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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sinister Street, vol. 2
+
+Author: Compton Mackenzie
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2010 [EBook #33798]
+[Last updated: April 21, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SINISTER STREET, VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+bookcover
+
+
+
+
+SINISTER STREET
+
+
+BY
+
+COMPTON MACKENZIE
+
+AUTHOR OF “CARNIVAL,” “YOUTH’S ENCOUNTER,” ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
+ D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+BOOK ONE DREAMING SPIRES
+CHAPTER   PAGE
+I.    THE FIRST DAY 3
+II.   THE FIRST WEEK 32
+III.  THE FIRST TERM 47
+IV.   CHEYNE WALK 63
+V.    YOUTH’S DOMINATION 84
+VI.   GRAY AND BLUE 110
+VII.  VENNER’S 143
+VIII. THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS 165
+IX.   THE LESSON OF SPAIN 183
+X.    STELLA IN OXFORD 209
+XI.   SYMPATHY 225
+XII.  202 HIGH 245
+XIII. PLASHERS MEAD 269
+XIV.  99 ST. GILES 288
+XV.   THE LAST TERM 308
+XVI.  THE LAST WEEK 319
+XVII. THE LAST DAY 333
+ 
+BOOK TWO ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+CHAPTER   PAGE
+I.    OSTIA DITIS 349
+II.   NEPTUNE CRESCENT 371
+III.  THE CAFÉ D’ORANGE 401
+IV.   LEPPARD STREET 427
+V.    THE INNERMOST CIRCLE 481
+VI.   TINDERBOX LANE 496
+VII.  THE GATE OF IVORY 552
+VIII. SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE 583
+IX.   THE GATE OF HORN 602
+X.    THE OLD WORLD 652
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER TO JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORADATO 655
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+DREAMING SPIRES
+
+
+Bright memories of young poetic pleasure In free companionship, the
+loving stress Of all life-beauty, lull’d in studious leisure, When
+every Muse was jocund with excess Of fine delight and tremulous
+happiness; The breath of an indolent unbridled June, When delicate
+thought fell from the dreamy moon: But now strange care, sorrow, and
+grief oppress. Robert Bridges.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FIRST DAY
+
+
+Michael felt glad to think he would start the adventure of Oxford from
+Paddington. The simplicity of that railway station might faintly
+mitigate alarms which no amount of previous deliberation could entirely
+disperse. He remembered how once he had lightly seen off a Cambridge
+friend from Liverpool Street and, looking back at the suburban tumult
+of the Great Eastern Railway, he was grateful for the simplicity of
+Paddington.
+
+Michael had been careful that all his heavy luggage should be sent in
+advance; and he had shown himself gravely exacting toward Alan in this
+matter of luggage, writing several times to remind him of his promise
+not to appear on the platform with more than a portmanteau of moderate
+size and a normal kit-bag. Michael hoped this precaution would prevent
+at any rate the porters from commenting upon the freshness of him and
+his friend.
+
+“Oxford train?” inquired a porter, as the hansom pulled up. Michael
+nodded, and made up his mind to show his esteem when he tipped this
+promethean.
+
+“Third class?” the porter went on. Michael mentally doubled the tip,
+for he had neglected to assure himself beforehand about the etiquette
+of class, and nothing could have suited so well his self-consciousness
+as this information casually yielded.
+
+“Let me see, you didn’t have any golf-clubs, did you, sir?” asked the
+porter.
+
+Michael shook his head regretfully, for as he looked hurriedly up and
+down the platform in search of Alan, he perceived golf-clubs
+everywhere, and when at last he saw him, actually even he had a
+golf-bag slung over his shoulder.
+
+“I never knew you played golf,” said Michael indignantly.
+
+“I don’t. These are the governor’s. He’s given up playing,” Alan
+explained.
+
+“Are you going to play?” Michael pursued. He was feeling rather envious
+of the appearance of these veteran implements.
+
+“I may have a shot,” Alan admitted.
+
+“You might have told me you were going to bring them,” Michael
+grumbled.
+
+“My dear old ass, I never knew I was, until the governor wanged them
+into my lap just as I was starting.”
+
+Michael turned aside and bought a number of papers, far too many for
+the short journey. Indeed, all the way they lay on the rack unregarded,
+while the train crossed and recrossed the silver Thames. At first he
+was often conscious of the other undergraduates in the compartment, who
+seemed to be eying him with a puzzled contempt; but very soon, when he
+perceived that this manner of looking at one’s neighbor was general, he
+became reconciled to the attitude and ascribed it to a habit of mind
+rather than to the expression of any individual distaste. Then
+suddenly, as Michael was gazing out of the window, the pearly sky broke
+into spires and pinnacles and domes and towers. He caught his breath
+for one bewitched moment, before he busied himself with the luggage on
+the rack.
+
+On the platform Michael and Alan decided to part company, as neither of
+them felt sure enough whether St. Mary’s or Christ Church were nearer
+to the station to risk a joint hansom.
+
+“Shall I come and see you this afternoon?” Michael rashly offered.
+
+“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, and they turned away from one another to
+secure their cabs.
+
+All the time that Michael was driving to St. Mary’s, he was regretting
+he had not urged Alan to visit him first. A growing sensation of shy
+dread was making him vow that once safe in his own rooms at St. Mary’s
+nothing should drag him forth again that day. What on earth would he
+say when he arrived at the college? Would he have to announce himself?
+How would he find his rooms? On these points he had pestered several
+Old Jacobeans now at Oxford, but none of them could remember the
+precise ceremonies of arrival. Michael leaned back in the hansom and
+cursed their inefficient memories.
+
+Then the cab pulled up by the St. Mary’s lodge, and events proceeded
+with unexpected rapidity. A cheerful man with red hair and a round face
+welcomed his luggage. The cabman was paid the double of his correct
+fare, and to Michael’s relief drove off instantly. From a sort of glass
+case that filled half the interior of the lodge somebody very much like
+a family butler inquired richly who Michael was.
+
+“Mr. C. M. S. Fane?” rolled out the unctuous man.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+“Is there another Fane?” he asked curiously.
+
+“No, sir,” said the head porter, and the negative came out with the
+sound of a drawn cork. “No, sir, but I wished to hessateen if I had
+your initials down correct in my list. Mr. C. M. S. Fane,” he went on,
+looking at a piece of paper. “St. Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.
+Your servant is Porcher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you’ll
+settle with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
+Cuthbert’s. Four. Two pair right.”
+
+The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael’s bag, and Michael was
+preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a
+warning hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole
+labeled Porcher.
+
+“These letters are for you, sir,” he explained pompously. Michael took
+them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
+along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and
+shouted “Porcher!” From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the
+scout appeared.
+
+“One of your gentlemen arrived,” said Henry. “Mr. Fane.” Then he
+touched his cap and retired.
+
+“Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?” Porcher asked.
+
+“Not much,” said Michael apologetically.
+
+“There’s a nice lot of stuff in your rooms,” Porcher informed him.
+“Come in yesterday morning, it did.”
+
+They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors
+Michael was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a
+water-tap that no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck
+in his mind somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.
+
+“These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you’ll shout, of
+course. I’m just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale’s wine.”
+
+Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
+packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
+in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted
+with much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was
+aware of a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room,
+it was a fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction
+of a privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
+bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
+green grass, across the Warden’s garden with its faint gaiety of
+autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
+the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
+leisurely files about the spare sunlight.
+
+It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
+problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would
+be necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
+tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
+attention to himself than would be pleasant, and he postponed the
+summons in favor of an examination of his letters. One after another he
+opened them, and every one was the advertisement of a tailor or
+hairdresser or tobacconist. The tailors were the most insistent; they
+even went so far as to announce that representatives would call upon
+him at his pleasure. Michael made up his mind to order his cap and gown
+after lunch. Lunch! How should he obtain lunch? Where should he obtain
+lunch? When should he obtain lunch? Obviously there must be some
+precise manner of obtaining lunch, some ritual consecrated by
+generations of St. Mary’s men. The loneliness came back triumphant, and
+plunged him dejectedly down into a surprisingly deep wicker-chair. The
+fire crackled in the silence, and the problem of lunch remained
+insoluble. The need for Porcher’s advice became more desperate. Other
+freshmen before him must have depended upon their scout’s experience.
+He began to practice calling Porcher in accents so low that they
+acquired a tender and reproachful significance. Michael braced himself
+for the performance after these choked and muffled rehearsals, and went
+boldly out on to the stone landing. An almost entranced silence held
+the staircase, a silence that he could not bring himself to violate. On
+the door of the rooms opposite he read his neighbor’s
+name—_Mackintosh_. He wished he knew whether Mackintosh were a
+freshman. It would be delightful to make him share the responsibility
+of summoning Porcher from his task of arranging Lonsdale’s wine. And
+who was Lonsdale? _No slops must be emptied here! Mackintosh! Fane!_
+Here were three announcements hinting at humanity in a desolation of
+stillness. Michael reading his own name gathered confidence and a
+volume of breath, leaned over the stone parapet of the landing and,
+losing all his courage in a sigh, decided to walk downstairs and take
+his chance of meeting Porcher on the way.
+
+On the floor beneath Michael read _Bannerman_ over the left-hand door
+and _Templeton-Collins_ over the right-hand door. While he was
+pondering the personality and status of Templeton-Collins, presumably
+the gentleman himself appeared, stared at Michael very deliberately,
+came forward and, leaning over the parapet, yelled in a voice that
+combined rage, protest, disappointment and appeal with the maximum of
+sound: “Porcher!” After which, Templeton-Collins again stared very
+deliberately at Michael and retired into his room, while Michael
+hurried down to intercept the scout, hoping his dismay at
+Templeton-Collins’ impatience would not be too great to allow him to
+pay a moment’s attention to himself.
+
+However, on the ground floor the silence was still unbroken, and
+hopelessly Michael read over the right-hand door _Amherst_, over the
+left-hand door _Lonsdale_. What critical moment had arrived in the
+unpacking of Lonsdale’s wine to make the scout so heedless of
+Templeton-Collins’ call? Again it resounded from above, and Michael
+looking up involuntarily, caught the downward glance of
+Templeton-Collins himself.
+
+“I say, is Porcher down there?” the latter asked fretfully.
+
+“I think he’s unpacking Lonsdale’s wine.”
+
+“Who’s Lonsdale?” demanded Templeton-Collins. “You might sing out and
+tell him I want him.”
+
+With this request Templeton-Collins vanished, leaving Michael in a
+quandary. There was only one hope of relieving the intolerable
+situation, he thought, which was to shout “Porcher” from where he was
+standing. This he did at the very moment the scout emerged from
+Lonsdale’s rooms.
+
+“Coming, sir,” said Porcher in an aggrieved voice.
+
+“I think Mr. Templeton-Collins is calling you,” Michael explained,
+rather lamely he felt, since it must have been obvious to the scout
+that Michael himself had been calling him.
+
+“And I say,” he added hurriedly, “you might bring me up a hammer or
+something to open my boxes, when you’ve done.”
+
+Leaving Porcher to appease the outraged Templeton-Collins, Michael
+retreated to the security of his own rooms, where in a few minutes the
+scout appeared to raise the question of lunch.
+
+“Will you take commons, sir?”
+
+Michael looked perplexed.
+
+“Commons is bread and cheese. Most of my gentlemen takes commons. If
+you want anything extra, you go to the kitchen and write your name down
+for what you want.”
+
+This sounded too difficult, and Michael gratefully chose commons.
+
+“Ale, sir?”
+
+Michael nodded. If the scout had suggested champagne, he would have
+assented immediately.
+
+Porcher set to work and undid the cases; he also explained where the
+china was kept and the wood and the coal. He expounded the theory of
+roll-calls and chapels, and was indeed so generous with information on
+every point of college existence that Michael would have been glad to
+retain his services for the afternoon.
+
+“And the other men on this staircase?” Michael asked, “are any of them
+freshers?”
+
+“Mr. Mackintosh, Mr. Amherst, and the Honorable Lonsdale is all
+freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
+Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
+noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he
+don’t improve,” said Porcher meditatively.
+
+“Do you mean on the coach-horn?” Michael asked.
+
+“Don’t improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
+He’d shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?”
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+“Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It’s easier to order it as
+you want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?”
+
+Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
+service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
+there was nothing.
+
+Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
+black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
+downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
+this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
+sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time
+he had coveted—Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt’s Knight in Armor
+and Montegna’s St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
+aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
+hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
+to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
+intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
+with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
+should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
+she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
+the grave city demanded.
+
+After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
+the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
+when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
+scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
+Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
+were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
+lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
+grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
+tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
+collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael
+examined his possessions in critical discontent. They seemed to
+symbolize the unpleasant crudity of youth. In the familiar surroundings
+of childhood they had seemed on the contrary to testify to his
+maturity. Now at Oxford he felt most abominably young again, yet he was
+able to console himself with the thought that youth would be no
+handicap among his peers. He took down the scenes of Montmartre even
+from the walls of his bedroom and pushed them ignominiously out of
+sight under the bed.
+
+Michael abandoned the contemplation of his possessions, and looked out
+of his sitting-room window at the High. There was something salutary in
+the jangle of the trams, in the vision of ordinary people moving
+unconsciously about the academic magnificence of Oxford. An
+undergraduate with gown wrapped carelessly round his neck flashed past
+on a bicycle, and Michael was discouraged by the sense of his diabolic
+ease. The luxury of his own rooms, the conviction of his new
+independence, the excitement of an undiscovered life all departed from
+him, and he was left with nothing but a loneliness more bitter even
+than when at Randell House he had first encountered school.
+
+Porcher came in presently with lunch, and the commons of bread and
+cheese with the ale foaming in a silver tankard added the final touch
+to Michael’s depression. He thought that nothing in the world, could
+express the spirit of loneliness so perfectly as a sparse lunch laid
+for one on a large table. He wandered away from its melancholy
+invitation into the bedroom and looked sadly down into the quad. In
+every doorway stood knots of senior men talking: continually came new
+arrivals to hail familiarly their friends after the vacation: scouts
+hurried to and fro with trays of food: from window to window gossip,
+greetings, appointments were merrily shouted. Michael watched this
+scene of intimate movement played against the background of elms and
+gray walls. The golden fume of the October weather transcended somehow
+all impermanence, and he felt with a sudden springing of imagination
+that so had this scene been played before, that so forever would it be
+played for generations to come. Yet for him as yet outside the picture
+remained, fortunately less eternal, that solitary lunch. He ate it
+hurriedly and as soon as he had finished set out to find Alan at Christ
+Church.
+
+Freedom came back with the elation of walking up the High; and in the
+Christ Church lodge Michael was able to ask without a blush for Alan’s
+rooms. The great space of Tom quad by absorbing his self-consciousness
+allowed him to feel himself an unit of the small and decorative
+population that enhanced the architecture there. The scattered, groups
+of friends whose voices became part of the very air itself like the
+wings of the pigeons and the perpetual tapping of footsteps, the two
+dons treading in slow confabulation that wide flagged terrace, even
+himself were here forever. Michael captured again in that moment the
+crystallized vision of Oxford which had first been vouchsafed to him
+long ago by that old print of St. Mary’s tower. He turned reluctantly
+away from Tom quad, and going on to seek Alan in Meadows, by mistake
+found himself in Peckwater. A tall fair undergraduate was standing
+alone in the center of the quad, cracking a whip. Suddenly Michael
+realized that his father had been at Christ Church; and this tall fair
+whip-cracker served for him as the symbol of his father. He must have
+often stood here so, cracking a whip; and Michael never came into
+Peckwater without recreating him so occupied on a fine autumn
+afternoon, whip in hand, very tall and very fair in the glinting
+sunlight.
+
+Dreams faded out, when Michael ran up the staircase to Alan’s rooms;
+but he was full-charged again with all that suppressed intellectual
+excitement which he had counted upon finding in Oxford, but which he
+had failed to find until the wide tranquillity of Tom quad had given
+him, as it were, the benediction of the University.
+
+“Hullo, Alan!” he cried. “How are you getting on? I say, why do they
+stick ‘Mr.’ in front of your name over the door? At St. Mary’s we drop
+the ‘Mr.’ or any other sort of title. Aren’t you unpacked _yet?_ You
+are a slacker. Look here, I want you to come out with me at once. I’ve
+got to get some more picture-wire and a gown and a picture of Mona
+Lisa.”
+
+“Mona how much?” said Alan.
+
+“La Gioconda, you ass.”
+
+“Sorry, my mistake,” said Alan.
+
+“And I saw some rattling book-shops as I came up the High,” Michael
+went on. “What did you have for lunch? I had bread and cheese—commons
+we call it at St. Mary’s. I say, I think I’m glad I don’t have to wear
+a scholar’s gown.”
+
+“I’m an exhibitioner,” said Alan.
+
+“Well, it’s the same thing. I like a commoner’s gown best. Where did
+you get that tea-caddy? I don’t believe I’ve got one. Pretty good view
+from your window. Mine looks out on the High.”
+
+“Look here,” asked Alan very solemnly, “where shall I hang this picture
+my mater gave me?”
+
+He displayed in a green frame The Soul’s Awakening.
+
+“Do you like it?” Michael asked gloomily.
+
+“I prefer these grouse by Thorburn that the governor gave me, but I
+like them both in a way,” Alan admitted.
+
+“I don’t think it much matters where you hang it,” Michael said. Then,
+thinking Alan looked rather hurt, he added hastily: “You see it’s such
+a very square room that practically it might go anywhere.”
+
+“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked, proffering a crowded plate.
+
+“A meringue?” Michael repeated.
+
+“We’re rather famous for our meringues here,” said Alan gravely. “We
+make them in the kitchen. I ordered a double lot in case you came in.”
+
+“You seem to have found out a good deal about Christ Church already,”
+Michael observed.
+
+“The House,” Alan corrected. “We call it—in fact everybody calls it the
+House.”
+
+Michael was inclined to resent this arrogation by a college not his own
+of a distinct and slightly affected piece of nomenclature, and he
+wished he possessed enough knowledge of his own peculiar college
+customs to counter Alan’s display.
+
+“Well, hurry up and come out of the House,” he urged. “You can’t stay
+here unpacking all the afternoon.”
+
+“Why do you want to start buying things straight away?” Alan argued.
+
+“Because I know what I want,” Michael insisted.
+
+“Since when?” Alan demanded. “I’m not going to buy anything for a bit.”
+
+“Come on, come on,” Michael urged. He was in a hurry to enjoy the
+luxury of traversing the quads of Christ Church in company, of
+strolling down the High in company, of looking into shop windows in
+company, of finally defeating that first dismal loneliness with Alan
+and his company.
+
+It certainly proved to be a lavish afternoon. Michael bought three
+straight-grained pipes so substantially silvered that they made his own
+old pipes take on an attenuated vulgarity. He bought an obese tobacco
+jar blazoned with the arms of his college and, similarly blazoned, a
+protuberant utensil for matches. He bought numerous ounces of those
+prodigally displayed mixtures of tobacco, every one of which was
+vouched for by the vendor as in its own way the perfect blend. He
+bought his cap and his gown and was measured by the tailor for a coat
+of Harris tweed such as everybody seemed to wear. He found the very
+autotype of Mona Lisa he coveted, and farther he was persuaded by the
+picture-dealer to buy for two guineas a signed proof of a small
+copperplate engraving of the Primavera. This expenditure frightened him
+from buying any more pictures that afternoon and seemed a violent and
+sudden extravagance. However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after
+signing his name several times, he was presented with a check book. In
+order to be perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one
+then and there, and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as
+irreverently as if they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his
+new check-book was the purse of Fortunatus.
+
+Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the
+purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in
+order to assert his independence in the face of Alan’s continuous
+dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a
+pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the
+pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties
+of knitted silk.
+
+By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Café in
+Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o’clock and neither of
+them felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other
+back to tea, they went into the café and ate a quantity of hot buttered
+toast and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their
+enjoyment and faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of
+three exquisitely untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the
+doorway and surveyed first the crowded café in general, and then more
+particularly Michael and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt.
+After a prolonged stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:
+
+“Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!”
+
+Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.
+
+Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed
+from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress
+seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan
+paid their bill and went out.
+
+“Are you coming back to my rooms?” Michael asked. Yet secretly he half
+hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to
+be alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.
+
+Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly,
+promising to meet him again to-morrow.
+
+Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers,
+for a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street
+lured him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man
+with a thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed
+to Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in
+tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against
+the shelves of books.
+
+A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good
+evening.
+
+“May I look round?” Michael asked.
+
+The bookseller nodded.
+
+“Just come up?” he inquired.
+
+“To-day,” Michael confessed.
+
+“And what sort of books are you interested in?”
+
+“All books,” said Michael.
+
+“This set of Pater for instance,” the bookseller suggested, handing
+Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with
+a golden monogram. “Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds
+fifteen cash.” This information he added in a note of disdainful
+tolerance.
+
+Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.
+
+“Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays,” Mr. Lampard went
+on. “In the early ‘nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for
+books.”
+
+Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.
+
+“Seven pounds ten,” he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid
+sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.
+
+“What college?” asked Mr. Lampard. “St. Mary’s? Ah, there used to be
+some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis
+of Montgomery’s son, was at St. Mary’s, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I
+published his first volume of poems—of course, you’ve read his books.
+He was at St. Mary’s. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.
+You’ve heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first
+number, but they’re getting very scarce. All St. Mary’s men and all
+great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I
+really don’t know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not
+selling them.”
+
+Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very
+thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some
+entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past,
+and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.
+
+“Perhaps after all I will take the Pater,” he said. “Only I may not be
+able to pay you this term.”
+
+The bookseller smiled.
+
+“I don’t think I shall worry you. Do you know this set—Boccaccio,
+Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered
+silk. They’ll always keep their price, and of course all the
+photogravures are included.”
+
+“All right. You might send them too.”
+
+Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of
+the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to
+College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling
+scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous
+those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against
+those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a
+buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had
+certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on
+the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy
+balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a
+pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson’s bookshop. At Lampard’s he
+was already a personality.
+
+All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford,
+but really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in
+comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the
+Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar
+conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The
+list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a
+discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools
+other, than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed
+to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was
+responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he
+stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound
+to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top
+of the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his
+name.
+
+“You’ll be at the second freshmen’s table. On the right, sir. Mr.
+Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir.”
+
+Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and
+hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly
+placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with
+either of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying
+the armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his
+judicial gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his
+voice.
+
+“How do you become head of a table?” Michael’s left-hand neighbor
+suddenly asked.
+
+Michael said he really did not know.
+
+“Because what I’m wondering,” the left-hand neighbor continued, “is why
+they’ve made that ass Wedderburn head of our table.”
+
+“Why, is he an ass?” Michael inquired.
+
+“Frightful ass,” continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael
+perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.
+“Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?”
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+“I thought you were a cousin of my mother,” said the left-hand
+neighbor.
+
+Michael looked astonished.
+
+“His name’s Mackintosh. What’s your name?”
+
+Michael told him.
+
+“My name’s Lonsdale. I think we’re on the same staircase—so’s
+Mackintosh. It’s a pity he’s an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I’d
+look him up.”
+
+Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential
+undertone:
+
+“I don’t mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor
+lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad—in fact
+rather good eggs—but the rest! Well, look at that ass Wedderburn. He’s
+typical.”
+
+“I think he looks rather a good sort,” said Michael.
+
+“My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M’ tutor used to like him, but
+really—well—I don’t mind telling you, he’s really an æsthete.”
+
+With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor
+and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly
+audible to Michael:
+
+“I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn’t half bad. I don’t know where
+he comes from, His name’s Fane.”
+
+“He’s from St. James’.”
+
+“Where on earth’s that?”
+
+“London.”
+
+“Why, I thought it was a kind of charity school,” said Lonsdale. Then
+he turned to Michael again:
+
+“I say, are you really from St. James’?”
+
+Michael replied coldly that he was.
+
+“I say, come and have coffee with me after hall. One or two O. E.’s are
+coming in, but you won’t mind?”
+
+“Why, do you want to find out something about St. James’?” demanded
+Michael, frowning.
+
+“Oh, I say, don’t be ratty. It’s that ass Tommy. He always talks at the
+top of his voice.”
+
+Lonsdale, as he spoke, looked so charmingly apologetic and displayed
+such accomplished sang-froid that Michael forgave him immediately and
+promised to come to coffee.
+
+“Good egg!” Lonsdale exclaimed with the satisfaction of having smoothed
+over an awkward place. “I say,” he offered, “if you’d like to meet
+Wedderburn, I’ll ask him, too. He seems to have improved since he’s
+been up at the Varsity. Don’t you think that fat man Wedderburn has
+improved, Tommy?”
+
+Tommy nodded.
+
+“One day’s done him no end of good.”
+
+“I say,” Lonsdale offered, “you haven’t met Fane. Mr. Fane—Mr.
+Grainger. I was just saying to Fane that the Etonians are a rotten lot
+this term.”
+
+“One or two are all right,” Grainger admitted with evident reluctance.
+
+“Well, perhaps two,” Lonsdale agreed. “This dinner isn’t bad, what?”
+
+By this time the conversation at the table had become more general, and
+Michael gradually realized that some of the alarm he had felt himself
+had certainly been felt by his companions. Now at any rate there was a
+perceptible relaxation of tension. Still the conversation was only
+general in so much as that whenever anybody spoke, the rest of the
+table listened. The moment the flow of his information dried up,
+somebody else began pumping forth instruction. These slightly nervous
+little lectures were delivered without any claim to authority and they
+came up prefaced by the third person of legendary narrative.
+
+“They say we shall all have to interview the Warden to-morrow.”
+
+“They say on Sunday afternoon the Wagger makes the same speech to the
+freshers that he’s made for twenty years.”
+
+“They say we ought to go head of the river this year.”
+
+“They say the freshers are expected to make a bonner on Sunday night.”
+
+“They say any one can have commons of bread and cheese by sending out
+word to the buttery. It’s really included in the two-and-fourpence for
+dinner.”
+
+“They say they charge a penny for the napkin every night.”
+
+So the information proceeded, and Michael had just thought to himself
+that going up to Oxford was very much like going to school again, when
+from the second-year tables crashed the sound of a concerted sneeze.
+The dons from high table looked coldly down the hall, expressing a
+vague, but seemingly impotent disapproval, for immediately afterward
+that sternutation shook the air a second time.
+
+Michael thought the difference between school and Oxford might be
+greater than he had supposed.
+
+The slowest eater at the second freshmen’s table had nervously left
+half his savory; Wedderburn without apparent embarrassment had received
+the Sub-Warden’s permission to rise from dinner; Lonsdale hurriedly
+marshaled as many of his acquaintances as he could, and in a large and
+noisy group they swarmed through the moonlight toward his rooms.
+
+Michael was interested by Lonsdale’s sitting-room, for he divined at
+once that it was typical, just a transplanted Eton study with the
+addition of smoking paraphernalia. The overmantel was plumed with small
+photographs of pleasant young creatures in the gay nautical costumes of
+the Fourth of June and festooned hats of Alexandra or Monarch, of the
+same pleasant young creatures at an earlier and chubbier age, of the
+same pleasant young creatures with penciled mustaches and the white
+waistcoat of Pop. In addition to their individual commemorations the
+pleasant young creatures would appear again in house groups, in winning
+house elevens, and most exquisitely of all in Eton Society. Michael
+always admired the photographs of Pop, for they seemed to him to
+epitomize all the traditions of all the public-schools of England, to
+epitomize them moreover with something of that immortality of captured
+action expressed by great Athenian sculpture. In comparison with Pop
+the Harrow Philathletic Society was a barbarous group, with all the
+self-consciousness of a deliberate archaism. Besides the personal
+photographs in Lonsdale’s room there were studies of grouse by
+Thorburn; and Michael, remembering Alan’s grouse, felt in accord with
+Lonsdale and with all that Lonsdale stood for. Knowing Alan, he felt
+that he knew Lonsdale, and at once he became more at ease with all his
+contemporaries in Lonsdale’s room. Michael looked at the colored prints
+of Cecil Aldin’s pictures and made up his mind he would buy a set for
+Alan: also possibly he would buy for Alan the Sir Galahad of Watts
+which was rather better than The Soul’s Awakening.
+
+After Lonsdale’s pictures Michael surveyed Lonsdale’s books, the
+brilliantly red volumes of Jorrocks, the two or three odd volumes of
+the Badminton library, and the school books tattered and ink-splashed.
+More interesting than such a library were the glossy new briars, the
+virgin meerschaum, the patent smoking-tables and another table
+evidently designed to make drinking easy, but by reason of the
+complexity of its machinery actually more likely to discourage one
+forever from refreshment. The rest of the space, apart from the
+furniture bequeathed by the noisy Templeton-Collins when he moved to
+larger rooms above, was crowded with the freshmen whom after hall
+Lonsdale had so hastily gathered together unassorted.
+
+“I ordered coffee for sixteen,” announced the host. “I thought it would
+be quicker than making it in a new machine that my sister gave me. It
+just makes enough for three, and the only time I tried, it took about
+an hour to do that ... who’ll drink port?”
+
+Michael thought the scout’s prophecies about the superfluity of
+Lonsdale’s wine were rather premature, for it seemed that everybody
+intended to drink port.
+
+“I believe this is supposed to be rather good port,” said Lonsdale.
+
+“It is jolly good,” several connoisseurs echoed.
+
+“I don’t know much about it myself. But my governor’s supposed to be
+rather a judge. He said ‘this is wasted on you and your friends, but I
+haven’t got any bad wine to give you.’”
+
+Here everybody held up their glasses against the light, took another
+sip and murmured their approval.
+
+“Do you think this is a good wine, Fane?” demanded Lonsdale, thereby
+drawing so much attention to Michael that he blushed to nearly as deep
+a color as the port itself.
+
+“I like it very much,” Michael said.
+
+“Do you like it, Wedderburn?” asked Lonsdale, turning to the freshman
+who had sat in the armchair at the head of the second table.
+
+“Damned good wine,” pronounced Wedderburn in a voice so rich with
+appreciation and so deep with judgment that he immediately established
+a reputation for worldly knowledge, and from having been slightly
+derided at Eton for his artistic ambitions was ever afterward respected
+and consulted. Michael envied his air of authority, but trembled for
+Wedderburn’s position when he heard him reproach Lonsdale for his lack
+of any good pictures.
+
+“You might stick up one that can be looked at for more than two
+seconds,” Wedderburn said severely.
+
+“What sort of picture?” asked Lonsdale.
+
+“Primavera, for instance,” Wedderburn suggested, and Michael’s heart
+beat in sympathy.
+
+“Never heard of the horse,” Lonsdale answered. “Who owned her?”
+
+“My god,” Wedderburn rumbled, “I’ll take you to buy one to-morrow,
+Lonny. You deserve it after that.”
+
+“Right-O!” Lonsdale cheerfully agreed. “Only I don’t want my room to
+look like the Academy, you know.”
+
+Wedderburn shook his head in benevolent contempt, and the conversation
+was deflected from Lonsdale’s artistic education by a long-legged
+Wykehamist with crisp chestnut hair and a thin florid face of dimpling
+smiles.
+
+“Has anybody been into Venner’s yet?” he asked.
+
+“I have,” proclaimed a dumpy Etonian whose down-curving nose hung over
+a perpetually open mouth. “Marjoribanks took me in just before hall.
+But he advised me not to go in by myself yet awhile.”
+
+“The second-year men don’t like it,” agreed the long-legged Wykehamist
+with a wise air. “They say one can begin to go in occasionally in one’s
+third term.”
+
+“What is Venner’s?” Michael asked.
+
+“Don’t you know?” sniffed the dumpy Etonian who had already managed to
+proclaim his friendship with Marjoribanks, the President of the Junior
+Common Room, and therefore presumably had the right to open his mouth a
+little wider than usual at Michael.
+
+“I’m not quite sure myself,” said Lonsdale quickly. “I vote that Cuffe
+explains.”
+
+“I’m not going to explain,” Cuffe protested, and for some minutes his
+mouth was tightly closed.
+
+“Isn’t it just a sort of special part of the J. C. R.?” suggested the
+smiling Wykehamist, who seemed to wish to make it pleasant for
+everybody, so long as he himself would not have to admit ignorance.
+“Old Venables himself is a ripper. They say he’s been steward of the J.
+C. R. for fifty years.”
+
+“Thirty-two years,” corrected Wedderburn in his voice of most
+reverberant certitude. “Venner’s is practically a club. You aren’t
+elected, but somehow you know just when you can go in without being
+stared at. There’s nothing in Oxford like that little office of
+Venner’s. It’s practically made St. Mary’s what it is.”
+
+All the freshmen, sipping their port and lolling back in their new
+gowns, looked very reverent and very conscious of the honor and glory
+of St. Mary’s which they themselves hoped soon to affirm more publicly
+than they could at present. Upon their meditations sounded very loud
+the blast of a coach-horn from above.
+
+“That’s Templeton-Collins,” said Michael.
+
+“Who’s he?” several demanded.
+
+“He’s the man who used to live in these rooms last year,” said Lonsdale
+lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these
+freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.
+
+“Let’s all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row,” suggested
+Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of
+a table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.
+
+“To a second-year blood?” whispered somebody in dread surprise.
+
+“Why not take away the coach-horn?” Lonsdale added.
+
+However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with
+unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.
+
+“Keep quiet, little boys,” shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.
+
+The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and
+the long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going
+to be a hot year. “I vote we have a bonner.”
+
+“Will you light it, Sinclair?” asked another Wykehamist in a cynical
+drawl.
+
+“Why not?” Sinclair retorted.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. But you always used to be better at theory than
+practice.”
+
+“How these Wykehamists love one another,” laughed an Etonian.
+
+This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in
+defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and
+bigoted confidence.
+
+“Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner,” said Wedderburn. “After
+the first ‘after.’”
+
+“‘After’?” queried another.
+
+“Oh, don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?” several well-informed freshmen
+began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of
+instruction, and the others gave way.
+
+“Every Sunday after hall,” he explained, “people go up to the J. C. R.
+and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the
+second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes
+round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the ‘after Common
+Room.’ People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the
+J. C. R. gives the first ‘after’ of the term. The others are usually
+given by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and
+lemon-squash. They usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport.
+They’re much better than private wines, better for everybody. That’s
+why we have them on Sunday night,” he concluded rather vaguely.
+
+The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into
+bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The
+first evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper
+than the superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table
+was now begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to
+intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the
+dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of
+Etonian tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some
+Etonians might exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical,
+less odiously serene than the majority of those they had so far only
+encountered in summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess
+was going to count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists
+extended a cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they
+never lost an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and
+though their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more
+debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to
+acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these
+strange new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might
+appear to Wykeham’s adamantine mold.
+
+Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in
+the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to
+put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless.
+Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for
+granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a
+day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and
+disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count.
+At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them
+credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social
+outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense
+of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and
+the last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the
+Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly
+it had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose
+trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were
+ignobly buttoned to the very end.
+
+“An Old Giggleswickian,” commented some one in reference to one of
+these disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was
+surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such
+inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old
+Wykehamist colors.
+
+“Why, were you at school with him?” asked Michael quickly.
+
+“Me? At Giggleswick?” stammered the Carthusian.
+
+“Why not?” said Michael. “You seem to know all about him.”
+
+“Isn’t your name Fane?” demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when
+Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.
+
+“That’ll help me along a bit, I expect,” Michael prophesied.
+
+“We were in the same form at Randell’s. My name’s Avery.”
+
+“I remember you,” said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how
+little Avery’s once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he
+thought Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep
+blue eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of
+Lonsdale’s room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out
+with him into the quad.
+
+“I say,” Avery began impulsively. “Did I make an ass of myself just
+now? I mean, do you think people were sick with me?”
+
+“What for?”
+
+“I mean did I sound snobbish?” Avery pursued.
+
+“Not more than anybody else,” Michael assured him, and as he watched
+Avery’s expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
+possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess
+and wore combinations instead of pants and vest.
+
+“I say, aren’t you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
+Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I’m in Cloisters. Are you
+going out? You’ll have to buck up. It’s after nine.”
+
+They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was
+ushered out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom
+boomed his final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation
+sounded here and there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.
+
+Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High
+came a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and
+more perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
+solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
+Michael pondered the freshmen’s chatter and apprehended dimly how this
+magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of naïve
+intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
+ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
+sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
+immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
+gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
+not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that
+morning.
+
+So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until
+at last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College
+Street and Queen’s Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
+forgetting the world.
+
+In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
+tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.
+
+It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
+was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert’s
+quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
+his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
+the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
+the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.
+
+Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
+from St. Mary’s tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The
+watered silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how
+Boccaccio should be read. Michael’s mind was filled with the
+imagination of that gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their
+gay stories in the sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais
+should be read: the very pages seemed to glitter like wine.
+
+Midnight chimed from St. Mary’s tower. One by one the new books went
+gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
+Michael’s bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
+was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
+splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room
+was full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was
+gleaming.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FIRST WEEK
+
+
+The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations,
+addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action
+against her neophytes.
+
+First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a
+deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid
+and manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to
+give the impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in
+an otherwise justly modulated existence.
+
+Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle’s room, knocked at
+the door and passed in at the don’s bidding to where he sat sighing
+amid heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the
+room was somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that
+crowded the walls.
+
+“Mr.?” queried the Senior Tutor. “Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James’. Your
+tutor will be the Dean—please sit down—the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What
+school are you proposing to read?”
+
+“History, I imagine,” said Michael. “History!” he repeated, as Mr.
+Ardle blinked at him.
+
+“Yes,” said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. “But we
+have to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and
+Literæ Humaniores.”
+
+“I explained to you that I wanted to read History,” said Michael,
+echoing himself involuntarily the don’s tone of patient boredom.
+
+“I have you down as coming from St. James’,” snapped the Senior Tutor.
+“A school reputed to send out good classical scholars, I believe.”
+
+“I’m not a scholar,” Michael interrupted. “And I don’t intend to take
+Honor Mods.”
+
+“That will be for the college to decide.”
+
+“Supposing the college decided I was to read Chinese?” Michael
+inquired.
+
+“There is no need for impertinence. Well, well, for the present I have
+put you down for the lectures on Pass Moderations. You will attend my
+lectures on Cicero, Mr. Churton on the Apologia, Mr. Carder on Logic,
+and Mr. Vereker for Latin Prose. The weekly essay set by the Warden for
+freshmen you will read to your tutor Mr. Ambrose.”
+
+Then he went on to give instructions about chapels and roll-calls and
+dining in hall and the various regulations of the college, while the
+Swiss mountains stared bleakly down at the chilly interview.
+
+“Now you’d better go and see Mr. Ambrose,” said the Senior Tutor, and
+Michael left him. On the staircase he passed Lonsdale going up.
+
+“What’s he like?” asked Lonsdale.
+
+“Pretty dull,” said Michael.
+
+“Does he keep you long?”
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+“Good work,” said Lonsdale cheerfully. “Because I’ve just bought a
+dog.” And he whistled his way upstairs.
+
+Michael wondered what the purchase of a dog had got to do with the
+Senior Tutor, but relinquished the problem on perceiving Mr. Ambrose’s
+name on the floor below.
+
+The Dean’s room was very much like the Senior Tutor’s, and the
+interview, save that it was made slightly more tolerable by the help of
+a cigarette, was of much the same chilliness owing to Michael’s
+reiterated refusal to read Honor Moderations.
+
+“I expected a little keenness,” said Mr. Ambrose.
+
+“I shall be keen enough when I’ve finished with Pass Mods,” said
+Michael. “Though what good it will be for me to read the Pro Milone and
+the Apology all over again, when I read them at fifteen, I don’t know.”
+
+“Then take Honor Moderations?” the Dean advised.
+
+“I’ve given up classics,” Michael argued, and as the cigarette was
+beginning to burn his fingers and the problem of disposing of it in the
+Dean’s room seemed insoluble, he hurried out.
+
+Lonsdale was whistling his way downstairs from his interview with Mr.
+Ardle.
+
+“Hallo, Fane, what did he say to you?”
+
+“I think all these dons are very much like schoolmasters,” growled
+Michael resentfully.
+
+“They can’t help it,” said Lonsdale. “I asked old Ardle if I could keep
+a dog in college, and he turned as blue as an owl. Any one would think
+I’d asked him if I could breed crocodiles.”
+
+In addition to these personal interviews the freshmen had certain
+communal experiences to undergo. Among these was their formal reception
+into the University, when they trooped after the Senior Tutor through
+gothic mazes and in some beautiful and remote room received from the
+Vice-Chancellor a bound volume of Statuta et Decreta Universitatis.
+This book they carried back with them to college, where in many rooms
+it shared with Ruff’s Guide and Soapy Sponge’s Sporting Tour an
+intellectual oligarchy. Saturday morning was spent in meeting the
+Warden at the Warden’s Lodgings, where they shook hands with him in
+nervous quartets. Michael when he discussed this experience with his
+fellows fancied that the Warden’s butler had left a deeper impression
+than the Warden himself. On Sunday afternoon, however, when they
+gathered in the hall to hear the annual address of welcome and
+exhortation, the great moon-faced Warden shone undimmed.
+
+“You have come to Oxford,” he concluded, “some of you to hunt foxes,
+some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you
+to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have
+come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen. In after life when you are
+ambassadors and proconsuls and members of Parliament you will never
+remember this little address which I have the honor now of delivering
+to you. That will not matter, so long as you always remember that you
+are St. Mary’s men and the heirs of an honorable and ancient
+foundation.”
+
+The great moon-faced Warden beamed at them for one moment, and after
+thanking them for their polite attention floated out of the hall. The
+pictures of cardinals and princes and poets in their high golden frames
+seemed in the dusk faintly to nod approval. The bell was ringing for
+evening chapel, and the freshmen went murmurously along the cloisters
+to take their places, feeling rather proud that the famous quire was
+their quire and looking with inquisitive condescension at the visitors
+who sat out of sight of those candle-starred singers.
+
+In hall that night the chief topic of conversation was the etiquette
+and ritual of the first J. C. R. wine.
+
+Michael to his chagrin found himself seated next to Mackintosh, for
+Mackintosh, cousin though he was of the sparkish Lonsdale, was a gloomy
+fellow scornful of the general merriment. As somebody had quickly said,
+sharpening his young wit, he was more of a wet-blanket than a
+Mackintosh.
+
+“I suppose you’re coming to the J. C. R.?” Michael asked.
+
+“Why should I? Why should I waste my time trying to keep sober for the
+amusement of all these fools?”
+
+“I expect it will be rather a rag,” said Michael hopefully, but he
+found it tantalizing to hear farther down the table snatches of
+conversation that heard more completely would have enlightened him on
+several points he had not yet mastered in the ceremony of wine in the
+J. C. R. However, it was useless to speculate on such subjects in the
+company of the lugubrious Mackintosh. So they talked instead of Sandow
+exercises and mountain-climbing in Cumberland, neither of which topics
+interested Michael very greatly.
+
+Hall was rowdy that evening, and the dons looked petulantly down from
+high table, annoyed to think that their distinguished visitors of
+Sunday evening should see so many pieces of bread flung by the
+second-year men. The moon-faced Warden was deflected from his
+intellectual revolutions round a Swedish man of science, and sent the
+butler down to whisper a remonstrance to the head of one of the
+second-year tables. But no sooner had the butler again taken his place
+behind the Warden’s chair than a number of third-year men whose table
+had been littered by the ammunition of their juniors retaliated without
+apparent loss of dignity, and presently both years combined to bombard
+under the Scholars. Meanwhile the freshmen applauded with laughter, and
+thought their seniors were wonderful exemplars for the future.
+
+After hall everybody went crowding up the narrow stairs to the J. C.
+R., and now most emphatically the J. C. R. presented a cheerful sight,
+with the red-shaded lamps casting such a glow that the decanters of
+wine stationed before the President’s place looked like a treasure of
+rubies. The two long tables were set at right angles to one another,
+and the President sat near their apex. All along their shining length
+at regular intervals stood great dishes of grapes richly bloomed, of
+apples and walnuts and salted almonds and deviled biscuits. The
+freshmen by instinct rushed to sit altogether at the end of the table
+more remote from the door. As Michael looked at his contemporaries, he
+perceived that of the forty odd freshmen scarcely five-and-twenty had
+come to this, the first J. C. R. Vaguely he realized that already two
+sets were manifest in the college, and he felt depressed by the
+dullness of those who had not come and some satisfaction with himself
+for coming.
+
+The freshmen stared with awe at Marjoribanks, the President of the J.
+C. R., and told one another with reverence that the two men on either
+side of him were those famous rowing blues from New College, Permain
+and Strutt; while some of them who had known these heroes at school sat
+anxiously unaware of their presence and spoke of them familiarly as
+Jack Permain and Bingey. There were several other cynosures from New
+College and University near the President’s chair, a vivid bunch of
+Leander ties. There were also one or two old St. Mary’s men who had
+descended to haunt for a swift week-end the place of their renown, and
+these were pointed out by knowing freshmen as unconcernedly as
+possible.
+
+One by one the President released the decanters, and round and round
+they came. Sometimes they would be held up by an interesting
+conversation; and when the sherry and the port and the burgundy were
+all standing idle, a shout of “pass along the wine” would go up, after
+which for a time the decanters would swing vigorously from hand to
+hand. Then suddenly Marjoribanks was seen to be bowing to Permain, and
+Permain was bowing solemnly back to his host. This was a plain token to
+everybody that the moment for drinking healths had arrived. A great
+babel of shouted names broke out at the end of the Common Room remote
+from the freshmen, so tremendous a din that the freshmen felt the
+drinking of their own healths at their end would pass unnoticed. So
+they drank to one another, bowing gravely after the manner of their
+seniors.
+
+Michael had determined to take nothing but burgundy, and when he had
+exchanged sentiments with the most of his year, he congratulated
+himself upon the comparative steadiness of his head. Already in the
+case of one or two reckless mixers he noticed a difficulty in deciding
+how many times it was necessary to clip a cigar, an inclination to
+strike the wrong end of a match and a confusion between right and left
+when the decanters in their circulation paused before them.
+
+After the first tumult of good wishes had died down, Marjoribanks
+lifted his glass, looked along to where the freshmen were sitting and
+shouted “Cuffe!” Cuffe hastily lifted his glass and answering
+“Marjorie!” drained his salute of acknowledgment. Then he sat back in
+his chair with an expression, Michael thought, very like that of an
+actress who has been handed a bouquet by the conductor. But Cuffe was
+not to be the only recipient of honor, for immediately afterward
+Marjoribanks sang out “Lonsdale!” Lonsdale was at the moment trying to
+explain to Tommy Grainger some trick with the skin of a banana which
+ought to have been an orange and a wooden match which ought to have
+been a wax vesta. Michael, who was sitting next to him, prodded
+anxiously his ribs.
+
+“What’s the matter?” demanded Lonsdale indignantly. “Can’t you see I’m
+doing a trick?”
+
+“Marjoribanks is drinking your health,” whispered Michael in an agony
+that Lonsdale would be passed over.
+
+“Hurrah!” shouted Lonsdale, rising to his feet and scandalizing his
+fellows by his intoxicated audacity. “Where is the old ripper!” Then
+“Mark over!” he shouted and collapsed into Tommy Grainger’s lap.
+Everybody laughed, and everybody, even the cynosures from New College
+and University, began to drink Lonsdale’s health without heel-taps.
+
+“No heelers, young Lonsdale,” they called mirthfully.
+
+Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with
+one hand on Michael’s shoulder, replied:
+
+“No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!” Then he collapsed again.
+
+Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk,
+all the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael
+and one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors
+remained more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a
+quizzical face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask
+Michael some trifling piece of information, cried “Fane!” raising his
+glass. Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and
+drank what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other
+senior men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks
+himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An
+immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life,
+a conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever.
+The wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At
+the foot on the right was a little office—the office of Venables, the
+steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of
+seniority called Venner’s. Wine-chartered though they were, the
+freshmen did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but
+hurried out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.
+
+Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of mediæval witches.
+The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels
+and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a
+grotesque vivacity, as the vapors curled around them. The wine humming
+in his head: the echoing shouts of his companions: the decorative
+effect of the gowns: the chiming high above of the bells in the tower:
+all combined to create for Michael a nightmare of exultation. He was
+aware of a tremendous zest in doing nothing, and there flowed over him
+a consciousness that this existence of shout and dance along these
+cloisters was really existence lived in a perpetual expression of the
+finest energy. The world seemed to be going round so much faster than
+usual that in order to keep up with this new pace, it was necessary for
+the individual like himself to walk faster, to talk faster, to think
+faster, and finally to raise to incoherent speed every coherent
+faculty. Another curious effect of the wine, for after all Michael
+admitted to himself that his mental exhilaration must be due to
+burgundy, was the way in which he found himself at every moment walking
+beside a different person. He would scarcely have finished an excited
+acceptance of Wedderburn’s offer to go to-morrow and look at some Dürer
+woodcuts, when he would suddenly find himself discussing
+sympathetically with Lonsdale the iniquity of the dons in refusing to
+let him keep his new dog in one of the scouts’ pigeon-holes in the
+lodge.
+
+“After all,” Lonsdale pointed out earnestly, “they’re never really
+full, and the dog isn’t large—of course I don’t expect to keep him in a
+pigeon-hole when he’s full grown, but he’s a puppy.”
+
+“It’s absurd,” Michael agreed.
+
+“That’s the word I’ve been looking for,” Lonsdale exclaimed. “What was
+it again? Absurd! You see what I say is, when one scout’s box is full,
+move the poor little beast into another. It isn’t likely they’d all be
+full at the same time. What was that word you found just now? Absurd!
+That’s it. It is absurd. It’s absurd!”
+
+“And anyway,” Michael pointed out, “if they were all full they could
+chain him to the leg of the porter’s desk.”
+
+“Of course they could. I say, Fane, you’re a damned good sort,” said
+Lonsdale. “I wish you’d come and have lunch with me to-morrow. I don’t
+think I’ve asked very many chaps: I want to show you that dog. He’s in
+a stable off Holywell at present. Beastly shame! I’m not complaining,
+of course, but what I want to ask our dons is how would they like to be
+bought by me and shut up in Holywell?”
+
+And just when Michael had a very good answer ready, he found himself
+arm-in-arm with Wedderburn again, who was saying in his gravest voice
+that over a genuine woodcut by Dürer it was well worth taking trouble.
+But before Michael could disengage Wedderburn’s Dürer from Lonsdale’s
+dog, he found himself running very fast beside Tommy Grainger who was
+shouting:
+
+“Five’s late again! Six, you’re bucketing! Bow, you’re late! Two,
+_will_ you get your belly down!”
+
+Then Grainger stopped suddenly and asked Michael in a very solemn tone
+whether he knew what was the matter with the crew. Michael shook his
+head and watched the others steer their devious course toward him and
+Grainger.
+
+“They’re too drunk to row,” said Grainger.
+
+“Much too drunk,” Michael agreed.
+
+When he had pondered for a moment or two his last remark, he discovered
+it was extraordinarily funny. So he was seized with a paroxysm of
+laughter, and the more he laughed, the more he wanted to laugh. When
+somebody asked him what he was laughing at, he replied it was because
+he had left the electric light burning in his room. Several people
+seemed to think this just as funny as Michael thought it, and they
+joined him in his mirth, laughing unquenchably until Wedderburn
+observed severely in his deepest voice:
+
+“Buck up, you’re all drunk, and they’re coming out of Venner’s.”
+
+Then like some patient profound countryman he shepherded them all up to
+the large room on a corner staircase of Cloisters, where the “after”
+was going to be held. The freshmen squeezed themselves together in a
+corner and were immensely entertained by the various performers,
+applauding with equal rapture a light comedian from Pembroke, a tenor
+from Corpus, a comic singer from Oriel and a mimic from professional
+London. They drank lemon squashes to steady themselves: they joined in
+choruses: they cheered and smoked cigars and grew more and more
+conscious as the evening progressed that they belonged to a great
+college called St. Mary’s. Their enthusiasm reached its zenith, when
+the captain of the Varsity Eleven (a St. Mary’s man even as they were
+St. Mary’s men) sang the St. Mary’s song in a voice whose gentleness of
+utterance and sighing modesty in no way abashed the noisy appreciation
+of the audience. It was a wonderful song, all about the triumphs of the
+college on river and cricket-field, in the Schools, in Parliament and
+indeed everywhere else. It had a fine rollicking chorus which was
+repeated twice after each verse. And as there were about seventeen
+verses, by the time the song was half over the freshmen had learned the
+words and were able to sing the final chorus with a vigor which
+positively detonated against the windows and contrasted divertingly
+with the almost inaudible soloist.
+
+Last of all came Auld Lang Syne, when everybody stood up on chairs and
+joined hands, seniors, second-year men and freshmen. Auld Lang Syne
+ended with perhaps the noisiest moment of all because although Lonsdale
+had taken several lemon squashes to steady himself, he had not taken
+enough to keep his balance through the ultimate energetic repetition,
+when he collapsed headlong into a tray of syphons and glasses, dragging
+with him two other freshmen. But nobody seemed to have hurt himself,
+and downstairs they all rushed, shouting and hulloaing, into the cool
+moonlight.
+
+The guests from New College and University and the “out-of-college” men
+hurried home, for it was close upon midnight. In the lodge the freshmen
+foregathered for a few minutes with the second-year men, and as they
+talked they knew that the moment was come when they must proclaim
+themselves free from the restrictions of school, and by the kindling of
+a bonfire prove that they were now truly grown up. Bundles of faggots
+were seized from the scouts’ holes: in the angle of St. Cuthbert’s quad
+where the complexion of the gravel was tanned by the numberless
+bonfires of past generations the pile of wood grew taller and taller:
+two or three douches of paraffin made the mass readily inflammable: a
+match was set, and with a roar the bonfire began. From their windows
+second-year men, their faces lighted by the ascending blaze, looked
+down with pleasant patronage upon the traditional pastime of their
+juniors. The freshmen danced gleefully round the pyre of their boyhood,
+feeding it with faggots and sometimes daringly and ostentatiously with
+chairs: the heat became intense: the smoke surged upward, obscuring the
+bland aspectful moon. Slowly upon the group of law-breakers fell a
+silence, as they stood bewitched by the beauty of their own handiwork.
+The riotous preparations and annunciatory yells had died away to an
+intimate murmur of conversation. From the lodge came Shadbolt the
+unctuous head-porter to survey for a moment this mighty bonfire:
+conscious of their undergraduate dignity the freshmen chaffed him,
+until he retired with muttered protests to summon the Dean.
+
+“What will the Dean do?” asked one or two less audacious ones as they
+faded into various doorways, ready to obliterate their presence as soon
+as authority should arrive upon the scene.
+
+“What does the Dean matter?” cried others, flinging more faggots on to
+the fire until it crackled and spat and bellowed more fiercely than
+ever, lighting up with its wavy radiance the great elms beyond the
+Warden’s garden and the Palladian fragment of New quad whence the dons
+like Georgian squires pondered their prosperity.
+
+Presently against the silvery space framed by the gateway of St.
+Cuthbert’s tower appeared the silhouette of the Dean, lank and tall
+with college cap tip-tilted down on to his nose and round his neck a
+gown wrapped like a shawl. Nearer he came, and involuntarily the
+freshmen so lately schoolboys took on in their attitude a certain
+anxiety. Somehow the group round the bonfire had become much smaller.
+Somehow more windows looking upon the quad were populated with
+flickering watchful faces.
+
+“Great Scott! What can Ambrose do?” demanded Lonsdale despairingly, but
+when at last the Dean reached the zone of the fire, there only remained
+about eight freshmen to ascertain his views and test his power. The
+Dean stood for a minute or two, silently warming his hands. In a ring
+the presumed leaders eyed him, talking to each other the while with
+slightly exaggerated carelessness.
+
+“Well, Mr. Fane?” asked the Dean.
+
+“Well, sir,” Michael replied.
+
+“Damned good,” whispered Lonsdale ecstatically in Michael’s ear. “You
+couldn’t have said anything better. That’s damned good.”
+
+Michael under the enthusiastic congratulations of Lonsdale began to
+feel he had indeed said something very good, but he hoped he would soon
+have an opportunity to say something even better.
+
+“Enjoying yourself, Mr. Lonsdale?” inquired the Dean.
+
+“Yes, sir. Are you?” answered Lonsdale.
+
+“Splendid,” murmured Michael.
+
+A silence followed this exchange of courtesies. The bonfire was
+beginning to die down, but nobody ventured under the Dean’s eye to put
+on more faggots. Under-porters were seen drawing near with pails of
+water, and though a cushion aimed from a window upset one pail, very
+soon the bonfire was a miserable mess of smoking ashes and the moon
+resumed her glory. From an upper window some second-year men chanted in
+a ridiculous monotone:
+
+“The Dean—he was the Dean—he was the Dean—he was the Dean! The Dean—he
+was the Dean he was—the Dean he was—the Dean!!”
+
+Mr. Ambrose did not bother to look up in the direction of the glee, but
+took another glance at Michael, Lonsdale, Grainger and the other
+stalwarts. Then he turned away.
+
+“Good night,” Lonsdale called after the retreating figure of the tall
+hunched don, and not being successful in luring him back, he poured his
+scorn upon the defaulters safe in their rooms above.
+
+“You are a lot of rotters. Come down and make another.”
+
+But the freshmen were not yet sufficiently hardy to do this. One by one
+they melted away, and Lonsdale marked his contempt for their
+pusillanimity by throwing two syphons and his gown into the Warden’s
+garden. After which he invited Michael and his fellow die-hards to
+drink a glass of port in his rooms. Here for an hour they sat,
+discussing their contemporaries.
+
+In the morning Shadbolt was asked if anybody had been hauled for last
+night’s bonner.
+
+“Mr. Fane, Mr. Grainger and the Honorable Lonsdale,” he informed the
+inquirer. Together those three interviewed the Dean.
+
+“Two guineas each,” he announced after a brief homily on the
+foolishness and inconvenience of keeping everybody up on the first
+Sunday of term. “And if you feel aggrieved, you can get up a
+subscription among your co-lunatics to defray your expenses.”
+
+Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look
+like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the
+other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a
+manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same
+to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST TERM
+
+
+His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
+discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
+certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more
+intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that
+first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which
+somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged
+a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly
+to his own “year.” These trials of personality were conducted with all
+the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness
+when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous
+impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed
+sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into
+a solitude of books. Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if
+he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name
+for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and
+afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to
+tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of
+pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been
+invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about
+half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not
+remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous
+tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing
+hospitality.
+
+Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made
+a general observation on the row of Sunday night’s celebration, Michael
+proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.
+
+“Were you in that gang?” Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
+surprise.
+
+“I was fined,” Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
+exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
+creating.
+
+“I say,” Carben sneered, “so at last one of the ‘bloods’ is going to
+condescend to play Rugger. Jonah,” he called to the captain of the
+Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
+room, “we’ve got a college blood playing three-quarter for us.”
+
+“Good work,” said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. “Where is he?”
+
+Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.
+
+“No end of a blood,” Carben went on. “Lights bonfires and gets fined
+all in his first week.”
+
+The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
+Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
+should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
+freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
+perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
+promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
+wrists and their smug insignificance.
+
+“You were at St. James’, weren’t you?” asked Jones. “Did you know
+Mansfield?”
+
+“I didn’t know him—exactly,” said Michael, “but—in fact—we thought him
+rather a tick.”
+
+“Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine,
+but don’t apologize.”
+
+There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s
+guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,”
+he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
+something positively contemptible.
+
+Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with
+cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the
+others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college.
+
+“Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded.
+“Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you
+keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said
+Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man
+in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s
+quite right.”
+
+“Quite right,” a chorus echoed.
+
+Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.;
+he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion
+of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael.
+He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he
+thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was
+probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.
+
+“These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was
+wisely propounding.
+
+“We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael
+inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
+rebuke.
+
+“Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,”
+Carben affirmed.
+
+How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
+and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
+atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
+a dismal genteelness.
+
+“Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put
+your name down for the Ugger.”
+
+“The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence.
+
+“The Union.”
+
+Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
+committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
+sponsorship of Carben.
+
+“I don’t think I’ll join this term.”
+
+He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment
+apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St.
+Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook
+off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a
+crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.
+
+In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
+was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
+along the table to Grainger:
+
+“I say, Tommy, do you know we’ve got a Rugger rough with us?”
+
+Several people murmured in surprise.
+
+“I say, have you really been playing Rugger?”
+
+“Well, great Scott!” exclaimed Michael, “there’s nothing very odd in
+that.”
+
+“But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men,” Lonsdale protested.
+
+“Some are,” Michael admitted. “Still, it’s a better game than Socker.”
+
+“But everybody at St. Mary’s plays Socker,” Lonsdale went on.
+
+Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that
+even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise
+Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians
+and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.
+And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this
+freshmen’s table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that
+with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their
+traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be
+snuffed out ignominiously.
+
+“Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger,” Michael asserted.
+
+“Shall I have a shot?” suggested Lonsdale.
+
+“It’s a most devilish good game,” Michael earnestly avowed.
+
+“Tommy,” Lonsdale shouted, “I’m going to be a Rugger rough myself.”
+
+“I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row,” said
+Wedderburn severely.
+
+“My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass,” chuckled the offender.
+
+Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.
+
+“Have you sconced me?” Lonsdale demanded.
+
+The head of the table nodded.
+
+Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown.
+Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn’s
+room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus
+of Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all
+very foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and
+his auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn’s
+return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited
+him in his room to enjoy his displeasure.
+
+Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between
+two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He
+continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with
+a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet
+many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them
+to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his
+own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was
+content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones,
+the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of
+his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college.
+Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it
+seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the
+protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a
+curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they
+lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they
+sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they
+gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.
+
+“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked
+Wedderburn.
+
+“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other
+to—I mean—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”
+
+“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more
+like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
+coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half
+the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me.
+We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is
+a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that
+D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books;
+and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over
+each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette
+ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the
+nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing
+who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R.
+four years from now.”
+
+But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was
+beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at
+Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was
+Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and
+episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from
+flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon
+freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to
+probe.
+
+“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,”
+said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s
+a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private
+school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for
+about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and
+how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly
+obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had
+nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk
+about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”
+
+“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my
+rooms because I like them.”
+
+“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued.
+“There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For
+instance, Avery——”
+
+“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.
+
+“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ‘Varsity Eleven,” said
+Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”
+
+“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.
+
+“That’s exactly what he isn’t,” Michael contradicted.
+
+“Damnable poseur,” Wedderburn rumbled.
+
+“Oh, well, so are you,” said Michael.
+
+He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery.
+Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his
+sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well.
+But all the Carthusians at St. Mary’s dressed rather too well and
+carried about with them the atmosphere of a week-end in a sporting
+country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would
+gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the
+course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to—to what? To some
+distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor
+he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him
+on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he
+dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale.
+Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art.
+Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend for ever
+Ardle’s dusty lectures on Cicero in order that for ever he might hear
+Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to
+glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause
+Mr. Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his
+Plato in a sadler’s shop, where he had found it necessary to complain
+of a saddle newly made for him.
+
+“But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not
+delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale.”
+
+“What’s he talking about?” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+“Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane,” added the Senior Tutor dryly.
+
+Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then
+seeing by the lecturer’s face that something was still wrong, he
+assumed a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the
+situation he laughed very heartily and said:
+
+“Oh, well, after all, it’s very much the same.” Then, as everybody else
+laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his
+trousers in gentle self-congratulation.
+
+“Rum old buffer,” he whispered presently to Michael. “His eye gets very
+glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?”
+
+Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered
+to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination
+was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to
+represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary’s, there might be added to the
+list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with
+charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael’s
+collection as types. There was Grainger, last year’s Captain of the
+Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the ‘Varsity in the spring.
+Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and
+listen for an hour at a time to his naïve theories of life. Grainger
+seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he
+exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to
+himself was surprising.
+
+“Great Scott, you are an odd chap,” Grainger once ejaculated.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Why, you’re a clever devil, aren’t you, and you don’t seem to do
+anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?”
+
+“A good deal,” Michael admitted. “At least, it would be rot if I talked
+it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way.”
+
+“You _are_ a curious chap. I can’t make you out.”
+
+“Why should you?” asked Michael. “You were never sent into this world
+to puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as
+you’re sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you’ll go into the
+Egyptian Civil Service and you’ll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly
+the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite
+comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I
+can’t imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them
+wriggling under me.”
+
+“I suppose you’re a Radical. They say you are,” Grainger lazily
+announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.
+
+“I suppose I might be,” said Michael, “if I wanted to proclaim myself
+anything at all, but I’d much rather watch you sprawling effectively
+and proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I’ve really very
+little inclination to criticize people like you. It’s only in books I
+think you’re a little boring.”
+
+Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming
+vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.
+
+CARLINGTON ROAD,
+_November 20th._
+
+_Dearest Michael,_
+
+_I’m so glad you’re still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it
+would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you,
+though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You’ll be glad
+to hear that I’ve got rid of this tiresome house. I’ve sold it to a
+retired Colonel—such an objectionable old man, and I’m really so
+pleased he’s bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn because the
+people next door were continually complaining of Stella’s piano, and
+really Carlington Road has become impossible. Such an air of living
+next door, and whenever I look out of the window the maid is shaking a
+mat and looking up to see if I’m interested. We must try to settle on a
+new house when you’re back in town. We’ll stay in a hotel for a while.
+Stella has had to take a studio, which I do not approve of her doing,
+and I cannot bear to see the piano going continually in and out of the
+house. There are so many things I want to talk to you about—money, and
+whether you would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we
+could find a house at some other time._
+
+_Your loving_
+_Mother._
+
+From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.
+
+_My dear old Michael_,
+
+_I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and I’ve
+taken a studio here because the man next door—a most_ frightful
+_bounder—said the noise I made went through and through his wife. As
+she’s nearly as big round as the world, I wasn’t flattered. Mother is
+getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange women come to the house
+and talk about some society for dealing with Life with a capital
+letter. I think we’re going to be rather well off, and Mother wants to
+live in a house she’s seen in Park Street, but I want to take a house
+in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like Cheyne Walk, because this house has got
+a splendid studio in the garden and I thought with some mauve brocades
+it would look perfectly lovely. There’s a very good_ paneled _room that
+you could have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am
+working at a Franck concerto. I’m being painted by rather a nice youth,
+at least he would be nice, if he weren’t so much like a corpse. I
+suppose you’ll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term._
+
+_Yours ever,_
+_Stella._
+
+_P.S.—I’ve come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution
+isn’t enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don’t think I
+shall appear in public again until I’ve lived a little. I really think
+life is rather exciting—unless it’s spelt with a capital letter._
+
+Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation
+in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would
+have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He
+was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the
+privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word
+to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with
+Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.
+
+Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by
+giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his
+friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had
+been casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle
+chattering groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought
+out and balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal
+dinner might, Michael thought, almost become with him a regular
+function, so that people would learn to speak with interest and respect
+of Fane’s terminal dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming
+a club, a club strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as
+really to preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate,
+putting aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try
+the effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided,
+since that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward
+arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be
+Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
+to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
+terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
+established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose
+a number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests
+would change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he
+felt that some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven
+as the number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more
+must be invited, and Michael without much further consideration
+selected five freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness
+drew them into prominence. But when he had given all the invitations
+Michael was a little depressed by the conventional appearance of his
+list. With the exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and
+Avery, his list was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn
+up by Grainger. As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of
+correctness that overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at
+the head of the table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed
+round the table his terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that
+on this occasion he had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe
+moment of self-examination he characterized as “snobbishness.” In this
+room at the Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun
+and steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
+subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
+and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
+eclectic society would have been out of place.
+
+Only Avery’s loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
+group.
+
+“_Who’s_ that man wearing a pie-frill?” whispered Alan sternly from
+Michael’s right.
+
+Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.
+
+“Avery allows himself a little license,” said Michael. “But, Alan, he’s
+really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you
+saw him on Sunday you’d think he was perfectly dressed. All Old
+Carthusians are.”
+
+But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
+met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
+in common.
+
+Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
+Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
+that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the
+responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt
+grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who
+waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief
+that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called
+Castleton.
+
+Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the
+strongest influence in Michael’s year, and his friendship would be good
+for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered
+Castleton rather over-rated, but there was a superficial similarity
+between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and
+jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate
+Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes
+wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more
+apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion
+in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he
+seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he
+seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he
+became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.
+
+Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more
+than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a
+detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman,
+and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would
+certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of
+St. Mary’s freshmen as this one might be considered. But a
+representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had
+intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with
+distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne,
+and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael’s desire to have
+him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However,
+it was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went
+round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to
+see his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.
+
+Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and
+smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale
+discussed their individual excellencies.
+
+“First of all,” said Lonsdale, “I want to propose the health of our
+distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he’s a jolly
+good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn’s a jolly good
+fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good
+fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend
+Tommy Grainger—whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we
+were boys together—I will here say that I confidently anticipate he
+will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he’s a jolly good
+fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name—all jolly good
+fellows—except our host. He’s given us a good dinner and good wine and
+good company, which nobody can deny. So here’s his health.”
+
+Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering
+procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were
+all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed
+through his first terminal dinner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CHEYNE WALK
+
+
+The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house.
+Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last
+abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and
+postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with
+Stella’s support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem
+of their new home.
+
+Ultimately they fixed upon Chelsea, indeed upon that very house Stella
+had chosen for its large studio separated by the length of a queer
+little walled garden from the rest of the house. Certainly 173 Cheyne
+Walk was better than 64 Carlington Road, thought Michael as, leaning
+back against the parapet of the Embankment, he surveyed the mellow
+exterior in the unreal sunlight of the January noon. Empty as it was,
+it diffused an atmosphere of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and
+peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed
+to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil
+interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering
+indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either
+side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the
+three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the first story
+all gave him much contemplative pleasure. He and his mother and Stella
+had in three weeks visited every feasible quarter of London and as
+Michael thought of Hampstead’s leaf-haunted by-streets, of the still
+squares of Kensington, even of Camden Hill’s sky-crowned freedom, he
+was sure he regretted none of them in the presence of this sedate house
+looking over the sun-flamed river and the crenated line of the long
+Battersea shore.
+
+Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott
+was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was
+anxious to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend
+of his father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years
+ago, an intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he
+was trying to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only
+definite impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into
+Michael’s palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and
+angular with a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the
+door. Michael crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr.
+Prescott. Himself explained who he was and, opening the front door, led
+the way into the empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after
+room to Prescott, that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the
+observation of the house than with a desire to achieve in regard to
+Michael himself a tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun
+that sloped thin golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare
+rooms expressed for Michael something of the sensation which Prescott’s
+attitude conveyed to him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth
+that could most easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused
+depths of his heart.
+
+“I suppose you knew my father very well,” said Michael at last,
+blushing as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.
+
+“About as well as anybody,” said Prescott nervously. “Like to talk to
+you about him some time. Better come to dinner. Live in Albany. Have a
+soldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important
+you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I’m almost what
+you might call your guardian. Of course your mother’s a dear woman.
+Known her for years. Always splendid to me. But she mustn’t get too
+charitable.”
+
+“Do you mean to people’s failings?” Michael asked.
+
+Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what
+Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak
+out clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard
+shyness of preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover,
+this empty house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a
+frankness and directness of intercourse that made absurd these
+roundabout postponements of actual problems.
+
+“Charitable to societies,” Prescott explained. “I don’t want her to
+think she’s got to endow half a dozen committees with money and
+occupation.”
+
+“Stella’s a little worried about mother’s charities,” Michael admitted.
+
+“Awful good sort, Stella,” Prescott jerked out. “Frightens me
+devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very
+much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out
+of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father,” he
+added vaguely.
+
+“Did you know my father when he first met my mother?” Michael asked
+directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong
+account.
+
+“Oh, yes, rather. I sent in my papers when he did. Chartered a yacht
+and sailed all over the Mediterranean. Good gracious, twenty years ago!
+How old we’re all getting. Poor old Saxby was always anxious that no
+kind of”—Prescott gibbed at the word for a moment or two—“no kind of
+slur should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have
+had to meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there
+was nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan, and yet he was always a
+rattling good sort. Only of course your mother was always cut off from
+women’s society. Couldn’t be helped, but I don’t want her now to overdo
+it. Glad she’s taken this house, though. What are you going to be?”
+
+Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at
+the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house.
+Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother’s graceful and elusive
+presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich
+associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance
+to muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived
+with Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of
+chintz and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration
+that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in
+a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr.
+Prescott listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of
+admiring perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by
+Mrs. Fane, and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it
+would fly with greater certainty, until room by room and window by
+window and corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and
+appropriately arranged.
+
+“I give full marks to Prescott,” said Stella later in the afternoon to
+Michael. “He’s like a nice horse.”
+
+“I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room,” said
+Michael.
+
+“Why?” demanded Stella.
+
+And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find
+one.
+
+“Well, why not?” he at last very lamely replied.
+
+There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between
+Michael and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing,
+while Mrs. Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street
+Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the
+multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael,
+however, after the first thrills of selection had died down, must be
+thinking about going up again and be content to look forward on the
+strength of Stella’s energetic promises to coming down for the Easter
+vacation and entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.
+
+Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old
+friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had
+been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather
+guilty because he had never been near his old school nor even walked
+over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It
+seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and
+Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends.
+All that Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing
+past of old associations and of a sense of transition into a new life
+that though as yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger
+and worthier experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have
+happened in Carlington Road.
+
+On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms
+in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the
+darkness of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming
+table in its center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the
+soldier-servant and the half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the
+walls of the great square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that
+brooded outside the heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany
+Michael was immeasurably aware of the life of London that was surging
+such a little distance away; but in this modish cloister he felt that
+the life he was aware of could never be dated, as if indeed were he to
+emerge into Piccadilly and behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered
+wigs they would not greatly surprise him. The Albany seemed to have
+wrung the spirit from the noisy years that swept on their course
+outside, to have snatched from each its heart and in the museum of this
+decorous glass arcade to have preserved it immortally, exhibiting the
+frozen palpitations to a sensitive observer.
+
+“You’re not talking much,” said Prescott.
+
+“I was thinking of old plays,” said Michael.
+
+Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
+called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
+himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
+Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
+that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
+evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
+incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
+upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
+perpetual present.
+
+“Don’t often go to the theater nowadays,” said Prescott. “When Saxby
+was alive”—Michael fancied that “alive” was substituted for something
+that might have hurt his feelings—“we used to go a lot, but it’s dull
+going alone.”
+
+“Must you go alone?” asked Michael.
+
+“Oh, no, of course I needn’t. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,”
+repeated the host.
+
+Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
+asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
+sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.
+
+“Oh, yes, I think you are very like,” said Prescott. “Good Lord, what a
+pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
+you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
+things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
+more brain than many people thought, but of course,” Prescott hurriedly
+added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
+equipment, “of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary.”
+
+“I like to be ordinary,” Michael said; “but I’m not.”
+
+“Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
+some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
+over by a train,” said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. “You
+know, I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he added. “Here you are all
+provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
+the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
+sister. Why, you might do anything.”
+
+“What, for example?” queried Michael.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. There’s the Diplomatic Service. But don’t be in a
+hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
+hundred a year at St. Mary’s. And when you’re twenty-one you come into
+roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you’ll have at
+least two thousand a year. But don’t be a young ass. You’ve been
+brought up quietly. You haven’t _got_ to cut a dash. Don’t get in a
+mess with women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get
+out of it.”
+
+“I don’t care much about women,” said Michael. “They’re disappointing.”
+
+“What, already?” exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.
+
+Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to
+the attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark
+discreet room, and the Albany’s atmosphere of passion squeezed into the
+mold of contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of
+Thackeray’s books, all combined to affect Michael with the idea that
+his life had been lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his
+host, and as the rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he
+beheld the old impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious,
+the sensitive slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the
+gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity
+to-morrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of
+finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the
+circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table
+he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it
+was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the
+other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some
+of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of
+his host was receding farther and farther every moment, and his
+conversation reached Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of
+light, while finally he was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly
+and with a half-defiant independence of precisely what he wished to
+say. The evening swam past comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of
+the cigar smoke the figure of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy
+armchair took on once again a definite corporeal existence. A clock on
+the mantelpiece chimed the twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of
+silvery apology for obtruding the hour. Michael came back into himself
+with a start of confusion.
+
+“I say, I must go.”
+
+Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.
+
+“I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I
+think I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night.”
+
+“No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted
+Prescott.
+
+And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the
+labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would
+lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably
+have mildly entertained his host.
+
+“Nothing,” he finally decided.
+
+Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
+with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle
+of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal
+and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth
+more beautiful.
+
+After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped
+endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
+assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
+before.
+
+Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner
+with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his
+birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair
+before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of
+the dinner.
+
+“You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott,”
+he affirmed. “I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
+without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
+perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant.”
+
+“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”
+
+“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should
+have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
+eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
+champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
+just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the
+silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
+third cigar.”
+
+Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
+dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his
+outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the
+terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better
+suit his mantelpiece.
+
+“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.
+
+“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery.
+“You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the
+Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”
+
+“What, for example?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, write perhaps.”
+
+“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed
+to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy,
+what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”
+
+“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling
+you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”
+
+Michael laughed.
+
+“And you’ll contribute,” Avery went on eagerly.
+
+“How much?”
+
+“I’m talking about articles. I shall call my paper—well, I haven’t
+thought about the title—but I shall get a good one. It won’t be like
+the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with
+art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won’t be decadent.
+It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it
+might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass.”
+
+“Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production,” said Michael. “I
+should call it The World Turned Upside Down.”
+
+“I’m perfectly serious about this paper,” said Avery reproachfully.
+
+“And I’m taking you very seriously,” said Michael. “That’s why I won’t
+write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?”
+
+“We might have one drawing. I’m not quite sure how much it costs to
+reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather
+advanced stuff.”
+
+“Well, as long as you don’t publish drawings that look as if the
+compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at
+it, and as long as——”
+
+“Oh, shut up,” interrupted the dreaming editor, “and don’t fall into
+that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It’s so young.”
+
+“But I am young,” Michael pointed out with careful gravity. “So are
+you. And, Maurice, really you know for me my own ambitions are best.
+I’ve got a great sense of responsibility, and if I were to start going
+through life trying to do things, I should worry myself all the time.
+The only chance for me is to find a sort of negative attitude to life
+like Prescott. You’ll do lots of things. I think you’re capable of
+them. But I’d rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I’d
+give anything to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are.
+But I’m not. I’ve got a sister whom you ought to meet. She’s got all
+the positive energy in our family. I can’t explain, Maurice, just
+exactly what I’m feeling about existence at this moment, unless I tell
+you more about myself than I possibly can—anyway yet a while. I don’t
+want to do any harm, and I don’t think I could ever feel I was in a
+position to do any good. Look here, don’t let’s talk any more. I meant
+to dream myself into an attitude to-night, and you’ve made me talk like
+an earnest young convert.”
+
+“I think I’ll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper,” said
+Avery excitedly.
+
+“He thinks you’re patronizing,” Michael warned him.
+
+Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:
+
+“Does he? I wonder why.”
+
+“But he won’t, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced
+drawings.”
+
+“Doesn’t he like me?” persisted Avery. “I’d better not go round to his
+rooms.”
+
+“Don’t be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled
+vanity.”
+
+When Avery had hesitatingly embarked upon his expedition to Wedderburn,
+Michael thought rather regretfully of his presence and wished he had
+been more sympathetic in his reception of the great scheme. Yet perhaps
+that was the best way to have begun his own scheme for not being
+disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to
+reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be
+no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life,
+Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books should give him
+his adventures. Actually he almost made up his mind to retire even from
+the observation of reality, so much had he felt, all this Christmas
+vacation, the dominance of Stella and so deeply had he been impressed
+by Prescott’s attitude of inscrutable commentary.
+
+Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled
+round to Wedderburn’s rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in
+contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old
+lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling
+touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm
+friendship—so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be
+nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the
+birth of this undergraduate bantling.
+
+“Though what exactly you want me to do,” protested Michael, “I don’t
+quite know.”
+
+“We want money, anyway,” Avery frankly admitted. “Oh, and by the way,
+Michael, I’ve asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you
+up.”
+
+“What on earth for?” gasped Michael.
+
+“Oh, they’ll want supers. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. Great
+sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of
+Morocco.”
+
+“But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?”
+Michael inquired gently.
+
+In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and
+not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary’s freshmen,
+including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the
+rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though
+Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of
+seeing Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco
+and Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional
+actresses who came up from London to take part in the production.
+
+“I think I ought to have played Lorenzo,” said Lonsdale seriously to
+Michael, just before the first night. “I think Miss Delacourt would
+have preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I’m only a
+gondolier, an attendant, and a soldier.”
+
+Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It
+seemed to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs.
+There had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in “my
+Lorenzo.”
+
+“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael
+observed.
+
+“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,”
+Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I
+wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign
+Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a
+chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t
+forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she
+threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I
+never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”
+
+Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice
+Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy
+all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals
+in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping
+sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a
+gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men
+from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the
+individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the
+individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one
+day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to
+lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.
+
+“Well, what of it?” said Michael. “He probably wants to borrow your
+dog.”
+
+“He says he’s at Lincoln,” Lonsdale stammered.
+
+“So he is.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something
+of Oxford?”
+
+The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great
+success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old
+members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told
+long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the
+auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the
+disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their
+various Toggers to victory.
+
+Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger
+almost swinging the St. Mary’s boat into the apprehensive stern of the
+only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening
+his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The
+Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in
+that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and
+Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path
+beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary’s failed to catch the
+boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his
+own way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.
+
+Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement
+of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his
+mother’s particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him,
+but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room
+in turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.
+
+There was his mother’s own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions
+and curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was
+Stella’s bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly
+mediæval, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room
+with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue
+and crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
+studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.
+
+“I haven’t done anything but just have it whitewashed,” she said. “I
+wanted you to choose the scheme, as I’m going to make all the noise.”
+
+The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
+his sister entered it.
+
+“But it’s absolutely empty,” he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
+in all that space except Stella’s piano, looking now almost as small
+and graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.
+
+“You shall decorate the room,” she said. “What will you choose?”
+
+Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
+gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries
+and blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude
+and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples,
+with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet,
+even as Michael’s fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions,
+his mind swiftly returned to the keyboard’s alternations of white and
+black, so that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric
+significance.
+
+“I don’t think we want anything,” he finally proclaimed. “Just two or
+three tall chairs and a mask of somebody—Beethoven perhaps—and black
+silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn’t go with elaborate
+decorations.”
+
+So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
+remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
+infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
+crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
+listen to the muffled sound of Stella’s notes. Never had any entrance
+seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
+able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the
+power and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room
+was larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed
+chair, Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the
+sun, would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these
+clear melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the
+high-backed chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space
+itself. Alan sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played
+and played, Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him
+the union that already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the
+joy of life on the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have
+always someone fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.
+
+“By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers,” said
+Alan.
+
+Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark’s powerful
+wings.
+
+April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
+usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
+the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
+greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
+him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
+walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
+not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
+them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
+here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had
+been none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the
+contemporary residents could ever have walked along its moderately
+cheerful uniformity.
+
+Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
+of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
+Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
+existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
+Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
+been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
+before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a
+visit to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more
+depressing than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the
+sensation of constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that
+was imposed upon his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as
+he wandered between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom
+of the river Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess
+the narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses
+did not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost
+seeming to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather
+the impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
+contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
+came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of
+insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to
+the tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble
+flaunting of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically
+by the dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a
+spirit haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former
+territory so much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington
+Road. When he reached the house itself, he was able to expel his
+sentiment for the past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new
+owner had dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the
+door, the number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him
+that this was indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so
+hardly with the problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree
+that, once an object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction
+to the threshold of this house when every area down the road owned a
+lime-tree identical in age and growth.
+
+Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
+check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
+inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
+house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
+street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
+horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
+recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
+lived.
+
+It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
+here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
+thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
+day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
+thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
+or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that
+never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past.
+Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself
+the game of vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of
+clouds which the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he
+had done this a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure
+again the vision he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible
+ever to remember the exact moment of falling asleep.
+
+After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
+moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to
+himself with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at
+the corner of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of
+Ulalume, and Michael found himself murmuring, “Of my most immemorial
+year,” half expectant of Lily’s slim form swaying toward him, half
+blushful already in breathless anticipation of the meeting.
+
+Down the road a door opened. Michael’s heart jumped annoyingly out of
+control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated
+in the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed,
+and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps.
+Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names
+of house-agents, that several “to let” boards leaned confidentially
+over the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who
+was whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew
+where Mrs. Haden had gone.
+
+“I wish I did,” said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. “No, sir,
+I’m afraid I don’t. Nor anybody else.”
+
+“You mean they went away in a hurry,” said Michael shamefaced.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“And left no address?”
+
+“Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen’s bills in the hall.”
+
+Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but
+glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with
+the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably
+defeated.
+
+In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room
+staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his
+discovery.
+
+“I’m glad you’re not going to start that business again,” she said.
+“And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall
+soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for
+me disinterestedly and without prejudice.”
+
+“What sort of difficulties?” Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her
+cheeks warm with the evening light.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” she half whispered. “But let’s go away together in
+the summer and not even take a piano.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+YOUTH’S DOMINATION
+
+
+On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary’s hymned the rising
+sun, Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible
+expression of his own mental image of Oxford’s completeness, to pierce
+in one dazzling moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts
+which had restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful
+obscurity about his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the
+city, as it were, imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity
+of his evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence
+of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the
+merely outward glory of its repository.
+
+All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
+called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
+live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
+bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
+the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
+that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
+make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
+of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily
+upon the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the
+cold hues and blushes of the sun’s youth, that stood as symbol for so
+much here in St. Mary’s, made of the east one great shell of lucent
+color. The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of
+dawn and sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys
+gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic
+visitors came half shyly through the portal that was to give such a
+sense of time’s rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible:
+dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and
+at last the tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and
+Lonsdale and Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides
+equipped in cap and gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding
+stairs to the top.
+
+For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
+scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
+poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
+worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
+with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
+to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
+lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
+and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
+it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
+again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
+dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the
+tower’s top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
+time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the
+sun mounted into the day.
+
+Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as
+emmets at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to
+stand. Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent
+hurtling outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of
+the town scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.
+
+Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the
+heart of England. He had refused Maurice’s invitation to a somewhat
+mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the
+almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he
+was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan,
+now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning
+celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far
+afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college
+shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign
+of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement
+of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After
+breakfast it would still be only about seven o’clock with a hot-eyed
+languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost
+decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and
+walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the
+lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed
+incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which
+had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate
+a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he
+extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary
+impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.
+
+It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more
+typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the
+sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double
+irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was
+glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in
+the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at
+the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice’s
+mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
+had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
+with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
+went back to the river’s bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
+while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
+it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
+water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
+and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
+Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
+dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn’s name, and deliberately he
+did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
+were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
+flowing into the ancestral Thames.
+
+Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
+Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
+was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
+white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
+one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.
+
+At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
+conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary
+inmate. His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat,
+but continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on
+the table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the
+table by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still
+fixed upon his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a
+cipher and regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in
+his silent company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this
+strange youth with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately
+carved countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing
+instead of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his
+waistcoat. Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker
+up his pale forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate
+examined the food on the plate before him.
+
+“I think it’s rather cold by now,” said Michael, unable to keep silence
+any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.
+
+“I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
+I’d read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you
+now, you’d think I was an affected ass,” he drawled.
+
+Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.
+
+“They’re all equally bad,” the poet proclaimed gloomily. “What made you
+come to this inn? I didn’t know that anybody else except me had ever
+been here. You’re at the Varsity, I suppose?”
+
+Michael with a nod announced his college.
+
+“I’m at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest
+undergraduates in Oxford.”
+
+“I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary’s,” Michael suggested.
+
+“Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary’s man. I
+refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know.”
+
+“Oh, rather. In fact, he’s rather a friend of mine. He’s keen on
+starting a paper just at present.”
+
+“I know. I know,” said the poet. “He’s asked me to be one of the
+forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?”
+
+“I was invited to be,” Michael admitted. “But instead I’m going to
+subscribe some of the capital required. My name’s Fane.”
+
+“Mine’s Hazlewood. It’s rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.
+Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere
+else. But they’ve got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go
+two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have
+you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris
+weighing the charms of Helen—no—on second thoughts I’m being forced.
+Don’t encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest
+roast chicken he had ever seen. “I think I missed a turning. I’ve been
+at Lechlade all day.”
+
+“We may as well ride back together,” Hazlewood proposed.
+
+After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and
+then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.
+Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.
+
+“Do you know many Balliol people?” he asked.
+
+Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting
+in The Merchant of Venice.
+
+“I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my
+rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea
+they’re keeping a chapel, or else it’s a relief from the unparagoned
+brutality of the college architecture.”
+
+Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his
+rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how
+many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax
+candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive
+candlesticks of wrought iron.
+
+“Mr. Fane of St. Mary’s,” said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was
+dimly aware of multitudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur
+of expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.
+
+“I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?” the
+chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.
+
+“Forgot all about it,” said Hazlewood. “But I suppose I can bring a
+visitor.”
+
+Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied
+criticism of the expostulation.
+
+“Sit down,” said Hazlewood peremptorily. “If I can’t bring a visitor I
+resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will
+have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us
+his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediæval Warfare.”
+
+“Don’t be an affected ass, Guy,” said Comeragh. “You know you yourself
+are reading a paper on The Sonnet.”
+
+“Rise from the noble lord,” said Hazlewood. “The first I’ve had in a
+day’s fishing. I say, Fane, don’t listen to this rot.”
+
+The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host
+and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.
+
+Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was
+sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the
+experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to
+whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood’s room was
+the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth
+for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary’s
+he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or
+Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood’s, nor would he have
+exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in
+Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.
+He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over
+the tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon
+their martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the
+level voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing
+sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco
+smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated
+loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the
+discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green
+curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and
+with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the
+tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the
+decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members
+of the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and
+earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous,
+sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more
+delightful.
+
+Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most
+unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made
+up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that
+from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with
+Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room
+would stand as representatives of the college.
+
+“Yes, I should think so,” said Hazlewood. “Why, are you making
+exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes
+an American to do that really well, you know.”
+
+“But what is the essential Balliol?” Michael demanded.
+
+“Who could say so easily? Perhaps it’s the same sort of spirit,
+slightly filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in
+Elizabethan England.”
+
+Michael asked for a little more elaboration.
+
+“Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by
+birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste
+not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be
+ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with
+Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.”
+
+“Will that description serve for yourself?” Michael asked.
+
+“For me? Oh, great scott, no! I’m utterly deficient in proconsular
+ambitions.”
+
+They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend
+after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his
+acquaintance with Balliol.
+
+When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with
+Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen
+to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his
+day.
+
+“_The Oxford Looking-Glass,_” Avery began, “_is intended to reflect
+contemporary undergraduate thought._”
+
+“I prefer ‘will reflect,’” Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of
+positive opinion.
+
+“I don’t think it very much matters,” said Michael, “as long as you
+don’t think that ‘contemporary undergraduate thought’ is too
+pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror,
+for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate
+thought ever reaches toward reality.”
+
+Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism,
+and the chief promoter went on:
+
+_“Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will
+be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama.”_
+
+“I think that’s a rotten sentence,” Michael interrupted.
+
+“Well, of course, it will be polished,” Avery irritably explained.
+“What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as
+simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at.”
+
+“Ah!” Michael agreed, smiling. “Now I’m beginning to understand.”
+
+“_It may be assumed_,” Avery went on, “_that the opinion of those who
+are ‘knocking at the door_’ (in inverted commas)——”
+
+“I shouldn’t think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a
+door in inverted commas,” Michael observed.
+
+“Look here, Michael,” Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously,
+“will you shut up, or you won’t be allowed to contribute.”
+
+“Haven’t you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door
+in Ibsen?” fretfully demanded Maurice. “_That the opinion of those who
+are knocking at the door,_” he continued defiantly, “_is not unworthy
+of an audience._”
+
+“But if they’re knocking at a door,” Michael objected, “they can’t be
+reflected in a mirror; unless it’s a glass door, and if it’s a glass
+door, they oughtn’t to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don’t
+knock hard, there isn’t much point——”
+
+“_The Editor in chief_,” pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael’s
+attempt to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass,
+“_will be M. Avery (St. Mary’s), with whom will be associated C. St. C.
+Wedderburn (St. Mary’s), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary’s), V. L. A. Townsend
+(B.N.C.)_. I haven’t asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he’s sure
+to join because he’s very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill
+Mowbray’s very bucked at the scheme. He’s just resigned from the
+Russell and joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the
+principal speakers are going to follow Chamberlain’s lead for
+Protection. _N. R. Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most
+tremendously keen, and rather a good man to have, as he’s had two poems
+taken by The Saturday Review already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_——”
+
+“That’s the man I’ve come to talk about,” said Michael. “I met him
+to-day.”
+
+Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear
+he had been considered interesting. “For in his own way,” said Avery
+solemnly, “he’s about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I’d sooner
+have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you
+and Wedders,” he added quickly. “I’m going to take this prospectus
+round to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make.”
+
+Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a
+large number of suggestions. “And he’s got a sense of humor,” he added
+consolingly.
+
+For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the
+preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary
+discussions gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the
+O.U.D.S. or the Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year
+men) belonged. Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass
+the organ of advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for
+Townsend to be as advanced as he chose within the limits of the space
+allotted to his progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole
+of the magazine to drama, especially since under the expanding
+ambitions of editorship he had come to the conclusion he was a critic
+himself, and so was the more firmly disinclined to let slip the
+trenchant opportunity of pulverizing the four or five musical comedies
+that would pass through the Oxford theater every term. However,
+Townsend’s demand for the drama and nothing but the drama was mitigated
+by his determination as a Liberal that The Oxford Looking-Glass should
+not be made the mouthpiece of the New Toryism represented by Mowbray;
+and Maurice was able to recover the control of the dramatic criticism
+by representing to Townsend the necessity for such unflinching
+exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston Club principles as would
+balance Mowbray’s torrential leadership of the Tory Democrats. “So
+called,” Townsend bitterly observed, “because as he supposed they were
+neither Tories nor Democrats.”
+
+Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the
+personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had
+astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then
+just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
+forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
+Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
+figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
+half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
+new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the
+Boer war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
+conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
+and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
+atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
+Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
+Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always
+thronged with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and
+whizzed about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but
+less dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.
+
+Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
+endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
+been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
+yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
+Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
+much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
+absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried
+sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity.
+As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity,
+whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers’ eggs or keeping an
+early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing
+tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and
+Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with
+two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a
+ramshorn of snuff and glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
+
+With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
+Wedderburn’s Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
+Hazlewood’s genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
+result into a soufflée of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
+as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
+exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute,
+outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine
+along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in
+the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
+published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
+reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
+first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he
+had hailed from St. Mary’s tower, this dream of youth’s domination set
+against the gray background of time’s endurance that was itself spun of
+the fabric of dreams.
+
+Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term’s end,
+inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding
+river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to
+destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass
+Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted
+to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the
+text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did
+Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by
+trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates
+have better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most
+inaccurate geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held
+against the bank by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at
+ease, the world became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise
+of life no more than the monotony of a river’s lapping, or along the
+level water meadows a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when
+supper was eaten by figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures
+that afterward drifted slowly down to college under the tree-entangled
+stars and flitting assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the
+rustle of a bird’s wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match
+dropped idly over the side of the canoe. This was the season when for a
+long while people sat talking at open windows, and from the Warden’s
+garden came sweetly up the scent of May flowers.
+
+Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of
+the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan’s
+room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important
+was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to
+bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of
+leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to
+cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect
+valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of
+the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.
+
+Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that
+he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the
+festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not
+inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by
+certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to
+her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection
+of normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors.
+Besides, though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his
+self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the
+battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage
+criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen’s table
+was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and
+sister.
+
+So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free
+to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so
+debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and
+cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon
+mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his
+father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent
+two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.
+
+“After all, they can only spend the day,” he sighed hopefully to
+Michael, “You’ll come and help me through lunch, won’t you, and we’ll
+rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is
+rowed. I was an ass to ask them. You won’t mind being bored a bit by my
+governor? I believe he’s considered quite a clever man.”
+
+Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished
+diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son’s estimate.
+
+“They’re arriving devilish early,” said Lonsdale, coming up to
+Michael’s room with an anxious face on the night before.
+
+Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as
+it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael’s door.
+
+“Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the
+station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the
+three of them at once. I think you’d better talk about wine to the
+governor. It’ll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated.
+Tell him how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing
+in late from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of
+the governor’s port from Tommy’s rooms in Parsons’ Quad.”
+
+Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without
+fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next
+morning.
+
+“I say, you’ve come frightfully early,” Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and
+Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.
+
+“Well, we can walk round my old college,” suggested Lord Cleveden
+cheerfully. “I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford
+nowadays.”
+
+“I say, I’m awfully sorry to let you in for this,” Lonsdale whispered
+to Michael. “Don’t encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around
+at the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something.”
+
+Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking
+round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of
+bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.
+
+“I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?” asked Michael as they
+stood in Peckwater.
+
+“Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap,
+he died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about
+much.”
+
+“Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott,” said Michael hurriedly.
+
+“Dick Prescott? Good gracious!” Lord Cleveden exclaimed, “I haven’t
+seen him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his
+life, to be sure.”
+
+“Did he?” asked Michael, well aware of the question’s folly, but
+incapable of not asking it.
+
+“Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal.”
+
+“Oh,” gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden
+about his father.
+
+“I can’t remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this
+one. Saxby’s I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.
+Let’s go up and ask the present owner to let us look in,” Lord Cleveden
+proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.
+
+“Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no,” protested his son. “No, no; he
+may have people with him. Really.”
+
+“Ah, to be sure,” Lord Cleveden agreed. “What a pity!”
+
+“And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary’s before lunch,” Lonsdale
+announced.
+
+“Do they make meringues here nowadays?” inquired Lord Cleveden
+meditatively.
+
+“No, no,” Lonsdale assured him. “They’ve given up since the famous cook
+died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary’s. And our
+crême caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they’ve got at the
+House.”
+
+The tour of St. Mary’s was conducted with almost incredible rapidity,
+because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted
+everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the
+kitchen.
+
+“Why didn’t you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?” Lady
+Cleveden inquired.
+
+“My dear mother,” said Arthur, “he’s quite impossible.”
+
+“But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man,” said Lady Cleveden,
+“and always asks us to stay with him when we’re in Scotland.”
+
+“Yes, but we never are,” Lonsdale pointed out. “And I’m sorry to hurt
+your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is
+really absolutely impossible. He’s the very worst type of Harrovian.”
+
+Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that
+Mackintosh was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind,
+and urged a theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly
+have declined rather offensively.
+
+“He’s not a very bonhomous lad,” said Lonsdale, and with that sentence
+banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.
+
+After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought
+to take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed
+down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the
+pleasure craft of St. Mary’s bobbed at their moorings.
+
+Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his
+sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into
+respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse
+himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications
+of his opinion he disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the
+punt. Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with
+the air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity
+was no longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave
+superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the
+navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of
+the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.
+
+“Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these
+toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own.” This comment
+was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so
+audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull
+fury. “Try and get along, please, sir. You’re holding up the whole
+river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices’ competition.”
+
+After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back
+to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of
+sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and
+mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea
+and then buzz off at once to see the first division row.
+
+“I think we shall go head to-night,” Lonsdale predicted very
+confidentially. “I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar
+yesterday.”
+
+But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale’s
+people to see St. Mary’s bump New College in front of their own barge,
+and afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with
+the westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox’s blazer and
+shine more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his
+buttonhole.
+
+“Now you’ve just got time to catch your train,” said Lonsdale, when the
+sound of the last pistol-shots and plaudits had died away. And “Phew!”
+he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, “how
+frightfully tiring one’s people are when imported in bulk!”
+
+Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second;
+and without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for
+Pass Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the
+end of the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of
+the most low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the
+candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly
+blows they had received below their intellectual belts.
+
+It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the
+last week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a
+good deal of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest
+justification, and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had
+stayed on the river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great
+expense of energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off
+indigestion.
+
+On one of these merry nights toward one o’clock somebody suggested that
+the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who
+had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt
+act of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This
+derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment
+known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park,
+and it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so
+that surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.
+
+Half a dozen freshmen—Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and
+Michael—all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the
+amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael
+alone possibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been
+one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in
+the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The
+others were more vaguely injured by Smithers’ hitherto undisturbed
+existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his
+accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was
+determined to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to
+follow the fashion.
+
+Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers
+from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass
+and paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm
+before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers’ reformation kept
+them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of
+guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself
+might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside
+Smithers’ open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first
+man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the
+sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric
+light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the
+crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows
+of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment
+an unworthy impulse in every heart.
+
+The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were
+evidently Smithers’ people, photographs like the groups in the parlors
+of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid’s mantelpiece.
+
+“I say, look at that fringe,” gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and
+Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.
+
+Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers’ room, began
+to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that
+stood in the background of this splendid “college career” of Percy or
+Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded
+to counterbalance “Smithers.” No doubt the champagne in gradual
+reaction was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn
+each tribute from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak
+room dedicated for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much
+inclined to detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go
+to bed. What seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was
+that on the evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the
+ascetic glories of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently
+no classical scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate
+for the scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was
+at St. Mary’s to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by
+competing on behalf of the college and the university in scientific
+knowledge with newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham.
+Smithers was merely an advertisement of Oxford’s democratic
+philanthropy, and would only gain from his university a rather inferior
+training in chemistry at a considerably greater personal cost but with
+nothing else that Oxford could and did give so prodigally to others
+more fortunately born.
+
+At this point in Michael’s meditations Smithers woke up, and from the
+bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The
+reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a
+long nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway
+between his two rooms.
+
+“Well, I’m jiggered!” he gasped. “What are you fellers doing in my
+sitting-room?”
+
+It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to take down from the wall
+what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers’ mother in order to
+examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick
+with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe’s grasp, and
+shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled
+through the open window into the deer-park.
+
+Cuffe’s expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very
+heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from
+damaging Smithers’ humble property and even from annoying any more
+Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.
+
+“I say, we can’t let that poor devil run about all night in the park
+with that picture,” said Grainger. “Let’s catch him and explain we got
+into his rooms by mistake.”
+
+“I hope he won’t throw himself into the river or anything,” murmured
+Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his
+reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever
+lighting upon him personally.
+
+“I say, for goodness’ sake, let’s catch him,” begged Michael, who had
+visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street
+that her son had died in defending her enlargement.
+
+Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its
+verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.
+
+“It’s like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Michael said to
+Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers,
+running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was
+undimmed by boughs.
+
+He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at
+once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew,
+for by this time the unwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of
+voices in the Fellows’ sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who
+supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing
+against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an
+entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead
+branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round
+tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down
+into the rose-beds of the Warden’s garden and by one supreme effort of
+endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert’s quad.
+
+“By Jove, that was a topping rag,” puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six
+glasses with welcome drink. “I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He
+said: ‘It’s no use you putting your coat over your ’ead, sir, because I
+knows you by your gait.’”
+
+“I wonder what happened to Smithers,” said Michael.
+
+“Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher,” Avery asserted. “I don’t
+know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary’s.”
+
+“A bounder like what?” asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room
+during Avery’s expression of opinion.
+
+Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the
+evening’s rag was provided for his entertainment.
+
+“But why don’t you let that poor devil alone?” demanded the listener.
+
+At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive
+reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted
+that men like him were very bad for the college.
+
+Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton,
+determined to probe through the medium of Castleton’s common sense and
+Wykehamist notions the ethical and æsthetic rights of people like
+Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.
+
+“After all, Oxford wasn’t founded to provide an expensive three years
+of idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like
+Cuffe,” Castleton pointed out.
+
+“No, no,” Michael agreed, “but no institution has ever yet remained
+true to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance,
+or Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved
+into something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may
+have departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful
+purpose in the scheme of social order.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not grumbling at what Oxford is,” Castleton went on. “I simply
+suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority,
+to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving
+no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are
+supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I
+should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the
+majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way
+in with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of
+hatred which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all
+of us.”
+
+Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.
+
+“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m afraid I’m too lazy to do much more than
+deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I’m
+beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The
+Spectator might talk, to bed.”
+
+The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton
+to his rooms. St. Mary’s tower against the sky opening like a flower
+seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward
+immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social
+distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and
+clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in
+beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed,
+spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And
+suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside
+the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the
+sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those
+who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.
+
+Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to
+invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect
+that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might
+embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself
+with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied
+that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more
+charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the
+experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the
+doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+GRAY AND BLUE
+
+
+When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty
+historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic
+enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he
+found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never
+lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as
+a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with
+which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world
+of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability
+Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed
+exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought
+that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the
+great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had
+been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of
+romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the
+more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in
+Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less
+conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized
+that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.
+
+Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster
+and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of
+other women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their
+company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with
+which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost
+as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be
+independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to
+make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to
+society.
+
+“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella
+irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for
+the whole of a hot summer afternoon.
+
+“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained.
+“And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a
+rotten time really when she was traveling round.”
+
+“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,” said Michael, “and
+now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”
+
+“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think
+if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so
+utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other
+people would make me vague.”
+
+“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.
+
+“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to
+make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the
+vagueness came after she ran away with father.”
+
+Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.
+
+“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he
+said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”
+
+“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I
+believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her
+past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost
+dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little
+things, you’d think—however, as I know you have rather a dread of
+perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”
+
+“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the
+freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though
+he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted
+child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was
+really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him
+to turn theories into practice.
+
+“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that
+professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you
+ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly
+sympathetic.”
+
+Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which
+made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
+
+“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael
+grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy
+so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever
+you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”
+
+For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again
+the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a
+rage.
+
+A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away
+into the country.
+
+“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.
+
+Michael sighed.
+
+“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half
+promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up
+Mental Science—so interesting and quite different from Christian
+Science.”
+
+“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.
+
+Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very
+much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.
+
+“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has
+been quite long enough in London for the present.”
+
+“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking
+coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You
+grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really
+necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”
+
+“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a
+matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall,
+and I think I’ll go.”
+
+The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice
+Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined
+them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in
+reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of
+England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of
+Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a
+request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the
+reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October,
+arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much
+money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation
+not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.
+
+The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and
+they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
+cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
+a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to
+pieces.
+
+“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one
+evening.
+
+“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.
+
+Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.
+
+“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”
+
+“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,”
+Castleton observed. “The sign-posts are like incantations.”
+
+“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects
+me profoundly sometimes.”
+
+Hazlewood laughed.
+
+“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by
+anything,” he prophesied.
+
+Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
+
+“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
+though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist——”
+
+“Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a
+laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”
+
+“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected
+sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and
+you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I
+shall ever come to Cornwall again.”
+
+With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
+
+“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish
+novelists—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
+men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
+own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”
+
+“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.
+
+“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent
+weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to
+solve their problems and if Maurice weren’t always so facile with the
+right emotion at the right moment.”
+
+“I’ve got a presentiment to-night,” said Michael, and not wishing to
+say more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to
+admit as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.
+
+Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
+small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
+or was it merely thunder in the air?
+
+Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:
+
+_join me here rather quickly._
+
+Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
+harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
+and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
+train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
+eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
+regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
+whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
+indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.
+
+It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
+street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
+luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.
+
+“I’m really awfully worried,” he said aloud to himself, as through the
+stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
+Charing Cross.
+
+Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
+and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
+something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
+herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
+great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than
+the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken
+his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of
+half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies
+and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine
+types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and
+those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper
+windows.
+
+Stella’s address was near the Quai d’Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
+found she was living in rooms over a bookseller’s shop with a view of
+the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
+glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
+gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
+damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.
+
+Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
+entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
+looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
+account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist’s
+justification. Stella’s chestnut hair streamed down her straight back
+like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
+and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
+she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
+before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
+This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
+somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
+dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
+pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
+inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
+she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
+silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
+heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
+laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.
+
+Yet, for all Michael’s relief at finding Stella at least superficially
+all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
+of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
+of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
+could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa
+Vine whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend
+for Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that
+he had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning,
+and Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to
+abandon music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris
+come walking.
+
+The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river’s
+bank.
+
+“Well,” said Michael at last, “why did you wire for me?”
+
+“I wanted you.”
+
+Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
+more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
+Stella’s impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
+begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
+fancy for his company.
+
+Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
+reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
+she had written to a letter.
+
+“Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
+an artist, that there was also life to be lived?”
+
+Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just
+how she proposed to put her theory to the test.
+
+“I told you that a youth was painting me.”
+
+“But you also said he looked like a corpse,” Michael quickly
+interjected. “You surely haven’t fallen in love with somebody who looks
+like a corpse?”
+
+“I’m not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,”
+Stella admitted.
+
+Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the
+fellow’s presumption.
+
+“I never yet met a painter who had very much inside,” he commented.
+
+“But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you’ll confess that your
+acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather
+small.”
+
+Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive
+hostility.
+
+“And I suppose this chap is in Paris now,” he said. “Well, I can’t do
+anything. I suppose for a long time now you’ve been making a fool of
+yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?”
+
+He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in
+love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom
+he had never seen.
+
+“I’ve certainly not been making a fool of myself,” Stella flamed. “But
+I thought I would rather you were close at hand.”
+
+“And who’s this Clarissa Vine?” Michael indignantly demanded.
+
+“She’s the girl I traveled with to Paris.”
+
+“But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that
+studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk.”
+
+By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all
+this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of
+the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.
+
+“I can’t bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she’ll
+sit and talk hot air till three o’clock in the morning. I shall go
+mad,” Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the
+immediate future.
+
+Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an
+unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her
+art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable
+companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael’s mistrust of
+Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could
+not stand George Ayliffe.
+
+Michael announced that, as Miss Vine had scarcely condescended to
+address a single word to him in the quarter of an hour he was waiting
+for Stella to dress, it was impossible for him to say whether he could
+stand her or not, but that he was still inclined to think she was
+thoroughly objectionable.
+
+“Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her,” Stella
+promised.
+
+“Party?” interrogated Michael, in dismay.
+
+“We’re having a party in our rooms to-night.”
+
+“And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“And I shall have to meet him?”
+
+She nodded again very cheerfully.
+
+They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently,
+Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so
+that he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a
+jolly afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any
+more confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a
+light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of
+vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.
+
+The party at the girls’ rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost
+more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being
+Stella’s brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence
+of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and
+that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare
+of the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect
+at which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they
+did from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps
+and shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to
+relinquish slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set
+Michael’s heart beating in the imagination of what altitudes it might
+not have reached along the path of romantic passions. Every young woman
+or young man who entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking
+in search of familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay
+worldlings to great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment,
+and Michael tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration
+personalities so pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his
+ordinary temper have plunged him into speechless gloom.
+
+Oxford after this assembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms
+seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of
+callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and
+wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose
+life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as
+romantically real as the sea-sound conjured by a shell. Here were
+gathered people who worked always in that circumfluent inspiration,
+that murmur of liberty, that whisper of humanity. What could Oxford
+give but the bells of out-worn beliefs, and the patter of aimless
+footsteps? How right Stella had been to say that academic perfection
+was vain without the breath of life. How right she was to find in
+George Ayliffe someone whose artistic sympathy would urge her on to
+achievements impossible to attain under Alan’s admiration for mere
+fingers and wrists.
+
+Michael watched this favorite of his sister all through the evening. He
+tried to think that Ayliffe’s cigarette-stained fingers were not so
+very unpleasant, that Ayliffe’s cadaverous exterior was just a noble
+melancholy, that Ayliffe’s high pointed head did not betray an almost
+insufferable self-esteem, and, what was the hardest task of all, he
+tried to persuade himself that Ayliffe’s last portrait of Stella had
+not transformed his splendidly unconcerned sister into a self-conscious
+degenerate.
+
+“How do you like George’s picture of Stella?”
+
+The direct inquiry close to his ear startled Michael. He had been
+leaning back in his chair, listening vaguely to the hum of the guests’
+conversation and getting from it nothing more definite than a sense of
+the extraordinary ease of social intercourse under these conditions.
+Looking round, he saw that Clarissa Vine had come to sit next to him
+and he felt half nervous of this concentrated gaze that so evidently
+betokened a determination to probe life and art and incidentally
+himself to the very roots.
+
+“I think it’s a little thin, don’t you?” said Clarie.
+
+Michael hated to have his opinion of a painting invited, and he
+resented the painter’s jargon that always seemed to apply equally to
+the subject and the medium. It was impossible to tell from Miss Vine’s
+question whether she referred to Stella’s figure or to Ayliffe’s
+expenditure upon paint.
+
+“I don’t think it’s very like Stella,” Michael replied, and consoled
+himself for the absence of subtlety or cleverness in such an answer by
+the fact that at least it was a direct statement of what he thought.
+
+“I know what you mean,” said Clarissa, nodding seriously.
+
+Michael hoped that she did. He could not conceive an affirmation of
+personal opinion delivered more plainly.
+
+“You mean he’s missed the other Stella,” said Clarissa.
+
+Michael bowed remotely. He told himself that contradiction or even
+qualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person
+of Clarissa’s unhumorous earnestness.
+
+“I said so when I first saw it,” cried Clarissa triumphantly. “I said,
+‘my god, George, you’ve only given us half of her!’”
+
+Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his
+initial impression of a full-length study had been correct, and,
+finding that it was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical
+conception of her own.
+
+From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to
+the splendor of the moon.
+
+“I know what you mean,” said Clarissa. “But I like sunshine effects
+best.”
+
+“I wasn’t really thinking about painting at that moment,” Michael
+observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be
+occupied with it.
+
+“You know _you’re_ very paintable,” Clarissa went on. “I suppose you’ve
+sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you’d let _me_ paint you.
+I should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have
+never noticed.”
+
+Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his
+weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.
+
+“You’re very passionate, aren’t you?” she said, shaking Michael’s
+temperament in the thermometer of her thought.
+
+“No; rather the reverse,” said Michael, as he irritably visualized
+himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa’s florid
+canvases.
+
+“All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me,” persisted Clarissa.
+
+Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this
+friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way
+with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be,
+was most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was
+not here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet
+ice was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.
+There should be some parallel with strawberries to illustrate his
+notion of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and
+constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and
+rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any
+nearer to the Mænad than the evocation of the image of a farouche
+dairymaid.
+
+All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to
+himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa’s
+request. “What can you be thinking about?” she asked, and at the moment
+mere inquisitiveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.
+Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing
+the pitch of his violin. So Michael assumed the portentous reverence of
+a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his attitude that he was
+beyond the range of Clarissa’s conversation. He did not know who had
+made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since,
+aside from his own participation in what it gave of unified emotion to
+the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart
+of everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk
+with Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which
+he had encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his
+imagination and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But
+now, when all were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that
+actually pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being,
+Michael’s aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling
+from heart to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which
+justified all that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was
+flaunting in voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and
+ambition. Even Clarissa’s prematurity seemed transferred from the cause
+to the effect of her art, so that here and there some strain of music
+was strong enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of
+abandon at which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael
+watching him was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with
+all the wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in
+check by the music, Stella’s affection for him was just intelligible.
+He might be said to possess now at least some of the graceful
+melancholy of a pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was
+much more in love with Stella than she was or ever could be in love
+with him. He realized that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and
+absorbing her music, was aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware
+it must be for ever impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as
+it was for him to paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for
+Ayliffe because he knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were
+losing her continually even now in complexities that could never by him
+be unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.
+
+More suggestive, however, than the individual listeners were the
+players themselves, so essentially typical were they of their
+respective instruments; and they were even something more than typical,
+for they did ultimately resemble them. The violinist must himself have
+answered in these harmonious wails to the lightest question addressed
+to him. His whole figure had surely that very look of obstinate
+surprise which belongs to a violin. The bones in that lean body of his
+might have been of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so
+little observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the
+simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a
+resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted
+with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be
+possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained
+and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances,
+could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion,
+however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure
+or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.
+
+There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella’s piano
+part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes
+of the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far
+beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost
+tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height
+from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had
+thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped
+altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not
+have been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the
+normal course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted
+spirit down to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of
+this long riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool
+accompaniment she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael
+looked sharply across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how
+often by Stella herself had he been just as gently treated.
+
+The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly
+inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed.
+From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk,
+until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.
+
+Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael’s
+too polite “Mr. Ayliffe,” although he did not perhaps realize all the
+deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after
+expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.
+
+“Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie,” cried Stella.
+
+“Of course I won’t,” said Michael, ruffling.
+
+“What do you want him to sit for?” Stella persisted, paying not the
+least regard to Michael’s objection.
+
+“Oh, something ascetic,” said Clarie, staring earnestly into space as
+if the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.
+
+“Just now it was to be something passionate,” Michael pointed out
+scornfully. He suspected Clarissa’s courage in the presence of Stella’s
+disdainful frankness.
+
+“Ah, perhaps it will be both!” Clarie promised, and “Good night, most
+darling Stella,” she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of
+reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness
+out of the room and up to bed.
+
+“My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She’s like a
+performing leopard!” Michael burst out. “She’s utterly stupid and
+utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes
+into your face and doesn’t wear stays.”
+
+“I get something out of all these queer people,” Stella explained.
+
+“New-art flower-vases, I should think,” scoffed Michael. “Why on earth
+you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of
+idiots I can’t imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and
+I’m jolly glad I’m not, if it’s to make one depend on the flattery of
+these fools.”
+
+“You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself
+very much. And you oughtn’t to be horrid about my friends. I think
+they’re all so dreadfully touching.”
+
+“Yes, and touched,” Michael grumbled. “You’re simply playing at being
+in Bohemia. You’d be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and
+Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and
+walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions.”
+
+“My dear Michael,” Stella argued, “do get out of your head the notion
+that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They’re not
+imported dolls.”
+
+“Well, you’re not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to
+you because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they
+might feel because you are better at your business than any of them are
+at theirs.”
+
+“Rot!” Stella ejaculated.
+
+However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched
+suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael
+simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so
+closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to
+surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The
+contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.
+No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a
+night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the
+moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in
+reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into
+elusive specters of a legendary paradise.
+
+“I suppose what’s really been the matter with me all the evening,”
+confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, “is that I’ve felt out
+of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that
+for them I simply didn’t exist. That’s rather galling. Now at Oxford,
+supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of
+men in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be
+out of sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we
+should all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella,
+why did you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these
+unappreciative enthusiasts?”
+
+“Perhaps I wanted a standard measure,” Stella whispered, with a gesture
+of disarming confidingness. “Something heavy and reliable.”
+
+“My dear girl, I’m much too much of a weathercock, or if you insist on
+me being heavy, let’s say a pendulum. And there’s nothing quite so
+confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night.”
+
+There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have
+been a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the
+ridiculous pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St.
+Cuthbert’s quad or erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden’s garden. He
+was constantly aware of a loss of dignity which worried him
+considerably and for which he took himself to task very sternly.
+Finally he attributed it to one of two reasons, either that he felt a
+sense of constraint in Stella’s presence on her account, or that his
+continued holding back was due to his difficulty in feeling any
+justification for extravagant behavior, when he had not the slightest
+intention of presenting the world with the usufruct of his emotions in
+terms of letters or color or sound.
+
+“I really think I’m rather jealous of all these people,” he told
+Stella. “They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and
+everything that happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now,
+I can do nothing with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very
+short time. I begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to
+criticize, then to be bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether
+and remain just as I was before it occurred except that I never can
+seize the same sort of experience again. Perhaps it’s being with you.
+Perhaps you absorb all the vitality.”
+
+Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.
+
+“Let’s go away and leave all these people,” she proposed. “Let’s go to
+Compiègne together, and we’ll see if you’re depressed by me then. But
+if you are, oh, Michael, I shan’t know what to do! Only you won’t be,
+if we’re in Compiègne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you
+know, we really met each other there for the first time.”
+
+It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to
+produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to
+all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely
+self-satisfied. It was pleasant to arrive in Compiègne and find that
+Madame Regnier’s house had not changed in three years, that the three
+old widows had not suffered from time’s now slow and kindly progress,
+that M. Regnier still ate his food with the same noisy recklessness,
+that the front garden blazed with just the same vermilion of the
+geranium flowers.
+
+For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long
+mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the
+simple pleasures of cassis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a
+sheaf of long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who
+on hearing that he was at Compiègne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul
+de Castéra-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon
+Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by
+his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince
+Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible
+even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his
+sister must become temporary members of the Société du Sport de
+Compiègne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.
+Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly
+elated at the prospect of knowing anybody belonging to this club, and
+were so obviously cast down when their guests seemed to hesitate, that
+Michael and Stella, more to please the Pension Regnier than themselves,
+accepted Prince Raoul’s offer.
+
+It was amusing, too, this so excessively aristocratic club where every
+afternoon Princesses and Duchesses and the wives of Greek financiers
+sat at tea or watched the tennis and polo of their husbands and
+brothers and sons. Stella and Michael played sets of tennis with
+Castéra-Verduzan and the vicomte de Miramont, luxurious sets in which
+there were always four little boys to pick up the balls and at least
+three dozen balls to be picked up. Stella was a great success as a
+tennis-player, and their sponsor introduced the brother and sister to
+all the languidly beautiful women sitting at tea, and also to the
+over-tailored sportsmen who were cultivating a supposedly Britannic
+seriousness of attitude toward their games. Soon Michael and Stella
+found themselves going out to dinner and playing bridge and listening
+to much admiration of England in a Franco-cockney accent that was the
+result of a foreign language mostly acquired from grooms. With all its
+veneer of English freedom, it was still a very ceremonious society, and
+though money had tempered the rigidity of its forms and opinions, there
+was always visible in the background of the noisiest party Black
+Papalism, a dominant Army and the hope of the Orleanist succession.
+Verduzan also took them for long drives in the forest, and altogether
+time went by very gayly and very swiftly, until Stella woke up to the
+fact that her piano had been silent for nearly a fortnight. Verduzan
+was waiting with his impatient car in the prim road outside the Pension
+Regnier when she made this discovery, and he looked very much mortified
+when she told him that to-day she really ought to practice.
+
+“But you must come because I have to go away to-morrow,” he declared.
+
+“Ah, but I’ve been making such wonderful resolutions ever since the sun
+rose,” Stella said, shaking her head. “I must work, mustn’t I,
+Michael?”
+
+“Oh, rot, she must come for this last time, mustn’t she, Fane?”
+
+Michael thought that once more might not spoil her execution
+irreparably.
+
+“Hurrah, you can’t get out of it, Miss Fane!”
+
+The car’s horn tooted in grotesque exultation. Stella put on her
+dust-cloak of silver-gray, and in a few minutes they were racing
+through the forest so fast that the trees on either side winked in a
+continuous blur or where the forest was thinner seemed like
+knitting-needles to gather up folds of landscape.
+
+After they had traversed all the wider roads at this speed, somewhere
+in the very heart of the forest Raoul turned sharply off along a
+wagoner’s track over whose green ruts the car jolted abominably, but
+just when it would have been impossible to go on, he stopped and they
+all got out.
+
+“You don’t know why I’ve brought you here,” he laughed.
+
+Michael and Stella looked their perplexity to the great delight of the
+young man. “Wait a minute and you’ll see,” he chuckled. He was leading
+the way along a narrow grass-grown lane whose hedges on either side
+were gleaming with big blackberries.
+
+“We shall soon be right out of the world,” said Stella. “Won’t that
+worry you, Monsieur?”
+
+“Well, yes, it would for a very long time,” replied the Prince, in a
+tone of such wistfulness as for the moment made him seem middle-aged.
+“But, look,” he cried, and triumphant youth returned to him once more.
+
+The lane had ended in a forest clearing whose vivid turf was looped
+with a chain of small ponds blue as steel. On the farther side stood a
+cottage with diamonded lattices and a gabled roof and a garden full of
+deep crimson phlox glowing against a background of gnarled and somber
+hawthorns. Cottage and clearing were set in a sweeping amphitheater of
+beechwoods.
+
+“It reminds me of Gawaine and the Green Knight,” said Michael.
+
+“I’ll take you inside,” Raoul offered.
+
+They walked across the small common silently, so deeply did they feel
+they were trespassing on some enchantment. From the cottage chimney
+curled a film of smoke that gave a voiceless voice to the silence, and
+when as they paused in the lych-gate, Castéra-Verduzan clanged the
+bell, it seemed indeed the summons to waken from a spell sleepers long
+ago bewitched.
+
+“Surely nobody is going to answer that bell,” said Stella.
+
+“Why, yes, of course, Ursule will open it. Ursule! Ursule!” he cried.
+“C’est moi, Monsieur Raoul.”
+
+The cottage door opened and, evidently much delighted, Ursule came
+stumping down the path. She was an old woman whose rosy face was
+pectinated with fine wrinkles as delicate as the pluming of a moth’s
+wing, while everything about her dress gave the same impression of
+extreme fineness, though the stuff was only a black bombazine and the
+tippet round her shoulders was of coarse lace. When she and Raoul had
+talked together in rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them
+graciously within.
+
+They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the
+sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs
+and dryness.
+
+“And there’s a piano!” cried Stella, running to it. She played the
+Cat’s Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.
+
+“You could practice on that piano?” Raoul anxiously inquired. “It
+belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do.
+She’s married now.”
+
+The sadness in Raoul’s voice had made Michael suppose he was going to
+say his sister was dead.
+
+“Then this divine place belongs to you?” Stella asked.
+
+“To my sister and me. Ursule was once my nurse. Would you be my guests
+here, although I shall be away? For as long as you like. Ursule will
+look after you. Do say ‘yes.’”
+
+“Why, what else could we say?” Michael and Stella demanded
+simultaneously.
+
+It was a disappointment to the Regniers when Michael and Stella came
+back to announce their retreat into the fast woodland, but perhaps M.
+Regnier found compensation in going down to his favorite café that
+afternoon and speaking of his guests, Monsieur and Mademoiselle Fêne,
+now staying with M. le prince de Castéra-Verduzan at his hunting-lodge
+in the forest.
+
+Later that afternoon with their luggage and music Raoul brought Michael
+and Stella back to the cottage in his car, after which he said
+good-bye. Ursule was happy to have somebody to look after, and the
+cottage that had seemed so very small against the high beeches of the
+steep country behind was much larger when it was explored. It stretched
+out a rectangular wing of cool and shadowed rooms toward the forest. In
+this portion Ursule lived, and there was the pantry, and the kitchen
+embossed with copper pans, and the still-room which had garnered each
+flowery year in its course. Coterminous with Ursule’s wing was a
+flagged court where a stone well-head stained with gray and orange
+lichen mirrored a circumscribed world. Beyond into an ancient orchard
+whose last red apples ripened under the first outstretched boughs of
+the forest tossed an acre of garden with runner-beans still in bloom.
+
+In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the
+white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded
+fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the
+homely meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the
+cottage there were two small bedrooms with frequent changing patterns
+in dimity and chintz, with many tinted china ornaments and holy
+pictures that all combined to present the likeness of two glass cases
+enshrining an immoderately gay confusion of flowers and fruit and
+birds.
+
+Here in these ultimate September days of summer’s reluctant farewell
+life had all the rich placidity of an apricot upon a sun-steeped wall.
+Michael, while Stella practiced really hard, read Gregorovius’ History
+of the Papacy; and when she stopped suddenly he would wake
+half-startled from the bloody horrors of the tenth century narrated
+laboriously with such cold pedantry, and hear above the first elusive
+silence swallows gathering on the green common, robins in their
+autumnal song, and down a corridor the footfalls and tinkling keys of
+Ursule.
+
+It was natural that such surroundings should beget many intimate
+conversations between Michael and Stella, and if anything were wanting
+to give them a sense of perfect ease the thought that here at Compiègne
+three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always
+smoothed away the trace of shyness.
+
+“Whether I had come out to Paris or not,” asked Michael earnestly,
+“there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between
+you and that fellow Ayliffe?” He had to recur to this uneasy theme.
+
+“There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow
+to rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people
+to play about with. It’s the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating
+cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no
+need to bother to sustain one’s personality at highest pitch. George
+used to be grateful for so little. He really wasn’t bad.”
+
+“But didn’t you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might
+fall in love with him? I don’t want to be too objectionably fraternal,
+but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of
+cheapening yourself.”
+
+“Only to other people,” Stella argued, “not to myself. My dear Michael,
+you’ve no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a
+composition that is really easy—ridiculously, fatuously easy.”
+
+“But you wouldn’t choose that piece for public performance,” Michael
+pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking
+Stella’s extravagance.
+
+“Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn’t very
+important?” She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.
+
+“Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you
+make out now?”
+
+“I wanted a corrective,” Stella explained.
+
+“But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I’m your brother? And,
+you know, I don’t believe you would consider that relationship had much
+to do with my importance one way or the other.”
+
+“In fact,” said Stella, laughing, “what you’re really trying to do is
+to work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you’re a
+corrective to George is that you’re a gentleman.”
+
+“There you are!” cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she
+had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions
+of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest
+excavation of life. “We all half apologize for using the word
+‘gentleman,’ but we can’t get on without it. People say it means
+nothing nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean
+more nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should
+add something to its value. I haven’t been able to talk this out
+before, because you’re the only person who knows what I was born and at
+the same time is able to understand that for me to think about my
+circumstances rather a lot doesn’t imply any very morbid
+self-consciousness. _You’re_ all right. You have this astonishing gift
+which would have guaranteed you self-expression whatever you had been
+born. When one sees an artist up to your level, one doesn’t give a damn
+for his ancestors or his family or his personal features apart from the
+security of the art’s consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination
+toward art myself, but inclinations are no good without something to
+lean up against at the end. These people who came to your party that
+night in Paris are in a way much happier, or rather much more secure
+than me. However far they incline without support, they’re most of them
+inclining away from a top-heavy suburban life. So if they become
+failures, they’ll always have the consolation of knowing they had
+either got to incline outward or be suffocated.”
+
+Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices
+at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the
+narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the
+lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of
+delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and
+pale fawn of their last attiring.
+
+“If I could only find in life itself,” said Michael, sighing, “a path
+leading to something like this cottage.”
+
+“But, meanwhile, go on,” Stella urged. “Do go on with your
+self-revelation. It’s so fascinating to me. It’s like a chord that
+never resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony.”
+
+“Something rather pathetic in fact,” Michael suggested.
+
+“Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic,” she assured
+him.
+
+“My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I’m the possessor of so
+much I can never make use of,” Michael began again. “I’m not merely
+discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn’t
+enter my head. Indeed, I don’t think I’m ever discontented or even
+resentful for one moment, but if I _were_ the head of a great family I
+should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my
+theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down
+with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas
+now——” he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“I don’t see much difference really,” Stella said. “You’re not
+prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale
+perhaps.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” Michael plunged on excitedly. “But crowds of people are
+doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that
+these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather
+irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another
+sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands
+any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us
+to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy
+trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass
+of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his
+existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education
+has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present
+meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we
+know anything about. And they are _not_, they simply and solidly are
+_not_. The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with
+all it connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of
+the educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that
+the average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face,
+will deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have
+been armed with weapons they don’t know how to use and are therefore so
+much the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a
+weapon of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I
+could have proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand
+scale even for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good
+nowadays.”
+
+“I wonder if you could,” murmured Stella. “Anyway, I don’t see why you
+shouldn’t ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the
+small scale.”
+
+“But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody
+and fades out of memory at the moment of death,” Michael grumbled.
+
+“Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid,” Stella pointed
+out, “you’ll find your niche.”
+
+“I shall be a sort of Prescott. That’s the most I can hope for,”
+Michael gloomily announced. “Yet after all that’s pretty good.”
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known
+Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an
+atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most
+esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that
+he finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.
+
+“Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so
+wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out
+your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to
+know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?”
+
+Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for
+keeping such an extraordinary event so secret.
+
+“Because I didn’t want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into
+your relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you,
+you would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn’t
+looking. And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him
+through her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not.”
+
+It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the
+woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse
+what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her
+the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in
+the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn
+of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage
+which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella’s
+appeal to Raoul de Castéra-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own
+personality had scarcely entered. Castéra-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe!
+What folly it had been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan.
+Yet it had seemed so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in
+love with each other. Michael wondered whether he were specially
+privileged in being able to see through to a sister’s heart, whether
+other brothers went blindly on without an inkling that their sisters
+were loved. It was astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had
+stepped so far and so rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the
+risk of ridicule for proposing to a girl whose mother’s love for a
+friend of his own he had spent his life in guarding. Michael put out
+the lamp and, lighting a candle, went along the corridor to bed. From
+the far end he heard Stella’s voice calling to him and turned back to
+ask her what she wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and,
+in that dainty room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the
+soft candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet
+bow someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all
+her largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish
+and protect.
+
+“Michael, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began, “and you
+mustn’t get cranky. I wish you wouldn’t bother so much about what
+you’re going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy.”
+
+“I don’t really bother a great deal,” Michael assured her. “But I do
+feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a
+nobody.”
+
+“The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and
+father,” said Stella.
+
+“Yes, logically,” Michael agreed. “But I think father did feel the
+responsibility rather heavily, and it’s a sort of loyalty I have for
+him which makes me so determined to justify myself.”
+
+That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two
+or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves
+trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest
+house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compiègne in time to say
+good-bye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old
+Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty
+was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their
+own that magical corner of the world.
+
+The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine
+weather came back. London welcomed their return with a gracious calm.
+The Thames was a sheet of trembling silver, and the distant roofs and
+spires and trees of the Surrey shore no more than breath upon a glass.
+In this luminous and immaterial city the house in Cheyne Walk stood out
+with the pleasant aspect of its demure reality, and Mrs. Fane like one
+of those clouded rose pastels on the walls of her room was to both of
+them after their absence from London herself for a while as they had
+known her in childhood.
+
+“Dear children, how charming to see you looking so well. I’m not quite
+sure I like that very Scotch-looking skirt, darling Stella. I’m so glad
+you’ve enjoyed yourselves together. Is it a heather mixture? And I was
+in France, too. But the trains are so oddly inconvenient. Mrs.
+Carruthers’ most interesting! I wish, darling Stella, you would take up
+Mental Science. Ah, but I forgot, you have your practicing.”
+
+It was time to go up to Oxford after the few days that Stella and
+Michael spent in making arrangements for a series of Brahms recitals in
+one of the smaller concert halls. Alan met Michael on the platform at
+Paddington. This custom they had loyally kept up each term, although
+otherwise their paths seemed to be diverging.
+
+“Good vac?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, rather! I’ve been working at rather a tricky slow leg-break.
+Fifty-five wickets for 8.4 during the vac. Not bad for a dry summer. I
+was playing for the Tics most of the time. What did you do?”
+
+Michael during the journey up talked mostly about Stella.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+VENNER’S
+
+
+The most of Michael’s friends had availed themselves of the right of
+seniority to move into more dignified rooms for their second year.
+These “extensions of premises,” as Castleton called them, reached the
+limit of expansion in the case of Lonsdale who, after a year’s
+residence in two small ground-floor rooms of St. Cuthbert’s populous
+quad, had acquired the largest suite of three in Cloisters. Exalted by
+palatial ambitions, he spent the first week of term in buttonholing
+people in the lodge, so that after whatever irrelevant piece of chatter
+he had seized upon as excuse he might wind up the conversation by
+observing nonchalantly:
+
+“Oh, I say, have you chaps toddled round to my new rooms yet? Rather
+decent. I’m quite keen on them. I’ve got a dining-room now. Devilish
+convenient. Thought of asking old Wedders to lay in a stock of
+pictures. It would buck him up rather.”
+
+“But why do you want these barracks?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, binges,” said Lonsdale. “We ought to be able to run some pretty
+useful binges here. Besides, I’m thinking of learning the bagpipes.”
+
+Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room
+in St. Cuthbert’s tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous
+Templeton-Collins on Michael’s staircase, and had brought back with him
+from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and
+the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael
+alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him.
+He had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their
+participation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for
+himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the
+Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect
+they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative
+purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for
+himself alone. How intimate and personal that sparse lunch laid for one
+on a large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset
+bookcase and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his
+pleasure! There was not now indeed a single book that did not recall
+the charmed idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there
+one volume that could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments
+eagerly expected all the day long.
+
+It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to
+gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds
+had proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the
+more worshipful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the
+miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to
+acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they
+generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their
+material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in
+some dead publishing season more extravagant buyers had spent four or
+five times as much to partake of their accumulated facts and fortuitous
+illustrations. With Michael the passion for remainders was short-lived,
+and he soon pushed them ignobly out of the way for the sake of those
+stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest
+flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to
+mercantile elation and depression.
+
+If among these ambassadors of learning and literature was to be
+distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had
+been extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the
+seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though
+enriched by the classic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the
+eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may
+have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a
+Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the
+universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was
+the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their
+euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every
+night for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a
+world of polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual
+maladies and minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of
+talismans, to fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and
+strange influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so
+perilously that under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half
+contemptuous of thought less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the
+present danced by in thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather
+perceived as bloodless and irresolute ephemerides. When people
+reproached him for his willful prejudice, he pointed out how easy it
+would always be to overtake the ideas of the present and how much waste
+of intellectual breath would be avoided by letting his three or four
+Oxford years account for the most immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed
+to him to provide an opportunity, and more than an opportunity—an
+inexpugnable command to wave with most reluctant hands farewell to the
+backward of time, around whose brink rose up more truthful dreams than
+those that floated indeterminate, beckoning through the mist across the
+wan mountains of the future.
+
+On the walls Michael’s pictures had been collected to achieve through
+another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her
+lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams
+behind; and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he
+sought in a picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room.
+One hour of the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always
+transform the pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some
+diagrammatic significance. Apart from the accumulation of books and
+pictures, he had changed the room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers,
+chairs and tables, all preserved the character of the room itself as
+something that existed outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient
+inhabitants who read and laughed and ate and talked for so
+comparatively fleeting a space of time between its four walls. With all
+that he had imposed of what in the opinion of his contemporaries were
+eccentricities of adornment, the rooms remained, as he would observe to
+any critic, essentially the same as his own. Instead of college groups
+which marked merely by the height of the individual’s waistcoat-opening
+the almost intolerable fugacity of their record, there were Leonardo
+and Blake and Frederick Walker to preserve the illusion of permanence,
+or at least of continuity. Instead of the bleached and desiccated ribs
+of momentarily current magazines cast away in sepulchral indignity,
+there were a hundred quartos whose calf bindings had the durableness
+and sober depth of walnut furniture, furniture, moreover, that was
+still in use.
+
+Yet it was in Venner’s office where Michael found the perfect fruit of
+time’s infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of
+the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his
+own rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present
+of finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of
+those moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through
+situations or persons or places, the assurance of immortality. Great
+pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always
+remain as the most obvious pledge of man’s spiritual potentiality, but
+these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress
+themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke
+of seeing God’s forehead pressed against the window panes, could
+believe that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had
+struggled in the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable.
+To him Blake seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to
+attempt the recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith.
+Every other writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur.
+Most people, seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would
+obtain the finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight
+of St. Mary’s tower against a green April afterglow, or of the
+moon-parched High Street in frost. Michael, however, found in Venner’s
+office, just as he had found in that old print of St. Mary’s tower
+rather than in the tower itself, the innermost shrine of Oxford, the
+profoundest revelation of the shining truth round which the mysterious
+material of Oxford had grown through the Middle Ages.
+
+Michael with others of his year had during the summer term ventured
+several times into Venner’s, but the entrance of even a comparatively
+obscure senior had always driven them out. They had not yet enjoyed the
+atmosphere of security without which a club unlike an orchard never
+tastes sweet. Now, with the presence of a new year’s freshmen and with
+the lordship of the college in their own hands, since to the
+out-of-college men age with merciless finger seemed already to be
+beckoning, Michael and his contemporaries in their pride of prime
+marched into Venner’s after hall and drank their coffee.
+
+Venner’s office was one of the small ground-floor rooms in Cloisters,
+but it had long ago been converted to the present use. An inner
+storeroom, to which Venner always retired to make a cup of squash or to
+open a bottle of whisky, had once been the bedroom. The office itself
+was not luxuriously furnished, and the accommodation was small. A
+window-seat with a view of the college kitchens, a square table, and a
+couple of Windsor chairs were considered enough for the men who
+frequented Venner’s every night after hall, and who on Sunday nights
+after wine in J.C.R. clustered there like a swarm of bees. Venner’s own
+high chair stood far back in the corner behind his high sloping desk on
+which, always spread open, lay the great ledger of J.C.R. accounts. On
+the shelves above were the account books of bygone years in which were
+indelibly recorded the extravagances of more than thirty years of St.
+Mary’s men. Over the fireplace was a gilt mirror of Victorian design
+stuck round with the fixture cards of the university and the college,
+with notices of grinds and musical clubs and debating societies; in
+fact, with all the printed petty news of Oxford. A few photographs of
+winning crews, a book-case with stores of college stationery, a
+Chippendale sideboard with a glass case of priced cigars on top, and an
+interesting drawerful of Venner’s relics above the varnished wainscot
+completed the furniture. The wall-paper was of that indefinite brownish
+yellow which one finds in the rooms of old-fashioned solicitors, and of
+that curious oily texture which seems to produce an impression of great
+age and at the same time of perfect modernity.
+
+Yet the office itself, haunted though it was by the accumulated
+personalities of every generation at St. Mary’s, would scarcely have
+possessed the magical effect of fusion which it did possess, had not
+all these personalities endured in a perpetual present through the
+conservative force of Venner himself. John Venables had been Steward of
+the Junior Common Room for thirty-three years, but he seemed to all
+these young men that came within the fragrancy of his charm to be as
+much an intrinsic part of the college as the tower itself. The
+moon-faced Warden, the dry-voiced dons, the deer park, the elms, the
+ancient doors and traceries, the lawns and narrow entries, the
+groinings and the lattices, were all subordinate in the estimation of
+the undergraduates to Venner. He knew the inner history of every rag;
+he realized why each man was popular or unpopular or merely ignored; he
+was a treasure-house of wise counsel and kindly advice; he held the
+keys of every heart. He was an old man with florid, clean-shaven face,
+a pair of benignant eyes intensely blue, a rounded nose, a gentle voice
+and most inimitable laugh. Something there was in him of the old family
+butler, a little more of the yeoman-farmer, a trace of the head
+game-keeper, a suspicion of the trainer of horses, but all these
+elements were blended to produce the effect of someone wise and saintly
+and simple who could trouble himself to heal the lightest wounds and
+could rouse with a look or a gesture undying affection.
+
+With such a tutelary spirit, it was not surprising the freedom of
+Venner’s should have been esteemed a privilege that could only be
+conferred by the user’s consciousness of his own right. There was no
+formal election to Venner’s: there simply happened a moment when the
+St. Mary’s man entered unembarrassed that mellow office and basked in
+that sunny effluence. In this ripe old room, generous and dry as sherry
+wine, how pleasant it was to sit and listen to Venner’s ripe old
+stories: how amazingly important seemed the trivial gossip of the
+college in this historic atmosphere: how much time was apparently
+wasted here between eight and ten at night, and what a thrill it always
+was to come into college about half-past nine of a murky evening and
+stroll round Cloisters to see if there was anybody in Venner’s. It
+could after all scarcely be accounted a waste of time to sit and slowly
+mature in Venner’s, and sometimes about half-past nine the old man
+would be alone, the fire would be dying down and during the half-hour
+that remained of his duty, it would be possible to peel a large apple
+very slowly and extract from him more of the essence of social history
+than could be gained from a term’s reading of great historians even
+with all the extra lucidity imparted by a course of Mr. So-and-So’s
+lectures.
+
+Michael found that Venner summed up clearly for him all his own
+tentative essays to grasp the meaning of life. He perceived in him the
+finest reaction to the prejudice and nobility, the efficiency and folly
+of aristocratic thought. He found in him the ideal realization of his
+own most cherished opinions. England, and all that was most
+inexplicable in the spirit of England, was expressed by Venner. He was
+a landscape, a piece of architecture, a simple poem of England. One of
+Venner’s applauded tricks was to attach a piece of string to the tongs
+for a listener to hold to his ears, while Venner struck the tongs with
+the poker and evoked the sound of St. Mary’s chimes. But the poker and
+tongs were unnecessary, for in Venner’s own voice was the sound of all
+the bells in England. Communion with this gracious, this tranquil, this
+mellow presence affected Michael with a sense of the calm certainty of
+his own life. It lulled all the discontent and all the unrest. It
+indicated for the remainder of his Oxford time a path which, if it did
+not lead to any outburst of existence, was at least a straight path,
+green bordered and gay with birdsong, with here and there a sight of
+ancient towers and faiths, and here and there an arbor in which he and
+his friends could sit and talk of their hopes.
+
+“Venner,” said Lonsdale one evening, “do you remember the Bishop of
+Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him
+in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow,” Venner began, full of
+reminiscence. “But we’ll look him up.”
+
+Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive
+evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were
+photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed
+for the criticism of his irreverent successors.
+
+“There you are,” chuckled Venner triumphantly. “What did I say? One
+dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for
+there’s another half dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men
+are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college
+as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop—Stebbing he was then. He
+put a cod-fish in the Dean’s bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about
+it! The old Warden kicked up such a fuss.”
+
+And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided
+from anecdote to anecdote of episcopal youth.
+
+“I thought the old boy liked the governor’s port,” laughed Lonsdale.
+“‘What a pity everybody can’t drink in moderation,’ said Gaiters. Next
+time he cocks his wicked old eye at me, I shall ask him about that
+cod-fish.”
+
+“What’s this they tell me about your bringing out a magazine?” Venner
+inquired, turning to Maurice Avery.
+
+“Out next week, Venner,” Maurice announced importantly.
+
+“Why, whatever do you find to write about?” asked Venner. “But I
+suppose it’s amusing. I’ve often been asked to write my own life. What
+an idea! As if I had any time. I’m glad enough to go to bed when I get
+home, though I always smoke a pipe first. We had two men here once who
+brought out a paper. Chalfont and Weymouth. I used to have some copies
+of it somewhere. They put in a lot of skits of the college dons. The
+Warden was quite annoyed. ‘Most scurrilous, Venables,’ he said to me, I
+remember. ‘Most scurrilous.’” Venner chuckled at the remembrance of the
+Warden’s indignation.
+
+“This is going to be a very serious affair, Venner,” explained
+somebody. “It’s going to put the world quite straight again.”
+
+“Ho-ho, I suppose you’re one of these Radicals,” said Venner to the
+editor. “Dear me, how anyone can be a Radical I can’t understand. I’ve
+always been a Conservative. We had a Socialist come up here to lecture
+once in a man’s rooms—a great Radical this man was—Sir Hugh Gaston—a
+baronet—there’s a funny thing, fancy a Radical baronet. Well, the men
+got to hear of this Socialist coming up and what do you think they
+did?” Venner chuckled in anticipatory relish. “Why, they cropped his
+hair down to nothing. Sir Hugh Gaston was quite upset about it, and
+when he made a fuss, they cut his hair too, though it was quite short
+already. There was a terrible rowdy set up then. The men are very much
+quieter nowadays.”
+
+The door opened as Venables finished his story, and Smithers came in to
+order rather nervously a tin of biscuits. The familiar frequenters of
+Venner’s eyed in cold silence his entrance, his blushful wait and his
+hurried exit.
+
+“That’s a scholar called Smithers,” Venner explained. “He’s a very
+quiet man. I don’t suppose any of you know him even by sight.”
+
+“We ragged him last term,” said Michael, smiling at his friends.
+
+“He’s a bounder,” declared Avery obstinately.
+
+“He hasn’t much money,” said Venner. “But he’s a very nice fellow. You
+oughtn’t to rag him. He’s very harmless. Never speaks to anybody. He’ll
+get a first, I expect, but there, you don’t think anything of that, I
+know. But the dons do. The Warden often has him to dinner. I shouldn’t
+rag him any more. He’s a very sensitive fellow. His father’s a
+carpenter. What a wonderful thing he should have a son come up to St.
+Mary’s.”
+
+The rebuke was so gently administered that only the momentary silence
+betrayed its efficacy.
+
+One day Michael brought Alan to be introduced to Venables, and it was a
+pleasure to see how immediately the old man appreciated Alan.
+
+“Why ever didn’t you come to St. Mary’s?” asked Venner. “Just the place
+for you. Don’t you find Christ Church a bit large? But they’ve got some
+very good land. I’ve often done a bit of shooting over the Christ
+Church farms. The Bursar knows me well. ‘Pleased to see you, Mr.
+Venables, and I hope you’ll have good sport.’ That’s what he said to me
+last time I saw him. Oh, he’s a very nice man! Do they still make
+meringues at your place? I don’t suppose you ever heard the story of
+the St. Mary’s men who broke into Christ Church. It caused quite a stir
+at the time. Well, some of our men were very tipsy one night at the
+Bullingdon wine, and one of them left his handkerchief in the rooms of
+a Christ Church man, and what do you think they did? Why, when they got
+back to college, this man said he wasn’t going to bed without his
+handkerchief. Did you ever hear of such a thing? So they all climbed
+out of St. Mary’s at about two in the morning and actually climbed into
+Christ Church. At least they thought it was Christ Church, but it was
+really Pembroke. Do you know Pembroke? I don’t suppose you’ve even been
+there. Our men always cheer Pembroke in the Eights—Pemmy, as they call
+it—because their barge is next to us. But fancy breaking in there at
+night to look for a handkerchief. They woke up every man in the
+college, and there was a regular set-to in the quad, and the night
+porter at Pembroke got a most terrible black eye. The President of the
+J.C.R. had to send an apology, and it was all put right, but this man
+who lost his handkerchief, Wilberforce his name was, became a regular
+nuisance, because for ever afterward, whenever he got drunk, he used to
+go looking for this old handkerchief. There you see, that’s what comes
+of going to the Bullingdon wine. Are you a member of the Bullingdon?”
+
+“He’s a cricketer, Venner,” Michael explained.
+
+“So was this fellow Wilberforce who lost his handkerchief, and what do
+you think? One day when we were playing Winchester—you’re not a
+Wykehamist, are you?—he came out to bat so drunk that the first ball he
+hit, he went and ran after it himself. It caused quite a scandal. But
+you don’t look one of that sort. Will you have a squash and a biscuit?
+The men like these biscuits very much. There’s been quite a run on
+them.”
+
+Michael was anxious to know how deep an impression Venner had made on
+Alan.
+
+“You’ve got nobody like him at the House?” he asked.
+
+Alan was bound to admit there was indeed nobody.
+
+“He’s an extraordinary chap,” said Michael. “He’s always different, and
+yet he’s always absolutely the same. For me he represents Oxford. When
+one’s in his company, one feels one’s with him for ever, and yet one
+knows that people who have gone down can feel just the same, and that
+people who haven’t yet come up will feel just the same. You know, I do
+really think that what it sets out to do St. Mary’s does better than
+any other college. And the reason of that is Venner’s. It’s the only
+successful democracy in the world.”
+
+“I shouldn’t have called it a democracy,” said Alan. “Everybody doesn’t
+go there.”
+
+“But everybody can go there. It depends entirely on themselves.”
+
+“What about that fellow Smithers you were talking about?” Alan asked.
+“He seems barred.”
+
+“But he won’t be,” Michael urged hopefully.
+
+“He’d be happier at the House all the same,” Alan said. “He’d find his
+own set there.”
+
+“But so he can at St. Mary’s.”
+
+“Then it isn’t a democracy,” Alan stoutly maintained.
+
+“I say, Alan,” exclaimed Michael, in surprise. “You’re getting quite a
+logician.”
+
+“Well, you always persist in treating me like an idiot,” said Alan.
+“But I _am_ reading Honor Mods. It’s a swat, but I’ve got to get some
+sort of a class.”
+
+“You’ll probably get a first,” said Michael.
+
+Yet how curious it was to think of Alan, whom he still regarded as
+chiefly a good-looking and capable athlete, taking a first class in a
+school he himself had indolently passed over. Of course he would never
+take a first. He was too much occupied with the perfection of new
+leg-breaks. And what would he do after his degree, his third in greats?
+A third was the utmost Michael mentally allowed him in the Final
+Schools.
+
+“I suppose you’ll ultimately try for the Indian Civil?” Michael asked.
+“Do you remember when we used to lie awake talking in bed at Carlington
+Road? It was always going to be me who did everything intellectual; you
+were always the sportsman.”
+
+“I am still. Michael, I think I’ve got a chance of my blue this year.
+If I can keep that leg-break,” he added fervidly. “There’s no slow
+right-hander of much class in the Varsity. I worked like a navvy at
+that leg-break last vac.”
+
+“I thought you were grinding for Mods,” Michael reminded him, with a
+smile.
+
+“I worked like a navvy at Mods,” said Alan.
+
+“You’ll be a proconsul, I really believe.” Michael looked admiringly at
+his friend. “And do you know, Alan, in appearance you’re turning into a
+regular viking.”
+
+“I meant to have my hair cut yesterday,” said Alan, in grave and
+reflective self-reproof.
+
+“It’s not your hair,” cried Michael. “It’s your whole personality. I
+never appreciated you until this moment.”
+
+“I think you talk more rot nowadays than you used to talk even,” said
+Alan. “So long, I must go back and work.”
+
+The tall figure with the dull gold hair curling out from the green cap
+of Harris tweed faded away in the November fog that was traveling in
+swift and smoky undulations through the Oxford streets. What a
+strangely attractive walk Alan had always had, and now it had gained
+something of determination, whether from leg-breaks or logic Michael
+did not know. But the result was a truer grace in the poise of his
+neck; a longer and more supple swing from his tapering flanks.
+
+Michael went on up the High and stood for a moment, watching the
+confusion caused by the fog at Carfax, listening to the fretful tinkles
+of the numerous bicycles and the jangling of the trams and the shouts
+of the paper-boys. Then he walked down Cornmarket Street past the shops
+splashing through the humid coils of vapor their lights upon the
+townspeople, loiterers and purchasers who thronged the pavements.
+Undergraduates strolled along, linked arm in arm and perpetually
+staring. How faithfully each group resembled its forerunners and
+successors. All had the same fresh complexions, the same ample green
+coats of Harris tweed, the same gray flannel trousers. Only in the
+casual acknowledgments of his greeting when he recognized acquaintances
+was there the least variation, since some would nod or toss their
+heads, others would shudder with their chins, and a few would raise
+their arms in a fanlike gesture of social benediction. Michael turned
+round into the Broad where the fog made mysterious even the tea-tray
+gothic of Balliol, and Trinity with its municipal ampelopsis. A
+spectral cabman saluted him interrogatively from the murk. A
+fox-terrier went yapping down the street at the heels of a don’s wife
+hurrying back to Banbury Road. A belated paper-boy yelled, “Varsity and
+Blackheath Result,” hastening toward a more profitable traffic. The fog
+grew denser every minute, and Michael turned round into Turl Street
+past many-windowed Exeter and the monastic silence of Lincoln. There
+was time to turn aside and visit Lampard’s bookshop. There was time to
+buy that Glossary of Ducange which he must have, and perhaps that red
+and golden Dictionary of Welby Pugin which he ought to have, and
+ultimately, as it turned out, there was time to buy half a dozen more
+great volumes whose connection with mediæval history was not too remote
+to give an excuse to Michael, if excuse were needed, for their
+purchase. Seven o’clock chimed suddenly, and Michael hurried to
+college, snatched a black coat and a gown out of Venner’s and just
+avoided the sconce for being more than a quarter of an hour late for
+hall.
+
+Michael was glad he had not missed hall that night. In Lampard’s
+alluring case of treasures he had been tempted to linger on until too
+late, and then to take with him two or three new books and in their
+entertainment to eat a solitary and meditative dinner at Buol’s. But it
+would have been a pity to have missed hall when the electric light
+failed abruptly and when everybody had just helped themselves to baked
+potatoes. It would have been sad not to have seen the Scholars’ table
+so splendidly wrecked or heard the volleys of laughter resounding
+through the darkness.
+
+“By gad,” said Lonsdale, when the light was restored and the second
+year leaned over their table in triumphant exhaustion. “Did you see
+that bad man Carben combing the potatoes out of his hair with a fork? I
+say, Porcher,” he said to his old scout who was waiting at the table,
+“do bring us some baked potatoes.”
+
+“Isn’t there none left?” inquired Porcher. “Mr. Lonsdale, sir, you’d
+better keep a bit quiet. The Sub-Warden’s looking very savage—very
+savage indeed.”
+
+At this moment Maurice Avery came hurrying in to dinner.
+
+“Oh, sconce him!” shouted everybody. “It’s nearly five-and-twenty
+past.”
+
+“Couldn’t help it,” said Maurice very importantly. “Just been seeing
+the first number of the O.L.G. through the press.”
+
+“By gad,” said Lonsdale. “It’s a way we have in the Buffs and the Forty
+Two’th. Look here, have we all got to buy this rotten paper of yours?
+What’s it going to cost?”
+
+“A shilling,” said Maurice modestly.
+
+“A bob!” cried Lonsdale. “But, my dear old ink-slinger, I can buy the
+five-o’clock Star for a half-penny.”
+
+Maurice had to put up with a good deal of chaff from everybody that
+night.
+
+“Let’s have the program,” Sinclair suggested.
+
+The editor was so much elated at the prospect of to-morrow’s great
+event that he rashly produced from his pocket the contents bill, which
+Lonsdale seized and immediately began to read out:
+
+“THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS. No. I. _“Some Reflections. By Maurice
+Avery._
+
+“What are you reflecting on, Mossy?”
+
+“Oh, politics,” said Maurice lightly, “and other things.”
+
+“My god, he’ll be Prime Minister next week,” said Cuffe.
+
+_“Socrates at Balliol. By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+“And just about where he ought to have been,” commented Lonsdale. “Oh,
+listen to this! Whoo-oop!
+
+_“The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
+
+“But wait a minute, who do you think it’s by? C. St. C. Wedderburn!
+Jolly old Wedders! The Failure of the Modern Illustrator. Wedders! My
+god, I shall cat with laughing. Wedders! A bee-luddy author.”
+
+“Sconce Mr. Lonsdale, please,” said Wedderburn, turning gravely to the
+recorder by his chair.
+
+“What, half a crown for not really saying bloody?” Lonsdale protested.
+
+That night after hall there was much to tell Venner of the successful
+bombardment with potatoes, and there was some chaff for Avery and
+Wedderburn in regard to their forthcoming magazine. Parties of
+out-of-college men came in after their dinner, and at half-past eight
+o’clock the little office was fuller than usual, with the college
+gossip being carried on in a helter-skelter of unceasing babble. Just
+when Fitzroy the Varsity bow was enunciating the glories of Wet Bobbery
+and the comparative obscurities of Dry Bobbery and just when all the
+Dry Bobs present were bowling the contrary arguments at him from every
+corner at once, the door opened and a freshman, as fair and floridly
+handsome as a young Bacchus, walked with curious tiptoe steps into the
+very heart of the assembly.
+
+Fitzroy stopped short in his discourse and thrummed impatiently with
+clenched fists upon his inflated chest, as gorillas do. The rest of the
+company eyed the entrance of the newcomer in puzzled, faintly hostile
+silence.
+
+“Oh, Venner,” said the intruder, in loftiest self-confidence and
+unabashed clarity of accent. “I haven’t had those cigars yet.”
+
+He hadn’t had his cigars yet! Confound his impudence, and what right
+had he to buy cigars, and what infernal assurance had led him to
+suppose he might stroll into Venner’s in the third raw week of his
+uncuffed fresherdom? Who was he? What was he? Unvoiced, these questions
+quivered in the wrathful silence.
+
+“The boy was told to take them up, sir,” said Venner. Something in
+Venner’s manner toward this newcomer indicated to the familiars that he
+might have deprecated this deliberate entrance armored in
+self-satisfaction. Something there was in Venner’s assumption of
+impersonal civility which told the familiars that Venner himself
+recognized and sympathized with their as yet unspoken horror of
+tradition’s breach.
+
+“I rather want them to-night,” said the newcomer, and then he surveyed
+slowly his seniors and even nodded to one or two of them whom
+presumably he had known at school. “So if the boy hasn’t taken them
+up,” he continued, “you might send up another box. Thanks very much.”
+
+He seemed to debate for a moment with himself whether he should stay,
+but finally decided to go. As he reached the door, he said that, by
+Jove, his cigarette had gone out, and “You’ve got a light,” he added to
+Lonsdale, who was standing nearest to him. “Thanks very much.” The door
+of Venner’s slammed behind his imperturbableness, and a sigh of pent-up
+stupefaction was let loose.
+
+“Who’s your young friend, Lonny?” cried one.
+
+“He thought Lonny was the Common Room boy,” cried another.
+
+“Venner, give the cigars to Mr. Lonsdale to take up,” shouted a third.
+
+“He’s very daring for a freshman,” said Venner. “Very daring. I thought
+he was a fourth year Scholar whom I’d never seen, when he first came in
+the other day. Most of the freshmen are very timid at first. They think
+the senior men don’t like their coming in too soon. And perhaps it’s
+better for them to order what they want when I’m by myself. I can talk
+to them more easily that way. With all the men wanting their coffee and
+whiskies, I really can’t attend to orders so well just after hall.”
+
+“Who is he, Venner?” demanded half a dozen indignant voices.
+
+“Mr. Appleby. The Honorable George Appleby. But you ought to know him.
+He’s an Etonian.”
+
+Several Etonians admitted they knew him, and the Wykehamists present
+seized the occasion to point out the impossibility of such manners
+belonging to any other school.
+
+“He’s a friend of yours, then?” said Venner to Lonsdale.
+
+“Good lord, no, Venner!” declared Lonsdale.
+
+“He seemed on very familiar terms with you,” Venner chuckled wickedly.
+
+Lonsdale thought very hard for two long exasperated moments and then
+announced with conviction that Appleby must be ragged, severely ragged
+this very night.
+
+“Now don’t go making a great noise,” Venner advised. “The dons don’t
+like it, and the Dean won’t be in a very good temper after that
+potato-throwing in hall.”
+
+“He must be ragged, Venner,” persisted Lonsdale inexorably. “There need
+be no noise, but I’m hanged if I’m going to have my cigarette taken out
+of my hand and used by a damned fresher. Who’s coming with me to rag
+this man Appleby?”
+
+The third-year men seemed to think the correction beneath their
+dignity, and the duty devolved naturally upon the second-year men.
+
+“I can’t come,” said Avery. “The O.L.G.’s coming out to-morrow.”
+
+“Look here, Mossy, if you say another word about your rotten paper, I
+won’t buy a copy,” Lonsdale vowed.
+
+Michael offered to go with Lonsdale and at any rate assist as a
+spectator. He was anxious to compare the behavior of Smithers with the
+behavior of Appleby in like circumstances. Grainger offered to come if
+Lonny would promise to fight sixteen rounds without gloves, and in the
+end he, with Lonsdale, Michael, Cuffe, Sinclair, and three or four
+others, marched up to Appleby’s rooms.
+
+Lonsdale knocked upon the door, and as he opened it assumed what he
+probably supposed to be an expression of ferocity, though he was told
+afterward he had merely looked rather more funny than usual.
+
+“Oh, hullo, Lonsdale,” said Appleby, as the party entered. “Come in and
+have a smoke. How’s your governor?”
+
+Lonsdale seemed to choke for breath a moment, and then sat down in a
+chair so deep that for the person once plunged into its recesses an
+offensive movement must have been extremely difficult.
+
+“Come in, you chaps,” Appleby pursued in hospitable serenity. “I don’t
+know any of your names, but take pews, take pews. Venner hasn’t sent up
+the cigars I ordered.”
+
+“We know,” interrupted Lonsdale severely.
+
+“But I’ve some pretty decent weeds here,” continued Appleby, without a
+tremor of embarrassment. “Who’s for whisky?”
+
+“Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you’ve got
+to understand is that....”
+
+Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale.
+
+“Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?”
+
+“What you require, young Appleby,” began Lonsdale.
+
+“You’ve got it right this time,” said Appleby encouragingly.
+
+“What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down.”
+
+“Oh, really?” said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest.
+
+“Yes,” answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative
+that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably
+unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for
+their more eloquent support.
+
+“Tell him he mustn’t come into Venner’s and put on all that side. It’s
+not done. He’s a fresher,” gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that
+absorbing chair.
+
+“All right,” agreed Appleby cheerfully. “I’ll send the order up to you
+next time.”
+
+Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could
+never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby’s whisky and
+smoking one of Appleby’s cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his
+resentment to flame, and he sprang up.
+
+“We ought to debag him!” he cried.
+
+Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the
+divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense
+hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to
+be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on
+a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was
+watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them
+to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.
+
+“Hopeless,” sighed Lonsdale. “The man’s a hopeless ass.”
+
+“I think he had the laugh, though,” said Michael.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS
+
+
+Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary’s with that scrupulousness of
+outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a
+discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning
+after the attempted adjustment of Appleby’s behavior, a raw and
+vaporous November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o’clock ran
+collarless, unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at
+whose head stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry
+matutinal appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name
+fairly entered in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started
+back on the taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of
+his toilet. Crossing the gravel space between Cloisters and Cuther’s
+worldly quad, he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one
+minute past eight o’clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.
+
+“What on earth.... Are you going to London?” he gasped.
+
+“Rather not. I’m going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G.”
+
+Michael shook his head, sighed compassionately, and passed on. Twenty
+minutes later in Common Room he was contemplating distastefully the
+kedgeree which with a more hopeful appetite he had ordered on the
+evening before, when Maurice planked down beside his place the first
+number of The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+“There’s a misprint on page thirty-seven, line six. It ought to be
+‘yet’ not ‘but.’ Otherwise I think it’s a success. Do you mind reading
+my slashing attack on the policy of the Oxford theater? Or perhaps
+you’d better begin at the beginning and go right through the whole
+paper and give me your absolutely frank opinion of it as a whole. Just
+tell me candidly if you think my Reflections are too individual. I want
+the effect to be more——”
+
+“Maurice,” Michael interrupted, “do you like kedgeree?”
+
+“Yes, very much,” Maurice answered absently. Then he plunged on again.
+“Also don’t forget to tell me if you think that Guy’s skit is too
+clever. And if you find any misprints I haven’t noticed, mark them
+down. We can’t alter them now, of course, but I’ll speak to the
+compositor myself. You like the color? I wonder whether it wouldn’t
+have been better to have had dark blue after all. Still——”
+
+“Well, if you like kedgeree,” Michael interrupted again, “do you like
+it as much in the morning as you thought you were going to like it the
+night before?”
+
+“Oh, how the dickens do I know?” exclaimed Maurice fretfully.
+
+“Well, will you just eat my breakfast and let me know if you think I
+ought to have ordered eggs and bacon last night?”
+
+“Aren’t you keen on the success of this paper?” Maurice demanded.
+
+“I’ll tell you later on,” Michael offered. “We’ll lunch together
+quietly in my rooms, and the little mulled claret we shall drink to
+keep out this filthy fog will also enormously conduce to the
+amiableness of my judgment.”
+
+“And you won’t come out with me and Nigel Stewart to watch people
+buying copies on their way to leckers?” Maurice suggested in a tone of
+disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in
+time to prevent Michael’s heart from being softened. The newcomer was
+at once invited to remove the editor.
+
+“Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?” Maurice demanded,
+unabashed.
+
+“Look here, Moss Avery,” said Lonsdale seriously, “if you promise to
+spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing
+syrup, I’ll ...”
+
+But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and
+left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind
+Lonsdale of last night’s encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of
+The Oxford Looking-Glass that lay beside his plate.
+
+It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and
+perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously
+hatched, and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there
+among the articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into
+the fold by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the
+image of Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on
+the variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that
+Academic Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist
+should be praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that
+without question was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not
+sure. It was a promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael
+played with the idea of elaborating his conception in an article for
+this very Looking-Glass which she invisibly supported. The Oxford
+Looking-Glass might serve her like the ægis of Pallas Athene, an ægis
+that would freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the
+twentieth century. Michael began to feel that his classical analogies
+were enmeshing the original idea, involving it already in complexities
+too manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking
+dreams at the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the
+Academic Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols
+of Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the
+dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don’s
+mind, the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring
+destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age
+and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by
+its harvest of youth, of sobriety sun-kindled to a radiancy of silver
+joy, of wisdom, peace, and shelter, and Attic glories.
+
+Michael became so nearly stifled by the net of his fancies that he
+almost rose from the table then and there, ambitious to take pen in
+hand and test the power of its sharpness to cut him free. He clearly
+saw the gray-eyed goddess as the personification of the spirit of the
+university: but suddenly all the impulse faded out in
+self-depreciation. Guy Hazlewood would solve the problem with his
+pranked-out allusiveness, would trace more featly the attributes of the
+Academic Muse and establish more convincingly her descent from Apollo
+or her identity with Athene. At least, however, he could offer the idea
+and if Guy made anything of it, the second number of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass would hold more of Michael Fane than the ten pounds he
+had laid on the table of its exchequer. Inspired by the zest of his own
+fancy, he read on deliberately.
+
+_Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
+
+The editor had really succeeded in reflecting accurately the passing
+glance of Oxford, although perhaps the tortuous gilt of the frame with
+which he had tried to impart style to his mirror was more personal to
+Maurice Avery than general to the university. Moreover, his glass would
+certainly never have stood a steady and protracted gaze. Still with all
+their faults these paragraphic reflections did show forth admirably the
+wit and unmatured cynicism of the various Junior Common Rooms, did
+signally flash with all the illusion of an important message, did
+suggest a potentiality for durable criticism.
+
+_Socrates at Balliol._ _By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+There was enough of Guy in his article to endear it to Michael, and
+there was so much of Oxford in Guy that whatever he wrote spontaneously
+would always enrich the magazine with that adventurous gaiety and
+childlike intolerance of Athene’s favorites.
+
+_The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._ _By C. St. C. Wedderburn._
+
+Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have
+expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.
+
+“Let us turn now to the illustrators of the sixties and seventies, and
+we shall see....” Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey
+himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became
+pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so
+much sententiousness.
+
+_Quo Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._
+
+Nigel’s plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the
+decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance,
+was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical
+expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would
+greatly serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its
+presence in The Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest
+magazine was not going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any
+other had endowed Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her
+poets lacked. Michael himself had since he came up let the practice of
+religion slide, but his first fervors had not burned themselves out so
+utterly as to make him despise the warmth they once had kindled. His
+inclination in any argument was always toward the Catholic point of
+view, and though he himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic
+speech and agnostic thought, he was always a little impatient of a
+skeptical non-age and very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had
+never been tried by the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart’s
+challenge with its plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would
+be effective save for the personality of the writer, who revealed his
+formal grace notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and
+the tassels of his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of
+its verbal cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in
+reading it that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost
+cause.
+
+Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart’s article, Michael managed to
+finish his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common
+Room, Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which
+he had fortified his place at table.
+
+“Have you been reading that thing of Mossy’s?” he asked incredulously.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+“Isn’t it most awful rot?”
+
+“Some of it,” Michael assured him.
+
+“I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy,” sighed Lonsdale.
+“I suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into
+supporting it. By Jove, I’ll write and tell the governor to buy a copy.
+I want him to raise my allowance this year, and he’ll think I’m
+beginning to take an interest in what he calls ‘affairs.’”
+
+Michael turned into Venner’s before going back to his own rooms.
+
+“Hullo, is that the paper?” asked Venner. “Dear me, this looks very
+learned. You should tell him to put some more about sport into it—our
+fellows are all so dreadfully wild about sport. They’d be sure to buy
+it then. Going to work this morning? That’s right. I’m always advising
+the men to work in the morning. But bless you, they don’t pay any
+attention to me. They only laugh and say, ‘what’s old Venner know about
+it?’”
+
+Michael, sitting snugly in the morning quiet of his room, leaned over
+to poke the fire into a blaze, eyed with satisfaction November’s sodden
+mists against his window, and settled himself back in the deep chair to
+The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+_Oxford Liberalism. By Vernon Townsend._ _A Restatement of Tory Ideals.
+By William Mowbray._
+
+These two articles Michael decided to take on trust. From their perusal
+he would only work himself up into a condition of irritated neutrality.
