tranquil course, unrocked by the loss or gain of him or the transient voyagers of each new generation. Very few eves and sunsets were still his to enjoy from this window-seat. Already the books were being stacked in preparation for their removal to the studio at 173 Cheyne Walk. Dusty and derelict belongings of him and Alan were already strewn about the landings outside their bedrooms. Even the golf-bag of Alan’s first term, woolly now with the accumulated mildew of neglect, had been dragged from its obscurity. Perhaps it would be impossible to drop astern as imperceptibly as he would have liked. Too many reminders of departure littered the rooms with their foreboding of finality.
“I’m shore I for one am quite sorry you’re going,” said the landlady. “I never wish to have a nicer norer quieter pair of gentlemen. It’s to be hoped, I’m shore, that next term’s comings-ins from St. John’s will be half as nice. Yerse, I shall be very pleased to have these coverlets—I suppose you would call them coverlets—and you’re leaving the shelves in the dining-room? Yerse, I’m shore they’ll be as handy as anything for the cruets and what not. And so you’re going to have a dinner here to eleven gentlemen—oh, eleven in all, yerse, I see.”
It was going to be rather difficult, Michael thought, to find exactly the ten people he wished to invite to this last terminal dinner. Alan, Grainger, and Castleton, of course. Bill Mowbray and Vernon Townsend. And Smithers. Certainly, he would ask Smithers. And why not George Appleby, who was Librarian of the Union this term, and no longer conceivable as that lackadaisical red rag which had fluttered Lonsdale to fury? What about the Dean? And if the Dean, why not Harbottle, his History tutor? And for the tenth place? It was really impossible to choose from the dozen or so acquaintances who had an equal claim upon it. He would leave the tenth place vacant, and just to amuse his own fancy he would fill it with the ghost of himself in the December of his first term.
Michael, when he saw his guests gathered in the sea-green dining-room of 99 St. Giles, knew that this last terminal dinner was an anachronism. After all, the prime and bloom of these eclectic entertainments had been in the two previous years. This was not the intimate and unusual society he had designed to gather round him as representative of his four years at the Varsity. This was merely representative of the tragical incompleteness of Oxford. It was certainly a very urbane evening, but it was somehow not particularly distinctive of Oxford, still less of Michael’s existence there. Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite the two dons. Perhaps everyone was tired under the strain of Schools. Michael was glad when the guests went and he sat alone in the window-seat with Alan.
“To-morrow, my mother and Stella are coming up,” he reminded Alan. “It’s rather curious my mother shouldn’t have been up all the time, until I’m really down.”
“Is that man Avery coming up?” Alan asked.
Michael nodded.
“I suppose your people see a good deal of him now he’s in town,” said Alan, trying to look indifferent to the answer.
“Less than before he went,” said Michael. “Stella’s rather off studios and the Vie de Bohême.”
“Oh, he has a studio?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t take very much interest in his movements,” Alan loftily explained.
They smoked on for a while without speaking.
“I must go to bed,” announced Alan at last.
“Not yet, not yet,” Michael urged him. “I don’t think you’ve quite realized that this is our last night in Ninety-nine.”
“I’ve settled to stay on here during Commem Week,” said Alan. “Your people are staying at the Randolph?”
Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan could really have been so far-sighted as to stay on in St. Giles for the sake of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and Stella home. “But why aren’t you going into college?” he asked.
“Oh, I thought it would be rather a fag moving in for so short a time. Besides, it’s been rather ripping in these digs.”
Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental enough to dread on Alan’s side a grudging assent to his enthusiasm.
“Yes, it has been awfully ripping,” he agreed.
“I should like to have had another year,” sighed Alan. “I think I was just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder how much of it is really applicable?”
“To what? To God?” asked Michael.
“No, the world—the world we live in.”
“I don’t fancy, you know,” said Michael, “that the intellectual part of Oxford is directly applicable to the world at all. What I mean to say is, that I think it can only be applied to the world through our behavior.”
“Well, of course,” said Alan, “that’s a truism.”
Michael was rather disconcerted. The thought in his mind had seemed more worthy of expression.
“But the point is,” Alan went on, “whether our philosophic education, our mental training has any effect on our behavior. It seems to me that Oxford is just as typically Oxford whatever a man reads.”
“That wasn’t the case at school,” said Michael. “I’m positive for instance the Modern side was definitely inferior to the Classical side—in manners and everything else. And though at Oxford other circumstances interfere to make the contrast less violent, it doesn’t seem to me one gains the quintessence of the university unless one reads Greats. Even History only supplies that in the case of men exceptionally sensitive to the spirit of place. I mean to say sensitive in such a way that Oxford, quite apart from dons and undergraduates, can herself educate. I’m tremendously anxious now that Oxford should become more democratic, but I’m equally anxious that, in proportion as she offers more willingly the shelter of her learning to the people, the learning she bestows shall be more than ever rigidly unpractical, as they say.”
“So you really think philosophy is directly applicable?” said Alan.
“How Socratic you are,” Michael laughed. “Perhaps the Rhodes Scholars will answer your question. I remember reading somewhere lately that it was confidently anticipated the advent of the Rhodes Scholars would transform a provincial university into an imperial one. That may have been written by a Cambridge man bitterly aware of his own provincial university. Yet a moment’s reflection should have taught him that provincialism in academic matters is possibly an advantage. Florence and Athens were provincial. Rome and London and Oxford are metropolitan—much more dangerously exposed to the metropolitan snares of superficiality and of submerged personality with the corollary of vulgar display. Neither Rome nor London nor Oxford has produced her own poets. They have always been sung by the envious but happy provincials. Rome and London would have treated Shelley just as Oxford did. Cambridge would have disapproved of him, but a bourgeois dread of interference would have let him alone. As for an imperial university, the idea is ghastly. I figure something like the Imperial Institute filled with Colonials eating pemmican. The Eucalyptic Vision, it might be called.”