+Indeed, he felt inclined to take all the rest of the magazine on trust.
+The tranquillity of his own room was too seductive. Dreaming became a
+duty here. It was so delightful to count from where he sat the books on
+the shelves and to arrive each time at a different estimate of their
+number. It was so restful to stare up at Mona Lisa and traverse without
+fatigue that labyrinth of rocks and streams. His desk not yet deranged
+by work or correspondence possessed a monumental stability of neatness
+that was most soothing to contemplate. It had the restfulness of a
+well-composed landscape where every contour took the eye easily onward
+and where every tree grew just where it was needed for a moment’s halt.
+The olive-green magazine dropped unregarded onto the floor, and there
+was no other book within reach. The dancing fire danced on. Far away
+sounded the cries of daily life. The chimes in St. Mary’s tower struck
+without proclaiming any suggestion of time. How long these roll-call
+mornings were and how rapidly dream on dream piled its drowsy outline.
+Was there not somewhere at the other end of Oxford a lecture at eleven
+o’clock? This raw morning was not suitable for lectures out of college.
+Was not Maurice coming to lunch? How deliciously far off was the time
+for ordering lunch. He really must get out of the habit of sitting in
+this deep wicker-chair, until evening licensed such repose.
+
+Some people had foolishly attended a ten-o’clock lecture at St. John’s.
+What a ludicrous idea! They had ridden miserably through the cold on
+their bicycles and with numb fingers were now trying to record scraps
+of generalization in a notebook that would inevitably be lost long
+before the Schools. At the same time it was rather lazy to lie back
+like this so early in the morning. Why was it so difficult to abandon
+the Sirenian creakings of this chair? He wanted another match for his
+second pipe, but even the need for that was not violent enough to break
+the luxurious catalepsy of his present condition.
+
+Then suddenly Maurice Avery and Nigel Stewart burst into the room, and
+Michael by a supreme effort plunged upward onto his legs to receive
+them.
+
+“My hat, what a frowst!” exclaimed Maurice, rushing to the window and
+letting in the mist and the noise of the High.
+
+“We’re very hearty this morning,” murmured Stewart. “I heard Mass at
+Barney’s for the success of the O.L.G.”
+
+“Nigel and I have walked down the High, rounded the Corn, and back
+along the Broad and the Turl,” announced Maurice. “And how many copies
+do you think we saw bought by people we didn’t know?”
+
+“None,” guessed Michael maliciously.
+
+“Don’t be an ass. Fifteen. Well, I’ve calculated that at least four
+times as many were being sold, while we were making our round. That’s
+sixty, and it’s not half-past ten yet. We ought to do another three
+hundred easily before lunch. In fact, roughly I calculate we shall do
+five hundred and twenty before to-night. Not bad. After two thousand we
+shall be making money.”
+
+“Maurice bought twenty-two copies himself,” said Stewart, laughing, and
+lest he should seem to be laughing at Maurice thrust an affectionate
+arm through his to reassure him.
+
+“Well, I wanted to encourage the boys who were selling them,” Maurice
+explained.
+
+“They’ll probably emigrate with the money they’ve made out of you,”
+predicted Michael. “And what on earth are you going to do with
+twenty-two copies? I find this one copy of mine extraordinarily in the
+way.”
+
+“Oh, I shall send them to well-known literary people in town. In fact,
+I’m going to write round and get the best-known old Oxford men to give
+us contributions from time to time, without payment, of course. I
+expect they’ll be rather pleased at being asked.”
+
+“Don’t you think it may turn their heads?” Michael anxiously suggested.
+“It would be dreadful to read of the sudden death of Quiller-Couch from
+apoplectic pride or to hear that Hilaire Belloc or Max Beerbohm had
+burst with exultation in his bath.”
+
+“It’s a pity you can’t be funny in print,” said Maurice severely.
+“You’d really be some use on the paper then.”
+
+“But what we’ve really come round to say,” interposed Stewart, “is that
+there’s an O.L.G. dinner to-night at the Grid; and then afterward we’re
+all going across to my digs opposite.”
+
+“And what about lunch with me?”
+
+Both Maurice and Nigel excused themselves. Maurice intended to spend
+all day at the Union. Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with
+three hearty Trindogs of Trinity.
+
+“But when did you join the Union?” Michael asked the editor.
+
+“I thought it was policy,” he explained. “After all, though we laugh at
+it here, most of the Varsity does belong. Besides, Townsend and Bill
+Mowbray were both keen. You see they think the O.L.G. is going to have
+an influence in Varsity politics. And, after all, I am editor.”
+
+“You certainly are,” Michael agreed. “Nothing quite so editorial was
+ever conceived by the overwrought brain of a disappointed female
+contributor.”
+
+Michael always enjoyed dining at the Grid. Of all the Oxford clubs it
+seemed to him to display the most completely normal undergraduate
+existence. Vincent’s, notwithstanding its acknowledged chieftaincy,
+depended ultimately too much on a mechanically apostolic succession. It
+was an institution to be admired without affection. It had every
+justification for calling itself The Club without any qualifying
+prefix, but it produced a type too highly specialized, and was too
+definitely Dark Blue and Leander Pink. In a way, too, it belonged as
+much to Cambridge, and although violently patriotic had merged its
+individuality in brawn. By its substitution of co-option for election,
+its Olympic might was now scarcely much more than the self-deification
+of Roman Emperors. Vincent’s was the last stronghold of muscular
+supremacy. Yet it was dreadfully improbable, as Michael admitted to
+himself, that he would have declined the offer of membership.
+
+The O.U.D.S. was at the opposite pole from Vincent’s, and if it did not
+offend by its reactionary encouragement of a supreme but discredited
+spirit, it offended even more by fostering a premature worldliness. For
+an Oxford club to take in The Stage and The Era was merely an exotic
+heresy. On the walls of its very ugly room the pictures of actors that
+in Garrick Street would have possessed a romantic dignity produced an
+effect of strain, a proclamation of mounte-bank-worship that differed
+only in degree from the photographs of actresses on the mantelpiece of
+a second-rate room in a second-rate college. The frequenters of the
+O.U.D.S. were always very definitely Oxford undergraduates, but they
+lacked the serenity of Oxford, and seemed already to have planted a
+foot in London. The big modern room over the big cheap shop was a
+restless place, and its pretentiousness and modernity were tinged with
+Thespianism. Scarcely ever did the Academic Muse enter the O.U.D.S.,
+Michael thought. She must greatly dislike Thespianism with all that it
+connoted of mildewed statuary in an English garden. Yet it would be
+possible to transmute the O.U.D.S., he dreamed. It had the advantage of
+a limited membership. It might easily become a grove where Apollo and
+Athene could converse without quarreling. Therefore, he could continue
+to frequent its halls.
+
+The Bullingdon was always delightful; the gray bowlers and the white
+trousers striped with vivid blue displayed its members, in their
+costume, at least, as unchanging types, but the archaism made it a club
+too conservative to register much more than an effect of peculiarity.
+The Bullingdon had too much money, and not enough unhampered humanity
+to achieve the universal. The Union, on the other hand, was too
+indiscriminate. Personality was here submerged in organization.
+Manchester or Birmingham could have produced a result very similar.
+
+The Grid, perhaps for the very fact that it was primarily a
+dining-club, was the abode of discreet good-fellowship. Its membership
+was very strictly limited, and might seem to have been confined to the
+seven or eight colleges that considered themselves the best colleges,
+but any man who deserved to be a member could in the end be sure of his
+election. The atmosphere was neither political nor sporting nor
+literary, nor financial, but it was very peculiarly and very intimately
+the elusive atmosphere of Oxford herself. The old rooms looking out on
+the converging High had recently been redecorated in a very crude shade
+of blue. Members were grumbling at the taste of the executive, but
+Michael thought the unabashed ugliness was in keeping with its
+character. It was as if unwillingly the club released its hold upon the
+externals of Victorianism. Such premises could afford to be
+anachronistic, since the frequenters were always so finely sensitive to
+fashion’s lightest breath. Eccentricity was not tolerated at the Grid
+except in the case of the half-dozen chartered personalities who were
+necessary to set off the correctness of the majority. The elective
+committee probably never made a mistake, and when somebody like Nigel
+Stewart was admitted, it was scrupulously ascertained beforehand that
+his presence would evoke affectionate amusement rather than the chill
+surprise with which the Grid would have greeted the entrance of someone
+who, however superior to the dead level of undergraduate life, lacked
+yet the indefinable justification for his humors.
+
+Michael on the evening of the Looking-Glass dinner went up the narrow
+stairs of the club in an aroma of pleasant anticipation, which was not
+even momentarily dispersed by the sudden occurrence of the fact that he
+had forgotten to take his name off hall, and must therefore pay two
+shillings and fourpence to the college for a dinner he would not eat.
+In the Strangers’ Room were waiting the typical guests of the typical
+members. Here and there nods were exchanged, but the general atmosphere
+was one of serious expectancy. In the distance the rattle of crockery
+told of dinners already in progress. Vernon Townsend came in soon after
+Michael, and as Townsend was a member, Michael lost that trifling
+malaise of waiting in a club’s guest-room which the undergraduate might
+conceal more admirably than any other class of man, but nevertheless
+felt acutely.
+
+“Not here yet, I suppose,” said Townsend.
+
+It was unnecessary to mention a name. Nigel Stewart’s habits were
+proverbial.
+
+“Read my article?” asked Townsend.
+
+“Splendid,” Michael murmured.
+
+“It’s going to get me the Librarianship of the Union,” Townsend
+earnestly assured Michael.
+
+Michael was about to congratulate the sanguine author without
+disclosing his ignorance of the article’s inside, when Bill Mowbray
+rushed breathlessly into the room. Everybody observed his dramatic
+entrance, whereupon he turned round and rushed out again, pausing only
+for one moment to exclaim in the doorway:
+
+“Good god, that fool will never remember!”
+
+“See that?” asked Townsend darkly, as the Tory Democrat vanished.
+
+Michael admitted that he undoubtedly had.
+
+“Bill Mowbray has become a poseur,” Townsend declared. “Or else he
+knows his ridiculous article on Toryism was too badly stashed by mine,”
+he added.
+
+“We shan’t see him again to-night,” Michael prophesied.
+
+Townsend shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“We shall, if he can make another effective entrance,” he said a little
+bitterly.
+
+Maurice Avery and Wedderburn arrived together. The combination of
+having just been elected to the Grid and the birth of the new paper had
+given Maurice such an effervescence of good spirits as even he seldom
+boasted. Wedderburn in contrast seemed graver, supplying in company
+with Maurice a solidity to the pair of them that was undeniably
+beneficial to their joint impression. They were followed almost
+immediately by Guy Hazlewood, who with his long legs came sloping in as
+self-possessed as he always was. Perhaps his left eyelid drooped a
+little lower than it was accustomed, and perhaps the sidelong smile
+that gave him a superficial resemblance to Michael was drawn down to a
+sharper point of mockery, but whatever stored-up flashes of mood and
+fancy Guy had to deliver, he always drawled them out in the same
+half-tired voice emphasized by the same careless indolence of gesture.
+And so this evening he was the same Guy Hazlewood, sure of being with
+his clear-cut pallor and effortless distinction of bearing, the
+personality that everyone would first observe in whatever company he
+found himself.
+
+“Nigel not here, of course,” he drawled. “Let’s have a sweep on what
+he’s been doing. Five bob all round. I say he’s just discovered Milton
+to be a great poet and is now, reading Lycidas to a spellbound group of
+the very heartiest Trindogs in Trinity.”
+
+“I think he saw The Perfect Flapper,” said Maurice “and has been trying
+ever since to find out whether she were a don’s daughter or a
+theatrical bird of passage.”
+
+“I think he’s forgotten all about it,” pronounced Wedderburn very
+deeply indeed.
+
+“I hope he saw that ass Bill Mowbray tearing off in the opposite
+direction and went to fetch him back,” said Townsend.
+
+“I think he’s saying Vespers for the week before last,” Michael
+proposed as his solution.
+
+Stewart himself came in at that moment, and in answer to an united
+demand to know the reason of his lateness embraced in that gentle and
+confiding air of his all the company, included them all as it were in
+an intimate aside, and with the voice and demeanor of a strayed
+archangel explained that the fearful velocity of a pill was responsible
+for his unpunctuality.
+
+“But you’re quite all right now, Nigel?” inquired Guy. “You could
+almost send a testimonial?”
+
+“Oh, rather,” murmured Nigel, with tender assurance lighting up his
+great, innocent eyes. “I expect, you know, dinner’s ready.” Then he
+plunged his arm through Guy’s, and led the way toward the private
+dining-room he had actually not forgotten to command.
+
+Dinner, owing to Avery’s determined steering of the conversation, was
+eaten to the accompaniment of undiluted shop. Never for a moment was
+any topic allowed to oust The Oxford Looking-Glass from discussion.
+Even Guy was powerless against the editor intoxicated by ambition’s
+fulfillment. Maurice sat in triumphant headship with only Mowbray’s
+vacant place to qualify very slightly the completeness of his
+satisfaction. He hoped they all liked his scheme of inviting
+well-known, even celebrated, old Oxford men to contribute from time to
+time. He flattered himself they would esteem the honor vouchsafed to
+them. He disclaimed the wish to monopolize the paper’s criticism and
+nobly invited Townsend to put in their places a series of contemporary
+dramatists. He congratulated Guy upon his satiric article and assured
+him of his great gifts. He reproached Michael for having written
+nothing, and vowed that many of the books for which he had already sent
+a printed demand to their publishers must in the December issue be
+reviewed by Michael. He arranged with Nigel Stewart and Wedderburn at
+least a dozen prospective campaigns to harry advertisers into unwilling
+publicity.
+
+At nine-o’clock, the staff of The Oxford Looking-Glass, reflecting now
+a very roseate world, marched across the High to wind up the evening in
+Stewart’s digs. On the threshold the host paused in sudden dismay.
+
+“Good lord, I quite forgot. There’s a meeting of the De Rebus
+Ecclesiasticis in my digs to-night. They’ll all be there; what shall I
+do?”
+
+“You can’t possibly go,” declared everybody.
+
+“Mrs. Arbour,” Nigel called out, hurriedly dipping into the landlady’s
+quarters. “Mrs. Arbour.”
+
+Mrs. Arbour assured him comfortably of her existence as she emerged to
+confer with him in the passage.
+
+“There may be one or two men waiting in my rooms. Will you put out
+syphons and whisky and explain that I shan’t be coming.”
+
+“Any reason to give, sir?” asked Mrs. Arbour.
+
+The recalcitrant shook his seraphic head.
+
+“No, sir,” said Mrs. Arbour cheerfully, “quite so. Just say you’re not
+coming? Yes, sir. Oh, they’ll make themselves at home without you, I’ll
+be bound. It’s not likely to be a very noisy party, is it, sir?”
+
+“Oh, no. It’s the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, Mrs. Arbour.”
+
+“I see, sir. Foreigners. I’ll look after them.”
+
+Nigel having disposed of the pious debaters, joined his friends again,
+and it was decided to adjourn to Guy’s digs in Holywell. Arm in arm the
+six journalists marched down the misted High. Arm in arm they turned
+into Catherine Street, and arm in arm they walked into the Proctor
+outside the Ratcliffe Camera. To him they admitted their membership of
+the university. To him they proffered very politely their names and the
+names of their colleges, and with the same politeness agreed to visit
+him next morning. The Proctor raised his cap and with his escort faded
+into the fog. Arm in arm the six journalists continued their progress
+into Holywell. Guy had digs in an old house whose gabled front leaned
+outward, whose oriel windows were supported by oaken beams worm-eaten
+and grotesquely carved. Within, a wide balustraded staircase went
+billowing upward unevenly. Guy’s room that he shared with two
+intellectual athletes from his own college was very large. It was
+paneled all round up to the ceiling, and it contained at least a dozen
+very comfortable armchairs. He had imposed upon his partners his own
+tastes and with that privilege had cut off electric light and gas, so
+that lit only by two Pompeian lamps, the room was very shadowy when
+they all came in.
+
+“Comeragh and Anstruther are working downstairs, I expect,” Guy
+explained, as one by one, while his guests waited in the dim light, he
+made a great illumination with wax candles. Then he poked up the fire
+and set glasses ready for anyone’s need. Great armchairs were pulled
+round in a semicircle: pipes were lit: the stillness and mystery of the
+Oxford night crept along the ancient street, a stillness which at
+regular intervals was broken by multitudinous chimes, or faintly now
+and then by passing footfalls. Unexcited by argument the talk rippled
+in murmurous contentment.
+
+Michael was in no mood himself for talking, and he sat back listening
+now and then, but mostly dreaming. He thought of the conversation in
+that long riverside room in Paris with its extravagance and
+pretentiousness. Here in this time-haunted Holywell Street was neither.
+To be sure, Christianity and the soul’s immortality and the future of
+England and contemporary art were running the gauntlet of youth’s
+examination, but the Academic Muse had shown the company her ægis, had
+turned everything to unpassionate stone, and softened all presumption
+with her guarded glances. It was extraordinary how under her guidance
+every subject was stripped of obtrusive reality, how even women,
+discussed never so grossly, remained untarnished; since they ceased to
+be real women, but mere abstractions wanton or chaste in accordance
+with the demands of wit. The ribaldry was Aristophanic or Rabelaisian
+with as little power to offend, so much was it consecrated and refined
+by immemorial usages. Michael wished that all the world could be
+touched by the magical freedom and equally magical restraint of the
+Academic Muse, and as he sat here in this ancient room, hoped almost
+violently that never again would he be compelled to smirch the present
+clarity and steadiness of his vision.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LESSON OF SPAIN
+
+
+Perhaps Michael enjoyed more than anything else during his accumulation
+of books the collection of as many various editions of Don Quixote as
+possible. He had brought up from London the fat volume illustrated by
+Doré over which he had fallen asleep long ago and of which owing to
+Nurse’s disapproval he had in consequence been deprived. Half the pages
+still showed where they had been bent under the weight of his small
+body: this honorable scar and the familiar musty smell and the book’s
+unquestionable if slightly vulgar dignity prevented Michael from
+banishing it from the shelf that now held so many better editions.
+However much the zest in Doré’s illustrations had died away in the
+flavor of Skelton’s English, Michael could not abandon the big volume
+with what it held of childhood’s first intellectual adventure. The
+shelf of Don Quixotes became in all his room one of the most cherished
+objects of contemplation. There was something in the “Q” and the “X”
+repeated on the back of volume after volume that positively gave
+Michael an impression in literal design of the Knight’s fantastic
+personality. The very soul of Spain seemed to be symbolized by those
+sere quartos of the seventeenth century, nor was it imperceptible even
+in Smollett’s cockney rendering bound in marbled boards. Staring at the
+row of Don Quixotes on a dull December afternoon, Michael felt
+overwhelmingly a desire to go to Spain himself, to drink at the source
+of Cervantes’ mighty stream of imagination which with every year’s new
+reading seemed to him to hold more and more certainly all that was most
+vital to life’s appreciation. He no longer failed to see the humor of
+Don Quixote, but even now tears came more easily than laughter, and he
+regretted as poignantly as the Knight himself those times of chivalry
+which with all the extravagance of their decay were yet in essence
+superior to the mode that ousted them into ignominy. Something akin to
+Don Quixote’s impulsive dismay Michael experienced in his own view of
+the twentieth century. He felt he needed a constructive ideal of
+conduct to sustain him through the long pilgrimage that must ensue
+after these hushed Oxford dreams.
+
+Term was nearly over. Michael had heard from Stella that she was going
+to spend two or three months in Germany. Her Brahms recitals, she
+wrote, had not been so successful as she ought to have made them. In
+London she was wasting time. Mother was continually wanting her to come
+to the theater. It seemed almost as if mother were trying to throw her
+in the way of marrying Prescott. He had certainly been very good, but
+she must retreat into Germany, and there again work hard. Would not
+Michael come too? Why was he so absurdly prejudiced against Germany? It
+was the only country in which to spend Christmas.
+
+The more Stella praised Germany, the more Michael felt the need of
+going to a country as utterly different from it as possible. He did not
+want to spend the vacation in London. He did not want his mother to
+talk vaguely to him of the advantage for Stella in marrying Prescott.
+The idea was preposterous. He would be angry with his mother, and he
+would blurt out to Prescott his dislike of such a notion. He would
+thereby wound a man whom he admired and display himself in the light of
+the objectionably fraternal youth. In the dreary and wet murk of
+December the sun-dried volumes of Cervantes spoke to him of Spain.
+
+Maurice Avery came up to his room, fatigued with fame and disappointed
+that Castleton with whom he had arranged to go to Rome had felt at the
+last moment he must take his mother to Bath. To him Michael proposed
+Spain.
+
+“But why not Rome?” Maurice argued. “As I originally settled.”
+
+“Not with me,” Michael pointed out. “I don’t want to go to Rome now. I
+always feel luxuriously that there will occur the moment in my life
+when I shall say, ‘I am ready to go to Rome. I must go to Rome.’ It’s a
+fancy of mine and nothing will induce me to spoil it by going to Rome
+at the wrong moment.”
+
+Maurice grumbled at him, told him he was affected, unreasonable, and
+even hinted Michael ought to come to Rome simply for the fact that he
+himself had been balked of his intention by the absurdly filial
+Castleton.
+
+“I do think mothers ought not to interfere,” Maurice protested. “My
+mother never interferes. Even my sisters are allowed to have their own
+way. Why can’t Mrs. Castleton go to Bath by herself? I’m sure Castleton
+overdoes this ‘duty’ pose. And now you won’t come to Rome. Well, will
+you come to Florence?”
+
+“Yes, and be worried by you to move on to Rome the very minute we
+arrive there,” said Michael. “No, thanks. If you don’t want to come to
+Spain, I’ll try to get someone else. Anyway, I don’t mind going by
+myself.”
+
+“But what shall we do in Spain?” asked Maurice fretfully.
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+“We can dance the fandango,” he pointed out. “Or if the fandango is too
+hard, there always remains the bolero.”
+
+“If we went to Rome,” Maurice was persisting, but Michael cut him
+short.
+
+“It’s absolutely useless, Mossy. I am not going to Rome.”
+
+“Then I suppose I shall have to go to Spain,” said Maurice, in a much
+injured tone.
+
+So in the end it was settled chiefly, Michael always maintained,
+because Maurice found out it was advisable to travel with a passport.
+As not by the greatest exaggeration of insecurity could a passport be
+deemed necessary for Rome, Maurice decided it was an overrated city and
+became at once fervidly Spanish, even to the extent of saying “gracias”
+whenever the cruet was passed to him in hall. Wedderburn at the last
+moment thought he would like to join the expedition: so Maurice with
+the passport in his breast pocket preferred to call it.
+
+There were two or three days of packing in London, while Maurice stayed
+at 173 Cheyne Walk and was a great success with Mrs. Fane. The Rugby
+match against Cambridge was visited in a steady downpour. Wedderburn
+fetched his luggage, and the last dinner was eaten together at Cheyne
+Walk. Mrs. Fane was tenderly, if rather vaguely, solicitous for their
+safety.
+
+“Dearest Michael,” she said, “do be careful not to be gored by a bull.
+I’ve never been to Spain. One seems to know nothing about it. Mr.
+Avery, do have some more turkey. I hope you don’t dreadfully dislike
+garlic. Such a pungent vegetable. Michael darling, why are you
+laughing? Isn’t it a vegetable? Mr. Wedderburn, do have some more
+turkey. A friend of mine, Mrs. Carruthers, who is a great believer in
+Mental Science ... Michael always laughs at me when I try to
+explain.... Hark, there is the cab, really. I hope it won’t be raining
+in Spain. ‘Rain, rain, go to Spain.’ So ominous, isn’t it? Good-bye,
+dearest boy, and write to me at Mrs. Carruthers, High Towers,
+Godalming.”
+
+“I say, I know Mrs. Carruthers. She lives near us,” Maurice exclaimed.
+
+“Come on,” his friends insisted. “You haven’t time now to explain the
+complications of Surrey society.”
+
+“I’m so glad,” said Mrs. Fane. “Because you’ll be able to see that
+Michael remembers the address.”
+
+“I never forget addresses, mother,” protested Michael.
+
+“No, I know. I always think everyone is like me. Merry Christmas, and
+do send a post card to Stella. She was so hurt you wouldn’t go to
+Germany.”
+
+In the drench and soak of December weather they drove off in the
+four-wheeler. On such a night it seemed more than ever romantic to be
+setting out to Spain, and all the way to Victoria Maurice tried to
+decide by the occasional gleam of a blurred lamp-light how many pesetas
+one received for an English sovereign.
+
+The crossing to Dieppe was rough, but all memories of the discomfort
+were wiped out when next day they saw the Sud Express looking very long
+and swift and torpedo-like between the high platforms of that white
+drawing-room, the Gare d’Orleans. Down they went all day through France
+with rain speckling the windows of their compartment, past the naked
+poplar trees and rolling fallows until dusk fell sadly on the flooded
+agriculture. Dawn broke as they were leaving behind them the
+illimitable Landes. Westward the Atlantic clouds swept in from the Bay
+of Biscay, parting momentarily to reveal rifts of milky turquoise sky.
+Wider and wider grew the rifts, and when the train passed close to the
+green cliffs of St. Jean de Luz, the air was soft and fragrant: the sea
+was blue. At Irun they were in Spain, and Michael, as he walked up and
+down the platform waiting for déjeuner, watched, with a thrill of
+conviction that this was indeed a frontier, the red and blue toy
+soldiers and the black and green toy soldiers dotted about the toy
+landscape.
+
+Maurice was rather annoyed that nobody demanded their passports and
+that every official should seem so much more anxious to examine their
+railway tickets, but when they reached Madrid and found that no
+bull-fights would be held before the spring, he began to mutter of Rome
+and was inclined to obliterate the Spaniards from the category of
+civilization, so earnestly had he applied himself by the jiggling light
+of the train to the mastery of all the grades from matador to
+banderillo.
+
+In Seville, however, Maurice admitted he could not imagine a city more
+perfectly adapted to express all that he desired from life. Seville
+with her guitars and lemon-trees, her castanets and oranges and fans,
+her fountains and carnations and flashing Andalusians, was for him the
+city to which one day he would return and dream. Here one day he could
+come when seriously he began to write or paint or take up whatever
+destiny in art was in store for him. Here he would forget whatever blow
+life might hold in the future. He would send everybody he knew to
+Seville, notwithstanding Michael’s objection that such generosity would
+recoil upon himself in his desire to possess somewhere on earth the
+opportunity of oblivion. Maurice and Wedderburn both bought Spanish
+cloaks and hats and went with easels to sit beside the Guadalquiver
+that sun-stained to the hue of its tawny banks was so contemptuous of
+their gentlemanly water-colors, as contemptuous as those
+cigarette-girls that came chattering from the tobacco-factory every
+noon. Michael preferred to wander over the roofs of the cathedral,
+until drowsed by the scent of warm stone he would sit for an hour
+merely conscious that the city lay below and that the sky was blue
+above.
+
+After Seville they traveled to Granada, to Cadiz and Cordova and other
+famous cities; and in the train they went slowly through La Mancha
+where any windmill might indeed be mistaken for Pentapolin of the Naked
+Arm, and where at the stations the water-carriers even in January cried
+“agua, agua,” so that already the railway-carriages seemed parched by
+the fierce summer sun. They traveled to Salamanca and Toledo, and last
+of all they went to Burgos where Maurice and Wedderburn strove in vain
+to draw corner after corner of the cathedral, in the dust and shadows
+of whose more remote chantries Michael heard many Masses. A realization
+of the power of faith was stirred in him by these Masses that every day
+of every year were said without the recognition of humanity. These
+mumblings of ancient priests, these sanctus-bells that rattled like
+shaken ribs, these interminable and ceremonious shufflings were the
+outward expression of the force that sustained this fabric of Burgos
+and had raised in Seville a cathedral that seemed to crush like a
+stupendous monster the houses scattered about in its path,
+insignificant as a heap of white shells. Half of these old priests,
+thought Michael, were probably puppets who did not understand even
+their own cracked Latinity, yet their ministrations were almost
+frightening in their efficacy: they were indeed the very stones of
+Burgos made vocal.
+
+Listening to these Masses, Michael began to regret he had allowed all
+his interest in religion to peter out in the irritation of compulsory
+chapel-keeping at Oxford. Here in Burgos, he felt less the elevating
+power of faith than the unrelenting and disdainful inevitableness of
+its endurance. At Bournemouth, when he experienced the first thrill of
+conversion, he had been exultingly aware of a personal friendliness
+between himself and God. Here in Burgos he was absorbed into the divine
+purpose neither against his will nor his desire, since he was
+positively aware of the impotency of his individuality to determine
+anything in the presence of omnipotence. He told himself this sense of
+inclusion was a sign of the outpouring once more of the grace of God,
+but he wished with a half whimsical amusement that the sensation were
+rather less like that of being contemptuously swept by a broom into the
+main dust-heap. Yet as on the last morning of his stay in Burgos
+Michael came away from Mass, he came away curiously fortified by his
+observation of the moldy confessionals worn down by the knees of so
+many penitents. That much power of impression at least had the
+individual on this cathedral.
+
+When Michael lay awake in the train going northward he remembered very
+vividly the sense of subordination which in retrospect suddenly seemed
+to him to reveal the essential majesty of Spain. The train stopped at
+some French station. Their carriage was already full enough, but a
+bilious and fussy Frenchman insisted there was still room, and on top
+of him broke in a loud-voiced and assertive Englishman with a meek
+wife. It was intolerable. Michael, Wedderburn, and Maurice displayed
+their most polite obstructiveness, but in the end each of them found
+himself upright, stiff-backed and exasperated. Michael thought
+regretfully of Spain, and remembered those peasants who shared their
+crusts, those peasants with rank skins of wine and flopping turkeys,
+those peasants who wrought so inimitably their cigarettes and would sit
+on the floor of the carriage rather than disarrange the comfort of the
+three English travelers. Michael went off into an uneasy sleep trying
+to arrange synthetically his deductions, trying to put Don Quixote and
+Burgos Cathedral and the grace of God and subordination and feudalism
+and himself into a working theory of life. And just when the theory
+really seemed to be shaping itself, he was awakened by the Englishman
+prodding his wife.
+
+“What is it, dear?” she murmured.
+
+“Did you pack those collars that were in the other chest of drawers?”
+
+“I think so, dear.”
+
+“I wish you’d know something for a change,” the husband grumbled.
+
+The Frenchman ground his teeth in swollen sleep, exhaling himself upon
+the stale air of the compartment. Maurice was turning over the pages of
+a comic paper. Wedderburn snored. It was difficult to achieve
+subordination of one’s personality in the presence of other
+personalities so insistently irritating.
+
+Stella had not come back from Germany when Michael reached home, which
+was a disappointment as he had looked forward to planning with her a
+journey back to Spain as soon as possible. His mother during this
+vacation had lapsed from Mental Science into an association to prevent
+premature burial.
+
+“My dearest boy, you have no idea of the numbers of people buried alive
+every year,” she said. “I have been talking to Dick Prescott about it.
+I cannot understand his indifference. I intend to devote all my time to
+it. We are going to organize a large bazaar next season. Banging their
+foreheads against the coffins! It’s dreadful to think of. Do be
+careful, Michael. I have written a long letter to Stella explaining all
+the precautions she ought to take. Who knows what may happen in
+Germany? Such an impulsive nation. At least the Kaiser is. Don’t laugh,
+my dear boy, it’s so much more serious than you think. Would you like
+to come with me to Mrs. Carruthers’ and hear some of the statistics?
+Gruesome, but most instructive. At three o’clock. You needn’t wait for
+tea, if you’re busy. The lecturer is an Eurasian. Where _is_ Eurasia,
+by the by?”
+
+Michael kissed his mother with affectionate amusement.
+
+“Will you wear the mantilla I brought you from Spain? Look, it’s as
+light as burnt tissue paper.”
+
+“Dearest Michael,” she murmured reproachfully, “you ought not to laugh
+about sacred subjects.... I don’t really see why we shouldn’t have a
+car. We must have a consultation with Dick Prescott.”
+
+After dinner that night Michael wrapped up some stained and faded
+vestments he had brought for Viner and went off to see him at Netting
+Hill. He told himself guiltily in the hansom that it was more than a
+year since he had been to see old Viner, but the priest was so heartily
+glad to welcome him and accepted so enthusiastically his propitiatory
+gifts, that he felt as much at ease as ever in the smoke-hung room.
+
+“Well, how’s Oxford? I was coming up last term, but I couldn’t get
+away. Have you been to see Sandifer yet? Or Pallant at Cowley, or Canon
+Harrowell?”
+
+Michael said he had not yet taken advantage of Viner’s letters of
+introduction to these dignitaries. He had indeed heard Pallant preach
+at the church of the Cowley Fathers, but he had thought him too much
+inclined to sacrifice on the altar of empirical science.
+
+“I hate compromise,” said Michael.
+
+“I don’t think Pallant compromises, but I think he does get hold of men
+by offering them Catholic doctrine in terms of the present.”
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“This visit to Spain seems to have made you very bigoted,” Viner
+observed, smiling.
+
+“I haven’t made up my mind one way or the other about Christianity,”
+Michael said. “But when I do I won’t try to include everybody, to say
+to every talkative young Pragmatist with Schiller’s last book in his
+pocket, ‘come inside, you’re really one of us.’ I shan’t invite every
+callow biologist to hear Mass just because a Cowley Dad sees nothing in
+the last article on spontaneous generation that need dismay the
+faithful. I’m getting rather fed up with toleration, really; the only
+people with any fanaticism now are the rationalists. It’s quite
+exhilarating sometimes to see the fire of disbelief glowing in the eyes
+of a passionate agnostic.”
+
+“Our Lord Himself was very tolerant,” said Viner.
+
+“Yes, tolerant to the weaknesses of the flesh, tolerant to the woman
+taken in adultery, tolerant to the people without wine at Cana, but he
+hadn’t much use for people who didn’t believe just as He believed.”
+
+“Isn’t it rather risky to slam the door in the face of the modern man?”
+
+“But, Mr. Viner,” Michael protested, “you can’t betray the myriads of
+the past because the individual of to-day finds his faith too weak to
+sustain him in their company, because the modern man wants to reëdit
+spiritual truths just as he has been able to reëdit a few physical
+facts that apparently stand the test of practical experiment. While men
+have been rolling along intoxicated by the theory of physical
+evolution, they may have retrograded spiritually.”
+
+“Of course, of course,” the priest agreed. “By the way, your faith
+seems to be resisting the batterings of external progress very stoutly.
+I’m glad, old chap.”
+
+“I’m not sure that I have much faith, but I certainly haven’t given up
+hope,” Michael said gravely. “I think, you know, that hope, which is
+after all a theological virtue, has never had justice at the hands of
+the theologians. Oh, lord, I wish earnest young believers weren’t so
+smug and timid. Or else I wish that I didn’t feel the necessity of
+coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the
+Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of
+fanciful private beliefs. But I want to force everything within the
+convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I
+hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the
+possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The
+Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire
+its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue.
+If only earnest young believers wouldn’t treat Almighty God with the
+same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite
+mistress.”
+
+“Michael, Michael!” cried Viner, “where are you taking me with your
+coördinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young
+believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against
+me? Remember, I’ve been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn
+mental somersaults. I thought you implied _you_ were a believer.”
+
+“Oh, no, I’m watching and hoping. And just now I’m afraid the anchor is
+dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn’t she? I’m not asking, you
+know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The
+psychologists have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But
+I’m hoping with all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away
+except faith. Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical
+moods ... I’m groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination.
+That’s something, you know. But I haven’t found my own place in the
+scheme.”
+
+“You see you’re very modern, after all,” said Viner, “with your
+coördinations and subordinations.”
+
+“But I don’t want to assert myself,” Michael explained. “I want to
+surrender myself, and I’m not going to surrender anything until I am
+sure by faith that I’m not merely surrendering the wastage of myself.”
+
+Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic sameness of the
+mission-priest’s existence. He had known so well before he went that,
+because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair,
+smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be
+either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated
+iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to
+year, from month to month, never changed in general character, but
+always gave the same impression of shrill cockney, of boisterous
+familiarity, of self-satisfied election. To-morrow morning he would say
+Mass to the same sparse congregation of sacristan and sisters-of-mercy
+and devout old maids. The same red-wristed server would stump about his
+liturgical business in Viner’s wake, and the same coffee pot put in the
+same place on the same table by the same landlady would await his
+return. There was a dreariness about the ministrations of this Notting
+Hill Mission which had been absent from the atmosphere of Burgos
+Cathedral. No doubt superficially even at Burgos there was a sameness,
+but it was a glorious sameness, a sameness that approximated to
+eternity. Long ago had the priests learned subordination. They had been
+absorbed into the omnipotence of the church against which the gates of
+hell could not prevail. Viner remained, however much as he might have
+surrendered of himself to his mission work, essentially an isolated, a
+pathetic individual.
+
+As usual, Michael met Alan at Paddington, and he was concerned to see
+that Alan looked rather pale and worried.
+
+“What problems have you been solving this vac?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, I’ve been swatting like a pig for Mods,” said Alan hopelessly.
+“You are a lucky lazy devil.”
+
+Even during the short journey to Oxford Alan furtively fingered his
+text-books, while he talked to Michael about a depressing January in
+London.
+
+“Never mind. Perhaps you’ll get your Blue next term,” said Michael.
+“And if you aren’t determined to play cricket all the Long, we’ll go
+away and have a really sporting vac somewhere.”
+
+“If I’m plowed,” said Alan gloomily, “I’ve settled to become a
+chartered accountant.”
+
+Michael enjoyed his second Lent term. With an easy conscience he
+relegated Rugby football into the limbo of the past. He decided such
+violent exercise was no longer necessary, and he was getting to know so
+many people at other colleges that the cultivation of new personalities
+occupied all his leisure. After Maurice and Wedderburn came back from
+Spain, they devoted much of their time to painting, and The Oxford
+Looking-Glass became a very expensive business on account of the
+reproduction of their drawings. Moreover, the circulation decreased in
+ratio with the increase of these drawings, and the five promoters who
+did not wish to practice art in the pages of their magazine convoked
+several meetings of protest. Finally Maurice was allowed to remain
+editor only on condition that he abstained from publishing any more
+drawings.
+
+Nigel Stewart’s meeting of the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis together with
+the visit to Spain induced Michael to turn his attention to that side
+of undergraduate life interested in religion. He went to see Canon
+Harrowell, and even accepted from him an invitation to a breakfast at
+which he met about half a dozen Klebe men who talked about bishops.
+Afterward Canon Harrowell seemed anxious to have a quiet talk with him
+in the library, but Michael made an excuse, not feeling inclined for
+self-revelation so quickly on top of six Klebe men and the eggs and
+bacon. He went to see Father Pallant at Cowley, but Father Pallant
+appeared so disappointed that he had brought him no scientific problems
+to reconcile with Catholic dogma, and was moreover so contemptuous of
+Dom Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B. and Clere Abbey that Michael never went to
+see him again. He preferred old Sandifer, who with all the worldly
+benefits of good wine, good food, and pleasant company, offered in
+addition his own courtly Caroline presence that added to wit and
+learning and trenchant theology made Michael regret he had not called
+upon him sooner.
+
+Nigel Stewart took Michael to a meeting of De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, at
+which he met not only the six Keble men who had talked about bishops at
+Canon Harrowell’s breakfast, but about twenty more members of the same
+college, all equally fervid and in his opinion equally objectionable.
+Michael also went with Nigel Stewart to Mass at St. Barnabas’, where he
+saw the same Keble men all singing conspicuously and all conveying the
+impression that every Sunday they occupied the same place. By the end
+of the term Michael’s aroused interest in religion at Oxford died out.
+He disliked the sensation of belonging to a particular school of
+thought within a university. The ecclesiastical people were like the
+ampelopsis at Trinity: they were highly colored, but so inappropriate
+to Oxford, that they seemed almost vulgar. It was ridiculous they
+should have to worship in Oxford at a very ugly modern church in the
+middle of very ugly modern slums, as ridiculous as it was to call in
+the aid of American creepers to cover up the sins of modern architects.
+
+Yet Michael was at a loss to explain to himself why the ecclesiastical
+people were so obviously out of place in Oxford. After all, they were
+the heirs of a force which had persisted there for many years almost in
+its present aspect: they were the heirs after a fashion of the force
+that kept the Royal Standard flying against the Parliament. But they
+had not inherited the spirit of mediæval Oxford. They were too
+self-conscious, too congregational. As individuals, perhaps they were
+in tone with Oxford, but, eating bacon and eggs and talking about
+bishops, they belonged evidently to Keble, and Michael could not help
+feeling that Keble like Mansfield and Ruskin Hall was in Oxford, but
+not in the least of Oxford. The spirit of mediæval Oxford was more
+typically preserved in the ordinary life of the ordinary graduate; and
+yet it was a mistake to think of the spirit of Oxford at any date. That
+spirit was dateless and indefinable, and each new manifestation which
+Michael was inclined to seize upon, even a manifestation so satisfying
+as Venner’s, became with the very moment that he was aware of it as
+impossible to determine as a dream which leaves nothing behind but the
+almost violent knowledge that it was and exasperatingly still is.
+
+The revived interest lasted a very short time in its communal aspect,
+and Michael retreated into his mediæval history, still solicitous of
+Catholicism in so far as to support the papacy against the Empire in
+the balance of his judgment, but no longer mingling with the Anglican
+adherents of the theory, nor even indeed committing himself openly to
+Christianity as a general creed. Indeed, his whole attitude to religion
+was the result of a reactionary bias rather than of any impulse toward
+constructive progression. He would have liked to urge himself forward
+confidently to proclaim his belief in Christianity, but he could
+acquire nothing more positive than a gentle skepticism of the value of
+every other form of thought, a gentleness that only became scornfully
+intolerant when provoked by ignorance or pretentious statement.
+
+Meanwhile, The Oxford Looking-Glass, though inclining officially to
+neither political party, was reflecting a widespread interest in social
+reform. Michael woke up to this phenomenon as he read through the sixth
+number on a withering March day toward the end of term. Knowing Maurice
+to be a chameleon who unconsciously acquired the hue of his
+surroundings, Michael was sure that The Oxford Looking-Glass by this
+earnest tone indicated the probable tendency of undergraduate energy in
+the hear future. Yet himself, as he surveyed his acquaintances, could
+not perceive in their attitude any hint of change. In St. Mary’s the
+debating clubs were still debating the existence of ghosts: the essay
+clubs were still listening to papers that took them along the by-ways
+of archæology or sport. Throughout the university the old habit of mind
+persisted apparently. The New College manner that London journalists
+miscalled the Oxford manner still prevailed in the discussion of
+intellectual subjects. In Balliol when any remark trembled on the edge
+of a generalization, somebody in a corner would protest, “Oh, shut up,
+fish-face!” and the conversation at once veered sharply back to golf or
+scandal, while the intellectual kitten who had been playing with his
+mental tail would be suddenly conscious of himself or his dignity and
+sit still. In Exeter the members of the Literary Society were still
+called the Bloody Lits. Nothing anywhere seemed as yet to hint that the
+traditional flippancy of Oxford which was merely an extension of the
+public-school spirit was in danger of dying out. Oxford was still the
+apotheosis of the amateur. It was still surprising when the Head of a
+House or a don or an undergraduate achieved anything in a manner that
+did not savor of happy chance. It was still natural to regard Cambridge
+as a provincial university, and to take pleasure in shocking the
+earnest young Cambridge man with the metropolitan humors and airy
+self-assurance of Oxford.
+
+Yet The Oxford Looking-Glass reflected another spirit which Michael
+could not account for and the presence of which he vaguely resented.
+
+“The O.L.G. is getting very priggish and serious and rather dull,” he
+complained to Maurice.
+
+“Not half so dull as it would be if I depended entirely on casual
+contributions,” replied the editor. “I don’t seem to get anything but
+earnestness.”
+
+“Oxford is becoming the home of living causes,” sighed Michael. “That’s
+a depressing thought. Do you really think these Rhodes Scholars from
+America and Australia and Germany are going to affect us?”
+
+“I don’t know,” Maurice said. “But everybody seems keen to speculate on
+the result.”
+
+“Why don’t you take up a strong line of patronage? Why don’t you
+threaten these pug-nosed invaders with the thunders of the past?”
+Michael demanded fiercely.
+
+“Would it be popular?” asked Maurice. “Personally of course I don’t
+care one way or the other, but I don’t want to let the O.L.G. in for a
+lot of criticism.”
+
+“You really ought to be a wonderful editor,” said Michael. “You’re so
+essentially the servant of the public.”
+
+“Well, with all your grumbles,” said Maurice, “ours is the only serious
+paper that has had any sort of a run of late years.”
+
+“But it lacks individuality,” Michael complained. “It’s so damned
+inclusive. It’s like The Daily Telegraph. It’s voluminous and
+undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything,
+from a man who’s going to be hanged for murder to a new record at
+cricket. Why can’t you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather
+delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?”
+
+“The Daily Mail,” Maurice scoffed. “That rag!”
+
+“A man once said to me,” Michael meditatively continued, “that whenever
+he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily
+Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how
+terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his
+Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all,” he
+added cheerfully, “nobody does read the O.L.G. The circulation depends
+on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations
+by the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor.
+Is it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found
+in-that great terra incognita—Queen’s College?”
+
+But Maurice had left him, and Michael strolled down to the lodge to see
+if there were any letters. Shadbolt handed him an invitation to dinner
+from the Warden. As he opened it, Lonsdale came up with a torn replica
+of his own.
+
+“I say, Michael, this is a rum sort of binge for the Wagger to give. I
+spotted all the notes laid out in a row by old Pumpkin-head’s butler.
+You. Me. Tommy Grainger. Fitzroy. That ass Appleby. That worm Carben.
+And Smithers. There may have been some others too. I hope I don’t get
+planted next the Pumpkinette.”
+
+“Miss Wagger may not be there,” said Michael hopefully. “But if she is,
+you’re bound to be next her.”
+
+“I say, Shadbolt,” Lonsdale demanded, “is this going to be a big squash
+at the Wagger’s?”
+
+“The Warden has given me no instruction, sir, about carriages. And so I
+think we may take it for granted as it will be mostly confined to
+members of the college, sir. His servant tells me as the Dean is going
+and the Senior Tutor.”
+
+“And there won’t be any does?”
+
+“Any what, sir?”
+
+“Any ladies?”
+
+“I expect as Miss Crackanthorpe will be present. She very rarely
+absconds from such proceedings,” said Shadbolt, drawing every word with
+the sound of popping corks from the depths of his pompousness.
+
+Michael and Lonsdale found out that to the list of guests they had
+established must be added the names of Maurice, Wedderburn and two
+freshmen who were already favorably reported through the college as
+good sportsmen.
+
+Two evenings later, at seven o’clock, Michael, Maurice, Lonsdale,
+Wedderburn, and Grainger, bowed and starched, stood in Venner’s,
+drinking peach bitters sharpened by the addition of gin.
+
+“The men have gone in to hall,” said Venner. “You ought to start round
+to the Warden’s lodgings at ten past seven. Now don’t be late. I expect
+you’ll have a capital dinner.”
+
+“Champagne, Venner?” asked Lonsdale.
+
+“Oh, bound to be! Bound to be,” said Venner. “The Warden knows how to
+give a dinner. There’s no doubt of that.”
+
+“Caviare, Venner?” asked Maurice.
+
+“I wouldn’t say for certain. But if you get an opportunity to drink any
+of that old hock, be sure you don’t forget. It’s a lovely wine. I wish
+we had a few dozen in the J.C.R. Now don’t go and get tipsy like some
+of our fellows did once at a dinner given by the Warden.”
+
+“Did they, Venner?” asked everybody, greatly interested.
+
+“It was just after the Transvaal war broke out. Only three or four
+years ago. There was a man called Castleton, a cousin of our Castleton,
+but a very different sort of man, such a rowdy fellow. He came out from
+the Warden’s most dreadfully tipsy, and the men were taking him back to
+his rooms, when he saw little Barnaby, a Science don, going across New
+quad. He broke away from his friends and shouted out, ‘there’s a
+blasted Boer,’ and before they could stop him, he’d knocked poor little
+Barnaby, a most nervous fellow, down in the wet grass and nearly
+throttled him. It was hushed up, but Castleton was never asked again
+you may be sure, and then soon after he volunteered for the front and
+died of enteric. So you see what comes of getting tipsy. Now you’d
+better start.”
+
+Arm in arm the five of them strolled through Cloisters until they came
+to the gothic door of the Warden’s Lodgings. Up the Warden’s majestic
+staircase they followed the butler into the Warden’s gothic
+drawing-room where they shook hands with the great moon-faced Warden
+himself, and with Miss Crackanthorpe, who was very much like her
+brother, and nearly as round on a much smaller scale. They nodded to
+the Dean, mentally calculating how many roll-calls they were behind,
+for the Dean notwithstanding the geniality of his greeting had one gray
+eye that seemed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded
+to Mr. Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed
+nervously in response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed
+them. The two freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful
+acknowledgments of their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a
+gesture of such bland welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with
+suppressed mortification and rage.
+
+“Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don’t sit next the
+Pumpkinette?” whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to
+dinner.
+
+“Not a halfpenny,” laughed Michael. “You will. And I shall get Ardle.”
+
+Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of
+three dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was
+to make the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that
+Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned
+forerunners had nothing to fear for his own preëminence. Modern life
+found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his
+office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his
+personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its
+ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in
+the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole
+dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which made more
+than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and
+the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.
+
+Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary
+shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness
+of the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by
+a magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing
+some grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many
+dinners in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by
+flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely
+believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so
+ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter
+would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these
+transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the
+commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the
+power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden’s great round
+face inclined slowly now toward Fitzroy with his fair complexion and
+military rigor of bearing, now toward Wedderburn whose evening dress
+acquired from the dignity of its owner the richness of black velvet.
+More directly in the light of the first lamp sat Maurice and Appleby
+opposite to one another, both imparting to the assemblage a charming
+worldliness, Maurice by his loose-fronted shirt, Appleby by the
+self-esteem of his restless blue eyes. The two freshmen on either side
+of the Dean wonderfully contrasted with his gauntness, and even more
+did the withered Ardle, who looked like a specimen of humanity dried as
+plants are dried between heavy books, contrast with the sprawling bulk
+of Grainger. On the other side, Michael watched with amusement Miss
+Crackanthorpe with shining apple-face bobbing nervously between
+Smithers pale and solid and domed like a great cheese, and Lonsdale
+cool and pink as an ice. In the background from the shadows at either
+end of the room the sage-green walls materialized in the lamplight: the
+three dead Wardens stared down at the table: and every fifteen minutes
+bells chimed in St. Mary’s tower.
+
+“And how is The Oxford Looking-Glass progressing, Avery?” inquired the
+Warden, shining full upon the editor in a steady gaze. “No doubt it
+takes up a great deal of your valuable time?”
+
+The Dean winked his gray decanal eye at the champagne: the Senior Tutor
+coughed remotely like a grasshopper: Lonsdale prodded Michael with his
+elbow and murmured that “the Wagger had laid Mossy a stymie.”
+
+Maurice admitted the responsibility of the paper for occupying a
+considerable amount of his _leisure_, but consoled himself for this by
+the fact that certainly, The Oxford Looking-Glass was progressing very
+well indeed.
+
+“We don’t altogether know what attitude to take up over the Rhodes
+Bequest,” said Maurice. Then boldly he demanded from the Warden what
+would be the effect of these imposed scholars from America and
+Australia and Africa.
+
+“The speculation is not without interest,” declared the Warden. “What
+does Fitzroy think?”
+
+Fitzroy threw back his shoulders as if he were going to abuse the
+Togger and said he thought the athletic qualifications were a mistake.
+“After all, sir, we don’t want the Tabs—I mean to say we don’t want to
+beat Cambridge with the help of a lot of foreigners.”
+
+“Foreigners, Fitzroy? Come, come, we can scarcely stigmatize Canadians
+as foreigners. What would become of the Imperial Idea?”
+
+“I think the Imperial Idea will take a lot of living up to,” said
+Wedderburn, “when we come face to face with its practical expression.
+Personally I loathe Colonials except at the Earl’s Court Exhibition.”
+
+“Ah, Wedderburn,” said the Warden, “you are luckily young enough to be
+able to be particular. I with increasing age begin to suffer from that
+terrible disease of age—toleration.”
+
+“But the Warden is not so very old,” whispered Miss Crackanthorpe to
+Lonsdale and Michael.
+
+“Oh, rather not,” Lonsdale murmured encouragingly.
+
+“I think they’ll wake up Oxford,” announced Smithers; then, as everyone
+turned to hear what more he would say, Smithers seemed inclined to melt
+into silence, but with a sudden jerk of defiance, he hardened himself
+and became volubly opinionative.
+
+“There’s no doubt,” he continued, “that these fellows will make the
+average undergrad look round him a bit.” As Smithers curtailed
+undergraduate to the convention of a lady-novelist, a shudder ran round
+the dinner party. Almost the butler instead of putting ice into the
+champagne might have slipped it down the backs of the guests.
+
+“In fact, what ho, she bumps,” whispered Lonsdale. “Likewise pip-ip,
+and tootle-oo.”
+
+“Anyway, he won’t be able to ignore them,” said Smithers.
+
+“We hope not, indeed,” the Warden gravely wished. “What does Lonsdale
+think? Lord Cleveden wrote to me to say how deeply interested he was by
+the whole scheme—a most appreciative letter, and your father has had a
+great experience of colonial conditions.”
+
+“Has he?” said Lonsdale. “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. You mean when
+he was Governor. Oh, rather. But I never knew him in those days.” Then
+under his breath he muttered to Michael: “Dive in, dive in, you rotter,
+I’m getting out of my depth.”
+
+“I think Oxford will change the Rhodes Scholars much more profoundly
+than the Rhodes Scholars will change Oxford,” said Michael. “At least
+they will if Oxford hasn’t lost anything lately. Sometimes I’m worried
+by that, and then I’m not, for I do really feel that they must be
+changed. Civilization must have some power, or we should all revert.”
+
+“And are we to regard these finished oversea products as barbarians?”
+asked the Warden.
+
+“Oh, yes,” said Michael earnestly. “Just as much barbarians as any
+freshmen.”
+
+Everybody looked at the two freshmen on either side of the Dean and
+laughed, while they laughed too and tried to appear pleasantly
+flattered by the epithet.
+
+“And what will Oxford give them?” asked the Dean dryly. He spoke with
+that contempt of generalizations of which all dons made a habit.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” said Michael. “But vaguely I would say that Oxford
+would cure them of being surprised by themselves or of showing surprise
+at anybody else. Marcus Aurelius said what I’m trying to say much
+better than I ever can. Also they will gain a sense of humor, or rather
+they will ripen whatever sense they already possess. And they’ll have a
+sense of continuity, too, and perhaps—but of course this will depend
+very much on their dons—perhaps they’ll take as much interest in the
+world as in Australia.”
+
+“Why will that depend on their dons?” challenged Mr. Ambrose.
+
+“Oh, well, you know,” explained Michael apologetically, “dons very
+often haven’t much capacity for inquisitiveness. They get frightened
+very easily, don’t they?”
+
+“Very true, very true,” said the Warden. “But, my dear Fane, your
+optimism and your pessimism are both quixotic, immensely quixotic.”
+
+Later on in the quad when the undergraduate members of the dinner party
+discussed the evening, Maurice rallied Michael on his conversation.
+
+“If you can talk your theories, why can’t you write them?” he
+complained.
+
+“Because they’d be almost indecently diaphanous,” said Michael.
+
+“Good old Fane!” said Grainger. “But, I say, you are an extraordinary
+chap, you know.”
+
+“He did it for me,” said Lonsdale. “Pumpkin-head would have burst, if
+I’d let out I didn’t know what part of the jolly old world my governor
+used to run.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STELLA IN OXFORD
+
+
+Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful
+than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had
+managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in
+view a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a
+blue. Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and
+Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.
+
+Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors’ match, in
+which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a
+reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at
+the guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the
+hall, men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as
+unconcernedly as if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.
+
+“Who is that man just sitting down?” Michael would ask.
+
+“I don’t know,” Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest
+the implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to
+be aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
+
+“Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in
+Peck?” asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
+
+“No, really?” answered Alan indifferently.
+
+After hall as they walked back to Meadows’, Michael tried to point out
+to him that the St. Mary’s method of dining in hall was superior to
+that of the House.
+
+“The dinner itself is better,” Alan admitted. “But I hate your system
+of all getting up from table at the same time. It’s like school.”
+
+“But if a guest comes to St. Mary’s he sits at his host’s regular
+table. He’s introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you’d had
+another guest to-night, you wouldn’t even have introduced me to him. He
+and I would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of
+dummies.”
+
+“Rot!” said Alan. “And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening?
+All the men at the guests’ table were absolute ticks.”
+
+“I’ve never met a House man who didn’t think every other House man
+impossible outside the four people in his own set,” retorted Michael.
+“And yet, I suppose, you’ll say it’s the best college?”
+
+“Of course,” Alan agreed.
+
+Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day’s reluctant death, while
+the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul’s Awakening faintly
+kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.
+
+“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked. “I expect there’s one in the
+cupboard.”
+
+“I’m sure there is,” said Michael. “It’s very unlikely that there is a
+single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all
+the same.”
+
+They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the
+tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes
+and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before
+him in the smoke.
+
+“It’s a pity,” he said, “Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though
+of course I wasn’t bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would
+have looked pretty well. Still four for forty-eight isn’t so bad in an
+innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to
+another bowler who’s no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail.
+I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two—first knock. Blob—second.
+Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in
+the first trial match.” So Alan voiced his hopes.
+
+“Of course you will,” said Michael. “And at Lord’s. I think I shall ask
+my mother and sister up for Eights,” he added.
+
+Alan looked rather disconcerted.
+
+“What’s the matter?” Michael asked. “You won’t have to worry about
+them. I’ll explain you’re busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you
+in a letter this week.”
+
+During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne
+Walk, and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and
+musical people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper
+interest in his existence.
+
+“Give her my—er—love, when you write,” said Alan very nonchalantly.
+“And I don’t think I’d say anything about those four wickets for
+forty-eight. I don’t fancy she’s very keen on cricket. It might bore
+her.”
+
+No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said
+about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three
+vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan
+announced as usual that “those men will be coming down soon for cocoa.”
+
+“Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at
+ten?” asked Michael. “And why am I never allowed to meet them?”
+
+“They’d bore you rather,” said Alan. “They’re people who live on this
+staircase. I don’t see them any other time.”
+
+Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so
+to his friend’s evident relief he got up to go.
+
+“You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and
+regularities,” he grumbled.
+
+“Stay, if you like,” said Alan, not very heartily. “But I warn you
+they’re all awfully dull, and I’ve made a rule to go to bed at
+half-past ten this term.”
+
+“So long,” said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.
+
+A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his
+invitation for Eights Week:
+
+173 CHEYNE WALK,
+S.W.
+_May 5._
+
+_My dearest Michael,_
+
+_I wish you’d asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help at
+the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at Westminster
+Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of
+Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think you’d be interested.
+It’s all about handicrafts. Weren’t you reading a book by William
+Morris the other day? His name is mentioned a great deal always. I’ve
+been meeting so many interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask
+Mrs. Ross to chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about
+poor Dick Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could
+understand how_ much much _happier she would be married to a nice man,
+even though he may be a little older than herself. This tearing all
+over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks of going to
+Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly impossible name
+beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks of unlearning all
+she has learned and beginning all over again. This is most absurd, and
+I’ve tried to explain to her. She should have thought of this man
+beginning with L before. At her age to start scales and exercises again
+does seem ridiculous. I really dread Stella’s coming of age. Who knows
+what she may not take it into her head to do? I can’t think where she
+gets this curious vein of eccentricity. I’ll write to Mrs. Ross if you
+like. Stella, of course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that
+I will not hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she
+suggests it to you._
+
+_Your loving_
+_Mother._
+
+Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad
+rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at
+Oxford. He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would
+never have listened to a word. Stella’s view of the visit came soon
+after her mother’s.
+
+173 CHEYNE WALK,
+S.W.
+_May 8._
+
+_Dear M.,_
+
+_What’s all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it
+necessary? At a shot I said to mother, “No, quite unnecessary.” But of
+course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won’t. Isn’t Mrs.
+Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn’t she rather object to
+me smoking cigars?_
+
+“Great scott!” interjaculated Michael.
+
+_I’m going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very
+charming to your only sister,_
+
+_Stella._
+
+_P.S.—Do crush mother over Prescott._
+
+Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely
+necessary for Stella’s visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars
+he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come.
+Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own
+attitude toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating
+it to her. In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured
+his own behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay
+on the view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was
+as much shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year
+he had been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at
+Eastbourne. Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to
+open the door once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter
+his mind as the sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon
+present themselves. It would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came
+up and saw him playing for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was
+provided to relieve the tedium of too much rowing.
+
+So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged
+that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs.
+Ross.
+
+Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of
+assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having
+helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the
+whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every
+other occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who
+was threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart
+spoke mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account
+he could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the
+High. Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael
+went down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.
+
+“I think it was a very bad move bringing me,” said Lonsdale, as they
+waited on the platform. “Your sister will probably think me an awful
+ass, and ...”
+
+But the train interrupted Lonsdale’s self-depreciation, and he
+sustained himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael
+thought Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as
+now when tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in
+the Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved
+Michael instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might
+appear in a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a
+very peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more
+like a boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide
+open on the city’s towers and spires, were more than usually gray and
+pellucid.
+
+“I say, I ordered a car to meet us,” said Lonsdale. “I thought we
+should buzz along quicker.”
+
+“What you really thought,” said Michael, “was that you would have to
+drive my sister in a hansom.”
+
+“Oh, no, I say, really,” protested Lonsdale.
+
+“I’m much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me,” Stella
+declared.
+
+“Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I’m an awful ass, Miss Fane,” said
+Lonsdale encouragingly. “Hallo, here’s the jolly old car.”
+
+As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the
+county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably
+Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.
+
+“You’ll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and
+that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she’ll have a pretty good
+notion of the main points of interest in the neighborhood,” said
+Michael.
+
+“He always rags me,” explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round
+at the visitors. “I say, isn’t Alan Merivale your nephew?” he asked
+Mrs. Ross. “He’s playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some
+very hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after
+lunch and watch the game for a bit.”
+
+Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met
+them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at
+least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale’s
+rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a
+dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that
+Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in
+Lonsdale’s rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately
+accorded.
+
+The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold
+chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going
+to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and
+speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of
+lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of
+mirthfulness as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.
+
+After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the
+Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and
+nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who
+was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully
+Alan’s meeting with Stella, watched Alan’s face fall when he saw her
+beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves.
+There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan
+to go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant
+century so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much
+there was in him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted to himself the
+improbability of Stella realizing anything at all about the importance
+of cricket. However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw
+Alan coming gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very
+first ball he had received.
+
+“Of course, you know, he isn’t played for his batting,” he hastened to
+explain to Stella.
+
+She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice
+to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside
+them, unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond
+though he was of Maurice.
+
+The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early
+tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell,
+they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to
+Mrs. Ross and Stella:
+
+“My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do
+that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We
+can’t bear our digs any longer.”
+
+“Why don’t you give a party there on Monday night,” suggested
+Wedderburn deeply.
+
+“Let me introduce you to Mrs’sss ... my sissss ... Mr. H’wood,” mumbled
+Michael in explanation of Wedderburn’s proposal.
+
+“What a charming idea,” drawled Guy. “But isn’t it rather a shame to
+ask Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren’t.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said Stella. “I should rather like to play in Oxford.”
+
+So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper
+river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward
+glance at the trend of the clouds, occurred Guy Hazlewood’s party in
+Holywell, which might more truly have been called Wedderburn’s party,
+since he at once assumed all responsibility for it.
+
+The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on
+account of the Balliol men invited.
+
+“Half Basutoland seems to be here,” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+“Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial,
+what else can you expect?” replied Michael.
+
+Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention
+more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless
+mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to
+Wedderburn’s suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to
+monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation
+with the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for to-morrow. But
+Michael fancied there was another reason.
+
+Stella played three times and was much applauded.
+
+“Very sporting effort, by Jove,” said Lonsdale, and this was probably
+the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of
+really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each
+occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in
+such inadequate surroundings.
+
+Michael himself was less moved by Stella’s playing than he had ever
+been. Nor was this coldness due to any anxiety for her success. He was
+sure enough of that in this uncritical audience.
+
+“Do you think Stella plays as well as she did?” he asked Mrs. Ross.
+
+“Perhaps this evening she may be a little excited,” Mrs. Ross
+suggested.
+
+“Perhaps,” said Michael doubtfully. “But what I mean is that, if she
+isn’t going to advance quite definitely, there really isn’t any longer
+an excuse for her to arrogate to herself a special code of behavior.”
+
+“Stella says a great deal more than she does,” Mrs. Ross reassured him.
+“You’d be surprised, as indeed I was surprised, to find how simple and
+childlike she really is. I think an audience is never good for her.”
+
+“But, after all, her life is going to be one audience after another in
+quick succession,” Michael pointed out.
+
+“Gradually an audience will cease to rouse her into any violence of
+thought or accentuation of superficial action—oh, Michael,” Mrs. Ross
+exclaimed, breaking off, “what dreadfully long words you’re tempting me
+to use, and why do you make me talk about Stella? I’d really rather
+talk about you.”
+
+“Stella is becoming a problem to me,” said Michael.
+
+“And you yourself are no longer a problem to yourself?” Mrs. Ross
+inquired.
+
+“Not in the sense I was, when we last talked together.”
+
+Michael was a little embarrassed by recalling that conversation. It
+seemed to link him too closely for his pleasure to the behavior which
+had led up to it, to be a part of himself at the time, farouche and
+uncontrolled.
+
+“And all worries have passed away?” persisted Mrs. Ross.
+
+“Yes, yes,” said Michael quickly. “For one thing,” he added as if he
+thought he had been too abrupt, “I’m too comfortably off to worry much
+about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face.
+Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of
+myself as sixteen and seventeen.” Michael was building brick by brick a
+bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. “I seem to
+see myself,” he persevered, “with very untidy hair, with very loose
+joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I
+blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with
+Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then,
+say to the second-year table in hall.” Michael paused for a moment,
+half hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former
+self, but as she said nothing, he continued: “When I came up to Oxford
+I found that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school
+like St. James’, but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a
+term what most of my contemporaries had been given several years to
+acquire. I remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, ‘By
+gad, Valérie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,’ and my mother
+disagreeing, ‘No, no, I’m sure you were right when you said St.
+James’.’ That’s so like mother. She probably had never thought the
+matter out at all. She was probably perfectly vague about the
+difference between St. James’ and Eton, but because it had been
+arranged so, she disliked the idea of any alteration. I’m telling you
+all this because, you know, you provided as it were the public-school
+influence for my early childhood. After you I ought to have passed on
+to a private school entirely different from Randell House, and then to
+Eton or Winchester. I’m perfectly sure I could have avoided everything
+that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, if I’d not been at a
+London day-school.”
+
+“But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?” asked
+Mrs. Ross. “Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as
+normality is concerned, through St. James’.”
+
+“Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young
+Englishman. Possibly he benefited by St. James’. Possibly at Eton, and
+with a prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere
+athlete, into one of the rather objectionable bigots of the
+public-school theory. Now I was never perfectly normal. I might even
+have been called morbid and unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn’t
+always possessed a sort of curious lonely humor which was about twice
+as severe as the conscience of tradition. At the same time, I had
+nothing to justify my abnormality. No astounding gift of genius, I
+mean.”
+
+“But, Michael,” interrupted Mrs. Ross, “I don’t fancy the greatest
+geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or
+seventeen.”
+
+“No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of
+greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of
+Keats’ letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all
+the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and
+never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my
+criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment
+I try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done.”
+
+“But still, I don’t see why a day-school should have militated against
+the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty.”
+
+“It did in this way,” said Michael. “It gave me too much with which to
+sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I
+was unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I’m sure of
+that, because since I’ve been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism
+so very much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say,
+there’s no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it’s partly due to
+being older.”
+
+“Really, Michael,” Mrs. Ross protested, “if you talk like this I shall
+begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up
+self-confidence seems to me not quite normal either.”
+
+“Ah, that’s only because I’m criticizing my earlier self. I really am
+now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want
+passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of
+social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously
+different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right
+mean between the two extremes. I’m enjoying Oxford enormously. I can’t
+tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate
+it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a
+struggle to find that wide normal road on which I’m strolling along
+now. I’m so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England,
+and that the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to
+apply to the world the same standards we tacitly respect—we
+undergraduates. I believe every problem of life can be solved by the
+transcendency of the spirit which has transcended us up here. You
+remember I used to say you were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those
+qualities in you which made me think of that resemblance I find in
+Oxford. Don’t ask me to say what they are, because I couldn’t explain.”
+
+“I think you have a great capacity for idealization,” said Mrs. Ross
+gravely. “I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I
+wonder what profession you’ll choose.”
+
+“I don’t suppose I shall choose a profession at all,” said Michael.
+“There’s no financial reason—at any rate—why I should.”
+
+“Well, you won’t have to decide against a profession just yet,” said
+Mrs. Ross. “And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you
+think Stella’s playing has deteriorated—if you really think it has.”
+
+“Oh, I didn’t say it had,” Michael contradicted in some dismay. “I
+merely said that to-night it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she
+was anxious. Perhaps she felt among all these undergraduates, as I felt
+in my first week. Perhaps she’s thinking what schoolboys they all are,
+and how infinitely youthful they appear beside those wild and
+worldly-wise Bohemians to whose company she has been accustomed for so
+long. I long to tell her that these undergraduates are really so much
+wiser, even if literature means Mr. Soapy Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and
+art The Soul’s Awakening, and religion putting on a bowler to go and
+have a hot breakfast at the O.U.D.S. after chapel, and politics the
+fag-ends of paternal or rather ancestral opinion, and life a hot bath
+and changing after a fox-hunt or a grouse-drive.”
+
+Farther conversation was stopped by Wedderburn driving everybody down
+to supper with pastoral exhortations in his deepest bass. Michael,
+after his talk with Mrs. Ross, was relieved to find himself next to
+Lonsdale and sheltered by a quivering rampart of jellies from more
+exacting company.
+
+“These Basutos aren’t so bad when you talk to them,” said Lonsdale.
+“Comeragh was at m’tutor’s. I wonder if he still collects bugs. I
+rather like that man Hazlewood. I thought him a bit sidy at first, but
+he’s rather keen on fishing. I don’t think much of the girl that
+Trinity man—what’s his name—Stewart has roped in. She looks like
+something left over from a needlework stall. I say, your sister jolly
+well knows how to punch a piano. Topping, what? Mossy’s been very much
+on the spot to-night. He and Wedders are behaving like a couple of
+theatrical managers. Why didn’t Alan Merivale turn up? I was talking to
+some of the cricket push at the Club, and it doesn’t look a hundred
+quid to a tanner on his Blue. Bad luck. He’s a very good egg.”
+
+Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale’s babble. He was watching the
+passage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven,
+Stella had let the cigars go by.
+
+The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of
+gables they stood laughing and talking for a moment. Guy Hazlewood,
+Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting
+guests.
+
+“It’s been awfully ripping,” these murmured to their hosts. The hosts
+beamed down.
+
+“We’ve been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to
+Miss Fane.”
+
+“You ought all to get Firsts now,” said Wedderburn.
+
+Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and
+Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of
+the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright spaces,
+into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled
+along the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died
+out to whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and
+midnight began to clang.
+
+“We must hurry,” said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward
+St. Mary’s, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.
+
+“Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?” Maurice suggested to
+Michael.
+
+“I’m rather tired,” objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was
+going to talk at great length about Stella.
+
+He was too jealous of Alan’s absence that evening to want to hear
+Maurice’s facile enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SYMPATHY
+
+
+Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael
+was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to
+assert her independence of personality would try to smash the glass of
+fashion and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions
+during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were
+when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed
+by that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of
+Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate
+foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music
+would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow
+belied.
+
+Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was
+in a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.
+
+“These hard wickets have finished me off,” he sighed. “I shall take up
+golf, I think.”
+
+The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered
+with gray fluff under the bed.
+
+“Oh, no, don’t play golf,” protested Michael, “you’ve got two more
+years to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a
+rotten game and has ruined Varsity cricket.”
+
+“But one can be alone at golf,” said Alan.
+
+“Alone?” repeated Michael. “Why on earth should you want to play an
+outdoor game alone?”
+
+“Because I get depressed sometimes,” Alan explained. “What good am I?”
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said Alan sadly. “I’ve been thinking of my
+future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my
+Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan’t even get into
+the Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk.
+Playing cricket for a suburban club on Saturday afternoons. That’s all
+I see before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?”
+
+“I don’t know that she is going,” said Michael. “She always talks a
+great deal about things which don’t always come off.”
+
+“I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much,”
+Alan said. “But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about
+music. I don’t think I care for him.”
+
+“Some people don’t,” Michael admitted. “I think women always like him,
+though.”
+
+“Yes, I should think they did,” Alan agreed bitterly. “Sorry I’m so
+depressing. Have a meringue or something.”
+
+“Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?” Michael challenged.
+
+“What made you think I was?” countered Alan, looking alarmed.
+
+“It’s pretty obvious,” Michael said. “And curiously enough I can quite
+understand it. Generally, of course, a brother finds it difficult to
+understand what other people can see in his sister, but I’m never
+surprised when they fall in love with Stella.”
+
+“A good many have?” asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a
+pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his
+bowling.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+“Oh, I’ve realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,”
+Alan sighed. “I’m evidently going to be a failure.”
+
+“Would you care for some advice?” inquired Michael very tentatively.
+
+“What sort of advice?” Alan asked.
+
+Michael took this for assent, and plunged in.
+
+“Let her alone,” he adjured his friend. “Let her absolutely alone.
+She’s very young, you know, and you’re not very old. Let her alone for
+at least a year. I suggest two years. Don’t see much of her, and don’t
+let her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really,
+Alan, it’s not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love
+with her. I don’t mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned
+down.”
+
+“Would he be?” demanded Alan gloomily.
+
+“Of course, of course ... it seems funny to be talking to you about
+love ... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know
+you’ll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I’m frightfully keen
+you should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don’t let her interfere
+with your cricket. Don’t take up golf on account of her.”
+
+Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he
+picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it
+before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy
+airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.
+
+“It’s funny,” said Michael, “that I should have an opportunity now of
+talking to you about love and cricket.”
+
+“Funny?” Alan repeated.
+
+“Don’t you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished
+you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for
+cricket?”
+
+“I believe I do remember vaguely,” said Alan.
+
+Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to
+let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had
+conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to
+elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the
+retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long
+while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique,
+the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had
+foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her
+departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather
+strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even
+than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects
+of next term.
+
+Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed
+sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college.
+Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs.
+Alan offered his fourth year to companionship with Michael, but nothing
+would induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so
+particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with
+whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were
+many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so
+anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an
+arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or
+second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice
+had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not
+wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later
+Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage
+them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place,
+and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.
+
+It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the
+indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until
+Michael seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had
+invited him to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as
+well, but they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially
+sharing, that is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in
+the same house and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to
+be thought of. Maurice was a very good fellow but—Maurice was—but—and
+Michael in asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company,
+asked himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging
+with Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could,
+and for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who
+represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused
+himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by
+applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time
+went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael’s
+choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a
+desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice’s sensitiveness that it could
+not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him?
+Soon it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not
+want to dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his
+feelings, and Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had
+receded into the background of casual encountership, he would take
+pleasure in his company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as
+if Maurice were losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael
+wondered why he had never before noticed how infallibly he ran after
+each new and petty phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy.
+It was intolerable to think of spending a year’s close association with
+all those paint-boxes and all that modeling wax and all those
+undestroyed proof-sheets of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Finally, he had
+never noticed before how many cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what
+skill he concealed in every sort of receptacle the stained and twisted
+stumps that were left over. That habit would be disastrous to their
+friendship, and Michael knew that each fresh cigarette lighted by him
+would consume a trace more of the friendship, until at last he would
+come to the state of observing him with a cold and mute resentment. He
+was in this attitude of mind toward his prospective companion, when
+Maurice came to see him. He seemed nervous, lighting and concealing
+even more cigarettes than usual.
+
+“About digs in Longwall,” he began.
+
+“I won’t live in Longwall,” affirmed Michael.
+
+“Do you think you could find anybody else?”
+
+“Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?” asked Michael
+hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long
+as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
+
+Maurice seemed embarrassed.
+
+“No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me.
+The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had
+fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but
+of course I said I was digging with you, and there’s no room for a
+third.”
+
+“I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny,” said Michael quickly.
+
+Maurice looked much relieved.
+
+“As long as you don’t feel I’ve treated you badly,” he began.
+
+“That’s all right,” said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice’s
+obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon
+as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his
+fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking
+cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice’s invitation to
+stay at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the
+penitence which had prompted it.
+
+Stella’s unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free
+to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least
+the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little
+contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and
+mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for
+keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son
+and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even
+her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially
+when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the
+tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery’s adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming
+oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the
+facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the
+facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that
+suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and
+the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a
+telegram. Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world
+of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully
+pressed trousers.
+
+“Dear Mrs. Avery,” he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative
+solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to
+France. “I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been
+called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the
+Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair
+distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery.”
+
+“Thank Heaven that’s done!” he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of
+Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South
+Wales.
+
+The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London
+between his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at
+Cressingham Hall—a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad
+Midlands. It was mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb
+the pastoral calm. Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden’s
+remonstrances to obtain a grasp of rural administration. So he and his
+sister Sylvia with Michael drove every day in a high dogcart to various
+outlying farms of the estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very
+popular, and after all as he confided to Michael that was the main
+thing.
+
+“And how’s his lordship, sir?” the tenant would inquire.
+
+“Oh, very fit,” Lonsdale would reply. “I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got
+any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a
+good deal about it.”
+
+In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of
+agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the
+sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife’s
+raspberries and gooseberries.
+
+“I envy your life,” said Michael.
+
+“A bit on the slow side, don’t you think?”
+
+“Plenty of time for thinking.”
+
+“Ah,” said Lonsdale. “But then I’ve got no brains. I really haven’t,
+you know. The poor old governor’s quite worried about it.”
+
+However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest
+draw up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port,
+he delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and
+notorieties, Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry
+him very much, not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of
+brains in his only son.
+
+“Dear Lady Cleveden,” he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty
+house in Cheyne Walk. “London is quite impossible after Cressingham.”
+
+And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the
+Embankment, the oily river and a lack-luster moon.
+
+Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott,
+inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot
+London weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more
+solicitude than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace
+for some time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while
+Prescott lent him a grave attention. At last Michael’s conversation
+exhausted itself, and for a few minutes there was silence, while
+Prescott betrayed his nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his
+cigar. At last he burnt himself and throwing away the cigar leaped
+forthwith into the tide of emotion that was deepening rapidly around
+his solitary figure.
+
+“Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella
+told you. Of course, I realize it’s quite absurd. Said so at once, and
+of course it’s all over now. Phew! it’s fearfully hot to-night. Always
+feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that’s the
+same with most people.”
+
+Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the
+moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment
+later the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott’s
+confidence Michael felt himself committed to a participation in his
+existence that called for some response. But he could not with any
+sincerity express a regret for Stella’s point of view.
+
+“Mother was very anxious she should accept you,” said Michael, and
+immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an
+eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella’s stilted
+declaration of her refusal.
+
+“Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of
+course I’m a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very
+ridiculous.”
+
+“I don’t think Stella is old enough to marry,” said Michael.
+
+“But don’t you think it’s better for girls to marry when they’re
+young?” asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes
+were very bright and his actions feverish. “I’ve noticed that
+tendencies recur in families. Time after time. I don’t like this
+Viennese business, yet if Stella had married me I shouldn’t have
+interfered with her,” he added, with a wistfulness that was out of
+keeping with his severely conventional appearance. “Still, I should
+have always been in the background.”
+
+“Yes, I expect that was what she felt,” said Michael.
+
+He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had
+wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any
+longer, he rose and said he must go.
+
+As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go
+down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved
+August journals “Suicide of a Man About Town.” At Cobble Place
+newspapers were read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on
+the day after that above a short paragraph the headline “Tragedy in the
+Albany” led him on to learn that actually Prescott was the man about
+town who had killed himself.
+
+Michael’s first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked
+so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the
+posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined
+with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable
+coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and
+attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner’s summing up of the
+evidence of depression and the perspiring jury’s delivery of their
+verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of
+a man’s life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the
+result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up
+the thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August
+journals he read now with a sharp interest “Cat Saves Household in
+Whitechapel Fire.” This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative
+action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the
+journey down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family
+from an inquest’s futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would
+have been awarded the commendatory platitudes of the coroner.
+
+Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the
+journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for
+evening. By this time the irony of the cat’s fortuitous interference
+was blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to
+the fact of Prescott’s death. He was no longer occupied by the strange
+sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous
+daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for
+once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott’s life was surely
+a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated
+all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly
+fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a
+death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a
+hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would
+be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in
+London, or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to
+the very portals of the Albany.
+
+Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was
+beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had
+first obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having
+given away to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead
+man’s confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting
+to think of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making
+this hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the
+public, so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the
+inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure
+from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals,
+the soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the
+profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of
+restraint whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in
+unrelaxing guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought
+about the business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an
+earlier mood of self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to
+whose almost contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately
+aspire. He had often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of
+thought and action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered
+into himself the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence.
+And now he must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a
+spiritual encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up
+pitiably into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the
+force of its squalid associations. The fresh dust of the Hampshire
+lanes became a gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his
+progress so that he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges
+were somber and monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected
+rags of a tramp. The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost
+their intimations of sane humanity, and turned to horrible abstractions
+of the dead life of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot.
+The comfortable assurance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling
+away to right and left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed
+along through the twilight. “My nerves are in a rotten state,” he told
+himself, and he was very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the
+night below, while himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly
+dusk.
+
+In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael
+thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew’s serene old age
+drove out the last memory of the coroner’s court, and here was Mrs.
+Ross coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in
+Cobble Place was her small son sleeping.
+
+“You look tired and pale, Michael,” said Mrs. Ross. “Why didn’t you
+wire which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the
+chaise.”
+
+“Poor fellow, of course he’s tired!” said Mrs. Carthew. “A most
+disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good.”
+
+The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this
+room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great
+rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in
+words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went
+the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played
+at backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of
+a parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the
+lamplight, met from time to time Michael’s glances with a concern that
+never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He
+was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock,
+to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him
+company.
+
+“Unless you want to work?” she added.
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:
+
+“Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott’s
+death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarrassed and came
+away.”
+
+“Oh, my dear Michael, I think you’re probably accusing yourself most
+unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your
+dinner?”
+
+“That’s just it. I believe I did know.”
+
+“You thought he was going to kill himself?”
+
+“No, I didn’t think anything so definite as that, but I had an
+intuition to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he’d think
+it rather cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe
+I’ve got the gift of understanding people, and yet I’m afraid to use
+it. Shall I ever learn?”
+
+Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own
+futility. He went on to rail at himself.
+
+“The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness
+wrecks the first decent chance I’ve had to turn it to account.”
+
+They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting
+that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him
+false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found
+it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the
+future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and
+straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was
+hinting.
+
+“My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything,” she affirmed.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamations of your
+willingness to do anything that you’re positive you can do better than
+anything else, I’m quite, quite sure you’re still the rather perverse
+Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time
+when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in
+the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I
+think you’re going to do—I almost said when you’re grown up—but I mean
+when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up
+your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of
+saying, ‘I knew it.’”
+
+“I suppose really I know what you think I shall do,” said Michael
+slowly. “But you’re wrong—at least, I think you’re wrong. I lack the
+mainspring of the parson’s life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of
+myself. How’s he getting on?”
+
+“Oh, he’s splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something
+more than I ever managed to give you.”
+
+“Naturally,” said Michael, smiling. “He’s your son.”
+
+“Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of....”
+Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. “No, I won’t tell you yet.”
+
+“You’re full of unrevealed mysteries,” said Michael.
+
+“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 CHEYNE WALK,
+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 loving_
+_Mother._
+
+_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 time ago,” 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 it was 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. She was 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 it gave 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+202 HIGH
+
+
+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 niche that 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 their own
+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 talking of 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 club
+colors: 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-sufficiency of 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.
+
+“I _must_ ask 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 through many 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
+probably Calvin’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 been avoided 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 with
+cognac; 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 felt his
+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 of ball 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’ll be 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 beguile this 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 is _done_
+when 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 another year, 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 thing myself. 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 amiable ragging 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+PLASHERS MEAD
+
+
+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 revealed in 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 walked on 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 roads more 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 that would 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 wasted a 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 decide what I’m going to _try_ to 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.
+
+They drove together to the railway station five miles away. In the
+sleepy September heat the slow train puffed in. Hot people with bunches
+of dahlias were bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.
+Michael sighed.
+
+“Don’t go,” said Guy. “It’s much too hot.”
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+“I must.”
+
+Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases
+awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.
+
+“Some of my books,” he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael
+watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the
+wine-dark dahlias of the platform.
+
+“What fun unpacking them,” he thought, and leaned back regretfully to
+survey the placid country gliding past.
+
+Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect
+seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or
+rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great
+railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic
+strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children,
+leaning over scabrous walls to salute the passing train. Always, as one
+entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses
+whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible.
+To Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid
+sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through
+London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became
+unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as
+the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and
+emerged in that space of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but
+the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering
+legions of children, was still in Michael’s ears when the hansom pulled
+up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.
+
+The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and
+informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than
+would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of
+time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been
+unaware of his sister’s arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too
+intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he
+actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an
+affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned
+by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the
+social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train
+sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer conspicuous in
+his memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and
+the webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant
+dream. He was in fact back in town.
+
+Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he
+hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very
+moment the parlormaid told him of Stella’s return he had feared such a
+return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask
+abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with
+just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by
+its demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably
+glad to see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side
+would have made him kiss her.
+
+“Hullo, I didn’t expect to see you,” was, however, all he said.
+
+“Nor did I you,” was what she answered.
+
+Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey
+from Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true
+insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.
+
+Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before
+lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas
+and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more
+disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella
+back from Vienna?
+
+“Did you come this morning?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, no. Last night. Why?” she demanded. “Do I look as crumpled as all
+that?”
+
+For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she
+had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was
+perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather
+wished she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his
+own explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment.
+Useless indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as
+the lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life
+where nothing really happens.
+
+After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she
+turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her
+again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than
+he had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray
+satin or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at
+him for not putting on a dinner jacket.
+
+“Don’t look so horrified at the notion,” she cried petulantly. “Can’t
+you realize that after a year with long-haired students I want a
+change?”
+
+After dinner Michael asked her to come and play in the studio.
+
+“Play?” she echoed. “I’m never going to play again.”
+
+“What perfect rot you are talking,” said Michael, in a damnatory
+generalization which was intended to cover not merely all she had been
+saying, but even all she had been doing almost since she first
+announced her intention of going to Vienna.
+
+Stella burst into tears.
+
+“Come on, let’s go to the studio,” said Michael. He felt that Stella’s
+tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that
+she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was
+therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly
+boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked
+to the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an
+outrage to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin,
+even though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to
+himself “Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante
+stark mad in white muslin.”
+
+“Come along, come along,” he begged her. “You must come to the studio.”
+
+Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he
+himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but
+when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently
+whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had
+plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael
+looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely
+an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly
+than before.
+
+“Look here, I say, why don’t you tell me what you’re crying about? You
+can’t go on crying forever, you know,” Michael pointed out. “And when
+you’ve stopped crying, you’ll feel such an ass if you haven’t explained
+what it was all about.”
+
+“I couldn’t possibly tell anybody,” said Stella, looking very fierce.
+Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that
+Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather
+unusually dramatic.
+
+“But I’m damned if I _will_ give up playing,” she proclaimed; and,
+sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion
+her weakness.
+
+It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her
+what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of
+self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella’s
+calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and
+would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished,
+she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily
+Haden.
+
+“I don’t know—really—they’ve left Trelawny Road,” he said, feeling
+vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.
+
+“And you never think of her, I suppose?” demanded Stella.
+
+“Well, no, I don’t very much.”
+
+“Yet I can remember,” said Stella, “when you were absolutely miserable
+because she had been flirting with somebody else.”
+
+“Yes, I was very miserable,” Michael admitted. “And you were rather
+contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more
+proud.”
+
+“And don’t you realize,” Stella said, “that just because I did remember
+what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?”
+
+Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her
+confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had
+finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and
+masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half
+hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.
+
+Michael made up his mind that Stella’s unhappiness was due to a
+love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or
+temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation
+against the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the
+fellow’s head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could
+picture himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He
+went so far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale
+requesting their secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to
+dance before him. He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily.
+Time had softened the trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had
+been guilty. Time with night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal
+charm. He had been reading this week of the great imaginative loves of
+the Middle Ages, and of that supple and golden-haired girl he began to
+weave an abstraction of passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He
+slept upon the evocation of her beauty just as he was setting forth
+upon a delicate and intangible pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested
+to Stella they should revisit Carlington Road.
+
+“My god, to think we once lived here!” exclaimed Stella, as they stood
+outside Number 64. “To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of
+course I was much more away from it than you ever were.”
+
+Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and
+habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was
+become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in
+possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.
+
+“Well, thank heaven, everything does change,” she murmured. “And that
+ugly things become even more ugly.”
+
+“Only for a time,” objected Michael. “In twenty years if we visit
+Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it
+all is.”
+
+“I wasn’t thinking so much of Carlington Road,” said Stella. “I was
+really thinking of people.”
+
+“Even they become beautiful again after a time,” argued Michael.
+
+“It would take a very long time for some,” said Stella coldly.
+
+Michael had rather dreaded his mother’s return, with Stella in this
+mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been
+unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if
+she and not herself had suffered lately.
+
+“I’m so glad you’re back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you
+aren’t going to Petersburg to-morrow, because the man at Vienna whose
+name begins with that extraordinary letter....”
+
+“Oh, mother,” Stella laughed, “the letter was quite ordinary. It was
+only L.”
+
+“But the name was dreadful, dear child. It always reminded one of furs.
+A most oppressive name. So that really you’ll be in London all this
+winter?”
+
+“Yes, only I shan’t play much,” said Stella.
+
+“Mrs. Carruthers is so anxious to meet you properly,” Mrs. Fane said.
+“And Mabel Carruthers is really very nice. Poor girl! I wish you could
+be friends with her. She’s interested in nothing her mother does.”
+
+Michael was really amazed when Stella, without a shrug, without even a
+wink at him, promised simply to let Mrs. Carruthers “meet her
+properly,” and actually betrayed as much interest in Mabel Carruthers
+as to inquire how old she was.
+
+Maurice arrived at Cheyne Walk, just before Michael went up for term,
+to say he had taken a most wonderful studio in Grosvenor Road. He was
+anxious that Michael should bring his sister to see it, but Stella
+would not go.
+
+“Thanks very much, my dear,” she said to him, “but I’ve seen too much
+of the real thing. I’m in no mood just now for a sentimental
+imitation.”
+
+“I think you ought to come,” said Michael. “It would be fun to see
+Maurice living in Grosvenor Road with all the Muses. Castleton will
+have such a time tidying up after them when he joins him next year.”
+
+But Stella would not go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+99 ST. GILES
+
+
+It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief
+figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way
+he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college
+itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars.
+Very soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he
+shared with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that
+this last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best,
+indeed perhaps of all the years of his life the best.
+
+College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had
+ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to
+feel the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two,
+revisiting Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from
+the daily round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which
+preserved its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable
+losses of each year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with
+what now seemed its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had
+never given him quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St.
+Giles could give. Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November
+dusks, when after a long walk through silent country Michael and Alan
+came back to the din of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded
+and greasy Cornmarket toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when
+they would find the tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered
+toast was eaten; tea was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was
+smoked to idle cracklings of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout
+landlady cleared away, and during the temporary disturbance Michael
+pulled back the blinds and watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting
+out St. John’s and the alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the
+Martyrs’ Memorial and even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery.
+The room was quiet again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and
+Alan, settled in deep chairs, read their History and Philosophy;
+outside in the November night footsteps went by; carts and wagons
+occasionally rattled; bells chimed; outside in the November murk
+present life was manifesting its continuity; here within, the battles
+and the glories, the thoughts, the theories and the speculations of the
+past for Michael and Alan moved across printed pages under the rich
+lamplight.
+
+Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99
+St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose
+decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael
+and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place
+during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a
+capacity for making apparently the most barren observations flower and
+fruit with intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit
+of the lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate
+revelation of her domestic past.
+
+After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o’clock, at which
+hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way
+Michael enjoyed the night most. The mediæval chronicles were put back
+on their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or
+Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael
+wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down
+came Don Quixote or Adlington’s Apuleius, or Florio’s Montaigne, or
+Lucian’s True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the
+fog stole into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at
+their measured intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city
+was there; at that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed
+than austere, for it was neither in time nor in space, but the
+abstraction of a city. Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go
+up to bed by candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open
+window the sound of two o’clock striking came very coldly, he could
+scarcely fancy himself in the present. The effort of intense reading,
+whether of bygone institutions or of past adventure, had left him in
+the condition of physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was
+aware of nothing but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish
+with the triumph of tremendous concentration, to undress in this
+stinging acerbity of night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in
+this world of dreaming spires.
+
+99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had
+anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide
+thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of movement,
+scarcely ever aroused a petty inquisitiveness into the actions of the
+passers-by. The traffic of the thoroughfare like the ships of the sea
+went by merely apprehended, but not observed. The big bay-window hung
+over the street like the stern-cabin of a frigate, and as Michael sat
+there he had the impression of being cut off from communication, the
+sense of perpetually leaving life astern. The door of 99 St. Giles did
+not open directly on the street, but was reached by a tortuous passage
+that ran the whole depth of the house. This entrance helped very much
+the illusion of separation from the ebb and flow of ordinary existence,
+and was so suggestive of a refuge that involuntarily Michael always
+hurried through it that the sooner he might set his foot on the steep
+and twisted staircase inside the house. There was always an excitement
+in reaching this staircase again, an impulse to run swiftly up, as if
+this return to the sitting-room was veritably an escape from the world.
+Here the books sprawled everywhere. At 202 High they had filled the
+cupboards in orderly fashion. Here they overflowed in dusty cataracts,
+and tottered upward in crazy escalades and tremulous piles. All the
+shelves were gorged with books. Moreover, Michael every afternoon
+bought more books. The landlady held up her hands in dismay as,
+crunching up the paper in which they had been wrapped, he considered in
+perplexity their accommodation. More space was necessary, and the
+sea-green dining-room was awarded shelves. Here every morning after
+breakfast came the exiles, the dull and the disappointing books which
+had been banished from the sitting-room. Foot by foot the sea-green
+walls disappeared behind these shelves. In Lampard’s bookshop Michael
+was certainly a personality. Lampard himself even came to tea, and sat
+nodding his approbation.
+
+As for Alan, he used to stay unmoved by the invading volumes. He had
+stipulated at the beginning that one small bookcase should be reserved
+for him. Here Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides always had
+room to breathe, without ever being called upon to endure the
+contamination of worm-eaten bibliophily.
+
+“Where the deuce has my Stubbs got to?” Michael would grumble, delving
+into the musty cascade of old plays and chap books which had
+temporarily obliterated the current literature of the week’s work.
+
+Alan would very serenely take down Plato from his own trim and
+unimpeded shelves, and his brow would already be knitted with the
+effort of fixing half-a-dozen abstractions before Michael had decided
+after a long excavation that Stubbs had somehow vanished in the by-ways
+of curious reading.
+
+Yet notwithstanding the amount of time occupied by arranging and buying
+and finding books, Michael did manage to absorb a good deal of history,
+even of that history whose human nature has to be sought arduously in
+charters, exchequer-rolls and acts of parliament. Schools were drawing
+near; the dates of Kings and Emperors and Popes in their succession
+adorned the walls of his bedroom, so that even while he was cleaning
+his teeth one fact could be acquired.
+
+Only on Sunday evenings did Michael allow himself really to reënter the
+life of St. Mary’s. These Sunday evenings had all the excitement of a
+long-interrupted reunion. To be sure, Venner’s was thronged with people
+who seemed to be taking life much too lightly; but Tommy Grainger was
+there, still engaged with a pass-group. People spoke hopefully of going
+head this year. Surely with Tommy and three other Blues in the boat,
+St. Mary’s must go head. The conversation was so familiar that it was
+almost a shock to find so many of the faces altered. But Cuffe was
+still there with his mouth perpetually open just as wide as ever.
+Sterne was still there and likely, so one heard, to make no end of runs
+next summer. George Appleby was very much in evidence since Lonsdale’s
+departure. George Appleby was certainly there, and Michael rather liked
+him and accepted an invitation to lunch. In hall the second-year men
+were not quite as rowdy as they used to be, and when they were rowdy,
+somehow to Michael and the rest of the fourth year they seemed to lack
+the imagination of themselves when they—but after all the only true
+judges of that were the Princes and Cardinals and Poets staring down
+from their high golden frames. The dons, too, at High Table might know,
+for there they sat, immemorial as ever.
+
+Wine in Common Room was just the same, and it really was very jolly to
+be sitting between Castleton—that very popular President of J.C.R.—and
+Tommy Grainger. There certainly was a great and grave satisfaction in
+leading off with a more ceremonious health drinking than had ever been
+achieved in the three years past. Michael found it amusing to catch the
+name of some freshman and, shouting abruptly a salute, to behold him
+wriggle and blush and drink his answer and wonder who on earth was
+hailing _him_. Michael often asked himself if it really were possible
+he could appear to that merry rout at the other end of J.C.R. in truly
+heroic mold. He supposed, with a smile at himself for so gross a fraud,
+that he really did for them pass mortal stature and that already he had
+a bunch of legends dangling from his halo. Down in Venner’s after wine,
+Michael fancied the shouts of the freshmen wandering round Cloisters
+were more raucous than once they had seemed. Sometimes really they were
+almost irritating, but the After was capital, although the new comic
+song of the new college jester lacked perhaps a little the perfect lilt
+of “Father says we’re going to beat them.” Yet, after all, the Boer war
+had been over three years now: no doubt “Father says we’re going to
+beat them” would have sounded a little stale. Last term, however, at
+Two Hundred and Two it had rung as fresh as ever. But the singer was
+gone now. It was meet his song should perish with his withdrawal from
+the Oxford scene. Still the After was quite good sport, and Michael was
+glad to think he and Grainger and Sterne were giving the last After but
+one of this term. He bicycled back to the digs with his head full of
+chatter, of clinking glasses and catchy tunes. Nevertheless, all
+consciousness of the evening’s merriment faded out, as he hurried up
+the crooked staircase to the sitting-room where Alan, upright at the
+table amid Thucydidean commentaries, was reading under the lamp’s
+immotionable rays, his hair glinting with what was now rare gold.
+
+During this autumn term neither Michael nor Alan spoke of Stella except
+as an essentially third person. She was in London, devoting so much of
+herself so charmingly to her mother that Mrs. Fane nearly abandoned
+every other interest in her favor. There were five Schumann recitals,
+of which press notices were sent to 99 St. Giles. Michael as he read
+them handed them on to Alan.
+
+“Jolly good,” said he, in a tone of such conventional praise that
+Michael really began to wonder whether he had after all changed his
+mind instead of merely concealing his intention. However, since
+conversation between these two had been stripped to the bare bones of
+intercourse, Michael could not bring himself to violate this habit of
+reserve for the sake of a curiosity the gratification of which in true
+friendship should never be demanded, nor even accepted with deeper
+attention than the trivial news of the day casually offered. Nor would
+Michael have felt it loyal to Alan to try from Stella to extract a
+point of view regarding him. Anyway, he reassured himself, nothing
+could be done at present.
+
+Toward the end of term Mrs. Ross wrote a letter to Michael whose news
+was sufficiently unexpected to rouse the two of them to a conversation
+of greater length than any they had had since term began.
+
+COBBLE PLACE,
+_November 30._
+
+_My dear Michael,_
+
+_You will be surprised to hear that I have become a Catholic, or I
+suppose I should say to you, if you still adhere to your theories, a
+Roman Catholic. My reasons for this step, apart of course from the true
+reason—the grace of God—were, I think, connected a good deal with my
+boy. When your friend Mr. Prescott killed himself, I felt very much the
+real emptiness of such a life that on the surface was so admirable, in
+some ways so enviable. I am dreadfully anxious that Kenneth—he is
+Kenneth Michael now—I hope you won’t be vexed I should have wished him
+to have Michael also—well, as I was saying—that Kenneth should grow up
+with all the help that the experience of the past can give him. It has
+become increasingly a matter of astonishment to me how so many English
+boys manage to muddle through the crises of their boyhood without the
+Sacraments. I’m afraid you’ll be reading this letter in rather a
+critical spirit, and perhaps resenting my implication that you, for
+instance, have come through so many crises without the Sacraments. But
+I’m not yet a good enough theologian to argue with you about the claims
+of your Church. Latterly I’ve felt positively alarmed by the prospect
+of grappling with Kenneth’s future. I have seen you struggle through,
+and I know I can say win a glorious victory over one side of yourself.
+But I have seen other things happen, even from where I live my secluded
+life. If my husband had not been killed I might not perhaps have felt
+this dread on Kenneth’s account. But I like to think that God in giving
+me that great sorrow has shown His purpose by offering me this new and
+unimagined peace and security and assurance. I need scarcely say I have
+had a rather worrying time lately. It is strange how when love and
+faith are the springs of action one must listen with greater patience
+than one could listen for any lesser motive to the opinions of other
+people._
+
+_Joan and Mary whom I’ve always thought of as just wrapped up in the
+good works of their dear good selves, really rose in their wrath and
+scorched me with the fieriest opposition. I could not have believed
+they had in them to say as much in all their lives as they said to me
+when I announced my intention. Nor had I any idea they knew so many
+English clergymen. I believe that to gratify them I have interviewed
+half the Anglican ministry. Even a Bishop was invoked to demonstrate my
+apostacy. Nancy, too, wrote furious letters. She was not outraged so
+much theologically, but her sense of social fitness was shattered._
+
+_My darling old mother was the only person who took my resolve calmly.
+“As long as you don’t try to convert me,” she said, “and don’t leave
+incense burning about the house, well—you’re old enough to know your
+own mind.” She was so amusing while Joan and Mary were marshaling
+arguments against me. She used to sit playing “Miss Milligan” with a
+cynical smile, and said, when it was all over and in spite of everyone
+I had been received, that she had really enjoyed Patience for the first
+time, as Joan and Mary were too busy to prevent her from cheating._
+
+_How are you and dear old Alan getting on? Of course you can read him
+this letter. I’ve not written to him because I fancy he won’t be very
+much interested. Forgive me that I did not take you into my confidence
+beforehand, but I feared a controversy with a real historian about the
+continuity of the Anglican church._
+
+_My love to you both at Oxford._
+
+_Your affectionate_
+_Maud Ross._
+
+“Great scott!” Michael exclaimed, as he finished the letter. “Alan!
+could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that Mrs. Ross, the
+most inveterate Whig and Roundhead and Orange bigot, at least whenever
+she used to argue with me, would have gone over?”
+
+“What do you mean?” Alan asked, sinking slowly to earth from his
+Platonic _ovpavos_. “Gone over where?”
+
+“To Rome—become a Roman Catholic.”
+
+“Who?” gasped Alan, staggered now more than Michael. “Mrs. Ross—Aunt
+Maud?”
+
+“It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard,” said Michael.
+“She—and Kenneth,” he added rather maliciously, seeing that Alan’s
+Britannic prejudice was violently aroused. “I’ll read you her letter.”
+
+Plato was shut up for the evening before Michael was halfway through,
+and almost before the last sentence had been read, Alan’s wrath
+exploded.
+
+“It’s all very fine for her to laugh like that at Joan and Mary and
+Nancy,” he said, coloring hotly. “But they were absolutely right, and
+Mrs. Ross—I mean Aunt Maud——”
+
+“I was afraid you were going to disown the relationship,” Michael
+laughed.
+
+“Aunt Maud is absolutely wrong. Why, my uncle would have been furious.
+Even if _she_ became a Catholic she had no business to take Kenneth
+with her. The more I think of it—you know, it really is a bit thick.”
+
+“Why do you object?” Michael asked curiously. “I never knew you thought
+about religion at all, except so far as occasionally to escort your
+mother politely to Matins, and that was after all to oblige her more
+than God. Besides, you’re reading Greats, and I always thought that the
+Greats people in their fourth year abstained from anything like a
+definite opinion for fear of losing their First.”
+
+“I may not have a definite opinion about Christianity,” said Alan. “But
+Catholicism is ridiculous, anyway—it doesn’t suit English people.”
+
+“There you’re treading on the heels of the School of Modern History
+which you affect to despise. You really don’t know, if I may say so,
+what could or could not suit the English people unless you know what
+has or has not suited them.”
+
+“Why don’t you become a Catholic yourself,” challenged Alan, “if you’re
+so keen on them?”
+
+“For a logician,” said Michael, “your conclusion is bad, being entirely
+unrelated to any of our premises. Secondly, were I inclined to label
+myself as anything, I should be disposed to label myself as a Catholic
+already.”
+
+“Oh, I know that affectation!” scoffed Alan.
+
+“Well, the net result of our commentary is that you, like everybody
+else, object to Mrs. Ross changing her opinions, because you don’t like
+it. Her position is negligible, the springs of action being religious.
+Now if my mother went over to Rome I should be rather bucked on her
+account.”
+
+“My dear chap, if you don’t mind my saying so,” suggested Alan as
+apologetically as his outraged conventionality would allow, “your
+mother has always been rather given to—er—all sorts of new cults, and
+it wouldn’t be so—er—noticeable in her case. But supposing Stella——”
+
+Michael looked at him sharply.
+
+“Supposing Stella did?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, of course she’s artistic and she’s traveled and—oh, well, I don’t
+know—Stella’s different.”
+
+At any rate, thought Michael, he was still in love with Stella. She was
+evidently beyond criticism.
+
+“You needn’t worry,” said Michael. “I don’t think she ever will.”
+
+“You didn’t think Aunt Maud ever would,” Alan pointed out.
+
+“And, great scott, it’s still absolutely incredible,” Michael murmured.
+
+Although in the face of Alan’s prejudice Michael had felt very strongly
+that Mrs. Ross had done well by her change of communion, or rather by
+her submission to a communion, for he never could remember her as
+perfervid in favor of any before, at the same time to himself he rather
+regretted the step, since it destroyed for him that idea he had kept of
+her as one who stood gravely holding the balance. He dreaded a little
+the effect upon her of a sudden plunge into Catholicism, just as he had
+felt uneasy when eight or nine years ago Alan had first propounded the
+theory of his uncle being in love with her. Michael remembered how the
+suggestion had faintly shocked his conception of Miss Carthew. It was a
+little disconcerting to have to justify herself to Nancy, or indeed to
+anyone. It seemed to weaken her status. Moreover, his own
+deep-implanted notion of “going over to Rome” as the act of a weakling
+and a weather-cock was hard to allay. His own gray image of Pallas
+Athene seemed now to be decked with meretricious roses. He was curious
+to know what his mother would think about the news. Mrs. Fane received
+it as calmly as if he had told her Mrs. Ross had taken up palmistry; to
+her Catholicism was only one of the numberless fads that made life
+amusing. As for Stella, she did not comment on the news at all. She was
+too much occupied with the diversions of the autumn season. Yet Stella
+was careful to impress on Michael that her new mode of life had not
+been dictated by any experience in Vienna.
+
+“Don’t think I’m drowning care,” she wrote. “I made a damned fool of
+myself and luckily you’re almost the only person who knows anything
+about it. I’ve wiped it out as completely as a composition I’ve learned
+and played and done with. Really I find this pottering life that mother
+and I lead very good for my music. I’m managing to store up a reserve
+of feeling. The Schumann recitals were in some ways my best efforts so
+far. Just now I’m absolutely mad about dancing and fencing; and as
+mother’s life is entirely devoted to the theory of physical culture at
+this exact moment, we’re both happy.”
+
+Michael told Alan what Stella said about dancing and fencing, and he
+was therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one
+who really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a
+Sword club at Oxford.
+
+“Hadn’t you better join as well next term?” he suggested. “Rather good
+ecker, I fancy.”
+
+“Much better than golf,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to
+his resolve of last summer.
+
+For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he
+wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford
+time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town
+very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and
+graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had
+called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth
+or sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more
+desirable. Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate
+visit as to a tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill
+this vision of return he refused Guy Hazlewood’s invitation to Plashers
+Mead. It seemed to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him
+the joy of charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of
+England and that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.
+
+Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael’s mood, and there
+for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political
+economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen
+city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more
+ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist
+destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford
+menaced his action.
+
+Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to
+keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February
+was that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made
+Oxford melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that
+lured him forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the
+window of Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie
+awake infatuated.
+
+Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like
+nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon
+history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term
+surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looked back with
+astonishment at the amount of apposite reading accomplished in what
+seemed, now so cruelly swift were the hours, a mere week of rain.
+
+He obtained leave to stay up during the Easter vacation, and time might
+have seemed to stand still, but that Spring on these rathe mornings of
+wind and scudded blue sky was forward with her traceries, bringing with
+every morning green Summer visibly nearer. The urgency of departure
+less than the need for redoubled diligence in acquiring knowledge
+obsessed Michael all this April. Sitting in the bay-window at
+Ninety-nine on these luminous eves of Spring, he vexed himself with the
+thought of disturbing so soon his books, of violating with change the
+peaceful confusion achieved in two terms. The fancy haunted him that
+for the length of the Long Vacation 99 St. Giles would drowse under the
+landlady’s nick-nacks brought out to replace his withdrawn treasures;
+that nothing would keep immortal the memory of him and Alan save their
+photographs in frames of almost royal ostentation. Vaguely through his
+mind ran the notion of becoming a don, that forever he might stay here
+in Oxford, a contemplative intellectual cut-off from the great world.
+For a week the notion ripened swiftly, and Michael worked very hard in
+his determination to proceed from a First to the competition for a
+Fellowship. The notion ripened too swiftly, however, and fell with a
+plump, fit for nothing, when he suddenly realized he would have to stay
+on in Oxford alone, since of all his friends he could see not one who
+would be likely in the academic cloister to accompany his meditations.
+With a gesture of weary contempt Michael flung Stubbs into the corner,
+and resolved that, come what might in the History Schools, for what
+remained of his time at Oxford he would enjoy the proffered anodyne.
+
+After he had disowned his work, he took to wandering rather aimlessly
+about the streets; but their aspect, still unfrequented as yet by the
+familiar figures of term-time, made him feel sad. Guy Hazlewood was
+summoned by telegram from where at Plashers Mead he was presumed to
+have found abiding peace. He came bicycling in from the Witney road at
+noon of a blue April day so richly canopied with rolling clouds that
+the unmatured season took on some of June’s ampler dignity. After lunch
+they walked to Witham Woods, and Guy tried to persuade Michael to come
+to Wychford when the summer term was over. He was full of the plan for
+founding that lay monastery, that cloister for artists who wished
+between Oxford and the world a space unstressed by anything save
+ordered meditation. Michael was captured anew by the idea he had first
+propounded, and they talked gayly of its advantages, foreseeing, if the
+right people could be induced to come, a period of intense stimulation
+against a background of serenity. Then Guy began to talk of how day by
+day he was subduing words to rhyme and meter.
+
+“And you, what would you do?” he asked.
+
+At once Michael realized the futility of their scheme for him.
+
+“I should only dream away another year,” he said rather sadly, “and so
+if you don’t mind, old chap, I think I won’t join you.”
+
+“Rot!” Guy drawled. “I’ve got it all clear now in my mind. Up at seven.
+At breakfast we should take it in turns to read aloud great poetry.
+From eight to ten retire to our cells, and work at a set piece—a sonnet
+or six lines of prose. Ten to eleven a discussion on what we’d done.
+Eleven to one work at our own stuff. One o’clock lunch with some
+reading aloud. All the afternoon to do what we like. Dinner at seven
+with more reading aloud, and in the evening reading to ourselves. Not a
+word to be spoken after nine o’clock, and bed at eleven. After tea
+twice a week we might have academic discussions.”
+
+“It sounds perfect,” said Michael, “if you’re already equipped with the
+desire to be an artist, and what is more important if deep down in
+yourself you’re convinced you have the least justification for
+ambition. But, Guy, what a curious chap you are. You seem to have grown
+so much younger since you went down.”
+
+Guy laughed on a note of exultation that sounded strange indeed in one
+whom when still at Balliol Michael had esteemed as perhaps the most
+perfect contemporary example of the undergraduate tired by the
+consciousness of his own impeccable attitude. Guy had always possessed
+so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of
+seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friendship, of everything
+indeed except parlor rowdiness with cushions and sofas, that Michael
+was almost shocked to hear the elaborately wearied Guy declare
+boisterously:
+
+“My dear chap, that is the great secret. The moment you go down, you do
+grow younger.”
+
+He must be in love, thought Michael suddenly; and, so remote was love
+seeming to him just now, he blushed in the implication by his inner
+self of having penetrated uninvited the secret of a friend.
+
+Guy talked all tea-time of the project, and when they had eaten enough
+bread and honey, they set out for Oxford by way of Godstow. The
+generous sun was blanched by watery clouds. A shrewd wind had risen
+while they sat in the inn, and the primroses looked very wan in the
+shriveled twilight. Michael had Guy’s company for a week of long walks
+and snug evenings, but the real intimacy which he had expected would be
+consummated by this visit never effected itself somehow. Guy was more
+remote in his mood of communal ambitions than he was at Oxford, living
+his life of whimsical detachment. After he went back to Plashers Mead,
+Michael only missed the sound of his voice, and was not conscious of
+that more violent wrench when the intercourse of silence is broken.
+
+It happened that year St. Mark’s Eve fell upon a Sunday, and Michael,
+having been reading the poems of Keats nearly all the afternoon, was
+struck by the coincidence. Oxford on such an occasion was able to
+provide exactly the same sensation for him as Winchester had given to
+the poet. Michael sat in his window-seat looking out over the broad
+thoroughfare of St. Giles, listening to the patter and lisp of Sabbath
+footfalls, to the burden of the bells; and as he sat there with the
+city receding in the wake of his window, he was aware more poignantly
+than ever of how actually in a few weeks it would recede. The bells and
+the footsteps were quiet for a while: the sun had gone: it was the
+vesper stillness of evening prayer: slowly the printed page before him
+faded from recognition. Already the farther corners of the room were
+black, revealing from time to time, as a tongue of flame leaped up in
+the grate, the golden blazonries of the books on the walls. It was
+everywhere dark when the people came out of church, and the footsteps
+were again audible. Michael envied Keats the power which he had known
+to preserve forever that St. Mark’s Eve of eighty years ago in
+Winchester. It was exasperating that now already the footfalls were
+dying away, that already their sensation was evanescent, that he could
+not with the wand of poetry forbid time to disturb this quintessential
+hour of Oxford. Art alone could bewitch the present in the fashion of
+that enchantress in the old fairy tale who sent long ago a court to
+sleep.
+
+What was the use of reading history unless the alchemy of literature
+had transcended the facts by the immortal presentation of them? These
+charters and acts of parliament, these exchequer-rolls and raked-up
+records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of
+Maitland’s fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs’ ponderous
+conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends,
+the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through
+the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the
+same directness of divine exposition as faith itself.
+
+Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was
+incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to
+him, and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these
+moments that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical
+assurances of human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for
+explanation. After all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful
+statement the fact of a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why
+he had wrought it forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense
+of the fact: it could not resolve it in such a way that life would
+cease to be the baffling attempt it was on the individual’s part to
+restate to himself his personal dreams.
+
+Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it
+was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over
+all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave
+the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the
+breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not
+some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical
+condition?
+
+The sensation of St. Mark’s Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the
+chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the
+psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of
+what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a
+while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull
+down the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit
+thoroughfare, with all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness,
+the immutable city that neither mist nor modern architects could
+destroy, the immortal academy whose spirit would surely outdare the
+menace of these reforming Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither
+the cowardly betrayers of her civilization who, even now before the
+barbarian was at her gates, were cringing to him with offers to sell
+the half of her heritage of learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all
+about him in the darkness, wished he could be a member of Convocation
+and make a flaming speech in defense of compulsory Greek. That happened
+to be the proposed surrender to modern conditions which at the moment
+was agitating his conservative passion.
+
+“Thank heaven I live when I do,” he said to himself. “If it were 2000
+A.D., how much more miserable I should be.”
+
+He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against
+the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather
+particularly good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LAST TERM
+
+
+Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary’s
+tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed
+that he was not seen in the sun’s eye. This lapse of enthusiasm
+saddened him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision
+of speeding youth.
+
+The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that
+notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the
+other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He
+was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice
+to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no
+good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days
+were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came
+round, and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the
+achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his
+friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had
+counted upon this bump-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for
+this happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them,
+and he went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure
+Tommy Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not
+the bump-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.
+
+Tired of the howling and the horse-play, tired of the fretful
+fireworks, he turned into Venner’s just before ten o’clock.
+
+“Why aren’t you with your friends, making a noise?” asked Venner.
+
+“Ought to go home and work,” Michael explained.
+
+“But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to
+the fore on these occasions.”
+
+“Don’t feel like it, Venner.”
+
+“You mustn’t work too hard, you know,” said the old man, blinking
+kindly at him.
+
+“Oh, it’s not work, Venner. It’s age.”
+
+“Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They’re having a rare time to-night. I
+don’t expect the dons’ll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a
+bump-supper. Why ever don’t you go out and do your share?”
+
+Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in
+his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no
+good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of
+ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to
+the lodge.
+
+“Don’t forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt,” he warned
+the porter. “I don’t want to be hauled to-morrow morning for damage
+done in my absence.”
+
+The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.
+
+“There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing
+your egress, sir,” he said pompously, “and had it registered in my book
+before you spoke.”
+
+Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pass out into the
+High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary’s bridge, and when
+the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood
+for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the
+shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to
+time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman
+candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all
+as the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to
+listen to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people,
+small as emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He
+regretted sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St.
+Giles, roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning.
+It was melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy,
+but outside its participation; and presently he started to walk quickly
+back to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that
+before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.
+
+Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael.
+Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college
+authorities to make him covet a good class: to Alan it was more
+important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to
+try for the Home Civil Service.
+
+“However, I’ve given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a
+Second, I shall be jolly grateful,” he told Michael.
+
+The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be
+sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black
+clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the
+university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four
+days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring
+and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of
+tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had
+even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to
+the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus
+and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black
+coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to
+the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was
+all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended
+with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June
+evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before,
+spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to
+enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing
+seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever,
+and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.
+
+This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her
+graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was
+not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely
+poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about
+it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine
+autumn day.
+
+It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of
+Oxford dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew
+Arnold had said she did not need June for beauty’s heightening. That
+was true. Her beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with
+all the grave consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded
+more the loss of this infoliated calm than of any of the people who
+were enjoying its amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that
+next year would not form themselves, that forever indeed would be
+irremediably dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members
+scattered did not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that
+next year himself would have lost the assurance that he was an organic
+part of this tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was
+already broken up: the end of the third year had effected that. This
+farewell to Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the
+very first moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of
+a Fellowship. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have
+withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth
+in the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive,
+and worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course.
+Now, since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather
+opulently fine mocked his exit.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE LAST WEEK
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+
+
+Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae descendam, magnorum haud
+umquam indignus avorum. VIRGIL.
+
+For Fancy cannot live on real food: In youth she will despise familiar
+joy To dwell in mournful shades, as they grow real, Then buildeth she
+of joy her fair ideal. ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OSTIA DITIS
+
+
+When Michael reached the Oxford Music-hall he wondered why he had
+overspurred his fatigue to such a point. There was no possibility of
+pleasure here, and he would have done better to stay at home and cure
+with sleep what was after all a natural depression. It had been foolish
+to expect a sedative from contact with this unquiet assemblage. In the
+mass they had nothing but a mechanical existence, subject as they were
+to the brightness or dimness of the electrolier that regulated their
+attention. Michael did not bother to buy a program. From every podgy
+hand he could see dangling the lithograph of St. Mary’s tower with its
+glazed moonlight; and he was not sufficiently aware of the glib atom
+who bounced about the golden dazzle of the stage to trouble about his
+name. He mingled with the slow pace of the men and women on the
+promenade. They were going backward and forward like flies, meeting for
+a moment in a quick buzz of colloquy and continuing after a momentary
+pause their impersonal and recurrent progress. Michael was absorbed in
+this ceaseless ebb and flow of motion where the sidelong glances of the
+women, as they brushed his elbow in the passing crowd, gave him no
+conviction of an individual gaze. Once or twice he diverted his steps
+from the stream and tried to watch in a half-hearted way the
+performance; but as he leaned over the plush-covered barrier a woman
+would sidle up to him, and he would move away in angry embarrassment
+from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of
+popping corks and the chink of glasses, the whirr of the ventilating
+fans, the stentorophonic orchestra, the red-faced raucous atom on the
+stage combined to irritate him beyond further endurance; and he had
+just resolved to walk seven times up and down the promenade before he
+went home, when somebody cried in heartiest greeting over his shoulder,
+“Hullo, Bangs!”
+
+Michael turned and saw Drake, and so miserable had been the effect of
+the music-hall that he welcomed him almost effusively, although he had
+not seen him during four years and would probably like him rather less
+now than he had liked him at school.
+
+“_My_ lord! fancy seeing you again!” Drake effused.
+
+Michael found himself shaken warmly by the hand in support of the
+enthusiastic recognition. After the less accentuated cordiality of
+Oxford manners, it was strange to be standing like this with clasped
+hands in the middle of this undulatory crowd.
+
+“I _say_, Bangs, old man, we must have a drink on this.”
+
+Drake led the way to the bar and called authoritatively for two
+whiskies and a split Polly.
+
+“Quite a little-bit-of-fluffy-all-right,” he whispered to Michael,
+seeming to calculate with geometrical eyes the arcs and semicircles of
+the barmaid’s form. She with her nose in the air poured out the liquid,
+and Michael wondered how any of it went into the glass. As a matter of
+fact, most of it splashed onto the bar, whence Drake presently took his
+change all bedewed with alcohol, and, lifting his glass, wished Michael
+a jolly good chin-chin.
+
+“’D luck,” Michael muttered in response.
+
+“_My_ lord!” Drake began again. “Fancy meeting you of all people. And
+not a bit different. I said to myself: ‘I’m jiggered if that isn’t old
+Bangs,’ and—well, _my_ lord! but I was surprised. Do you often come out
+on the randan?”
+
+“Not very often,” Michael admitted. “I just happened to be alone
+to-night.”
+
+“Good for you, old sport. What have you been doing since you left
+school?”
+
+“I’m just down from Oxford,” Michael informed him.
+
+“Pretty good spree up there, eh?”
+
+“Oh, yes, rather,” said Michael.
+
+“Well, I had the chance to go,” said Drake. “But it wasn’t good enough.
+It’s against you in the City, you know. Waste of time really, except of
+course for a parson or a schoolmaster.”
+
+“Yes, I expect it would have been rather a waste of time for you,”
+Michael agreed.
+
+“Oh, rotten! So you moved from—where was it?—Carlington Road?”
+
+“Yes, we moved to Cheyne Walk.”
+
+“Let’s see. That’s in Hampstead, isn’t it?”
+
+“Well, it’s rather nearer the river,” suggested Michael. “Are you still
+in Trelawny Road?”
+
+“Yes, still in the same old hovel. My hat! Talking of Trelawny Road, it
+_is_ a small world. Who do you think I saw last week?”
+
+“Not Lily Haden?” Michael asked, in spite of a wish not to rise so
+quickly to Drake’s hook.
+
+“You’re right. I saw the fair Lily. But where do you think I saw her?
+Bangs, old boy, I tell you I’m not a fellow who’s easily surprised. But
+this knocked me. Of course, you’ll understand the Hadens flitted from
+Trelawny Road soon after you stopped calling. So who knows what’s
+happened since? I give you three guesses where I saw her.”
+
+“I hate riddles,” said Michael fretfully.
+
+“At the Orient,” said Drake solemnly. “The Orient Promenade. You could
+have knocked me down with a feather.”
+
+Michael stared at Drake, scarcely realizing the full implication of
+what he just announced. Then suddenly he grasped the horrible fact that
+revealed to him here in a music-hall carried a double force. His one
+instinct for the moment was to prevent Drake from knowing into what
+depths his news had plunged him.
+
+“Has she changed?” asked Michael, and could have kicked himself for the
+question.
+
+“Well, of course there was a good deal of powder,” said Drake. “I’m not
+easily shocked, but this gave me a turn. She was with a man, but even
+if she hadn’t been, I doubt if I’d have had the nerve to talk to her. I
+wouldn’t have known what to say. But, of course, you know, her mother
+was a bit rapid. That’s where it is. Have another drink. You’re looking
+quite upset.”
+
+Michael shook his head. He must go home.
+
+“Aren’t you coming down West a bit?” asked Drake, in disappointment.
+“The night’s still young.”
+
+But Michael was not to be persuaded.
+
+“Well, don’t let’s lose sight of each other now we’ve met. What’s your
+club? I’ve just joined the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You
+get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You ought to join. Or perhaps
+you’re already suited?”
+
+“I belong to the Bath,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, of course, if you’re suited, that’s all right. But any time you
+want to join the Primrose just let me know and I’ll put you up. The sub
+isn’t really very much. Guinea a year.”
+
+Michael thanked him and escaped as quickly as he could. Outside even in
+Oxford Street the air was full of summer, and the cool people
+sauntering under the sapphirine sky were as welcome to his vision as if
+he had waked from a fever. His head was throbbing with the heat of the
+music-hall, and the freshness of night-air was delicious. He called a
+hansom and told the driver to go to Blackfriars Bridge, and from there
+slowly along the Embankment to Cheyne Walk. For a time he leaned back
+in the cab, thinking of nothing, barely conscious of golden
+thoroughfares, of figures in silhouette against the glitter, and of the
+London roar rising and falling. Presently in the quiet of the shadowy
+cross-streets he began to appreciate what seemed the terrible
+importance to himself of Drake’s news.
+
+“It concerns me,” he began to reiterate aloud. “It concerns me—me—me.
+It’s useless to think that it doesn’t. It concerns me.”
+
+Then a more ghastly suggestion whispered itself. How should he ever
+know that he was not primarily responsible? The idea came over him with
+sickening intensity; and upright now he saw in the cracked mirrors of
+the cab a face blanched, a forehead clammy with sweat, and over his
+shoulder like a goblin the wraith of Lily. It was horrible to see so
+distorted that beautiful memory which time had etherealized out of a
+reality, until of her being nothing had endured but a tenuous image of
+earliest love. Now under the shock of her degradation he must be
+dragged back by this goblin to face his responsibility. He must behold
+again close at hand her shallow infidelity. He must assure himself of
+her worthlessness, hammer into his brain that from the beginning she
+had merely trifled with him. This must be established for the sake of
+his conscience. Where the devil was this driver going?
+
+“I told you down the Embankment,” Michael shouted through the trap.
+
+“I can’t go down the Embankment before I gets there, can I, sir?” the
+cabman asked reproachfully.
+
+Michael closed the trap. He was abashed when he perceived they were
+still only in Fleet Street. Why had he gone to The Oxford to-night? Why
+had he spoken to Drake? Why had he not stayed at Wychford? Why had he
+not returned to London with the others? Such regrets were valueless. It
+was foredoomed that Lily should come into his life again. Yet there was
+no reason why she should. There was no reason at all. Men could hardly
+be held responsible for the fall of women, unless themselves had upon
+their souls the guilt of betrayal or desertion. It was ridiculous to
+argue that he must bother because at eighteen he had loved her, because
+at eighteen he had thought she was worthy of being loved. No doubt the
+Orient Promenade was the sequel of kissing objectionable actors in the
+back gardens of West Kensington. Yet the Orient Promenade? That was a
+damnable place. The Orient Promenade? He remembered her kisses. Sitting
+in this cab, he was kissing her now. She had ridden for hours deep in
+his arms. Not Oxford could cure this relapse into the past. Every spire
+and every tower had crashed to ruins around his staid conceptions, so
+that they too presently fell away. Four years of plastic calm were
+unfashioned, and she was again beside him. Every passing lamp lit up
+her face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her
+place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered,
+pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What
+invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to
+turn his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He
+must remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money,
+plead with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the
+hansom kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor
+Road the onrushing street-lamps flung their balls of light with
+monotonous jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to
+find her. He would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the
+morning perhaps the problem would present itself in less difficult
+array.
+
+Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera,
+and suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day
+he could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so
+that he would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful
+engagement of Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony
+of their happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the
+window, staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the
+generous night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the
+reflected lamps in golden pagodas sprawled across the width of the
+river and where the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the
+bridge, nuzzled the shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around
+the patient barges at their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the
+surface of the stream, blurring the golden pagodas of light so that
+they jigged and glittered until the motion died away. Eastward in the
+sky over London hung a tawny stain that blotted out the stars.
+
+From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city
+stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.
+He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false
+vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the
+dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that
+London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion,
+that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his
+memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She
+was walking toward him in Kensington Gardens: not a contour of her
+delicate progress had been blunted by the rasp of time. Five years ago
+he had been the first to speak: now, must it be she who sometimes spoke
+first? Seventeen she had told him had been her age, and they had kissed
+in the dark midway between two lamps. No doubt she had been kissed
+before. In that household of Trelawny Road anything else was
+inconceivable. The gray streets of West Kensington in terrace upon
+terrace stretched before him, and now as he recalled their barren
+stones it seemed to him there was not one corner round which he might
+not expect to meet her face to face. “_Michael, why do you make me love
+you so?_” That was her voice. It was she who had asked him that
+question. Never before this moment had he realized the import of her
+demand. Now, when it was years too late to remedy, it came out of the
+past like an accusation. He had answered it then with closer kisses. He
+had released her then like a ruffled bird, secure that to-morrow and
+to-morrow and to-morrow she would nestle to his arms for cherishing.
+And now if he thought more of her life beneath that lurid stain he
+would go mad; if he conjured to himself the vision of her now—had not
+Drake said she was powdered and painted? To this had she come. And she
+was here in London. Last week she had been seen. It was no nightmare.
+It was real, horrible and real. He must go out again at once and find
+her. He must not sit dreaming here, staring at the silly Thames, the
+smooth and imperturbable Thames. He must plunge into that
+phantasmagoric city; he must fly from haunt to haunt; he must drag the
+depths of every small hell; he must find her to-night.
+
+Michael rose, but on the instant of his decision his mother and Stella
+drove up. Alan was no longer with them. He must have gone home to
+Richmond. How normal sounded their voices from the pavement below.
+Perhaps he would after all go down and greet them. They might wonder
+otherwise if something had happened. Looking at himself as he passed
+the mirror on his way down, he saw that he really was haggard. If he
+pleaded a headache, his countenance would bear him out. In the end he
+shouted to them over the balusters, and both of them wanted to come up
+with remedies. He would not let them. The last thing his mood desired
+was the tending of cool hands.
+
+“I’m only fagged out,” he told them. “I want a night’s sleep.”
+
+Yet he knew how hard it would be to fall asleep. His brain was on fire.
+Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut
+the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with
+the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt
+less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted
+half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He
+seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room
+surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects.
+The cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a
+sense that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had
+shaken him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that
+he had wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he
+could examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going,
+and the need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still
+all his impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear
+view of his attitude.
+
+He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses
+nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present
+she appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to
+bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the
+loss of beauty, of passion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so
+constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly
+incapable was Drake’s account to change his outward picture of her, he
+could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It
+seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night,
+she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years
+ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.
+
+Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prostitute in
+London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no
+account. Were they of no account? _C’est une douzaine de filles de
+joie._ When he read Manon this morning—how strange! this morning he had
+been reading Manon at Oxford—he was moved with pity for all poor light
+women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New
+Orleans nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because
+he was still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was
+because he had known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the
+damning weight that in the past she had said, “_Michael, why do you
+make me love you so?_” If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If
+there was shame, he was shameful. Others after him had sinned against
+her casually, counting their behavior no more than a speck of dust in
+the garbage of human emotion with which she was already smirched. He
+may not have seduced her, but he had sinned against her, because while
+loving her he had let her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He
+had trifled with her sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for
+blame was cowardly. It was that very youth which was the sin, because
+under society’s laws, whatever fine figure his love might seem to him
+to have cut, he should have known that it was a profitless love for a
+girl. He shared in the guilt. He partook of the shame. That was
+incontrovertible.
+
+Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not
+his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally
+incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said
+to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to
+marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott
+must always have deplored the position in which his friend’s mistress
+had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one’s mother. It
+seemed to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her,
+if Lady Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which
+he had soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our
+rigid divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable
+times in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen
+had cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been
+sinned against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say
+that the sinner had in the circumstances behaved very well, that so far
+as he was able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse
+his father’s initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not
+wash out his deliberate sin against—and who was she? Who was his
+mother? Valérie ... and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a
+clergyman ... a gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had
+exposed her to the calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved
+chivalrously at any rate by the standards of romance. But by what small
+margin had his own mother escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions
+of order and safety and custom tottered and reeled at such a thought.
+Surely such a realization doubled his obligation to atone by rescuing
+Lily, out of very thankfulness to God that his own mother had escaped
+the evil which had come to her. How wretchedly puny now seemed all his
+own repinings. All he had gained for his own character had been a vague
+dissatisfaction that he could not succeed to the earldom in order to
+prove the sanctity of good breeding. There had been no gratitude; there
+had been nothing but a hurt conceit. The horror of Drake’s news would
+at least cure him forever of that pettiness. Already he felt the
+strength that comes from the sight of a task that must be conquered. He
+had been moved that morning by the tale of Manon Lescaut. This tale of
+Lily was in comparison with that as an earthquake to the tunneling of a
+mole beneath a croquet-lawn. And now must he regard his father’s memory
+with condemnation? Must he hate him? He must hate him, indeed, unless
+by his own behavior he could feel he had accepted in substitution the
+burden of his father’s responsibility. And he had admired him so much
+dying out there in Africa for his country. He had resented his death
+for the sake of thousands more unworthy living comfortably at home.
+
+“All my standards are falling to pieces,” thought Michael. “Heroes and
+heroines are all turning into cardboard. If I don’t make some effort to
+be true to conviction, I shall turn to cardboard with the rest.”
+
+He began to pace the room in a tumult of intentions, vows and
+resolutions. Somehow before he slept he must shape his course. Four
+years had dreamed themselves away at Oxford. Unless all that education
+was as immaterial as the fogs of the Isis, it must provide him now with
+an indication of his duty. He had believed in Oxford, believed in her
+infallibility and glory, he had worshiped all she stood for. He had
+surrendered himself to her to make of him a gentleman, and unless these
+four years had been a delusion, his education must bear fruit now.
+
+Michael made up his mind suddenly, and as it seemed to him at the
+moment in possession of perfect calm and clarity of judgment, that he
+would marry Lily. He had accepted marriage as a law of his society.
+Well, then that law should be kept. He would test every article of the
+creed of an English gentleman. He would try in the fire of his purpose
+honor, pride, courtesy, and humility. All these must come to his aid,
+if he were going to marry a whore. Let him stab himself with the word.
+Let him not blind himself with euphemisms. His friends would have no
+euphemisms for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying
+Queenie Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How
+everybody would despise his folly. There would not be one friend who
+would understand. Least of all would his mother understand. It was a
+hard thing to do; and yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could
+be granted the grace of faith to sustain him. Principles were rather
+barren things to support the soul in a fight with convention.
+Principles of honor when so very personal were apt to crumple in the
+blast of society’s principles all fiercely kindled against him. Just
+now he had thought of the thankfulness he owed to God. Was it more than
+a figure of speech, an exaggerative personification under great emotion
+of what most people would call chance? At any rate, here was God in a
+cynical mood, and the divine justice of this retributive situation
+seemed to hint at something beyond mere luck. And if principles were
+strong enough to sustain him to the onset, faith might fire him to the
+coronation of his self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and
+calmly to marry Lily, and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if
+to hearten him he saw her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for
+his dreams the ways of night like a gazelle.
+
+Next morning when Michael woke, his resolve purified by sleep of
+feverish and hysterical promptings was fresh upon his pillow. In the
+fatigue and strain of the preceding night the adventure had caught a
+hectic glow of exaltation. Now, with the sparrows twittering and the
+milkman clanking and yodeling down Cheyne Walk and the young air
+puffing the curtains, his course acquired a simplicity in this lucid
+hour of deliberation, which made the future normal and even obvious.
+There was a great relief in this fresh following breeze after the
+becalmed inaction of Oxford: it seemed an augury of life’s importance
+that so immediately on top of the Oxford dream he should find such a
+complete dispersion of mist and so urgent a fairway before him. The
+task of finding Lily might easily occupy him for some time, for a life
+like hers would be made up of mutable appearances and sudden strange
+eclipses. It might well be a year before she was seen again on the
+Orient Promenade. Yet it was just as likely that he would find her at
+once. For a moment he caught his breath in thinking of the sudden
+plunge which that meeting would involve. He thought of all the
+arguments and all the dismay that the revelation of his purpose would
+set in motion. However, the marriage had to be. He had threshed it all
+out last night. But he might reasonably hope for a brief delay. Such a
+hope was no disloyalty to his determination.
+
+Stella was already at breakfast when he came downstairs. Michael raised
+his eyebrows in demand for news of her and Alan.
+
+“Mother was the sweetest thing imaginable,” she said. “And so we’re
+engaged. I wanted to come and talk to you last night, but I thought you
+would rather be left alone.”
+
+“I’m glad you’re happy,” he said gravely. “And I’m glad you’re safe.”
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise.
+
+“I’ve never been anything but safe,” she assured him.
+
+“Haven’t you?” he asked, looking at her and reproving himself for the
+thought that this gray-eyed sister of his could ever have exposed
+herself to the least likelihood of falling into Lily’s case. Yet there
+had been times when he had felt alarmed for her security and happiness.
+There had been that fellow Ayliffe, and more serious still there had
+been that unknown influence in Vienna. Invulnerable she might seem now
+in this cool dining-room on a summer morning, but there had been times
+when he had doubted.
+
+“What are you looking at?” she asked, flaunting her imperious
+boyishness in his solemn countenance.
+
+“You. Thinking you ought to be damned grateful.”
+
+“What for?”
+
+“Everything.”
+
+“You included, I suppose,” she laughed.
+
+Still it had been rather absurd, Michael thought, as he tapped his egg,
+to suppose there was anything in Stella’s temperament which could ever
+link her to Lily. Should he announce his quest for her approbation and
+sympathy? It was difficult somehow to begin. Already a subtle change
+had taken place in their relation to each other since she was engaged
+to Alan. Of course, his reserve was ridiculous, but he could not bring
+himself to break through now. Besides, in any case it were better to
+wait until he had found Lily again. It would all sound very
+pretentiously noble in anticipation, and though she would have every
+right to laugh, he did not want her to laugh. When he stood on the
+brink of marriage, they would none of them be able to laugh. There was
+a grim satisfaction in that.
+
+“When does mother suggest you should be married?” he asked.
+
+“We more or less settled November. Alan has given up the Civil Service.
+That’s my first piece of self-assertion. He’s coming for me this
+morning, and we’re going to lunch at Richmond.”
+
+“You’ve never met Mr. and Mrs. Merivale?”
+
+Stella shook her head.
+
+“Old Merivale’s a ripping old boy. Always making bad puns. And Mrs.
+Merivale’s a dear.”
+
+“They must both be perfect to have been the father and mother of Alan,”
+said Stella.
+
+“I shouldn’t get too excited over him,” Michael advised. “Or over
+yourself, either. You might give me the credit of knowing all about it
+long before either of you.”
+
+“Darling Michael,” she cried, bounding at him like a puppy.
+
+“When you’ve done making an ass of yourself you might chuck me a roll.”
+
+Alan arrived soon after breakfast, and he and Michael had a few minutes
+together, while Stella was getting ready to go out.
+
+“Were your people pleased?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, of course. Naturally the mater was a little nervous. She thought I
+seemed young. Talked a good deal about being a little boy only
+yesterday and that sort of rot.”
+
+“And your governor?”
+
+“He supposed I was determined to steal her,” said Alan, with a
+whimsical look of apology for the pun. “And having worked that off he
+spent the rest of the evening relishing his own joke.”
+
+Stella came down ready to start for Richmond. Both she and Alan were in
+white, and Michael said they looked like a couple of cricketers. But he
+envied them as he waved them farewell from the front door through which
+the warm day was deliciously invading the house. Their happiness
+sparkled on the air as visibly almost as the sunshine winking on the
+river. Those Richmond days belonged imperishably to him and Alan, yet
+for Alan this Saturday would triumph over all the others before.
+Michael turned back into the house rather sadly. The radiance of the
+morning had been dislustered by their departure, and Michael against
+his will had to be aware of the sense of exclusion which lovers leave
+in their wake. He waited indoors until his mother came down. She was
+solicitous for the headache of last night, and while he was with her he
+was not troubled by regrets for the break-up of established
+intercourse. He asked himself whether he should take her into his
+confidence by announcing the tale of Lily. Yet he did not wish to give
+her an impression of being more straightly bound to follow his quest
+than by the broadest rules of conduct. He felt it would be easier to
+explain when the marriage had taken place. How lucky for him that he
+was not financially dependent! That he was not, however, laid upon him
+the greater obligation. He could find, even if he wished one, no excuse
+for unfulfillment.
+
+Michael and his mother talked for a time of the engagement. She was
+still somewhat doubtful of Alan’s youth, when called upon to adapt
+itself to Stella’s temperament.
+
+“I think you’re wrong there,” said Michael. “Alan is rather a rigid
+person in fundamentals, you know, and his youth will give just that
+flexibility which Stella would demand. In another five years he would
+have been ensconced behind an Englishman’s strong but most unmanageable
+barrier of prejudice. I noticed so much his attitude toward Mrs. Ross
+when she was received into the Roman Church. I asked him what he would
+say if Stella went over. He maintained that she was different. I think
+that’s a sign he’ll be ready to apply imagination to her behavior.”
+
+“Yes, but I hope he won’t think that whatever she does is right,” Mrs.
+Fane objected.
+
+“Oh, no,” laughed Michael. “Imagination will always be rather an effort
+for Alan. Mother, would you be worried if I told you I wanted to go
+away for a while—I mean to say, go away and perhaps more or less not be
+heard of for a while?”
+
+“Abroad?” she asked.
+
+“Not necessarily abroad. I’m not going to involve myself in a dangerous
+undertaking; but I’m just sufficiently tired of my very comfortable
+existence to wish to make an experiment. I may be away quite a short
+time, but I might want to be away a few months. Will you promise me not
+to worry yourself over my movements? Some of the success of this
+undertaking will probably depend on a certain amount of freedom. You
+can understand, can’t you, that the claims of home, however delightful,
+might in certain circumstances be a problem?”
+
+“I suppose you’re taking steps to prepare my mind for something very
+extremely unpleasant,” she said.
+
+“Let’s ascribe it all to my incurably romantic temperament,” Michael
+suggested.
+
+“And I’m not to worry?”
+
+“No, please don’t.”
+
+“But when are you going away?”
+
+“I’m not really going away at all,” Michael explained. “But if I didn’t
+come back to dinner one night or even the next night, would you be
+content to know quite positively that I hadn’t been run over?”
+
+“You’re evidently going to be thoroughly eccentric. But I suppose,” she
+added wistfully, “that after your deserted childhood I can hardly
+expect you to be anything else. Yet it seems so comfortable here.” She
+was looking round at the chairs.
+
+“I’m not proposing to go to the North Pole, you know,” Michael said,
+“but I don’t want to obey dinner-gongs.”
+
+“Very noisy and abrupt,” she agreed.
+
+Soon they were discussing all kinds of substitutions.
+
+“Mother, what an extraordinary lot you know about noise,” Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+“Dearest boy, I’m on the committee of a society for the abatement of
+London street noises.”
+
+“So deeply occupied with reform,” he said, patting her hand.
+
+“One must do something,” she smiled.
+
+“I know,” he asserted. “And therefore you’ll let me ride this new
+hobby-horse I’m trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?”
+
+“You know perfectly well that you will anyhow,” said Mrs. Fane, shaking
+her head.
+
+Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this
+admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in
+order to assist at Castleton’s induction, and Michael walked along the
+Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.
+
+The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a
+state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at
+work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and
+at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from
+Tchaikovsky’s symphonies.
+
+“Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable,” said Castleton. “Do
+you know Cunningham?” He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.
+
+“Making it comfortable,” Michael repeated. “My first impression was
+just the reverse. I suppose it’s no good asking you people to give me
+lunch?”
+
+“Rather, of course,” Maurice declared. “Castleton, it’s your turn to
+buy lunch.”
+
+“One extraordinary thing, Michael,” said Castleton, “is the way in
+which Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing
+something. You’d think he kept a ledger of all our tasks.”
+
+“We can send old Mother Wadman if you’re tired,” Maurice offered.
+Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and
+Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.
+
+“I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up,” Maurice
+explained, “but we shall be three times as comfortable when he’s
+finished. He’s putting up divans.”
+
+Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton
+was at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over
+multitudinous roofs.
+
+“What a great rolling sense of human life they do give,” said Michael.
+“A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and
+all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there’s the
+lighthouse,” he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.
+
+“The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile
+for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church,” said Maurice. “We’re
+having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a
+secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What
+is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We
+two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I
+shall meet the girl who’s meant to share this with me. Then I really
+think I could work.”
+
+Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were
+not the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were
+married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be
+driven out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They
+would be suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and
+yet they would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The
+windows of the city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly
+as the stars. Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because
+to see her in a room like this would be to love her. How well he
+understood Maurice’s desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody
+wanted a girl to perfect Plashers Mead. Even Guy’s fairy child at
+Plashers Mead had seemed an intrusion; but here, to protect one’s
+loneliness against the overpowering contemplation of the life around,
+love was a necessity. And perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the
+ambition his friends had for his career. It might be so. Perhaps
+himself might find an inspiration in an attic high up over roofs. It
+might be. It might be so.
+
+“What are you thinking about?” Maurice asked.
+
+“I was thinking you were probably right,” said Michael.
+
+Maurice looked pleasantly surprised. He was rather accustomed to be
+snubbed when he told Michael of his desire for feminine companionship.
+
+“I don’t want to get married, you know,” he hastily added.
+
+“That would depend,” said Michael. “If one married what is called an
+impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to
+make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St.
+Thomas’ Church at half-past two.”
+
+“But why are you so keen about marriage?” Maurice demanded.
+
+“Well, it has certain advantages,” Michael pointed out.
+
+“Not among the sparrows,” said Maurice.
+
+“Most of all among the sparrows,” Michael contradicted. He was becoming
+absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to
+remove the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he
+proposed to take. They would be able to reënter the world after a long
+retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the
+opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the
+touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked
+something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he
+had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during
+that first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily
+had assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire
+for the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock
+of disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake’s account
+of her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news
+had merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.
+
+“It is really extraordinarily romantic up here,” Maurice exclaimed,
+bursting in upon his reverie.
+
+“Yes, I suppose that’s the reason,” Michael admitted.
+
+“The reason of what?” Maurice asked.
+
+“Of what I was thinking,” Michael said.
+
+Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and
+almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.
+
+Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their
+hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house
+still and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a
+hansom-cab, and told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+NEPTUNE CRESCENT
+
+
+The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to
+Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of
+it at Brother Aloysius’ behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his
+choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.
+The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a
+deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With
+the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had
+apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no
+farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his
+experience.
+
+That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery;
+that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gruesomeness, for
+ever since Mrs. Pearcey’s blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had
+held for him a macaber significance: of the hellish portals mystery and
+gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time
+tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed
+the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown
+London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy
+onward. Maple’s and Shoolbred’s, those outposts of shopping
+civilization, were left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of
+roguery began. He was not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so
+disquieting. It was probably a mere trick of contrast between present
+squalor and the greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim,
+but it had a nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot
+from the thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those
+bright yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he
+remembered them from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of
+them skirting the Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the
+pantomime. Even now their painted destinations affected him with a
+dismay that real people could be familiar with this sinister route.
+
+Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for
+years as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a
+tawdry and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others.
+Now the cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron
+railway bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town
+behind a huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered
+through the murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the
+pavement, past a wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of
+humanity chalked upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was
+Kentish Town. It lay to the left of this bridge that was the color of
+stale blood. Michael told the driver to stop for one moment, and he
+leaned forward over the apron of the cab to survey the cross-street of
+swarming feculent humanity that was presumably the entering highway. A
+train roared over the bridge; a piano organ gargled its tune; a
+wagon-load of iron girders drew near in a clanging tintamar of slow
+progress. Michael’s brief pause was enough to make such an impression
+of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his original conception of
+Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb. But just as the cab
+reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he caught sight of a
+slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their mucid
+heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the stucco
+was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid arabesques
+and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town a
+putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and noise and
+exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character
+allotted by his prefiguration.
+
+The Camden Road was, in contrast with what had gone before, a wide and
+easy thoroughfare which let in the blue summer sky; and it was not for
+some minutes that Michael began to notice what a queerness came from
+the terraces that branched off on either side. The suggestion these
+terraces could weave extended itself to the detached houses of the main
+road. In the gaps between them long parallelograms of gardens could be
+seen joining others even longer that led up to the backs of another
+road behind. Sometimes it seemed that fifty gardens at once were
+visible, circumscribed secretive pleasure-grounds in the amount of life
+they could conceal, the life that could prosper and decay beneath their
+arbors merely for that conspiracy of gloating windows. It was
+impossible not to speculate upon the quality of existence in these
+precise enclosures; and to this the chapels of obscure sects that the
+cab occasionally passed afforded an indication. To these arid little
+tabernacles the population stole out on Sunday mornings. There would be
+something devilish about these reunions. Upon these pinchbeck creeds
+their souls must surely starve, must slowly shrink to desiccated imps.
+Anything more spiritually malevolent than those announcements chalked
+upon the black notice-board of the advent of the hebdomadal messiah,
+the peregrine cleric, the sacred migrant was impossible to imagine.
+With what apostolic cleverness would he impose himself upon these
+people, and how after the gravid midday meal of the Sabbath he would
+sit in those green arbors like a horrible Chinese fum. The cabman broke
+in upon Michael’s fantastic depression by calling down through the trap
+that they were arrived at the Nag’s Head and what part of Seven Sisters
+Road did he want.
+
+Michael was disappointed by the Seven Sisters Road. It seemed to be
+merely the garish mart of a moderately poor suburban population. There
+was here nothing to support the diabolic legend with which under the
+suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the
+streets he had passed this afternoon there had been none less
+inferential of romance than this long shopping street.
+
+“What number do you want, sir?” the driver repeated.
+
+“Well, really I want rooms,” Michael explained. “Only this seems a bit
+noisy.”
+
+“Yes, it is a bit boisterous,” the cabman agreed.
+
+Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began
+to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it
+became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and
+the quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he
+wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate
+upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less
+surreptitious than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of
+the parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high
+into the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of
+Kentish Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy
+slum.
+
+“Try turning off to the left,” he called to the driver through the
+roof.
+
+The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost
+immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each
+street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and
+well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses’ declension
+from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.
+
+Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an
+unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy,
+guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal
+laurels. Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on
+account of the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with
+age, carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals
+and the iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery,
+helped the illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old
+sea-port. A card advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number
+Fourteen. Michael signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and
+rang the bell. The Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he
+could hear the whistle of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but
+the jingle of the horse’s harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat
+which was wheedling its lean body in and out of the railings of the
+falciform garden.
+
+Soon the landlady opened the door and stood inquisitively in the narrow
+passage. She was a woman of probably about thirty-five with stubby
+fingers; her skin was rather moist, but she had a good-natured
+expression, and perhaps when the curl-papers were taken out from her
+colorless hair, and when lace frills and common finery should soften
+her turgid outlines she would be handsome in a labored sort of way. The
+discussion with Mrs. Murdoch about her vacant rooms did not take long.
+Michael had made up his mind to any horrors of dirt and discomfort, and
+he was really pleasantly surprised by their appearance. As for Mrs.
+Murdoch, she was evidently too much interested to know what had brought
+Michael to her house to make any difficulties in the way of his
+accommodation.
+
+“Will you want dinner to-night?” she asked doubtfully.
+
+“No, but I’d like some tea now, if you can manage it; and I suppose you
+can let me have a latchkey?”
+
+“I’ve got the kettle on the boil at this moment. I was going out myself
+for the evening. Meeting my husband at the Horseshoe. There’s only one
+other lodger—Miss Carlyle. And she’s in the profession.”
+
+As Mrs. Murdoch made this announcement, she looked up at the
+fly-frecked ceiling, and Michael thought how extraordinarily light and
+meaningless her eyes were and how curiously dim and heavy this small
+sitting-room was against the brilliancy of the external summer.
+
+“Well, then, tea when I can get it,” said Mrs. Murdoch cheerfully. “And
+the double-u is just next your bedroom on the top floor. That’s all, I
+think.”
+
+She left him with a backward smile over her shoulder, as if she were
+loath to relinquish the study of this unusual visitor to Neptune
+Crescent.
+
+Michael when he was alone examined the chairs that were standing about
+the room as stiff as grenadiers in their red rep. He stripped them of
+their antimacassars and pulled the one that looked least uncomfortable
+close to the window. Outside, the yellow cat was still mewing; but the
+cab was gone and down the gray street that led to Neptune Crescent here
+and there sad-gaited wayfarers were visible. Two or three sparrows were
+cheeping in a battered laburnum, and all along the horizon the blue sky
+descending to the smoke of London had lost its color and had been
+turned to the similitude of tarnished metal. A luxurious mournfulness
+was in the view, and he leaned out over the sill scenting the reasty
+London air.
+
+It was with a sudden shock of conviction that Michael realized he was
+in Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually
+been in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him
+must have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those
+quixotic resolutions roused by Drake’s legend of Lily. He would not
+otherwise have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He
+would have waited to test the truth of Drake’s story. His first
+emotional despair had vanished with almost unaccountable ease.
+Certainly he wanted to be independent of the criticism of his friends
+until he had proved his purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this
+withdrawal to a desire for a secluded and unflinching contemplation of
+a life that from Cheyne Walk he could never focus. But ultimately he
+must acknowledge that his sojourn here, following as it did straight
+upon his entrance into the underworld through the disappointing portals
+of the Seven Sisters Road, was due to that ancient lure of the shades.
+This experience was foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in
+childish dreams to this day indelible. He could not remember any period
+in his life when the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for
+his fear that shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of
+most ordinary existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat
+desolately in the pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when
+on his lonely walks he had passed askance by Padua Terrace; the
+shouting of murders by newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all
+those dreadful intimations in childhood had procured his present idea
+of London. With the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they
+still persisted behind the outward presentation of a normal and
+comfortable procedure in the midst of money, friends, and well-bred
+conventions. Nor had that speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of
+childhood, the endowment by the young of material things with
+immaterial potencies. Phantoms which had slunk by as terrors invisible
+to the blind eyes of grown-ups had been abominably incarnate for him.
+Brother Aloysius had been something more than a mere personification,
+and that life which the ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below
+the surface, so easy was it to enter, had he not entered it that one
+night very easily?
+
+Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the
+phantoms and the realities of the underworld. There for him lay very
+easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They
+had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and
+academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the
+victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that
+he was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of
+philosophers. He would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion
+of evil. He would not allow himself to disparage the problem before him
+by any speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet
+Lily again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether
+gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he
+must not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her.
+Such an encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental
+appeal; at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and
+she would forever elude him, she with secret years within her
+experience. His instinct first to sever himself from his own world must
+have been infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now
+he found himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and
+scenting the reasty London air.
+
+And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or
+Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the
+evening’s end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into
+Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its
+red rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to
+this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a
+matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar’s Feast glowered above
+the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two thorny
+shells upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless
+dim circumnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the
+bulrushes in their conch of nacreous glass.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him
+admiringly.
+
+“Do you think you’ll be staying long?” she inquired.
+
+Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
+
+“No. No. I’m really very glad to let them. You’ll find it nice and
+quiet here. There’s only Miss Carlyle, who’s in the profession and
+comes in sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of
+course he hasn’t got his own shop now.”
+
+She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch’s
+loss of independence; so he said, “Of course not,” nodding wisely.
+
+“There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a
+servant-girl,” said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and
+shaking her curl-papers. “Yes. Though I don’t know why I’m telling you
+straight off as you might say. But there, I’m funny sometimes. If I
+take to anybody, there’s nothing I won’t do for them. Alf—that _is_ my
+old man—he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to
+get into conversation with him, you’d better not let on you know he
+used to have a shop of his own.”
+
+Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with
+his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr.
+Murdoch was working now.
+
+“In a chemist’s shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know,” she said,
+beaming archly. “It’s what you might call rather a funny place. Only he
+gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him.”
+
+Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch’s
+reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a
+postcard.
+
+“Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it’s in the kitchen
+dresser, that’s a sure thing. Perhaps you’d like to come down and see
+the kitchen?”
+
+Michael followed her downstairs. There were no basements in Neptune
+Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his
+sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above
+the kitchen.
+
+“Miss Carlyle has her room here,” said Mrs. Murdoch, pointing next door
+to the kitchen. “Nice and handy for her as she’s rather late sometimes.
+I hate to hear anybody go creaking upstairs, I do. It makes me
+nervous.”
+
+The kitchen was pleasant enough and looked out upon a narrow strip of
+garden full of coarse plants.
+
+“They’ll be very merry and bright, won’t they?” said Mrs. Murdoch,
+smiling encouragement at the greenery. “It’s wonderful what you can do
+nowadays for threepence.”
+
+Michael asked what they were.
+
+“Why, sunflowers, of course, only they want another month yet. I have
+them every year—yes. They’re less trouble than rabbits or chickens. Now
+where did I see that postcard?”
+
+She searched the various utensils, and at last discovered the postcard
+stuck behind a mutilated clock.
+
+“What _will_ they bring out next?” demanded Mrs. Murdoch, surveying it
+with affectionate approbation. “Pretty, I call it.”
+
+A pair of lovers in black plush were sitting enlaced beneath a pink
+frosted moon.
+
+“Just the thing, if you’re writing to your young lady,” said Mrs.
+Murdoch, offering it to Michael.
+
+He accepted it with many expressions of gratitude, but when he was in
+his own room he laughed very much at the idea of sending it to his
+mother in Cheyne Walk. However, as he must write and tell her he would
+not be home for some time, he decided to go out and buy both writing
+materials and unillustrated postcards. When he came back he found Mrs.
+Murdoch feathered for the evening’s entertainment. She gave him the
+latchkey, and from his window Michael watched her progress down Neptune
+Crescent. Just before her lavender dress disappeared behind the
+Portugal laurels she turned round and waved to him. He wondered what
+his mother would say if she knew from what curious corner of London the
+news of his withdrawal would reach her to-night.
+
+The house was very still, and the refulgence of the afternoon light
+streaming into the small room fused the raw colors to a fiery
+concordancy. Upon the silence sounded presently a birdlike fidgeting,
+and Michael going out onto the landing to discover what it was, caught
+to his surprise the upward glance of a thin little woman in untidy
+pink.
+
+“Hulloa!” she cried. “I never knew there was anybody in—you did give me
+a turn. I’ve only just woke up.”
+
+Michael explained the situation, and she seemed relieved.
+
+“I’ve been asleep all the afternoon,” she went on. “But it’s only
+natural in this hot weather to go to sleep in the afternoon if you
+don’t go out for a walk. Why don’t you come down and talk to me while I
+have some tea?”
+
+Michael accepted the invitation with a courtesy which he half suspected
+this peaked pink little creature considered diverting.
+
+“You’ll excuse the general untidiness,” she said. “But really in this
+weather anyone can’t bother to put their things away properly.”
+
+Michael assented, and looked round at the room. It certainly was
+untidy. The large bed was ruffled where she had been lying down, and
+the soiled copy of a novelette gave it a sort of stale slovenry. Over
+the foot hung an accumulation of pink clothes. On the chairs, too,
+there were clothes pink and white, and the door bulged with numberless
+skirts. Miss Carlyle herself wore a pink blouse whose front had escaped
+the constriction of a belt. Even her face was a flat unshaded pink, and
+her thin lips would scarcely have showed save that the powder round the
+edges was slightly caked. Yet there was nothing of pink’s freshness and
+pleasant crudity in the general effect. It was a tired, a frowsy pink
+like a fondant that has lain a long while in a confectioner’s window.
+
+“Take a chair and make yourself at home,” she invited him. “What’s your
+name?”
+
+He told her “Fane.”
+
+“You silly thing, you don’t suppose I’m going to call you Mr. Fane, do
+you? What’s your other name? Michael? That’s Irish, isn’t it? I used to
+know a fellow once called Micky Sullivan. I suppose they call you Micky
+at home.”
+
+He was afraid he was invariably known as Michael, and Miss Carlyle
+sighed at the stiff sort of a name it was.
+
+“Mine’s Poppy,” she volunteered. “That’s much more free and easy. Or I
+think so,” she added rather doubtfully, as Michael did not immediately
+celebrate its license by throwing pillows at her. “Are you really
+lodging here?” she went on. “You don’t look much like a pro.”
+
+Michael said that was so much the better, as he wasn’t one.
+
+“I’ve got you at last,” cried Poppy. “You’re a shop-walker at
+Russell’s.”
+
+He could not help laughing very much at this, and the queer pink room
+seemed to become more faded at the sound of his merriment. Poppy looked
+offended by the reception of her guess, and Michael hastened to restore
+her good temper by asking questions of her.
+
+“You’re on the stage, aren’t you?”
+
+“I usually get into panto,” she admitted.
+
+“Aren’t you acting now?”
+
+“Yes, I don’t think. You needn’t be funny.”
+
+“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
+
+“You mind your business,” she said bitterly. “And I’ll look after
+mine.”
+
+“There doesn’t seem to be anything very rude in asking if you’re acting
+now,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, shut up! As if you didn’t know.”
+
+“Know what?” he repeated.
+
+He looked so genuinely puzzled that Poppy seemed to make an effort to
+overcome her suspicion of his mockery.
+
+“It’s five years since I went on the game,” she said.
+
+Michael blushed violently, partly on her account, partly for his own
+stupidity, and explained that Mrs. Murdoch had told him she was in the
+profession.
+
+“Well, you didn’t expect her to say ‘my ground-floor front’s a gay
+woman,’ did you?”
+
+He agreed that such an abrupt characterization would have surprised
+him.
+
+“Well, I’m going out to get dinner now,” she announced.
+
+“Why don’t you dine with me?” Michael suggested.
+
+She looked at him doubtfully.
+
+“Can you afford it?”
+
+“I think I could manage it.”
+
+“Because if we _are_ in the same house that doesn’t say you’ve got to
+pay my board, does it?” she demanded proudly.
+
+“Once in a way won’t matter,” Michael insisted. “And we might go on to
+a music hall afterward.”
+
+“Yes, we might, if I hadn’t got to pay the woman who’s looking after my
+kid for some clothes she’s made for him,” said Poppy. “And sitting with
+you at the Holborn all night won’t do that. No, you can give me dinner
+and then I’ll P.O. I’m not going to put on a frock even for you,
+because I never get off only when I’m in a coat and skirt.”
+
+Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.
+
+“Go on, sit down. As you’re going to take me out to dinner, you can
+talk to me while I dress as a reward.”
+
+In this faded pink room where the sun was by now shining with a
+splendor that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and
+overblown, Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape
+as it were from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters
+to be written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she
+was ready.
+
+Michael’s own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor
+front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this
+moment such a room as Poppy’s. It could not be. It could not be. And he
+realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury,
+craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors.
+This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of
+the underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature
+downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque
+with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course
+her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive
+plainness, her schoolma’am air, her decent unobtrusiveness. Yet she was
+plucky, and she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her
+child. There was, too, something admirable in the candor with which she
+had treated him. There was something friendly and birdlike about her,
+and he thought how when he had been first aware of her movements below
+he had compared them to a bird’s fidgeting. There was something really
+appealing about the gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at
+her description; and then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed
+her to forego what might after all have been for her a pleasant evening
+because she must pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after
+her child. He could so easily have offered to give her the money. No
+matter, he could make amends at once and offer it to her now. It would
+be doubtless an unusual experience for her to come into contact with
+someone whose rule of life was not dictated by the brutal self-interest
+of those with whom her commerce must generally lie. She would serve to
+bring to the proof his theory that so much of the world’s beastliness
+could be cleansed by having recourse to the natural instincts of decent
+behavior without any grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael
+did feel very philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy’s
+summons.
+
+“I say,” he began at once. “It was stupid of me just now not to suggest
+that I should find the money for your kid’s clothes. Look here, we’ll
+go to the Holborn after dinner and——” he paused. He felt a delicacy in
+inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her
+company—“and—er—I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?”
+
+“I say, kiddie, you’re a sport,” she said. “Only look here, don’t go
+and spend more than what you can afford. It isn’t as if we’d met by
+chance, as you might say.”
+
+“Oh no, I can afford two pounds,” Michael assured her.
+
+“Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for
+four shillings. That’s not too much, is it?”
+
+He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he
+stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds
+was not offered for hire.
+
+“But, kiddie, I can’t bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge
+here. These aren’t gay rooms.”
+
+“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” said Michael. “The money is a
+present.”
+
+“Oh, is it?” she flamed out. “Then you can keep your dirty money.
+Thanks, I haven’t come down to charity. Not yet. If I’m not good enough
+for you, you can keep your money. I believe you’re nothing more than a
+dirty ponce. I’ve gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I’m
+not going to begin now. That’s very certain. Are you going out or am I
+going out? Because I don’t want to be seen with you. You and your
+presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I
+went home with you.”
+
+Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front
+door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the
+fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange
+lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the
+houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather
+the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that passage where
+the little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder
+with the mean and vicious passions they now veiled. Very soon, however,
+his disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there
+was not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively
+conceal secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous
+toadstools in rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must
+flourish here. It was foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a
+half-aroused curiosity had taken its place, and Michael regretted that
+he had not stayed to hear what more she would have said. How far she
+had been from appreciating the motives that prompted his offer of
+money. Poppy’s injustice began to depress him. He felt, walking
+southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of her failure to be grateful
+from his point of view. It hurt him to find sincerity so lightly
+regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity which had been
+touched. _Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned._ The ability to
+apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave Michael a
+great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a statement,
+and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He
+experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great
+commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy
+had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He
+hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could
+not expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She
+could have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could
+she grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical
+expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not
+impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her.
+Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his
+tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only
+an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside.
+Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved
+in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck
+him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the
+power to effect.
+
+On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the
+front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the
+evening.
+
+At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance
+of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the
+landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt
+stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and
+top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern
+behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening
+with much amusement to the people round him. He liked to hear each
+petty host assure his guests that he had brought them to a place of
+which very few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of
+this assurance stared at one another like conspirators.
+
+Just before nine o’clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of
+Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding
+all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade.
+He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from
+Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its
+approach his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her
+suddenly without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of
+himself. However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who
+resembled her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving
+Promenade whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the
+crowd. That on the stage a lady of the haute école was with a curious
+wooden rapidity putting a white horse through a number of tricks did
+not concern his attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was
+the performance. Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair
+than that weary heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there
+was an unity of effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At
+The Oxford the whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was
+a real exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days.
+Indeed, so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the
+frankness almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of
+profiting by the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be
+drugged into perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.
+
+Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled
+tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of shimmering green plush, the dim
+foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding
+circumambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the
+barrier, the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones—there was nothing
+that spoiled the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the
+more nearly was the effect achieved. At intervals women whose
+close-fitting dresses seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by:
+and generally the people eyed one another with the indifferent frozen
+eyes of swimming fish. There was indeed something cold-blooded in the
+very atmosphere, and it was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of
+women that he was expecting Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able
+to imagine her in the luxury of the Orient than sleeping down the sun
+over a crumpled novelette in such a room as Poppy’s in Camden Town.
+
+The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was
+restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the assurance that
+he had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the
+shock he knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The
+evening wore itself away. The lady of the haute école was succeeded by
+a band of Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by
+half a dozen cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its
+mechanical course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it
+was almost possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope’s shifting
+squares and lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the
+ballet and whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down
+there on the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a
+history, so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the
+Promenade where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to
+account for her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life.
+The ballet was over, and he passed out into the streets.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without
+finding Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the
+heart of London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the
+merest chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet
+he began to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by
+some enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as
+if his friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in
+that circumambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal
+motion. They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward
+and forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at
+any of the restaurants or cafés to which he went after the theater. By
+the intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself
+off from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often
+thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had
+seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had
+never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen
+the night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to
+Lily; and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a
+hat, perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never
+meeting the wearer’s glance.
+
+He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their
+unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not
+meet in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in
+avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it
+was possible to seclude one’s self from the claims of human
+intercourse. He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out
+over the sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream
+to the distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which
+every afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books
+indeed that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to
+resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed
+their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.
+Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch
+him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.
+
+“I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do,” she affirmed.
+“Doesn’t it tire your eyes?”
+
+Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book,
+looking sideways at it like a fat goose.
+
+“Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn’t
+it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This
+_is_ Tuesday, isn’t it?”
+
+After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch
+decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.
+
+Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could
+scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a
+preconception of an elderly chemist reduced by misfortune and misdeeds
+to the status of one of those individuals who with a discreet manner
+somewhere between a family doctor and a grocer place themselves at the
+service of the public in an atmosphere of antiseptics. Mr. Murdoch was
+not at all like this. He was a squat swarthy man with one very dark eye
+that stared fixedly regardless of the expression of its fellow. Michael
+could not make up his mind whether this eye were blind or not. He
+rather hoped it was, but in any case its fierce blankness was very
+disconcerting. Conversation between Michael and Mr. Murdoch was not
+very lively, and Mrs. Murdoch’s adjutant inquisitiveness made Michael
+the more monosyllabic whenever her husband did commit himself to a
+direct inquiry.
+
+“I looked for you in the Horseshoe the other evening,” said Michael
+finally, at a loss how in any other way to give Mr. Murdoch an
+impression that he took the faintest interest in his existence.
+
+“In the Horseshoe?” repeated Mr. Murdoch, in surprise. “I never go to
+the Horseshoe only when a friend asks me in to have one.”
+
+Michael saw Mrs. Murdoch frowning at him, and, perceiving that there
+was a reason why her husband must not suppose she had been to the
+Horseshoe on the evening of his arrival, he said he had gathered
+somehow, he did not exactly know where or why or when, that Mr. Murdoch
+was often to be found in the Horseshoe. He wished this awkward and
+unpleasant man would leave him and cock his rolling eye anywhere else
+but in his room.
+
+“Bit of a reader, aren’t you?” inquired the chemist.
+
+Michael admitted he read a good deal.
+
+“Ever read Jibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” continued
+the chemist.
+
+“Some of it.”
+
+Mr. Murdoch said in that case it was just as well he hadn’t bought some
+volumes he’d seen on a barrow in the Caledonian Road.
+
+“Four-and-six, with two books out in the middle,” he proclaimed.
+
+Michael could merely nod his comment, though he racked his brains to
+think of some remark that would betray a vestige of cordiality. Mr.
+Murdoch got up to retire to the kitchen. He evidently did not find his
+tenant sympathetic. Outside on the landing Michael heard him say to his
+wife: “Stuck up la-di-da sort of a ——, isn’t he?”
+
+Presently the wife came up again.
+
+“How did you like my old man?”
+
+“Oh, very much.”
+
+“Did you notice his eye?”
+
+Michael said he had noticed something.
+
+“His brother Fred did that for him.”
+
+She spoke proudly, as if Fred’s act had been a humane achievement.
+“When they were boys,” she explained. “It gives him a funny look. I
+remember when I first met him it gave me the creeps, but I don’t notice
+it really now. Would you believe he couldn’t see an elephant with it?”
+
+“I wondered if it were blind,” said Michael.
+
+“Blind as a leg of mutton,” said Mrs. Murdoch, and still there lingered
+in her accents a trace of pride. Then suddenly her demeanor changed and
+there crept over her countenance what Michael was bound to believe to
+be an expression of coyness.
+
+“Don’t say anything more to Alf about the Horseshoe. You see, I only
+gave you the idea I was meeting him, because I didn’t really know you
+very well at the time. Of course really I’d gone to see my sister. No,
+without a joke, I was spending the evening with a gentleman friend.”
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment.
+
+“My old man wouldn’t half knock me about, if he had the least
+suspicion. But it’s someone I knew before I was married, and that makes
+a difference, doesn’t it?”
+
+“Does your husband go out with lady friends he knew before he was
+married?” Michael asked, and wondered if Mrs. Murdoch would see an
+implied reproof.
+
+“What?” she shrilled. “I’d like to catch him nosing after another
+woman. He wouldn’t see a hundred elephants before I’d done with him.
+I’d show him.”
+
+“But why should you have freedom and not he?” Michael asked.
+
+“Never mind about him. You let him try. You see what he’d get.”
+
+Michael did not think the argument could be carried on very profitably.
+So he showed signs of wanting to return to his book, and Mrs. Murdoch
+retired. What extraordinary standards she had, and how bitterly she was
+prepared to defend a convention, for after all in such a marriage the
+infidelity of the husband was nothing but a conventional offense: she
+obviously had no affection for him. The point of view became very
+topsyturvy in Neptune Crescent, Michael decided.
+
+On the last evening of the fortnight during which he had regularly
+visited the Orient, Michael went straight back to Camden Town without
+waiting to scan the cafés and restaurants until half-past twelve as he
+usually had. This abode in Neptune Crescent was empty, and as always
+when that was the case the personality of the house was very vivid upon
+his imagination. As he turned up the gas-jet in the hall, the cramped
+interior with its fusty smell and its thread-bare staircarpet
+disappearing into the upper gloom round the corner seemed to be
+dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of
+having the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent
+impulse. For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the
+ineffable depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to
+glance at every one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the
+exaggerated defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to
+lock and double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two
+clanking chains. He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and
+Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the
+summer night, while himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back
+garden and went climbing over garden wall and garden wall to abandon
+this curious mixture of salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and
+solidity, this quite indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way
+strangely cozy house. He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor
+front. He peered cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed.
+The gas-jet was glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue
+flame, but the light from the passage showed all her clothes still
+strewn about. From the open door came out the faint perfume of stale
+scent which mingled with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle
+expression of the house’s personality. He closed the door gently. In
+the silence it seemed almost as if the least percussion would rouse the
+very clothes from their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning
+another pinhead of gas, and the light from the passage reaching here
+very dimly was only just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly
+sheen and to show the mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the
+luminous face of the clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to
+unreality, and when Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering
+his room, even they were scarcely sound guarantors of his own
+actuality. He had a certain queasiness in opening the door of the
+Murdochs’ bedroom, and he was rather glad when he was confronted here
+by a black void whose secrecy he did not feel tempted to violate. With
+three or four books under his arm he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned
+out of the window two cats yawled and fizzed at one another among the
+laurels, and then scampered away into muteness. From a scintillation of
+colored lights upon the horizon he could hear the scrannel sounds of
+the railway come thinly along the night air. Nothing else broke the
+silence of the nocturnal streets. Michael felt tired, and he was
+disappointed by his failure to find Lily. Just as he was dozing off, he
+remembered that his Viva Voce at Oxford was due some time this week. He
+must go back to Cheyne Walk to-morrow, and on this resolution he fell
+asleep.
+
+Michael woke up with a start and instantly became aware that the house
+was full of discordant sounds. For a minute or two he lay motionless
+trying to connect the noise with the present, trying to separate his
+faculties from the inspissate air that seemed to be throttling them. He
+was not yet free from the confusion of sleep, and for a few seconds he
+could only perceive the sound almost visibly churning the clotted
+darkness that was stifling him. Gradually the clamor resolved itself
+into the voices of Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy at the pitch of
+excitement. Nothing was intelligible except the oaths that came up in a
+series of explosions detached from the main din. He got out of bed and
+lit the gas, saw that it was one o’clock, dressed himself roughly, and
+opened the door of his room.
+
+“Yes, my lad, you thought you was very clever.”
+
+“No, I didn’t think I was clever. Now then.”
+
+“Yes! You can spend all your money on that muck. The sauce of it. In a
+hansom!”
+
+Here Poppy’s voice came in with a malignant piping sound.
+
+“Muck yourself, you dirty old case-keeper!”
+
+“You call me a case-keeper? What men have I ever let you bring back
+here?”
+
+Mrs. Murdoch’s voice was swollen with wrath.
+
+“You don’t know how many men I haven’t brought back. So now, you great
+ugly mare!” Poppy howled.
+
+“The only fellow you’ve ever brought to my house is that one-eyed ——
+who calls himself my husband. Mister _Mur_doch! Mis-ter _Murdoch!_ And
+you get out of my house in the streets where you belong. I don’t want
+no two-and-fours in _my_ house.”
+
+“Hark at her!” Poppy cried, in a horrible screaming laugh. “Why don’t
+you go back on the streets yourself? Why, I can remember you as one of
+the old fourpenny Hasbeens when I was still dressmaking; a dirty
+drunken old teat that couldn’t have got off with a blind tramp.”
+
+Michael punctuated each fresh taunt and accusation with a step forward
+to interfere; and every time he held himself back, pondering the
+impossibility of extracting from these charges and countercharges any
+logical assignment of blame. It made him laugh to think how
+extraordinarily in the wrong they all three were and at the same time
+how they were all perfectly convinced they were right. The only factor
+left out of account was Mrs. Murdoch’s own behavior. He wondered rather
+what effect that gentleman friend would produce on the husband. He
+decided that he had better go back to bed until the racket subsided.
+Then, just as he was turning away in the midst of an outpouring of
+vileness far more foul than anything uttered so far, he heard what
+sounded like a blow. That of course could not be tolerated, and he
+descended to intervene.
+
+The passage was the field of battle, and the narrow space seemed to
+give not only an added virulence to the fight, but also an added
+grotesquery. When Michael arrived at the head of the staircase, Alf had
+pinned his wife to the wall and was shouting to Poppy over his shoulder
+to get back into her own room. Poppy would go halfway, but always a new
+insult would occur to her, and she would return to fling it at Mrs.
+Murdoch, stabbing the while into its place again a hatpin which during
+her retreats she always half withdrew.
+
+As for Mrs. Murdoch, she was by now weeping hysterically and
+occasionally making sudden forward plunges that collapsed like jelly.
+
+Michael paused at the head of the stairs, wondering what to say. It
+seemed to him really rather a good thing that Alf was restraining his
+wife. It would be extremely unpleasant to have to separate the two
+women if they closed with each other. He had almost decided to retire
+upstairs again, when Poppy caught sight of him and at once turned her
+abuse in his direction.
+
+“What’s it got to do with you?” she screamed. “What’s the good in you
+standing gaping there? We all know what _you_ are. We all know what
+she’s always going up to _your_ room for.”
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was heaving and puffing and groaning, and while Alf held
+her, his rolling eye with fierce and meaningless stare nearly made
+Michael laugh. However, he managed to be serious, and gravely advised
+Poppy to go to bed.
+
+“Don’t you dare try to order me about!” she shrieked. “Keep your
+poncified ways for that fat old maggot which her husband can’t hardly
+hold, and I don’t blame him. She’s about as big as a omnibus.”
+
+“Oh, you wicked woman,” sobbed Mrs. Murdoch. “Oh, you mean, hateful
+snake-in-the-grass! Oh, you filth!”
+
+“Hold your jaw,” commanded Alf. “If you don’t want me to punch into
+you.”
+
+“All day she’s in his room. Let him stand up and deny it if he can, the
+dirty tyke. Why don’t you punch into _him,_ Alf?” Poppy screamed.
+
+Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.
+
+“Let _me_ look after Mrs. Murdoch I _don’t_ think!” shouted Poppy. “And
+be a man, even if you can’t keep your old woman out of the lodger’s
+room. —— ——! I wouldn’t half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man, the ——
+——!”
+
+It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being
+nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman’s thin magenta
+lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable.
+When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to
+hold on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.
+
+Michael’s laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch
+spat in her husband’s face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip
+upon her shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other.
+Michael, though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs
+to part them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned
+and attacked him. The hat-stand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat
+slid up and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and
+dust and spirituous breath.
+
+At last Michael managed to secure Poppy’s thin twitching arms and to
+hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and
+he was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began
+fecklessly to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf,
+who had gone to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case
+a policeman’s bull’s-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared
+in the doorway.
+
+“What a smell of gas!” he exclaimed nervously.
+
+There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in
+her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead
+pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was
+rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried
+to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked
+the door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended
+upon the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the
+hat-stand, while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of
+tumbled hair.
+
+Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very
+cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed
+eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers:
+of last night’s tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming
+countenance.
+
+“Quite a set-out we had last night, didn’t we?” she said expansively.
+“But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with
+my old man in a hansom cab. There’s a nice game to get up to. I was
+bound to let her have it. I couldn’t have held myself in.”
+
+“I suppose you’ll get rid of her now,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, well, she’s not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She
+was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I’d had one or two myself.
+Oh, well, it wouldn’t do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment
+in this life?”
+
+She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his
+standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy
+feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and
+fears. But to-day he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune
+Crescent.
+
+“It seems such a pity,” she said. “And just as I was beginning to get
+used to your ways. Oh, well, we’ll meet again some day, I hope, this
+side of the cemetery.”
+
+Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night,
+but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away
+from Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small
+doorway looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also
+waved rather maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose
+pressed against the panes of the ground-floor front.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CAFÉ D’ORANGE
+
+
+Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding
+that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected
+she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune
+Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not
+subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life,
+the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate
+and gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the
+tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became
+waxily pink under his stare.
+
+“Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir.” It was as if she were rebuking
+his observation.
+
+His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.
+
+“Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you
+to send me those postcards.”
+
+If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her
+about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did
+not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have
+seemed to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other
+people was a confidence he always resented.
+
+“Stella and Alan are in the studio,” she told him.
+
+They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said
+he would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of
+pallid grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could
+not keep back the thought of how utterly Alan’s company had replaced
+his own. Not that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted;
+but a period of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were
+being rather ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously
+glad to see him that the fleck of bitterness vanished immediately, and
+he was at their service.
+
+“Where have you been?” Stella demanded. “We go to Richmond. We send
+frantic wires to you to join us on the river, and when we come back
+you’re gone. Where have you been?”
+
+“I’ve been away,” Michael answered, with a certain amount of
+embarrassment.
+
+“My dear old Michael, we never supposed you’d been hiding in the
+cistern-cupboard for a fortnight,” said Stella, striking three chords
+of cheerful contempt.
+
+“I believe he went back to Oxford,” suggested Alan.
+
+“I am going up to-morrow,” Michael said. “When is your Viva?”
+
+“Next week. Where are you going to stay?”
+
+“In college, if I can get hold of a room.”
+
+“Bother Oxford,” interrupted Stella. “We want to know where you’ve been
+this fortnight.”
+
+“You do,” Alan corrected.
+
+“I’ll tell you both later on,” Michael volunteered. “Just at present I
+suppose you won’t grudge me a secret. People who are engaged to be
+married should show a very special altruism toward people who are not.”
+
+“Michael, I will not have you being important and carrying about a
+secret with you,” Stella declared.
+
+“You can manage either me or Alan,” Michael offered. “But you simply
+shall not manage both of us. Personally, I recommend you to break-in
+Alan.”
+
+With evasive banter he succeeded in postponing the revelation of what
+he was, as Stella said, up to.
+
+“We’re going in for Herefords,” Alan suddenly announced without
+consideration for the trend of the talk. “You know. Those white-faced
+chaps.”
+
+Michael looked at him in astonishment.
+
+“I was thinking about this place of Stella’s in Huntingdonshire,” Alan
+explained. “We went down to see it last week.”
+
+“Oh, Alan, why did you tell him? He doesn’t deserve to be told.”
+
+“Is it decent?” Michael asked.
+
+“Awfully decent,” said Alan. “Rather large, you know.”
+
+“In fact, we shall belong to the squirearchy,” cried Stella, crashing
+down upon the piano with the first bars of Chopin’s most exciting
+Polonaise and from the Polonaise going off into an absurd impromptu
+recitative.
+
+“We shall have a dog-cart—a high and shining dog-cart—and we shall go
+bowling down the lanes of the county of Hunts—because in books about
+people who live in the county and of the county and by with or from the
+county dog-carts invariably bowl—we shall have a herd of Herefordshire
+bulls and bullocks and bullockesses—and my husband Alan with a straw in
+his mouth will go every morning with the bailiff to inspect their
+well-being—and three days every week from November to March we shall go
+hunting in Huntingdon—and when we aren’t actually hunting in Huntingdon
+we shall be talking about hunting—and we shall also talk about the
+Primrose League and the foot-and-mouth disease and the evolutions of
+the new High Church Vicar—we shall....”
+
+But Michael threw a cushion at her, and the recitative came to an end.
+
+They all three talked for a long while more seriously of plans for life
+at Hardingham Hall.
+
+“You know dear old Prescott requested me in his will that I would
+hyphen his name on to mine, whether I were married or single,” said
+Stella. “So we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Alan has been
+very good about that, though I think he’s got a dim idea it’s putting
+on side. Stella Prescott-Merivale or The Curse of the County! And when
+I play I’m going to be Madame Merivale. I decline to be done out of the
+Madame! and everybody will pronounce it Marivahleh and I shall receive
+the unanimous encomia of the critical press.”
+
+“Life will be rather a rag,” said Michael, with approbation.
+
+“Of course it’s going to be simply wonderful. Can’t you see the
+headlines? From Chopin to Sheep. Madame Merivale, the famous Virtuosa,
+and her Flock of Barbary Long-tails.”
+
+It was all so very remote from Neptune Crescent, Michael thought. They
+really were going to be so ridiculously happy, these two, in their
+country life. And now they were talking of finding him a house close to
+Hardingham Hall. There must be just that small Georgian house, they
+vowed, where with a large garden of stately walks and a
+well-proportioned library of books he could stay in contented retreat.
+They promised him, too, that beyond the tallest cedar on the lawn a
+gazebo should command the widest, the greenest expanse of England ever
+beheld.
+
+“It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts,” said
+Stella, “if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And
+of course you’d ride a nag. I’m not sure really that you wouldn’t have
+to wear knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me
+feel like Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?”
+
+“I should make up your mind which,” Michael advised.
+
+“But you know what I mean,” she persisted. “The doctor’s wife would
+come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or
+whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, ‘We must ask
+my brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to
+know. My brother knows everything.’ And she would agree with a
+pursed-up mouth. ‘Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone
+says your brother is a great scholar. It’s such a pleasure to have him
+at the Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?’”
+
+“If you’re supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you
+at once that it’s not a bit like it.”
+
+“But I think you ought to come and live near us,” Alan solemnly put in.
+
+“Of course, my dear, he’s coming,” Stella declared.
+
+“Of course I’m not,” Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they
+wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want
+him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would
+enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would
+care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the
+shrubbery’s edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In
+the quick vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds,
+Michael experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he
+intended to do.
+
+“And how about Michael’s wife?” Alan asked.
+
+Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
+
+“Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him,” Stella
+confidently prophesied.
+
+“No, really,” said Michael to hide his embarrassment. “I object.
+Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement.”
+
+Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describe a
+lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended
+to place him.
+
+“I think rather a Quakerish person, don’t you, Alan? Rather neat and
+tiny with a great sense of humor and....”
+
+“In fact, an admirable sick nurse,” Michael interposed, laughing.
+
+Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the
+river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how
+naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now
+that by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in
+the long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed
+to Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the
+security of his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that
+fleeting disloyalty to his task.
+
+Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn’s old
+white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the
+tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and
+irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really
+it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay
+between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in
+Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made
+no attempt to find Lily.
+
+Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael’s
+immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel
+the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had
+achieved a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or
+two of the St. Mary’s dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at
+All Souls. The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was
+attractive to have anything so remote come suddenly within the region
+of feasibleness. He would lose nothing by trying for it, and if he
+succeeded what a congenial existence offered itself. With private means
+he would be able to divide his time between Oxford and London. There
+would really be nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that
+seemed to stretch before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he
+certainly had not worked hard enough to obtain a first without some
+talent) he would prosecute the study of history. He would make himself
+famous in a select sort of way. He would become the authority of a
+minor tributary to the great stream of research. A set of very
+scholarly, very thorough works would testify to his reputation. There
+were plenty of archaic problems still to be solved. He cast a
+proprietary glance over the centuries, and he had almost decided to
+devote himself to the service of Otto I and Sylvester II, when in a
+moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly before his mind as the
+ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of research into the past
+seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the congratulatory letters and
+decided to let the future wait a while. This pursuit of Lily was a mad
+business, no doubt, but to come to grips with the present called for a
+certain amount of madness.
+
+Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of
+trying for All Souls.
+
+“You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were
+up that you didn’t know what you ought to do, and now when it’s
+perfectly obvious you won’t make the slightest attempt to do it.”
+
+“Used I to grumble?” asked Michael.
+
+“Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical
+questions which had no answer,” said Alan severely.
+
+“What if I told you I’d found an answer to a great many of them?”
+
+“Ever since I’ve been engaged to Stella you’ve found it necessary to be
+very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?”
+
+“It’s imaginable, don’t you think, that I might be making up my mind to
+do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at
+All Souls?”
+
+“But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch
+it.”
+
+“I tell you it was a fluke.”
+
+“My third wasn’t a fluke,” said Alan. “I worked really hard for it.”
+
+“Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run,” Michael
+argued. “You have already fitted into your place with the most complete
+exactitude. There’s no dimension in your future that can possibly
+trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big
+for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my
+frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be
+too small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to
+squeeze into it most uncomfortably.”
+
+“You’ll never do anything,” Alan prophesied. “Because you’ll always be
+doubting.”
+
+“I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity,” Michael pointed
+out. “With all doubts and hesitations I’m perfectly convinced of one
+great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which
+lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization.
+Reason carried to the _nth_ power can always with absurd ease be
+debauched by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind’s wretched little
+lament for disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because
+they are irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she
+claims to be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member
+of Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The
+franchise is to be endowed with a sacramental significance. If the New
+Women win, they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men.
+But of course they won’t win, because God is so delightfully
+irrational. By the way, it’s worth noting that the peculiar vestment
+with which popular fancy has clothed the New Woman is called rational
+costume. You often hear of ‘rationals’ as a synonym for breeches. What
+was I saying? Oh, yes, about God being irrational. You never know what
+he’ll do next. He is a dreadful problem for rationalists. That’s why
+they have abolished him.”
+
+“You’re confusing two different kinds of reason,” said Alan. “What you
+call impulse—unless your impulse is mere madness—is what I might call
+reason.”
+
+“In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the
+reconstruction of your terminology. I’m not a philosopher, and
+therefore I’ve given this vague generic name ‘impulse’ to something
+which deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering
+impetus does it give to conduct, a very long name indeed.”
+
+“But if you’re going through life depending on impulse,” Alan objected,
+“you’ll be no better off than a weathercock. You can’t discount reason
+in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by
+experience.”
+
+“The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no
+reliance whatever.”
+
+“It’s no good arguing with you,” Alan said. “Because what you call
+impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect
+logic.”
+
+“Alan, I can’t believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your
+conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I’m not
+going to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a
+country squire. Let’s hold on to what certainties we can.”
+
+Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem
+of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the
+intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he
+thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore
+he refrained.
+
+There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was
+already in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the
+burden of it in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and
+Stella and Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join
+them, if he could get away from London.
+
+“If you can get away!” Stella scoffed. “What rot you do talk.”
+
+But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where
+he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others
+northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on
+which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the
+stagnant sheen of the Thames.
+
+That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was
+no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from
+London for a while. After the performance he visited the Café d’Orange
+in Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often
+noticed the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the
+quality of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the
+Café d’Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he
+had so far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he
+was rather inclined to think that she was someone’s mistress and that
+Drake’s view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she
+had yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
+
+Downstairs at the Café d’Orange was rather more like a corner of hell
+than Michael had anticipated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in
+these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and
+vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly
+down and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner
+left by the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy
+tunics of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were
+grinding out ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking
+and laughter, the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of
+the waiters made such a din that Michael stood for a moment in
+confusion, debating the possibility of one more person threading his
+way through the serried tables to a seat.
+
+There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and
+in one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So
+paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across
+and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and
+soon with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before
+him in that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always
+induced by ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped
+alcove, he seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and
+voices of the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic
+finale. After a time the various groups and individuals were separated
+in his mind, so that in their movements he began to take an easily
+transferred interest, endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant
+characteristics in turn. Round him in the alcove there were strange
+contrasts of behavior. At one table four offensive youths were showing
+off with exaggerated laughter for the benefit of nobody’s attention.
+Behind them in the crepuscule of two broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl;
+ivory white and cloying the air with her heavy perfume, was arguing in
+low passionate tones with a cold-eyed listener who with a straw was
+tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a moist surface of cigarette-ash.
+In the deepest corner a girl with a high complexion and bright eyes was
+making ardent love to a partially drunk and bearded man, winking the
+while over her shoulder at whoever would watch her comedy. The other
+places were filled by impersonal women who sipped from their glasses
+without relish and stared disdainfully at each other down their
+powdered noses. At Michael’s own table was a blotchy man who
+alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and immediately
+opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat pale face of
+the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat trimmed with
+daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not catch her eye,
+and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward the raffish and
+rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall were large
+mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in reflection the
+throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications.
+Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls,
+and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay
+longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they
+must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and
+with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless
+accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of
+alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam
+of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
+
+Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested
+commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him,
+and he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
+
+“You’re very silent, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll give you a penny for
+them.”
+
+“I really wasn’t thinking about anything in particular,” said Michael.
+“Will you have a drink?”
+
+“Don’t mind if I do. Alphonse!” she shouted, tugging at the arm of the
+overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. “Bring me a hot
+whisky-and-lemon. There’s a love.”
+
+Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed
+on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was
+expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a
+fountain of glass.
+
+“I’ve taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot,” she informed
+Michael. “You know. Anyone does, don’t they? Get a sudden fit and keep
+on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This’ll be my sixth to-night. But
+I’m a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I
+reckon it’ll bring me luck.”
+
+“I expect it will,” Michael said.
+
+“You are serious, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you was
+the spitting image of a fellow I know—Bert Saunders, who writes about
+the boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He’s more of a bright-eyes
+than you are, though.”
+
+The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael’s health.
+
+“Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it,” she said
+meditatingly. “What’s your name, kiddie?”
+
+He told her.
+
+“Michael,” she repeated. “You’re a Jew, then?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name,
+isn’t it? Michael? Of course it is. I don’t mind Jew fellows myself.
+One or two of them have been very good to me. My name’s Daisy Palmer.”
+
+The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his
+encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very
+cautious.
+
+“You look rather French,” was his most audacious sally toward the
+personal.
+
+“Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on
+the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself.”
+
+Again the conversation dropped.
+
+“I’m waiting for a friend,” Daisy volunteered. “She’s been having a row
+with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and
+tell me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here
+by now. What’s the time, kid?”
+
+It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
+
+“I’m rather worried over Doll,” she confided to Michael, “because this
+fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns
+nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, ‘Doll, that dirty rotter you’re
+so soft over’ll swing for you before he’s done. Why don’t you leave
+him,’ I said, ‘and come and live along with me for a bit?’”
+
+“And what did she say?” Michael asked.
+
+But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself
+coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
+
+“Oh, doesn’t she look shocking white,” exclaimed Daisy. “Doll!” she
+shouted, waving to her. “Over here, duck.”
+
+The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in
+exaggerated falsetto.
+
+“—— to you,” she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was
+a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased
+Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said
+to these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Café
+d’Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on
+otherwise indescribable humanity.
+
+By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating
+chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend’s side. She began
+immediately a voluble tale:
+
+“Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told
+him off so as he could hardly look me in the face. ‘You call yourself a
+man,’ I said, ‘why, you dirty little alien.’ That’s what I called him.
+I did straight, ‘you dirty little——’”
+
+“This is my friend,” interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed.
+It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going
+to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember
+the convention of their profession.
+
+“Pleased to meet you,” said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand
+with half-a-simper.
+
+“What will you drink?” asked Michael.
+
+“Mine’s a brandy and soda, please. ‘You dirty little alien,’ I said.”
+Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
+
+“Go on, did you? And what did he say?” asked Daisy admiringly.
+
+“He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?”
+
+“That’s right,” nodded Daisy wisely.
+
+“‘For two years,’ I said, ‘you’ve let a girl keep you,’ I said, ‘and
+then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get
+hold of her,’ I said. ‘I’ll tear her eyes out.’ ‘No, you won’t, now
+then,’ he said. ‘Won’t I? I will, then,’ and with that I just lost
+control of my feelings, I felt that wild....”
+
+“What did you do, Doll?” asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe
+the outraged memory.
+
+“What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to
+the Orange. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you can sit drinking tea while you break my
+heart.’ Don’t you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a
+straight girl when I first knew him. Straight—well, anyway not on the
+game like what I am now.” Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter
+self-compassion. “I’ve slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me
+like dirt.”
+
+“Go on. Don’t cry, duck,” Daisy begged. “Come home with me to-night and
+we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn’t cry over
+him,” she said fiercely. “There’s no fellow worth crying over. The best
+of them isn’t worth crying over.”
+
+The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly’s tears,
+and Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive
+pugnacity of the underworld, rose to attack them.
+
+“Sit down,” Daisy commanded. “I wouldn’t mess my hands, if I was you,
+with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You’ll get us all
+into trouble.”
+
+Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute
+or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
+
+Gradually Dolly’s tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she
+became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen
+with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin
+expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
+
+“Rotten, I call it, don’t you?” said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing
+to Michael.
+
+He agreed with a profound nod.
+
+“And she’s been that good to him. You wouldn’t believe.”
+
+Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of
+Dolly’s virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
+
+At this moment the subject of Daisy’s eulogy rose from her seat and
+stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the
+beerhall.
+
+“My God!” she said, with ominous calm.
+
+“What is it, duck?” asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
+
+“My God!” Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a
+volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass
+evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy
+seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her
+back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of
+the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in
+a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors
+began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the
+cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man
+collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer
+winked over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four
+offensive youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man
+ceased to look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily
+his teeth.
+
+It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather
+a nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her
+friend. She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark
+that Florrie for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she
+could come it over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do
+that; yes, more than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
+
+The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging
+his way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using
+their best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate.
+Though she declared loudly that nothing would make her quit the Orange,
+and certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to
+be coaxed away.
+
+Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again
+and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers,
+which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how
+it had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and
+enmities and friendships of a complete society. He found himself
+explaining to several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been
+compelled to endure at the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was
+extraordinary how suddenly this absurd intrigue of the underworld came
+to seem tremendously important. He felt that all his sense of
+proportion was rapidly disappearing. In the middle of an excited
+justification of Dolly’s tears he was aware that he and his
+surroundings and his attitude were to himself incredible. He was
+positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the inconsequence of dreams.
+Or was all his life until this moment a dream, and was this reality?
+One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was the necessity to see
+the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the evening. He felt
+very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with admirable composure, and
+when he asked her advice about the course of action, he agreed at once
+with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a cab and be allowed in
+Daisy’s rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage and grief that was
+here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very imprudent display of
+emotion.
+
+“She’ll be barred from coming down here,” said Daisy. “Come on, let’s
+get her home.”
+
+“Where’s that Florrie?” screamed Dolly.
+
+“She’s gone home. So what’s the use in your carrying on so mad? The
+manager’s got his eye on us, Doll. Come on, Doll, let’s get on home. I
+tell you the manager’s looking at us. You are a silly girl.”
+
+“—— the manager,” said Dolly obstinately. “Let him look.”
+
+“Why don’t you come and see if you can find Florrie outside?” Daisy
+suggested.
+
+Dolly was moved by this proposal, and presently she agreed to vacate
+the Orange, much to Michael’s relief, for he was expecting every moment
+to see her attack the manager with the match-stand that was fretting
+her fingers. As it happened, Daisy’s well-meant suggestion was very
+unlucky because Hungarian Dave, the cause of all the bother, was
+standing on the pavement close to the entrance.
+
+Daisy whispered to Michael to get a cab quickly, because Hungarian Dave
+was close at hand. He looked at him curiously, this degraded individual
+in whose domestic affairs he was now so deeply involved. A very
+objectionable creature he was, too, with his greasy hair and large red
+mouth. His cap was pulled down over the eyes, and he may have wished
+not to be seen; but an instinct for his presence made Dolly turn round,
+and in a moment she was in the thick of the delight of telling him off
+for the benefit of a crowd increasing with every epithet she flung. It
+was useless now to attempt to get her away, and Michael and Daisy could
+only drag her back when she seemed inclined to attack him with
+finger-nails or hatpin.
+
+“Get a cab,” cried Daisy. “Never mind what she says. Get a cab, and
+we’ll put the silly thing into it and drive off. The coppers will be
+here in a moment.”
+
+Michael managed to hail a hansom immediately, but when he turned back
+to the scene of the pavement the conditions of the dispute were
+entirely changed. Hungarian Dave, infuriated or frightened, had knocked
+Dolly down, and she was just staggering to her feet, when a policeman
+stepped into the circle.
+
+“Come on, move along,” he growled.
+
+The bully had merged himself in the ring of onlookers, and Dolly, with
+a cry of fury, flung herself in his direction.
+
+“Stop that, will you?” the policeman said savagely, seizing her by the
+arm.
+
+“Go on, it’s a dirty shame,” cried Daisy. “Why don’t you take the
+fellow as knocked her down?”
+
+Michael by this time had forced his way through the crowd, rage beating
+upon his brain like a great scarlet hammer.
+
+“You infernal ass,” he shouted to the constable. “Haven’t you got the
+sense to see that this woman was attacked first? Where is the
+blackguard who did it?” he demanded of the stupid, the gross, the
+vilely curious press of onlookers. No one came forward to support him,
+and Hungarian Dave had slipped away.
+
+“Move on, will you?” the policeman repeated.
+
+“Damn you,” cried Michael. “Will you let go of that woman’s arm?”
+
+The constable with a bovine density of purpose proceeded apparently to
+arrest the wretched Dolly, and Michael maddened by his idiocy felt that
+the only thing to do was to hit him as hard as he could. This he did.
+The constable immediately blew his whistle. Other masses of inane bulk
+loomed up, and Michael was barely able to control himself sufficiently
+not to resist all the way to Vine Street, as two of them marched him
+along, and four more followed with Daisy and Dolly. A spumy trail of
+nocturnal loiterers clung to their wake.
+
+Next morning Michael appeared before the magistrate. He listened to the
+charge against him and nearly laughed aloud in court, because the whole
+business so much resembled the trial in Alice in Wonderland. It was not
+that the magistrate was quite so illogical as the King of Hearts; but
+he was so obviously biassed in favor of the veracity of a London
+policeman, that the inconsequence of the nightmare which had begun last
+night was unalterably preserved. Michael, aware of the circumstances
+which had led up to what was being made to appear as wantonly riotous
+behavior in Leicester Square, could not fail to be exasperated by the
+inability of the magistrate to understand his own straightforward
+story. He began to sympathize with the lawless population. The law
+could only seem to them an unintelligent machine for crushing their
+freedom. If the conduct of this case were a specimen of administration,
+it was obvious that arrest must be synonymous with condemnation. The
+magistrate in the first place seemed dreadfully overcome by the sorrow
+of beholding a young man in Michael’s position on the police-court.
+
+“I cannot help wondering when I see a young man who has had every
+opportunity ...” the magistrate went on in a voice that worked on the
+stale air of the court like a rusty file.
+
+“I’m not a defaulting bank clerk,” Michael interrupted. “Is it
+impossible for you to understand——”
+
+“Don’t speak to me like that. Keep quiet. I’ve never been spoken to
+like that in all my experience as a magistrate. Keep quiet.”
+
+Michael sighed in compassion for his age and stupidity.
+
+“Are there any previous convictions against Wearne and Palmer?” the
+magistrate inquired. He was told that the woman Palmer had not hitherto
+appeared, but that Wearne had been previously fined for disorderly
+conduct in Shaftesbury Avenue. “Ah!” said the magistrate. “Ah!” he
+repeated, looking over the rim of his glasses. “And the case against
+the male defendant? I will take the evidence of Constable C11254.”
+
+“Your worship, I was on duty yesterday evening at 12.25 in Leicester
+Square. Hearing a noise in the direction of the Caffy Dorringe and
+observing a crowd collect, I moved across the road to disperse it. The
+defendant Wearne was using obscene language to an unknown man; and
+wishing to get her to move on I took hold of her arm. The male
+defendant, also using very obscene language, attempted to rescue her
+and struck me on the chest. I blew my whistle....”
+
+The ponderous constable with his thick red neck continued a sing-song
+narrative.
+
+When Michael’s turn came to refute some of the evidence against him, he
+merely shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“It’s really useless, you know, for me to say anything. If ‘damn you’
+is obscene, then I was obscene. If a girl is knocked down by a bully
+and on rising to her feet is instantly arrested by a dunderhead in a
+blue uniform, and if an onlooker punches this functionary, then I did
+assault the constable.”
+
+“This sort of insolence won’t do,” said the magistrate trembling with a
+curious rarefied passion. “I have a very good mind to send you to
+prison without the option of a fine, but in consideration....”
+
+Somehow or other it was made to appear a piece of extraordinary
+magnanimity on the part of the magistrate that Michael was only fined
+three guineas and costs.
+
+“I wish to pay the fines of Miss Palmer and Miss Wearne,” he announced.
+
+Later in the morning Michael, with the two girls, emerged into the
+garish summer day. Not even yet was the illusion of a nightmare
+dissipated, for as he looked at his two companions, feathered, frilled
+and bedraggled, who were walking beside him, he could scarcely
+acknowledge even their probable reality here in the sun.
+
+“I shan’t drink hot whisky-and-lemon again in a hurry,” vowed Daisy. “I
+knew it was going to bring me bad luck when I said it tasted so funny.”
+
+“But you said your hat was going to be lucky,” Michael pointed out.
+
+“Yes, I’ve been properly sucked in over that,” Daisy agreed.
+
+“Nothing ever brings me luck,” grumbled Dolly resentfully.
+
+As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he
+was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal
+mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.
+
+“I reckon I’ll go home and have a good lay down,” said Daisy. “Are you
+going to have dinner with me?” she asked, turning to Dolly.
+
+“Dinner?” echoed Dolly. “Nice time to talk to anyone about their
+dinner, when they’ve got the sick like I have! Dinner!”
+
+They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he
+might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He
+found it embarrassing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and
+Edgar’s window to stare instead at him and his companions.
+
+Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call
+upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the
+second five-pound note into which the law had broken.
+
+“Is this for us?” she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll’s going
+to live with me a bit now, aren’t you, Doll?”
+
+“I suppose so,” said Doll.
+
+Michael really admired the hospitality which was willing to shelter
+this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the
+sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with
+Hungarian Dave.
+
+When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary
+appearance by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo
+was almost to make him incredulous of the night’s event, and he could
+not help paying a visit to the Café d’Orange, to verify the alcove in
+which he had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and
+he stood for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the
+night before he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the
+bar, he thought he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes,
+it was certainly Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder,
+addressing him by name. Meats turned round with a start.
+
+“Don’t you remember me?” asked Michael.
+
+“Of course I do,” said Meats nervously. “But for the love of Jerusalem
+drop calling me by that name. Here, let’s go outside.”
+
+In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.
+
+“Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble,” said Meats.
+
+“You are a strange chap,” said Michael. “When I first met you it was
+Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now——”
+
+“Look here,” said Meats, “give over, will you? I’ve told you once. If
+you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now
+don’t forget.”
+
+“Come and have a drink, and tell me what you’ve been doing in the four
+years since we met,” Michael suggested.
+
+“B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?”
+
+Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had
+vanished from his mind.
+
+“Come on, then,” said Barnes. “We’ll go into the Afrique, upstairs.”
+
+Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was
+causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness
+which had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had
+seemed the predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at
+the round marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled
+an actor out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was
+the cheesy complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season
+too much worn and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with
+its dismoded exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness;
+perhaps, thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it
+had merely been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an
+exception. Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a
+compassionate amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity
+as of a puppet temporarily put out of action testified to his own
+morbid heightening of common things in the past. How incredible it
+seemed now that this Barnes had once been able to work upon his soul
+with influential doctrine.
+
+“What have you been doing with yourself?” Michael asked again.
+
+“Oh, hopping and popping about. I’ve got the rats at present.”
+
+“Where are you living?”
+
+Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. “What do you want
+to know for?” he asked.
+
+“Mere inquisitiveness,” Michael assured him. “You really needn’t treat
+me like a detective, you know.”
+
+“My mistake,” said Barnes. “But really, Fane. Let’s see, that is your
+name? Thought it was. I don’t often forget a name. No, without swank,
+Fane, I’ve been hounded off my legs lately. I’m living in Leppard
+Street. Pimlico way.”
+
+“I’d like to come and see you some time,” said Michael.
+
+“Here, straight, what _is_ your game?” Barnes could not conceal his
+suspicion.
+
+“Inquisitiveness,” Michael declared again. “Also I rather want a Sancho
+Panza.”
+
+“Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige,” said Barnes very
+sarcastically.
+
+It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming,
+but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that
+he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEPPARD STREET
+
+
+While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes
+an outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present
+narrative was probably not less cynical than the account of his life
+related to Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps
+because his imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality,
+he could no longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals
+calmly, neither blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental
+goose-flesh. Yet amid all the frankness accorded to him he could not
+find out why Barnes had changed his name. He was curious about this,
+because he could not conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for
+Barnes to reveal. It would be interesting to find out what could really
+make even him pause; no doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the
+underworld, it would turn out to be something that Michael himself
+would consider trivial in comparison with so much of what Barnes had
+boasted. Anyway, whether he discovered the secret or not, it would
+certainly be interesting to study Barnes, since in him good and evil
+might at any moment display themselves as clearly as a hidden substance
+to a reagent flung into a seething alembic. It might perhaps be
+assuming too much to say that there was any good in him; and yet
+Michael was unwilling to suppose that all his conversions were merely
+the base drugs of a disordered morality. Apart from his philosophic
+value, Barnes might very actually be of service in the machinery of
+finding Lily.
+
+At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.
+
+“Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this,” he commented.
+
+Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse
+to be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing
+in that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably
+than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had
+civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a
+commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased
+with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the
+reverse true?
+
+“Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?”
+Michael asked. “I do wish you could understand it’s really so much more
+difficult. I can’t distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly
+so well as you can.”
+
+“Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell
+you,” said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. “In my experience most
+of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we
+haven’t got. I don’t care what it is—a woman or a drink or a new suit
+of clothes. Money’ll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I
+could be a bloody angel.”
+
+“Supposing I offered you half as much for three months,” suggested
+Michael. “Do you think you’d find life any easier while it lasted?”
+
+“Well, don’t be silly,” said Barnes. “Of course I should. If you’d
+walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody
+had dropped a threepenny bit, you’d think it was easier. It’s not a bit
+of good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you’d be just the
+same. Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man
+who first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey’s ears
+on his nob. What’s it done for me? I ask you. Why, it’s made me so that
+I’d steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid
+on another.”
+
+“Tell me about Leppard Street,” said Michael, laughing. “What’s it
+like?”
+
+“Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That’s what it
+looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who’s lost all his
+teeth, and you’ve got what it feels like to be living in it.”
+
+“Supposing I said I’d like to try?” asked Michael. “What would you
+think?”
+
+“Think? I shouldn’t think two seconds. I should know you were having a
+game. What good’s Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing
+up and down all day on cushions?”
+
+“Experience,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, rats! Nothing’s experience that you haven’t had to do.”
+
+“Well, I’ll give you five pounds a week,” Michael offered, “if you’ll
+keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn’t want
+anything very dreadful, of course,” he added.
+
+It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest,
+so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and
+offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason
+for wishing to go to Leppard Street.
+
+“You see, I want to find a girl,” he explained.
+
+“Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you’ll lose the best girl
+you’ve got straight off. That’s all there is to it.”
+
+“You don’t understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I
+want to find her and marry her.”
+
+It seemed to Michael that Barnes’ manner changed in some scarcely
+definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five
+pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked.
+He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an
+almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his
+former attitude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve
+had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap.
+Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no
+allusion to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to
+emotion. This was proving really a most delightful example of the truth
+of his theory. And it was clever of Barnes—it was more than clever, it
+was truly imaginative of him—to realize without another question the
+need to leave for a while Cheyne Walk.
+
+“But is there a vacant room?” Michael asked in sudden dread of
+disappointment.
+
+“Look here, you’d better see the place before you decide on leaving
+here,” Barnes advised. “It isn’t a cross between Buckingham Palace and
+the Carlton, you know.”
+
+“I suppose it’s the name that attracts me,” said Michael. “It sounds
+ferocious.”
+
+“I don’t know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house
+is ferocious enough. Never mind.” He jingled the five sovereigns.
+
+“I’ll go up and pack,” said Michael. “By the way, I haven’t told you
+yet that I was run in last night.”
+
+“In quod you mean?” asked Barnes. “Whatever for?”
+
+“Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square.”
+
+“These coppers are the limit,” said Barnes emphatically. “The absolute
+limit. Really. They’ll pinch the Archbishop of Canterbury for looking
+into Stagg and Mantle’s window before we know where we are.”
+
+Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the
+doorway to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the
+macaw on its perch were about equally exotic.
+
+They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along
+the river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the
+adventurousness of London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the
+high spring-tide without exulting in the movement of the stream that
+was washing out with its flood all the listlessness of the hot August
+afternoon. When Chelsea Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the
+banks of a great river sweeping through a great city began to be more
+evident. The whole character of the Embankment changed at every hundred
+yards. First there was that somber canal which, flowing under the road
+straight from the Thames, reappeared between a cañon of gloomy houses
+and vanished again underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what
+was apparently a large private house which had been gutted of the
+tokens of humanity and filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and
+pistons, all moving perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of
+noise. Under Grosvenor Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering
+forward and a train crashing overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and
+girders dripping with the excrement of railway-engines, they came into
+Grosvenor Road. They passed the first habitations of Pimlico, two or
+three terraces and isolated houses all different in character. There
+could scarcely be another road in London so varied as this. Maurice had
+been wise to have his studio in Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of
+Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an epitome of London.
+
+The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide
+thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray
+street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so
+insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton
+Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains
+the poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily
+sinister respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very
+wide and very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were
+checked off by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the
+noise of the horse’s hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to
+which every evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home.
+It was impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in
+Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here
+but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and
+hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose
+wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
+
+“I wouldn’t mind having lodgings here,” said Barnes. He had caught
+sight of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This
+was the outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was
+full of them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the
+period of final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison
+with the middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older
+and now very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was
+almost attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew
+nearer to Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its
+predecessor, each one being a little less able to resist the corrosion
+of a persistently inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp
+effect of contrast, occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with
+their houses so uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of
+irremediable decadency.
+
+Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem
+endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just
+before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge,
+it swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the
+street ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of
+broken glass: these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on
+the other a coal yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an
+exit between two rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an
+exit, however, that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts.
+Some fifty yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in
+which five very tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very
+edge of the embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and
+flanked on either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an
+impression of quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the
+narrow oblong windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The
+houses were built of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened
+from yellow to the same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as
+an appendix for the draff of the neighborhood’s rubbish. The ribs of an
+umbrella; a child’s boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here
+in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
+
+“Here we are,” said Barnes. “Here’s Leppard Street that you’ve been so
+anxious to see.”
+
+“It looks rather exciting,” Michael commented.
+
+“Oh, it’s the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don’t think.
+Exciting?” Barnes repeated. “You know, Fane, there’s something wrong
+with you. If you think this is exciting, you’d go raving mad when I
+showed you some of the places where I’ve lived. Well, here we are,
+anyhow. Number One—the corner house.”
+
+They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening
+ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a
+parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato
+parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
+
+Barnes opened the door.
+
+“We’ll take your bag up to my room first, and then we’ll go downstairs
+and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don’t change
+your mind when you’ve seen the inside.”
+
+Michael had no time to notice Barnes’ room very much. But vaguely he
+saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses
+masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and
+crimson fruits. After that glimpse they went down again over the
+grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted
+to the landlady in the basement.
+
+“She’ll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her,” he said to
+Michael. “You see, just lately I’ve been very anxious to avoid meeting
+her.”
+
+He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
+
+They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale
+soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by:
+here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a
+Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury,
+so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the
+whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight
+of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It
+was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated
+everything else.
+
+“That’s Cleghorne,” said Barnes. “I reckon he’d sleep Rip van Winkle
+barmy.”
+
+“What’s he do?” whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
+
+“He snores for a living, he does,” said Barnes.
+
+They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the
+landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two
+trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and
+chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a
+moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the
+carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
+
+“I’ve brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne,” said Barnes.
+
+“Have you brought your five weeks’ rent owing?” she asked sourly.
+
+He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered
+up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose
+angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought
+she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the
+wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.
+
+“Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms
+on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to
+come up and show you?”
+
+She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along
+her sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.
+
+“Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ...” Michael began.
+
+“Mis-ter Cleghorne!” she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she
+began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked
+continuously.
+
+“Oh, I don’t want to disturb him,” said Michael.
+
+“Disturb him!” she sneered. “Why, half Bedlam could drive through his
+brains in a omnibus before he’d move a little finger to trouble
+hisself. Yes,” she shouted, “Yes!” Her voice mingling with the creak of
+the roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it
+grew more strident. “Why, the blessed house might burn before he’d even
+put on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his
+wife can work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if
+anyone could disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the
+larder, he’d only grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people ’ud be very
+pleased to be asthmatic, if they could lie snorting on a bed from
+morning to night.”
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne’s hands were dry now, and she led the way along the
+passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She
+unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was
+not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of
+fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some
+dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant
+the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window,
+catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a
+landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.
+
+“That’s all I got for two months’ rent,” said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly,
+surveying it. “And it’s just about fit for my old man to go and bury
+his good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that’s all. The bedroom’s in
+here, of course.” She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had
+been picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far
+as some child had been able to reach.
+
+The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much
+darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the
+window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square
+of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small
+pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary
+engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.
+
+“Do you want to see the top-floor back?” Mrs. Cleghorne asked.
+
+“Well, if you wouldn’t mind.” Michael felt bound to apologize to her,
+whatever was suggested.
+
+She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to
+enter the vacant room.
+
+The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the
+permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over
+another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and
+even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was
+less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no
+fireplace and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than
+the positive emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at
+the gimcrack washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was
+visible in long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with
+its pleated iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress
+exuding flock like clustered maggots.
+
+“This is furnished, of course,” said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently
+sucking a tooth. “Well, which will you have?”
+
+“I think perhaps I’ll take the ground-floor rooms. I’ll have them done
+up.”
+
+“Oh, they’re quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave
+them an extra-special clear-out.”
+
+“But you wouldn’t object to my doing them up?” persisted Michael.
+
+“Oh, no, I shouldn’t _object,”_ said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent
+was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very
+much pleasure from the fruition of Michael’s proposal.
+
+They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently
+beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because
+somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two
+empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she
+was endowing them with a value and a character they did not possess.
+
+“I’ve always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth
+any other two rooms in the house. And of course that’s the reason I’m
+really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to
+everyone right out—if you want the two best rooms in the house, why,
+you must pay according. They’re only empty now because I’ve always been
+particular about letting them. I won’t have anybody, and that’s a fact.
+Mr. Barnes here knows I’m really fond of those rooms.”
+
+They had reentered them, and Mrs. Cleghorne stood with arms admiringly
+akimbo.
+
+“They really are a beautiful lodging,” she declared. “When would you
+want them from?”
+
+“Well, as soon as I can get them done up,” said Michael.
+
+“I see. Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly just what you
+was thinking of doing?”
+
+Michael gave some of his theories of decoration, while Mrs. Cleghorne
+waited in critical audience; as it were, feeling the pulse of the
+apartments under the stimulus of Michael’s sketch of their
+potentiality.
+
+“All white?” the landlady echoed pessimistically. “That sounds very
+gloomy, doesn’t it? More like a outhouse or a coal-cellar than a nice
+couple of rooms.”
+
+“Well, they couldn’t look rottener than what they do at present,”
+Barnes put in. “So if you take my advice, you’ll say ‘yes’ and be very
+thankful. They’ll look clean, anyway.”
+
+The landlady threw back her head and surveyed Barnes like a snake about
+to strike.
+
+“Rotten?” she sniffed. “I’m sure this gentleman here isn’t likely to
+find a nicer and cheaper pair of rooms or a more convenient and a
+quieter pair of rooms anywhere in Pimlico. A lot of people is very
+anxious to be in this neighborhood.”
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was much offended by Barnes’ criticism, and there was a
+long period of dubiety before it was settled that Michael should be
+accepted as a tenant.
+
+“I’ve never cared for white,” she said, in final protest. “Not since I
+was married.”
+
+Reminded of Mr. Cleghorne’s existence in the basement, she hurried
+forthwith to rout him out. As she disappeared, Michael saw that she was
+searching in the musty folds of her skirt in order to deposit in her
+purse the month’s rent he had paid in advance.
+
+A couple of weeks passed while the decorators worked hard; and Michael
+returned from an unwilling visit to Scotland to find them ready for
+him. He got together a certain amount of furniture, and toward the end
+of August he moved into Leppard Street.
+
+Barnes on account of the prosperity which had come to him through
+Michael’s money had managed to dress himself in a series of
+outrageously new and fashionable suits, and on the afternoon of his
+patron’s arrival he strutted about the apartments.
+
+“Very nice,” he said. “Very nice, indeed. I reckon old Ma Cleghorne
+ought to be very pleased with herself. Some of these pictures are a bit
+too religious for me just at present, but everyone to their own taste,
+that’s what I always say. To their own taste,” he repeated. “Otherwise,
+what’s the good in being given an opinion of your own?”
+
+Michael felt it was time to explain to Barnes more particularly his
+quest of Lily.
+
+“You don’t know a girl called Lily Haden?” he asked.
+
+“Lily Haden,” said Barnes thoughtfully. “Lily Hopkins. A great fat girl
+with red....”
+
+“No, no,” Michael interrupted. “Lily Haden. Tall. Slim. Very fair hair.
+Of course she may have another name now.”
+
+“That’s it, you see,” said Barnes wisely.
+
+“Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, I must find her,” Michael went
+on.
+
+“Well, if you go about it in that spirit, you’ll soon find her,” Barnes
+prophesied.
+
+Michael looked at him sharply. He thought he noticed in Barnes’ manner
+a suggestion of humoring him. He rather resented the way in which
+Barnes seemed to encourage him as one might encourage a child.
+
+“You understand I want to marry her?” Michael asked fiercely.
+
+“That’s all right, old chap. I’m not trying to stop you, am I?”
+
+“But why are you talking as if I weren’t in earnest?” Michael demanded.
+“When I first told you about it you were evidently very pleased, and
+now you’ve got a sneer which frankly I tell you I find extraordinarily
+objectionable.”
+
+Barnes looked much alarmed by Michael’s sudden attack, and explained
+that he meant nothing by his remarks beyond a bit of fun.
+
+“Is it funny to marry somebody?” Michael demanded.
+
+“Sometimes it’s very funny to marry a tart,” said Barnes.
+
+Michael flushed. This was a directness of speech for which he was not
+prepared.
+
+“But when I first told you,” Michael said, “you seemed very pleased.”
+
+“I was very pleased to find I’d evidently struck a nice-mannered
+lunatic,” said Barnes. “You offered me five quid a week, didn’t you?
+Well, you didn’t offer me that to give you good advice, now did you?”
+
+Michael tried to conceal the mortification that was being inflicted
+upon him. He had been very near to making a fool of himself by
+supposing that his announcement had aroused admiration. Instead of
+admiring him, Barnes evidently regarded him as an idiot whom it were
+politic to encourage on account of the money this idiot could provide.
+It was an humiliating discovery. The chivalry on which he congratulated
+himself had not touched a single chord in Barnes. Was it likely that in
+Lily herself he would find someone more responsive to what he still
+obstinately maintained to himself was really rather a fine impulse?
+Michael began to feel half sorry for Barnes because he could not
+appreciate nobility of motive. It began to seem worth while trying to
+impose upon him the appreciation which he felt he owed. Michael was
+sorry for his uncultivated ideals, and he took a certain amount of
+pleasure in the thought of how much Barnes might benefit from a close
+association with himself. He did not regret the whim which had brought
+them to Leppard Street. Whatever else might happen, it would always be
+consoling to think that he would be helping Barnes. In half a dream
+Michael began to build up the vision of a newer and a finer Barnes, a
+Barnes with sensitiveness and decent instincts, a Barnes who would
+forsake very willingly the sordid existence he had hitherto led in
+order to rise under Michael’s guidance and help to a wider and better
+life. Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the
+affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him
+his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his
+mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem
+at its true value the step he proposed to take.
+
+Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out
+of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would
+surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He
+could not fail to be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so
+much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It
+was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect.
+Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few
+books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and
+those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had
+managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as
+yet he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a
+small secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh
+atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived
+perpetually in a social twilight. Michael’s missionary affection began
+to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He
+felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with
+their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in
+their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence
+hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and
+everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to
+fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be
+his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had
+an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes
+were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down,
+and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned
+himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long
+time.
+
+Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with
+blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the
+corner.
+
+“Come in,” Michael cheerfully invited him.
+
+The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all
+his clothes were on the verge of coming off, so much like a frayed
+accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a
+space of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the
+bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.
+
+“What I really came down for was a match,” the stranger explained.
+
+Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in
+one of his pockets.
+
+“You don’t go in for puzzles, I suppose?” he asked tentatively. “But
+any time I can help. I’m the Solutionist, you know. Don’t let me keep
+you. Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I’m worrying out this week’s lot in
+The Golden Penny very slowly. I’ve really had a sort of a headache the
+last few days—a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about
+cricketers?” he asked, turning to Michael. “Famous cricketers, of
+course, that is? For instance, I cannot think what this one can be.”
+
+He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny
+weekly.
+
+“I’ve got all the others,” he said to Michael. “But one picture will
+often stump you like this. No joke intended.” He smiled feebly and
+pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the
+letter T.
+
+“What about Hirst?” Michael asked.
+
+“Hirst,” repeated the Solutionist. “Her S T. That’s it. That’s it.” In
+his excitement he began to dribble. “I’m very much obliged to you, sir.
+Her S. T. Yes, that’s it.”
+
+He began to shuffle toward the door.
+
+“Anything you want solved at any time,” he said to Michael. “I’m only
+just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be
+most delighted to solve anything—anything!”
+
+He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his
+problems would puzzle the Solutionist.
+
+“What’s his name?” he inquired of Barnes.
+
+“Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a
+living at it.”
+
+“At what?” Michael asked.
+
+“Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took
+fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his
+advertisement in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be
+a conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me
+more like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You
+should see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular
+dust-hole, that’s what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve
+anything—anything! He hasn’t solved how to earn more than ten bob a
+week, year in year out. Silly——! That’s what he is, barmy.”
+
+Michael’s hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers
+of 1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once
+visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a
+staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various
+personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow
+windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly
+arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to
+observe them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the mass. No
+doubt Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained
+by Michael’s subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael
+how Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the
+inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers
+ultimately escaped owing her money.
+
+It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would
+doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the
+landlady’s strict regulation no longer to take them in could be
+relaxed. All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted
+by children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In
+Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and
+occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to
+play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish
+that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little
+girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer’s shop
+of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to
+the basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear
+below at twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above
+the walls of the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered
+what sort of a desolate appearance these five houses must present for
+voyagers to and from Victoria. They must surely stand up very
+forbidding in abandonment to those who were traveling back to their
+cherished dolls-houses in Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not
+actually see the trains, but always he could hear their shrieking and
+their clangor, and he looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in
+her high serene four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall.
+Nothing except the trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a
+perpetual silence. Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing
+with her husband, the noise of her rage down in the basement among the
+quilts and coverlets never penetrated beyond the door at the head of
+the inclosing staircase, save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So
+silent was the house that had it not been for the variety of the
+smells, Michael might easily have supposed that it really was empty and
+that life here was indeed an illusion. The smells, however, of onions
+or hot blankets or machine-oil or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed
+emphatically that a community shared these ascending mustard-colored
+walls, that human beings passed along the stale landings to frowst
+behind those finger-stained doors of salmon-pink. Sometimes, too,
+Michael emerging into the passage from his room would hear from dingy
+altitudes descend the noise of a door hurriedly slammed; and sometimes
+he would see go down the ulcerous steps in front of the house
+depressing women in black, or unshaven men with the debtor’s wary and
+furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be permanent were Barnes
+and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength of Michael’s
+allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every night. He used
+to assure Michael, when toward two o’clock of the next afternoon he
+extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with the greatest
+pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The Solutionist
+occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of newspaper, and
+often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple of Belgian
+hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the nettles of
+the back-yard.
+
+After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard
+Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any
+rate into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish,
+would be welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger
+of being drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting
+surface. He felt inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer,
+and to hear from her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and
+Hungarian Dave. He found her card with the Guilford Street address and
+went over to Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady
+looked surprised when he inquired for Miss Palmer.
+
+“Oh, she’s been gone this fortnight,” the woman informed him. Michael
+asked where she was living now.
+
+“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said the landlady, and as she was already
+slowly and very unpleasantly closing the door, Michael came away a
+little disconsolate. These abrupt dematerializations of the underworld
+were really very difficult to grapple with. It gave him a sense of the
+futility of his search for Lily (though lately he had prosecuted it
+somewhat lazily) when girls, who a month ago offered what was
+presumably a permanent address, could have vanished completely a
+fortnight later. Perhaps Daisy would be at the Orange. He would take
+Barnes with him this evening and ask his opinion of her and Dolly and
+Hungarian Dave.
+
+The beerhall downstairs looked exactly the same as when he had visited
+it a month ago. Michael could sympathize with the affection such places
+roused in the hearts of their frequenters. There was a great deal to be
+said for an institution that could present, day in, day out, a steady
+aspect to a society whose life was spent in such extremes of elation
+and despair, of prosperity and wretchedness, and whose actual lodging
+was liable to be changed at any moment for better or worse.
+
+“Not a bad place, is it?” said Barnes, looking round in critical
+approval at the prostitutes and bullies hoarded round the tables puddly
+with the overflow of mineral waters and froth of beer.
+
+“You really like it?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, it’s cheerful,” said Barnes. “And that’s something nowadays.”
+
+Michael perceived Daisy before they were halfway across the room. He
+greeted her with particular friendliness as an individual among these
+hard-eyed constellations.
+
+“Hulloa!” she cried. “Wherever have you been all this time?”
+
+“I called at Guilford Street, but you were gone.”
+
+“Oh, yes. I left there. I couldn’t stand the woman there any longer.
+Sit down. Who’s your friend?”
+
+Michael brought Barnes into the conversation, and suggested moving into
+one of the alcoves where it was easier to talk.
+
+“No, come on, sit down here. Fritz won’t like it, if we move.”
+
+Michael looked round for the protector, and she laughed.
+
+“You silly thing! Fritz is the waiter.”
+
+Michael presently grew accustomed to being jogged in the back by
+everyone who passed, and so powerful was the personality of the Orange
+that very soon he, like the rest of the crowd, was able to discuss
+private affairs without paying any heed to the solitary smoking
+listeners around.
+
+“Where’s Dolly?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, I had to get rid of her very sharp,” said Daisy. “She served me a
+very nasty trick after I’d been so good to her. Besides, I’ve taken up
+with a fellow. Bert Saunders. He does the boxing for Crime
+Illustrated.”
+
+“You told me I was like him,” Michael reminded her.
+
+“That’s right. I remember now. I’m living down off Judd Street in a
+flat. Why don’t you come round and see me there?”
+
+“I will,” Michael promised.
+
+“Wasn’t Bert Saunders the fellow who was keeping Kitty Metcalfe?” asked
+Barnes.
+
+“That’s right. Only he gave her the push after she hit Maudie Clive
+over the head with a port-wine glass in the Half Moon upstairs.”
+
+“I knew Kitty,” said Barnes, shaking his head to imply that
+acquaintance with Kitty had involved a wider experience than fell to
+most men. “What’s happened to her?”
+
+“Oh, Gard, don’t ask me,” said Daisy. “She’s got in with a fellow who
+kept a fried-fish place in the Caledonian Road, and I’ve never even
+seen her since.”
+
+“And what’s happened to Dolly?” asked Michael.
+
+“Oh, good job if that love-boy of hers does punch into her. Silly cow!
+She ought to know better. Fancy going off as soft as you like with that
+big-mouthed five-to-two, and after I’d just given her six of my new
+handkerchiefs.”
+
+Michael wished he could have an opportunity of explaining to Barnes
+that on account of Daisy’s friendship for Dolly, he and she and the
+cast-off had spent a night in the police-cells. He thought it would
+have amused him.
+
+“Where’s the Half Moon?” he asked instead.
+
+Daisy said it was a place in Glasshouse Street for which she had no
+very great affection. However, Michael was anxious to see it; and soon
+they left the Orange to visit the Half Moon.
+
+It was a public-house with nothing that was demirep in its exterior;
+but upstairs there was a room frequented after eleven o’clock by ladies
+of the town. They walked up a narrow twisting staircase carpeted with
+bright red felt and lit by a red-shaded lamp, and found themselves in a
+room even more densely fumed with tobacco smoke than downstairs at the
+Orange. In a corner was an electric organ which was fed with a stream
+of pennies and blared forth its repertory of ten tunes with maddening
+persistence. One of these tunes was gay enough to make the girls wish
+to dance, and always with its recurrence there was a certain amount of
+cake-walking which was immediately stopped by a commissionaire who
+stood in the doorway and shouted “Order, please! Quiet, please! No
+dancing, ladies!” To the nearest couple he always whispered that the
+police were outside.
+
+Daisy, having stigmatized the Half Moon as the rottenest hole within a
+mile of the Dilly, proceeded to become more cheerful with every penny
+dropped into the slot; and finally she invited Michael to come back
+with her to Judd Street, as her boy had gone down to Margate to see
+Young Sancy, a prospective lightweight champion, who was training
+there.
+
+“Anyway, you can see me home,” she said. “Even if you don’t come in.
+Besides, my flat’s all right. It is, really. You know. Comfortable.
+He’s very good to me, is Bert, though he’s a bit soppified. He dresses
+very nice, and he earns good money. Well, three pound a week. That’s
+not so bad, is it?”
+
+“That’s all right,” said Barnes. “With what you earn as well.”
+
+“There’s a nerve,” said Daisy. “Well, I can’t stay moping indoors all
+the evening, can I? But he’s most shocking jealous is Bert. And he
+calls me his pussy-cat. Puss, puss! There’s a scream. He’s really a bit
+soft, and his eyes is awful. But it’s nice, so here’s luck.” She
+drained her glass. “‘Do you love me, puss?’ he says. Silly thing! But
+they think a lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see
+him the other morning about something he’s been writing. I don’t know
+what it was. I hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him
+something dreadful, and then he says, ‘My pussy-cat mustn’t disturb
+me.’”
+
+Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was
+beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a
+good move.
+
+“I shan’t go if you don’t come back with me,” she declared.
+
+Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and
+he promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however;
+nor would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and
+Michael went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm
+September night.
+
+Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of
+her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey.
+He flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here
+at last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship
+with a woman of that class with whom mere friendship would be more
+improbable than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with
+her homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on
+while she chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any
+other relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was
+proud as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign
+trees that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he
+felt a thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings
+of Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to
+think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this
+friendship that was giving to all the houses they passed a strange
+peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking
+at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown
+bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and
+beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was
+indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and
+presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.
+
+“Our flat’s in here. Agnes House, it’s called. Come in and have one
+before you go home,” she invited.
+
+Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his
+confidence in their new friendship.
+
+Agnes House was only entitled to the distinction of a name rather than
+a number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby,
+small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was
+already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been
+exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This
+collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of
+age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more
+admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain.
+Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt
+in itself apart from any association with depravity: it was like a
+young person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without
+arousing pity.
+
+“Rather nice, eh?” said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the
+flat. “Sit down. I’ll get some whisky. There’s a bathroom, you know.
+And it’s grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we
+was upstairs. I always swore I’d never live in a flat. Well, I don’t
+really call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever
+be found out.”
+
+Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn
+about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous
+when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled
+throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a
+placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great
+deal of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to
+fright her fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at
+the sound of a key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike
+existence of the underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael
+could see the villainous paper used for every kind of domestic
+service—to wrap up a piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the
+cat’s dinner, and spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon
+the disks of grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very
+natural, when the eyes never rested from these views of sordid
+violence, to expect evil everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was
+already half inclined to accept the underworld’s preoccupation with
+crime as a truer judgment of human nature than was held by a
+sentimental civilization, and he began to wonder whether a good deal of
+his own privacy had not been spent in a fool’s paradise of security.
+The moated grange and the dark tower were harmless rococo terrors
+beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes House.
+
+“The kitchen’s in a rare old mess, isn’t it?” said Daisy looking round
+her. “It gives Bert the rats to see it like this.”
+
+“Are you fond of him?” Michael asked. He was anxious to display his
+friendly interest.
+
+“Oh, he’s all right. But I wouldn’t ever get fond of _any_body. It
+doesn’t pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they
+can do as they like with you.”
+
+“I don’t understand why you live with him, if he’s nothing better than
+all right,” said Michael.
+
+“Well, I’m used to him, and he’s not always in the way like some
+fellows are.”
+
+Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as
+it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it
+was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her
+ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and
+beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches
+of François Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing
+pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be
+wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first
+from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard
+subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably
+despise it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the
+quality of the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove
+to her the reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the
+relation in which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.
+
+“There’s something extraordinarily attractive about being friends,” he
+began. “Isn’t it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to
+be nothing more than a friend?”
+
+“Friends,” Daisy repeated. “I don’t know that I think much of friends.
+You don’t get much out of _them_, do you?”
+
+“Is that all anybody is for,” Michael asked in disappointment. “To get
+something out of?”
+
+“Well, naturally. Anyone can’t live on nothing, can they?”
+
+“But I don’t see why a friend shouldn’t be as profitable as an
+ephemeral ... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at
+eleven and say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as
+generous.”
+
+“I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted
+twice as much back in return,” said Daisy.
+
+“Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine
+in the police court?” he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was
+so anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he
+could not help making the allusion.
+
+“I suppose you wanted to,” she said.
+
+“As a friend,” he persisted.
+
+“Oh, all right,” she agreed with him lazily. “Have it your own way. I’m
+too sleepy to argue.”
+
+“Then we are friends?” Michael asked gravely.
+
+“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a
+clothes-line. Get on with it, Roy—or what’s your name? Michael, eh?
+That’s right.”
+
+“Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?”
+
+“Advice is very cheap,” said Daisy.
+
+“I used to know a girl,” Michael began.
+
+“A straight-cut?”
+
+“Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was.”
+
+“I see. And now she’s got a naughty little twinkle in her eye.”
+
+“Look here. Do listen seriously,” Michael begged. “She isn’t a
+straight-cut any longer.”
+
+“Well, what did I tell you? That’s what I said. She’s gone gay.”
+
+“I want to get her away from this life,” Michael announced, with such
+solemnity that Daisy was insulted.
+
+“Why, what’s the matter with it? You’re as bad as a German ponce I knew
+who joined the Salvation Army. Don’t you try taking me home to-night to
+our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick.”
+
+“But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a
+‘lady.’”
+
+“More shame for her then,” said Daisy indignantly. “She ought to have
+known better.”
+
+It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily’s fall gave to one so
+deeply plunged. There was in Daisy’s attitude something of the
+unionist’s toward foreign blackleg labor.
+
+“Well, you see,” Michael pointed out. “As even you have no pity for
+her, wouldn’t it be right for me to try to get her out of the life
+altogether?”
+
+“How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade
+all day, before you sprang it on her....”
+
+“I had nothing to do with it,” Michael interrupted. “At least not
+directly.”
+
+“Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?” she demanded in
+surprise.
+
+“I feel a certain responsibility,” he explained. “Go on with what you
+were saying.”
+
+“If she left a nice home,” Daisy continued, “to live gay, she isn’t
+going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now,
+is she?”
+
+“But I want to marry her,” said Michael simply.
+
+Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.
+
+“You must be worse than potty over her,” she gasped.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Why? Why, because it doesn’t pay to marry that sort of girl. She’ll
+only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you’ll wish you
+hadn’t been such a grass-eyes.”
+
+A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael
+sitting in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was
+right. Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was
+coeval with all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility,
+so that he felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal
+pessimism. Yet in the same instant he was aware of the need for him to
+do something, even if his action were to carry within itself the
+potential destruction of more than he was setting out to accomplish.
+
+“When do you see her?” asked Daisy. “And what does _she_ say about
+being married?”
+
+“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her for nearly five years,”
+Michael explained rather apologetically. “I’m searching for her now.
+I’ve got to find her.”
+
+“Strike me, if you aren’t the funniest —— I ever met,” Daisy exclaimed.
+
+She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for
+Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing.
+The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed
+plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter
+seemed to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of
+emptiness was due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of
+the room, whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so
+homely was the behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast
+suddenly they made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no
+more substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its
+hollowness. It became an interior very much like those glimpses of
+interiors in Crime Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would
+have shown Daisy Palmer cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even
+in sanguinary death to display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped
+edge of a white petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to
+dream in Leppard Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither
+as here he would enter sensationally.
+
+Daisy ceased to rock herself with mirth.
+
+“No, really,” she said. “It’s a shame to laugh, but you are the limit.
+Only you did ask my advice, and I tell you straight you’ll be sorry if
+you do marry her. What’s she like, Wandering Willie? Have some cocoa if
+I make it? Go on, do. I’ll boil it on the gas-ring.”
+
+Michael was touched by her attention, and he accepted the offer of
+cocoa. Then he began to describe Lily’s appearance. He could not,
+however much she might laugh, keep off the object of his quest. Lily
+was, after all, the only rational explanation of his present mode of
+life.
+
+“She sounds a bit washed out according to your description of her,”
+Daisy commented. “Still, everyone to their own fancy, and if you like
+blue-eyed bottles of peroxide, that’s your look-out.”
+
+They were drinking the cocoa she had made, and the flame of the
+gas-ring gave just the barren comfort that the kitchen seemed to
+demand. Another blackbeetle hurried over the oilcloth. A belated fly
+buzzed angrily against the shade of the electric light. Daisy yawned
+and looked up at the metal clock with its husky tick.
+
+Suddenly there was the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. She
+leaped up.
+
+“Gard, supposing that’s Bert come back from Margate!”
+
+She pushed Michael hurriedly across the passage into the front room,
+commanding him to keep quiet and stay in an empty curtained recess.
+Then she hurried back to the kitchen, leaving him in a very unpleasant
+frame of mind. He heard through the closed door Daisy’s voice in
+colloquy with a deeper voice. Evidently Bert had come back; but his
+return had been so abrupt that he had had no time to prevent himself
+being placed in this ridiculous position. Would he have to stay in this
+recess all night? He peered out into the room, which was in a filigree
+of bleak shadows made by the street lamp shining through the muslin
+curtains of the window. Through a desolation of undrawn blinds the
+houses of Little Quondam Street were visible across the road. The
+unused room smelt moldy, and if Michael had ever pictured himself in
+the complexity of a clandestine affair, this was not at all the
+romantic environment he would have chosen for his drama. This was
+really damned annoying, and he made a step in the direction of the
+kitchen to put an end to the misunderstanding. Surely Saunders would
+have realized that his visit to Daisy was harmless: and yet would he?
+How stupid she had been to hustle him out of the way like this.
+Naturally the fellow would be suspicious now. Would that hum of
+conversation never stop? It reminded him of the fly which had been
+buzzing round the lamp. Supposing Saunders came in here to fetch
+something? Was he to hide ignominiously behind this confounded curtain,
+and what on earth would happen if he were discovered? Michael boiled
+with rage at the prospect of such an indignity. Saunders would probably
+want to fight him. A man who spent his life helping to produce Crime
+Illustrated was no doubt deep-dyed himself in the vulgar crudity of his
+material.
+
+Ten minutes passed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten
+more minutes passed; and Michael began to estimate the difficulty of
+climbing out of the window into the street. It had been delightful,
+this experience, until he had entered this cursed flat. He should have
+parted from Daisy on the doorstep, and then he would have carried home
+with him the memory of a friendship that belonged to the London
+starlight. The whole relation had been ruined by entering this scabrous
+building.
+
+He must have been here for more than an hour. It was insufferable. He
+would go boldly into the kitchen and brave Saunders’ violence. Yet he
+could not do that because Daisy would be involved by such a step. What
+could they be talking about? It was really unreasonable for people who
+lived together to sit up chatting half the night. At last he heard the
+sound of an opening door; there were footsteps in the passage; another
+door-opened; after a minute or two somebody walked out into the street.
+Michael had just sighed with relief, when he heard footsteps coming
+back; and the buzz of conversation began again in a lighter timbre.
+This was simply intolerable. He was evidently going to stay here until
+the filigree of shadows faded in the dawn. Saunders must have brought
+in a friend with him. Another half hour passed and Michael had reached
+a stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friendship. Not
+again would he so easily let himself be made ridiculous. Then he became
+conscious of a keen desire to see this Saunders whom, by the way, he
+was supposed to resemble. It was tantalizing to miss the opportunity of
+comparison.
+
+The hum of conversation stopped. Soon afterward Daisy came into the
+room and whispered that he could creep out now, but that he must not
+slam the front door. She would see him at the Orange to-morrow.
+
+When they reached the passage, she called back through the kitchen:
+
+“Bert, do you know you left the front door open?”
+
+Idiotically and uxoriously floated from the inner bedroom: “Did I,
+pussy cat? Puss must shut it then.”
+
+Daisy dug Michael violently in the ribs to express her inward hilarity;
+then suddenly she pulled him to her and kissed him roughly. In another
+second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a
+nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some
+garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him
+in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.
+
+Barnes was sitting in Michael’s room, when he got back to Leppard
+Street.
+
+“What ho,” he said sleepily. “You’ve been enjoying yourself with that
+piece, then?”
+
+Michael regarded him angrily.
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn’t look so solemn; she’s not a bad bit of
+goods, either. I’ve heard of her before.”
+
+Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to
+convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover,
+if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out
+utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a
+reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had
+slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations
+had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it
+had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld’s
+distorting mirror.
+
+On the following night Michael went to the Café d’Orange, and heard
+Daisy’s account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert
+Saunders.
+
+“But really, you know,” she said. “It did give me a turn. Fancy him
+coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting
+fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there
+and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert’s all right with his
+pussy-cat.”
+
+“But why didn’t you let me stay where I was?” Michael asked. “And
+introduce me quite calmly. He couldn’t have said anything.”
+
+“Couldn’t he?” Daisy cried. “I reckon he could then. I reckon he could
+have said a lot. If he hadn’t, I’d have given him the chuck right away.
+I don’t want no fellow hanging around me that hasn’t got the pluck to
+go for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. _Couldn’t_ he have
+said anything?”
+
+Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time
+to meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the
+underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been
+devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from
+the standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes,
+Daisy—they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral
+antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer.
+They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they
+were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it
+possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure
+to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the
+absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived
+a great constructive force?
+
+Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough
+evidence as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through
+the rapid darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very
+often he was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street
+came to stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against
+the light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through
+the chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante’s obscure
+wood of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual
+events. Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom,
+because he knew that he was winning here with each new experience a
+small advance; at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the
+former pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition
+he told himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily,
+that through her salvation he would save himself.
+
+Michael did not reënter his own world, whose confusion of minor
+problems would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed
+before the problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help
+to solve the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He
+did not tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their
+letters came to him at his club. They did not worry him, although
+Stella threatened a terrible punishment if he did not appear in their
+midst in time to give her away in November. This he promised to do in
+spite of everything. He was faithful to his search for Lily, and he
+even went so far as to call upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her
+since that night at the Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex
+himself over the failure to discover Lily’s whereabauts. Having placed
+himself at the nod of destiny, he was content to believe that if he
+never found her he must be content to look elsewhere for the expression
+of himself. September became October. It would be six years this month
+since first they met, and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be
+captured anew?
+
+One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated
+season whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because
+no fall of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled
+walls from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk
+was perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he
+knew. Yes, he could. It was Chator’s, the dear, the pious and the
+bubbling Chator’s; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the
+corridors of St. James’. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized
+and shaken his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however,
+he was twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a
+fountain of questions about his progress during these years with a
+great deal of information about his own. He came in eagerly at
+Michael’s invitation, and so much had he still to ask and tell that it
+was a long time before he wanted to know what had brought Michael to
+Leppard Street.
+
+“How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn’t my
+district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I
+say, what a dreadful slum!” Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as
+if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. “I
+never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what
+really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a
+man who’s just come to us from Ely was talking about you only
+yesterday. My goodness, how ...”
+
+“It’s no larger than a grain of sand,” Michael interrupted quickly.
+
+“What is?” asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at
+Michael.
+
+“You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren’t you?”
+
+“I suppose you’ll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute.” Chator
+was beaming with delight at the prospect. “But seriously, this man
+Stewart—Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know
+him?”
+
+“Nigel isn’t here, too?” Michael exclaimed.
+
+“He’s our deacon.”
+
+“Oh, how priceless you’ll both be in the pulpit,” said Michael. “And
+to-morrow’s Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Mass?”
+
+“My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be
+preaching at Evening Prayer. Why don’t you come to supper in the Clergy
+House afterward?”
+
+“How do you like your Vicar?”
+
+“Oh, very sound, very sound,” said Chator, shaking his head.
+
+“Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?” asked Michael,
+twinkling.
+
+“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He’s very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at
+first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he’s not. Not a bit.
+We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it.
+And of course we’ve got the children.”
+
+They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and
+Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.
+
+“You will come on Sunday?”
+
+“Of course. But what’s the name of your church?”
+
+“My dear fellow, that shows you haven’t heard your parochial Mass,”
+said Chator, with mock seriousness. “St. Chad’s is our church.”
+
+“It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron,” said Michael.
+
+“I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield.”
+
+Michael laughed loudly.
+
+“My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven’t
+changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad’s—Sunday.”
+
+From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled
+walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be
+bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a
+coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.
+
+Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on
+Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference
+to Michael’s wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening
+through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior
+of St. Chad’s with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense
+was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine
+edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built
+of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any
+other material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing
+deliberately beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat
+thawing in a stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in
+London streets, and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves.
+The Stations of the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the
+lithographs in their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians
+was familiar music.
+
+As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his
+companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom,
+but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the
+past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the
+forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any
+longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the
+craving of his soul for God.
+
+Chator’s discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering
+simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect
+upon the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic
+way. The sermon had the naïve obviousness and the sweet seriousness of
+a child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see
+that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or
+indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself,
+a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its
+expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having
+upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a
+sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of
+the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of
+the homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were
+in his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with
+its tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael’s
+opinion of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his
+eloquence: these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse
+one so deep in the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that
+a positive sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe
+it did; he would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of
+truth was posited among these perishable streets.
+
+The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn,
+Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people
+pouring forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come
+here to rest from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the
+chill vapors of the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their
+journey home. Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had
+leisure to sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or
+shops that made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit
+for neither good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered
+together for a little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now
+already they were trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps
+would shuffle for a space over the dark pavements; a few would have
+pickled cabbage and cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life
+in this limbo between Hell and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be
+judged with the bulk of the congregation: another reason must be found
+for the influence of Evening Prayer or of Chator’s words upon him.
+
+“Did you like the sermon?” Michael asked in the porch.
+
+“I didn’t listen to a word of it,” said Barnes emphatically.
+
+“Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested,”
+said Michael.
+
+“I was thinking what a mug I’d been not to back The Clown for the
+Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I’ll tell you what it is.
+I’m not used to money, and that’s a fact. I don’t know how to spend it.
+I’m afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks.”
+
+“I thought you enjoyed the service,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, I’m used to services. You know. On and off I’ve done a lot of
+churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow
+preaching to curdle me up. I’ve gone through it. Religion, love, and
+measles; they’re all about the same. I don’t reckon anybody gets them
+more than once properly.”
+
+Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and
+though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much
+irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went
+back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What
+puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to
+be impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a
+mean and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was
+amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical
+powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius’ blue
+eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice.
+Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his
+expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when
+he met him again at Earl’s Court he had been kindled by those blue
+eyes. Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was
+now that lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times
+lately, but they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll’s.
+
+“I really must have been mad when I was young,” Michael said to
+himself. “And yet other people have preserved the influence they used
+to have over me. Other people haven’t changed. Why should he? I wonder
+whether it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?”
+
+Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes’ lapse into
+unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the
+Clergy House.
+
+Nigel Stewart’s room, which they visited in the minutes before supper,
+had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a
+picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his
+clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael
+chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire
+beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta
+at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.
+
+The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with
+Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to
+a brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going
+to sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar
+and two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the
+same sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met
+that walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or
+treasurer of club accounts or vicar’s churchwarden, is always to be
+found attached to the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened,
+and found he had a deep voice and was unable to get nearer to “th” than
+“v.”
+
+“We’re raver finking,” he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate,
+“of starting Benediction, vis year.”
+
+“That will be wonderful,” said Michael politely.
+
+“Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver.”
+
+The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish
+stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off
+their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart,
+and Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar
+was left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.
+
+“I envy you people,” said Michael, as the three of them sank down into
+deep wicker chairs. “I envy this power you have to bring Oxford—or
+Cambridge—into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action,
+isn’t it? And you’re free from the thought which must often worry dons
+that perhaps they are having a very good time without doing very much
+to deserve it.”
+
+“We work hard in this parish,” spluttered Chator. “Oh, rather. Very
+hard.”
+
+“That’s what I say. You have the true peace that thrives on activity,”
+said Michael. “But at the same time, what I’m rather anxious to know is
+how nearly you touch the real sinners.”
+
+Stewart and Chator looked at one another across his chair.
+
+“How much do we, brother?” asked Stewart.
+
+“No, really,” protested Michael. “My dear Nigel, I can’t have you being
+so affected. Brother! You must give up being archaic now that you’re a
+pale young curate.”
+
+“What do you call the real sinners?” asked Chator. “You saw our
+congregation to-night. All poor, of course.”
+
+“Shall I say frankly what I think?” Michael asked.
+
+The other two nodded.
+
+“I’m not sure if that congregation is worth a very great deal. I’m not
+trying to be offensive, so listen to me patiently. That congregation
+would come whatever you did. They came not because they wanted to
+worship God or because they desired the forgiveness of their sins, nor
+even because they think that going to church is a good habit. No, they
+came in a sort of sad drift of aimlessness; they came in out of the
+dreariness of their lives to sit for a little while in the glow that a
+church like yours can always provide. They went out again with a vague
+memory of comfort, material comfort, I mean; but they took away with
+them nothing that would kindle a flame to light up the gray week-days.
+Do you know, I fancy that when these picture-theaters become more
+common, as they will, most of your people will get from them just the
+same sensation of warmth and material comfort. Obviously if this is a
+true observation on my part, your people regard church from a merely
+negative attitude. That isn’t enough, as you’ll admit.”
+
+“But it’s not fair to judge by the evening congregation,” Chator burst
+out. “You must remember that we get quite a different crowd at Mass.”
+
+“But do you get the real sinners?” Michael repeated.
+
+“My dear Michael, what does this inquisition forebode?” said Stewart.
+“You’re becoming wrapped in mystery. You’re found in Leppard Street for
+no reason that I’ve yet heard. And now you attack us in this unkind
+way.”
+
+“I’m not attacking you,” Michael said. “I’m trying to extract from you
+a point of view. Lately it happens that I’ve found myself in the
+company of a certain class, well—the company of bullies and
+prostitutes. You must have lots of them in this parish. Do you get hold
+of them? I don’t believe you do, because the chief thing which has
+struck me is the utter remoteness of the Church or indeed of any kind
+of religion from the life of that class. And their standards are
+upside-down—actually upside-down. They’re handed over entirely to the
+powers of darkness. Now, as far as I can see, the Devil—or whatever you
+choose to call him—only cares about people who are worth his while. He
+hands the others over to anybody that likes to deal with them. Equally
+I would say that God is a little contemptuous of the poor
+intermediates. The Church, however, in these hard times for religion is
+glad to get hold even of them, and this miserable spirit of mediocrity
+runs through the whole organization. The bishops are moderate; the
+successful parsons are moderate; and the flock is moderate. To come
+back to the sinners. You know, they _would_ be worth getting. You’ve no
+idea what a force they would raise. And now, all their industry, all
+their ingenuity, all their vitality is devoted to the service of evil.”
+
+Chator could contain himself no longer.
+
+“My dear fellow, you don’t understand how impossible it is to get in
+touch with the people you’re talking about. They elude one. Of course,
+we should rejoice to get them. But they’re impossible.”
+
+“Christ moved among sinners,” said Michael.
+
+“It’s not because we don’t long to move among them,” Chator spluttered
+in exasperation. “We would give anything to move among them. But we
+can’t. I don’t know why. But they won’t relax any of their barriers.
+They’re notoriously difficult.”
+
+“Then it all comes down to a ‘no’ in answer to my question,” said
+Michael. “You don’t get the real sinners. That’s what’s the matter with
+St. Chad’s—until you can compel the sinner to come in, you’ll stay in a
+spiritual backwater.”
+
+“If you were a priest,” said Chator, “you’d realize our handicap
+better.”
+
+“No doubt,” Michael agreed. “But don’t forget that the Salvation Army
+gets hold of sinners. In fact, I’ll wager that nine out of ten of the
+people with whom I’ve been in contact lately would only understand by
+religion the Salvation Army. Personally I loathe the Salvation Army. I
+think it is almost a more disruptive organization than anything else in
+the world. But at least it is alive; it’s not suet like most of the
+Dissenting Sects or a rather rich and heavy plum-pudding like the
+greater part of the Church of England. It’s a maddening and atrociously
+bad and cheap alcohol, but it does enflame. I tell you, my dear old
+Chator and my dear old Nigel, you have the greatest opportunity
+imaginable for energy, for living and bringing life to others, if only
+you’ll not sit down and be content because you’ve got the children and
+can fill the church for Evening Prayer with that colorless, dreary,
+dreadfully sorrowful crowd I saw to-night.”
+
+Michael leaned back in his chair; the fire crackled above the silence;
+and, outside, the disheartened quiet of the Sabbath was brooding.
+Chator was the first to speak.
+
+“Some of what you say may be true, but the rest of it is a mere muddle
+of heresies and misconceptions and misstatements. It’s absolute
+blasphemy to say that God is contemptuous of what you called the
+intermediates, and you apparently believe that evil is only misdirected
+good. You apparently think that your harlots and bullies are better for
+being more actively harmful.”
+
+“No, no,” Michael corrected. “You didn’t follow my argument. As a
+matter of fact, I believe in the absolutism of evil the more, the more
+I see of evil men and women. What I meant was that in proportion to the
+harm they have power to effect would be the inspiration and advantage
+of turning their abilities toward good. But cut out all theological
+questions and confess that the Church has failed with the class I speak
+of.”
+
+The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without
+reaching a conclusion.
+
+“You can’t have friars nowadays,” said Chator in response to Michael’s
+last expression of ambition. “Conditions have changed.”
+
+“Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an
+absolute Christianity,” Michael pointed out. “Conditions had changed
+when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a
+host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists
+are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions.
+Do you believe in Christ?”
+
+“Don’t try to be objectionable, my dear fellow,” said Chator, getting
+very red.
+
+“Well, if you do,” persisted Michael, “if you accept the Gospels, it is
+utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make ‘change of
+conditions’ an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your
+parish.”
+
+“Michael,” said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator’s obviously
+rising anger. “Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission
+are you upon? I believe you’re getting too much wrapped up in private
+fads and fancies. Why don’t you come and work for us at St. Chad’s?”
+
+“He’s one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense
+fervor,” said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and
+Michael felt rather penitent.
+
+“I wish I _could_ work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so
+offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is
+inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight
+of workers in coöperation freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I
+should probably feel like you that the children were the most
+important. Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was
+confirmed by the realization of evil? Usually, it’s the other way
+about, isn’t it? I’ve met many unbelievers who first began to doubt,
+because the problem of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency.
+Chator, you have forgiven me, haven’t you?”
+
+“I ought to have realized that you didn’t mean half you were saying,”
+said Chator.
+
+Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he
+had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he
+let Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.
+
+Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he
+was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street.
+Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to
+Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up
+sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No
+doubt, however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would
+benefit greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael
+had shut himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan,
+and he used to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical
+experiments in his solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on
+several occasions at Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done
+the daring of discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was,
+Nigel was still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he
+would ever cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his
+own diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and
+told him that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.
+
+“All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all,” said
+Michael. “At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed
+through it at the age of sixteen.”
+
+“You must have been horribly precocious,” said Nigel disapprovingly.
+
+“Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give
+up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You’ll be telling me
+soon that you’ve been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite.”
+
+Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an
+experience, and Michael laughed:
+
+“Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He’s just the person you
+ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an
+æsthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?”
+
+“I really think you _are_ growing very offensive,” said Nigel.
+
+“No, I’m not. I’m illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and
+Maurice’s encounters with religion would match each other. Both would
+have a very wide, but also a very superficial area.”
+
+November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist
+at Stella’s wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his
+affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully
+planned sallies of curiosity:
+
+“What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine.
+Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I’ll tell
+you quite enough when the moment comes for telling.”
+
+“Michael, you’re getting dreadfully obstinate,” Stella declared. “I
+remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time.”
+
+“It’s not I who am obstinate,” said Michael. “It’s you who are utterly
+spoiled by the lovelorn Alan.”
+
+Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day
+before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St.
+Martin’s summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of
+those June Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer
+blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer’s image in
+this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He
+wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the
+sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a
+summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead
+days.
+
+Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa.
+
+Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then
+it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could
+remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to
+know them so well:
+
+Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita Magnanimum heroum, pueri
+innuptæque puellæ.
+
+There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory
+of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
+
+Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et ... terris apricis.
+
+Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these
+lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation
+of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park
+would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet
+because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of
+youth, to the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that
+was forever overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their
+sanctity with sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy
+and absurdity also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than
+those deeper moments.
+
+“Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?” he asked.
+
+“Rather,” said Alan, and they both smiled.
+
+“Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst
+out laughing and had to rush out of the room?”
+
+“Rather,” said Alan. “Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren’t they?”
+
+“Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs.
+Merivale?” Michael queried.
+
+“I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at
+anything,” said Alan.
+
+“And yet do you realize that we’re only talking of eight years ago?
+Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the
+time when that wedding took place.”
+
+To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life
+Michael’s calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked
+on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive
+mortality.
+
+“You’ll be writing epitaphs next,” said Alan, in rather an aggrieved
+voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during
+the silence.
+
+“At any rate,” Michael said. “You can congratulate yourself upon not
+having wasted time.”
+
+“My god,” cried Alan, stopping suddenly. “I believe I’m the luckiest
+man alive.”
+
+“I thought you’d found a sovereign,” said Michael. He had never heard
+Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment
+later Alan would be blushing at his want of reserve, he loyally covered
+up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.
+
+Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as
+none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she
+must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her
+Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very
+anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble
+Place, but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy
+came, and Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously
+contemplated marrying her. How well he remembered her in short skirts,
+and here she was a woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold
+pince-nez.
+
+“You _are_ a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place,” grumbled
+Nancy. “Do you realize we haven’t met for years?”
+
+“You’re such a woman of affairs,” said Michael.
+
+“Well, do let’s try to meet next time. I say, don’t you think Maud
+looks terribly ill since she became a Romanist?”
+
+Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
+
+“I think she’s looking rather well.”
+
+“Absolute destruction of individuality, you know,” said Nancy, shaking
+her head. “I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must
+admit that she hasn’t forced her religion down our throats.”
+
+“Did you expect an auto-da-fé in the middle of the lawn?” he asked. She
+thumped him on the shoulder:
+
+“Silly ass! Don’t you try to rag me.”
+
+They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at
+eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have
+regretted the step.
+
+Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the
+ceremony.
+
+“Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?”
+
+“You’ve admitted I’m a married woman,” she exclaimed. “Now surely you
+can tell me what you’ve been doing since August and where you’ve been.”
+
+“I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every
+woman,” said Michael. “Alas, you are not!”
+
+“Michael, you’re perfectly horrid to me.”
+
+“Don’t be too much the young wife,” he advised, with mocking
+earnestness.
+
+“I won’t listen to anything you say, until I know where you’ve been. Of
+course, if I hadn’t been so busy, I could easily have found you out.”
+
+“Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,”
+Michael laughed.
+
+“You shan’t stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me.”
+
+“By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful
+news,” said Michael. “Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your
+honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but
+I’ve never heard.”
+
+“We’re going to Compiègne,” said Stella. “I wrote to little
+Castéra-Verduzan, and he’s lent us the cottage where you and I stayed.”
+
+That choice of Stella’s seemed to mark more decisively than anything
+she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
+
+When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother,
+talking.
+
+“I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers,” she
+told him. “But if you’re going to be here, I could put her off.”
+
+Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother’s
+loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
+
+“No, no, I’m going away again,” he told her.
+
+“Just as you like, dearest boy.”
+
+“You’re glad about Stella?”
+
+“Very glad.”
+
+“And you like Alan?”
+
+“Of course. Charming—charming.”
+
+The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who
+had been brought up to Mrs. Fane’s sitting-room out of the way of the
+wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
+
+“It’s really quite chilly this afternoon,” said Mrs. Fane.
+
+“Yes, there’s a good deal of mist along the river,” said Michael. “A
+pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather
+dreary in the forest.”
+
+“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a
+forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in
+love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”
+
+Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went
+back to Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE INNERMOST CIRCLE
+
+
+November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and
+these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the
+house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even
+when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made
+more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at
+first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would
+presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico
+magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life
+was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall
+Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so
+unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
+
+One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to
+Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk
+with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a
+dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which
+every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater.
+At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been
+given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet
+somebody from Oxford to-night—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round
+half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd
+about him. How were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiègne? Probably
+they were having clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a
+smell of woodfires. With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round
+Piccadilly, sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side
+streets, but always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle.
+Here he would stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west
+and south and north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were
+coming out of the theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to
+Daisy? Should he call a hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the
+spinning of a polychromatic top, he could not leave the Island.
+
+They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge
+one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the
+opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to
+their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must
+begin to frequent the Orient again.
+
+Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a
+nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement
+to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story
+had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had
+been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily
+had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw
+off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the
+road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the
+stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision
+he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and
+there was frost in the air.
+
+Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out
+his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like
+that. Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It
+would serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of
+those vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together
+now; instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark
+pavement. How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At
+last he knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her
+still. What nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry
+her in order to rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her
+still: he loved her now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of
+Green Park rattled to his stick. He loved her more passionately because
+the ghost of her whom he had thought of with romantic embellishment all
+these years was but a caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer
+which had floated through his dreams was become nothing, now that again
+he had seen herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and
+the delicate poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women
+on the pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of
+gravel by the curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what
+direction had she driven away? Even that he did not know. She might
+have driven past this very lamp-post a few minutes back.
+
+Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate
+upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and
+these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the
+imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not
+picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape
+without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would
+put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner
+of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How
+she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the
+Orient,” he would say. She should know immediately that he was not
+deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when
+he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was
+disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid
+woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and
+huddled against the wall of the King’s garden. He put a sixpence among
+her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars
+were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold
+parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to
+Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This
+kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One
+after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of
+doors and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider
+thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary
+policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous.
+And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of
+human dwellings, were Michael’s own thoughts thronged with fancies of
+himself and Lily.
+
+It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge
+across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard
+Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly
+toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced
+across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she
+stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment,
+and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would
+have liked and run.
+
+“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.
+
+It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his
+pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her
+one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet
+it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied
+the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in
+her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always
+haunt her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She
+was not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves,
+as at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears
+and that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks,
+there would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become
+even an individual in the multitude of weary London women.
+
+“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.
+
+“Home. I’m going home,” he said.
+
+“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”
+
+He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her
+voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let
+her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see
+her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to
+Leppard Street.
+
+“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she
+murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of
+you.”
+
+Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against
+the star-incrusted sky.
+
+“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny
+smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were
+blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the
+question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
+
+“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”
+
+“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”
+
+Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in
+what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the
+house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with
+the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who
+slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep
+comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping
+about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put
+his foot on the steps of the front door.
+
+“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”
+
+She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into
+the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor
+as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
+
+“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the
+house sleeps down here.”
+
+She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage.
+When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
+
+“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.
+
+Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the
+greasy wall.
+
+“Here you are. Here you are.”
+
+The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous
+candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his
+cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to
+light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room
+where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door
+exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry.
+Then she led him down three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety
+door, and welcomed him.
+
+“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative
+satisfaction.
+
+Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp.
+The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of
+black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he
+had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this
+room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his
+mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often
+noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a
+map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a
+washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on
+which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald
+powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she
+stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as
+iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.
+
+“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put
+the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such
+a stranger.”
+
+Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was
+hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a
+pale blue chest next to a washstand.
+
+“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.
+
+“What cat?”
+
+“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”
+
+She called, and a small black cat came out.
+
+“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under
+the bed like that.”
+
+Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had
+lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that
+finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.
+
+“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him
+do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His
+mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks
+very well, so she’s got a good home. But _he_ isn’t stinted. Oh, no. He
+gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have
+animals, look after them.”
+
+Michael nodded agreement.
+
+“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better
+than human beings.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.
+
+“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”
+
+The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
+
+“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the
+deliberate novelist.
+
+“After my boy.”
+
+“Your boy?” he echoed.
+
+“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened
+the woman into a fleeting dignity.
+
+“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
+
+“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than
+what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the
+converse was more probable.
+
+“He’s not living with you?”
+
+“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything—not
+ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil
+Service. I lived with his father for many years—in fact, from the time
+I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He’s
+been dead about six years now.”
+
+“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”
+
+“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what
+they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always
+falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a
+Catholic myself.”
+
+As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of
+the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he
+had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect
+humility of spirit.
+
+“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short
+silence.
+
+“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way
+of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”
+
+Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself
+discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her
+health.
+
+“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one,
+and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave,
+they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That
+isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”
+
+Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
+
+“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a
+good deal from some of the men?”
+
+“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment
+more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a
+provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s
+mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might
+not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being
+always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay
+in here for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday—or was
+it Thursday?—time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count
+the days, does it? One day last week I did what I’ve never done before:
+I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and
+another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I
+thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man—a very rough sort of
+a man he was, I’m not surprised poor Peter runs away from them—I heard
+him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night.
+And will you believe it, he’d gone to my bag and taken out his six
+shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had
+at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as
+they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it
+with women like myself. Well now, you can’t say a man like that is any
+better than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets.
+Though I will say it was a warning.”
+
+“I suppose you’d be glad to give up the life,” said Michael, and as he
+asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence
+of this woman a very futile one.
+
+“Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I’m really
+at anyone’s mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in
+one way, the harm’s done.”
+
+Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and
+powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the
+more obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and
+at her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid
+flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
+
+“You see,” she went on, “though I have to put up with a great deal,
+it’s only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up
+by my father, and my mother being—well, it’s no use to mince matters as
+they say—my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this
+occurred with the Frenchman I told you about—that really was a downward
+step, though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good
+to me from the beginning to the end. Still, I’m used to refinement, and
+I have a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I
+dislike the woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent
+regular—eight-and-six, that is....”
+
+“Quite enough, too,” said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was
+so like the scarred surface of the moon.
+
+“You’re right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I’m my own
+mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don’t interfere
+with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking,
+but really Mrs. Cleghorne—that is the woman who keeps the house—really
+she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I
+go all day with only a cup of tea.”
+
+Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own
+breakfast on a chafing dish.
+
+“I interrupted you,” he said. “You were going to tell me something
+about Mrs. Cleghorne.”
+
+“Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this
+seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me.
+Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she’d seen him
+going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn’t a nice thing to
+do, is it? One doesn’t want to go round drinking in public-houses. It
+looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we’ve fallen out
+over it. In fact, I haven’t seen him for some months. Still I shouldn’t
+complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some
+extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you’ll
+understand—well, as I was saying—what with one thing and another my
+rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you’ve paid regular for
+close on two years, you expect a little consideration.”
+
+“Have you lived in this burrow for two years?” Michael asked in
+amazement.
+
+“In the week before Christmas it’ll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs.
+Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round
+here and abuse me. Her mother’s an old woman, you’ll understand, and
+her language—well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick.” She put
+her hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. “She stands in that
+doorway and bullies me until I’m ashamed to sit on this bed and stand
+it. I really am. You’d hardly believe there was such things to say to
+anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I’ve made up my
+mind she isn’t going to do it again. I’m not going to _have_ it.” She
+was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs
+of the bed creaked.
+
+“The mother doesn’t live here?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I’m
+not going to let it occur again. I don’t consider I’ve been well
+treated. If I’d spent the money on gin, I shouldn’t so much object to
+what the old woman calls me, for I don’t say my life isn’t a bit of a
+struggle. But there’s so many things to use up the money, when I’ve got
+what’s wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his
+half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little
+bit smart—really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should
+I be?—and I never waste money on clothes for clothes’ sake, as they
+say—well, after that it’s none so easy to find eight-and-six for the
+week’s rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat’s milk.”
+
+Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by
+living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her
+wretchedness.
+
+“I hope your boy will turn out well,” he ventured at last.
+
+“Oh, he’s a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps
+the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his
+being in the Civil Service.”
+
+“Or even a priest,” Michael suggested.
+
+“Well, you see, he wasn’t born in wedlock. Would that make a
+difference?”
+
+“I don’t think so,” said Michael gently. “Oh, no, I hope that wouldn’t
+make a difference.”
+
+He was finding the imagination of this woman’s life too poignant, and
+he rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged
+inwardly that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in
+which she had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he
+would have to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged
+down into his pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had
+thought an exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity
+when she had stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he
+wished he had five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly
+and hopelessly in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She
+must have robbed him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the
+thief’s and liar’s film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into
+his own? Was it impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns
+out of his pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had
+pawed him with her hands in the black passage, and if the money had
+fallen on the road, he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the
+unjust theft; he ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant
+to give her. And yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had
+said the cat recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken
+the sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the
+weight she bore. And if she had taken them, why not? The cat was not at
+hand to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the
+money for herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey
+upon others in self-defense.
+
+“I find I haven’t any money with me,” said Michael, looking at her.
+
+“That doesn’t matter. I’ve really quite enjoyed our little talk.”
+
+“But I’ll send you some more,” he promised.
+
+“No, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t done anything to have you send your
+money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn’t think I
+was really quite your style. Of course, I’ve really come down. It’s no
+use denying it. I’m _not_ what I was.”
+
+If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had
+robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had
+feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.
+
+“I shall send you some money for your boy,” he said, in the darkness by
+the door.
+
+“No, it doesn’t matter.”
+
+“What’s your name?”
+
+“Well, I’m known here as Mrs. Smith.” Doubtfully she whispered as the
+cold air came in through the open door: “I don’t expect you’d care
+about giving me a kiss.”
+
+Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he
+kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.
+
+When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black
+houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure
+to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their
+fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the
+stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try to
+rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he
+must be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could
+encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far
+as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary
+policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of
+lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the
+knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now
+as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very
+much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in
+the haggard lamplight.
+
+Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
+
+He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly
+in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face
+downward upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that
+anything so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately
+afterward he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and
+shamefacedly he put away the broken picture in a drawer.
+
+Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In
+twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to
+save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy
+that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every
+time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window
+rattling in the wind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TINDERBOX LANE
+
+
+Next morning, when he woke, Michael made up his mind to leave Leppard
+Street finally in the course of this day. He could not bear the thought
+that he would only have to lean out of his window to see the actual
+roof which covered that unforgettable den beneath him. He wondered what
+would be the best thing to do with the furniture. It might be worth
+while to install Barnes in these rooms and pay his rent for some months
+instead of the salary which, now that Lily had been seen, was no longer
+a justifiable expenditure. He certainly would prefer that Barnes should
+never meet Lily now, and he regretted he had revealed her name. Still
+he had a sort of affection for Barnes which precluded the notion of
+deserting him altogether. These rooms with their simple and unmuffled
+furniture, the green shelves and narrow white bed, would be good for
+his character. He would also leave a few chosen books behind, and he
+would write and ask Nigel Stewart to visit here from time to time.
+Michael dressed himself and went upstairs to interview Barnes where he
+lay beneath a heap of bedclothes.
+
+“Oh, I daresay I could make the rooms look all right,” said Barnes.
+“But what about coal?”
+
+“I shall pay for coal and light as well as the rent.”
+
+“I thought you’d find it a bit dismal here,” said Barnes knowingly. “I
+wonder you’ve stuck it out as long as you have.”
+
+“After February,” Michael said, “I may want to come to some other
+arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you
+understand that when the three months are up, I shan’t be able to allow
+you five pounds a week any longer.”
+
+“No, I never supposed you would,” said Barnes, in a tone of
+resignation.
+
+Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not:
+however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could
+do no harm to mention it.
+
+“Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?”
+he asked.
+
+“I didn’t know there was one here; but it’s not a very rare occurrence
+in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to
+that.”
+
+“If you hear any row going on down there,” said Michael, “you had
+better interfere at once.”
+
+“Who with?” Barnes inquired indignantly.
+
+“With the row,” said Michael. “If the woman is being badly treated on
+account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately.”
+
+“Well, I’m not in the old tear’s secret, am I?” asked Barnes, in an
+injured tone. “You can’t expect me to go routing about after every old
+fly-by-night stuck in a basement.”
+
+“I’m particularly anxious to know that she is all right,” Michael
+insisted.
+
+“Oh well, of course, if she’s a friend of yours, Fane, that’s another
+matter. If it’s any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I’ll do
+it.”
+
+Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the
+Solutionist, who was also in bed.
+
+“I’ve got a commission for you,” said Michael.
+
+The Solutionist’s watery eyes brightened faintly.
+
+“You’re fond of animals, aren’t you?” Michael went on. “I see you
+feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I’m interested in a cat who
+appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a
+quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith’s door every morning.
+Mrs. Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are
+fond of animals; but you mustn’t mention me. Here’s a check for five
+pounds. Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits.”
+
+The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
+
+“I couldn’t cash this nowadays,” he said helplessly. “And get a quart
+of milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst.”
+
+“All right. I’ll send you postal orders,” said Michael. “Now I’m going
+away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount
+left every day. You’ll do what I ask? And you’ll promise not to say a
+word about me?”
+
+The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely
+puzzled than he had ever seen him.
+
+Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into
+the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her
+cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did
+not know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully
+complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes
+get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window
+the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and
+asked her to come and speak to him.
+
+“I see,” she said. “Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms, and you’re paying
+in advance up to February. Oh, and his coal and his gas as well? I see.
+Well, that you can settle month by month. Through me? Oh, yes.”
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could
+not help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
+
+“Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?” Michael
+asked.
+
+“He’s still in his bed, but I’ll go myself.”
+
+This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered.
+Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate
+which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her
+condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it
+were being bestowed from a superior height.
+
+Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white
+rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with
+him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice’s studio in
+Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange
+whom himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his
+big horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending
+for some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and
+presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
+
+As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily
+again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good
+deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It
+had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but
+driving toward Maurice’s studio along the banks of the river, Michael
+thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
+
+“I’ve brought you these pictures,” he explained to Maurice, and let the
+gift account for his own long disappearance from communion with his
+friends. “They’re pretty hackneyed, but I think it’s rather good for
+you to have a few hackneyed things amid the riot of originality here.
+What are you doing, Mossy?”
+
+“Well, I’m rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point
+of View.”
+
+“You haven’t met your lady-love yet?”
+
+“No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there’s plenty of time. What about
+you?” Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend
+as a stone where women were concerned.
+
+“I’ve seen her,” said Michael. He simply had to give himself the
+pleasure of announcing so much.
+
+“By Jove, have you really? You’ve actually found your fate?” Maurice
+was evidently very much excited by Michael’s lapse into humanity; he
+had been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. “What’s
+she like?”
+
+“I haven’t spoken to her yet. I’ve only seen her in the distance.”
+
+“And you’ve really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with
+me here. Castleton isn’t coming back from the Temple until after tea.”
+
+Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while
+he stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very
+moment herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought
+if he once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too
+much, and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist
+saying that she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be
+applied to many girls, and it was only for himself that in this case
+they had all the thrilling significance they did.
+
+“I like fair girls best,” Maurice agreed. “But most fair girls are
+dolls. If I met one who wasn’t, I should be hopelessly in love with
+her.”
+
+“Perhaps you will,” Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very
+generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had
+the power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could
+choose his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the
+studio, or he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were
+she to be his, he must hold secrets about her that could never be
+unfolded.
+
+“I really must bolt off,” he declared. “I’ve got a cab waiting.”
+
+Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused
+the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and
+inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
+
+“Life’s really too easy in this house,” he thought. “It’s so impossible
+to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately.
+I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I
+shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here.”
+
+Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily
+at once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of
+her raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have
+made their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the
+joyful prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was
+really tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was
+to be exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington
+Gardens. However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater
+had made such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much
+attention to lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress.
+Otherwise he was himself again of six years ago, with only the
+delightful difference that he was now independent and could carry her
+forthwith into marriage. The knowledge that from a material point of
+view he could do this filled him with a magnificent consciousness of
+life’s plenitude. So far, all his experiments in living had been
+bounded by ignorance or credulity on his own side, and on the side of
+other people by their unsuitableness for experiments. Certainly he had
+made discoveries, but they might better be called disillusionments. Now
+here was Lily who would give him herself to discover, who would open
+for him, not a looking-glass world in which human nature reflected
+itself in endless reduplications of perversity, but a world such as
+lovers only know, wherein the greatest deeps are themselves. Michael
+scarcely bothered to worry himself with the thought that Lily had
+embarked upon her own discoveries apart from him; she had been
+bewitched again by his romantic spells into the innocent girl of
+seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his capacity for
+idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged upon her.
+Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior was
+discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this
+intoxication of happiness.
+
+With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit
+the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment
+threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had
+come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when
+he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new
+Lily wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision
+of her last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the
+queer adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still
+higher upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his
+return to Cheyne Walk had helped to strengthen his hopefulness. Now he
+had returned to this circumambient crowd, looking round as each
+newcomer came up the steps, and all the while horribly aware that this
+evening Lily was not coming to the Orient. He had never been upset like
+this since his resolve was taken. The glimpse of her last night had
+made him very impatient, and he reviled himself again for having been
+such a fool as to let her escape. He fell in a rage with his immobility
+here in London. He demanded why it was not possible to swirl in
+widening circles round the city until he found her. He was no longer
+content to remain in this aquarium, stuck like a mollusc to the side of
+the tank. He wanted to see her again. He was fretful for her slow
+contemptuous walk and her debonair smile. He wanted to see her again.
+Already this quest was becoming the true torment of love. Every single
+other person in sight was a dreary automaton in whom he took no trace
+of interest. Every movement, every laugh, every shadow made him repine
+at its uselessness to him. All those years at Oxford of dreams and
+hesitations had let him store up within himself a very fury of love. He
+had been living falsely all this time: there had never been one dull
+hour which could not have been enchanted by her to the most glorious
+hour imaginable. He had realized that when he saw her last night; he
+had realized all the waste, all the deadness, all the idiotic
+philosophy and impotence of these years without her. How the fancy of
+her vexed him now; how easily could he in his frustration knock down
+the individuals of this senseless restless crowd, one after another,
+like the dummies of humanity they were.
+
+The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling
+curtain. Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into
+Piccadilly. She must be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for
+her to come casually like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear
+for weeks. Or was she a man’s mistress, the mistress of a man of forty?
+He could picture him. He would be a stockbroker, the sort of man whom
+one saw in first-class railway carriages traveling up to town in the
+morning and reading The Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid
+in his buttonhole and take her to Brighton for week-ends. He knew just
+the shade of bluish pink that his cheeks were; and the way his neck
+looked against his collar; the shape of his mustache, the smell of his
+cigar, and his handicap at golf.
+
+It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that.
+Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they
+must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along
+as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after
+restaurant, café after café, standing in the doorways and staring at
+the tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him,
+as people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his
+frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and
+ask what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a
+lunatic.
+
+Michael’s behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often
+ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a
+nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled
+Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions,
+because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily
+among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been
+searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked
+up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry
+Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been
+hers.
+
+By one o’clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to
+suppose that Lily would be found among these furtive women with their
+waylaying eyes in the gloom. Michael went back tired out to Cheyne
+Walk. On the following night he visited the Orient again and afterward
+searched every likely and unlikely place in the neighborhood of the
+heart of pleasure. He went also to the Empire and to the Alhambra;
+sometimes hurrying from one to the other twice in the evening, when
+panics that he was missing Lily overtook him. He met Lonsdale one night
+at the Empire, and Lonsdale took him to several night-clubs which gave
+a great zest to Michael’s search; for he became a member of them
+himself, and so possessed every night another hour or more before he
+had to give up hope of finding her.
+
+Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was
+greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for
+Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt
+qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult,
+impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
+
+Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers
+Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole
+time rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline
+Grey, the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer.
+Guy explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it
+seemed he would soon have to choose between love and art; how
+restrictions were continually being put upon their meeting each other;
+and how violently difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead,
+where Michael had prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very
+sympathetic, and when he met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did
+think she was beautiful and very much like the wild rose that Guy had
+taken as the symbol of her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could
+not imagine problems of conduct in which she could be involved.
+Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel that over Plashers Mead
+brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet it seemed ridiculous to compare
+Guy’s difficulties with his own.
+
+For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan
+had by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to
+see how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was
+certainly something very attractive in these two young people moving
+about that grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and
+stood at the end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred
+acres. That it could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns
+had been defaced by builder’s rubbish was now inconceivable. So too
+within, Michael could not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan
+had ever stood in this drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows
+whose sills scarcely rose above the level of the grass outside; that
+anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library
+with its pilasters and calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that
+anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes
+of those bag-wigged squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that
+girl in her chip hat, holding a bunch of cherries.
+
+“No doubt you’ve got a keen scent for tradition,” said Michael to
+Stella. “But really you have been able to get into the manner
+surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you
+both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace—Stella, I’m
+afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and
+where do hounds meet to-morrow?”
+
+“We’re simply loving it here,” Stella said. “But I think the piano is
+feeling a little bit out of his element. He’s stiff with being on his
+best behavior.”
+
+“I’m hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field,” said Alan.
+“I’ll show it to you to-morrow morning.”
+
+The butler came in with news of callers:
+
+“The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley.”
+
+“Oh, damn!” Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. “I really
+don’t think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you’ve
+both got to come in and be polite.”
+
+Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room,
+whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and
+Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+“We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas,
+but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer
+really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I’ve
+been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of
+ours.”
+
+Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella’s
+interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered
+if Stella had guessed this.
+
+“And Anne heard you play at King’s Hall. Didn’t you, Anne dear?”
+
+Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
+
+“That child is going to worship Stella,” Michael thought.
+
+“We’re hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth
+Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr.
+Fane, you’ll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the
+pleasure of seeing you as well?”
+
+Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
+
+“What absolute rot!” Stella cried. “Of course you’ll be here.”
+
+But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
+
+“They tell us you’ve been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband
+was so much interested and is so much looking forward to seeing your
+stock; but at present he must not drive far. I’ve also heard of you
+from my youngest boy who went up to Christ Church last October year. He
+is very much excited to think that Hardingham is going to have such a
+famous—what is it called, Anne?—some kind of a bowler.”
+
+“A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother,” said Lady Anne.
+
+“Wasn’t he in the Eton eleven?” asked Alan.
+
+“Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment,” said
+Lady Stilton. “Possibly a superior player.”
+
+“Oh, no, mother!” Lady Anne indignantly declared. “He would have played
+for certain against Harrow, if he hadn’t sprained his ankle at the nets
+the week before.”
+
+“I do hope you’ll let him come and see you this vacation,” Lady Stilton
+said.
+
+“Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round
+here,” Alan replied. “I’m just planning out a new pitch now.”
+
+“How delightful all this is,” thought Michael, with visions of summer
+evenings.
+
+Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a
+great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+“Of course, _you’ve_ got to marry Anne,” said Stella to Michael, as
+soon as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
+
+“Alan,” Michael appealed. “Is it impossible for you to nip now forever
+this bud of matchmaking?”
+
+“I think it’s rather a good idea,” said Alan. “I knew young Varley by
+sight. He’s a very sound bat.”
+
+“I shan’t come here again,” Michael threatened, “until you’ve dissolved
+this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to
+marry me to every girl you meet, why don’t you devote yourself to the
+task of making Huntingdon a first-class county in cricket? Stella might
+captain the team.”
+
+Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with
+long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year’s
+morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let
+himself be deterred by Stella’s gibes.
+
+“I admit you’re as happy as you can be,” he said. “Now surely you,
+after so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost
+as well as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet
+married.”
+
+“Michael, you’re having an affair with some girl,” Stella said
+accusingly.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Swear?”
+
+“By everything I believe in, I vow I’m not having an affair with any
+girl. I wish I were.”
+
+His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King’s
+Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that
+it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
+
+Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a
+carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive
+with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in
+the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist’s in the King’s Road, he
+saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham
+Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit
+of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on
+sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and
+sixpence for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
+
+“Ought to be very good,” commented the tobacconist. “Well, we want a
+bit of brightening up nowadays down this way, and that’s a fact. Why, I
+can remember Cremorne Gardens. Tut-tut! Bless my soul. Yes, and the old
+World’s End. That’s going back into the seventies, that is. And it
+seems only yesterday.”
+
+“I rather wish I’d got a ticket,” said Michael.
+
+“Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I
+suppose you’d like one for a lady as well?”
+
+“No, I’ll have two men’s tickets.”
+
+Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany
+him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio
+was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed
+to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go
+alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they
+seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch
+other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of
+spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress.
+So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
+
+Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was
+deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to
+contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which,
+having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal
+loss to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises
+again in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese
+lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it
+now not positively forbidding.
+
+Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many
+of the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also
+professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful
+inventions. The medley of colors, the motion of the dance, the sound of
+the music, the streamers of bunting and the ribbons fluttering round
+the Maypole in the middle of the room, all combined to give Michael an
+illusion of a very jocund assemblage. There were plenty of men dancing
+without masks, which was rather a pity, as their dull, ordinary faces
+halted abruptly the play of fancy. On second thoughts he was glad such
+revelers were allowed upon the floor, since as the scene gradually
+began to affect him he felt it might be amusing for himself to dance
+once or twice before the evening ended. With this notion in view, he
+began to follow more particularly the progress of different girls,
+balancing their charms one against another, and always deriving a good
+deal of pleasure from the reflection that, while at this moment they
+did not know of his existence, in an hour’s time he might have entered
+their lives. This thought did give a romantic zest to an entertainment
+which would otherwise have been quite cut off from his appreciation.
+
+Suddenly Michael’s heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and
+swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking
+away from him along the side of the hall—those two pierrettes in
+black—that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn’t she turn
+round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The
+pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be
+sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily.
+He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below
+him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily’s
+languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that
+it was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He
+hurried down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the
+ball-room. Where were they now? They were coming toward him: the other
+pierrette with the rose pompons said something as they passed. It could
+only be Lily who bowed her head like that in lazy assent. It was Lily!
+Should he call out to her, when next they passed him? If it were not
+Lily, what a fool he would look. If it were not Lily, it would not
+matter what he looked, for the disappointment would outweigh everything
+else. They were going up the room again. They were turning the corner
+again. They were sweeping toward him again. They were passing him
+again. He called “Lily! Lily!” in a voice sharp with eagerness. Neither
+girl gave a sign of attention. It was not she, after all. Yet his voice
+might have been drowned in the noise of the dance. He would call again;
+but again they passed him by unheeding. The dance was over. They had
+stopped at the other end of the room. He pressed forward against the
+egress of the dancers. He pressed forward roughly, and once or twice he
+heard grumbling murmurs because he had deranged a difficult piece of
+costumery. He was conscious of angry masks regarding him; and then he
+was free of the crowd, and before him, talking together under a canopy
+of holly were the two pierrettes. The musicians sat among the palms
+looking at him as they rested upon their instruments. Michael felt that
+his voice was going to refuse to utter her name:
+
+“Lily! Lily!”
+
+The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his
+voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were
+Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what
+she was going to do.
+
+“I say, how on earth did you recognize me?” Lily murmured, raising her
+mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and
+tender, so scornful and so passionate.
+
+“I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across
+the road to speak to you, but you’d gone before I could manage it.
+Where have you been all these years? Once I went to Trelawny Road, but
+the house was empty.” He could not tell her that Drake had been the
+first to bring him news of her.
+
+“It’s years since I was there,” said Lily. “Years and years.” She
+turned to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came
+closer to be introduced.
+
+“Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren’t I good to remember your
+name quite correctly?” Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was
+utterly scornful. “What made you come here? Have you got a friend with
+you?”
+
+Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an
+accident.
+
+“Why did _you_ come?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, something to do,” said Lily. “We live near here.”
+
+“So do I,” said Michael hastily.
+
+“Do you?” Her eyebrows went up in what he imagined was an expression of
+rather cruel interrogation. “This is a silly sort of a show. Still,
+even Covent Garden is dull now.”
+
+Michael thought what a fool he had been not to include Covent Garden in
+his search. How well he might have known she would go there.
+
+“Where’s Doris?” he asked.
+
+Lily shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“I never see anything of her nowadays. She married an actor. I don’t
+often get letters from home, do I, Sylvia?”
+
+The pierrette with rose pompons, who ever since her introduction had
+still been standing outside the conversation, now raised her mask.
+Michael liked her face. She had merry eyes, and a wide nose rather
+Slavonic. Next to Lily she seemed almost dumpy.
+
+“Letters, my dear,” she exclaimed, in a very deep voice, “Who wants
+letters?”
+
+The music of a waltz was beginning, and Michael asked Lily if she would
+dance with him. She looked at Sylvia.
+
+“I don’t think....”
+
+“Oh, what rot, Lily! Of course you can dance.”
+
+Michael gave her a grateful smile.
+
+In a moment Lily had lowered her mask, and they were waltzing together.
+
+“My gad, how gloriously you waltz!” he whispered. “Did we ever dance
+together five years ago?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and he felt the faint movement tremble
+through the imponderable form he held.
+
+“Lily, I’ve been looking for you since June,” he sighed.
+
+“You’re breaking step,” she said. Though her mask was down, Michael was
+sure that she was frowning at him.
+
+“Lily, why are you so cold with me? Have you forgotten?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Why, everything!” Michael gasped.
+
+“You’re absolutely out of time now,” she said sternly.
+
+They waltzed for a while in silence, and Michael felt like a midge
+spinning upon a dazzle.
+
+“Do you remember when we met in Kensington Gardens?” he ventured. “I
+remember you had black pompons on your shoes then, and now you have
+pale blue pompons on your dress.”
+
+She was not answering him.
+
+“It’s funny you should still be living near me,” he went on. “I suppose
+you’re angry with me because I suddenly never saw you again. That was
+partly your mother’s fault.”
+
+She looked at him in faint perplexity, swaying to the melody of the
+waltz. Michael thought he had blundered in betraying himself as so
+obviously lovestruck now. He must be seeming to her like that absurd
+and sentimental boy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him,
+for she could compare him with other men. Ejaculations of wonder at her
+beauty would no longer serve, with all the experience she might bring
+to mock them. She was smiling at him now, and the mask she wore made
+the smile seem a sneer. He grew so angry with her suddenly that almost
+he stopped in the swing of the dance to shake her.
+
+“But it was much more your fault,” he said savagely. “Do you remember
+Drake?”
+
+She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
+
+“Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us.”
+
+“Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed
+by some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that?
+Couldn’t you say ‘no’? Were you too lazy?”
+
+Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
+
+“Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or
+did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were
+flirting with?”
+
+Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no
+gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his
+arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that,
+while she was with him, she was his again.
+
+What did the past matter?
+
+“Ah, Lily, you love me still! I’ll ask no more questions. Am I out of
+step?”
+
+“No, not now,” she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with
+the swoon of their dancing.
+
+“Take off that silly mask,” he commanded. “Take it off and give it to
+me. I can hold you with one arm.”
+
+She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as
+if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no
+longer veiled her face; her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her
+lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm
+until he could touch her shoulder.
+
+“Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over.”
+
+She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and
+danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and
+Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood
+in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
+
+Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always
+known her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything
+that was happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it
+were a street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking.
+Nor with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced
+with Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after
+midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall,
+and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a
+cab, but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they
+lived, was only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham
+Road. The fog was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the
+girls’ arms with a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of
+extraordinary freedom from the world, as if they were all three
+embarked upon an adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their
+shoes deep down in the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession
+of their shoes he had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them.
+The fog was denser and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb,
+listening for oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far
+down the Fulham Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of
+them seemed to sail across to the opposite pavement. He had nothing to
+say because he was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she
+talked now no more than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to
+carry on the conversation, and since most of this consisted of
+questions to Lily and Michael about their former friendship, which
+neither Lily nor Michael answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last;
+and they walked on silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls
+close to him and watching all the time Lily’s hand holding up her big
+black cloak.
+
+“Here we are, you two dreamers,” said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by
+a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly,
+without any dip down into a road.
+
+“Through here? How fascinating!” said Michael.
+
+They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in
+front of a door set in a wall.
+
+“I’ve got the key,” said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
+
+“But this is extraordinary,” Michael exclaimed. “Aren’t we walking
+through a garden?”
+
+“Yes, it’s quite a long garden,” Sylvia informed him. There was a smell
+of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael
+thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following
+Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden
+like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they
+walked up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
+
+“She’s downstairs,” said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the
+key. A woman’s figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the
+passage.
+
+“Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We’re frozen,” Sylvia called. As the
+woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
+
+“We’ve brought an old friend of Lily’s back from the dance. It wasn’t
+really worth going to. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, ought I?” she
+laughed, turning round to Michael. “Come in and get warm. This is Mrs.
+Gainsborough, who’s the queen of cards.”
+
+“Get along with you, you great saucy thing,” said Mrs. Gainsborough,
+laughing.
+
+She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her
+crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her
+black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the
+middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger,
+sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was
+amused to hear her address Sylvia as “great.”
+
+“We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old
+mountain,” Sylvia said.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest
+of wheezy laughter.
+
+“Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room
+table,” and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the
+diminutive corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near
+the fire. Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass
+case of humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell
+coronated with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on
+the chair was of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her
+pierrette’s dress of black with light blue pompons looked strangely
+remote from present time in that setting. Michael could not connect
+this secluded house with anything which had made an impression upon him
+during his experience of the underworld. Here was nothing that was not
+cozy and old-fashioned; here was no sign of decay, whether in the
+fabric of the house or in the attitude of the people living there. This
+small square room with the heavy furniture that occupied so much of the
+space had no demirep demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped
+sides and back of floriated wood; that brass birdcage hanging in the
+window against the curtains of maroon serge; those cabinets in
+miniature, some lacquered, some of plain wood with tiny drop-handles of
+brass; those black chairs with seats of gilded cane; those trays with
+marquetery in mother-of-pearl of wreaths and rivulets and parrots; that
+table-cloth like a dish of black Sèvres; those simpering steel
+engravings—there was nothing that did not bespeak the sobriety of the
+Victorian prime here miraculously preserved. Lily and Sylvia in such
+dresses belonged to a period of fantasy; Mrs. Gainsborough was in
+keeping with her furniture; and Michael, as he looked at himself in the
+glass overmantel, did not think that he was seeming very intrusive.
+
+“Whose are these rooms?” he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not
+believe they were her creation or discovery.
+
+“I found them,” said Sylvia. “The old girl who owns the house is bad,
+but beautiful. Aren’t you, you most astonishing but attractive
+mammoth?” This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the
+moment panting into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
+
+“Get along with you,” the landlady chuckled. “Now don’t go to sleep,
+Lily. Your supper is just on ready.” She went puffing from the room in
+busy mirthfulness.
+
+“She’s one of the best,” said Sylvia. “This house was given to her by
+an old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting
+of him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers.
+She was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle
+Rooms and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness.”
+
+It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have
+mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected
+him more sharply now with a sense of the appropriateness of this house
+in Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood
+of this foggy night.
+
+“Supper! Supper!” Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
+
+It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet,
+and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and
+give him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair,
+up from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so,
+and she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to
+follow them across the passage.
+
+It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table
+with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance.
+That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside,
+was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a
+woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
+
+Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again.
+So he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
+
+“Oh, my eye, my eye!” laughed Sylvia. “To think that Aunt Enormous was
+once in the ballet at the Opera.”
+
+“How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!” Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of
+muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them
+frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue
+eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that
+Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the
+New Year’s Day which could so change his fortune.
+
+“Were you in the ballet?” he asked.
+
+“Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like
+to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now.”
+
+“Show the kind gentleman your picture,” said Sylvia. “She wears it
+round her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank.”
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy
+young woman in a pork-pie hat.
+
+“That’s myself,” said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. “Well, and I
+always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why
+shouldn’t I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?”
+
+“But show him the others,” Sylvia demanded.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained
+morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces
+against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait’s wraith: a
+girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering,
+with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence
+of a ghostly bloom.
+
+“Oh, look at her,” cried Sylvia. “In her beautiful pantalettes!”
+
+“Hold your tongue, you!”
+
+They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which
+lasted on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the
+other room and sat round the fire.
+
+“Tell us about the General,” said Sylvia.
+
+“Go on, as if you hadn’t heard a score of times all I’ve got to tell
+about the General—though you know I hate him to be called that. He’ll
+always be the Captain to me.”
+
+Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough
+embarked upon tales of gay days in the ’sixties and ’seventies. It was
+astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could
+scarcely have changed since then.
+
+“The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in eighteen-sixty-nine
+before I was twenty, and I’ve lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many’s
+the summer daybreak we’ve walked back here after dancing all night at
+Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl’s Court is nothing to
+Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it’s as
+well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me
+the dismals to be going there now without my Captain.”
+
+She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very
+smoke and grime of the city.
+
+“Who knows what’s going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?” she
+said, shaking her head. “So enjoy yourselves while you can. That’s my
+motto. And if there’s a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be
+very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am
+now.”
+
+The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company,
+seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it
+was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of
+her youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces.
+Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead
+singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes
+reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young
+subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story
+to story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after
+two o’clock, and Michael rose to go.
+
+“We’ll have one song,” cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough
+to the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up
+albums, and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a
+pleating of claret-colored silk.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed
+in comparison so frail and old, sang in a wheezy pipe of a voice: _The
+Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me._
+
+“But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me
+behind my back,” she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face
+Sylvia when she had finished.
+
+“Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like
+it.”
+
+“Bless your heart, my dearie.” She laid a hand on Sylvia’s for an
+instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and
+asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily
+and her out to lunch.
+
+“We can lunch to-morrow, can’t we?” Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily’s
+arm, for she was now fast asleep.
+
+“Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow,” Lily yawned.
+
+He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to
+shake hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that
+the outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to
+speed his departure.
+
+The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the
+night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming
+undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But
+he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter
+night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his
+overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls’
+shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most
+fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers
+which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse
+blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by
+nor cat offended his isolation. The London night belonged to him; his
+only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on
+either side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than
+a few yards in front.
+
+He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his
+good luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing
+was ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that
+carnival. Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined
+to buy all sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had
+fingered vaguely from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily’s
+discovery was colored with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze
+the situation in which he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea
+through the fog, he was bemused by the romantic memory of her which was
+traveling along with his thoughts. He could hold very tightly her
+shoes: he could almost embrace the phantom of her beauty that curled
+upon the vapors round each lamp: he was intoxicated merely by the sound
+of the street where she lived.
+
+“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!”
+
+He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed
+to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of
+the railway-carriage: “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
+
+“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!” he chanted at the
+fog, and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on
+ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
+
+“I’m awfully sorry, constable.”
+
+“Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren’t you?”
+
+“Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink
+my health when you’re off duty.”
+
+He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman’s hand, and as he left the
+stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was
+the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on
+the Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black
+river flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with
+monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here, a frore
+whitish mist that saturated him with a malignant chill. Michael was
+glad to find himself looking at the dolphin-headed knocker of 173
+Cheyne Walk. The effect of being in his own bedroom again, even though
+the girls’ shoes lay fantastically upon the floor, was at first to make
+him believe that Tinderbox Lane might have been a dream, and after
+that, because he knew it was not a dream, to wonder about it.
+
+Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could
+Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small
+house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and
+stability, almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety.
+Mrs. Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very
+demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would
+have been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary
+to assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of
+high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be
+on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady’s kindling
+stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the
+Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been
+nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael’s heart leaped with the fancy
+that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night;
+and, picking up Lily’s shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about
+its secrets.
+
+In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dull January rain; but
+Michael greeted the outlook as cheerfully as if it had been perfect May
+weather. He went first to a post office to send off the money he had
+promised to Mrs. Smith and the Solutionist. After this discharge of
+business, he felt more cheerful than ever, and, as if to capture the
+final touch of fantasy necessary to bewitch yesterday night, he
+suddenly realized, when he was hurrying along Fulham Road in the rain,
+that he had no idea of the number of Mrs. Gainsborough’s house. He also
+began to wonder if there really could be such a place as Tinderbox
+Lane, and as he walked on without discovering any indication of its
+existence, he wondered if Sylvia had invented the name, so that he
+might never find her and Lily again. It was an uneasy thought, for
+without a number and without a name—but just as he was planning an
+elaborate way to discover the real name of the street, he saw in front
+of him Tinderbox Lane enameled in the ordinary characters of municipal
+direction. Here were the two posts: here was the narrow entrance. The
+rumble of the traffic grew fainter. On one side was a high blank wall;
+on the other a row of two-storied houses. They were naturally dwellings
+of the poorer classes, but at intervals a painter had acquired one, and
+had painted it white or affixed green shutters with heart-shaped
+openings. The width of the pavement varied continually, but generally
+at the beginning it was very narrow. Later on, however, it became wide
+enough to allow trees to be planted down the middle. Beyond this part
+was a block of new flats round which Tinderbox Lane narrowed again to a
+mere alley looking now rather dank and gloomy in the rain. Michael
+could not remember from last night in the fog either the trees or the
+flats. The door of Lily’s lodging had been set in a wall: here on one
+side was certainly a wall, but never a door to relieve the grimy
+blankness. He began to feel discouraged, and he walked round into the
+narrow alley behind the flats. Here were doors in the wall at last, and
+Michael examined each of them in turn. Two were dark blue: one was
+green: one was brown. 74: 75: 76: 77. He chose 77 because it was
+farthest away from the flats. After a very long wait, an old woman
+holding over herself a very large umbrella opened it.
+
+“Mrs. Gainsborough ...?” Michael began.
+
+But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his
+inquiry.
+
+Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last
+the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself
+under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman’s next door.
+
+“I’ve come to take the girls out to lunch.”
+
+“That’s a good boy,” she wheezed. “The dearies will be glad to get out
+and enjoy themselves a bit. Here’s a day. This would have suited Noah,
+wouldn’t it?”
+
+She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the
+garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house
+itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the
+astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the
+pretentious gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind,
+nor even in front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These
+houses with doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to
+individuals, and for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by
+the development of the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long
+gardens in a row must be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad
+to think that the flats opposite were no doubt due to the death of
+someone who had owned a similar house and garden.
+
+Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side.
+Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently
+to the kitchen. Two fairly large trees were planted in the grass that
+ran up to the house on either side of the balcony.
+
+“Those are my mulberries,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “This is called
+Mulberry Cottage. I’ve been meaning to have the name painted on the
+outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There’s a
+character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his
+mulberries. But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my
+flowers are really remarkable. But there, it’s not to be wondered at.
+M’ father was a nursery gardener.”
+
+She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why.
+Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of
+the Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
+
+“The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls,” she wheezed at the door of the
+sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of
+bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily
+was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her
+book down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the
+title, and found it was the Contes Drôlatiques of Balzac. An unusual
+girl, he thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could
+not kiss her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now
+restored, supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at
+ease again. Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he
+sat thinking of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The
+silence here was very like the country. London was a thousand miles
+away, and he could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and
+less did he think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage.
+Yet the apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take
+Lily away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she
+might not want to marry him at once. The discovery of her in this
+pleasant house with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of
+rescue which he had planned. She would not presumably be escaping from
+a situation she abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was
+it Sylvia who was making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and
+explain that he had no predatory intentions. She would surely be glad
+that he wanted to marry Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and
+tinkled the lusters on the mantelshelf. “Sweet,” said the canary in the
+brass cage: the rain sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small
+square room was the malaise of someone’s jealousy. The tentative
+solution that was propounding itself did not come from his own
+impression of Sylvia, but it seemed positively to be an emanation from
+the four walls of the room which in the stillness was able to force its
+reality upon him. “Sweet,” said the canary: the lusters stopped their
+tinkling: the rain sizzled steadily outside.
+
+Lunch at Kettner’s was a great success. At least Michael thought it was
+a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy
+walls, and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but
+rather to give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and
+wintry sun. Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was
+conscious that the other people in the restaurant were turning round to
+envy their table.
+
+The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less
+he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been
+comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she
+displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly
+herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid
+question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and
+Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been
+disquieting, but that Sylvia talked of them with such a really
+tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more
+than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the
+river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and balls.
+Quite definitely Michael was able to assure himself that out of the
+host of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored
+above the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were
+independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be
+Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and
+perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm’s length from Lily,
+as he felt himself being held now. Her attitude might have nothing to
+do with jealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she
+was, indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who
+read the Contes Drôlatiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a
+girl who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had
+said something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet
+he knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the
+conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what
+was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy
+walls.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the
+girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be
+alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To
+find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a
+room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative,
+so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
+
+“We’re alone,” he managed to say at last.
+
+“Sylvia’s gone to Brighton. She didn’t want to go a bit.”
+
+“Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven’t kissed for five years.”
+
+He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him,
+it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He
+heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from
+perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the
+trance of silence.
+
+“Lily, you will marry me, won’t you? Very soon? At once?”
+
+Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him
+from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the
+remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue
+relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was
+such a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of
+action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his
+arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet
+most poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had
+dreaded at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition,
+scarcely knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This
+tranquillity of caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a
+lullaby to his fears. It was the very rhapsody of his intention to
+kneel beside her, murmuring huskily the little words of love. He would
+have married her wherever and whatever he found her, but the relief was
+overwhelming. He had thought of a beautiful thing ruined; he had
+foreshadowed glooms and tragic colloquies; he had desperately hoped his
+devotion might be granted at least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he
+found this ivory girl, this loveliness of rose and coral within his
+arms. So many times she had eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the
+night, and so often in dreams he had held her for kisses that were
+robbed from him by the sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could
+believe he held her now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his
+cheeks, when her mouth was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon
+this airy beauty must have perished; and even now what was she? A shred
+of goldleaf on his open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and
+destructible in a moment of adversity.
+
+Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been
+aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she
+was placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her,
+though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He
+could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about
+whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous
+promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he
+would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for
+her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection,
+thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses
+blowing in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in
+her kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in
+itself; and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the
+fat pink loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which
+the Captain had first imagined his gift.
+
+So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet
+ineffably vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would
+have had them express, the hour passed.
+
+“We must talk of practical things,” he declared, rising from his knees.
+
+“You always want to talk,” Lily pouted.
+
+“I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?”
+
+“Yes; but it’s so difficult to do things quickly.”
+
+“We’ll be married in a month. We’ll be married on Saint Valentine’s
+Day,” Michael announced.
+
+“It’s so wet now to think of weddings.” She looked peevishly out of the
+window.
+
+“You haven’t got to think about it. You’ve got to do it.”
+
+“And it’s so dull,” she objected. “Sylvia says it’s appallingly dull.
+And she’s been married.”
+
+“What has Sylvia got to do with it?” he demanded.
+
+“Oh, well, she’s been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother
+died, what was I to do? I couldn’t bear Doris any more. She always gets
+on my nerves. Anyway, don’t let’s talk about marriage now. In the
+summer I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather.”
+
+“But look here,” he persisted. “Are you in love with me?”
+
+She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
+
+“Well, if you’re not in love with me....”
+
+“Oh, I am, I am! Don’t shout so, Michael. If I wasn’t awfully fond of
+you, I shouldn’t have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men
+coming here.”
+
+“Are you Sylvia’s servant?” said Michael, in exasperation.
+
+“Don’t be stupid. Of course not.”
+
+“It’s ridiculous,” he grumbled, “to quote her with every sentence.”
+
+“Why you couldn’t have stayed where you were,” said Lily fretfully, “I
+don’t know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If
+you’re so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up.”
+
+“So, we’re not to talk any more about marriage?”
+
+After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that
+Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not
+the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
+
+“Don’t let’s talk about anything,” said Lily. He could not stand aloof
+from the arms she held wide open.
+
+Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael
+spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked
+approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The
+weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch,
+it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long.
+One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he
+asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey’s. Michael
+had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should
+seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what
+he told himself was the only café in London which had escaped the
+cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
+
+As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very
+white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her
+self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael
+suddenly suspicious.
+
+“Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?” he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“It depends who we go with. Often I don’t care for them much. And the
+girls you see there are frightfully common.”
+
+He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If
+it were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no
+difference to his resolution. People began to come into the café,
+shaking the wet from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was
+audible above the conversation.
+
+“I wish we could have had one fine day together,” said Michael
+regretfully. “Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the
+winter?”
+
+“I must have been very fond of you,” Lily laughed. “I don’t think you
+could make me walk like that now.”
+
+“Aren’t you so fond of me now?” he asked reproachfully.
+
+“You ought to know,” she whispered.
+
+All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets,
+and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
+
+“Shall I come in?” Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
+
+“Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course.”
+
+He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
+
+“Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink
+after midnight?”
+
+“I told you that Sylvia doesn’t like me to,” she said.
+
+“But you would, if she didn’t mind?” Michael went on, torturing
+himself.
+
+“How fond you are of ‘ifs,’” she answered. “I can’t bother to think
+about ‘ifs’ myself.”
+
+If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips
+with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already
+he was feeling the influence of Lily’s attitude. He wondered if, when
+he married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It
+was as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful
+woman as in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
+
+“Happiness makes me inactive,” said Michael to himself. “So of course I
+shall never really be happy. What a paradox.”
+
+He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a
+surrender to-night.
+
+“I’m glad I didn’t suggest staying late,” he thought, as he walked away
+down the dripping garden path. “I should have been mad with
+unreasonable suspicions, if she had said ‘yes.’”
+
+Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very
+much, he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of
+malice in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have
+dinner with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond.
+Michael was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet
+until she had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia’s
+influence? And who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
+
+The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o’clock as
+usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the
+fire.
+
+“Lily isn’t down yet,” she told him.
+
+He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he
+and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
+
+“Jolly dance?” he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
+
+“Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out.” Michael
+flung down his challenge.
+
+“She’s been talking to me about what you said yesterday,” Sylvia began.
+
+Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her
+countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that
+out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
+
+“When do you propose to marry her?” Sylvia went on.
+
+“As soon as possible,” he said coolly.
+
+“Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?” she
+demanded.
+
+“I really don’t know. You have rather an advantage over me in that
+respect.”
+
+“I’m glad you admit that,” interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
+
+“You have personality. You’ve probably been very kind to Lily. You’re
+cleverer than she is. You’re with her all the time. I’ve only quite
+suddenly come into her life again.”
+
+“I’m glad you think you’ve managed to do that,” she said, glowering.
+
+More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a
+cat crouching by the fire.
+
+“Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an
+opportunity to be alone with Lily, you now think you’ve come into her
+life. My god, you’re like some damned fool in a novel!”
+
+“A novel by whom?” Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off
+Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he
+never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
+
+“Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp,” she answered savagely.
+
+He bowed.
+
+“I suppose you’re suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?”
+she sneered.
+
+Michael was rather startled by her divination.
+
+“What should I redeem her from?”
+
+“I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?”
+
+“I don’t know that I boasted of it,” he replied, in rather an injured
+tone. “But I did know her—very well.”
+
+“Couldn’t you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should
+have said that Lily’s future must have been obvious from the time she
+was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got
+out of her life then: what the hell’s your object in coming into it
+again now, as you call it, unless you’re a sentimentalist? People don’t
+let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without
+the help of sentiment.”
+
+Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the conversation was
+able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true.
+He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia
+looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
+
+“Sentiment about what?” he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
+
+“You think Lily’s a tart, don’t you? And you think I am, don’t you?”
+
+He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
+
+“I did think so,” he said. “But of course I’ve changed my mind since
+I’ve seen something of you.”
+
+“Oh, of course you’ve changed your mind, have you?” she laughed
+contemptuously. “And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?”
+
+“Even if _you_ are,” said Michael hotly, “I needn’t believe that Lily
+is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry
+her.”
+
+“Sentimentalist,” she jeered. “Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist.”
+
+“Your sneers don’t particularly affect me, you know,” he said politely.
+
+“Oh, for god’s sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut
+out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And
+I’m sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I’m a perpetual
+bugbear to his good form.”
+
+“Because you made a hash of marriage,” Michael pointed out, “it doesn’t
+follow that I’m not to marry Lily. I can’t understand your objections.”
+
+“Listen. You couldn’t make her happy. You couldn’t make her any happier
+than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time
+without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let
+any one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the money
+myself. And I usually can. Well, why should I stand aside now and let
+you carry her off, even though you do want to marry her? I could argue
+against it on your side by telling you that you have no chance of
+keeping Lily faithful to you? Can’t you see that she has no moral
+energy? Can’t you see that she’s vain and empty-headed? Can’t you see
+that? But why should I argue with you for your benefit? I don’t care a
+damn about your side in the matter.”
+
+“What exactly do you care about?” Michael asked. “If Lily is what you
+say, I should have thought you’d be glad to be rid of her. After all,
+I’m not proposing to do her any wrong.”
+
+“Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!” Sylvia cried. “Man can
+only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be
+a success, you’ll have to own Lily. That’s what I rebel against—the
+ownership of women. It makes me mad.”
+
+“Yes, it seems to,” Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage
+with Sylvia’s unreasonableness. “If it comes to ownership,” he went on
+angrily, “I should have thought that handing her over to the highest
+bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable
+slave of man.”
+
+“Why?” challenged Sylvia. “You sentimental ass, can’t you understand
+that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She’s
+free. I’m free.”
+
+“You’re not at all free,” Michael indignantly contradicted. “You’re
+bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few
+less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts,
+you’d be a good deal happier.”
+
+“I don’t want to be happier.”
+
+“Oh, I think you’re merely hysterical,” he said disdainfully. “But,
+after all, your opinions about yourself don’t matter to me. Only I
+can’t see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you
+have the right, I don’t grasp your reason for wanting to.”
+
+“When I met Lily first,” said Sylvia, “she had joined the chorus of a
+touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I’d just
+run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d
+ever seen. That’s three years ago. Is she beautiful still?”
+
+“Of course she is,” said Michael.
+
+“Well, it’s I who have kept her beautiful. I’ve kept her free also. If
+sometimes I’ve let her have affairs with men, I’ve taken care that they
+were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort
+of....”
+
+“Look here,” Michael burst in. “I’m sick of this conversation. You’re
+talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I’m going to marry her,
+whatever you think.”
+
+“I say you won’t, and you shan’t,” Sylvia declared.
+
+The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the
+fire, glaring at each other.
+
+“The extraordinary thing is,” said Michael at last, “I thought you had
+a sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing
+is that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you.
+But I can’t help saying it.”
+
+“The opinions of sentimentalists don’t interest me one way or the
+other,” Sylvia snapped.
+
+“Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so
+pleasant on the evening we met?”
+
+“I really can’t bother to go back as far as that.”
+
+“You weren’t jealous _then_,” Michael persisted.
+
+“Who says I’m jealous now?” she cried.
+
+“I do. What do you think you are, unless you’re jealous? When is Lily
+coming down?”
+
+“She isn’t coming down until you’ve gone.”
+
+“Then I shall go and call her.”
+
+“She’s not in London.”
+
+“I don’t believe you.”
+
+A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia
+the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He
+congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was
+obviously going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
+
+On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
+
+“You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because
+Lily loves me.”
+
+“It’s not true,” Sylvia declared. “It’s not true. She doesn’t love you,
+and what right have you to love her?”
+
+She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
+
+“What college was your husband at?” Michael suddenly inquired.
+
+“Balliol.”
+
+“I wonder if I knew him.”
+
+“Oh, no. He was older than you.”
+
+It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane,
+that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so
+much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He
+would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to
+have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he
+felt that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let
+Lily continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if
+Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably
+irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no
+less than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not
+want to marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily,
+from whom there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his
+theories of behavior were being referred back to his own desires. It
+was useless to pretend any longer that his pursuit had been quixotry.
+Even if it had seemed so on that night when he first heard the news of
+Lily from Drake, the impulse at the back of his resolve had been his
+passion for her. When he looked back at his behavior lately, a good
+deal of it seemed to have been dictated by self-gratification. He
+remembered how deeply hurt he had felt by Poppy’s treatment of what he
+had supposed his chivalry. In retrospect his chivalry was seeming
+uncommonly like self-satisfaction. His friendship for Daisy; for
+Barnes; for the underworld; it had been nothing but self-satisfaction.
+Very well, then. If self was to be the touchstone in future, he could
+face that standard as easily as any other. By the time he had reached
+the end of Tinderbox Lane Michael was convinced of his profound
+cynicism. He felt truly obliged to Sylvia for curing him of sentiment.
+He had so often inveighed against sentiment as the spring of human
+action, that he was most sincerely grateful for the proof of his own
+sentimental bias. He would go to Sylvia to-morrow and say frankly that
+he did not care a bit what Lily had been, was now, or would be; he
+wanted her. She was something beautiful which he coveted. For the
+possession of her he was ready to struggle. He would declare war upon
+Sylvia as upon a rival. She should be rather surprised to-morrow
+morning, Michael thought, congratulating himself upon this new and
+ruthless policy.
+
+On the next morning, however, all Michael’s plans for his future
+behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry
+Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold
+resolution, were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing
+a bell at intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for
+the position he had imagined himself taking up in that small square
+room. This errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such rapt
+interest at his ringing of the bell, was by no means the audience he
+had pictured.
+
+“Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?” Michael asked.
+
+The errand-boy shook his head.
+
+“Well, why do you do it?”
+
+“I wasn’t,” said the errand-boy.
+
+“What are you doing, then?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from
+Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no
+answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but
+there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to
+Sylvia:
+
+173 CHEYNE WALK,
+S.W.
+
+_Dear Sylvia,_
+
+_If you aren’t afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me see
+Lily?_
+
+_I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting._
+
+_Yours,_
+_M. F._
+
+To Lily he wrote:
+
+_Darling,_
+
+_Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to
+three._
+
+_Michael._
+
+Alone, of course.
+
+Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not
+come. All the time he spent in a second-hand bookshop with one eye on
+the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:
+
+_Come to-morrow at twelve._
+
+_S. S._
+
+Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the
+waste-paper basket.
+
+“I thought I should sting you into giving way,” he exclaimed.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
+
+“They’ve gone away, the demons!” was what she said.
+
+Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching
+behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert
+he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
+
+“Where have they gone?” he asked blankly.
+
+“Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage.
+There’s a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I’ll give it to you.”
+
+Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
+
+“We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are,” Mrs.
+Gainsborough said.
+
+“Very soon,” he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold
+begonias to-morrow morning.
+
+In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia’s note, a bleak little envelope
+waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read
+it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the
+silence that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his
+cage. Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
+
+From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia’s hostility was
+stretching out toward him. “Sweet,” said the canary. Michael tore open
+the envelope and read:
+
+_Perhaps you’ll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You’d
+much better give her up. In a way, I’m rather sorry for you, but not
+enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear young
+thing, that you aren’t even beginning to understand women. I admit that
+there’s precious little to understand in Lily. And for that very
+reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty, you’ll hate her.
+Now_ I _hate to think of this happening. She’s a thousand times better
+off with me than she ever could be with you. Perhaps my maternal
+instinct has gone off the lines a bit and fixed itself on Lily. And yet
+I don’t think it’s anything so sickly as sentimental mothering. No, I
+believe I just like to sit and look at her. Lily’s rather cross with me
+for taking her away from “such a nice boy.” Does that please you? And
+doesn’t it exactly describe you? However, I won’t crow. Don’t break the
+lusters, when you read this. They belong to Fatty. What I suggest for
+you is a walk in Kensington Gardens to the refrain of “Blast the whole
+bloody world!” Now look shocked, my little Vandyck._
+
+_S. S._
+
+Michael tore the letter up. He did not want to read and re-read it for
+the rest of the day. His eyelids were pricking unpleasantly, and he
+went out to find Mrs. Gainsborough. He was really sensitive that even a
+room should witness such a discomfiture. The landlady was downstairs in
+the kitchen, where he had not yet been. In this room of copper pots and
+pans, with only the garden in view, she might have been a farmer’s
+wife.
+
+“Sit down,” she said. “And make yourself at home.”
+
+“Will you sit down?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, well, yes, if it’s any pleasure to you.” She took off her apron
+and seated herself, smoothing the bombasine skirt over her knees.
+
+A tabby cat purred between them; a kettle was singing; and there was a
+smell of allspice.
+
+“You really don’t know where the girls have gone?” Michael began.
+
+“No more than you do,” she assured him. “But that Sylvia is really a
+Turk.”
+
+“I suppose Lily didn’t tell you that I used to know her six years ago?”
+he asked.
+
+“Oh, yes, she talked about you a lot. A good deal more than Miss Sylvia
+liked, that’s a sure thing.”
+
+“Well, do you think it’s fair for Sylvia to carry her off like this? I
+want to marry Lily, Mrs. Gainsborough.”
+
+“There, only fancy what a daring that Sylvia has. She’s a nice girl,
+and very high-spirited, but she _is_ a Miss Dictatorial.”
+
+Michael felt encouraged by Mrs. Gainsborough’s attitude, and he made up
+his mind to throw himself upon her mercy. Sentiment would be his only
+weapon, and he found some irony in the reflection that he had set out
+this morning to be a brutal cynic in his treatment of the situation.
+
+“Do you think it’s fair to try to prevent Lily from marrying me? You
+know as well as I do that the life she’s leading now isn’t going to be
+the best life possible for her. You’re a woman of the world, Mrs.
+Gainsborough——”
+
+“I was once,” she corrected. “And a very naughty world it was, too.”
+
+“You were glad, weren’t you, when the Captain brought you to this
+house? You were glad to feel secure? You would have married him?”
+
+“No, I wouldn’t marry him. I preferred to be as I am. Still that’s
+nothing for Lily to go by. She’s more suited for marriage than what I
+was.”
+
+“Don’t you think,” Michael went on eagerly, “that if after six years
+I’m longing to marry her, I ought to marry her? I know that she might
+be much worse off than she is, but equally she might be much better
+off. Look here, Mrs. Gainsborough, it’s up to you. You’ve got to make
+it possible for me to see her. You’ve got to.”
+
+“But if I do anything like that,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “it means I
+have an unpleasantness with Sylvia. That girl’s a regular heathen when
+she turns nasty. I should be left all alone in my little house. And
+what with Spring coming on and all, and the flowers looking so nice in
+the garden, I should feel very much the square peg in the round hole.”
+
+“Lily and I would come and see you,” he promised. “And I don’t think
+Sylvia would leave you. She’d never find another house like Mulberry
+Cottage or another landlady like you.”
+
+“Yes, I daresay; but you can’t tell these things. Once she’s in her
+tantrums, there’s no saying what will happen. And, besides, I don’t
+know what you want me to do.”
+
+“I want you to send me word the first moment that Lily’s alone for an
+hour; and when I ring, do answer the bell.”
+
+“Now that wasn’t my fault yesterday,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Really I
+thought we should have the fire-escape in. The way you nagged at that
+poor bell! It was really chronic. But would she let me so much as speak
+to you, even with the door only on the jar? Certainly not! And all the
+time she was snapping round the house like a young crocodile. And yet
+I’m really fond of that girl. Well, when the Captain died, she was a
+daughter to me. Oh, she was, she was really a daughter to me. Well, you
+see, his sister invited me to the funeral, which I thought was very
+nice, her being an old maid and very strict. Now, I hardly liked to put
+on a widow’s cap and yet I hardly didn’t like to. But Sylvia, she said
+not on any account, and I was very glad I didn’t, because there was a
+lot of persons there very stand-offish, and I should have been at my
+wits to know whatever I was going to say.”
+
+“Look here,” said Michael. “When the Captain gave you this house, he
+loved you. You were young, weren’t you? You were young and beautiful?
+Well, would you like to think your house was going to be used to
+separate two people very much in love with each other? You can say I
+climbed over the wall. You can make any excuse you like to Sylvia. But,
+Mrs. Gainsborough, do, do let me know when Lily is going to be alone.
+If she doesn’t want to come away with me, it will be my fault, and that
+will be the end of it. If only you’ll help me at the beginning. Will
+you? Will you promise to help me?”
+
+“I never could resist a man,” sighed Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+resignation. “There’s a character! Oh, well, it’s my own and no one
+else’s, that’s one good job.”
+
+Michael had to wait until February was nearly over before he heard from
+her. It had been very difficult to remain quietly at Cheyne Walk, but
+he knew that if he were to show any sign of activity, Sylvia would
+carry Lily off again.
+
+“A person to see you, sir,” said the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid.
+
+Michael found Mrs. Gainsborough sitting in the hall. She was wearing a
+bonnet tied with very bright cerise ribbons.
+
+“They’ve had a rumpus, the pair of them, this afternoon. And Sylvia’s
+gone off in the sulks. I really was quite aggravated with her. Oh,
+she’s a willful spitfire, that girl, sometimes. She really is.”
+
+Michael was coming away without a coat or hat, and Mrs. Gainsborough
+stopped him.
+
+“Now don’t behave like a silly. Dress yourself properly and don’t make
+me run. I’m getting stout, you know,” she protested.
+
+“We’ll get a hansom.”
+
+“What, ride in a hansom? Never! A four-wheeler if you _like_.”
+
+It was difficult to find a four-wheeler, and Michael was nearly mad
+with impatience.
+
+“Now don’t upset yourself. Sylvia won’t be back to-night, and there’s
+no need to tug at me as if I was a cork in a bottle. People will think
+we’re a walking poppy-show, if you don’t act more quiet. They’re all
+turning round to stare at us.”
+
+A four-wheeler appeared presently, and very soon they were walking down
+Tinderbox Lane. Michael felt rather like a little boy out with his
+nurse, as he kept turning back to exhort Mrs. Gainsborough to come more
+quickly. She grew more and more red in the face, and so wheezy that he
+was afraid something would happen to her, and for a few yards made no
+attempt to hurry her along. At last they reached Mulberry Cottage.
+
+“Supposing Sylvia has come back!” he said.
+
+“I keep on telling you she’s gone away for the night. Now get on
+indoors with you. You’ve nearly been my death.”
+
+“I say, you don’t know how grateful I am to you!” Michael exclaimed,
+turning round and grasping her fat hands.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough shouted upstairs to Lily as loudly as her
+breathlessness would permit:
+
+“I’ve brought you back that surprise packet I promised.”
+
+Then she vanished, and Michael waited for Lily at the foot of the
+stairs. She came down very soon, looking very straight and slim in her
+philamot frock of Chinese crêpe that so well became her. Soon she was
+in his arms and glad enough to be petted after Sylvia’s rages.
+
+“Lily, how can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It’s
+absolutely intolerable.”
+
+“She’s been horrid to me to-day,” said Lily resentfully.
+
+“Well, why do you put up with it?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. I hate always squabbling. It’s much easier to give
+way to her, and usually I don’t much mind.”
+
+“You don’t much mind whether we’re married!” Michael exclaimed. “How
+can you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you
+marry me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look
+beautiful. You’d be happy married to me—you really would.”
+
+“Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father
+didn’t get on, and Doris doesn’t get on with the man she’s married to.
+In fact, everybody seems to hate it.”
+
+“Do you hate me?” Michael demanded.
+
+“No, I think you’re awfully sweet.”
+
+“Well, why don’t you marry me? You’ll have plenty of money and nothing
+to bother about. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy being married.”
+
+For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve.
+For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A
+chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her
+loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting
+at the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty,
+the bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess
+her without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. “_Michael,
+why do you make me love you so?_” Was that the last protest she ever
+made against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must
+primarily be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.
+
+“Lily,” he cried, catching her to him. “You’re coming away with me
+now.”
+
+He kissed her a hundred times.
+
+“Now! Now! Do you hear me?”
+
+She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly
+what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to
+marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her
+yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing
+frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.
+
+“Quite an elopement,” Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.
+
+“A very virtuous elopement,” said Michael, with a laugh.
+
+“Oh, but shan’t I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!”
+
+“Well, it’s Sylvia’s fault,” said Lily fretfully. “She shouldn’t worry
+me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in
+the world.”
+
+The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.
+
+“Where are you going?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked. “I declare, you’re like
+two babes in the wood.”
+
+“To my sister’s in Huntingdonshire,” said Michael, and he wrote out the
+address.
+
+“Oh, in the country! Well, Summer’ll be on us before we know where we
+are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished.”
+
+“Is your sister pretty?” Lily asked, as they were driving to King’s
+Cross.
+
+“She’s handsome,” said Michael. “You’ll like her, I think. And her
+husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to
+say we’re coming.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GATE OF IVORY
+
+
+It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class
+compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would
+create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure
+himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella,
+but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he
+felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting
+outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the
+still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of
+his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a
+little Stella’s judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the
+hedgerows monotonously, and the horses’ breath curled round the rigid
+form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the
+blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if
+she were happy.
+
+“It makes me sleepy driving like this,” she murmured. Her head was on
+his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she
+traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke
+her up.
+
+There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they
+arrived, though Michael watched Stella’s glances rather anxiously.
+
+Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked
+beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem
+a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against
+the stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock?
+Stella, too, whom he had always considered a personality of some
+extravagance, seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and
+conventional. It used always to be himself who criticized people:
+Stella had always been rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married
+to Alan; or was Lily the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to
+be going all right, especially when he consoled himself by remembering
+the abruptness of Lily’s introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily
+away with her into the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael
+tried to feel that this was what he had expected would happen; but he
+could not drive away the consciousness of a new formality brooding over
+Hardingham. It was annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed
+deliberately to avoid any reference to Lily. He would not even remind
+Michael of the evening at the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her
+five or six years ago. Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab
+with her sister on that occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk
+about cricket pitches; and yet he could not bring himself to ask right
+out what Alan thought of her, because it would have impinged upon his
+pride to do so. In about ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano,
+and tacitly they agreed to forego the intimacy of drinking port
+together any longer.
+
+Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the
+drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.
+
+“Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play.”
+
+It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for
+hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good
+impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended
+almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily
+thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very
+aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the
+slightest movement on her part or Alan’s as an implication of
+disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.
+
+When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the
+few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to
+explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox
+Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily’s life would be fatal. He
+found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up
+and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather
+depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he
+hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would
+smother everything else in a great surprise.
+
+“Of course, that’s what I imagined you were thinking of doing,” said
+Stella. “So you’ve made up your quarrel of five years ago?”
+
+“When are you going to get married?” Alan asked.
+
+“Well, I hoped you’d be able to have us here for a week or so, or at
+any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live.”
+
+“Oh, of course she can stay here,” said Stella.
+
+“Oh, rather, of course,” Alan echoed.
+
+Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making
+signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a
+farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was
+objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the
+billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself
+between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed
+quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he
+was plunged.
+
+A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred
+to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance
+toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being
+slowly chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather
+anxious to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any
+opportunity. As for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and
+saying very little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under
+the shadow of disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael
+determined to come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning
+of strong easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a
+walk to Stella.
+
+They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs
+scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.
+
+“I don’t think I care much for this country of yours,” said Michael at
+last. “It’s flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I
+should care to live here, I don’t know.”
+
+“There’s a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of
+the wind there.”
+
+Michael resented Stella’s pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and
+so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a
+fortnight.
+
+“I hate badly trained dogs,” he grumbled when Stella turned round to
+whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.
+
+“So do I,” she agreed.
+
+It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually
+and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was
+easier in the shelter of the wood.
+
+“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for having us to stay down
+here,” he began.
+
+Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:
+
+“Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?” she demanded.
+
+Her use of the word “business” annoyed him: it crystallized all the
+offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly
+attitude these two weeks.
+
+“I shall be delighted to talk about this ‘business.’ Though why you
+should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don’t
+quite know.”
+
+“Do you want me to speak out frankly—to say exactly what I think of you
+and Lily and of your marrying her? You won’t like it, and I won’t do it
+unless you ask me.”
+
+“Go on,” said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her
+again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis
+with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her
+shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was
+hers: the anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were
+all hers. It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella
+should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land
+forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other
+girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already
+she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved
+her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he
+loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on
+Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a
+royal battle in this wood. Stella with her dogs and trees behind her,
+with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her,
+might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.
+
+“Go on, I’m waiting for you to begin,” Michael repeated.
+
+“Straight off, then,” she said, “I may as well tell you that this
+marriage is impossible. I don’t know where you found her again, and I
+don’t care. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me what she
+had been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else.
+But, Michael, she’s flabby. You’ll hate me for saying so, but she is,
+she really is! In a year you’ll admit that; you’ll see her growing
+older and flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that’s
+possible. Even her beauty won’t last. These very fair girls fall to
+pieces like moth-eaten dolls. I’ve tried to find something in her
+during this fortnight. I’ve tried and tried; but there’s nothing. You
+may be in love with her now, though I don’t believe you are. I think
+it’s all a piece of sentimentalism. I’ve often teased you about getting
+married, but please don’t suppose that I haven’t realized how almost
+impossible it would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear
+and tear of your idealism. I’m prepared to bet that behind your
+determination to marry this girl there’s a reason, a lovely,
+unpractical, idealistic reason. Isn’t there? You’ve been away with her
+for a week-end, and have tortured yourself into a theory of reparation.
+Is that it? Or you’ve fallen in love with the notion of yourself in
+love at eighteen. Oh, you can’t marry her, you foolish old darling.”
+
+“Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn’t keep whistling to
+that infernal dog,” said Michael. “If this marriage is so terrible, I
+should have thought you’d have forgotten there were such animals as
+cocker-spaniels. It’s rubbish for you to say you’ve tried to find
+something in Lily. You haven’t made the slightest attempt. You’ve
+criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You’re sunk deep
+already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is
+the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when
+you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I
+didn’t talk as you’ve been talking to me.”
+
+“No, you were always very cautiously fraternal,” said Stella. “Ah, no,
+I won’t say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you’ll break
+my heart if you marry this girl.”
+
+“You won’t do anything of the kind,” he contradicted. “You’ll be
+whistling to spaniels all the time.”
+
+“Michael, it’s really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I’m
+feeling so wretched about you.”
+
+“It’s all fine for you to sneer at Lily,” said Michael. “But I can
+remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room
+over some man who’d made a fool of you. _You_ looked pretty flabby
+then.”
+
+“How dare you remind me of that?” Stella cried, in a fury. “How dare
+you? How dare you?”
+
+“You brought it on yourself,” said Michael coldly.
+
+“You’re going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry
+her, then! But don’t come to me for sympathy, when she’s forced you to
+drag yourself through the divorce court.”
+
+“No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again,”
+said Michael bitterly. “Unless it’s for advice when I want to buy a
+spaniel.”
+
+They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy
+fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having
+referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion
+on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had
+always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked
+sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she
+would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far
+they had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with
+marriage. Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally
+were smashed by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about
+Stella’s music lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage?
+The sooner he and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he
+ought to suggest going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until
+he could find a place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her.
+They would be married next month, and he would take her abroad. He
+would be able to see her at last in some of the places where in days
+gone by he had dreamed of seeing her.
+
+“I suppose you wouldn’t object to keeping Lily here two or three days
+more, while I find a place in town?” said Michael. It only struck him
+when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor.
+Stella would despise him more than ever.
+
+“Michael,” Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path.
+“Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can
+realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I’m
+willing actually to plead with you. It’s intolerable to think of you
+tied to her!”
+
+“It’s too late,” said Michael. “I must marry her. Not for any reasons
+that the world would consider reasons,” he went on. “But because I want
+to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me
+before the world.”
+
+“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! It’s all wrong. She’s all wrong. Her people
+are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know
+how casual he is about people he doesn’t like. He usually flings them
+out of his mind at once.”
+
+“Oh, Alan’s amazing in every way,” said Michael. He longed to say that
+he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so
+much the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite
+place to which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for
+a few days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the
+problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that
+he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily
+to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like
+this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and
+Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could
+not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be
+better to pocket his pride.
+
+Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.
+
+“Look here,” she said. “You absurd old Quixote, listen. I’m going to do
+all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town
+and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if
+you’ll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a
+truce I mean that I’ll be charming to her and take no steps to
+influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war,
+even if you win in the end and marry her.”
+
+“Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?”
+
+“Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we
+shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands
+you in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you’ll
+come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair
+of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood.”
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Lily,” said Michael,
+frowning.
+
+“The truce has begun,” Stella declared. “For a fortnight I’ll be an
+angel.”
+
+Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded
+Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to
+the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning.
+Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.
+
+“Lily, you look adorable in this glade,” he told her. “I believe, if
+you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch
+tree.”
+
+The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich
+deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body
+of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the
+ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some
+primroses and brought them to Lily.
+
+“These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you
+let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house
+you’re going to live in? Will you not be lonely?”
+
+“I like to have you with me always,” she murmured.
+
+He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were
+usually mute.
+
+“We shall be married in a month,” he cried. “Can you smell violets?”
+
+“Something sweet I smell.”
+
+But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets
+themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open
+fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering
+companies.
+
+“These eves of early Spring are like swords,” Michael exclaimed.
+
+“Like what?” Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.
+
+“Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their
+sharpness and sweetness.”
+
+“Oh, you mean it’s cold,” she said. “Take my arm.”
+
+“Well, I meant rather more than that, really,” Michael laughed. But
+because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had
+been from following his thoughts.
+
+Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before
+the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.
+
+“Not more than a fortnight, mind,” were Stella’s last words.
+
+He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice
+about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.
+
+“Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and
+Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill,
+Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent’s Canal, Adelphi
+Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is
+impossible. But you’re living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to
+move from there?”
+
+Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He
+supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be
+sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much
+delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who
+she was or where Michael had met her.
+
+“By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don’t think I’m
+desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal,
+if we can find the right one.”
+
+That afternoon they set out.
+
+They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was
+very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about
+fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor
+Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that
+the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing
+press.
+
+“Yes, but we don’t want to start a printing press,” Michael objected.
+“And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant
+can manage.”
+
+It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this
+house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering
+anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they
+went off to Regent’s Park.
+
+“I don’t think you’re likely to find anything so good as that house,”
+Maurice said gloomily. “In fact, I know you won’t. I wish I could
+afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at
+the Temple just as soon from there.”
+
+“I don’t see why he should bother about the Temple,” said Michael.
+“That house was rather bigger.”
+
+“You’ll never find another house like it,” Maurice prophesied. “Look at
+this neighborhood we’re driving through now. Impossible to live here!”
+
+They were in the Hampstead Road.
+
+“I haven’t any intention of doing so,” Michael laughed. “But there
+remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally
+suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought.”
+
+“Wonderful house!” Maurice sighed. “I shall always regret you didn’t
+take it.”
+
+However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the
+new prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic
+railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that
+seemed to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close
+around them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near
+Regent’s Park; and they crossed St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale, walking
+on until they reached a point where at the confluence of two branches
+the canal became a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole
+length of the base of this triangle and almost level with the water,
+stood the garden of a very large square house.