“And you’d make a distinction between imperial and metropolitan?” Alan asked.
“Good gracious, yes. Wouldn’t you distinguish between New York and London? Imperialism is the worst qualities of the provinces gathered up and exhibited to the world in the worst way. A metropolis takes provincialism and skims the cream. It is a disintegrating, but for itself a civilizing, force. A metropolis doesn’t encourage creative art by metropolitans. It ought to be engaged all the time in trying to make the provincials appreciate what they themselves are doing.”
“I think you’re probably talking a good deal of rot,” said Alan severely. “And we seem to have gone a long way from my question.”
“About the application of philosophy?”
Alan nodded.
“Dear man, as were I a Cantabrian provincial, I should say. Dear man! Doesn’t it make you shiver? It’s like the ‘Pleased to meet you,’ of Americans and Tootingians. It’s so terribly and intrusively personal. So informative and unrestrained, so gushing and——”
“I wish you’d answer my question,” Alan grumbled, “and call me what you like without talking about it.”
“Now I’ve forgotten my answer,” said Michael. “And it was a wonderful answer. Oh, I remember now. Of course, your philosophy is applicable to the world. You coming from a metropolitan university will try to infect the world with your syllogisms. You will meet Cambridge men much better educated than yourself, but all of them incompetent to appreciate their own education. You will gently banter them, trying to allay their provincial suspicion of your easy manner. You will——”
“You will simply not be serious,” said Alan. “And so I shall go to bed.”
“My dear chap, I’m only talking like this because if I were serious, I couldn’t bear to think that to-night is almost the end of our fourth year. It is, in fact, the end of 99 St. Giles.”
“Well, it isn’t as if we were never going to see each other again,” said Alan awkwardly.
“But it is,” said Michael. “Don’t you realize, even with all your researches into philosophy, that after to-night we shall only see each other in dreams? After to-night we shall never again have identical interests and obligations.”
“Well, anyway, I’m going to bed,” said Alan, and with a good-night very typical in its curtness of many earlier ones uttered in similar accents, he went upstairs.
Michael, when he found himself alone, thought it wiser to follow him. It was melancholy to watch the moon above the empty thoroughfare, and to hear the bells echoing through the spaces of the city.
Michael’s old rooms in college were lent to him for three or four days as he had hoped they would be. The present occupant, a freshman, was not staying up for Commemoration, and though next term he would move into larger rooms for his second year, his effects had not yet been transferred. Michael found it interesting to deduce from the evidence of his books and pictures the character of the owner with whom he had merely a nodding acquaintance. On the whole, he seemed to be a dull young man. The photographs of his relatives were dull: his books were dull and unkempt: his pictures were dull, narrative rather than decorative. Probably there was nothing in the room that was strictly individual, nothing that he had acquired to satisfy his own taste. Every picture had probably been brought to Oxford because its absence would not be noticed in whatever spare bedroom it had previously been hung. Every book seemed either a survival of school or the inexpensive pastime of a railway journey. The very clock on the mantelpiece, which was still drearily ticking, looked like the first prize of a consolation race, rather than the gratification of a personal choice. Michael reproached the young man for being able to spend three terms a year without an attempt to garnish decently the gothic bookshelves, without an effort to leave upon this temporary abode the impression of his lodging. He almost endowed the room itself with a capacity for criticism, feeling it must deplore three terms of such undistinguished company. Yet, after all, he had left nothing to tell of his sojourn here. Although he and the dull young freshman had both used this creaking wicker-chair, for their successors neither of them could preserve the indication of their precedence. One relic of his own occupation, however, he did find in the fragments of envelopes which he had stuck to the door on innumerable occasions to announce the time of his return. These bits of paper that straggled in a kite’s tail over the oak door had evidently resisted all attempts to scrub them off. There were usually a few on every door in college, but no one had ever so extensively advertised his movements as Michael, and to see these obstinate bits of tabs gave him a real pleasure, as if they assured him of his former existence here. Each one had marked an ubiquitous hour that was recorded more indelibly than many other occasions of higher importance.
There was not, however, much time for sentimentalizing over the past, as somewhere before one o’clock his mother and Stella would arrive, and they must be met. Alan came with him to the railway station, and it was delightful to see Wedderburn with them, and in another part of the train Maurice with his mother and sisters. They must all have lunch at the Randolph, said Wedderburn immediately. Mrs. Fane was surprised to find the Randolph such a large hotel, and told Michael that if she had known it were possible to be at all comfortable in Oxford, she would have come up to see him long before. In the middle of lunch Lonsdale appeared, having according to his own account traced Michael’s movements with tremendous determination. He was introduced to Mrs. Fane, who evidently took a fancy to him. She was looking, Michael thought, most absurdly young as Lonsdale rattled away to her, himself quite unchanged by a year at Scoone’s and a recent failure to enter the Foreign Office.
“I say, this is awfully sporting of you, Mrs. Fane. You know, one feels fearfully out of it, coming up like this. Terribly old, and all that. I’ve been mugging away for the Diplomatic and I’ve just made an awful ass of myself. So I thought I wouldn’t ask my governor to come up. He’s choking himself to pieces over my career at present, but I’ve had an awfully decent offer from a man I know who runs a motor business, and I don’t think I’ve got the ambassadorial manner, do you? I think I shall be much better at selling cars, don’t you? I say, which balls are you going to? Because I must buzz round and see about tickets.”
Lonsdale’s last question seemed to demand an answer, and Mrs. Fane looked at Michael rather anxiously.
“Michael, what balls are we going to?” she inquired.