+
+“There’s a curious place,” said Michael. “How on earth does one get at
+it?”
+
+They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of
+the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance
+down a flight of steps.
+
+“Ararat House,” Michael read.
+
+“Flat to let,” Maurice read.
+
+“I think this looks rather promising,” said Michael.
+
+It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A
+portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house,
+under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and
+so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion.
+The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor
+buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the
+windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with
+plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must
+have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and
+rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house
+would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat
+to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
+
+They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes,
+there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the
+ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms
+on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like
+a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat
+called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
+
+They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them
+had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without
+much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The
+dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very
+brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling
+and walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky
+kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors
+into the drawing-room.
+
+As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily
+must live here.
+
+It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic
+saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he
+decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a
+room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and
+the cameos of Théophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with
+orient gewgaws; Barbey d’Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a
+corner Villiers de l’Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a
+tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic
+embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts
+with whom Michael had identified it.
+
+“But this is like a scene in a pantomime,” Maurice exclaimed.
+
+It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted
+to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the
+ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were
+gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of
+nymphs and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces
+fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of
+black and yellow lozenges.
+
+“It’s hideous,” Maurice exclaimed.
+
+The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
+
+“Hideous but rather fascinating,” Michael said. “Look at the queer
+melancholy light, and look at the view.”
+
+It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the
+room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper
+had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much
+subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their
+leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues
+and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown
+magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they
+walked out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries
+of slag and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright
+green slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path
+running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the
+sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet
+and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep
+everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply
+down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air
+diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city’s breath: the circling of
+the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
+
+“In summer this will be wonderful,” Michael predicted.
+
+“On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,”
+Maurice said.
+
+“Except that they’ll probably have retired to bed,” Michael pointed
+out.
+
+“I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,”
+Maurice laughed.
+
+“Let’s ask the housekeeper,” Michael said solemnly.
+
+They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem
+exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead
+water without.
+
+“Who lives in the other flats?” Michael inquired of the housekeeper.
+
+“There’s four others,” she began. “Up above there’s Colonel and
+Mrs....”
+
+“I see,” Michael interrupted. “Just ordinary people. Do they ever go
+out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange
+curtains?”
+
+The housekeeper stared at him.
+
+“They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The
+courts is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman
+to see about the flat.”
+
+She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take
+Number One, Ararat House.
+
+“It absolutely was made to set her off,” he told Maurice. “You wait
+till I’ve furnished it as it ought to be furnished.”
+
+“And we’ll have amazing fêtes aqueuses in the summer,” Maurice
+declared. “We’ll buy a barge and—why, of course—the canal flows into
+the Thames at Grosvenor Road.”
+
+“Underground—like the Styx,” said Michael, nodding.
+
+“Of course, it’s going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other
+except by water.”
+
+“Like splendid dead Venetians,” said Michael.
+
+The fortnight of Lily’s stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice
+in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian
+glass; oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small
+round mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many
+mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls
+were hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There
+were slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and
+lemon satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over
+the parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous
+roses as deep as damsons or burgundy; and from the ceiling hung two
+chandeliers of cut glass.
+
+“You know,” said Maurice seriously, “she’ll have to be very beautiful
+to carry this off.”
+
+“She is very beautiful,” said Michael. “And there’s room for her to
+walk about here. She’ll move about this room as wonderfully as those
+swans upon the canal.”
+
+“Michael, what’s happened to you? You’re becoming as eccentric as me.”
+Maurice looked at him rather jealously. “And, I say, do you really want
+me to come with you to King’s Cross to-morrow afternoon?”
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+“After you’ve helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see
+the person we’ve done it for.”
+
+“Yes, but look here. Who’s going to stay in the flat with her? You
+can’t leave her alone until you’re married. As you told me the story,
+it sounded very romantic; but if she’s going to be your wife, you’ve
+got to guard her reputation.”
+
+Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the
+tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic
+Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt
+inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.
+
+“I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman,” he said.
+
+“That’s all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this
+time.”
+
+“You don’t know anybody?”
+
+“I? Great scott, no!”
+
+They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave
+him for an appointment.
+
+“To-morrow afternoon then at King’s Cross,” he said, and jumped on an
+omnibus.
+
+Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth could he get to stay
+with Lily? Would it not be better to marry at once? But that would
+involve breaking his promise to Stella. If he asked Mrs. Gainsborough,
+it would mean Sylvia knowing where Lily was. If, on the other hand, he
+should employ a strange woman, Lily might dislike her. Could he ask
+Mrs. Ross to come up to town? No, of course, that was absurd. It looked
+as if he would have to ask Mrs. Gainsborough. Or why not ask Sylvia
+herself? In that case, why establish Lily at Ararat House before they
+were married? This marriage had seemed so very easy an achievement; but
+slowly it was turning into an insoluble complex. He might sound Sylvia
+upon her attitude. It would enormously simplify everything if she would
+consent; and if she consented she would, he believed, play fair with
+him. The longer Michael thought about it, the more it seemed the safest
+course to call in Sylvia’s aid. He was almost hailing a hansom to go to
+Tinderbox Lane, when he realized how foolish it would be not to try to
+sever Lily completely from the life she had been leading in Sylvia’s
+company. Not even ought he to expose her to the beaming laxity of Mrs.
+Gainsborough.
+
+Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem
+which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught
+sight of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of
+the automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk?
+Then he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip
+the kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered
+the Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read
+in a sing-song the virtues of a procession of various automatons
+seeking situations as cooks and housemaids.
+
+“What wages do you wish to give?”
+
+“Oh, the usual wages,” Michael said. “But I rather want these servants
+to-day.”
+
+He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose
+the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to
+Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to
+make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the
+spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman
+in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her
+promise to suit him by to-morrow at midday. She suggested a capable
+housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well
+dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She
+undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the
+absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to
+Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up
+his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort
+was perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o’clock, and he drove off
+to King’s Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of
+introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for
+him on the platform.
+
+Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when
+he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry
+into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that
+he was free this afternoon.
+
+“Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home to-night,” said Maurice.
+“Or will you be very late?”
+
+“Oh, no, I shan’t be late,” Michael answering, flushing. He had a
+notion that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation.
+It seemed as if he were testing his behavior.
+
+Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio bedroom
+was a little bare, it was soon strewn with her clothes, and made
+thereby inhabitable.
+
+“And of course,” said Michael, “you’ve got to buy lots and lots of
+clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two
+hundred—three hundred pounds?”
+
+The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to
+delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time,
+in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that
+he had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had
+been given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed
+through his mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux,
+and, remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad
+that Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined
+Manon.
+
+“And do you like Miss Harper?” he inquired.
+
+“Yes, she seems all right.”
+
+They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the
+flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had
+forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest
+in household affairs.
+
+“I think I ought to go now,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, no, stay a little longer.”
+
+But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as
+much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how
+important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be
+lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.
+
+“Oh, you’re going now?” said Miss Harper, looking at him rather
+curiously.
+
+“I shall be round in the morning. You’ll finish making the lists of
+what you still want?”
+
+Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he
+drove to Grosvenor Road.
+
+Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.
+
+“Look here, old chap,” Maurice began at once, “you can’t possibly marry
+that girl.”
+
+Michael frowned.
+
+“You too?”
+
+“I know all about her,” Maurice went on. “I’ve never actually met her,
+but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five
+years ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened
+in between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who’s had an
+affair with her—a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He’s often up
+here. You’re bound to meet him some time.”
+
+“Not at all, if I never come here again,” said Michael, in a cold rage.
+
+“It’s no use for you to be angry with me,” said Maurice. “I should be a
+rotten friend, if I didn’t warn you.”
+
+“Oh, go to hell!” said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.
+
+“I’ll die first,” retorted Maurice, grinning.
+
+Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not
+to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.
+
+“So much for 422 Grosvenor Road,” he said, slamming the big front door
+behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he
+walked on without turning his head.
+
+It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know
+about her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If
+Maurice chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would
+have to be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from
+the first moment of his resolve that this sort of thing was bound to
+happen. It left him curiously indifferent.
+
+A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden
+round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the
+very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room.
+Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her
+taste. Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old
+silver, or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was
+London and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the
+enchantment of her presence. Often they walked up and down the still
+deserted garden, by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide
+nearer to them, waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand
+with her hair in a stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly
+like the necks of the birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful
+in the long luminous dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening
+star that were shining upon them as they walked by the edge of the
+water.
+
+For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to
+the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in
+the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that
+people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic;
+that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this
+room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a
+hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at
+midnight, to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden
+stuffs and candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by
+going away at midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every
+night he went away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black
+dress, to leave in the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were
+not forbidding him to stay. Or when she stood under the portico
+sleepily resting in his arms, it was difficult to let her turn back
+alone. How close were their kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness!
+This was no London that he knew, this scented city of Spring, this
+tropic gloom, this mad innominate cavern that engorged them. The very
+stars were melting in the water of the canal: the earth bedewed with
+fevers of the Spring was warm as blood: why should he forsake her each
+night of this week? Yet every midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and
+clamored, Michael left her, saying that May would come, and June, and
+another April, when she would have been his a year.
+
+The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness
+and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these
+days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten.
+They could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else
+did the weather deprive him.
+
+Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back
+from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so
+deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in
+the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of
+taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers
+and mirrors.
+
+“Why didn’t you wire me to say you were coming?” he asked.
+
+“I came because Stella wrote to me.”
+
+Michael frowned, and his mother went on:
+
+“It wasn’t very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage
+through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it
+yourself.”
+
+Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from
+them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the
+past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his
+mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very
+inconsiderately.
+
+“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me,” he admitted. “But life has been such a
+whirl lately that I’ve somehow taken for granted the obvious
+courtesies. Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather
+choked me off taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why
+do you begin on the subject at once, before you’ve even taken your
+things off?”
+
+She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.
+
+“Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are
+standing at the edge of this terrible step?”
+
+“Oh, I think I’m perfectly level-headed,” he said, “even on the brink
+of disaster.”
+
+“Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I’d come back in March as
+I meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn’t very well leave
+her. She’s always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I
+did not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in
+the next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the
+washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to
+think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you,
+and now you ask most cruelly why I don’t take my things off.”
+
+“There wasn’t any need for you to worry yourself,” he said hotly.
+“Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices.”
+
+“Prejudices!” his mother repeated. “Prejudice is a very mild word for
+what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry.”
+
+“But it is prejudice,” Michael insisted. “She knows nothing against
+her.”
+
+“She knows a great deal.”
+
+“How?” he demanded incredulously.
+
+“You’d better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off
+these furs. It’s stifling in London. So very much hotter than the
+Riviera.”
+
+Mrs. Fane left him with Stella’s letter.
+
+LONG’S HOTEL,
+_April 9._
+
+_Darling Mother,_
+
+_When you get this you must come_ at once _to London. You are the only
+person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible creature
+imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he was eighteen,
+and I think she treated him badly even then—I remember his being very
+upset about it in the summer before my first concert. Apparently he
+rediscovered her this winter, and for some reason or other wants to_
+marry _her now. He brought her down to Hardingham, and I saw then that
+she was a minx. Alan remembers her mother as a dreadful woman who tried
+to make love to him. Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!_
+
+_Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row about
+it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by herself), and
+we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to say, and nothing to
+do except look at herself in the glass. I had declared war on the
+marriage from the moment she left, but I had only a fortnight to stop
+it. I was rather in a difficulty because I knew nothing definite
+against her, though I was sure that if she wasn’t a bad lot already,
+she would be later on. I wrote first of all to Maurice Avery, who told
+me that she’d had a not at all reputable affair with a painter friend
+of his. It seems, however, that he had already spoken to Michael about
+this and that Michael walked out of the house in a rage. Then I came up
+to town with Alan and saw Wedderburn, who knew nothing about her and
+hadn’t seen Michael for months. Then we got hold of Lonsdale. He has
+apparently met her at Covent Garden, and_ I’m perfectly sure _that he
+has actually been away with her himself. Though, of course, he was much
+too polite to tell me so. He was absolutely horrified when he heard
+about her and Michael. I asked him to tell Michael anything he knew
+against her, but he didn’t see how he could. He said he wouldn’t have
+the heart. I told him it was his duty, but he said he wouldn’t be able
+to bear the sight of Michael’s face when he told him. Of course, the
+poor darling knows nothing about her. You must come at once to London
+and talk to him yourself. You’ve no time to lose. I’ll meet you if you
+send me a wire. I’ve no influence over Michael any more. You’re the
+only person who can stop it. He’s so sweet about her. She’s rather
+lovely to look at, I must say. Lots of love from Alan and from me._
+
+_Your loving_
+_Stella._
+
+Michael was touched by Lonsdale’s attitude. It showed, he thought, an
+exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had
+certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing
+was going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother
+to come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in
+argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had
+weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such
+a very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she
+must have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought
+her downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.
+
+“Have you read Stella’s letter?” she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at
+once. It’s dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you
+must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella
+and not resent her interference.”
+
+“I see that you feel bound to apologize for her,” Michael observed.
+
+“Now, that is so bitter.”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find
+out things I know already.”
+
+“Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?”
+
+“I didn’t know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been
+people. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to marry her.”
+
+“But you’ll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go
+on knowing Lonsdale, for instance.”
+
+“Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case,” Michael said. “You
+couldn’t have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay
+I shall be able to make new friends.”
+
+“But, darling boy,” she said pleadingly, “your position will be so
+terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly
+want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be
+dragged down by this horrible creature!”
+
+“Mother, believe me, you’re getting a very distorted idea of Lily.
+She’s beautiful, you know; and if she’s not so clever as Stella, I’m
+rather glad of it. I don’t think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she
+hasn’t committed the sin of being common. She won’t disgrace you
+outwardly, and if Stella hadn’t gone round raking up all this
+abominable information about her you would have liked her very much.”
+
+“My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren’t too young to
+know that it’s impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without
+reproach.”
+
+“But, mother, you ...” he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of
+the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious
+that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.
+
+“Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I
+knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won’t marry
+her, you won’t, will you?”
+
+“Yes, mother. I’m going to,” he said coldly.
+
+“But why so impetuously?” she asked. “Why won’t you wait a little
+time?”
+
+“There’s no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts.”
+
+“If only your father were alive!” she exclaimed. “It would have shocked
+him so inexpressibly.”
+
+“He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn’t he?” Michael
+said, and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.
+
+She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical
+and heroic dignity of reproach:
+
+“I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me.”
+
+“I’m awfully sorry,” he murmured. “It was inexcusable.”
+
+“Michael,” she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, “won’t you give up
+this marriage?”
+
+He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.
+
+“Mother, I must keep faith with myself.”
+
+“Only with yourself? Then she doesn’t care for you? And you’re not
+thinking of _her?_”
+
+“Of course she cares for me.”
+
+“But she’d get over it almost at once?”
+
+“Perhaps,” he admitted.
+
+“Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?”
+
+“That will be my look-out,” he said impatiently. “If she fails, it will
+be my fault. It’s always the man’s fault. Always.”
+
+“Very well,” said his mother resignedly. “I can say no more, can I? You
+must do as you like.”
+
+The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else
+would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his
+own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would
+show his penitence.
+
+“Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked
+out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for
+her, there is a deeper cause, a reason that’s bound up with my whole
+theory of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not
+back out of this marriage.”
+
+“Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?” she asked.
+
+He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called
+her “this girl,” half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the
+happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or
+abstractions of morality to obscure it.
+
+“Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you.”
+
+“Except not marry her.”
+
+“That wouldn’t be a sacrifice worth making,” he argued. “Because if I
+did that I should destroy myself to myself, and what was left of me
+wouldn’t be a complete Michael. It wouldn’t be your son.”
+
+“Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?”
+
+He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?
+
+“Not merely for your own sake,” she urged; “but for all our sakes. We
+shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three
+months’ time.”
+
+He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.
+
+“I won’t marry her for three months,” he promised.
+
+“And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly
+missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel.”
+
+She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately
+self again.
+
+Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had
+promised his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She
+pouted over her frocks.
+
+“I wish you’d settled that before. What good will all these dresses be
+now?”
+
+“You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here
+without me?”
+
+“Without you? Why are you going away?”
+
+“Because I must, Lily. Because ... oh, dearest girl, can’t you see that
+I’m too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day
+and every night as I have been all this fortnight?”
+
+“If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather
+dull, shan’t I?”
+
+“And shan’t I?” he asked.
+
+She looked at him.
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me.”
+
+He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.
+
+Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry
+with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time
+of trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must
+be married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well.
+He was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid
+the people who had brought it about.
+
+Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he
+turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that
+would take him down into Berkshire at once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE
+
+
+It was almost dark when Michael reached the little station at the foot
+of the Downs. He was half inclined to put up at the village inn and
+arrive at the Abbey in the morning; but he was feeling depressed by the
+alteration of his plans, and longed to withdraw immediately into the
+monastic peace. He had bought what he needed for the couple of nights
+before any luggage could reach him, and he thought that with so little
+to carry he might as well walk the six miles to the Abbey. He asked
+when the moon would be up.
+
+“Oh, not much before half-past nine, sir,” the porter said.
+
+Michael suddenly remembered that to-morrow was Easter Sunday, and,
+thinking it would be as well not to arrive too late, in case there
+should be a number of guests, he managed to get hold of a cart. The
+wind blew very freshly as they slowly climbed the Downs, and the man
+who was driving him was very voluble on the subject of the large
+additions which had been made to the Abbey buildings during the last
+few years.
+
+“They’ve put up a grand sort of a lodge—Gatehouse, so some do call it.
+A bit after the style of the Tower of London, I’ve heard some say.”
+
+Michael was glad to think that Dom Cuthbert’s plans seemed to be coming
+to perfection in their course. How long was it since he and Chator were
+here? Eight or nine years; now Chator was a priest, and himself had
+done nothing.
+
+The Abbey Gatehouse was majestic in the darkness, and the driver pealed
+the great bell with a portentous clangor. Michael recognized the
+pock-marked brother who opened the door; but he could not remember his
+name. He felt it would be rather absurd to ask the monk if he
+recognized him by this wavering lanthorn-light.
+
+“Is the Reverend—is Dom Cuthbert at the Abbey now?” he asked. “You
+don’t remember me, I expect? Michael Fane. I stayed here one Autumn
+eight or nine years ago.”
+
+The monk held up the lanthorn and stared at him.
+
+“The Reverend Father is in the Guest Room now,” said Brother Ambrose.
+Michael had suddenly recalled his name.
+
+“Do you think I shall be able to stay here to-night? Or have you a lot
+of guests for Easter?”
+
+“We can always find room,” said Brother Ambrose. Michael dismissed his
+driver and followed the monk along the drive.
+
+Dom Cuthbert knew him at once, and seemed very glad that he had come to
+the Abbey.
+
+“You can have a cell in the Gatehouse. Our new Gatehouse. It’s copied
+from the one at Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. Very beautiful. Very
+beautiful.”
+
+Michael was introduced to the three or four guests, all types of
+ecclesiastical laymen, who had been talking with the Abbot. The
+Compline bell rang almost at once, and the Office was still held in the
+little chapel of mud and laths built by the hands of the monks.
+
+Keep me as the apple of an eye. Hide me in the shadow of thy wing.
+
+Here was worship unhampered by problems of social behavior: here was
+peace.
+
+Lying awake that night in his cell; watching the lattices very luminous
+in the moonlight; hearing the April wind in the hazel coppice, Michael
+tried to reach a perspective of his life these nine months since
+Oxford, but sleep came to him and pacified all confusions. He went to
+Mass next morning, but did not make his Communion, because he had a
+feeling that he could only have done so under false pretenses. There
+was no reason why he should have felt thus, he assured himself; but
+this morning there had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill.
+He went for a walk on the Downs, over the great green spaces that
+marked no season save in the change of the small flowers blowing in
+their turf. He wondered if he would be able to find the stones he had
+erected that July day when he first came here with Chator. He found
+what, as far as he could remember, was the place; and he also found a
+group of stones that might have been the ruins of his little monument.
+More remarkable than old stones now seemed to him a Pasque anemone
+colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously reminded him of the evening
+in March when he had walked with Lily in the wood at Hardingham.
+
+The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael’s
+partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke.
+He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here
+on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He
+hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring
+his sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a
+feverish adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions
+for Lily’s entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart,
+begging him to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being
+pursued and haunted; an intolerable idea that he was the quarry of an
+evil chase. He could not stay at the Abbey any longer: he was being
+rejected by the spirit of the place.
+
+Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.
+
+“Stay at least to-night,” he urged, and Michael gave way.
+
+He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed
+Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany.
+He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt
+more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak
+he dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the
+primroses limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs;
+and when the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway
+station. To-day he ought to have married Lily.
+
+At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting,
+unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of
+Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne
+Walk.
+
+“I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,”
+was the explanation he gave himself of what already seemed mere
+sleeplessness.
+
+Michael found his mother very much worried by his disappearance; she
+had assumed that he had broken his promise. He consoled her, but
+excused himself from staying with her in town.
+
+“You mustn’t ask too much of me,” he said.
+
+“No, no, dearest boy; I’m glad for you to go away, but where will you
+go?”
+
+He thought he would pay an overdue visit to Cobble Place.
+
+Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Carthew were delighted to see him, and he felt as he
+always felt at Cobble Place the persistent tranquillity which not the
+greatest inquietude of spirit could long withstand. It was now nearly
+three years since he had been there, and he was surprised to see how
+very old Mrs. Carthew had grown in that time. This and the active
+presence of Kenneth, now a jolly boy of nine, were the only changes in
+the aspect of the household. Michael enjoyed himself in firing Kenneth
+with a passion for birds’ eggs and butterflies, and they went long
+walks together and made expeditions in the canoe.
+
+Yet every day when Michael sat down to write to Lily, he almost wrote
+to say he was coming to London as soon as his letter. Her letters to
+him, written in a sprawling girlish hand, were always very much alike.
+
+1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+_My dear,_
+
+_Come back soon. I’m getting bored. Miss Harper isn’t bad. Can’t write
+a long letter because this nib is awful. Kisses._
+
+_Your loving_
+_Lily._
+
+This would stand for any of them.
+
+May month had come in: Michael and Kenneth were finding whitethroats’
+nests in the nettle-beds of the paddock, before a word to Mrs. Ross was
+said about the marriage.
+
+“Stella has written to me about it,” she told him.
+
+They were sitting in the straggling wind-frayed orchard beyond the
+stream: lamps were leaping: apple-blossom stippled the grass: Kenneth
+was chasing Orange Tips up the slope toward Grogg’s Folly.
+
+“Stella has been very busy all round,” said Michael. “I suppose
+according to her I’m going to marry an impossible creature. Creature is
+as far as she usually gets in particular description of Lily.”
+
+“She certainly wasn’t very complimentary about your choice,” Mrs. Ross
+admitted.
+
+“I wish somebody could understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean that
+I’m mad because I’m going to marry a beautiful girl who isn’t very
+clever.”
+
+“But I gathered from Stella,” Mrs. Ross said, “that her past ...
+Michael, you must be very tolerant of me if I upset you, because we
+happen to be sitting just where I was stupid and unsympathetic once
+before. You see what an impression that made on me. I actually remember
+the very place.”
+
+“She probably has done things in the past,” said Michael. “But she’s
+scarcely twenty-three yet, and I love her. Her past becomes a trifle.
+Besides, I was in love with her six years ago, and I—well, six years
+ago I was rather thoughtless very often. I don’t want you to think that
+I’m going to marry her now from any sense of duty. I love her. At the
+same time when people argue that she’s not the correct young Miss they
+apparently expect me to marry, I’m left unmoved. Pasts belong to men as
+well as to women.”
+
+Mrs. Ross nodded slowly. Kenneth came rushing up, shouting that he had
+caught a frightfully rare butterfly. Michael looked at it.
+
+“A female Orange Tip,” was the verdict.
+
+“But isn’t that frightfully rare?”
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+“No rarer than the males; but you don’t notice them, that’s all.”
+
+Kenneth retired to find some more.
+
+“And you’re sure you’ll be happy with her?” Mrs. Ross asked.
+
+“As sure as I am that I shall be happy with anybody. I ought to be
+married to her by now. This delay that I’ve so weakly allowed isn’t
+going to effect much.”
+
+Michael sighed. He had meant to be in Provence this month of May.
+
+“But the delay can’t do any harm,” Mrs. Ross pointed out. “At any rate,
+it will enable you to feel more sure of yourself, and more sure of her,
+too.”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Michael doubtfully. “My theory has always been
+that if a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing at once.”
+
+“And after you’re married,” she asked, “what are you going to do? Just
+lead a lazy life?”
+
+“Oh, no; I suppose I shall find some occupation that will keep me out
+of mischief.”
+
+“That sounds a little cynical. Ah, well, I suppose it is a
+disappointment to me.”
+
+“What’s a disappointment?”
+
+“I’ve hoped and prayed so much lately that you would have a
+vocation....”
+
+“A priest,” he interrupted quickly, “It’s no good, Mrs. Ross. I have
+thought of being one, but I’m always put off by the professional side
+of it. And there are ways of doing what a priest does without being
+one.”
+
+“Of course, I can’t agree with you there,” she said.
+
+“Well, apart from the sacraments, I mean. Lately I’ve seen something of
+the underworld, and I shall think of some way of being useful down
+there. Already I believe I’ve done a bit.”
+
+They talked of the problems of the underworld and Michael was
+encouraged by what he fancied was a much greater breadth in her point
+of view nowadays to speak of things that formerly would have made her
+gray eyes harden in fastidious disapproval.
+
+“I feel happier about you since this talk,” she said. “As long as you
+won’t be content to let your great gift of humanity be wasted, as long
+as you won’t be content to think that in marrying your Lily you have
+done with all your obligations.”
+
+“Oh, no, I shan’t feel that. In fact, I shall be all the more anxious
+to justify myself.”
+
+Kenneth came back to importune Michael for a walk as far as Grogg’s
+Folly.
+
+“It’s such fun for Kenneth to have you here!” Mrs. Ross exclaimed.
+“I’ve never seen him so boisterously happy.”
+
+“I used to enjoy myself here just as much as he does,” said Michael.
+“Though perhaps I didn’t show it. I always think of myself as rather a
+dreary little beast when I was a kid.”
+
+“On the contrary, you were a most attractive boy; such a wide-eyed
+little boy,” said Mrs. Ross softly, looking back into time. “I’ve
+seldom seen you so happy as just before I blew out your candle the
+first night of your first stay here.”
+
+“I say, do come up the hill,” interrupted Kenneth despairingly.
+
+“A thousand apologies, my lord,” said Michael. “We’ll go now.”
+
+They did not stop until they reached the tower on the summit.
+
+“When I was your age,” Michael told him, “I used to think that I could
+see the whole of England from here.”
+
+“Could you really?” said Kenneth, in admiration. “Could you see any of
+France, too?”
+
+“I expect so,” Michael answered. “I expect really I thought I could see
+the whole world. Kenneth, what are you going to be when you grow up? A
+soldier?”
+
+“Yes, if I can—or what is a philosopher?”
+
+“A philosopher philosophizes.”
+
+“Does he really? Is that a difficult thing to do, to philosopherize?”
+
+“Yes; it’s almost harder to do than to pronounce.”
+
+Soon they were tearing down the hill, frightening the larks to right
+and left of their progress.
+
+The weather grew warmer every day, and at last Mrs. Carthew came out in
+a wheel-chair to see the long-spurred columbines, claret and gold,
+watchet, rose and white.
+
+“Really quite a display,” she said to Michael. “And so you’re to get
+married?”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“What for?” the old lady demanded, looking at him over her spectacles.
+
+“Well, principally because I want to,” Michael answered, after a short
+pause.
+
+“The best reason,” she agreed. “But in your case insufficient, and I’ll
+tell you why—you aren’t old enough yet to know what you do want.”
+
+“Twenty-three,” Michael reminded her.
+
+“Twenty-fiddlesticks!” she snapped. “And isn’t there a good deal of
+opposition?”
+
+“A good deal.”
+
+“And no doubt you feel a fine romantical heroical young fellow?”
+
+“Not particularly.”
+
+“Well, I’m not going to argue against your marrying her,” said Mrs.
+Carthew. “Because I know quite well that the more I proved you to be
+wrong, the more you’d be determined to prove _I_ was. But I can give
+you advice about marriage, because I’ve been married and you haven’t.
+Is she dark? If she’s dark, be very cold for a year, and if she doesn’t
+leave you in that time, she’ll adore you for the rest of her life.”
+
+“But she’s fair,” said Michael. “Very fair indeed.”
+
+“Then beat her. Not actually, of course; but beat her figuratively for
+a year. If you don’t, she’ll either be a shrew or a whiner. Both
+impossible to live with.”
+
+“Which did Captain Carthew do to you?” asked Michael, twinkling.
+
+“Neither; I ruled him with a rod of iron.”
+
+“But do you think I’m wise to wait like this before marrying her?”
+Michael asked.
+
+“There’s no wisdom in waiting to do an unwise thing.”
+
+“You’re so sure it is unwise?”
+
+“All marriages are unwise,” said Mrs. Carthew sharply. “That’s why
+everybody gets married. For most people it is the only imprudence they
+have an opportunity of committing. After that, they’re permanently
+cured of rashness, and settle down. There are exceptions, of course:
+they take to drink. I must say I’m greatly pleased with these
+long-spurred columbines.”
+
+Michael thought she had finished the discussion of his marriage, but
+suddenly she said:
+
+“I thought I told you to come and see me when you went down from
+Oxford.”
+
+“I ought to have come,” Michael agreed rather humbly. He always felt
+inclined to propitiate the old lady.
+
+“Here we have the lamentable result. Marriage at twenty-three.”
+
+“Alan married at twenty-three,” he pointed out.
+
+“Two fools don’t make a wise-man,” said Mrs. Carthew.
+
+“He’s very happy.”
+
+“He would be satisfied with much less than you, and he has married a
+delightful girl.”
+
+“I’m going to marry a delightful girl.”
+
+The old lady made no reply. Nor did she comment again upon his prospect
+of happiness.
+
+In mid-May, after a visit of nearly a month, Michael left Cobble Place
+and went to stay at Plashers Mead. Guy Hazlewood was the only friend he
+still had who could not possibly have come into contact with Lily or
+her former surroundings. Moreover, Guy was deep in love himself, and he
+had been very sympathetic when he wrote to Michael about his
+engagement.
+
+“Do I intrude upon your May idyll?” Michael asked.
+
+“My dear chap, don’t be so absurd. But why aren’t you married? You’re
+as bad as me.”
+
+“Why aren’t _you_ married?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” Guy sighed. “Everybody seems to be conspiring to
+put it off.”
+
+They were sitting in Guy’s green library. The windows wide open let in
+across the sound of the burbling stream the warm air of the lucid May
+night, where bats and owls and evejars flew across the face of the
+decrescent moon.
+
+“It’s this dreamy country in which you live,” said Michael.
+
+“What about you? You’ve let people put off your marriage.”
+
+“Only for another two months,” Michael explained.
+
+“You see I’m down to one hundred and fifty pounds a year now,” Guy
+muttered. “I can’t marry on that, and I can’t leave this place, and her
+people can’t afford to make her an allowance. They think I ought to go
+away and work at journalism. However, I’m not going to worry you with
+my troubles.”
+
+Guy was a good deal with Pauline every day: Michael wrote long letters
+to Lily and read poetry.
+
+“Browning?” asked Guy one afternoon, looking over Michael’s shoulder.
+
+“Yes; The Statue and The Bust.”
+
+“Oh, don’t remind me of that poem. It haunts me,” Guy declared.
+
+A week passed. There was no moon now, and the nights grew warmer. It
+was weather to make lovers happy, but Guy seemed worried. He would not
+come for walks with Michael through the dark and scented water-meadows,
+and Michael used to think that often at night he was meeting Pauline.
+It made him jealous to imagine them lost in this amaranthine
+profundity. They were happy now, if through all their lives they should
+never be happy again. Yet Guy was obviously fretted: he was getting
+spoiled by good fortune. “And I have had about a fortnight of
+incomplete happiness,” Michael said to himself. Supposing that a
+calamity fell upon him during this delay. He would never cease to
+regret his weakness in granting his mother’s request: he would hate
+Stella for having interfered: his life would be miserable forever. Yet
+what calamity did he fear? In a sudden apprehension, he struck a match
+and read her last letter:
+
+1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+_My dear,_
+
+_It’s getting awfully dull in London. Miss Harper asked me to call her
+“Mabel.” Rather cheek, I thought, don’t you think so? But she’s really
+awfully decent. I can’t write a long letter because we’re going to the
+Palace. I say, do buck up and come back to London, I’m getting bored.
+Love and kisses._
+
+_Lily._
+
+What’s the good of _writing_ “kisses”?
+
+What indeed was the good of writing “kisses”? Michael thought, as the
+match fizzed out in the dewy grass at his feet. It was not fair to
+treat Lily like this. He had captured her from life with Sylvia,
+because he had meant to marry her at once. Now he had left her alone in
+that flat with a woman he did not know at all. Whatever people might
+say against Lily, she was very patient and trustful. “She must love me
+a good deal,” Michael said. “Or she wouldn’t stand this casual
+treatment.”
+
+Pauline came to tea next day with her sisters Margaret and Monica.
+Michael had an idea that she did not like him very much. She talked
+shyly and breathlessly to him; and he, embarrassed by her shyness,
+answered in monosyllables.
+
+“Pauline is rather jealous of you,” said Guy that evening, as they sat
+in the library.
+
+“Jealous of me?” Michael was amazed.
+
+“She has some fantastic idea that you don’t approve of our engagement.
+Of course, I told her what nonsense she was thinking; but she vowed
+that this afternoon you showed quite plainly your disapproval of her.
+She insists that you are very cold and severe.”
+
+“I’m afraid I was very dull,” Michael confessed apologetically. “But I
+was really envying you and her for being together in May.”
+
+“Together!” Guy repeated. “It’s the object of everyone in Wychford to
+keep us apart!”
+
+“Do tell her I’m not cold,” Michael begged. “And say how lovely I think
+her; for really, Guy, she is very lovely and strange. She is a fairy’s
+child.”
+
+“She is, she is,” Guy said. “Sometimes I’m nearly off my head with the
+sense of responsibility I have for her happiness. I wonder and wonder
+until I’m nearly crazed.”
+
+“I’m feeling responsible just now about Lily. I’ve never told you, Guy,
+but you may hear from other people that I’ve made what is called a
+mésalliance. Of course, Lily has been....” He stumbled. He could find
+no words that would not humiliate himself and her. “Guy, come up with
+me to-morrow and meet her. It’s not fair to leave her like this,” he
+suddenly proclaimed.
+
+“I don’t think I can come away.”
+
+“Oh, yes, you can. Of course. You must,” Michael urged.
+
+“Pauline will be more jealous of you than ever, if I do.”
+
+“For one night,” Michael pleaded. “I must see her. And you must meet
+her. Everyone has been so rotten about her, and, Guy, you’ll appreciate
+her. I won’t bore you by describing her. You must meet her to-morrow.
+And the rooms in Ararat House. By Jove, you’ll think them wonderful.
+You should see her in candlelight among the mirrors. Pauline won’t mind
+your coming away with me for a night. We’ll stay at Cheyne Walk.”
+
+“Well, as a matter of fact, I’m rather hard up just now....”
+
+“Oh, what rot! This is my expedition. And when you’ve seen her, you
+must talk to my mother about her. She’s so prejudiced against Lily. You
+will come, won’t you?”
+
+Guy nodded a promise, and Michael went off to bed on the excitement of
+to-morrow’s joy.
+
+Guy would not start before the afternoon, and Michael spent the morning
+under a willow beside the river. It was good to lie staring up at the
+boughs, and know that every fleecy cloud going by was a cloud nearer to
+his seeing Lily again.
+
+Michael and Guy arrived at Paddington about five o’clock.
+
+“We’ll go straight round from here and surprise her,” Michael said,
+laughing with excitement, as they got into a taxi. “She’ll have had a
+letter from me this morning, in which I was lamenting not seeing her
+for six weeks. My gad, supposing she isn’t in! Oh, well, we can wait.
+You’ll love the room, and we’ll all three sit out in the garden
+to-night, and you’ll tell me as we walk home to Chelsea what you think
+of her. Guy you’ve absolutely got to like her. And if you don’t ... oh,
+but you will. It isn’t everybody who can appreciate beauty like hers.
+And there’s an extraordinary subtlety about her. Of course, she isn’t
+at all subtle. She’s simple. In fact, that’s one of the things Stella
+has got against her. What I call simplicity and absence of training for
+effect Stella calls stupidity. My own belief is that you’ll be quite
+content to look at her and not care whether she talks or not. I tell
+you, she’s like a Piero della Francesca angel. Cheer up, Guy. Why are
+you looking so depressed?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” said Guy. “I’m thinking what a lucky chap you are.
+What’s a little family opposition when you know you’re going to be able
+to do what you want? Who can stop you? You’re independent, and you’re
+in love.”
+
+“Of course they can’t stop me!” Michael cried, jumping up and down on
+the cushions of the taxi in his excitement. “Guy, you’re great! You
+really are. You’re the only person who’s seen the advantage of going
+right ahead. But don’t look so sad yourself. You’ll marry your
+Pauline.”
+
+“Yes, in about four years,” Guy sighed.
+
+“Oh, no, no; in about four months. Will Pauline like Lily? She won’t be
+jealous of me when I’m married will she?”
+
+“No, but I think I shall be,” Guy laughed.
+
+“Laugh, you old devil, laugh!” Michael shouted. “Here we are. Did you
+ever see such a house? It hasn’t quite the austerity of Plashers Mead,
+has it?”
+
+“It looks rather fun,” Guy commented.
+
+“You know,” Michael said solemnly, pausing for a moment at the head of
+the steps going down to the front door. “You know, Guy, I believe that
+you’ll be able to persuade my mother to withdraw all her opposition
+to-night. I believe I’m going to marry Lily this week. And I shall be
+so glad—Guy, you don’t know how glad I shall be.”
+
+He ran hurriedly down the steps and had pressed the bell of Number One
+before Guy had entered the main door.
+
+“I say, you know, it will be really terrible if she’s out after all my
+boasting,” said Michael. “And Miss Harper, too—that’s the
+housekeeper—my housekeeper, you know. If they’re both out, we’ll have
+to go round and wait in the garden until they come in. Hark, there’s
+somebody coming.”
+
+The door opened, and Michael hurried in.
+
+“Hullo, good afternoon, Miss Harper. You didn’t expect to see me, eh?
+I’ve brought a friend. Is Miss Haden in the big room?”
+
+“Miss Haden is out, Mr. Fane,” said the housekeeper.
+
+“What’s the matter? You’re looking rather upset.”
+
+“Am I, Mr. Fane?” she asked blankly. “Am I? Oh, no, I’m very well. Oh,
+yes, very well. It’s the funny light, I expect, Mr. Fane.”
+
+She seemed to be choking out all her words, and Michael looked at her
+sharply.
+
+“Well, we’ll wait in the big room.”
+
+“It’s rather untidy. You see, we—I wasn’t expecting you, Mr. Fane.”
+
+“That’s all right,” said Michael. “Hulloa ...I say, Guy, go on into
+that room ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
+
+Guy mistook the direction and turned the handle of Lily’s bedroom door.
+
+“No, no,” Michael called. “The double doors opposite.”
+
+“My mistake,” said Guy cheerfully. “But don’t worry: the other door was
+locked. So if you’ve got a Bluebeard’s Closet, I’ve done no harm.”
+
+He disappeared into the big room, and the moment he was inside Michael
+turned fiercely to Miss Harper.
+
+“Who’s is this hat?” he demanded, snatching it up.
+
+“Hat? What hat?” she choked out.
+
+“Why is the door of her bedroom locked? Why is it locked—locked?”
+
+The stillness of the crepuscular hall seemed to palpitate with the
+woman’s breath.
+
+“Miss Haden must have locked it when she went out,” she stammered.
+
+“Is that the truth?” Michael demanded. “It’s not the truth. It’s a lie.
+You wouldn’t be panting like a fish in a basket, unless there was
+something wrong. I’ll break the door in.”
+
+“No, Mr. Fane, don’t do that!” the woman groaned out, in a cracked
+expostulation. “This is the first time since you’ve been away. And it
+was an old friend.”
+
+“How dare you tell me anything about him? Guy! Guy!”
+
+Michael rushed into the big room and dragged Guy out.
+
+“Come away, come away, come away! I’ve been sold!”
+
+“If you’d only listen a moment. I could——” Miss Harper began.
+
+Michael pushed her out of their path.
+
+“What on earth is it?” Guy asked.
+
+“Come on, don’t hang about in this hell of a house. Come on, Guy.”
+
+Michael had flung the door back to slam into Miss Harper’s face, and,
+seizing Guy by the wrist, he dragged him up the steps, and had started
+to run down the road, when Guy shouted:
+
+“Michael, the taxi! The taxi’s waiting with our bags.”
+
+“Oh, very well, in a taxi then, a taxi if you like,” Michael chattered,
+and he plunged into it.
+
+“Where to?” the driver asked.
+
+“Cheyne Walk. But drive quickly. Don’t hang about up and down this
+road.”
+
+The driver looked round with an expression of injured dignity, shook
+his head in exclamation, and drove off.
+
+“What on earth has happened?” Guy asked. “And why on earth are you
+holding a top-hat?”
+
+Michael burst into laughter.
+
+“So I am. Look at it. A top-hat. I say, Guy, did you ever hear of
+anyone being cut out by a top-hat, cuckolded by a top-hat? We’ll
+present it to the driver. Driver! Do you want a top-hat?”
+
+“Here, who are you having a game with?” demanded the driver, pulling up
+the car.
+
+“I’m not having a game with anybody,” Michael said. “But two people and
+this top-hat have just been having a hell of a game with me. You’d much
+better take it as a present. I shall only throw it away. He refuses,”
+Michael went on. “He refuses a perfectly good top-hat. Who’s the maker?
+My god, his dirty greasy head has obliterated the name of the maker.
+Good-bye, hat! Drive on, drive on!” he shouted to the driver, and
+hurled the hat spinning under an omnibus. Then he turned to Guy.
+
+“I’ve been sold by the girl I was going to marry,” he said. “I say,
+Guy, I’ve got some jolly good advice for you. Don’t you marry a whore.
+Sorry, old chap!—I forgot you were engaged already. Besides, people
+don’t marry whores, unless they’re fools like me. Didn’t you say just
+now that I was very lucky? Do you know—I think I am lucky. I think it
+was a great piece of luck bringing you to see that girl to-day. Don’t
+you? Oh, Guy, I could go mad with disappointment. Will nothing in all
+the world ever be what it seems?”
+
+“Look here, Michael, are you sure you weren’t too hasty? You didn’t
+wait to see if there was any explanation, did you?”
+
+“She was only going back to her old habits,” said Michael bitterly. “I
+was a fool to think she wouldn’t. And yet I adored her. Fancy, you’ve
+never seen her, after all. Lovely, lovely animal!”
+
+“Oh, you knew what she was?” exclaimed Guy.
+
+“Knew? Yes, of course I knew; but I thought she loved me. I didn’t care
+about anything when I was sure she loved me. She could only have gone
+such a little way down, I thought. She seemed so easy to bring out.
+Seeds of pomegranate. Seeds of pomegranate! She’s only eaten seeds of
+pomegranate, but they were enough to keep her behind. Where are we
+going? Oh, yes, Cheyne Walk. My mother will be delighted when she hears
+my news, and so will everybody. That’s what’s amusing me. Everybody
+will clap their hands, and I’m wretched. But you are sorry for me, Guy?
+You don’t think I’m just a fool being shown his folly? And at eighteen
+I was nearly off my head only because I saw someone kiss her! There’s
+one thing over which I score—the only person who can appreciate all the
+humor of this situation is myself.”
+
+Nearly all the way to Cheyne Walk Michael was laughing very loudly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GATE OF HORN
+
+
+Guy thought it would be better if he went straight back to Plashers
+Mead; but Michael asked him to stay until the next day. He was in no
+mood, he said, for a solitary evening, and he could not bear the notion
+of visiting friends, or of talking to his mother without the
+restriction that somebody else’s presence would produce.
+
+So Guy agreed to spend the night in London, and they dined with Mrs.
+Fane. Michael in the sun-colored Summer room felt smothered by a
+complete listlessness; and talking very little, he sat wondering at the
+swiftness with which a strong fabric of the imagination had tumbled
+down. The quiet of Cheyne Walk became a consciousness of boredom and
+futility, and he suggested on a sudden impulse that he and Guy should
+go and visit Maurice in the studio. It would be pleasant walking along
+the Embankment, he said.
+
+“But I thought you wanted to keep quiet,” Guy exclaimed.
+
+“No, I’ve grown restless during dinner; and, besides, I want to make a
+few arrangements about the flat, and then be done with that
+business—forever.”
+
+They started off without waiting for coffee. It was a calm Summer
+evening of shadows blue and amethyst, of footfalls and murmurs, an
+evening plumy as a moth, warm and gentle as the throat of a pigeon.
+Nobody on any pavement was hurrying; and maidservants loitered in area
+gates, looking up and down the roads.
+
+The big room at the top of 422 Grosvenor Road had never seemed so
+romantic. There were half a dozen people sitting at the open windows;
+and Cunningham was playing a sonata of Brahms, a sonata with a melody
+that was drawing the London night into this big room where the
+cigarettes dimmed and brightened like stars. The player sat at the
+piano for an hour, and Maurice unexpectedly made no attempt to disturb
+the occasion. Michael thought that perhaps he was wondering what had
+brought himself and Guy here, and for that reason did not rush to show
+Guy his studio by gaslight: Maurice was probably thinking how strange
+it was for Michael to revisit him suddenly like this after their
+quarrel.
+
+When the room was lighted up, Michael and Guy were introduced to the
+men they did not know. Among them was Ronnie Walker, the painter whom
+Maurice had mentioned to Michael as an old lover of Lily. Michael knew
+now why Maurice had allowed the music to go on so long, and he was
+careful to talk as much as possible to Walker in order to embarrass
+Maurice, who could scarcely pay any attention to Guy, so nervously was
+he watching over his shoulder the progress of the conversation.
+
+Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the
+window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a
+distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the
+piano again.
+
+“I say, I’m awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here
+to-night,” Maurice began. “I have been rather cursing myself for
+telling you about him and....”
+
+“It doesn’t matter at all,” Michael interrupted. “I’m not going to
+marry her.”
+
+“Oh, that’s splendid!” Maurice exclaimed. “I’ve been tremendously
+worried about you.”
+
+Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that
+Maurice could be “tremendously worried” by anything.
+
+“I want you to arrange matters,” said Michael. “I can’t go near the
+place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The
+rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you
+like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the
+money. Get rid of the woman who’s there—Miss Harper her name is.”
+
+“But I shall feel rather awkward....”
+
+“Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it, then!” Michael broke in fretfully. “I’ll
+ask Guy.”
+
+“You’re getting awfully irascible,” Maurice complained. “Of course I’ll
+do anything you want, if you won’t always jump down my throat at the
+first word I utter. What has happened, though?”
+
+“What do you expect to happen when you’re engaged to a girl like that?”
+Michael asked.
+
+Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then,
+you see, I’m not a very great believer in women. What are you going to
+do yourself?”
+
+“I haven’t settled yet. I’ve got to arrange one or two things in town,
+and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about
+a week?”
+
+“I daresay I might,” Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room.
+Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile
+comprehension.
+
+The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
+
+“This is where you ought to be, if you want to write,” Maurice
+proclaimed to Guy. “It’s ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the
+country. You’ll expire of stagnation.”
+
+“Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are,” said
+Castleton. “I’m almost expiring from the violence with which I am being
+precipitated from one to another of Maurice’s energies.”
+
+Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and
+next morning Guy went back to Wychford.
+
+Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of
+the betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly
+made financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man
+whom only yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred
+for the part he had played in Lily’s life. Perhaps he had lost the
+power to feel anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of
+Maurice; already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more
+clearly remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was
+calling her a shade his present emotion proved that she was much more
+than that, for the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart.
+Then the indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill
+remained.
+
+Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and
+they went to Bohême. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat
+unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if
+she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of
+all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at
+night and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life
+itself, but he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any
+activity in the conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here
+at supper and for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was
+spiritually withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to
+the notion of a debased material comfort as the only condition worth
+achieving for a body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it
+almost seemed.
+
+“Michael, have you been bored to-night?” his mother asked, when they
+had come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while
+Michael finished a cigar.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy
+Puccini, don’t you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?”
+
+“I think summer in London is always tiring,” he said.
+
+She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures
+of her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.
+
+“Dear child, what is it?” she whispered, with fluttering arms
+outstretched to comfort him.
+
+“Oh, I’ve finished with all that! I’ve finished with all that! You’ll
+be delighted—you mustn’t be worried because I seem upset for the
+moment. I found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I’m not
+going to marry her or even see her again.”
+
+“Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?”
+
+“Finished! Finished! Finished!” he sobbed.
+
+“Nothing is finished at twenty-three,” she murmured, leaning over to
+pet him.
+
+“I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day.”
+
+It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It
+seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on
+account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself
+again; and he went off to bed.
+
+Next day Michael’s depression was profound because he could perceive no
+reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in
+the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her.
+She was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen
+to her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he
+had lately been involved? Must he withdraw entirely and confess defeat?
+No doubt a cynic would argue that Lily was hopeless, and indeed he knew
+that from any point of view where marriage was concerned she was
+hopeless. He must leave her where he had found her, in that pretty
+paradise of evil which now she well adorned. If her destiny was to
+whirl downward through the labyrinths of the underworld, he could do no
+more. That himself had issued with the false dreams through the ivory
+gate was her fault, and she must pay the penalty of her misdirection.
+He would revisit Leppard Street, and from the innermost circle where he
+had beheld Mrs. Smith he would seek a way out through the gate of true
+dreams. He would be glad to see if the amount of security he had been
+able to guarantee to Barnes had helped him at all. He had money and he
+could leave money behind in Leppard Street, money that might preserve
+the people in the house where he had lived. Was this a quixotic notion,
+to leave one set of people free from the necessity to hand themselves
+over to evil? Michael’s spirits began to rise as he looked forward to
+what he could still effect in Leppard Street. And for Lily what could
+he still do? He would visit Sylvia and consult with her. She was
+strong, and if she had chosen harlotry, she was still strong. She was
+not lazy nor languid. Lazy, laughing, languid Lily! Lily did not laugh
+much; she was too lazy even for that. How beautiful she had been! Her
+beauty stabbed him with the poignancy of what was past. How beautiful
+she had been! When Maurice went to tell her of the final ending of it
+all, she would pout and shrug her shoulders. That was all she would do;
+and she would be faintly resentful at having been disturbed in her lazy
+life. Perhaps Maurice would fall in love with her, and it would be
+ironical and just that she should fall violently in love with Maurice
+and be cast off by him. Maurice would never suffer; as soon as a woman
+showed a sign of upsetting his theories about feminine behavior he
+would be done with her. He would jilt her as easily as he jilted one
+Muse for another. Why was he being so hard on Maurice?
+
+“I believe that down in my heart I still don’t really like him,”
+Michael said to himself. “Right back from the time I met him in
+Macrae’s form at Randell’s I’ve never really liked him.”
+
+It was curious how one could grow more and more intimate with a person,
+and all the time never really like him; so intimate with him as to
+intrust him with the disposal of a wrecked love-affair, and all the
+while never really like him. Why, then, had he invited Maurice to go
+abroad? Perhaps he wanted the company of someone he could faintly
+despise. Even friendship must pay tribute to human vanity. Life became
+a merciless business when one ceased to stand alone. The herding
+instinct of man was responsible for the corruption of civilization, and
+Michael thought of the bestiality of a crowd. How loathsome humanity
+was in the aggregate, but individually how rare, how wonderful.
+
+Michael walked boldly enough toward Tinderbox Lane; and when he rang
+the bell of Mulberry Cottage not a qualm of sentiment assailed him. He
+was definitely pleased with himself, as he stood outside the door in
+the wall, to think with what a serenity of indifference he was able to
+visit a place so much endeared to him a little time ago.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough answered the door and nearly fell upon Michael’s
+neck.
+
+“Good Land! Here’s a surprise.”
+
+“It’s almost more of a surprise for me to see you, Mrs. Gainsborough.”
+
+“Why, who else should you see?”
+
+“I was beginning to think you never existed. Can I come in?”
+
+“Sylvia’s indoors,” she said warningly.
+
+“I rather wanted to see her.”
+
+“She’s been carrying on alarming about you ever since you stole her
+Lily. And she didn’t take me on her knee and cuddle me, when she found
+you were gone off. How do you like me new frock?”
+
+Michael thought that in her checkered black and green gingham she
+looked like an old Summer number of an illustrated magazine, and he
+told her so.
+
+“Well, there! Did you ever? I never did. There’s a bouquet to hand a
+lady! Back number! Whatever next? I wonder you hadn’t the liberty to
+say I’d rose from the grave.”
+
+“Aren’t I to see Sylvia?” Michael asked, laughing.
+
+“Well, don’t blame me if she packs you off with a flea in your ear, as
+they say—well, she is a Miss Temper, and no mistake. How do you like me
+garden?”
+
+Mulberry Cottage was just the bower of greenery that Michael had
+supposed he would find in early June.
+
+“Actually roses,” he exclaimed. “Or at least there will be very soon.”
+
+“Oh, yes. Glory de Die-Johns. That was always Pa’s favorite. That and a
+good snooze of a Sunday afternoon was about what he cared most for in
+this world. But my Captain he used to like camellias, and gardenias of
+course—oh, he had a very soft corner in his heart for a nice gardenia.
+Ah dear, what a masher he was to be sure!”
+
+Sylvia had evidently seen them walking up the garden path, for leaning
+over the railings of the balcony she was waiting for them.
+
+“Here’s quite a stranger come to see you,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+a propitiatory glance in Sylvia’s direction.
+
+“I rather want to have a talk with you,” said Michael, and he, too,
+found himself rather annoyingly adopting a deprecating manner.
+
+Sylvia came slowly down the balcony steps.
+
+“I suppose you want my help,” she said, and her underlip had a warning
+out-thrust.
+
+“I’ll get on with my fal-lals,” Mrs. Gainsborough muttered, and she
+bundled herself quickly indoors.
+
+Sylvia and Michael sat down on the garden-seat under the mulberry tree
+whose leaves were scarcely yet uncurling. Michael found a great charm
+in sitting close to Sylvia like this: she and Stella both possessed a
+capacity for bracing him that he did not find in anyone else. Sylvia
+was really worth quarreling with; but it would be very delightful to be
+friends with her. He had never liked a person so much whom he had so
+little reason to like. He could not help thinking that in her heart
+Sylvia must like him. It was a strangely provocative fancy.
+
+“Lily and I have parted,” he began at once.
+
+“And why do you suppose that piece of information will interest me?”
+Sylvia asked.
+
+Michael was rather taken aback. When he came to consider it, there did
+seem no good reason why Sylvia should any longer be interested after
+the way in which Lily had been snatched away from her. He was silent
+for a moment.
+
+“But it would have interested you a short time ago,” he said.
+
+“No doubt,” Sylvia agreed. “But luckily for me one of the benefits
+conferred by my temperament is an ability to throw aside things that
+have disappointed me, things that have ceased to be useful—and what
+applies to things applies even more strongly to people.”
+
+“You mean to say you’ve put Lily right out of your life?” Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+He was shocked by the notion, for he did not realize until this moment
+how much he had been depending upon Sylvia for peace of mind.
+
+“Haven’t you put her out of _your_ life?” she asked, looking round at
+him sharply. Until this question she had been staring sullenly down at
+the grass.
+
+“Well, I had to,” said Michael.
+
+“You’re bearing up very well under the sad necessity,” she sneered.
+
+“I don’t know that I am bearing up very well. I don’t think that coming
+to you to talk about it is a special sign of fortitude.”
+
+“What do you want me to do?” Sylvia demanded. “Get her back into your
+life again? Isn’t that the phrase you like?”
+
+“Oh, no, that’s unimaginable,” said Michael. “You see, it was really
+the second time. Once six years ago, and again now, very much more—more
+utterly. You said that your temperament enables you to throw off things
+and people. Mine makes me bow to what I fancy are irremediable strokes
+of fate.”
+
+“Unimaginable! Irremediable! We’re turning this interview into a
+Rossetti sonnet,” Sylvia scoffed.
+
+“I was thinking about that poem Jenny to-day. It’s funny you should
+mention Rossetti.”
+
+“Impervious youth!” she exclaimed.
+
+“It’s hopeless for you to try to wound me with words,” Michael assured
+her, with grave earnestness. “I was wounded the day before yesterday
+into complete immunity from small pains.”
+
+“I suppose you found her ...”
+
+Michael flushed and gripped her by the wrist.
+
+“No, no, don’t say something brutal and beastly!” he stammered. “You
+know what happened. You prophesied it. Well, I thought you were wrong,
+and you were right. That’s a victory for you. You couldn’t wish for me
+to be more humbled than I am by having to admit that I wasn’t strong
+enough to keep her faithful for six weeks. But we did agree, I think,
+about one thing.” He smiled sadly. “We did agree that she was
+beautiful. You were as proud of that as I was, and of course you had a
+great deal more reason to be proud. You did own her. I never owned her,
+and isn’t that your great objection to the relation between man and
+woman?”
+
+“What are you trying to make me do?” Sylvia asked.
+
+“I want you to have Lily to live with you again.”
+
+“To relieve yourself of all responsibility, I suppose,” she said
+bitterly.
+
+“No, no; why will you persist in ascribing the worst motive to
+everything I say? Isn’t your jealousy fed full enough even yet?”
+
+Sylvia made the garden-seat quiver with an irritable movement.
+
+“You will persist in thinking that jealousy solved all problems,” she
+cried.
+
+“Oh, don’t let us turn aside into what isn’t very important. You can’t
+care whether I think you’re jealous or not.”
+
+“I don’t care in so far as it is your opinion,” Sylvia admitted. “But I
+object to inaccurate thinking. If your life was spent in a confusion of
+all moral values as mine is, you would be anxious for a little
+straightforward computation for a change.”
+
+“Perhaps you are right,” Michael admitted, “in thinking that I’m asking
+you to look after Lily to relieve myself of a responsibility. But it’s
+only because I see no chance of doing it in any other way. I mean—it’s
+not laziness on my part. It’s a confession of absolute failure.”
+
+“In fact, you’re throwing yourself on my mercy,” Sylvia said.
+
+“Yes; and also her,” he added gently.
+
+“Am I such a moral companion—such an ennobling influence?”
+
+“I would sooner think of her under your influence than think of her
+drifting. What I want you to understand is that I’m not consigning her
+to you for sentimental reasons. I would sooner that Lily were dragged
+down by you at a gallop than that she should sink slowly and lazily of
+her own accord. You have a strong personality. You are well-read. You
+are quite out of the common, and in the life you have chosen, so far as
+I have had experience, you are unique.”
+
+Sylvia stared in front of her, and Michael waited anxiously for the
+reply.
+
+“Have you ever read Petronius?” she asked suddenly.
+
+“Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are—have you ever read
+Petronius?”
+
+“It’s the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could
+behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare,
+too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses.
+Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and
+incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me.
+Man revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly
+contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic
+in it. Not any religion I’ve ever heard of, for in all religions man is
+set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my
+conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as
+less repulsive than—ugh! it makes me shudder—but oh, my son, doesn’t it
+make me laugh....” She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a
+moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely,
+fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. “So I
+worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily
+was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don’t want to worship
+anything but beauty. I don’t care about purity or uprightness, but I
+must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely
+girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and
+you can’t understand that I’m only able to see you in the shape of a
+frog. It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so
+earnestly and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy
+frog.”
+
+“But what has all this to do with Petronius? There’s nothing in that
+romance particularly complimentary to women,” Michael argued.
+
+“It’s the nightmare effect of it that I adore,” Sylvia exclaimed. “It’s
+the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from
+which there’s no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It
+is gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that’s all I want in my
+reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having
+been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the
+truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not
+one moderately decent person all through.”
+
+“And you will take Lily back?” Michael asked.
+
+“Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don’t
+for heaven’s sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I’m doing
+anything except gratify myself in this matter.”
+
+“I don’t want you to do it for any other reason,” he said. “I shall
+feel more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By
+the way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker—a painter. He
+had an affair with Lily, didn’t he?”
+
+“Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything
+more.”
+
+“And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?”
+
+“Who? The Honorable Arthur?”
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+“Yes, we met him first at Covent Garden, and went to Brighton with him
+and another boy—Clarehaven—Lord Clarehaven.”
+
+“Oh, I remember him at the House,” said Michael.
+
+“Money is necessary sometimes, you know,” Sylvia laughed.
+
+“Of course it is. Look here. Will you in future, whenever you feel
+you’re in a nightmare—will you write to me and let me send money?” he
+asked. “I know you despise me and of course ... I understand; but I
+can’t bear to think of anyone being haunted as you must be haunted
+sometimes. Don’t be proud about this, because _I’ve_ got no pride left.
+I’m only terribly anxious to be of service to somebody. There’s really
+no reason for you to be proud. You see, I should always be so very much
+more anxious to help than you would to be helped. And it really isn’t
+only because of Lily that I say this. I’ve got a good many books you’d
+enjoy, and I think I’ll send them to you. Good-bye.”
+
+“Good-bye,” she said, looking at him curiously.
+
+Michael turned away from her down the gravel-path, and a moment later
+slammed the door. He had only gone a few steps away, when he heard
+Sylvia calling after him.
+
+“You stupid!” she said. “You never told me Lily’s address.”
+
+“I’ll give you a card.”
+
+“Mr. Michael Fane,” she read, “1 Ararat House, Island Road.” She looked
+at him and raised her eyebrows.
+
+“You see, I expected to live there myself,” Michael explained. “I told
+a friend of mine, Maurice Avery, to clear up everything. The furniture
+can all be sold. If you want anything for here, take it of course; but
+I think most of the things will be too large for Mulberry Cottage.”
+
+“And what shall I say to Lily?” she asked.
+
+“Oh, I don’t think I should say anything about me.”
+
+“Who was the man?”
+
+“I never saw him,” said Michael. “I only saw his hat.”
+
+She pulled him to her and kissed him.
+
+“How many women have done that suddenly like that?” she demanded.
+
+“One—well, perhaps two.” He was wondering if Mrs. Smith’s kiss ought to
+count in the comparison.
+
+“I never have to any man,” she said, and vanished through the door in
+the wall.
+
+Michael hoped that Sylvia intended to imply by that kiss that his offer
+of help was accepted. Fancy her having read Petronius! He could send
+her his Adlington’s Apuleius. She would enjoy reading that, and he
+would write in it: _I’ve eaten rose-leaves and I am no longer a golden
+ass._ Perhaps he would also send her his Shelton’s Don Quixote.
+
+When Michael turned out of Tinderbox Lane into the Fulham Road, each
+person of humanity he passed upon the pavement seemed to him strange
+with unrevealed secrets. The people of London were somehow
+transfigured, and he longed to see their souls, if it were only in the
+lucid flashes of a nightmare. Yet for nearly a year he had been peering
+into the souls of people. Had he, indeed. Had he not rather been
+peering to see in their souls the reflection of his own? He was moved
+by the thought of Sylvia in London, and suddenly he was swept from his
+feet by the surging against him of the thoughts of all the passers-by
+and, struggling in the trough of these thoughts, he was more and more
+conscious that unless he fought for himself he would be lost. The
+illusion fled on the instant of its creation; and the people were
+themselves again—dull, quick, slow, ordinary, depressed, gay; political
+busy-bodies, political fools, political slaves, political animals. How
+they huddled together, each one of them afraid to stand for himself. It
+was political passion that made them animals, each dependent in turn on
+the mimicry of his neighbor. Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or
+envious of his neighbor’s opinion. God was meaningless to the political
+state: this herd cared only for idols. Michael began to make a
+catalogue of the Golden Calves that the Golden Asses of green England
+worshiped. They were bowing down and braying to their Golden Calves,
+these Golden Asses, and they could not see that there were rose-trees
+growing everywhere, most prodigally of all in the gutter, any one petal
+of which (what did the thorns matter?) would have given back to them
+their humanity. Yet even then, Michael dismally concluded, they would
+continue to bow down to the Golden Calves, because they would fancy
+that it was the Calves who had planted and cultivated the rose-trees.
+Then out of all the thronging thoughts made visible he began to pursue
+the fancy of Sylvia in London, and, as he did so, she faded farther and
+farther from his vision like a butterfly seen from a train, that keeps
+pace, it seems for a moment, and is lost upon the flowery embankment
+behind.
+
+Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk
+under the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he
+had stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained
+Leppard Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on
+through the Chelsea slums.
+
+Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever
+seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the
+corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a
+breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number
+One; and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the
+blank wall opposite.
+
+Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one
+o’clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the
+creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract
+Mrs. Cleghorne’s attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out
+into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight
+must have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand.
+With her fibrous neck working and with an old cap of her husband’s
+pinned on a skimpy bun at the back of her head, she was horrible after
+Mrs. Gainsborough in the black and green gingham. Michael looked down
+at her over the railings; and she, recognizing him at last, pounced
+back to come up and open the door.
+
+“I couldn’t think who it was. We had a man round selling pots of musk
+this morning, and I didn’t want to come trapesing upstairs for
+nothing.”
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was receiving him so pleasantly that Michael scarcely
+knew what to say. No doubt his regular payment of rent had a good deal
+to do with it.
+
+“Is Mr. Barnes up?” he asked.
+
+“I don’t know, I’m sure. I never go inside his door now. No.”
+
+“Oh, really? Why not?”
+
+“I’m the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don’t consider
+he has treated us fair.”
+
+“Oh, really?”
+
+“He’s got a woman here living with him. Now of course that’s a thing I
+should never allow, but seeing as you weren’t here and was paying the
+rent regular I thought to myself that I’ll just shut my eyes until you
+came back. It’s really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with
+the other lodgers. It’s quite upset me, it has; and _Mis_-ter Cleghorne
+has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma’s been so
+bad lately—it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him.”
+
+This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently
+the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent
+for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it
+was locked.
+
+“I’ll get on down again to my oven,” said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike
+glance at the closed door. “I’m just cooking a bit of fish for my old
+man’s dinner.”
+
+She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin
+in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.
+
+Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the
+passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes’ voice called out to know
+who was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to
+somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited
+Michael to come in.
+
+It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of
+the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still
+there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled
+picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of
+St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had
+novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow
+moirette lay over Michael’s narrow bed, which he was surprised to see
+in the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and
+the old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and
+dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the
+folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for
+him to explain the alterations.
+
+“Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn’t it?” said Barnes,
+blinking round him.
+
+A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely
+the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it
+was as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man’s eyes; but
+there clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a
+touch he would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.
+
+“You look pretty pasty,” said Michael severely.
+
+“Worry, old man, worry,” said Barnes. “Well, to put it straight, I fell
+in with a girl who was down on her luck, and I knew you’d be the very
+one to encourage a bit of charity. So I brought her here.”
+
+“Why are you sleeping in this room?” Michael asked.
+
+“You’re getting a Mr. Smart, aren’t you?” said Barnes. “Fancy you’re
+noticing that. Oh, well, I suppose you’ve come to ask for your rooms
+back?”
+
+Michael with the consciousness of the woman behind those curtained
+doors knew that he could discuss nothing at present. He felt that all
+the time her ear was at the keyhole, and he went out suddenly, telling
+Barnes to meet him at the Orange that night.
+
+Again the beerhall impressed him with its eternal sameness. It was as
+if a cinema film had broken when he last went out of the Café d’Orange,
+and had been set in action again at the moment of his return. He looked
+round to see if Daisy was there, and she was. Her hat which had
+formerly been black and trimmed with white daisies was now, to mark the
+season, white and trimmed with black daisies.
+
+“Hulloa, little stranger!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
+
+So exactly the same was the Orange that Michael was almost surprised
+that she should have observed a passage of time.
+
+“You never seem to come here now,” she said reproachfully. “Come on.
+Sit down. Don’t stand about like a man selling matches on the curb.”
+
+“How’s Bert?” Michael asked.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Bert Saunders. The man you were living with in Little Quondam Street.”
+
+“Oh, him! Oh, I had to get rid of him double quick. What? Yes, when it
+came to asking me to go to Paris with a fighting fellow. Only fancy the
+cheek of it! It would help him, he said, with his business. Dirty
+Ecnop! I soon shoved him down the Apples-and-pears.”
+
+“I haven’t understood a word of that last sentence,” said Michael.
+
+“Don’t you know back-slang and rhyming-slang? Oh, it’s grand! Here, I
+forgot, there’s something I wanted to tell you. Do you remember you was
+in here with a fellow who you said his name was Burns?”
+
+“Barnes, you mean, I expect. Yes, he’s supposed to be meeting me here
+to-night, as a matter of fact.”
+
+“Well, you be careful of him. He’ll get you into trouble.”
+
+Michael looked incredulous.
+
+“It’s true as I sit here,” said Daisy earnestly. “Come over in the
+corner and let’s have our drink there. I can’t talk here with that
+blue-nosed —— behind me, squinting at us across his lager.” She looked
+round indignantly at the man in question.
+
+They moved across to one of the alcoves, and Daisy leaned over and
+spoke quietly and rather tensely, so differently from the usual rollick
+of her voice that Michael began to feel a presentiment of dread.
+
+“I was out on the Dilly one night soon after you’d been round to my
+place, and I was with a girl called Janie Filson. ‘Oo-er,’ she said to
+me. ‘Did you see who that was passed?’ I looked round and saw this
+fellow Burns.”
+
+“Barnes,” Michael corrected.
+
+“Oh, well, Barnes. His name doesn’t matter, because it isn’t his own,
+anyway. ‘That’s Harry Meats,’ she said. And she called out after him.
+‘Hulloa, Harry, where’s Cissie?’ He went as white as ... oh, he did go
+shocking white. He just turned to see who it was had called out after
+him, and then he slid up Swallow Street like a bit of paper. ‘Who’s
+Cissie?’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember Cissie Cummings?’ she said. ‘That
+fair girl who always wore a big purple hat and used to be in the
+Leicester Lounge and always carried a box of chocolates for swank?’ I
+did remember the girl when Janie spoke about her. Only I never knew
+her, see? ‘He wasn’t very pleased when you mentioned her,’ I said.
+‘Didn’t he look awful?’ said Janie, and just then she got off with a
+fellow and I couldn’t ask her any more.”
+
+“I don’t think that’s enough to make me very much afraid of Barnes,”
+Michael commented.
+
+“Wait a minute, I haven’t finished yet. Don’t be in such a hurry. The
+other day I saw Janie Filson again. She’s been away to Italy—is there a
+place called Italy? Of course there is. Well, as I was saying, she’d
+been to Italy with her fellow who’s a commercial traveler and that’s
+why I hadn’t seen her. And Janie said to me, ‘Do you know what they’re
+saying?’ I said, ‘No, what?’ And she said, ‘Did you read nearly a year
+ago about a woman who was found murdered in the Euston Road? A gay
+woman it was,’ she said. So I said, ‘Lots of women is found murdered,
+my dear. I can’t remember every one I see the picture of.’ Well, anyone
+can’t, can they?” Daisy broke off to ask Michael in an injured voice.
+Then she resumed her tale. “When I was with that fellow Bert I used to
+read nothing else but murders all the time. Give anyone the rats, it
+would. ‘Lots of women, my dear,’ I said. And she said, ‘Well, there was
+one in particular who the police never found out the name of, because
+there wasn’t any clothing or nothing found.’ So I did remember about
+it, and she said, ‘Well, they’re saying now it was Cissie Cummings.’
+And I said, ‘Well, what of it, if it was?’ And she said, ‘What of it?’
+she said. ‘Well, if it was her,’ she said, ‘I know who done it.’ ‘Who
+done it?’ I asked—because, you see, I’d forgotten about this fellow
+Burns. ‘Why, Harry Meats,’ she said. ‘That fellow I saw on the Dilly
+the night when I was along with you.’”
+
+“I don’t think you have enough evidence for the police,” Michael
+decided, with half a smile. Yet nevertheless a malaise chilled him, and
+he looked over his shoulder at the mob in the beer hall.
+
+“—— the police!” Daisy exclaimed. “I don’t care about them when I’m
+positive certain of something. I tell you, I know that fellow Burns, or
+Meats, or whatever his name is, done it.”
+
+“But what am I to do about it?” Michael asked.
+
+“Well, you’ll get into trouble, that’s all,” Daisy prophesied. “You’d
+look very funny if he was pinched for murder while you was out walking
+with him. Ugh! It gives me the creeps. Order me a gin, there’s a good
+boy.”
+
+Michael obtained for Daisy her drink, and sat waiting for Barnes to
+appear.
+
+“He won’t come,” Daisy scoffed. “If he’s feeling funny about the neck,
+he won’t come down here. He’s never been down since that night he came
+down with you. Fancy, to go and do a poor girl in like that! I’d spit
+in his face, if I saw him.”
+
+“Daisy, you really mustn’t assume such horrible things about a man.
+He’s as innocent as you or me.”
+
+“Is he?” Daisy retorted. “I don’t think so then. You never saw how
+shocking white his face went when Janie asked him about Cissie.”
+
+“But if there were any suspicion of him,” Michael pointed out, “the
+police would have tackled him long ago.”
+
+“Oh, they aren’t half artful, the police aren’t,” said Daisy. “Nothing
+they’d like better than get waiting about and seeing if he didn’t go
+and murder another poor girl, so as they could have him for the two,
+and be all the more pleased about it.”
+
+“That’s talking nonsense,” Michael protested. “The police don’t do that
+sort of thing.”
+
+“I don’t know,” Daisy argued. “One or two poor girls more or less
+wouldn’t worry them. After all, that’s what we’re for—to get pinched
+when they’ve got nothing better to do. Of course, I know it’s part of
+the game, but there it is. If you steal my purse and I follow you round
+and tell a copper, what would he do? Why, pinch me for soliciting. No,
+my motto is, ‘Keep out of the way of the police.’ And if you take my
+advice, you’ll do the same. If this fellow didn’t do the girl in,”
+Daisy asked earnestly, leaning forward over the table, “why doesn’t he
+come down here and keep his appointment with you to-night? Don’t you
+worry. He knows the word has gone round, and he’s going to lie very low
+for a bit. I wouldn’t say the tecs aren’t watching out for him even
+now.”
+
+“My dear Daisy, you’re getting absolutely fanciful,” Michael declared.
+
+“Oh, well, good luck to fanciful,” said Daisy, draining her glass.
+“Here, why don’t you come home with me to-night?”
+
+“What, and spend another three hours hiding in a cupboard?”
+
+“No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel,
+because the woman I’m living with’s got her son come home from being a
+soldier and she wouldn’t like for him to know anything. Well, it’s
+better not. You’re much more comfortable when you aren’t in gay rooms,
+because they haven’t got a hold over you. Are you coming?”
+
+For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him.
+For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the
+underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He
+could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with
+her. No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet
+not much more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He
+had always escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not
+again more completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld
+without having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a
+spectator, intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies,
+but never intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He
+thought, as he sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid
+roguery, that it would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There
+would be no strain in living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had
+loved Lily would be a joke to her. Why should not he take her for what
+she was—shrewd, mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He
+would do her no wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in
+the scheme of the universe.
+
+Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he
+remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that
+Daisy could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage
+to plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought
+of the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this
+nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks
+ago—yesterday, indeed—he might have joined himself to Daisy under the
+pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he
+must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion
+might enter, were too dangerous.
+
+“No, I won’t come home with you, dear Daisy,” he said, taking her hand
+over the puddly table. “You know, you didn’t kiss me that night in
+Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you,
+did you?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“What’s the good of asking me why I kissed you?” she said, embarrassed
+and almost made angry by his reminder. “Perhaps I was twopence on the
+can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if
+you aren’t coming home, you aren’t, and I must get along. Sitting
+talking to you isn’t paying my rent, is it?”
+
+He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming
+to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a
+token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and
+he was at a loss to find a symbol service.
+
+“Is there nothing I can do for you?”
+
+“Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don’t get off to-night.”
+
+He offered them to her eagerly.
+
+“Go on, you silly thing,” she said, pushing the money away. “As if I
+meant it.”
+
+“If you didn’t, I did,” said Michael.
+
+“Oh, all right,” she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her
+purse. “Well, chin-chin, Clive, don’t be so long coming down here next
+time.”
+
+“Michael is my name,” he said, for he was rather distressed to think
+that she would pass forever from his life supposing him to be called
+Clive.
+
+“As if I didn’t know that,” she said. “I remember, because it’s a Jew
+name.”
+
+“But it isn’t,” Michael contradicted.
+
+“Jews are called that.”
+
+“Very likely,” he admitted.
+
+“Oh, well, it’ll be all the same in a hundred years.”
+
+She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded
+beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him.
+Then she disappeared.
+
+Michael sat on in the Café d’Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not
+arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale
+of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her
+suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was
+shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably
+murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he
+feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to
+imagine that material hell of the trial. The bandage dropped from the
+eyes of justice, and he saw her pig’s-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful;
+and her scales were like a grocer’s. He pitied Barnes in the clutches
+of anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist.
+After all, Daisy’s story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to
+himself’s hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to
+account for his dislike of Janie Filson’s salute without supposing
+murder. Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the
+thought used to come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed,
+the thought of murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was
+absurd to think of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling
+hansoms and all that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes
+not met him at the Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an
+appointment when his pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie
+Cummings had traveled even to Leppard Street?
+
+Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction
+for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his
+mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the
+curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with
+double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in
+Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o’clock,
+and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever
+brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for
+Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.
+
+The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the
+houses confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars.
+Several windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals
+of habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers
+behind, and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows
+of his old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door
+quietly and stood listening for a moment in the passage. He could hear
+a low snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a
+word was distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening
+close to the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the
+blackness, fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was
+seeming so sinister in this house. It was incredible that a brief
+movement would open the front door again and let in the starlight; for,
+as he stood here, Leppard Street was under the earth deep down. He
+moved a little farther into the hall, and, putting out his hand to feel
+for the balusters, drew back with a start, for he might have clapped it
+down upon a cold bald head, so much like that was the newel’s wooden
+knob. Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and
+every instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the
+house like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose
+and fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then
+without warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion.
+Every word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.
+
+“I say he gave you thirty shillings. Now then!” Barnes yapped.
+
+“And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you’ve had.”
+
+“Don’t I hear through the door what you get?”
+
+Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment
+to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had
+been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was
+the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The
+recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing
+longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night,
+which smelled so sweet after that passage.
+
+He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the
+five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he
+pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of
+black basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the
+speculation of their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning
+and brooded upon the builders that built them and the sphinx that
+commanded them to be built.
+
+In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather
+prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of
+brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped
+and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher
+and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number
+One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a
+moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a
+wild, irregular walk in Michael’s direction. He had a sensation that
+she had known he was standing here against this wall, that she had
+watched him all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been
+standing here against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he
+could not advance to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the
+wall. Michael saw her very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight.
+Her hat was askew, and a black ostrich plume hung down over her big
+chalky face: her lips were glistening as if they had been smeared with
+jam. She was wearing a black satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts
+swept past him, like an overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by
+a wire from the scene.
+
+Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to
+have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene
+primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He
+realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could
+hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he
+had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the
+reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One
+with the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather
+startled as he walked up the steps to see Barnes’ face pressed against
+the window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave
+reassuringly to a mask like that.
+
+Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key
+from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.
+
+“Here, I couldn’t get down to the Orange to-night. I’ve had a bit of
+trouble with this girl.”
+
+The gas was flaring in the sitting-room by now, and the night, which
+outside had been lightening for dawn, was black as ink upon the panes.
+
+“Sit on the bed. The chairs are all full of her dirty clothes. I’ll
+pull the blinds down. I’m going to leave here to-morrow, Fane. Did you
+see her going down the road? She must have passed you by. I tell you
+straight, Fane, half an hour back I was in two minds to do her in. I
+was, straight. And I would have, if ... Oh, well, I kept my temper and
+threw her out instead. Gratitude! It’s my belief gratitude doesn’t
+exist in this world. You sit down and have a smoke. He left some
+cigarettes behind.”
+
+“Who did?” Michael asked sharply.
+
+“Who did what?”
+
+“Left these cigarettes.”
+
+“Oh, they’re some I bought yesterday,” said Barnes.
+
+“I think it’s just as well for you that you are going to-morrow
+morning. I hope you quite realize that otherwise I should have turned
+you out.”
+
+“Well, don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” Barnes protested. “I’ve
+had quite enough to worry me without any nastiness between old friends
+to make it worse.”
+
+“You can’t expect me to be pleased at the way you’ve treated my rooms,”
+Michael said.
+
+“Oh, the gas-stove, you mean?”
+
+“It’s not a question of gas-stoves. It’s a question of living on a
+woman.”
+
+“Who did?”
+
+“You.”
+
+“If I’d had to live on her earnings, I should be very poorly off now,”
+grumbled Barnes, in an injured voice.
+
+Under Michael’s attack he was regaining his old perkiness.
+
+“At any rate, you must go to-morrow morning,” Michael insisted.
+
+“Don’t I keep on telling you that I’m going? It’s no good for you to
+nag at me, Fane.”
+
+“And what about the woman?”
+
+“Her? Let her go to ——,” said Barnes contemptuously. “She can’t do me
+any harm. What if she does tell the coppers I’ve been living on her?
+They won’t worry me unless they’ve nothing better to do, and I’ll have
+hooked it by then.”
+
+“You’re sure she can’t do you any harm?” Michael asked gravely.
+“There’s nothing else she could tell the police?”
+
+“Here, what are you talking about?” asked Barnes, coming close to
+Michael and staring at him fixedly. Michael debated whether he should
+mention Cissie Cummings, but he lacked the courage either to frighten
+Barnes with the suggestion of his guilt or to preserve a superior
+attitude in the face of his enraged innocence.
+
+“I shall come round to-morrow morning, or rather this morning, at
+nine,” said Michael. “And I shall expect to find you ready to clear out
+of here for good.”
+
+“You’re very short with a fellow, aren’t you?” said Barnes. “What do
+you want to go away for? Why don’t you stay so as you can see me off
+the premises?”
+
+Michael thought that he could observe underneath all the assurance a
+sharp anxiety on Barnes’ part not to be left alone.
+
+“You can lay down and have a sleep in here. I’ll get on into the
+bedroom.”
+
+Michael consented to stay, and Barnes was obviously relieved. He put
+out the gas and retired into the bedroom. The dawn was graying the
+room, and the sun would be up in less than an hour. Early sparrows were
+beginning to chirp. The woman who had burst out of the door and fled up
+the street seemed now a chimera of the night. Half-dozing, Michael lay
+on the bed, half dozing and faintly oppressed by the odor of patchouli
+coming from the clothes heaped upon the chairs. St. George was visible
+already, and even the outlines of The Knight in Armor were tremulously
+apparent. Michael wondered why he did not feel a greater resentment at
+the profanation of these rooms. And why did Barnes keep fidgeting on
+the other side of the folding doors? The sparrows were cheeping more
+loudly: the trains were more frequent. Michael woke from sleep with a
+start and saw that Barnes was throwing the clothes from the chairs on
+the floor: stirred up thus in this clear light the scent of patchouli
+was even more noticeable. What on earth was Barnes doing? He was
+turning the whole room upside-down.
+
+“What the deuce are you looking for?” Michael yawned.
+
+“That’s all right, old man, you get on with your sleep. I’m just
+putting my things together,” Barnes told him.
+
+Michael turned over and was beginning to doze again when Barnes woke
+him by the noise he made in taking the dirty dishes out of the old
+grate.
+
+“How on earth can I sleep, when you’re continually fidgeting?” Michael
+demanded fretfully. “What’s the time?”
+
+“Just gone half-past five.”
+
+Barnes paid no more attention to Michael’s rest, but began more
+feverishly than ever to rummage among all the things in the room.
+
+Michael could not stand his activity any longer, and dry-mouthed from
+an uncomfortable sleep, he sat up.
+
+“What _are_ you looking for?”
+
+“Well, if you want to know, I’m looking for a watch-bracelet.”
+
+“It’s not likely to be under the carpet,” said Michael severely.
+
+Barnes was wrenching out the tacks to Michael’s annoyance.
+
+“Perhaps it isn’t,” Barnes agreed. “But I’ve got to find this
+watch-bracelet. It’s gold. I don’t want to lose it.”
+
+“Was it a woman’s?”
+
+Barnes looked round at him like a small animal alarmed.
+
+“Yes, it was a woman’s. What makes you ask?”
+
+“What’s it like?”
+
+“Gold. Gold, I keep telling you.”
+
+“When did you have it last?”
+
+“Last night.”
+
+“Well, it can’t have gone far.”
+
+“No, blast it, of course it can’t,” said Barnes, searching with renewed
+impatience. He was throwing the clothes about the room again, and the
+odor of staleness became nauseating.
+
+“I’m going to wash,” Michael announced, moving across to the bedroom.
+
+“You’ll excuse the untidiness,” Barnes called out after him, in a tone
+of rather strained jocularity.
+
+Of Michael’s old room no vestige remained. A very large double-bed took
+up almost all the space, and all the furniture was new and tawdry. The
+walls were hung with studies of cocottes pretending to be naiads and
+dryads, horrible women posed in the silvanity of a photographer’s
+studio. The room was littered with clothes, and Michael could not move
+a step without entangling his feet in a petticoat or treading upon
+hidden shoes. He tried to splash his face, but the very washstand was
+sickly.
+
+“Well, you’ve managed to debauch my bedroom quite successfully,” he
+said to Barnes, when he came back to the sitting-room.
+
+“That’s all right. I’ll get rid of all the new furniture. I can pop the
+lot. Well, it’s mine. If I could find this bloody watch-bracelet, I
+could begin to make some arrangements.”
+
+“What about breakfast?” Michael began to look for something to eat.
+Every plate and knife was dirty, and there were three or four
+half-finished tins of condensed milk which had turned pistachio green
+and stank abominably.
+
+“There’s a couple of herrings somewhere,” said Barnes. “Or there was.
+But everything seems upside-down this morning. Where the hell is that
+watch? It can’t have walked away on its own. If that mare took it! I’ve
+a very particular reason for not wanting to lose that watch. Oh, —— ——!
+wherever can it have got to?”
+
+“Well, anyway shut up using such filthy language. When does the milkman
+come round?”
+
+“I don’t know when he comes round. Here, Fane, have you ever heard of
+anyone talking in their sleep?”
+
+“Of course I’ve heard of people talking in their sleep,” Michael
+answered. “It’s not very unusual.”
+
+“Ah, hollering out, yes—but talking in a sensible sort of a way, so
+that if you came in and listened to what they said, you’d think it was
+the truth? Have you ever heard of that?”
+
+“I don’t suppose I can give you an instance, but obviously it must
+often happen.”
+
+“Must it?” said Barnes, in a depressed voice. “You see, I set
+particular value by this watch-bracelet; and I thought perhaps I might
+have talked about it in my sleep, and that mare just to spite me have
+gone and taken it. I wonder where it is now.”
+
+Michael also began to wonder where it was now, and Barnes’ anxiety was
+transferred to him, so that he began to fancy the whole of this fine
+morning was tremendously bound up with exactly where the watch-bracelet
+now was. Barnes had begun to turn over everything for about the sixth
+time.
+
+“If the watch is here,” said Michael irritably, “it will be found when
+you move your things out, and if it’s not here, it’s useless to go on
+worrying about it.”
+
+“Ah, it’s all very nice for you to be so calm! But what price it’s
+being my watch that’s lost, not yours, old sport?”
+
+“I’m not going to talk about it any more,” Michael declared. “I want to
+know what you’re going to do when you leave here.”
+
+“Ah, that’s it! What am I?”
+
+“Would you like to go to the Colonies?”
+
+“What, say good-bye to dear old Leicester Square and pop off for good
+and all? I wouldn’t mind.”
+
+“I don’t mind telling you,” said Michael, “that if I’d discovered you
+here a week ago living like this, I should have had nothing more to do
+with you. As it is, I’ve a good mind to sling you out to look after
+yourself. However, I’m willing to get you a ticket for wherever you
+think you’d like to go, and when I hear you’ve arrived, I’ll send you
+enough money to keep you going for a time.”
+
+“Fane, I don’t mind saying it. You’ve been a good pal to me.”
+
+“Hark, there’s the milkman at last!” Michael exclaimed. He went out
+into the sparkling air of the fine Summer morning and came back with
+plenty of milk for breakfast. After they had made a sort of meal, he
+suggested that Barnes ought to come with him and visit some of the
+Colonial Agencies. They walked down Victoria Street and across St.
+James’ Park, and in the Strand he made Barnes have a shave. The visit
+to the barber took away some of his nocturnal raffishness, and Michael
+found him very amusing during the various discussions that took place
+in the Agencies.
+
+“I think the walk has done you good.”
+
+“Yes,” Barnes doubtfully admitted. “I don’t think it has done me much
+harm.”
+
+They had lunch at Romano’s, where Barnes drank a good deal of Chianti
+and became full of confidence in his future.
+
+“That’s where it is, Fane. A fellow like you is lucky. But that’s no
+reason why I shouldn’t be lucky in my turn. My life has been a failure
+so far. Yes, I’m not going to attempt to deny it. There are lots of
+things in my life that might have been different. You’ll understand
+when I say different I mean pleasanter for everybody all round, myself
+included. But that’s all finished. With this fruit-farm—well, of course
+it’s no good grumbling and running down good things—those apples we saw
+were big enough to make anybody’s fortune. Cawdashit, Fane, I can see
+myself sitting under one of those apple-trees and counting the bloody
+fruit falling down at my feet and me popping them into baskets and
+selling them—where was it he said we sold them?” Barnes poured out more
+Chianti. “Really, it seems a sin on a fine day like this to be hanging
+about in London. Well, I’ve had some sprees in old London, and that’s a
+fact; so I’m not going to start running it down now. If I hadn’t lost
+that watch-bracelet, I wouldn’t give a damn for anybody. Good old
+London,” he went on meditatively. “Yes, I’ve had some times—good times
+and bad times—and here I am.”
+
+He gradually became incoherent, and Michael thought it would be as well
+to escort him back to Leppard Street and impress on him once again that
+he must remove all his things immediately.
+
+“You’ll have to be quick with your packing-up. You ought to sail next
+week. I shall go and see about your passage to-morrow.”
+
+They drove back to Leppard Street in a taxi, and as they got out Barnes
+said emphatically:
+
+“You know what it is, Fane? Cawdashit! I feel like a marquis when I’m
+out with you, and it I hadn’t have lost that watch-bracelet I’d feel
+like the bloody German Emperor. That’s me. All up in the air one
+minute, and yet worry myself barmy over a little thing like a watch the
+next.”
+
+“Hullo!” he exclaimed, looking up the road as their taxi drove off.
+“Somebody else is playing at being a millionaire.”
+
+Another taxi was driving into Leppard Street.
+
+Michael had already opened the front door, and he told Barnes not to
+hang about on the steps. Barnes turned reluctantly from his inspection
+of the new taxi’s approach. It pulled up at Number One, and three men
+jumped out.
+
+“That’s your man,” Michael heard one of them say, and in another moment
+he heard, “Henry Meats ... I hold a warrant ... murder of Cissie ...
+anything you say ... used against you,” all in the mumbo-jumbo of a
+nightmare.
+
+Michael came down the steps again very quickly; and Barnes, now
+handcuffed, turned to him despairingly.
+
+“Tell ’em my name isn’t Meats, Fane. Tell ’em they’ve made a mistake.
+Oh, my God, I never done it! I never done it!”
+
+The two men were pushing him, dead white, crumpled, sobbing, into the
+taxi; he seemed very small beside the big men with their square
+shoulders and bristly mustaches. Michael heard him still moaning as the
+taxi jangled and whirred abruptly forward. The third man watched it
+disappear between the two walls; then he strolled up the steps to enter
+the house. Mrs. Cleghorne was already in the hall, and over the
+balusters of each landing faces could be seen peering down. As if the
+word were uttered by the house itself, “murder” floated in a whisper
+upon the air. The faces shifted; doors opened and shut far above;
+footsteps hurried to and fro; and still of all these sounds “murder”
+was the most audible.
+
+“This is the gentleman who rents the rooms,” Mrs. Cleghorne was saying.
+
+“But I’ve not been near them till yesterday evening for six months,”
+Michael hurriedly explained.
+
+“That’s quite right,” Mrs. Cleghorne echoed.
+
+“Well, I’m afraid we must go through them,” said the officer.
+
+“Oh, of course.”
+
+“Let me see, is this your address?”
+
+“Well, no—Cheyne Walk—173.”
+
+“We might want to have a little talk with you about this here Meats.”
+
+Michael was enraged with himself for not asseverating “Barnes! Barnes!
+Barnes!” as he had been begged to do. He despised himself for not
+trying to save that white crumpled thing huddled between those big men
+with their bristly mustaches; yet all the while he felt violently
+afraid that the police officer would think him involved in these
+disgraceful rooms, that he would suppose the pictures and the tawdry
+furniture belonged to him, that he would imagine the petticoats and
+underlinen strewn about the floor had something to do with him.
+
+“If you want me,” he found himself saying, “you have my address.”
+
+Quickly he hurried away from Leppard Street, and traveled in a trance
+of shame to Hardingham. Alan was just going in to bat, when Michael
+walked across from the Hall to the cricket-field.
+
+Stella came from her big basket chair to greet him, and for a while he
+sat with her in the buttercups, watching Alan at the wicket. Nothing
+had ever seemed so easy as the bowling of the opposite side on this
+fine June evening, and Michael tried to banish the thought of Barnes in
+the spaciousness of these level fields. Stella was evidently being very
+careful not to convey the impression that she had lately won a victory
+over him. It was really ridiculous, Michael thought, as he plucked idly
+the buttercups and made desultory observations to Stella about the
+merit of a stroke by Alan, it was more than ridiculous, it was
+deliberate folly to enmesh himself with such horrors as he had beheld
+at Leppard Street. There were doubtless very unpleasant events
+continually happening in this world, but willfully to drag one’s self
+into misery on account of them was merely to show an incapacity to
+appreciate the more fortunate surroundings of one’s allotted niche. The
+avoidance of even the sight of evil was as justifiable as the avoidance
+of evil itself, and the moral economy of the world might suffer a
+dangerous displacement, if everyone were to involve themselves in such
+events as those in which himself had lately been involved. Duty was
+owing all the time to people nearer at hand than Barnes. No doubt the
+world would be better for being rid of him; diseases of the body must
+be fought, and the corruption of human society must be cleansed. Any
+pity for Barnes was a base sentimentalism; it was merely a reaction of
+personal discomfort at having seen an unpleasant operation. The
+sentimentalism of that cry “Don’t hurt him!” was really contemptible,
+and since it seemed that he was likely to be too weak to bear the sight
+of the cleansing knife, he must in future avoid the occasion of its
+use. Otherwise his intellectual outlook was going to be sapped, and he
+would find himself in the ranks of the faddists.
+
+“I think I shall stay down here the rest of the summer, if I may,” he
+said to Stella.
+
+“My dear, of course you can. We’ll have a wonderful time. Hullo, Alan
+is retiring.”
+
+Alan came up and sat beside them in the buttercups.
+
+“I thought I saw you just as I was going in,” he said. “Anything going
+on in town?”
+
+“No, nothing much,” said Michael. “I saw a man arrested for murder this
+afternoon.”
+
+“Did you really? How beastly! Our team’s just beginning to get into
+shape. I say, Stella. That youth working on old Rundle’s farm is going
+to be pret-ty good. Did you see him lift their fast bowlers twice
+running over the pond?”
+
+Michael strolled away to take a solitary walk. It seemed incredible now
+to think that he had brought Lily down here, that he had wandered with
+her over this field. What an infringement it must have seemed to Stella
+and Alan of their already immemorial peace. They had really been very
+good about his invasion. And here was the wood where he and Stella had
+fought. Michael sat down in the glade and listened to the busy
+flutterings of the birds. Why had Stella objected to his marriage with
+Lily? All the superficial answers were ready at once; but was not her
+real objection only another facet of the diamond of selfishness?
+Selfishness was a diamond. Precious, hard, and very often
+beautiful—when seen by itself.
+
+Michael spent a week at Hardingham, during which he managed to put out
+of his mind the thought of Barnes in prison awaiting his trial. Then
+one day the butler informed him of a person wishing to speak to him. In
+the library he found the detective who had asked for his address at
+Leppard Street.
+
+“Sorry to have to trouble you, sir, but there was one or two little
+questions we wanted to ask.”
+
+Michael feared he would have to appear at the trial, and asked at once
+if that was going to be necessary.
+
+“Oh, no, I don’t think so. We’ve got it all marked out fair and square
+against Mr. Meats. He doesn’t stand a chance of getting off. How did
+you come to be mixed up with him?”
+
+Michael explained the circumstances which had led up to his knowing
+Meats.
+
+“I see; and you just wanted to give him a bit of a helping hand. Oh,
+well, the feeling does you credit, I’m bound to say; but another time,
+sir, I should make a few inquiries first. We should probably have had
+him before, if he hadn’t been helped by you. Of course, I quite
+understand you knew nothing about this murder, but anyone can often do
+a lot of harm by helping undeserving people. We mightn’t have nabbed
+him even now, if some woman hadn’t brought us a nice little bit of
+evidence, and I found some more things myself after a search. Oh, yes,
+he doesn’t stand an earthly. We knew for a moral cert who did it,
+straightaway; but the police don’t get a fair chance in England. We let
+all these blooming Radicals interfere too much. That’s my opinion.
+Anyone would think the police was a lot of criminals by the way some
+people talk about them.”
+
+“Is anybody defending him?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, he’ll be awarded a counsel,” said the detective indignantly. “For
+which you and me has to pay. That’s a nice thing, isn’t it? But he
+doesn’t stand an earthly.”
+
+“Where will he be hanged?”
+
+“Pentonville.”
+
+Michael thought how Mrs. Murdoch in Neptune Crescent would shudder some
+Tuesday morning in the near future.
+
+“I’m sorry you should have had to come all this way to find me,”
+Michael said. He hated himself for being polite to the inspector, but
+he could not help it. He rang the bell.
+
+“Oh, Dawkins, will you give Inspector—what is your name, by the bye?”
+
+“Dawkins,” said the inspector.
+
+“How curious!” Michael laughed.
+
+“Yes, sir,” the inspector laughed.
+
+“Lunch in the gun room, Dawkins. You must be hungry.”
+
+“Well, sir, I could do with a snack, I daresay.” He followed his
+namesake from the room, and outside Michael could hear them begin to
+chatter of the coincidence.
+
+“But supposing I’d been in the same state of life as Meats,” Michael
+said to himself. “What devil’s web wouldn’t they be trying to spin
+round me?”
+
+He was seized with fury at himself for his cowardice. He had thought of
+nothing but his own reputation ever since Meats had been arrested. He
+had worried over the opinion of a police inspector; had been ashamed of
+the appearance of the rooms; had actually been afraid that he would be
+implicated in the disgraceful affair. So long as it had been easy to
+flatter himself with the pleasure he was giving or the good he was
+doing to Meats, he had kept him with money. Now when Meats had been
+dragged away, he was anxious to disclaim the whole acquaintanceship for
+fear of the criticism of a big man with a bristly mustache. The despair
+in Meats’ last cry to him echoed round this library. He had seen
+society in action: not all the devils and fiends imagined by mediæval
+monks were so horrible as those big men with bristly mustaches. What
+did they know of Meats and his life? What did they care, but that they
+were paid by society to remove rubbish? Justice had decreed that Meats
+should be arrested, and like a dead rat in the gutter he was swept up
+by these scavengers. What compact had he broken that men should freeze
+to stones and crush him? He had broken the laws of men and the laws of
+God; he had committed murder. And were not murders as foul being
+committed every moment? Murdered ambition, murdered love, murdered
+pity, murdered gratitude, murdered faith, did none of these cry out for
+vengeance?
+
+Society had seized the murderer, and it was useless to cry out. Himself
+was as impotent as the prisoner. Meats had sinned against the hive:
+this infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he
+felt to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was
+become a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by
+fear. Something was needed to destroy this gregarious organism. War and
+pestilence must come; but in the past these two had come often enough,
+and mankind was the same afterward. This ant-hill of a globe had been
+ravaged often enough, but the ants were all busy again carrying their
+mean little burdens of food hither and thither in affright for the
+comfort of their mean little lives.
+
+“And I’m as bad as any of them,” said Michael to himself. “I know I
+have obligations in Leppard Street, and I’ve run away from them because
+I’m afraid of what people will think. Of course, I always fail. I’m a
+coward.”
+
+He could not stay any longer at Hardingham. He must go and see about
+Mrs. Smith now. Society would be seizing her soon and bringing her
+miserable life to an end in whitewashed prison corridors. He must do
+something for Meats. Perhaps he would not be able to save him from
+death, but he must not sit here ringing bells for butlers called
+Dawkins to feed inspectors called Dawkins.
+
+Stella came in with the first roses of the year.
+
+“Aren’t they beauties?”
+
+“Yes, splendid. I’m going up to town this afternoon.”
+
+“But not for long?”
+
+“I don’t know. It depends. Do you know, Stella, it’s an extraordinary
+thing, but ever since you’ve practically given up playing, I feel very
+much more alive. How do you account for that?”
+
+“Well, I haven’t given up playing for one thing,” Stella contradicted.
+
+“Stella do you ever feel inspired nowadays?”
+
+“Not so much as I did,” she admitted.
+
+“I feel now as if I were on the verge of an inspiration.”
+
+“Not another Lily,” she said quickly, with half a laugh.
+
+“You’ve no right to sneer at me about that,” he said fiercely. “You
+must be very careful, you know. _You’ll_ become flabby, if you aren’t
+careful, here at Hardingham.”
+
+“Oh, Michael!” she laughed. “Don’t look at me as if you were a Major
+Prophet. I won’t become flabby. I shall start composing at once.”
+
+“There you are!” he cried triumphantly. “Never say again that I can’t
+wake you up.”
+
+“You did not wake me up.”
+
+“I did. I did. And do you know I believe I’ve discovered that I’m an
+anarchist?”
+
+“Is that your inspiration?”
+
+“Who knows? It may be.”
+
+“Well, don’t come and be anarchical down here, because Alan is going to
+stand at the next election.”
+
+“What on earth good would Alan be in Parliament?” Michael asked
+derisively. “He’s much too happy.”
+
+“Michael, why are you so horrid about Alan nowadays?”
+
+He was penitent in a moment at the suggestion, but when he said
+good-bye to Stella he had a curious feeling that from henceforth he was
+going to be stronger than her.
+
+On reaching London, Michael went to see Castleton at the Temple, and he
+found him in chambers at the top of dusty stairs in King’s Beach Walk.
+
+“Lucky to get these, wasn’t I?” said Castleton. By craning out of the
+window, the river was visible.
+
+“I suppose you’ve never had a murder case yet?” Michael asked.
+
+“Not yet,” said Castleton. “In fact, I’m going in for Chancery work.
+And I shall get my first brief in about five years, with luck.”
+
+Michael inquired how one went to work to retain the greatest criminal
+advocate of the day, and Castleton said he would have to be approached
+through a solicitor.
+
+“Well, will you get hold of him for me?”
+
+Castleton looked rather blank.
+
+“If you can’t get him, get the next best, and so on. Tell him the man I
+want to defend hasn’t a chance, and that’s why I’m particularly anxious
+he should get off.”
+
+They discussed details for some time, and Castleton was astonished at
+Michael’s wish to aid Meats.
+
+“It seems very perverse,” he said.
+
+“Perverse!” Michael echoed. “And what about your profession? That is
+really the most perverse factor in modern life.”
+
+“But in this case,” Castleton argued, “the victim seems so utterly
+worthless.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Michael. “But as society never interfered when he was
+passively offensive, why, the moment he becomes actively offensive,
+should society have the right to put him out of the way? They never
+tried to cure him for his own good. Why should they kill him for their
+own?”
+
+“You want to strike at the foundations of the legal system,” said the
+barrister.
+
+“Exactly,” Michael agreed; and the argument came to an end because
+there was obviously nothing more to be said.
+
+Castleton promises to do all he could for Meats, and also to keep
+Michael’s name out of the business. As Michael walked down the stairs,
+it gave him a splendid satisfaction to think how already the law was
+being set in motion against the law. A blow for Inspector Dawkins. And
+what about the murdered girl? “She won’t be helped by Meats’ death,”
+said Michael to himself. “Society is not considering her protection now
+any more than it did when she was alive.” _No slops must be emptied
+here_: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the
+stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a
+sentimentalist.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.
+
+“A nice set-out and no mistake!” she declared. “Half of the
+neighborhood have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder
+had been done in here. Mr. Cleghorne’s quite hoarse with hollering out
+to them to keep off. And it never rains but what it pours. There’s a
+poor woman gone and died here now. However, a funeral’s a little more
+lively than the police nosing round, though her not having a blessed
+halfpenny and owing me three weeks on the rent it certainly won’t be
+anything better than a pauper’s funeral.”
+
+“What woman?” Michael asked.
+
+“Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I’ve been very good to—a Mrs. Smith.”
+
+“Dead?” he echoed.
+
+“Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body.
+What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I _should_ say. It quite worried Mr.
+Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around
+so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he’s read a lot about these
+Roman Catholics, and he doesn’t hold with them. They’re that underhand,
+he says, it makes him nervous.”
+
+“Can I see this priest?” Michael asked.
+
+“Well, it’s hardly the room you’re accustomed to. I’ve really looked at
+her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old
+mother has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her.”
+
+“I think I should like to see this priest,” Michael persisted.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and
+she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They
+descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out
+to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused
+herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was
+sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look
+up from his Office.
+
+“Is that you, Sister?” he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited
+for him to explain his business.
+
+“I wanted to ask about this poor woman.”
+
+Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing
+was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
+
+“I was interested in her,” Michael exclaimed.
+
+“Indeed!” said the priest dryly. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
+
+“Is her cat here?”
+
+“There was some sort of an animal, but the woman of the house took it
+off.”
+
+A silence followed, and Michael was aware of the priest’s hostility.
+
+“I suppose she didn’t see her son before she died?” Michael went on.
+“Her son is with the Jesuits.”
+
+“You seem to know a great deal about the poor soul?”
+
+“I thought I had managed to help her,” said Michael, in a sad voice.
+
+“Indeed?” commented the priest, even more dryly.
+
+“And there is nothing I can do now?”
+
+“Almighty God has taken her,” said the priest. “There is nothing you
+can do.”
+
+“I could have some Masses said for her.”
+
+“Are you a Catholic?” the priest asked.
+
+“No; but I fancy I shall be a Catholic,” Michael said; and as he spoke
+it was like a rushing wind. He hurried out into the passage where a nun
+passed him in the gloom. “She will be praying,” Michael thought, and,
+looking back over his shoulder, he said:
+
+“Pray for me, Sister.”
+
+The nun was evidently startled by the voice, and went on quickly down
+the three steps and up the other into Mrs. Smith’s den.
+
+Michael climbed upstairs to interview the Solutionist. He found him
+lying in bed.
+
+“Why wasn’t that money paid regularly?” he asked severely.
+
+“Who is it?” the Solutionist muttered, in fuddled accents. “Wanted the
+money myself. Had a glorious time. The cat’s all right, and the poor
+old rabbits are dead. Can’t give everybody a good time. Somebody’s got
+to suffer in this world.”
+
+Michael left him, and without entering his old rooms again went away
+from Leppard Street.
+
+The moment had come to visit Rome, and remembering how he had once
+dissuaded Maurice from going there, he felt some compunction now in
+telling him that he wanted to travel alone. However, it would be
+impossible to visit Rome for the first time with Maurice. In the studio
+he led up to his backing out of the engagement.
+
+“About this going abroad,” he began.
+
+“I say, Michael, I don’t think I can come just now. The editor of The
+Point of View wants a series of articles on the ballet, and I’m going
+to start on them at once.”
+
+It was a relief to Michael, and he wished Maurice good luck.
+
+“Yes, I think they’re going to be rather good,” he said confidently.
+“I’m going to begin with the Opera: then the Empire and the Alhambra:
+and in September there will be the new ballet at the Orient. Of course,
+I’ve got a theory about English ballet.”
+
+“Is there anything about which you haven’t got a theory?” Michael
+asked. “Hullo, you’ve got the Venetian mirror from Ararat House. I’m so
+glad!”
+
+“I’ve arranged all that,” Maurice said. “Lily Haden has gone to live
+with a girl called Sylvia Scarlett. Rather a terror, I thought.”
+
+“Yes, I had an idea you’d find her a bit difficult.”
+
+“Oh, but I scored off her in the end,” said Maurice quickly.
+
+“Congratulations,” said Michael. “Well, I’m going to Rome.”
+
+“I say, rather hot.”
+
+“So much the better.”
+
+“I used to be rather keen on Rome, but I’ve a theory it’s generally a
+disappointment. However, I suppose I shall have to go one day.”
+
+“Yes, I don’t think Rome ought to miss your patronage, Maurice.”
+
+They parted as intimate friends, but while Michael was going downstairs
+from the studio he thought that it might very easily be for the last
+time.
+
+His mother was at home for tea; lots of women and a bishop were having
+a committee about something. When they had all rustled away into the
+mellow June evening, Michael asked what had been accomplished.
+
+“It’s this terrible state of the London streets,” said Mrs. Fane.
+“Something has got to be done about these miserable women. The Bishop
+of Chelsea has promised to bring in some kind of a bill in Parliament.
+He feels so strongly about it.”
+
+“What does he feel?” Michael asked.
+
+“Why, of course, that they shouldn’t be allowed.”
+
+“The remedy lies with him,” Michael said. “He must take them the
+Sacraments.”
+
+“My dearest boy, what are you talking about? He does his best. He’s
+always picking them up and driving them home in his brougham. He can’t
+do more than that. Really he quite thrilled us with some of his
+experiences.”
+
+Michael laughed and took hold of her hand.
+
+“What would you say if I told you that I was thinking very seriously of
+being a priest?”
+
+“Oh, my dear Michael, and you look so particularly nice in tweeds!”
+
+Michael laughed and went upstairs to pack. He would leave London
+to-morrow morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OLD WORLD
+
+
+The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn
+was quivering upon the meadows near Chambéry Michael was sure with an
+almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hardships
+of thought. Waterfalls swayed from the mountains, and the gray torrents
+they fed plunged along beside the train. Down through Italy they
+traveled all day, past the cypresses, and the olive-trees wise and
+graceful in the sunlight. It was already dusk when they reached the
+Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses
+shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset;
+but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train
+reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter
+carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down
+the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber
+shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide
+street in Rome.
+
+“There has been nothing like this,” he said, “since I walked down the
+High. There will be nothing like this ever again.”
+
+Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups
+of ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one
+mighty column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was
+figured with innumerable horses and warriors.
+
+“We must seek for truth in the past,” he said.
+
+How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was
+only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in
+Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues,
+rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived
+as shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this
+column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name.
+What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the
+morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct
+of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this
+solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.
+
+“All that I have done and experienced so far,” Michael thought, “would
+not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of
+other people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have
+been given knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I
+offer myself to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man.
+Man for man standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader.
+The reason why the modern world is so critical of the fruits of
+Christianity after nineteen hundred years is because they have expected
+it from the beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to
+the individual the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is
+much more anxious about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds
+are destroyed, whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake,
+or by the great illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a
+great war, and everybody will discover it has come either because
+people are Christians or because they are not Christians. Nobody will
+think it is because each man wants to interfere with the conduct of his
+neighbor. That woman in Leppard Street who died in the peace of God,
+how much more was she a Christian than me, who, without perceiving the
+beam in my own eye, have trotted round operating on the motes of other
+people. And once I had to make an effort to kiss her in fellowship.
+Rome! Rome! How parochial you make my youth!”
+
+The last exclamation was uttered aloud.
+
+“Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?” said a
+voice.
+
+A man in a black cloak was speaking.
+
+“No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies,” said
+Michael.
+
+“There is only one tragedy for youth.”
+
+“And that is?”
+
+“Age,” said the stranger.
+
+“And what is the tragedy of age?”
+
+“There is no tragedy of age,” said the stranger.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER
+TO
+JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO
+
+MY DEAR JOHN,
+
+There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in
+prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it
+thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have
+himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the
+book.
+
+You will remember that last year “Youth’s Encounter,” the first part of
+Michael Fane’s story, obtained a great advertisement through the action
+of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be
+drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of
+compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the
+realities of war will obtain me a pardon in “Sinister Street,” the
+second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the
+sensitive or affronted the simple.
+
+Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the
+question of the form of the English novel. There has lately been
+noticeable in the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel
+is thinly disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are
+peculiarly formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack
+upon the form of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted
+in regarding “Youth’s Encounter” merely as an achievement of memory,
+and I have felt sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of
+literary Datas, rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist.
+You know from many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could
+remember of my childhood, the book would not by this time have reached
+much beyond my fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public
+school and my own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I
+fancy it would have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a
+place of which I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that
+nowadays it is a much better university than Oxford, and in thinking
+thus you are the only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy.
+Obviously, too, it was unavoidable in writing about St. James’ that I
+should draw certain characters from the life, and for doing this I have
+been attacked on grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of
+schoolmasters to be exempt from the privilege of public men to be
+sometimes caricatured. Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With
+regard to the Oxford dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to
+them what is after all much more likely to be a true impression of
+their virtues and follies than those formed by a schoolboy of his
+masters. Therefore, in this second volume, “Sinister Street,” there is
+not a single portrait of a don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the
+undergraduate a much less important factor than the schoolmaster is to
+the schoolboy, and the few shadows of dons which appear in this volume
+are as vital as most dons in the flesh seem to the normal
+undergraduate.
+
+The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably
+will be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as
+such rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own
+existence up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth
+writing at such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of
+people who can bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the
+capacity of the spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your
+authority was said by Aristotle. “Art,” says _The Sydney Bulletin_, a
+curious antipodean paper, “is selection.” “It is time to protest,” says
+an American paper, “against these long books.” At this rate, we shall
+soon be spending all our time with books. “The enormous length must
+make it formless,” other critics have decided. Ultimately I believe
+Aristotle’s remark to be the truest guide, and I am tempted to hope
+that with the publication of the second volume many irrelevancies have
+established their relevancy.
+
+It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the
+end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes
+as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life,
+but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for
+me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new
+adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society
+preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences
+that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be
+determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these
+influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same
+time I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he
+is not myself in a looking-glass.
+
+I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional
+use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any
+“preciousness,” but to efforts at finding the only word that will say
+what I mean. To take two examples: “Reasty” signifies “covered with a
+kind of rust and having a rancid taste,” and it seems to me exactly to
+describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several
+suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects.
+“Inquiline” sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been
+sentimentalized like “pilgrim”; it is not an Americanism like
+“transients,” and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay;
+whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given
+votes.
+
+We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world,
+and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure
+Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of
+the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to
+a duke.
+
+There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of
+this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this
+year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other
+readers who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second
+volume have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have
+seemed above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe
+there is nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of
+obligation as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his
+anonymous critics.
+
+Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our
+enduring friendship.
+
+Yours ever,
+COMPTON MACKENZIE.
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sinister Street, vol. 2
+
+Author: Compton Mackenzie
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2010 [EBook #33798]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SINISTER STREET, VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SINISTER STREET
+
+BY
+
+COMPTON MACKENZIE
+
+AUTHOR OF "CARNIVAL," "YOUTH'S ENCOUNTER," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+DREAMING SPIRES
+
+CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+I. THE FIRST DAY 3
+
+II. THE FIRST WEEK                  32
+
+III. THE FIRST TERM                 47
+
+IV. CHEYNE WALK                     63
+
+V. YOUTH'S DOMINATION               84
+
+VI. GRAY AND BLUE                  110
+
+VII. VENNER'S                      143
+
+VIII. THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS     165
+
+IX. THE LESSON OF SPAIN            183
+
+X. STELLA IN OXFORD                209
+
+XI. SYMPATHY                       225
+
+XII. 202 HIGH                      245
+
+XIII. PLASHERS MEAD                269
+
+XIV. 99 ST. GILES                  288
+
+XV. THE LAST TERM                  308
+
+XVI. THE LAST WEEK                 319
+
+XVII. THE LAST DAY                 333
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+
+CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+I. OSTIA DITIS                     349
+
+II. NEPTUNE CRESCENT               371
+
+III. THE CAF� D'ORANGE             401
+
+IV. LEPPARD STREET                 427
+
+V. THE INNERMOST CIRCLE            481
+
+VI. TINDERBOX LANE                 496
+
+VII. THE GATE OF IVORY             552
+
+VIII. SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE         583
+
+IX. THE GATE OF HORN               602
+
+X. THE OLD WORLD                   652
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER TO
+JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORADATO         655
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+DREAMING SPIRES
+
+    Bright memories of young poetic pleasure
+      In free companionship, the loving stress
+    Of all life-beauty, lull'd in studious leisure,
+      When every Muse was jocund with excess
+      Of fine delight and tremulous happiness;
+    The breath of an indolent unbridled June,
+    When delicate thought fell from the dreamy moon:
+      But now strange care, sorrow, and grief oppress.
+
+      ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FIRST DAY
+
+
+Michael felt glad to think he would start the adventure of Oxford from
+Paddington. The simplicity of that railway station might faintly
+mitigate alarms which no amount of previous deliberation could entirely
+disperse. He remembered how once he had lightly seen off a Cambridge
+friend from Liverpool Street and, looking back at the suburban tumult of
+the Great Eastern Railway, he was grateful for the simplicity of
+Paddington.
+
+Michael had been careful that all his heavy luggage should be sent in
+advance; and he had shown himself gravely exacting toward Alan in this
+matter of luggage, writing several times to remind him of his promise
+not to appear on the platform with more than a portmanteau of moderate
+size and a normal kit-bag. Michael hoped this precaution would prevent
+at any rate the porters from commenting upon the freshness of him and
+his friend.
+
+"Oxford train?" inquired a porter, as the hansom pulled up. Michael
+nodded, and made up his mind to show his esteem when he tipped this
+promethean.
+
+"Third class?" the porter went on. Michael mentally doubled the tip, for
+he had neglected to assure himself beforehand about the etiquette of
+class, and nothing could have suited so well his self-consciousness as
+this information casually yielded.
+
+"Let me see, you didn't have any golf-clubs, did you, sir?" asked the
+porter.
+
+Michael shook his head regretfully, for as he looked hurriedly up and
+down the platform in search of Alan, he perceived golf-clubs everywhere,
+and when at last he saw him, actually even he had a golf-bag slung over
+his shoulder.
+
+"I never knew you played golf," said Michael indignantly.
+
+"I don't. These are the governor's. He's given up playing," Alan
+explained.
+
+"Are you going to play?" Michael pursued. He was feeling rather envious
+of the appearance of these veteran implements.
+
+"I may have a shot," Alan admitted.
+
+"You might have told me you were going to bring them," Michael grumbled.
+
+"My dear old ass, I never knew I was, until the governor wanged them
+into my lap just as I was starting."
+
+Michael turned aside and bought a number of papers, far too many for the
+short journey. Indeed, all the way they lay on the rack unregarded,
+while the train crossed and recrossed the silver Thames. At first he was
+often conscious of the other undergraduates in the compartment, who
+seemed to be eying him with a puzzled contempt; but very soon, when he
+perceived that this manner of looking at one's neighbor was general, he
+became reconciled to the attitude and ascribed it to a habit of mind
+rather than to the expression of any individual distaste. Then suddenly,
+as Michael was gazing out of the window, the pearly sky broke into
+spires and pinnacles and domes and towers. He caught his breath for one
+bewitched moment, before he busied himself with the luggage on the rack.
+
+On the platform Michael and Alan decided to part company, as neither of
+them felt sure enough whether St. Mary's or Christ Church were nearer to
+the station to risk a joint hansom.
+
+"Shall I come and see you this afternoon?" Michael rashly offered.
+
+"Oh, rather," Alan agreed, and they turned away from one another to
+secure their cabs.
+
+All the time that Michael was driving to St. Mary's, he was regretting
+he had not urged Alan to visit him first. A growing sensation of shy
+dread was making him vow that once safe in his own rooms at St. Mary's
+nothing should drag him forth again that day. What on earth would he say
+when he arrived at the college? Would he have to announce himself? How
+would he find his rooms? On these points he had pestered several Old
+Jacobeans now at Oxford, but none of them could remember the precise
+ceremonies of arrival. Michael leaned back in the hansom and cursed
+their inefficient memories.
+
+Then the cab pulled up by the St. Mary's lodge, and events proceeded
+with unexpected rapidity. A cheerful man with red hair and a round face
+welcomed his luggage. The cabman was paid the double of his correct
+fare, and to Michael's relief drove off instantly. From a sort of glass
+case that filled half the interior of the lodge somebody very much like
+a family butler inquired richly who Michael was.
+
+"Mr. C. M. S. Fane?" rolled out the unctuous man.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Is there another Fane?" he asked curiously.
+
+"No, sir," said the head porter, and the negative came out with the
+sound of a drawn cork. "No, sir, but I wished to hessateen if I had your
+initials down correct in my list. Mr. C. M. S. Fane," he went on,
+looking at a piece of paper. "St. Cuthbert's. Four. Two pair right. Your
+servant is Porcher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you'll settle
+with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
+Cuthbert's. Four. Two pair right."
+
+The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael's bag, and Michael was
+preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a warning
+hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole labeled
+Porcher.
+
+"These letters are for you, sir," he explained pompously. Michael took
+them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
+along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and shouted
+"Porcher!" From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the scout
+appeared.
+
+"One of your gentlemen arrived," said Henry. "Mr. Fane." Then he touched
+his cap and retired.
+
+"Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?" Porcher asked.
+
+"Not much," said Michael apologetically.
+
+"There's a nice lot of stuff in your rooms," Porcher informed him. "Come
+in yesterday morning, it did."
+
+They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors Michael
+was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a water-tap that
+no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck in his mind
+somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.
+
+"These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you'll shout, of
+course. I'm just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale's wine."
+
+Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
+packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
+in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted with
+much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was aware of
+a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room, it was a
+fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction of a
+privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
+bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
+green grass, across the Warden's garden with its faint gaiety of
+autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
+the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
+leisurely files about the spare sunlight.
+
+It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
+problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would be
+necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
+tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
+attention to himself than would be pleasant, and he postponed the
+summons in favor of an examination of his letters. One after another he
+opened them, and every one was the advertisement of a tailor or
+hairdresser or tobacconist. The tailors were the most insistent; they
+even went so far as to announce that representatives would call upon him
+at his pleasure. Michael made up his mind to order his cap and gown
+after lunch. Lunch! How should he obtain lunch? Where should he obtain
+lunch? When should he obtain lunch? Obviously there must be some precise
+manner of obtaining lunch, some ritual consecrated by generations of St.
+Mary's men. The loneliness came back triumphant, and plunged him
+dejectedly down into a surprisingly deep wicker-chair. The fire crackled
+in the silence, and the problem of lunch remained insoluble. The need
+for Porcher's advice became more desperate. Other freshmen before him
+must have depended upon their scout's experience. He began to practice
+calling Porcher in accents so low that they acquired a tender and
+reproachful significance. Michael braced himself for the performance
+after these choked and muffled rehearsals, and went boldly out on to the
+stone landing. An almost entranced silence held the staircase, a
+silence that he could not bring himself to violate. On the door of the
+rooms opposite he read his neighbor's name--_Mackintosh_. He wished he
+knew whether Mackintosh were a freshman. It would be delightful to make
+him share the responsibility of summoning Porcher from his task of
+arranging Lonsdale's wine. And who was Lonsdale? _No slops must be
+emptied here! Mackintosh! Fane!_ Here were three announcements hinting
+at humanity in a desolation of stillness. Michael reading his own name
+gathered confidence and a volume of breath, leaned over the stone
+parapet of the landing and, losing all his courage in a sigh, decided to
+walk downstairs and take his chance of meeting Porcher on the way.
+
+On the floor beneath Michael read _Bannerman_ over the left-hand door
+and _Templeton-Collins_ over the right-hand door. While he was pondering
+the personality and status of Templeton-Collins, presumably the
+gentleman himself appeared, stared at Michael very deliberately, came
+forward and, leaning over the parapet, yelled in a voice that combined
+rage, protest, disappointment and appeal with the maximum of sound:
+"Porcher!" After which, Templeton-Collins again stared very deliberately
+at Michael and retired into his room, while Michael hurried down to
+intercept the scout, hoping his dismay at Templeton-Collins' impatience
+would not be too great to allow him to pay a moment's attention to
+himself.
+
+However, on the ground floor the silence was still unbroken, and
+hopelessly Michael read over the right-hand door _Amherst_, over the
+left-hand door _Lonsdale_. What critical moment had arrived in the
+unpacking of Lonsdale's wine to make the scout so heedless of
+Templeton-Collins' call? Again it resounded from above, and Michael
+looking up involuntarily, caught the downward glance of
+Templeton-Collins himself.
+
+"I say, is Porcher down there?" the latter asked fretfully.
+
+"I think he's unpacking Lonsdale's wine."
+
+"Who's Lonsdale?" demanded Templeton-Collins. "You might sing out and
+tell him I want him."
+
+With this request Templeton-Collins vanished, leaving Michael in a
+quandary. There was only one hope of relieving the intolerable
+situation, he thought, which was to shout "Porcher" from where he was
+standing. This he did at the very moment the scout emerged from
+Lonsdale's rooms.
+
+"Coming, sir," said Porcher in an aggrieved voice.
+
+"I think Mr. Templeton-Collins is calling you," Michael explained,
+rather lamely he felt, since it must have been obvious to the scout that
+Michael himself had been calling him.
+
+"And I say," he added hurriedly, "you might bring me up a hammer or
+something to open my boxes, when you've done."
+
+Leaving Porcher to appease the outraged Templeton-Collins, Michael
+retreated to the security of his own rooms, where in a few minutes the
+scout appeared to raise the question of lunch.
+
+"Will you take commons, sir?"
+
+Michael looked perplexed.
+
+"Commons is bread and cheese. Most of my gentlemen takes commons. If you
+want anything extra, you go to the kitchen and write your name down for
+what you want."
+
+This sounded too difficult, and Michael gratefully chose commons.
+
+"Ale, sir?"
+
+Michael nodded. If the scout had suggested champagne, he would have
+assented immediately.
+
+Porcher set to work and undid the cases; he also explained where the
+china was kept and the wood and the coal. He expounded the theory of
+roll-calls and chapels, and was indeed so generous with information on
+every point of college existence that Michael would have been glad to
+retain his services for the afternoon.
+
+"And the other men on this staircase?" Michael asked, "are any of them
+freshers?"
+
+"Mr. Mackintosh, Mr. Amherst, and the Honorable Lonsdale is all
+freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
+Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
+noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he don't
+improve," said Porcher meditatively.
+
+"Do you mean on the coach-horn?" Michael asked.
+
+"Don't improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
+He'd shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It's easier to order it as you
+want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?"
+
+Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
+service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
+there was nothing.
+
+Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
+black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
+downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
+this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
+sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time he
+had coveted--Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt's Knight in Armor and
+Montegna's St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
+aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
+hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
+to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
+intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
+with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
+should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
+she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
+the grave city demanded.
+
+After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
+the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
+when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
+scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
+Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
+were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
+lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
+grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
+tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
+collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael
+examined his possessions in critical discontent. They seemed to
+symbolize the unpleasant crudity of youth. In the familiar surroundings
+of childhood they had seemed on the contrary to testify to his maturity.
+Now at Oxford he felt most abominably young again, yet he was able to
+console himself with the thought that youth would be no handicap among
+his peers. He took down the scenes of Montmartre even from the walls of
+his bedroom and pushed them ignominiously out of sight under the bed.
+
+Michael abandoned the contemplation of his possessions, and looked out
+of his sitting-room window at the High. There was something salutary in
+the jangle of the trams, in the vision of ordinary people moving
+unconsciously about the academic magnificence of Oxford. An
+undergraduate with gown wrapped carelessly round his neck flashed past
+on a bicycle, and Michael was discouraged by the sense of his diabolic
+ease. The luxury of his own rooms, the conviction of his new
+independence, the excitement of an undiscovered life all departed from
+him, and he was left with nothing but a loneliness more bitter even than
+when at Randell House he had first encountered school.
+
+Porcher came in presently with lunch, and the commons of bread and
+cheese with the ale foaming in a silver tankard added the final touch to
+Michael's depression. He thought that nothing in the world, could
+express the spirit of loneliness so perfectly as a sparse lunch laid for
+one on a large table. He wandered away from its melancholy invitation
+into the bedroom and looked sadly down into the quad. In every doorway
+stood knots of senior men talking: continually came new arrivals to hail
+familiarly their friends after the vacation: scouts hurried to and fro
+with trays of food: from window to window gossip, greetings,
+appointments were merrily shouted. Michael watched this scene of
+intimate movement played against the background of elms and gray walls.
+The golden fume of the October weather transcended somehow all
+impermanence, and he felt with a sudden springing of imagination that so
+had this scene been played before, that so forever would it be played
+for generations to come. Yet for him as yet outside the picture
+remained, fortunately less eternal, that solitary lunch. He ate it
+hurriedly and as soon as he had finished set out to find Alan at Christ
+Church.
+
+Freedom came back with the elation of walking up the High; and in the
+Christ Church lodge Michael was able to ask without a blush for Alan's
+rooms. The great space of Tom quad by absorbing his self-consciousness
+allowed him to feel himself an unit of the small and decorative
+population that enhanced the architecture there. The scattered, groups
+of friends whose voices became part of the very air itself like the
+wings of the pigeons and the perpetual tapping of footsteps, the two
+dons treading in slow confabulation that wide flagged terrace, even
+himself were here forever. Michael captured again in that moment the
+crystallized vision of Oxford which had first been vouchsafed to him
+long ago by that old print of St. Mary's tower. He turned reluctantly
+away from Tom quad, and going on to seek Alan in Meadows, by mistake
+found himself in Peckwater. A tall fair undergraduate was standing alone
+in the center of the quad, cracking a whip. Suddenly Michael realized
+that his father had been at Christ Church; and this tall fair
+whip-cracker served for him as the symbol of his father. He must have
+often stood here so, cracking a whip; and Michael never came into
+Peckwater without recreating him so occupied on a fine autumn afternoon,
+whip in hand, very tall and very fair in the glinting sunlight.
+
+Dreams faded out, when Michael ran up the staircase to Alan's rooms; but
+he was full-charged again with all that suppressed intellectual
+excitement which he had counted upon finding in Oxford, but which he had
+failed to find until the wide tranquillity of Tom quad had given him, as
+it were, the benediction of the University.
+
+"Hullo, Alan!" he cried. "How are you getting on? I say, why do they
+stick 'Mr.' in front of your name over the door? At St. Mary's we drop
+the 'Mr.' or any other sort of title. Aren't you unpacked _yet?_ You are
+a slacker. Look here, I want you to come out with me at once. I've got
+to get some more picture-wire and a gown and a picture of Mona Lisa."
+
+"Mona how much?" said Alan.
+
+"La Gioconda, you ass."
+
+"Sorry, my mistake," said Alan.
+
+"And I saw some rattling book-shops as I came up the High," Michael went
+on. "What did you have for lunch? I had bread and cheese--commons we
+call it at St. Mary's. I say, I think I'm glad I don't have to wear a
+scholar's gown."
+
+"I'm an exhibitioner," said Alan.
+
+"Well, it's the same thing. I like a commoner's gown best. Where did you
+get that tea-caddy? I don't believe I've got one. Pretty good view from
+your window. Mine looks out on the High."
+
+"Look here," asked Alan very solemnly, "where shall I hang this picture
+my mater gave me?"
+
+He displayed in a green frame The Soul's Awakening.
+
+"Do you like it?" Michael asked gloomily.
+
+"I prefer these grouse by Thorburn that the governor gave me, but I like
+them both in a way," Alan admitted.
+
+"I don't think it much matters where you hang it," Michael said. Then,
+thinking Alan looked rather hurt, he added hastily: "You see it's such a
+very square room that practically it might go anywhere."
+
+"Will you have a meringue?" Alan asked, proffering a crowded plate.
+
+"A meringue?" Michael repeated.
+
+"We're rather famous for our meringues here," said Alan gravely. "We
+make them in the kitchen. I ordered a double lot in case you came in."
+
+"You seem to have found out a good deal about Christ Church already,"
+Michael observed.
+
+"The House," Alan corrected. "We call it--in fact everybody calls it the
+House."
+
+Michael was inclined to resent this arrogation by a college not his own
+of a distinct and slightly affected piece of nomenclature, and he wished
+he possessed enough knowledge of his own peculiar college customs to
+counter Alan's display.
+
+"Well, hurry up and come out of the House," he urged. "You can't stay
+here unpacking all the afternoon."
+
+"Why do you want to start buying things straight away?" Alan argued.
+
+"Because I know what I want," Michael insisted.
+
+"Since when?" Alan demanded. "I'm not going to buy anything for a bit."
+
+"Come on, come on," Michael urged. He was in a hurry to enjoy the luxury
+of traversing the quads of Christ Church in company, of strolling down
+the High in company, of looking into shop windows in company, of finally
+defeating that first dismal loneliness with Alan and his company.
+
+It certainly proved to be a lavish afternoon. Michael bought three
+straight-grained pipes so substantially silvered that they made his own
+old pipes take on an attenuated vulgarity. He bought an obese tobacco
+jar blazoned with the arms of his college and, similarly blazoned, a
+protuberant utensil for matches. He bought numerous ounces of those
+prodigally displayed mixtures of tobacco, every one of which was vouched
+for by the vendor as in its own way the perfect blend. He bought his cap
+and his gown and was measured by the tailor for a coat of Harris tweed
+such as everybody seemed to wear. He found the very autotype of Mona
+Lisa he coveted, and farther he was persuaded by the picture-dealer to
+buy for two guineas a signed proof of a small copperplate engraving of
+the Primavera. This expenditure frightened him from buying any more
+pictures that afternoon and seemed a violent and sudden extravagance.
+However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after signing his name
+several times, he was presented with a check book. In order to be
+perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one then and there,
+and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as irreverently as if
+they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his new check-book was
+the purse of Fortunatus.
+
+Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the
+purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in
+order to assert his independence in the face of Alan's continuous
+dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a
+pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the
+pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties of
+knitted silk.
+
+By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Caf� in
+Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o'clock and neither of them
+felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other back to
+tea, they went into the caf� and ate a quantity of hot buttered toast
+and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their enjoyment and
+faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of three exquisitely
+untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the doorway and surveyed
+first the crowded caf� in general, and then more particularly Michael
+and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt. After a prolonged
+stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:
+
+"Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!"
+
+Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.
+
+Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed
+from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress
+seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan
+paid their bill and went out.
+
+"Are you coming back to my rooms?" Michael asked. Yet secretly he half
+hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to be
+alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.
+
+Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly,
+promising to meet him again to-morrow.
+
+Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers, for
+a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street lured
+him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man with a
+thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed to
+Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in
+tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against
+the shelves of books.
+
+A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good
+evening.
+
+"May I look round?" Michael asked.
+
+The bookseller nodded.
+
+"Just come up?" he inquired.
+
+"To-day," Michael confessed.
+
+"And what sort of books are you interested in?"
+
+"All books," said Michael.
+
+"This set of Pater for instance," the bookseller suggested, handing
+Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with
+a golden monogram. "Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds
+fifteen cash." This information he added in a note of disdainful
+tolerance.
+
+Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.
+
+"Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays," Mr. Lampard went
+on. "In the early 'nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for
+books."
+
+Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.
+
+"Seven pounds ten," he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid
+sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.
+
+"What college?" asked Mr. Lampard. "St. Mary's? Ah, there used to be
+some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis
+of Montgomery's son, was at St. Mary's, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I
+published his first volume of poems--of course, you've read his books.
+He was at St. Mary's. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.
+You've heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first
+number, but they're getting very scarce. All St. Mary's men and all
+great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I
+really don't know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not
+selling them."
+
+Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very
+thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some
+entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past, and
+the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.
+
+"Perhaps after all I will take the Pater," he said. "Only I may not be
+able to pay you this term."
+
+The bookseller smiled.
+
+"I don't think I shall worry you. Do you know this set--Boccaccio,
+Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered
+silk. They'll always keep their price, and of course all the
+photogravures are included."
+
+"All right. You might send them too."
+
+Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of
+the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to
+College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling
+scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous
+those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against
+those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a buyer
+of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had
+certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on the
+pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy
+balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a
+pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson's bookshop. At Lampard's he was
+already a personality.
+
+All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford, but
+really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in
+comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the
+Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar
+conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The
+list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a
+discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools other,
+than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed to have
+produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was
+responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he
+stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound
+to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top of
+the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his
+name.
+
+"You'll be at the second freshmen's table. On the right, sir. Mr.
+Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir."
+
+Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and
+hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly
+placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with either
+of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying the
+armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his judicial
+gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his voice.
+
+"How do you become head of a table?" Michael's left-hand neighbor
+suddenly asked.
+
+Michael said he really did not know.
+
+"Because what I'm wondering," the left-hand neighbor continued, "is why
+they've made that ass Wedderburn head of our table."
+
+"Why, is he an ass?" Michael inquired.
+
+"Frightful ass," continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael
+perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.
+"Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"I thought you were a cousin of my mother," said the left-hand neighbor.
+
+Michael looked astonished.
+
+"His name's Mackintosh. What's your name?"
+
+Michael told him.
+
+"My name's Lonsdale. I think we're on the same staircase--so's
+Mackintosh. It's a pity he's an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I'd
+look him up."
+
+Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential
+undertone:
+
+"I don't mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor
+lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad--in fact
+rather good eggs--but the rest! Well, look at that ass Wedderburn. He's
+typical."
+
+"I think he looks rather a good sort," said Michael.
+
+"My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M' tutor used to like him, but
+really--well--I don't mind telling you, he's really an �sthete."
+
+With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor
+and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly
+audible to Michael:
+
+"I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn't half bad. I don't know where
+he comes from, His name's Fane."
+
+"He's from St. James'."
+
+"Where on earth's that?"
+
+"London."
+
+"Why, I thought it was a kind of charity school," said Lonsdale. Then he
+turned to Michael again:
+
+"I say, are you really from St. James'?"
+
+Michael replied coldly that he was.
+
+"I say, come and have coffee with me after hall. One or two O. E.'s are
+coming in, but you won't mind?"
+
+"Why, do you want to find out something about St. James'?" demanded
+Michael, frowning.
+
+"Oh, I say, don't be ratty. It's that ass Tommy. He always talks at the
+top of his voice."
+
+Lonsdale, as he spoke, looked so charmingly apologetic and displayed
+such accomplished sang-froid that Michael forgave him immediately and
+promised to come to coffee.
+
+"Good egg!" Lonsdale exclaimed with the satisfaction of having smoothed
+over an awkward place. "I say," he offered, "if you'd like to meet
+Wedderburn, I'll ask him, too. He seems to have improved since he's been
+up at the Varsity. Don't you think that fat man Wedderburn has improved,
+Tommy?"
+
+Tommy nodded.
+
+"One day's done him no end of good."
+
+"I say," Lonsdale offered, "you haven't met Fane. Mr. Fane--Mr.
+Grainger. I was just saying to Fane that the Etonians are a rotten lot
+this term."
+
+"One or two are all right," Grainger admitted with evident reluctance.
+
+"Well, perhaps two," Lonsdale agreed. "This dinner isn't bad, what?"
+
+By this time the conversation at the table had become more general, and
+Michael gradually realized that some of the alarm he had felt himself
+had certainly been felt by his companions. Now at any rate there was a
+perceptible relaxation of tension. Still the conversation was only
+general in so much as that whenever anybody spoke, the rest of the
+table listened. The moment the flow of his information dried up,
+somebody else began pumping forth instruction. These slightly nervous
+little lectures were delivered without any claim to authority and they
+came up prefaced by the third person of legendary narrative.
+
+"They say we shall all have to interview the Warden to-morrow."
+
+"They say on Sunday afternoon the Wagger makes the same speech to the
+freshers that he's made for twenty years."
+
+"They say we ought to go head of the river this year."
+
+"They say the freshers are expected to make a bonner on Sunday night."
+
+"They say any one can have commons of bread and cheese by sending out
+word to the buttery. It's really included in the two-and-fourpence for
+dinner."
+
+"They say they charge a penny for the napkin every night."
+
+So the information proceeded, and Michael had just thought to himself
+that going up to Oxford was very much like going to school again, when
+from the second-year tables crashed the sound of a concerted sneeze. The
+dons from high table looked coldly down the hall, expressing a vague,
+but seemingly impotent disapproval, for immediately afterward that
+sternutation shook the air a second time.
+
+Michael thought the difference between school and Oxford might be
+greater than he had supposed.
+
+The slowest eater at the second freshmen's table had nervously left half
+his savory; Wedderburn without apparent embarrassment had received the
+Sub-Warden's permission to rise from dinner; Lonsdale hurriedly
+marshaled as many of his acquaintances as he could, and in a large and
+noisy group they swarmed through the moonlight toward his rooms.
+
+Michael was interested by Lonsdale's sitting-room, for he divined at
+once that it was typical, just a transplanted Eton study with the
+addition of smoking paraphernalia. The overmantel was plumed with small
+photographs of pleasant young creatures in the gay nautical costumes of
+the Fourth of June and festooned hats of Alexandra or Monarch, of the
+same pleasant young creatures at an earlier and chubbier age, of the
+same pleasant young creatures with penciled mustaches and the white
+waistcoat of Pop. In addition to their individual commemorations the
+pleasant young creatures would appear again in house groups, in winning
+house elevens, and most exquisitely of all in Eton Society. Michael
+always admired the photographs of Pop, for they seemed to him to
+epitomize all the traditions of all the public-schools of England, to
+epitomize them moreover with something of that immortality of captured
+action expressed by great Athenian sculpture. In comparison with Pop the
+Harrow Philathletic Society was a barbarous group, with all the
+self-consciousness of a deliberate archaism. Besides the personal
+photographs in Lonsdale's room there were studies of grouse by Thorburn;
+and Michael, remembering Alan's grouse, felt in accord with Lonsdale and
+with all that Lonsdale stood for. Knowing Alan, he felt that he knew
+Lonsdale, and at once he became more at ease with all his contemporaries
+in Lonsdale's room. Michael looked at the colored prints of Cecil
+Aldin's pictures and made up his mind he would buy a set for Alan: also
+possibly he would buy for Alan the Sir Galahad of Watts which was rather
+better than The Soul's Awakening.
+
+After Lonsdale's pictures Michael surveyed Lonsdale's books, the
+brilliantly red volumes of Jorrocks, the two or three odd volumes of the
+Badminton library, and the school books tattered and ink-splashed. More
+interesting than such a library were the glossy new briars, the virgin
+meerschaum, the patent smoking-tables and another table evidently
+designed to make drinking easy, but by reason of the complexity of its
+machinery actually more likely to discourage one forever from
+refreshment. The rest of the space, apart from the furniture bequeathed
+by the noisy Templeton-Collins when he moved to larger rooms above, was
+crowded with the freshmen whom after hall Lonsdale had so hastily
+gathered together unassorted.
+
+"I ordered coffee for sixteen," announced the host. "I thought it would
+be quicker than making it in a new machine that my sister gave me. It
+just makes enough for three, and the only time I tried, it took about an
+hour to do that ... who'll drink port?"
+
+Michael thought the scout's prophecies about the superfluity of
+Lonsdale's wine were rather premature, for it seemed that everybody
+intended to drink port.
+
+"I believe this is supposed to be rather good port," said Lonsdale.
+
+"It is jolly good," several connoisseurs echoed.
+
+"I don't know much about it myself. But my governor's supposed to be
+rather a judge. He said 'this is wasted on you and your friends, but I
+haven't got any bad wine to give you.'"
+
+Here everybody held up their glasses against the light, took another sip
+and murmured their approval.
+
+"Do you think this is a good wine, Fane?" demanded Lonsdale, thereby
+drawing so much attention to Michael that he blushed to nearly as deep a
+color as the port itself.
+
+"I like it very much," Michael said.
+
+"Do you like it, Wedderburn?" asked Lonsdale, turning to the freshman
+who had sat in the armchair at the head of the second table.
+
+"Damned good wine," pronounced Wedderburn in a voice so rich with
+appreciation and so deep with judgment that he immediately established a
+reputation for worldly knowledge, and from having been slightly derided
+at Eton for his artistic ambitions was ever afterward respected and
+consulted. Michael envied his air of authority, but trembled for
+Wedderburn's position when he heard him reproach Lonsdale for his lack
+of any good pictures.
+
+"You might stick up one that can be looked at for more than two
+seconds," Wedderburn said severely.
+
+"What sort of picture?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Primavera, for instance," Wedderburn suggested, and Michael's heart
+beat in sympathy.
+
+"Never heard of the horse," Lonsdale answered. "Who owned her?"
+
+"My god," Wedderburn rumbled, "I'll take you to buy one to-morrow,
+Lonny. You deserve it after that."
+
+"Right-O!" Lonsdale cheerfully agreed. "Only I don't want my room to
+look like the Academy, you know."
+
+Wedderburn shook his head in benevolent contempt, and the conversation
+was deflected from Lonsdale's artistic education by a long-legged
+Wykehamist with crisp chestnut hair and a thin florid face of dimpling
+smiles.
+
+"Has anybody been into Venner's yet?" he asked.
+
+"I have," proclaimed a dumpy Etonian whose down-curving nose hung over a
+perpetually open mouth. "Marjoribanks took me in just before hall. But
+he advised me not to go in by myself yet awhile."
+
+"The second-year men don't like it," agreed the long-legged Wykehamist
+with a wise air. "They say one can begin to go in occasionally in one's
+third term."
+
+"What is Venner's?" Michael asked.
+
+"Don't you know?" sniffed the dumpy Etonian who had already managed to
+proclaim his friendship with Marjoribanks, the President of the Junior
+Common Room, and therefore presumably had the right to open his mouth a
+little wider than usual at Michael.
+
+"I'm not quite sure myself," said Lonsdale quickly. "I vote that Cuffe
+explains."
+
+"I'm not going to explain," Cuffe protested, and for some minutes his
+mouth was tightly closed.
+
+"Isn't it just a sort of special part of the J. C. R.?" suggested the
+smiling Wykehamist, who seemed to wish to make it pleasant for
+everybody, so long as he himself would not have to admit ignorance. "Old
+Venables himself is a ripper. They say he's been steward of the J. C. R.
+for fifty years."
+
+"Thirty-two years," corrected Wedderburn in his voice of most
+reverberant certitude. "Venner's is practically a club. You aren't
+elected, but somehow you know just when you can go in without being
+stared at. There's nothing in Oxford like that little office of
+Venner's. It's practically made St. Mary's what it is."
+
+All the freshmen, sipping their port and lolling back in their new
+gowns, looked very reverent and very conscious of the honor and glory of
+St. Mary's which they themselves hoped soon to affirm more publicly than
+they could at present. Upon their meditations sounded very loud the
+blast of a coach-horn from above.
+
+"That's Templeton-Collins," said Michael.
+
+"Who's he?" several demanded.
+
+"He's the man who used to live in these rooms last year," said Lonsdale
+lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these
+freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.
+
+"Let's all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row," suggested
+Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of a
+table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.
+
+"To a second-year blood?" whispered somebody in dread surprise.
+
+"Why not take away the coach-horn?" Lonsdale added.
+
+However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with
+unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.
+
+"Keep quiet, little boys," shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.
+
+The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and the
+long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going to be
+a hot year. "I vote we have a bonner."
+
+"Will you light it, Sinclair?" asked another Wykehamist in a cynical
+drawl.
+
+"Why not?" Sinclair retorted.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. But you always used to be better at theory than
+practice."
+
+"How these Wykehamists love one another," laughed an Etonian.
+
+This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in
+defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and
+bigoted confidence.
+
+"Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner," said Wedderburn. "After
+the first 'after.'"
+
+"'After'?" queried another.
+
+"Oh, don't you know? Haven't you heard?" several well-informed freshmen
+began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of
+instruction, and the others gave way.
+
+"Every Sunday after hall," he explained, "people go up to the J. C. R.
+and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the
+second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes
+round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the 'after Common
+Room.' People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the J.
+C. R. gives the first 'after' of the term. The others are usually given
+by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and lemon-squash. They
+usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport. They're much better than
+private wines, better for everybody. That's why we have them on Sunday
+night," he concluded rather vaguely.
+
+The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into
+bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The first
+evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper than the
+superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table was now
+begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to
+intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the
+dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of Etonian
+tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some Etonians might
+exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical, less odiously
+serene than the majority of those they had so far only encountered in
+summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess was going to
+count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists extended a
+cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they never lost
+an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and though
+their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more
+debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to
+acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these strange
+new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might appear to
+Wykeham's adamantine mold.
+
+Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in
+the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to
+put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless.
+Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for
+granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a
+day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and
+disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count.
+At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them
+credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social
+outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense
+of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and the
+last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the
+Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly it
+had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose
+trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were
+ignobly buttoned to the very end.
+
+"An Old Giggleswickian," commented some one in reference to one of these
+disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was
+surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such
+inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old
+Wykehamist colors.
+
+"Why, were you at school with him?" asked Michael quickly.
+
+"Me? At Giggleswick?" stammered the Carthusian.
+
+"Why not?" said Michael. "You seem to know all about him."
+
+"Isn't your name Fane?" demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when
+Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.
+
+"That'll help me along a bit, I expect," Michael prophesied.
+
+"We were in the same form at Randell's. My name's Avery."
+
+"I remember you," said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how
+little Avery's once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he thought
+Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep blue
+eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of
+Lonsdale's room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out
+with him into the quad.
+
+"I say," Avery began impulsively. "Did I make an ass of myself just now?
+I mean, do you think people were sick with me?"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"I mean did I sound snobbish?" Avery pursued.
+
+"Not more than anybody else," Michael assured him, and as he watched
+Avery's expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
+possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess and
+wore combinations instead of pants and vest.
+
+"I say, aren't you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
+Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I'm in Cloisters. Are you
+going out? You'll have to buck up. It's after nine."
+
+They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was ushered
+out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom boomed his
+final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation sounded here and
+there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.
+
+Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High came
+a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and more
+perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
+solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
+Michael pondered the freshmen's chatter and apprehended dimly how this
+magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of na�ve
+intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
+ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
+sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
+immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
+gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
+not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that morning.
+
+So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until at
+last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College Street
+and Queen's Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
+forgetting the world.
+
+In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
+tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.
+
+It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
+was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert's
+quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
+his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
+the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
+the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.
+
+Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
+from St. Mary's tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The watered
+silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how Boccaccio
+should be read. Michael's mind was filled with the imagination of that
+gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their gay stories in the
+sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais should be read: the very
+pages seemed to glitter like wine.
+
+Midnight chimed from St. Mary's tower. One by one the new books went
+gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
+Michael's bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
+was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
+splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room was
+full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was gleaming.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FIRST WEEK
+
+
+The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations,
+addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action
+against her neophytes.
+
+First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a
+deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid and
+manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to give the
+impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in an
+otherwise justly modulated existence.
+
+Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle's room, knocked at
+the door and passed in at the don's bidding to where he sat sighing amid
+heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the room was
+somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that crowded the
+walls.
+
+"Mr.?" queried the Senior Tutor. "Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James'. Your
+tutor will be the Dean--please sit down--the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What
+school are you proposing to read?"
+
+"History, I imagine," said Michael. "History!" he repeated, as Mr. Ardle
+blinked at him.
+
+"Yes," said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. "But we have
+to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and Liter�
+Humaniores."
+
+"I explained to you that I wanted to read History," said Michael,
+echoing himself involuntarily the don's tone of patient boredom.
+
+"I have you down as coming from St. James'," snapped the Senior Tutor.
+"A school reputed to send out good classical scholars, I believe."
+
+"I'm not a scholar," Michael interrupted. "And I don't intend to take
+Honor Mods."
+
+"That will be for the college to decide."
+
+"Supposing the college decided I was to read Chinese?" Michael inquired.
+
+"There is no need for impertinence. Well, well, for the present I have
+put you down for the lectures on Pass Moderations. You will attend my
+lectures on Cicero, Mr. Churton on the Apologia, Mr. Carder on Logic,
+and Mr. Vereker for Latin Prose. The weekly essay set by the Warden for
+freshmen you will read to your tutor Mr. Ambrose."
+
+Then he went on to give instructions about chapels and roll-calls and
+dining in hall and the various regulations of the college, while the
+Swiss mountains stared bleakly down at the chilly interview.
+
+"Now you'd better go and see Mr. Ambrose," said the Senior Tutor, and
+Michael left him. On the staircase he passed Lonsdale going up.
+
+"What's he like?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Pretty dull," said Michael.
+
+"Does he keep you long?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"Good work," said Lonsdale cheerfully. "Because I've just bought a dog."
+And he whistled his way upstairs.
+
+Michael wondered what the purchase of a dog had got to do with the
+Senior Tutor, but relinquished the problem on perceiving Mr. Ambrose's
+name on the floor below.
+
+The Dean's room was very much like the Senior Tutor's, and the
+interview, save that it was made slightly more tolerable by the help of
+a cigarette, was of much the same chilliness owing to Michael's
+reiterated refusal to read Honor Moderations.
+
+"I expected a little keenness," said Mr. Ambrose.
+
+"I shall be keen enough when I've finished with Pass Mods," said
+Michael. "Though what good it will be for me to read the Pro Milone and
+the Apology all over again, when I read them at fifteen, I don't know."
+
+"Then take Honor Moderations?" the Dean advised.
+
+"I've given up classics," Michael argued, and as the cigarette was
+beginning to burn his fingers and the problem of disposing of it in the
+Dean's room seemed insoluble, he hurried out.
+
+Lonsdale was whistling his way downstairs from his interview with Mr.
+Ardle.
+
+"Hallo, Fane, what did he say to you?"
+
+"I think all these dons are very much like schoolmasters," growled
+Michael resentfully.
+
+"They can't help it," said Lonsdale. "I asked old Ardle if I could keep
+a dog in college, and he turned as blue as an owl. Any one would think
+I'd asked him if I could breed crocodiles."
+
+In addition to these personal interviews the freshmen had certain
+communal experiences to undergo. Among these was their formal reception
+into the University, when they trooped after the Senior Tutor through
+gothic mazes and in some beautiful and remote room received from the
+Vice-Chancellor a bound volume of Statuta et Decreta Universitatis. This
+book they carried back with them to college, where in many rooms it
+shared with Ruff's Guide and Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour an
+intellectual oligarchy. Saturday morning was spent in meeting the Warden
+at the Warden's Lodgings, where they shook hands with him in nervous
+quartets. Michael when he discussed this experience with his fellows
+fancied that the Warden's butler had left a deeper impression than the
+Warden himself. On Sunday afternoon, however, when they gathered in the
+hall to hear the annual address of welcome and exhortation, the great
+moon-faced Warden shone undimmed.
+
+"You have come to Oxford," he concluded, "some of you to hunt foxes,
+some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you
+to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have
+come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen. In after life when you are
+ambassadors and proconsuls and members of Parliament you will never
+remember this little address which I have the honor now of delivering to
+you. That will not matter, so long as you always remember that you are
+St. Mary's men and the heirs of an honorable and ancient foundation."
+
+The great moon-faced Warden beamed at them for one moment, and after
+thanking them for their polite attention floated out of the hall. The
+pictures of cardinals and princes and poets in their high golden frames
+seemed in the dusk faintly to nod approval. The bell was ringing for
+evening chapel, and the freshmen went murmurously along the cloisters to
+take their places, feeling rather proud that the famous quire was their
+quire and looking with inquisitive condescension at the visitors who sat
+out of sight of those candle-starred singers.
+
+In hall that night the chief topic of conversation was the etiquette and
+ritual of the first J. C. R. wine.
+
+Michael to his chagrin found himself seated next to Mackintosh, for
+Mackintosh, cousin though he was of the sparkish Lonsdale, was a gloomy
+fellow scornful of the general merriment. As somebody had quickly said,
+sharpening his young wit, he was more of a wet-blanket than a
+Mackintosh.
+
+"I suppose you're coming to the J. C. R.?" Michael asked.
+
+"Why should I? Why should I waste my time trying to keep sober for the
+amusement of all these fools?"
+
+"I expect it will be rather a rag," said Michael hopefully, but he found
+it tantalizing to hear farther down the table snatches of conversation
+that heard more completely would have enlightened him on several points
+he had not yet mastered in the ceremony of wine in the J. C. R. However,
+it was useless to speculate on such subjects in the company of the
+lugubrious Mackintosh. So they talked instead of Sandow exercises and
+mountain-climbing in Cumberland, neither of which topics interested
+Michael very greatly.
+
+Hall was rowdy that evening, and the dons looked petulantly down from
+high table, annoyed to think that their distinguished visitors of Sunday
+evening should see so many pieces of bread flung by the second-year men.
+The moon-faced Warden was deflected from his intellectual revolutions
+round a Swedish man of science, and sent the butler down to whisper a
+remonstrance to the head of one of the second-year tables. But no sooner
+had the butler again taken his place behind the Warden's chair than a
+number of third-year men whose table had been littered by the ammunition
+of their juniors retaliated without apparent loss of dignity, and
+presently both years combined to bombard under the Scholars. Meanwhile
+the freshmen applauded with laughter, and thought their seniors were
+wonderful exemplars for the future.
+
+After hall everybody went crowding up the narrow stairs to the J. C. R.,
+and now most emphatically the J. C. R. presented a cheerful sight, with
+the red-shaded lamps casting such a glow that the decanters of wine
+stationed before the President's place looked like a treasure of rubies.
+The two long tables were set at right angles to one another, and the
+President sat near their apex. All along their shining length at regular
+intervals stood great dishes of grapes richly bloomed, of apples and
+walnuts and salted almonds and deviled biscuits. The freshmen by
+instinct rushed to sit altogether at the end of the table more remote
+from the door. As Michael looked at his contemporaries, he perceived
+that of the forty odd freshmen scarcely five-and-twenty had come to
+this, the first J. C. R. Vaguely he realized that already two sets were
+manifest in the college, and he felt depressed by the dullness of those
+who had not come and some satisfaction with himself for coming.
+
+The freshmen stared with awe at Marjoribanks, the President of the J. C.
+R., and told one another with reverence that the two men on either side
+of him were those famous rowing blues from New College, Permain and
+Strutt; while some of them who had known these heroes at school sat
+anxiously unaware of their presence and spoke of them familiarly as Jack
+Permain and Bingey. There were several other cynosures from New College
+and University near the President's chair, a vivid bunch of Leander
+ties. There were also one or two old St. Mary's men who had descended to
+haunt for a swift week-end the place of their renown, and these were
+pointed out by knowing freshmen as unconcernedly as possible.
+
+One by one the President released the decanters, and round and round
+they came. Sometimes they would be held up by an interesting
+conversation; and when the sherry and the port and the burgundy were all
+standing idle, a shout of "pass along the wine" would go up, after which
+for a time the decanters would swing vigorously from hand to hand. Then
+suddenly Marjoribanks was seen to be bowing to Permain, and Permain was
+bowing solemnly back to his host. This was a plain token to everybody
+that the moment for drinking healths had arrived. A great babel of
+shouted names broke out at the end of the Common Room remote from the
+freshmen, so tremendous a din that the freshmen felt the drinking of
+their own healths at their end would pass unnoticed. So they drank to
+one another, bowing gravely after the manner of their seniors.
+
+Michael had determined to take nothing but burgundy, and when he had
+exchanged sentiments with the most of his year, he congratulated himself
+upon the comparative steadiness of his head. Already in the case of one
+or two reckless mixers he noticed a difficulty in deciding how many
+times it was necessary to clip a cigar, an inclination to strike the
+wrong end of a match and a confusion between right and left when the
+decanters in their circulation paused before them.
+
+After the first tumult of good wishes had died down, Marjoribanks lifted
+his glass, looked along to where the freshmen were sitting and shouted
+"Cuffe!" Cuffe hastily lifted his glass and answering "Marjorie!"
+drained his salute of acknowledgment. Then he sat back in his chair with
+an expression, Michael thought, very like that of an actress who has
+been handed a bouquet by the conductor. But Cuffe was not to be the only
+recipient of honor, for immediately afterward Marjoribanks sang out
+"Lonsdale!" Lonsdale was at the moment trying to explain to Tommy
+Grainger some trick with the skin of a banana which ought to have been
+an orange and a wooden match which ought to have been a wax vesta.
+Michael, who was sitting next to him, prodded anxiously his ribs.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Lonsdale indignantly. "Can't you see I'm
+doing a trick?"
+
+"Marjoribanks is drinking your health," whispered Michael in an agony
+that Lonsdale would be passed over.
+
+"Hurrah!" shouted Lonsdale, rising to his feet and scandalizing his
+fellows by his intoxicated audacity. "Where is the old ripper!" Then
+"Mark over!" he shouted and collapsed into Tommy Grainger's lap.
+Everybody laughed, and everybody, even the cynosures from New College
+and University, began to drink Lonsdale's health without heel-taps.
+
+"No heelers, young Lonsdale," they called mirthfully.
+
+Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with
+one hand on Michael's shoulder, replied:
+
+"No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!" Then he collapsed again.
+
+Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk, all
+the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael and
+one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors remained
+more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a quizzical
+face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask Michael
+some trifling piece of information, cried "Fane!" raising his glass.
+Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and drank
+what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other senior
+men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks
+himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An
+immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life, a
+conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever. The
+wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At the
+foot on the right was a little office--the office of Venables, the
+steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of
+seniority called Venner's. Wine-chartered though they were, the freshmen
+did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but hurried
+out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.
+
+Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of medi�val witches.
+The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels
+and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a
+grotesque vivacity, as the vapors curled around them. The wine humming
+in his head: the echoing shouts of his companions: the decorative effect
+of the gowns: the chiming high above of the bells in the tower: all
+combined to create for Michael a nightmare of exultation. He was aware
+of a tremendous zest in doing nothing, and there flowed over him a
+consciousness that this existence of shout and dance along these
+cloisters was really existence lived in a perpetual expression of the
+finest energy. The world seemed to be going round so much faster than
+usual that in order to keep up with this new pace, it was necessary for
+the individual like himself to walk faster, to talk faster, to think
+faster, and finally to raise to incoherent speed every coherent faculty.
+Another curious effect of the wine, for after all Michael admitted to
+himself that his mental exhilaration must be due to burgundy, was the
+way in which he found himself at every moment walking beside a different
+person. He would scarcely have finished an excited acceptance of
+Wedderburn's offer to go to-morrow and look at some D�rer woodcuts, when
+he would suddenly find himself discussing sympathetically with Lonsdale
+the iniquity of the dons in refusing to let him keep his new dog in one
+of the scouts' pigeon-holes in the lodge.
+
+"After all," Lonsdale pointed out earnestly, "they're never really full,
+and the dog isn't large--of course I don't expect to keep him in a
+pigeon-hole when he's full grown, but he's a puppy."
+
+"It's absurd," Michael agreed.
+
+"That's the word I've been looking for," Lonsdale exclaimed. "What was
+it again? Absurd! You see what I say is, when one scout's box is full,
+move the poor little beast into another. It isn't likely they'd all be
+full at the same time. What was that word you found just now? Absurd!
+That's it. It is absurd. It's absurd!"
+
+"And anyway," Michael pointed out, "if they were all full they could
+chain him to the leg of the porter's desk."
+
+"Of course they could. I say, Fane, you're a damned good sort," said
+Lonsdale. "I wish you'd come and have lunch with me to-morrow. I don't
+think I've asked very many chaps: I want to show you that dog. He's in a
+stable off Holywell at present. Beastly shame! I'm not complaining, of
+course, but what I want to ask our dons is how would they like to be
+bought by me and shut up in Holywell?"
+
+And just when Michael had a very good answer ready, he found himself
+arm-in-arm with Wedderburn again, who was saying in his gravest voice
+that over a genuine woodcut by D�rer it was well worth taking trouble.
+But before Michael could disengage Wedderburn's D�rer from Lonsdale's
+dog, he found himself running very fast beside Tommy Grainger who was
+shouting:
+
+"Five's late again! Six, you're bucketing! Bow, you're late! Two, _will_
+you get your belly down!"
+
+Then Grainger stopped suddenly and asked Michael in a very solemn tone
+whether he knew what was the matter with the crew. Michael shook his
+head and watched the others steer their devious course toward him and
+Grainger.
+
+"They're too drunk to row," said Grainger.
+
+"Much too drunk," Michael agreed.
+
+When he had pondered for a moment or two his last remark, he discovered
+it was extraordinarily funny. So he was seized with a paroxysm of
+laughter, and the more he laughed, the more he wanted to laugh. When
+somebody asked him what he was laughing at, he replied it was because he
+had left the electric light burning in his room. Several people seemed
+to think this just as funny as Michael thought it, and they joined him
+in his mirth, laughing unquenchably until Wedderburn observed severely
+in his deepest voice:
+
+"Buck up, you're all drunk, and they're coming out of Venner's."
+
+Then like some patient profound countryman he shepherded them all up to
+the large room on a corner staircase of Cloisters, where the "after" was
+going to be held. The freshmen squeezed themselves together in a corner
+and were immensely entertained by the various performers, applauding
+with equal rapture a light comedian from Pembroke, a tenor from Corpus,
+a comic singer from Oriel and a mimic from professional London. They
+drank lemon squashes to steady themselves: they joined in choruses: they
+cheered and smoked cigars and grew more and more conscious as the
+evening progressed that they belonged to a great college called St.
+Mary's. Their enthusiasm reached its zenith, when the captain of the
+Varsity Eleven (a St. Mary's man even as they were St. Mary's men) sang
+the St. Mary's song in a voice whose gentleness of utterance and sighing
+modesty in no way abashed the noisy appreciation of the audience. It was
+a wonderful song, all about the triumphs of the college on river and
+cricket-field, in the Schools, in Parliament and indeed everywhere else.
+It had a fine rollicking chorus which was repeated twice after each
+verse. And as there were about seventeen verses, by the time the song
+was half over the freshmen had learned the words and were able to sing
+the final chorus with a vigor which positively detonated against the
+windows and contrasted divertingly with the almost inaudible soloist.
+
+Last of all came Auld Lang Syne, when everybody stood up on chairs and
+joined hands, seniors, second-year men and freshmen. Auld Lang Syne
+ended with perhaps the noisiest moment of all because although Lonsdale
+had taken several lemon squashes to steady himself, he had not taken
+enough to keep his balance through the ultimate energetic repetition,
+when he collapsed headlong into a tray of syphons and glasses, dragging
+with him two other freshmen. But nobody seemed to have hurt himself, and
+downstairs they all rushed, shouting and hulloaing, into the cool
+moonlight.
+
+The guests from New College and University and the "out-of-college" men
+hurried home, for it was close upon midnight. In the lodge the freshmen
+foregathered for a few minutes with the second-year men, and as they
+talked they knew that the moment was come when they must proclaim
+themselves free from the restrictions of school, and by the kindling of
+a bonfire prove that they were now truly grown up. Bundles of faggots
+were seized from the scouts' holes: in the angle of St. Cuthbert's quad
+where the complexion of the gravel was tanned by the numberless bonfires
+of past generations the pile of wood grew taller and taller: two or
+three douches of paraffin made the mass readily inflammable: a match was
+set, and with a roar the bonfire began. From their windows second-year
+men, their faces lighted by the ascending blaze, looked down with
+pleasant patronage upon the traditional pastime of their juniors. The
+freshmen danced gleefully round the pyre of their boyhood, feeding it
+with faggots and sometimes daringly and ostentatiously with chairs: the
+heat became intense: the smoke surged upward, obscuring the bland
+aspectful moon. Slowly upon the group of law-breakers fell a silence, as
+they stood bewitched by the beauty of their own handiwork. The riotous
+preparations and annunciatory yells had died away to an intimate murmur
+of conversation. From the lodge came Shadbolt the unctuous head-porter
+to survey for a moment this mighty bonfire: conscious of their
+undergraduate dignity the freshmen chaffed him, until he retired with
+muttered protests to summon the Dean.
+
+"What will the Dean do?" asked one or two less audacious ones as they
+faded into various doorways, ready to obliterate their presence as soon
+as authority should arrive upon the scene.
+
+"What does the Dean matter?" cried others, flinging more faggots on to
+the fire until it crackled and spat and bellowed more fiercely than
+ever, lighting up with its wavy radiance the great elms beyond the
+Warden's garden and the Palladian fragment of New quad whence the dons
+like Georgian squires pondered their prosperity.
+
+Presently against the silvery space framed by the gateway of St.
+Cuthbert's tower appeared the silhouette of the Dean, lank and tall with
+college cap tip-tilted down on to his nose and round his neck a gown
+wrapped like a shawl. Nearer he came, and involuntarily the freshmen so
+lately schoolboys took on in their attitude a certain anxiety. Somehow
+the group round the bonfire had become much smaller. Somehow more
+windows looking upon the quad were populated with flickering watchful
+faces.
+
+"Great Scott! What can Ambrose do?" demanded Lonsdale despairingly, but
+when at last the Dean reached the zone of the fire, there only remained
+about eight freshmen to ascertain his views and test his power. The Dean
+stood for a minute or two, silently warming his hands. In a ring the
+presumed leaders eyed him, talking to each other the while with slightly
+exaggerated carelessness.
+
+"Well, Mr. Fane?" asked the Dean.
+
+"Well, sir," Michael replied.
+
+"Damned good," whispered Lonsdale ecstatically in Michael's ear. "You
+couldn't have said anything better. That's damned good."
+
+Michael under the enthusiastic congratulations of Lonsdale began to feel
+he had indeed said something very good, but he hoped he would soon have
+an opportunity to say something even better.
+
+"Enjoying yourself, Mr. Lonsdale?" inquired the Dean.
+
+"Yes, sir. Are you?" answered Lonsdale.
+
+"Splendid," murmured Michael.
+
+A silence followed this exchange of courtesies. The bonfire was
+beginning to die down, but nobody ventured under the Dean's eye to put
+on more faggots. Under-porters were seen drawing near with pails of
+water, and though a cushion aimed from a window upset one pail, very
+soon the bonfire was a miserable mess of smoking ashes and the moon
+resumed her glory. From an upper window some second-year men chanted in
+a ridiculous monotone:
+
+"The Dean--he was the Dean--he was the Dean--he was the Dean! The
+Dean--he was the Dean he was--the Dean he was--the Dean!!"
+
+Mr. Ambrose did not bother to look up in the direction of the glee, but
+took another glance at Michael, Lonsdale, Grainger and the other
+stalwarts. Then he turned away.
+
+"Good night," Lonsdale called after the retreating figure of the tall
+hunched don, and not being successful in luring him back, he poured his
+scorn upon the defaulters safe in their rooms above.
+
+"You are a lot of rotters. Come down and make another."
+
+But the freshmen were not yet sufficiently hardy to do this. One by one
+they melted away, and Lonsdale marked his contempt for their
+pusillanimity by throwing two syphons and his gown into the Warden's
+garden. After which he invited Michael and his fellow die-hards to drink
+a glass of port in his rooms. Here for an hour they sat, discussing
+their contemporaries.
+
+In the morning Shadbolt was asked if anybody had been hauled for last
+night's bonner.
+
+"Mr. Fane, Mr. Grainger and the Honorable Lonsdale," he informed the
+inquirer. Together those three interviewed the Dean.
+
+"Two guineas each," he announced after a brief homily on the foolishness
+and inconvenience of keeping everybody up on the first Sunday of term.
+"And if you feel aggrieved, you can get up a subscription among your
+co-lunatics to defray your expenses."
+
+Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look
+like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the
+other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a
+manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same
+to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST TERM
+
+
+His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
+discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
+certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually
+varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term
+became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after
+numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view
+of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own
+"year." These trials of personality were conducted with all the help
+that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had
+registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often
+sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt
+inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books.
+Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on
+the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby football. He
+was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the
+secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant
+courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it
+was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a
+second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors
+and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed
+before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed
+as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.
+
+Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a
+general observation on the row of Sunday night's celebration, Michael
+proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.
+
+"Were you in that gang?" Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
+surprise.
+
+"I was fined," Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
+exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
+creating.
+
+"I say," Carben sneered, "so at last one of the 'bloods' is going to
+condescend to play Rugger. Jonah," he called to the captain of the
+Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
+room, "we've got a college blood playing three-quarter for us."
+
+"Good work," said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. "Where is he?"
+
+Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.
+
+"No end of a blood," Carben went on. "Lights bonfires and gets fined all
+in his first week."
+
+The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
+Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
+should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
+freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
+perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
+promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
+wrists and their smug insignificance.
+
+"You were at St. James', weren't you?" asked Jones. "Did you know
+Mansfield?"
+
+"I didn't know him--exactly," said Michael, "but--in fact--we thought
+him rather a tick."
+
+"Thanks very much and all that," said Jones. "He was a friend of mine,
+but don't apologize."
+
+There was a general laugh at Michael's expense from which Carben's
+guffaw survived. "Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,"
+he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
+something positively contemptible.
+
+Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold
+dislike the constellated pimples on Carben's face. Meanwhile the others
+exercised their scornful wit upon the "bloods" of the college.
+
+"Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?" Carben indignantly demanded.
+"Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. 'Can't you keep
+your fat little paunch down? I don't want to look at it,' said Fitzroy.
+That's pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front
+of a lot of freshers. Gingold's going to jack rowing, and he's quite
+right."
+
+"Quite right," a chorus echoed.
+
+Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he
+remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of
+wrath at the insult offered to Gingold's dignity irritated Michael. He
+felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly
+deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as
+offensive as Jones and Carben.
+
+"These rowing bloods think they've bought the college," somebody was
+wisely propounding.
+
+"We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn't we?" Michael
+inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
+rebuke.
+
+"Well, I think it would be a d'd good thing, if we dropped six places,"
+Carben affirmed.
+
+How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
+and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
+atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
+a dismal genteelness.
+
+"Oh, by the way, before you go," said Carben, "you'd better let me put
+your name down for the Ugger."
+
+"The what?" Michael asked, with a faint insolence.
+
+"The Union."
+
+Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
+committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
+sponsorship of Carben.
+
+"I don't think I'll join this term."
+
+He ran down the stairs from Carben's rooms and stood for a moment
+apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary's
+tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the
+memory of Carben's tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday
+train and plunged immediately into deep country.
+
+In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
+was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
+along the table to Grainger:
+
+"I say, Tommy, do you know we've got a Rugger rough with us?"
+
+Several people murmured in surprise.
+
+"I say, have you really been playing Rugger?"
+
+"Well, great Scott!" exclaimed Michael, "there's nothing very odd in
+that."
+
+"But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men," Lonsdale protested.
+
+"Some are," Michael admitted. "Still, it's a better game than Socker."
+
+"But everybody at St. Mary's plays Socker," Lonsdale went on.
+
+Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that
+even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise
+Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians
+and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.
+And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this
+freshmen's table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that
+with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their
+traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be
+snuffed out ignominiously.
+
+"Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger," Michael asserted.
+
+"Shall I have a shot?" suggested Lonsdale.
+
+"It's a most devilish good game," Michael earnestly avowed.
+
+"Tommy," Lonsdale shouted, "I'm going to be a Rugger rough myself."
+
+"I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row," said
+Wedderburn severely.
+
+"My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass," chuckled the offender.
+
+Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.
+
+"Have you sconced me?" Lonsdale demanded.
+
+The head of the table nodded.
+
+Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown.
+Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn's
+room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus of
+Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all very
+foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and his
+auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn's
+return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited him
+in his room to enjoy his displeasure.
+
+Michael's consciousness of the sharp division in the college between
+two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He
+continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with a
+delighted irony the comments of the "bad men" on the "bloods." Yet many
+of these "bad men" he rather liked, and he would often defend them to
+his critical young contemporaries, although on the "bad men" of his own
+year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in
+this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend
+of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook
+by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he
+seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him
+essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers.
+These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in
+numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves;
+when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon
+or the Mitre or the Queen's, they gathered in the lodge almost in the
+dimensions of a school-treat.
+
+"Why do we always go about in such quantity?" Michael once asked
+Wedderburn.
+
+"What else can we do?" answered Wedderburn. "We must subject each other
+to--I mean--we haven't got any clubs yet. We're bound to stick
+together."
+
+"Well, I'm getting rather fed up with it," said Michael. "I feel more
+like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
+coffee and tea in great masses of people. I'm bored to tears by half the
+men I go about with, and I'm sure they're bored to tears with me. We
+don't talk about anything but each other's schools and whether A is a
+better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it's true that D
+isn't really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and
+every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each
+other's shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash
+off the pictures. And when they've all read the story of the nightingale
+in the Decameron, they sit up till one o'clock discussing who of our
+year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R. four years
+from now."
+
+But for all Michael's grumbling through that first term he was beginning
+to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which
+in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself
+whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a
+butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of
+artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of
+whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.
+
+"I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself," said
+Michael. "And yet I don't think it is snobbishness. I believe it's a
+form of collecting. It's a throw back to primitive life in a private
+school. One day in your fourth year you'll give a dinner party for about
+twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and how and
+where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly obvious.
+Partly of course it's due to being at Eton where you had nothing to do
+but observe social distinction in the making and talk about Burne-Jones
+to your tutor."
+
+"My dear fellow," said Wedderburn deeply, "I have these people up to my
+rooms because I like them."
+
+"But it is convenient always to like the right people," Michael argued.
+"There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don't like. For
+instance, Avery----"
+
+"Avery!" Wedderburn snorted.
+
+"He's not likely ever to be captain of the 'Varsity Eleven," said
+Michael. "But he's amusing, and he can talk about books."
+
+"Patronizing ass," Wedderburn growled.
+
+"That's exactly what he isn't," Michael contradicted.
+
+"Damnable poseur," Wedderburn rumbled.
+
+"Oh, well, so are you," said Michael.
+
+He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery.
+Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his
+sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well.
+But all the Carthusians at St. Mary's dressed rather too well and
+carried about with them the atmosphere of a week-end in a sporting
+country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would
+gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the
+course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to--to what? To some
+distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor
+he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him
+on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he
+dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale.
+Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art.
+Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend for ever
+Ardle's dusty lectures on Cicero in order that for ever he might hear
+Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to
+glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause Mr.
+Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his Plato
+in a sadler's shop, where he had found it necessary to complain of a
+saddle newly made for him.
+
+"But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not
+delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale."
+
+"What's he talking about?" Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+"Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane," added the Senior Tutor dryly.
+
+Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then
+seeing by the lecturer's face that something was still wrong, he assumed
+a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the situation
+he laughed very heartily and said:
+
+"Oh, well, after all, it's very much the same." Then, as everybody else
+laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his
+trousers in gentle self-congratulation.
+
+"Rum old buffer," he whispered presently to Michael. "His eye gets very
+glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?"
+
+Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered
+to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination
+was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to
+represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary's, there might be added to the
+list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with
+charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael's
+collection as types. There was Grainger, last year's Captain of the
+Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the 'Varsity in the spring.
+Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and
+listen for an hour at a time to his na�ve theories of life. Grainger
+seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he
+exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to
+himself was surprising.
+
+"Great Scott, you are an odd chap," Grainger once ejaculated.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, you're a clever devil, aren't you, and you don't seem to do
+anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?"
+
+"A good deal," Michael admitted. "At least, it would be rot if I talked
+it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way."
+
+"You _are_ a curious chap. I can't make you out."
+
+"Why should you?" asked Michael. "You were never sent into this world to
+puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as you're
+sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you'll go into the
+Egyptian Civil Service and you'll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly
+the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite
+comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I
+can't imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them
+wriggling under me."
+
+"I suppose you're a Radical. They say you are," Grainger lazily
+announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.
+
+"I suppose I might be," said Michael, "if I wanted to proclaim myself
+anything at all, but I'd much rather watch you sprawling effectively and
+proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I've really very
+little inclination to criticize people like you. It's only in books I
+think you're a little boring."
+
+Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming
+vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.
+
+     CARLINGTON ROAD,
+
+     November 20th.
+
+     Dearest Michael,
+
+     I'm so glad you're still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it
+     would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you,
+     though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You'll be
+     glad to hear that I've got rid of this tiresome house. I've sold it
+     to a retired Colonel--such an objectionable old man, and I'm really
+     so pleased he's bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn
+     because the people next door were continually complaining of
+     Stella's piano, and really Carlington Road has become impossible.
+     Such an air of living next door, and whenever I look out of the
+     window the maid is shaking a mat and looking up to see if I'm
+     interested. We must try to settle on a new house when you're back
+     in town. We'll stay in a hotel for a while. Stella has had to take
+     a studio, which I do not approve of her doing, and I cannot bear to
+     see the piano going continually in and out of the house. There are
+     so many things I want to talk to you about--money, and whether you
+     would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we could
+     find a house at some other time.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.
+
+     My dear old Michael,
+
+     I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and
+     I've taken a studio here because the man next door--a most
+     _frightful_ bounder--said the noise I made went through and through
+     his wife. As she's nearly as big round as the world, I wasn't
+     flattered. Mother is getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange
+     women come to the house and talk about some society for dealing
+     with Life with a capital letter. I think we're going to be rather
+     well off, and Mother wants to live in a house she's seen in Park
+     Street, but I want to take a house in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like
+     Cheyne Walk, because this house has got a splendid studio in the
+     garden and I thought with some mauve brocades it would look
+     perfectly lovely. There's a very good _paneled_ room that you could
+     have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am working
+     at a Franck concerto. I'm being painted by rather a nice youth, at
+     least he would be nice, if he weren't so much like a corpse. I
+     suppose you'll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term.
+
+     Yours ever,
+
+     Stella.
+
+     P.S.--I've come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution
+     isn't enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don't
+     think I shall appear in public again until I've lived a little. I
+     really think life is rather exciting--unless it's spelt with a
+     capital letter.
+
+Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation
+in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would
+have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He was
+sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the
+privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word to
+describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with
+Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.
+
+Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by
+giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his
+friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had been
+casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle chattering
+groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought out and
+balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal dinner might,
+Michael thought, almost become with him a regular function, so that
+people would learn to speak with interest and respect of Fane's terminal
+dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming a club, a club
+strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as really to
+preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate, putting
+aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try the
+effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided, since
+that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward
+arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be
+Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
+to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
+terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
+established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose a
+number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests would
+change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he felt that
+some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven as the
+number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more must be
+invited, and Michael without much further consideration selected five
+freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness drew them into
+prominence. But when he had given all the invitations Michael was a
+little depressed by the conventional appearance of his list. With the
+exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and Avery, his list
+was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn up by Grainger.
+As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of correctness that
+overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at the head of the
+table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed round the table his
+terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that on this occasion he
+had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe moment of
+self-examination he characterized as "snobbishness." In this room at the
+Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun and
+steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
+subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
+and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
+eclectic society would have been out of place.
+
+Only Avery's loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
+group.
+
+"_Who's_ that man wearing a pie-frill?" whispered Alan sternly from
+Michael's right.
+
+Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.
+
+"Avery allows himself a little license," said Michael. "But, Alan, he's
+really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you saw
+him on Sunday you'd think he was perfectly dressed. All Old Carthusians
+are."
+
+But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
+met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
+in common.
+
+Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
+Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
+that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the
+responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt
+grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who
+waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief
+that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called
+Castleton.
+
+Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the
+strongest influence in Michael's year, and his friendship would be good
+for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered
+Castleton rather over-rated, but there was a superficial similarity
+between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and
+jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate
+Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes
+wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more
+apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion
+in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he
+seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he
+seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he
+became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.
+
+Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more
+than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a
+detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman,
+and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would
+certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of
+St. Mary's freshmen as this one might be considered. But a
+representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had
+intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with
+distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne,
+and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael's desire to have
+him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However, it
+was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went
+round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to see
+his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.
+
+Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and
+smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale
+discussed their individual excellencies.
+
+"First of all," said Lonsdale, "I want to propose the health of our
+distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he's a jolly
+good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn's a jolly good
+fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good
+fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend
+Tommy Grainger--whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we
+were boys together--I will here say that I confidently anticipate he
+will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he's a jolly good
+fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name--all jolly good
+fellows--except our host. He's given us a good dinner and good wine and
+good company, which nobody can deny. So here's his health."
+
+Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering
+procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were
+all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed
+through his first terminal dinner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CHEYNE WALK
+
+
+The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house.
+Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last
+abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and
+postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with
+Stella's support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem
+of their new home.
+
+Ultimately they fixed upon Chelsea, indeed upon that very house Stella
+had chosen for its large studio separated by the length of a queer
+little walled garden from the rest of the house. Certainly 173 Cheyne
+Walk was better than 64 Carlington Road, thought Michael as, leaning
+back against the parapet of the Embankment, he surveyed the mellow
+exterior in the unreal sunlight of the January noon. Empty as it was, it
+diffused an atmosphere of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and
+peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed
+to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil
+interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering
+indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either
+side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the
+three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the first story
+all gave him much contemplative pleasure. He and his mother and Stella
+had in three weeks visited every feasible quarter of London and as
+Michael thought of Hampstead's leaf-haunted by-streets, of the still
+squares of Kensington, even of Camden Hill's sky-crowned freedom, he was
+sure he regretted none of them in the presence of this sedate house
+looking over the sun-flamed river and the crenated line of the long
+Battersea shore.
+
+Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott
+was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was anxious
+to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend of his
+father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years ago, an
+intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he was trying
+to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only definite
+impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into Michael's
+palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and angular with
+a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the door. Michael
+crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr. Prescott. Himself
+explained who he was and, opening the front door, led the way into the
+empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after room to Prescott,
+that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the observation of the
+house than with a desire to achieve in regard to Michael himself a
+tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun that sloped thin
+golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare rooms expressed for
+Michael something of the sensation which Prescott's attitude conveyed to
+him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth that could most
+easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused depths of his
+heart.
+
+"I suppose you knew my father very well," said Michael at last, blushing
+as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.
+
+"About as well as anybody," said Prescott nervously. "Like to talk to
+you about him some time. Better come to dinner. Live in Albany. Have a
+soldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important
+you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I'm almost what you
+might call your guardian. Of course your mother's a dear woman. Known
+her for years. Always splendid to me. But she mustn't get too
+charitable."
+
+"Do you mean to people's failings?" Michael asked.
+
+Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what
+Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak out
+clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard shyness of
+preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover, this empty
+house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a frankness and
+directness of intercourse that made absurd these roundabout
+postponements of actual problems.
+
+"Charitable to societies," Prescott explained. "I don't want her to
+think she's got to endow half a dozen committees with money and
+occupation."
+
+"Stella's a little worried about mother's charities," Michael admitted.
+
+"Awful good sort, Stella," Prescott jerked out. "Frightens me
+devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very
+much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out
+of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father," he added
+vaguely.
+
+"Did you know my father when he first met my mother?" Michael asked
+directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong
+account.
+
+"Oh, yes, rather. I sent in my papers when he did. Chartered a yacht and
+sailed all over the Mediterranean. Good gracious, twenty years ago! How
+old we're all getting. Poor old Saxby was always anxious that no kind
+of"--Prescott gibbed at the word for a moment or two--"no kind of slur
+should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have had to
+meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there was
+nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan, and yet he was always a
+rattling good sort. Only of course your mother was always cut off from
+women's society. Couldn't be helped, but I don't want her now to overdo
+it. Glad she's taken this house, though. What are you going to be?"
+
+Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at
+the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house.
+Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother's graceful and elusive
+presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich
+associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance to
+muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived with
+Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of chintz
+and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration that she
+flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in a
+confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr. Prescott
+listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of admiring
+perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by Mrs. Fane,
+and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it would fly
+with greater certainty, until room by room and window by window and
+corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and
+appropriately arranged.
+
+"I give full marks to Prescott," said Stella later in the afternoon to
+Michael. "He's like a nice horse."
+
+"I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room," said
+Michael.
+
+"Why?" demanded Stella.
+
+And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find
+one.
+
+"Well, why not?" he at last very lamely replied.
+
+There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between Michael
+and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing, while Mrs.
+Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street Hotel, chosen
+by them as a convenient center from which to direct the multitudinous
+activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael, however, after
+the first thrills of selection had died down, must be thinking about
+going up again and be content to look forward on the strength of
+Stella's energetic promises to coming down for the Easter vacation and
+entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.
+
+Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old
+friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had
+been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather guilty
+because he had never been near his old school nor even walked over to
+Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It seemed to
+him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and Wedderburn
+and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends. All that
+Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing past of old
+associations and of a sense of transition into a new life that though as
+yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger and worthier
+experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have happened in
+Carlington Road.
+
+On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms
+in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the darkness
+of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming table in its
+center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the soldier-servant and the
+half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the walls of the great
+square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that brooded outside the
+heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany Michael was immeasurably
+aware of the life of London that was surging such a little distance
+away; but in this modish cloister he felt that the life he was aware of
+could never be dated, as if indeed were he to emerge into Piccadilly and
+behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered wigs they would not greatly
+surprise him. The Albany seemed to have wrung the spirit from the noisy
+years that swept on their course outside, to have snatched from each its
+heart and in the museum of this decorous glass arcade to have preserved
+it immortally, exhibiting the frozen palpitations to a sensitive
+observer.
+
+"You're not talking much," said Prescott.
+
+"I was thinking of old plays," said Michael.
+
+Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
+called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
+himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
+Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
+that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
+evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
+incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
+upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
+perpetual present.
+
+"Don't often go to the theater nowadays," said Prescott. "When Saxby was
+alive"--Michael fancied that "alive" was substituted for something that
+might have hurt his feelings--"we used to go a lot, but it's dull going
+alone."
+
+"Must you go alone?" asked Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, of course I needn't. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,"
+repeated the host.
+
+Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
+asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
+sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.
+
+"Oh, yes, I think you are very like," said Prescott. "Good Lord, what a
+pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
+you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
+things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
+more brain than many people thought, but of course," Prescott hurriedly
+added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
+equipment, "of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary."
+
+"I like to be ordinary," Michael said; "but I'm not."
+
+"Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
+some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
+over by a train," said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. "You
+know, I think you're a very lucky chap," he added. "Here you are all
+provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
+the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
+sister. Why, you might do anything."
+
+"What, for example?" queried Michael.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. There's the Diplomatic Service. But don't be in a
+hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
+hundred a year at St. Mary's. And when you're twenty-one you come into
+roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you'll have at
+least two thousand a year. But don't be a young ass. You've been brought
+up quietly. You haven't _got_ to cut a dash. Don't get in a mess with
+women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get out of
+it."
+
+"I don't care much about women," said Michael. "They're disappointing."
+
+"What, already?" exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.
+
+Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to the
+attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark discreet
+room, and the Albany's atmosphere of passion squeezed into the mold of
+contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of Thackeray's books,
+all combined to affect Michael with the idea that his life had been
+lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his host, and as the
+rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he beheld the old
+impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious, the sensitive
+slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the gloom. Left behind
+was the new Michael going up to the Varsity to-morrow morning for his
+second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends
+who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a
+recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to
+manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight
+uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment,
+made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy
+remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was
+receding farther and farther every moment, and his conversation reached
+Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of light, while finally he
+was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly and with a half-defiant
+independence of precisely what he wished to say. The evening swam past
+comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of the cigar smoke the figure
+of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy armchair took on once again a
+definite corporeal existence. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed the
+twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of silvery apology for obtruding
+the hour. Michael came back into himself with a start of confusion.
+
+"I say, I must go."
+
+Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.
+
+"I say," said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, "I think
+I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night."
+
+"No, no, no, my dear boy; I've been very much interested," insisted
+Prescott.
+
+And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth
+of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to
+discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly
+entertained his host.
+
+"Nothing," he finally decided.
+
+Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
+with all the rich confidence of a term's maturity. Even in the drizzle
+of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and
+waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more
+beautiful.
+
+After hall Avery came up to Michael's room, and while the rain dripped
+endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
+assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
+before.
+
+Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with
+Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth,
+so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the
+blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner.
+
+"You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott," he
+affirmed. "I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
+without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
+perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant."
+
+"But you wouldn't be," Avery objected, "if you thought about it."
+
+"No, but I shouldn't think about it," Michael pointed out. "I should
+have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
+eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
+champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
+just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn't quite the
+silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
+third cigar."
+
+Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
+dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his
+outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the
+terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better
+suit his mantelpiece.
+
+"I wonder what I shall be like at fifty," he sighed.
+
+"It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty," said Avery. "You
+can't possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the
+Varsity. You'll have to do something."
+
+"What, for example?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, write perhaps."
+
+"Write!" Michael scoffed. "Why, when I can read all these"--he pointed
+to his bookshelves--"and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy,
+what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing."
+
+"Well, I intend to write," said Avery. "In fact, I don't mind telling
+you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can."
+
+Michael laughed.
+
+"And you'll contribute," Avery went on eagerly.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"I'm talking about articles. I shall call my paper--well, I haven't
+thought about the title--but I shall get a good one. It won't be like
+the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with
+art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won't be decadent.
+It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it
+might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass."
+
+"Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production," said Michael. "I
+should call it The World Turned Upside Down."
+
+"I'm perfectly serious about this paper," said Avery reproachfully.
+
+"And I'm taking you very seriously," said Michael. "That's why I won't
+write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?"
+
+"We might have one drawing. I'm not quite sure how much it costs to
+reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather advanced
+stuff."
+
+"Well, as long as you don't publish drawings that look as if the
+compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at
+it, and as long as----"
+
+"Oh, shut up," interrupted the dreaming editor, "and don't fall into
+that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It's so young."
+
+"But I am young," Michael pointed out with careful gravity. "So are you.
+And, Maurice, really you know for me my own ambitions are best. I've got
+a great sense of responsibility, and if I were to start going through
+life trying to do things, I should worry myself all the time. The only
+chance for me is to find a sort of negative attitude to life like
+Prescott. You'll do lots of things. I think you're capable of them. But
+I'd rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I'd give anything
+to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are. But I'm not.
+I've got a sister whom you ought to meet. She's got all the positive
+energy in our family. I can't explain, Maurice, just exactly what I'm
+feeling about existence at this moment, unless I tell you more about
+myself than I possibly can--anyway yet a while. I don't want to do any
+harm, and I don't think I could ever feel I was in a position to do any
+good. Look here, don't let's talk any more. I meant to dream myself into
+an attitude to-night, and you've made me talk like an earnest young
+convert."
+
+"I think I'll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper," said
+Avery excitedly.
+
+"He thinks you're patronizing," Michael warned him.
+
+Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:
+
+"Does he? I wonder why."
+
+"But he won't, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced
+drawings."
+
+"Doesn't he like me?" persisted Avery. "I'd better not go round to his
+rooms."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled
+vanity."
+
+When Avery had hesitatingly embarked upon his expedition to Wedderburn,
+Michael thought rather regretfully of his presence and wished he had
+been more sympathetic in his reception of the great scheme. Yet perhaps
+that was the best way to have begun his own scheme for not being
+disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to
+reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be
+no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life,
+Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books should give him his
+adventures. Actually he almost made up his mind to retire even from the
+observation of reality, so much had he felt, all this Christmas
+vacation, the dominance of Stella and so deeply had he been impressed by
+Prescott's attitude of inscrutable commentary.
+
+Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled
+round to Wedderburn's rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in
+contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old
+lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling
+touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm
+friendship--so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be
+nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the
+birth of this undergraduate bantling.
+
+"Though what exactly you want me to do," protested Michael, "I don't
+quite know."
+
+"We want money, anyway," Avery frankly admitted. "Oh, and by the way,
+Michael, I've asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you
+up."
+
+"What on earth for?" gasped Michael.
+
+"Oh, they'll want supers. They're doing The Merchant of Venice. Great
+sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of
+Morocco."
+
+"But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?"
+Michael inquired gently.
+
+In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and
+not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary's freshmen,
+including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the rehearsals
+certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though Michael was
+not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of seeing
+Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco and
+Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional actresses
+who came up from London to take part in the production.
+
+"I think I ought to have played Lorenzo," said Lonsdale seriously to
+Michael, just before the first night. "I think Miss Delacourt would have
+preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I'm only a gondolier,
+an attendant, and a soldier."
+
+Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It seemed
+to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs. There
+had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in "my
+Lorenzo."
+
+"I'm only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge," Michael
+observed.
+
+"And I don't think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,"
+Lonsdale went on. "He doesn't appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I
+wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign Office
+and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I'm
+perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don't forget you're
+lunching with me to-morrow. I don't mind telling you she threw over a
+lunch with that ass from Oriel who's playing Lorenzo. I never heard such
+an idiotic voice in my life."
+
+Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice
+Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy
+all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals in
+the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to
+Alan's rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an
+attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other
+colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the individuality of
+each college, but most of all perhaps the individuality of his own
+college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one day with an expression of
+alarm to say that he had been invited to lunch by the man who played
+Launcelot Gobbo.
+
+"Well, what of it?" said Michael. "He probably wants to borrow your
+dog."
+
+"He says he's at Lincoln," Lonsdale stammered.
+
+"So he is."
+
+"Well, I don't know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something of
+Oxford?"
+
+The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great
+success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old
+members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told
+long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the
+auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the
+disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their various
+Toggers to victory.
+
+Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger
+almost swinging the St. Mary's boat into the apprehensive stern of the
+only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening
+his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The
+Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in
+that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and
+Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path
+beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary's failed to catch the
+boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his own
+way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.
+
+Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement
+of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his
+mother's particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him,
+but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room in
+turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.
+
+There was his mother's own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions and
+curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was
+Stella's bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly
+medi�val, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room
+with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue and
+crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
+studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.
+
+"I haven't done anything but just have it whitewashed," she said. "I
+wanted you to choose the scheme, as I'm going to make all the noise."
+
+The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
+his sister entered it.
+
+"But it's absolutely empty," he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
+in all that space except Stella's piano, looking now almost as small and
+graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.
+
+"You shall decorate the room," she said. "What will you choose?"
+
+Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
+gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries and
+blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude and
+amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with
+Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even
+as Michael's fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions, his mind
+swiftly returned to the keyboard's alternations of white and black, so
+that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric significance.
+
+"I don't think we want anything," he finally proclaimed. "Just two or
+three tall chairs and a mask of somebody--Beethoven perhaps--and black
+silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn't go with elaborate
+decorations."
+
+So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
+remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
+infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
+crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
+listen to the muffled sound of Stella's notes. Never had any entrance
+seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
+able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the power
+and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room was
+larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed chair,
+Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the sun,
+would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these clear
+melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the high-backed
+chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space itself. Alan
+sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played and played,
+Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him the union that
+already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the joy of life on
+the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have always someone
+fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.
+
+"By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers," said
+Alan.
+
+Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark's powerful
+wings.
+
+April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
+usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
+the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
+greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
+him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
+walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
+not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
+them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
+here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had been
+none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the contemporary
+residents could ever have walked along its moderately cheerful
+uniformity.
+
+Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
+of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
+Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
+existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
+Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
+been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
+before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a visit
+to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more depressing
+than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the sensation of
+constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that was imposed upon
+his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as he wandered
+between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom of the river
+Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess the
+narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses did
+not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost seeming
+to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather the
+impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
+contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
+came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of
+insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to the
+tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble flaunting
+of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically by the
+dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a spirit
+haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former territory so
+much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington Road. When he
+reached the house itself, he was able to expel his sentiment for the
+past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new owner had
+dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the door, the
+number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him that this was
+indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so hardly with the
+problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree that, once an
+object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction to the threshold
+of this house when every area down the road owned a lime-tree identical
+in age and growth.
+
+Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
+check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
+inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
+house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
+street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
+horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
+recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
+lived.
+
+It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
+here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
+thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
+day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
+thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
+or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never
+is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes
+during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of
+vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of clouds which
+the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he had done this
+a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure again the vision
+he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible ever to remember the
+exact moment of falling asleep.
+
+After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
+moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to himself
+with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at the corner
+of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of Ulalume, and
+Michael found himself murmuring, "Of my most immemorial year," half
+expectant of Lily's slim form swaying toward him, half blushful already
+in breathless anticipation of the meeting.
+
+Down the road a door opened. Michael's heart jumped annoyingly out of
+control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated in
+the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed, and a
+man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps. Michael
+saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names of
+house-agents, that several "to let" boards leaned confidentially over
+the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who was
+whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew where
+Mrs. Haden had gone.
+
+"I wish I did," said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. "No, sir,
+I'm afraid I don't. Nor anybody else."
+
+"You mean they went away in a hurry," said Michael shamefaced.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And left no address?"
+
+"Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen's bills in the hall."
+
+Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but
+glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with
+the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably
+defeated.
+
+In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room
+staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his
+discovery.
+
+"I'm glad you're not going to start that business again," she said.
+"And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall
+soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for
+me disinterestedly and without prejudice."
+
+"What sort of difficulties?" Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her
+cheeks warm with the evening light.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she half whispered. "But let's go away together in
+the summer and not even take a piano."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+YOUTH'S DOMINATION
+
+
+On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary's hymned the rising sun,
+Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible expression of
+his own mental image of Oxford's completeness, to pierce in one dazzling
+moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts which had
+restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful obscurity about
+his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were,
+imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his evocation to
+recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence of human desire and
+human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of
+its repository.
+
+All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
+called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
+live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
+bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
+the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
+that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
+make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
+of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily upon
+the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the cold
+hues and blushes of the sun's youth, that stood as symbol for so much
+here in St. Mary's, made of the east one great shell of lucent color.
+The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of dawn and
+sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys gathered like
+twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic visitors came half
+shyly through the portal that was to give such a sense of time's
+rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible: dons came
+hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and at last the
+tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and Lonsdale and
+Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides equipped in cap and
+gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding stairs to the top.
+
+For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
+scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
+poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
+worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
+with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
+to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
+lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
+and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
+it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
+again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
+dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the
+tower's top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
+time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the sun
+mounted into the day.
+
+Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as emmets
+at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to stand.
+Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent hurtling
+outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of the town
+scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.
+
+Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the
+heart of England. He had refused Maurice's invitation to a somewhat
+mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the
+almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he was
+inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan, now
+sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning
+celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far
+afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college
+shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign
+of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement
+of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After
+breakfast it would still be only about seven o'clock with a hot-eyed
+languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost
+decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and
+walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the
+lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed
+incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which had
+so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate a
+much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he
+extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary
+impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.
+
+It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more
+typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the
+sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double
+irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was
+glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in
+the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at
+the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice's
+mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
+had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
+with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
+went back to the river's bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
+while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
+it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
+water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
+and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
+Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
+dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn's name, and deliberately he
+did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
+were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
+flowing into the ancestral Thames.
+
+Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
+Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
+was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
+white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
+one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.
+
+At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
+conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary inmate.
+His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat, but
+continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on the
+table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the table
+by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still fixed upon
+his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a cipher and
+regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in his silent
+company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this strange youth
+with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately carved
+countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing instead
+of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his waistcoat.
+Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker up his pale
+forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate examined the
+food on the plate before him.
+
+"I think it's rather cold by now," said Michael, unable to keep silence
+any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.
+
+"I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
+I'd read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you
+now, you'd think I was an affected ass," he drawled.
+
+Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.
+
+"They're all equally bad," the poet proclaimed gloomily. "What made you
+come to this inn? I didn't know that anybody else except me had ever
+been here. You're at the Varsity, I suppose?"
+
+Michael with a nod announced his college.
+
+"I'm at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest
+undergraduates in Oxford."
+
+"I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary's," Michael suggested.
+
+"Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary's man. I
+refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know."
+
+"Oh, rather. In fact, he's rather a friend of mine. He's keen on
+starting a paper just at present."
+
+"I know. I know," said the poet. "He's asked me to be one of the
+forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?"
+
+"I was invited to be," Michael admitted. "But instead I'm going to
+subscribe some of the capital required. My name's Fane."
+
+"Mine's Hazlewood. It's rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.
+Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere
+else. But they've got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go
+two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have
+you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris
+weighing the charms of Helen--no--on second thoughts I'm being forced.
+Don't encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?"
+
+"I don't know," said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest
+roast chicken he had ever seen. "I think I missed a turning. I've been
+at Lechlade all day."
+
+"We may as well ride back together," Hazlewood proposed.
+
+After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and
+then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.
+Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.
+
+"Do you know many Balliol people?" he asked.
+
+Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting
+in The Merchant of Venice.
+
+"I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my
+rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea
+they're keeping a chapel, or else it's a relief from the unparagoned
+brutality of the college architecture."
+
+Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his
+rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how
+many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax
+candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive
+candlesticks of wrought iron.
+
+"Mr. Fane of St. Mary's," said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was dimly
+aware of multitudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur of
+expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.
+
+"I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?" the
+chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.
+
+"Forgot all about it," said Hazlewood. "But I suppose I can bring a
+visitor."
+
+Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied
+criticism of the expostulation.
+
+"Sit down," said Hazlewood peremptorily. "If I can't bring a visitor I
+resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will
+have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us his
+carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Medi�val Warfare."
+
+"Don't be an affected ass, Guy," said Comeragh. "You know you yourself
+are reading a paper on The Sonnet."
+
+"Rise from the noble lord," said Hazlewood. "The first I've had in a
+day's fishing. I say, Fane, don't listen to this rot."
+
+The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host
+and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.
+
+Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was
+sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the
+experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to
+whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood's room was
+the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth
+for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary's
+he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or
+Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood's, nor would he have
+exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in
+Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.
+He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over the
+tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon their
+martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the level
+voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing
+sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco
+smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated
+loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the
+discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green
+curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and
+with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the
+tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the
+decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members of
+the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and
+earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous,
+sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more
+delightful.
+
+Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most unjustly
+had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made up his mind
+to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that from it he
+might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with Hazlewood to the
+lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room would stand as
+representatives of the college.
+
+"Yes, I should think so," said Hazlewood. "Why, are you making
+exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes
+an American to do that really well, you know."
+
+"But what is the essential Balliol?" Michael demanded.
+
+"Who could say so easily? Perhaps it's the same sort of spirit, slightly
+filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in Elizabethan
+England."
+
+Michael asked for a little more elaboration.
+
+"Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by
+birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste
+not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be
+ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with
+Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are."
+
+"Will that description serve for yourself?" Michael asked.
+
+"For me? Oh, great scott, no! I'm utterly deficient in proconsular
+ambitions."
+
+They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend after
+promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his acquaintance
+with Balliol.
+
+When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with Wedderburn
+drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Both
+the promoters insisted that Michael should listen to their announcement
+before he told them anything about himself or his day.
+
+_"The Oxford Looking-Glass" Avery began, "is intended to reflect
+contemporary undergraduate thought."_
+
+"I prefer 'will reflect,'" Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of
+positive opinion.
+
+"I don't think it very much matters," said Michael, "as long as you
+don't think that 'contemporary undergraduate thought' is too
+pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror,
+for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate thought
+ever reaches toward reality."
+
+Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism, and
+the chief promoter went on:
+
+_"Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will
+be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama."_
+
+"I think that's a rotten sentence," Michael interrupted.
+
+"Well, of course, it will be polished," Avery irritably explained. "What
+Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as simply
+and directly as possible what we are aiming at."
+
+"Ah!" Michael agreed, smiling. "Now I'm beginning to understand."
+
+"_It may be assumed_," Avery went on, "_that the opinion of those who
+are 'knocking at the door_' (in inverted commas)----"
+
+"I shouldn't think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a
+door in inverted commas," Michael observed.
+
+"Look here, Michael," Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously,
+"will you shut up, or you won't be allowed to contribute."
+
+"Haven't you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door
+in Ibsen?" fretfully demanded Maurice. _"That the opinion of those who
+are knocking at the door," he continued defiantly, "is not unworthy of
+an audience."_
+
+"But if they're knocking at a door," Michael objected, "they can't be
+reflected in a mirror; unless it's a glass door, and if it's a glass
+door, they oughtn't to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don't
+knock hard, there isn't much point----"
+
+"_The Editor in chief_," pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael's attempt
+to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass, "_will be
+M. Avery (St. Mary's), with whom will be associated C. St. C. Wedderburn
+(St. Mary's), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary's), V. L. A. Townsend (B.N.C.)_. I
+haven't asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he's sure to join
+because he's very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill Mowbray's
+very bucked at the scheme. He's just resigned from the Russell and
+joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the principal
+speakers are going to follow Chamberlain's lead for Protection. _N. R.
+Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most tremendously keen, and rather
+a good man to have, as he's had two poems taken by The Saturday Review
+already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_----"
+
+"That's the man I've come to talk about," said Michael. "I met him
+to-day."
+
+Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear
+he had been considered interesting. "For in his own way," said Avery
+solemnly, "he's about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I'd sooner
+have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you
+and Wedders," he added quickly. "I'm going to take this prospectus round
+to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make."
+
+Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a
+large number of suggestions. "And he's got a sense of humor," he added
+consolingly.
+
+For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the
+preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary discussions
+gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the O.U.D.S. or the
+Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year men) belonged.
+Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass the organ of
+advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for Townsend to be as
+advanced as he chose within the limits of the space allotted to his
+progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole of the magazine to
+drama, especially since under the expanding ambitions of editorship he
+had come to the conclusion he was a critic himself, and so was the more
+firmly disinclined to let slip the trenchant opportunity of pulverizing
+the four or five musical comedies that would pass through the Oxford
+theater every term. However, Townsend's demand for the drama and
+nothing but the drama was mitigated by his determination as a Liberal
+that The Oxford Looking-Glass should not be made the mouthpiece of the
+New Toryism represented by Mowbray; and Maurice was able to recover the
+control of the dramatic criticism by representing to Townsend the
+necessity for such unflinching exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston
+Club principles as would balance Mowbray's torrential leadership of the
+Tory Democrats. "So called," Townsend bitterly observed, "because as he
+supposed they were neither Tories nor Democrats."
+
+Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the
+personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had
+astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then
+just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
+forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
+Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
+figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
+half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
+new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the Boer
+war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
+conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
+and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
+atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
+Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
+Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always thronged
+with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and whizzed
+about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but less
+dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.
+
+Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
+endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
+been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
+yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
+Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
+much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
+absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried sometimes
+to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity. As it was,
+Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity, whether he were
+feeding Rugger blues on plovers' eggs or keeping an early chapel with
+the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing tennis in the Varsity
+doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and Rollinat and Rops and
+Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with two candles burning
+before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a ramshorn of snuff and
+glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
+
+With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
+Wedderburn's Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
+Hazlewood's genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
+result into a souffl�e of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
+as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
+exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute, outside
+money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine along to
+success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in the
+preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
+published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
+reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
+first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he had
+hailed from St. Mary's tower, this dream of youth's domination set
+against the gray background of time's endurance that was itself spun of
+the fabric of dreams.
+
+Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term's end,
+inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding
+river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to
+destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass
+Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted
+to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the
+text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did
+Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by
+trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates have
+better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most inaccurate
+geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held against the bank
+by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at ease, the world
+became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise of life no more
+than the monotony of a river's lapping, or along the level water meadows
+a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when supper was eaten by
+figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures that afterward drifted
+slowly down to college under the tree-entangled stars and flitting
+assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the rustle of a bird's
+wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match dropped idly over the
+side of the canoe. This was the season when for a long while people sat
+talking at open windows, and from the Warden's garden came sweetly up
+the scent of May flowers.
+
+Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of
+the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan's
+room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important
+was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to
+bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of
+leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to
+cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect
+valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of
+the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.
+
+Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that
+he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the
+festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not
+inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by
+certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to
+her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection of
+normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors. Besides,
+though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his
+self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the
+battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage
+criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen's table
+was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and
+sister.
+
+So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free
+to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so
+debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and
+cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon
+mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his
+father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent
+two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.
+
+"After all, they can only spend the day," he sighed hopefully to
+Michael, "You'll come and help me through lunch, won't you, and we'll
+rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is
+rowed. I was an ass to ask them. You won't mind being bored a bit by my
+governor? I believe he's considered quite a clever man."
+
+Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished
+diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son's estimate.
+
+"They're arriving devilish early," said Lonsdale, coming up to Michael's
+room with an anxious face on the night before.
+
+Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as
+it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael's door.
+
+"Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the
+station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the three
+of them at once. I think you'd better talk about wine to the governor.
+It'll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated. Tell him
+how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing in late
+from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of the
+governor's port from Tommy's rooms in Parsons' Quad."
+
+Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without
+fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next
+morning.
+
+"I say, you've come frightfully early," Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and
+Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.
+
+"Well, we can walk round my old college," suggested Lord Cleveden
+cheerfully. "I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford
+nowadays."
+
+"I say, I'm awfully sorry to let you in for this," Lonsdale whispered to
+Michael. "Don't encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around at
+the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something."
+
+Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking
+round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of
+bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.
+
+"I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?" asked Michael as they
+stood in Peckwater.
+
+"Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap, he
+died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about much."
+
+"Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott," said Michael hurriedly.
+
+"Dick Prescott? Good gracious!" Lord Cleveden exclaimed, "I haven't seen
+him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his life,
+to be sure."
+
+"Did he?" asked Michael, well aware of the question's folly, but
+incapable of not asking it.
+
+"Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal."
+
+"Oh," gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden
+about his father.
+
+"I can't remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this
+one. Saxby's I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.
+Let's go up and ask the present owner to let us look in," Lord Cleveden
+proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.
+
+"Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no," protested his son. "No, no; he
+may have people with him. Really."
+
+"Ah, to be sure," Lord Cleveden agreed. "What a pity!"
+
+"And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary's before lunch," Lonsdale
+announced.
+
+"Do they make meringues here nowadays?" inquired Lord Cleveden
+meditatively.
+
+"No, no," Lonsdale assured him. "They've given up since the famous cook
+died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary's. And our
+cr�me caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they've got at the
+House."
+
+The tour of St. Mary's was conducted with almost incredible rapidity,
+because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted
+everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the
+kitchen.
+
+"Why didn't you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?" Lady
+Cleveden inquired.
+
+"My dear mother," said Arthur, "he's quite impossible."
+
+"But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man," said Lady Cleveden,
+"and always asks us to stay with him when we're in Scotland."
+
+"Yes, but we never are," Lonsdale pointed out. "And I'm sorry to hurt
+your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is
+really absolutely impossible. He's the very worst type of Harrovian."
+
+Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that Mackintosh
+was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind, and urged a
+theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly have declined
+rather offensively.
+
+"He's not a very bonhomous lad," said Lonsdale, and with that sentence
+banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.
+
+After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought to
+take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed
+down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the
+pleasure craft of St. Mary's bobbed at their moorings.
+
+Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his
+sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into
+respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse
+himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications of
+his opinion he disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the punt.
+Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with the
+air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity was no
+longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave
+superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the
+navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of
+the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.
+
+"Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these
+toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own." This comment
+was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so
+audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull
+fury. "Try and get along, please, sir. You're holding up the whole
+river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices' competition."
+
+After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back
+to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of
+sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and
+mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea and
+then buzz off at once to see the first division row.
+
+"I think we shall go head to-night," Lonsdale predicted very
+confidentially. "I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar
+yesterday."
+
+But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale's people
+to see St. Mary's bump New College in front of their own barge, and
+afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with the
+westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox's blazer and shine
+more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his buttonhole.
+
+"Now you've just got time to catch your train," said Lonsdale, when the
+sound of the last pistol-shots and plaudits had died away. And "Phew!"
+he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, "how
+frightfully tiring one's people are when imported in bulk!"
+
+Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second; and
+without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for Pass
+Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the end of
+the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of the most
+low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the
+candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly
+blows they had received below their intellectual belts.
+
+It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the last
+week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a good deal
+of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest justification,
+and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had stayed on the
+river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great expense of
+energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off indigestion.
+
+On one of these merry nights toward one o'clock somebody suggested that
+the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who
+had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt act
+of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This
+derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment
+known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park, and
+it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so that
+surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.
+
+Half a dozen freshmen--Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and
+Michael--all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the
+amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael
+alone possibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been
+one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in
+the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The
+others were more vaguely injured by Smithers' hitherto undisturbed
+existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his
+accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was determined
+to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to follow the
+fashion.
+
+Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers
+from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass and
+paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm
+before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers' reformation kept
+them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of
+guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself
+might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside
+Smithers' open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first
+man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the
+sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric
+light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the
+crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows
+of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment
+an unworthy impulse in every heart.
+
+The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were
+evidently Smithers' people, photographs like the groups in the parlors
+of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid's mantelpiece.
+
+"I say, look at that fringe," gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and
+Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.
+
+Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers' room, began
+to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that
+stood in the background of this splendid "college career" of Percy or
+Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded
+to counterbalance "Smithers." No doubt the champagne in gradual reaction
+was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn each tribute
+from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak room dedicated
+for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much inclined to
+detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go to bed. What
+seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was that on the
+evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the ascetic glories
+of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently no classical
+scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate for the
+scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was at St.
+Mary's to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by competing on
+behalf of the college and the university in scientific knowledge with
+newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham. Smithers was merely an
+advertisement of Oxford's democratic philanthropy, and would only gain
+from his university a rather inferior training in chemistry at a
+considerably greater personal cost but with nothing else that Oxford
+could and did give so prodigally to others more fortunately born.
+
+At this point in Michael's meditations Smithers woke up, and from the
+bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The
+reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a long
+nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway between his
+two rooms.
+
+"Well, I'm jiggered!" he gasped. "What are you fellers doing in my
+sitting-room?"
+
+It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to take down from the wall
+what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers' mother in order to
+examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick
+with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe's grasp, and
+shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled
+through the open window into the deer-park.
+
+Cuffe's expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very
+heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from
+damaging Smithers' humble property and even from annoying any more
+Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.
+
+"I say, we can't let that poor devil run about all night in the park
+with that picture," said Grainger. "Let's catch him and explain we got
+into his rooms by mistake."
+
+"I hope he won't throw himself into the river or anything," murmured
+Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his
+reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever
+lighting upon him personally.
+
+"I say, for goodness' sake, let's catch him," begged Michael, who had
+visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street
+that her son had died in defending her enlargement.
+
+Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its
+verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.
+
+"It's like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor," Michael said to
+Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers,
+running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was
+undimmed by boughs.
+
+He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at
+once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew,
+for by this time the unwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of
+voices in the Fellows' sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who
+supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing
+against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an
+entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead
+branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round
+tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down
+into the rose-beds of the Warden's garden and by one supreme effort of
+endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert's quad.
+
+"By Jove, that was a topping rag," puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six
+glasses with welcome drink. "I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He
+said: 'It's no use you putting your coat over your 'ead, sir, because I
+knows you by your gait.'"
+
+"I wonder what happened to Smithers," said Michael.
+
+"Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher," Avery asserted. "I don't
+know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary's."
+
+"A bounder like what?" asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room
+during Avery's expression of opinion.
+
+Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the
+evening's rag was provided for his entertainment.
+
+"But why don't you let that poor devil alone?" demanded the listener.
+
+At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive
+reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted
+that men like him were very bad for the college.
+
+Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton,
+determined to probe through the medium of Castleton's common sense and
+Wykehamist notions the ethical and �sthetic rights of people like
+Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.
+
+"After all, Oxford wasn't founded to provide an expensive three years of
+idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like
+Cuffe," Castleton pointed out.
+
+"No, no," Michael agreed, "but no institution has ever yet remained true
+to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance, or
+Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved into
+something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may have
+departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful purpose in
+the scheme of social order."
+
+"Oh, I'm not grumbling at what Oxford is," Castleton went on. "I simply
+suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority,
+to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving
+no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are
+supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I
+should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the
+majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way in
+with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of hatred
+which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all of us."
+
+Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.
+
+"No, I'm afraid I haven't. I'm afraid I'm too lazy to do much more than
+deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I'm
+beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The
+Spectator might talk, to bed."
+
+The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton
+to his rooms. St. Mary's tower against the sky opening like a flower
+seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward
+immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social
+distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and
+clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in
+beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed,
+spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And
+suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside
+the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the
+sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those
+who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.
+
+Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to
+invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect
+that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might
+embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself
+with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied
+that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more
+charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the
+experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the
+doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+GRAY AND BLUE
+
+
+When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty
+historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic
+enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he found
+that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never lost for
+an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as a very
+little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with which, as
+he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world of
+ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea's easy stability Mrs.
+Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed
+exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought
+that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the great
+world, however much apart from the great world her existence had been
+when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of romance
+because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the more
+subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in Cheyne
+Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less
+conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized
+that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.
+
+Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster and
+concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of other
+women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their
+company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with
+which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost as
+if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be
+independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to
+make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to
+society.
+
+"Where does mother get hold of all these women?" Michael asked Stella
+irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for the
+whole of a hot summer afternoon.
+
+"Oh, they're all interested in something or other," Stella explained.
+"And mother's interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a
+rotten time really when she was traveling round."
+
+"But she used always to be so vague and amusing," said Michael, "and now
+she's as fussy and practical as a vicar's wife."
+
+"I think I know why that is," Stella theorized meditatively. "I think if
+I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so
+utterly that when he wasn't with me any sort of contact with other
+people would make me vague."
+
+"Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now," Michael argued.
+
+"No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to
+make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the
+vagueness came after she ran away with father."
+
+Michael looked rather offended by Stella's blunt reference.
+
+"I rather wish you wouldn't talk quite so easily about all of that," he
+said. "I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it."
+
+"Like mother, in fact," Stella pointed out. "Do you know, Michael, I
+believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her
+past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost
+dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little things,
+you'd think--however, as I know you have rather a dread of perfect
+frankness in your only sister, I'll shut up and say no more."
+
+"What things?" asked Michael sharply. Stella's theories about the
+freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though he
+had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted
+child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was
+really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him to
+turn theories into practice.
+
+"Oh, Michael!" Stella laughed reprovingly. "Don't put on that
+professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you
+ever want confidences from me you'll have just to be humbly
+sympathetic."
+
+Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which
+made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
+
+"I don't see anything to giggle at in such a question," Michael
+grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy
+so cheap. "Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you
+may say, you don't practice as much as you used. Why?"
+
+For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again
+the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a
+rage.
+
+A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into
+the country.
+
+"My dear boy, I'm much too busy with the Bazaar," said Mrs. Fane.
+
+Michael sighed.
+
+"I don't think I can possibly get away until August, and then I've half
+promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up
+Mental Science--so interesting and quite different from Christian
+Science."
+
+"I hate these mock-turtle religions," said Michael savagely.
+
+Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very
+much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.
+
+"But why don't you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has
+been quite long enough in London for the present."
+
+"I've got to practice hard for my next concert," said Stella, looking
+coldly at her brother. "You and Michael are so funny, mother. You
+grumble at me when I don't practice all day, and yet when it's really
+necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away."
+
+"I never suggested your coming away," Michael contradicted. "As a matter
+of fact, I've been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall, and I
+think I'll go."
+
+The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice
+Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined
+them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in reference
+to the political candidature of a friend in the north of England, he
+decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of Tory Democracy
+and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a request to forward
+his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the reading-party sent
+it to await at Univ Mowbray's arrival in October, arguing that such an
+arrangement would save Bill and his friends much money, as he would
+indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation not more than
+forty-eight hours on the same spot.
+
+The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and
+they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
+cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
+a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.
+
+"I'm doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall," Avery announced one
+evening.
+
+"What, a sort of potted guide?" Hazlewood asked.
+
+Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.
+
+"No, no; it's an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall."
+
+"I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,"
+Castleton observed. "The sign-posts are like incantations."
+
+"Much more than that," Avery earnestly assured him. "It really affects
+me profoundly sometimes."
+
+Hazlewood laughed.
+
+"Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You'll never be affected profoundly by
+anything," he prophesied.
+
+Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
+
+"You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
+though, as you're aware, I'm a profound materialist----"
+
+"Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night," Hazlewood interrupted, with a
+laugh. "He'll soon transcend all human thought."
+
+"Here in Cornwall," Maurice pursued, undaunted, "I really am affected
+sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You'll all rag me, and
+you can, but though I've enjoyed myself frightfully, I don't think I
+shall ever come to Cornwall again."
+
+With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
+
+"Shut up, Maurice!" Hazlewood chaffed. "You've been reading Cornish
+novelists--the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
+men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
+own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech."
+
+"Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?" Michael broke in suddenly.
+
+"Of course I do," said Hazlewood. "And I'd believe in the inherent
+weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn't always go there to
+solve their problems and if Maurice weren't always so facile with the
+right emotion at the right moment."
+
+"I've got a presentiment to-night," said Michael, and not wishing to say
+more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to admit
+as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.
+
+Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
+small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
+or was it merely thunder in the air?
+
+Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:
+
+    _join me here rather quickly._
+
+Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
+harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
+and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
+train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
+eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
+regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
+whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
+indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.
+
+It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
+street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
+luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.
+
+"I'm really awfully worried," he said aloud to himself, as through the
+stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
+Charing Cross.
+
+Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
+and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
+something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
+herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
+great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the
+pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his
+seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half
+a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and
+gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types,
+those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those
+who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.
+
+Stella's address was near the Quai d'Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
+found she was living in rooms over a bookseller's shop with a view of
+the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
+glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
+gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
+damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.
+
+Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
+entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
+looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
+account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist's
+justification. Stella's chestnut hair streamed down her straight back
+like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
+and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
+she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
+before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
+This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
+somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
+dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
+pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
+inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
+she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
+silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
+heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
+laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.
+
+Yet, for all Michael's relief at finding Stella at least superficially
+all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
+of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
+of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
+could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa Vine
+whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend for
+Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that he
+had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning, and
+Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to abandon
+music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris come
+walking.
+
+The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river's bank.
+
+"Well," said Michael at last, "why did you wire for me?"
+
+"I wanted you."
+
+Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
+more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
+Stella's impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
+begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
+fancy for his company.
+
+Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
+reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
+she had written to a letter.
+
+"Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
+an artist, that there was also life to be lived?"
+
+Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just
+how she proposed to put her theory to the test.
+
+"I told you that a youth was painting me."
+
+"But you also said he looked like a corpse," Michael quickly
+interjected. "You surely haven't fallen in love with somebody who looks
+like a corpse?"
+
+"I'm not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,"
+Stella admitted.
+
+Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the
+fellow's presumption.
+
+"I never yet met a painter who had very much inside," he commented.
+
+"But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you'll confess that your
+acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather
+small."
+
+Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive
+hostility.
+
+"And I suppose this chap is in Paris now," he said. "Well, I can't do
+anything. I suppose for a long time now you've been making a fool of
+yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?"
+
+He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in
+love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom
+he had never seen.
+
+"I've certainly not been making a fool of myself," Stella flamed. "But
+I thought I would rather you were close at hand."
+
+"And who's this Clarissa Vine?" Michael indignantly demanded.
+
+"She's the girl I traveled with to Paris."
+
+"But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that
+studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk."
+
+By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all
+this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of
+the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.
+
+"I can't bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she'll
+sit and talk hot air till three o'clock in the morning. I shall go mad,"
+Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the immediate
+future.
+
+Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an
+unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her
+art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable
+companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael's mistrust of
+Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could not
+stand George Ayliffe.
+
+Michael announced that, as Miss Vine had scarcely condescended to
+address a single word to him in the quarter of an hour he was waiting
+for Stella to dress, it was impossible for him to say whether he could
+stand her or not, but that he was still inclined to think she was
+thoroughly objectionable.
+
+"Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her," Stella
+promised.
+
+"Party?" interrogated Michael, in dismay.
+
+"We're having a party in our rooms to-night."
+
+"And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And I shall have to meet him?"
+
+She nodded again very cheerfully.
+
+They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently,
+Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so that
+he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a jolly
+afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any more
+confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a
+light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of
+vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.
+
+The party at the girls' rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost
+more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being
+Stella's brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence
+of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and
+that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare of
+the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect at
+which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they did
+from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps and
+shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to relinquish
+slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set Michael's heart
+beating in the imagination of what altitudes it might not have reached
+along the path of romantic passions. Every young woman or young man who
+entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking in search of
+familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay worldlings to
+great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment, and Michael
+tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration personalities so
+pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his ordinary temper
+have plunged him into speechless gloom.
+
+Oxford after this assembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms
+seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of
+callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and
+wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose
+life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as
+romantically real as the sea-sound conjured by a shell. Here were
+gathered people who worked always in that circumfluent inspiration, that
+murmur of liberty, that whisper of humanity. What could Oxford give but
+the bells of out-worn beliefs, and the patter of aimless footsteps? How
+right Stella had been to say that academic perfection was vain without
+the breath of life. How right she was to find in George Ayliffe someone
+whose artistic sympathy would urge her on to achievements impossible to
+attain under Alan's admiration for mere fingers and wrists.
+
+Michael watched this favorite of his sister all through the evening. He
+tried to think that Ayliffe's cigarette-stained fingers were not so very
+unpleasant, that Ayliffe's cadaverous exterior was just a noble
+melancholy, that Ayliffe's high pointed head did not betray an almost
+insufferable self-esteem, and, what was the hardest task of all, he
+tried to persuade himself that Ayliffe's last portrait of Stella had not
+transformed his splendidly unconcerned sister into a self-conscious
+degenerate.
+
+"How do you like George's picture of Stella?"
+
+The direct inquiry close to his ear startled Michael. He had been
+leaning back in his chair, listening vaguely to the hum of the guests'
+conversation and getting from it nothing more definite than a sense of
+the extraordinary ease of social intercourse under these conditions.
+Looking round, he saw that Clarissa Vine had come to sit next to him and
+he felt half nervous of this concentrated gaze that so evidently
+betokened a determination to probe life and art and incidentally himself
+to the very roots.
+
+"I think it's a little thin, don't you?" said Clarie.
+
+Michael hated to have his opinion of a painting invited, and he resented
+the painter's jargon that always seemed to apply equally to the subject
+and the medium. It was impossible to tell from Miss Vine's question
+whether she referred to Stella's figure or to Ayliffe's expenditure upon
+paint.
+
+"I don't think it's very like Stella," Michael replied, and consoled
+himself for the absence of subtlety or cleverness in such an answer by
+the fact that at least it was a direct statement of what he thought.
+
+"I know what you mean," said Clarissa, nodding seriously.
+
+Michael hoped that, she did. He could not conceive an affirmation of
+personal opinion delivered more plainly.
+
+"You mean he's missed the other Stella," said Clarissa.
+
+Michael bowed remotely. He told himself that contradiction or even
+qualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person of
+Clarissa's unhumorous earnestness.
+
+"I said so when I first saw it," cried Clarissa triumphantly. "I said,
+'my god, George, you've only given us half of her!'"
+
+Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his initial
+impression of a full-length study had been correct, and, finding that it
+was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical conception of her
+own.
+
+From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to the
+splendor of the moon.
+
+"I know what you mean," said Clarissa. "But I like sunshine effects
+best."
+
+"I wasn't really thinking about painting at that moment," Michael
+observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be
+occupied with it.
+
+"You know _you're_ very paintable," Clarissa went on. "I suppose you've
+sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you'd let _me_ paint you. I
+should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have never
+noticed."
+
+Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his
+weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.
+
+"You're very passionate, aren't you?" she said, shaking Michael's
+temperament in the thermometer of her thought.
+
+"No; rather the reverse," said Michael, as he irritably visualized
+himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa's florid
+canvases.
+
+"All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me," persisted Clarissa.
+
+Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this
+friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way
+with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be, was
+most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was not
+here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet ice
+was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.
+There should be some parallel with strawberries to illustrate his notion
+of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and
+constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and
+rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any nearer
+to the M�nad than the evocation of the image of a farouche dairymaid.
+
+All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to
+himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa's
+request. "What can you be thinking about?" she asked, and at the moment
+mere inquisitiveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.
+Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing
+the pitch of his violin. So Michael assumed the portentous reverence of
+a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his attitude that he was
+beyond the range of Clarissa's conversation. He did not know who had
+made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since,
+aside from his own participation in what it gave of unified emotion to
+the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart of
+everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk with
+Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which he had
+encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his imagination
+and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But now, when all
+were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that actually
+pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being, Michael's
+aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling from heart
+to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which justified all
+that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was flaunting in
+voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and ambition. Even
+Clarissa's prematurity seemed transferred from the cause to the effect
+of her art, so that here and there some strain of music was strong
+enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of abandon at
+which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael watching him
+was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with all the
+wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in check by the
+music, Stella's affection for him was just intelligible. He might be
+said to possess now at least some of the graceful melancholy of a
+pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was much more in love
+with Stella than she was or ever could be in love with him. He realized
+that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and absorbing her music, was
+aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware it must be for ever
+impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as it was for him to
+paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for Ayliffe because he
+knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were losing her
+continually even now in complexities that could never by him be
+unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.
+
+More suggestive, however, than the individual listeners were the players
+themselves, so essentially typical were they of their respective
+instruments; and they were even something more than typical, for they
+did ultimately resemble them. The violinist must himself have answered
+in these harmonious wails to the lightest question addressed to him. His
+whole figure had surely that very look of obstinate surprise which
+belongs to a violin. The bones in that lean body of his might have been
+of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so little
+observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the
+simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a
+resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted
+with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be
+possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained
+and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances,
+could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion,
+however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure
+or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.
+
+There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella's piano
+part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes of
+the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far
+beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost
+tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height
+from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had
+thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped
+altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not have
+been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the normal
+course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted spirit down
+to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of this long
+riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool accompaniment
+she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael looked sharply
+across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how often by Stella
+herself had he been just as gently treated.
+
+The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly
+inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed.
+From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk,
+until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.
+
+Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael's too
+polite "Mr. Ayliffe," although he did not perhaps realize all the
+deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after
+expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.
+
+"Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie," cried Stella.
+
+"Of course I won't," said Michael, ruffling.
+
+"What do you want him to sit for?" Stella persisted, paying not the
+least regard to Michael's objection.
+
+"Oh, something ascetic," said Clarie, staring earnestly into space as if
+the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.
+
+"Just now it was to be something passionate," Michael pointed out
+scornfully. He suspected Clarissa's courage in the presence of Stella's
+disdainful frankness.
+
+"Ah, perhaps it will be both!" Clarie promised, and "Good night, most
+darling Stella," she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of
+reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness
+out of the room and up to bed.
+
+"My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She's like a
+performing leopard!" Michael burst out. "She's utterly stupid and
+utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes into
+your face and doesn't wear stays."
+
+"I get something out of all these queer people," Stella explained.
+
+"New-art flower-vases, I should think," scoffed Michael. "Why on earth
+you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of
+idiots I can't imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and
+I'm jolly glad I'm not, if it's to make one depend on the flattery of
+these fools."
+
+"You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself
+very much. And you oughtn't to be horrid about my friends. I think
+they're all so dreadfully touching."
+
+"Yes, and touched," Michael grumbled. "You're simply playing at being in
+Bohemia. You'd be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and
+Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and
+walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions."
+
+"My dear Michael," Stella argued, "do get out of your head the notion
+that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They're not
+imported dolls."
+
+"Well, you're not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to you
+because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they might
+feel because you are better at your business than any of them are at
+theirs."
+
+"Rot!" Stella ejaculated.
+
+However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched
+suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael
+simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so
+closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to
+surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The
+contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.
+No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a
+night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the
+moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in
+reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into
+elusive specters of a legendary paradise.
+
+"I suppose what's really been the matter with me all the evening,"
+confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, "is that I've felt out
+of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that
+for them I simply didn't exist. That's rather galling. Now at Oxford,
+supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of men
+in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be out of
+sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we should
+all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella, why did
+you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these unappreciative
+enthusiasts?"
+
+"Perhaps I wanted a standard measure," Stella whispered, with a gesture
+of disarming confidingness. "Something heavy and reliable."
+
+"My dear girl, I'm much too much of a weathercock, or if you insist on
+me being heavy, let's say a pendulum. And there's nothing quite so
+confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night."
+
+There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have been
+a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the ridiculous
+pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St. Cuthbert's quad or
+erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden's garden. He was constantly aware
+of a loss of dignity which worried him considerably and for which he
+took himself to task very sternly. Finally he attributed it to one of
+two reasons, either that he felt a sense of constraint in Stella's
+presence on her account, or that his continued holding back was due to
+his difficulty in feeling any justification for extravagant behavior,
+when he had not the slightest intention of presenting the world with the
+usufruct of his emotions in terms of letters or color or sound.
+
+"I really think I'm rather jealous of all these people," he told Stella.
+"They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and everything that
+happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now, I can do nothing
+with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very short time. I
+begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to criticize, then to be
+bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether and remain just as I was
+before it occurred except that I never can seize the same sort of
+experience again. Perhaps it's being with you. Perhaps you absorb all
+the vitality."
+
+Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.
+
+"Let's go away and leave all these people," she proposed. "Let's go to
+Compi�gne together, and we'll see if you're depressed by me then. But if
+you are, oh, Michael, I shan't know what to do! Only you won't be, if
+we're in Compi�gne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you know,
+we really met each other there for the first time."
+
+It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to
+produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to
+all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely self-satisfied.
+It was pleasant to arrive in Compi�gne and find that Madame Regnier's
+house had not changed in three years, that the three old widows had not
+suffered from time's now slow and kindly progress, that M. Regnier still
+ate his food with the same noisy recklessness, that the front garden
+blazed with just the same vermilion of the geranium flowers.
+
+For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long
+mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the simple
+pleasures of cassis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a sheaf of
+long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who on
+hearing that he was at Compi�gne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul de
+Cast�ra-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon
+Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by
+his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince
+Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible
+even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his
+sister must become temporary members of the Soci�t� du Sport de
+Compi�gne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.
+Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly
+elated at the prospect of knowing anybody belonging to this club, and
+were so obviously cast down when their guests seemed to hesitate, that
+Michael and Stella, more to please the Pension Regnier than themselves,
+accepted Prince Raoul's offer.
+
+It was amusing, too, this so excessively aristocratic club where every
+afternoon Princesses and Duchesses and the wives of Greek financiers sat
+at tea or watched the tennis and polo of their husbands and brothers and
+sons. Stella and Michael played sets of tennis with Cast�ra-Verduzan and
+the vicomte de Miramont, luxurious sets in which there were always four
+little boys to pick up the balls and at least three dozen balls to be
+picked up. Stella was a great success as a tennis-player, and their
+sponsor introduced the brother and sister to all the languidly beautiful
+women sitting at tea, and also to the over-tailored sportsmen who were
+cultivating a supposedly Britannic seriousness of attitude toward their
+games. Soon Michael and Stella found themselves going out to dinner and
+playing bridge and listening to much admiration of England in a
+Franco-cockney accent that was the result of a foreign language mostly
+acquired from grooms. With all its veneer of English freedom, it was
+still a very ceremonious society, and though money had tempered the
+rigidity of its forms and opinions, there was always visible in the
+background of the noisiest party Black Papalism, a dominant Army and the
+hope of the Orleanist succession. Verduzan also took them for long
+drives in the forest, and altogether time went by very gayly and very
+swiftly, until Stella woke up to the fact that her piano had been silent
+for nearly a fortnight. Verduzan was waiting with his impatient car in
+the prim road outside the Pension Regnier when she made this discovery,
+and he looked very much mortified when she told him that to-day she
+really ought to practice.
+
+"But you must come because I have to go away to-morrow," he declared.
+
+"Ah, but I've been making such wonderful resolutions ever since the sun
+rose," Stella said, shaking her head. "I must work, mustn't I, Michael?"
+
+"Oh, rot, she must come for this last time, mustn't she, Fane?"
+
+Michael thought that once more might not spoil her execution
+irreparably.
+
+"Hurrah, you can't get out of it, Miss Fane!"
+
+The car's horn tooted in grotesque exultation. Stella put on her
+dust-cloak of silver-gray, and in a few minutes they were racing through
+the forest so fast that the trees on either side winked in a continuous
+blur or where the forest was thinner seemed like knitting-needles to
+gather up folds of landscape.
+
+After they had traversed all the wider roads at this speed, somewhere
+in the very heart of the forest Raoul turned sharply off along a
+wagoner's track over whose green ruts the car jolted abominably, but
+just when it would have been impossible to go on, he stopped and they
+all got out.
+
+"You don't know why I've brought you here," he laughed.
+
+Michael and Stella looked their perplexity to the great delight of the
+young man. "Wait a minute and you'll see," he chuckled. He was leading
+the way along a narrow grass-grown lane whose hedges on either side were
+gleaming with big blackberries.
+
+"We shall soon be right out of the world," said Stella. "Won't that
+worry you, Monsieur?"
+
+"Well, yes, it would for a very long time," replied the Prince, in a
+tone of such wistfulness as for the moment made him seem middle-aged.
+"But, look," he cried, and triumphant youth returned to him once more.
+
+The lane had ended in a forest clearing whose vivid turf was looped with
+a chain of small ponds blue as steel. On the farther side stood a
+cottage with diamonded lattices and a gabled roof and a garden full of
+deep crimson phlox glowing against a background of gnarled and somber
+hawthorns. Cottage and clearing were set in a sweeping amphitheater of
+beechwoods.
+
+"It reminds me of Gawaine and the Green Knight," said Michael.
+
+"I'll take you inside," Raoul offered.
+
+They walked across the small common silently, so deeply did they feel
+they were trespassing on some enchantment. From the cottage chimney
+curled a film of smoke that gave a voiceless voice to the silence, and
+when as they paused in the lych-gate, Cast�ra-Verduzan clanged the bell,
+it seemed indeed the summons to waken from a spell sleepers long ago
+bewitched.
+
+"Surely nobody is going to answer that bell," said Stella.
+
+"Why, yes, of course, Ursule will open it. Ursule! Ursule!" he cried.
+"C'est moi, Monsieur Raoul."
+
+The cottage door opened and, evidently much delighted, Ursule came
+stumping down the path. She was an old woman whose rosy face was
+pectinated with fine wrinkles as delicate as the pluming of a moth's
+wing, while everything about her dress gave the same impression of
+extreme fineness, though the stuff was only a black bombazine and the
+tippet round her shoulders was of coarse lace. When she and Raoul had
+talked together in rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them
+graciously within.
+
+They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the
+sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs and
+dryness.
+
+"And there's a piano!" cried Stella, running to it. She played the Cat's
+Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.
+
+"You could practice on that piano?" Raoul anxiously inquired. "It
+belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do. She's
+married now."
+
+The sadness in Raoul's voice had made Michael suppose he was going to
+say his sister was dead.
+
+"Then this divine place belongs to you?" Stella asked.
+
+"To my sister and me. Ursule was once my nurse. Would you be my guests
+here, although I shall be away? For as long as you like. Ursule will
+look after you. Do say 'yes.'"
+
+"Why, what else could we say?" Michael and Stella demanded
+simultaneously.
+
+It was a disappointment to the Regniers when Michael and Stella came
+back to announce their retreat into the fast woodland, but perhaps M.
+Regnier found compensation in going down to his favorite caf� that
+afternoon and speaking of his guests, Monsieur and Mademoiselle F�ne,
+now staying with M. le prince de Cast�ra-Verduzan at his hunting-lodge
+in the forest.
+
+Later that afternoon with their luggage and music Raoul brought Michael
+and Stella back to the cottage in his car, after which he said good-bye.
+Ursule was happy to have somebody to look after, and the cottage that
+had seemed so very small against the high beeches of the steep country
+behind was much larger when it was explored. It stretched out a
+rectangular wing of cool and shadowed rooms toward the forest. In this
+portion Ursule lived, and there was the pantry, and the kitchen embossed
+with copper pans, and the still-room which had garnered each flowery
+year in its course. Coterminous with Ursule's wing was a flagged court
+where a stone well-head stained with gray and orange lichen mirrored a
+circumscribed world. Beyond into an ancient orchard whose last red
+apples ripened under the first outstretched boughs of the forest tossed
+an acre of garden with runner-beans still in bloom.
+
+In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the
+white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded
+fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the homely
+meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the cottage
+there were two small bedrooms with frequent changing patterns in dimity
+and chintz, with many tinted china ornaments and holy pictures that all
+combined to present the likeness of two glass cases enshrining an
+immoderately gay confusion of flowers and fruit and birds.
+
+Here in these ultimate September days of summer's reluctant farewell
+life had all the rich placidity of an apricot upon a sun-steeped wall.
+Michael, while Stella practiced really hard, read Gregorovius' History
+of the Papacy; and when she stopped suddenly he would wake half-startled
+from the bloody horrors of the tenth century narrated laboriously with
+such cold pedantry, and hear above the first elusive silence swallows
+gathering on the green common, robins in their autumnal song, and down a
+corridor the footfalls and tinkling keys of Ursule.
+
+It was natural that such surroundings should beget many intimate
+conversations between Michael and Stella, and if anything were wanting
+to give them a sense of perfect ease the thought that here at Compi�gne
+three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always
+smoothed away the trace of shyness.
+
+"Whether I had come out to Paris or not," asked Michael earnestly,
+"there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between
+you and that fellow Ayliffe?" He had to recur to this uneasy theme.
+
+"There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow to
+rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people to
+play about with. It's the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating
+cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no need
+to bother to sustain one's personality at highest pitch. George used to
+be grateful for so little. He really wasn't bad."
+
+"But didn't you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might
+fall in love with him? I don't want to be too objectionably fraternal,
+but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of cheapening
+yourself."
+
+"Only to other people," Stella argued, "not to myself. My dear Michael,
+you've no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a
+composition that is really easy--ridiculously, fatuously easy."
+
+"But you wouldn't choose that piece for public performance," Michael
+pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking
+Stella's extravagance.
+
+"Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn't very
+important?" She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.
+
+"Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you
+make out now?"
+
+"I wanted a corrective," Stella explained.
+
+"But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I'm your brother? And,
+you know, I don't believe you would consider that relationship had much
+to do with my importance one way or the other."
+
+"In fact," said Stella, laughing, "what you're really trying to do is to
+work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you're a
+corrective to George is that you're a gentleman."
+
+"There you are!" cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she
+had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions
+of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest
+excavation of life. "We all half apologize for using the word
+'gentleman,' but we can't get on without it. People say it means nothing
+nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more
+nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add
+something to its value. I haven't been able to talk this out before,
+because you're the only person who knows what I was born and at the same
+time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances
+rather a lot doesn't imply any very morbid self-consciousness. _You're_
+all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed
+you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist
+up to your level, one doesn't give a damn for his ancestors or his
+family or his personal features apart from the security of the art's
+consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but
+inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the
+end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a
+way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they
+incline without support, they're most of them inclining away from a
+top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they'll always have
+the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be
+suffocated."
+
+Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices
+at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the
+narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the
+lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of
+delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and
+pale fawn of their last attiring.
+
+"If I could only find in life itself," said Michael, sighing, "a path
+leading to something like this cottage."
+
+"But, meanwhile, go on," Stella urged. "Do go on with your
+self-revelation. It's so fascinating to me. It's like a chord that never
+resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony."
+
+"Something rather pathetic in fact," Michael suggested.
+
+"Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic," she assured
+him.
+
+"My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I'm the possessor of so
+much I can never make use of," Michael began again. "I'm not merely
+discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn't
+enter my head. Indeed, I don't think I'm ever discontented or even
+resentful for one moment, but if I _were_ the head of a great family I
+should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my
+theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down
+with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas
+now----" he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I don't see much difference really," Stella said. "You're not
+prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale
+perhaps."
+
+"Yes, yes," Michael plunged on excitedly. "But crowds of people are
+doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that
+these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather
+irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another
+sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands
+any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us
+to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy
+trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass
+of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his
+existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education
+has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present
+meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we know
+anything about. And they are _not_, they simply and solidly are _not_.
+The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with all it
+connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of the
+educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that the
+average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face, will
+deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have been
+armed with weapons they don't know how to use and are therefore so much
+the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a weapon
+of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I could have
+proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand scale even
+for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good nowadays."
+
+"I wonder if you could," murmured Stella. "Anyway, I don't see why you
+shouldn't ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the
+small scale."
+
+"But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody
+and fades out of memory at the moment of death," Michael grumbled.
+
+"Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid," Stella pointed
+out, "you'll find your niche."
+
+"I shall be a sort of Prescott. That's the most I can hope for," Michael
+gloomily announced. "Yet after all that's pretty good."
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known
+Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an
+atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most
+esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that he
+finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.
+
+"Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so
+wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out
+your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to
+know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?"
+
+Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for keeping
+such an extraordinary event so secret.
+
+"Because I didn't want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into your
+relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you, you
+would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn't looking.
+And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him through
+her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not."
+
+It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the
+woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse
+what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her
+the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in
+the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn
+of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage
+which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella's appeal
+to Raoul de Cast�ra-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own personality had
+scarcely entered. Cast�ra-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe! What folly it had
+been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan. Yet it had seemed
+so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in love with each
+other. Michael wondered whether he were specially privileged in being
+able to see through to a sister's heart, whether other brothers went
+blindly on without an inkling that their sisters were loved. It was
+astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had stepped so far and so
+rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the risk of ridicule for
+proposing to a girl whose mother's love for a friend of his own he had
+spent his life in guarding. Michael put out the lamp and, lighting a
+candle, went along the corridor to bed. From the far end he heard
+Stella's voice calling to him and turned back to ask her what she
+wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and, in that dainty
+room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the soft
+candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet bow
+someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all her
+largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish and
+protect.
+
+"Michael, I've been thinking about what you said," she began, "and you
+mustn't get cranky. I wish you wouldn't bother so much about what you're
+going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy."
+
+"I don't really bother a great deal," Michael assured her. "But I do
+feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a
+nobody."
+
+"The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and
+father," said Stella.
+
+"Yes, logically," Michael agreed. "But I think father did feel the
+responsibility rather heavily, and it's a sort of loyalty I have for him
+which makes me so determined to justify myself."
+
+That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two
+or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves
+trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest
+house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compi�gne in time to say
+good-bye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old
+Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty
+was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their
+own that magical corner of the world.
+
+The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine weather
+came back. London welcomed their return with a gracious calm. The Thames
+was a sheet of trembling silver, and the distant roofs and spires and
+trees of the Surrey shore no more than breath upon a glass. In this
+luminous and immaterial city the house in Cheyne Walk stood out with the
+pleasant aspect of its demure reality, and Mrs. Fane like one of those
+clouded rose pastels on the walls of her room was to both of them after
+their absence from London herself for a while as they had known her in
+childhood.
+
+"Dear children, how charming to see you looking so well. I'm not quite
+sure I like that very Scotch-looking skirt, darling Stella. I'm so glad
+you've enjoyed yourselves together. Is it a heather mixture? And I was
+in France, too. But the trains are so oddly inconvenient. Mrs.
+Carruthers' most interesting! I wish, darling Stella, you would take up
+Mental Science. Ah, but I forgot, you have your practicing."
+
+It was time to go up to Oxford after the few days that Stella and
+Michael spent in making arrangements for a series of Brahms recitals in
+one of the smaller concert halls. Alan met Michael on the platform at
+Paddington. This custom they had loyally kept up each term, although
+otherwise their paths seemed to be diverging.
+
+"Good vac?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, rather! I've been working at rather a tricky slow leg-break.
+Fifty-five wickets for 8.4 during the vac. Not bad for a dry summer. I
+was playing for the Tics most of the time. What did you do?"
+
+Michael during the journey up talked mostly about Stella.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+VENNER'S
+
+
+The most of Michael's friends had availed themselves of the right of
+seniority to move into more dignified rooms for their second year. These
+"extensions of premises," as Castleton called them, reached the limit of
+expansion in the case of Lonsdale who, after a year's residence in two
+small ground-floor rooms of St. Cuthbert's populous quad, had acquired
+the largest suite of three in Cloisters. Exalted by palatial ambitions,
+he spent the first week of term in buttonholing people in the lodge, so
+that after whatever irrelevant piece of chatter he had seized upon as
+excuse he might wind up the conversation by observing nonchalantly:
+
+"Oh, I say, have you chaps toddled round to my new rooms yet? Rather
+decent. I'm quite keen on them. I've got a dining-room now. Devilish
+convenient. Thought of asking old Wedders to lay in a stock of pictures.
+It would buck him up rather."
+
+"But why do you want these barracks?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, binges," said Lonsdale. "We ought to be able to run some pretty
+useful binges here. Besides, I'm thinking of learning the bagpipes."
+
+Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room
+in St. Cuthbert's tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous
+Templeton-Collins on Michael's staircase, and had brought back with him
+from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and
+the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael
+alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him. He
+had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their
+participation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for
+himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the
+Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect
+they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative
+purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for himself
+alone. How intimate and personal that sparse lunch laid for one on a
+large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset bookcase
+and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his pleasure! There
+was not now indeed a single book that did not recall the charmed
+idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there one volume that
+could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments eagerly expected
+all the day long.
+
+It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to
+gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds had
+proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the more
+worshipful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the
+miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to
+acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they
+generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their
+material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in
+some dead publishing season more extravagant buyers had spent four or
+five times as much to partake of their accumulated facts and fortuitous
+illustrations. With Michael the passion for remainders was short-lived,
+and he soon pushed them ignobly out of the way for the sake of those
+stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest
+flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to mercantile
+elation and depression.
+
+If among these ambassadors of learning and literature was to be
+distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had been
+extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the
+seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though
+enriched by the classic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the
+eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may
+have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a
+Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the
+universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was
+the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their
+euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every night
+for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a world of
+polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual maladies and
+minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of talismans, to
+fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and strange
+influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so perilously that
+under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half contemptuous of thought
+less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the present danced by in
+thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather perceived as bloodless and
+irresolute ephemerides. When people reproached him for his willful
+prejudice, he pointed out how easy it would always be to overtake the
+ideas of the present and how much waste of intellectual breath would be
+avoided by letting his three or four Oxford years account for the most
+immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed to him to provide an opportunity,
+and more than an opportunity--an inexpugnable command to wave with most
+reluctant hands farewell to the backward of time, around whose brink
+rose up more truthful dreams than those that floated indeterminate,
+beckoning through the mist across the wan mountains of the future.
+
+On the walls Michael's pictures had been collected to achieve through
+another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her
+lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams behind;
+and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he sought in a
+picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room. One hour of
+the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always transform the
+pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some diagrammatic significance.
+Apart from the accumulation of books and pictures, he had changed the
+room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers, chairs and tables, all
+preserved the character of the room itself as something that existed
+outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient inhabitants who read and
+laughed and ate and talked for so comparatively fleeting a space of time
+between its four walls. With all that he had imposed of what in the
+opinion of his contemporaries were eccentricities of adornment, the
+rooms remained, as he would observe to any critic, essentially the same
+as his own. Instead of college groups which marked merely by the height
+of the individual's waistcoat-opening the almost intolerable fugacity of
+their record, there were Leonardo and Blake and Frederick Walker to
+preserve the illusion of permanence, or at least of continuity. Instead
+of the bleached and desiccated ribs of momentarily current magazines
+cast away in sepulchral indignity, there were a hundred quartos whose
+calf bindings had the durableness and sober depth of walnut furniture,
+furniture, moreover, that was still in use.
+
+Yet it was in Venner's office where Michael found the perfect fruit of
+time's infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of
+the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his own
+rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present of
+finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of those
+moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through
+situations or persons or places, the assurance of immortality. Great
+pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always
+remain as the most obvious pledge of man's spiritual potentiality, but
+these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress
+themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke
+of seeing God's forehead pressed against the window panes, could believe
+that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had struggled in
+the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable. To him Blake
+seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to attempt the
+recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith. Every other
+writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur. Most people,
+seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would obtain the
+finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight of St.
+Mary's tower against a green April afterglow, or of the moon-parched
+High Street in frost. Michael, however, found in Venner's office, just
+as he had found in that old print of St. Mary's tower rather than in the
+tower itself, the innermost shrine of Oxford, the profoundest revelation
+of the shining truth round which the mysterious material of Oxford had
+grown through the Middle Ages.
+
+Michael with others of his year had during the summer term ventured
+several times into Venner's, but the entrance of even a comparatively
+obscure senior had always driven them out. They had not yet enjoyed the
+atmosphere of security without which a club unlike an orchard never
+tastes sweet. Now, with the presence of a new year's freshmen and with
+the lordship of the college in their own hands, since to the
+out-of-college men age with merciless finger seemed already to be
+beckoning, Michael and his contemporaries in their pride of prime
+marched into Venner's after hall and drank their coffee.
+
+Venner's office was one of the small ground-floor rooms in Cloisters,
+but it had long ago been converted to the present use. An inner
+storeroom, to which Venner always retired to make a cup of squash or to
+open a bottle of whisky, had once been the bedroom. The office itself
+was not luxuriously furnished, and the accommodation was small. A
+window-seat with a view of the college kitchens, a square table, and a
+couple of Windsor chairs were considered enough for the men who
+frequented Venner's every night after hall, and who on Sunday nights
+after wine in J.C.R. clustered there like a swarm of bees. Venner's own
+high chair stood far back in the corner behind his high sloping desk on
+which, always spread open, lay the great ledger of J.C.R. accounts. On
+the shelves above were the account books of bygone years in which were
+indelibly recorded the extravagances of more than thirty years of St.
+Mary's men. Over the fireplace was a gilt mirror of Victorian design
+stuck round with the fixture cards of the university and the college,
+with notices of grinds and musical clubs and debating societies; in
+fact, with all the printed petty news of Oxford. A few photographs of
+winning crews, a book-case with stores of college stationery, a
+Chippendale sideboard with a glass case of priced cigars on top, and an
+interesting drawerful of Venner's relics above the varnished wainscot
+completed the furniture. The wall-paper was of that indefinite brownish
+yellow which one finds in the rooms of old-fashioned solicitors, and of
+that curious oily texture which seems to produce an impression of great
+age and at the same time of perfect modernity.
+
+Yet the office itself, haunted though it was by the accumulated
+personalities of every generation at St. Mary's, would scarcely have
+possessed the magical effect of fusion which it did possess, had not all
+these personalities endured in a perpetual present through the
+conservative force of Venner himself. John Venables had been Steward of
+the Junior Common Room for thirty-three years, but he seemed to all
+these young men that came within the fragrancy of his charm to be as
+much an intrinsic part of the college as the tower itself. The
+moon-faced Warden, the dry-voiced dons, the deer park, the elms, the
+ancient doors and traceries, the lawns and narrow entries, the groinings
+and the lattices, were all subordinate in the estimation of the
+undergraduates to Venner. He knew the inner history of every rag; he
+realized why each man was popular or unpopular or merely ignored; he was
+a treasure-house of wise counsel and kindly advice; he held the keys of
+every heart. He was an old man with florid, clean-shaven face, a pair of
+benignant eyes intensely blue, a rounded nose, a gentle voice and most
+inimitable laugh. Something there was in him of the old family butler, a
+little more of the yeoman-farmer, a trace of the head game-keeper, a
+suspicion of the trainer of horses, but all these elements were blended
+to produce the effect of someone wise and saintly and simple who could
+trouble himself to heal the lightest wounds and could rouse with a look
+or a gesture undying affection.
+
+With such a tutelary spirit, it was not surprising the freedom of
+Venner's should have been esteemed a privilege that could only be
+conferred by the user's consciousness of his own right. There was no
+formal election to Venner's: there simply happened a moment when the St.
+Mary's man entered unembarrassed that mellow office and basked in that
+sunny effluence. In this ripe old room, generous and dry as sherry wine,
+how pleasant it was to sit and listen to Venner's ripe old stories: how
+amazingly important seemed the trivial gossip of the college in this
+historic atmosphere: how much time was apparently wasted here between
+eight and ten at night, and what a thrill it always was to come into
+college about half-past nine of a murky evening and stroll round
+Cloisters to see if there was anybody in Venner's. It could after all
+scarcely be accounted a waste of time to sit and slowly mature in
+Venner's, and sometimes about half-past nine the old man would be alone,
+the fire would be dying down and during the half-hour that remained of
+his duty, it would be possible to peel a large apple very slowly and
+extract from him more of the essence of social history than could be
+gained from a term's reading of great historians even with all the extra
+lucidity imparted by a course of Mr. So-and-So's lectures.
+
+Michael found that Venner summed up clearly for him all his own
+tentative essays to grasp the meaning of life. He perceived in him the
+finest reaction to the prejudice and nobility, the efficiency and folly
+of aristocratic thought. He found in him the ideal realization of his
+own most cherished opinions. England, and all that was most inexplicable
+in the spirit of England, was expressed by Venner. He was a landscape, a
+piece of architecture, a simple poem of England. One of Venner's
+applauded tricks was to attach a piece of string to the tongs for a
+listener to hold to his ears, while Venner struck the tongs with the
+poker and evoked the sound of St. Mary's chimes. But the poker and tongs
+were unnecessary, for in Venner's own voice was the sound of all the
+bells in England. Communion with this gracious, this tranquil, this
+mellow presence affected Michael with a sense of the calm certainty of
+his own life. It lulled all the discontent and all the unrest. It
+indicated for the remainder of his Oxford time a path which, if it did
+not lead to any outburst of existence, was at least a straight path,
+green bordered and gay with birdsong, with here and there a sight of
+ancient towers and faiths, and here and there an arbor in which he and
+his friends could sit and talk of their hopes.
+
+"Venner," said Lonsdale one evening, "do you remember the Bishop of
+Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him
+in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac."
+
+"Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow," Venner began, full of
+reminiscence. "But we'll look him up."
+
+Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive
+evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were
+photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed for
+the criticism of his irreverent successors.
+
+"There you are," chuckled Venner triumphantly. "What did I say? One
+dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for
+there's another half dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men
+are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college
+as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop--Stebbing he was then. He
+put a cod-fish in the Dean's bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about it!
+The old Warden kicked up such a fuss."
+
+And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided
+from anecdote to anecdote of episcopal youth.
+
+"I thought the old boy liked the governor's port," laughed Lonsdale.
+"'What a pity everybody can't drink in moderation,' said Gaiters. Next
+time he cocks his wicked old eye at me, I shall ask him about that
+cod-fish."
+
+"What's this they tell me about your bringing out a magazine?" Venner
+inquired, turning to Maurice Avery.
+
+"Out next week, Venner," Maurice announced importantly.
+
+"Why, whatever do you find to write about?" asked Venner. "But I suppose
+it's amusing. I've often been asked to write my own life. What an idea!
+As if I had any time. I'm glad enough to go to bed when I get home,
+though I always smoke a pipe first. We had two men here once who brought
+out a paper. Chalfont and Weymouth. I used to have some copies of it
+somewhere. They put in a lot of skits of the college dons. The Warden
+was quite annoyed. 'Most scurrilous, Venables,' he said to me, I
+remember. 'Most scurrilous.'" Venner chuckled at the remembrance of the
+Warden's indignation.
+
+"This is going to be a very serious affair, Venner," explained somebody.
+"It's going to put the world quite straight again."
+
+"Ho-ho, I suppose you're one of these Radicals," said Venner to the
+editor. "Dear me, how anyone can be a Radical I can't understand. I've
+always been a Conservative. We had a Socialist come up here to lecture
+once in a man's rooms--a great Radical this man was--Sir Hugh Gaston--a
+baronet--there's a funny thing, fancy a Radical baronet. Well, the men
+got to hear of this Socialist coming up and what do you think they did?"
+Venner chuckled in anticipatory relish. "Why, they cropped his hair down
+to nothing. Sir Hugh Gaston was quite upset about it, and when he made a
+fuss, they cut his hair too, though it was quite short already. There
+was a terrible rowdy set up then. The men are very much quieter
+nowadays."
+
+The door opened as Venables finished his story, and Smithers came in to
+order rather nervously a tin of biscuits. The familiar frequenters of
+Venner's eyed in cold silence his entrance, his blushful wait and his
+hurried exit.
+
+"That's a scholar called Smithers," Venner explained. "He's a very quiet
+man. I don't suppose any of you know him even by sight."
+
+"We ragged him last term," said Michael, smiling at his friends.
+
+"He's a bounder," declared Avery obstinately.
+
+"He hasn't much money," said Venner. "But he's a very nice fellow. You
+oughtn't to rag him. He's very harmless. Never speaks to anybody. He'll
+get a first, I expect, but there, you don't think anything of that, I
+know. But the dons do. The Warden often has him to dinner. I shouldn't
+rag him any more. He's a very sensitive fellow. His father's a
+carpenter. What a wonderful thing he should have a son come up to St.
+Mary's."
+
+The rebuke was so gently administered that only the momentary silence
+betrayed its efficacy.
+
+One day Michael brought Alan to be introduced to Venables, and it was a
+pleasure to see how immediately the old man appreciated Alan.
+
+"Why ever didn't you come to St. Mary's?" asked Venner. "Just the place
+for you. Don't you find Christ Church a bit large? But they've got some
+very good land. I've often done a bit of shooting over the Christ Church
+farms. The Bursar knows me well. 'Pleased to see you, Mr. Venables, and
+I hope you'll have good sport.' That's what he said to me last time I
+saw him. Oh, he's a very nice man! Do they still make meringues at your
+place? I don't suppose you ever heard the story of the St. Mary's men
+who broke into Christ Church. It caused quite a stir at the time. Well,
+some of our men were very tipsy one night at the Bullingdon wine, and
+one of them left his handkerchief in the rooms of a Christ Church man,
+and what do you think they did? Why, when they got back to college, this
+man said he wasn't going to bed without his handkerchief. Did you ever
+hear of such a thing? So they all climbed out of St. Mary's at about two
+in the morning and actually climbed into Christ Church. At least they
+thought it was Christ Church, but it was really Pembroke. Do you know
+Pembroke? I don't suppose you've even been there. Our men always cheer
+Pembroke in the Eights--Pemmy, as they call it--because their barge is
+next to us. But fancy breaking in there at night to look for a
+handkerchief. They woke up every man in the college, and there was a
+regular set-to in the quad, and the night porter at Pembroke got a most
+terrible black eye. The President of the J.C.R. had to send an apology,
+and it was all put right, but this man who lost his handkerchief,
+Wilberforce his name was, became a regular nuisance, because for ever
+afterward, whenever he got drunk, he used to go looking for this old
+handkerchief. There you see, that's what comes of going to the
+Bullingdon wine. Are you a member of the Bullingdon?"
+
+"He's a cricketer, Venner," Michael explained.
+
+"So was this fellow Wilberforce who lost his handkerchief, and what do
+you think? One day when we were playing Winchester--you're not a
+Wykehamist, are you?--he came out to bat so drunk that the first ball he
+hit, he went and ran after it himself. It caused quite a scandal. But
+you don't look one of that sort. Will you have a squash and a biscuit?
+The men like these biscuits very much. There's been quite a run on
+them."
+
+Michael was anxious to know how deep an impression Venner had made on
+Alan.
+
+"You've got nobody like him at the House?" he asked.
+
+Alan was bound to admit there was indeed nobody.
+
+"He's an extraordinary chap," said Michael. "He's always different, and
+yet he's always absolutely the same. For me he represents Oxford. When
+one's in his company, one feels one's with him for ever, and yet one
+knows that people who have gone down can feel just the same, and that
+people who haven't yet come up will feel just the same. You know, I do
+really think that what it sets out to do St. Mary's does better than any
+other college. And the reason of that is Venner's. It's the only
+successful democracy in the world."
+
+"I shouldn't have called it a democracy," said Alan. "Everybody doesn't
+go there."
+
+"But everybody can go there. It depends entirely on themselves."
+
+"What about that fellow Smithers you were talking about?" Alan asked.
+"He seems barred."
+
+"But he won't be," Michael urged hopefully.
+
+"He'd be happier at the House all the same," Alan said. "He'd find his
+own set there."
+
+"But so he can at St. Mary's."
+
+"Then it isn't a democracy," Alan stoutly maintained.
+
+"I say, Alan," exclaimed Michael, in surprise. "You're getting quite a
+logician."
+
+"Well, you always persist in treating me like an idiot," said Alan. "But
+I _am_ reading Honor Mods. It's a swat, but I've got to get some sort of
+a class."
+
+"You'll probably get a first," said Michael.
+
+Yet how curious it was to think of Alan, whom he still regarded as
+chiefly a good-looking and capable athlete, taking a first class in a
+school he himself had indolently passed over. Of course he would never
+take a first. He was too much occupied with the perfection of new
+leg-breaks. And what would he do after his degree, his third in greats?
+A third was the utmost Michael mentally allowed him in the Final
+Schools.
+
+"I suppose you'll ultimately try for the Indian Civil?" Michael asked.
+"Do you remember when we used to lie awake talking in bed at Carlington
+Road? It was always going to be me who did everything intellectual; you
+were always the sportsman."
+
+"I am still. Michael, I think I've got a chance of my blue this year. If
+I can keep that leg-break," he added fervidly. "There's no slow
+right-hander of much class in the Varsity. I worked like a navvy at that
+leg-break last vac."
+
+"I thought you were grinding for Mods," Michael reminded him, with a
+smile.
+
+"I worked like a navvy at Mods," said Alan.
+
+"You'll be a proconsul, I really believe." Michael looked admiringly at
+his friend. "And do you know, Alan, in appearance you're turning into a
+regular viking."
+
+"I meant to have my hair cut yesterday," said Alan, in grave and
+reflective self-reproof.
+
+"It's not your hair," cried Michael. "It's your whole personality. I
+never appreciated you until this moment."
+
+"I think you talk more rot nowadays than you used to talk even," said
+Alan. "So long, I must go back and work."
+
+The tall figure with the dull gold hair curling out from the green cap
+of Harris tweed faded away in the November fog that was traveling in
+swift and smoky undulations through the Oxford streets. What a strangely
+attractive walk Alan had always had, and now it had gained something of
+determination, whether from leg-breaks or logic Michael did not know.
+But the result was a truer grace in the poise of his neck; a longer and
+more supple swing from his tapering flanks.
+
+Michael went on up the High and stood for a moment, watching the
+confusion caused by the fog at Carfax, listening to the fretful tinkles
+of the numerous bicycles and the jangling of the trams and the shouts of
+the paper-boys. Then he walked down Cornmarket Street past the shops
+splashing through the humid coils of vapor their lights upon the
+townspeople, loiterers and purchasers who thronged the pavements.
+Undergraduates strolled along, linked arm in arm and perpetually
+staring. How faithfully each group resembled its forerunners and
+successors. All had the same fresh complexions, the same ample green
+coats of Harris tweed, the same gray flannel trousers. Only in the
+casual acknowledgments of his greeting when he recognized acquaintances
+was there the least variation, since some would nod or toss their heads,
+others would shudder with their chins, and a few would raise their arms
+in a fanlike gesture of social benediction. Michael turned round into
+the Broad where the fog made mysterious even the tea-tray gothic of
+Balliol, and Trinity with its municipal ampelopsis. A spectral cabman
+saluted him interrogatively from the murk. A fox-terrier went yapping
+down the street at the heels of a don's wife hurrying back to Banbury
+Road. A belated paper-boy yelled, "Varsity and Blackheath Result,"
+hastening toward a more profitable traffic. The fog grew denser every
+minute, and Michael turned round into Turl Street past many-windowed
+Exeter and the monastic silence of Lincoln. There was time to turn aside
+and visit Lampard's bookshop. There was time to buy that Glossary of
+Ducange which he must have, and perhaps that red and golden Dictionary
+of Welby Pugin which he ought to have, and ultimately, as it turned out,
+there was time to buy half a dozen more great volumes whose connection
+with medi�val history was not too remote to give an excuse to Michael,
+if excuse were needed, for their purchase. Seven o'clock chimed
+suddenly, and Michael hurried to college, snatched a black coat and a
+gown out of Venner's and just avoided the sconce for being more than a
+quarter of an hour late for hall.
+
+Michael was glad he had not missed hall that night. In Lampard's
+alluring case of treasures he had been tempted to linger on until too
+late, and then to take with him two or three new books and in their
+entertainment to eat a solitary and meditative dinner at Buol's. But it
+would have been a pity to have missed hall when the electric light
+failed abruptly and when everybody had just helped themselves to baked
+potatoes. It would have been sad not to have seen the Scholars' table so
+splendidly wrecked or heard the volleys of laughter resounding through
+the darkness.
+
+"By gad," said Lonsdale, when the light was restored and the second year
+leaned over their table in triumphant exhaustion. "Did you see that bad
+man Carben combing the potatoes out of his hair with a fork? I say,
+Porcher," he said to his old scout who was waiting at the table, "do
+bring us some baked potatoes."
+
+"Isn't there none left?" inquired Porcher. "Mr. Lonsdale, sir, you'd
+better keep a bit quiet. The Sub-Warden's looking very savage--very
+savage indeed."
+
+At this moment Maurice Avery came hurrying in to dinner.
+
+"Oh, sconce him!" shouted everybody. "It's nearly five-and-twenty past."
+
+"Couldn't help it," said Maurice very importantly. "Just been seeing the
+first number of the O.L.G. through the press."
+
+"By gad," said Lonsdale. "It's a way we have in the Buffs and the Forty
+Two'th. Look here, have we all got to buy this rotten paper of yours?
+What's it going to cost?"
+
+"A shilling," said Maurice modestly.
+
+"A bob!" cried Lonsdale. "But, my dear old ink-slinger, I can buy the
+five-o'clock Star for a half-penny."
+
+Maurice had to put up with a good deal of chaff from everybody that
+night.
+
+"Let's have the program," Sinclair suggested.
+
+The editor was so much elated at the prospect of to-morrow's great event
+that he rashly produced from his pocket the contents bill, which
+Lonsdale seized and immediately began to read out:
+
+    "THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS.
+    No. I.
+    _"Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
+
+"What are you reflecting on, Mossy?"
+
+"Oh, politics," said Maurice lightly, "and other things."
+
+"My god, he'll be Prime Minister next week," said Cuffe.
+
+    _"Socrates at Balliol. By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+"And just about where he ought to have been," commented Lonsdale. "Oh,
+listen to this! Whoo-oop!
+
+    _"The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
+
+"But wait a minute, who do you think it's by? C. St. C. Wedderburn!
+Jolly old Wedders! The Failure of the Modern Illustrator. Wedders! My
+god, I shall cat with laughing. Wedders! A bee-luddy author."
+
+"Sconce Mr. Lonsdale, please," said Wedderburn, turning gravely to the
+recorder by his chair.
+
+"What, half a crown for not really saying bloody?" Lonsdale protested.
+
+That night after hall there was much to tell Venner of the successful
+bombardment with potatoes, and there was some chaff for Avery and
+Wedderburn in regard to their forthcoming magazine. Parties of
+out-of-college men came in after their dinner, and at half-past eight
+o'clock the little office was fuller than usual, with the college gossip
+being carried on in a helter-skelter of unceasing babble. Just when
+Fitzroy the Varsity bow was enunciating the glories of Wet Bobbery and
+the comparative obscurities of Dry Bobbery and just when all the Dry
+Bobs present were bowling the contrary arguments at him from every
+corner at once, the door opened and a freshman, as fair and floridly
+handsome as a young Bacchus, walked with curious tiptoe steps into the
+very heart of the assembly.
+
+Fitzroy stopped short in his discourse and thrummed impatiently with
+clenched fists upon his inflated chest, as gorillas do. The rest of the
+company eyed the entrance of the newcomer in puzzled, faintly hostile
+silence.
+
+"Oh, Venner," said the intruder, in loftiest self-confidence and
+unabashed clarity of accent. "I haven't had those cigars yet."
+
+He hadn't had his cigars yet! Confound his impudence, and what right had
+he to buy cigars, and what infernal assurance had led him to suppose he
+might stroll into Venner's in the third raw week of his uncuffed
+fresherdom? Who was he? What was he? Unvoiced, these questions quivered
+in the wrathful silence.
+
+"The boy was told to take them up, sir," said Venner. Something in
+Venner's manner toward this newcomer indicated to the familiars that he
+might have deprecated this deliberate entrance armored in
+self-satisfaction. Something there was in Venner's assumption of
+impersonal civility which told the familiars that Venner himself
+recognized and sympathized with their as yet unspoken horror of
+tradition's breach.
+
+"I rather want them to-night," said the newcomer, and then he surveyed
+slowly his seniors and even nodded to one or two of them whom presumably
+he had known at school. "So if the boy hasn't taken them up," he
+continued, "you might send up another box. Thanks very much."
+
+He seemed to debate for a moment with himself whether he should stay,
+but finally decided to go. As he reached the door, he said that, by
+Jove, his cigarette had gone out, and "You've got a light," he added to
+Lonsdale, who was standing nearest to him. "Thanks very much." The door
+of Venner's slammed behind his imperturbableness, and a sigh of pent-up
+stupefaction was let loose.
+
+"Who's your young friend, Lonny?" cried one.
+
+"He thought Lonny was the Common Room boy," cried another.
+
+"Venner, give the cigars to Mr. Lonsdale to take up," shouted a third.
+
+"He's very daring for a freshman," said Venner. "Very daring. I thought
+he was a fourth year Scholar whom I'd never seen, when he first came in
+the other day. Most of the freshmen are very timid at first. They think
+the senior men don't like their coming in too soon. And perhaps it's
+better for them to order what they want when I'm by myself. I can talk
+to them more easily that way. With all the men wanting their coffee and
+whiskies, I really can't attend to orders so well just after hall."
+
+"Who is he, Venner?" demanded half a dozen indignant voices.
+
+"Mr. Appleby. The Honorable George Appleby. But you ought to know him.
+He's an Etonian."
+
+Several Etonians admitted they knew him, and the Wykehamists present
+seized the occasion to point out the impossibility of such manners
+belonging to any other school.
+
+"He's a friend of yours, then?" said Venner to Lonsdale.
+
+"Good lord, no, Venner!" declared Lonsdale.
+
+"He seemed on very familiar terms with you," Venner chuckled wickedly.
+
+Lonsdale thought very hard for two long exasperated moments and then
+announced with conviction that Appleby must be ragged, severely ragged
+this very night.
+
+"Now don't go making a great noise," Venner advised. "The dons don't
+like it, and the Dean won't be in a very good temper after that
+potato-throwing in hall."
+
+"He must be ragged, Venner," persisted Lonsdale inexorably. "There need
+be no noise, but I'm hanged if I'm going to have my cigarette taken out
+of my hand and used by a damned fresher. Who's coming with me to rag
+this man Appleby?"
+
+The third-year men seemed to think the correction beneath their dignity,
+and the duty devolved naturally upon the second-year men.
+
+"I can't come," said Avery. "The O.L.G.'s coming out to-morrow."
+
+"Look here, Mossy, if you say another word about your rotten paper, I
+won't buy a copy," Lonsdale vowed.
+
+Michael offered to go with Lonsdale and at any rate assist as a
+spectator. He was anxious to compare the behavior of Smithers with the
+behavior of Appleby in like circumstances. Grainger offered to come if
+Lonny would promise to fight sixteen rounds without gloves, and in the
+end he, with Lonsdale, Michael, Cuffe, Sinclair, and three or four
+others, marched up to Appleby's rooms.
+
+Lonsdale knocked upon the door, and as he opened it assumed what he
+probably supposed to be an expression of ferocity, though he was told
+afterward he had merely looked rather more funny than usual.
+
+"Oh, hullo, Lonsdale," said Appleby, as the party entered. "Come in and
+have a smoke. How's your governor?"
+
+Lonsdale seemed to choke for breath a moment, and then sat down in a
+chair so deep that for the person once plunged into its recesses an
+offensive movement must have been extremely difficult.
+
+"Come in, you chaps," Appleby pursued in hospitable serenity. "I don't
+know any of your names, but take pews, take pews. Venner hasn't sent up
+the cigars I ordered."
+
+"We know," interrupted Lonsdale severely.
+
+"But I've some pretty decent weeds here," continued Appleby, without a
+tremor of embarrassment. "Who's for whisky?"
+
+"Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you've got
+to understand is that...."
+
+Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale.
+
+"Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?"
+
+"What you require, young Appleby," began Lonsdale.
+
+"You've got it right this time," said Appleby encouragingly.
+
+"What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down."
+
+"Oh, really?" said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest.
+
+"Yes," answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative
+that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably
+unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for
+their more eloquent support.
+
+"Tell him he mustn't come into Venner's and put on all that side. It's
+not done. He's a fresher," gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that
+absorbing chair.
+
+"All right," agreed Appleby cheerfully. "I'll send the order up to you
+next time."
+
+Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could
+never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby's whisky and
+smoking one of Appleby's cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his
+resentment to flame, and he sprang up.
+
+"We ought to debag him!" he cried.
+
+Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the
+divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense
+hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to
+be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on
+a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was
+watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them
+to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.
+
+"Hopeless," sighed Lonsdale. "The man's a hopeless ass."
+
+"I think he had the laugh, though," said Michael.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS
+
+
+Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary's with that scrupulousness of
+outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a
+discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning
+after the attempted adjustment of Appleby's behavior, a raw and vaporous
+November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o'clock ran collarless,
+unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head
+stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal
+appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name fairly entered
+in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started back on the
+taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of his toilet.
+Crossing the gravel space between Cloisters and Cuther's worldly quad,
+he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one minute past
+eight o'clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.
+
+"What on earth.... Are you going to London?" he gasped.
+
+"Rather not. I'm going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G."
+
+Michael shook his head, sighed compassionately, and passed on. Twenty
+minutes later in Common Room he was contemplating distastefully the
+kedgeree which with a more hopeful appetite he had ordered on the
+evening before, when Maurice planked down beside his place the first
+number of The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+"There's a misprint on page thirty-seven, line six. It ought to be 'yet'
+not 'but.' Otherwise I think it's a success. Do you mind reading my
+slashing attack on the policy of the Oxford theater? Or perhaps you'd
+better begin at the beginning and go right through the whole paper and
+give me your absolutely frank opinion of it as a whole. Just tell me
+candidly if you think my Reflections are too individual. I want the
+effect to be more----"
+
+"Maurice," Michael interrupted, "do you like kedgeree?"
+
+"Yes, very much," Maurice answered absently. Then he plunged on again.
+"Also don't forget to tell me if you think that Guy's skit is too
+clever. And if you find any misprints I haven't noticed, mark them down.
+We can't alter them now, of course, but I'll speak to the compositor
+myself. You like the color? I wonder whether it wouldn't have been
+better to have had dark blue after all. Still----"
+
+"Well, if you like kedgeree," Michael interrupted again, "do you like it
+as much in the morning as you thought you were going to like it the
+night before?"
+
+"Oh, how the dickens do I know?" exclaimed Maurice fretfully.
+
+"Well, will you just eat my breakfast and let me know if you think I
+ought to have ordered eggs and bacon last night?"
+
+"Aren't you keen on the success of this paper?" Maurice demanded.
+
+"I'll tell you later on," Michael offered. "We'll lunch together quietly
+in my rooms, and the little mulled claret we shall drink to keep out
+this filthy fog will also enormously conduce to the amiableness of my
+judgment."
+
+"And you won't come out with me and Nigel Stewart to watch people
+buying copies on their way to leckers?" Maurice suggested in a tone of
+disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in
+time to prevent Michael's heart from being softened. The newcomer was at
+once invited to remove the editor.
+
+"Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?" Maurice demanded,
+unabashed.
+
+"Look here, Moss Avery," said Lonsdale seriously, "if you promise to
+spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing
+syrup, I'll ..."
+
+But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and
+left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind Lonsdale
+of last night's encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass that lay beside his plate.
+
+It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and
+perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously hatched,
+and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there among the
+articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into the fold
+by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the image of
+Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on the
+variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that Academic
+Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist should be
+praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that without question
+was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not sure. It was a
+promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael played with the
+idea of elaborating his conception in an article for this very
+Looking-Glass which she invisibly supported. The Oxford Looking-Glass
+might serve her like the �gis of Pallas Athene, an �gis that would
+freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the twentieth
+century. Michael began to feel that his classical analogies were
+enmeshing the original idea, involving it already in complexities too
+manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking dreams at
+the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the Academic
+Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols of
+Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the
+dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don's mind,
+the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring
+destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age
+and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by
+its harvest of youth, of sobriety sun-kindled to a radiancy of silver
+joy, of wisdom, peace, and shelter, and Attic glories.
+
+Michael became so nearly stifled by the net of his fancies that he
+almost rose from the table then and there, ambitious to take pen in hand
+and test the power of its sharpness to cut him free. He clearly saw the
+gray-eyed goddess as the personification of the spirit of the
+university: but suddenly all the impulse faded out in self-depreciation.
+Guy Hazlewood would solve the problem with his pranked-out allusiveness,
+would trace more featly the attributes of the Academic Muse and
+establish more convincingly her descent from Apollo or her identity with
+Athene. At least, however, he could offer the idea and if Guy made
+anything of it, the second number of The Oxford Looking-Glass would hold
+more of Michael Fane than the ten pounds he had laid on the table of its
+exchequer. Inspired by the zest of his own fancy, he read on
+deliberately.
+
+    _Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
+
+The editor had really succeeded in reflecting accurately the passing
+glance of Oxford, although perhaps the tortuous gilt of the frame with
+which he had tried to impart style to his mirror was more personal to
+Maurice Avery than general to the university. Moreover, his glass would
+certainly never have stood a steady and protracted gaze. Still with all
+their faults these paragraphic reflections did show forth admirably the
+wit and unmatured cynicism of the various Junior Common Rooms, did
+signally flash with all the illusion of an important message, did
+suggest a potentiality for durable criticism.
+
+    _Socrates at Balliol._ _By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+There was enough of Guy in his article to endear it to Michael, and
+there was so much of Oxford in Guy that whatever he wrote spontaneously
+would always enrich the magazine with that adventurous gaiety and
+childlike intolerance of Athene's favorites.
+
+    _The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
+    _By C. St. C. Wedderburn._
+
+Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have
+expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.
+
+"Let us turn now to the illustrators of the sixties and seventies, and
+we shall see...." Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey
+himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became
+pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so
+much sententiousness.
+
+    _Quo Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._
+
+Nigel's plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the
+decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance,
+was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical
+expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would greatly
+serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its presence in The
+Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest magazine was not
+going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any other had endowed
+Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her poets lacked. Michael
+himself had since he came up let the practice of religion slide, but his
+first fervors had not burned themselves out so utterly as to make him
+despise the warmth they once had kindled. His inclination in any
+argument was always toward the Catholic point of view, and though he
+himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic speech and agnostic
+thought, he was always a little impatient of a skeptical non-age and
+very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had never been tried by
+the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart's challenge with its
+plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would be effective save
+for the personality of the writer, who revealed his formal grace
+notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and the tassels of
+his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of its verbal
+cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in reading it
+that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost cause.
+
+Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart's article, Michael managed to finish
+his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common Room,
+Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which he had
+fortified his place at table.
+
+"Have you been reading that thing of Mossy's?" he asked incredulously.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Isn't it most awful rot?"
+
+"Some of it," Michael assured him.
+
+"I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy," sighed Lonsdale. "I
+suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into supporting
+it. By Jove, I'll write and tell the governor to buy a copy. I want him
+to raise my allowance this year, and he'll think I'm beginning to take
+an interest in what he calls 'affairs.'"
+
+Michael turned into Venner's before going back to his own rooms.
+
+"Hullo, is that the paper?" asked Venner. "Dear me, this looks very
+learned. You should tell him to put some more about sport into it--our
+fellows are all so dreadfully wild about sport. They'd be sure to buy it
+then. Going to work this morning? That's right. I'm always advising the
+men to work in the morning. But bless you, they don't pay any attention
+to me. They only laugh and say, 'what's old Venner know about it?'"
+
+Michael, sitting snugly in the morning quiet of his room, leaned over to
+poke the fire into a blaze, eyed with satisfaction November's sodden
+mists against his window, and settled himself back in the deep chair to
+The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+    _Oxford Liberalism. By Vernon Townsend._
+    _A Restatement of Tory Ideals. By William Mowbray._
+
+These two articles Michael decided to take on trust. From their perusal
+he would only work himself up into a condition of irritated neutrality.
+Indeed, he felt inclined to take all the rest of the magazine on trust.
+The tranquillity of his own room was too seductive. Dreaming became a
+duty here. It was so delightful to count from where he sat the books on
+the shelves and to arrive each time at a different estimate of their
+number. It was so restful to stare up at Mona Lisa and traverse without
+fatigue that labyrinth of rocks and streams. His desk not yet deranged
+by work or correspondence possessed a monumental stability of neatness
+that was most soothing to contemplate. It had the restfulness of a
+well-composed landscape where every contour took the eye easily onward
+and where every tree grew just where it was needed for a moment's halt.
+The olive-green magazine dropped unregarded onto the floor, and there
+was no other book within reach. The dancing fire danced on. Far away
+sounded the cries of daily life. The chimes in St. Mary's tower struck
+without proclaiming any suggestion of time. How long these roll-call
+mornings were and how rapidly dream on dream piled its drowsy outline.
+Was there not somewhere at the other end of Oxford a lecture at eleven
+o'clock? This raw morning was not suitable for lectures out of college.
+Was not Maurice coming to lunch? How deliciously far off was the time
+for ordering lunch. He really must get out of the habit of sitting in
+this deep wicker-chair, until evening licensed such repose.
+
+Some people had foolishly attended a ten-o'clock lecture at St. John's.
+What a ludicrous idea! They had ridden miserably through the cold on
+their bicycles and with numb fingers were now trying to record scraps of
+generalization in a notebook that would inevitably be lost long before
+the Schools. At the same time it was rather lazy to lie back like this
+so early in the morning. Why was it so difficult to abandon the Sirenian
+creakings of this chair? He wanted another match for his second pipe,
+but even the need for that was not violent enough to break the luxurious
+catalepsy of his present condition.
+
+Then suddenly Maurice Avery and Nigel Stewart burst into the room, and
+Michael by a supreme effort plunged upward onto his legs to receive
+them.
+
+"My hat, what a frowst!" exclaimed Maurice, rushing to the window and
+letting in the mist and the noise of the High.
+
+"We're very hearty this morning," murmured Stewart. "I heard Mass at
+Barney's for the success of the O.L.G."
+
+"Nigel and I have walked down the High, rounded the Corn, and back along
+the Broad and the Turl," announced Maurice. "And how many copies do you
+think we saw bought by people we didn't know?"
+
+"None," guessed Michael maliciously.
+
+"Don't be an ass. Fifteen. Well, I've calculated that at least four
+times as many were being sold, while we were making our round. That's
+sixty, and it's not half-past ten yet. We ought to do another three
+hundred easily before lunch. In fact, roughly I calculate we shall do
+five hundred and twenty before to-night. Not bad. After two thousand we
+shall be making money."
+
+"Maurice bought twenty-two copies himself," said Stewart, laughing, and
+lest he should seem to be laughing at Maurice thrust an affectionate arm
+through his to reassure him.
+
+"Well, I wanted to encourage the boys who were selling them," Maurice
+explained.
+
+"They'll probably emigrate with the money they've made out of you,"
+predicted Michael. "And what on earth are you going to do with
+twenty-two copies? I find this one copy of mine extraordinarily in the
+way."
+
+"Oh, I shall send them to well-known literary people in town. In fact,
+I'm going to write round and get the best-known old Oxford men to give
+us contributions from time to time, without payment, of course. I expect
+they'll be rather pleased at being asked."
+
+"Don't you think it may turn their heads?" Michael anxiously suggested.
+"It would be dreadful to read of the sudden death of Quiller-Couch from
+apoplectic pride or to hear that Hilaire Belloc or Max Beerbohm had
+burst with exultation in his bath."
+
+"It's a pity you can't be funny in print," said Maurice severely. "You'd
+really be some use on the paper then."
+
+"But what we've really come round to say," interposed Stewart, "is that
+there's an O.L.G. dinner to-night at the Grid; and then afterward we're
+all going across to my digs opposite."
+
+"And what about lunch with me?"
+
+Both Maurice and Nigel excused themselves. Maurice intended to spend all
+day at the Union. Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with three
+hearty Trindogs of Trinity.
+
+"But when did you join the Union?" Michael asked the editor.
+
+"I thought it was policy," he explained. "After all, though we laugh at
+it here, most of the Varsity does belong. Besides, Townsend and Bill
+Mowbray were both keen. You see they think the O.L.G. is going to have
+an influence in Varsity politics. And, after all, I am editor."
+
+"You certainly are," Michael agreed. "Nothing quite so editorial was
+ever conceived by the overwrought brain of a disappointed female
+contributor."
+
+Michael always enjoyed dining at the Grid. Of all the Oxford clubs it
+seemed to him to display the most completely normal undergraduate
+existence. Vincent's, notwithstanding its acknowledged chieftaincy,
+depended ultimately too much on a mechanically apostolic succession. It
+was an institution to be admired without affection. It had every
+justification for calling itself The Club without any qualifying prefix,
+but it produced a type too highly specialized, and was too definitely
+Dark Blue and Leander Pink. In a way, too, it belonged as much to
+Cambridge, and although violently patriotic had merged its individuality
+in brawn. By its substitution of co-option for election, its Olympic
+might was now scarcely much more than the self-deification of Roman
+Emperors. Vincent's was the last stronghold of muscular supremacy. Yet
+it was dreadfully improbable, as Michael admitted to himself, that he
+would have declined the offer of membership.
+
+The O.U.D.S. was at the opposite pole from Vincent's, and if it did not
+offend by its reactionary encouragement of a supreme but discredited
+spirit, it offended even more by fostering a premature worldliness. For
+an Oxford club to take in The Stage and The Era was merely an exotic
+heresy. On the walls of its very ugly room the pictures of actors that
+in Garrick Street would have possessed a romantic dignity produced an
+effect of strain, a proclamation of mounte-bank-worship that differed
+only in degree from the photographs of actresses on the mantelpiece of a
+second-rate room in a second-rate college. The frequenters of the
+O.U.D.S. were always very definitely Oxford undergraduates, but they
+lacked the serenity of Oxford, and seemed already to have planted a foot
+in London. The big modern room over the big cheap shop was a restless
+place, and its pretentiousness and modernity were tinged with
+Thespianism. Scarcely ever did the Academic Muse enter the O.U.D.S.,
+Michael thought. She must greatly dislike Thespianism with all that it
+connoted of mildewed statuary in an English garden. Yet it would be
+possible to transmute the O.U.D.S., he dreamed. It had the advantage of
+a limited membership. It might easily become a grove where Apollo and
+Athene could converse without quarreling. Therefore, he could continue
+to frequent its halls.
+
+The Bullingdon was always delightful; the gray bowlers and the white
+trousers striped with vivid blue displayed its members, in their
+costume, at least, as unchanging types, but the archaism made it a club
+too conservative to register much more than an effect of peculiarity.
+The Bullingdon had too much money, and not enough unhampered humanity to
+achieve the universal. The Union, on the other hand, was too
+indiscriminate. Personality was here submerged in organization.
+Manchester or Birmingham could have produced a result very similar.
+
+The Grid, perhaps for the very fact that it was primarily a dining-club,
+was the abode of discreet good-fellowship. Its membership was very
+strictly limited, and might seem to have been confined to the seven or
+eight colleges that considered themselves the best colleges, but any man
+who deserved to be a member could in the end be sure of his election.
+The atmosphere was neither political nor sporting nor literary, nor
+financial, but it was very peculiarly and very intimately the elusive
+atmosphere of Oxford herself. The old rooms looking out on the
+converging High had recently been redecorated in a very crude shade of
+blue. Members were grumbling at the taste of the executive, but Michael
+thought the unabashed ugliness was in keeping with its character. It was
+as if unwillingly the club released its hold upon the externals of
+Victorianism. Such premises could afford to be anachronistic, since the
+frequenters were always so finely sensitive to fashion's lightest
+breath. Eccentricity was not tolerated at the Grid except in the case of
+the half-dozen chartered personalities who were necessary to set off the
+correctness of the majority. The elective committee probably never made
+a mistake, and when somebody like Nigel Stewart was admitted, it was
+scrupulously ascertained beforehand that his presence would evoke
+affectionate amusement rather than the chill surprise with which the
+Grid would have greeted the entrance of someone who, however superior to
+the dead level of undergraduate life, lacked yet the indefinable
+justification for his humors.
+
+Michael on the evening of the Looking-Glass dinner went up the narrow
+stairs of the club in an aroma of pleasant anticipation, which was not
+even momentarily dispersed by the sudden occurrence of the fact that he
+had forgotten to take his name off hall, and must therefore pay two
+shillings and fourpence to the college for a dinner he would not eat. In
+the Strangers' Room were waiting the typical guests of the typical
+members. Here and there nods were exchanged, but the general atmosphere
+was one of serious expectancy. In the distance the rattle of crockery
+told of dinners already in progress. Vernon Townsend came in soon after
+Michael, and as Townsend was a member, Michael lost that trifling
+malaise of waiting in a club's guest-room which the undergraduate might
+conceal more admirably than any other class of man, but nevertheless
+felt acutely.
+
+"Not here yet, I suppose," said Townsend.
+
+It was unnecessary to mention a name. Nigel Stewart's habits were
+proverbial.
+
+"Read my article?" asked Townsend.
+
+"Splendid," Michael murmured.
+
+"It's going to get me the Librarianship of the Union," Townsend
+earnestly assured Michael.
+
+Michael was about to congratulate the sanguine author without disclosing
+his ignorance of the article's inside, when Bill Mowbray rushed
+breathlessly into the room. Everybody observed his dramatic entrance,
+whereupon he turned round and rushed out again, pausing only for one
+moment to exclaim in the doorway:
+
+"Good god, that fool will never remember!"
+
+"See that?" asked Townsend darkly, as the Tory Democrat vanished.
+
+Michael admitted that he undoubtedly had.
+
+"Bill Mowbray has become a poseur," Townsend declared. "Or else he knows
+his ridiculous article on Toryism was too badly stashed by mine," he
+added.
+
+"We shan't see him again to-night," Michael prophesied.
+
+Townsend shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We shall, if he can make another effective entrance," he said a little
+bitterly.
+
+Maurice Avery and Wedderburn arrived together. The combination of having
+just been elected to the Grid and the birth of the new paper had given
+Maurice such an effervescence of good spirits as even he seldom boasted.
+Wedderburn in contrast seemed graver, supplying in company with Maurice
+a solidity to the pair of them that was undeniably beneficial to their
+joint impression. They were followed almost immediately by Guy
+Hazlewood, who with his long legs came sloping in as self-possessed as
+he always was. Perhaps his left eyelid drooped a little lower than it
+was accustomed, and perhaps the sidelong smile that gave him a
+superficial resemblance to Michael was drawn down to a sharper point of
+mockery, but whatever stored-up flashes of mood and fancy Guy had to
+deliver, he always drawled them out in the same half-tired voice
+emphasized by the same careless indolence of gesture. And so this
+evening he was the same Guy Hazlewood, sure of being with his clear-cut
+pallor and effortless distinction of bearing, the personality that
+everyone would first observe in whatever company he found himself.
+
+"Nigel not here, of course," he drawled. "Let's have a sweep on what
+he's been doing. Five bob all round. I say he's just discovered Milton
+to be a great poet and is now, reading Lycidas to a spellbound group of
+the very heartiest Trindogs in Trinity."
+
+"I think he saw The Perfect Flapper," said Maurice "and has been trying
+ever since to find out whether she were a don's daughter or a theatrical
+bird of passage."
+
+"I think he's forgotten all about it," pronounced Wedderburn very deeply
+indeed.
+
+"I hope he saw that ass Bill Mowbray tearing off in the opposite
+direction and went to fetch him back," said Townsend.
+
+"I think he's saying Vespers for the week before last," Michael proposed
+as his solution.
+
+Stewart himself came in at that moment, and in answer to an united
+demand to know the reason of his lateness embraced in that gentle and
+confiding air of his all the company, included them all as it were in an
+intimate aside, and with the voice and demeanor of a strayed archangel
+explained that the fearful velocity of a pill was responsible for his
+unpunctuality.
+
+"But you're quite all right now, Nigel?" inquired Guy. "You could almost
+send a testimonial?"
+
+"Oh, rather," murmured Nigel, with tender assurance lighting up his
+great, innocent eyes. "I expect, you know, dinner's ready." Then he
+plunged his arm through Guy's, and led the way toward the private
+dining-room he had actually not forgotten to command.
+
+Dinner, owing to Avery's determined steering of the conversation, was
+eaten to the accompaniment of undiluted shop. Never for a moment was any
+topic allowed to oust The Oxford Looking-Glass from discussion. Even Guy
+was powerless against the editor intoxicated by ambition's fulfillment.
+Maurice sat in triumphant headship with only Mowbray's vacant place to
+qualify very slightly the completeness of his satisfaction. He hoped
+they all liked his scheme of inviting well-known, even celebrated, old
+Oxford men to contribute from time to time. He flattered himself they
+would esteem the honor vouchsafed to them. He disclaimed the wish to
+monopolize the paper's criticism and nobly invited Townsend to put in
+their places a series of contemporary dramatists. He congratulated Guy
+upon his satiric article and assured him of his great gifts. He
+reproached Michael for having written nothing, and vowed that many of
+the books for which he had already sent a printed demand to their
+publishers must in the December issue be reviewed by Michael. He
+arranged with Nigel Stewart and Wedderburn at least a dozen prospective
+campaigns to harry advertisers into unwilling publicity.
+
+At nine-o'clock, the staff of The Oxford Looking-Glass, reflecting now a
+very roseate world, marched across the High to wind up the evening in
+Stewart's digs. On the threshold the host paused in sudden dismay.
+
+"Good lord, I quite forgot. There's a meeting of the De Rebus
+Ecclesiasticis in my digs to-night. They'll all be there; what shall I
+do?"
+
+"You can't possibly go," declared everybody.
+
+"Mrs. Arbour," Nigel called out, hurriedly dipping into the landlady's
+quarters. "Mrs. Arbour."
+
+Mrs. Arbour assured him comfortably of her existence as she emerged to
+confer with him in the passage.
+
+"There may be one or two men waiting in my rooms. Will you put out
+syphons and whisky and explain that I shan't be coming."
+
+"Any reason to give, sir?" asked Mrs. Arbour.
+
+The recalcitrant shook his seraphic head.
+
+"No, sir," said Mrs. Arbour cheerfully, "quite so. Just say you're not
+coming? Yes, sir. Oh, they'll make themselves at home without you, I'll
+be bound. It's not likely to be a very noisy party, is it, sir?"
+
+"Oh, no. It's the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, Mrs. Arbour."
+
+"I see, sir. Foreigners. I'll look after them."
+
+Nigel having disposed of the pious debaters, joined his friends again,
+and it was decided to adjourn to Guy's digs in Holywell. Arm in arm the
+six journalists marched down the misted High. Arm in arm they turned
+into Catherine Street, and arm in arm they walked into the Proctor
+outside the Ratcliffe Camera. To him they admitted their membership of
+the university. To him they proffered very politely their names and the
+names of their colleges, and with the same politeness agreed to visit
+him next morning. The Proctor raised his cap and with his escort faded
+into the fog. Arm in arm the six journalists continued their progress
+into Holywell. Guy had digs in an old house whose gabled front leaned
+outward, whose oriel windows were supported by oaken beams worm-eaten
+and grotesquely carved. Within, a wide balustraded staircase went
+billowing upward unevenly. Guy's room that he shared with two
+intellectual athletes from his own college was very large. It was
+paneled all round up to the ceiling, and it contained at least a dozen
+very comfortable armchairs. He had imposed upon his partners his own
+tastes and with that privilege had cut off electric light and gas, so
+that lit only by two Pompeian lamps, the room was very shadowy when they
+all came in.
+
+"Comeragh and Anstruther are working downstairs, I expect," Guy
+explained, as one by one, while his guests waited in the dim light, he
+made a great illumination with wax candles. Then he poked up the fire
+and set glasses ready for anyone's need. Great armchairs were pulled
+round in a semicircle: pipes were lit: the stillness and mystery of the
+Oxford night crept along the ancient street, a stillness which at
+regular intervals was broken by multitudinous chimes, or faintly now and
+then by passing footfalls. Unexcited by argument the talk rippled in
+murmurous contentment.
+
+Michael was in no mood himself for talking, and he sat back listening
+now and then, but mostly dreaming. He thought of the conversation in
+that long riverside room in Paris with its extravagance and
+pretentiousness. Here in this time-haunted Holywell Street was neither.
+To be sure, Christianity and the soul's immortality and the future of
+England and contemporary art were running the gauntlet of youth's
+examination, but the Academic Muse had shown the company her �gis, had
+turned everything to unpassionate stone, and softened all presumption
+with her guarded glances. It was extraordinary how under her guidance
+every subject was stripped of obtrusive reality, how even women,
+discussed never so grossly, remained untarnished; since they ceased to
+be real women, but mere abstractions wanton or chaste in accordance with
+the demands of wit. The ribaldry was Aristophanic or Rabelaisian with as
+little power to offend, so much was it consecrated and refined by
+immemorial usages. Michael wished that all the world could be touched by
+the magical freedom and equally magical restraint of the Academic Muse,
+and as he sat here in this ancient room, hoped almost violently that
+never again would he be compelled to smirch the present clarity and
+steadiness of his vision.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LESSON OF SPAIN
+
+
+Perhaps Michael enjoyed more than anything else during his accumulation
+of books the collection of as many various editions of Don Quixote as
+possible. He had brought up from London the fat volume illustrated by
+Dor� over which he had fallen asleep long ago and of which owing to
+Nurse's disapproval he had in consequence been deprived. Half the pages
+still showed where they had been bent under the weight of his small
+body: this honorable scar and the familiar musty smell and the book's
+unquestionable if slightly vulgar dignity prevented Michael from
+banishing it from the shelf that now held so many better editions.
+However much the zest in Dor�'s illustrations had died away in the
+flavor of Skelton's English, Michael could not abandon the big volume
+with what it held of childhood's first intellectual adventure. The shelf
+of Don Quixotes became in all his room one of the most cherished objects
+of contemplation. There was something in the "Q" and the "X" repeated on
+the back of volume after volume that positively gave Michael an
+impression in literal design of the Knight's fantastic personality. The
+very soul of Spain seemed to be symbolized by those sere quartos of the
+seventeenth century, nor was it imperceptible even in Smollett's cockney
+rendering bound in marbled boards. Staring at the row of Don Quixotes on
+a dull December afternoon, Michael felt overwhelmingly a desire to go to
+Spain himself, to drink at the source of Cervantes' mighty stream of
+imagination which with every year's new reading seemed to him to hold
+more and more certainly all that was most vital to life's appreciation.
+He no longer failed to see the humor of Don Quixote, but even now tears
+came more easily than laughter, and he regretted as poignantly as the
+Knight himself those times of chivalry which with all the extravagance
+of their decay were yet in essence superior to the mode that ousted them
+into ignominy. Something akin to Don Quixote's impulsive dismay Michael
+experienced in his own view of the twentieth century. He felt he needed
+a constructive ideal of conduct to sustain him through the long
+pilgrimage that must ensue after these hushed Oxford dreams.
+
+Term was nearly over. Michael had heard from Stella that she was going
+to spend two or three months in Germany. Her Brahms recitals, she wrote,
+had not been so successful as she ought to have made them. In London she
+was wasting time. Mother was continually wanting her to come to the
+theater. It seemed almost as if mother were trying to throw her in the
+way of marrying Prescott. He had certainly been very good, but she must
+retreat into Germany, and there again work hard. Would not Michael come
+too? Why was he so absurdly prejudiced against Germany? It was the only
+country in which to spend Christmas.
+
+The more Stella praised Germany, the more Michael felt the need of going
+to a country as utterly different from it as possible. He did not want
+to spend the vacation in London. He did not want his mother to talk
+vaguely to him of the advantage for Stella in marrying Prescott. The
+idea was preposterous. He would be angry with his mother, and he would
+blurt out to Prescott his dislike of such a notion. He would thereby
+wound a man whom he admired and display himself in the light of the
+objectionably fraternal youth. In the dreary and wet murk of December
+the sun-dried volumes of Cervantes spoke to him of Spain.
+
+Maurice Avery came up to his room, fatigued with fame and disappointed
+that Castleton with whom he had arranged to go to Rome had felt at the
+last moment he must take his mother to Bath. To him Michael proposed
+Spain.
+
+"But why not Rome?" Maurice argued. "As I originally settled."
+
+"Not with me," Michael pointed out. "I don't want to go to Rome now. I
+always feel luxuriously that there will occur the moment in my life when
+I shall say, 'I am ready to go to Rome. I must go to Rome.' It's a fancy
+of mine and nothing will induce me to spoil it by going to Rome at the
+wrong moment."
+
+Maurice grumbled at him, told him he was affected, unreasonable, and
+even hinted Michael ought to come to Rome simply for the fact that he
+himself had been balked of his intention by the absurdly filial
+Castleton.
+
+"I do think mothers ought not to interfere," Maurice protested. "My
+mother never interferes. Even my sisters are allowed to have their own
+way. Why can't Mrs. Castleton go to Bath by herself? I'm sure Castleton
+overdoes this 'duty' pose. And now you won't come to Rome. Well, will
+you come to Florence?"
+
+"Yes, and be worried by you to move on to Rome the very minute we arrive
+there," said Michael. "No, thanks. If you don't want to come to Spain,
+I'll try to get someone else. Anyway, I don't mind going by myself."
+
+"But what shall we do in Spain?" asked Maurice fretfully.
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+"We can dance the fandango," he pointed out. "Or if the fandango is too
+hard, there always remains the bolero."
+
+"If we went to Rome," Maurice was persisting, but Michael cut him short.
+
+"It's absolutely useless, Mossy. I am not going to Rome."
+
+"Then I suppose I shall have to go to Spain," said Maurice, in a much
+injured tone.
+
+So in the end it was settled chiefly, Michael always maintained, because
+Maurice found out it was advisable to travel with a passport. As not by
+the greatest exaggeration of insecurity could a passport be deemed
+necessary for Rome, Maurice decided it was an overrated city and became
+at once fervidly Spanish, even to the extent of saying "gracias"
+whenever the cruet was passed to him in hall. Wedderburn at the last
+moment thought he would like to join the expedition: so Maurice with the
+passport in his breast pocket preferred to call it.
+
+There were two or three days of packing in London, while Maurice stayed
+at 173 Cheyne Walk and was a great success with Mrs. Fane. The Rugby
+match against Cambridge was visited in a steady downpour. Wedderburn
+fetched his luggage, and the last dinner was eaten together at Cheyne
+Walk. Mrs. Fane was tenderly, if rather vaguely, solicitous for their
+safety.
+
+"Dearest Michael," she said, "do be careful not to be gored by a bull.
+I've never been to Spain. One seems to know nothing about it. Mr. Avery,
+do have some more turkey. I hope you don't dreadfully dislike garlic.
+Such a pungent vegetable. Michael darling, why are you laughing? Isn't
+it a vegetable? Mr. Wedderburn, do have some more turkey. A friend of
+mine, Mrs. Carruthers, who is a great believer in Mental Science ...
+Michael always laughs at me when I try to explain.... Hark, there is the
+cab, really. I hope it won't be raining in Spain. 'Rain, rain, go to
+Spain.' So ominous, isn't it? Good-bye, dearest boy, and write to me at
+Mrs. Carruthers, High Towers, Godalming."
+
+"I say, I know Mrs. Carruthers. She lives near us," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+"Come on," his friends insisted. "You haven't time now to explain the
+complications of Surrey society."
+
+"I'm so glad," said Mrs. Fane. "Because you'll be able to see that
+Michael remembers the address."
+
+"I never forget addresses, mother," protested Michael.
+
+"No, I know. I always think everyone is like me. Merry Christmas, and do
+send a post card to Stella. She was so hurt you wouldn't go to Germany."
+
+In the drench and soak of December weather they drove off in the
+four-wheeler. On such a night it seemed more than ever romantic to be
+setting out to Spain, and all the way to Victoria Maurice tried to
+decide by the occasional gleam of a blurred lamp-light how many pesetas
+one received for an English sovereign.
+
+The crossing to Dieppe was rough, but all memories of the discomfort
+were wiped out when next day they saw the Sud Express looking very long
+and swift and torpedo-like between the high platforms of that white
+drawing-room, the Gare d'Orleans. Down they went all day through France
+with rain speckling the windows of their compartment, past the naked
+poplar trees and rolling fallows until dusk fell sadly on the flooded
+agriculture. Dawn broke as they were leaving behind them the illimitable
+Landes. Westward the Atlantic clouds swept in from the Bay of Biscay,
+parting momentarily to reveal rifts of milky turquoise sky. Wider and
+wider grew the rifts, and when the train passed close to the green
+cliffs of St. Jean de Luz, the air was soft and fragrant: the sea was
+blue. At Irun they were in Spain, and Michael, as he walked up and down
+the platform waiting for d�jeuner, watched, with a thrill of conviction
+that this was indeed a frontier, the red and blue toy soldiers and the
+black and green toy soldiers dotted about the toy landscape.
+
+Maurice was rather annoyed that nobody demanded their passports and that
+every official should seem so much more anxious to examine their railway
+tickets, but when they reached Madrid and found that no bull-fights
+would be held before the spring, he began to mutter of Rome and was
+inclined to obliterate the Spaniards from the category of civilization,
+so earnestly had he applied himself by the jiggling light of the train
+to the mastery of all the grades from matador to banderillo.
+
+In Seville, however, Maurice admitted he could not imagine a city more
+perfectly adapted to express all that he desired from life. Seville with
+her guitars and lemon-trees, her castanets and oranges and fans, her
+fountains and carnations and flashing Andalusians, was for him the city
+to which one day he would return and dream. Here one day he could come
+when seriously he began to write or paint or take up whatever destiny in
+art was in store for him. Here he would forget whatever blow life might
+hold in the future. He would send everybody he knew to Seville,
+notwithstanding Michael's objection that such generosity would recoil
+upon himself in his desire to possess somewhere on earth the opportunity
+of oblivion. Maurice and Wedderburn both bought Spanish cloaks and hats
+and went with easels to sit beside the Guadalquiver that sun-stained to
+the hue of its tawny banks was so contemptuous of their gentlemanly
+water-colors, as contemptuous as those cigarette-girls that came
+chattering from the tobacco-factory every noon. Michael preferred to
+wander over the roofs of the cathedral, until drowsed by the scent of
+warm stone he would sit for an hour merely conscious that the city lay
+below and that the sky was blue above.
+
+After Seville they traveled to Granada, to Cadiz and Cordova and other
+famous cities; and in the train they went slowly through La Mancha where
+any windmill might indeed be mistaken for Pentapolin of the Naked Arm,
+and where at the stations the water-carriers even in January cried
+"agua, agua," so that already the railway-carriages seemed parched by
+the fierce summer sun. They traveled to Salamanca and Toledo, and last
+of all they went to Burgos where Maurice and Wedderburn strove in vain
+to draw corner after corner of the cathedral, in the dust and shadows of
+whose more remote chantries Michael heard many Masses. A realization of
+the power of faith was stirred in him by these Masses that every day of
+every year were said without the recognition of humanity. These
+mumblings of ancient priests, these sanctus-bells that rattled like
+shaken ribs, these interminable and ceremonious shufflings were the
+outward expression of the force that sustained this fabric of Burgos and
+had raised in Seville a cathedral that seemed to crush like a stupendous
+monster the houses scattered about in its path, insignificant as a heap
+of white shells. Half of these old priests, thought Michael, were
+probably puppets who did not understand even their own cracked Latinity,
+yet their ministrations were almost frightening in their efficacy: they
+were indeed the very stones of Burgos made vocal.
+
+Listening to these Masses, Michael began to regret he had allowed all
+his interest in religion to peter out in the irritation of compulsory
+chapel-keeping at Oxford. Here in Burgos, he felt less the elevating
+power of faith than the unrelenting and disdainful inevitableness of its
+endurance. At Bournemouth, when he experienced the first thrill of
+conversion, he had been exultingly aware of a personal friendliness
+between himself and God. Here in Burgos he was absorbed into the divine
+purpose neither against his will nor his desire, since he was
+positively aware of the impotency of his individuality to determine
+anything in the presence of omnipotence. He told himself this sense of
+inclusion was a sign of the outpouring once more of the grace of God,
+but he wished with a half whimsical amusement that the sensation were
+rather less like that of being contemptuously swept by a broom into the
+main dust-heap. Yet as on the last morning of his stay in Burgos Michael
+came away from Mass, he came away curiously fortified by his observation
+of the moldy confessionals worn down by the knees of so many penitents.
+That much power of impression at least had the individual on this
+cathedral.
+
+When Michael lay awake in the train going northward he remembered very
+vividly the sense of subordination which in retrospect suddenly seemed
+to him to reveal the essential majesty of Spain. The train stopped at
+some French station. Their carriage was already full enough, but a
+bilious and fussy Frenchman insisted there was still room, and on top of
+him broke in a loud-voiced and assertive Englishman with a meek wife. It
+was intolerable. Michael, Wedderburn, and Maurice displayed their most
+polite obstructiveness, but in the end each of them found himself
+upright, stiff-backed and exasperated. Michael thought regretfully of
+Spain, and remembered those peasants who shared their crusts, those
+peasants with rank skins of wine and flopping turkeys, those peasants
+who wrought so inimitably their cigarettes and would sit on the floor of
+the carriage rather than disarrange the comfort of the three English
+travelers. Michael went off into an uneasy sleep trying to arrange
+synthetically his deductions, trying to put Don Quixote and Burgos
+Cathedral and the grace of God and subordination and feudalism and
+himself into a working theory of life. And just when the theory really
+seemed to be shaping itself, he was awakened by the Englishman prodding
+his wife.
+
+"What is it, dear?" she murmured.
+
+"Did you pack those collars that were in the other chest of drawers?"
+
+"I think so, dear."
+
+"I wish you'd know something for a change," the husband grumbled.
+
+The Frenchman ground his teeth in swollen sleep, exhaling himself upon
+the stale air of the compartment. Maurice was turning over the pages of
+a comic paper. Wedderburn snored. It was difficult to achieve
+subordination of one's personality in the presence of other
+personalities so insistently irritating.
+
+Stella had not come back from Germany when Michael reached home, which
+was a disappointment as he had looked forward to planning with her a
+journey back to Spain as soon as possible. His mother during this
+vacation had lapsed from Mental Science into an association to prevent
+premature burial.
+
+"My dearest boy, you have no idea of the numbers of people buried alive
+every year," she said. "I have been talking to Dick Prescott about it. I
+cannot understand his indifference. I intend to devote all my time to
+it. We are going to organize a large bazaar next season. Banging their
+foreheads against the coffins! It's dreadful to think of. Do be careful,
+Michael. I have written a long letter to Stella explaining all the
+precautions she ought to take. Who knows what may happen in Germany?
+Such an impulsive nation. At least the Kaiser is. Don't laugh, my dear
+boy, it's so much more serious than you think. Would you like to come
+with me to Mrs. Carruthers' and hear some of the statistics? Gruesome,
+but most instructive. At three o'clock. You needn't wait for tea, if
+you're busy. The lecturer is an Eurasian. Where _is_ Eurasia, by the
+by?"
+
+Michael kissed his mother with affectionate amusement.
+
+"Will you wear the mantilla I brought you from Spain? Look, it's as
+light as burnt tissue paper."
+
+"Dearest Michael," she murmured reproachfully, "you ought not to laugh
+about sacred subjects.... I don't really see why we shouldn't have a
+car. We must have a consultation with Dick Prescott."
+
+After dinner that night Michael wrapped up some stained and faded
+vestments he had brought for Viner and went off to see him at Netting
+Hill. He told himself guiltily in the hansom that it was more than a
+year since he had been to see old Viner, but the priest was so heartily
+glad to welcome him and accepted so enthusiastically his propitiatory
+gifts, that he felt as much at ease as ever in the smoke-hung room.
+
+"Well, how's Oxford? I was coming up last term, but I couldn't get away.
+Have you been to see Sandifer yet? Or Pallant at Cowley, or Canon
+Harrowell?"
+
+Michael said he had not yet taken advantage of Viner's letters of
+introduction to these dignitaries. He had indeed heard Pallant preach at
+the church of the Cowley Fathers, but he had thought him too much
+inclined to sacrifice on the altar of empirical science.
+
+"I hate compromise," said Michael.
+
+"I don't think Pallant compromises, but I think he does get hold of men
+by offering them Catholic doctrine in terms of the present."
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"This visit to Spain seems to have made you very bigoted," Viner
+observed, smiling.
+
+"I haven't made up my mind one way or the other about Christianity,"
+Michael said. "But when I do I won't try to include everybody, to say to
+every talkative young Pragmatist with Schiller's last book in his
+pocket, 'come inside, you're really one of us.' I shan't invite every
+callow biologist to hear Mass just because a Cowley Dad sees nothing in
+the last article on spontaneous generation that need dismay the
+faithful. I'm getting rather fed up with toleration, really; the only
+people with any fanaticism now are the rationalists. It's quite
+exhilarating sometimes to see the fire of disbelief glowing in the eyes
+of a passionate agnostic."
+
+"Our Lord Himself was very tolerant," said Viner.
+
+"Yes, tolerant to the weaknesses of the flesh, tolerant to the woman
+taken in adultery, tolerant to the people without wine at Cana, but he
+hadn't much use for people who didn't believe just as He believed."
+
+"Isn't it rather risky to slam the door in the face of the modern man?"
+
+"But, Mr. Viner," Michael protested, "you can't betray the myriads of
+the past because the individual of to-day finds his faith too weak to
+sustain him in their company, because the modern man wants to re�dit
+spiritual truths just as he has been able to re�dit a few physical facts
+that apparently stand the test of practical experiment. While men have
+been rolling along intoxicated by the theory of physical evolution, they
+may have retrograded spiritually."
+
+"Of course, of course," the priest agreed. "By the way, your faith seems
+to be resisting the batterings of external progress very stoutly. I'm
+glad, old chap."
+
+"I'm not sure that I have much faith, but I certainly haven't given up
+hope," Michael said gravely. "I think, you know, that hope, which is
+after all a theological virtue, has never had justice at the hands of
+the theologians. Oh, lord, I wish earnest young believers weren't so
+smug and timid. Or else I wish that I didn't feel the necessity of
+coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the
+Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of
+fanciful private beliefs. But I want to force everything within the
+convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I
+hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the
+possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The
+Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire
+its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue.
+If only earnest young believers wouldn't treat Almighty God with the
+same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite
+mistress."
+
+"Michael, Michael!" cried Viner, "where are you taking me with your
+co�rdinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young
+believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against
+me? Remember, I've been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn
+mental somersaults. I thought you implied _you_ were a believer."
+
+"Oh, no, I'm watching and hoping. And just now I'm afraid the anchor is
+dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn't she? I'm not asking, you
+know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The psychologists
+have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But I'm hoping with
+all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away except faith.
+Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical moods ... I'm
+groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination. That's
+something, you know. But I haven't found my own place in the scheme."
+
+"You see you're very modern, after all," said Viner, "with your
+co�rdinations and subordinations."
+
+"But I don't want to assert myself," Michael explained. "I want to
+surrender myself, and I'm not going to surrender anything until I am
+sure by faith that I'm not merely surrendering the wastage of myself."
+
+Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic sameness of the
+mission-priest's existence. He had known so well before he went that,
+because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair,
+smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be
+either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated
+iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to year,
+from month to month, never changed in general character, but always gave
+the same impression of shrill cockney, of boisterous familiarity, of
+self-satisfied election. To-morrow morning he would say Mass to the same
+sparse congregation of sacristan and sisters-of-mercy and devout old
+maids. The same red-wristed server would stump about his liturgical
+business in Viner's wake, and the same coffee pot put in the same place
+on the same table by the same landlady would await his return. There was
+a dreariness about the ministrations of this Notting Hill Mission which
+had been absent from the atmosphere of Burgos Cathedral. No doubt
+superficially even at Burgos there was a sameness, but it was a glorious
+sameness, a sameness that approximated to eternity. Long ago had the
+priests learned subordination. They had been absorbed into the
+omnipotence of the church against which the gates of hell could not
+prevail. Viner remained, however much as he might have surrendered of
+himself to his mission work, essentially an isolated, a pathetic
+individual.
+
+As usual, Michael met Alan at Paddington, and he was concerned to see
+that Alan looked rather pale and worried.
+
+"What problems have you been solving this vac?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, I've been swatting like a pig for Mods," said Alan hopelessly. "You
+are a lucky lazy devil."
+
+Even during the short journey to Oxford Alan furtively fingered his
+text-books, while he talked to Michael about a depressing January in
+London.
+
+"Never mind. Perhaps you'll get your Blue next term," said Michael. "And
+if you aren't determined to play cricket all the Long, we'll go away and
+have a really sporting vac somewhere."
+
+"If I'm plowed," said Alan gloomily, "I've settled to become a chartered
+accountant."
+
+Michael enjoyed his second Lent term. With an easy conscience he
+relegated Rugby football into the limbo of the past. He decided such
+violent exercise was no longer necessary, and he was getting to know so
+many people at other colleges that the cultivation of new personalities
+occupied all his leisure. After Maurice and Wedderburn came back from
+Spain, they devoted much of their time to painting, and The Oxford
+Looking-Glass became a very expensive business on account of the
+reproduction of their drawings. Moreover, the circulation decreased in
+ratio with the increase of these drawings, and the five promoters who
+did not wish to practice art in the pages of their magazine convoked
+several meetings of protest. Finally Maurice was allowed to remain
+editor only on condition that he abstained from publishing any more
+drawings.
+
+Nigel Stewart's meeting of the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis together with the
+visit to Spain induced Michael to turn his attention to that side of
+undergraduate life interested in religion. He went to see Canon
+Harrowell, and even accepted from him an invitation to a breakfast at
+which he met about half a dozen Klebe men who talked about bishops.
+Afterward Canon Harrowell seemed anxious to have a quiet talk with him
+in the library, but Michael made an excuse, not feeling inclined for
+self-revelation so quickly on top of six Klebe men and the eggs and
+bacon. He went to see Father Pallant at Cowley, but Father Pallant
+appeared so disappointed that he had brought him no scientific problems
+to reconcile with Catholic dogma, and was moreover so contemptuous of
+Dom Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B. and Clere Abbey that Michael never went to
+see him again. He preferred old Sandifer, who with all the worldly
+benefits of good wine, good food, and pleasant company, offered in
+addition his own courtly Caroline presence that added to wit and
+learning and trenchant theology made Michael regret he had not called
+upon him sooner.
+
+Nigel Stewart took Michael to a meeting of De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, at
+which he met not only the six Keble men who had talked about bishops at
+Canon Harrowell's breakfast, but about twenty more members of the same
+college, all equally fervid and in his opinion equally objectionable.
+Michael also went with Nigel Stewart to Mass at St. Barnabas', where he
+saw the same Keble men all singing conspicuously and all conveying the
+impression that every Sunday they occupied the same place. By the end of
+the term Michael's aroused interest in religion at Oxford died out. He
+disliked the sensation of belonging to a particular school of thought
+within a university. The ecclesiastical people were like the ampelopsis
+at Trinity: they were highly colored, but so inappropriate to Oxford,
+that they seemed almost vulgar. It was ridiculous they should have to
+worship in Oxford at a very ugly modern church in the middle of very
+ugly modern slums, as ridiculous as it was to call in the aid of
+American creepers to cover up the sins of modern architects.
+
+Yet Michael was at a loss to explain to himself why the ecclesiastical
+people were so obviously out of place in Oxford. After all, they were
+the heirs of a force which had persisted there for many years almost in
+its present aspect: they were the heirs after a fashion of the force
+that kept the Royal Standard flying against the Parliament. But they had
+not inherited the spirit of medi�val Oxford. They were too
+self-conscious, too congregational. As individuals, perhaps they were in
+tone with Oxford, but, eating bacon and eggs and talking about bishops,
+they belonged evidently to Keble, and Michael could not help feeling
+that Keble like Mansfield and Ruskin Hall was in Oxford, but not in the
+least of Oxford. The spirit of medi�val Oxford was more typically
+preserved in the ordinary life of the ordinary graduate; and yet it was
+a mistake to think of the spirit of Oxford at any date. That spirit was
+dateless and indefinable, and each new manifestation which Michael was
+inclined to seize upon, even a manifestation so satisfying as Venner's,
+became with the very moment that he was aware of it as impossible to
+determine as a dream which leaves nothing behind but the almost violent
+knowledge that it was and exasperatingly still is.
+
+The revived interest lasted a very short time in its communal aspect,
+and Michael retreated into his medi�val history, still solicitous of
+Catholicism in so far as to support the papacy against the Empire in the
+balance of his judgment, but no longer mingling with the Anglican
+adherents of the theory, nor even indeed committing himself openly to
+Christianity as a general creed. Indeed, his whole attitude to religion
+was the result of a reactionary bias rather than of any impulse toward
+constructive progression. He would have liked to urge himself forward
+confidently to proclaim his belief in Christianity, but he could acquire
+nothing more positive than a gentle skepticism of the value of every
+other form of thought, a gentleness that only became scornfully
+intolerant when provoked by ignorance or pretentious statement.
+
+Meanwhile, The Oxford Looking-Glass, though inclining officially to
+neither political party, was reflecting a widespread interest in social
+reform. Michael woke up to this phenomenon as he read through the sixth
+number on a withering March day toward the end of term. Knowing Maurice
+to be a chameleon who unconsciously acquired the hue of his
+surroundings, Michael was sure that The Oxford Looking-Glass by this
+earnest tone indicated the probable tendency of undergraduate energy in
+the hear future. Yet himself, as he surveyed his acquaintances, could
+not perceive in their attitude any hint of change. In St. Mary's the
+debating clubs were still debating the existence of ghosts: the essay
+clubs were still listening to papers that took them along the by-ways of
+arch�ology or sport. Throughout the university the old habit of mind
+persisted apparently. The New College manner that London journalists
+miscalled the Oxford manner still prevailed in the discussion of
+intellectual subjects. In Balliol when any remark trembled on the edge
+of a generalization, somebody in a corner would protest, "Oh, shut up,
+fish-face!" and the conversation at once veered sharply back to golf or
+scandal, while the intellectual kitten who had been playing with his
+mental tail would be suddenly conscious of himself or his dignity and
+sit still. In Exeter the members of the Literary Society were still
+called the Bloody Lits. Nothing anywhere seemed as yet to hint that the
+traditional flippancy of Oxford which was merely an extension of the
+public-school spirit was in danger of dying out. Oxford was still the
+apotheosis of the amateur. It was still surprising when the Head of a
+House or a don or an undergraduate achieved anything in a manner that
+did not savor of happy chance. It was still natural to regard Cambridge
+as a provincial university, and to take pleasure in shocking the earnest
+young Cambridge man with the metropolitan humors and airy self-assurance
+of Oxford.
+
+Yet The Oxford Looking-Glass reflected another spirit which Michael
+could not account for and the presence of which he vaguely resented.
+
+"The O.L.G. is getting very priggish and serious and rather dull," he
+complained to Maurice.
+
+"Not half so dull as it would be if I depended entirely on casual
+contributions," replied the editor. "I don't seem to get anything but
+earnestness."
+
+"Oxford is becoming the home of living causes," sighed Michael. "That's
+a depressing thought. Do you really think these Rhodes Scholars from
+America and Australia and Germany are going to affect us?"
+
+"I don't know," Maurice said. "But everybody seems keen to speculate on
+the result."
+
+"Why don't you take up a strong line of patronage? Why don't you
+threaten these pug-nosed invaders with the thunders of the past?"
+Michael demanded fiercely.
+
+"Would it be popular?" asked Maurice. "Personally of course I don't care
+one way or the other, but I don't want to let the O.L.G. in for a lot of
+criticism."
+
+"You really ought to be a wonderful editor," said Michael. "You're so
+essentially the servant of the public."
+
+"Well, with all your grumbles,", said Maurice, "ours is the only serious
+paper that has had any sort of a run of late years."
+
+"But it lacks individuality," Michael complained. "It's so damned
+inclusive. It's like The Daily Telegraph. It's voluminous and
+undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything,
+from a man who's going to be hanged for murder to a new record at
+cricket. Why can't you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather
+delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?"
+
+"The Daily Mail," Maurice scoffed. "That rag!"
+
+"A man once said to me," Michael meditatively continued, "that whenever
+he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily
+Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how
+terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his
+Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all," he
+added cheerfully, "nobody does read the O.L.G. The circulation depends
+on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations by
+the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor. Is
+it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found
+in-that great terra incognita--Queen's College?"
+
+But Maurice had left him, and Michael strolled down to the lodge to see
+if there were any letters. Shadbolt handed him an invitation to dinner
+from the Warden. As he opened it, Lonsdale came up with a torn replica
+of his own.
+
+"I say, Michael, this is a rum sort of binge for the Wagger to give. I
+spotted all the notes laid out in a row by old Pumpkin-head's butler.
+You. Me. Tommy Grainger. Fitzroy. That ass Appleby. That worm Carben.
+And Smithers. There may have been some others too. I hope I don't get
+planted next the Pumpkinette."
+
+"Miss Wagger may not be there," said Michael hopefully. "But if she is,
+you're bound to be next her."
+
+"I say, Shadbolt," Lonsdale demanded, "is this going to be a big squash
+at the Wagger's?"
+
+"The Warden has given me no instruction, sir, about carriages. And so I
+think we may take it for granted as it will be mostly confined to
+members of the college, sir. His servant tells me as the Dean is going
+and the Senior Tutor."
+
+"And there won't be any does?"
+
+"Any what, sir?"
+
+"Any ladies?"
+
+"I expect as Miss Crackanthorpe will be present. She very rarely
+absconds from such proceedings," said Shadbolt, drawing every word with
+the sound of popping corks from the depths of his pompousness.
+
+Michael and Lonsdale found out that to the list of guests they had
+established must be added the names of Maurice, Wedderburn and two
+freshmen who were already favorably reported through the college as good
+sportsmen.
+
+Two evenings later, at seven o'clock, Michael, Maurice, Lonsdale,
+Wedderburn, and Grainger, bowed and starched, stood in Venner's,
+drinking peach bitters sharpened by the addition of gin.
+
+"The men have gone in to hall," said Venner. "You ought to start round
+to the Warden's lodgings at ten past seven. Now don't be late. I expect
+you'll have a capital dinner."
+
+"Champagne, Venner?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Oh, bound to be! Bound to be," said Venner. "The Warden knows how to
+give a dinner. There's no doubt of that."
+
+"Caviare, Venner?" asked Maurice.
+
+"I wouldn't say for certain. But if you get an opportunity to drink any
+of that old hock, be sure you don't forget. It's a lovely wine. I wish
+we had a few dozen in the J.C.R. Now don't go and get tipsy like some of
+our fellows did once at a dinner given by the Warden."
+
+"Did they, Venner?" asked everybody, greatly interested.
+
+"It was just after the Transvaal war broke out. Only three or four years
+ago. There was a man called Castleton, a cousin of our Castleton, but a
+very different sort of man, such a rowdy fellow. He came out from the
+Warden's most dreadfully tipsy, and the men were taking him back to his
+rooms, when he saw little Barnaby, a Science don, going across New quad.
+He broke away from his friends and shouted out, 'there's a blasted
+Boer,' and before they could stop him, he'd knocked poor little Barnaby,
+a most nervous fellow, down in the wet grass and nearly throttled him.
+It was hushed up, but Castleton was never asked again you may be sure,
+and then soon after he volunteered for the front and died of enteric. So
+you see what comes of getting tipsy. Now you'd better start."
+
+Arm in arm the five of them strolled through Cloisters until they came
+to the gothic door of the Warden's Lodgings. Up the Warden's majestic
+staircase they followed the butler into the Warden's gothic drawing-room
+where they shook hands with the great moon-faced Warden himself, and
+with Miss Crackanthorpe, who was very much like her brother, and nearly
+as round on a much smaller scale. They nodded to the Dean, mentally
+calculating how many roll-calls they were behind, for the Dean
+notwithstanding the geniality of his greeting had one gray eye that
+seemed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded to Mr.
+Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed nervously in
+response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed them. The two
+freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful acknowledgments of
+their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a gesture of such bland
+welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with suppressed mortification and
+rage.
+
+"Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don't sit next the
+Pumpkinette?" whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to
+dinner.
+
+"Not a halfpenny," laughed Michael. "You will. And I shall get Ardle."
+
+Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of three
+dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was to make
+the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that
+Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned
+forerunners had nothing to fear for his own pre�minence. Modern life
+found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his
+office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his
+personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its
+ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in
+the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole
+dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which made more
+than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and
+the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.
+
+Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary
+shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness of
+the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by a
+magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing some
+grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many dinners
+in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by
+flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely
+believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so
+ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter
+would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these
+transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the
+commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the
+power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden's great round
+face inclined slowly now toward Fitzroy with his fair complexion and
+military rigor of bearing, now toward Wedderburn whose evening dress
+acquired from the dignity of its owner the richness of black velvet.
+More directly in the light of the first lamp sat Maurice and Appleby
+opposite to one another, both imparting to the assemblage a charming
+worldliness, Maurice by his loose-fronted shirt, Appleby by the
+self-esteem of his restless blue eyes. The two freshmen on either side
+of the Dean wonderfully contrasted with his gauntness, and even more did
+the withered Ardle, who looked like a specimen of humanity dried as
+plants are dried between heavy books, contrast with the sprawling bulk
+of Grainger. On the other side, Michael watched with amusement Miss
+Crackanthorpe with shining apple-face bobbing nervously between Smithers
+pale and solid and domed like a great cheese, and Lonsdale cool and
+pink as an ice. In the background from the shadows at either end of the
+room the sage-green walls materialized in the lamplight: the three dead
+Wardens stared down at the table: and every fifteen minutes bells chimed
+in St. Mary's tower.
+
+"And how is The Oxford Looking-Glass progressing, Avery?" inquired the
+Warden, shining full upon the editor in a steady gaze. "No doubt it
+takes up a great deal of your valuable time?"
+
+The Dean winked his gray decanal eye at the champagne: the Senior Tutor
+coughed remotely like a grasshopper: Lonsdale prodded Michael with his
+elbow and murmured that "the Wagger had laid Mossy a stymie."
+
+Maurice admitted the responsibility of the paper for occupying a
+considerable amount of his _leisure_, but consoled himself for this by
+the fact that certainly, The Oxford Looking-Glass was progressing very
+well indeed.
+
+"We don't altogether know what attitude to take up over the Rhodes
+Bequest," said Maurice. Then boldly he demanded from the Warden what
+would be the effect of these imposed scholars from America and Australia
+and Africa.
+
+"The speculation is not without interest," declared the Warden. "What
+does Fitzroy think?"
+
+Fitzroy threw back his shoulders as if he were going to abuse the Togger
+and said he thought the athletic qualifications were a mistake. "After
+all, sir, we don't want the Tabs--I mean to say we don't want to beat
+Cambridge with the help of a lot of foreigners."
+
+"Foreigners, Fitzroy? Come, come, we can scarcely stigmatize Canadians
+as foreigners. What would become of the Imperial Idea?"
+
+"I think the Imperial Idea will take a lot of living up to," said
+Wedderburn, "when we come face to face with its practical expression.
+Personally I loathe Colonials except at the Earl's Court Exhibition."
+
+"Ah, Wedderburn," said the Warden, "you are luckily young enough to be
+able to be particular. I with increasing age begin to suffer from that
+terrible disease of age--toleration."
+
+"But the Warden is not so very old," whispered Miss Crackanthorpe to
+Lonsdale and Michael.
+
+"Oh, rather not," Lonsdale murmured encouragingly.
+
+"I think they'll wake up Oxford," announced Smithers; then, as everyone
+turned to hear what more he would say, Smithers seemed inclined to melt
+into silence, but with a sudden jerk of defiance, he hardened himself
+and became volubly opinionative.
+
+"There's no doubt," he continued, "that these fellows will make the
+average undergrad look round him a bit." As Smithers curtailed
+undergraduate to the convention of a lady-novelist, a shudder ran round
+the dinner party. Almost the butler instead of putting ice into the
+champagne might have slipped it down the backs of the guests.
+
+"In fact, what ho, she bumps," whispered Lonsdale. "Likewise pip-ip, and
+tootle-oo."
+
+"Anyway, he won't be able to ignore them," said Smithers.
+
+"We hope not, indeed," the Warden gravely wished. "What does Lonsdale
+think? Lord Cleveden wrote to me to say how deeply interested he was by
+the whole scheme--a most appreciative letter, and your father has had a
+great experience of colonial conditions."
+
+"Has he?" said Lonsdale. "Oh, yes, I see what you mean. You mean when he
+was Governor. Oh, rather. But I never knew him in those days." Then
+under his breath he muttered to Michael: "Dive in, dive in, you rotter,
+I'm getting out of my depth."
+
+"I think Oxford will change the Rhodes Scholars much more profoundly
+than the Rhodes Scholars will change Oxford," said Michael. "At least
+they will if Oxford hasn't lost anything lately. Sometimes I'm worried
+by that, and then I'm not, for I do really feel that they must be
+changed. Civilization must have some power, or we should all revert."
+
+"And are we to regard these finished oversea products as barbarians?"
+asked the Warden.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Michael earnestly. "Just as much barbarians as any
+freshmen."
+
+Everybody looked at the two freshmen on either side of the Dean and
+laughed, while they laughed too and tried to appear pleasantly flattered
+by the epithet.
+
+"And what will Oxford give them?" asked the Dean dryly. He spoke with
+that contempt of generalizations of which all dons made a habit.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Michael. "But vaguely I would say that Oxford
+would cure them of being surprised by themselves or of showing surprise
+at anybody else. Marcus Aurelius said what I'm trying to say much better
+than I ever can. Also they will gain a sense of humor, or rather they
+will ripen whatever sense they already possess. And they'll have a sense
+of continuity, too, and perhaps--but of course this will depend very
+much on their dons--perhaps they'll take as much interest in the world
+as in Australia."
+
+"Why will that depend on their dons?" challenged Mr. Ambrose.
+
+"Oh, well, you know," explained Michael apologetically, "dons very often
+haven't much capacity for inquisitiveness. They get frightened very
+easily, don't they?"
+
+"Very true, very true," said the Warden. "But, my dear Fane, your
+optimism and your pessimism are both quixotic, immensely quixotic."
+
+Later on in the quad when the undergraduate members of the dinner party
+discussed the evening, Maurice rallied Michael on his conversation.
+
+"If you can talk your theories, why can't you write them?" he
+complained.
+
+"Because they'd be almost indecently diaphanous," said Michael.
+
+"Good old Fane!" said Grainger. "But, I say, you are an extraordinary
+chap, you know."
+
+"He did it for me," said Lonsdale. "Pumpkin-head would have burst, if
+I'd let out I didn't know what part of the jolly old world my governor
+used to run."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STELLA IN OXFORD
+
+
+Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful
+than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had
+managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in view
+a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a blue.
+Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and
+Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.
+
+Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors' match, in
+which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a
+reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at the
+guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the hall,
+men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as unconcernedly as
+if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.
+
+"Who is that man just sitting down?" Michael would ask.
+
+"I don't know," Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest the
+implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to be
+aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
+
+"Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in
+Peck?" asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
+
+"No, really?" answered Alan indifferently.
+
+After hall as they walked back to Meadows', Michael tried to point out
+to him that the St. Mary's method of dining in hall was superior to that
+of the House.
+
+"The dinner itself is better," Alan admitted. "But I hate your system of
+all getting up from table at the same time. It's like school."
+
+"But if a guest comes to St. Mary's he sits at his host's regular table.
+He's introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you'd had another
+guest to-night, you wouldn't even have introduced me to him. He and I
+would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of dummies."
+
+"Rot!" said Alan. "And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening?
+All the men at the guests' table were absolute ticks."
+
+"I've never met a House man who didn't think every other House man
+impossible outside the four people in his own set," retorted Michael.
+"And yet, I suppose, you'll say it's the best college?"
+
+"Of course," Alan agreed.
+
+Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day's reluctant death, while
+the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul's Awakening faintly
+kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.
+
+"Will you have a meringue?" Alan asked. "I expect there's one in the
+cupboard."
+
+"I'm sure there is," said Michael. "It's very unlikely that there is a
+single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all the
+same."
+
+They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the
+tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes
+and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before
+him in the smoke.