“Trinity, the House, and the Apollo,” he told her.
“What house is that? and I don’t think I ever heard of Apollo College. It sounds very attractive. Have I said something foolish?” Mrs. Fane looked round her, for everyone was laughing.
“The House is Christ Church, mother,” said Michael, and then swiftly he remembered his father might have made that name familiar to her. If he had, she gave no sign; and Michael blushing fiercely, went on quickly to explain that the Apollo was the name of the Masonic Lodge of the university. Stella and Mrs. Fane rested that afternoon, and Michael with Wedderburn, Lonsdale, and several other contemporaries spent a jolly time in St. Mary’s, walking round and reviving the memories of former rags. Alan had suggested that, as he would be near the Randolph, he might as well call in and escort Mrs. Fane and Stella down to tea in Michael’s rooms. Mrs. Avery with Blanche and Eileen Avery had also been invited, and there was very little space left for teacups. Wedderburn, however, assisted by Porcher on whom alone of these familiar people time had not laid a visible finger, managed to make everybody think they had enjoyed their tea. Afterward there was a general move to the river for a short time, but as Lonsdale said, it must be for a very short time in order that everyone might be in good form for the Trinity ball. Mrs. Fane thought she would like to stay with Michael and talk to him for a while. It was strange to see her sitting here in his old room, and to be in a way more sharply aware of her than he had ever been, as he watched her fanning herself and looking round at the furniture, while the echoes of laughter and talk died away down the stone staircase without.
“Dear Michael,” she said. “I wish I’d seen this room when you lived in it properly.”
He laughed.
“When I lived in it properly,” he answered, “I should have been made so shy by your visit that I think you’d have hated me and the room.”
“You must have been so domestic,” said his mother. “Such a curious thing has happened.”
“Apropos of what?” asked Michael, smiling.
“You know Dick Prescott left Stella all his money, well——”
“But, mother, I didn’t know anything about it.”
“It was rather vague. He left it first to some old lady whom he intended to live four or five years, but she died this week, and so Stella inherits it at once. About two thousand a year. It’s all in land, and will have to be managed. Huntingdonshire, or some country nobody believes in. It’s all very difficult. She must marry at once.”
“But, mother, why because she is to be better off and own land in Huntingdonshire, is she to marry at once?” asked Michael.
“To avoid fortune-hunters, odd foreign counts, and people.”
“But she’s not twenty-one yet,” he objected.
“My dearest boy, I know, I know. That’s why she must marry. Don’t you see, when she’s of age, she’ll be able to marry whom she likes, and you know how headstrong Stella is.”
“Mother,” said Michael suddenly, “supposing she married Alan?”
“Delightful boy,” she commented.
“You mean he’s too young?”
“For the present, yes.”
“But you wouldn’t try to stop an engagement, would you?” he asked very earnestly.
“My dearest Michael, if two young people I were fond of fell in love, I should be the last person to try to interfere,” Mrs. Fane promised.
“Well, don’t say anything to Alan about Stella having more money. I think he might be sensitive about it.”
“Darling Stella!” she sighed. “So intoxicated with poverty—the notion of it, I mean.”
“Mother,” said Michael suddenly and nervously, “you know, don’t you, that the day after to-morrow is the House ball—the Christ Church ball?”
“Where your father was?” she said gently, pondering the past.
He nodded.
“I’ll show you his old rooms,” Michael promised.
“Darling boy,” she murmured, putting out her hand. He held it very tightly for a moment.
Next day after the Trinity ball Alan, who was very cheerful, told Michael he thought it would be good sport to invite everybody to tea at 99 St. Giles.
“Oh, I particularly didn’t want that to happen,” said Michael, taken aback.
Alan was puzzled to know his reason.
“You’ll probably think me absurd,” said Michael. “But I rather wanted to keep Ninety-nine for a place that I could remember as more than all others the very heart of Oxford, the most intimate expression of all I have cared for up here.”
“Well, so you can, still,” said Alan severely. “My asking a few people there to tea won’t stop you.”
“All the same, I wish you wouldn’t,” Michael persisted. “I moved into college for Commem just to avoid taking anybody to St. Giles.”
“Not even Stella?” demanded Alan.
Michael shook his head.
“Well, of course, if you don’t want me to, I won’t,” said Alan grudgingly. “But I think you’re rather ridiculous.”
“I am, I know,” Michael agreed. “But thanks for honoring me. Do you think Stella has altered much since she was in Vienna, and during this year in town?”
“Not a bit,” Alan declared enthusiastically. “And yet in one way she has,” he corrected himself. “She seems less out of one’s reach.”
“Or else you know better how to stretch,” Michael laughed.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of her attitude to me,” said Alan a little stiffly.
“Most generalizations come down to a particular fact,” Michael answered. But he would not tease Alan too much because he really wished him to have confidence.
After the Trinity ball it seemed to Michael now not very rash to sound Stella about her point of view with regard to Alan. For this purpose he invited her to come in a canoe with him on the Cher. Yet when together they were gliding down the green tunnels of the stream, when all the warmth of June was at their service, when neither question nor answer could have cast on either more than a momentary shadow, Michael could not bring himself to approach the subject even indirectly. They discussed lazily the success of the Trinity ball, without reference to the fact that Stella had danced three-quarters of her program with Alan. She did not even bother to say he was a good dancer, so much was the convention of indifference demanded by the brother and sister in their progress along this fronded stream.
That night in the Town Hall Michael did not dance a great deal himself at the Masonic ball. He sat with Lonsdale in the gallery, and together they much diverted themselves with the costumes of the Freemasons. It was really ridiculous to see Wedderburn in a red cloak and inconvenient sword dancing the Templars quadrille.