+
+"It's a pity," he said, "Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though
+of course I wasn't bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would
+have looked pretty well. Still four for forty-eight isn't so bad in an
+innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to
+another bowler who's no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail.
+I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two--first knock. Blob--second.
+Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in
+the first trial match." So Alan voiced his hopes.
+
+"Of course you will," said Michael. "And at Lord's. I think I shall ask
+my mother and sister up for Eights," he added.
+
+Alan looked rather disconcerted.
+
+"What's the matter?" Michael asked. "You won't have to worry about them.
+I'll explain you're busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you in a
+letter this week."
+
+During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne Walk,
+and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and musical
+people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper interest in his
+existence.
+
+"Give her my--er--love, when you write," said Alan very nonchalantly.
+"And I don't think I'd say anything about those four wickets for
+forty-eight. I don't fancy she's very keen on cricket. It might bore
+her."
+
+No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said
+about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three
+vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan
+announced as usual that "those men will be coming down soon for cocoa."
+
+"Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at
+ten?" asked Michael. "And why am I never allowed to meet them?"
+
+"They'd bore you rather," said Alan. "They're people who live on this
+staircase. I don't see them any other time."
+
+Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so
+to his friend's evident relief he got up to go.
+
+"You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and
+regularities," he grumbled.
+
+"Stay, if you like," said Alan, not very heartily. "But I warn you
+they're all awfully dull, and I've made a rule to go to bed at half-past
+ten this term."
+
+"So long," said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.
+
+A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his invitation
+for Eights Week:
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     May 5.
+
+     My dearest Michael,
+
+     I wish you'd asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help
+     at the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at
+     Westminster Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the
+     Condition of Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think
+     you'd be interested. It's all about handicrafts. Weren't you
+     reading a book by William Morris the other day? His name is
+     mentioned a great deal always. I've been meeting so many
+     interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask Mrs. Ross to
+     chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about poor Dick
+     Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could
+     understand how _much much_ happier she would be married to a nice
+     man, even though he may be a little older than herself. This
+     tearing all over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks
+     of going to Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly
+     impossible name beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks
+     of unlearning all she has learned and beginning all over again.
+     This is most absurd, and I've tried to explain to her. She should
+     have thought of this man beginning with L before. At her age to
+     start scales and exercises again does seem ridiculous. I really
+     dread Stella's coming of age. Who knows what she may not take it
+     into her head to do? I can't think where she gets this curious vein
+     of eccentricity. I'll write to Mrs. Ross if you like. Stella, of
+     course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that I will not
+     hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she suggests
+     it to you.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad
+rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at Oxford.
+He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would never
+have listened to a word. Stella's view of the visit came soon after her
+mother's.
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     May 8.
+
+     Dear M.,
+
+     What's all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it
+     necessary? At a shot I said to mother, "No, quite unnecessary." But
+     of course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won't. Isn't
+     Mrs. Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn't she rather
+     object to me smoking cigars?
+
+"Great scott!" interjaculated Michael.
+
+     I'm going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very
+     charming to your only sister,
+
+     Stella.
+
+     P.S.--Do crush mother over Prescott.
+
+Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely
+necessary for Stella's visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars
+he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come.
+Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own attitude
+toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating it to her.
+In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured his own
+behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay on the
+view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was as much
+shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year he had
+been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at Eastbourne.
+Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to open the door
+once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter his mind as the
+sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon present themselves. It
+would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came up and saw him playing
+for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was provided to relieve the
+tedium of too much rowing.
+
+So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged
+that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs.
+Ross.
+
+Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of
+assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having
+helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the
+whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every other
+occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who was
+threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart spoke
+mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account he
+could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the High.
+Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael went
+down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.
+
+"I think it was a very bad move bringing me," said Lonsdale, as they
+waited on the platform. "Your sister will probably think me an awful
+ass, and ..."
+
+But the train interrupted Lonsdale's self-depreciation, and he sustained
+himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael thought
+Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as now when
+tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in the
+Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved Michael
+instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might appear in
+a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a very
+peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more like a
+boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide open on
+the city's towers and spires, were more than usually gray and pellucid.
+
+"I say, I ordered a car to meet us," said Lonsdale. "I thought we should
+buzz along quicker."
+
+"What you really thought," said Michael, "was that you would have to
+drive my sister in a hansom."
+
+"Oh, no, I say, really," protested Lonsdale.
+
+"I'm much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me," Stella
+declared.
+
+"Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I'm an awful ass, Miss Fane," said
+Lonsdale encouragingly. "Hallo, here's the jolly old car."
+
+As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the
+county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably
+Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.
+
+"You'll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and
+that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she'll have a pretty good notion
+of the main points of interest in the neighborhood," said Michael.
+
+"He always rags me," explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round at
+the visitors. "I say, isn't Alan Merivale your nephew?" he asked Mrs.
+Ross. "He's playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some very
+hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after lunch and
+watch the game for a bit."
+
+Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met
+them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at
+least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale's
+rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a
+dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that
+Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in Lonsdale's
+rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately accorded.
+
+The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold
+chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going
+to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and
+speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of
+lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of mirthfulness
+as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.
+
+After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the
+Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and
+nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who
+was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully
+Alan's meeting with Stella, watched Alan's face fall when he saw her
+beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves.
+There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan to
+go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant century
+so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much there was in
+him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted to himself the improbability of
+Stella realizing anything at all about the importance of cricket.
+However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw Alan coming
+gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very first ball he
+had received.
+
+"Of course, you know, he isn't played for his batting," he hastened to
+explain to Stella.
+
+She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice
+to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside them,
+unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond though he
+was of Maurice.
+
+The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early
+tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell,
+they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to
+Mrs. Ross and Stella:
+
+"My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do
+that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We
+can't bear our digs any longer."
+
+"Why don't you give a party there on Monday night," suggested Wedderburn
+deeply.
+
+"Let me introduce you to Mrs'sss ... my sissss ... Mr. H'wood," mumbled
+Michael in explanation of Wedderburn's proposal.
+
+"What a charming idea," drawled Guy. "But isn't it rather a shame to ask
+Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren't."
+
+"Oh, no," said Stella. "I should rather like to play in Oxford."
+
+So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper
+river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward glance
+at the trend of the clouds, occurred Guy Hazlewood's party in Holywell,
+which might more truly have been called Wedderburn's party, since he at
+once assumed all responsibility for it.
+
+The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on
+account of the Balliol men invited.
+
+"Half Basutoland seems to be here," Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+"Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial, what
+else can you expect?" replied Michael.
+
+Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention
+more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless
+mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to
+Wedderburn's suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to
+monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation with
+the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for to-morrow. But Michael
+fancied there was another reason.
+
+Stella played three times and was much applauded.
+
+"Very sporting effort, by Jove," said Lonsdale, and this was probably
+the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of
+really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each
+occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in
+such inadequate surroundings.
+
+Michael himself was less moved by Stella's playing than he had ever
+been. Nor was this coldness due to any anxiety for her success. He was
+sure enough of that in this uncritical audience.
+
+"Do you think Stella plays as well as she did?" he asked Mrs. Ross.
+
+"Perhaps this evening she may be a little excited," Mrs. Ross suggested.
+
+"Perhaps," said Michael doubtfully. "But what I mean is that, if she
+isn't going to advance quite definitely, there really isn't any longer
+an excuse for her to arrogate to herself a special code of behavior."
+
+"Stella says a great deal more than she does," Mrs. Ross reassured him.
+"You'd be surprised, as indeed I was surprised, to find how simple and
+childlike she really is. I think an audience is never good for her."
+
+"But, after all, her life is going to be one audience after another in
+quick succession," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Gradually an audience will cease to rouse her into any violence of
+thought or accentuation of superficial action--oh, Michael," Mrs. Ross
+exclaimed, breaking off, "what dreadfully long words you're tempting me
+to use, and why do you make me talk about Stella? I'd really rather talk
+about you."
+
+"Stella is becoming a problem to me," said Michael.
+
+"And you yourself are no longer a problem to yourself?" Mrs. Ross
+inquired.
+
+"Not in the sense I was, when we last talked together."
+
+Michael was a little embarrassed by recalling that conversation. It
+seemed to link him too closely for his pleasure to the behavior which
+had led up to it, to be a part of himself at the time, farouche and
+uncontrolled.
+
+"And all worries have passed away?" persisted Mrs. Ross.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Michael quickly. "For one thing," he added as if he
+thought he had been too abrupt, "I'm too comfortably off to worry much
+about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face.
+Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of
+myself as sixteen and seventeen." Michael was building brick by brick a
+bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. "I seem to
+see myself," he persevered, "with very untidy hair, with very loose
+joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I
+blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with
+Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say
+to the second-year table in hall." Michael paused for a moment, half
+hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self,
+but as she said nothing, he continued: "When I came up to Oxford I found
+that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St.
+James', but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what
+most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I
+remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, 'By gad,
+Val�rie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,' and my mother disagreeing,
+'No, no, I'm sure you were right when you said St. James'.' That's so
+like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She
+was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James' and
+Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any
+alteration. I'm telling you all this because, you know, you provided as
+it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I
+ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from
+Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I'm perfectly sure I
+could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or
+seventeen, if I'd not been at a London day-school."
+
+"But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?" asked
+Mrs. Ross. "Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as
+normality is concerned, through St. James'."
+
+"Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman.
+Possibly he benefited by St. James'. Possibly at Eton, and with a
+prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into
+one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. Now
+I was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and
+unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn't always possessed a sort of
+curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience
+of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality.
+No astounding gift of genius, I mean."
+
+"But, Michael," interrupted Mrs. Ross, "I don't fancy the greatest
+geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or
+seventeen."
+
+"No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of
+greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of
+Keats' letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all
+the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and
+never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my
+criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment I
+try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done."
+
+"But still, I don't see why a day-school should have militated against
+the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty."
+
+"It did in this way," said Michael. "It gave me too much with which to
+sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I was
+unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I'm sure of that,
+because since I've been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism so very
+much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say, there's
+no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it's partly due to being
+older."
+
+"Really, Michael," Mrs. Ross protested, "if you talk like this I shall
+begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up self-confidence
+seems to me not quite normal either."
+
+"Ah, that's only because I'm criticizing my earlier self. I really am
+now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want
+passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of
+social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously
+different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right
+mean between the two extremes. I'm enjoying Oxford enormously. I can't
+tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate
+it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a
+struggle to find that wide normal road on which I'm strolling along now.
+I'm so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England, and that
+the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to apply to the
+world the same standards we tacitly respect--we undergraduates. I
+believe every problem of life can be solved by the transcendency of the
+spirit which has transcended us up here. You remember I used to say you
+were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those qualities in you which made me
+think of that resemblance I find in Oxford. Don't ask me to say what
+they are, because I couldn't explain."
+
+"I think you have a great capacity for idealization," said Mrs. Ross
+gravely. "I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I wonder
+what profession you'll choose."
+
+"I don't suppose I shall choose a profession at all," said Michael.
+"There's no financial reason--at any rate--why I should."
+
+"Well, you won't have to decide against a profession just yet," said
+Mrs. Ross. "And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you think
+Stella's playing has deteriorated--if you really think it has."
+
+"Oh, I didn't say it had," Michael contradicted in some dismay. "I
+merely said that to-night it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she
+was anxious. Perhaps she felt among all these undergraduates, as I felt
+in my first week. Perhaps she's thinking what schoolboys they all are,
+and how infinitely youthful they appear beside those wild and
+worldly-wise Bohemians to whose company she has been accustomed for so
+long. I long to tell her that these undergraduates are really so much
+wiser, even if literature means Mr. Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour, and
+art The Soul's Awakening, and religion putting on a bowler to go and
+have a hot breakfast at the O.U.D.S. after chapel, and politics the
+fag-ends of paternal or rather ancestral opinion, and life a hot bath
+and changing after a fox-hunt or a grouse-drive."
+
+Farther conversation was stopped by Wedderburn driving everybody down to
+supper with pastoral exhortations in his deepest bass. Michael, after
+his talk with Mrs. Ross, was relieved to find himself next to Lonsdale
+and sheltered by a quivering rampart of jellies from more exacting
+company.
+
+"These Basutos aren't so bad when you talk to them," said Lonsdale.
+"Comeragh was at m'tutor's. I wonder if he still collects bugs. I rather
+like that man Hazlewood. I thought him a bit sidy at first, but he's
+rather keen on fishing. I don't think much of the girl that Trinity
+man--what's his name--Stewart has roped in. She looks like something
+left over from a needlework stall. I say, your sister jolly well knows
+how to punch a piano. Topping, what? Mossy's been very much on the spot
+to-night. He and Wedders are behaving like a couple of theatrical
+managers. Why didn't Alan Merivale turn up? I was talking to some of the
+cricket push at the Club, and it doesn't look a hundred quid to a tanner
+on his Blue. Bad luck. He's a very good egg."
+
+Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale's babble. He was watching the
+passage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven,
+Stella had let the cigars go by.
+
+The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of
+gables they stood laughing and talking for a moment. Guy Hazlewood,
+Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting
+guests.
+
+"It's been awfully ripping," these murmured to their hosts. The hosts
+beamed down.
+
+"We've been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to
+Miss Fane."
+
+"You ought all to get Firsts now," said Wedderburn.
+
+Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and
+Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of
+the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright spaces,
+into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled along
+the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died out to
+whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and midnight began
+to clang.
+
+"We must hurry," said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward
+St. Mary's, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.
+
+"Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?" Maurice suggested to Michael.
+
+"I'm rather tired," objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was going
+to talk at great length about Stella.
+
+He was too jealous of Alan's absence that evening to want to hear
+Maurice's facile enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SYMPATHY
+
+
+Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael
+was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to
+assert her independence of personality would try to smash the glass of
+fashion and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions
+during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were
+when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed by
+that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of
+Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate
+foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music
+would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow
+belied.
+
+Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was in
+a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.
+
+"These hard wickets have finished me off," he sighed. "I shall take up
+golf, I think."
+
+The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered
+with gray fluff under the bed.
+
+"Oh, no, don't play golf," protested Michael, "you've got two more years
+to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a rotten game
+and has ruined Varsity cricket."
+
+"But one can be alone at golf," said Alan.
+
+"Alone?" repeated Michael. "Why on earth should you want to play an
+outdoor game alone?"
+
+"Because I get depressed sometimes," Alan explained. "What good am I?"
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+"It's nothing to laugh at," said Alan sadly. "I've been thinking of my
+future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my
+Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan't even get into the
+Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk. Playing
+cricket for a suburban club on Saturday afternoons. That's all I see
+before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?"
+
+"I don't know that she is going," said Michael. "She always talks a
+great deal about things which don't always come off."
+
+"I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much," Alan
+said. "But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about music. I
+don't think I care for him."
+
+"Some people don't," Michael admitted. "I think women always like him,
+though."
+
+"Yes, I should think they did," Alan agreed bitterly. "Sorry I'm so
+depressing. Have a meringue or something."
+
+"Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?" Michael challenged.
+
+"What made you think I was?" countered Alan, looking alarmed.
+
+"It's pretty obvious," Michael said. "And curiously enough I can quite
+understand it. Generally, of course, a brother finds it difficult to
+understand what other people can see in his sister, but I'm never
+surprised when they fall in love with Stella."
+
+"A good many have?" asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a
+pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his
+bowling.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Oh, I've realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,"
+Alan sighed. "I'm evidently going to be a failure."
+
+"Would you care for some advice?" inquired Michael very tentatively.
+
+"What sort of advice?" Alan asked.
+
+Michael took this for assent, and plunged in.
+
+"Let her alone," he adjured his friend. "Let her absolutely alone. She's
+very young, you know, and you're not very old. Let her alone for at
+least a year. I suggest two years. Don't see much of her, and don't let
+her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really,
+Alan, it's not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love
+with her. I don't mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned
+down."
+
+"Would he be?" demanded Alan gloomily.
+
+"Of course, of course ... it seems funny to be talking to you about love
+... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know
+you'll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I'm frightfully keen you
+should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don't let her interfere with
+your cricket. Don't take up golf on account of her."
+
+Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he
+picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it
+before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy
+airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.
+
+"It's funny," said Michael, "that I should have an opportunity now of
+talking to you about love and cricket."
+
+"Funny?" Alan repeated.
+
+"Don't you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished
+you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for
+cricket?"
+
+"I believe I do remember vaguely," said Alan.
+
+Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to
+let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had
+conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to
+elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the
+retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long
+while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique,
+the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had
+foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her
+departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather
+strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even
+than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects
+of next term.
+
+Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed
+sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college.
+Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs. Alan
+offered his fourth year to companionship with Michael, but nothing would
+induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so
+particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with
+whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were
+many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so
+anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an
+arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or
+second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice
+had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not
+wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later
+Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage
+them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place,
+and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.
+
+It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the
+indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until Michael
+seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had invited him
+to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as well, but
+they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially sharing, that
+is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in the same house
+and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to be thought of.
+Maurice was a very good fellow but--Maurice was--but--and Michael in
+asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company, asked
+himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging with
+Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could, and
+for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who
+represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused
+himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by
+applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time
+went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael's
+choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a
+desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice's sensitiveness that it could
+not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him? Soon
+it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not want to
+dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his feelings, and
+Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had receded into the
+background of casual encountership, he would take pleasure in his
+company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as if Maurice were
+losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael wondered why he had
+never before noticed how infallibly he ran after each new and petty
+phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy. It was intolerable to
+think of spending a year's close association with all those paint-boxes
+and all that modeling wax and all those undestroyed proof-sheets of The
+Oxford Looking-Glass. Finally, he had never noticed before how many
+cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what skill he concealed in every sort
+of receptacle the stained and twisted stumps that were left over. That
+habit would be disastrous to their friendship, and Michael knew that
+each fresh cigarette lighted by him would consume a trace more of the
+friendship, until at last he would come to the state of observing him
+with a cold and mute resentment. He was in this attitude of mind toward
+his prospective companion, when Maurice came to see him. He seemed
+nervous, lighting and concealing even more cigarettes than usual.
+
+"About digs in Longwall," he began.
+
+"I won't live in Longwall," affirmed Michael.
+
+"Do you think you could find anybody else?"
+
+"Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?" asked Michael
+hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long
+as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
+
+Maurice seemed embarrassed.
+
+"No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me.
+The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had
+fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but
+of course I said I was digging with you, and there's no room for a
+third."
+
+"I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny," said Michael quickly.
+
+Maurice looked much relieved.
+
+"As long as you don't feel I've treated you badly," he began.
+
+"That's all right," said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice's
+obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon
+as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his
+fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking
+cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice's invitation to stay
+at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the penitence
+which had prompted it.
+
+Stella's unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free
+to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least
+the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little
+contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and
+mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for
+keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son
+and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even
+her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when
+his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the
+tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery's adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming
+oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the
+facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the
+facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited
+the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the
+tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram.
+Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of
+light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully pressed
+trousers.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Avery," he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative
+solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to
+France. "I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been
+called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the
+Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair
+distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery."
+
+"Thank Heaven that's done!" he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of
+Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South
+Wales.
+
+The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London between
+his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at Cressingham
+Hall--a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad Midlands. It was
+mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb the pastoral calm.
+Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden's remonstrances to obtain a
+grasp of rural administration. So he and his sister Sylvia with Michael
+drove every day in a high dogcart to various outlying farms of the
+estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very popular, and after all as
+he confided to Michael that was the main thing.
+
+"And how's his lordship, sir?" the tenant would inquire.
+
+"Oh, very fit," Lonsdale would reply. "I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got
+any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a
+good deal about it."
+
+In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of
+agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the
+sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife's
+raspberries and gooseberries.
+
+"I envy your life," said Michael.
+
+"A bit on the slow side, don't you think?"
+
+"Plenty of time for thinking."
+
+"Ah," said Lonsdale. "But then I've got no brains. I really haven't, you
+know. The poor old governor's quite worried about it."
+
+However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest draw
+up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port, he
+delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and notorieties,
+Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry him very much,
+not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of brains in his
+only son.
+
+"Dear Lady Cleveden," he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty
+house in Cheyne Walk. "London is quite impossible after Cressingham."
+
+And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the
+Embankment, the oily river and a lack-luster moon.
+
+Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott,
+inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot London
+weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more solicitude
+than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace for some
+time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while Prescott lent
+him a grave attention. At last Michael's conversation exhausted itself,
+and for a few minutes there was silence, while Prescott betrayed his
+nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his cigar. At last he burnt
+himself and throwing away the cigar leaped forthwith into the tide of
+emotion that was deepening rapidly around his solitary figure.
+
+"Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella
+told you. Of course, I realize it's quite absurd. Said so at once, and
+of course it's all over now. Phew! it's fearfully hot to-night. Always
+feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that's the
+same with most people."
+
+Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the
+moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment later
+the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott's confidence
+Michael felt himself committed to a participation in his existence that
+called for some response. But he could not with any sincerity express a
+regret for Stella's point of view.
+
+"Mother was very anxious she should accept you," said Michael, and
+immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an
+eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella's stilted
+declaration of her refusal.
+
+"Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of
+course I'm a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very
+ridiculous."
+
+"I don't think Stella is old enough to marry," said Michael.
+
+"But don't you think it's better for girls to marry when they're young?"
+asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes were very
+bright and his actions feverish. "I've noticed that tendencies recur in
+families. Time after time. I don't like this Viennese business, yet if
+Stella had married me I shouldn't have interfered with her," he added,
+with a wistfulness that was out of keeping with his severely
+conventional appearance. "Still, I should have always been in the
+background."
+
+"Yes, I expect that was what she felt," said Michael.
+
+He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had
+wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any
+longer, he rose and said he must go.
+
+As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go
+down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved August
+journals "Suicide of a Man About Town." At Cobble Place newspapers were
+read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on the day after that
+above a short paragraph the headline "Tragedy in the Albany" led him on
+to learn that actually Prescott was the man about town who had killed
+himself.
+
+Michael's first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked
+so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the
+posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined
+with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable
+coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and
+attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner's summing up of the
+evidence of depression and the perspiring jury's delivery of their
+verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of
+a man's life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the
+result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up the
+thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August
+journals he read now with a sharp interest "Cat Saves Household in
+Whitechapel Fire." This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative
+action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the journey
+down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family from an
+inquest's futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would have been
+awarded the commendatory platitudes of the coroner.
+
+Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the
+journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for
+evening. By this time the irony of the cat's fortuitous interference was
+blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to the
+fact of Prescott's death. He was no longer occupied by the strange
+sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous
+daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for
+once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott's life was surely
+a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated
+all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly
+fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a
+death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a
+hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would
+be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in London,
+or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to the very
+portals of the Albany.
+
+Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was
+beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had first
+obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having given away
+to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead man's
+confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting to think
+of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making this
+hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the public,
+so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the
+inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure
+from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals, the
+soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the
+profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of restraint
+whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in unrelaxing
+guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought about the
+business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an earlier mood of
+self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to whose almost
+contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately aspire. He had
+often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of thought and
+action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered into himself
+the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence. And now he
+must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a spiritual
+encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up pitiably
+into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the force of
+its squalid associations. The fresh dust of the Hampshire lanes became a
+gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his progress so that
+he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges were somber and
+monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected rags of a tramp.
+The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost their intimations
+of sane humanity, and turned to horrible abstractions of the dead life
+of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot. The comfortable
+assurance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling away to right and
+left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed along through the
+twilight. "My nerves are in a rotten state," he told himself, and he was
+very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the night below, while
+himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly dusk.
+
+In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael
+thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew's serene old age
+drove out the last memory of the coroner's court, and here was Mrs. Ross
+coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in Cobble
+Place was her small son sleeping.
+
+"You look tired and pale, Michael," said Mrs. Ross. "Why didn't you wire
+which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the chaise."
+
+"Poor fellow, of course he's tired!" said Mrs. Carthew. "A most
+disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good."
+
+The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this
+room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great
+rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in
+words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went
+the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played at
+backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of a
+parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the
+lamplight, met from time to time Michael's glances with a concern that
+never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He
+was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock,
+to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him
+company.
+
+"Unless you want to work?" she added.
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:
+
+"Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott's
+death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarrassed and came
+away."
+
+"Oh, my dear Michael, I think you're probably accusing yourself most
+unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your
+dinner?"
+
+"That's just it. I believe I did know."
+
+"You thought he was going to kill himself?"
+
+"No, I didn't think anything so definite as that, but I had an intuition
+to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he'd think it rather
+cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe I've got
+the gift of understanding people, and yet I'm afraid to use it. Shall I
+ever learn?"
+
+Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own
+futility. He went on to rail at himself.
+
+"The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness
+wrecks the first decent chance I've had to turn it to account."
+
+They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting
+that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him
+false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found
+it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the
+future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and
+straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was
+hinting.
+
+"My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything," she affirmed.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamations of your
+willingness to do anything that you're positive you can do better than
+anything else, I'm quite, quite sure you're still the rather perverse
+Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time
+when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in
+the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I
+think you're going to do--I almost said when you're grown up--but I mean
+when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up
+your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of
+saying, 'I knew it.'"
+
+"I suppose really I know what you think I shall do," said Michael
+slowly. "But you're wrong--at least, I think you're wrong. I lack the
+mainspring of the parson's life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of
+myself. How's he getting on?"
+
+"Oh, he's splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something
+more than I ever managed to give you."
+
+"Naturally," said Michael, smiling. "He's your son."
+
+"Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of...."
+Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. "No, I won't tell you yet."
+
+"You're full of unrevealed mysteries," said Michael.
+
+"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 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     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 re�ntering 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 loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+     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 time ago," 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 it was 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. She was 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 it gave 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+2O2 HIGH
+
+
+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
+forc�s 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
+D�rers 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
+�sthetic 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 �sthetic niche that 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 D�rer
+woodcuts. These giants in their baggy blanket trousers, their
+brass-buttoned coats and Leander ties nearly as pink as their own
+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 talking of 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
+na�ve 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 club
+colors: 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-sufficiency of 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.
+
+"I _must_ ask 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 through many 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 probably Calvin'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 been avoided 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 with cognac; 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 felt his 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 of ball 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'll be 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 beguile this 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 is _done_ when 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 another year, 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 thing myself. 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 amiable ragging 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+PLASHERS MEAD
+
+
+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
+revealed in 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 walked on
+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 medi�val 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 roads more 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 that
+would 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 wasted a 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 decide what I'm going to _try_ to 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.
+
+They drove together to the railway station five miles away. In the
+sleepy September heat the slow train puffed in. Hot people with bunches
+of dahlias were bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.
+Michael sighed.
+
+"Don't go," said Guy. "It's much too hot."
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"I must."
+
+Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases
+awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.
+
+"Some of my books," he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael
+watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the
+wine-dark dahlias of the platform.
+
+"What fun unpacking them," he thought, and leaned back regretfully to
+survey the placid country gliding past.
+
+Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect
+seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or
+rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great
+railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic
+strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children,
+leaning over scabrous walls to salute the passing train. Always, as one
+entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses
+whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible. To
+Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid
+sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through
+London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became
+unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as
+the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and
+emerged in that space of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but
+the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering
+legions of children, was still in Michael's ears when the hansom pulled
+up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.
+
+The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and
+informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than
+would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of
+time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been
+unaware of his sister's arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too
+intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he
+actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an
+affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned
+by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the
+social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train
+sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer conspicuous in his
+memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and the
+webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant dream. He
+was in fact back in town.
+
+Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he
+hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very
+moment the parlormaid told him of Stella's return he had feared such a
+return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask
+abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with
+just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by its
+demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably glad to
+see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side would
+have made him kiss her.
+
+"Hullo, I didn't expect to see you," was, however, all he said.
+
+"Nor did I you," was what she answered.
+
+Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey from
+Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true
+insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.
+
+Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before
+lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas
+and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more
+disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella back
+from Vienna?
+
+"Did you come this morning?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no. Last night. Why?" she demanded. "Do I look as crumpled as all
+that?"
+
+For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she
+had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was
+perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather wished
+she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his own
+explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment. Useless
+indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as the
+lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life where
+nothing really happens.
+
+After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she
+turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her
+again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than he
+had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray satin
+or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at him for
+not putting on a dinner jacket.
+
+"Don't look so horrified at the notion," she cried petulantly. "Can't
+you realize that after a year with long-haired students I want a
+change?"
+
+After dinner Michael asked her to come and play in the studio.
+
+"Play?" she echoed. "I'm never going to play again."
+
+"What perfect rot you are talking," said Michael, in a damnatory
+generalization which was intended to cover not merely all she had been
+saying, but even all she had been doing almost since she first announced
+her intention of going to Vienna.
+
+Stella burst into tears.
+
+"Come on, let's go to the studio," said Michael. He felt that Stella's
+tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that
+she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was
+therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly
+boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked to
+the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an outrage
+to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin, even
+though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to
+himself "Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante
+stark mad in white muslin."
+
+"Come along, come along," he begged her. "You must come to the studio."
+
+Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he
+himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when
+at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently
+whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had
+plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael
+looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an
+ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly
+than before.
+
+"Look here, I say, why don't you tell me what you're crying about? You
+can't go on crying forever, you know," Michael pointed out. "And when
+you've stopped crying, you'll feel such an ass if you haven't explained
+what it was all about."
+
+"I couldn't possibly tell anybody," said Stella, looking very fierce.
+Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that
+Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather unusually
+dramatic.
+
+"But I'm damned if I _will_ give up playing," she proclaimed; and,
+sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her
+weakness.
+
+It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her
+what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of
+self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella's
+calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and
+would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished,
+she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily
+Haden.
+
+"I don't know--really--they've left Trelawny Road," he said, feeling
+vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.
+
+"And you never think of her, I suppose?" demanded Stella.
+
+"Well, no, I don't very much."
+
+"Yet I can remember," said Stella, "when you were absolutely miserable
+because she had been flirting with somebody else."
+
+"Yes, I was very miserable," Michael admitted. "And you were rather
+contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more
+proud."
+
+"And don't you realize," Stella said, "that just because I did remember
+what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?"
+
+Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her
+confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had
+finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and
+masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half
+hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.
+
+Michael made up his mind that Stella's unhappiness was due to a
+love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or
+temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation against
+the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the fellow's
+head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could picture
+himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He went so
+far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale requesting their
+secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to dance before him.
+He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily. Time had softened the
+trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had been guilty. Time with
+night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal charm. He had been reading
+this week of the great imaginative loves of the Middle Ages, and of that
+supple and golden-haired girl he began to weave an abstraction of
+passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He slept upon the evocation of
+her beauty just as he was setting forth upon a delicate and intangible
+pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested to Stella they should revisit
+Carlington Road.
+
+"My god, to think we once lived here!" exclaimed Stella, as they stood
+outside Number 64. "To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of
+course I was much more away from it than you ever were."
+
+Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and
+habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was
+become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in
+possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.
+
+"Well, thank heaven, everything does change," she murmured. "And that
+ugly things become even more ugly."
+
+"Only for a time," objected Michael. "In twenty years if we visit
+Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it
+all is."
+
+"I wasn't thinking so much of Carlington Road," said Stella. "I was
+really thinking of people."
+
+"Even they become beautiful again after a time," argued Michael.
+
+"It would take a very long time for some," said Stella coldly.
+
+Michael had rather dreaded his mother's return, with Stella in this
+mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been
+unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if she
+and not herself had suffered lately.
+
+"I'm so glad you're back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you
+aren't going to Petersburg to-morrow, because the man at Vienna whose
+name begins with that extraordinary letter...."
+
+"Oh, mother," Stella laughed, "the letter was quite ordinary. It was
+only L."
+
+"But the name was dreadful, dear child. It always reminded one of furs.
+A most oppressive name. So that really you'll be in London all this
+winter?"
+
+"Yes, only I shan't play much," said Stella.
+
+"Mrs. Carruthers is so anxious to meet you properly," Mrs. Fane said.
+"And Mabel Carruthers is really very nice. Poor girl! I wish you could
+be friends with her. She's interested in nothing her mother does."
+
+Michael was really amazed when Stella, without a shrug, without even a
+wink at him, promised simply to let Mrs. Carruthers "meet her properly,"
+and actually betrayed as much interest in Mabel Carruthers as to inquire
+how old she was.
+
+Maurice arrived at Cheyne Walk, just before Michael went up for term, to
+say he had taken a most wonderful studio in Grosvenor Road. He was
+anxious that Michael should bring his sister to see it, but Stella would
+not go.
+
+"Thanks very much, my dear," she said to him, "but I've seen too much of
+the real thing. I'm in no mood just now for a sentimental imitation."
+
+"I think you ought to come," said Michael. "It would be fun to see
+Maurice living in Grosvenor Road with all the Muses. Castleton will have
+such a time tidying up after them when he joins him next year."
+
+But Stella would not go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+99 ST. GILES
+
+
+It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief
+figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way
+he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college
+itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars. Very
+soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he shared
+with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that this
+last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best, indeed
+perhaps of all the years of his life the best.
+
+College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had
+ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to feel
+the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two, revisiting
+Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from the daily
+round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which preserved
+its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable losses of each
+year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with what now seemed
+its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had never given him
+quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St. Giles could give.
+Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November dusks, when after a
+long walk through silent country Michael and Alan came back to the din
+of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded and greasy Cornmarket
+toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when they would find the
+tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered toast was eaten; tea
+was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was smoked to idle cracklings
+of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout landlady cleared away, and
+during the temporary disturbance Michael pulled back the blinds and
+watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting out St. John's and the
+alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the Martyrs' Memorial and
+even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery. The room was quiet
+again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and Alan, settled in deep
+chairs, read their History and Philosophy; outside in the November night
+footsteps went by; carts and wagons occasionally rattled; bells chimed;
+outside in the November murk present life was manifesting its
+continuity; here within, the battles and the glories, the thoughts, the
+theories and the speculations of the past for Michael and Alan moved
+across printed pages under the rich lamplight.
+
+Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99
+St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose
+decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael
+and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place
+during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a capacity
+for making apparently the most barren observations flower and fruit with
+intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit of the
+lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate revelation
+of her domestic past.
+
+After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o'clock, at which
+hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way
+Michael enjoyed the night most. The medi�val chronicles were put back on
+their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or
+Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael
+wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down came
+Don Quixote or Adlington's Apuleius, or Florio's Montaigne, or Lucian's
+True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the fog stole
+into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at their measured
+intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city was there; at
+that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed than austere,
+for it was neither in time nor in space, but the abstraction of a city.
+Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go up to bed by
+candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open window the sound
+of two o'clock striking came very coldly, he could scarcely fancy
+himself in the present. The effort of intense reading, whether of bygone
+institutions or of past adventure, had left him in the condition of
+physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was aware of nothing
+but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish with the triumph
+of tremendous concentration, to undress in this stinging acerbity of
+night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in this world of dreaming
+spires.
+
+99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had
+anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide
+thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of movement,
+scarcely ever aroused a petty inquisitiveness into the actions of the
+passers-by. The traffic of the thoroughfare like the ships of the sea
+went by merely apprehended, but not observed. The big bay-window hung
+over the street like the stern-cabin of a frigate, and as Michael sat
+there he had the impression of being cut off from communication, the
+sense of perpetually leaving life astern. The door of 99 St. Giles did
+not open directly on the street, but was reached by a tortuous passage
+that ran the whole depth of the house. This entrance helped very much
+the illusion of separation from the ebb and flow of ordinary existence,
+and was so suggestive of a refuge that involuntarily Michael always
+hurried through it that the sooner he might set his foot on the steep
+and twisted staircase inside the house. There was always an excitement
+in reaching this staircase again, an impulse to run swiftly up, as if
+this return to the sitting-room was veritably an escape from the world.
+Here the books sprawled everywhere. At 202 High they had filled the
+cupboards in orderly fashion. Here they overflowed in dusty cataracts,
+and tottered upward in crazy escalades and tremulous piles. All the
+shelves were gorged with books. Moreover, Michael every afternoon bought
+more books. The landlady held up her hands in dismay as, crunching up
+the paper in which they had been wrapped, he considered in perplexity
+their accommodation. More space was necessary, and the sea-green
+dining-room was awarded shelves. Here every morning after breakfast came
+the exiles, the dull and the disappointing books which had been banished
+from the sitting-room. Foot by foot the sea-green walls disappeared
+behind these shelves. In Lampard's bookshop Michael was certainly a
+personality. Lampard himself even came to tea, and sat nodding his
+approbation.
+
+As for Alan, he used to stay unmoved by the invading volumes. He had
+stipulated at the beginning that one small bookcase should be reserved
+for him. Here Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides always had
+room to breathe, without ever being called upon to endure the
+contamination of worm-eaten bibliophily.
+
+"Where the deuce has my Stubbs got to?" Michael would grumble, delving
+into the musty cascade of old plays and chap books which had temporarily
+obliterated the current literature of the week's work.
+
+Alan would very serenely take down Plato from his own trim and
+unimpeded shelves, and his brow would already be knitted with the effort
+of fixing half-a-dozen abstractions before Michael had decided after a
+long excavation that Stubbs had somehow vanished in the by-ways of
+curious reading.
+
+Yet notwithstanding the amount of time occupied by arranging and buying
+and finding books, Michael did manage to absorb a good deal of history,
+even of that history whose human nature has to be sought arduously in
+charters, exchequer-rolls and acts of parliament. Schools were drawing
+near; the dates of Kings and Emperors and Popes in their succession
+adorned the walls of his bedroom, so that even while he was cleaning his
+teeth one fact could be acquired.
+
+Only on Sunday evenings did Michael allow himself really to re�nter the
+life of St. Mary's. These Sunday evenings had all the excitement of a
+long-interrupted reunion. To be sure, Venner's was thronged with people
+who seemed to be taking life much too lightly; but Tommy Grainger was
+there, still engaged with a pass-group. People spoke hopefully of going
+head this year. Surely with Tommy and three other Blues in the boat, St.
+Mary's must go head. The conversation was so familiar that it was almost
+a shock to find so many of the faces altered. But Cuffe was still there
+with his mouth perpetually open just as wide as ever. Sterne was still
+there and likely, so one heard, to make no end of runs next summer.
+George Appleby was very much in evidence since Lonsdale's departure.
+George Appleby was certainly there, and Michael rather liked him and
+accepted an invitation to lunch. In hall the second-year men were not
+quite as rowdy as they used to be, and when they were rowdy, somehow to
+Michael and the rest of the fourth year they seemed to lack the
+imagination of themselves when they--but after all the only true judges
+of that were the Princes and Cardinals and Poets staring down from
+their high golden frames. The dons, too, at High Table might know, for
+there they sat, immemorial as ever.
+
+Wine in Common Room was just the same, and it really was very jolly to
+be sitting between Castleton--that very popular President of J.C.R.--and
+Tommy Grainger. There certainly was a great and grave satisfaction in
+leading off with a more ceremonious health drinking than had ever been
+achieved in the three years past. Michael found it amusing to catch the
+name of some freshman and, shouting abruptly a salute, to behold him
+wriggle and blush and drink his answer and wonder who on earth was
+hailing _him_. Michael often asked himself if it really were possible he
+could appear to that merry rout at the other end of J.C.R. in truly
+heroic mold. He supposed, with a smile at himself for so gross a fraud,
+that he really did for them pass mortal stature and that already he had
+a bunch of legends dangling from his halo. Down in Venner's after wine,
+Michael fancied the shouts of the freshmen wandering round Cloisters
+were more raucous than once they had seemed. Sometimes really they were
+almost irritating, but the After was capital, although the new comic
+song of the new college jester lacked perhaps a little the perfect lilt
+of "Father says we're going to beat them." Yet, after all, the Boer war
+had been over three years now: no doubt "Father says we're going to beat
+them" would have sounded a little stale. Last term, however, at Two
+Hundred and Two it had rung as fresh as ever. But the singer was gone
+now. It was meet his song should perish with his withdrawal from the
+Oxford scene. Still the After was quite good sport, and Michael was glad
+to think he and Grainger and Sterne were giving the last After but one
+of this term. He bicycled back to the digs with his head full of
+chatter, of clinking glasses and catchy tunes. Nevertheless, all
+consciousness of the evening's merriment faded out, as he hurried up the
+crooked staircase to the sitting-room where Alan, upright at the table
+amid Thucydidean commentaries, was reading under the lamp's immotionable
+rays, his hair glinting with what was now rare gold.
+
+During this autumn term neither Michael nor Alan spoke of Stella except
+as an essentially third person. She was in London, devoting so much of
+herself so charmingly to her mother that Mrs. Fane nearly abandoned
+every other interest in her favor. There were five Schumann recitals, of
+which press notices were sent to 99 St. Giles. Michael as he read them
+handed them on to Alan.
+
+"Jolly good," said he, in a tone of such conventional praise that
+Michael really began to wonder whether he had after all changed his mind
+instead of merely concealing his intention. However, since conversation
+between these two had been stripped to the bare bones of intercourse,
+Michael could not bring himself to violate this habit of reserve for the
+sake of a curiosity the gratification of which in true friendship should
+never be demanded, nor even accepted with deeper attention than the
+trivial news of the day casually offered. Nor would Michael have felt it
+loyal to Alan to try from Stella to extract a point of view regarding
+him. Anyway, he reassured himself, nothing could be done at present.
+
+Toward the end of term Mrs. Ross wrote a letter to Michael whose news
+was sufficiently unexpected to rouse the two of them to a conversation
+of greater length than any they had had since term began.
+
+     COBBLE PLACE,
+
+     November 30.
+
+     My dear Michael,
+
+     You will be surprised to hear that I have become a Catholic, or I
+     suppose I should say to you, if you still adhere to your theories,
+     a Roman Catholic. My reasons for this step, apart of course from
+     the true reason--the grace of God--were, I think, connected a good
+     deal with my boy. When your friend Mr. Prescott killed himself, I
+     felt very much the real emptiness of such a life that on the
+     surface was so admirable, in some ways so enviable. I am dreadfully
+     anxious that Kenneth--he is Kenneth Michael now--I hope you won't
+     be vexed I should have wished him to have Michael also--well, as I
+     was saying--that Kenneth should grow up with all the help that the
+     experience of the past can give him. It has become increasingly a
+     matter of astonishment to me how so many English boys manage to
+     muddle through the crises of their boyhood without the Sacraments.
+     I'm afraid you'll be reading this letter in rather a critical
+     spirit, and perhaps resenting my implication that you, for
+     instance, have come through so many crises without the Sacraments.
+     But I'm not yet a good enough theologian to argue with you about
+     the claims of your Church. Latterly I've felt positively alarmed by
+     the prospect of grappling with Kenneth's future. I have seen you
+     struggle through, and I know I can say win a glorious victory over
+     one side of yourself. But I have seen other things happen, even
+     from where I live my secluded life. If my husband had not been
+     killed I might not perhaps have felt this dread on Kenneth's
+     account. But I like to think that God in giving me that great
+     sorrow has shown His purpose by offering me this new and unimagined
+     peace and security and assurance. I need scarcely say I have had a
+     rather worrying time lately. It is strange how when love and faith
+     are the springs of action one must listen with greater patience
+     than one could listen for any lesser motive to the opinions of
+     other people.
+
+     Joan and Mary whom I've always thought of as just wrapped up in the
+     good works of their dear good selves, really rose in their wrath
+     and scorched me with the fieriest opposition. I could not have
+     believed they had in them to say as much in all their lives as they
+     said to me when I announced my intention. Nor had I any idea they
+     knew so many English clergymen. I believe that to gratify them I
+     have interviewed half the Anglican ministry. Even a Bishop was
+     invoked to demonstrate my apostacy. Nancy, too, wrote furious
+     letters. She was not outraged so much theologically, but her sense
+     of social fitness was shattered.
+
+     My darling old mother was the only person who took my resolve
+     calmly. "As long as you don't try to convert me," she said, "and
+     don't leave incense burning about the house, well--you're old
+     enough to know your own mind." She was so amusing while Joan and
+     Mary were marshaling arguments against me. She used to sit playing
+     "Miss Milligan" with a cynical smile, and said, when it was all
+     over and in spite of everyone I had been received, that she had
+     really enjoyed Patience for the first time, as Joan and Mary were
+     too busy to prevent her from cheating.
+
+     How are you and dear old Alan getting on? Of course you can read
+     him this letter. I've not written to him because I fancy he won't
+     be very much interested. Forgive me that I did not take you into my
+     confidence beforehand, but I feared a controversy with a real
+     historian about the continuity of the Anglican church.
+
+     My love to you both at Oxford.
+
+     Your affectionate
+
+     Maud Ross.
+
+"Great scott!" Michael exclaimed, as he finished the letter. "Alan!
+could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that Mrs. Ross, the
+most inveterate Whig and Roundhead and Orange bigot, at least whenever
+she used to argue with me, would have gone over?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Alan asked, sinking slowly to earth from his
+Platonic _ovpavos_. "Gone over where?"
+
+"To Rome--become a Roman Catholic."
+
+"Who?" gasped Alan, staggered now more than Michael. "Mrs. Ross--Aunt
+Maud?"
+
+"It's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard," said Michael.
+"She--and Kenneth," he added rather maliciously, seeing that Alan's
+Britannic prejudice was violently aroused. "I'll read you her letter."
+
+Plato was shut up for the evening before Michael was halfway through,
+and almost before the last sentence had been read, Alan's wrath
+exploded.
+
+"It's all very fine for her to laugh like that at Joan and Mary and
+Nancy," he said, coloring hotly. "But they were absolutely right, and
+Mrs. Ross--I mean Aunt Maud----"
+
+"I was afraid you were going to disown the relationship," Michael
+laughed.
+
+"Aunt Maud is absolutely wrong. Why, my uncle would have been furious.
+Even if _she_ became a Catholic she had no business to take Kenneth with
+her. The more I think of it--you know, it really is a bit thick."
+
+"Why do you object?" Michael asked curiously. "I never knew you thought
+about religion at all, except so far as occasionally to escort your
+mother politely to Matins, and that was after all to oblige her more
+than God. Besides, you're reading Greats, and I always thought that the
+Greats people in their fourth year abstained from anything like a
+definite opinion for fear of losing their First."
+
+"I may not have a definite opinion about Christianity," said Alan. "But
+Catholicism is ridiculous, anyway--it doesn't suit English people."
+
+"There you're treading on the heels of the School of Modern History
+which you affect to despise. You really don't know, if I may say so,
+what could or could not suit the English people unless you know what
+has or has not suited them."
+
+"Why don't you become a Catholic yourself," challenged Alan, "if you're
+so keen on them?"
+
+"For a logician," said Michael, "your conclusion is bad, being entirely
+unrelated to any of our premises. Secondly, were I inclined to label
+myself as anything, I should be disposed to label myself as a Catholic
+already."
+
+"Oh, I know that affectation!" scoffed Alan.
+
+"Well, the net result of our commentary is that you, like everybody
+else, object to Mrs. Ross changing her opinions, because you don't like
+it. Her position is negligible, the springs of action being religious.
+Now if my mother went over to Rome I should be rather bucked on her
+account."
+
+"My dear chap, if you don't mind my saying so," suggested Alan as
+apologetically as his outraged conventionality would allow, "your mother
+has always been rather given to--er--all sorts of new cults, and it
+wouldn't be so--er--noticeable in her case. But supposing Stella----"
+
+Michael looked at him sharply.
+
+"Supposing Stella did?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, of course she's artistic and she's traveled and--oh, well, I don't
+know--Stella's different."
+
+At any rate, thought Michael, he was still in love with Stella. She was
+evidently beyond criticism.
+
+"You needn't worry," said Michael. "I don't think she ever will."
+
+"You didn't think Aunt Maud ever would," Alan pointed out.
+
+"And, great scott, it's still absolutely incredible," Michael murmured.
+
+Although in the face of Alan's prejudice Michael had felt very strongly
+that Mrs. Ross had done well by her change of communion, or rather by
+her submission to a communion, for he never could remember her as
+perfervid in favor of any before, at the same time to himself he rather
+regretted the step, since it destroyed for him that idea he had kept of
+her as one who stood gravely holding the balance. He dreaded a little
+the effect upon her of a sudden plunge into Catholicism, just as he had
+felt uneasy when eight or nine years ago Alan had first propounded the
+theory of his uncle being in love with her. Michael remembered how the
+suggestion had faintly shocked his conception of Miss Carthew. It was a
+little disconcerting to have to justify herself to Nancy, or indeed to
+anyone. It seemed to weaken her status. Moreover, his own deep-implanted
+notion of "going over to Rome" as the act of a weakling and a
+weather-cock was hard to allay. His own gray image of Pallas Athene
+seemed now to be decked with meretricious roses. He was curious to know
+what his mother would think about the news. Mrs. Fane received it as
+calmly as if he had told her Mrs. Ross had taken up palmistry; to her
+Catholicism was only one of the numberless fads that made life amusing.
+As for Stella, she did not comment on the news at all. She was too much
+occupied with the diversions of the autumn season. Yet Stella was
+careful to impress on Michael that her new mode of life had not been
+dictated by any experience in Vienna.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Don't think I'm drowning care," she wrote. "I made a damned fool of
+myself and luckily you're almost the only person who knows anything
+about it. I've wiped it out as completely as a composition I've learned
+and played and done with. Really I find this pottering life that mother
+and I lead very good for my music. I'm managing to store up a reserve of
+feeling. The Schumann recitals were in some ways my best efforts so far.
+Just now I'm absolutely mad about dancing and fencing; and as mother's
+life is entirely devoted to the theory of physical culture at this
+exact moment, we're both happy."
+
+Michael told Alan what Stella said about dancing and fencing, and he was
+therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one who
+really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a
+Sword club at Oxford.
+
+"Hadn't you better join as well next term?" he suggested. "Rather good
+ecker, I fancy."
+
+"Much better than golf," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, rather," Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to
+his resolve of last summer.
+
+For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he
+wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford
+time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town
+very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and
+graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had
+called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth or
+sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more desirable.
+Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate visit as to a
+tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill this vision of
+return he refused Guy Hazlewood's invitation to Plashers Mead. It seemed
+to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him the joy of
+charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of England and
+that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.
+
+Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael's mood, and there
+for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political
+economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen
+city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more
+ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist
+destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford
+menaced his action.
+
+Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to
+keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February was
+that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made Oxford
+melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that lured him
+forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the window of
+Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie awake
+infatuated.
+
+Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like
+nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon
+history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term
+surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looked back with
+astonishment at the amount of apposite reading accomplished in what
+seemed, now so cruelly swift were the hours, a mere week of rain.
+
+He obtained leave to stay up during the Easter vacation, and time might
+have seemed to stand still, but that Spring on these rathe mornings of
+wind and scudded blue sky was forward with her traceries, bringing with
+every morning green Summer visibly nearer. The urgency of departure less
+than the need for redoubled diligence in acquiring knowledge obsessed
+Michael all this April. Sitting in the bay-window at Ninety-nine on
+these luminous eves of Spring, he vexed himself with the thought of
+disturbing so soon his books, of violating with change the peaceful
+confusion achieved in two terms. The fancy haunted him that for the
+length of the Long Vacation 99 St. Giles would drowse under the
+landlady's nick-nacks brought out to replace his withdrawn treasures;
+that nothing would keep immortal the memory of him and Alan save their
+photographs in frames of almost royal ostentation. Vaguely through his
+mind ran the notion of becoming a don, that forever he might stay here
+in Oxford, a contemplative intellectual cut-off from the great world.
+For a week the notion ripened swiftly, and Michael worked very hard in
+his determination to proceed from a First to the competition for a
+Fellowship. The notion ripened too swiftly, however, and fell with a
+plump, fit for nothing, when he suddenly realized he would have to stay
+on in Oxford alone, since of all his friends he could see not one who
+would be likely in the academic cloister to accompany his meditations.
+With a gesture of weary contempt Michael flung Stubbs into the corner,
+and resolved that, come what might in the History Schools, for what
+remained of his time at Oxford he would enjoy the proffered anodyne.
+
+After he had disowned his work, he took to wandering rather aimlessly
+about the streets; but their aspect, still unfrequented as yet by the
+familiar figures of term-time, made him feel sad. Guy Hazlewood was
+summoned by telegram from where at Plashers Mead he was presumed to have
+found abiding peace. He came bicycling in from the Witney road at noon
+of a blue April day so richly canopied with rolling clouds that the
+unmatured season took on some of June's ampler dignity. After lunch they
+walked to Witham Woods, and Guy tried to persuade Michael to come to
+Wychford when the summer term was over. He was full of the plan for
+founding that lay monastery, that cloister for artists who wished
+between Oxford and the world a space unstressed by anything save ordered
+meditation. Michael was captured anew by the idea he had first
+propounded, and they talked gayly of its advantages, foreseeing, if the
+right people could be induced to come, a period of intense stimulation
+against a background of serenity. Then Guy began to talk of how day by
+day he was subduing words to rhyme and meter.
+
+"And you, what would you do?" he asked.
+
+At once Michael realized the futility of their scheme for him.
+
+"I should only dream away another year," he said rather sadly, "and so
+if you don't mind, old chap, I think I won't join you."
+
+"Rot!" Guy drawled. "I've got it all clear now in my mind. Up at seven.
+At breakfast we should take it in turns to read aloud great poetry. From
+eight to ten retire to our cells, and work at a set piece--a sonnet or
+six lines of prose. Ten to eleven a discussion on what we'd done. Eleven
+to one work at our own stuff. One o'clock lunch with some reading aloud.
+All the afternoon to do what we like. Dinner at seven with more reading
+aloud, and in the evening reading to ourselves. Not a word to be spoken
+after nine o'clock, and bed at eleven. After tea twice a week we might
+have academic discussions."
+
+"It sounds perfect," said Michael, "if you're already equipped with the
+desire to be an artist, and what is more important if deep down in
+yourself you're convinced you have the least justification for ambition.
+But, Guy, what a curious chap you are. You seem to have grown so much
+younger since you went down."
+
+Guy laughed on a note of exultation that sounded strange indeed in one
+whom when still at Balliol Michael had esteemed as perhaps the most
+perfect contemporary example of the undergraduate tired by the
+consciousness of his own impeccable attitude. Guy had always possessed
+so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of
+seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friendship, of everything indeed
+except parlor rowdiness with cushions and sofas, that Michael was almost
+shocked to hear the elaborately wearied Guy declare boisterously:
+
+"My dear chap, that is the great secret. The moment you go down, you do
+grow younger."
+
+He must be in love, thought Michael suddenly; and, so remote was love
+seeming to him just now, he blushed in the implication by his inner self
+of having penetrated uninvited the secret of a friend.
+
+Guy talked all tea-time of the project, and when they had eaten enough
+bread and honey, they set out for Oxford by way of Godstow. The generous
+sun was blanched by watery clouds. A shrewd wind had risen while they
+sat in the inn, and the primroses looked very wan in the shriveled
+twilight. Michael had Guy's company for a week of long walks and snug
+evenings, but the real intimacy which he had expected would be
+consummated by this visit never effected itself somehow. Guy was more
+remote in his mood of communal ambitions than he was at Oxford, living
+his life of whimsical detachment. After he went back to Plashers Mead,
+Michael only missed the sound of his voice, and was not conscious of
+that more violent wrench when the intercourse of silence is broken.
+
+It happened that year St. Mark's Eve fell upon a Sunday, and Michael,
+having been reading the poems of Keats nearly all the afternoon, was
+struck by the coincidence. Oxford on such an occasion was able to
+provide exactly the same sensation for him as Winchester had given to
+the poet. Michael sat in his window-seat looking out over the broad
+thoroughfare of St. Giles, listening to the patter and lisp of Sabbath
+footfalls, to the burden of the bells; and as he sat there with the city
+receding in the wake of his window, he was aware more poignantly than
+ever of how actually in a few weeks it would recede. The bells and the
+footsteps were quiet for a while: the sun had gone: it was the vesper
+stillness of evening prayer: slowly the printed page before him faded
+from recognition. Already the farther corners of the room were black,
+revealing from time to time, as a tongue of flame leaped up in the
+grate, the golden blazonries of the books on the walls. It was
+everywhere dark when the people came out of church, and the footsteps
+were again audible. Michael envied Keats the power which he had known to
+preserve forever that St. Mark's Eve of eighty years ago in Winchester.
+It was exasperating that now already the footfalls were dying away, that
+already their sensation was evanescent, that he could not with the wand
+of poetry forbid time to disturb this quintessential hour of Oxford. Art
+alone could bewitch the present in the fashion of that enchantress in
+the old fairy tale who sent long ago a court to sleep.
+
+What was the use of reading history unless the alchemy of literature had
+transcended the facts by the immortal presentation of them? These
+charters and acts of parliament, these exchequer-rolls and raked-up
+records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of
+Maitland's fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs' ponderous
+conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends,
+the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through
+the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the same
+directness of divine exposition as faith itself.
+
+Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was
+incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to him,
+and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these moments
+that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical assurances of
+human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for explanation. After
+all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful statement the fact of
+a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why he had wrought it
+forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense of the fact: it
+could not resolve it in such a way that life would cease to be the
+baffling attempt it was on the individual's part to restate to himself
+his personal dreams.
+
+Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it
+was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over
+all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave
+the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the
+breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not
+some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical condition?
+
+The sensation of St. Mark's Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the
+chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the
+psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of
+what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a
+while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull down
+the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit thoroughfare, with
+all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness, the immutable city
+that neither mist nor modern architects could destroy, the immortal
+academy whose spirit would surely outdare the menace of these reforming
+Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither the cowardly betrayers of
+her civilization who, even now before the barbarian was at her gates,
+were cringing to him with offers to sell the half of her heritage of
+learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all about him in the darkness, wished
+he could be a member of Convocation and make a flaming speech in defense
+of compulsory Greek. That happened to be the proposed surrender to
+modern conditions which at the moment was agitating his conservative
+passion.
+
+"Thank heaven I live when I do," he said to himself. "If it were 2000
+A.D., how much more miserable I should be."
+
+He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against
+the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather
+particularly good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LAST TERM
+
+
+Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary's
+tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed
+that he was not seen in the sun's eye. This lapse of enthusiasm saddened
+him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision of speeding
+youth.
+
+The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that
+notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the
+other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He
+was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice
+to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no
+good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days
+were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came round,
+and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the
+achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his
+friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had
+counted upon this bump-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for this
+happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them, and he
+went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure Tommy
+Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not the
+bump-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.
+
+Tired of the howling and the horse-play, tired of the fretful
+fireworks, he turned into Venner's just before ten o'clock.
+
+"Why aren't you with your friends, making a noise?" asked Venner.
+
+"Ought to go home and work," Michael explained.
+
+"But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to
+the fore on these occasions."
+
+"Don't feel like it, Venner."
+
+"You mustn't work too hard, you know," said the old man, blinking kindly
+at him.
+
+"Oh, it's not work, Venner. It's age."
+
+"Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They're having a rare time to-night. I
+don't expect the dons'll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a
+bump-supper. Why ever don't you go out and do your share?"
+
+Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in
+his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no
+good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of
+ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to
+the lodge.
+
+"Don't forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt," he warned
+the porter. "I don't want to be hauled to-morrow morning for damage done
+in my absence."
+
+The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.
+
+"There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing your
+egress, sir," he said pompously, "and had it registered in my book
+before you spoke."
+
+Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pass out into the
+High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary's bridge, and when
+the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood
+for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the
+shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to
+time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman
+candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all as
+the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to listen
+to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people, small as
+emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He regretted
+sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St. Giles,
+roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning. It was
+melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy, but
+outside its participation; and presently he started to walk quickly back
+to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that
+before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.
+
+Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael.
+Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college
+authorities to make him covet a good class: to Alan it was more
+important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to
+try for the Home Civil Service.
+
+"However, I've given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a
+Second, I shall be jolly grateful," he told Michael.
+
+The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be
+sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black
+clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the
+university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four
+days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring
+and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of
+tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had
+even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to
+the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus
+and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black
+coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to
+the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was
+all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended
+with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June
+evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before,
+spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to
+enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing
+seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever,
+and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.
+
+This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her
+graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was
+not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely
+poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about
+it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine
+autumn day.
+
+It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of Oxford
+dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew Arnold had
+said she did not need June for beauty's heightening. That was true. Her
+beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with all the grave
+consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded more the loss of
+this infoliated calm than of any of the people who were enjoying its
+amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that next year would
+not form themselves, that forever indeed would be irremediably
+dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members scattered did
+not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that next year himself
+would have lost the assurance that he was an organic part of this
+tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was already broken
+up: the end of the third year had effected that. This farewell to
+Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the very first
+moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of a
+Fellowship. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have
+withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth in
+the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive, and
+worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course. Now,
+since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather
+opulently fine mocked his exit.
+
+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 Boh�me."
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE LAST WEEK
+
+
+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 cr�pe-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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+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 Abb� Pr�vost 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 Abb� 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 Abb� 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 d�crive mes sentiments, ni que je vous rapporte
+mes derni�res 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 Abb� Pr�vost
+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 Abb� Pr�vost 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
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+
+    Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
+    descendam, magnorum haud umquam indignus avorum.
+
+    VIRGIL.
+
+    For Fancy cannot live on real food:
+    In youth she will despise familiar joy
+    To dwell in mournful shades, as they grow real,
+    Then buildeth she of joy her fair ideal.
+
+    ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OSTIA DITIS
+
+
+When Michael reached the Oxford Music-hall he wondered why he had
+overspurred his fatigue to such a point. There was no possibility of
+pleasure here, and he would have done better to stay at home and cure
+with sleep what was after all a natural depression. It had been foolish
+to expect a sedative from contact with this unquiet assemblage. In the
+mass they had nothing but a mechanical existence, subject as they were
+to the brightness or dimness of the electrolier that regulated their
+attention. Michael did not bother to buy a program. From every podgy
+hand he could see dangling the lithograph of St. Mary's tower with its
+glazed moonlight; and he was not sufficiently aware of the glib atom who
+bounced about the golden dazzle of the stage to trouble about his name.
+He mingled with the slow pace of the men and women on the promenade.
+They were going backward and forward like flies, meeting for a moment in
+a quick buzz of colloquy and continuing after a momentary pause their
+impersonal and recurrent progress. Michael was absorbed in this
+ceaseless ebb and flow of motion where the sidelong glances of the
+women, as they brushed his elbow in the passing crowd, gave him no
+conviction of an individual gaze. Once or twice he diverted his steps
+from the stream and tried to watch in a half-hearted way the
+performance; but as he leaned over the plush-covered barrier a woman
+would sidle up to him, and he would move away in angry embarrassment
+from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of popping
+corks and the chink of glasses, the whirr of the ventilating fans, the
+stentorophonic orchestra, the red-faced raucous atom on the stage
+combined to irritate him beyond further endurance; and he had just
+resolved to walk seven times up and down the promenade before he went
+home, when somebody cried in heartiest greeting over his shoulder,
+"Hullo, Bangs!"
+
+Michael turned and saw Drake, and so miserable had been the effect of
+the music-hall that he welcomed him almost effusively, although he had
+not seen him during four years and would probably like him rather less
+now than he had liked him at school.
+
+"_My_ lord! fancy seeing you again!" Drake effused.
+
+Michael found himself shaken warmly by the hand in support of the
+enthusiastic recognition. After the less accentuated cordiality of
+Oxford manners, it was strange to be standing like this with clasped
+hands in the middle of this undulatory crowd.
+
+"I _say_, Bangs, old man, we must have a drink on this."
+
+Drake led the way to the bar and called authoritatively for two whiskies
+and a split Polly.
+
+"Quite a little-bit-of-fluffy-all-right," he whispered to Michael,
+seeming to calculate with geometrical eyes the arcs and semicircles of
+the barmaid's form. She with her nose in the air poured out the liquid,
+and Michael wondered how any of it went into the glass. As a matter of
+fact, most of it splashed onto the bar, whence Drake presently took his
+change all bedewed with alcohol, and, lifting his glass, wished Michael
+a jolly good chin-chin.
+
+"'D luck," Michael muttered in response.
+
+"_My_ lord!" Drake began again. "Fancy meeting you of all people. And
+not a bit different. I said to myself: 'I'm jiggered if that isn't old
+Bangs,' and--well, _my_ lord! but I was surprised. Do you often come out
+on the randan?"
+
+"Not very often," Michael admitted. "I just happened to be alone
+to-night."
+
+"Good for you, old sport. What have you been doing since you left
+school?"
+
+"I'm just down from Oxford," Michael informed him.
+
+"Pretty good spree up there, eh?"
+
+"Oh, yes, rather," said Michael.
+
+"Well, I had the chance to go," said Drake. "But it wasn't good enough.
+It's against you in the City, you know. Waste of time really, except of
+course for a parson or a schoolmaster."
+
+"Yes, I expect it would have been rather a waste of time for you,"
+Michael agreed.
+
+"Oh, rotten! So you moved from--where was it?--Carlington Road?"
+
+"Yes, we moved to Cheyne Walk."
+
+"Let's see. That's in Hampstead, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, it's rather nearer the river," suggested Michael. "Are you still
+in Trelawny Road?"
+
+"Yes, still in the same old hovel. My hat! Talking of Trelawny Road, it
+_is_ a small world. Who do you think I saw last week?"
+
+"Not Lily Haden?" Michael asked, in spite of a wish not to rise so
+quickly to Drake's hook.
+
+"You're right. I saw the fair Lily. But where do you think I saw her?
+Bangs, old boy, I tell you I'm not a fellow who's easily surprised. But
+this knocked me. Of course, you'll understand the Hadens flitted from
+Trelawny Road soon after you stopped calling. So who knows what's
+happened since? I give you three guesses where I saw her."
+
+"I hate riddles," said Michael fretfully.
+
+"At the Orient," said Drake solemnly. "The Orient Promenade. You could
+have knocked me down with a feather."
+
+Michael stared at Drake, scarcely realizing the full implication of what
+he just announced. Then suddenly he grasped the horrible fact that
+revealed to him here in a music-hall carried a double force. His one
+instinct for the moment was to prevent Drake from knowing into what
+depths his news had plunged him.
+
+"Has she changed?" asked Michael, and could have kicked himself for the
+question.
+
+"Well, of course there was a good deal of powder," said Drake. "I'm not
+easily shocked, but this gave me a turn. She was with a man, but even if
+she hadn't been, I doubt if I'd have had the nerve to talk to her. I
+wouldn't have known what to say. But, of course, you know, her mother
+was a bit rapid. That's where it is. Have another drink. You're looking
+quite upset."
+
+Michael shook his head. He must go home.
+
+"Aren't you coming down West a bit?" asked Drake, in disappointment.
+"The night's still young."
+
+But Michael was not to be persuaded.
+
+"Well, don't let's lose sight of each other now we've met. What's your
+club? I've just joined the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You
+get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You ought to join. Or perhaps
+you're already suited?"
+
+"I belong to the Bath," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, of course, if you're suited, that's all right. But any time you
+want to join the Primrose just let me know and I'll put you up. The sub
+isn't really very much. Guinea a year."
+
+Michael thanked him and escaped as quickly as he could. Outside even in
+Oxford Street the air was full of summer, and the cool people sauntering
+under the sapphirine sky were as welcome to his vision as if he had
+waked from a fever. His head was throbbing with the heat of the
+music-hall, and the freshness of night-air was delicious. He called a
+hansom and told the driver to go to Blackfriars Bridge, and from there
+slowly along the Embankment to Cheyne Walk. For a time he leaned back in
+the cab, thinking of nothing, barely conscious of golden thoroughfares,
+of figures in silhouette against the glitter, and of the London roar
+rising and falling. Presently in the quiet of the shadowy cross-streets
+he began to appreciate what seemed the terrible importance to himself of
+Drake's news.
+
+"It concerns me," he began to reiterate aloud. "It concerns me--me--me.
+It's useless to think that it doesn't. It concerns me."
+
+Then a more ghastly suggestion whispered itself. How should he ever know
+that he was not primarily responsible? The idea came over him with
+sickening intensity; and upright now he saw in the cracked mirrors of
+the cab a face blanched, a forehead clammy with sweat, and over his
+shoulder like a goblin the wraith of Lily. It was horrible to see so
+distorted that beautiful memory which time had etherealized out of a
+reality, until of her being nothing had endured but a tenuous image of
+earliest love. Now under the shock of her degradation he must be dragged
+back by this goblin to face his responsibility. He must behold again
+close at hand her shallow infidelity. He must assure himself of her
+worthlessness, hammer into his brain that from the beginning she had
+merely trifled with him. This must be established for the sake of his
+conscience. Where the devil was this driver going?
+
+"I told you down the Embankment," Michael shouted through the trap.
+
+"I can't go down the Embankment before I gets there, can I, sir?" the
+cabman asked reproachfully.
+
+Michael closed the trap. He was abashed when he perceived they were
+still only in Fleet Street. Why had he gone to The Oxford to-night? Why
+had he spoken to Drake? Why had he not stayed at Wychford? Why had he
+not returned to London with the others? Such regrets were valueless. It
+was foredoomed that Lily should come into his life again. Yet there was
+no reason why she should. There was no reason at all. Men could hardly
+be held responsible for the fall of women, unless themselves had upon
+their souls the guilt of betrayal or desertion. It was ridiculous to
+argue that he must bother because at eighteen he had loved her, because
+at eighteen he had thought she was worthy of being loved. No doubt the
+Orient Promenade was the sequel of kissing objectionable actors in the
+back gardens of West Kensington. Yet the Orient Promenade? That was a
+damnable place. The Orient Promenade? He remembered her kisses. Sitting
+in this cab, he was kissing her now. She had ridden for hours deep in
+his arms. Not Oxford could cure this relapse into the past. Every spire
+and every tower had crashed to ruins around his staid conceptions, so
+that they too presently fell away. Four years of plastic calm were
+unfashioned, and she was again beside him. Every passing lamp lit up her
+face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her
+place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered,
+pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What
+invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to turn
+his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He must
+remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money, plead
+with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the hansom
+kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor Road the
+onrushing street-lamps flung their balls of light with monotonous
+jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to find her. He
+would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the morning perhaps the
+problem would present itself in less difficult array.
+
+Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera, and
+suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day he
+could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so that he
+would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful engagement of
+Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony of their
+happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the window,
+staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the generous
+night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the reflected
+lamps in golden pagodas sprawled across the width of the river and where
+the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the bridge, nuzzled the
+shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around the patient barges at
+their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the surface of the stream,
+blurring the golden pagodas of light so that they jigged and glittered
+until the motion died away. Eastward in the sky over London hung a tawny
+stain that blotted out the stars.
+
+From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city
+stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.
+He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false
+vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the
+dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that
+London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion,
+that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his
+memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She
+was walking toward him in Kensington Gardens: not a contour of her
+delicate progress had been blunted by the rasp of time. Five years ago
+he had been the first to speak: now, must it be she who sometimes spoke
+first? Seventeen she had told him had been her age, and they had kissed
+in the dark midway between two lamps. No doubt she had been kissed
+before. In that household of Trelawny Road anything else was
+inconceivable. The gray streets of West Kensington in terrace upon
+terrace stretched before him, and now as he recalled their barren stones
+it seemed to him there was not one corner round which he might not
+expect to meet her face to face. "_Michael, why do you make me love you
+so?_" That was her voice. It was she who had asked him that question.
+Never before this moment had he realized the import of her demand. Now,
+when it was years too late to remedy, it came out of the past like an
+accusation. He had answered it then with closer kisses. He had released
+her then like a ruffled bird, secure that to-morrow and to-morrow and
+to-morrow she would nestle to his arms for cherishing. And now if he
+thought more of her life beneath that lurid stain he would go mad; if he
+conjured to himself the vision of her now--had not Drake said she was
+powdered and painted? To this had she come. And she was here in London.
+Last week she had been seen. It was no nightmare. It was real, horrible
+and real. He must go out again at once and find her. He must not sit
+dreaming here, staring at the silly Thames, the smooth and imperturbable
+Thames. He must plunge into that phantasmagoric city; he must fly from
+haunt to haunt; he must drag the depths of every small hell; he must
+find her to-night.
+
+Michael rose, but on the instant of his decision his mother and Stella
+drove up. Alan was no longer with them. He must have gone home to
+Richmond. How normal sounded their voices from the pavement below.
+Perhaps he would after all go down and greet them. They might wonder
+otherwise if something had happened. Looking at himself as he passed the
+mirror on his way down, he saw that he really was haggard. If he pleaded
+a headache, his countenance would bear him out. In the end he shouted to
+them over the balusters, and both of them wanted to come up with
+remedies. He would not let them. The last thing his mood desired was the
+tending of cool hands.
+
+"I'm only fagged out," he told them. "I want a night's sleep."
+
+Yet he knew how hard it would be to fall asleep. His brain was on fire.
+Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut
+the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with
+the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt
+less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted
+half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He
+seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room
+surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects. The
+cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a sense
+that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had shaken
+him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that he had
+wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he could
+examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going, and the
+need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still all his
+impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear view of his
+attitude.
+
+He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses
+nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present she
+appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to
+bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the
+loss of beauty, of passion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so
+constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly
+incapable was Drake's account to change his outward picture of her, he
+could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It
+seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night,
+she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years
+ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.
+
+Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prostitute in
+London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no
+account. Were they of no account? _C'est une douzaine de filles de
+joie._ When he read Manon this morning--how strange! this morning he had
+been reading Manon at Oxford--he was moved with pity for all poor light
+women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New Orleans
+nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because he was
+still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was because he had
+known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the damning weight
+that in the past she had said, "_Michael, why do you make me love you
+so?_" If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If there was shame, he
+was shameful. Others after him had sinned against her casually, counting
+their behavior no more than a speck of dust in the garbage of human
+emotion with which she was already smirched. He may not have seduced
+her, but he had sinned against her, because while loving her he had let
+her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He had trifled with her
+sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for blame was cowardly.
+It was that very youth which was the sin, because under society's laws,
+whatever fine figure his love might seem to him to have cut, he should
+have known that it was a profitless love for a girl. He shared in the
+guilt. He partook of the shame. That was incontrovertible.
+
+Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not
+his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally
+incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said
+to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to
+marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott
+must always have deplored the position in which his friend's mistress
+had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one's mother. It seemed
+to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her, if Lady
+Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which he had
+soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our rigid
+divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable times
+in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen had
+cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been sinned
+against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say that the
+sinner had in the circumstances behaved very well, that so far as he was
+able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse his father's
+initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not wash out his
+deliberate sin against--and who was she? Who was his mother? Val�rie ...
+and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a clergyman ... a
+gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had exposed her to the
+calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved chivalrously at any rate
+by the standards of romance. But by what small margin had his own mother
+escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions of order and safety and
+custom tottered and reeled at such a thought. Surely such a realization
+doubled his obligation to atone by rescuing Lily, out of very
+thankfulness to God that his own mother had escaped the evil which had
+come to her. How wretchedly puny now seemed all his own repinings. All
+he had gained for his own character had been a vague dissatisfaction
+that he could not succeed to the earldom in order to prove the sanctity
+of good breeding. There had been no gratitude; there had been nothing
+but a hurt conceit. The horror of Drake's news would at least cure him
+forever of that pettiness. Already he felt the strength that comes from
+the sight of a task that must be conquered. He had been moved that
+morning by the tale of Manon Lescaut. This tale of Lily was in
+comparison with that as an earthquake to the tunneling of a mole beneath
+a croquet-lawn. And now must he regard his father's memory with
+condemnation? Must he hate him? He must hate him, indeed, unless by his
+own behavior he could feel he had accepted in substitution the burden of
+his father's responsibility. And he had admired him so much dying out
+there in Africa for his country. He had resented his death for the sake
+of thousands more unworthy living comfortably at home.
+
+"All my standards are falling to pieces," thought Michael. "Heroes and
+heroines are all turning into cardboard. If I don't make some effort to
+be true to conviction, I shall turn to cardboard with the rest."
+
+He began to pace the room in a tumult of intentions, vows and
+resolutions. Somehow before he slept he must shape his course. Four
+years had dreamed themselves away at Oxford. Unless all that education
+was as immaterial as the fogs of the Isis, it must provide him now with
+an indication of his duty. He had believed in Oxford, believed in her
+infallibility and glory, he had worshiped all she stood for. He had
+surrendered himself to her to make of him a gentleman, and unless these
+four years had been a delusion, his education must bear fruit now.
+
+Michael made up his mind suddenly, and as it seemed to him at the moment
+in possession of perfect calm and clarity of judgment, that he would
+marry Lily. He had accepted marriage as a law of his society. Well,
+then that law should be kept. He would test every article of the creed
+of an English gentleman. He would try in the fire of his purpose honor,
+pride, courtesy, and humility. All these must come to his aid, if he
+were going to marry a whore. Let him stab himself with the word. Let him
+not blind himself with euphemisms. His friends would have no euphemisms
+for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying Queenie
+Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How everybody would
+despise his folly. There would not be one friend who would understand.
+Least of all would his mother understand. It was a hard thing to do; and
+yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could be granted the grace of
+faith to sustain him. Principles were rather barren things to support
+the soul in a fight with convention. Principles of honor when so very
+personal were apt to crumple in the blast of society's principles all
+fiercely kindled against him. Just now he had thought of the
+thankfulness he owed to God. Was it more than a figure of speech, an
+exaggerative personification under great emotion of what most people
+would call chance? At any rate, here was God in a cynical mood, and the
+divine justice of this retributive situation seemed to hint at something
+beyond mere luck. And if principles were strong enough to sustain him to
+the onset, faith might fire him to the coronation of his
+self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and calmly to marry Lily,
+and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if to hearten him he saw
+her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for his dreams the ways of
+night like a gazelle.
+
+Next morning when Michael woke, his resolve purified by sleep of
+feverish and hysterical promptings was fresh upon his pillow. In the
+fatigue and strain of the preceding night the adventure had caught a
+hectic glow of exaltation. Now, with the sparrows twittering and the
+milkman clanking and yodeling down Cheyne Walk and the young air puffing
+the curtains, his course acquired a simplicity in this lucid hour of
+deliberation, which made the future normal and even obvious. There was a
+great relief in this fresh following breeze after the becalmed inaction
+of Oxford: it seemed an augury of life's importance that so immediately
+on top of the Oxford dream he should find such a complete dispersion of
+mist and so urgent a fairway before him. The task of finding Lily might
+easily occupy him for some time, for a life like hers would be made up
+of mutable appearances and sudden strange eclipses. It might well be a
+year before she was seen again on the Orient Promenade. Yet it was just
+as likely that he would find her at once. For a moment he caught his
+breath in thinking of the sudden plunge which that meeting would
+involve. He thought of all the arguments and all the dismay that the
+revelation of his purpose would set in motion. However, the marriage had
+to be. He had threshed it all out last night. But he might reasonably
+hope for a brief delay. Such a hope was no disloyalty to his
+determination.
+
+Stella was already at breakfast when he came downstairs. Michael raised
+his eyebrows in demand for news of her and Alan.
+
+"Mother was the sweetest thing imaginable," she said. "And so we're
+engaged. I wanted to come and talk to you last night, but I thought you
+would rather be left alone."
+
+"I'm glad you're happy," he said gravely. "And I'm glad you're safe."
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise.
+
+"I've never been anything but safe," she assured him.
+
+"Haven't you?" he asked, looking at her and reproving himself for the
+thought that this gray-eyed sister of his could ever have exposed
+herself to the least likelihood of falling into Lily's case. Yet there
+had been times when he had felt alarmed for her security and happiness.
+There had been that fellow Ayliffe, and more serious still there had
+been that unknown influence in Vienna. Invulnerable she might seem now
+in this cool dining-room on a summer morning, but there had been times
+when he had doubted.
+
+"What are you looking at?" she asked, flaunting her imperious boyishness
+in his solemn countenance.
+
+"You. Thinking you ought to be damned grateful."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"You included, I suppose," she laughed.
+
+Still it had been rather absurd, Michael thought, as he tapped his egg,
+to suppose there was anything in Stella's temperament which could ever
+link her to Lily. Should he announce his quest for her approbation and
+sympathy? It was difficult somehow to begin. Already a subtle change had
+taken place in their relation to each other since she was engaged to
+Alan. Of course, his reserve was ridiculous, but he could not bring
+himself to break through now. Besides, in any case it were better to
+wait until he had found Lily again. It would all sound very
+pretentiously noble in anticipation, and though she would have every
+right to laugh, he did not want her to laugh. When he stood on the brink
+of marriage, they would none of them be able to laugh. There was a grim
+satisfaction in that.
+
+"When does mother suggest you should be married?" he asked.
+
+"We more or less settled November. Alan has given up the Civil Service.
+That's my first piece of self-assertion. He's coming for me this
+morning, and we're going to lunch at Richmond."
+
+"You've never met Mr. and Mrs. Merivale?"
+
+Stella shook her head.
+
+"Old Merivale's a ripping old boy. Always making bad puns. And Mrs.
+Merivale's a dear."
+
+"They must both be perfect to have been the father and mother of Alan,"
+said Stella.
+
+"I shouldn't get too excited over him," Michael advised. "Or over
+yourself, either. You might give me the credit of knowing all about it
+long before either of you."
+
+"Darling Michael," she cried, bounding at him like a puppy.
+
+"When you've done making an ass of yourself you might chuck me a roll."
+
+Alan arrived soon after breakfast, and he and Michael had a few minutes
+together, while Stella was getting ready to go out.
+
+"Were your people pleased?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, of course. Naturally the mater was a little nervous. She thought I
+seemed young. Talked a good deal about being a little boy only yesterday
+and that sort of rot."
+
+"And your governor?"
+
+"He supposed I was determined to steal her," said Alan, with a whimsical
+look of apology for the pun. "And having worked that off he spent the
+rest of the evening relishing his own joke."
+
+Stella came down ready to start for Richmond. Both she and Alan were in
+white, and Michael said they looked like a couple of cricketers. But he
+envied them as he waved them farewell from the front door through which
+the warm day was deliciously invading the house. Their happiness
+sparkled on the air as visibly almost as the sunshine winking on the
+river. Those Richmond days belonged imperishably to him and Alan, yet
+for Alan this Saturday would triumph over all the others before. Michael
+turned back into the house rather sadly. The radiance of the morning had
+been dislustered by their departure, and Michael against his will had
+to be aware of the sense of exclusion which lovers leave in their wake.
+He waited indoors until his mother came down. She was solicitous for the
+headache of last night, and while he was with her he was not troubled by
+regrets for the break-up of established intercourse. He asked himself
+whether he should take her into his confidence by announcing the tale of
+Lily. Yet he did not wish to give her an impression of being more
+straightly bound to follow his quest than by the broadest rules of
+conduct. He felt it would be easier to explain when the marriage had
+taken place. How lucky for him that he was not financially dependent!
+That he was not, however, laid upon him the greater obligation. He could
+find, even if he wished one, no excuse for unfulfillment.
+
+Michael and his mother talked for a time of the engagement. She was
+still somewhat doubtful of Alan's youth, when called upon to adapt
+itself to Stella's temperament.
+
+"I think you're wrong there," said Michael. "Alan is rather a rigid
+person in fundamentals, you know, and his youth will give just that
+flexibility which Stella would demand. In another five years he would
+have been ensconced behind an Englishman's strong but most unmanageable
+barrier of prejudice. I noticed so much his attitude toward Mrs. Ross
+when she was received into the Roman Church. I asked him what he would
+say if Stella went over. He maintained that she was different. I think
+that's a sign he'll be ready to apply imagination to her behavior."
+
+"Yes, but I hope he won't think that whatever she does is right," Mrs.
+Fane objected.
+
+"Oh, no," laughed Michael. "Imagination will always be rather an effort
+for Alan. Mother, would you be worried if I told you I wanted to go away
+for a while--I mean to say, go away and perhaps more or less not be
+heard of for a while?"
+
+"Abroad?" she asked.
+
+"Not necessarily abroad. I'm not going to involve myself in a dangerous
+undertaking; but I'm just sufficiently tired of my very comfortable
+existence to wish to make an experiment. I may be away quite a short
+time, but I might want to be away a few months. Will you promise me not
+to worry yourself over my movements? Some of the success of this
+undertaking will probably depend on a certain amount of freedom. You can
+understand, can't you, that the claims of home, however delightful,
+might in certain circumstances be a problem?"
+
+"I suppose you're taking steps to prepare my mind for something very
+extremely unpleasant," she said.
+
+"Let's ascribe it all to my incurably romantic temperament," Michael
+suggested.
+
+"And I'm not to worry?"
+
+"No, please don't."
+
+"But when are you going away?"
+
+"I'm not really going away at all," Michael explained. "But if I didn't
+come back to dinner one night or even the next night, would you be
+content to know quite positively that I hadn't been run over?"
+
+"You're evidently going to be thoroughly eccentric. But I suppose," she
+added wistfully, "that after your deserted childhood I can hardly expect
+you to be anything else. Yet it seems so comfortable here." She was
+looking round at the chairs.
+
+"I'm not proposing to go to the North Pole, you know," Michael said,
+"but I don't want to obey dinner-gongs."
+
+"Very noisy and abrupt," she agreed.
+
+Soon they were discussing all kinds of substitutions.
+
+"Mother, what an extraordinary lot you know about noise," Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+"Dearest boy, I'm on the committee of a society for the abatement of
+London street noises."
+
+"So deeply occupied with reform," he said, patting her hand.
+
+"One must do something," she smiled.
+
+"I know," he asserted. "And therefore you'll let me ride this new
+hobby-horse I'm trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?"
+
+"You know perfectly well that you will anyhow," said Mrs. Fane, shaking
+her head.
+
+Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this
+admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in
+order to assist at Castleton's induction, and Michael walked along the
+Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.
+
+The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a
+state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at
+work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and
+at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from
+Tchaikovsky's symphonies.
+
+"Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable," said Castleton. "Do
+you know Cunningham?" He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.
+
+"Making it comfortable," Michael repeated. "My first impression was just
+the reverse. I suppose it's no good asking you people to give me lunch?"
+
+"Rather, of course," Maurice declared. "Castleton, it's your turn to buy
+lunch."
+
+"One extraordinary thing, Michael," said Castleton, "is the way in which
+Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing something.
+You'd think he kept a ledger of all our tasks."
+
+"We can send old Mother Wadman if you're tired," Maurice offered.
+Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and
+Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.
+
+"I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up," Maurice
+explained, "but we shall be three times as comfortable when he's
+finished. He's putting up divans."
+
+Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton was
+at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over
+multitudinous roofs.
+
+"What a great rolling sense of human life they do give," said Michael.
+"A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and
+all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there's the
+lighthouse," he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.
+
+"The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile
+for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church," said Maurice. "We're
+having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a
+secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What
+is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We
+two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I shall
+meet the girl who's meant to share this with me. Then I really think I
+could work."
+
+Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were not
+the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were
+married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be driven
+out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They would be
+suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and yet they
+would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The windows of the
+city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly as the stars.
+Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because to see her in
+a room like this would be to love her. How well he understood Maurice's
+desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody wanted a girl to perfect
+Plashers Mead. Even Guy's fairy child at Plashers Mead had seemed an
+intrusion; but here, to protect one's loneliness against the
+overpowering contemplation of the life around, love was a necessity. And
+perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the ambition his friends had for
+his career. It might be so. Perhaps himself might find an inspiration in
+an attic high up over roofs. It might be. It might be so.
+
+"What are you thinking about?" Maurice asked.
+
+"I was thinking you were probably right," said Michael.
+
+Maurice looked pleasantly surprised. He was rather accustomed to be
+snubbed when he told Michael of his desire for feminine companionship.
+
+"I don't want to get married, you know," he hastily added.
+
+"That would depend," said Michael. "If one married what is called an
+impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to
+make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St.
+Thomas' Church at half-past two."
+
+"But why are you so keen about marriage?" Maurice demanded.
+
+"Well, it has certain advantages," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Not among the sparrows," said Maurice.
+
+"Most of all among the sparrows," Michael contradicted. He was becoming
+absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to remove
+the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he proposed
+to take. They would be able to re�nter the world after a long
+retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the
+opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the
+touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked
+something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he
+had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during that
+first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily had
+assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire for
+the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock of
+disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake's account of
+her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news had
+merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.
+
+"It is really extraordinarily romantic up here," Maurice exclaimed,
+bursting in upon his reverie.
+
+"Yes, I suppose that's the reason," Michael admitted.
+
+"The reason of what?" Maurice asked.
+
+"Of what I was thinking," Michael said.
+
+Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and
+almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.
+
+Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their
+hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house still
+and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a hansom-cab, and
+told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+NEPTUNE CRESCENT
+
+
+The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to
+Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of
+it at Brother Aloysius' behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his
+choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.
+The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a
+deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With
+the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had
+apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no
+farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his
+experience.
+
+That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery;
+that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gruesomeness, for
+ever since Mrs. Pearcey's blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had
+held for him a macaber significance: of the hellish portals mystery and
+gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time
+tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed
+the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown
+London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy onward.
+Maple's and Shoolbred's, those outposts of shopping civilization, were
+left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of roguery began. He was
+not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so disquieting. It was
+probably a mere trick of contrast between present squalor and the
+greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim, but it had a
+nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot from the
+thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those bright
+yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he remembered them
+from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of them skirting the
+Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the pantomime. Even now
+their painted destinations affected him with a dismay that real people
+could be familiar with this sinister route.
+
+Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for years
+as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a tawdry
+and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others. Now the
+cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron railway
+bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town behind a
+huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered through the
+murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the pavement, past a
+wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of humanity chalked
+upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was Kentish Town. It lay to
+the left of this bridge that was the color of stale blood. Michael told
+the driver to stop for one moment, and he leaned forward over the apron
+of the cab to survey the cross-street of swarming feculent humanity that
+was presumably the entering highway. A train roared over the bridge; a
+piano organ gargled its tune; a wagon-load of iron girders drew near in
+a clanging tintamar of slow progress. Michael's brief pause was enough
+to make such an impression of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his
+original conception of Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb.
+But just as the cab reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he caught
+sight of a slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their
+mucid heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the
+stucco was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid
+arabesques and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town
+a putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and noise and
+exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character
+allotted by his prefiguration.
+
+The Camden Road was, in contrast with what had gone before, a wide and
+easy thoroughfare which let in the blue summer sky; and it was not for
+some minutes that Michael began to notice what a queerness came from the
+terraces that branched off on either side. The suggestion these terraces
+could weave extended itself to the detached houses of the main road. In
+the gaps between them long parallelograms of gardens could be seen
+joining others even longer that led up to the backs of another road
+behind. Sometimes it seemed that fifty gardens at once were visible,
+circumscribed secretive pleasure-grounds in the amount of life they
+could conceal, the life that could prosper and decay beneath their
+arbors merely for that conspiracy of gloating windows. It was impossible
+not to speculate upon the quality of existence in these precise
+enclosures; and to this the chapels of obscure sects that the cab
+occasionally passed afforded an indication. To these arid little
+tabernacles the population stole out on Sunday mornings. There would be
+something devilish about these reunions. Upon these pinchbeck creeds
+their souls must surely starve, must slowly shrink to desiccated imps.
+Anything more spiritually malevolent than those announcements chalked
+upon the black notice-board of the advent of the hebdomadal messiah, the
+peregrine cleric, the sacred migrant was impossible to imagine. With
+what apostolic cleverness would he impose himself upon these people, and
+how after the gravid midday meal of the Sabbath he would sit in those
+green arbors like a horrible Chinese fum. The cabman broke in upon
+Michael's fantastic depression by calling down through the trap that
+they were arrived at the Nag's Head and what part of Seven Sisters Road
+did he want.
+
+Michael was disappointed by the Seven Sisters Road. It seemed to be
+merely the garish mart of a moderately poor suburban population. There
+was here nothing to support the diabolic legend with which under the
+suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the
+streets he had passed this afternoon there had been none less
+inferential of romance than this long shopping street.
+
+"What number do you want, sir?" the driver repeated.
+
+"Well, really I want rooms," Michael explained. "Only this seems a bit
+noisy."
+
+"Yes, it is a bit boisterous," the cabman agreed.
+
+Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began
+to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it
+became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and the
+quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he
+wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate
+upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less surreptitious
+than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of the
+parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high into
+the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of Kentish
+Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy slum.
+
+"Try turning off to the left," he called to the driver through the roof.
+
+The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost
+immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each
+street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and
+well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses' declension
+from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.
+
+Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an
+unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy,
+guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal laurels.
+Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on account of
+the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with age,
+carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals and the
+iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery, helped the
+illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old sea-port. A card
+advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number Fourteen. Michael
+signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and rang the bell. The
+Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he could hear the whistle
+of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but the jingle of the
+horse's harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat which was wheedling
+its lean body in and out of the railings of the falciform garden.
+
+Soon the landlady opened the door and stood inquisitively in the narrow
+passage. She was a woman of probably about thirty-five with stubby
+fingers; her skin was rather moist, but she had a good-natured
+expression, and perhaps when the curl-papers were taken out from her
+colorless hair, and when lace frills and common finery should soften her
+turgid outlines she would be handsome in a labored sort of way. The
+discussion with Mrs. Murdoch about her vacant rooms did not take long.
+Michael had made up his mind to any horrors of dirt and discomfort, and
+he was really pleasantly surprised by their appearance. As for Mrs.
+Murdoch, she was evidently too much interested to know what had brought
+Michael to her house to make any difficulties in the way of his
+accommodation.
+
+"Will you want dinner to-night?" she asked doubtfully.
+
+"No, but I'd like some tea now, if you can manage it; and I suppose you
+can let me have a latchkey?"
+
+"I've got the kettle on the boil at this moment. I was going out myself
+for the evening. Meeting my husband at the Horseshoe. There's only one
+other lodger--Miss Carlyle. And she's in the profession."
+
+As Mrs. Murdoch made this announcement, she looked up at the fly-frecked
+ceiling, and Michael thought how extraordinarily light and meaningless
+her eyes were and how curiously dim and heavy this small sitting-room
+was against the brilliancy of the external summer.
+
+"Well, then, tea when I can get it," said Mrs. Murdoch cheerfully. "And
+the double-u is just next your bedroom on the top floor. That's all, I
+think."
+
+She left him with a backward smile over her shoulder, as if she were
+loath to relinquish the study of this unusual visitor to Neptune
+Crescent.
+
+Michael when he was alone examined the chairs that were standing about
+the room as stiff as grenadiers in their red rep. He stripped them of
+their antimacassars and pulled the one that looked least uncomfortable
+close to the window. Outside, the yellow cat was still mewing; but the
+cab was gone and down the gray street that led to Neptune Crescent here
+and there sad-gaited wayfarers were visible. Two or three sparrows were
+cheeping in a battered laburnum, and all along the horizon the blue sky
+descending to the smoke of London had lost its color and had been turned
+to the similitude of tarnished metal. A luxurious mournfulness was in
+the view, and he leaned out over the sill scenting the reasty London
+air.
+
+It was with a sudden shock of conviction that Michael realized he was in
+Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually been
+in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him must
+have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those quixotic
+resolutions roused by Drake's legend of Lily. He would not otherwise
+have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He would have
+waited to test the truth of Drake's story. His first emotional despair
+had vanished with almost unaccountable ease. Certainly he wanted to be
+independent of the criticism of his friends until he had proved his
+purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this withdrawal to a desire for
+a secluded and unflinching contemplation of a life that from Cheyne Walk
+he could never focus. But ultimately he must acknowledge that his
+sojourn here, following as it did straight upon his entrance into the
+underworld through the disappointing portals of the Seven Sisters Road,
+was due to that ancient lure of the shades. This experience was
+foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in childish dreams to
+this day indelible. He could not remember any period in his life when
+the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for his fear that
+shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of most ordinary
+existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat desolately in the
+pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when on his lonely
+walks he had passed askance by Padua Terrace; the shouting of murders by
+newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all those dreadful
+intimations in childhood had procured his present idea of London. With
+the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they still persisted
+behind the outward presentation of a normal and comfortable procedure in
+the midst of money, friends, and well-bred conventions. Nor had that
+speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of childhood, the endowment
+by the young of material things with immaterial potencies. Phantoms
+which had slunk by as terrors invisible to the blind eyes of grown-ups
+had been abominably incarnate for him. Brother Aloysius had been
+something more than a mere personification, and that life which the
+ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below the surface, so easy was it
+to enter, had he not entered it that one night very easily?
+
+Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the
+phantoms and the realities of the underworld. There for him lay very
+easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They
+had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and
+academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the
+victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that he
+was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of philosophers. He
+would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion of evil. He would
+not allow himself to disparage the problem before him by any
+speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet Lily
+again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether
+gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he must
+not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her. Such an
+encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental appeal;
+at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and she would
+forever elude him, she with secret years within her experience. His
+instinct first to sever himself from his own world must have been
+infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now he found
+himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and scenting
+the reasty London air.
+
+And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or
+Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the
+evening's end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into
+Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its red
+rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to
+this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a
+matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar's Feast glowered above
+the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two thorny
+shells upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless
+dim circumnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the bulrushes
+in their conch of nacreous glass.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him
+admiringly.
+
+"Do you think you'll be staying long?" she inquired.
+
+Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
+
+"No. No. I'm really very glad to let them. You'll find it nice and quiet
+here. There's only Miss Carlyle, who's in the profession and comes in
+sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of course he
+hasn't got his own shop now."
+
+She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch's
+loss of independence; so he said, "Of course not," nodding wisely.
+
+"There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a
+servant-girl," said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and
+shaking her curl-papers. "Yes. Though I don't know why I'm telling you
+straight off as you might say. But there, I'm funny sometimes. If I take
+to anybody, there's nothing I won't do for them. Alf--that _is_ my old
+man--he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to get
+into conversation with him, you'd better not let on you know he used to
+have a shop of his own."
+
+Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with
+his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr.
+Murdoch was working now.
+
+"In a chemist's shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know," she said,
+beaming archly. "It's what you might call rather a funny place. Only he
+gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him."
+
+Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch's
+reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a
+postcard.
+
+"Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it's in the kitchen
+dresser, that's a sure thing. Perhaps you'd like to come down and see
+the kitchen?"
+
+Michael followed her downstairs. There were no basements in Neptune
+Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his
+sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above the
+kitchen.
+
+"Miss Carlyle has her room here," said Mrs. Murdoch, pointing next door
+to the kitchen. "Nice and handy for her as she's rather late sometimes.
+I hate to hear anybody go creaking upstairs, I do. It makes me nervous."
+
+The kitchen was pleasant enough and looked out upon a narrow strip of
+garden full of coarse plants.
+
+"They'll be very merry and bright, won't they?" said Mrs. Murdoch,
+smiling encouragement at the greenery. "It's wonderful what you can do
+nowadays for threepence."
+
+Michael asked what they were.
+
+"Why, sunflowers, of course, only they want another month yet. I have
+them every year--yes. They're less trouble than rabbits or chickens. Now
+where did I see that postcard?"
+
+She searched the various utensils, and at last discovered the postcard
+stuck behind a mutilated clock.
+
+"What _will_ they bring out next?" demanded Mrs. Murdoch, surveying it
+with affectionate approbation. "Pretty, I call it."
+
+A pair of lovers in black plush were sitting enlaced beneath a pink
+frosted moon.
+
+"Just the thing, if you're writing to your young lady," said Mrs.
+Murdoch, offering it to Michael.
+
+He accepted it with many expressions of gratitude, but when he was in
+his own room he laughed very much at the idea of sending it to his
+mother in Cheyne Walk. However, as he must write and tell her he would
+not be home for some time, he decided to go out and buy both writing
+materials and unillustrated postcards. When he came back he found Mrs.
+Murdoch feathered for the evening's entertainment. She gave him the
+latchkey, and from his window Michael watched her progress down Neptune
+Crescent. Just before her lavender dress disappeared behind the Portugal
+laurels she turned round and waved to him. He wondered what his mother
+would say if she knew from what curious corner of London the news of his
+withdrawal would reach her to-night.
+
+The house was very still, and the refulgence of the afternoon light
+streaming into the small room fused the raw colors to a fiery
+concordancy. Upon the silence sounded presently a birdlike fidgeting,
+and Michael going out onto the landing to discover what it was, caught
+to his surprise the upward glance of a thin little woman in untidy pink.
+
+"Hulloa!" she cried. "I never knew there was anybody in--you did give me
+a turn. I've only just woke up."
+
+Michael explained the situation, and she seemed relieved.
+
+"I've been asleep all the afternoon," she went on. "But it's only
+natural in this hot weather to go to sleep in the afternoon if you don't
+go out for a walk. Why don't you come down and talk to me while I have
+some tea?"
+
+Michael accepted the invitation with a courtesy which he half suspected
+this peaked pink little creature considered diverting.
+
+"You'll excuse the general untidiness," she said. "But really in this
+weather anyone can't bother to put their things away properly."
+
+Michael assented, and looked round at the room. It certainly was untidy.
+The large bed was ruffled where she had been lying down, and the soiled
+copy of a novelette gave it a sort of stale slovenry. Over the foot hung
+an accumulation of pink clothes. On the chairs, too, there were clothes
+pink and white, and the door bulged with numberless skirts. Miss Carlyle
+herself wore a pink blouse whose front had escaped the constriction of a
+belt. Even her face was a flat unshaded pink, and her thin lips would
+scarcely have showed save that the powder round the edges was slightly
+caked. Yet there was nothing of pink's freshness and pleasant crudity in
+the general effect. It was a tired, a frowsy pink like a fondant that
+has lain a long while in a confectioner's window.
+
+"Take a chair and make yourself at home," she invited him. "What's your
+name?"
+
+He told her "Fane."
+
+"You silly thing, you don't suppose I'm going to call you Mr. Fane, do
+you? What's your other name? Michael? That's Irish, isn't it? I used to
+know a fellow once called Micky Sullivan. I suppose they call you Micky
+at home."
+
+He was afraid he was invariably known as Michael, and Miss Carlyle
+sighed at the stiff sort of a name it was.
+
+"Mine's Poppy," she volunteered. "That's much more free and easy. Or I
+think so," she added rather doubtfully, as Michael did not immediately
+celebrate its license by throwing pillows at her. "Are you really
+lodging here?" she went on. "You don't look much like a pro."
+
+Michael said that was so much the better, as he wasn't one.
+
+"I've got you at last," cried Poppy. "You're a shop-walker at
+Russell's."
+
+He could not help laughing very much at this, and the queer pink room
+seemed to become more faded at the sound of his merriment. Poppy looked
+offended by the reception of her guess, and Michael hastened to restore
+her good temper by asking questions of her.
+
+"You're on the stage, aren't you?"
+
+"I usually get into panto," she admitted.
+
+"Aren't you acting now?"
+
+"Yes, I don't think. You needn't be funny."
+
+"I wasn't trying to be funny."
+
+"You mind your business," she said bitterly. "And I'll look after mine."
+
+"There doesn't seem to be anything very rude in asking if you're acting
+now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, shut up! As if you didn't know."
+
+"Know what?" he repeated.
+
+He looked so genuinely puzzled that Poppy seemed to make an effort to
+overcome her suspicion of his mockery.
+
+"It's five years since I went on the game," she said.
+
+Michael blushed violently, partly on her account, partly for his own
+stupidity, and explained that Mrs. Murdoch had told him she was in the
+profession.
+
+"Well, you didn't expect her to say 'my ground-floor front's a gay
+woman,' did you?"
+
+He agreed that such an abrupt characterization would have surprised him.
+
+"Well, I'm going out to get dinner now," she announced.
+
+"Why don't you dine with me?" Michael suggested.
+
+She looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"Can you afford it?"
+
+"I think I could manage it."
+
+"Because if we _are_ in the same house that doesn't say you've got to
+pay my board, does it?" she demanded proudly.
+
+"Once in a way won't matter," Michael insisted. "And we might go on to a
+music hall afterward."
+
+"Yes, we might, if I hadn't got to pay the woman who's looking after my
+kid for some clothes she's made for him," said Poppy. "And sitting with
+you at the Holborn all night won't do that. No, you can give me dinner
+and then I'll P.O. I'm not going to put on a frock even for you, because
+I never get off only when I'm in a coat and skirt."
+
+Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.
+
+"Go on, sit down. As you're going to take me out to dinner, you can talk
+to me while I dress as a reward."
+
+In this faded pink room where the sun was by now shining with a splendor
+that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and overblown,
+Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape as it were
+from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters to be
+written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she was
+ready.
+
+Michael's own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor
+front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this
+moment such a room as Poppy's. It could not be. It could not be. And he
+realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury,
+craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors.
+This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of the
+underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature
+downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque
+with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course
+her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive plainness,
+her schoolma'am air, her decent unobtrusiveness. Yet she was plucky, and
+she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her child. There was,
+too, something admirable in the candor with which she had treated him.
+There was something friendly and birdlike about her, and he thought how
+when he had been first aware of her movements below he had compared them
+to a bird's fidgeting. There was something really appealing about the
+gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at her description; and
+then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed her to forego what
+might after all have been for her a pleasant evening because she must
+pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after her child. He could
+so easily have offered to give her the money. No matter, he could make
+amends at once and offer it to her now. It would be doubtless an unusual
+experience for her to come into contact with someone whose rule of life
+was not dictated by the brutal self-interest of those with whom her
+commerce must generally lie. She would serve to bring to the proof his
+theory that so much of the world's beastliness could be cleansed by
+having recourse to the natural instincts of decent behavior without any
+grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael did feel very
+philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy's summons.
+
+"I say," he began at once. "It was stupid of me just now not to suggest
+that I should find the money for your kid's clothes. Look here, we'll go
+to the Holborn after dinner and----" he paused. He felt a delicacy in
+inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her
+company--"and--er--I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?"
+
+"I say, kiddie, you're a sport," she said. "Only look here, don't go and
+spend more than what you can afford. It isn't as if we'd met by chance,
+as you might say."
+
+"Oh no, I can afford two pounds," Michael assured her.
+
+"Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for
+four shillings. That's not too much, is it?"
+
+He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he
+stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds
+was not offered for hire.
+
+"But, kiddie, I can't bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge
+here. These aren't gay rooms."
+
+"I don't want to go anywhere with you," said Michael. "The money is a
+present."
+
+"Oh, is it?" she flamed out. "Then you can keep your dirty money.
+Thanks, I haven't come down to charity. Not yet. If I'm not good enough
+for you, you can keep your money. I believe you're nothing more than a
+dirty ponce. I've gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I'm
+not going to begin now. That's very certain. Are you going out or am I
+going out? Because I don't want to be seen with you. You and your
+presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I
+went home with you."
+
+Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front
+door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the
+fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange
+lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the
+houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather
+the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that passage where the
+little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder with the
+mean and vicious passions they now veiled. Very soon, however, his
+disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there was
+not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively conceal
+secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous toadstools in
+rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must flourish here. It was
+foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a half-aroused curiosity had
+taken its place, and Michael regretted that he had not stayed to hear
+what more she would have said. How far she had been from appreciating
+the motives that prompted his offer of money. Poppy's injustice began to
+depress him. He felt, walking southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of
+her failure to be grateful from his point of view. It hurt him to find
+sincerity so lightly regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity
+which had been touched. _Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned._ The
+ability to apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave
+Michael a great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a
+statement, and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He
+experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great
+commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy
+had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He
+hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could not
+expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She could
+have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could she
+grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical
+expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not
+impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her.
+Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his
+tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only
+an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside.
+Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved
+in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck
+him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the
+power to effect.
+
+On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the
+front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the
+evening.
+
+At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance
+of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the
+landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt
+stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and
+top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern
+behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening
+with much amusement to the people round him. He liked to hear each petty
+host assure his guests that he had brought them to a place of which very
+few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of this
+assurance stared at one another like conspirators.
+
+Just before nine o'clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of
+Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding
+all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade.
+He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from
+Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its approach
+his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her suddenly
+without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of himself.
+However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who resembled
+her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving Promenade
+whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the crowd. That on
+the stage a lady of the haute �cole was with a curious wooden rapidity
+putting a white horse through a number of tricks did not concern his
+attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was the performance.
+Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair than that weary
+heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there was an unity of
+effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At The Oxford the
+whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was a real
+exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days. Indeed,
+so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the frankness
+almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of profiting by
+the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be drugged into
+perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.
+
+Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled
+tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of shimmering green plush, the dim
+foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding
+circumambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the barrier,
+the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones--there was nothing that spoiled
+the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the more nearly was
+the effect achieved. At intervals women whose close-fitting dresses
+seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by: and generally the people
+eyed one another with the indifferent frozen eyes of swimming fish.
+There was indeed something cold-blooded in the very atmosphere, and it
+was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of women that he was expecting
+Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able to imagine her in the luxury
+of the Orient than sleeping down the sun over a crumpled novelette in
+such a room as Poppy's in Camden Town.
+
+The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was
+restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the assurance that he
+had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the shock he
+knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The evening wore
+itself away. The lady of the haute �cole was succeeded by a band of
+Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by half a dozen
+cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its mechanical
+course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it was almost
+possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope's shifting squares and
+lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the ballet and
+whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down there on
+the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a history,
+so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the Promenade
+where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to account for
+her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life. The ballet was
+over, and he passed out into the streets.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without finding
+Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the heart of
+London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the merest
+chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet he began
+to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by some
+enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as if his
+friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in that
+circumambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal motion.
+They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward and
+forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at any
+of the restaurants or caf�s to which he went after the theater. By the
+intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself off
+from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often
+thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had
+seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had
+never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen the
+night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to Lily;
+and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a hat,
+perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never meeting the
+wearer's glance.
+
+He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their
+unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not meet
+in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in
+avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it
+was possible to seclude one's self from the claims of human intercourse.
+He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out over the
+sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream to the
+distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which every
+afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books indeed
+that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to
+resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed
+their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.
+Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch
+him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.
+
+"I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do," she affirmed.
+"Doesn't it tire your eyes?"
+
+Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book,
+looking sideways at it like a fat goose.
+
+"Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn't
+it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This
+_is_ Tuesday, isn't it?"
+
+After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch
+decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.
+
+Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could
+scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a
+preconception of an elderly chemist reduced by misfortune and misdeeds
+to the status of one of those individuals who with a discreet manner
+somewhere between a family doctor and a grocer place themselves at the
+service of the public in an atmosphere of antiseptics. Mr. Murdoch was
+not at all like this. He was a squat swarthy man with one very dark eye
+that stared fixedly regardless of the expression of its fellow. Michael
+could not make up his mind whether this eye were blind or not. He
+rather hoped it was, but in any case its fierce blankness was very
+disconcerting. Conversation between Michael and Mr. Murdoch was not very
+lively, and Mrs. Murdoch's adjutant inquisitiveness made Michael the
+more monosyllabic whenever her husband did commit himself to a direct
+inquiry.
+
+"I looked for you in the Horseshoe the other evening," said Michael
+finally, at a loss how in any other way to give Mr. Murdoch an
+impression that he took the faintest interest in his existence.
+
+"In the Horseshoe?" repeated Mr. Murdoch, in surprise. "I never go to
+the Horseshoe only when a friend asks me in to have one."
+
+Michael saw Mrs. Murdoch frowning at him, and, perceiving that there was
+a reason why her husband must not suppose she had been to the Horseshoe
+on the evening of his arrival, he said he had gathered somehow, he did
+not exactly know where or why or when, that Mr. Murdoch was often to be
+found in the Horseshoe. He wished this awkward and unpleasant man would
+leave him and cock his rolling eye anywhere else but in his room.
+
+"Bit of a reader, aren't you?" inquired the chemist.
+
+Michael admitted he read a good deal.
+
+"Ever read Jibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?" continued the
+chemist.
+
+"Some of it."
+
+Mr. Murdoch said in that case it was just as well he hadn't bought some
+volumes he'd seen on a barrow in the Caledonian Road.
+
+"Four-and-six, with two books out in the middle," he proclaimed.
+
+Michael could merely nod his comment, though he racked his brains to
+think of some remark that would betray a vestige of cordiality. Mr.
+Murdoch got up to retire to the kitchen. He evidently did not find his
+tenant sympathetic. Outside on the landing Michael heard him say to his
+wife: "Stuck up la-di-da sort of a----, isn't he?"
+
+Presently the wife came up again.
+
+"How did you like my old man?"
+
+"Oh, very much."
+
+"Did you notice his eye?"
+
+Michael said he had noticed something.
+
+"His brother Fred did that for him."
+
+She spoke proudly, as if Fred's act had been a humane achievement. "When
+they were boys," she explained. "It gives him a funny look. I remember
+when I first met him it gave me the creeps, but I don't notice it really
+now. Would you believe he couldn't see an elephant with it?"
+
+"I wondered if it were blind," said Michael.
+
+"Blind as a leg of mutton," said Mrs. Murdoch, and still there lingered
+in her accents a trace of pride. Then suddenly her demeanor changed and
+there crept over her countenance what Michael was bound to believe to be
+an expression of coyness.
+
+"Don't say anything more to Alf about the Horseshoe. You see, I only
+gave you the idea I was meeting him, because I didn't really know you
+very well at the time. Of course really I'd gone to see my sister. No,
+without a joke, I was spending the evening with a gentleman friend."
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"My old man wouldn't half knock me about, if he had the least suspicion.
+But it's someone I knew before I was married, and that makes a
+difference, doesn't it?"
+
+"Does your husband go out with lady friends he knew before he was
+married?" Michael asked, and wondered if Mrs. Murdoch would see an
+implied reproof.
+
+"What?" she shrilled. "I'd like to catch him nosing after another
+woman. He wouldn't see a hundred elephants before I'd done with him. I'd
+show him."
+
+"But why should you have freedom and not he?" Michael asked.
+
+"Never mind about him. You let him try. You see what he'd get."
+
+Michael did not think the argument could be carried on very profitably.
+So he showed signs of wanting to return to his book, and Mrs. Murdoch
+retired. What extraordinary standards she had, and how bitterly she was
+prepared to defend a convention, for after all in such a marriage the
+infidelity of the husband was nothing but a conventional offense: she
+obviously had no affection for him. The point of view became very
+topsyturvy in Neptune Crescent, Michael decided.
+
+On the last evening of the fortnight during which he had regularly
+visited the Orient, Michael went straight back to Camden Town without
+waiting to scan the caf�s and restaurants until half-past twelve as he
+usually had. This abode in Neptune Crescent was empty, and as always
+when that was the case the personality of the house was very vivid upon
+his imagination. As he turned up the gas-jet in the hall, the cramped
+interior with its fusty smell and its thread-bare staircarpet
+disappearing into the upper gloom round the corner seemed to be
+dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of having
+the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent impulse.
+For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the ineffable
+depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to glance at every
+one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the exaggerated
+defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to lock and
+double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two clanking chains.
+He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch and
+Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the summer night, while
+himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back garden and went climbing
+over garden wall and garden wall to abandon this curious mixture of
+salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and solidity, this quite
+indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way strangely cozy house.
+He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor front. He peered
+cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed. The gas-jet was
+glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue flame, but the
+light from the passage showed all her clothes still strewn about. From
+the open door came out the faint perfume of stale scent which mingled
+with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle expression of the
+house's personality. He closed the door gently. In the silence it seemed
+almost as if the least percussion would rouse the very clothes from
+their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning another pinhead of
+gas, and the light from the passage reaching here very dimly was only
+just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly sheen and to show the
+mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the luminous face of the
+clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to unreality, and when
+Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering his room, even they
+were scarcely sound guarantors of his own actuality. He had a certain
+queasiness in opening the door of the Murdochs' bedroom, and he was
+rather glad when he was confronted here by a black void whose secrecy he
+did not feel tempted to violate. With three or four books under his arm
+he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned out of the window two cats yawled
+and fizzed at one another among the laurels, and then scampered away
+into muteness. From a scintillation of colored lights upon the horizon
+he could hear the scrannel sounds of the railway come thinly along the
+night air. Nothing else broke the silence of the nocturnal streets.
+Michael felt tired, and he was disappointed by his failure to find
+Lily. Just as he was dozing off, he remembered that his Viva Voce at
+Oxford was due some time this week. He must go back to Cheyne Walk
+to-morrow, and on this resolution he fell asleep.
+
+Michael woke up with a start and instantly became aware that the house
+was full of discordant sounds. For a minute or two he lay motionless
+trying to connect the noise with the present, trying to separate his
+faculties from the inspissate air that seemed to be throttling them. He
+was not yet free from the confusion of sleep, and for a few seconds he
+could only perceive the sound almost visibly churning the clotted
+darkness that was stifling him. Gradually the clamor resolved itself
+into the voices of Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy at the pitch of
+excitement. Nothing was intelligible except the oaths that came up in a
+series of explosions detached from the main din. He got out of bed and
+lit the gas, saw that it was one o'clock, dressed himself roughly, and
+opened the door of his room.
+
+"Yes, my lad, you thought you was very clever."
+
+"No, I didn't think I was clever. Now then."
+
+"Yes! You can spend all your money on that muck. The sauce of it. In a
+hansom!"
+
+Here Poppy's voice came in with a malignant piping sound.
+
+"Muck yourself, you dirty old case-keeper!"
+
+"You call me a case-keeper? What men have I ever let you bring back
+here?"
+
+Mrs. Murdoch's voice was swollen with wrath.
+
+"You don't know how many men I haven't brought back. So now, you great
+ugly mare!" Poppy howled.
+
+"The only fellow you've ever brought to my house is that one-eyed----
+who calls himself my husband. Mister _Mur_doch! Mis-ter _Murdoch!_ And
+you get out of my house in the streets where you belong. I don't want
+no two-and-fours in _my_ house."
+
+"Hark at her!" Poppy cried, in a horrible screaming laugh. "Why don't
+you go back on the streets yourself? Why, I can remember you as one of
+the old fourpenny Hasbeens when I was still dressmaking; a dirty drunken
+old teat that couldn't have got off with a blind tramp."
+
+Michael punctuated each fresh taunt and accusation with a step forward
+to interfere; and every time he held himself back, pondering the
+impossibility of extracting from these charges and countercharges any
+logical assignment of blame. It made him laugh to think how
+extraordinarily in the wrong they all three were and at the same time
+how they were all perfectly convinced they were right. The only factor
+left out of account was Mrs. Murdoch's own behavior. He wondered rather
+what effect that gentleman friend would produce on the husband. He
+decided that he had better go back to bed until the racket subsided.
+Then, just as he was turning away in the midst of an outpouring of
+vileness far more foul than anything uttered so far, he heard what
+sounded like a blow. That of course could not be tolerated, and he
+descended to intervene.
+
+The passage was the field of battle, and the narrow space seemed to give
+not only an added virulence to the fight, but also an added grotesquery.
+When Michael arrived at the head of the staircase, Alf had pinned his
+wife to the wall and was shouting to Poppy over his shoulder to get back
+into her own room. Poppy would go halfway, but always a new insult would
+occur to her, and she would return to fling it at Mrs. Murdoch, stabbing
+the while into its place again a hatpin which during her retreats she
+always half withdrew.
+
+As for Mrs. Murdoch, she was by now weeping hysterically and
+occasionally making sudden forward plunges that collapsed like jelly.
+
+Michael paused at the head of the stairs, wondering what to say. It
+seemed to him really rather a good thing that Alf was restraining his
+wife. It would be extremely unpleasant to have to separate the two women
+if they closed with each other. He had almost decided to retire upstairs
+again, when Poppy caught sight of him and at once turned her abuse in
+his direction.
+
+"What's it got to do with you?" she screamed. "What's the good in you
+standing gaping there? We all know what _you_ are. We all know what
+she's always going up to _your_ room for."
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was heaving and puffing and groaning, and while Alf held
+her, his rolling eye with fierce and meaningless stare nearly made
+Michael laugh. However, he managed to be serious, and gravely advised
+Poppy to go to bed.
+
+"Don't you dare try to order me about!" she shrieked. "Keep your
+poncified ways for that fat old maggot which her husband can't hardly
+hold, and I don't blame him. She's about as big as a omnibus."
+
+"Oh, you wicked woman," sobbed Mrs. Murdoch. "Oh, you mean, hateful
+snake-in-the-grass! Oh, you filth!"
+
+"Hold your jaw," commanded Alf. "If you don't want me to punch into
+you."
+
+"All day she's in his room. Let him stand up and deny it if he can, the
+dirty tyke. Why don't you punch into _him,_ Alf?" Poppy screamed.
+
+Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.
+
+"Let _me_ look after Mrs. Murdoch I _don't_ think!" shouted Poppy. "And
+be a man, even if you can't keep your old woman out of the lodger's
+room. ---- ----! I wouldn't half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man,
+the ---- ----!"
+
+It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being
+nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman's thin magenta
+lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable.
+When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to hold
+on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.
+
+Michael's laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch spat
+in her husband's face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip upon her
+shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other. Michael,
+though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs to part
+them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned and
+attacked him. The hat-stand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat slid up
+and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and dust and
+spirituous breath.
+
+At last Michael managed to secure Poppy's thin twitching arms and to
+hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and he
+was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began fecklessly
+to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf, who had gone
+to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case a policeman's
+bull's-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared in the doorway.
+
+"What a smell of gas!" he exclaimed nervously.
+
+There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in
+her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead
+pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was
+rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried
+to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked the
+door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended upon
+the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the hat-stand,
+while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of tumbled
+hair.
+
+Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very
+cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed
+eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers: of
+last night's tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming
+countenance.
+
+"Quite a set-out we had last night, didn't we?" she said expansively.
+"But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with
+my old man in a hansom cab. There's a nice game to get up to. I was
+bound to let her have it. I couldn't have held myself in."
+
+"I suppose you'll get rid of her now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, well, she's not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She
+was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I'd had one or two myself.
+Oh, well, it wouldn't do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment
+in this life?"
+
+She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his
+standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy
+feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and
+fears. But to-day he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune Crescent.
+
+"It seems such a pity," she said. "And just as I was beginning to get
+used to your ways. Oh, well, we'll meet again some day, I hope, this
+side of the cemetery."
+
+Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night,
+but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away from
+Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small doorway
+looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also waved rather
+maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose pressed
+against the panes of the ground-floor front.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CAF� D'ORANGE
+
+
+Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding
+that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected
+she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune
+Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not
+subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life,
+the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate and
+gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the
+tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became waxily
+pink under his stare.
+
+"Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir." It was as if she were rebuking
+his observation.
+
+His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.
+
+"Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you
+to send me those postcards."
+
+If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her
+about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did
+not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have seemed
+to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other people
+was a confidence he always resented.
+
+"Stella and Alan are in the studio," she told him.
+
+They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said he
+would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of pallid
+grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could not keep
+back the thought of how utterly Alan's company had replaced his own. Not
+that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted; but a period
+of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were being rather
+ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously glad to see
+him that the fleck of bitterness vanished immediately, and he was at
+their service.
+
+"Where have you been?" Stella demanded. "We go to Richmond. We send
+frantic wires to you to join us on the river, and when we come back
+you're gone. Where have you been?"
+
+"I've been away," Michael answered, with a certain amount of
+embarrassment.
+
+"My dear old Michael, we never supposed you'd been hiding in the
+cistern-cupboard for a fortnight," said Stella, striking three chords of
+cheerful contempt.
+
+"I believe he went back to Oxford," suggested Alan.
+
+"I am going up to-morrow," Michael said. "When is your Viva?"
+
+"Next week. Where are you going to stay?"
+
+"In college, if I can get hold of a room."
+
+"Bother Oxford," interrupted Stella. "We want to know where you've been
+this fortnight."
+
+"You do," Alan corrected.
+
+"I'll tell you both later on," Michael volunteered. "Just at present I
+suppose you won't grudge me a secret. People who are engaged to be
+married should show a very special altruism toward people who are not."
+
+"Michael, I will not have you being important and carrying about a
+secret with you," Stella declared.
+
+"You can manage either me or Alan," Michael offered. "But you simply
+shall not manage both of us. Personally, I recommend you to break-in
+Alan."
+
+With evasive banter he succeeded in postponing the revelation of what he
+was, as Stella said, up to.
+
+"We're going in for Herefords," Alan suddenly announced without
+consideration for the trend of the talk. "You know. Those white-faced
+chaps."
+
+Michael looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"I was thinking about this place of Stella's in Huntingdonshire," Alan
+explained. "We went down to see it last week."
+
+"Oh, Alan, why did you tell him? He doesn't deserve to be told."
+
+"Is it decent?" Michael asked.
+
+"Awfully decent," said Alan. "Rather large, you know."
+
+"In fact, we shall belong to the squirearchy," cried Stella, crashing
+down upon the piano with the first bars of Chopin's most exciting
+Polonaise and from the Polonaise going off into an absurd impromptu
+recitative.
+
+"We shall have a dog-cart--a high and shining dog-cart--and we shall go
+bowling down the lanes of the county of Hunts--because in books about
+people who live in the county and of the county and by with or from the
+county dog-carts invariably bowl--we shall have a herd of Herefordshire
+bulls and bullocks and bullockesses--and my husband Alan with a straw in
+his mouth will go every morning with the bailiff to inspect their
+well-being--- and three days every week from November to March we shall
+go hunting in Huntingdon--and when we aren't actually hunting in
+Huntingdon we shall be talking about hunting--and we shall also talk
+about the Primrose League and the foot-and-mouth disease and the
+evolutions of the new High Church Vicar--we shall...."
+
+But Michael threw a cushion at her, and the recitative came to an end.
+
+They all three talked for a long while more seriously of plans for life
+at Hardingham Hall.
+
+"You know dear old Prescott requested me in his will that I would hyphen
+his name on to mine, whether I were married or single," said Stella. "So
+we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Alan has been very good
+about that, though I think he's got a dim idea it's putting on side.
+Stella Prescott-Merivale or The Curse of the County! And when I play I'm
+going to be Madame Merivale. I decline to be done out of the Madame! and
+everybody will pronounce it Marivahleh and I shall receive the unanimous
+encomia of the critical press."
+
+"Life will be rather a rag," said Michael, with approbation.
+
+"Of course it's going to be simply wonderful. Can't you see the
+headlines? From Chopin to Sheep. Madame Merivale, the famous Virtuosa,
+and her Flock of Barbary Long-tails."
+
+It was all so very remote from Neptune Crescent, Michael thought. They
+really were going to be so ridiculously happy, these two, in their
+country life. And now they were talking of finding him a house close to
+Hardingham Hall. There must be just that small Georgian house, they
+vowed, where with a large garden of stately walks and a
+well-proportioned library of books he could stay in contented retreat.
+They promised him, too, that beyond the tallest cedar on the lawn a
+gazebo should command the widest, the greenest expanse of England ever
+beheld.
+
+"It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts," said Stella,
+"if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And of course
+you'd ride a nag. I'm not sure really that you wouldn't have to wear
+knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me feel like
+Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?"
+
+"I should make up your mind which," Michael advised.
+
+"But you know what I mean," she persisted. "The doctor's wife would
+come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or
+whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, 'We must ask my
+brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to know.
+My brother knows everything.' And she would agree with a pursed-up
+mouth. 'Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone says your
+brother is a great scholar. It's such a pleasure to have him at the
+Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?'"
+
+"If you're supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you
+at once that it's not a bit like it."
+
+"But I think you ought to come and live near us," Alan solemnly put in.
+
+"Of course, my dear, he's coming," Stella declared.
+
+"Of course I'm not," Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they
+wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want
+him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would
+enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would
+care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the shrubbery's
+edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In the quick
+vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds, Michael
+experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he intended to do.
+
+"And how about Michael's wife?" Alan asked.
+
+Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
+
+"Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him," Stella
+confidently prophesied.
+
+"No, really," said Michael to hide his embarrassment. "I object.
+Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement."
+
+Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describe a
+lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended
+to place him.
+
+"I think rather a Quakerish person, don't you, Alan? Rather neat and
+tiny with a great sense of humor and...."
+
+"In fact, an admirable sick nurse," Michael interposed, laughing.
+
+Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the
+river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how
+naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now that
+by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in the
+long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed to
+Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the security of
+his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that fleeting
+disloyalty to his task.
+
+Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn's old
+white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the
+tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and
+irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really
+it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay
+between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in
+Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made
+no attempt to find Lily.
+
+Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael's
+immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel
+the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had achieved
+a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or two of the
+St. Mary's dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at All Souls.
+The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was attractive to have
+anything so remote come suddenly within the region of feasibleness. He
+would lose nothing by trying for it, and if he succeeded what a
+congenial existence offered itself. With private means he would be able
+to divide his time between Oxford and London. There would really be
+nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that seemed to stretch
+before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he certainly had not
+worked hard enough to obtain a first without some talent) he would
+prosecute the study of history. He would make himself famous in a select
+sort of way. He would become the authority of a minor tributary to the
+great stream of research. A set of very scholarly, very thorough works
+would testify to his reputation. There were plenty of archaic problems
+still to be solved. He cast a proprietary glance over the centuries, and
+he had almost decided to devote himself to the service of Otto I and
+Sylvester II, when in a moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly
+before his mind as the ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of
+research into the past seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the
+congratulatory letters and decided to let the future wait a while. This
+pursuit of Lily was a mad business, no doubt, but to come to grips with
+the present called for a certain amount of madness.
+
+Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of
+trying for All Souls.
+
+"You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were
+up that you didn't know what you ought to do, and now when it's
+perfectly obvious you won't make the slightest attempt to do it."
+
+"Used I to grumble?" asked Michael.
+
+"Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical
+questions which had no answer," said Alan severely.
+
+"What if I told you I'd found an answer to a great many of them?"
+
+"Ever since I've been engaged to Stella you've found it necessary to be
+very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?"
+
+"It's imaginable, don't you think, that I might be making up my mind to
+do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at
+All Souls?"
+
+"But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch
+it."
+
+"I tell you it was a fluke."
+
+"My third wasn't a fluke," said Alan. "I worked really hard for it."
+
+"Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run," Michael
+argued. "You have already fitted into your place with the most complete
+exactitude. There's no dimension in your future that can possibly
+trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big
+for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my
+frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be too
+small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to squeeze
+into it most uncomfortably."
+
+"You'll never do anything," Alan prophesied. "Because you'll always be
+doubting."
+
+"I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity," Michael pointed
+out. "With all doubts and hesitations I'm perfectly convinced of one
+great factor in human life--the necessity to follow the impulse which
+lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization. Reason
+carried to the _nth_ power can always with absurd ease be debauched
+by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind's wretched little lament for
+disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because they are
+irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she claims to
+be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member of
+Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The franchise is
+to be endowed with a sacramental significance. If the New Women win,
+they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men. But of course
+they won't win, because God is so delightfully irrational. By the way,
+it's worth noting that the peculiar vestment with which popular fancy
+has clothed the New Woman is called rational costume. You often hear of
+'rationals' as a synonym for breeches. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about
+God being irrational. You never know what he'll do next. He is a
+dreadful problem for rationalists. That's why they have abolished him."
+
+"You're confusing two different kinds of reason," said Alan. "What you
+call impulse--unless your impulse is mere madness--is what I might call
+reason."
+
+"In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the
+reconstruction of your terminology. I'm not a philosopher, and therefore
+I've given this vague generic name 'impulse' to something which
+deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering impetus does
+it give to conduct, a very long name indeed."
+
+"But if you're going through life depending on impulse," Alan objected,
+"you'll be no better off than a weathercock. You can't discount reason
+in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by
+experience."
+
+"The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no
+reliance whatever."
+
+"It's no good arguing with you," Alan said. "Because what you call
+impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect logic."
+
+"Alan, I can't believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your
+conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I'm not going
+to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a country
+squire. Let's hold on to what certainties we can."
+
+Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem
+of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the
+intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he
+thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore
+he refrained.
+
+There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was already
+in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the burden of it
+in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and Stella and
+Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join them, if he
+could get away from London.
+
+"If you can get away!" Stella scoffed. "What rot you do talk."
+
+But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where
+he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others
+northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on
+which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the
+stagnant sheen of the Thames.
+
+That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was
+no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from London
+for a while. After the performance he visited the Caf� d'Orange in
+Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often noticed
+the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the quality
+of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the Caf�
+d'Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he had so
+far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he was
+rather inclined to think that she was someone's mistress and that
+Drake's view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she had
+yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
+
+Downstairs at the Caf� d'Orange was rather more like a corner of hell
+than Michael had anticipated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in
+these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and
+vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly down
+and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner left by
+the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy tunics
+of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were grinding out
+ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking and laughter,
+the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of the waiters made
+such a din that Michael stood for a moment in confusion, debating the
+possibility of one more person threading his way through the serried
+tables to a seat.
+
+There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and in
+one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So
+paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across
+and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and soon
+with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before him in
+that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always induced by
+ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped alcove, he
+seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and voices of
+the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic finale. After
+a time the various groups and individuals were separated in his mind, so
+that in their movements he began to take an easily transferred interest,
+endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant characteristics in turn. Round
+him in the alcove there were strange contrasts of behavior. At one table
+four offensive youths were showing off with exaggerated laughter for the
+benefit of nobody's attention. Behind them in the crepuscule of two
+broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl; ivory white and cloying the air with
+her heavy perfume, was arguing in low passionate tones with a cold-eyed
+listener who with a straw was tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a
+moist surface of cigarette-ash. In the deepest corner a girl with a high
+complexion and bright eyes was making ardent love to a partially drunk
+and bearded man, winking the while over her shoulder at whoever would
+watch her comedy. The other places were filled by impersonal women who
+sipped from their glasses without relish and stared disdainfully at each
+other down their powdered noses. At Michael's own table was a blotchy
+man who alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and
+immediately opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat
+pale face of the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat
+trimmed with daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not
+catch her eye, and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward
+the raffish and rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall
+were large mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in
+reflection the throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications.
+Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls,
+and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay
+longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they
+must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and
+with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless
+accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of
+alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam
+of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
+
+Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested
+commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him, and
+he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
+
+"You're very silent, kiddie," she said. "I'll give you a penny for
+them."
+
+"I really wasn't thinking about anything in particular," said Michael.
+"Will you have a drink?"
+
+"Don't mind if I do. Alphonse!" she shouted, tugging at the arm of the
+overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. "Bring me a hot
+whisky-and-lemon. There's a love."
+
+Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed
+on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was
+expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a
+fountain of glass.
+
+"I've taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot," she informed
+Michael. "You know. Anyone does, don't they? Get a sudden fit and keep
+on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This'll be my sixth to-night. But
+I'm a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I reckon
+it'll bring me luck."
+
+"I expect it will," Michael said.
+
+"You are serious, aren't you? When I first saw you I thought you was the
+spitting image of a fellow I know--Bert Saunders, who writes about the
+boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He's more of a bright-eyes than
+you are, though."
+
+The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael's health.
+
+"Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it," she said
+meditatingly. "What's your name, kiddie?"
+
+He told her.
+
+"Michael," she repeated. "You're a Jew, then?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name, isn't
+it? Michael? Of course it is. I don't mind Jew fellows myself. One or
+two of them have been very good to me. My name's Daisy Palmer."
+
+The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his
+encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very
+cautious.
+
+"You look rather French," was his most audacious sally toward the
+personal.
+
+"Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on
+the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself."
+
+Again the conversation dropped.
+
+"I'm waiting for a friend," Daisy volunteered. "She's been having a row
+with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and tell
+me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here by
+now. What's the time, kid?"
+
+It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
+
+"I'm rather worried over Doll," she confided to Michael, "because this
+fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns
+nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, 'Doll, that dirty rotter you're so
+soft over'll swing for you before he's done. Why don't you leave him,' I
+said, 'and come and live along with me for a bit?'"
+
+"And what did she say?" Michael asked.
+
+But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself
+coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
+
+"Oh, doesn't she look shocking white," exclaimed Daisy. "Doll!" she
+shouted, waving to her. "Over here, duck."
+
+The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in
+exaggerated falsetto.
+
+"---- to you," she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was
+a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased
+Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said to
+these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Caf�
+d'Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on
+otherwise indescribable humanity.
+
+By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating
+chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend's side. She began
+immediately a voluble tale:
+
+"Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told him
+off so as he could hardly look me in the face. 'You call yourself a
+man,' I said, 'why, you dirty little alien.' That's what I called him. I
+did straight, 'you dirty little---- '"
+
+"This is my friend," interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed.
+It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going
+to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember the
+convention of their profession.
+
+"Pleased to meet you," said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand with
+half-a-simper.
+
+"What will you drink?" asked Michael.
+
+"Mine's a brandy and soda, please. 'You dirty little alien,' I said."
+Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
+
+"Go on, did you? And what did he say?" asked Daisy admiringly.
+
+"He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?"
+
+"That's right," nodded Daisy wisely.
+
+"'For two years,' I said, 'you've let a girl keep you,' I said, 'and
+then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get
+hold of her,' I said. 'I'll tear her eyes out.' 'No, you won't, now
+then,' he said. 'Won't I? I will, then,' and with that I just lost
+control of my feelings, I felt that wild...."
+
+"What did you do, Doll?" asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe
+the outraged memory.
+
+"What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to the
+Orange. 'Yes,' I said, 'you can sit drinking tea while you break my
+heart.' Don't you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a
+straight girl when I first knew him. Straight--well, anyway not on the
+game like what I am now." Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter
+self-compassion. "I've slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me like
+dirt."
+
+"Go on. Don't cry, duck," Daisy begged. "Come home with me to-night and
+we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn't cry over
+him," she said fiercely. "There's no fellow worth crying over. The best
+of them isn't worth crying over."
+
+The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly's tears, and
+Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive pugnacity of
+the underworld, rose to attack them.
+
+"Sit down," Daisy commanded. "I wouldn't mess my hands, if I was you,
+with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You'll get us all
+into trouble."
+
+Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute
+or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
+
+Gradually Dolly's tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she
+became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen
+with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin
+expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
+
+"Rotten, I call it, don't you?" said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing to
+Michael.
+
+He agreed with a profound nod.
+
+"And she's been that good to him. You wouldn't believe."
+
+Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of
+Dolly's virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
+
+At this moment the subject of Daisy's eulogy rose from her seat and
+stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the
+beerhall.
+
+"My God!" she said, with ominous calm.
+
+"What is it, duck?" asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
+
+"My God!" Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a
+volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass
+evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy
+seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her
+back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of
+the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in
+a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors
+began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the
+cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man
+collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer winked
+over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four offensive
+youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man ceased to
+look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily his teeth.
+
+It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather a
+nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her friend.
+She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark that Florrie
+for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she could come it
+over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do that; yes, more
+than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
+
+The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging his
+way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using their
+best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate. Though she
+declared loudly that nothing would make her quit the Orange, and
+certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to be
+coaxed away.
+
+Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again
+and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers,
+which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how it
+had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and enmities
+and friendships of a complete society. He found himself explaining to
+several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been compelled to endure at
+the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was extraordinary how suddenly this
+absurd intrigue of the underworld came to seem tremendously important.
+He felt that all his sense of proportion was rapidly disappearing. In
+the middle of an excited justification of Dolly's tears he was aware
+that he and his surroundings and his attitude were to himself
+incredible. He was positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the
+inconsequence of dreams. Or was all his life until this moment a dream,
+and was this reality? One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was
+the necessity to see the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the
+evening. He felt very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with
+admirable composure, and when he asked her advice about the course of
+action, he agreed at once with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a
+cab and be allowed in Daisy's rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage
+and grief that was here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very
+imprudent display of emotion.
+
+"She'll be barred from coming down here," said Daisy. "Come on, let's
+get her home."
+
+"Where's that Florrie?" screamed Dolly.
+
+"She's gone home. So what's the use in your carrying on so mad? The
+manager's got his eye on us, Doll. Come on, Doll, let's get on home. I
+tell you the manager's looking at us. You are a silly girl."
+
+"---- the manager," said Dolly obstinately. "Let him look."
+
+"Why don't you come and see if you can find Florrie outside?" Daisy
+suggested.
+
+Dolly was moved by this proposal, and presently she agreed to vacate the
+Orange, much to Michael's relief, for he was expecting every moment to
+see her attack the manager with the match-stand that was fretting her
+fingers. As it happened, Daisy's well-meant suggestion was very unlucky
+because Hungarian Dave, the cause of all the bother, was standing on the
+pavement close to the entrance.
+
+Daisy whispered to Michael to get a cab quickly, because Hungarian Dave
+was close at hand. He looked at him curiously, this degraded individual
+in whose domestic affairs he was now so deeply involved. A very
+objectionable creature he was, too, with his greasy hair and large red
+mouth. His cap was pulled down over the eyes, and he may have wished not
+to be seen; but an instinct for his presence made Dolly turn round, and
+in a moment she was in the thick of the delight of telling him off for
+the benefit of a crowd increasing with every epithet she flung. It was
+useless now to attempt to get her away, and Michael and Daisy could only
+drag her back when she seemed inclined to attack him with finger-nails
+or hatpin.
+
+"Get a cab," cried Daisy. "Never mind what she says. Get a cab, and
+we'll put the silly thing into it and drive off. The coppers will be
+here in a moment."
+
+Michael managed to hail a hansom immediately, but when he turned back to
+the scene of the pavement the conditions of the dispute were entirely
+changed. Hungarian Dave, infuriated or frightened, had knocked Dolly
+down, and she was just staggering to her feet, when a policeman stepped
+into the circle.
+
+"Come on, move along," he growled.
+
+The bully had merged himself in the ring of onlookers, and Dolly, with a
+cry of fury, flung herself in his direction.
+
+"Stop that, will you?" the policeman said savagely, seizing her by the
+arm.
+
+"Go on, it's a dirty shame," cried Daisy. "Why don't you take the fellow
+as knocked her down?"
+
+Michael by this time had forced his way through the crowd, rage beating
+upon his brain like a great scarlet hammer.
+
+"You infernal ass," he shouted to the constable. "Haven't you got the
+sense to see that this woman was attacked first? Where is the blackguard
+who did it?" he demanded of the stupid, the gross, the vilely curious
+press of onlookers. No one came forward to support him, and Hungarian
+Dave had slipped away.
+
+"Move on, will you?" the policeman repeated.
+
+"Damn you," cried Michael. "Will you let go of that woman's arm?"
+
+The constable with a bovine density of purpose proceeded apparently to
+arrest the wretched Dolly, and Michael maddened by his idiocy felt that
+the only thing to do was to hit him as hard as he could. This he did.
+The constable immediately blew his whistle. Other masses of inane bulk
+loomed up, and Michael was barely able to control himself sufficiently
+not to resist all the way to Vine Street, as two of them marched him
+along, and four more followed with Daisy and Dolly. A spumy trail of
+nocturnal loiterers clung to their wake.
+
+Next morning Michael appeared before the magistrate. He listened to the
+charge against him and nearly laughed aloud in court, because the whole
+business so much resembled the trial in Alice in Wonderland. It was not
+that the magistrate was quite so illogical as the King of Hearts; but he
+was so obviously biassed in favor of the veracity of a London
+policeman, that the inconsequence of the nightmare which had begun last
+night was unalterably preserved. Michael, aware of the circumstances
+which had led up to what was being made to appear as wantonly riotous
+behavior in Leicester Square, could not fail to be exasperated by the
+inability of the magistrate to understand his own straightforward story.
+He began to sympathize with the lawless population. The law could only
+seem to them an unintelligent machine for crushing their freedom. If the
+conduct of this case were a specimen of administration, it was obvious
+that arrest must be synonymous with condemnation. The magistrate in the
+first place seemed dreadfully overcome by the sorrow of beholding a
+young man in Michael's position on the police-court.
+
+"I cannot help wondering when I see a young man who has had every
+opportunity ..." the magistrate went on in a voice that worked on the
+stale air of the court like a rusty file.
+
+"I'm not a defaulting bank clerk," Michael interrupted. "Is it
+impossible for you to understand----"
+
+"Don't speak to me like that. Keep quiet. I've never been spoken to like
+that in all my experience as a magistrate. Keep quiet."
+
+Michael sighed in compassion for his age and stupidity.
+
+"Are there any previous convictions against Wearne and Palmer?" the
+magistrate inquired. He was told that the woman Palmer had not hitherto
+appeared, but that Wearne had been previously fined for disorderly
+conduct in Shaftesbury Avenue. "Ah!" said the magistrate. "Ah!" he
+repeated, looking over the rim of his glasses. "And the case against the
+male defendant? I will take the evidence of Constable C11254."
+
+"Your worship, I was on duty yesterday evening at 12.25 in Leicester
+Square. Hearing a noise in the direction of the Caffy Dorringe and
+observing a crowd collect, I moved across the road to disperse it. The
+defendant Wearne was using obscene language to an unknown man; and
+wishing to get her to move on I took hold of her arm. The male
+defendant, also using very obscene language, attempted to rescue her and
+struck me on the chest. I blew my whistle...."
+
+The ponderous constable with his thick red neck continued a sing-song
+narrative.
+
+When Michael's turn came to refute some of the evidence against him, he
+merely shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It's really useless, you know, for me to say anything. If 'damn you' is
+obscene, then I was obscene. If a girl is knocked down by a bully and on
+rising to her feet is instantly arrested by a dunderhead in a blue
+uniform, and if an onlooker punches this functionary, then I did assault
+the constable."
+
+"This sort of insolence won't do," said the magistrate trembling with a
+curious rarefied passion. "I have a very good mind to send you to prison
+without the option of a fine, but in consideration...."
+
+Somehow or other it was made to appear a piece of extraordinary
+magnanimity on the part of the magistrate that Michael was only fined
+three guineas and costs.
+
+"I wish to pay the fines of Miss Palmer and Miss Wearne," he announced.
+
+Later in the morning Michael, with the two girls, emerged into the
+garish summer day. Not even yet was the illusion of a nightmare
+dissipated, for as he looked at his two companions, feathered, frilled
+and bedraggled, who were walking beside him, he could scarcely
+acknowledge even their probable reality here in the sun.
+
+"I shan't drink hot whisky-and-lemon again in a hurry," vowed Daisy. "I
+knew it was going to bring me bad luck when I said it tasted so funny."
+
+"But you said your hat was going to be lucky," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Yes, I've been properly sucked in over that," Daisy agreed.
+
+"Nothing ever brings me luck," grumbled Dolly resentfully.
+
+As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he
+was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal
+mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.
+
+"I reckon I'll go home and have a good lay down," said Daisy. "Are you
+going to have dinner with me?" she asked, turning to Dolly.
+
+"Dinner?" echoed Dolly. "Nice time to talk to anyone about their dinner,
+when they've got the sick like I have! Dinner!"
+
+They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he
+might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He
+found it embarrassing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and
+Edgar's window to stare instead at him and his companions.
+
+Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call
+upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the
+second five-pound note into which the law had broken.
+
+"Is this for us?" she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll's going to
+live with me a bit now, aren't you, Doll?"
+
+"I suppose so," said Doll.
+
+Michael really admired the hospitality which was willing to shelter
+this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the
+sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with
+Hungarian Dave.
+
+When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary appearance
+by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo was almost
+to make him incredulous of the night's event, and he could not help
+paying a visit to the Caf� d'Orange, to verify the alcove in which he
+had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and he stood
+for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the night before
+he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the bar, he thought
+he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes, it was certainly
+Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder, addressing him by
+name. Meats turned round with a start.
+
+"Don't you remember me?" asked Michael.
+
+"Of course I do," said Meats nervously. "But for the love of Jerusalem
+drop calling me by that name. Here, let's go outside."
+
+In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.
+
+"Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble," said Meats.
+
+"You are a strange chap," said Michael. "When I first met you it was
+Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now----"
+
+"Look here," said Meats, "give over, will you? I've told you once. If
+you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now
+don't forget."
+
+"Come and have a drink, and tell me what you've been doing in the four
+years since we met," Michael suggested.
+
+"B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?"
+
+Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had
+vanished from his mind.
+
+"Come on, then," said Barnes. "We'll go into the Afrique, upstairs."
+
+Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was
+causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness which
+had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had seemed the
+predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at the round
+marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled an actor
+out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was the cheesy
+complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season too much worn
+and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with its dismoded
+exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness; perhaps,
+thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it had merely
+been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an exception.
+Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a compassionate
+amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity as of a puppet
+temporarily put out of action testified to his own morbid heightening of
+common things in the past. How incredible it seemed now that this Barnes
+had once been able to work upon his soul with influential doctrine.
+
+"What have you been doing with yourself?" Michael asked again.
+
+"Oh, hopping and popping about. I've got the rats at present."
+
+"Where are you living?"
+
+Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. "What do you want
+to know for?" he asked.
+
+"Mere inquisitiveness," Michael assured him. "You really needn't treat
+me like a detective, you know."
+
+"My mistake," said Barnes. "But really, Fane. Let's see, that is your
+name? Thought it was. I don't often forget a name. No, without swank,
+Fane, I've been hounded off my legs lately. I'm living in Leppard
+Street. Pimlico way."
+
+"I'd like to come and see you some time," said Michael.
+
+"Here, straight, what _is_ your game?" Barnes could not conceal his
+suspicion.
+
+"Inquisitiveness," Michael declared again. "Also I rather want a Sancho
+Panza."
+
+"Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige," said Barnes very
+sarcastically.
+
+It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming,
+but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that
+he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEPPARD STREET
+
+
+While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes an
+outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present narrative
+was probably not less cynical than the account of his life related to
+Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps because his
+imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality, he could no
+longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals calmly, neither
+blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental goose-flesh. Yet amid
+all the frankness accorded to him he could not find out why Barnes had
+changed his name. He was curious about this, because he could not
+conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for Barnes to reveal. It would
+be interesting to find out what could really make even him pause; no
+doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the underworld, it would turn
+out to be something that Michael himself would consider trivial in
+comparison with so much of what Barnes had boasted. Anyway, whether he
+discovered the secret or not, it would certainly be interesting to study
+Barnes, since in him good and evil might at any moment display
+themselves as clearly as a hidden substance to a reagent flung into a
+seething alembic. It might perhaps be assuming too much to say that
+there was any good in him; and yet Michael was unwilling to suppose that
+all his conversions were merely the base drugs of a disordered morality.
+Apart from his philosophic value, Barnes might very actually be of
+service in the machinery of finding Lily.
+
+At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.
+
+"Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this," he commented.
+
+Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse to
+be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing in
+that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably
+than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had
+civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a
+commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased
+with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the
+reverse true?
+
+"Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?" Michael
+asked. "I do wish you could understand it's really so much more
+difficult. I can't distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly
+so well as you can."
+
+"Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell
+you," said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. "In my experience most
+of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we haven't
+got. I don't care what it is--a woman or a drink or a new suit of
+clothes. Money'll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I
+could be a bloody angel."
+
+"Supposing I offered you half as much for three months," suggested
+Michael. "Do you think you'd find life any easier while it lasted?"
+
+"Well, don't be silly," said Barnes. "Of course I should. If you'd
+walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody had
+dropped a threepenny bit, you'd think it was easier. It's not a bit of
+good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you'd be just the same.
+Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man who
+first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey's ears on his
+nob. What's it done for me? I ask you. Why, it's made me so that I'd
+steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid on
+another."
+
+"Tell me about Leppard Street," said Michael, laughing. "What's it
+like?"
+
+"Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That's what it
+looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who's lost all his
+teeth, and you've got what it feels like to be living in it."
+
+"Supposing I said I'd like to try?" asked Michael. "What would you
+think?"
+
+"Think? I shouldn't think two seconds. I should know you were having a
+game. What good's Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing
+up and down all day on cushions?"
+
+"Experience," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, rats! Nothing's experience that you haven't had to do."
+
+"Well, I'll give you five pounds a week," Michael offered, "if you'll
+keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn't want
+anything very dreadful, of course," he added.
+
+It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest,
+so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and
+offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason
+for wishing to go to Leppard Street.
+
+"You see, I want to find a girl," he explained.
+
+"Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you'll lose the best girl
+you've got straight off. That's all there is to it."
+
+"You don't understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I
+want to find her and marry her."
+
+It seemed to Michael that Barnes' manner changed in some scarcely
+definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five
+pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked.
+He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an
+almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his
+former attitude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve
+had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap.
+Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no allusion
+to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to emotion. This was
+proving really a most delightful example of the truth of his theory. And
+it was clever of Barnes--it was more than clever, it was truly
+imaginative of him--to realize without another question the need to
+leave for a while Cheyne Walk.
+
+"But is there a vacant room?" Michael asked in sudden dread of
+disappointment.
+
+"Look here, you'd better see the place before you decide on leaving
+here," Barnes advised. "It isn't a cross between Buckingham Palace and
+the Carlton, you know."
+
+"I suppose it's the name that attracts me," said Michael. "It sounds
+ferocious."
+
+"I don't know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house
+is ferocious enough. Never mind." He jingled the five sovereigns.
+
+"I'll go up and pack," said Michael. "By the way, I haven't told you yet
+that I was run in last night."
+
+"In quod you mean?" asked Barnes. "Whatever for?"
+
+"Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square."
+
+"These coppers are the limit," said Barnes emphatically. "The absolute
+limit. Really. They'll pinch the Archbishop of Canterbury for looking
+into Stagg and Mantle's window before we know where we are."
+
+Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the doorway
+to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the macaw on
+its perch were about equally exotic.
+
+They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along the
+river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the adventurousness of
+London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the high spring-tide
+without exulting in the movement of the stream that was washing out with
+its flood all the listlessness of the hot August afternoon. When Chelsea
+Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the banks of a great river
+sweeping through a great city began to be more evident. The whole
+character of the Embankment changed at every hundred yards. First there
+was that somber canal which, flowing under the road straight from the
+Thames, reappeared between a ca�on of gloomy houses and vanished again
+underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what was apparently a
+large private house which had been gutted of the tokens of humanity and
+filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and pistons, all moving
+perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of noise. Under Grosvenor
+Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering forward and a train crashing
+overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and girders dripping with the
+excrement of railway-engines, they came into Grosvenor Road. They passed
+the first habitations of Pimlico, two or three terraces and isolated
+houses all different in character. There could scarcely be another road
+in London so varied as this. Maurice had been wise to have his studio in
+Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an
+epitome of London.
+
+The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide
+thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray
+street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so
+insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton
+Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the
+poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister
+respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and
+very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off
+by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the
+horse's hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every
+evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was
+impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in
+Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here
+but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and
+hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose
+wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
+
+"I wouldn't mind having lodgings here," said Barnes. He had caught sight
+of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the
+outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of
+them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of
+final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the
+middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now
+very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost
+attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to
+Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each
+one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently
+inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast,
+occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so
+uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable
+decadency.
+
+Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem
+endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just
+before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it
+swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street
+ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken glass:
+these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal
+yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two
+rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however,
+that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty
+yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very
+tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the
+embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on
+either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of
+quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong
+windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built
+of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the
+same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the
+draff of the neighborhood's rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child's
+boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter
+undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
+
+"Here we are," said Barnes. "Here's Leppard Street that you've been so
+anxious to see."
+
+"It looks rather exciting," Michael commented.
+
+"Oh, it's the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don't think.
+Exciting?" Barnes repeated. "You know, Fane, there's something wrong
+with you. If you think this is exciting, you'd go raving mad when I
+showed you some of the places where I've lived. Well, here we are,
+anyhow. Number One--the corner house."
+
+They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening
+ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a
+parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato
+parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
+
+Barnes opened the door.
+
+"We'll take your bag up to my room first, and then we'll go downstairs
+and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don't change
+your mind when you've seen the inside."
+
+Michael had no time to notice Barnes' room very much. But vaguely he saw
+a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by
+cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits.
+After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet
+that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in
+the basement.
+
+"She'll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her," he said to
+Michael. "You see, just lately I've been very anxious to avoid meeting
+her."
+
+He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
+
+They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale
+soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by:
+here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a
+Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury,
+so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the
+whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight
+of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It
+was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated
+everything else.
+
+"That's Cleghorne," said Barnes. "I reckon he'd sleep Rip van Winkle
+barmy."
+
+"What's he do?" whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
+
+"He snores for a living, he does," said Barnes.
+
+They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the
+landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two
+trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and
+chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a
+moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the
+carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
+
+"I've brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne," said Barnes.
+
+"Have you brought your five weeks' rent owing?" she asked sourly.
+
+He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered
+up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose
+angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought
+she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the
+wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.
+
+"Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms
+on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to
+come up and show you?"
+
+She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along her
+sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ..." Michael began.
+
+"Mis-ter Cleghorne!" she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she
+began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked
+continuously.
+
+"Oh, I don't want to disturb him," said Michael.
+
+"Disturb him!" she sneered. "Why, half Bedlam could drive through his
+brains in a omnibus before he'd move a little finger to trouble hisself.
+Yes," she shouted, "Yes!" Her voice mingling with the creak of the
+roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it grew
+more strident. "Why, the blessed house might burn before he'd even put
+on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his wife can
+work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if anyone could
+disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the larder, he'd only
+grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people 'ud be very pleased to be asthmatic,
+if they could lie snorting on a bed from morning to night."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne's hands were dry now, and she led the way along the
+passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She
+unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was
+not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of
+fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some
+dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant
+the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window,
+catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a
+landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.
+
+"That's all I got for two months' rent," said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly,
+surveying it. "And it's just about fit for my old man to go and bury his
+good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that's all. The bedroom's in here, of
+course." She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had been
+picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far as
+some child had been able to reach.
+
+The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much
+darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the
+window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square
+of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small
+pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary
+engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.
+
+"Do you want to see the top-floor back?" Mrs. Cleghorne asked.
+
+"Well, if you wouldn't mind." Michael felt bound to apologize to her,
+whatever was suggested.
+
+She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to
+enter the vacant room.
+
+The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the
+permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over
+another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and
+even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was
+less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no fireplace
+and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than the positive
+emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at the gimcrack
+washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was visible in
+long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with its pleated
+iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress exuding
+flock like clustered maggots.
+
+"This is furnished, of course," said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently
+sucking a tooth. "Well, which will you have?"
+
+"I think perhaps I'll take the ground-floor rooms. I'll have them done
+up."
+
+"Oh, they're quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave
+them an extra-special clear-out."
+
+"But you wouldn't object to my doing them up?" persisted Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, I shouldn't _object,"_ said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent
+was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very
+much pleasure from the fruition of Michael's proposal.
+
+They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently
+beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because
+somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two
+empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she
+was endowing them with a value and a character they did not possess.
+
+"I've always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth
+any other two rooms in the house. And of course that's the reason I'm
+really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to everyone
+right out--if you want the two best rooms in the house, why, you must
+pay according. They're only empty now because I've always been
+particular about letting them. I won't have anybody, and that's a fact.
+Mr. Barnes here knows I'm really fond of those rooms."
+
+They had reentered them, and Mrs. Cleghorne stood with arms admiringly
+akimbo.
+
+"They really are a beautiful lodging," she declared. "When would you
+want them from?"
+
+"Well, as soon as I can get them done up," said Michael.
+
+"I see. Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly just what you
+was thinking of doing?"
+
+Michael gave some of his theories of decoration, while Mrs. Cleghorne
+waited in critical audience; as it were, feeling the pulse of the
+apartments under the stimulus of Michael's sketch of their potentiality.
+
+"All white?" the landlady echoed pessimistically. "That sounds very
+gloomy, doesn't it? More like a outhouse or a coal-cellar than a nice
+couple of rooms."
+
+"Well, they couldn't look rottener than what they do at present," Barnes
+put in. "So if you take my advice, you'll say 'yes' and be very
+thankful. They'll look clean, anyway."
+
+The landlady threw back her head and surveyed Barnes like a snake about
+to strike.
+
+"Rotten?" she sniffed. "I'm sure this gentleman here isn't likely to
+find a nicer and cheaper pair of rooms or a more convenient and a
+quieter pair of rooms anywhere in Pimlico. A lot of people is very
+anxious to be in this neighborhood."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was much offended by Barnes' criticism, and there was a
+long period of dubiety before it was settled that Michael should be
+accepted as a tenant.
+
+"I've never cared for white," she said, in final protest. "Not since I
+was married."
+
+Reminded of Mr. Cleghorne's existence in the basement, she hurried
+forthwith to rout him out. As she disappeared, Michael saw that she was
+searching in the musty folds of her skirt in order to deposit in her
+purse the month's rent he had paid in advance.
+
+A couple of weeks passed while the decorators worked hard; and Michael
+returned from an unwilling visit to Scotland to find them ready for him.
+He got together a certain amount of furniture, and toward the end of
+August he moved into Leppard Street.
+
+Barnes on account of the prosperity which had come to him through
+Michael's money had managed to dress himself in a series of outrageously
+new and fashionable suits, and on the afternoon of his patron's arrival
+he strutted about the apartments.
+
+"Very nice," he said. "Very nice, indeed. I reckon old Ma Cleghorne
+ought to be very pleased with herself. Some of these pictures are a bit
+too religious for me just at present, but everyone to their own taste,
+that's what I always say. To their own taste," he repeated. "Otherwise,
+what's the good in being given an opinion of your own?"
+
+Michael felt it was time to explain to Barnes more particularly his
+quest of Lily.
+
+"You don't know a girl called Lily Haden?" he asked.
+
+"Lily Haden," said Barnes thoughtfully. "Lily Hopkins. A great fat girl
+with red...."
+
+"No, no," Michael interrupted. "Lily Haden. Tall. Slim. Very fair hair.
+Of course she may have another name now."
+
+"That's it, you see," said Barnes wisely.
+
+"Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, I must find her," Michael went
+on.
+
+"Well, if you go about it in that spirit, you'll soon find her," Barnes
+prophesied.
+
+Michael looked at him sharply. He thought he noticed in Barnes' manner a
+suggestion of humoring him. He rather resented the way in which Barnes
+seemed to encourage him as one might encourage a child.
+
+"You understand I want to marry her?" Michael asked fiercely.
+
+"That's all right, old chap. I'm not trying to stop you, am I?"
+
+"But why are you talking as if I weren't in earnest?" Michael demanded.
+"When I first told you about it you were evidently very pleased, and now
+you've got a sneer which frankly I tell you I find extraordinarily
+objectionable."
+
+Barnes looked much alarmed by Michael's sudden attack, and explained
+that he meant nothing by his remarks beyond a bit of fun.
+
+"Is it funny to marry somebody?" Michael demanded.
+
+"Sometimes it's very funny to marry a tart," said Barnes.
+
+Michael flushed. This was a directness of speech for which he was not
+prepared.
+
+"But when I first told you," Michael said, "you seemed very pleased."
+
+"I was very pleased to find I'd evidently struck a nice-mannered
+lunatic," said Barnes. "You offered me five quid a week, didn't you?
+Well, you didn't offer me that to give you good advice, now did you?"
+
+Michael tried to conceal the mortification that was being inflicted
+upon him. He had been very near to making a fool of himself by supposing
+that his announcement had aroused admiration. Instead of admiring him,
+Barnes evidently regarded him as an idiot whom it were politic to
+encourage on account of the money this idiot could provide. It was an
+humiliating discovery. The chivalry on which he congratulated himself
+had not touched a single chord in Barnes. Was it likely that in Lily
+herself he would find someone more responsive to what he still
+obstinately maintained to himself was really rather a fine impulse?
+Michael began to feel half sorry for Barnes because he could not
+appreciate nobility of motive. It began to seem worth while trying to
+impose upon him the appreciation which he felt he owed. Michael was
+sorry for his uncultivated ideals, and he took a certain amount of
+pleasure in the thought of how much Barnes might benefit from a close
+association with himself. He did not regret the whim which had brought
+them to Leppard Street. Whatever else might happen, it would always be
+consoling to think that he would be helping Barnes. In half a dream
+Michael began to build up the vision of a newer and a finer Barnes, a
+Barnes with sensitiveness and decent instincts, a Barnes who would
+forsake very willingly the sordid existence he had hitherto led in order
+to rise under Michael's guidance and help to a wider and better life.
+Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the
+affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him
+his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his
+mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem at
+its true value the step he proposed to take.
+
+Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out
+of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would
+surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He
+could not fail to be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so
+much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It
+was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect.
+Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few
+books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and
+those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had
+managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as yet
+he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a small
+secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh
+atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived
+perpetually in a social twilight. Michael's missionary affection began
+to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He
+felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with
+their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in
+their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence
+hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and
+everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to
+fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be
+his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had
+an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes
+were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down,
+and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned
+himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long
+time.
+
+Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with
+blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the
+corner.
+
+"Come in," Michael cheerfully invited him.
+
+The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all
+his clothes were on the verge of coming off, so much like a frayed
+accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a
+space of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the
+bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.
+
+"What I really came down for was a match," the stranger explained.
+
+Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in
+one of his pockets.
+
+"You don't go in for puzzles, I suppose?" he asked tentatively. "But any
+time I can help. I'm the Solutionist, you know. Don't let me keep you.
+Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I'm worrying out this week's lot in The
+Golden Penny very slowly. I've really had a sort of a headache the last
+few days--a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about cricketers?"
+he asked, turning to Michael. "Famous cricketers, of course, that is?
+For instance, I cannot think what this one can be."
+
+He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny
+weekly.
+
+"I've got all the others," he said to Michael. "But one picture will
+often stump you like this. No joke intended." He smiled feebly and
+pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the
+letter T.
+
+"What about Hirst?" Michael asked.
+
+"Hirst," repeated the Solutionist. "Her S T. That's it. That's it." In
+his excitement he began to dribble. "I'm very much obliged to you, sir.
+Her S. T. Yes, that's it."
+
+He began to shuffle toward the door.
+
+"Anything you want solved at any time," he said to Michael. "I'm only
+just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be most
+delighted to solve anything--anything!"
+
+He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his
+problems would puzzle the Solutionist.
+
+"What's his name?" he inquired of Barnes.
+
+"Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a
+living at it."
+
+"At what?" Michael asked.
+
+"Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took
+fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his
+advertisement in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be a
+conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me more
+like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You should
+see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular dust-hole,
+that's what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve anything--anything!
+He hasn't solved how to earn more than ten bob a week, year in year out.
+Silly----! That's what he is, barmy."
+
+Michael's hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers of
+1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once
+visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a
+staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various
+personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow
+windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly
+arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to observe
+them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the mass. No doubt
+Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained by
+Michael's subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael how
+Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the
+inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers
+ultimately escaped owing her money.
+
+It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would
+doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the
+landlady's strict regulation no longer to take them in could be relaxed.
+All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted by
+children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In
+Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and
+occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to
+play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish
+that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little
+girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer's shop
+of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to the
+basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear below at
+twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above the walls of
+the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered what sort of a
+desolate appearance these five houses must present for voyagers to and
+from Victoria. They must surely stand up very forbidding in abandonment
+to those who were traveling back to their cherished dolls-houses in
+Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not actually see the trains,
+but always he could hear their shrieking and their clangor, and he
+looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in her high serene
+four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall. Nothing except the
+trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a perpetual silence.
+Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing with her husband, the
+noise of her rage down in the basement among the quilts and coverlets
+never penetrated beyond the door at the head of the inclosing staircase,
+save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So silent was the house that
+had it not been for the variety of the smells, Michael might easily have
+supposed that it really was empty and that life here was indeed an
+illusion. The smells, however, of onions or hot blankets or machine-oil
+or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed emphatically that a community
+shared these ascending mustard-colored walls, that human beings passed
+along the stale landings to frowst behind those finger-stained doors of
+salmon-pink. Sometimes, too, Michael emerging into the passage from his
+room would hear from dingy altitudes descend the noise of a door
+hurriedly slammed; and sometimes he would see go down the ulcerous steps
+in front of the house depressing women in black, or unshaven men with
+the debtor's wary and furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be
+permanent were Barnes and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength
+of Michael's allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every
+night. He used to assure Michael, when toward two o'clock of the next
+afternoon he extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with
+the greatest pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The
+Solutionist occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of
+newspaper, and often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple
+of Belgian hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the
+nettles of the back-yard.
+
+After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard
+Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any rate
+into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish, would be
+welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger of being
+drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting surface. He felt
+inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer, and to hear from
+her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and Hungarian Dave. He
+found her card with the Guilford Street address and went over to
+Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady looked surprised
+when he inquired for Miss Palmer.
+
+"Oh, she's been gone this fortnight," the woman informed him. Michael
+asked where she was living now.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure," said the landlady, and as she was already
+slowly and very unpleasantly closing the door, Michael came away a
+little disconsolate. These abrupt dematerializations of the underworld
+were really very difficult to grapple with. It gave him a sense of the
+futility of his search for Lily (though lately he had prosecuted it
+somewhat lazily) when girls, who a month ago offered what was presumably
+a permanent address, could have vanished completely a fortnight later.
+Perhaps Daisy would be at the Orange. He would take Barnes with him this
+evening and ask his opinion of her and Dolly and Hungarian Dave.
+
+The beerhall downstairs looked exactly the same as when he had visited
+it a month ago. Michael could sympathize with the affection such places
+roused in the hearts of their frequenters. There was a great deal to be
+said for an institution that could present, day in, day out, a steady
+aspect to a society whose life was spent in such extremes of elation and
+despair, of prosperity and wretchedness, and whose actual lodging was
+liable to be changed at any moment for better or worse.
+
+"Not a bad place, is it?" said Barnes, looking round in critical
+approval at the prostitutes and bullies hoarded round the tables puddly
+with the overflow of mineral waters and froth of beer.
+
+"You really like it?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, it's cheerful," said Barnes. "And that's something nowadays."
+
+Michael perceived Daisy before they were halfway across the room. He
+greeted her with particular friendliness as an individual among these
+hard-eyed constellations.
+
+"Hulloa!" she cried. "Wherever have you been all this time?"
+
+"I called at Guilford Street, but you were gone."
+
+"Oh, yes. I left there. I couldn't stand the woman there any longer. Sit
+down. Who's your friend?"
+
+Michael brought Barnes into the conversation, and suggested moving into
+one of the alcoves where it was easier to talk.
+
+"No, come on, sit down here. Fritz won't like it, if we move."
+
+Michael looked round for the protector, and she laughed.
+
+"You silly thing! Fritz is the waiter."
+
+Michael presently grew accustomed to being jogged in the back by
+everyone who passed, and so powerful was the personality of the Orange
+that very soon he, like the rest of the crowd, was able to discuss
+private affairs without paying any heed to the solitary smoking
+listeners around.
+
+"Where's Dolly?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I had to get rid of her very sharp," said Daisy. "She served me a
+very nasty trick after I'd been so good to her. Besides, I've taken up
+with a fellow. Bert Saunders. He does the boxing for Crime Illustrated."
+
+"You told me I was like him," Michael reminded her.
+
+"That's right. I remember now. I'm living down off Judd Street in a
+flat. Why don't you come round and see me there?"
+
+"I will," Michael promised.
+
+"Wasn't Bert Saunders the fellow who was keeping Kitty Metcalfe?" asked
+Barnes.
+
+"That's right. Only he gave her the push after she hit Maudie Clive over
+the head with a port-wine glass in the Half Moon upstairs."
+
+"I knew Kitty," said Barnes, shaking his head to imply that acquaintance
+with Kitty had involved a wider experience than fell to most men.
+"What's happened to her?"
+
+"Oh, Gard, don't ask me," said Daisy. "She's got in with a fellow who
+kept a fried-fish place in the Caledonian Road, and I've never even seen
+her since."
+
+"And what's happened to Dolly?" asked Michael.
+
+"Oh, good job if that love-boy of hers does punch into her. Silly cow!
+She ought to know better. Fancy going off as soft as you like with that
+big-mouthed five-to-two, and after I'd just given her six of my new
+handkerchiefs."
+
+Michael wished he could have an opportunity of explaining to Barnes that
+on account of Daisy's friendship for Dolly, he and she and the cast-off
+had spent a night in the police-cells. He thought it would have amused
+him.
+
+"Where's the Half Moon?" he asked instead.
+
+Daisy said it was a place in Glasshouse Street for which she had no very
+great affection. However, Michael was anxious to see it; and soon they
+left the Orange to visit the Half Moon.
+
+It was a public-house with nothing that was demirep in its exterior; but
+upstairs there was a room frequented after eleven o'clock by ladies of
+the town. They walked up a narrow twisting staircase carpeted with
+bright red felt and lit by a red-shaded lamp, and found themselves in a
+room even more densely fumed with tobacco smoke than downstairs at the
+Orange. In a corner was an electric organ which was fed with a stream of
+pennies and blared forth its repertory of ten tunes with maddening
+persistence. One of these tunes was gay enough to make the girls wish to
+dance, and always with its recurrence there was a certain amount of
+cake-walking which was immediately stopped by a commissionaire who stood
+in the doorway and shouted "Order, please! Quiet, please! No dancing,
+ladies!" To the nearest couple he always whispered that the police were
+outside.
+
+Daisy, having stigmatized the Half Moon as the rottenest hole within a
+mile of the Dilly, proceeded to become more cheerful with every penny
+dropped into the slot; and finally she invited Michael to come back with
+her to Judd Street, as her boy had gone down to Margate to see Young
+Sancy, a prospective lightweight champion, who was training there.
+
+"Anyway, you can see me home," she said. "Even if you don't come in.
+Besides, my flat's all right. It is, really. You know. Comfortable. He's
+very good to me, is Bert, though he's a bit soppified. He dresses very
+nice, and he earns good money. Well, three pound a week. That's not so
+bad, is it?"
+
+"That's all right," said Barnes. "With what you earn as well."
+
+"There's a nerve," said Daisy. "Well, I can't stay moping indoors all
+the evening, can I? But he's most shocking jealous is Bert. And he calls
+me his pussy-cat. Puss, puss! There's a scream. He's really a bit soft,
+and his eyes is awful. But it's nice, so here's luck." She drained her
+glass. "'Do you love me, puss?' he says. Silly thing! But they think a
+lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see him the other
+morning about something he's been writing. I don't know what it was. I
+hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him something dreadful, and
+then he says, 'My pussy-cat mustn't disturb me.'"
+
+Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was
+beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a good
+move.
+
+"I shan't go if you don't come back with me," she declared.
+
+Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and he
+promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however; nor
+would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and Michael
+went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm September
+night.
+
+Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of
+her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey. He
+flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here at
+last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship with a
+woman of that class with whom mere friendship would be more improbable
+than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with her
+homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on while she
+chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any other
+relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was proud
+as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign trees
+that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he felt a
+thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings of
+Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to
+think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this
+friendship that was giving to all the houses they passed a strange
+peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking
+at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown
+bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and
+beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was
+indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and
+presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.
+
+"Our flat's in here. Agnes House, it's called. Come in and have one
+before you go home," she invited.
+
+Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his confidence
+in their new friendship.
+
+Agnes House was only entitled to the distinction of a name rather than a
+number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby,
+small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was
+already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been
+exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This
+collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of
+age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more
+admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain.
+Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt in
+itself apart from any association with depravity: it was like a young
+person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without arousing
+pity.
+
+"Rather nice, eh?" said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the
+flat. "Sit down. I'll get some whisky. There's a bathroom, you know. And
+it's grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we was
+upstairs. I always swore I'd never live in a flat. Well, I don't really
+call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever be found
+out."
+
+Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn
+about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous
+when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled
+throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a
+placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great deal
+of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to fright her
+fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at the sound of a
+key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike existence of the
+underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael could see the
+villainous paper used for every kind of domestic service--to wrap up a
+piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the cat's dinner, and
+spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon the disks of
+grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very natural, when the
+eyes never rested from these views of sordid violence, to expect evil
+everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was already half inclined to accept
+the underworld's preoccupation with crime as a truer judgment of human
+nature than was held by a sentimental civilization, and he began to
+wonder whether a good deal of his own privacy had not been spent in a
+fool's paradise of security. The moated grange and the dark tower were
+harmless rococo terrors beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes
+House.
+
+"The kitchen's in a rare old mess, isn't it?" said Daisy looking round
+her. "It gives Bert the rats to see it like this."
+
+"Are you fond of him?" Michael asked. He was anxious to display his
+friendly interest.
+
+"Oh, he's all right. But I wouldn't ever get fond of _any_body. It
+doesn't pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they
+can do as they like with you."
+
+"I don't understand why you live with him, if he's nothing better than
+all right," said Michael.
+
+"Well, I'm used to him, and he's not always in the way like some fellows
+are."
+
+Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as
+it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it
+was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her
+ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and
+beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches of
+Fran�ois Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing
+pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be
+wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first
+from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard
+subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably despise
+it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the quality of
+the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove to her the
+reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the relation in
+which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.
+
+"There's something extraordinarily attractive about being friends," he
+began. "Isn't it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to
+be nothing more than a friend?"
+
+"Friends," Daisy repeated. "I don't know that I think much of friends.
+You don't get much out of _them_, do you?"
+
+"Is that all anybody is for," Michael asked in disappointment. "To get
+something out of?"
+
+"Well, naturally. Anyone can't live on nothing, can they?"
+
+"But I don't see why a friend shouldn't be as profitable as an ephemeral
+... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at eleven and
+say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as generous."
+
+"I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted
+twice as much back in return," said Daisy.
+
+"Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine in
+the police court?" he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was so
+anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he could
+not help making the allusion.
+
+"I suppose you wanted to," she said.
+
+"As a friend," he persisted.
+
+"Oh, all right," she agreed with him lazily. "Have it your own way. I'm
+too sleepy to argue."
+
+"Then we are friends?" Michael asked gravely.
+
+"Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a
+clothes-line. Get on with it, Roy--or what's your name? Michael, eh?
+That's right."
+
+"Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?"
+
+"Advice is very cheap," said Daisy.
+
+"I used to know a girl," Michael began.
+
+"A straight-cut?"
+
+"Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was."
+
+"I see. And now she's got a naughty little twinkle in her eye."
+
+"Look here. Do listen seriously," Michael begged. "She isn't a
+straight-cut any longer."
+
+"Well, what did I tell you? That's what I said. She's gone gay."
+
+"I want to get her away from this life," Michael announced, with such
+solemnity that Daisy was insulted.
+
+"Why, what's the matter with it? You're as bad as a German ponce I knew
+who joined the Salvation Army. Don't you try taking me home to-night to
+our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick."
+
+"But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a
+'lady.'"
+
+"More shame for her then," said Daisy indignantly. "She ought to have
+known better."
+
+It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily's fall gave to one so
+deeply plunged. There was in Daisy's attitude something of the
+unionist's toward foreign blackleg labor.
+
+"Well, you see," Michael pointed out. "As even you have no pity for her,
+wouldn't it be right for me to try to get her out of the life
+altogether?"
+
+"How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade
+all day, before you sprang it on her...."
+
+"I had nothing to do with it," Michael interrupted. "At least not
+directly."
+
+"Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?" she demanded in
+surprise.
+
+"I feel a certain responsibility," he explained. "Go on with what you
+were saying."
+
+"If she left a nice home," Daisy continued, "to live gay, she isn't
+going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now,
+is she?"
+
+"But I want to marry her," said Michael simply.
+
+Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.
+
+"You must be worse than potty over her," she gasped.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why? Why, because it doesn't pay to marry that sort of girl. She'll
+only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you'll wish you hadn't
+been such a grass-eyes."
+
+A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael sitting
+in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was right.
+Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was coeval with
+all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility, so that he
+felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal pessimism. Yet in
+the same instant he was aware of the need for him to do something, even
+if his action were to carry within itself the potential destruction of
+more than he was setting out to accomplish.
+
+"When do you see her?" asked Daisy. "And what does _she_ say about being
+married?"
+
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I haven't seen her for nearly five years,"
+Michael explained rather apologetically. "I'm searching for her now.
+I've got to find her."
+
+"Strike me, if you aren't the funniest---- I ever met," Daisy exclaimed.
+
+She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for
+Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing.
+The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed
+plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter seemed
+to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of emptiness was
+due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of the room,
+whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so homely was the
+behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast suddenly they
+made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no more
+substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its hollowness. It
+became an interior very much like those glimpses of interiors in Crime
+Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would have shown Daisy Palmer
+cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even in sanguinary death to
+display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped edge of a white
+petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to dream in Leppard
+Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither as here he would
+enter sensationally.
+
+Daisy ceased to rock herself with mirth.
+
+"No, really," she said. "It's a shame to laugh, but you are the limit.
+Only you did ask my advice, and I tell you straight you'll be sorry if
+you do marry her. What's she like, Wandering Willie? Have some cocoa if
+I make it? Go on, do. I'll boil it on the gas-ring."
+
+Michael was touched by her attention, and he accepted the offer of
+cocoa. Then he began to describe Lily's appearance. He could not,
+however much she might laugh, keep off the object of his quest. Lily
+was, after all, the only rational explanation of his present mode of
+life.
+
+"She sounds a bit washed out according to your description of her,"
+Daisy commented. "Still, everyone to their own fancy, and if you like
+blue-eyed bottles of peroxide, that's your look-out."
+
+They were drinking the cocoa she had made, and the flame of the gas-ring
+gave just the barren comfort that the kitchen seemed to demand. Another
+blackbeetle hurried over the oilcloth. A belated fly buzzed angrily
+against the shade of the electric light. Daisy yawned and looked up at
+the metal clock with its husky tick.
+
+Suddenly there was the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. She leaped
+up.
+
+"Gard, supposing that's Bert come back from Margate!"
+
+She pushed Michael hurriedly across the passage into the front room,
+commanding him to keep quiet and stay in an empty curtained recess. Then
+she hurried back to the kitchen, leaving him in a very unpleasant frame
+of mind. He heard through the closed door Daisy's voice in colloquy with
+a deeper voice. Evidently Bert had come back; but his return had been so
+abrupt that he had had no time to prevent himself being placed in this
+ridiculous position. Would he have to stay in this recess all night? He
+peered out into the room, which was in a filigree of bleak shadows made
+by the street lamp shining through the muslin curtains of the window.
+Through a desolation of undrawn blinds the houses of Little Quondam
+Street were visible across the road. The unused room smelt moldy, and if
+Michael had ever pictured himself in the complexity of a clandestine
+affair, this was not at all the romantic environment he would have
+chosen for his drama. This was really damned annoying, and he made a
+step in the direction of the kitchen to put an end to the
+misunderstanding. Surely Saunders would have realized that his visit to
+Daisy was harmless: and yet would he? How stupid she had been to hustle
+him out of the way like this. Naturally the fellow would be suspicious
+now. Would that hum of conversation never stop? It reminded him of the
+fly which had been buzzing round the lamp. Supposing Saunders came in
+here to fetch something? Was he to hide ignominiously behind this
+confounded curtain, and what on earth would happen if he were
+discovered? Michael boiled with rage at the prospect of such an
+indignity. Saunders would probably want to fight him. A man who spent
+his life helping to produce Crime Illustrated was no doubt deep-dyed
+himself in the vulgar crudity of his material.
+
+Ten minutes passed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten
+more minutes passed; and Michael began to estimate the difficulty of
+climbing out of the window into the street. It had been delightful, this
+experience, until he had entered this cursed flat. He should have parted
+from Daisy on the doorstep, and then he would have carried home with him
+the memory of a friendship that belonged to the London starlight. The
+whole relation had been ruined by entering this scabrous building.
+
+He must have been here for more than an hour. It was insufferable. He
+would go boldly into the kitchen and brave Saunders' violence. Yet he
+could not do that because Daisy would be involved by such a step. What
+could they be talking about? It was really unreasonable for people who
+lived together to sit up chatting half the night. At last he heard the
+sound of an opening door; there were footsteps in the passage; another
+door-opened; after a minute or two somebody walked out into the street.
+Michael had just sighed with relief, when he heard footsteps coming
+back; and the buzz of conversation began again in a lighter timbre. This
+was simply intolerable. He was evidently going to stay here until the
+filigree of shadows faded in the dawn. Saunders must have brought in a
+friend with him. Another half hour passed and Michael had reached a
+stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friendship. Not again
+would he so easily let himself be made ridiculous. Then he became
+conscious of a keen desire to see this Saunders whom, by the way, he was
+supposed to resemble. It was tantalizing to miss the opportunity of
+comparison.
+
+The hum of conversation stopped. Soon afterward Daisy came into the room
+and whispered that he could creep out now, but that he must not slam the
+front door. She would see him at the Orange to-morrow.
+
+When they reached the passage, she called back through the kitchen:
+
+"Bert, do you know you left the front door open?"
+
+Idiotically and uxoriously floated from the inner bedroom: "Did I, pussy
+cat? Puss must shut it then."
+
+Daisy dug Michael violently in the ribs to express her inward hilarity;
+then suddenly she pulled him to her and kissed him roughly. In another
+second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a
+nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some
+garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him
+in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.
+
+Barnes was sitting in Michael's room, when he got back to Leppard
+Street.
+
+"What ho," he said sleepily. "You've been enjoying yourself with that
+piece, then?"
+
+Michael regarded him angrily.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn't look so solemn; she's not a bad bit of
+goods, either. I've heard of her before."
+
+Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to
+convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover,
+if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out
+utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a
+reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had
+slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations
+had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it
+had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld's
+distorting mirror.
+
+On the following night Michael went to the Caf� d'Orange, and heard
+Daisy's account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert
+Saunders.
+
+"But really, you know," she said. "It did give me a turn. Fancy him
+coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting
+fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there
+and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert's all right with his
+pussy-cat."
+
+"But why didn't you let me stay where I was?" Michael asked. "And
+introduce me quite calmly. He couldn't have said anything."
+
+"Couldn't he?" Daisy cried. "I reckon he could then. I reckon he could
+have said a lot. If he hadn't, I'd have given him the chuck right away.
+I don't want no fellow hanging around me that hasn't got the pluck to go
+for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. _Couldn't_ he have said
+anything?"
+
+Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time to
+meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the
+underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been
+devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from the
+standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes,
+Daisy--they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral
+antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer.
+They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they
+were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it
+possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure
+to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the
+absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a
+great constructive force?
+
+Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence
+as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid
+darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he
+was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to
+stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against the
+light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the
+chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante's obscure wood
+of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events.
+Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he
+knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance;
+at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former
+pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told
+himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that
+through her salvation he would save himself.
+
+Michael did not re�nter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems
+would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the
+problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve
+the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not
+tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to
+him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a
+terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give
+her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He
+was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call
+upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the
+Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex himself over the failure to
+discover Lily's whereabauts. Having placed himself at the nod of
+destiny, he was content to believe that if he never found her he must be
+content to look elsewhere for the expression of himself. September
+became October. It would be six years this month since first they met,
+and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be captured anew?
+
+One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated season
+whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because no fall
+of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled walls
+from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk was
+perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he knew.
+Yes, he could. It was Chator's, the dear, the pious and the bubbling
+Chator's; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the corridors
+of St. James'. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized and shaken
+his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however, he was
+twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a fountain of
+questions about his progress during these years with a great deal of
+information about his own. He came in eagerly at Michael's invitation,
+and so much had he still to ask and tell that it was a long time before
+he wanted to know what had brought Michael to Leppard Street.
+
+"How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn't my
+district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I
+say, what a dreadful slum!" Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as
+if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. "I
+never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what
+really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a man
+who's just come to us from Ely was talking about you only yesterday. My
+goodness, how ..."
+
+"It's no larger than a grain of sand," Michael interrupted quickly.
+
+"What is?" asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at
+Michael.
+
+"You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren't you?"
+
+"I suppose you'll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute." Chator
+was beaming with delight at the prospect. "But seriously, this man
+Stewart--Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know
+him?"
+
+"Nigel isn't here, too?" Michael exclaimed.
+
+"He's our deacon."
+
+"Oh, how priceless you'll both be in the pulpit," said Michael. "And
+to-morrow's Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Mass?"
+
+"My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be preaching
+at Evening Prayer. Why don't you come to supper in the Clergy House
+afterward?"
+
+"How do you like your Vicar?"
+
+"Oh, very sound, very sound," said Chator, shaking his head.
+
+"Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?" asked Michael,
+twinkling.
+
+"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He's very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at
+first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he's not. Not a bit.
+We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it.
+And of course we've got the children."
+
+They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and
+Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.
+
+"You will come on Sunday?"
+
+"Of course. But what's the name of your church?"
+
+"My dear fellow, that shows you haven't heard your parochial Mass," said
+Chator, with mock seriousness. "St. Chad's is our church."
+
+"It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron," said Michael.
+
+"I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield."
+
+Michael laughed loudly.
+
+"My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven't
+changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad's--Sunday."
+
+From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled
+walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be
+bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a
+coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.
+
+Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on
+Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference
+to Michael's wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening
+through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior
+of St. Chad's with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense
+was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine
+edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built
+of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any other
+material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing deliberately
+beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat thawing in a
+stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in London streets,
+and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves. The Stations of
+the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in
+their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians was familiar
+music.
+
+As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his
+companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom,
+but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the
+past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the
+forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any
+longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the
+craving of his soul for God.
+
+Chator's discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering
+simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect upon
+the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic way.
+The sermon had the na�ve obviousness and the sweet seriousness of a
+child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see
+that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or
+indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself,
+a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its
+expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having
+upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a
+sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of
+the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of the
+homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were in
+his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with its
+tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael's opinion
+of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his eloquence:
+these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse one so deep in
+the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that a positive
+sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe it did; he
+would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of truth was
+posited among these perishable streets.
+
+The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn,
+Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people pouring
+forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come here to rest
+from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the chill vapors of
+the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their journey home.
+Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had leisure to
+sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or shops that
+made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit for neither
+good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered together for a
+little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now already they were
+trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps would shuffle for a
+space over the dark pavements; a few would have pickled cabbage and
+cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life in this limbo between
+Hell and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be judged with the bulk of
+the congregation: another reason must be found for the influence of
+Evening Prayer or of Chator's words upon him.
+
+"Did you like the sermon?" Michael asked in the porch.
+
+"I didn't listen to a word of it," said Barnes emphatically.
+
+"Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested," said
+Michael.
+
+"I was thinking what a mug I'd been not to back The Clown for the
+Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I'll tell you what it is.
+I'm not used to money, and that's a fact. I don't know how to spend it.
+I'm afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks."
+
+"I thought you enjoyed the service," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, I'm used to services. You know. On and off I've done a lot of
+churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow
+preaching to curdle me up. I've gone through it. Religion, love, and
+measles; they're all about the same. I don't reckon anybody gets them
+more than once properly."
+
+Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and
+though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much
+irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went
+back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What
+puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to be
+impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a mean
+and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was
+amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical
+powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius' blue
+eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice.
+Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his
+expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when he
+met him again at Earl's Court he had been kindled by those blue eyes.
+Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was now that
+lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times lately, but
+they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll's.
+
+"I really must have been mad when I was young," Michael said to himself.
+"And yet other people have preserved the influence they used to have
+over me. Other people haven't changed. Why should he? I wonder whether
+it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?"
+
+Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes' lapse into
+unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the
+Clergy House.
+
+Nigel Stewart's room, which they visited in the minutes before supper,
+had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a
+picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his
+clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael
+chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire
+beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta
+at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.
+
+The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with
+Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to a
+brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going to
+sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar and
+two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the same
+sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met that
+walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or treasurer of
+club accounts or vicar's churchwarden, is always to be found attached to
+the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened, and found he had a
+deep voice and was unable to get nearer to "th" than "v."
+
+"We're raver finking," he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate,
+"of starting Benediction, vis year."
+
+"That will be wonderful," said Michael politely.
+
+"Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver."
+
+The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish
+stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off
+their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart, and
+Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar was
+left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.
+
+"I envy you people," said Michael, as the three of them sank down into
+deep wicker chairs. "I envy this power you have to bring Oxford--or
+Cambridge--into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action,
+isn't it? And you're free from the thought which must often worry dons
+that perhaps they are having a very good time without doing very much to
+deserve it."
+
+"We work hard in this parish," spluttered Chator. "Oh, rather. Very
+hard."
+
+"That's what I say. You have the true peace that thrives on activity,"
+said Michael. "But at the same time, what I'm rather anxious to know is
+how nearly you touch the real sinners."
+
+Stewart and Chator looked at one another across his chair.
+
+"How much do we, brother?" asked Stewart.
+
+"No, really," protested Michael. "My dear Nigel, I can't have you being
+so affected. Brother! You must give up being archaic now that you're a
+pale young curate."
+
+"What do you call the real sinners?" asked Chator. "You saw our
+congregation to-night. All poor, of course."
+
+"Shall I say frankly what I think?" Michael asked.
+
+The other two nodded.
+
+"I'm not sure if that congregation is worth a very great deal. I'm not
+trying to be offensive, so listen to me patiently. That congregation
+would come whatever you did. They came not because they wanted to
+worship God or because they desired the forgiveness of their sins, nor
+even because they think that going to church is a good habit. No, they
+came in a sort of sad drift of aimlessness; they came in out of the
+dreariness of their lives to sit for a little while in the glow that a
+church like yours can always provide. They went out again with a vague
+memory of comfort, material comfort, I mean; but they took away with
+them nothing that would kindle a flame to light up the gray week-days.
+Do you know, I fancy that when these picture-theaters become more
+common, as they will, most of your people will get from them just the
+same sensation of warmth and material comfort. Obviously if this is a
+true observation on my part, your people regard church from a merely
+negative attitude. That isn't enough, as you'll admit."
+
+"But it's not fair to judge by the evening congregation," Chator burst
+out. "You must remember that we get quite a different crowd at Mass."
+
+"But do you get the real sinners?" Michael repeated.
+
+"My dear Michael, what does this inquisition forebode?" said Stewart.
+"You're becoming wrapped in mystery. You're found in Leppard Street for
+no reason that I've yet heard. And now you attack us in this unkind
+way."
+
+"I'm not attacking you," Michael said. "I'm trying to extract from you a
+point of view. Lately it happens that I've found myself in the company
+of a certain class, well--the company of bullies and prostitutes. You
+must have lots of them in this parish. Do you get hold of them? I don't
+believe you do, because the chief thing which has struck me is the utter
+remoteness of the Church or indeed of any kind of religion from the
+life of that class. And their standards are upside-down--actually
+upside-down. They're handed over entirely to the powers of darkness.
+Now, as far as I can see, the Devil--or whatever you choose to call
+him--only cares about people who are worth his while. He hands the
+others over to anybody that likes to deal with them. Equally I would say
+that God is a little contemptuous of the poor intermediates. The Church,
+however, in these hard times for religion is glad to get hold even of
+them, and this miserable spirit of mediocrity runs through the whole
+organization. The bishops are moderate; the successful parsons are
+moderate; and the flock is moderate. To come back to the sinners. You
+know, they _would_ be worth getting. You've no idea what a force they
+would raise. And now, all their industry, all their ingenuity, all their
+vitality is devoted to the service of evil."
+
+Chator could contain himself no longer.
+
+"My dear fellow, you don't understand how impossible it is to get in
+touch with the people you're talking about. They elude one. Of course,
+we should rejoice to get them. But they're impossible."
+
+"Christ moved among sinners," said Michael.
+
+"It's not because we don't long to move among them," Chator spluttered
+in exasperation. "We would give anything to move among them. But we
+can't. I don't know why. But they won't relax any of their barriers.
+They're notoriously difficult."
+
+"Then it all comes down to a 'no' in answer to my question," said
+Michael. "You don't get the real sinners. That's what's the matter with
+St. Chad's--until you can compel the sinner to come in, you'll stay in a
+spiritual backwater."
+
+"If you were a priest," said Chator, "you'd realize our handicap
+better."
+
+"No doubt," Michael agreed. "But don't forget that the Salvation Army
+gets hold of sinners. In fact, I'll wager that nine out of ten of the
+people with whom I've been in contact lately would only understand by
+religion the Salvation Army. Personally I loathe the Salvation Army. I
+think it is almost a more disruptive organization than anything else in
+the world. But at least it is alive; it's not suet like most of the
+Dissenting Sects or a rather rich and heavy plum-pudding like the
+greater part of the Church of England. It's a maddening and atrociously
+bad and cheap alcohol, but it does enflame. I tell you, my dear old
+Chator and my dear old Nigel, you have the greatest opportunity
+imaginable for energy, for living and bringing life to others, if only
+you'll not sit down and be content because you've got the children and
+can fill the church for Evening Prayer with that colorless, dreary,
+dreadfully sorrowful crowd I saw to-night."
+
+Michael leaned back in his chair; the fire crackled above the silence;
+and, outside, the disheartened quiet of the Sabbath was brooding. Chator
+was the first to speak.
+
+"Some of what you say may be true, but the rest of it is a mere muddle
+of heresies and misconceptions and misstatements. It's absolute
+blasphemy to say that God is contemptuous of what you called the
+intermediates, and you apparently believe that evil is only misdirected
+good. You apparently think that your harlots and bullies are better for
+being more actively harmful."
+
+"No, no," Michael corrected. "You didn't follow my argument. As a matter
+of fact, I believe in the absolutism of evil the more, the more I see of
+evil men and women. What I meant was that in proportion to the harm they
+have power to effect would be the inspiration and advantage of turning
+their abilities toward good. But cut out all theological questions and
+confess that the Church has failed with the class I speak of."
+
+The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without
+reaching a conclusion.
+
+"You can't have friars nowadays," said Chator in response to Michael's
+last expression of ambition. "Conditions have changed."
+
+"Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an
+absolute Christianity," Michael pointed out. "Conditions had changed
+when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a
+host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists
+are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions. Do
+you believe in Christ?"
+
+"Don't try to be objectionable, my dear fellow," said Chator, getting
+very red.
+
+"Well, if you do," persisted Michael, "if you accept the Gospels, it is
+utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make 'change of
+conditions' an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your
+parish."
+
+"Michael," said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator's obviously
+rising anger. "Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission
+are you upon? I believe you're getting too much wrapped up in private
+fads and fancies. Why don't you come and work for us at St. Chad's?"
+
+"He's one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense
+fervor," said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and
+Michael felt rather penitent.
+
+"I wish I _could_ work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so
+offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is
+inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight of
+workers in co�peration freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I
+should probably feel like you that the children were the most important.
+Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was confirmed by
+the realization of evil? Usually, it's the other way about, isn't it?
+I've met many unbelievers who first began to doubt, because the problem
+of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency. Chator, you have
+forgiven me, haven't you?"
+
+"I ought to have realized that you didn't mean half you were saying,"
+said Chator.
+
+Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he
+had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he let
+Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.
+
+Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he
+was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street.
+Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to
+Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up
+sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No doubt,
+however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would benefit
+greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael had shut
+himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan, and he used
+to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical experiments in his
+solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on several occasions at
+Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done the daring of
+discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was, Nigel was
+still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he would ever
+cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his own
+diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and told him
+that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.
+
+"All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all," said
+Michael. "At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed
+through it at the age of sixteen."
+
+"You must have been horribly precocious," said Nigel disapprovingly.
+
+"Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give
+up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You'll be telling me
+soon that you've been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite."
+
+Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an
+experience, and Michael laughed:
+
+"Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He's just the person you
+ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an
+�sthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?"
+
+"I really think you _are_ growing very offensive," said Nigel.
+
+"No, I'm not. I'm illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and
+Maurice's encounters with religion would match each other. Both would
+have a very wide, but also a very superficial area."
+
+November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist at
+Stella's wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his
+affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully
+planned sallies of curiosity:
+
+"What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine.
+Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I'll tell
+you quite enough when the moment comes for telling."
+
+"Michael, you're getting dreadfully obstinate," Stella declared. "I
+remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time."
+
+"It's not I who am obstinate," said Michael. "It's you who are utterly
+spoiled by the lovelorn Alan."
+
+Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before
+the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin's
+summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June
+Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a
+wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer's image in this wraith
+of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan
+were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from
+Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term
+recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.
+
+    Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
+    In Vallombrosa.
+
+Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then
+it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could
+remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to
+know them so well:
+
+    Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
+    Magnanimum heroum, pueri innupt�que puell�.
+
+There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory
+of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
+
+    Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et
+    ... terris apricis.
+
+Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these
+lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of
+other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would
+soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because
+those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of youth, to
+the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that was forever
+overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their sanctity with
+sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy and absurdity
+also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than those deeper
+moments.
+
+"Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?" he asked.
+
+"Rather," said Alan, and they both smiled.
+
+"Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst
+out laughing and had to rush out of the room?"
+
+"Rather," said Alan. "Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren't they?"
+
+"Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs.
+Merivale?" Michael queried.
+
+"I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at
+anything," said Alan.
+
+"And yet do you realize that we're only talking of eight years ago?
+Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the
+time when that wedding took place."
+
+To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life
+Michael's calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked
+on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive
+mortality.
+
+"You'll be writing epitaphs next," said Alan, in rather an aggrieved
+voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during
+the silence.
+
+"At any rate," Michael said. "You can congratulate yourself upon not
+having wasted time."
+
+"My god," cried Alan, stopping suddenly. "I believe I'm the luckiest man
+alive."
+
+"I thought you'd found a sovereign," said Michael. He had never heard
+Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment
+later Alan would be blushing at his want of reserve, he loyally covered
+up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.
+
+Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as
+none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she
+must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her
+Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very
+anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble Place,
+but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy came, and
+Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously contemplated marrying
+her. How well he remembered her in short skirts, and here she was a
+woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold pince-nez.
+
+"You _are_ a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place," grumbled
+Nancy. "Do you realize we haven't met for years?"
+
+"You're such a woman of affairs," said Michael.
+
+"Well, do let's try to meet next time. I say, don't you think Maud looks
+terribly ill since she became a Romanist?"
+
+Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
+
+"I think she's looking rather well."
+
+"Absolute destruction of individuality, you know," said Nancy, shaking
+her head. "I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must admit
+that she hasn't forced her religion down our throats."
+
+"Did you expect an auto-da-f� in the middle of the lawn?" he asked. She
+thumped him on the shoulder:
+
+"Silly ass! Don't you try to rag me."
+
+They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at
+eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have regretted
+the step.
+
+Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the
+ceremony.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?"
+
+"You've admitted I'm a married woman," she exclaimed. "Now surely you
+can tell me what you've been doing since August and where you've been."
+
+"I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every
+woman," said Michael. "Alas, you are not!"
+
+"Michael, you're perfectly horrid to me."
+
+"Don't be too much the young wife," he advised, with mocking
+earnestness.
+
+"I won't listen to anything you say, until I know where you've been. Of
+course, if I hadn't been so busy, I could easily have found you out."
+
+"Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,"
+Michael laughed.
+
+"You shan't stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me."
+
+"By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful
+news," said Michael. "Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your
+honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but
+I've never heard."
+
+"We're going to Compi�gne," said Stella. "I wrote to little
+Cast�ra-Verduzan, and he's lent us the cottage where you and I stayed."
+
+That choice of Stella's seemed to mark more decisively than anything she
+had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
+
+When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother,
+talking.
+
+"I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers," she
+told him. "But if you're going to be here, I could put her off."
+
+Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother's
+loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
+
+"No, no, I'm going away again," he told her.
+
+"Just as you like, dearest boy."
+
+"You're glad about Stella?"
+
+"Very glad."
+
+"And you like Alan?"
+
+"Of course. Charming--charming."
+
+The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had
+been brought up to Mrs. Fane's sitting-room out of the way of the
+wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
+
+"It's really quite chilly this afternoon," said Mrs. Fane.
+
+"Yes, there's a good deal of mist along the river," said Michael. "A
+pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather
+dreary in the forest."
+
+"Why did they go to a forest?" she asked. "So like Stella to choose a
+forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in
+love, one doesn't notice the mud."
+
+Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went
+back to Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE INNERMOST CIRCLE
+
+
+November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and
+these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the
+house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even
+when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made
+more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at
+first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would
+presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico
+magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life
+was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall
+Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so
+unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
+
+One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to
+Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk
+with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a
+dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which
+every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At
+the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a
+sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from
+Oxford to-night--Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half expectant
+of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him. How
+were Stella and Alan getting on at Compi�gne? Probably they were having
+clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a smell of woodfires.
+With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round Piccadilly,
+sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side streets, but
+always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle. Here he would
+stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west and south and
+north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were coming out of the
+theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to Daisy? Should he call a
+hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the spinning of a polychromatic
+top, he could not leave the Island.
+
+They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge
+one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the
+opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to
+their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must
+begin to frequent the Orient again.
+
+Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a
+nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to
+a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake's story had
+been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been
+slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had
+become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off
+the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road.
+A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had
+passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to
+walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost
+in the air.
+
+Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out
+his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that.
+Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It would
+serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of those
+vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together now;
+instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark pavement.
+How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At last he
+knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her still. What
+nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry her in order to
+rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her still; he loved her
+now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of Green Park rattled to
+his stick. He loved her more passionately because the ghost of her whom
+he had thought of with romantic embellishment all these years was but a
+caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer which had floated
+through his dreams was become nothing, now that again he had seen
+herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and the delicate
+poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women on the
+pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of gravel by the
+curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what direction had she
+driven away? Even that he did not know. She might have driven past this
+very lamp-post a few minutes back.
+
+Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate
+upon a hansom's progress. Here already were main roads branching, and
+these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the
+imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not
+picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape
+without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would
+put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of
+that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she
+would turn toward him in her black dress. "I saw you outside the
+Orient," he would say. She should know immediately that he was not
+deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when
+he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was
+disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid
+woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and
+huddled against the wall of the King's garden. He put a sixpence among
+her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars
+were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold
+parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to
+Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This
+kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One
+after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of doors
+and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider
+thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary
+policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous.
+And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of
+human dwellings, were Michael's own thoughts thronged with fancies of
+himself and Lily.
+
+It was nearly one o'clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across
+the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street.
+From the opposite pavement a woman's figure stepped quickly toward him
+out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road
+made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once
+and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could
+not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and
+run.
+
+"Where are you off to in such a hurry?" he heard her say.
+
+It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his
+pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her
+one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet
+it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied
+the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in
+her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always haunt
+her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She was
+not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves, as
+at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears and
+that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks, there
+would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become even an
+individual in the multitude of weary London women.
+
+"Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?" she repeated.
+
+"Home. I'm going home," he said.
+
+"Let's walk a bit of the way together."
+
+He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her
+voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her
+know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her
+materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard
+Street.
+
+"Why don't you come back with me? I live quite near here," she murmured.
+"Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you."
+
+Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the
+star-incrusted sky.
+
+"Come on, dear. I live in the corner house."
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny
+smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were
+blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the
+question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
+
+"Go on, dear, you've got some money with you?"
+
+"It's not that," said Michael. "I don't want to come in with you."
+
+Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in
+what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the
+house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with
+the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who
+slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep
+comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping
+about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put
+his foot on the steps of the front door.
+
+"Not that door," she said. "Down here."
+
+She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into
+the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as
+the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
+
+"Don't make a noise," she whispered. "Because the woman who keeps the
+house sleeps down here."
+
+She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage.
+When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
+
+"Got a vesta with you?" she whispered.
+
+Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy
+wall.
+
+"Here you are. Here you are."
+
+The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle
+she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek,
+but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the
+candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne
+snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous
+breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down
+three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety door, and welcomed him.
+
+"I'm quite on my own, you see," she said, in a voice of tentative
+satisfaction.
+
+Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp.
+The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of
+black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he
+had seen in Barnes' room above. He tried to recall how much of this room
+he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind
+with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The
+action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the
+moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a
+light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with
+a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons.
+The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame,
+Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what
+remained of henna and peroxide.
+
+"That's more cheerful. Though I must say it's a pity they haven't put
+the gas in here. Oh, don't sit on that old box. It makes you look such a
+stranger."
+
+Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was
+hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a
+pale blue chest next to a washstand.
+
+"Are you looking at my cat?" she asked.
+
+"What cat?"
+
+"He's under the bed, I'll be bound."
+
+She called, and a small black cat came out.
+
+"Isn't he lovely? But, fancy, he's afraid of me. He always gets under
+the bed like that."
+
+Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had
+lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that
+finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.
+
+"Well, there!" the woman exclaimed. "Did you ever? I've never seen him
+do that before. He knows you're a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His
+mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very
+well, so she's got a good home. But _he_ isn't stinted. Oh, no. He gets
+his milk every day. What I say is, if you're going to have animals, look
+after them."
+
+Michael nodded agreement.
+
+"Because to my mind," she went on, "a great many animals are better than
+human beings."
+
+"Oh, yes, I think they probably are," said Michael.
+
+"Poor Peter!" she crooned. "I wouldn't starve you, would I?"
+
+The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
+
+"Why do you call it Peter?" he asked. The name savored rather of the
+deliberate novelist.
+
+"After my boy."
+
+"Your boy?" he echoed.
+
+"Oh, he's a fine boy, and a good boy." The mention of her son stiffened
+the woman into a fleeting dignity.
+
+"I suppose he's about twelve?" Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
+
+"Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I'm a little older than what
+I look." As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the
+converse was more probable.
+
+"He's not living with you?"
+
+"Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn't have him here for anything--not
+ever. Oh, no, he's at school with the Jesuits. He's to go in the Civil
+Service. I lived with his father for many years--in fact, from the time
+I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He's
+been dead about six years now."
+
+"I suppose he left money to provide for the boy."
+
+"Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren't what
+they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always
+falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I'm a
+Catholic myself."
+
+As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the
+bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had
+entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility
+of spirit.
+
+"I suppose you don't care for this life?" he asked after a short
+silence.
+
+"Well, no, I do not. It's not at all what I should call a refined way of
+living, and often it's really very unpleasant."
+
+Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself
+discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her
+health.
+
+"For one thing," she continued, "the police are very rough with one, and
+if anyone doesn't behave just as they'd like for them to behave, they
+make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn't
+right, is it? It's really not as it should be, I don't think."
+
+Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
+
+"It's damnable!" he growled. "And I suppose you have to put up with a
+good deal from some of the men?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment
+more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer's shop in a
+provincial town. "Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I'm at anyone's
+mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might
+not. Really, if it wasn't for the woman who keeps the house being always
+so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here
+for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday--or was it
+Thursday?--time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count
+the days, does it? One day last week I did what I've never done before:
+I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and
+another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I
+thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man--a very rough sort of
+a man he was, I'm not surprised poor Peter runs away from them--I heard
+him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night.
+And will you believe it, he'd gone to my bag and taken out his six
+shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had
+at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as
+they say. I wouldn't be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it with
+women like myself. Well now, you can't say a man like that is any better
+than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets. Though
+I will say it was a warning."
+
+"I suppose you'd be glad to give up the life," said Michael, and as he
+asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence of
+this woman a very futile one.
+
+"Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I'm really
+at anyone's mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in
+one way, the harm's done."
+
+Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and
+powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the more
+obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and at
+her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid
+flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
+
+"You see," she went on, "though I have to put up with a great deal, it's
+only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up by my
+father, and my mother being--well, it's no use to mince matters as they
+say--my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this occurred
+with the Frenchman I told you about--that really was a downward step,
+though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good to me
+from the beginning to the end. Still, I'm used to refinement, and I have
+a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I dislike the
+woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent regular--eight-and-six, that
+is...."
+
+"Quite enough, too," said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was so
+like the scarred surface of the moon.
+
+"You're right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I'm my own
+mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don't interfere
+with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking,
+but really Mrs. Cleghorne--that is the woman who keeps the house--really
+she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I
+go all day with only a cup of tea."
+
+Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own
+breakfast on a chafing dish.
+
+"I interrupted you," he said. "You were going to tell me something about
+Mrs. Cleghorne."
+
+"Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this
+seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me.
+Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she'd seen him
+going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn't a nice thing to
+do, is it? One doesn't want to go round drinking in public-houses. It
+looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we've fallen out
+over it. In fact, I haven't seen him for some months. Still I shouldn't
+complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some
+extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you'll
+understand--well, as I was saying--what with one thing and another my
+rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you've paid regular for
+close on two years, you expect a little consideration."
+
+"Have you lived in this burrow for two years?" Michael asked in
+amazement.
+
+"In the week before Christmas it'll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs.
+Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round
+here and abuse me. Her mother's an old woman, you'll understand, and her
+language--well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick." She put her
+hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. "She stands in that
+doorway and bullies me until I'm ashamed to sit on this bed and stand
+it. I really am. You'd hardly believe there was such things to say to
+anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I've made up my
+mind she isn't going to do it again. I'm not going to _have_ it." She
+was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs
+of the bed creaked.
+
+"The mother doesn't live here?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I'm
+not going to let it occur again. I don't consider I've been well
+treated. If I'd spent the money on gin, I shouldn't so much object to
+what the old woman calls me, for I don't say my life isn't a bit of a
+struggle. But there's so many things to use up the money, when I've got
+what's wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his
+half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little
+bit smart--really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should
+I be?--and I never waste money on clothes for clothes' sake, as they
+say--well, after that it's none so easy to find eight-and-six for the
+week's rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat's milk."
+
+Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by
+living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her
+wretchedness.
+
+"I hope your boy will turn out well," he ventured at last.
+
+"Oh, he's a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps
+the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his
+being in the Civil Service."
+
+"Or even a priest," Michael suggested.
+
+"Well, you see, he wasn't born in wedlock. Would that make a
+difference?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Michael gently. "Oh, no, I hope that wouldn't
+make a difference."
+
+He was finding the imagination of this woman's life too poignant, and he
+rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged inwardly
+that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in which she
+had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he would have
+to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged down into his
+pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had thought an
+exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity when she had
+stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he wished he had
+five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly and hopelessly
+in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She must have robbed
+him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the thief's and liar's
+film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into his own? Was it
+impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns out of his
+pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had pawed him with
+her hands in the black passage, and if the money had fallen on the road,
+he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the unjust theft; he
+ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant to give her. And
+yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had said the cat
+recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken the
+sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the weight
+she bore. And if she had taken them, why not? The cat was not at hand
+to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the money for
+herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey upon others
+in self-defense.
+
+"I find I haven't any money with me," said Michael, looking at her.
+
+"That doesn't matter. I've really quite enjoyed our little talk."
+
+"But I'll send you some more," he promised.
+
+"No, it doesn't matter. I haven't done anything to have you send your
+money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn't think I was
+really quite your style. Of course, I've really come down. It's no use
+denying it. I'm _not_ what I was."
+
+If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had
+robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had
+feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.
+
+"I shall send you some money for your boy," he said, in the darkness by
+the door.
+
+"No, it doesn't matter."
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Well, I'm known here as Mrs. Smith." Doubtfully she whispered as the
+cold air came in through the open door: "I don't expect you'd care about
+giving me a kiss."
+
+Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he
+kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.
+
+When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black
+houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure
+to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their
+fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the
+stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try to
+rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he must
+be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could
+encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far
+as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary
+policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of
+lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the
+knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now
+as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very
+much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in
+the haggard lamplight.
+
+Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
+
+He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly
+in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face downward
+upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that anything
+so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately afterward
+he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and shamefacedly he
+put away the broken picture in a drawer.
+
+Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In
+twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to
+save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy
+that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every
+time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window
+rattling in the wind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TINDERBOX LANE
+
+
+Next morning, when he woke, Michael made up his mind to leave Leppard
+Street finally in the course of this day. He could not bear the thought
+that he would only have to lean out of his window to see the actual roof
+which covered that unforgettable den beneath him. He wondered what would
+be the best thing to do with the furniture. It might be worth while to
+install Barnes in these rooms and pay his rent for some months instead
+of the salary which, now that Lily had been seen, was no longer a
+justifiable expenditure. He certainly would prefer that Barnes should
+never meet Lily now, and he regretted he had revealed her name. Still he
+had a sort of affection for Barnes which precluded the notion of
+deserting him altogether. These rooms with their simple and unmuffled
+furniture, the green shelves and narrow white bed, would be good for his
+character. He would also leave a few chosen books behind, and he would
+write and ask Nigel Stewart to visit here from time to time. Michael
+dressed himself and went upstairs to interview Barnes where he lay
+beneath a heap of bedclothes.
+
+"Oh, I daresay I could make the rooms look all right," said Barnes. "But
+what about coal?"
+
+"I shall pay for coal and light as well as the rent."
+
+"I thought you'd find it a bit dismal here," said Barnes knowingly. "I
+wonder you've stuck it out as long as you have."
+
+"After February," Michael said, "I may want to come to some other
+arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you
+understand that when the three months are up, I shan't be able to allow
+you five pounds a week any longer."
+
+"No, I never supposed you would," said Barnes, in a tone of resignation.
+
+Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not:
+however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could do
+no harm to mention it.
+
+"Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?"
+he asked.
+
+"I didn't know there was one here; but it's not a very rare occurrence
+in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to
+that."
+
+"If you hear any row going on down there," said Michael, "you had better
+interfere at once."
+
+"Who with?" Barnes inquired indignantly.
+
+"With the row," said Michael. "If the woman is being badly treated on
+account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately."
+
+"Well, I'm not in the old tear's secret, am I?" asked Barnes, in an
+injured tone. "You can't expect me to go routing about after every old
+fly-by-night stuck in a basement."
+
+"I'm particularly anxious to know that she is all right," Michael
+insisted.
+
+"Oh well, of course, if she's a friend of yours, Fane, that's another
+matter. If it's any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I'll do
+it."
+
+Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the
+Solutionist, who was also in bed.
+
+"I've got a commission for you," said Michael.
+
+The Solutionist's watery eyes brightened faintly.
+
+"You're fond of animals, aren't you?" Michael went on. "I see you
+feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I'm interested in a cat who
+appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a
+quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith's door every morning. Mrs.
+Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are fond
+of animals; but you mustn't mention me. Here's a check for five pounds.
+Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits."
+
+The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
+
+"I couldn't cash this nowadays," he said helplessly. "And get a quart of
+milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst."
+
+"All right. I'll send you postal orders," said Michael. "Now I'm going
+away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount
+left every day. You'll do what I ask? And you'll promise not to say a
+word about me?"
+
+The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely
+puzzled than he had ever seen him.
+
+Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into
+the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her
+cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did not
+know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully
+complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes
+get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window
+the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and asked
+her to come and speak to him.
+
+"I see," she said. "Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms, and you're paying
+in advance up to February. Oh, and his coal and his gas as well? I see.
+Well, that you can settle month by month. Through me? Oh, yes."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could not
+help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
+
+"Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?" Michael
+asked.
+
+"He's still in his bed, but I'll go myself."
+
+This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered.
+Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate
+which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her
+condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it
+were being bestowed from a superior height.
+
+Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white
+rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with
+him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice's studio in
+Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange whom
+himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his big
+horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending for
+some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and
+presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
+
+As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily
+again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good
+deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It
+had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but
+driving toward Maurice's studio along the banks of the river, Michael
+thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
+
+"I've brought you these pictures," he explained to Maurice, and let the
+gift account for his own long disappearance from communion with his
+friends. "They're pretty hackneyed, but I think it's rather good for you
+to have a few hackneyed things amid the riot of originality here. What
+are you doing, Mossy?"
+
+"Well, I'm rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point of
+View."
+
+"You haven't met your lady-love yet?"
+
+"No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there's plenty of time. What about
+you?" Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend
+as a stone where women were concerned.
+
+"I've seen her," said Michael. He simply had to give himself the
+pleasure of announcing so much.
+
+"By Jove, have you really? You've actually found your fate?" Maurice was
+evidently very much excited by Michael's lapse into humanity; he had
+been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. "What's she
+like?"
+
+"I haven't spoken to her yet. I've only seen her in the distance."
+
+"And you've really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with me
+here. Castleton isn't coming back from the Temple until after tea."
+
+Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while he
+stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very moment
+herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought if he
+once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too much,
+and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist saying that
+she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be applied to many
+girls, and it was only for himself that in this case they had all the
+thrilling significance they did.
+
+"I like fair girls best," Maurice agreed. "But most fair girls are
+dolls. If I met one who wasn't, I should be hopelessly in love with
+her."
+
+"Perhaps you will," Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very
+generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had the
+power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could choose
+his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the studio, or
+he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were she to be his,
+he must hold secrets about her that could never be unfolded.
+
+"I really must bolt off," he declared. "I've got a cab waiting."
+
+Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused
+the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and
+inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
+
+"Life's really too easy in this house," he thought. "It's so impossible
+to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately.
+I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I
+shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here."
+
+Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily at
+once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of her
+raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have made
+their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the joyful
+prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was really
+tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was to be
+exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington Gardens.
+However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater had made
+such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much attention to
+lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress. Otherwise he
+was himself again of six years ago, with only the delightful difference
+that he was now independent and could carry her forthwith into marriage.
+The knowledge that from a material point of view he could do this filled
+him with a magnificent consciousness of life's plenitude. So far, all
+his experiments in living had been bounded by ignorance or credulity on
+his own side, and on the side of other people by their unsuitableness
+for experiments. Certainly he had made discoveries, but they might
+better be called disillusionments. Now here was Lily who would give him
+herself to discover, who would open for him, not a looking-glass world
+in which human nature reflected itself in endless reduplications of
+perversity, but a world such as lovers only know, wherein the greatest
+deeps are themselves. Michael scarcely bothered to worry himself with
+the thought that Lily had embarked upon her own discoveries apart from
+him; she had been bewitched again by his romantic spells into the
+innocent girl of seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his
+capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged
+upon her. Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior
+was discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this
+intoxication of happiness.
+
+With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit
+the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment
+threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had
+come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when
+he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new Lily
+wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision of her
+last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the queer
+adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still higher
+upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his return to
+Cheyne Walk had helped to strengthen his hopefulness. Now he had
+returned to this circumambient crowd, looking round as each newcomer
+came up the steps, and all the while horribly aware that this evening
+Lily was not coming to the Orient. He had never been upset like this
+since his resolve was taken. The glimpse of her last night had made him
+very impatient, and he reviled himself again for having been such a fool
+as to let her escape. He fell in a rage with his immobility here in
+London. He demanded why it was not possible to swirl in widening circles
+round the city until he found her. He was no longer content to remain in
+this aquarium, stuck like a mollusc to the side of the tank. He wanted
+to see her again. He was fretful for her slow contemptuous walk and her
+debonair smile. He wanted to see her again. Already this quest was
+becoming the true torment of love. Every single other person in sight
+was a dreary automaton in whom he took no trace of interest. Every
+movement, every laugh, every shadow made him repine at its uselessness
+to him. All those years at Oxford of dreams and hesitations had let him
+store up within himself a very fury of love. He had been living falsely
+all this time: there had never been one dull hour which could not have
+been enchanted by her to the most glorious hour imaginable. He had
+realized that when he saw her last night; he had realized all the waste,
+all the deadness, all the idiotic philosophy and impotence of these
+years without her. How the fancy of her vexed him now; how easily could
+he in his frustration knock down the individuals of this senseless
+restless crowd, one after another, like the dummies of humanity they
+were.
+
+The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling curtain.
+Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into Piccadilly. She must
+be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for her to come casually
+like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear for weeks. Or was she
+a man's mistress, the mistress of a man of forty? He could picture him.
+He would be a stockbroker, the sort of man whom one saw in first-class
+railway carriages traveling up to town in the morning and reading The
+Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid in his buttonhole and
+take her to Brighton for week-ends. He knew just the shade of bluish
+pink that his cheeks were; and the way his neck looked against his
+collar; the shape of his mustache, the smell of his cigar, and his
+handicap at golf.
+
+It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that.
+Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they
+must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along
+as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after
+restaurant, caf� after caf�, standing in the doorways and staring at the
+tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him, as
+people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his
+frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and ask
+what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a
+lunatic.
+
+Michael's behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often
+ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a
+nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled
+Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions,
+because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily
+among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been
+searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked
+up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry
+Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been
+hers.
+
+By one o'clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to
+suppose that Lily would be found among these furtive women with their
+waylaying eyes in the gloom. Michael went back tired out to Cheyne Walk.
+On the following night he visited the Orient again and afterward
+searched every likely and unlikely place in the neighborhood of the
+heart of pleasure. He went also to the Empire and to the Alhambra;
+sometimes hurrying from one to the other twice in the evening, when
+panics that he was missing Lily overtook him. He met Lonsdale one night
+at the Empire, and Lonsdale took him to several night-clubs which gave a
+great zest to Michael's search; for he became a member of them himself,
+and so possessed every night another hour or more before he had to give
+up hope of finding her.
+
+Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was
+greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for
+Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt
+qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult,
+impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
+
+Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers
+Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole time
+rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline Grey,
+the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer. Guy
+explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it seemed
+he would soon have to choose between love and art; how restrictions were
+continually being put upon their meeting each other; and how violently
+difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead, where Michael had
+prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very sympathetic, and when he
+met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did think she was beautiful
+and very much like the wild rose that Guy had taken as the symbol of
+her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could not imagine problems of
+conduct in which she could be involved. Nevertheless, it was impossible
+not to feel that over Plashers Mead brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet
+it seemed ridiculous to compare Guy's difficulties with his own.
+
+For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan had
+by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to see
+how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was certainly
+something very attractive in these two young people moving about that
+grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and stood at the
+end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred acres. That it
+could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns had been defaced
+by builder's rubbish was now inconceivable. So too within, Michael could
+not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan had ever stood in this
+drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows whose sills scarcely rose
+above the level of the grass outside; that anyone else but Stella and
+Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library with its pilasters and
+calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that anyone else but Stella
+and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes of those bag-wigged
+squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that girl in her chip hat,
+holding a bunch of cherries.
+
+"No doubt you've got a keen scent for tradition," said Michael to
+Stella. "But really you have been able to get into the manner
+surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you
+both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace--Stella, I'm
+afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and
+where do hounds meet to-morrow?"
+
+"We're simply loving it here," Stella said. "But I think the piano is
+feeling a little bit out of his element. He's stiff with being on his
+best behavior."
+
+"I'm hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field," said Alan.
+"I'll show it to you to-morrow morning."
+
+The butler came in with news of callers:
+
+"The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley."
+
+"Oh, damn!" Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. "I really
+don't think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you've
+both got to come in and be polite."
+
+Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room,
+whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and
+Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+"We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas,
+but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer
+really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I've
+been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of
+ours."
+
+Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella's
+interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered
+if Stella had guessed this.
+
+"And Anne heard you play at King's Hall. Didn't you, Anne dear?"
+
+Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
+
+"That child is going to worship Stella," Michael thought.
+
+"We're hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth
+Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr.
+Fane, you'll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the
+pleasure of seeing you as well?"
+
+Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
+
+"What absolute rot!" Stella cried. "Of course you'll be here."
+
+But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
+
+"They tell us you've been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband was
+so much interested and is so much looking forward to seeing your stock;
+but at present he must not drive far. I've also heard of you from my
+youngest boy who went up to Christ Church last October year. He is very
+much excited to think that Hardingham is going to have such a
+famous--what is it called, Anne?--some kind of a bowler."
+
+"A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother," said Lady Anne.
+
+"Wasn't he in the Eton eleven?" asked Alan.
+
+"Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment," said Lady
+Stilton. "Possibly a superior player."
+
+"Oh, no, mother!" Lady Anne indignantly declared. "He would have played
+for certain against Harrow, if he hadn't sprained his ankle at the nets
+the week before."
+
+"I do hope you'll let him come and see you this vacation," Lady Stilton
+said.
+
+"Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round
+here," Alan replied. "I'm just planning out a new pitch now."
+
+"How delightful all this is," thought Michael, with visions of summer
+evenings.
+
+Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a
+great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+"Of course, _you've_ got to marry Anne," said Stella to Michael, as soon
+as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
+
+"Alan," Michael appealed. "Is it impossible for you to nip now forever
+this bud of matchmaking?"
+
+"I think it's rather a good idea," said Alan. "I knew young Varley by
+sight. He's a very sound bat."
+
+"I shan't come here again," Michael threatened, "until you've dissolved
+this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to
+marry me to every girl you meet, why don't you devote yourself to the
+task of making Huntingdon a first-class county in cricket? Stella might
+captain the team."
+
+Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with
+long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year's
+morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let himself
+be deterred by Stella's gibes.
+
+"I admit you're as happy as you can be," he said. "Now surely you, after
+so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost as well
+as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet married."
+
+"Michael, you're having an affair with some girl," Stella said
+accusingly.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Swear?"
+
+"By everything I believe in, I vow I'm not having an affair with any
+girl. I wish I were."
+
+His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King's
+Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that
+it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
+
+Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a
+carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive
+with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in
+the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist's in the King's Road, he
+saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham
+Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit
+of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on
+sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and sixpence
+for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
+
+"Ought to be very good," commented the tobacconist. "Well, we want a
+bit of brightening up nowadays down this way, and that's a fact. Why, I
+can remember Cremorne Gardens. Tut-tut! Bless my soul. Yes, and the old
+World's End. That's going back into the seventies, that is. And it seems
+only yesterday."
+
+"I rather wish I'd got a ticket," said Michael.
+
+"Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I
+suppose you'd like one for a lady as well?"
+
+"No, I'll have two men's tickets."
+
+Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany
+him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio
+was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed
+to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go
+alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they
+seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch
+other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of
+spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress.
+So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
+
+Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was
+deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to
+contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which,
+having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal loss
+to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises again
+in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese
+lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it
+now not positively forbidding.
+
+Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many of
+the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also
+professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful
+inventions. The medley of colors, the motion of the dance, the sound of
+the music, the streamers of bunting and the ribbons fluttering round the
+Maypole in the middle of the room, all combined to give Michael an
+illusion of a very jocund assemblage. There were plenty of men dancing
+without masks, which was rather a pity, as their dull, ordinary faces
+halted abruptly the play of fancy. On second thoughts he was glad such
+revelers were allowed upon the floor, since as the scene gradually began
+to affect him he felt it might be amusing for himself to dance once or
+twice before the evening ended. With this notion in view, he began to
+follow more particularly the progress of different girls, balancing
+their charms one against another, and always deriving a good deal of
+pleasure from the reflection that, while at this moment they did not
+know of his existence, in an hour's time he might have entered their
+lives. This thought did give a romantic zest to an entertainment which
+would otherwise have been quite cut off from his appreciation.
+
+Suddenly Michael's heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and
+swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking
+away from him along the side of the hall--those two pierrettes in
+black--that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn't she turn
+round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The
+pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be
+sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily.
+He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below
+him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily's
+languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that it
+was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He hurried
+down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the ball-room. Where
+were they now? They were coming toward him: the other pierrette with
+the rose pompons said something as they passed. It could only be Lily
+who bowed her head like that in lazy assent. It was Lily! Should he call
+out to her, when next they passed him? If it were not Lily, what a fool
+he would look. If it were not Lily, it would not matter what he looked,
+for the disappointment would outweigh everything else. They were going
+up the room again. They were turning the corner again. They were
+sweeping toward him again. They were passing him again. He called "Lily!
+Lily!" in a voice sharp with eagerness. Neither girl gave a sign of
+attention. It was not she, after all. Yet his voice might have been
+drowned in the noise of the dance. He would call again; but again they
+passed him by unheeding. The dance was over. They had stopped at the
+other end of the room. He pressed forward against the egress of the
+dancers. He pressed forward roughly, and once or twice he heard
+grumbling murmurs because he had deranged a difficult piece of
+costumery. He was conscious of angry masks regarding him; and then he
+was free of the crowd, and before him, talking together under a canopy
+of holly were the two pierrettes. The musicians sat among the palms
+looking at him as they rested upon their instruments. Michael felt that
+his voice was going to refuse to utter her name:
+
+"Lily! Lily!"
+
+The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his
+voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were
+Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what
+she was going to do.
+
+"I say, how on earth did you recognize me?" Lily murmured, raising her
+mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and
+tender, so scornful and so passionate.
+
+"I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across
+the road to speak to you, but you'd gone before I could manage it.
+Where have you been all these years? Once I went to Trelawny Road, but
+the house was empty." He could not tell her that Drake had been the
+first to bring him news of her.
+
+"It's years since I was there," said Lily. "Years and years." She turned
+to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came closer
+to be introduced.
+
+"Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren't I good to remember your
+name quite correctly?" Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was
+utterly scornful. "What made you come here? Have you got a friend with
+you?"
+
+Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an
+accident.
+
+"Why did _you_ come?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, something to do," said Lily. "We live near here."
+
+"So do I," said Michael hastily.
+
+"Do you?" Her eyebrows went up in what he imagined was an expression of
+rather cruel interrogation. "This is a silly sort of a show. Still, even
+Covent Garden is dull now."
+
+Michael thought what a fool he had been not to include Covent Garden in
+his search. How well he might have known she would go there.
+
+"Where's Doris?" he asked.
+
+Lily shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I never see anything of her nowadays. She married an actor. I don't
+often get letters from home, do I, Sylvia?"
+
+The pierrette with rose pompons, who ever since her introduction had
+still been standing outside the conversation, now raised her mask.
+Michael liked her face. She had merry eyes, and a wide nose rather
+Slavonic. Next to Lily she seemed almost dumpy.
+
+"Letters, my dear," she exclaimed, in a very deep voice, "Who wants
+letters?"
+
+The music of a waltz was beginning, and Michael asked Lily if she would
+dance with him. She looked at Sylvia.
+
+"I don't think...."
+
+"Oh, what rot, Lily! Of course you can dance."
+
+Michael gave her a grateful smile.
+
+In a moment Lily had lowered her mask, and they were waltzing together.
+
+"My gad, how gloriously you waltz!" he whispered. "Did we ever dance
+together five years ago?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and he felt the faint movement tremble
+through the imponderable form he held.
+
+"Lily, I've been looking for you since June," he sighed.
+
+"You're breaking step," she said. Though her mask was down, Michael was
+sure that she was frowning at him.
+
+"Lily, why are you so cold with me? Have you forgotten?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Why, everything!" Michael gasped.
+
+"You're absolutely out of time now," she said sternly.
+
+They waltzed for a while in silence, and Michael felt like a midge
+spinning upon a dazzle.
+
+"Do you remember when we met in Kensington Gardens?" he ventured. "I
+remember you had black pompons on your shoes then, and now you have pale
+blue pompons on your dress."
+
+She was not answering him.
+
+"It's funny you should still be living near me," he went on. "I suppose
+you're angry with me because I suddenly never saw you again. That was
+partly your mother's fault."
+
+She looked at him in faint perplexity, swaying to the melody of the
+waltz. Michael thought he had blundered in betraying himself as so
+obviously lovestruck now. He must be seeming to her like that absurd and
+sentimental boy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him, for
+she could compare him with other men. Ejaculations of wonder at her
+beauty would no longer serve, with all the experience she might bring to
+mock them. She was smiling at him now, and the mask she wore made the
+smile seem a sneer. He grew so angry with her suddenly that almost he
+stopped in the swing of the dance to shake her.
+
+"But it was much more your fault," he said savagely. "Do you remember
+Drake?"
+
+She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
+
+"Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us."
+
+"Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed by
+some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that?
+Couldn't you say 'no'? Were you too lazy?"
+
+Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
+
+"Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or
+did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were
+flirting with?"
+
+Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no
+gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his
+arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that,
+while she was with him, she was his again.
+
+What did the past matter?
+
+"Ah, Lily, you love me still! I'll ask no more questions. Am I out of
+step?"
+
+"No, not now," she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with the
+swoon of their dancing.
+
+"Take off that silly mask," he commanded. "Take it off and give it to
+me. I can hold you with one arm."
+
+She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as
+if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no
+longer veiled her face; her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her
+lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm
+until he could touch her shoulder.
+
+"Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over."
+
+She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and
+danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and
+Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood
+in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
+
+Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always known
+her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything that was
+happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it were a
+street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking. Nor
+with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced with
+Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after
+midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall,
+and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a cab,
+but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they lived, was
+only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham Road. The fog
+was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the girls' arms with
+a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of extraordinary
+freedom from the world, as if they were all three embarked upon an
+adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their shoes deep down in
+the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession of their shoes he
+had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them. The fog was denser
+and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb, listening for
+oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far down the Fulham
+Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of them seemed to
+sail across to the opposite pavement. He had nothing to say because he
+was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she talked now no more
+than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to carry on the
+conversation, and since most of this consisted of questions to Lily and
+Michael about their former friendship, which neither Lily nor Michael
+answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last; and they walked on
+silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls close to him and
+watching all the time Lily's hand holding up her big black cloak.
+
+"Here we are, you two dreamers," said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by
+a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly,
+without any dip down into a road.
+
+"Through here? How fascinating!" said Michael.
+
+They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in
+front of a door set in a wall.
+
+"I've got the key," said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
+
+"But this is extraordinary," Michael exclaimed. "Aren't we walking
+through a garden?"
+
+"Yes, it's quite a long garden," Sylvia informed him. There was a smell
+of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael
+thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following
+Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden
+like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they walked
+up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
+
+"She's downstairs," said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the key.
+A woman's figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the passage.
+
+"Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We're frozen," Sylvia called. As the
+woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
+
+"We've brought an old friend of Lily's back from the dance. It wasn't
+really worth going to. Oh, I oughtn't to have said that, ought I?" she
+laughed, turning round to Michael. "Come in and get warm. This is Mrs.
+Gainsborough, who's the queen of cards."
+
+"Get along with you, you great saucy thing," said Mrs. Gainsborough,
+laughing.
+
+She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her
+crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her
+black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the
+middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger,
+sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was
+amused to hear her address Sylvia as "great."
+
+"We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old
+mountain," Sylvia said.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest
+of wheezy laughter.
+
+"Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room table,"
+and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the diminutive
+corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near the fire.
+Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass case of
+humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell coronated
+with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on the chair was
+of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her pierrette's dress of
+black with light blue pompons looked strangely remote from present time
+in that setting. Michael could not connect this secluded house with
+anything which had made an impression upon him during his experience of
+the underworld. Here was nothing that was not cozy and old-fashioned;
+here was no sign of decay, whether in the fabric of the house or in the
+attitude of the people living there. This small square room with the
+heavy furniture that occupied so much of the space had no demirep
+demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped sides and back of
+floriated wood; that brass birdcage hanging in the window against the
+curtains of maroon serge; those cabinets in miniature, some lacquered,
+some of plain wood with tiny drop-handles of brass; those black chairs
+with seats of gilded cane; those trays with marquetery in
+mother-of-pearl of wreaths and rivulets and parrots; that table-cloth
+like a dish of black S�vres; those simpering steel engravings--there was
+nothing that did not bespeak the sobriety of the Victorian prime here
+miraculously preserved. Lily and Sylvia in such dresses belonged to a
+period of fantasy; Mrs. Gainsborough was in keeping with her furniture;
+and Michael, as he looked at himself in the glass overmantel, did not
+think that he was seeming very intrusive.
+
+"Whose are these rooms?" he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not
+believe they were her creation or discovery.
+
+"I found them," said Sylvia. "The old girl who owns the house is bad,
+but beautiful. Aren't you, you most astonishing but attractive mammoth?"
+This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the moment panting
+into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
+
+"Get along with you," the landlady chuckled. "Now don't go to sleep,
+Lily. Your supper is just on ready." She went puffing from the room in
+busy mirthfulness.
+
+"She's one of the best," said Sylvia. "This house was given to her by an
+old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting of
+him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers. She
+was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle Rooms
+and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness."
+
+It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have
+mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected him
+more sharply now with a sense of the appropriateness of this house in
+Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood of
+this foggy night.
+
+"Supper! Supper!" Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
+
+It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet,
+and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and give
+him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair, up
+from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so, and
+she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to follow
+them across the passage.
+
+It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table
+with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance.
+That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside,
+was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a
+woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
+
+Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again. So
+he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
+
+"Oh, my eye, my eye!" laughed Sylvia. "To think that Aunt Enormous was
+once in the ballet at the Opera."
+
+"How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!" Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of
+muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them
+frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue
+eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that
+Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the
+New Year's Day which could so change his fortune.
+
+"Were you in the ballet?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like
+to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now."
+
+"Show the kind gentleman your picture," said Sylvia. "She wears it round
+her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank."
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy
+young woman in a pork-pie hat.
+
+"That's myself," said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. "Well, and I
+always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why
+shouldn't I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?"
+
+"But show him the others," Sylvia demanded.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained
+morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces
+against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait's wraith: a
+girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering,
+with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence of
+a ghostly bloom.
+
+"Oh, look at her," cried Sylvia. "In her beautiful pantalettes!"
+
+"Hold your tongue, you!"
+
+They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which lasted
+on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the other
+room and sat round the fire.
+
+"Tell us about the General," said Sylvia.
+
+"Go on, as if you hadn't heard a score of times all I've got to tell
+about the General--though you know I hate him to be called that. He'll
+always be the Captain to me."
+
+Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough
+embarked upon tales of gay days in the 'sixties and 'seventies. It was
+astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could
+scarcely have changed since then.
+
+"The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in eighteen-sixty-nine
+before I was twenty, and I've lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many's
+the summer daybreak we've walked back here after dancing all night at
+Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl's Court is nothing to
+Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it's as
+well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me the
+dismals to be going there now without my Captain."
+
+She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very
+smoke and grime of the city.
+
+"Who knows what's going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?" she
+said, shaking her head. "So enjoy yourselves while you can. That's my
+motto. And if there's a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be
+very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am
+now."
+
+The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company,
+seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it
+was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of her
+youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces.
+Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead
+singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes
+reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young
+subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story to
+story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after two
+o'clock, and Michael rose to go.
+
+"We'll have one song," cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough to
+the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up albums,
+and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a pleating of
+claret-colored silk.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed in
+comparison so frail and old, sang in a wheezy pipe of a voice: _The
+Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me._
+
+"But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me
+behind my back," she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face
+Sylvia when she had finished.
+
+"Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like it."
+
+"Bless your heart, my dearie." She laid a hand on Sylvia's for an
+instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and
+asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily
+and her out to lunch.
+
+"We can lunch to-morrow, can't we?" Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily's arm,
+for she was now fast asleep.
+
+"Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow," Lily yawned.
+
+He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to shake
+hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that the
+outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to
+speed his departure.
+
+The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the
+night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming
+undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But
+he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter
+night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his
+overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls'
+shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most
+fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers
+which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse
+blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by
+nor cat offended his isolation. The London night belonged to him; his
+only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on either
+side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than a few
+yards in front.
+
+He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his good
+luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing was
+ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that carnival.
+Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined to buy all
+sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had fingered vaguely
+from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily's discovery was colored
+with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze the situation in which
+he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea through the fog, he was
+bemused by the romantic memory of her which was traveling along with his
+thoughts. He could hold very tightly her shoes: he could almost embrace
+the phantom of her beauty that curled upon the vapors round each lamp:
+he was intoxicated merely by the sound of the street where she lived.
+
+"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!"
+
+He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed
+to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of
+the railway-carriage: "Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?"
+
+"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!" he chanted at the fog,
+and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on
+ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, constable."
+
+"Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren't you?"
+
+"Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink
+my health when you're off duty."
+
+He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman's hand, and as he left the
+stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was
+the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on the
+Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black river
+flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with
+monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here, a frore
+whitish mist that saturated him with a malignant chill. Michael was glad
+to find himself looking at the dolphin-headed knocker of 173 Cheyne
+Walk. The effect of being in his own bedroom again, even though the
+girls' shoes lay fantastically upon the floor, was at first to make him
+believe that Tinderbox Lane might have been a dream, and after that,
+because he knew it was not a dream, to wonder about it.
+
+Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could
+Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small
+house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and stability,
+almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety. Mrs.
+Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very
+demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would have
+been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary to
+assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of
+high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be
+on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady's kindling
+stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the
+Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been
+nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael's heart leaped with the fancy
+that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night;
+and, picking up Lily's shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about its
+secrets.
+
+In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dull January rain; but
+Michael greeted the outlook as cheerfully as if it had been perfect May
+weather. He went first to a post office to send off the money he had
+promised to Mrs. Smith and the Solutionist. After this discharge of
+business, he felt more cheerful than ever, and, as if to capture the
+final touch of fantasy necessary to bewitch yesterday night, he suddenly
+realized, when he was hurrying along Fulham Road in the rain, that he
+had no idea of the number of Mrs. Gainsborough's house. He also began to
+wonder if there really could be such a place as Tinderbox Lane, and as
+he walked on without discovering any indication of its existence, he
+wondered if Sylvia had invented the name, so that he might never find
+her and Lily again. It was an uneasy thought, for without a number and
+without a name--but just as he was planning an elaborate way to discover
+the real name of the street, he saw in front of him Tinderbox Lane
+enameled in the ordinary characters of municipal direction. Here were
+the two posts: here was the narrow entrance. The rumble of the traffic
+grew fainter. On one side was a high blank wall; on the other a row of
+two-storied houses. They were naturally dwellings of the poorer classes,
+but at intervals a painter had acquired one, and had painted it white or
+affixed green shutters with heart-shaped openings. The width of the
+pavement varied continually, but generally at the beginning it was very
+narrow. Later on, however, it became wide enough to allow trees to be
+planted down the middle. Beyond this part was a block of new flats round
+which Tinderbox Lane narrowed again to a mere alley looking now rather
+dank and gloomy in the rain. Michael could not remember from last night
+in the fog either the trees or the flats. The door of Lily's lodging had
+been set in a wall: here on one side was certainly a wall, but never a
+door to relieve the grimy blankness. He began to feel discouraged, and
+he walked round into the narrow alley behind the flats. Here were doors
+in the wall at last, and Michael examined each of them in turn. Two were
+dark blue: one was green: one was brown. 74: 75: 76: 77. He chose 77
+because it was farthest away from the flats. After a very long wait, an
+old woman holding over herself a very large umbrella opened it.
+
+"Mrs. Gainsborough ...?" Michael began.
+
+But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his
+inquiry.
+
+Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last
+the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself
+under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman's next door.
+
+"I've come to take the girls out to lunch."
+
+"That's a good boy," she wheezed. "The dearies will be glad to get out
+and enjoy themselves a bit. Here's a day. This would have suited Noah,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the
+garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house
+itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the
+astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the pretentious
+gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind, nor even in
+front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These houses with
+doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to individuals, and
+for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by the development of
+the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long gardens in a row must
+be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad to think that the flats
+opposite were no doubt due to the death of someone who had owned a
+similar house and garden.
+
+Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side.
+Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently to
+the kitchen. Two fairly large trees were planted in the grass that ran
+up to the house on either side of the balcony.
+
+"Those are my mulberries," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "This is called
+Mulberry Cottage. I've been meaning to have the name painted on the
+outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There's a
+character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his mulberries.
+But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my flowers are really
+remarkable. But there, it's not to be wondered at. M' father was a
+nursery gardener."
+
+She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why.
+Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of the
+Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
+
+"The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls," she wheezed at the door of the
+sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of
+bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily
+was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her book
+down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the title, and
+found it was the Contes Dr�latiques of Balzac. An unusual girl, he
+thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could not kiss
+her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now restored,
+supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at ease again.
+Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he sat thinking
+of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The silence here
+was very like the country. London was a thousand miles away, and he
+could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and less did he
+think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage. Yet the
+apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take Lily
+away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she might not
+want to marry him at once. The discovery of her in this pleasant house
+with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of rescue which he had
+planned. She would not presumably be escaping from a situation she
+abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was it Sylvia who was
+making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and explain that he had no
+predatory intentions. She would surely be glad that he wanted to marry
+Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and tinkled the lusters on the
+mantelshelf. "Sweet," said the canary in the brass cage: the rain
+sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small square room was the
+malaise of someone's jealousy. The tentative solution that was
+propounding itself did not come from his own impression of Sylvia, but
+it seemed positively to be an emanation from the four walls of the room
+which in the stillness was able to force its reality upon him. "Sweet,"
+said the canary: the lusters stopped their tinkling: the rain sizzled
+steadily outside.
+
+Lunch at Kettner's was a great success. At least Michael thought it was
+a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy walls,
+and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but rather to
+give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and wintry sun.
+Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was conscious that
+the other people in the restaurant were turning round to envy their
+table.
+
+The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less
+he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been
+comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she
+displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly
+herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid
+question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and
+Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been
+disquieting, but that Sylvia talked of them with such a really
+tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more
+than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the
+river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and balls.
+Quite definitely Michael was able to assure himself that out of the host
+of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored above
+the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were
+independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be
+Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and
+perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm's length from Lily, as
+he felt himself being held now. Her attitude might have nothing to do
+with jealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she was,
+indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who read
+the Contes Dr�latiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a girl
+who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had said
+something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet he
+knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the
+conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what
+was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy
+walls.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the
+girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be
+alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To
+find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a
+room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative,
+so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
+
+"We're alone," he managed to say at last.
+
+"Sylvia's gone to Brighton. She didn't want to go a bit."
+
+"Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven't kissed for five years."
+
+He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him,
+it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He
+heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from
+perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the
+trance of silence.
+
+"Lily, you will marry me, won't you? Very soon? At once?"
+
+Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him
+from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the
+remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue
+relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such
+a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of
+action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his
+arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most
+poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded
+at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely
+knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of
+caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears.
+It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring
+huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and
+whatever he found her, but the relief was overwhelming. He had thought
+of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic
+colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at
+least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this
+loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had
+eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in
+dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the
+sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could believe he held her
+now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his cheeks, when her mouth
+was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon this airy beauty must
+have perished; and even now what was she? A shred of goldleaf on his
+open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and destructible in a
+moment of adversity.
+
+Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been
+aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was
+placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her,
+though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He
+could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about
+whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous
+promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he
+would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for
+her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection,
+thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses blowing
+in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her
+kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself;
+and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink
+loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain
+had first imagined his gift.
+
+So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably
+vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had
+them express, the hour passed.
+
+"We must talk of practical things," he declared, rising from his knees.
+
+"You always want to talk," Lily pouted.
+
+"I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?"
+
+"Yes; but it's so difficult to do things quickly."
+
+"We'll be married in a month. We'll be married on Saint Valentine's
+Day," Michael announced.
+
+"It's so wet now to think of weddings." She looked peevishly out of the
+window.
+
+"You haven't got to think about it. You've got to do it."
+
+"And it's so dull," she objected. "Sylvia says it's appallingly dull.
+And she's been married."
+
+"What has Sylvia got to do with it?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, well, she's been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother
+died, what was I to do? I couldn't bear Doris any more. She always gets
+on my nerves. Anyway, don't let's talk about marriage now. In the summer
+I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather."
+
+"But look here," he persisted. "Are you in love with me?"
+
+She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
+
+"Well, if you're not in love with me...."
+
+"Oh, I am, I am! Don't shout so, Michael. If I wasn't awfully fond of
+you, I shouldn't have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men
+coming here."
+
+"Are you Sylvia's servant?" said Michael, in exasperation.
+
+"Don't be stupid. Of course not."
+
+"It's ridiculous," he grumbled, "to quote her with every sentence."
+
+"Why you couldn't have stayed where you were," said Lily fretfully, "I
+don't know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If
+you're so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up."
+
+"So, we're not to talk any more about marriage?"
+
+After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that
+Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not
+the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
+
+"Don't let's talk about anything," said Lily. He could not stand aloof
+from the arms she held wide open.
+
+Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael
+spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked
+approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The
+weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch,
+it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long.
+One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he
+asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey's. Michael
+had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should
+seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what he
+told himself was the only caf� in London which had escaped the
+cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
+
+As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very
+white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her
+self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael suddenly
+suspicious.
+
+"Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?" he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"It depends who we go with. Often I don't care for them much. And the
+girls you see there are frightfully common."
+
+He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If it
+were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no difference
+to his resolution. People began to come into the caf�, shaking the wet
+from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was audible above the
+conversation.
+
+"I wish we could have had one fine day together," said Michael
+regretfully. "Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the
+winter?"
+
+"I must have been very fond of you," Lily laughed. "I don't think you
+could make me walk like that now."
+
+"Aren't you so fond of me now?" he asked reproachfully.
+
+"You ought to know," she whispered.
+
+All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets,
+and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
+
+"Shall I come in?" Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
+
+"Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course."
+
+He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
+
+"Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink after
+midnight?"
+
+"I told you that Sylvia doesn't like me to," she said.
+
+"But you would, if she didn't mind?" Michael went on, torturing himself.
+
+"How fond you are of 'ifs,'" she answered. "I can't bother to think
+about 'ifs' myself."
+
+If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips
+with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already
+he was feeling the influence of Lily's attitude. He wondered if, when he
+married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It was
+as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful woman as
+in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
+
+"Happiness makes me inactive," said Michael to himself. "So of course I
+shall never really be happy. What a paradox."
+
+He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a surrender
+to-night.
+
+"I'm glad I didn't suggest staying late," he thought, as he walked away
+down the dripping garden path. "I should have been mad with unreasonable
+suspicions, if she had said 'yes.'"
+
+Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very much,
+he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of malice
+in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have dinner
+with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond. Michael
+was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet until she
+had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia's influence? And
+who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
+
+The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o'clock as
+usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the
+fire.
+
+"Lily isn't down yet," she told him.
+
+He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he
+and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
+
+"Jolly dance?" he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
+
+"Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out." Michael
+flung down his challenge.
+
+"She's been talking to me about what you said yesterday," Sylvia began.
+
+Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her
+countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that
+out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
+
+"When do you propose to marry her?" Sylvia went on.
+
+"As soon as possible," he said coolly.
+
+"Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?" she
+demanded.
+
+"I really don't know. You have rather an advantage over me in that
+respect."
+
+"I'm glad you admit that," interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
+
+"You have personality. You've probably been very kind to Lily. You're
+cleverer than she is. You're with her all the time. I've only quite
+suddenly come into her life again."
+
+"I'm glad you think you've managed to do that," she said, glowering.
+
+More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a
+cat crouching by the fire.
+
+"Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an opportunity
+to be alone with Lily, you now think you've come into her life. My god,
+you're like some damned fool in a novel!"
+
+"A novel by whom?" Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off
+Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he
+never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
+
+"Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp," she answered savagely.
+
+He bowed.
+
+"I suppose you're suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?"
+she sneered.
+
+Michael was rather startled by her divination.
+
+"What should I redeem her from?"
+
+"I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?"
+
+"I don't know that I boasted of it," he replied, in rather an injured
+tone. "But I did know her--very well."
+
+"Couldn't you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should
+have said that Lily's future must have been obvious from the time she
+was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got
+out of her life then: what the hell's your object in coming into it
+again now, as you call it, unless you're a sentimentalist? People don't
+let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without
+the help of sentiment."
+
+Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the conversation was
+able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true.
+He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia
+looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
+
+"Sentiment about what?" he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
+
+"You think Lily's a tart, don't you? And you think I am, don't you?"
+
+He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
+
+"I did think so," he said. "But of course I've changed my mind since
+I've seen something of you."
+
+"Oh, of course you've changed your mind, have you?" she laughed
+contemptuously. "And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?"
+
+"Even if _you_ are," said Michael hotly, "I needn't believe that Lily
+is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry
+her."
+
+"Sentimentalist," she jeered. "Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist."
+
+"Your sneers don't particularly affect me, you know," he said politely.
+
+"Oh, for god's sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut
+out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And I'm
+sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I'm a perpetual
+bugbear to his good form."
+
+"Because you made a hash of marriage," Michael pointed out, "it doesn't
+follow that I'm not to marry Lily. I can't understand your objections."
+
+"Listen. You couldn't make her happy. You couldn't make her any happier
+than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time
+without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let any
+one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the money myself.
+And I usually can. Well, why should I stand aside now and let you carry
+her off, even though you do want to marry her? I could argue against it
+on your side by telling you that you have no chance of keeping Lily
+faithful to you? Can't you see that she has no moral energy? Can't you
+see that she's vain and empty-headed? Can't you see that? But why should
+I argue with you for your benefit? I don't care a damn about your side
+in the matter."
+
+"What exactly do you care about?" Michael asked. "If Lily is what you
+say, I should have thought you'd be glad to be rid of her. After all,
+I'm not proposing to do her any wrong."
+
+"Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!" Sylvia cried. "Man can
+only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be
+a success, you'll have to own Lily. That's what I rebel against--the
+ownership of women. It makes me mad."
+
+"Yes, it seems to," Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage
+with Sylvia's unreasonableness. "If it comes to ownership," he went on
+angrily, "I should have thought that handing her over to the highest
+bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable
+slave of man."
+
+"Why?" challenged Sylvia. "You sentimental ass, can't you understand
+that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She's
+free. I'm free."
+
+"You're not at all free," Michael indignantly contradicted. "You're
+bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few
+less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts, you'd
+be a good deal happier."
+
+"I don't want to be happier."
+
+"Oh, I think you're merely hysterical," he said disdainfully. "But,
+after all, your opinions about yourself don't matter to me. Only I
+can't see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you
+have the right, I don't grasp your reason for wanting to."
+
+"When I met Lily first," said Sylvia, "she had joined the chorus of a
+touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I'd just
+run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I'd
+ever seen. That's three years ago. Is she beautiful still?"
+
+"Of course she is," said Michael.
+
+"Well, it's I who have kept her beautiful. I've kept her free also. If
+sometimes I've let her have affairs with men, I've taken care that they
+were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort of...."
+
+"Look here," Michael burst in. "I'm sick of this conversation. You're
+talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I'm going to marry her,
+whatever you think."
+
+"I say you won't, and you shan't," Sylvia declared.
+
+The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the
+fire, glaring at each other.
+
+"The extraordinary thing is," said Michael at last, "I thought you had a
+sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing is
+that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you. But I
+can't help saying it."
+
+"The opinions of sentimentalists don't interest me one way or the
+other," Sylvia snapped.
+
+"Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so pleasant
+on the evening we met?"
+
+"I really can't bother to go back as far as that."
+
+"You weren't jealous _then_," Michael persisted.
+
+"Who says I'm jealous now?" she cried.
+
+"I do. What do you think you are, unless you're jealous? When is Lily
+coming down?"
+
+"She isn't coming down until you've gone."
+
+"Then I shall go and call her."
+
+"She's not in London."
+
+"I don't believe you."
+
+A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia
+the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He
+congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was obviously
+going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
+
+On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
+
+"You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because
+Lily loves me."
+
+"It's not true," Sylvia declared. "It's not true. She doesn't love you,
+and what right have you to love her?"
+
+She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
+
+"What college was your husband at?" Michael suddenly inquired.
+
+"Balliol."
+
+"I wonder if I knew him."
+
+"Oh, no. He was older than you."
+
+It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane,
+that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so
+much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He
+would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to
+have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he felt
+that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let Lily
+continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if
+Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably
+irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no less
+than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not want to
+marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily, from whom
+there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his theories of
+behavior were being referred back to his own desires. It was useless to
+pretend any longer that his pursuit had been quixotry. Even if it had
+seemed so on that night when he first heard the news of Lily from Drake,
+the impulse at the back of his resolve had been his passion for her.
+When he looked back at his behavior lately, a good deal of it seemed to
+have been dictated by self-gratification. He remembered how deeply hurt
+he had felt by Poppy's treatment of what he had supposed his chivalry.
+In retrospect his chivalry was seeming uncommonly like self-satisfaction.
+His friendship for Daisy; for Barnes; for the underworld; it had been
+nothing but self-satisfaction. Very well, then. If self was to be the
+touchstone in future, he could face that standard as easily as any
+other. By the time he had reached the end of Tinderbox Lane Michael was
+convinced of his profound cynicism. He felt truly obliged to Sylvia for
+curing him of sentiment. He had so often inveighed against sentiment as
+the spring of human action, that he was most sincerely grateful for the
+proof of his own sentimental bias. He would go to Sylvia to-morrow and
+say frankly that he did not care a bit what Lily had been, was now, or
+would be; he wanted her. She was something beautiful which he coveted.
+For the possession of her he was ready to struggle. He would declare war
+upon Sylvia as upon a rival. She should be rather surprised to-morrow
+morning, Michael thought, congratulating himself upon this new and
+ruthless policy.
+
+On the next morning, however, all Michael's plans for his future
+behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry
+Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold resolution,
+were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing a bell at
+intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for the position
+he had imagined himself taking up in that small square room. This
+errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such rapt interest at
+his ringing of the bell, was by no means the audience he had pictured.
+
+"Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?" Michael asked.
+
+The errand-boy shook his head.
+
+"Well, why do you do it?"
+
+"I wasn't," said the errand-boy.
+
+"What are you doing, then?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from
+Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no
+answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but
+there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to
+Sylvia:
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     Dear Sylvia,
+
+     If you aren't afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me
+     see Lily?
+
+     I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     M. F.
+
+To Lily he wrote:
+
+     Darling,
+
+     Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to
+     three.
+
+     Michael.
+
+     Alone, of course.
+
+Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not
+come. All the time he spent in a second-hand bookshop with one eye on
+the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:
+
+     Come to-morrow at twelve.
+
+     S. S.
+
+Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the
+waste-paper basket.
+
+"I thought I should sting you into giving way," he exclaimed.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
+
+"They've gone away, the demons!" was what she said.
+
+Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching
+behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert
+he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
+
+"Where have they gone?" he asked blankly.
+
+"Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage.
+There's a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I'll give it to you."
+
+Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
+
+"We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are," Mrs.
+Gainsborough said.
+
+"Very soon," he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold
+begonias to-morrow morning.
+
+In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia's note, a bleak little envelope
+waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read
+it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the silence
+that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his cage.
+Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
+
+From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia's hostility was
+stretching out toward him. "Sweet," said the canary. Michael tore open
+the envelope and read:
+
+     Perhaps you'll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You'd
+     much better give her up. In a way, I'm rather sorry for you, but
+     not enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear
+     young thing, that you aren't even beginning to understand women. I
+     admit that there's precious little to understand in Lily. And for
+     that very reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty,
+     you'll hate her. Now _I_ hate to think of this happening. She's a
+     thousand times better off with me than she ever could be with you.
+     Perhaps my maternal instinct has gone off the lines a bit and fixed
+     itself on Lily. And yet I don't think it's anything so sickly as
+     sentimental mothering. No, I believe I just like to sit and look at
+     her. Lily's rather cross with me for taking her away from "such a
+     nice boy." Does that please you? And doesn't it exactly describe
+     you? However, I won't crow. Don't break the lusters, when you read
+     this. They belong to Fatty. What I suggest for you is a walk in
+     Kensington Gardens to the refrain of "Blast the whole bloody
+     world!" Now look shocked, my little Vandyck.
+
+     S. S.
+
+Michael tore the letter up. He did not want to read and re-read it for
+the rest of the day. His eyelids were pricking unpleasantly, and he went
+out to find Mrs. Gainsborough. He was really sensitive that even a room
+should witness such a discomfiture. The landlady was downstairs in the
+kitchen, where he had not yet been. In this room of copper pots and
+pans, with only the garden in view, she might have been a farmer's wife.
+
+"Sit down," she said. "And make yourself at home."
+
+"Will you sit down?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, well, yes, if it's any pleasure to you." She took off her apron and
+seated herself, smoothing the bombasine skirt over her knees.
+
+A tabby cat purred between them; a kettle was singing; and there was a
+smell of allspice.
+
+"You really don't know where the girls have gone?" Michael began.
+
+"No more than you do," she assured him. "But that Sylvia is really a
+Turk."
+
+"I suppose Lily didn't tell you that I used to know her six years ago?"
+he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, she talked about you a lot. A good deal more than Miss Sylvia
+liked, that's a sure thing."
+
+"Well, do you think it's fair for Sylvia to carry her off like this? I
+want to marry Lily, Mrs. Gainsborough."
+
+"There, only fancy what a daring that Sylvia has. She's a nice girl, and
+very high-spirited, but she _is_ a Miss Dictatorial."
+
+Michael felt encouraged by Mrs. Gainsborough's attitude, and he made up
+his mind to throw himself upon her mercy. Sentiment would be his only
+weapon, and he found some irony in the reflection that he had set out
+this morning to be a brutal cynic in his treatment of the situation.
+
+"Do you think it's fair to try to prevent Lily from marrying me? You
+know as well as I do that the life she's leading now isn't going to be
+the best life possible for her. You're a woman of the world, Mrs.
+Gainsborough----"
+
+"I was once," she corrected. "And a very naughty world it was, too."
+
+"You were glad, weren't you, when the Captain brought you to this house?
+You were glad to feel secure? You would have married him?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't marry him. I preferred to be as I am. Still that's
+nothing for Lily to go by. She's more suited for marriage than what I
+was."
+
+"Don't you think," Michael went on eagerly, "that if after six years I'm
+longing to marry her, I ought to marry her? I know that she might be
+much worse off than she is, but equally she might be much better off.
+Look here, Mrs. Gainsborough, it's up to you. You've got to make it
+possible for me to see her. You've got to."
+
+"But if I do anything like that," said Mrs. Gainsborough, "it means I
+have an unpleasantness with Sylvia. That girl's a regular heathen when
+she turns nasty. I should be left all alone in my little house. And what
+with Spring coming on and all, and the flowers looking so nice in the
+garden, I should feel very much the square peg in the round hole."
+
+"Lily and I would come and see you," he promised. "And I don't think
+Sylvia would leave you. She'd never find another house like Mulberry
+Cottage or another landlady like you."
+
+"Yes, I daresay; but you can't tell these things. Once she's in her
+tantrums, there's no saying what will happen. And, besides, I don't know
+what you want me to do."
+
+"I want you to send me word the first moment that Lily's alone for an
+hour; and when I ring, do answer the bell."
+
+"Now that wasn't my fault yesterday," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Really I
+thought we should have the fire-escape in. The way you nagged at that
+poor bell! It was really chronic. But would she let me so much as speak
+to you, even with the door only on the jar? Certainly not! And all the
+time she was snapping round the house like a young crocodile. And yet
+I'm really fond of that girl. Well, when the Captain died, she was a
+daughter to me. Oh, she was, she was really a daughter to me. Well, you
+see, his sister invited me to the funeral, which I thought was very
+nice, her being an old maid and very strict. Now, I hardly liked to put
+on a widow's cap and yet I hardly didn't like to. But Sylvia, she said
+not on any account, and I was very glad I didn't, because there was a
+lot of persons there very stand-offish, and I should have been at my
+wits to know whatever I was going to say."
+
+"Look here," said Michael. "When the Captain gave you this house, he
+loved you. You were young, weren't you? You were young and beautiful?
+Well, would you like to think your house was going to be used to
+separate two people very much in love with each other? You can say I
+climbed over the wall. You can make any excuse you like to Sylvia. But,
+Mrs. Gainsborough, do, do let me know when Lily is going to be alone. If
+she doesn't want to come away with me, it will be my fault, and that
+will be the end of it. If only you'll help me at the beginning. Will
+you? Will you promise to help me?"
+
+"I never could resist a man," sighed Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+resignation. "There's a character! Oh, well, it's my own and no one
+else's, that's one good job."
+
+Michael had to wait until February was nearly over before he heard from
+her. It had been very difficult to remain quietly at Cheyne Walk, but he
+knew that if he were to show any sign of activity, Sylvia would carry
+Lily off again.
+
+"A person to see you, sir," said the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid.
+
+Michael found Mrs. Gainsborough sitting in the hall. She was wearing a
+bonnet tied with very bright cerise ribbons.
+
+"They've had a rumpus, the pair of them, this afternoon. And Sylvia's
+gone off in the sulks. I really was quite aggravated with her. Oh, she's
+a willful spitfire, that girl, sometimes. She really is."
+
+Michael was coming away without a coat or hat, and Mrs. Gainsborough
+stopped him.
+
+"Now don't behave like a silly. Dress yourself properly and don't make
+me run. I'm getting stout, you know," she protested.
+
+"We'll get a hansom."
+
+"What, ride in a hansom? Never! A four-wheeler if you _like_."
+
+It was difficult to find a four-wheeler, and Michael was nearly mad with
+impatience.
+
+"Now don't upset yourself. Sylvia won't be back to-night, and there's no
+need to tug at me as if I was a cork in a bottle. People will think
+we're a walking poppy-show, if you don't act more quiet. They're all
+turning round to stare at us."
+
+A four-wheeler appeared presently, and very soon they were walking down
+Tinderbox Lane. Michael felt rather like a little boy out with his
+nurse, as he kept turning back to exhort Mrs. Gainsborough to come more
+quickly. She grew more and more red in the face, and so wheezy that he
+was afraid something would happen to her, and for a few yards made no
+attempt to hurry her along. At last they reached Mulberry Cottage.
+
+"Supposing Sylvia has come back!" he said.
+
+"I keep on telling you she's gone away for the night. Now get on indoors
+with you. You've nearly been my death."
+
+"I say, you don't know how grateful I am to you!" Michael exclaimed,
+turning round and grasping her fat hands.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough shouted upstairs to Lily as loudly as her
+breathlessness would permit:
+
+"I've brought you back that surprise packet I promised."
+
+Then she vanished, and Michael waited for Lily at the foot of the
+stairs. She came down very soon, looking very straight and slim in her
+philamot frock of Chinese cr�pe that so well became her. Soon she was in
+his arms and glad enough to be petted after Sylvia's rages.
+
+"Lily, how can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It's
+absolutely intolerable."
+
+"She's been horrid to me to-day," said Lily resentfully.
+
+"Well, why do you put up with it?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I hate always squabbling. It's much easier to give
+way to her, and usually I don't much mind."
+
+"You don't much mind whether we're married!" Michael exclaimed. "How can
+you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you marry
+me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look beautiful.
+You'd be happy married to me--you really would."
+
+"Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father
+didn't get on, and Doris doesn't get on with the man she's married to.
+In fact, everybody seems to hate it."
+
+"Do you hate me?" Michael demanded.
+
+"No, I think you're awfully sweet."
+
+"Well, why don't you marry me? You'll have plenty of money and nothing
+to bother about. I think you'd thoroughly enjoy being married."
+
+For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve.
+For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A
+chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her
+loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting at
+the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty, the
+bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess her
+without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. "_Michael, why do
+you make me love you so?_" Was that the last protest she ever made
+against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must primarily
+be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.
+
+"Lily," he cried, catching her to him. "You're coming away with me now."
+
+He kissed her a hundred times.
+
+"Now! Now! Do you hear me?"
+
+She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly
+what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to
+marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her
+yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing
+frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.
+
+"Quite an elopement," Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.
+
+"A very virtuous elopement," said Michael, with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, but shan't I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!"
+
+"Well, it's Sylvia's fault," said Lily fretfully. "She shouldn't worry
+me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in
+the world."
+
+The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.
+
+"Where are you going?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked. "I declare, you're like
+two babes in the wood."
+
+"To my sister's in Huntingdonshire," said Michael, and he wrote out the
+address.
+
+"Oh, in the country! Well, Summer'll be on us before we know where we
+are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished."
+
+"Is your sister pretty?" Lily asked, as they were driving to King's
+Cross.
+
+"She's handsome," said Michael. "You'll like her, I think. And her
+husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to
+say we're coming."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GATE OF IVORY
+
+
+It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class
+compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would
+create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure
+himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella,
+but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he
+felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting
+outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the
+still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of
+his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a
+little Stella's judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the
+hedgerows monotonously, and the horses' breath curled round the rigid
+form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the
+blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if
+she were happy.
+
+"It makes me sleepy driving like this," she murmured. Her head was on
+his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled
+until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.
+
+There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they
+arrived, though Michael watched Stella's glances rather anxiously.
+
+Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked
+beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem
+a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against the
+stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock? Stella,
+too, whom he had always considered a personality of some extravagance,
+seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and conventional. It used
+always to be himself who criticized people: Stella had always been
+rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married to Alan; or was Lily
+the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to be going all right,
+especially when he consoled himself by remembering the abruptness of
+Lily's introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily away with her into
+the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael tried to feel that
+this was what he had expected would happen; but he could not drive away
+the consciousness of a new formality brooding over Hardingham. It was
+annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed deliberately to avoid any
+reference to Lily. He would not even remind Michael of the evening at
+the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her five or six years ago.
+Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab with her sister on that
+occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk about cricket pitches;
+and yet he could not bring himself to ask right out what Alan thought of
+her, because it would have impinged upon his pride to do so. In about
+ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano, and tacitly they agreed
+to forego the intimacy of drinking port together any longer.
+
+Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the
+drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.
+
+"Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play."
+
+It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for
+hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good
+impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended
+almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily
+thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very
+aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the
+slightest movement on her part or Alan's as an implication of
+disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.
+
+When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few
+details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to
+explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox
+Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily's life would be fatal. He
+found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up
+and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing
+home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the
+declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother
+everything else in a great surprise.
+
+"Of course, that's what I imagined you were thinking of doing," said
+Stella. "So you've made up your quarrel of five years ago?"
+
+"When are you going to get married?" Alan asked.
+
+"Well, I hoped you'd be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any
+rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live."
+
+"Oh, of course she can stay here," said Stella.
+
+"Oh, rather, of course," Alan echoed.
+
+Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making
+signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a
+farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was
+objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the
+billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself
+between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed
+quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he
+was plunged.
+
+A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred
+to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance
+toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being slowly
+chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather anxious
+to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any opportunity. As
+for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and saying very
+little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under the shadow of
+disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael determined to
+come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning of strong
+easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a walk to
+Stella.
+
+They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs
+scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.
+
+"I don't think I care much for this country of yours," said Michael at
+last. "It's flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I
+should care to live here, I don't know."
+
+"There's a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of
+the wind there."
+
+Michael resented Stella's pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so
+launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a
+fortnight.
+
+"I hate badly trained dogs," he grumbled when Stella turned round to
+whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.
+
+"So do I," she agreed.
+
+It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually
+and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was
+easier in the shelter of the wood.
+
+"I don't think I've properly thanked you for having us to stay down
+here," he began.
+
+Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:
+
+"Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?" she demanded.
+
+Her use of the word "business" annoyed him: it crystallized all the
+offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly
+attitude these two weeks.
+
+"I shall be delighted to talk about this 'business.' Though why you
+should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don't
+quite know."
+
+"Do you want me to speak out frankly--to say exactly what I think of you
+and Lily and of your marrying her? You won't like it, and I won't do it
+unless you ask me."
+
+"Go on," said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her
+again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis
+with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders
+like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the
+anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers.
+It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able
+to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against
+the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this
+consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that
+rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and
+indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he
+hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he
+had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood.
+Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all
+round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it
+difficult to discomfit Sylvia.
+
+"Go on, I'm waiting for you to begin," Michael repeated.
+
+"Straight off, then," she said, "I may as well tell you that this
+marriage is impossible. I don't know where you found her again, and I
+don't care. It wouldn't make the slightest difference to me what she had
+been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else. But,
+Michael, she's flabby. You'll hate me for saying so, but she is, she
+really is! In a year you'll admit that; you'll see her growing older and
+flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that's possible.
+Even her beauty won't last. These very fair girls fall to pieces like
+moth-eaten dolls. I've tried to find something in her during this
+fortnight. I've tried and tried; but there's nothing. You may be in love
+with her now, though I don't believe you are. I think it's all a piece
+of sentimentalism. I've often teased you about getting married, but
+please don't suppose that I haven't realized how almost impossible it
+would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear and tear of
+your idealism. I'm prepared to bet that behind your determination to
+marry this girl there's a reason, a lovely, unpractical, idealistic
+reason. Isn't there? You've been away with her for a week-end, and have
+tortured yourself into a theory of reparation. Is that it? Or you've
+fallen in love with the notion of yourself in love at eighteen. Oh, you
+can't marry her, you foolish old darling."
+
+"Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn't keep whistling to
+that infernal dog," said Michael. "If this marriage is so terrible, I
+should have thought you'd have forgotten there were such animals as
+cocker-spaniels. It's rubbish for you to say you've tried to find
+something in Lily. You haven't made the slightest attempt. You've
+criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You're sunk deep
+already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is
+the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when
+you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I
+didn't talk as you've been talking to me."
+
+"No, you were always very cautiously fraternal," said Stella. "Ah, no, I
+won't say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you'll break my
+heart if you marry this girl."
+
+"You won't do anything of the kind," he contradicted. "You'll be
+whistling to spaniels all the time."
+
+"Michael, it's really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I'm
+feeling so wretched about you."
+
+"It's all fine for you to sneer at Lily," said Michael. "But I can
+remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room
+over some man who'd made a fool of you. _You_ looked pretty flabby
+then."
+
+"How dare you remind me of that?" Stella cried, in a fury. "How dare
+you? How dare you?"
+
+"You brought it on yourself," said Michael coldly.
+
+"You're going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry
+her, then! But don't come to me for sympathy, when she's forced you to
+drag yourself through the divorce court."
+
+"No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again," said
+Michael bitterly. "Unless it's for advice when I want to buy a spaniel."
+
+They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy
+fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having
+referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion
+on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had
+always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked
+sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she
+would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far they
+had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with marriage.
+Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally were smashed
+by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about Stella's music
+lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage? The sooner he
+and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he ought to suggest
+going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until he could find a
+place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her. They would be
+married next month, and he would take her abroad. He would be able to
+see her at last in some of the places where in days gone by he had
+dreamed of seeing her.
+
+"I suppose you wouldn't object to keeping Lily here two or three days
+more, while I find a place in town?" said Michael. It only struck him
+when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor.
+Stella would despise him more than ever.
+
+"Michael," Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path.
+"Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can
+realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I'm
+willing actually to plead with you. It's intolerable to think of you
+tied to her!"
+
+"It's too late," said Michael. "I must marry her. Not for any reasons
+that the world would consider reasons," he went on. "But because I want
+to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me
+before the world."
+
+"I won't, I won't, I won't! It's all wrong. She's all wrong. Her people
+are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know
+how casual he is about people he doesn't like. He usually flings them
+out of his mind at once."
+
+"Oh, Alan's amazing in every way," said Michael. He longed to say that
+he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so much
+the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite place to
+which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for a few
+days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the
+problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that
+he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily
+to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like
+this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and
+Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could
+not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be
+better to pocket his pride.
+
+Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.
+
+"Look here," she said. "You absurd old Quixote, listen. I'm going to do
+all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town
+and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if
+you'll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce
+I mean that I'll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her
+to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win
+in the end and marry her."
+
+"Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?"
+
+"Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we
+shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you
+in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you'll come
+and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all
+the eligible young women in the neighborhood."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Lily," said Michael, frowning.
+
+"The truce has begun," Stella declared. "For a fortnight I'll be an
+angel."
+
+Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded
+Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to
+the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning.
+Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.
+
+"Lily, you look adorable in this glade," he told her. "I believe, if you
+were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree."
+
+The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps
+of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the
+missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged
+sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses
+and brought them to Lily.
+
+"These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you
+let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you're
+going to live in? Will you not be lonely?"
+
+"I like to have you with me always," she murmured.
+
+He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were
+usually mute.
+
+"We shall be married in a month," he cried. "Can you smell violets?"
+
+"Something sweet I smell."
+
+But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets
+themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open
+fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering
+companies.
+
+"These eves of early Spring are like swords," Michael exclaimed.
+
+"Like what?" Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.
+
+"Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their
+sharpness and sweetness."
+
+"Oh, you mean it's cold," she said. "Take my arm."
+
+"Well, I meant rather more than that, really," Michael laughed. But
+because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had
+been from following his thoughts.
+
+Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before
+the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.
+
+"Not more than a fortnight, mind," were Stella's last words.
+
+He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice
+about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.
+
+"Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and
+Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill,
+Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent's Canal, Adelphi
+Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is
+impossible. But you're living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to
+move from there?"
+
+Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He
+supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be
+sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much
+delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who
+she was or where Michael had met her.
+
+"By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don't think I'm
+desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal,
+if we can find the right one."
+
+That afternoon they set out.
+
+They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was
+very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about
+fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor
+Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the
+stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.
+
+"Yes, but we don't want to start a printing press," Michael objected.
+"And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant
+can manage."
+
+It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this
+house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering
+anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they
+went off to Regent's Park.
+
+"I don't think you're likely to find anything so good as that house,"
+Maurice said gloomily. "In fact, I know you won't. I wish I could afford
+to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the
+Temple just as soon from there."
+
+"I don't see why he should bother about the Temple," said Michael. "That
+house was rather bigger."
+
+"You'll never find another house like it," Maurice prophesied. "Look at
+this neighborhood we're driving through now. Impossible to live here!"
+
+They were in the Hampstead Road.
+
+"I haven't any intention of doing so," Michael laughed. "But there
+remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally
+suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought."
+
+"Wonderful house!" Maurice sighed. "I shall always regret you didn't
+take it."
+
+However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the new
+prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic
+railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that seemed
+to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close around
+them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near Regent's Park;
+and they crossed St. John's Wood and Maida Vale, walking on until they
+reached a point where at the confluence of two branches the canal became
+a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole length of the
+base of this triangle and almost level with the water, stood the garden
+of a very large square house.
+
+"There's a curious place," said Michael. "How on earth does one get at
+it?"
+
+They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of
+the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance down
+a flight of steps.
+
+"Ararat House," Michael read.
+
+"Flat to let," Maurice read.
+
+"I think this looks rather promising," said Michael.
+
+It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A
+portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house,
+under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so
+irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion. The
+stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor
+buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the
+windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with
+plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must
+have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and
+rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house
+would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to
+be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
+
+They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes,
+there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the
+ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms
+on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like a
+plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat
+called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
+
+They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them
+had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without
+much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The
+dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very
+brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling and
+walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky
+kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors
+into the drawing-room.
+
+As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must
+live here.
+
+It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic
+saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he
+decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a
+room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and
+the cameos of Th�ophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with
+orient gewgaws; Barbey d'Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a
+corner Villiers de l'Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a
+tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic
+embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts
+with whom Michael had identified it.
+
+"But this is like a scene in a pantomime," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted
+to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the
+ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were
+gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of nymphs
+and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces
+fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of
+black and yellow lozenges.
+
+"It's hideous," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
+
+"Hideous but rather fascinating," Michael said. "Look at the queer
+melancholy light, and look at the view."
+
+It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the
+room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper
+had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much
+subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their
+leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues
+and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown
+magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they walked
+out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries of slag
+and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright green
+slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path
+running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the
+sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet
+and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep
+everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply
+down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air
+diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city's breath: the circling of
+the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
+
+"In summer this will be wonderful," Michael predicted.
+
+"On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,"
+Maurice said.
+
+"Except that they'll probably have retired to bed," Michael pointed out.
+
+"I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,"
+Maurice laughed.
+
+"Let's ask the housekeeper," Michael said solemnly.
+
+They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem
+exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead
+water without.
+
+"Who lives in the other flats?" Michael inquired of the housekeeper.
+
+"There's four others," she began. "Up above there's Colonel and Mrs...."
+
+"I see," Michael interrupted. "Just ordinary people. Do they ever go
+out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange
+curtains?"
+
+The housekeeper stared at him.
+
+"They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The courts
+is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman to see
+about the flat."
+
+She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take
+Number One, Ararat House.
+
+"It absolutely was made to set her off," he told Maurice. "You wait till
+I've furnished it as it ought to be furnished."
+
+"And we'll have amazing f�tes aqueuses in the summer," Maurice declared.
+"We'll buy a barge and--why, of course--the canal flows into the Thames
+at Grosvenor Road."
+
+"Underground--like the Styx," said Michael, nodding.
+
+"Of course, it's going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other
+except by water."
+
+"Like splendid dead Venetians," said Michael.
+
+The fortnight of Lily's stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice
+in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian glass;
+oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small round
+mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many
+mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls were
+hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There were
+slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and lemon
+satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over the
+parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous
+roses as deep as damsons or burgundy; and from the ceiling hung two
+chandeliers of cut glass.
+
+"You know," said Maurice seriously, "she'll have to be very beautiful to
+carry this off."
+
+"She is very beautiful," said Michael. "And there's room for her to walk
+about here. She'll move about this room as wonderfully as those swans
+upon the canal."
+
+"Michael, what's happened to you? You're becoming as eccentric as me."
+Maurice looked at him rather jealously. "And, I say, do you really want
+me to come with you to King's Cross to-morrow afternoon?"
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"After you've helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see
+the person we've done it for."
+
+"Yes, but look here. Who's going to stay in the flat with her? You can't
+leave her alone until you're married. As you told me the story, it
+sounded very romantic; but if she's going to be your wife, you've got to
+guard her reputation."
+
+Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the
+tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic
+Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt
+inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.
+
+"I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman," he said.
+
+"That's all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this
+time."
+
+"You don't know anybody?"
+
+"I? Great scott, no!"
+
+They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave him
+for an appointment.
+
+"To-morrow afternoon then at King's Cross," he said, and jumped on an
+omnibus.
+
+Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth could he get to stay
+with Lily? Would it not be better to marry at once? But that would
+involve breaking his promise to Stella. If he asked Mrs. Gainsborough,
+it would mean Sylvia knowing where Lily was. If, on the other hand, he
+should employ a strange woman, Lily might dislike her. Could he ask Mrs.
+Ross to come up to town? No, of course, that was absurd. It looked as if
+he would have to ask Mrs. Gainsborough. Or why not ask Sylvia herself?
+In that case, why establish Lily at Ararat House before they were
+married? This marriage had seemed so very easy an achievement; but
+slowly it was turning into an insoluble complex. He might sound Sylvia
+upon her attitude. It would enormously simplify everything if she would
+consent; and if she consented she would, he believed, play fair with
+him. The longer Michael thought about it, the more it seemed the safest
+course to call in Sylvia's aid. He was almost hailing a hansom to go to
+Tinderbox Lane, when he realized how foolish it would be not to try to
+sever Lily completely from the life she had been leading in Sylvia's
+company. Not even ought he to expose her to the beaming laxity of Mrs.
+Gainsborough.
+
+Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem
+which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught sight
+of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of the
+automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk? Then
+he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip the
+kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered the
+Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read in a
+sing-song the virtues of a procession of various automatons seeking
+situations as cooks and housemaids.
+
+"What wages do you wish to give?"
+
+"Oh, the usual wages," Michael said. "But I rather want these servants
+to-day."
+
+He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose
+the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to
+Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to
+make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the
+spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman
+in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her
+promise to suit him by to-morrow at midday. She suggested a capable
+housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well
+dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She
+undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the
+absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to
+Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up
+his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort was
+perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o'clock, and he drove off to
+King's Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of
+introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for
+him on the platform.
+
+Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when
+he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry
+into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that he
+was free this afternoon.
+
+"Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home to-night," said Maurice. "Or
+will you be very late?"
+
+"Oh, no, I shan't be late," Michael answering, flushing. He had a notion
+that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation. It
+seemed as if he were testing his behavior.
+
+Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio bedroom
+was a little bare, it was soon strewn with her clothes, and made thereby
+inhabitable.
+
+"And of course," said Michael, "you've got to buy lots and lots of
+clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two
+hundred--three hundred pounds?"
+
+The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to
+delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time,
+in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that he
+had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had been
+given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed through his
+mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux, and,
+remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad that
+Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined Manon.
+
+"And do you like Miss Harper?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes, she seems all right."
+
+They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the
+flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had
+forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest
+in household affairs.
+
+"I think I ought to go now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, stay a little longer."
+
+But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as
+much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how
+important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be
+lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.
+
+"Oh, you're going now?" said Miss Harper, looking at him rather
+curiously.
+
+"I shall be round in the morning. You'll finish making the lists of what
+you still want?"
+
+Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he drove
+to Grosvenor Road.
+
+Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.
+
+"Look here, old chap," Maurice began at once, "you can't possibly marry
+that girl."
+
+Michael frowned.
+
+"You too?"
+
+"I know all about her," Maurice went on. "I've never actually met her,
+but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five years
+ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened in
+between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who's had an affair
+with her--a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He's often up here.
+You're bound to meet him some time."
+
+"Not at all, if I never come here again," said Michael, in a cold rage.
+
+"It's no use for you to be angry with me," said Maurice. "I should be a
+rotten friend, if I didn't warn you."
+
+"Oh, go to hell!" said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.
+
+"I'll die first," retorted Maurice, grinning.
+
+Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not
+to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.
+
+"So much for 422 Grosvenor Road," he said, slamming the big front door
+behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he
+walked on without turning his head.
+
+It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know about
+her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If Maurice
+chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would have to
+be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from the first
+moment of his resolve that this sort of thing was bound to happen. It
+left him curiously indifferent.
+
+A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden
+round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the
+very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room.
+Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her taste.
+Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old silver,
+or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was London
+and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the enchantment of
+her presence. Often they walked up and down the still deserted garden,
+by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide nearer to them,
+waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand with her hair in a
+stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly like the necks of the
+birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful in the long luminous
+dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening star that were shining
+upon them as they walked by the edge of the water.
+
+For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to
+the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in
+the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that
+people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic;
+that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this
+room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a
+hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at midnight,
+to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden stuffs and
+candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by going away at
+midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every night he went
+away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black dress, to leave in
+the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were not forbidding him
+to stay. Or when she stood under the portico sleepily resting in his
+arms, it was difficult to let her turn back alone. How close were their
+kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness! This was no London that he
+knew, this scented city of Spring, this tropic gloom, this mad
+innominate cavern that engorged them. The very stars were melting in the
+water of the canal: the earth bedewed with fevers of the Spring was warm
+as blood: why should he forsake her each night of this week? Yet every
+midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and clamored, Michael left her,
+saying that May would come, and June, and another April, when she would
+have been his a year.
+
+The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness
+and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these
+days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten. They
+could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else did
+the weather deprive him.
+
+Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back
+from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so
+deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in
+the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of
+taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers and
+mirrors.
+
+"Why didn't you wire me to say you were coming?" he asked.
+
+"I came because Stella wrote to me."
+
+Michael frowned, and his mother went on:
+
+"It wasn't very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage
+through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it
+yourself."
+
+Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from
+them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the
+past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his
+mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very
+inconsiderately.
+
+"I'm sorry. It was wrong of me," he admitted. "But life has been such a
+whirl lately that I've somehow taken for granted the obvious courtesies.
+Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather choked me off
+taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why do you begin on
+the subject at once, before you've even taken your things off?"
+
+She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.
+
+"Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are
+standing at the edge of this terrible step?"
+
+"Oh, I think I'm perfectly level-headed," he said, "even on the brink of
+disaster."
+
+"Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I'd come back in March as I
+meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn't very well leave
+her. She's always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I did
+not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in the
+next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the
+washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to
+think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you,
+and now you ask most cruelly why I don't take my things off."
+
+"There wasn't any need for you to worry yourself," he said hotly.
+"Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices."
+
+"Prejudices!" his mother repeated. "Prejudice is a very mild word for
+what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry."
+
+"But it is prejudice," Michael insisted. "She knows nothing against
+her."
+
+"She knows a great deal."
+
+"How?" he demanded incredulously.
+
+"You'd better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off
+these furs. It's stifling in London. So very much hotter than the
+Riviera."
+
+Mrs. Fane left him with Stella's letter.
+
+     LONG'S HOTEL,
+
+     April 9.
+
+     Darling Mother,
+
+     When you get this you must come _at once_ to London. You are the
+     only person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible
+     creature imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he
+     was eighteen, and I think she treated him badly even then--I
+     remember his being very upset about it in the summer before my
+     first concert. Apparently he rediscovered her this winter, and for
+     some reason or other wants to _marry_ her now. He brought her down
+     to Hardingham, and I saw then that she was a minx. Alan remembers
+     her mother as a dreadful woman who tried to make love to him.
+     Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!
+
+     Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row
+     about it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by
+     herself), and we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to
+     say, and nothing to do except look at herself in the glass. I had
+     declared war on the marriage from the moment she left, but I had
+     only a fortnight to stop it. I was rather in a difficulty because I
+     knew nothing definite against her, though I was sure that if she
+     wasn't a bad lot already, she would be later on. I wrote first of
+     all to Maurice Avery, who told me that she'd had a not at all
+     reputable affair with a painter friend of his. It seems, however,
+     that he had already spoken to Michael about this and that Michael
+     walked out of the house in a rage. Then I came up to town with Alan
+     and saw Wedderburn, who knew nothing about her and hadn't seen
+     Michael for months. Then we got hold of Lonsdale. He has apparently
+     met her at Covent Garden, and _I'm perfectly sure_ that he has
+     actually been away with her himself. Though, of course, he was much
+     too polite to tell me so. He was absolutely horrified when he heard
+     about her and Michael. I asked him to tell Michael anything he knew
+     against her, but he didn't see how he could. He said he wouldn't
+     have the heart. I told him it was his duty, but he said he wouldn't
+     be able to bear the sight of Michael's face when he told him. Of
+     course, the poor darling knows nothing about her. You must come at
+     once to London and talk to him yourself. You've no time to lose.
+     I'll meet you if you send me a wire. I've no influence over Michael
+     any more. You're the only person who can stop it. He's so sweet
+     about her. She's rather lovely to look at, I must say. Lots of love
+     from Alan and from me.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Stella.
+
+Michael was touched by Lonsdale's attitude. It showed, he thought, an
+exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had
+certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing was
+going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother to
+come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in
+argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had
+weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such a
+very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she must
+have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought her
+downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.
+
+"Have you read Stella's letter?" she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at
+once. It's dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you
+must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella
+and not resent her interference."
+
+"I see that you feel bound to apologize for her," Michael observed.
+
+"Now, that is so bitter."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find
+out things I know already."
+
+"Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?"
+
+"I didn't know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been
+people. That's one of the reasons I'm going to marry her."
+
+"But you'll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go
+on knowing Lonsdale, for instance."
+
+"Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case," Michael said. "You
+couldn't have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay I
+shall be able to make new friends."
+
+"But, darling boy," she said pleadingly, "your position will be so
+terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly
+want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be
+dragged down by this horrible creature!"
+
+"Mother, believe me, you're getting a very distorted idea of Lily. She's
+beautiful, you know; and if she's not so clever as Stella, I'm rather
+glad of it. I don't think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she hasn't
+committed the sin of being common. She won't disgrace you outwardly, and
+if Stella hadn't gone round raking up all this abominable information
+about her you would have liked her very much."
+
+"My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren't too young to
+know that it's impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without
+reproach."
+
+"But, mother, you ..." he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of
+the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious
+that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.
+
+"Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I
+knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won't marry
+her, you won't, will you?"
+
+"Yes, mother. I'm going to," he said coldly.
+
+"But why so impetuously?" she asked. "Why won't you wait a little time?"
+
+"There's no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts."
+
+"If only your father were alive!" she exclaimed. "It would have shocked
+him so inexpressibly."
+
+"He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn't he?" Michael said,
+and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.
+
+She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical
+and heroic dignity of reproach:
+
+"I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," he murmured. "It was inexcusable."
+
+"Michael," she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, "won't you give up
+this marriage?"
+
+He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.
+
+"Mother, I must keep faith with myself."
+
+"Only with yourself? Then she doesn't care for you? And you're not
+thinking of _her?_"
+
+"Of course she cares for me."
+
+"But she'd get over it almost at once?"
+
+"Perhaps," he admitted.
+
+"Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?"
+
+"That will be my look-out," he said impatiently. "If she fails, it will
+be my fault. It's always the man's fault. Always."
+
+"Very well," said his mother resignedly. "I can say no more, can I? You
+must do as you like."
+
+The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else
+would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his
+own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would
+show his penitence.
+
+"Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked
+out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for her,
+there is a deeper cause, a reason that's bound up with my whole theory
+of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not back out of
+this marriage."
+
+"Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?" she asked.
+
+He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called
+her "this girl," half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the
+happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or
+abstractions of morality to obscure it.
+
+"Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you."
+
+"Except not marry her."
+
+"That wouldn't be a sacrifice worth making," he argued. "Because if I
+did that I should destroy myself to myself, and what was left of me
+wouldn't be a complete Michael. It wouldn't be your son."
+
+"Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?"
+
+He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?
+
+"Not merely for your own sake," she urged; "but for all our sakes. We
+shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three
+months' time."
+
+He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.
+
+"I won't marry her for three months," he promised.
+
+"And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly
+missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel."
+
+She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately
+self again.
+
+Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had promised
+his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She pouted over
+her frocks.
+
+"I wish you'd settled that before. What good will all these dresses be
+now?"
+
+"You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here
+without me?"
+
+"Without you? Why are you going away?"
+
+"Because I must, Lily. Because ... oh, dearest girl, can't you see that
+I'm too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day
+and every night as I have been all this fortnight?"
+
+"If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather dull,
+shan't I?"
+
+"And shan't I?" he asked.
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me."
+
+He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.
+
+Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry
+with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time of
+trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must be
+married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well. He
+was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid the
+people who had brought it about.
+
+Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he
+turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that
+would take him down into Berkshire at once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE
+
+
+It was almost dark when Michael reached the little station at the foot
+of the Downs. He was half inclined to put up at the village inn and
+arrive at the Abbey in the morning; but he was feeling depressed by the
+alteration of his plans, and longed to withdraw immediately into the
+monastic peace. He had bought what he needed for the couple of nights
+before any luggage could reach him, and he thought that with so little
+to carry he might as well walk the six miles to the Abbey. He asked when
+the moon would be up.
+
+"Oh, not much before half-past nine, sir," the porter said.
+
+Michael suddenly remembered that to-morrow was Easter Sunday, and,
+thinking it would be as well not to arrive too late, in case there
+should be a number of guests, he managed to get hold of a cart. The wind
+blew very freshly as they slowly climbed the Downs, and the man who was
+driving him was very voluble on the subject of the large additions which
+had been made to the Abbey buildings during the last few years.
+
+"They've put up a grand sort of a lodge--Gatehouse, so some do call it.
+A bit after the style of the Tower of London, I've heard some say."
+
+Michael was glad to think that Dom Cuthbert's plans seemed to be coming
+to perfection in their course. How long was it since he and Chator were
+here? Eight or nine years; now Chator was a priest, and himself had done
+nothing.
+
+The Abbey Gatehouse was majestic in the darkness, and the driver pealed
+the great bell with a portentous clangor. Michael recognized the
+pock-marked brother who opened the door; but he could not remember his
+name. He felt it would be rather absurd to ask the monk if he recognized
+him by this wavering lanthorn-light.
+
+"Is the Reverend--is Dom Cuthbert at the Abbey now?" he asked. "You
+don't remember me, I expect? Michael Fane. I stayed here one Autumn
+eight or nine years ago."
+
+The monk held up the lanthorn and stared at him.
+
+"The Reverend Father is in the Guest Room now," said Brother Ambrose.
+Michael had suddenly recalled his name.
+
+"Do you think I shall be able to stay here to-night? Or have you a lot
+of guests for Easter?"
+
+"We can always find room," said Brother Ambrose. Michael dismissed his
+driver and followed the monk along the drive.
+
+Dom Cuthbert knew him at once, and seemed very glad that he had come to
+the Abbey.
+
+"You can have a cell in the Gatehouse. Our new Gatehouse. It's copied
+from the one at Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. Very beautiful. Very
+beautiful."
+
+Michael was introduced to the three or four guests, all types of
+ecclesiastical laymen, who had been talking with the Abbot. The Compline
+bell rang almost at once, and the Office was still held in the little
+chapel of mud and laths built by the hands of the monks.
+
+    Keep me as the apple of an eye.
+    Hide me in the shadow of thy wing.
+
+Here was worship unhampered by problems of social behavior: here was
+peace.
+
+Lying awake that night in his cell; watching the lattices very luminous
+in the moonlight; hearing the April wind in the hazel coppice, Michael
+tried to reach a perspective of his life these nine months since Oxford,
+but sleep came to him and pacified all confusions. He went to Mass next
+morning, but did not make his Communion, because he had a feeling that
+he could only have done so under false pretenses. There was no reason
+why he should have felt thus, he assured himself; but this morning there
+had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill. He went for a walk
+on the Downs, over the great green spaces that marked no season save in
+the change of the small flowers blowing in their turf. He wondered if he
+would be able to find the stones he had erected that July day when he
+first came here with Chator. He found what, as far as he could remember,
+was the place; and he also found a group of stones that might have been
+the ruins of his little monument. More remarkable than old stones now
+seemed to him a Pasque anemone colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously
+reminded him of the evening in March when he had walked with Lily in the
+wood at Hardingham.
+
+The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael's
+partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke.
+He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here
+on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He
+hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring his
+sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a feverish
+adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions for Lily's
+entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart, begging him
+to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being pursued and
+haunted; an intolerable idea that he was the quarry of an evil chase. He
+could not stay at the Abbey any longer: he was being rejected by the
+spirit of the place.
+
+Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.
+
+"Stay at least to-night," he urged, and Michael gave way.
+
+He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed
+Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany.
+He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt
+more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak he
+dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the primroses
+limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs; and when
+the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway station.
+To-day he ought to have married Lily.
+
+At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting,
+unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of
+Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne
+Walk.
+
+"I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,"
+was the explanation he gave himself of what already seemed mere
+sleeplessness.
+
+Michael found his mother very much worried by his disappearance; she had
+assumed that he had broken his promise. He consoled her, but excused
+himself from staying with her in town.
+
+"You mustn't ask too much of me," he said.
+
+"No, no, dearest boy; I'm glad for you to go away, but where will you
+go?"
+
+He thought he would pay an overdue visit to Cobble Place.
+
+Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Carthew were delighted to see him, and he felt as he
+always felt at Cobble Place the persistent tranquillity which not the
+greatest inquietude of spirit could long withstand. It was now nearly
+three years since he had been there, and he was surprised to see how
+very old Mrs. Carthew had grown in that time. This and the active
+presence of Kenneth, now a jolly boy of nine, were the only changes in
+the aspect of the household. Michael enjoyed himself in firing Kenneth
+with a passion for birds' eggs and butterflies, and they went long walks
+together and made expeditions in the canoe.
+
+Yet every day when Michael sat down to write to Lily, he almost wrote to
+say he was coming to London as soon as his letter. Her letters to him,
+written in a sprawling girlish hand, were always very much alike.
+
+     1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+
+     ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+     My dear,
+
+     Come back soon. I'm getting bored. Miss Harper isn't bad. Can't
+     write a long letter because this nib is awful. Kisses.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Lily.
+
+This would stand for any of them.
+
+May month had come in: Michael and Kenneth were finding whitethroats'
+nests in the nettle-beds of the paddock, before a word to Mrs. Ross was
+said about the marriage.
+
+"Stella has written to me about it," she told him.
+
+They were sitting in the straggling wind-frayed orchard beyond the
+stream: lamps were leaping: apple-blossom stippled the grass: Kenneth
+was chasing Orange Tips up the slope toward Grogg's Folly.
+
+"Stella has been very busy all round," said Michael. "I suppose
+according to her I'm going to marry an impossible creature. Creature is
+as far as she usually gets in particular description of Lily."
+
+"She certainly wasn't very complimentary about your choice," Mrs. Ross
+admitted.
+
+"I wish somebody could understand that it doesn't necessarily mean that
+I'm mad because I'm going to marry a beautiful girl who isn't very
+clever."
+
+"But I gathered from Stella," Mrs. Ross said, "that her past ...
+Michael, you must be very tolerant of me if I upset you, because we
+happen to be sitting just where I was stupid and unsympathetic once
+before. You see what an impression that made on me. I actually remember
+the very place."
+
+"She probably has done things in the past," said Michael. "But she's
+scarcely twenty-three yet, and I love her. Her past becomes a trifle.
+Besides, I was in love with her six years ago, and I--well, six years
+ago I was rather thoughtless very often. I don't want you to think that
+I'm going to marry her now from any sense of duty. I love her. At the
+same time when people argue that she's not the correct young Miss they
+apparently expect me to marry, I'm left unmoved. Pasts belong to men as
+well as to women."
+
+Mrs. Ross nodded slowly. Kenneth came rushing up, shouting that he had
+caught a frightfully rare butterfly. Michael looked at it.
+
+"A female Orange Tip," was the verdict.
+
+"But isn't that frightfully rare?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"No rarer than the males; but you don't notice them, that's all."
+
+Kenneth retired to find some more.
+
+"And you're sure you'll be happy with her?" Mrs. Ross asked.
+
+"As sure as I am that I shall be happy with anybody. I ought to be
+married to her by now. This delay that I've so weakly allowed isn't
+going to effect much."
+
+Michael sighed. He had meant to be in Provence this month of May.
+
+"But the delay can't do any harm," Mrs. Ross pointed out. "At any rate,
+it will enable you to feel more sure of yourself, and more sure of her,
+too."
+
+"I don't know," said Michael doubtfully. "My theory has always been that
+if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing at once."
+
+"And after you're married," she asked, "what are you going to do? Just
+lead a lazy life?"
+
+"Oh, no; I suppose I shall find some occupation that will keep me out of
+mischief."
+
+"That sounds a little cynical. Ah, well, I suppose it is a
+disappointment to me."
+
+"What's a disappointment?"
+
+"I've hoped and prayed so much lately that you would have a
+vocation...."
+
+"A priest," he interrupted quickly, "It's no good, Mrs. Ross. I have
+thought of being one, but I'm always put off by the professional side of
+it. And there are ways of doing what a priest does without being one."
+
+"Of course, I can't agree with you there," she said.
+
+"Well, apart from the sacraments, I mean. Lately I've seen something of
+the underworld, and I shall think of some way of being useful down
+there. Already I believe I've done a bit."
+
+They talked of the problems of the underworld and Michael was encouraged
+by what he fancied was a much greater breadth in her point of view
+nowadays to speak of things that formerly would have made her gray eyes
+harden in fastidious disapproval.
+
+"I feel happier about you since this talk," she said. "As long as you
+won't be content to let your great gift of humanity be wasted, as long
+as you won't be content to think that in marrying your Lily you have
+done with all your obligations."
+
+"Oh, no, I shan't feel that. In fact, I shall be all the more anxious to
+justify myself."
+
+Kenneth came back to importune Michael for a walk as far as Grogg's
+Folly.
+
+"It's such fun for Kenneth to have you here!" Mrs. Ross exclaimed. "I've
+never seen him so boisterously happy."
+
+"I used to enjoy myself here just as much as he does," said Michael.
+"Though perhaps I didn't show it. I always think of myself as rather a
+dreary little beast when I was a kid."
+
+"On the contrary, you were a most attractive boy; such a wide-eyed
+little boy," said Mrs. Ross softly, looking back into time. "I've seldom
+seen you so happy as just before I blew out your candle the first night
+of your first stay here."
+
+"I say, do come up the hill," interrupted Kenneth despairingly.
+
+"A thousand apologies, my lord," said Michael. "We'll go now."
+
+They did not stop until they reached the tower on the summit.
+
+"When I was your age," Michael told him, "I used to think that I could
+see the whole of England from here."
+
+"Could you really?" said Kenneth, in admiration. "Could you see any of
+France, too?"
+
+"I expect so," Michael answered. "I expect really I thought I could see
+the whole world. Kenneth, what are you going to be when you grow up? A
+soldier?"
+
+"Yes, if I can--or what is a philosopher?"
+
+"A philosopher philosophizes."
+
+"Does he really? Is that a difficult thing to do, to philosopherize?"
+
+"Yes; it's almost harder to do than to pronounce."
+
+Soon they were tearing down the hill, frightening the larks to right and
+left of their progress.
+
+The weather grew warmer every day, and at last Mrs. Carthew came out in
+a wheel-chair to see the long-spurred columbines, claret and gold,
+watchet, rose and white.
+
+"Really quite a display," she said to Michael. "And so you're to get
+married?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"What for?" the old lady demanded, looking at him over her spectacles.
+
+"Well, principally because I want to," Michael answered, after a short
+pause.
+
+"The best reason," she agreed. "But in your case insufficient, and I'll
+tell you why--you aren't old enough yet to know what you do want."
+
+"Twenty-three," Michael reminded her.
+
+"Twenty-fiddlesticks!" she snapped. "And isn't there a good deal of
+opposition?"
+
+"A good deal."
+
+"And no doubt you feel a fine romantical heroical young fellow?"
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, I'm not going to argue against your marrying her," said Mrs.
+Carthew. "Because I know quite well that the more I proved you to be
+wrong, the more you'd be determined to prove _I_ was. But I can give you
+advice about marriage, because I've been married and you haven't. Is she
+dark? If she's dark, be very cold for a year, and if she doesn't leave
+you in that time, she'll adore you for the rest of her life."
+
+"But she's fair," said Michael. "Very fair indeed."
+
+"Then beat her. Not actually, of course; but beat her figuratively for a
+year. If you don't, she'll either be a shrew or a whiner. Both
+impossible to live with."
+
+"Which did Captain Carthew do to you?" asked Michael, twinkling.
+
+"Neither; I ruled him with a rod of iron."
+
+"But do you think I'm wise to wait like this before marrying her?"
+Michael asked.
+
+"There's no wisdom in waiting to do an unwise thing."
+
+"You're so sure it is unwise?"
+
+"All marriages are unwise," said Mrs. Carthew sharply. "That's why
+everybody gets married. For most people it is the only imprudence they
+have an opportunity of committing. After that, they're permanently cured
+of rashness, and settle down. There are exceptions, of course: they take
+to drink. I must say I'm greatly pleased with these long-spurred
+columbines."
+
+Michael thought she had finished the discussion of his marriage, but
+suddenly she said:
+
+"I thought I told you to come and see me when you went down from
+Oxford."
+
+"I ought to have come," Michael agreed rather humbly. He always felt
+inclined to propitiate the old lady.
+
+"Here we have the lamentable result. Marriage at twenty-three."
+
+"Alan married at twenty-three," he pointed out.
+
+"Two fools don't make a wise-man," said Mrs. Carthew.
+
+"He's very happy."
+
+"He would be satisfied with much less than you, and he has married a
+delightful girl."
+
+"I'm going to marry a delightful girl."
+
+The old lady made no reply. Nor did she comment again upon his prospect
+of happiness.
+
+In mid-May, after a visit of nearly a month, Michael left Cobble Place
+and went to stay at Plashers Mead. Guy Hazlewood was the only friend he
+still had who could not possibly have come into contact with Lily or her
+former surroundings. Moreover, Guy was deep in love himself, and he had
+been very sympathetic when he wrote to Michael about his engagement.
+
+"Do I intrude upon your May idyll?" Michael asked.
+
+"My dear chap, don't be so absurd. But why aren't you married? You're as
+bad as me."
+
+"Why aren't _you_ married?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Guy sighed. "Everybody seems to be conspiring to put
+it off."
+
+They were sitting in Guy's green library. The windows wide open let in
+across the sound of the burbling stream the warm air of the lucid May
+night, where bats and owls and evejars flew across the face of the
+decrescent moon.
+
+"It's this dreamy country in which you live," said Michael.
+
+"What about you? You've let people put off your marriage."
+
+"Only for another two months," Michael explained.
+
+"You see I'm down to one hundred and fifty pounds a year now," Guy
+muttered. "I can't marry on that, and I can't leave this place, and her
+people can't afford to make her an allowance. They think I ought to go
+away and work at journalism. However, I'm not going to worry you with my
+troubles."
+
+Guy was a good deal with Pauline every day: Michael wrote long letters
+to Lily and read poetry.
+
+"Browning?" asked Guy one afternoon, looking over Michael's shoulder.
+
+"Yes; The Statue and The Bust."
+
+"Oh, don't remind me of that poem. It haunts me," Guy declared.
+
+A week passed. There was no moon now, and the nights grew warmer. It was
+weather to make lovers happy, but Guy seemed worried. He would not come
+for walks with Michael through the dark and scented water-meadows, and
+Michael used to think that often at night he was meeting Pauline. It
+made him jealous to imagine them lost in this amaranthine profundity.
+They were happy now, if through all their lives they should never be
+happy again. Yet Guy was obviously fretted: he was getting spoiled by
+good fortune. "And I have had about a fortnight of incomplete
+happiness," Michael said to himself. Supposing that a calamity fell upon
+him during this delay. He would never cease to regret his weakness in
+granting his mother's request: he would hate Stella for having
+interfered: his life would be miserable forever. Yet what calamity did
+he fear? In a sudden apprehension, he struck a match and read her last
+letter:
+
+     1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+
+     ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+     My dear,
+
+     It's getting awfully dull in London. Miss Harper asked me to call
+     her "Mabel." Rather cheek, I thought, don't you think so? But she's
+     really awfully decent. I can't write a long letter because we're
+     going to the Palace. I say, do buck up and come back to London, I'm
+     getting bored. Love and kisses.
+
+     Lily.
+
+     What's the good of _writing_ "kisses"?
+
+What indeed was the good of writing "kisses"? Michael thought, as the
+match fizzed out in the dewy grass at his feet. It was not fair to treat
+Lily like this. He had captured her from life with Sylvia, because he
+had meant to marry her at once. Now he had left her alone in that flat
+with a woman he did not know at all. Whatever people might say against
+Lily, she was very patient and trustful. "She must love me a good
+deal," Michael said. "Or she wouldn't stand this casual treatment."
+
+Pauline came to tea next day with her sisters Margaret and Monica.
+Michael had an idea that she did not like him very much. She talked
+shyly and breathlessly to him; and he, embarrassed by her shyness,
+answered in monosyllables.
+
+"Pauline is rather jealous of you," said Guy that evening, as they sat
+in the library.
+
+"Jealous of me?" Michael was amazed.
+
+"She has some fantastic idea that you don't approve of our engagement.
+Of course, I told her what nonsense she was thinking; but she vowed that
+this afternoon you showed quite plainly your disapproval of her. She
+insists that you are very cold and severe."
+
+"I'm afraid I was very dull," Michael confessed apologetically. "But I
+was really envying you and her for being together in May."
+
+"Together!" Guy repeated. "It's the object of everyone in Wychford to
+keep us apart!"
+
+"Do tell her I'm not cold," Michael begged. "And say how lovely I think
+her; for really, Guy, she is very lovely and strange. She is a fairy's
+child."
+
+"She is, she is," Guy said. "Sometimes I'm nearly off my head with the
+sense of responsibility I have for her happiness. I wonder and wonder
+until I'm nearly crazed."
+
+"I'm feeling responsible just now about Lily. I've never told you, Guy,
+but you may hear from other people that I've made what is called a
+m�salliance. Of course, Lily has been...." He stumbled. He could find no
+words that would not humiliate himself and her. "Guy, come up with me
+to-morrow and meet her. It's not fair to leave her like this," he
+suddenly proclaimed.
+
+"I don't think I can come away."
+
+"Oh, yes, you can. Of course. You must," Michael urged.
+
+"Pauline will be more jealous of you than ever, if I do."
+
+"For one night," Michael pleaded. "I must see her. And you must meet
+her. Everyone has been so rotten about her, and, Guy, you'll appreciate
+her. I won't bore you by describing her. You must meet her to-morrow.
+And the rooms in Ararat House. By Jove, you'll think them wonderful. You
+should see her in candlelight among the mirrors. Pauline won't mind your
+coming away with me for a night. We'll stay at Cheyne Walk."
+
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I'm rather hard up just now...."
+
+"Oh, what rot! This is my expedition. And when you've seen her, you must
+talk to my mother about her. She's so prejudiced against Lily. You will
+come, won't you?"
+
+Guy nodded a promise, and Michael went off to bed on the excitement of
+to-morrow's joy.
+
+Guy would not start before the afternoon, and Michael spent the morning
+under a willow beside the river. It was good to lie staring up at the
+boughs, and know that every fleecy cloud going by was a cloud nearer to
+his seeing Lily again.
+
+Michael and Guy arrived at Paddington about five o'clock.
+
+"We'll go straight round from here and surprise her," Michael said,
+laughing with excitement, as they got into a taxi. "She'll have had a
+letter from me this morning, in which I was lamenting not seeing her for
+six weeks. My gad, supposing she isn't in! Oh, well, we can wait. You'll
+love the room, and we'll all three sit out in the garden to-night, and
+you'll tell me as we walk home to Chelsea what you think of her. Guy
+you've absolutely got to like her. And if you don't ... oh, but you
+will. It isn't everybody who can appreciate beauty like hers. And
+there's an extraordinary subtlety about her. Of course, she isn't at all
+subtle. She's simple. In fact, that's one of the things Stella has got
+against her. What I call simplicity and absence of training for effect
+Stella calls stupidity. My own belief is that you'll be quite content to
+look at her and not care whether she talks or not. I tell you, she's
+like a Piero della Francesca angel. Cheer up, Guy. Why are you looking
+so depressed?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Guy. "I'm thinking what a lucky chap you are.
+What's a little family opposition when you know you're going to be able
+to do what you want? Who can stop you? You're independent, and you're in
+love."
+
+"Of course they can't stop me!" Michael cried, jumping up and down on
+the cushions of the taxi in his excitement. "Guy, you're great! You
+really are. You're the only person who's seen the advantage of going
+right ahead. But don't look so sad yourself. You'll marry your Pauline."
+
+"Yes, in about four years," Guy sighed.
+
+"Oh, no, no; in about four months. Will Pauline like Lily? She won't be
+jealous of me when I'm married will she?"
+
+"No, but I think I shall be," Guy laughed.
+
+"Laugh, you old devil, laugh!" Michael shouted. "Here we are. Did you
+ever see such a house? It hasn't quite the austerity of Plashers Mead,
+has it?"
+
+"It looks rather fun," Guy commented.
+
+"You know," Michael said solemnly, pausing for a moment at the head of
+the steps going down to the front door. "You know, Guy, I believe that
+you'll be able to persuade my mother to withdraw all her opposition
+to-night. I believe I'm going to marry Lily this week. And I shall be
+so glad--Guy, you don't know how glad I shall be."
+
+He ran hurriedly down the steps and had pressed the bell of Number One
+before Guy had entered the main door.
+
+"I say, you know, it will be really terrible if she's out after all my
+boasting," said Michael. "And Miss Harper, too--that's the
+housekeeper--my housekeeper, you know. If they're both out, we'll have
+to go round and wait in the garden until they come in. Hark, there's
+somebody coming."
+
+The door opened, and Michael hurried in.
+
+"Hullo, good afternoon, Miss Harper. You didn't expect to see me, eh?
+I've brought a friend. Is Miss Haden in the big room?"
+
+"Miss Haden is out, Mr. Fane," said the housekeeper.
+
+"What's the matter? You're looking rather upset."
+
+"Am I, Mr. Fane?" she asked blankly. "Am I? Oh, no, I'm very well. Oh,
+yes, very well. It's the funny light, I expect, Mr. Fane."
+
+She seemed to be choking out all her words, and Michael looked at her
+sharply.
+
+"Well, we'll wait in the big room."
+
+"It's rather untidy. You see, we--I wasn't expecting you, Mr. Fane."
+
+"That's all right," said Michael. "Hulloa ...I say, Guy, go on into that
+room ahead. I'll be with you in a minute."
+
+Guy mistook the direction and turned the handle of Lily's bedroom door.
+
+"No, no," Michael called. "The double doors opposite."
+
+"My mistake," said Guy cheerfully. "But don't worry: the other door was
+locked. So if you've got a Bluebeard's Closet, I've done no harm."
+
+He disappeared into the big room, and the moment he was inside Michael
+turned fiercely to Miss Harper.
+
+"Who's is this hat?" he demanded, snatching it up.
+
+"Hat? What hat?" she choked out.
+
+"Why is the door of her bedroom locked? Why is it locked--locked?"
+
+The stillness of the crepuscular hall seemed to palpitate with the
+woman's breath.
+
+"Miss Haden must have locked it when she went out," she stammered.
+
+"Is that the truth?" Michael demanded. "It's not the truth. It's a lie.
+You wouldn't be panting like a fish in a basket, unless there was
+something wrong. I'll break the door in."
+
+"No, Mr. Fane, don't do that!" the woman groaned out, in a cracked
+expostulation. "This is the first time since you've been away. And it
+was an old friend."
+
+"How dare you tell me anything about him? Guy! Guy!"
+
+Michael rushed into the big room and dragged Guy out.
+
+"Come away, come away, come away! I've been sold!"
+
+"If you'd only listen a moment. I could----" Miss Harper began.
+
+Michael pushed her out of their path.
+
+"What on earth is it?" Guy asked.
+
+"Come on, don't hang about in this hell of a house. Come on, Guy."
+
+Michael had flung the door back to slam into Miss Harper's face, and,
+seizing Guy by the wrist, he dragged him up the steps, and had started
+to run down the road, when Guy shouted:
+
+"Michael, the taxi! The taxi's waiting with our bags."
+
+"Oh, very well, in a taxi then, a taxi if you like," Michael chattered,
+and he plunged into it.
+
+"Where to?" the driver asked.
+
+"Cheyne Walk. But drive quickly. Don't hang about up and down this
+road."
+
+The driver looked round with an expression of injured dignity, shook his
+head in exclamation, and drove off.
+
+"What on earth has happened?" Guy asked. "And why on earth are you
+holding a top-hat?"
+
+Michael burst into laughter.
+
+"So I am. Look at it. A top-hat. I say, Guy, did you ever hear of anyone
+being cut out by a top-hat, cuckolded by a top-hat? We'll present it to
+the driver. Driver! Do you want a top-hat?"
+
+"Here, who are you having a game with?" demanded the driver, pulling up
+the car.
+
+"I'm not having a game with anybody," Michael said. "But two people and
+this top-hat have just been having a hell of a game with me. You'd much
+better take it as a present. I shall only throw it away. He refuses,"
+Michael went on. "He refuses a perfectly good top-hat. Who's the maker?
+My god, his dirty greasy head has obliterated the name of the maker.
+Good-bye, hat! Drive on, drive on!" he shouted to the driver, and hurled
+the hat spinning under an omnibus. Then he turned to Guy.
+
+"I've been sold by the girl I was going to marry," he said. "I say, Guy,
+I've got some jolly good advice for you. Don't you marry a whore. Sorry,
+old chap!--I forgot you were engaged already. Besides, people don't
+marry whores, unless they're fools like me. Didn't you say just now that
+I was very lucky? Do you know--I think I am lucky. I think it was a
+great piece of luck bringing you to see that girl to-day. Don't you? Oh,
+Guy, I could go mad with disappointment. Will nothing in all the world
+ever be what it seems?"
+
+"Look here, Michael, are you sure you weren't too hasty? You didn't
+wait to see if there was any explanation, did you?"
+
+"She was only going back to her old habits," said Michael bitterly. "I
+was a fool to think she wouldn't. And yet I adored her. Fancy, you've
+never seen her, after all. Lovely, lovely animal!"
+
+"Oh, you knew what she was?" exclaimed Guy.
+
+"Knew? Yes, of course I knew; but I thought she loved me. I didn't care
+about anything when I was sure she loved me. She could only have gone
+such a little way down, I thought. She seemed so easy to bring out.
+Seeds of pomegranate. Seeds of pomegranate! She's only eaten seeds of
+pomegranate, but they were enough to keep her behind. Where are we
+going? Oh, yes, Cheyne Walk. My mother will be delighted when she hears
+my news, and so will everybody. That's what's amusing me. Everybody will
+clap their hands, and I'm wretched. But you are sorry for me, Guy? You
+don't think I'm just a fool being shown his folly? And at eighteen I was
+nearly off my head only because I saw someone kiss her! There's one
+thing over which I score--the only person who can appreciate all the
+humor of this situation is myself."
+
+Nearly all the way to Cheyne Walk Michael was laughing very loudly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GATE OF HORN
+
+
+Guy thought it would be better if he went straight back to Plashers
+Mead; but Michael asked him to stay until the next day. He was in no
+mood, he said, for a solitary evening, and he could not bear the notion
+of visiting friends, or of talking to his mother without the restriction
+that somebody else's presence would produce.
+
+So Guy agreed to spend the night in London, and they dined with Mrs.
+Fane. Michael in the sun-colored Summer room felt smothered by a
+complete listlessness; and talking very little, he sat wondering at the
+swiftness with which a strong fabric of the imagination had tumbled
+down. The quiet of Cheyne Walk became a consciousness of boredom and
+futility, and he suggested on a sudden impulse that he and Guy should go
+and visit Maurice in the studio. It would be pleasant walking along the
+Embankment, he said.
+
+"But I thought you wanted to keep quiet," Guy exclaimed.
+
+"No, I've grown restless during dinner; and, besides, I want to make a
+few arrangements about the flat, and then be done with that
+business--forever."
+
+They started off without waiting for coffee. It was a calm Summer
+evening of shadows blue and amethyst, of footfalls and murmurs, an
+evening plumy as a moth, warm and gentle as the throat of a pigeon.
+Nobody on any pavement was hurrying; and maidservants loitered in area
+gates, looking up and down the roads.
+
+The big room at the top of 422 Grosvenor Road had never seemed so
+romantic. There were half a dozen people sitting at the open windows;
+and Cunningham was playing a sonata of Brahms, a sonata with a melody
+that was drawing the London night into this big room where the
+cigarettes dimmed and brightened like stars. The player sat at the piano
+for an hour, and Maurice unexpectedly made no attempt to disturb the
+occasion. Michael thought that perhaps he was wondering what had brought
+himself and Guy here, and for that reason did not rush to show Guy his
+studio by gaslight: Maurice was probably thinking how strange it was for
+Michael to revisit him suddenly like this after their quarrel.
+
+When the room was lighted up, Michael and Guy were introduced to the men
+they did not know. Among them was Ronnie Walker, the painter whom
+Maurice had mentioned to Michael as an old lover of Lily. Michael knew
+now why Maurice had allowed the music to go on so long, and he was
+careful to talk as much as possible to Walker in order to embarrass
+Maurice, who could scarcely pay any attention to Guy, so nervously was
+he watching over his shoulder the progress of the conversation.
+
+Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the
+window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a
+distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the
+piano again.
+
+"I say, I'm awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here
+to-night," Maurice began. "I have been rather cursing myself for telling
+you about him and...."
+
+"It doesn't matter at all," Michael interrupted. "I'm not going to marry
+her."
+
+"Oh, that's splendid!" Maurice exclaimed. "I've been tremendously
+worried about you."
+
+Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that Maurice
+could be "tremendously worried" by anything.
+
+"I want you to arrange matters," said Michael. "I can't go near the
+place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The
+rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you
+like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the money.
+Get rid of the woman who's there--Miss Harper her name is."
+
+"But I shall feel rather awkward...."
+
+"Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, then!" Michael broke in fretfully. "I'll
+ask Guy."
+
+"You're getting awfully irascible," Maurice complained. "Of course I'll
+do anything you want, if you won't always jump down my throat at the
+first word I utter. What has happened, though?"
+
+"What do you expect to happen when you're engaged to a girl like that?"
+Michael asked.
+
+Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then, you
+see, I'm not a very great believer in women. What are you going to do
+yourself?"
+
+"I haven't settled yet. I've got to arrange one or two things in town,
+and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a
+week?"
+
+"I daresay I might," Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room.
+Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile
+comprehension.
+
+The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
+
+"This is where you ought to be, if you want to write," Maurice
+proclaimed to Guy. "It's ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the
+country. You'll expire of stagnation."
+
+"Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are," said Castleton.
+"I'm almost expiring from the violence with which I am being
+precipitated from one to another of Maurice's energies."
+
+Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next
+morning Guy went back to Wychford.
+
+Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the
+betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made
+financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only
+yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part
+he had played in Lily's life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel
+anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice;
+already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly
+remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a
+shade his present emotion proved that she was much more than that, for
+the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart. Then the
+indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill remained.
+
+Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and
+they went to Boh�me. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat
+unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if
+she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of
+all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at night
+and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life itself, but
+he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any activity in the
+conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here at supper and
+for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was spiritually
+withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to the notion of
+a debased material comfort as the only condition worth achieving for a
+body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it almost seemed.
+
+"Michael, have you been bored to-night?" his mother asked, when they had
+come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while
+Michael finished a cigar.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy
+Puccini, don't you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?"
+
+"I think summer in London is always tiring," he said.
+
+She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures of
+her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.
+
+"Dear child, what is it?" she whispered, with fluttering arms
+outstretched to comfort him.
+
+"Oh, I've finished with all that! I've finished with all that! You'll be
+delighted--you mustn't be worried because I seem upset for the moment. I
+found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I'm not going to
+marry her or even see her again."
+
+"Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?"
+
+"Finished! Finished! Finished!" he sobbed.
+
+"Nothing is finished at twenty-three," she murmured, leaning over to pet
+him.
+
+"I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day."
+
+It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It
+seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on
+account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself
+again; and he went off to bed.
+
+Next day Michael's depression was profound because he could perceive no
+reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in
+the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her. She
+was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen to
+her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he had
+lately been involved? Must he withdraw entirely and confess defeat? No
+doubt a cynic would argue that Lily was hopeless, and indeed he knew
+that from any point of view where marriage was concerned she was
+hopeless. He must leave her where he had found her, in that pretty
+paradise of evil which now she well adorned. If her destiny was to whirl
+downward through the labyrinths of the underworld, he could do no more.
+That himself had issued with the false dreams through the ivory gate was
+her fault, and she must pay the penalty of her misdirection. He would
+revisit Leppard Street, and from the innermost circle where he had
+beheld Mrs. Smith he would seek a way out through the gate of true
+dreams. He would be glad to see if the amount of security he had been
+able to guarantee to Barnes had helped him at all. He had money and he
+could leave money behind in Leppard Street, money that might preserve
+the people in the house where he had lived. Was this a quixotic notion,
+to leave one set of people free from the necessity to hand themselves
+over to evil? Michael's spirits began to rise as he looked forward to
+what he could still effect in Leppard Street. And for Lily what could he
+still do? He would visit Sylvia and consult with her. She was strong,
+and if she had chosen harlotry, she was still strong. She was not lazy
+nor languid. Lazy, laughing, languid Lily! Lily did not laugh much; she
+was too lazy even for that. How beautiful she had been! Her beauty
+stabbed him with the poignancy of what was past. How beautiful she had
+been! When Maurice went to tell her of the final ending of it all, she
+would pout and shrug her shoulders. That was all she would do; and she
+would be faintly resentful at having been disturbed in her lazy life.
+Perhaps Maurice would fall in love with her, and it would be ironical
+and just that she should fall violently in love with Maurice and be cast
+off by him. Maurice would never suffer; as soon as a woman showed a sign
+of upsetting his theories about feminine behavior he would be done with
+her. He would jilt her as easily as he jilted one Muse for another. Why
+was he being so hard on Maurice?
+
+"I believe that down in my heart I still don't really like him," Michael
+said to himself. "Right back from the time I met him in Macrae's form at
+Randell's I've never really liked him."
+
+It was curious how one could grow more and more intimate with a person,
+and all the time never really like him; so intimate with him as to
+intrust him with the disposal of a wrecked love-affair, and all the
+while never really like him. Why, then, had he invited Maurice to go
+abroad? Perhaps he wanted the company of someone he could faintly
+despise. Even friendship must pay tribute to human vanity. Life became a
+merciless business when one ceased to stand alone. The herding instinct
+of man was responsible for the corruption of civilization, and Michael
+thought of the bestiality of a crowd. How loathsome humanity was in the
+aggregate, but individually how rare, how wonderful.
+
+Michael walked boldly enough toward Tinderbox Lane; and when he rang the
+bell of Mulberry Cottage not a qualm of sentiment assailed him. He was
+definitely pleased with himself, as he stood outside the door in the
+wall, to think with what a serenity of indifference he was able to visit
+a place so much endeared to him a little time ago.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough answered the door and nearly fell upon Michael's
+neck.
+
+"Good Land! Here's a surprise."
+
+"It's almost more of a surprise for me to see you, Mrs. Gainsborough."
+
+"Why, who else should you see?"
+
+"I was beginning to think you never existed. Can I come in?"
+
+"Sylvia's indoors," she said warningly.
+
+"I rather wanted to see her."
+
+"She's been carrying on alarming about you ever since you stole her
+Lily. And she didn't take me on her knee and cuddle me, when she found
+you were gone off. How do you like me new frock?"
+
+Michael thought that in her checkered black and green gingham she looked
+like an old Summer number of an illustrated magazine, and he told her
+so.
+
+"Well, there! Did you ever? I never did. There's a bouquet to hand a
+lady! Back number! Whatever next? I wonder you hadn't the liberty to say
+I'd rose from the grave."
+
+"Aren't I to see Sylvia?" Michael asked, laughing.
+
+"Well, don't blame me if she packs you off with a flea in your ear, as
+they say--well, she is a Miss Temper, and no mistake. How do you like me
+garden?"
+
+Mulberry Cottage was just the bower of greenery that Michael had
+supposed he would find in early June.
+
+"Actually roses," he exclaimed. "Or at least there will be very soon."
+
+"Oh, yes. Glory de Die-Johns. That was always Pa's favorite. That and a
+good snooze of a Sunday afternoon was about what he cared most for in
+this world. But my Captain he used to like camellias, and gardenias of
+course--oh, he had a very soft corner in his heart for a nice gardenia.
+Ah dear, what a masher he was to be sure!"
+
+Sylvia had evidently seen them walking up the garden path, for leaning
+over the railings of the balcony she was waiting for them.
+
+"Here's quite a stranger come to see you," said Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+a propitiatory glance in Sylvia's direction.
+
+"I rather want to have a talk with you," said Michael, and he, too,
+found himself rather annoyingly adopting a deprecating manner.
+
+Sylvia came slowly down the balcony steps.
+
+"I suppose you want my help," she said, and her underlip had a warning
+out-thrust.
+
+"I'll get on with my fal-lals," Mrs. Gainsborough muttered, and she
+bundled herself quickly indoors.
+
+Sylvia and Michael sat down on the garden-seat under the mulberry tree
+whose leaves were scarcely yet uncurling. Michael found a great charm in
+sitting close to Sylvia like this: she and Stella both possessed a
+capacity for bracing him that he did not find in anyone else. Sylvia was
+really worth quarreling with; but it would be very delightful to be
+friends with her. He had never liked a person so much whom he had so
+little reason to like. He could not help thinking that in her heart
+Sylvia must like him. It was a strangely provocative fancy.
+
+"Lily and I have parted," he began at once.
+
+"And why do you suppose that piece of information will interest me?"
+Sylvia asked.
+
+Michael was rather taken aback. When he came to consider it, there did
+seem no good reason why Sylvia should any longer be interested after the
+way in which Lily had been snatched away from her. He was silent for a
+moment.
+
+"But it would have interested you a short time ago," he said.
+
+"No doubt," Sylvia agreed. "But luckily for me one of the benefits
+conferred by my temperament is an ability to throw aside things that
+have disappointed me, things that have ceased to be useful--and what
+applies to things applies even more strongly to people."
+
+"You mean to say you've put Lily right out of your life?" Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+He was shocked by the notion, for he did not realize until this moment
+how much he had been depending upon Sylvia for peace of mind.
+
+"Haven't you put her out of _your_ life?" she asked, looking round at
+him sharply. Until this question she had been staring sullenly down at
+the grass.
+
+"Well, I had to," said Michael.
+
+"You're bearing up very well under the sad necessity," she sneered.
+
+"I don't know that I am bearing up very well. I don't think that coming
+to you to talk about it is a special sign of fortitude."
+
+"What do you want me to do?" Sylvia demanded. "Get her back into your
+life again? Isn't that the phrase you like?"
+
+"Oh, no, that's unimaginable," said Michael. "You see, it was really the
+second time. Once six years ago, and again now, very much more--more
+utterly. You said that your temperament enables you to throw off things
+and people. Mine makes me bow to what I fancy are irremediable strokes
+of fate."
+
+"Unimaginable! Irremediable! We're turning this interview into a
+Rossetti sonnet," Sylvia scoffed.
+
+"I was thinking about that poem Jenny to-day. It's funny you should
+mention Rossetti."
+
+"Impervious youth!" she exclaimed.
+
+"It's hopeless for you to try to wound me with words," Michael assured
+her, with grave earnestness. "I was wounded the day before yesterday
+into complete immunity from small pains."
+
+"I suppose you found her ..."
+
+Michael flushed and gripped her by the wrist.
+
+"No, no, don't say something brutal and beastly!" he stammered. "You
+know what happened. You prophesied it. Well, I thought you were wrong,
+and you were right. That's a victory for you. You couldn't wish for me
+to be more humbled than I am by having to admit that I wasn't strong
+enough to keep her faithful for six weeks. But we did agree, I think,
+about one thing." He smiled sadly. "We did agree that she was beautiful.
+You were as proud of that as I was, and of course you had a great deal
+more reason to be proud. You did own her. I never owned her, and isn't
+that your great objection to the relation between man and woman?"
+
+"What are you trying to make me do?" Sylvia asked.
+
+"I want you to have Lily to live with you again."
+
+"To relieve yourself of all responsibility, I suppose," she said
+bitterly.
+
+"No, no; why will you persist in ascribing the worst motive to
+everything I say? Isn't your jealousy fed full enough even yet?"
+
+Sylvia made the garden-seat quiver with an irritable movement.
+
+"You will persist in thinking that jealousy solved all problems," she
+cried.
+
+"Oh, don't let us turn aside into what isn't very important. You can't
+care whether I think you're jealous or not."
+
+"I don't care in so far as it is your opinion," Sylvia admitted. "But I
+object to inaccurate thinking. If your life was spent in a confusion of
+all moral values as mine is, you would be anxious for a little
+straightforward computation for a change."
+
+"Perhaps you are right," Michael admitted, "in thinking that I'm asking
+you to look after Lily to relieve myself of a responsibility. But it's
+only because I see no chance of doing it in any other way. I mean--it's
+not laziness on my part. It's a confession of absolute failure."
+
+"In fact, you're throwing yourself on my mercy," Sylvia said.
+
+"Yes; and also her," he added gently.
+
+"Am I such a moral companion--such an ennobling influence?"
+
+"I would sooner think of her under your influence than think of her
+drifting. What I want you to understand is that I'm not consigning her
+to you for sentimental reasons. I would sooner that Lily were dragged
+down by you at a gallop than that she should sink slowly and lazily of
+her own accord. You have a strong personality. You are well-read. You
+are quite out of the common, and in the life you have chosen, so far as
+I have had experience, you are unique."
+
+Sylvia stared in front of her, and Michael waited anxiously for the
+reply.
+
+"Have you ever read Petronius?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are--have you ever read
+Petronius?"
+
+"It's the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could
+behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare,
+too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses.
+Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and
+incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man
+revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly
+contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic
+in it. Not any religion I've ever heard of, for in all religions man is
+set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my
+conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as
+less repulsive than--ugh! it makes me shudder--but oh, my son, doesn't
+it make me laugh...." She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a
+moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely,
+fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. "So I
+worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily
+was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don't want to worship
+anything but beauty. I don't care about purity or uprightness, but I
+must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely
+girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and you
+can't understand that I'm only able to see you in the shape of a frog.
+It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so earnestly
+and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy frog."
+
+"But what has all this to do with Petronius? There's nothing in that
+romance particularly complimentary to women," Michael argued.
+
+"It's the nightmare effect of it that I adore," Sylvia exclaimed. "It's
+the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from
+which there's no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It is
+gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that's all I want in my
+reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having
+been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the
+truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not
+one moderately decent person all through."
+
+"And you will take Lily back?" Michael asked.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don't for
+heaven's sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I'm doing anything
+except gratify myself in this matter."
+
+"I don't want you to do it for any other reason," he said. "I shall feel
+more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By the
+way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker--a painter. He had
+an affair with Lily, didn't he?"
+
+"Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything
+more."
+
+"And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?"
+
+"Who? The Honorable Arthur?"
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Yes, we met him first at Covent Garden, and went to Brighton with him
+and another boy--Clarehaven--Lord Clarehaven."
+
+"Oh, I remember him at the House," said Michael.
+
+"Money is necessary sometimes, you know," Sylvia laughed.
+
+"Of course it is. Look here. Will you in future, whenever you feel
+you're in a nightmare--will you write to me and let me send money?" he
+asked. "I know you despise me and of course ... I understand; but I
+can't bear to think of anyone being haunted as you must be haunted
+sometimes. Don't be proud about this, because _I've_ got no pride left.
+I'm only terribly anxious to be of service to somebody. There's really
+no reason for you to be proud. You see, I should always be so very much
+more anxious to help than you would to be helped. And it really isn't
+only because of Lily that I say this. I've got a good many books you'd
+enjoy, and I think I'll send them to you. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye," she said, looking at him curiously.
+
+Michael turned away from her down the gravel-path, and a moment later
+slammed the door. He had only gone a few steps away, when he heard
+Sylvia calling after him.
+
+"You stupid!" she said. "You never told me Lily's address."
+
+"I'll give you a card."
+
+"Mr. Michael Fane," she read, "1 Ararat House, Island Road." She looked
+at him and raised her eyebrows.
+
+"You see, I expected to live there myself," Michael explained. "I told a
+friend of mine, Maurice Avery, to clear up everything. The furniture can
+all be sold. If you want anything for here, take it of course; but I
+think most of the things will be too large for Mulberry Cottage."
+
+"And what shall I say to Lily?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't think I should say anything about me."
+
+"Who was the man?"
+
+"I never saw him," said Michael. "I only saw his hat."
+
+She pulled him to her and kissed him.
+
+"How many women have done that suddenly like that?" she demanded.
+
+"One--well, perhaps two." He was wondering if Mrs. Smith's kiss ought to
+count in the comparison.
+
+"I never have to any man," she said, and vanished through the door in
+the wall.
+
+Michael hoped that Sylvia intended to imply by that kiss that his offer
+of help was accepted. Fancy her having read Petronius! He could send her
+his Adlington's Apuleius. She would enjoy reading that, and he would
+write in it: _I've eaten rose-leaves and I am no longer a golden ass._
+Perhaps he would also send her his Shelton's Don Quixote.
+
+When Michael turned out of Tinderbox Lane into the Fulham Road, each
+person of humanity he passed upon the pavement seemed to him strange
+with unrevealed secrets. The people of London were somehow transfigured,
+and he longed to see their souls, if it were only in the lucid flashes
+of a nightmare. Yet for nearly a year he had been peering into the
+souls of people. Had he, indeed. Had he not rather been peering to see
+in their souls the reflection of his own? He was moved by the thought of
+Sylvia in London, and suddenly he was swept from his feet by the surging
+against him of the thoughts of all the passers-by and, struggling in the
+trough of these thoughts, he was more and more conscious that unless he
+fought for himself he would be lost. The illusion fled on the instant of
+its creation; and the people were themselves again--dull, quick, slow,
+ordinary, depressed, gay; political busy-bodies, political fools,
+political slaves, political animals. How they huddled together, each one
+of them afraid to stand for himself. It was political passion that made
+them animals, each dependent in turn on the mimicry of his neighbor.
+Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or envious of his neighbor's
+opinion. God was meaningless to the political state: this herd cared
+only for idols. Michael began to make a catalogue of the Golden Calves
+that the Golden Asses of green England worshiped. They were bowing down
+and braying to their Golden Calves, these Golden Asses, and they could
+not see that there were rose-trees growing everywhere, most prodigally
+of all in the gutter, any one petal of which (what did the thorns
+matter?) would have given back to them their humanity. Yet even then,
+Michael dismally concluded, they would continue to bow down to the
+Golden Calves, because they would fancy that it was the Calves who had
+planted and cultivated the rose-trees. Then out of all the thronging
+thoughts made visible he began to pursue the fancy of Sylvia in London,
+and, as he did so, she faded farther and farther from his vision like a
+butterfly seen from a train, that keeps pace, it seems for a moment, and
+is lost upon the flowery embankment behind.
+
+Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk under
+the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he had
+stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained Leppard
+Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on through the
+Chelsea slums.
+
+Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever
+seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the
+corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a
+breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number One;
+and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the blank
+wall opposite.
+
+Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one
+o'clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the
+creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract
+Mrs. Cleghorne's attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out
+into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight must
+have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand. With her
+fibrous neck working and with an old cap of her husband's pinned on a
+skimpy bun at the back of her head, she was horrible after Mrs.
+Gainsborough in the black and green gingham. Michael looked down at her
+over the railings; and she, recognizing him at last, pounced back to
+come up and open the door.
+
+"I couldn't think who it was. We had a man round selling pots of musk
+this morning, and I didn't want to come trapesing upstairs for nothing."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was receiving him so pleasantly that Michael scarcely
+knew what to say. No doubt his regular payment of rent had a good deal
+to do with it.
+
+"Is Mr. Barnes up?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure. I never go inside his door now. No."
+
+"Oh, really? Why not?"
+
+"I'm the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don't consider he
+has treated us fair."
+
+"Oh, really?"
+
+"He's got a woman here living with him. Now of course that's a thing I
+should never allow, but seeing as you weren't here and was paying the
+rent regular I thought to myself that I'll just shut my eyes until you
+came back. It's really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with
+the other lodgers. It's quite upset me, it has; and _Mis_-ter Cleghorne
+has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma's been so
+bad lately--it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him."
+
+This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently
+the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent
+for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it was
+locked.
+
+"I'll get on down again to my oven," said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike
+glance at the closed door. "I'm just cooking a bit of fish for my old
+man's dinner."