“I think the English are curious people,” said Michael. “How absurd that all these undergraduates should belong to an Apollo Lodge and wear these aprons and dress up like this! Look at Wedders!”
“Enter Second Ruffian, what?” Lonsdale chuckled.
“I suppose it does take the place of religion,” Michael ejaculated, in a tone of bewilderment. “Can you see my sister and Alan Merivale anywhere?” he added casually.
“When’s that coming off?” asked Lonsdale. He had taken to an eyeglass since he had been in London, and the enhanced eye glittered very wisely at Michael.
“You think?”
“What? Rather! My dear old bird, I’ll lay a hundred to thirty. Look at them now.”
“They’re only dancing,” said Michael.
“But what dancing! Beautiful action. I never saw a pair go down so sweetly to the gate. By the way, what are you going to do now you’re down?”
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
“I suppose you wouldn’t like to come into the motor business?”
“No, thanks very much,” said Michael.
“Well, you must do something, you know,” said Lonsdale, letting fall his eyeglass in disapproval. “You’ll find that out in town.”
Michael was engaged for the next dance to one of Maurice’s sisters. Amid the whirl of frocks, as he swung round this pretty and insipid creature in pink crêpe-de-chine, he was dreadfully aware that neither his nor her conversation mattered at all, and that valuable time was being robbed from him to the strains of the Choristers waltz. Really he would have preferred to leave Oxford in a manner more solemn than this, not tangled up with frills and misses and obvious music. Looking down at Blanche Avery, he almost hated her. And to-morrow there would be another ball. He must dance with her again, with her and with her sister and with a dozen more dolls like her.
Next morning, or rather next noon, for it was noon before people woke after these balls that were not over until four o’clock, Michael looked out of his bedroom window with a sudden dismay at the great elms of the deer park, deep-bosomed, verdurous, entranced beneath the June sky.
“This is the last whole day,” he said, “the last day when I shall have a night at the end of it; and it’s going to be absolutely wasted at a picnic with all these women.”
Michael scarcely knew how to tolerate that picnic, and wondered resentfully why everybody else seemed to enjoy it so much.
“Delicious life,” said his mother, as he punted her away from the tinkling crowd on the bank. “I’m not surprised you like Oxford, dear Michael.”
“I like it—I liked it, I mean, very much more when it was altogether different from this sort of thing. The great point of Oxford—in fact, the whole point of Oxford—is that there are no girls.”
“How charmingly savage you are, dear boy,” said his mother. “And how absurd to pretend you don’t care for girls.”
“But I don’t,” he asserted. “In Oxford I actually dislike them very much. They’re out of place except in Banbury Road. Dons should never have been allowed to marry. Really, mother, women in Oxford are wrong.”
“Of course, I can’t argue with you. But there seem to me to be a great many of them.”
“Great scott, you don’t think it’s like this in term-time, do you?”
“Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Fane, apparently very much surprised. “I thought undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I’m sure they are, too.”
“Do you mean to say you really thought this Commem herd was always roaming about Oxford?”
“Michael, your Oxford expressions are utterly unintelligible to me.”
“Don’t you realize you are up here for Commem—for Commemoration?” he asked.
“How wonderful!” she said. “Don’t tell me any more. It’s so romantic, to be told one is ‘up’ for something.”
Michael began to laugh, and the irritation of seeing the peaceful banks of the upper river dappled with feminine forms, so that everywhere the cattle had moved away to browse in the remote corners of the meadows, vanished.
The ball at Christ Church seemed likely to be the most successful and to be the one that would remain longest in the memories of those who had taken part in this Commemoration. Nowhere could an arbiter of pleasure have found so perfect a site for his most elaborate entertainment. There was something very strangely romantic in this gay assembly dancing in the great hall of the House, so that along the cloisters sounded the unfamiliar noise of fiddles; but what gave principally the quality of romance and strangeness was that beyond the music, beyond the fantastically brilliant hall, stretched all around the dark quadrangles deserted now save where about their glooms dresses indeterminate as moths were here and there visible. The decrescent moon would scarcely survive the dawn, and meanwhile there would be darkness everywhere away from the golden heart of the dance in that great hall spinning with light and motion.
Alan was evidently pleased that he was being able to show Stella his own college. He wore about him an air of confidence that Michael did not remember to have seen so plainly marked before. He and Stella were dancing together all the time here at Christ Church, and Michael felt he, too, must dance vigorously, so that he should not find himself overlooking them. He was shy somehow of overlooking them, and when Blanche Avery and Eileen Avery and half a dozen more cousins and sisters of friends had been led back to their chaperones, Michael went over to his mother and invited her to walk with him in the quadrangles of Christ Church. She knew why he wanted her to walk with him, and as she took his arm gently, she pressed it to her side. He thought again how ridiculously young she seemed and how the lightness of her touch was no less than that of the ethereal Eileen or the filmy Blanche. He wished he had asked her to dance with him, but yet on second thoughts was glad he had not, since to walk with her thus along these dark cloisters, down which traveled fainter and fainter the fiddles of the Eton Boating Song, was even better than dancing. Soon they were in Peckwater, standing silent on the gravel, almost overweighted by that heavy Georgian quadrangle.
“He lived either on that staircase or that one,” said Michael. “But all the staircases and all the rooms in Peck are just the same, and all the men who have lived in them for the past fifty years are just the same. The House is a wonderful place, and the type it displays best changes less easily than any other.”
“I didn’t know him when he lived here,” she murmured.
With her hand still resting lightly upon his sleeve, Michael felt the palpitation of long-stored-up memories and emotions. As she stood here pensive in the darkness, the years were rolling back.
“I expect if he were alive,” she went on softly, “he would wonder how time could have gone by so quickly since he was here. People always do, don’t they, when they revisit places they’ve known in younger days? When he was here, I must have been about fifteen. Funny, severe, narrow-minded old father!”
Michael waited rather anxiously. She had never yet spoken of her life before she met his father, and he had never brought himself to ask her.
“Funny old man! He was at Cambridge—Trinity College, I think it was called.”
Then she was silent for a while, and Michael knew that she was linking her father and his father in past events; but still she did not voice her thoughts, and whatever joys or miseries of that bygone time were being recalled were still wrapped up in her reserve: nor did Michael feel justified in trying to persuade her to unloose them, even here in this majestic enclosure that would have engulfed them all as soon as they were free.
“You’re not cold?” he tenderly demanded.
Surely upon his arm she had shivered.
“No, but I think we’ll go back to the ballroom,” she sighed.
Michael felt awed when their feet grated again in movement over the gravel. Behind them in the quadrangle there were ghosts, and the noise of walking here seemed sacrilegious upon this moonless and heavy summer night. Presently, however, two couples came laughing into the lamplight at the corner. The sense of decorous creeds outraged by his mother’s behavior of long ago vanished in the relief that present youth gave with its laughing company and fashionable frocks. Beside such heedlessness it were vain to conjure too remorsefully the past. After all, Peckwater was a place in which young men should crack whips and shout to one another across window-boxes; here there should be no tombs. Michael and his mother went on their way to the hall, and soon the music of the waltzing filled magically the lamplit entries of the great college, luring them to come back with light hearts, so importunate was the gaiety.
Michael rather reproached himself afterward for not trying to take advantage of his mother’s inclination to yield him a more extensive confidence. He was sure Stella would not have allowed the opportunity to slip by so in a craven embarrassment; or was it rather a fine sensitiveness, an imaginative desire to let the whole of that history lie buried in whatever poor shroud romance could lend it? As he was thinking of Stella, herself came toward him over the shining floor of the ballroom emptied for the interval between two dances. How delicately flushed she was and how her gray eyes were lustered with joy of the evening, or perhaps with fortunate tidings. Michael was struck by the direct way in which she was coming toward him without bothering through self-consciousness to seem to find him unexpectedly.
“Come for a walk with me in the moonlight,” she said, taking his arm.
“There’s no moon yet, but I’ll take you for a walk.”
The clock was striking two, as they reached Tom quad, and the decrescent moon to contradict him was already above the roofs. They strolled over to the fountain and stood there captured by loveliness, silent themselves and listening to the talk and laughter of shimmering figures that reached them subdued and intermittent from the flagged terraces in the distance.
“I suppose,” said Stella suddenly, “you’re very fond of Alan?”
“Rather, of course I am.”
“So am I.”
Then she blushed, and her cheeks were very crimson in the moonlight. Michael had never seen her blush like this, had never been aware before of her maidenhood that now flooded his consciousness like a bouquet of roses. Hitherto she had always been for Michael a figure untouched by human weakness. Even when last summer he had seen her break down disconsolate, he had been less shocked by her grief than by its incongruity in her. This blush gave to him his only sister as a woman.
“The trouble with Alan is that he thinks he can’t marry me because I have money, whereas he will be dependent on what he earns. That’s rubbish, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” he agreed warmly. “I’ll tell him so, if you like.”
“I don’t think he’d pay much attention,” she said. “But you know, poor old Prescott left me a lot of land.”
Michael nodded.
“Well, it’s got to be managed, hasn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Michael. “You’ll want a land agent.”
“Why not Alan?” she asked. “I don’t want to marry somebody in the Home Civil Service. I want him to be with me all day. Wouldn’t you?”
“You’ve not told mother?” Michael suggested cautiously.
“Not yet. I shall be twenty-one almost at once, you know.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He was determined that in Stella’s behavior there should be no reflection, however pale, of what long ago had come into the life of an undergraduate going down from Christ Church. He wished for Stella and Alan to have all the benisons of the world. “You’ve no right to assume that mother will object,” he told her.
But Stella did not begin to speak, as she was used, of her determination to have her own way in spite of everybody. She was a softer Stella to-night; and that alone showed to Michael how right he had been to wish with all his heart that she would fall in love with Alan.
“There he is!” she cried, clapping her hands.
Michael looked up, and saw him coming across the great moonlit space, tall and fair and flushed as he should be coming like this to claim Stella. Michael punched Alan to express his pleasure, and then he quickly left them standing by the fountain close together.
At sunrise when the stones of Oxford were the color of lavender, a photograph was taken of those who had been dancing at the Christ Church ball; after which, their gaiety recorded, the revelers went home. Michael was relieved when Alan offered to drive his mother and Stella back to the Randolph. He was not wishing for company that morning, but rather to walk slowly down to college alone. He waited, therefore, to see the dancers disappear group by group round various corners, until the High was desolate and he was the only human figure under this virginal sky. In his bedroom clear and still and sweet with morning light he did not want to go to bed. The birds fluttering on the lawns, the sun sparkling with undeterrent rays of gold not yet high and fierce, and all the buildings of the college dreaming upon the bosom of this temperate morn made him too vigilant for beauty. It would be wrong to sleep away this Oxford morning. With deliberate enjoyment he changed from ruffled evening dress into flannels.