+
+She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin
+in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.
+
+Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the
+passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes' voice called out to know who
+was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to
+somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited
+Michael to come in.
+
+It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of
+the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still
+there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled
+picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of
+St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had
+novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow
+moirette lay over Michael's narrow bed, which he was surprised to see in
+the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and the
+old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and
+dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the
+folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for
+him to explain the alterations.
+
+"Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn't it?" said Barnes,
+blinking round him.
+
+A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely
+the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it was
+as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man's eyes; but there
+clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a touch he
+would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.
+
+"You look pretty pasty," said Michael severely.
+
+"Worry, old man, worry," said Barnes. "Well, to put it straight, I fell
+in with a girl who was down on her luck, and I knew you'd be the very
+one to encourage a bit of charity. So I brought her here."
+
+"Why are you sleeping in this room?" Michael asked.
+
+"You're getting a Mr. Smart, aren't you?" said Barnes. "Fancy you're
+noticing that. Oh, well, I suppose you've come to ask for your rooms
+back?"
+
+Michael with the consciousness of the woman behind those curtained doors
+knew that he could discuss nothing at present. He felt that all the time
+her ear was at the keyhole, and he went out suddenly, telling Barnes to
+meet him at the Orange that night.
+
+Again the beerhall impressed him with its eternal sameness. It was as if
+a cinema film had broken when he last went out of the Caf� d'Orange, and
+had been set in action again at the moment of his return. He looked
+round to see if Daisy was there, and she was. Her hat which had
+formerly been black and trimmed with white daisies was now, to mark the
+season, white and trimmed with black daisies.
+
+"Hulloa!, little stranger!" she exclaimed. "Where have you been?"
+
+So exactly the same was the Orange that Michael was almost surprised
+that she should have observed a passage of time.
+
+"You never seem to come here now," she said reproachfully. "Come on. Sit
+down. Don't stand about like a man selling matches on the curb."
+
+"How's Bert?" Michael asked.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Bert Saunders. The man you were living with in Little Quondam Street."
+
+"Oh, him! Oh, I had to get rid of him double quick. What? Yes, when it
+came to asking me to go to Paris with a fighting fellow. Only fancy the
+cheek of it! It would help him, he said, with his business. Dirty Ecnop!
+I soon shoved him down the Apples-and-pears."
+
+"I haven't understood a word of that last sentence," said Michael.
+
+"Don't you know back-slang and rhyming-slang? Oh, it's grand! Here, I
+forgot, there's something I wanted to tell you. Do you remember you was
+in here with a fellow who you said his name was Burns?"
+
+"Barnes, you mean, I expect. Yes, he's supposed to be meeting me here
+to-night, as a matter of fact."
+
+"Well, you be careful of him. He'll get you into trouble."
+
+Michael looked incredulous.
+
+"It's true as I sit here," said Daisy earnestly. "Come over in the
+corner and let's have our drink there. I can't talk here with that
+blue-nosed---- behind me, squinting at us across his lager." She looked
+round indignantly at the man in question.
+
+They moved across to one of the alcoves, and Daisy leaned over and spoke
+quietly and rather tensely, so differently from the usual rollick of her
+voice that Michael began to feel a presentiment of dread.
+
+"I was out on the Dilly one night soon after you'd been round to my
+place, and I was with a girl called Janie Filson. 'Oo-er,' she said to
+me. 'Did you see who that was passed?' I looked round and saw this
+fellow Burns."
+
+"Barnes," Michael corrected.
+
+"Oh, well, Barnes. His name doesn't matter, because it isn't his own,
+anyway. 'That's Harry Meats,' she said. And she called out after him.
+'Hulloa, Harry, where's Cissie?' He went as white as ... oh, he did go
+shocking white. He just turned to see who it was had called out after
+him, and then he slid up Swallow Street like a bit of paper. 'Who's
+Cissie?' I said. 'Don't you remember Cissie Cummings?' she said. 'That
+fair girl who always wore a big purple hat and used to be in the
+Leicester Lounge and always carried a box of chocolates for swank?' I
+did remember the girl when Janie spoke about her. Only I never knew her,
+see? 'He wasn't very pleased when you mentioned her,' I said. 'Didn't he
+look awful?' said Janie, and just then she got off with a fellow and I
+couldn't ask her any more."
+
+"I don't think that's enough to make me very much afraid of Barnes,"
+Michael commented.
+
+"Wait a minute, I haven't finished yet. Don't be in such a hurry. The
+other day I saw Janie Filson again. She's been away to Italy--is there a
+place called Italy? Of course there is. Well, as I was saying, she'd
+been to Italy with her fellow who's a commercial traveler and that's why
+I hadn't seen her. And Janie said to me, 'Do you know what they're
+saying?' I said, 'No, what?' And she said, 'Did you read nearly a year
+ago about a woman who was found murdered in the Euston Road? A gay woman
+it was,' she said. So I said, 'Lots of women is found murdered, my dear.
+I can't remember every one I see the picture of.' Well, anyone can't,
+can they?" Daisy broke off to ask Michael in an injured voice. Then she
+resumed her tale. "When I was with that fellow Bert I used to read
+nothing else but murders all the time. Give anyone the rats, it would.
+'Lots of women, my dear,' I said. And she said, 'Well, there was one in
+particular who the police never found out the name of, because there
+wasn't any clothing or nothing found.' So I did remember about it, and
+she said, 'Well, they're saying now it was Cissie Cummings.' And I said,
+'Well, what of it, if it was?' And she said, 'What of it?' she said.
+'Well, if it was her,' she said, 'I know who done it.' 'Who done it?' I
+asked--because, you see, I'd forgotten about this fellow Burns. 'Why,
+Harry Meats,' she said. 'That fellow I saw on the Dilly the night when I
+was along with you.'"
+
+"I don't think you have enough evidence for the police," Michael
+decided, with half a smile. Yet nevertheless a malaise chilled him, and
+he looked over his shoulder at the mob in the beer hall.
+
+"---- the police!" Daisy exclaimed. "I don't care about them when I'm
+positive certain of something. I tell you, I know that fellow Burns, or
+Meats, or whatever his name is, done it."
+
+"But what am I to do about it?" Michael asked.
+
+"Well, you'll get into trouble, that's all," Daisy prophesied. "You'd
+look very funny if he was pinched for murder while you was out walking
+with him. Ugh! It gives me the creeps. Order me a gin, there's a good
+boy."
+
+Michael obtained for Daisy her drink, and sat waiting for Barnes to
+appear.
+
+"He won't come," Daisy scoffed. "If he's feeling funny about the neck,
+he won't come down here. He's never been down since that night he came
+down with you. Fancy, to go and do a poor girl in like that! I'd spit in
+his face, if I saw him."
+
+"Daisy, you really mustn't assume such horrible things about a man. He's
+as innocent as you or me."
+
+"Is he?" Daisy retorted. "I don't think so then. You never saw how
+shocking white his face went when Janie asked him about Cissie."
+
+"But if there were any suspicion of him," Michael pointed out, "the
+police would have tackled him long ago."
+
+"Oh, they aren't half artful, the police aren't," said Daisy. "Nothing
+they'd like better than get waiting about and seeing if he didn't go and
+murder another poor girl, so as they could have him for the two, and be
+all the more pleased about it."
+
+"That's talking nonsense," Michael protested. "The police don't do that
+sort of thing."
+
+"I don't know," Daisy argued. "One or two poor girls more or less
+wouldn't worry them. After all, that's what we're for--to get pinched
+when they've got nothing better to do. Of course, I know it's part of
+the game, but there it is. If you steal my purse and I follow you round
+and tell a copper, what would he do? Why, pinch me for soliciting. No,
+my motto is, 'Keep out of the way of the police.' And if you take my
+advice, you'll do the same. If this fellow didn't do the girl in," Daisy
+asked earnestly, leaning forward over the table, "why doesn't he come
+down here and keep his appointment with you to-night? Don't you worry.
+He knows the word has gone round, and he's going to lie very low for a
+bit. I wouldn't say the tecs aren't watching out for him even now."
+
+"My dear Daisy, you're getting absolutely fanciful," Michael declared.
+
+"Oh, well, good luck to fanciful," said Daisy, draining her glass.
+"Here, why don't you come home with me to-night?"
+
+"What, and spend another three hours hiding in a cupboard?"
+
+"No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel,
+because the woman I'm living with's got her son come home from being a
+soldier and she wouldn't like for him to know anything. Well, it's
+better not. You're much more comfortable when you aren't in gay rooms,
+because they haven't got a hold over you. Are you coming?"
+
+For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him.
+For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the
+underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He
+could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with her.
+No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet not much
+more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He had always
+escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not again more
+completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld without
+having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a spectator,
+intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies, but never
+intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He thought, as he
+sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid roguery, that it
+would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There would be no strain in
+living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had loved Lily would be a
+joke to her. Why should not he take her for what she was--shrewd,
+mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He would do her no
+wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in the scheme of the
+universe.
+
+Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he
+remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that Daisy
+could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage to
+plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought of
+the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this
+nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks
+ago--yesterday, indeed--he might have joined himself to Daisy under the
+pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he
+must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion
+might enter, were too dangerous.
+
+"No, I won't come home with you, dear Daisy," he said, taking her hand
+over the puddly table. "You know, you didn't kiss me that night in
+Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you,
+did you?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What's the good of asking me why I kissed you?" she said, embarrassed
+and almost made angry by his reminder. "Perhaps I was twopence on the
+can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if you
+aren't coming home, you aren't, and I must get along. Sitting talking to
+you isn't paying my rent, is it?"
+
+He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming
+to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a
+token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and
+he was at a loss to find a symbol service.
+
+"Is there nothing I can do for you?"
+
+"Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don't get off to-night."
+
+He offered them to her eagerly.
+
+"Go on, you silly thing," she said, pushing the money away. "As if I
+meant it."
+
+"If you didn't, I did," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, all right," she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her
+purse. "Well, chin-chin, Clive, don't be so long coming down here next
+time."
+
+"Michael is my name," he said, for he was rather distressed to think
+that she would pass forever from his life supposing him to be called
+Clive.
+
+"As if I didn't know that," she said. "I remember, because it's a Jew
+name."
+
+"But it isn't," Michael contradicted.
+
+"Jews are called that."
+
+"Very likely," he admitted.
+
+"Oh, well, it'll be all the same in a hundred years."
+
+She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded
+beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him.
+Then she disappeared.
+
+Michael sat on in the Caf� d'Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not
+arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale
+of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her
+suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was
+shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably
+murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he
+feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to
+imagine that material hell of the trial. The bandage dropped from the
+eyes of justice, and he saw her pig's-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful;
+and her scales were like a grocer's. He pitied Barnes in the clutches of
+anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist. After
+all, Daisy's story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to himself's
+hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to account for
+his dislike of Janie Filson's salute without supposing murder.
+Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the thought used to
+come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed, the thought of
+murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was absurd to think
+of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling hansoms and all
+that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes not met him at the
+Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an appointment when his
+pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie Cummings had traveled even to
+Leppard Street?
+
+Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction
+for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his
+mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the
+curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with
+double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in
+Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o'clock,
+and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever
+brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for
+Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.
+
+The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the houses
+confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars. Several
+windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals of
+habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers behind,
+and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows of his
+old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door quietly and
+stood listening for a moment in the passage. He could hear a low
+snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a word was
+distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening close to
+the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the blackness,
+fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was seeming so
+sinister in this house. It was incredible that a brief movement would
+open the front door again and let in the starlight; for, as he stood
+here, Leppard Street was under the earth deep down. He moved a little
+farther into the hall, and, putting out his hand to feel for the
+balusters, drew back with a start, for he might have clapped it down
+upon a cold bald head, so much like that was the newel's wooden knob.
+Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and every
+instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the house
+like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose and
+fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then without
+warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion. Every
+word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.
+
+"I say he gave you thirty shillings. Now then!" Barnes yapped.
+
+"And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you've had."
+
+"Don't I hear through the door what you get?"
+
+Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment
+to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had
+been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was
+the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The
+recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing
+longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night,
+which smelled so sweet after that passage.
+
+He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the
+five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he
+pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of black
+basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the speculation of
+their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning and brooded upon
+the builders that built them and the sphinx that commanded them to be
+built.
+
+In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather
+prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of
+brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped
+and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher
+and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number
+One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a
+moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a wild,
+irregular walk in Michael's direction. He had a sensation that she had
+known he was standing here against this wall, that she had watched him
+all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been standing here
+against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he could not advance
+to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the wall. Michael saw her
+very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight. Her hat was askew, and
+a black ostrich plume hung down over her big chalky face: her lips were
+glistening as if they had been smeared with jam. She was wearing a black
+satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts swept past him, like an
+overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by a wire from the scene.
+
+Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to
+have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene
+primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He
+realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could
+hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he
+had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the
+reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One with
+the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather startled
+as he walked up the steps to see Barnes' face pressed against the
+window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave
+reassuringly to a mask like that.
+
+Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key
+from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.
+
+"Here, I couldn't get down to the Orange to-night. I've had a bit of
+trouble with this girl."
+
+The gas was flaring in the sitting-room by now, and the night, which
+outside had been lightening for dawn, was black as ink upon the panes.
+
+"Sit on the bed. The chairs are all full of her dirty clothes. I'll pull
+the blinds down. I'm going to leave here to-morrow, Fane. Did you see
+her going down the road? She must have passed you by. I tell you
+straight, Fane, half an hour back I was in two minds to do her in. I
+was, straight. And I would have, if ... Oh, well, I kept my temper and
+threw her out instead. Gratitude! It's my belief gratitude doesn't exist
+in this world. You sit down and have a smoke. He left some cigarettes
+behind."
+
+"Who did?" Michael asked sharply.
+
+"Who did what?"
+
+"Left these cigarettes."
+
+"Oh, they're some I bought yesterday," said Barnes.
+
+"I think it's just as well for you that you are going to-morrow morning.
+I hope you quite realize that otherwise I should have turned you out."
+
+"Well, don't look at me in that tone of voice," Barnes protested. "I've
+had quite enough to worry me without any nastiness between old friends
+to make it worse."
+
+"You can't expect me to be pleased at the way you've treated my rooms,"
+Michael said.
+
+"Oh, the gas-stove, you mean?"
+
+"It's not a question of gas-stoves. It's a question of living on a
+woman."
+
+"Who did?"
+
+"You."
+
+"If I'd had to live on her earnings, I should be very poorly off now,"
+grumbled Barnes, in an injured voice.
+
+Under Michael's attack he was regaining his old perkiness.
+
+"At any rate, you must go to-morrow morning," Michael insisted.
+
+"Don't I keep on telling you that I'm going? It's no good for you to nag
+at me, Fane."
+
+"And what about the woman?"
+
+"Her? Let her go to----," said Barnes contemptuously. "She can't do me
+any harm. What if she does tell the coppers I've been living on her?
+They won't worry me unless they've nothing better to do, and I'll have
+hooked it by then."
+
+"You're sure she can't do you any harm?" Michael asked gravely. "There's
+nothing else she could tell the police?"
+
+"Here, what are you talking about?" asked Barnes, coming close to
+Michael and staring at him fixedly. Michael debated whether he should
+mention Cissie Cummings, but he lacked the courage either to frighten
+Barnes with the suggestion of his guilt or to preserve a superior
+attitude in the face of his enraged innocence.
+
+"I shall come round to-morrow morning, or rather this morning, at nine,"
+said Michael. "And I shall expect to find you ready to clear out of here
+for good."
+
+"You're very short with a fellow, aren't you?" said Barnes. "What do you
+want to go away for? Why don't you stay so as you can see me off the
+premises?"
+
+Michael thought that he could observe underneath all the assurance a
+sharp anxiety on Barnes' part not to be left alone.
+
+"You can lay down and have a sleep in here. I'll get on into the
+bedroom."
+
+Michael consented to stay, and Barnes was obviously relieved. He put out
+the gas and retired into the bedroom. The dawn was graying the room, and
+the sun would be up in less than an hour. Early sparrows were beginning
+to chirp. The woman who had burst out of the door and fled up the street
+seemed now a chimera of the night. Half-dozing, Michael lay on the bed,
+half dozing and faintly oppressed by the odor of patchouli coming from
+the clothes heaped upon the chairs. St. George was visible already, and
+even the outlines of The Knight in Armor were tremulously apparent.
+Michael wondered why he did not feel a greater resentment at the
+profanation of these rooms. And why did Barnes keep fidgeting on the
+other side of the folding doors? The sparrows were cheeping more loudly:
+the trains were more frequent. Michael woke from sleep with a start and
+saw that Barnes was throwing the clothes from the chairs on the floor:
+stirred up thus in this clear light the scent of patchouli was even more
+noticeable. What on earth was Barnes doing? He was turning the whole
+room upside-down.
+
+"What the deuce are you looking for?" Michael yawned.
+
+"That's all right, old man, you get on with your sleep. I'm just putting
+my things together," Barnes told him.
+
+Michael turned over and was beginning to doze again when Barnes woke him
+by the noise he made in taking the dirty dishes out of the old grate.
+
+"How on earth can I sleep, when you're continually fidgeting?" Michael
+demanded fretfully. "What's the time?"
+
+"Just gone half-past five."
+
+Barnes paid no more attention to Michael's rest, but began more
+feverishly than ever to rummage among all the things in the room.
+
+Michael could not stand his activity any longer, and dry-mouthed from an
+uncomfortable sleep, he sat up.
+
+"What _are_ you looking for?"
+
+"Well, if you want to know, I'm looking for a watch-bracelet."
+
+"It's not likely to be under the carpet," said Michael severely.
+
+Barnes was wrenching out the tacks to Michael's annoyance.
+
+"Perhaps it isn't," Barnes agreed. "But I've got to find this
+watch-bracelet. It's gold. I don't want to lose it."
+
+"Was it a woman's?"
+
+Barnes looked round at him like a small animal alarmed.
+
+"Yes, it was a woman's. What makes you ask?"
+
+"What's it like?"
+
+"Gold. Gold, I keep telling you."
+
+"When did you have it last?"
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Well, it can't have gone far."
+
+"No, blast it, of course it can't," said Barnes, searching with renewed
+impatience. He was throwing the clothes about the room again, and the
+odor of staleness became nauseating.
+
+"I'm going to wash," Michael announced, moving across to the bedroom.
+
+"You'll excuse the untidiness," Barnes called out after him, in a tone
+of rather strained jocularity.
+
+Of Michael's old room no vestige remained. A very large double-bed took
+up almost all the space, and all the furniture was new and tawdry. The
+walls were hung with studies of cocottes pretending to be naiads and
+dryads, horrible women posed in the silvanity of a photographer's
+studio. The room was littered with clothes, and Michael could not move a
+step without entangling his feet in a petticoat or treading upon hidden
+shoes. He tried to splash his face, but the very washstand was sickly.
+
+"Well, you've managed to debauch my bedroom quite successfully," he said
+to Barnes, when he came back to the sitting-room.
+
+"That's all right. I'll get rid of all the new furniture. I can pop the
+lot. Well, it's mine. If I could find this bloody watch-bracelet, I
+could begin to make some arrangements."
+
+"What about breakfast?" Michael began to look for something to eat.
+Every plate and knife was dirty, and there were three or four
+half-finished tins of condensed milk which had turned pistachio green
+and stank abominably.
+
+"There's a couple of herrings somewhere," said Barnes. "Or there was.
+But everything seems upside-down this morning. Where the hell is that
+watch? It can't have walked away on its own. If that mare took it! I've
+a very particular reason for not wanting to lose that watch. Oh, ----
+----! wherever can it have got to?"
+
+"Well, anyway shut up using such filthy language. When does the milkman
+come round?"
+
+"I don't know when he comes round. Here, Fane, have you ever heard of
+anyone talking in their sleep?"
+
+"Of course I've heard of people talking in their sleep," Michael
+answered. "It's not very unusual."
+
+"Ah, hollering out, yes--but talking in a sensible sort of a way, so
+that if you came in and listened to what they said, you'd think it was
+the truth? Have you ever heard of that?"
+
+"I don't suppose I can give you an instance, but obviously it must often
+happen."
+
+"Must it?" said Barnes, in a depressed voice. "You see, I set particular
+value by this watch-bracelet; and I thought perhaps I might have talked
+about it in my sleep, and that mare just to spite me have gone and taken
+it. I wonder where it is now."
+
+Michael also began to wonder where it was now, and Barnes' anxiety was
+transferred to him, so that he began to fancy the whole of this fine
+morning was tremendously bound up with exactly where the watch-bracelet
+now was. Barnes had begun to turn over everything for about the sixth
+time.
+
+"If the watch is here," said Michael irritably, "it will be found when
+you move your things out, and if it's not here, it's useless to go on
+worrying about it."
+
+"Ah, it's all very nice for you to be so calm! But what price it's being
+my watch that's lost, not yours, old sport?"
+
+"I'm not going to talk about it any more," Michael declared. "I want to
+know what you're going to do when you leave here."
+
+"Ah, that's it! What am I?"
+
+"Would you like to go to the Colonies?"
+
+"What, say good-bye to dear old Leicester Square and pop off for good
+and all? I wouldn't mind."
+
+"I don't mind telling you," said Michael, "that if I'd discovered you
+here a week ago living like this, I should have had nothing more to do
+with you. As it is, I've a good mind to sling you out to look after
+yourself. However, I'm willing to get you a ticket for wherever you
+think you'd like to go, and when I hear you've arrived, I'll send you
+enough money to keep you going for a time."
+
+"Fane, I don't mind saying it. You've been a good pal to me."
+
+"Hark, there's the milkman at last!" Michael exclaimed. He went out into
+the sparkling air of the fine Summer morning and came back with plenty
+of milk for breakfast. After they had made a sort of meal, he suggested
+that Barnes ought to come with him and visit some of the Colonial
+Agencies. They walked down Victoria Street and across St. James' Park,
+and in the Strand he made Barnes have a shave. The visit to the barber
+took away some of his nocturnal raffishness, and Michael found him very
+amusing during the various discussions that took place in the Agencies.
+
+"I think the walk has done you good."
+
+"Yes," Barnes doubtfully admitted. "I don't think it has done me much
+harm."
+
+They had lunch at Romano's, where Barnes drank a good deal of Chianti
+and became full of confidence in his future.
+
+"That's where it is, Fane. A fellow like you is lucky. But that's no
+reason why I shouldn't be lucky in my turn. My life has been a failure
+so far. Yes, I'm not going to attempt to deny it. There are lots of
+things in my life that might have been different. You'll understand when
+I say different I mean pleasanter for everybody all round, myself
+included. But that's all finished. With this fruit-farm--well, of course
+it's no good grumbling and running down good things--those apples we saw
+were big enough to make anybody's fortune. Cawdashit, Fane, I can see
+myself sitting under one of those apple-trees and counting the bloody
+fruit falling down at my feet and me popping them into baskets and
+selling them--where was it he said we sold them?" Barnes poured out more
+Chianti. "Really, it seems a sin on a fine day like this to be hanging
+about in London. Well, I've had some sprees in old London, and that's a
+fact; so I'm not going to start running it down now. If I hadn't lost
+that watch-bracelet, I wouldn't give a damn for anybody. Good old
+London," he went on meditatively. "Yes, I've had some times--good times
+and bad times--and here I am."
+
+He gradually became incoherent, and Michael thought it would be as well
+to escort him back to Leppard Street and impress on him once again that
+he must remove all his things immediately.
+
+"You'll have to be quick with your packing-up. You ought to sail next
+week. I shall go and see about your passage to-morrow."
+
+They drove back to Leppard Street in a taxi, and as they got out Barnes
+said emphatically:
+
+"You know what it is, Fane? Cawdashit! I feel like a marquis when I'm
+out with you, and it I hadn't have lost that watch-bracelet I'd feel
+like the bloody German Emperor. That's me. All up in the air one minute,
+and yet worry myself barmy over a little thing like a watch the next."
+
+"Hullo!" he exclaimed, looking up the road as their taxi drove off.
+"Somebody else is playing at being a millionaire."
+
+Another taxi was driving into Leppard Street.
+
+Michael had already opened the front door, and he told Barnes not to
+hang about on the steps. Barnes turned reluctantly from his inspection
+of the new taxi's approach. It pulled up at Number One, and three men
+jumped out.
+
+"That's your man," Michael heard one of them say, and in another moment
+he heard, "Henry Meats ... I hold a warrant ... murder of Cissie ...
+anything you say ... used against you," all in the mumbo-jumbo of a
+nightmare.
+
+Michael came down the steps again very quickly; and Barnes, now
+handcuffed, turned to him despairingly.
+
+"Tell 'em my name isn't Meats, Fane. Tell 'em they've made a mistake.
+Oh, my God, I never done it! I never done it!"
+
+The two men were pushing him, dead white, crumpled, sobbing, into the
+taxi; he seemed very small beside the big men with their square
+shoulders and bristly mustaches. Michael heard him still moaning as the
+taxi jangled and whirred abruptly forward. The third man watched it
+disappear between the two walls; then he strolled up the steps to enter
+the house. Mrs. Cleghorne was already in the hall, and over the
+balusters of each landing faces could be seen peering down. As if the
+word were uttered by the house itself, "murder" floated in a whisper
+upon the air. The faces shifted; doors opened and shut far above;
+footsteps hurried to and fro; and still of all these sounds "murder" was
+the most audible.
+
+"This is the gentleman who rents the rooms," Mrs. Cleghorne was saying.
+
+"But I've not been near them till yesterday evening for six months,"
+Michael hurriedly explained.
+
+"That's quite right," Mrs. Cleghorne echoed.
+
+"Well, I'm afraid we must go through them," said the officer.
+
+"Oh, of course."
+
+"Let me see, is this your address?"
+
+"Well, no--Cheyne Walk--173."
+
+"We might want to have a little talk with you about this here Meats."
+
+Michael was enraged with himself for not asseverating "Barnes! Barnes!
+Barnes!" as he had been begged to do. He despised himself for not trying
+to save that white crumpled thing huddled between those big men with
+their bristly mustaches; yet all the while he felt violently afraid that
+the police officer would think him involved in these disgraceful rooms,
+that he would suppose the pictures and the tawdry furniture belonged to
+him, that he would imagine the petticoats and underlinen strewn about
+the floor had something to do with him.
+
+"If you want me," he found himself saying, "you have my address."
+
+Quickly he hurried away from Leppard Street, and traveled in a trance of
+shame to Hardingham. Alan was just going in to bat, when Michael walked
+across from the Hall to the cricket-field.
+
+Stella came from her big basket chair to greet him, and for a while he
+sat with her in the buttercups, watching Alan at the wicket. Nothing had
+ever seemed so easy as the bowling of the opposite side on this fine
+June evening, and Michael tried to banish the thought of Barnes in the
+spaciousness of these level fields. Stella was evidently being very
+careful not to convey the impression that she had lately won a victory
+over him. It was really ridiculous, Michael thought, as he plucked idly
+the buttercups and made desultory observations to Stella about the merit
+of a stroke by Alan, it was more than ridiculous, it was deliberate
+folly to enmesh himself with such horrors as he had beheld at Leppard
+Street. There were doubtless very unpleasant events continually
+happening in this world, but willfully to drag one's self into misery on
+account of them was merely to show an incapacity to appreciate the more
+fortunate surroundings of one's allotted niche. The avoidance of even
+the sight of evil was as justifiable as the avoidance of evil itself,
+and the moral economy of the world might suffer a dangerous
+displacement, if everyone were to involve themselves in such events as
+those in which himself had lately been involved. Duty was owing all the
+time to people nearer at hand than Barnes. No doubt the world would be
+better for being rid of him; diseases of the body must be fought, and
+the corruption of human society must be cleansed. Any pity for Barnes
+was a base sentimentalism; it was merely a reaction of personal
+discomfort at having seen an unpleasant operation. The sentimentalism of
+that cry "Don't hurt him!" was really contemptible, and since it seemed
+that he was likely to be too weak to bear the sight of the cleansing
+knife, he must in future avoid the occasion of its use. Otherwise his
+intellectual outlook was going to be sapped, and he would find himself
+in the ranks of the faddists.
+
+"I think I shall stay down here the rest of the summer, if I may," he
+said to Stella.
+
+"My dear, of course you can. We'll have a wonderful time. Hullo, Alan is
+retiring."
+
+Alan came up and sat beside them in the buttercups.
+
+"I thought I saw you just as I was going in," he said. "Anything going
+on in town?"
+
+"No, nothing much," said Michael. "I saw a man arrested for murder this
+afternoon."
+
+"Did you really? How beastly! Our team's just beginning to get into
+shape. I say, Stella. That youth working on old Rundle's farm is going
+to be pret-ty good. Did you see him lift their fast bowlers twice
+running over the pond?"
+
+Michael strolled away to take a solitary walk. It seemed incredible now
+to think that he had brought Lily down here, that he had wandered with
+her over this field. What an infringement it must have seemed to Stella
+and Alan of their already immemorial peace. They had really been very
+good about his invasion. And here was the wood where he and Stella had
+fought. Michael sat down in the glade and listened to the busy
+flutterings of the birds. Why had Stella objected to his marriage with
+Lily? All the superficial answers were ready at once; but was not her
+real objection only another facet of the diamond of selfishness?
+Selfishness was a diamond. Precious, hard, and very often
+beautiful--when seen by itself.
+
+Michael spent a week at Hardingham, during which he managed to put out
+of his mind the thought of Barnes in prison awaiting his trial. Then one
+day the butler informed him of a person wishing to speak to him. In the
+library he found the detective who had asked for his address at Leppard
+Street.
+
+"Sorry to have to trouble you, sir, but there was one or two little
+questions we wanted to ask."
+
+Michael feared he would have to appear at the trial, and asked at once
+if that was going to be necessary.
+
+"Oh, no, I don't think so. We've got it all marked out fair and square
+against Mr. Meats. He doesn't stand a chance of getting off. How did you
+come to be mixed up with him?"
+
+Michael explained the circumstances which had led up to his knowing
+Meats.
+
+"I see; and you just wanted to give him a bit of a helping hand. Oh,
+well, the feeling does you credit, I'm bound to say; but another time,
+sir, I should make a few inquiries first. We should probably have had
+him before, if he hadn't been helped by you. Of course, I quite
+understand you knew nothing about this murder, but anyone can often do a
+lot of harm by helping undeserving people. We mightn't have nabbed him
+even now, if some woman hadn't brought us a nice little bit of evidence,
+and I found some more things myself after a search. Oh, yes, he doesn't
+stand an earthly. We knew for a moral cert who did it, straightaway; but
+the police don't get a fair chance in England. We let all these blooming
+Radicals interfere too much. That's my opinion. Anyone would think the
+police was a lot of criminals by the way some people talk about them."
+
+"Is anybody defending him?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll be awarded a counsel," said the detective indignantly. "For
+which you and me has to pay. That's a nice thing, isn't it? But he
+doesn't stand an earthly."
+
+"Where will he be hanged?"
+
+"Pentonville."
+
+Michael thought how Mrs. Murdoch in Neptune Crescent would shudder some
+Tuesday morning in the near future.
+
+"I'm sorry you should have had to come all this way to find me," Michael
+said. He hated himself for being polite to the inspector, but he could
+not help it. He rang the bell.
+
+"Oh, Dawkins, will you give Inspector--what is your name, by the bye?"
+
+"Dawkins," said the inspector.
+
+"How curious!" Michael laughed.
+
+"Yes, sir," the inspector laughed.
+
+"Lunch in the gun room, Dawkins. You must be hungry."
+
+"Well, sir, I could do with a snack, I daresay." He followed his
+namesake from the room, and outside Michael could hear them begin to
+chatter of the coincidence.
+
+"But supposing I'd been in the same state of life as Meats," Michael
+said to himself. "What devil's web wouldn't they be trying to spin round
+me?"
+
+He was seized with fury at himself for his cowardice. He had thought of
+nothing but his own reputation ever since Meats had been arrested. He
+had worried over the opinion of a police inspector; had been ashamed of
+the appearance of the rooms; had actually been afraid that he would be
+implicated in the disgraceful affair. So long as it had been easy to
+flatter himself with the pleasure he was giving or the good he was doing
+to Meats, he had kept him with money. Now when Meats had been dragged
+away, he was anxious to disclaim the whole acquaintanceship for fear of
+the criticism of a big man with a bristly mustache. The despair in
+Meats' last cry to him echoed round this library. He had seen society in
+action: not all the devils and fiends imagined by medi�val monks were so
+horrible as those big men with bristly mustaches. What did they know of
+Meats and his life? What did they care, but that they were paid by
+society to remove rubbish? Justice had decreed that Meats should be
+arrested, and like a dead rat in the gutter he was swept up by these
+scavengers. What compact had he broken that men should freeze to stones
+and crush him? He had broken the laws of men and the laws of God; he had
+committed murder. And were not murders as foul being committed every
+moment? Murdered ambition, murdered love, murdered pity, murdered
+gratitude, murdered faith, did none of these cry out for vengeance?
+
+Society had seized the murderer, and it was useless to cry out. Himself
+was as impotent as the prisoner. Meats had sinned against the hive: this
+infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he felt
+to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was become
+a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by fear.
+Something was needed to destroy this gregarious organism. War and
+pestilence must come; but in the past these two had come often enough,
+and mankind was the same afterward. This ant-hill of a globe had been
+ravaged often enough, but the ants were all busy again carrying their
+mean little burdens of food hither and thither in affright for the
+comfort of their mean little lives.
+
+"And I'm as bad as any of them," said Michael to himself. "I know I have
+obligations in Leppard Street, and I've run away from them because I'm
+afraid of what people will think. Of course, I always fail. I'm a
+coward."
+
+He could not stay any longer at Hardingham. He must go and see about
+Mrs. Smith now. Society would be seizing her soon and bringing her
+miserable life to an end in whitewashed prison corridors. He must do
+something for Meats. Perhaps he would not be able to save him from
+death, but he must not sit here ringing bells for butlers called Dawkins
+to feed inspectors called Dawkins.
+
+Stella came in with the first roses of the year.
+
+"Aren't they beauties?"
+
+"Yes, splendid. I'm going up to town this afternoon."
+
+"But not for long?"
+
+"I don't know. It depends. Do you know, Stella, it's an extraordinary
+thing, but ever since you've practically given up playing, I feel very
+much more alive. How do you account for that?"
+
+"Well, I haven't given up playing for one thing," Stella contradicted.
+
+"Stella do you ever feel inspired nowadays?"
+
+"Not so much as I did," she admitted.
+
+"I feel now as if I were on the verge of an inspiration."
+
+"Not another Lily," she said quickly, with half a laugh.
+
+"You've no right to sneer at me about that," he said fiercely. "You must
+be very careful, you know. _You'll_ become flabby, if you aren't
+careful, here at Hardingham."
+
+"Oh, Michael!" she laughed. "Don't look at me as if you were a Major
+Prophet. I won't become flabby. I shall start composing at once."
+
+"There you are!" he cried triumphantly. "Never say again that I can't
+wake you up."
+
+"You did not wake me up."
+
+"I did. I did. And do you know I believe I've discovered that I'm an
+anarchist?"
+
+"Is that your inspiration?"
+
+"Who knows? It may be."
+
+"Well, don't come and be anarchical down here, because Alan is going to
+stand at the next election."
+
+"What on earth good would Alan be in Parliament?" Michael asked
+derisively. "He's much too happy."
+
+"Michael, why are you so horrid about Alan nowadays?"
+
+He was penitent in a moment at the suggestion, but when he said
+good-bye to Stella he had a curious feeling that from henceforth he was
+going to be stronger than her.
+
+On reaching London, Michael went to see Castleton at the Temple, and he
+found him in chambers at the top of dusty stairs in King's Beach Walk.
+
+"Lucky to get these, wasn't I?" said Castleton. By craning out of the
+window, the river was visible.
+
+"I suppose you've never had a murder case yet?" Michael asked.
+
+"Not yet," said Castleton. "In fact, I'm going in for Chancery work. And
+I shall get my first brief in about five years, with luck."
+
+Michael inquired how one went to work to retain the greatest criminal
+advocate of the day, and Castleton said he would have to be approached
+through a solicitor.
+
+"Well, will you get hold of him for me?"
+
+Castleton looked rather blank.
+
+"If you can't get him, get the next best, and so on. Tell him the man I
+want to defend hasn't a chance, and that's why I'm particularly anxious
+he should get off."
+
+They discussed details for some time, and Castleton was astonished at
+Michael's wish to aid Meats.
+
+"It seems very perverse," he said.
+
+"Perverse!" Michael echoed. "And what about your profession? That is
+really the most perverse factor in modern life."
+
+"But in this case," Castleton argued, "the victim seems so utterly
+worthless."
+
+"Exactly," said Michael. "But as society never interfered when he was
+passively offensive, why, the moment he becomes actively offensive,
+should society have the right to put him out of the way? They never
+tried to cure him for his own good. Why should they kill him for their
+own?"
+
+"You want to strike at the foundations of the legal system," said the
+barrister.
+
+"Exactly," Michael agreed; and the argument came to an end because there
+was obviously nothing more to be said.
+
+Castleton promises to do all he could for Meats, and also to keep
+Michael's name out of the business. As Michael walked down the stairs,
+it gave him a splendid satisfaction to think how already the law was
+being set in motion against the law. A blow for Inspector Dawkins. And
+what about the murdered girl? "She won't be helped by Meats' death,"
+said Michael to himself. "Society is not considering her protection now
+any more than it did when she was alive." _No slops must be emptied
+here_: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the
+stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a sentimentalist.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.
+
+"A nice set-out and no mistake!" she declared. "Half of the neighborhood
+have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder had been done
+in here. Mr. Cleghorne's quite hoarse with hollering out to them to keep
+off. And it never rains but what it pours. There's a poor woman gone and
+died here now. However, a funeral's a little more lively than the police
+nosing round, though her not having a blessed halfpenny and owing me
+three weeks on the rent it certainly won't be anything better than a
+pauper's funeral."
+
+"What woman?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I've been very good to--a Mrs. Smith."
+
+"Dead?" he echoed.
+
+"Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body.
+What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I _should_ say. It quite worried Mr.
+Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around
+so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he's read a lot about these
+Roman Catholics, and he doesn't hold with them. They're that underhand,
+he says, it makes him nervous."
+
+"Can I see this priest?" Michael asked.
+
+"Well, it's hardly the room you're accustomed to. I've really looked at
+her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old mother
+has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her."
+
+"I think I should like to see this priest," Michael persisted.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and
+she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They
+descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out
+to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused
+herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was
+sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look
+up from his Office.
+
+"Is that you, Sister?" he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited
+for him to explain his business.
+
+"I wanted to ask about this poor woman."
+
+Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing
+was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
+
+"I was interested in her," Michael exclaimed.
+
+"Indeed!" said the priest dryly. "I wouldn't have thought so."
+
+"Is her cat here?"
+
+"There was some sort of an animal, but the woman of the house took it
+off."
+
+A silence followed, and Michael was aware of the priest's hostility.
+
+"I suppose she didn't see her son before she died?" Michael went on.
+"Her son is with the Jesuits."
+
+"You seem to know a great deal about the poor soul?"
+
+"I thought I had managed to help her," said Michael, in a sad voice.
+
+"Indeed?" commented the priest, even more dryly.
+
+"And there is nothing I can do now?"
+
+"Almighty God has taken her," said the priest. "There is nothing you can
+do."
+
+"I could have some Masses said for her."
+
+"Are you a Catholic?" the priest asked.
+
+"No; but I fancy I shall be a Catholic," Michael said; and as he spoke
+it was like a rushing wind. He hurried out into the passage where a nun
+passed him in the gloom. "She will be praying," Michael thought, and,
+looking back over his shoulder, he said:
+
+"Pray for me, Sister."
+
+The nun was evidently startled by the voice, and went on quickly down
+the three steps and up the other into Mrs. Smith's den.
+
+Michael climbed upstairs to interview the Solutionist. He found him
+lying in bed.
+
+"Why wasn't that money paid regularly?" he asked severely.
+
+"Who is it?" the Solutionist muttered, in fuddled accents. "Wanted the
+money myself. Had a glorious time. The cat's all right, and the poor old
+rabbits are dead. Can't give everybody a good time. Somebody's got to
+suffer in this world."
+
+Michael left him, and without entering his old rooms again went away
+from Leppard Street.
+
+The moment had come to visit Rome, and remembering how he had once
+dissuaded Maurice from going there, he felt some compunction now in
+telling him that he wanted to travel alone. However, it would be
+impossible to visit Rome for the first time with Maurice. In the studio
+he led up to his backing out of the engagement.
+
+"About this going abroad," he began.
+
+"I say, Michael, I don't think I can come just now. The editor of The
+Point of View wants a series of articles on the ballet, and I'm going to
+start on them at once."
+
+It was a relief to Michael, and he wished Maurice good luck.
+
+"Yes, I think they're going to be rather good," he said confidently.
+"I'm going to begin with the Opera: then the Empire and the Alhambra:
+and in September there will be the new ballet at the Orient. Of course,
+I've got a theory about English ballet."
+
+"Is there anything about which you haven't got a theory?" Michael asked.
+"Hullo, you've got the Venetian mirror from Ararat House. I'm so glad!"
+
+"I've arranged all that," Maurice said. "Lily Haden has gone to live
+with a girl called Sylvia Scarlett. Rather a terror, I thought."
+
+"Yes, I had an idea you'd find her a bit difficult."
+
+"Oh, but I scored off her in the end," said Maurice quickly.
+
+"Congratulations," said Michael. "Well, I'm going to Rome."
+
+"I say, rather hot."
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"I used to be rather keen on Rome, but I've a theory it's generally a
+disappointment. However, I suppose I shall have to go one day."
+
+"Yes, I don't think Rome ought to miss your patronage, Maurice."
+
+They parted as intimate friends, but while Michael was going downstairs
+from the studio he thought that it might very easily be for the last
+time.
+
+His mother was at home for tea; lots of women and a bishop were having a
+committee about something. When they had all rustled away into the
+mellow June evening, Michael asked what had been accomplished.
+
+"It's this terrible state of the London streets," said Mrs. Fane.
+"Something has got to be done about these miserable women. The Bishop of
+Chelsea has promised to bring in some kind of a bill in Parliament. He
+feels so strongly about it."
+
+"What does he feel?" Michael asked.
+
+"Why, of course, that they shouldn't be allowed."
+
+"The remedy lies with him," Michael said. "He must take them the
+Sacraments."
+
+"My dearest boy, what are you talking about? He does his best. He's
+always picking them up and driving them home in his brougham. He can't
+do more than that. Really he quite thrilled us with some of his
+experiences."
+
+Michael laughed and took hold of her hand.
+
+"What would you say if I told you that I was thinking very seriously of
+being a priest?"
+
+"Oh, my dear Michael, and you look so particularly nice in tweeds!"
+
+Michael laughed and went upstairs to pack. He would leave London
+to-morrow morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OLD WORLD
+
+
+The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn
+was quivering upon the meadows near Chamb�ry Michael was sure with an
+almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hardships
+of thought. Waterfalls swayed from the mountains, and the gray torrents
+they fed plunged along beside the train. Down through Italy they
+traveled all day, past the cypresses, and the olive-trees wise and
+graceful in the sunlight. It was already dusk when they reached the
+Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses
+shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset;
+but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train
+reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter
+carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down
+the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber
+shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide
+street in Rome.
+
+"There has been nothing like this," he said, "since I walked down the
+High. There will be nothing like this ever again."
+
+Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups of
+ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one mighty
+column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was figured with
+innumerable horses and warriors.
+
+"We must seek for truth in the past," he said.
+
+How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was
+only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in
+Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues,
+rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived as
+shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this
+column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name.
+What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the
+morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct
+of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this
+solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.
+
+"All that I have done and experienced so far," Michael thought, "would
+not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of other
+people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have been given
+knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself
+to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man. Man for man
+standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader. The reason why
+the modern world is so critical of the fruits of Christianity after
+nineteen hundred years is because they have expected it from the
+beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to the individual
+the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is much more anxious
+about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds are destroyed,
+whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake, or by the great
+illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a great war, and
+everybody will discover it has come either because people are Christians
+or because they are not Christians. Nobody will think it is because each
+man wants to interfere with the conduct of his neighbor. That woman in
+Leppard Street who died in the peace of God, how much more was she a
+Christian than me, who, without perceiving the beam in my own eye, have
+trotted round operating on the motes of other people. And once I had to
+make an effort to kiss her in fellowship. Rome! Rome! How parochial you
+make my youth!"
+
+The last exclamation was uttered aloud.
+
+"Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?" said a
+voice.
+
+A man in a black cloak was speaking.
+
+"No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies," said
+Michael.
+
+"There is only one tragedy for youth."
+
+"And that is?"
+
+"Age," said the stranger.
+
+"And what is the tragedy of age?"
+
+"There is no tragedy of age," said the stranger.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER
+
+TO
+
+JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO
+
+
+MY DEAR JOHN,
+
+There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in
+prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it
+thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have
+himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the
+book.
+
+You will remember that last year "Youth's Encounter," the first part of
+Michael Fane's story, obtained a great advertisement through the action
+of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be
+drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of
+compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the
+realities of war will obtain me a pardon in "Sinister Street," the
+second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the
+sensitive or affronted the simple.
+
+Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the question
+of the form of the English novel. There has lately been noticeable in
+the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel is thinly
+disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are peculiarly
+formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack upon the form
+of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted in regarding
+"Youth's Encounter" merely as an achievement of memory, and I have felt
+sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of literary Datas,
+rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist. You know from
+many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could remember of my
+childhood, the book would not by this time have reached much beyond my
+fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public school and my
+own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I fancy it would
+have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a place of which
+I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that nowadays it is a
+much better university than Oxford, and in thinking thus you are the
+only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy. Obviously, too, it was
+unavoidable in writing about St. James' that I should draw certain
+characters from the life, and for doing this I have been attacked on
+grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of schoolmasters to
+be exempt from the privilege of public men to be sometimes caricatured.
+Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With regard to the Oxford
+dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to them what is after all
+much more likely to be a true impression of their virtues and follies
+than those formed by a schoolboy of his masters. Therefore, in this
+second volume, "Sinister Street," there is not a single portrait of a
+don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the undergraduate a much less
+important factor than the schoolmaster is to the schoolboy, and the few
+shadows of dons which appear in this volume are as vital as most dons in
+the flesh seem to the normal undergraduate.
+
+The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably will
+be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as such
+rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own existence
+up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth writing at
+such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of people who can
+bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the capacity of the
+spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your authority was said by
+Aristotle. "Art," says _The Sydney Bulletin_, a curious antipodean
+paper, "is selection." "It is time to protest," says an American paper,
+"against these long books." At this rate, we shall soon be spending all
+our time with books. "The enormous length must make it formless," other
+critics have decided. Ultimately I believe Aristotle's remark to be the
+truest guide, and I am tempted to hope that with the publication of the
+second volume many irrelevancies have established their relevancy.
+
+It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the
+end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes
+as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life,
+but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for
+me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new
+adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society
+preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences
+that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be
+determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these
+influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same time
+I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he is
+not myself in a looking-glass.
+
+I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional
+use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any
+"preciousness," but to efforts at finding the only word that will say
+what I mean. To take two examples: "Reasty" signifies "covered with a
+kind of rust and having a rancid taste," and it seems to me exactly to
+describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several
+suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects.
+"Inquiline" sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been
+sentimentalized like "pilgrim"; it is not an Americanism like
+"transients," and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay;
+whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given
+votes.
+
+We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world,
+and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure
+Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of
+the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to a
+duke.
+
+There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of
+this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this
+year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other readers
+who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second volume
+have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have seemed
+above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe there is
+nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of obligation
+as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his anonymous critics.
+
+Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our
+enduring friendship.
+
+Yours ever,
+
+COMPTON MACKENZIE.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
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@@ -0,0 +1,22987 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sinister Street, vol. 2
+
+Author: Compton Mackenzie
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2010 [EBook #33798]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SINISTER STREET, VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SINISTER STREET
+
+BY
+
+COMPTON MACKENZIE
+
+AUTHOR OF "CARNIVAL," "YOUTH'S ENCOUNTER," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+DREAMING SPIRES
+
+CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+I. THE FIRST DAY 3
+
+II. THE FIRST WEEK                  32
+
+III. THE FIRST TERM                 47
+
+IV. CHEYNE WALK                     63
+
+V. YOUTH'S DOMINATION               84
+
+VI. GRAY AND BLUE                  110
+
+VII. VENNER'S                      143
+
+VIII. THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS     165
+
+IX. THE LESSON OF SPAIN            183
+
+X. STELLA IN OXFORD                209
+
+XI. SYMPATHY                       225
+
+XII. 202 HIGH                      245
+
+XIII. PLASHERS MEAD                269
+
+XIV. 99 ST. GILES                  288
+
+XV. THE LAST TERM                  308
+
+XVI. THE LAST WEEK                 319
+
+XVII. THE LAST DAY                 333
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+
+CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+I. OSTIA DITIS                     349
+
+II. NEPTUNE CRESCENT               371
+
+III. THE CAFE D'ORANGE             401
+
+IV. LEPPARD STREET                 427
+
+V. THE INNERMOST CIRCLE            481
+
+VI. TINDERBOX LANE                 496
+
+VII. THE GATE OF IVORY             552
+
+VIII. SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE         583
+
+IX. THE GATE OF HORN               602
+
+X. THE OLD WORLD                   652
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER TO
+JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORADATO         655
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+DREAMING SPIRES
+
+    Bright memories of young poetic pleasure
+      In free companionship, the loving stress
+    Of all life-beauty, lull'd in studious leisure,
+      When every Muse was jocund with excess
+      Of fine delight and tremulous happiness;
+    The breath of an indolent unbridled June,
+    When delicate thought fell from the dreamy moon:
+      But now strange care, sorrow, and grief oppress.
+
+      ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FIRST DAY
+
+
+Michael felt glad to think he would start the adventure of Oxford from
+Paddington. The simplicity of that railway station might faintly
+mitigate alarms which no amount of previous deliberation could entirely
+disperse. He remembered how once he had lightly seen off a Cambridge
+friend from Liverpool Street and, looking back at the suburban tumult of
+the Great Eastern Railway, he was grateful for the simplicity of
+Paddington.
+
+Michael had been careful that all his heavy luggage should be sent in
+advance; and he had shown himself gravely exacting toward Alan in this
+matter of luggage, writing several times to remind him of his promise
+not to appear on the platform with more than a portmanteau of moderate
+size and a normal kit-bag. Michael hoped this precaution would prevent
+at any rate the porters from commenting upon the freshness of him and
+his friend.
+
+"Oxford train?" inquired a porter, as the hansom pulled up. Michael
+nodded, and made up his mind to show his esteem when he tipped this
+promethean.
+
+"Third class?" the porter went on. Michael mentally doubled the tip, for
+he had neglected to assure himself beforehand about the etiquette of
+class, and nothing could have suited so well his self-consciousness as
+this information casually yielded.
+
+"Let me see, you didn't have any golf-clubs, did you, sir?" asked the
+porter.
+
+Michael shook his head regretfully, for as he looked hurriedly up and
+down the platform in search of Alan, he perceived golf-clubs everywhere,
+and when at last he saw him, actually even he had a golf-bag slung over
+his shoulder.
+
+"I never knew you played golf," said Michael indignantly.
+
+"I don't. These are the governor's. He's given up playing," Alan
+explained.
+
+"Are you going to play?" Michael pursued. He was feeling rather envious
+of the appearance of these veteran implements.
+
+"I may have a shot," Alan admitted.
+
+"You might have told me you were going to bring them," Michael grumbled.
+
+"My dear old ass, I never knew I was, until the governor wanged them
+into my lap just as I was starting."
+
+Michael turned aside and bought a number of papers, far too many for the
+short journey. Indeed, all the way they lay on the rack unregarded,
+while the train crossed and recrossed the silver Thames. At first he was
+often conscious of the other undergraduates in the compartment, who
+seemed to be eying him with a puzzled contempt; but very soon, when he
+perceived that this manner of looking at one's neighbor was general, he
+became reconciled to the attitude and ascribed it to a habit of mind
+rather than to the expression of any individual distaste. Then suddenly,
+as Michael was gazing out of the window, the pearly sky broke into
+spires and pinnacles and domes and towers. He caught his breath for one
+bewitched moment, before he busied himself with the luggage on the rack.
+
+On the platform Michael and Alan decided to part company, as neither of
+them felt sure enough whether St. Mary's or Christ Church were nearer to
+the station to risk a joint hansom.
+
+"Shall I come and see you this afternoon?" Michael rashly offered.
+
+"Oh, rather," Alan agreed, and they turned away from one another to
+secure their cabs.
+
+All the time that Michael was driving to St. Mary's, he was regretting
+he had not urged Alan to visit him first. A growing sensation of shy
+dread was making him vow that once safe in his own rooms at St. Mary's
+nothing should drag him forth again that day. What on earth would he say
+when he arrived at the college? Would he have to announce himself? How
+would he find his rooms? On these points he had pestered several Old
+Jacobeans now at Oxford, but none of them could remember the precise
+ceremonies of arrival. Michael leaned back in the hansom and cursed
+their inefficient memories.
+
+Then the cab pulled up by the St. Mary's lodge, and events proceeded
+with unexpected rapidity. A cheerful man with red hair and a round face
+welcomed his luggage. The cabman was paid the double of his correct
+fare, and to Michael's relief drove off instantly. From a sort of glass
+case that filled half the interior of the lodge somebody very much like
+a family butler inquired richly who Michael was.
+
+"Mr. C. M. S. Fane?" rolled out the unctuous man.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Is there another Fane?" he asked curiously.
+
+"No, sir," said the head porter, and the negative came out with the
+sound of a drawn cork. "No, sir, but I wished to hessateen if I had your
+initials down correct in my list. Mr. C. M. S. Fane," he went on,
+looking at a piece of paper. "St. Cuthbert's. Four. Two pair right. Your
+servant is Porcher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you'll settle
+with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
+Cuthbert's. Four. Two pair right."
+
+The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael's bag, and Michael was
+preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a warning
+hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole labeled
+Porcher.
+
+"These letters are for you, sir," he explained pompously. Michael took
+them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
+along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and shouted
+"Porcher!" From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the scout
+appeared.
+
+"One of your gentlemen arrived," said Henry. "Mr. Fane." Then he touched
+his cap and retired.
+
+"Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?" Porcher asked.
+
+"Not much," said Michael apologetically.
+
+"There's a nice lot of stuff in your rooms," Porcher informed him. "Come
+in yesterday morning, it did."
+
+They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors Michael
+was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a water-tap that
+no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck in his mind
+somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.
+
+"These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you'll shout, of
+course. I'm just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale's wine."
+
+Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
+packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
+in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted with
+much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was aware of
+a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room, it was a
+fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction of a
+privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
+bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
+green grass, across the Warden's garden with its faint gaiety of
+autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
+the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
+leisurely files about the spare sunlight.
+
+It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
+problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would be
+necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
+tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
+attention to himself than would be pleasant, and he postponed the
+summons in favor of an examination of his letters. One after another he
+opened them, and every one was the advertisement of a tailor or
+hairdresser or tobacconist. The tailors were the most insistent; they
+even went so far as to announce that representatives would call upon him
+at his pleasure. Michael made up his mind to order his cap and gown
+after lunch. Lunch! How should he obtain lunch? Where should he obtain
+lunch? When should he obtain lunch? Obviously there must be some precise
+manner of obtaining lunch, some ritual consecrated by generations of St.
+Mary's men. The loneliness came back triumphant, and plunged him
+dejectedly down into a surprisingly deep wicker-chair. The fire crackled
+in the silence, and the problem of lunch remained insoluble. The need
+for Porcher's advice became more desperate. Other freshmen before him
+must have depended upon their scout's experience. He began to practice
+calling Porcher in accents so low that they acquired a tender and
+reproachful significance. Michael braced himself for the performance
+after these choked and muffled rehearsals, and went boldly out on to the
+stone landing. An almost entranced silence held the staircase, a
+silence that he could not bring himself to violate. On the door of the
+rooms opposite he read his neighbor's name--_Mackintosh_. He wished he
+knew whether Mackintosh were a freshman. It would be delightful to make
+him share the responsibility of summoning Porcher from his task of
+arranging Lonsdale's wine. And who was Lonsdale? _No slops must be
+emptied here! Mackintosh! Fane!_ Here were three announcements hinting
+at humanity in a desolation of stillness. Michael reading his own name
+gathered confidence and a volume of breath, leaned over the stone
+parapet of the landing and, losing all his courage in a sigh, decided to
+walk downstairs and take his chance of meeting Porcher on the way.
+
+On the floor beneath Michael read _Bannerman_ over the left-hand door
+and _Templeton-Collins_ over the right-hand door. While he was pondering
+the personality and status of Templeton-Collins, presumably the
+gentleman himself appeared, stared at Michael very deliberately, came
+forward and, leaning over the parapet, yelled in a voice that combined
+rage, protest, disappointment and appeal with the maximum of sound:
+"Porcher!" After which, Templeton-Collins again stared very deliberately
+at Michael and retired into his room, while Michael hurried down to
+intercept the scout, hoping his dismay at Templeton-Collins' impatience
+would not be too great to allow him to pay a moment's attention to
+himself.
+
+However, on the ground floor the silence was still unbroken, and
+hopelessly Michael read over the right-hand door _Amherst_, over the
+left-hand door _Lonsdale_. What critical moment had arrived in the
+unpacking of Lonsdale's wine to make the scout so heedless of
+Templeton-Collins' call? Again it resounded from above, and Michael
+looking up involuntarily, caught the downward glance of
+Templeton-Collins himself.
+
+"I say, is Porcher down there?" the latter asked fretfully.
+
+"I think he's unpacking Lonsdale's wine."
+
+"Who's Lonsdale?" demanded Templeton-Collins. "You might sing out and
+tell him I want him."
+
+With this request Templeton-Collins vanished, leaving Michael in a
+quandary. There was only one hope of relieving the intolerable
+situation, he thought, which was to shout "Porcher" from where he was
+standing. This he did at the very moment the scout emerged from
+Lonsdale's rooms.
+
+"Coming, sir," said Porcher in an aggrieved voice.
+
+"I think Mr. Templeton-Collins is calling you," Michael explained,
+rather lamely he felt, since it must have been obvious to the scout that
+Michael himself had been calling him.
+
+"And I say," he added hurriedly, "you might bring me up a hammer or
+something to open my boxes, when you've done."
+
+Leaving Porcher to appease the outraged Templeton-Collins, Michael
+retreated to the security of his own rooms, where in a few minutes the
+scout appeared to raise the question of lunch.
+
+"Will you take commons, sir?"
+
+Michael looked perplexed.
+
+"Commons is bread and cheese. Most of my gentlemen takes commons. If you
+want anything extra, you go to the kitchen and write your name down for
+what you want."
+
+This sounded too difficult, and Michael gratefully chose commons.
+
+"Ale, sir?"
+
+Michael nodded. If the scout had suggested champagne, he would have
+assented immediately.
+
+Porcher set to work and undid the cases; he also explained where the
+china was kept and the wood and the coal. He expounded the theory of
+roll-calls and chapels, and was indeed so generous with information on
+every point of college existence that Michael would have been glad to
+retain his services for the afternoon.
+
+"And the other men on this staircase?" Michael asked, "are any of them
+freshers?"
+
+"Mr. Mackintosh, Mr. Amherst, and the Honorable Lonsdale is all
+freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
+Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
+noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he don't
+improve," said Porcher meditatively.
+
+"Do you mean on the coach-horn?" Michael asked.
+
+"Don't improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
+He'd shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It's easier to order it as you
+want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?"
+
+Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
+service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
+there was nothing.
+
+Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
+black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
+downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
+this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
+sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time he
+had coveted--Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt's Knight in Armor and
+Montegna's St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
+aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
+hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
+to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
+intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
+with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
+should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
+she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
+the grave city demanded.
+
+After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
+the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
+when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
+scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
+Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
+were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
+lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
+grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
+tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
+collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael
+examined his possessions in critical discontent. They seemed to
+symbolize the unpleasant crudity of youth. In the familiar surroundings
+of childhood they had seemed on the contrary to testify to his maturity.
+Now at Oxford he felt most abominably young again, yet he was able to
+console himself with the thought that youth would be no handicap among
+his peers. He took down the scenes of Montmartre even from the walls of
+his bedroom and pushed them ignominiously out of sight under the bed.
+
+Michael abandoned the contemplation of his possessions, and looked out
+of his sitting-room window at the High. There was something salutary in
+the jangle of the trams, in the vision of ordinary people moving
+unconsciously about the academic magnificence of Oxford. An
+undergraduate with gown wrapped carelessly round his neck flashed past
+on a bicycle, and Michael was discouraged by the sense of his diabolic
+ease. The luxury of his own rooms, the conviction of his new
+independence, the excitement of an undiscovered life all departed from
+him, and he was left with nothing but a loneliness more bitter even than
+when at Randell House he had first encountered school.
+
+Porcher came in presently with lunch, and the commons of bread and
+cheese with the ale foaming in a silver tankard added the final touch to
+Michael's depression. He thought that nothing in the world, could
+express the spirit of loneliness so perfectly as a sparse lunch laid for
+one on a large table. He wandered away from its melancholy invitation
+into the bedroom and looked sadly down into the quad. In every doorway
+stood knots of senior men talking: continually came new arrivals to hail
+familiarly their friends after the vacation: scouts hurried to and fro
+with trays of food: from window to window gossip, greetings,
+appointments were merrily shouted. Michael watched this scene of
+intimate movement played against the background of elms and gray walls.
+The golden fume of the October weather transcended somehow all
+impermanence, and he felt with a sudden springing of imagination that so
+had this scene been played before, that so forever would it be played
+for generations to come. Yet for him as yet outside the picture
+remained, fortunately less eternal, that solitary lunch. He ate it
+hurriedly and as soon as he had finished set out to find Alan at Christ
+Church.
+
+Freedom came back with the elation of walking up the High; and in the
+Christ Church lodge Michael was able to ask without a blush for Alan's
+rooms. The great space of Tom quad by absorbing his self-consciousness
+allowed him to feel himself an unit of the small and decorative
+population that enhanced the architecture there. The scattered, groups
+of friends whose voices became part of the very air itself like the
+wings of the pigeons and the perpetual tapping of footsteps, the two
+dons treading in slow confabulation that wide flagged terrace, even
+himself were here forever. Michael captured again in that moment the
+crystallized vision of Oxford which had first been vouchsafed to him
+long ago by that old print of St. Mary's tower. He turned reluctantly
+away from Tom quad, and going on to seek Alan in Meadows, by mistake
+found himself in Peckwater. A tall fair undergraduate was standing alone
+in the center of the quad, cracking a whip. Suddenly Michael realized
+that his father had been at Christ Church; and this tall fair
+whip-cracker served for him as the symbol of his father. He must have
+often stood here so, cracking a whip; and Michael never came into
+Peckwater without recreating him so occupied on a fine autumn afternoon,
+whip in hand, very tall and very fair in the glinting sunlight.
+
+Dreams faded out, when Michael ran up the staircase to Alan's rooms; but
+he was full-charged again with all that suppressed intellectual
+excitement which he had counted upon finding in Oxford, but which he had
+failed to find until the wide tranquillity of Tom quad had given him, as
+it were, the benediction of the University.
+
+"Hullo, Alan!" he cried. "How are you getting on? I say, why do they
+stick 'Mr.' in front of your name over the door? At St. Mary's we drop
+the 'Mr.' or any other sort of title. Aren't you unpacked _yet?_ You are
+a slacker. Look here, I want you to come out with me at once. I've got
+to get some more picture-wire and a gown and a picture of Mona Lisa."
+
+"Mona how much?" said Alan.
+
+"La Gioconda, you ass."
+
+"Sorry, my mistake," said Alan.
+
+"And I saw some rattling book-shops as I came up the High," Michael went
+on. "What did you have for lunch? I had bread and cheese--commons we
+call it at St. Mary's. I say, I think I'm glad I don't have to wear a
+scholar's gown."
+
+"I'm an exhibitioner," said Alan.
+
+"Well, it's the same thing. I like a commoner's gown best. Where did you
+get that tea-caddy? I don't believe I've got one. Pretty good view from
+your window. Mine looks out on the High."
+
+"Look here," asked Alan very solemnly, "where shall I hang this picture
+my mater gave me?"
+
+He displayed in a green frame The Soul's Awakening.
+
+"Do you like it?" Michael asked gloomily.
+
+"I prefer these grouse by Thorburn that the governor gave me, but I like
+them both in a way," Alan admitted.
+
+"I don't think it much matters where you hang it," Michael said. Then,
+thinking Alan looked rather hurt, he added hastily: "You see it's such a
+very square room that practically it might go anywhere."
+
+"Will you have a meringue?" Alan asked, proffering a crowded plate.
+
+"A meringue?" Michael repeated.
+
+"We're rather famous for our meringues here," said Alan gravely. "We
+make them in the kitchen. I ordered a double lot in case you came in."
+
+"You seem to have found out a good deal about Christ Church already,"
+Michael observed.
+
+"The House," Alan corrected. "We call it--in fact everybody calls it the
+House."
+
+Michael was inclined to resent this arrogation by a college not his own
+of a distinct and slightly affected piece of nomenclature, and he wished
+he possessed enough knowledge of his own peculiar college customs to
+counter Alan's display.
+
+"Well, hurry up and come out of the House," he urged. "You can't stay
+here unpacking all the afternoon."
+
+"Why do you want to start buying things straight away?" Alan argued.
+
+"Because I know what I want," Michael insisted.
+
+"Since when?" Alan demanded. "I'm not going to buy anything for a bit."
+
+"Come on, come on," Michael urged. He was in a hurry to enjoy the luxury
+of traversing the quads of Christ Church in company, of strolling down
+the High in company, of looking into shop windows in company, of finally
+defeating that first dismal loneliness with Alan and his company.
+
+It certainly proved to be a lavish afternoon. Michael bought three
+straight-grained pipes so substantially silvered that they made his own
+old pipes take on an attenuated vulgarity. He bought an obese tobacco
+jar blazoned with the arms of his college and, similarly blazoned, a
+protuberant utensil for matches. He bought numerous ounces of those
+prodigally displayed mixtures of tobacco, every one of which was vouched
+for by the vendor as in its own way the perfect blend. He bought his cap
+and his gown and was measured by the tailor for a coat of Harris tweed
+such as everybody seemed to wear. He found the very autotype of Mona
+Lisa he coveted, and farther he was persuaded by the picture-dealer to
+buy for two guineas a signed proof of a small copperplate engraving of
+the Primavera. This expenditure frightened him from buying any more
+pictures that afternoon and seemed a violent and sudden extravagance.
+However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after signing his name
+several times, he was presented with a check book. In order to be
+perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one then and there,
+and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as irreverently as if
+they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his new check-book was
+the purse of Fortunatus.
+
+Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the
+purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in
+order to assert his independence in the face of Alan's continuous
+dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a
+pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the
+pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties of
+knitted silk.
+
+By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Cafe in
+Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o'clock and neither of them
+felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other back to
+tea, they went into the cafe and ate a quantity of hot buttered toast
+and parti-colored cakes. The only thing that marred their enjoyment and
+faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of three exquisitely
+untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the doorway and surveyed
+first the crowded cafe in general, and then more particularly Michael
+and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt. After a prolonged
+stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:
+
+"Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!"
+
+Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.
+
+Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed
+from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress
+seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan
+paid their bill and went out.
+
+"Are you coming back to my rooms?" Michael asked. Yet secretly he half
+hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to be
+alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.
+
+Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly,
+promising to meet him again to-morrow.
+
+Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers, for
+a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street lured
+him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man with a
+thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed to
+Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in
+tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against
+the shelves of books.
+
+A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good
+evening.
+
+"May I look round?" Michael asked.
+
+The bookseller nodded.
+
+"Just come up?" he inquired.
+
+"To-day," Michael confessed.
+
+"And what sort of books are you interested in?"
+
+"All books," said Michael.
+
+"This set of Pater for instance," the bookseller suggested, handing
+Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with
+a golden monogram. "Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds
+fifteen cash." This information he added in a note of disdainful
+tolerance.
+
+Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.
+
+"Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays," Mr. Lampard went
+on. "In the early 'nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for
+books."
+
+Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.
+
+"Seven pounds ten," he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid
+sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.
+
+"What college?" asked Mr. Lampard. "St. Mary's? Ah, there used to be
+some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis
+of Montgomery's son, was at St. Mary's, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I
+published his first volume of poems--of course, you've read his books.
+He was at St. Mary's. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth.
+You've heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first
+number, but they're getting very scarce. All St. Mary's men and all
+great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I
+really don't know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not
+selling them."
+
+Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very
+thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some
+entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past, and
+the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.
+
+"Perhaps after all I will take the Pater," he said. "Only I may not be
+able to pay you this term."
+
+The bookseller smiled.
+
+"I don't think I shall worry you. Do you know this set--Boccaccio,
+Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered
+silk. They'll always keep their price, and of course all the
+photogravures are included."
+
+"All right. You might send them too."
+
+Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of
+the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to
+College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling
+scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous
+those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against
+those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a buyer
+of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had
+certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on the
+pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy
+balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a
+pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson's bookshop. At Lampard's he was
+already a personality.
+
+All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford, but
+really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in
+comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the
+Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar
+conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The
+list of freshmen, pinned up on the board in the Lodge, was a
+discouraging document to those isolated members of public schools other,
+than Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Charterhouse. These four seemed to have
+produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. Eton alone was
+responsible for half the list. What chance, thought Michael, could he
+stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound
+to ensue from such a preponderance? However, he was by now at the top of
+the steps that led up to hall, and a mild old butler was asking his
+name.
+
+"You'll be at the second freshmen's table. On the right, sir. Mr.
+Wedderburn is at the head of your table, sir."
+
+Michael was glad to find his table at the near end of hall, and
+hurriedly taking his seat, almost dived into the soup that was quickly
+placed before him. He did not venture to open a conversation with either
+of his neighbors, but stared instead at the freshman occupying the
+armchair at the head of the table, greatly impressed by his judicial
+gravity of demeanor, his neat bulk and the profundity of his voice.
+
+"How do you become head of a table?" Michael's left-hand neighbor
+suddenly asked.
+
+Michael said he really did not know.
+
+"Because what I'm wondering," the left-hand neighbor continued, "is why
+they've made that ass Wedderburn head of our table."
+
+"Why, is he an ass?" Michael inquired.
+
+"Frightful ass," continued the left-hand neighbor, whom Michael
+perceived to be a small round-faced youth, very fair and very pink.
+"Perfectly harmless, of course. Are you an Harrovian?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"I thought you were a cousin of my mother," said the left-hand neighbor.
+
+Michael looked astonished.
+
+"His name's Mackintosh. What's your name?"
+
+Michael told him.
+
+"My name's Lonsdale. I think we're on the same staircase--so's
+Mackintosh. It's a pity he's an Harrovian, but I promised my mother I'd
+look him up."
+
+Then, after surveying the table, Lonsdale went on in a confidential
+undertone:
+
+"I don't mind telling you that the Etonians up here are a pretty poor
+lot. There are two chaps from my house who are not so bad--in fact
+rather good eggs--but the rest! Well, look at that ass Wedderburn. He's
+typical."
+
+"I think he looks rather a good sort," said Michael.
+
+"My dear chap, he was absolutely barred. M' tutor used to like him, but
+really--well--I don't mind telling you, he's really an aesthete."
+
+With this shocked condemnation, Lonsdale turned to his other neighbor
+and said in his jerky and somewhat mincing voice that was perfectly
+audible to Michael:
+
+"I say, Tommy, this man on my right isn't half bad. I don't know where
+he comes from, His name's Fane."
+
+"He's from St. James'."
+
+"Where on earth's that?"
+
+"London."
+
+"Why, I thought it was a kind of charity school," said Lonsdale. Then he
+turned to Michael again:
+
+"I say, are you really from St. James'?"
+
+Michael replied coldly that he was.
+
+"I say, come and have coffee with me after hall. One or two O. E.'s are
+coming in, but you won't mind?"
+
+"Why, do you want to find out something about St. James'?" demanded
+Michael, frowning.
+
+"Oh, I say, don't be ratty. It's that ass Tommy. He always talks at the
+top of his voice."
+
+Lonsdale, as he spoke, looked so charmingly apologetic and displayed
+such accomplished sang-froid that Michael forgave him immediately and
+promised to come to coffee.
+
+"Good egg!" Lonsdale exclaimed with the satisfaction of having smoothed
+over an awkward place. "I say," he offered, "if you'd like to meet
+Wedderburn, I'll ask him, too. He seems to have improved since he's been
+up at the Varsity. Don't you think that fat man Wedderburn has improved,
+Tommy?"
+
+Tommy nodded.
+
+"One day's done him no end of good."
+
+"I say," Lonsdale offered, "you haven't met Fane. Mr. Fane--Mr.
+Grainger. I was just saying to Fane that the Etonians are a rotten lot
+this term."
+
+"One or two are all right," Grainger admitted with evident reluctance.
+
+"Well, perhaps two," Lonsdale agreed. "This dinner isn't bad, what?"
+
+By this time the conversation at the table had become more general, and
+Michael gradually realized that some of the alarm he had felt himself
+had certainly been felt by his companions. Now at any rate there was a
+perceptible relaxation of tension. Still the conversation was only
+general in so much as that whenever anybody spoke, the rest of the
+table listened. The moment the flow of his information dried up,
+somebody else began pumping forth instruction. These slightly nervous
+little lectures were delivered without any claim to authority and they
+came up prefaced by the third person of legendary narrative.
+
+"They say we shall all have to interview the Warden to-morrow."
+
+"They say on Sunday afternoon the Wagger makes the same speech to the
+freshers that he's made for twenty years."
+
+"They say we ought to go head of the river this year."
+
+"They say the freshers are expected to make a bonner on Sunday night."
+
+"They say any one can have commons of bread and cheese by sending out
+word to the buttery. It's really included in the two-and-fourpence for
+dinner."
+
+"They say they charge a penny for the napkin every night."
+
+So the information proceeded, and Michael had just thought to himself
+that going up to Oxford was very much like going to school again, when
+from the second-year tables crashed the sound of a concerted sneeze. The
+dons from high table looked coldly down the hall, expressing a vague,
+but seemingly impotent disapproval, for immediately afterward that
+sternutation shook the air a second time.
+
+Michael thought the difference between school and Oxford might be
+greater than he had supposed.
+
+The slowest eater at the second freshmen's table had nervously left half
+his savory; Wedderburn without apparent embarrassment had received the
+Sub-Warden's permission to rise from dinner; Lonsdale hurriedly
+marshaled as many of his acquaintances as he could, and in a large and
+noisy group they swarmed through the moonlight toward his rooms.
+
+Michael was interested by Lonsdale's sitting-room, for he divined at
+once that it was typical, just a transplanted Eton study with the
+addition of smoking paraphernalia. The overmantel was plumed with small
+photographs of pleasant young creatures in the gay nautical costumes of
+the Fourth of June and festooned hats of Alexandra or Monarch, of the
+same pleasant young creatures at an earlier and chubbier age, of the
+same pleasant young creatures with penciled mustaches and the white
+waistcoat of Pop. In addition to their individual commemorations the
+pleasant young creatures would appear again in house groups, in winning
+house elevens, and most exquisitely of all in Eton Society. Michael
+always admired the photographs of Pop, for they seemed to him to
+epitomize all the traditions of all the public-schools of England, to
+epitomize them moreover with something of that immortality of captured
+action expressed by great Athenian sculpture. In comparison with Pop the
+Harrow Philathletic Society was a barbarous group, with all the
+self-consciousness of a deliberate archaism. Besides the personal
+photographs in Lonsdale's room there were studies of grouse by Thorburn;
+and Michael, remembering Alan's grouse, felt in accord with Lonsdale and
+with all that Lonsdale stood for. Knowing Alan, he felt that he knew
+Lonsdale, and at once he became more at ease with all his contemporaries
+in Lonsdale's room. Michael looked at the colored prints of Cecil
+Aldin's pictures and made up his mind he would buy a set for Alan: also
+possibly he would buy for Alan the Sir Galahad of Watts which was rather
+better than The Soul's Awakening.
+
+After Lonsdale's pictures Michael surveyed Lonsdale's books, the
+brilliantly red volumes of Jorrocks, the two or three odd volumes of the
+Badminton library, and the school books tattered and ink-splashed. More
+interesting than such a library were the glossy new briars, the virgin
+meerschaum, the patent smoking-tables and another table evidently
+designed to make drinking easy, but by reason of the complexity of its
+machinery actually more likely to discourage one forever from
+refreshment. The rest of the space, apart from the furniture bequeathed
+by the noisy Templeton-Collins when he moved to larger rooms above, was
+crowded with the freshmen whom after hall Lonsdale had so hastily
+gathered together unassorted.
+
+"I ordered coffee for sixteen," announced the host. "I thought it would
+be quicker than making it in a new machine that my sister gave me. It
+just makes enough for three, and the only time I tried, it took about an
+hour to do that ... who'll drink port?"
+
+Michael thought the scout's prophecies about the superfluity of
+Lonsdale's wine were rather premature, for it seemed that everybody
+intended to drink port.
+
+"I believe this is supposed to be rather good port," said Lonsdale.
+
+"It is jolly good," several connoisseurs echoed.
+
+"I don't know much about it myself. But my governor's supposed to be
+rather a judge. He said 'this is wasted on you and your friends, but I
+haven't got any bad wine to give you.'"
+
+Here everybody held up their glasses against the light, took another sip
+and murmured their approval.
+
+"Do you think this is a good wine, Fane?" demanded Lonsdale, thereby
+drawing so much attention to Michael that he blushed to nearly as deep a
+color as the port itself.
+
+"I like it very much," Michael said.
+
+"Do you like it, Wedderburn?" asked Lonsdale, turning to the freshman
+who had sat in the armchair at the head of the second table.
+
+"Damned good wine," pronounced Wedderburn in a voice so rich with
+appreciation and so deep with judgment that he immediately established a
+reputation for worldly knowledge, and from having been slightly derided
+at Eton for his artistic ambitions was ever afterward respected and
+consulted. Michael envied his air of authority, but trembled for
+Wedderburn's position when he heard him reproach Lonsdale for his lack
+of any good pictures.
+
+"You might stick up one that can be looked at for more than two
+seconds," Wedderburn said severely.
+
+"What sort of picture?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Primavera, for instance," Wedderburn suggested, and Michael's heart
+beat in sympathy.
+
+"Never heard of the horse," Lonsdale answered. "Who owned her?"
+
+"My god," Wedderburn rumbled, "I'll take you to buy one to-morrow,
+Lonny. You deserve it after that."
+
+"Right-O!" Lonsdale cheerfully agreed. "Only I don't want my room to
+look like the Academy, you know."
+
+Wedderburn shook his head in benevolent contempt, and the conversation
+was deflected from Lonsdale's artistic education by a long-legged
+Wykehamist with crisp chestnut hair and a thin florid face of dimpling
+smiles.
+
+"Has anybody been into Venner's yet?" he asked.
+
+"I have," proclaimed a dumpy Etonian whose down-curving nose hung over a
+perpetually open mouth. "Marjoribanks took me in just before hall. But
+he advised me not to go in by myself yet awhile."
+
+"The second-year men don't like it," agreed the long-legged Wykehamist
+with a wise air. "They say one can begin to go in occasionally in one's
+third term."
+
+"What is Venner's?" Michael asked.
+
+"Don't you know?" sniffed the dumpy Etonian who had already managed to
+proclaim his friendship with Marjoribanks, the President of the Junior
+Common Room, and therefore presumably had the right to open his mouth a
+little wider than usual at Michael.
+
+"I'm not quite sure myself," said Lonsdale quickly. "I vote that Cuffe
+explains."
+
+"I'm not going to explain," Cuffe protested, and for some minutes his
+mouth was tightly closed.
+
+"Isn't it just a sort of special part of the J. C. R.?" suggested the
+smiling Wykehamist, who seemed to wish to make it pleasant for
+everybody, so long as he himself would not have to admit ignorance. "Old
+Venables himself is a ripper. They say he's been steward of the J. C. R.
+for fifty years."
+
+"Thirty-two years," corrected Wedderburn in his voice of most
+reverberant certitude. "Venner's is practically a club. You aren't
+elected, but somehow you know just when you can go in without being
+stared at. There's nothing in Oxford like that little office of
+Venner's. It's practically made St. Mary's what it is."
+
+All the freshmen, sipping their port and lolling back in their new
+gowns, looked very reverent and very conscious of the honor and glory of
+St. Mary's which they themselves hoped soon to affirm more publicly than
+they could at present. Upon their meditations sounded very loud the
+blast of a coach-horn from above.
+
+"That's Templeton-Collins," said Michael.
+
+"Who's he?" several demanded.
+
+"He's the man who used to live in these rooms last year," said Lonsdale
+lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these
+freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.
+
+"Let's all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row," suggested
+Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of a
+table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.
+
+"To a second-year blood?" whispered somebody in dread surprise.
+
+"Why not take away the coach-horn?" Lonsdale added.
+
+However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with
+unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.
+
+"Keep quiet, little boys," shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.
+
+The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and the
+long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going to be
+a hot year. "I vote we have a bonner."
+
+"Will you light it, Sinclair?" asked another Wykehamist in a cynical
+drawl.
+
+"Why not?" Sinclair retorted.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. But you always used to be better at theory than
+practice."
+
+"How these Wykehamists love one another," laughed an Etonian.
+
+This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in
+defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and
+bigoted confidence.
+
+"Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner," said Wedderburn. "After
+the first 'after.'"
+
+"'After'?" queried another.
+
+"Oh, don't you know? Haven't you heard?" several well-informed freshmen
+began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of
+instruction, and the others gave way.
+
+"Every Sunday after hall," he explained, "people go up to the J. C. R.
+and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the
+second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes
+round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the 'after Common
+Room.' People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the J.
+C. R. gives the first 'after' of the term. The others are usually given
+by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and lemon-squash. They
+usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport. They're much better than
+private wines, better for everybody. That's why we have them on Sunday
+night," he concluded rather vaguely.
+
+The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into
+bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The first
+evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper than the
+superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table was now
+begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to
+intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the
+dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of Etonian
+tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some Etonians might
+exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical, less odiously
+serene than the majority of those they had so far only encountered in
+summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess was going to
+count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists extended a
+cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they never lost
+an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and though
+their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more
+debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to
+acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these strange
+new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might appear to
+Wykeham's adamantine mold.
+
+Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in
+the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to
+put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless.
+Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for
+granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a
+day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and
+disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count.
+At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them
+credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social
+outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense
+of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and the
+last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the
+Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly it
+had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose
+trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were
+ignobly buttoned to the very end.
+
+"An Old Giggleswickian," commented some one in reference to one of these
+disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was
+surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such
+inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old
+Wykehamist colors.
+
+"Why, were you at school with him?" asked Michael quickly.
+
+"Me? At Giggleswick?" stammered the Carthusian.
+
+"Why not?" said Michael. "You seem to know all about him."
+
+"Isn't your name Fane?" demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when
+Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.
+
+"That'll help me along a bit, I expect," Michael prophesied.
+
+"We were in the same form at Randell's. My name's Avery."
+
+"I remember you," said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how
+little Avery's once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he thought
+Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep blue
+eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of
+Lonsdale's room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out
+with him into the quad.
+
+"I say," Avery began impulsively. "Did I make an ass of myself just now?
+I mean, do you think people were sick with me?"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"I mean did I sound snobbish?" Avery pursued.
+
+"Not more than anybody else," Michael assured him, and as he watched
+Avery's expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
+possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess and
+wore combinations instead of pants and vest.
+
+"I say, aren't you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
+Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I'm in Cloisters. Are you
+going out? You'll have to buck up. It's after nine."
+
+They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was ushered
+out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom boomed his
+final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation sounded here and
+there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.
+
+Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High came
+a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and more
+perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
+solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
+Michael pondered the freshmen's chatter and apprehended dimly how this
+magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of naive
+intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
+ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
+sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
+immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
+gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
+not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that morning.
+
+So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until at
+last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College Street
+and Queen's Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
+forgetting the world.
+
+In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
+tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.
+
+It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
+was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert's
+quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
+his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
+the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
+the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.
+
+Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
+from St. Mary's tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The watered
+silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how Boccaccio
+should be read. Michael's mind was filled with the imagination of that
+gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their gay stories in the
+sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais should be read: the very
+pages seemed to glitter like wine.
+
+Midnight chimed from St. Mary's tower. One by one the new books went
+gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
+Michael's bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
+was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
+splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room was
+full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was gleaming.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FIRST WEEK
+
+
+The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations,
+addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action
+against her neophytes.
+
+First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a
+deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid and
+manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to give the
+impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in an
+otherwise justly modulated existence.
+
+Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle's room, knocked at
+the door and passed in at the don's bidding to where he sat sighing amid
+heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the room was
+somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that crowded the
+walls.
+
+"Mr.?" queried the Senior Tutor. "Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James'. Your
+tutor will be the Dean--please sit down--the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What
+school are you proposing to read?"
+
+"History, I imagine," said Michael. "History!" he repeated, as Mr. Ardle
+blinked at him.
+
+"Yes," said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. "But we have
+to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and Literae
+Humaniores."
+
+"I explained to you that I wanted to read History," said Michael,
+echoing himself involuntarily the don's tone of patient boredom.
+
+"I have you down as coming from St. James'," snapped the Senior Tutor.
+"A school reputed to send out good classical scholars, I believe."
+
+"I'm not a scholar," Michael interrupted. "And I don't intend to take
+Honor Mods."
+
+"That will be for the college to decide."
+
+"Supposing the college decided I was to read Chinese?" Michael inquired.
+
+"There is no need for impertinence. Well, well, for the present I have
+put you down for the lectures on Pass Moderations. You will attend my
+lectures on Cicero, Mr. Churton on the Apologia, Mr. Carder on Logic,
+and Mr. Vereker for Latin Prose. The weekly essay set by the Warden for
+freshmen you will read to your tutor Mr. Ambrose."
+
+Then he went on to give instructions about chapels and roll-calls and
+dining in hall and the various regulations of the college, while the
+Swiss mountains stared bleakly down at the chilly interview.
+
+"Now you'd better go and see Mr. Ambrose," said the Senior Tutor, and
+Michael left him. On the staircase he passed Lonsdale going up.
+
+"What's he like?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Pretty dull," said Michael.
+
+"Does he keep you long?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"Good work," said Lonsdale cheerfully. "Because I've just bought a dog."
+And he whistled his way upstairs.
+
+Michael wondered what the purchase of a dog had got to do with the
+Senior Tutor, but relinquished the problem on perceiving Mr. Ambrose's
+name on the floor below.
+
+The Dean's room was very much like the Senior Tutor's, and the
+interview, save that it was made slightly more tolerable by the help of
+a cigarette, was of much the same chilliness owing to Michael's
+reiterated refusal to read Honor Moderations.
+
+"I expected a little keenness," said Mr. Ambrose.
+
+"I shall be keen enough when I've finished with Pass Mods," said
+Michael. "Though what good it will be for me to read the Pro Milone and
+the Apology all over again, when I read them at fifteen, I don't know."
+
+"Then take Honor Moderations?" the Dean advised.
+
+"I've given up classics," Michael argued, and as the cigarette was
+beginning to burn his fingers and the problem of disposing of it in the
+Dean's room seemed insoluble, he hurried out.
+
+Lonsdale was whistling his way downstairs from his interview with Mr.
+Ardle.
+
+"Hallo, Fane, what did he say to you?"
+
+"I think all these dons are very much like schoolmasters," growled
+Michael resentfully.
+
+"They can't help it," said Lonsdale. "I asked old Ardle if I could keep
+a dog in college, and he turned as blue as an owl. Any one would think
+I'd asked him if I could breed crocodiles."
+
+In addition to these personal interviews the freshmen had certain
+communal experiences to undergo. Among these was their formal reception
+into the University, when they trooped after the Senior Tutor through
+gothic mazes and in some beautiful and remote room received from the
+Vice-Chancellor a bound volume of Statuta et Decreta Universitatis. This
+book they carried back with them to college, where in many rooms it
+shared with Ruff's Guide and Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour an
+intellectual oligarchy. Saturday morning was spent in meeting the Warden
+at the Warden's Lodgings, where they shook hands with him in nervous
+quartets. Michael when he discussed this experience with his fellows
+fancied that the Warden's butler had left a deeper impression than the
+Warden himself. On Sunday afternoon, however, when they gathered in the
+hall to hear the annual address of welcome and exhortation, the great
+moon-faced Warden shone undimmed.
+
+"You have come to Oxford," he concluded, "some of you to hunt foxes,
+some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you
+to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have
+come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen. In after life when you are
+ambassadors and proconsuls and members of Parliament you will never
+remember this little address which I have the honor now of delivering to
+you. That will not matter, so long as you always remember that you are
+St. Mary's men and the heirs of an honorable and ancient foundation."
+
+The great moon-faced Warden beamed at them for one moment, and after
+thanking them for their polite attention floated out of the hall. The
+pictures of cardinals and princes and poets in their high golden frames
+seemed in the dusk faintly to nod approval. The bell was ringing for
+evening chapel, and the freshmen went murmurously along the cloisters to
+take their places, feeling rather proud that the famous quire was their
+quire and looking with inquisitive condescension at the visitors who sat
+out of sight of those candle-starred singers.
+
+In hall that night the chief topic of conversation was the etiquette and
+ritual of the first J. C. R. wine.
+
+Michael to his chagrin found himself seated next to Mackintosh, for
+Mackintosh, cousin though he was of the sparkish Lonsdale, was a gloomy
+fellow scornful of the general merriment. As somebody had quickly said,
+sharpening his young wit, he was more of a wet-blanket than a
+Mackintosh.
+
+"I suppose you're coming to the J. C. R.?" Michael asked.
+
+"Why should I? Why should I waste my time trying to keep sober for the
+amusement of all these fools?"
+
+"I expect it will be rather a rag," said Michael hopefully, but he found
+it tantalizing to hear farther down the table snatches of conversation
+that heard more completely would have enlightened him on several points
+he had not yet mastered in the ceremony of wine in the J. C. R. However,
+it was useless to speculate on such subjects in the company of the
+lugubrious Mackintosh. So they talked instead of Sandow exercises and
+mountain-climbing in Cumberland, neither of which topics interested
+Michael very greatly.
+
+Hall was rowdy that evening, and the dons looked petulantly down from
+high table, annoyed to think that their distinguished visitors of Sunday
+evening should see so many pieces of bread flung by the second-year men.
+The moon-faced Warden was deflected from his intellectual revolutions
+round a Swedish man of science, and sent the butler down to whisper a
+remonstrance to the head of one of the second-year tables. But no sooner
+had the butler again taken his place behind the Warden's chair than a
+number of third-year men whose table had been littered by the ammunition
+of their juniors retaliated without apparent loss of dignity, and
+presently both years combined to bombard under the Scholars. Meanwhile
+the freshmen applauded with laughter, and thought their seniors were
+wonderful exemplars for the future.
+
+After hall everybody went crowding up the narrow stairs to the J. C. R.,
+and now most emphatically the J. C. R. presented a cheerful sight, with
+the red-shaded lamps casting such a glow that the decanters of wine
+stationed before the President's place looked like a treasure of rubies.
+The two long tables were set at right angles to one another, and the
+President sat near their apex. All along their shining length at regular
+intervals stood great dishes of grapes richly bloomed, of apples and
+walnuts and salted almonds and deviled biscuits. The freshmen by
+instinct rushed to sit altogether at the end of the table more remote
+from the door. As Michael looked at his contemporaries, he perceived
+that of the forty odd freshmen scarcely five-and-twenty had come to
+this, the first J. C. R. Vaguely he realized that already two sets were
+manifest in the college, and he felt depressed by the dullness of those
+who had not come and some satisfaction with himself for coming.
+
+The freshmen stared with awe at Marjoribanks, the President of the J. C.
+R., and told one another with reverence that the two men on either side
+of him were those famous rowing blues from New College, Permain and
+Strutt; while some of them who had known these heroes at school sat
+anxiously unaware of their presence and spoke of them familiarly as Jack
+Permain and Bingey. There were several other cynosures from New College
+and University near the President's chair, a vivid bunch of Leander
+ties. There were also one or two old St. Mary's men who had descended to
+haunt for a swift week-end the place of their renown, and these were
+pointed out by knowing freshmen as unconcernedly as possible.
+
+One by one the President released the decanters, and round and round
+they came. Sometimes they would be held up by an interesting
+conversation; and when the sherry and the port and the burgundy were all
+standing idle, a shout of "pass along the wine" would go up, after which
+for a time the decanters would swing vigorously from hand to hand. Then
+suddenly Marjoribanks was seen to be bowing to Permain, and Permain was
+bowing solemnly back to his host. This was a plain token to everybody
+that the moment for drinking healths had arrived. A great babel of
+shouted names broke out at the end of the Common Room remote from the
+freshmen, so tremendous a din that the freshmen felt the drinking of
+their own healths at their end would pass unnoticed. So they drank to
+one another, bowing gravely after the manner of their seniors.
+
+Michael had determined to take nothing but burgundy, and when he had
+exchanged sentiments with the most of his year, he congratulated himself
+upon the comparative steadiness of his head. Already in the case of one
+or two reckless mixers he noticed a difficulty in deciding how many
+times it was necessary to clip a cigar, an inclination to strike the
+wrong end of a match and a confusion between right and left when the
+decanters in their circulation paused before them.
+
+After the first tumult of good wishes had died down, Marjoribanks lifted
+his glass, looked along to where the freshmen were sitting and shouted
+"Cuffe!" Cuffe hastily lifted his glass and answering "Marjorie!"
+drained his salute of acknowledgment. Then he sat back in his chair with
+an expression, Michael thought, very like that of an actress who has
+been handed a bouquet by the conductor. But Cuffe was not to be the only
+recipient of honor, for immediately afterward Marjoribanks sang out
+"Lonsdale!" Lonsdale was at the moment trying to explain to Tommy
+Grainger some trick with the skin of a banana which ought to have been
+an orange and a wooden match which ought to have been a wax vesta.
+Michael, who was sitting next to him, prodded anxiously his ribs.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Lonsdale indignantly. "Can't you see I'm
+doing a trick?"
+
+"Marjoribanks is drinking your health," whispered Michael in an agony
+that Lonsdale would be passed over.
+
+"Hurrah!" shouted Lonsdale, rising to his feet and scandalizing his
+fellows by his intoxicated audacity. "Where is the old ripper!" Then
+"Mark over!" he shouted and collapsed into Tommy Grainger's lap.
+Everybody laughed, and everybody, even the cynosures from New College
+and University, began to drink Lonsdale's health without heel-taps.
+
+"No heelers, young Lonsdale," they called mirthfully.
+
+Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with
+one hand on Michael's shoulder, replied:
+
+"No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!" Then he collapsed again.
+
+Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk, all
+the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael and
+one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors remained
+more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a quizzical
+face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask Michael
+some trifling piece of information, cried "Fane!" raising his glass.
+Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and drank
+what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other senior
+men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks
+himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An
+immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life, a
+conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever. The
+wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At the
+foot on the right was a little office--the office of Venables, the
+steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of
+seniority called Venner's. Wine-chartered though they were, the freshmen
+did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but hurried
+out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.
+
+Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of mediaeval witches.
+The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels
+and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a
+grotesque vivacity, as the vapors curled around them. The wine humming
+in his head: the echoing shouts of his companions: the decorative effect
+of the gowns: the chiming high above of the bells in the tower: all
+combined to create for Michael a nightmare of exultation. He was aware
+of a tremendous zest in doing nothing, and there flowed over him a
+consciousness that this existence of shout and dance along these
+cloisters was really existence lived in a perpetual expression of the
+finest energy. The world seemed to be going round so much faster than
+usual that in order to keep up with this new pace, it was necessary for
+the individual like himself to walk faster, to talk faster, to think
+faster, and finally to raise to incoherent speed every coherent faculty.
+Another curious effect of the wine, for after all Michael admitted to
+himself that his mental exhilaration must be due to burgundy, was the
+way in which he found himself at every moment walking beside a different
+person. He would scarcely have finished an excited acceptance of
+Wedderburn's offer to go to-morrow and look at some Durer woodcuts, when
+he would suddenly find himself discussing sympathetically with Lonsdale
+the iniquity of the dons in refusing to let him keep his new dog in one
+of the scouts' pigeon-holes in the lodge.
+
+"After all," Lonsdale pointed out earnestly, "they're never really full,
+and the dog isn't large--of course I don't expect to keep him in a
+pigeon-hole when he's full grown, but he's a puppy."
+
+"It's absurd," Michael agreed.
+
+"That's the word I've been looking for," Lonsdale exclaimed. "What was
+it again? Absurd! You see what I say is, when one scout's box is full,
+move the poor little beast into another. It isn't likely they'd all be
+full at the same time. What was that word you found just now? Absurd!
+That's it. It is absurd. It's absurd!"
+
+"And anyway," Michael pointed out, "if they were all full they could
+chain him to the leg of the porter's desk."
+
+"Of course they could. I say, Fane, you're a damned good sort," said
+Lonsdale. "I wish you'd come and have lunch with me to-morrow. I don't
+think I've asked very many chaps: I want to show you that dog. He's in a
+stable off Holywell at present. Beastly shame! I'm not complaining, of
+course, but what I want to ask our dons is how would they like to be
+bought by me and shut up in Holywell?"
+
+And just when Michael had a very good answer ready, he found himself
+arm-in-arm with Wedderburn again, who was saying in his gravest voice
+that over a genuine woodcut by Durer it was well worth taking trouble.
+But before Michael could disengage Wedderburn's Durer from Lonsdale's
+dog, he found himself running very fast beside Tommy Grainger who was
+shouting:
+
+"Five's late again! Six, you're bucketing! Bow, you're late! Two, _will_
+you get your belly down!"
+
+Then Grainger stopped suddenly and asked Michael in a very solemn tone
+whether he knew what was the matter with the crew. Michael shook his
+head and watched the others steer their devious course toward him and
+Grainger.
+
+"They're too drunk to row," said Grainger.
+
+"Much too drunk," Michael agreed.
+
+When he had pondered for a moment or two his last remark, he discovered
+it was extraordinarily funny. So he was seized with a paroxysm of
+laughter, and the more he laughed, the more he wanted to laugh. When
+somebody asked him what he was laughing at, he replied it was because he
+had left the electric light burning in his room. Several people seemed
+to think this just as funny as Michael thought it, and they joined him
+in his mirth, laughing unquenchably until Wedderburn observed severely
+in his deepest voice:
+
+"Buck up, you're all drunk, and they're coming out of Venner's."
+
+Then like some patient profound countryman he shepherded them all up to
+the large room on a corner staircase of Cloisters, where the "after" was
+going to be held. The freshmen squeezed themselves together in a corner
+and were immensely entertained by the various performers, applauding
+with equal rapture a light comedian from Pembroke, a tenor from Corpus,
+a comic singer from Oriel and a mimic from professional London. They
+drank lemon squashes to steady themselves: they joined in choruses: they
+cheered and smoked cigars and grew more and more conscious as the
+evening progressed that they belonged to a great college called St.
+Mary's. Their enthusiasm reached its zenith, when the captain of the
+Varsity Eleven (a St. Mary's man even as they were St. Mary's men) sang
+the St. Mary's song in a voice whose gentleness of utterance and sighing
+modesty in no way abashed the noisy appreciation of the audience. It was
+a wonderful song, all about the triumphs of the college on river and
+cricket-field, in the Schools, in Parliament and indeed everywhere else.
+It had a fine rollicking chorus which was repeated twice after each
+verse. And as there were about seventeen verses, by the time the song
+was half over the freshmen had learned the words and were able to sing
+the final chorus with a vigor which positively detonated against the
+windows and contrasted divertingly with the almost inaudible soloist.
+
+Last of all came Auld Lang Syne, when everybody stood up on chairs and
+joined hands, seniors, second-year men and freshmen. Auld Lang Syne
+ended with perhaps the noisiest moment of all because although Lonsdale
+had taken several lemon squashes to steady himself, he had not taken
+enough to keep his balance through the ultimate energetic repetition,
+when he collapsed headlong into a tray of syphons and glasses, dragging
+with him two other freshmen. But nobody seemed to have hurt himself, and
+downstairs they all rushed, shouting and hulloaing, into the cool
+moonlight.
+
+The guests from New College and University and the "out-of-college" men
+hurried home, for it was close upon midnight. In the lodge the freshmen
+foregathered for a few minutes with the second-year men, and as they
+talked they knew that the moment was come when they must proclaim
+themselves free from the restrictions of school, and by the kindling of
+a bonfire prove that they were now truly grown up. Bundles of faggots
+were seized from the scouts' holes: in the angle of St. Cuthbert's quad
+where the complexion of the gravel was tanned by the numberless bonfires
+of past generations the pile of wood grew taller and taller: two or
+three douches of paraffin made the mass readily inflammable: a match was
+set, and with a roar the bonfire began. From their windows second-year
+men, their faces lighted by the ascending blaze, looked down with
+pleasant patronage upon the traditional pastime of their juniors. The
+freshmen danced gleefully round the pyre of their boyhood, feeding it
+with faggots and sometimes daringly and ostentatiously with chairs: the
+heat became intense: the smoke surged upward, obscuring the bland
+aspectful moon. Slowly upon the group of law-breakers fell a silence, as
+they stood bewitched by the beauty of their own handiwork. The riotous
+preparations and annunciatory yells had died away to an intimate murmur
+of conversation. From the lodge came Shadbolt the unctuous head-porter
+to survey for a moment this mighty bonfire: conscious of their
+undergraduate dignity the freshmen chaffed him, until he retired with
+muttered protests to summon the Dean.
+
+"What will the Dean do?" asked one or two less audacious ones as they
+faded into various doorways, ready to obliterate their presence as soon
+as authority should arrive upon the scene.
+
+"What does the Dean matter?" cried others, flinging more faggots on to
+the fire until it crackled and spat and bellowed more fiercely than
+ever, lighting up with its wavy radiance the great elms beyond the
+Warden's garden and the Palladian fragment of New quad whence the dons
+like Georgian squires pondered their prosperity.
+
+Presently against the silvery space framed by the gateway of St.
+Cuthbert's tower appeared the silhouette of the Dean, lank and tall with
+college cap tip-tilted down on to his nose and round his neck a gown
+wrapped like a shawl. Nearer he came, and involuntarily the freshmen so
+lately schoolboys took on in their attitude a certain anxiety. Somehow
+the group round the bonfire had become much smaller. Somehow more
+windows looking upon the quad were populated with flickering watchful
+faces.
+
+"Great Scott! What can Ambrose do?" demanded Lonsdale despairingly, but
+when at last the Dean reached the zone of the fire, there only remained
+about eight freshmen to ascertain his views and test his power. The Dean
+stood for a minute or two, silently warming his hands. In a ring the
+presumed leaders eyed him, talking to each other the while with slightly
+exaggerated carelessness.
+
+"Well, Mr. Fane?" asked the Dean.
+
+"Well, sir," Michael replied.
+
+"Damned good," whispered Lonsdale ecstatically in Michael's ear. "You
+couldn't have said anything better. That's damned good."
+
+Michael under the enthusiastic congratulations of Lonsdale began to feel
+he had indeed said something very good, but he hoped he would soon have
+an opportunity to say something even better.
+
+"Enjoying yourself, Mr. Lonsdale?" inquired the Dean.
+
+"Yes, sir. Are you?" answered Lonsdale.
+
+"Splendid," murmured Michael.
+
+A silence followed this exchange of courtesies. The bonfire was
+beginning to die down, but nobody ventured under the Dean's eye to put
+on more faggots. Under-porters were seen drawing near with pails of
+water, and though a cushion aimed from a window upset one pail, very
+soon the bonfire was a miserable mess of smoking ashes and the moon
+resumed her glory. From an upper window some second-year men chanted in
+a ridiculous monotone:
+
+"The Dean--he was the Dean--he was the Dean--he was the Dean! The
+Dean--he was the Dean he was--the Dean he was--the Dean!!"
+
+Mr. Ambrose did not bother to look up in the direction of the glee, but
+took another glance at Michael, Lonsdale, Grainger and the other
+stalwarts. Then he turned away.
+
+"Good night," Lonsdale called after the retreating figure of the tall
+hunched don, and not being successful in luring him back, he poured his
+scorn upon the defaulters safe in their rooms above.
+
+"You are a lot of rotters. Come down and make another."
+
+But the freshmen were not yet sufficiently hardy to do this. One by one
+they melted away, and Lonsdale marked his contempt for their
+pusillanimity by throwing two syphons and his gown into the Warden's
+garden. After which he invited Michael and his fellow die-hards to drink
+a glass of port in his rooms. Here for an hour they sat, discussing
+their contemporaries.
+
+In the morning Shadbolt was asked if anybody had been hauled for last
+night's bonner.
+
+"Mr. Fane, Mr. Grainger and the Honorable Lonsdale," he informed the
+inquirer. Together those three interviewed the Dean.
+
+"Two guineas each," he announced after a brief homily on the foolishness
+and inconvenience of keeping everybody up on the first Sunday of term.
+"And if you feel aggrieved, you can get up a subscription among your
+co-lunatics to defray your expenses."
+
+Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look
+like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the
+other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a
+manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same
+to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST TERM
+
+
+His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
+discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
+certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually
+varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term
+became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after
+numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view
+of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own
+"year." These trials of personality were conducted with all the help
+that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had
+registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often
+sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt
+inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books.
+Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on
+the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby football. He
+was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the
+secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant
+courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it
+was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a
+second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors
+and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed
+before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed
+as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.
+
+Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a
+general observation on the row of Sunday night's celebration, Michael
+proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.
+
+"Were you in that gang?" Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
+surprise.
+
+"I was fined," Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
+exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
+creating.
+
+"I say," Carben sneered, "so at last one of the 'bloods' is going to
+condescend to play Rugger. Jonah," he called to the captain of the
+Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
+room, "we've got a college blood playing three-quarter for us."
+
+"Good work," said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. "Where is he?"
+
+Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.
+
+"No end of a blood," Carben went on. "Lights bonfires and gets fined all
+in his first week."
+
+The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
+Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
+should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
+freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
+perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
+promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
+wrists and their smug insignificance.
+
+"You were at St. James', weren't you?" asked Jones. "Did you know
+Mansfield?"
+
+"I didn't know him--exactly," said Michael, "but--in fact--we thought
+him rather a tick."
+
+"Thanks very much and all that," said Jones. "He was a friend of mine,
+but don't apologize."
+
+There was a general laugh at Michael's expense from which Carben's
+guffaw survived. "Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,"
+he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
+something positively contemptible.
+
+Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold
+dislike the constellated pimples on Carben's face. Meanwhile the others
+exercised their scornful wit upon the "bloods" of the college.
+
+"Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?" Carben indignantly demanded.
+"Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. 'Can't you keep
+your fat little paunch down? I don't want to look at it,' said Fitzroy.
+That's pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front
+of a lot of freshers. Gingold's going to jack rowing, and he's quite
+right."
+
+"Quite right," a chorus echoed.
+
+Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he
+remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of
+wrath at the insult offered to Gingold's dignity irritated Michael. He
+felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly
+deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as
+offensive as Jones and Carben.
+
+"These rowing bloods think they've bought the college," somebody was
+wisely propounding.
+
+"We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn't we?" Michael
+inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
+rebuke.
+
+"Well, I think it would be a d'd good thing, if we dropped six places,"
+Carben affirmed.
+
+How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
+and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
+atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
+a dismal genteelness.
+
+"Oh, by the way, before you go," said Carben, "you'd better let me put
+your name down for the Ugger."
+
+"The what?" Michael asked, with a faint insolence.
+
+"The Union."
+
+Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
+committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
+sponsorship of Carben.
+
+"I don't think I'll join this term."
+
+He ran down the stairs from Carben's rooms and stood for a moment
+apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary's
+tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the
+memory of Carben's tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday
+train and plunged immediately into deep country.
+
+In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
+was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
+along the table to Grainger:
+
+"I say, Tommy, do you know we've got a Rugger rough with us?"
+
+Several people murmured in surprise.
+
+"I say, have you really been playing Rugger?"
+
+"Well, great Scott!" exclaimed Michael, "there's nothing very odd in
+that."
+
+"But the Rugger roughs are all very bad men," Lonsdale protested.
+
+"Some are," Michael admitted. "Still, it's a better game than Socker."
+
+"But everybody at St. Mary's plays Socker," Lonsdale went on.
+
+Michael felt for a while enraged against the pettiness of outlook that
+even the admired Lonsdale displayed. How ridiculous it was to despise
+Rugby football because the college was so largely composed of Etonians
+and Harrovians and Wykehamists and Carthusians. It was like schoolboys.
+And Michael abruptly realized that all of them sitting at this
+freshmen's table were really schoolboys. It was natural after all that
+with the patriotism of youth they should disdain games foreign to their
+traditions. This, however, was no reason for allowing Rugby to be
+snuffed out ignominiously.
+
+"Anyway I shall go on playing Rugger," Michael asserted.
+
+"Shall I have a shot?" suggested Lonsdale.
+
+"It's a most devilish good game," Michael earnestly avowed.
+
+"Tommy," Lonsdale shouted, "I'm going to be a Rugger rough myself."
+
+"I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row," said
+Wedderburn severely.
+
+"My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass," chuckled the offender.
+
+Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.
+
+"Have you sconced me?" Lonsdale demanded.
+
+The head of the table nodded.
+
+Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown.
+Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn's
+room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus of
+Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all very
+foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and his
+auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn's
+return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited him
+in his room to enjoy his displeasure.
+
+Michael's consciousness of the sharp division in the college between
+two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He
+continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with a
+delighted irony the comments of the "bad men" on the "bloods." Yet many
+of these "bad men" he rather liked, and he would often defend them to
+his critical young contemporaries, although on the "bad men" of his own
+year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in
+this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend
+of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook
+by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he
+seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him
+essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers.
+These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in
+numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves;
+when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon
+or the Mitre or the Queen's, they gathered in the lodge almost in the
+dimensions of a school-treat.
+
+"Why do we always go about in such quantity?" Michael once asked
+Wedderburn.
+
+"What else can we do?" answered Wedderburn. "We must subject each other
+to--I mean--we haven't got any clubs yet. We're bound to stick
+together."
+
+"Well, I'm getting rather fed up with it," said Michael. "I feel more
+like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
+coffee and tea in great masses of people. I'm bored to tears by half the
+men I go about with, and I'm sure they're bored to tears with me. We
+don't talk about anything but each other's schools and whether A is a
+better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it's true that D
+isn't really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and
+every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each
+other's shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash
+off the pictures. And when they've all read the story of the nightingale
+in the Decameron, they sit up till one o'clock discussing who of our
+year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R. four years
+from now."
+
+But for all Michael's grumbling through that first term he was beginning
+to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which
+in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself
+whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a
+butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of
+artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of
+whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.
+
+"I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself," said
+Michael. "And yet I don't think it is snobbishness. I believe it's a
+form of collecting. It's a throw back to primitive life in a private
+school. One day in your fourth year you'll give a dinner party for about
+twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and how and
+where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly obvious.
+Partly of course it's due to being at Eton where you had nothing to do
+but observe social distinction in the making and talk about Burne-Jones
+to your tutor."
+
+"My dear fellow," said Wedderburn deeply, "I have these people up to my
+rooms because I like them."
+
+"But it is convenient always to like the right people," Michael argued.
+"There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don't like. For
+instance, Avery----"
+
+"Avery!" Wedderburn snorted.
+
+"He's not likely ever to be captain of the 'Varsity Eleven," said
+Michael. "But he's amusing, and he can talk about books."
+
+"Patronizing ass," Wedderburn growled.
+
+"That's exactly what he isn't," Michael contradicted.
+
+"Damnable poseur," Wedderburn rumbled.
+
+"Oh, well, so are you," said Michael.
+
+He thought how willfully Wedderburn would persist in misjudging Avery.
+Yet himself had spent most delightful hours with him. To be sure, his
+sensitiveness made him sharp-tongued, and he dressed rather too well.
+But all the Carthusians at St. Mary's dressed rather too well and
+carried about with them the atmosphere of a week-end in a sporting
+country-house owned by very rich people. This burbling prosperity would
+gradually trickle away, Michael thought, and he began to follow the
+course of Avery four years hence directed by Oxford to--to what? To some
+distinguished goal of art, but whether as writer or painter or sculptor
+he did not know, Avery was so very versatile. Michael mentally put him
+on one side to decorate a conspicuous portion of the ideal edifice he
+dreamed of creating from his Oxford society. There was Lonsdale.
+Lonsdale really possessed the serene perfection of a great work of art.
+Michael thought to himself that almost he could bear to attend for ever
+Ardle's dusty lectures on Cicero in order that for ever he might hear
+Lonsdale admit with earnest politeness that he had not found time to
+glance at the text the day before, that he was indeed sorry to cause Mr.
+Ardle such a mortification, but that unfortunately he had left his Plato
+in a sadler's shop, where he had found it necessary to complain of a
+saddle newly made for him.
+
+"But I am lecturing on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale. The Pro Milone was not
+delivered by Plato, Mr. Lonsdale."
+
+"What's he talking about?" Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+"Nor was it delivered by Mr. Fane," added the Senior Tutor dryly.
+
+Lonsdale looked at first very much alarmed by this suggestion, then
+seeing by the lecturer's face that something was still wrong, he assumed
+a puzzled expression, and finally in an attempt to relieve the situation
+he laughed very heartily and said:
+
+"Oh, well, after all, it's very much the same." Then, as everybody else
+laughed very loudly, Lonsdale sat down and leaned back, pulling up his
+trousers in gentle self-congratulation.
+
+"Rum old buffer," he whispered presently to Michael. "His eye gets very
+glassy when he looks at me. Do you think I ought to ask him to lunch?"
+
+Michael thought that Avery, Wedderburn and Lonsdale might be considered
+to form the nucleus of the intimate ideal society which his imagination
+was leading him on to shape. And if that trio seemed not completely to
+represent the forty freshmen of St. Mary's, there might be added to the
+list certain others for qualities of athletic renown that combined with
+charm of personality gave them the right to be set up in Michael's
+collection as types. There was Grainger, last year's Captain of the
+Boats at Eton, who would certainly row for the 'Varsity in the spring.
+Michael liked to sit in his rooms and watch his sprawling bulk and
+listen for an hour at a time to his naive theories of life. Grainger
+seemed to shed rays of positive goodness, and Michael found that he
+exercised over this splendid piece of youth a fascination which to
+himself was surprising.
+
+"Great Scott, you are an odd chap," Grainger once ejaculated.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, you're a clever devil, aren't you, and you don't seem to do
+anything. Have I talked a lot of rot?"
+
+"A good deal," Michael admitted. "At least, it would be rot if I talked
+it, but it would be ridiculous if you talked in any other way."
+
+"You _are_ a curious chap. I can't make you out."
+
+"Why should you?" asked Michael. "You were never sent into this world to
+puzzle out things. You were sent here to sprawl across it just as you're
+sprawling across that sofa. When you go down, you'll go into the
+Egyptian Civil Service and you'll sprawl across the Sahara in exactly
+the same way. I rather wish I were like you. It must be quite
+comfortable to sit down heavily and unconcernedly on a lot of people. I
+can't imagine a more delightful mattress; only I should feel them
+wriggling under me."
+
+"I suppose you're a Radical. They say you are," Grainger lazily
+announced through puffed-out fumes of tobacco.
+
+"I suppose I might be," said Michael, "if I wanted to proclaim myself
+anything at all, but I'd much rather watch you sprawling effectively and
+proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I've really very
+little inclination to criticize people like you. It's only in books I
+think you're a little boring."
+
+Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming
+vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.
+
+     CARLINGTON ROAD,
+
+     November 20th.
+
+     Dearest Michael,
+
+     I'm so glad you're still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it
+     would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you,
+     though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You'll be
+     glad to hear that I've got rid of this tiresome house. I've sold it
+     to a retired Colonel--such an objectionable old man, and I'm really
+     so pleased he's bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn
+     because the people next door were continually complaining of
+     Stella's piano, and really Carlington Road has become impossible.
+     Such an air of living next door, and whenever I look out of the
+     window the maid is shaking a mat and looking up to see if I'm
+     interested. We must try to settle on a new house when you're back
+     in town. We'll stay in a hotel for a while. Stella has had to take
+     a studio, which I do not approve of her doing, and I cannot bear to
+     see the piano going continually in and out of the house. There are
+     so many things I want to talk to you about--money, and whether you
+     would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we could
+     find a house at some other time.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.
+
+     My dear old Michael,
+
+     I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and
+     I've taken a studio here because the man next door--a most
+     _frightful_ bounder--said the noise I made went through and through
+     his wife. As she's nearly as big round as the world, I wasn't
+     flattered. Mother is getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange
+     women come to the house and talk about some society for dealing
+     with Life with a capital letter. I think we're going to be rather
+     well off, and Mother wants to live in a house she's seen in Park
+     Street, but I want to take a house in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like
+     Cheyne Walk, because this house has got a splendid studio in the
+     garden and I thought with some mauve brocades it would look
+     perfectly lovely. There's a very good _paneled_ room that you could
+     have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am working
+     at a Franck concerto. I'm being painted by rather a nice youth, at
+     least he would be nice, if he weren't so much like a corpse. I
+     suppose you'll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term.
+
+     Yours ever,
+
+     Stella.
+
+     P.S.--I've come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution
+     isn't enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don't
+     think I shall appear in public again until I've lived a little. I
+     really think life is rather exciting--unless it's spelt with a
+     capital letter.
+
+Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation
+in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would
+have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He was
+sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the
+privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word to
+describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with
+Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.
+
+Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by
+giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his
+friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had been
+casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle chattering
+groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought out and
+balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal dinner might,
+Michael thought, almost become with him a regular function, so that
+people would learn to speak with interest and respect of Fane's terminal
+dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming a club, a club
+strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as really to
+preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate, putting
+aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try the
+effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided, since
+that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward
+arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be
+Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
+to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
+terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
+established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose a
+number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests would
+change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he felt that
+some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven as the
+number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more must be
+invited, and Michael without much further consideration selected five
+freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness drew them into
+prominence. But when he had given all the invitations Michael was a
+little depressed by the conventional appearance of his list. With the
+exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and Avery, his list
+was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn up by Grainger.
+As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of correctness that
+overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at the head of the
+table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed round the table his
+terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that on this occasion he
+had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe moment of
+self-examination he characterized as "snobbishness." In this room at the
+Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun and
+steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
+subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
+and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
+eclectic society would have been out of place.
+
+Only Avery's loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
+group.
+
+"_Who's_ that man wearing a pie-frill?" whispered Alan sternly from
+Michael's right.
+
+Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.
+
+"Avery allows himself a little license," said Michael. "But, Alan, he's
+really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you saw
+him on Sunday you'd think he was perfectly dressed. All Old Carthusians
+are."
+
+But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
+met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
+in common.
+
+Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
+Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
+that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the
+responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt
+grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who
+waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief
+that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called
+Castleton.
+
+Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the
+strongest influence in Michael's year, and his friendship would be good
+for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered
+Castleton rather over-rated, but there was a superficial similarity
+between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and
+jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate
+Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes
+wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more
+apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion
+in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he
+seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he
+seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he
+became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.
+
+Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more
+than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a
+detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman,
+and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would
+certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of
+St. Mary's freshmen as this one might be considered. But a
+representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had
+intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with
+distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne,
+and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael's desire to have
+him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However, it
+was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went
+round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to see
+his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.
+
+Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and
+smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale
+discussed their individual excellencies.
+
+"First of all," said Lonsdale, "I want to propose the health of our
+distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he's a jolly
+good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn's a jolly good
+fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good
+fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend
+Tommy Grainger--whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we
+were boys together--I will here say that I confidently anticipate he
+will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he's a jolly good
+fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name--all jolly good
+fellows--except our host. He's given us a good dinner and good wine and
+good company, which nobody can deny. So here's his health."
+
+Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering
+procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were
+all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed
+through his first terminal dinner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CHEYNE WALK
+
+
+The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house.
+Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last
+abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and
+postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with
+Stella's support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem
+of their new home.
+
+Ultimately they fixed upon Chelsea, indeed upon that very house Stella
+had chosen for its large studio separated by the length of a queer
+little walled garden from the rest of the house. Certainly 173 Cheyne
+Walk was better than 64 Carlington Road, thought Michael as, leaning
+back against the parapet of the Embankment, he surveyed the mellow
+exterior in the unreal sunlight of the January noon. Empty as it was, it
+diffused an atmosphere of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and
+peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed
+to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil
+interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering
+indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either
+side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the
+three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the first story
+all gave him much contemplative pleasure. He and his mother and Stella
+had in three weeks visited every feasible quarter of London and as
+Michael thought of Hampstead's leaf-haunted by-streets, of the still
+squares of Kensington, even of Camden Hill's sky-crowned freedom, he was
+sure he regretted none of them in the presence of this sedate house
+looking over the sun-flamed river and the crenated line of the long
+Battersea shore.
+
+Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott
+was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was anxious
+to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend of his
+father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years ago, an
+intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he was trying
+to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only definite
+impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into Michael's
+palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and angular with
+a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the door. Michael
+crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr. Prescott. Himself
+explained who he was and, opening the front door, led the way into the
+empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after room to Prescott,
+that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the observation of the
+house than with a desire to achieve in regard to Michael himself a
+tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun that sloped thin
+golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare rooms expressed for
+Michael something of the sensation which Prescott's attitude conveyed to
+him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth that could most
+easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused depths of his
+heart.
+
+"I suppose you knew my father very well," said Michael at last, blushing
+as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.
+
+"About as well as anybody," said Prescott nervously. "Like to talk to
+you about him some time. Better come to dinner. Live in Albany. Have a
+soldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important
+you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I'm almost what you
+might call your guardian. Of course your mother's a dear woman. Known
+her for years. Always splendid to me. But she mustn't get too
+charitable."
+
+"Do you mean to people's failings?" Michael asked.
+
+Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what
+Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak out
+clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard shyness of
+preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover, this empty
+house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a frankness and
+directness of intercourse that made absurd these roundabout
+postponements of actual problems.
+
+"Charitable to societies," Prescott explained. "I don't want her to
+think she's got to endow half a dozen committees with money and
+occupation."
+
+"Stella's a little worried about mother's charities," Michael admitted.
+
+"Awful good sort, Stella," Prescott jerked out. "Frightens me
+devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very
+much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out
+of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father," he added
+vaguely.
+
+"Did you know my father when he first met my mother?" Michael asked
+directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong
+account.
+
+"Oh, yes, rather. I sent in my papers when he did. Chartered a yacht and
+sailed all over the Mediterranean. Good gracious, twenty years ago! How
+old we're all getting. Poor old Saxby was always anxious that no kind
+of"--Prescott gibbed at the word for a moment or two--"no kind of slur
+should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have had to
+meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there was
+nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan, and yet he was always a
+rattling good sort. Only of course your mother was always cut off from
+women's society. Couldn't be helped, but I don't want her now to overdo
+it. Glad she's taken this house, though. What are you going to be?"
+
+Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at
+the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house.
+Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother's graceful and elusive
+presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich
+associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance to
+muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived with
+Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of chintz
+and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration that she
+flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in a
+confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr. Prescott
+listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of admiring
+perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by Mrs. Fane,
+and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it would fly
+with greater certainty, until room by room and window by window and
+corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and
+appropriately arranged.
+
+"I give full marks to Prescott," said Stella later in the afternoon to
+Michael. "He's like a nice horse."
+
+"I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room," said
+Michael.
+
+"Why?" demanded Stella.
+
+And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find
+one.
+
+"Well, why not?" he at last very lamely replied.
+
+There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between Michael
+and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing, while Mrs.
+Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street Hotel, chosen
+by them as a convenient center from which to direct the multitudinous
+activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael, however, after
+the first thrills of selection had died down, must be thinking about
+going up again and be content to look forward on the strength of
+Stella's energetic promises to coming down for the Easter vacation and
+entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.
+
+Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old
+friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had
+been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather guilty
+because he had never been near his old school nor even walked over to
+Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It seemed to
+him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and Wedderburn
+and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends. All that
+Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing past of old
+associations and of a sense of transition into a new life that though as
+yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger and worthier
+experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have happened in
+Carlington Road.
+
+On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms
+in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the darkness
+of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming table in its
+center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the soldier-servant and the
+half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the walls of the great
+square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that brooded outside the
+heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany Michael was immeasurably
+aware of the life of London that was surging such a little distance
+away; but in this modish cloister he felt that the life he was aware of
+could never be dated, as if indeed were he to emerge into Piccadilly and
+behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered wigs they would not greatly
+surprise him. The Albany seemed to have wrung the spirit from the noisy
+years that swept on their course outside, to have snatched from each its
+heart and in the museum of this decorous glass arcade to have preserved
+it immortally, exhibiting the frozen palpitations to a sensitive
+observer.
+
+"You're not talking much," said Prescott.
+
+"I was thinking of old plays," said Michael.
+
+Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
+called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
+himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
+Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
+that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
+evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
+incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
+upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
+perpetual present.
+
+"Don't often go to the theater nowadays," said Prescott. "When Saxby was
+alive"--Michael fancied that "alive" was substituted for something that
+might have hurt his feelings--"we used to go a lot, but it's dull going
+alone."
+
+"Must you go alone?" asked Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, of course I needn't. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,"
+repeated the host.
+
+Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
+asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
+sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.
+
+"Oh, yes, I think you are very like," said Prescott. "Good Lord, what a
+pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
+you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
+things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
+more brain than many people thought, but of course," Prescott hurriedly
+added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
+equipment, "of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary."
+
+"I like to be ordinary," Michael said; "but I'm not."
+
+"Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
+some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
+over by a train," said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. "You
+know, I think you're a very lucky chap," he added. "Here you are all
+provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
+the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
+sister. Why, you might do anything."
+
+"What, for example?" queried Michael.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. There's the Diplomatic Service. But don't be in a
+hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
+hundred a year at St. Mary's. And when you're twenty-one you come into
+roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you'll have at
+least two thousand a year. But don't be a young ass. You've been brought
+up quietly. You haven't _got_ to cut a dash. Don't get in a mess with
+women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get out of
+it."
+
+"I don't care much about women," said Michael. "They're disappointing."
+
+"What, already?" exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.
+
+Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to the
+attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark discreet
+room, and the Albany's atmosphere of passion squeezed into the mold of
+contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of Thackeray's books,
+all combined to affect Michael with the idea that his life had been
+lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his host, and as the
+rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he beheld the old
+impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious, the sensitive
+slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the gloom. Left behind
+was the new Michael going up to the Varsity to-morrow morning for his
+second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends
+who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a
+recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to
+manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight
+uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment,
+made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy
+remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was
+receding farther and farther every moment, and his conversation reached
+Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of light, while finally he
+was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly and with a half-defiant
+independence of precisely what he wished to say. The evening swam past
+comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of the cigar smoke the figure
+of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy armchair took on once again a
+definite corporeal existence. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed the
+twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of silvery apology for obtruding
+the hour. Michael came back into himself with a start of confusion.
+
+"I say, I must go."
+
+Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.
+
+"I say," said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, "I think
+I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night."
+
+"No, no, no, my dear boy; I've been very much interested," insisted
+Prescott.
+
+And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth
+of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to
+discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly
+entertained his host.
+
+"Nothing," he finally decided.
+
+Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
+with all the rich confidence of a term's maturity. Even in the drizzle
+of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and
+waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more
+beautiful.
+
+After hall Avery came up to Michael's room, and while the rain dripped
+endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
+assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
+before.
+
+Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with
+Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth,
+so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the
+blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner.
+
+"You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott," he
+affirmed. "I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
+without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
+perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant."
+
+"But you wouldn't be," Avery objected, "if you thought about it."
+
+"No, but I shouldn't think about it," Michael pointed out. "I should
+have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
+eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
+champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
+just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn't quite the
+silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
+third cigar."
+
+Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
+dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his
+outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the
+terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better
+suit his mantelpiece.
+
+"I wonder what I shall be like at fifty," he sighed.
+
+"It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty," said Avery. "You
+can't possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the
+Varsity. You'll have to do something."
+
+"What, for example?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, write perhaps."
+
+"Write!" Michael scoffed. "Why, when I can read all these"--he pointed
+to his bookshelves--"and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy,
+what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing."
+
+"Well, I intend to write," said Avery. "In fact, I don't mind telling
+you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can."
+
+Michael laughed.
+
+"And you'll contribute," Avery went on eagerly.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"I'm talking about articles. I shall call my paper--well, I haven't
+thought about the title--but I shall get a good one. It won't be like
+the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with
+art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won't be decadent.
+It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it
+might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass."
+
+"Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production," said Michael. "I
+should call it The World Turned Upside Down."
+
+"I'm perfectly serious about this paper," said Avery reproachfully.
+
+"And I'm taking you very seriously," said Michael. "That's why I won't
+write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?"
+
+"We might have one drawing. I'm not quite sure how much it costs to
+reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather advanced
+stuff."
+
+"Well, as long as you don't publish drawings that look as if the
+compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at
+it, and as long as----"
+
+"Oh, shut up," interrupted the dreaming editor, "and don't fall into
+that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It's so young."
+
+"But I am young," Michael pointed out with careful gravity. "So are you.
+And, Maurice, really you know for me my own ambitions are best. I've got
+a great sense of responsibility, and if I were to start going through
+life trying to do things, I should worry myself all the time. The only
+chance for me is to find a sort of negative attitude to life like
+Prescott. You'll do lots of things. I think you're capable of them. But
+I'd rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I'd give anything
+to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are. But I'm not.
+I've got a sister whom you ought to meet. She's got all the positive
+energy in our family. I can't explain, Maurice, just exactly what I'm
+feeling about existence at this moment, unless I tell you more about
+myself than I possibly can--anyway yet a while. I don't want to do any
+harm, and I don't think I could ever feel I was in a position to do any
+good. Look here, don't let's talk any more. I meant to dream myself into
+an attitude to-night, and you've made me talk like an earnest young
+convert."
+
+"I think I'll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper," said
+Avery excitedly.
+
+"He thinks you're patronizing," Michael warned him.
+
+Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:
+
+"Does he? I wonder why."
+
+"But he won't, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced
+drawings."
+
+"Doesn't he like me?" persisted Avery. "I'd better not go round to his
+rooms."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled
+vanity."
+
+When Avery had hesitatingly embarked upon his expedition to Wedderburn,
+Michael thought rather regretfully of his presence and wished he had
+been more sympathetic in his reception of the great scheme. Yet perhaps
+that was the best way to have begun his own scheme for not being
+disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to
+reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be
+no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life,
+Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books should give him his
+adventures. Actually he almost made up his mind to retire even from the
+observation of reality, so much had he felt, all this Christmas
+vacation, the dominance of Stella and so deeply had he been impressed by
+Prescott's attitude of inscrutable commentary.
+
+Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled
+round to Wedderburn's rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in
+contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old
+lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling
+touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm
+friendship--so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be
+nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the
+birth of this undergraduate bantling.
+
+"Though what exactly you want me to do," protested Michael, "I don't
+quite know."
+
+"We want money, anyway," Avery frankly admitted. "Oh, and by the way,
+Michael, I've asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you
+up."
+
+"What on earth for?" gasped Michael.
+
+"Oh, they'll want supers. They're doing The Merchant of Venice. Great
+sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of
+Morocco."
+
+"But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?"
+Michael inquired gently.
+
+In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and
+not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary's freshmen,
+including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the rehearsals
+certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though Michael was
+not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of seeing
+Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco and
+Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional actresses
+who came up from London to take part in the production.
+
+"I think I ought to have played Lorenzo," said Lonsdale seriously to
+Michael, just before the first night. "I think Miss Delacourt would have
+preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I'm only a gondolier,
+an attendant, and a soldier."
+
+Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It seemed
+to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs. There
+had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in "my
+Lorenzo."
+
+"I'm only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge," Michael
+observed.
+
+"And I don't think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,"
+Lonsdale went on. "He doesn't appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I
+wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign Office
+and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I'm
+perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don't forget you're
+lunching with me to-morrow. I don't mind telling you she threw over a
+lunch with that ass from Oriel who's playing Lorenzo. I never heard such
+an idiotic voice in my life."
+
+Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice
+Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy
+all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals in
+the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to
+Alan's rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an
+attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other
+colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the individuality of
+each college, but most of all perhaps the individuality of his own
+college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one day with an expression of
+alarm to say that he had been invited to lunch by the man who played
+Launcelot Gobbo.
+
+"Well, what of it?" said Michael. "He probably wants to borrow your
+dog."
+
+"He says he's at Lincoln," Lonsdale stammered.
+
+"So he is."
+
+"Well, I don't know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something of
+Oxford?"
+
+The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great
+success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old
+members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told
+long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the
+auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the
+disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their various
+Toggers to victory.
+
+Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger
+almost swinging the St. Mary's boat into the apprehensive stern of the
+only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening
+his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The
+Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in
+that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and
+Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path
+beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary's failed to catch the
+boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his own
+way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.
+
+Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement
+of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his
+mother's particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him,
+but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room in
+turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.
+
+There was his mother's own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions and
+curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was
+Stella's bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly
+mediaeval, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room
+with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue and
+crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
+studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.
+
+"I haven't done anything but just have it whitewashed," she said. "I
+wanted you to choose the scheme, as I'm going to make all the noise."
+
+The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
+his sister entered it.
+
+"But it's absolutely empty," he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
+in all that space except Stella's piano, looking now almost as small and
+graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.
+
+"You shall decorate the room," she said. "What will you choose?"
+
+Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
+gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries and
+blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude and
+amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with
+Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even
+as Michael's fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions, his mind
+swiftly returned to the keyboard's alternations of white and black, so
+that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric significance.
+
+"I don't think we want anything," he finally proclaimed. "Just two or
+three tall chairs and a mask of somebody--Beethoven perhaps--and black
+silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn't go with elaborate
+decorations."
+
+So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
+remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
+infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
+crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
+listen to the muffled sound of Stella's notes. Never had any entrance
+seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
+able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the power
+and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room was
+larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed chair,
+Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the sun,
+would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these clear
+melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the high-backed
+chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space itself. Alan
+sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played and played,
+Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him the union that
+already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the joy of life on
+the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have always someone
+fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.
+
+"By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers," said
+Alan.
+
+Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark's powerful
+wings.
+
+April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
+usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
+the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
+greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
+him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
+walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
+not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
+them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
+here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had been
+none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the contemporary
+residents could ever have walked along its moderately cheerful
+uniformity.
+
+Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
+of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
+Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
+existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
+Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
+been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
+before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a visit
+to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more depressing
+than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the sensation of
+constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that was imposed upon
+his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as he wandered
+between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom of the river
+Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess the
+narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses did
+not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost seeming
+to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather the
+impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
+contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
+came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of
+insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to the
+tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble flaunting
+of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically by the
+dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a spirit
+haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former territory so
+much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington Road. When he
+reached the house itself, he was able to expel his sentiment for the
+past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new owner had
+dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the door, the
+number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him that this was
+indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so hardly with the
+problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree that, once an
+object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction to the threshold
+of this house when every area down the road owned a lime-tree identical
+in age and growth.
+
+Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
+check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
+inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
+house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
+street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
+horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
+recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
+lived.
+
+It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
+here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
+thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
+day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
+thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
+or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never
+is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes
+during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of
+vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of clouds which
+the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he had done this
+a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure again the vision
+he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible ever to remember the
+exact moment of falling asleep.
+
+After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
+moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to himself
+with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at the corner
+of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of Ulalume, and
+Michael found himself murmuring, "Of my most immemorial year," half
+expectant of Lily's slim form swaying toward him, half blushful already
+in breathless anticipation of the meeting.
+
+Down the road a door opened. Michael's heart jumped annoyingly out of
+control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated in
+the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed, and a
+man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps. Michael
+saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names of
+house-agents, that several "to let" boards leaned confidentially over
+the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who was
+whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew where
+Mrs. Haden had gone.
+
+"I wish I did," said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. "No, sir,
+I'm afraid I don't. Nor anybody else."
+
+"You mean they went away in a hurry," said Michael shamefaced.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And left no address?"
+
+"Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen's bills in the hall."
+
+Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but
+glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with
+the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably
+defeated.
+
+In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room
+staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his
+discovery.
+
+"I'm glad you're not going to start that business again," she said.
+"And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall
+soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for
+me disinterestedly and without prejudice."
+
+"What sort of difficulties?" Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her
+cheeks warm with the evening light.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she half whispered. "But let's go away together in
+the summer and not even take a piano."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+YOUTH'S DOMINATION
+
+
+On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary's hymned the rising sun,
+Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible expression of
+his own mental image of Oxford's completeness, to pierce in one dazzling
+moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts which had
+restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful obscurity about
+his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were,
+imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his evocation to
+recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence of human desire and
+human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of
+its repository.
+
+All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
+called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
+live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
+bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
+the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
+that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
+make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
+of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily upon
+the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the cold
+hues and blushes of the sun's youth, that stood as symbol for so much
+here in St. Mary's, made of the east one great shell of lucent color.
+The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of dawn and
+sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys gathered like
+twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic visitors came half
+shyly through the portal that was to give such a sense of time's
+rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible: dons came
+hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and at last the
+tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and Lonsdale and
+Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides equipped in cap and
+gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding stairs to the top.
+
+For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
+scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
+poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
+worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
+with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
+to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
+lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
+and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
+it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
+again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
+dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the
+tower's top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
+time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the sun
+mounted into the day.
+
+Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as emmets
+at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to stand.
+Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent hurtling
+outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of the town
+scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.
+
+Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the
+heart of England. He had refused Maurice's invitation to a somewhat
+mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the
+almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he was
+inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan, now
+sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning
+celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far
+afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college
+shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign
+of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement
+of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After
+breakfast it would still be only about seven o'clock with a hot-eyed
+languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost
+decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and
+walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the
+lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed
+incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which had
+so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate a
+much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he
+extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary
+impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.
+
+It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more
+typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the
+sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double
+irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was
+glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in
+the grass by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at
+the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice's
+mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
+had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
+with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
+went back to the river's bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
+while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
+it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
+water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
+and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
+Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
+dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn's name, and deliberately he
+did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
+were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
+flowing into the ancestral Thames.
+
+Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
+Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
+was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
+white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
+one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.
+
+At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
+conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary inmate.
+His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat, but
+continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on the
+table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the table
+by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still fixed upon
+his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a cipher and
+regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in his silent
+company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this strange youth
+with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately carved
+countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing instead
+of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his waistcoat.
+Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker up his pale
+forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate examined the
+food on the plate before him.
+
+"I think it's rather cold by now," said Michael, unable to keep silence
+any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.
+
+"I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
+I'd read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you
+now, you'd think I was an affected ass," he drawled.
+
+Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.
+
+"They're all equally bad," the poet proclaimed gloomily. "What made you
+come to this inn? I didn't know that anybody else except me had ever
+been here. You're at the Varsity, I suppose?"
+
+Michael with a nod announced his college.
+
+"I'm at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest
+undergraduates in Oxford."
+
+"I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary's," Michael suggested.
+
+"Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary's man. I
+refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know."
+
+"Oh, rather. In fact, he's rather a friend of mine. He's keen on
+starting a paper just at present."
+
+"I know. I know," said the poet. "He's asked me to be one of the
+forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?"
+
+"I was invited to be," Michael admitted. "But instead I'm going to
+subscribe some of the capital required. My name's Fane."
+
+"Mine's Hazlewood. It's rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.
+Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere
+else. But they've got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go
+two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have
+you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris
+weighing the charms of Helen--no--on second thoughts I'm being forced.
+Don't encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?"
+
+"I don't know," said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest
+roast chicken he had ever seen. "I think I missed a turning. I've been
+at Lechlade all day."
+
+"We may as well ride back together," Hazlewood proposed.
+
+After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and
+then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.
+Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.
+
+"Do you know many Balliol people?" he asked.
+
+Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting
+in The Merchant of Venice.
+
+"I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my
+rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea
+they're keeping a chapel, or else it's a relief from the unparagoned
+brutality of the college architecture."
+
+Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his
+rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how
+many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax
+candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive
+candlesticks of wrought iron.
+
+"Mr. Fane of St. Mary's," said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was dimly
+aware of multitudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur of
+expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.
+
+"I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?" the
+chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.
+
+"Forgot all about it," said Hazlewood. "But I suppose I can bring a
+visitor."
+
+Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied
+criticism of the expostulation.
+
+"Sit down," said Hazlewood peremptorily. "If I can't bring a visitor I
+resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will
+have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us his
+carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediaeval Warfare."
+
+"Don't be an affected ass, Guy," said Comeragh. "You know you yourself
+are reading a paper on The Sonnet."
+
+"Rise from the noble lord," said Hazlewood. "The first I've had in a
+day's fishing. I say, Fane, don't listen to this rot."
+
+The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host
+and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.
+
+Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was
+sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the
+experience without any prickings of self-consciousness and doubt as to
+whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood's room was
+the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth
+for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary's
+he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or
+Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood's, nor would he have
+exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in
+Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.
+He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over the
+tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon their
+martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the level
+voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing
+sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished glass. The tobacco
+smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated
+loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the
+discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green
+curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and
+with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the
+tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the
+decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members of
+the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and
+earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous,
+sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more
+delightful.
+
+Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most unjustly
+had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made up his mind
+to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that from it he
+might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with Hazlewood to the
+lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room would stand as
+representatives of the college.
+
+"Yes, I should think so," said Hazlewood. "Why, are you making
+exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes
+an American to do that really well, you know."
+
+"But what is the essential Balliol?" Michael demanded.
+
+"Who could say so easily? Perhaps it's the same sort of spirit, slightly
+filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in Elizabethan
+England."
+
+Michael asked for a little more elaboration.
+
+"Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by
+birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste
+not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be
+ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with
+Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are."
+
+"Will that description serve for yourself?" Michael asked.
+
+"For me? Oh, great scott, no! I'm utterly deficient in proconsular
+ambitions."
+
+They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend after
+promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his acquaintance
+with Balliol.
+
+When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with Wedderburn
+drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Both
+the promoters insisted that Michael should listen to their announcement
+before he told them anything about himself or his day.
+
+_"The Oxford Looking-Glass" Avery began, "is intended to reflect
+contemporary undergraduate thought."_
+
+"I prefer 'will reflect,'" Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of
+positive opinion.
+
+"I don't think it very much matters," said Michael, "as long as you
+don't think that 'contemporary undergraduate thought' is too
+pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror,
+for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate thought
+ever reaches toward reality."
+
+Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism, and
+the chief promoter went on:
+
+_"Some of the subjects which The Oxford Looking-Glass will reflect will
+be Literature, Politics, Painting, Music, and the Drama."_
+
+"I think that's a rotten sentence," Michael interrupted.
+
+"Well, of course, it will be polished," Avery irritably explained. "What
+Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as simply
+and directly as possible what we are aiming at."
+
+"Ah!" Michael agreed, smiling. "Now I'm beginning to understand."
+
+"_It may be assumed_," Avery went on, "_that the opinion of those who
+are 'knocking at the door_' (in inverted commas)----"
+
+"I shouldn't think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a
+door in inverted commas," Michael observed.
+
+"Look here, Michael," Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously,
+"will you shut up, or you won't be allowed to contribute."
+
+"Haven't you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door
+in Ibsen?" fretfully demanded Maurice. _"That the opinion of those who
+are knocking at the door," he continued defiantly, "is not unworthy of
+an audience."_
+
+"But if they're knocking at a door," Michael objected, "they can't be
+reflected in a mirror; unless it's a glass door, and if it's a glass
+door, they oughtn't to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don't
+knock hard, there isn't much point----"
+
+"_The Editor in chief_," pursued Maurice, undaunted by Michael's attempt
+to reduce to absurdity the claims of The Oxford Looking-Glass, "_will be
+M. Avery (St. Mary's), with whom will be associated C. St. C. Wedderburn
+(St. Mary's), C. M. S. Fane (St. Mary's), V. L. A. Townsend (B.N.C.)_. I
+haven't asked him yet, as a matter of fact, but he's sure to join
+because he's very keen on Ibsen. _W. Mowbray (Univ.)._ Bill Mowbray's
+very bucked at the scheme. He's just resigned from the Russell and
+joined the Canning. They say at the Union that a lot of the principal
+speakers are going to follow Chamberlain's lead for Protection. _N. R.
+Stewart (Trinity)._ Nigel Stewart is most tremendously keen, and rather
+a good man to have, as he's had two poems taken by The Saturday Review
+already. _G. Hazlewood (Balliol)_----"
+
+"That's the man I've come to talk about," said Michael. "I met him
+to-day."
+
+Avery asked if Michael liked old Guy and was obviously pleased to hear
+he had been considered interesting. "For in his own way," said Avery
+solemnly, "he's about the most brilliant man in the Varsity. I'd sooner
+have him under me than all the rest put together, except of course you
+and Wedders," he added quickly. "I'm going to take this prospectus round
+to show him to-morrow. He may have some suggestions to make."
+
+Michael joined with the Editor in supposing that Hazlewood might have a
+large number of suggestions. "And he's got a sense of humor," he added
+consolingly.
+
+For a week or two Michael found himself deeply involved in the
+preliminaries of The Oxford Looking-Glass, and the necessary discussions
+gave many pleasant excuses for dinner parties at the O.U.D.S. or the
+Grid to which Townsend and Stewart (both second-year men) belonged.
+Vernon Townsend wished to make The Oxford Looking-Glass the organ of
+advanced drama; but Avery, though he was willing for Townsend to be as
+advanced as he chose within the limits of the space allotted to his
+progressive pen, was unwilling to surrender the whole of the magazine to
+drama, especially since under the expanding ambitions of editorship he
+had come to the conclusion he was a critic himself, and so was the more
+firmly disinclined to let slip the trenchant opportunity of pulverizing
+the four or five musical comedies that would pass through the Oxford
+theater every term. However, Townsend's demand for the drama and
+nothing but the drama was mitigated by his determination as a Liberal
+that The Oxford Looking-Glass should not be made the mouthpiece of the
+New Toryism represented by Mowbray; and Maurice was able to recover the
+control of the dramatic criticism by representing to Townsend the
+necessity for such unflinching exposition of Free Trade and Palmerston
+Club principles as would balance Mowbray's torrential leadership of the
+Tory Democrats. "So called," Townsend bitterly observed, "because as he
+supposed they were neither Tories nor Democrats."
+
+Mowbray at the end of his second year was certainly one of the
+personalities of undergraduate Oxford. For a year and a term he had
+astonished the Russell Club by the vigor of his Radicalism; and then
+just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
+forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
+Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
+figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
+half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
+new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the Boer
+war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
+conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
+and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
+atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
+Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
+Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always thronged
+with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and whizzed
+about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but less
+dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.
+
+Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
+endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
+been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
+yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
+Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
+much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
+absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried sometimes
+to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity. As it was,
+Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity, whether he were
+feeding Rugger blues on plovers' eggs or keeping an early chapel with
+the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing tennis in the Varsity
+doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and Rollinat and Rops and
+Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with two candles burning
+before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a ramshorn of snuff and
+glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
+
+With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
+Wedderburn's Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
+Hazlewood's genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
+result into a soufflee of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
+as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
+exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute, outside
+money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine along to
+success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in the
+preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
+published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
+reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
+first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he had
+hailed from St. Mary's tower, this dream of youth's domination set
+against the gray background of time's endurance that was itself spun of
+the fabric of dreams.
+
+Divinity and Pass Moderations would occur some time at the term's end,
+inexplicable as such a dreary interruption seemed in these gliding
+river-days which only rain had power for a brief noontide or evening to
+destroy. Yet, as an admission that time flies, the candidates for Pass
+Mods and Divvers attended a few sun-drowsed lectures and never omitted
+to lay most tenderly underneath the cushions of punt or canoe the
+text-books of their impertinent examinations. Seldom, however, did
+Cicero or the logical Jevons emerge in that pool muffled from sight by
+trellised boughs of white and crimson hawthorn. Seldom did Socrates have
+better than a most listless audience or St. Paul the most inaccurate
+geographers, when on the upper river the punt was held against the bank
+by paddles fast in the mud; for there, as one lay at ease, the world
+became a world of tall-growing grasses, and the noise of life no more
+than the monotony of a river's lapping, or along the level water meadows
+a faint sibilance of wind. This was the season when supper was eaten by
+figures in silhouette against the sunset, figures that afterward drifted
+slowly down to college under the tree-entangled stars and flitting
+assiduous bats, with no sound all the way but the rustle of a bird's
+wing in the bushes and the fizz of a lighted match dropped idly over the
+side of the canoe. This was the season when for a long while people sat
+talking at open windows, and from the Warden's garden came sweetly up
+the scent of May flowers.
+
+Sometimes Michael went to the Parks to watch Alan play in one or two of
+the early trial matches, and sometimes they sat in the window of Alan's
+room looking out into Christ Church meadows. Nothing that was important
+was ever spoken during these dreaming nights, and if Michael tried to
+bring the conversation round to Stella, Alan would always talk of
+leg-drives and the problems that perpetually presented themselves to
+cover-point. Yet the evenings were always to Michael in retrospect
+valuable, betokening a period of perfect happiness from the lighting of
+the first pipe to the eating of the last meringue.
+
+Eights Week drew near, and Michael decided after much deliberation that
+he would not ask either his mother or Stella to take part in the
+festival. One of his reasons, only very grudgingly admitted, for not
+inviting Stella was his fear lest Alan might be put into the shade by
+certain more brilliant friends whom he would feel bound to introduce to
+her. Having made up his own mind that Alan represented the perfection of
+normal youth, he was unwilling to admit dangerous competitors. Besides,
+though by now he had managed to rid himself of most of his
+self-consciousness, he was not sure he felt equal to charging the
+battery of eyes that mounted guard in the lodge. The almost savage
+criticism of friends and relatives indulged in by the freshmen's table
+was more than he could equably contemplate for his own mother and
+sister.
+
+So Eights Week arrived with Michael unencumbered and delightfully free
+to stand in the lodge and watch the embarrassed youth, usually so
+debonair and self-possessed, herding a long trail of gay sisters and
+cousins toward his room where even now waited the inevitable salmon
+mayonnaise. Lonsdale in a moment of filial enthusiasm had invited his
+father and mother and only sister to come up, and afterward had spent
+two days of lavish regret for the rashness of the undertaking.
+
+"After all, they can only spend the day," he sighed hopefully to
+Michael, "You'll come and help me through lunch, won't you, and we'll
+rush them off by the first train possible after the first division is
+rowed. I was an ass to ask them. You won't mind being bored a bit by my
+governor? I believe he's considered quite a clever man."
+
+Michael, remembering that Lord Cleveden had been a distinguished
+diplomatist, was prepared to accept his son's estimate.
+
+"They're arriving devilish early," said Lonsdale, coming up to Michael's
+room with an anxious face on the night before.
+
+Ever since his fatal display of affection, he had taken to posting, as
+it were, bulletins of the sad event on Michael's door.
+
+"Would you be frightfully bored if I asked you to come down to the
+station and meet them? It will be impossible for me to talk to the three
+of them at once. I think you'd better talk about wine to the governor.
+It'll buck him rather to think his port has been appreciated. Tell him
+how screwed we made the bobby that night when we were climbing in late
+from that binge on the Cher, and let down glass after glass of the
+governor's port from Tommy's rooms in Parsons' Quad."
+
+Michael promised to do his best to entertain the father, and without
+fail to support the son at the ceremony of meeting his people next
+morning.
+
+"I say, you've come frightfully early," Lonsdale exclaimed, as Lord and
+Lady Cleveden with his sister Sylvia alighted from the train.
+
+"Well, we can walk round my old college," suggested Lord Cleveden
+cheerfully. "I scarcely ever have an opportunity to get up to Oxford
+nowadays."
+
+"I say, I'm awfully sorry to let you in for this," Lonsdale whispered to
+Michael. "Don't encourage the governor to do too much buzzing around at
+the House. Tell him the mayonnaise is getting cold or something."
+
+Soon they arrived at Christ Church, and Michael rather enjoyed walking
+round with Lord Cleveden and listening to his stately anecdotes of
+bygone adventure in these majestic quadrangles.
+
+"I wonder if Lord Saxby was up in your time?" asked Michael as they
+stood in Peckwater.
+
+"Yes, knew him well. In fact, he was a connection of mine. Poor chap, he
+died in South Africa. Where did you meet him? He never went about much."
+
+"Oh, I met him with a chap called Prescott," said Michael hurriedly.
+
+"Dick Prescott? Good gracious!" Lord Cleveden exclaimed, "I haven't seen
+him for years. What an extraordinary mess poor Saxby made of his life,
+to be sure."
+
+"Did he?" asked Michael, well aware of the question's folly, but
+incapable of not asking it.
+
+"Terrible! Terrible! But it was never a public scandal."
+
+"Oh," gulped Michael humbly, wishful he had never asked Lord Cleveden
+about his father.
+
+"I can't remember whether my old rooms were on that staircase or this
+one. Saxby's I think were on this, but mine surely were on that one.
+Let's go up and ask the present owner to let us look in," Lord Cleveden
+proposed, peering the while in amiable doubt at the two staircases.
+
+"Oh, no, I say, father, really, no, no," protested his son. "No, no; he
+may have people with him. Really."
+
+"Ah, to be sure," Lord Cleveden agreed. "What a pity!"
+
+"And I think we ought to buzz round St. Mary's before lunch," Lonsdale
+announced.
+
+"Do they make meringues here nowadays?" inquired Lord Cleveden
+meditatively.
+
+"No, no," Lonsdale assured him. "They've given up since the famous cook
+died. Look here, we absolutely must buzz round St. Mary's. And our
+creme caramel is a much showier sweet than anything they've got at the
+House."
+
+The tour of St. Mary's was conducted with almost incredible rapidity,
+because Lonsdale knew so little about his own college that he omitted
+everything except the J.C.R., the hall, the chapel, the buttery and the
+kitchen.
+
+"Why didn't you ask Duncan Mackintosh to lunch, Arthur dear?" Lady
+Cleveden inquired.
+
+"My dear mother," said Arthur, "he's quite impossible."
+
+"But Sir Hugh Mackintosh is such a charming man," said Lady Cleveden,
+"and always asks us to stay with him when we're in Scotland."
+
+"Yes, but we never are," Lonsdale pointed out. "And I'm sorry to hurt
+your feelings, mother, about a relation of yours, but Mackintosh is
+really absolutely impossible. He's the very worst type of Harrovian."
+
+Michael felt bound to support his friend by pointing out that Mackintosh
+was so eccentric as to dislike entertainment of any kind, and urged a
+theory that even if he had been asked, he would certainly have declined
+rather offensively.
+
+"He's not a very bonhomous lad," said Lonsdale, and with that sentence
+banished Mackintosh for ever from human society.
+
+After lunch the host supposed in a whisper to Michael that they ought to
+take his people out in a punt. Michael nodded agreement, and weighed
+down by cushions the party walked through the college to where the
+pleasure craft of St. Mary's bobbed at their moorings.
+
+Lonsdale on the river possessed essentially the grand manner, and his
+sister who had been ready to laugh at him gently was awed into
+respectful admiration. Even Lord Cleveden seemed inclined to excuse
+himself, if ever in one of the comprehensive and majestic indications of
+his opinion he disturbed however slightly the equilibrium of the punt.
+Lonsdale stood up in the stern and handled the ungainly pole with the
+air of a Surbiton expert. His tendency toward an early rotundity was no
+longer noticeable. His pink and cheerful face assumed a grave
+superciliousness of expression that struck with apologetic dismay the
+navigators who impeded his progress. Round his waist the rich hues of
+the Eton Ramblers glowed superbly.
+
+"Thank you, sir. Do you mind letting me through, sir? Some of these
+toshers ought not to be trusted with a punt of their own." This comment
+was for Michael and uttered in a voice of most laryngeal scorn so
+audible that the party of New College men involved reddened with dull
+fury. "Try and get along, please, sir. You're holding up the whole
+river, sir. I say, Michael, this is an absolute novices' competition."
+
+After an hour of this slow progress Lonsdale decided they must go back
+to college for tea, an operation which required every resource of
+sangfroid to execute successfully. When he had landed his father and
+mother and sister, he announced that they must all be quick over tea and
+then buzz off at once to see the first division row.
+
+"I think we shall go head to-night," Lonsdale predicted very
+confidentially. "I told Tommy Grainger he rowed like a caterpillar
+yesterday."
+
+But after all it was not to be the joyful privilege of Lonsdale's people
+to see St. Mary's bump New College in front of their own barge, and
+afterward to behold the victorious boat row past in triumph with the
+westering sun making glow more richly scarlet the cox's blazer and shine
+more strangely beautiful the three white lilies in his buttonhole.
+
+"Now you've just got time to catch your train," said Lonsdale, when the
+sound of the last pistol-shots and plaudits had died away. And "Phew!"
+he sighed, as he and Michael walked slowly down the station-hall, "how
+frightfully tiring one's people are when imported in bulk!"
+
+Eights Week came to an end with the scarlet and lilies still second; and
+without the heartening effect of a bump-supper the candidates for Pass
+Mods applied themselves violently to the matter in hand. At the end of
+the examination, which was characterized by Lonsdale as one of the most
+low-down exhibitions of in-fighting he had ever witnessed, the
+candidates had still a week of idleness to recover from the dastardly
+blows they had received below their intellectual belts.
+
+It was the time of the midsummer moon; and the freshmen in this the last
+week of their state celebrated the beauty of the season with a good deal
+of midsummer madness. Bonfires were lit for the slightest justification,
+and rowdy suppers were eaten in college after they had stayed on the
+river until midnight, rowdy suppers that demanded a great expense of
+energy before going to bed, in order perhaps to stave off indigestion.
+
+On one of these merry nights toward one o'clock somebody suggested that
+the hour was a suitable one for the ragging of a certain Smithers who
+had made himself obnoxious to the modish majority not from any overt act
+of contumely, but for his general bearing and plebeian origin. This
+derided Smithers lived on the ground floor of the Palladian fragment
+known as New Quad. The back of New Quad looked out on the deer-park, and
+it was unanimously resolved to invade his rooms from the window, so that
+surprise and alarm would strike at the heart of Smithers.
+
+Half a dozen freshmen--Avery, Lonsdale, Grainger, Cuffe, Sinclair, and
+Michael--all rendered insensitive to the emotions of other people by the
+amount of champagne they had drunk, set out to harry Smithers. Michael
+alone possibly had a personal slight to repay, since Smithers had been
+one of the freshmen who had sniggered at his momentary mortification in
+the rooms of Carben, the Rugby secretary, during his first week. The
+others were more vaguely injured by Smithers' hitherto undisturbed
+existence. Avery disliked his face: Lonsdale took exception to his
+accent: Grainger wanted to see what he looked like: Cuffe was determined
+to be offensive to somebody: and Sinclair was anxious to follow the
+fashion.
+
+Not even the magic of the moonlit park deterred these social avengers
+from their vendetta. They moved silently indeed over the filmy grass and
+paused to hearken when in the distance the deer stampeded in alarm
+before their progress, but the fixed idea of Smithers' reformation kept
+them to their project, and perhaps only Michael felt a slight sense of
+guilt in profaning this fairy calm with what he admitted to himself
+might very easily be regarded as a piece of stupid cruelty. Outside
+Smithers' open window they all stopped; then after hoisting the first
+man onto the dewy sill, one by one they climbed noiselessly into the
+sitting-room of the offensive Smithers. Somebody turned on the electric
+light, and they all stood half-abashed, surveying one another in the
+crude glare that in contrast with the velvet depths and silver shadows
+of the woodland they had traversed seemed to illuminate for one moment
+an unworthy impulse in every heart.
+
+The invaders looked round in surprise at the photographs of what were
+evidently Smithers' people, photographs like the groups in the parlors
+of country inns or the tender decorations of a housemaid's mantelpiece.
+
+"I say, look at that fringe," gurgled Avery, and forthwith he and
+Lonsdale collapsed on the sofa in a paroxysm of strangled mirth.
+
+Michael, as he gradually took in the features of Smithers' room, began
+to feel very much ashamed of himself. He recognized the poverty that
+stood in the background of this splendid "college career" of Percy or
+Clarence or whatever other name of feudal magnificence had been awarded
+to counterbalance "Smithers." No doubt the champagne in gradual reaction
+was over-charging him with sentiment, but observing in turn each tribute
+from home that adorned with a pathetic utility this bleak room dedicated
+for generations to poor scholars, Michael felt very much inclined to
+detach himself from the personal ragging of Smithers and go to bed. What
+seemed to him in this changed mood so particularly sad was that on the
+evidence of his books Smithers was not sustained by the ascetic glories
+of learning for the sake of learning. He was evidently no classical
+scholar with a future of such dignity as would compensate for the
+scraping and paring of the past. To judge by his books, he was at St.
+Mary's to ward off the criticism of outraged Radicals by competing on
+behalf of the college and the university in scientific knowledge with
+newer foundations like Manchester or Birmingham. Smithers was merely an
+advertisement of Oxford's democratic philanthropy, and would only gain
+from his university a rather inferior training in chemistry at a
+considerably greater personal cost but with nothing else that Oxford
+could and did give so prodigally to others more fortunately born.
+
+At this point in Michael's meditations Smithers woke up, and from the
+bedroom came a demand in startled cockney to know who was there. The
+reformers were just thinking about their reply, when Smithers, in a long
+nightgown and heavy-eyed with sleep, appeared in the doorway between his
+two rooms.
+
+"Well, I'm jiggered!" he gasped. "What are you fellers doing in my
+sitting-room?"
+
+It happened that Cuffe at this moment chose to take down from the wall
+what was probably an enlarged portrait of Smithers' mother in order to
+examine it more closely. The son, supposing he meant to play some trick
+with it, sprang across the room, snatched it from Cuffe's grasp, and
+shouting an objurgation of his native Hackney or Bermondsey, fled
+through the open window into the deer-park.
+
+Cuffe's expression of dismay was so absurd that everybody laughed very
+heartily; and the outburst of laughter turned away their thoughts from
+damaging Smithers' humble property and even from annoying any more
+Smithers himself with proposals for his reformation.
+
+"I say, we can't let that poor devil run about all night in the park
+with that picture," said Grainger. "Let's catch him and explain we got
+into his rooms by mistake."
+
+"I hope he won't throw himself into the river or anything," murmured
+Sinclair anxious not to be involved in any affair that might spoil his
+reputation for enjoying every rag without the least reproach ever
+lighting upon him personally.
+
+"I say, for goodness' sake, let's catch him," begged Michael, who had
+visions of being sent to explain to a weeping mother in a mean street
+that her son had died in defending her enlargement.
+
+Out into the moon-washed park the pursuers tumbled, and through its
+verdurous deeps of giant elms they hurried in search of the outlaw.
+
+"It's like a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor," Michael said to
+Avery, and as he spoke he caught a glimpse of the white-robed Smithers,
+running like a young druid across a glade where the moonlight was
+undimmed by boughs.
+
+He called to Smithers to go back to his rooms, but whether he went at
+once or huddled in some hollow tree half the night Michael never knew,
+for by this time the unwonted stampeding of the deer and the sound of
+voices in the Fellows' sacred pleasure-ground had roused the Dean, who
+supported by the nocturnal force of the college servants was advancing
+against the six disturbers of the summer night. The next hour was an
+entrancing time of hot pursuit and swift evasion, of crackling dead
+branches and sudden falls in lush grass, of stealthy procedure round
+tree-trunks, and finally of scaling a high wall, dropping heavily down
+into the rose-beds of the Warden's garden and by one supreme effort of
+endurance going to ground in St. Cuthbert's quad.
+
+"By Jove, that was a topping rag," puffed Lonsdale, as he filled six
+glasses with welcome drink. "I think old Shadbolt recognized me. He
+said: 'It's no use you putting your coat over your 'ead, sir, because I
+knows you by your gait.'"
+
+"I wonder what happened to Smithers," said Michael.
+
+"Damned good thing if he fell into the Cher," Avery asserted. "I don't
+know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary's."
+
+"A bounder like what?" asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room
+during Avery's expression of opinion.
+
+Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the
+evening's rag was provided for his entertainment.
+
+"But why don't you let that poor devil alone?" demanded the listener.
+
+At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive
+reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted
+that men like him were very bad for the college.
+
+Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton,
+determined to probe through the medium of Castleton's common sense and
+Wykehamist notions the ethical and aesthetic rights of people like
+Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.
+
+"After all, Oxford wasn't founded to provide an expensive three years of
+idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like
+Cuffe," Castleton pointed out.
+
+"No, no," Michael agreed, "but no institution has ever yet remained true
+to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance, or
+Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved into
+something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may have
+departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful purpose in
+the scheme of social order."
+
+"Oh, I'm not grumbling at what Oxford is," Castleton went on. "I simply
+suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority,
+to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving
+no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are
+supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I
+should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the
+majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way in
+with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of hatred
+which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all of us."
+
+Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.
+
+"No, I'm afraid I haven't. I'm afraid I'm too lazy to do much more than
+deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I'm
+beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new sub-editor of The
+Spectator might talk, to bed."
+
+The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton
+to his rooms. St. Mary's tower against the sky opening like a flower
+seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward
+immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social
+distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and
+clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in
+beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed,
+spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And
+suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside
+the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the
+sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those
+who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.
+
+Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to
+invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect
+that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might
+embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself
+with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied
+that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more
+charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the
+experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the
+doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+GRAY AND BLUE
+
+
+When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty
+historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic
+enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he found
+that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never lost for
+an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as a very
+little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with which, as
+he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world of
+ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea's easy stability Mrs.
+Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed
+exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought
+that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the great
+world, however much apart from the great world her existence had been
+when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of romance
+because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the more
+subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in Cheyne
+Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less
+conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized
+that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.
+
+Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster and
+concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of other
+women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their
+company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with
+which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost as
+if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be
+independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to
+make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to
+society.
+
+"Where does mother get hold of all these women?" Michael asked Stella
+irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for the
+whole of a hot summer afternoon.
+
+"Oh, they're all interested in something or other," Stella explained.
+"And mother's interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a
+rotten time really when she was traveling round."
+
+"But she used always to be so vague and amusing," said Michael, "and now
+she's as fussy and practical as a vicar's wife."
+
+"I think I know why that is," Stella theorized meditatively. "I think if
+I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so
+utterly that when he wasn't with me any sort of contact with other
+people would make me vague."
+
+"Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now," Michael argued.
+
+"No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to
+make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the
+vagueness came after she ran away with father."
+
+Michael looked rather offended by Stella's blunt reference.
+
+"I rather wish you wouldn't talk quite so easily about all of that," he
+said. "I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it."
+
+"Like mother, in fact," Stella pointed out. "Do you know, Michael, I
+believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her
+past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost
+dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little things,
+you'd think--however, as I know you have rather a dread of perfect
+frankness in your only sister, I'll shut up and say no more."
+
+"What things?" asked Michael sharply. Stella's theories about the
+freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though he
+had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted
+child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was
+really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him to
+turn theories into practice.
+
+"Oh, Michael!" Stella laughed reprovingly. "Don't put on that
+professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you
+ever want confidences from me you'll have just to be humbly
+sympathetic."
+
+Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which
+made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
+
+"I don't see anything to giggle at in such a question," Michael
+grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy
+so cheap. "Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you
+may say, you don't practice as much as you used. Why?"
+
+For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again
+the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a
+rage.
+
+A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into
+the country.
+
+"My dear boy, I'm much too busy with the Bazaar," said Mrs. Fane.
+
+Michael sighed.
+
+"I don't think I can possibly get away until August, and then I've half
+promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up
+Mental Science--so interesting and quite different from Christian
+Science."
+
+"I hate these mock-turtle religions," said Michael savagely.
+
+Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very
+much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.
+
+"But why don't you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has
+been quite long enough in London for the present."
+
+"I've got to practice hard for my next concert," said Stella, looking
+coldly at her brother. "You and Michael are so funny, mother. You
+grumble at me when I don't practice all day, and yet when it's really
+necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away."
+
+"I never suggested your coming away," Michael contradicted. "As a matter
+of fact, I've been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall, and I
+think I'll go."
+
+The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice
+Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined
+them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in reference
+to the political candidature of a friend in the north of England, he
+decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of Tory Democracy
+and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a request to forward
+his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the reading-party sent
+it to await at Univ Mowbray's arrival in October, arguing that such an
+arrangement would save Bill and his friends much money, as he would
+indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation not more than
+forty-eight hours on the same spot.
+
+The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and
+they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
+cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
+a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.
+
+"I'm doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall," Avery announced one
+evening.
+
+"What, a sort of potted guide?" Hazlewood asked.
+
+Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.
+
+"No, no; it's an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall."
+
+"I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,"
+Castleton observed. "The sign-posts are like incantations."
+
+"Much more than that," Avery earnestly assured him. "It really affects
+me profoundly sometimes."
+
+Hazlewood laughed.
+
+"Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You'll never be affected profoundly by
+anything," he prophesied.
+
+Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
+
+"You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
+though, as you're aware, I'm a profound materialist----"
+
+"Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night," Hazlewood interrupted, with a
+laugh. "He'll soon transcend all human thought."
+
+"Here in Cornwall," Maurice pursued, undaunted, "I really am affected
+sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You'll all rag me, and
+you can, but though I've enjoyed myself frightfully, I don't think I
+shall ever come to Cornwall again."
+
+With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
+
+"Shut up, Maurice!" Hazlewood chaffed. "You've been reading Cornish
+novelists--the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
+men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
+own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech."
+
+"Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?" Michael broke in suddenly.
+
+"Of course I do," said Hazlewood. "And I'd believe in the inherent
+weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn't always go there to
+solve their problems and if Maurice weren't always so facile with the
+right emotion at the right moment."
+
+"I've got a presentiment to-night," said Michael, and not wishing to say
+more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to admit
+as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.
+
+Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
+small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
+or was it merely thunder in the air?
+
+Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:
+
+    _join me here rather quickly._
+
+Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
+harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
+and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
+train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
+eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
+regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
+whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
+indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.
+
+It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
+street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
+luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.
+
+"I'm really awfully worried," he said aloud to himself, as through the
+stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
+Charing Cross.
+
+Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
+and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
+something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
+herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
+great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the
+pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his
+seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half
+a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and
+gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types,
+those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those
+who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.
+
+Stella's address was near the Quai d'Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
+found she was living in rooms over a bookseller's shop with a view of
+the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
+glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
+gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
+damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.
+
+Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
+entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
+looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
+account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist's
+justification. Stella's chestnut hair streamed down her straight back
+like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
+and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
+she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
+before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
+This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
+somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
+dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
+pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
+inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
+she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
+silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
+heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
+laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.
+
+Yet, for all Michael's relief at finding Stella at least superficially
+all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
+of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
+of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
+could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa Vine
+whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend for
+Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that he
+had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning, and
+Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to abandon
+music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris come
+walking.
+
+The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river's bank.
+
+"Well," said Michael at last, "why did you wire for me?"
+
+"I wanted you."
+
+Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
+more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
+Stella's impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
+begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
+fancy for his company.
+
+Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
+reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
+she had written to a letter.
+
+"Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
+an artist, that there was also life to be lived?"
+
+Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just
+how she proposed to put her theory to the test.
+
+"I told you that a youth was painting me."
+
+"But you also said he looked like a corpse," Michael quickly
+interjected. "You surely haven't fallen in love with somebody who looks
+like a corpse?"
+
+"I'm not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,"
+Stella admitted.
+
+Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the
+fellow's presumption.
+
+"I never yet met a painter who had very much inside," he commented.
+
+"But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you'll confess that your
+acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather
+small."
+
+Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive
+hostility.
+
+"And I suppose this chap is in Paris