In the sitting-room Michael looked idly through the books, and glanced with dissatisfaction at the desquamating backs of the magazines. There was nothing here fit to occupy his attention at such a peerless hour. Yet he still lingered by the books. Habit was strong enough to make him feel it necessary at least to pretend to read during the hours before breakfast. Finally in desperation he pulled out one of the magazines, and as he did so a small volume bound in paper fell onto the floor. It was Manon Lescaut, and Michael was pleased that the opportunity was given to him of reading a book he had for a long time meant to read. Moreover, if it were disappointing, this edition was so small that it would fit easily into his pocket and be no bother to carry. He wondered rather how Manon Lescaut had come into this bookshelf, and he opened it at an aquatint of ladies deject and lightly clothed—c’est une douzaine de filles de joie, said the inscription beneath. Here, Michael feared, was the explanation of how the Abbé Prévost found himself squeezed away between Pearson’s and The Strand. Here at last was evidence in these rooms of a personal choice. Here spoke, if somewhat ignobly, the character of the purchaser. Michael slipped the small volume into his pocket and went out.
The great lawns in front of New Quad stretched for his solitary pleasure in the golden emptiness of morn. At such an hour it were vain to repine; so supreme was beauty like this that Michael’s own departure from Oxford appeared to him as unimportant as the fall of a petal unshaken by any breath of summer wind. With the air brimming to his draught and with early bees restless along the herbaceous border by the stream’s parapet, Michael began to read Manon Lescaut. He would finish this small volume before breakfast, unless the fumes of the sun should drug him out of all power to award the Abbé his fast attention. The great artist was stronger than the weather, and Michael read on while the sun climbed the sky, while the noises of a new day began, while the footsteps of hurrying scouts went to and fro.
It was half-past eight when he finished that tale of love. For a few moments he sat dazed, visualizing that dreadful waste near New Orleans where in the sand it was so easy for the star-crossed Chevalier to bury the idol of his heart.
Porcher was surprised to find Michael up and wide awake.
“You oughtn’t to have gone and tired yourself like that, sir,” he said reproachfully.
Michael rather resented putting back the little book among those magazines. He felt it would be almost justifiable to deprive the owner of what he so evidently did not esteem, and he wondered if, when he had cut the pages with his prurient paper-knife the purchaser had wished at the end of this most austere tale that he had not spent his money so barrenly. C’est une douzaine de filles de joie. It was a bitter commentary on human nature, that a mere aquatint of these poor naked creatures jolting to exile in their tumbril should extort half a crown from an English undergraduate to probe their history.
“Dirty-minded little beast,” said Michael, as he confiscated the edition of Manon Lescaut, placing it in his suitcase. Then he went out into St. Mary’s Walks, and at the end of the longest vista sat down on a garden-bench beside the Cherwell. Before him stretched the verdurous way down which he had come; beyond, taking shape among the elms, was the college; to right and left were vivid meadows where the cattle were scarcely moving, so lush was the pasturage here; and at his side ran the slow, the serpentine, the tree-green tranquil Cher.
As he sat here among the bowers of St. Mary’s, the story he had just read came back to him with a double poignancy. He scarcely thought that any tale of love could purify so sharply every emotion but that of pity too profound for words. He wondered if his father had loved with such a devotion of self-destruction as had inspired des Grieux. It was strange himself should have been so greatly moved by a story of love at the moment when he was making ready to enter the world. He had not thought of love during all the time he had been up at Oxford. Now he went back in memory to the days when Lily had the power to shake his soul, even as the soul of des Grieux had been shaken in that inn-yard of Amiens, when coming by the coach from Arras he first beheld Manon. How trivial had been Lily’s infidelity compared with Manon’s: how shallow had been his own devotion beside the Chevalier’s. But the love of des Grieux for Manon was beyond the love of ordinary youth. The Abbé by his art had transmuted a wild infatuation, a foolish passion for a wanton into something above even the chivalry of the noblest lover of the Middle Ages. It was beyond all tears, this tale; and the dry grief it now exacted gave to Michael in some inexplicable way a knowledge of life more truly than any book since Don Quixote. It was an academic tale, too: it was told within the narrowest confines of the most rigid form. There was not in this narrative one illegitimate device to excite an easy compassion in the reader: it was literature of a quality marmoreal, and it moved as only stone can move. The death of Manon in the wilderness haunted him even as he sat here: almost he too could have prostrated himself in humiliation before this tragedy.
“There is no story like it,” said Michael to the sleek river. N’exigez point de moi que je vous décrive mes sentiments, ni que je vous rapporte mes dernières expressions. And it was bought by an undergraduate for half a crown because he wanted to stare like the peasant-folk. C’est une douzaine de filles de joie. How really promising that illustration must have looked: how the coin must have itched in his pocket: how carefully he must have weighed the slimness of the book against his modesty: how easy it had been to conceal behind those magazines.
But he could not sit here any longer reconstructing the shamefaced curiosity of a dull young freshman, nor even, with so much to arrange this last morning, could he continue to brood upon the woes of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut. It was time to go and rouse Lonsdale. Lonsdale had slept long enough in those ground-floor rooms of his where on the first day of the first term the inextricable Porcher had arranged his wine. It did not take long to drag Lonsdale out of bed.
“You slack devil, I’ve not been to bed at all,” said Michael.
“More silly ass you,” Lonsdale yawned. “Now don’t annoy me while I’m dressing with your impressions of the sunrise.” Michael watched him eat his breakfast, while he slowly and with the troublesome aid of his eyeglass managed to focus once again the world.
“I was going to tell you something deuced interesting about myself when you buzzed off this morning. You’ve heard of Queenie Molyneux—well, Queenie ...”
“Wait a bit,” Michael interrupted. “I haven’t heard of Queenie Molyneux.”
“Why, she’s in the Pink Quartette.”
Michael still looked blank, and Lonsdale adjusting his eyeglass looked at him in amazement.
“The Pink Quartette in My Mistake.”
“Oh, that rotten musical comedy,” said Michael. “I haven’t seen it.”
Lonsdale shook his head in despair, and the monocle tinkled down upon his plate. When he had wiped it clean of marmalade, he asked Michael in a compassionate voice if he never went to the theater, and with a sigh returned to the subject of Queenie.
“It’s the most extraordinary piece of luck. A girl that everyone in town has been running after falls in love with me. Now the question is, what ought I to do? I can’t afford to keep her, and I’m not cad enough to let somebody else keep her, and use the third latchkey. My dear old chap, I don’t mind telling you I’m in the deuce of a fix.”
“Are you very much in love with her?” Michael asked.
“Of course I am. You don’t get Queenies chucked at your head like turnips. Of course I’m frightfully keen.”
“Why don’t you marry her?” Michael asked.
“What? Marry her? You don’t seem to understand who I’m talking about. Queenie Molyneux! She’s in the Pink Quartette in My Mistake.”
“Well?”
“Well, I can’t marry a chorus-girl.”
“Other people have,” said Michael.
“Well, yes, but—er—you know, Queenie has rather a reputation. I shouldn’t be the first.”
“The problem’s too hard for me,” said Michael.
In his heart he would have liked to push Manon Lescaut into Lonsdale’s hands and bid him read that for counsel. But he could not help laughing to himself at the notion of Lonsdale wrestling with the moral of Manon Lescaut, and if the impulse had ever reached his full consciousness, it died on the instant.
“Of course, if this motor-car business is any good,” Lonsdale was saying, “I might be able in a year or two to compete with elderly financiers. But my advice to you ...”
“You asked for my advice,” said Michael, with a smile.
“I know I did. I know I did. But as you haven’t ever been to see My Mistake—the most absolutely successful musical comedy for years—why, my dear fellow, I’ve been thirty-eight times!... and my advice to you is ‘avoid actresses.’ Oh, yes, I know it’s difficult, I know, I know.”
Lonsdale shook his head so often that the monocle fell on the floor, and his wisdom was speechless until he could find it again.
Michael left him soon afterward, feeling rather sadly that the horizon before him was clouding over with feminine forms. Alan would soon be engaged to his sister. It was delightful, of course, but in one way it already placed a barrier between their perfect intercourse. Maurice would obviously soon be thinking of nothing but women. Already even up at Oxford a great deal of his attention had been turned in that direction: and now Lonsdale had Queenie. This swift severance from youth by all his friends, this preoccupation with womanhood was likely to be depressing, thought Michael, unless himself also fell in love. That was very improbable, however. Love filled him with fear. The Abbé Prévost that morning had expressed for him in art the quintessence of what he knew with sharp prevision love for him would mean. He felt a dread of leaving Oxford that quite overshadowed his regret. Here was shelter—why had he not shaped his career to stay forever in this cold peace? And, after all, why should he not? He was independent. Why should he enter the world and call down upon himself such troubles and torments as had vexed his youth in London? From the standpoint of moral experience he had a right to stay here: and yet it would be desolate to stay here without a vital reason, merely to grow old on the fringe of the university. Could he have been a Fellow, it would have been different: but to vegetate, to dream, to linger without any power of art to put into form even what he had experienced already, that would inevitably breed a pernicious melancholy. On the other hand, he might go to Plashers Mead. He might almost make trial of art. Guy would inspire him, Guy living his secluded existence with books above a stream. Whatever occurred to him in the way of personal failure, he could on his side encourage Guy. His opinion might be valuable, for although he seemed to have no passion to create, he was sure his judgment was good. How Guy would appreciate Manon; and perhaps like so many classics he had taken it as read, nor knew yet what depths of pity, what profundities of beauty awaited his essay.
Michael made up his mind that instead of going to London this afternoon he would ride over to Wychford and either stay with Guy or in any case announce his speedy return to stay with him for at least the rest of the summer. Alan would escort his mother and Stella home. It would be easier for Alan that way. His mother would be so charming to him, and everything would soon be arranged. With this plan to unfold, Michael hurried across to Ninety-nine. Alan was already up. Everything was packed. Michael realized he could already regard the digs without a pang for the imminence of final departure. Perhaps the Abbé Prévost had deprived him of the capacity for a merely sentimental emotion, at any rate for the present.
Alan looked rather doubtful over Michael’s proposal.
“I hate telling things in the train,” he objected.
“You haven’t got to tell anything in the train,” Michael contradicted. “My mother is sure to invite you to dinner to-night, and you can tell her at home. It’s much better for me to be out of it. I shall be back in a few days to pack up various things I shall want for Plashers Mead.”
“It’s a most extraordinary thing,” said Alan slowly, “that the moment you think there’s a chance of my marrying your sister, you drop me like a hot brick.”
Michael touched his shoulder affectionately.
“I’m more pleased about you and her than about anything that has ever happened,” he said earnestly. “Now are you content?”
“Of course, I oughtn’t to have spoken to her,” said Alan. “I really don’t know, looking back at last night, how on earth I had the cheek. I expect I said a lot of rot. I ought certainly to have waited until I was in the Home Civil.”
“You must chuck that idea,” said Michael. “Stella would loathe the Civil Service.”
“I can’t marry ...” Alan began.
“You’ve got to manage her affairs. She has a temperament. She also has land.” Then Michael explained about Prescott, and so eloquent was he upon the need for Stella’s happiness that Alan began to give way.
“I always thought I should be too proud to live on a woman,” he said.
“Don’t make me bring forward all my arguments over again,” Michael begged. “I’m already feeling very fagged. You’ll have all your work cut out. To manage Stella herself, let alone her piano and let alone her land, is worth a very handsome salary. But that’s nothing to do with it. You’re in love with each other. Are you going to be selfish enough to satisfy your own silly pride at the expense of her happiness? I could say lots more. I could sing your praises as ...”
“Thanks very much. You needn’t bother,” interrupted Alan gruffly.
“Well, will you not be an ass?”
“I’ll try.”
“Otherwise I shall tell you what a perfect person you are.”
“Get out,” said Alan, flinging a cushion.
Michael left him and went down to the Randolph. He found Stella already dressed and waiting impatiently in the lobby for his arrival. His mother was not yet down.
“It’s all right,” he began, “I’ve destroyed the last vestige of Alan’s masculine vanity. Mother will be all right—if,” said Michael severely, pausing to relish the flavor of what might be the last occasion on which he would administer with authority a brotherly admonition. “If you don’t put on a lot of side and talk about being twenty-one in a couple of months. Do you understand?”
Stella for answer flung her arms round his neck, and Michael grew purple under the conspicuous affront she had put upon his dignity.
“You absurd piece of pomposity,” she said. “I really adore you.”
“For God’s sake don’t talk in that exaggerated way,” Michael muttered. “I hope you aren’t going to make a public ass of Alan like that. He’d be rather sick.”
“If you say another word,” Stella threatened, “I’ll clap my hands and go dancing all round this hotel.”
At lunch Michael explained that he was not coming to town for a day or two, and his mother accepted his announcement with her usual gracious calm. Just before they were getting ready to enter their cab to go to the station, Michael took her aside.
“Mother, you’ll be very sympathetic, won’t you?” Then he whispered to her, fondling her arm. “They really are so much in love, but Alan will never be able to explain how much, and I swear to you he and Stella were made for each other.”
“But they don’t want to be married at once?” asked Mrs. Fane, in some alarm.
“Oh, not to-morrow,” Michael admitted. “But don’t ask them to have a year’s engagement. Will you promise me?”
“Why don’t you come back to-night and talk to me about it?” she asked.
“Because they’ll be so delightful talking to you without me. I should spoil it. And don’t forget—Alan is a slow bowler, but he gets wickets.”
Michael watched with a smile his mother waving to him from the cab while still she was vaguely trying to resolve the parting metaphor he had flung at her. As soon as the cab had turned the corner, he called for his bicycle and rode off to Wychford.
He went slowly with many roadside halts, nor was there the gentlest rise up which he did not walk. It was after five o’clock when he dipped from the rolling highway down into Wychford. There were pink roses everywhere on the gray houses. As he went through the gate of Plashers Mead, he hugged himself with the thought of Guy’s pleasure at seeing him so unexpectedly on this burnished afternoon of midsummer. The leaves of the old espalier rustled crisply: they were green and glossy, and the apples, still scarcely larger than nuts, promised in the autumn when he and Guy would be together here a ruddy harvest. The house was unresponsive when he knocked at the door. He waited for a minute or two, and then he went into the stone-paved hall and up the steep stairs to the long corridor, at whose far end the framed view of the open doorway into Guy’s green room glowed as vividly as if it gave upon a high-walled sunlit garden. The room itself was empty. There were only the books and a lingering smell of tobacco smoke, and through the bay-window the burble of the stream swiftly flowing. Michael looked out over the orchard and away to the far-flung horizon of the wold beyond.
Here assuredly, he told himself, was the perfect refuge. Here in this hollow waterway was peace. From here sometimes in the morning he and Guy would ride into Oxford, whence at twilight they would steal forth again and, dipping down from the bleak road, find Plashers Mead set safe in a land that was tributary only to the moon. Guy’s diamond pencil, with which he was wont upon the window to inscribe mottoes, lay on the sill. Michael picked it up and scratched upon the glass: The fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land, setting the date below.
Then suddenly coming down past the house with the stream he saw in a canoe Guy with a girl. The canoe swept past the window and was lost round the bend, hidden immediately by reeds and overarching willows. Yet Michael had time to see the girl, to see her cheeks of frailest rose, to know she was a fairy’s child and that Guy was deep in love. Although the fleet vision thrilled him with a romantic beauty, Michael was disheartened. Even here at Plashers Mead, where he had counted upon finding a cloister, the disintegration of life’s progress had begun. It would be absurd for him to intrude now upon Guy. He would scarcely be welcomed now in this June weather. After all, he must go to London; so he left behind him the long gray house and walked up the slanting hill that led to the nearest railway station. By the gate where he and Guy had first seen Plashers Mead, he paused to throw one regret back into that hollow waterway, one regret for the long gray house on its green island circled by singing streams.
There were two hours to wait at the station before the train would arrive. He would be in London about half-past nine. Discovering a meadow pied with daisies, Michael slept in the sun.
When he woke, the grass was smelling fresh in the shadows, and the sun was westering. He went across to the station and, during the ten minutes left before his train came in, walked up and down the platform in the spangled airs of evening, past the tea-roses planted there, slim tawny buds and ivory cups dabbled with creamy flushes.
It was dark when Michael reached Paddington, and he felt depressed, wishing he had come back with the others. No doubt they would all be at the theater. Or should he drive home and perhaps find them there?
“Know anything about this golf-bag, Bill?” one porter was shouting to another.
Michael went over to look at the label in case it might be Alan’s bag. But it was an abandoned golf-bag belonging to no one: there were no initials even painted on the canvas. This forsaken golf-bag doubled Michael’s depression, and though he had always praised Paddington as the best of railway stations, he thought to-night it was the gloomiest in London. Then he remembered in a listless way that he had forgotten to inquire about his suit-case, which had been sent after him from Oxford to Shipcott, the station for Wychford. It must be lying there now with Manon Lescaut inside. He made arrangements to recapture it, which consummated his depression. Then he called a hansom and drove to Cheyne Walk. They had all gone to the Opera, the parlormaid told him. Michael could not bear to stay at home to-night alone: so, getting back into the hansom, he told the man to drive to the Oxford Music-hall. It would be grimly amusing to see on the programs there the theatrical view of St. Mary’s tower.
THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK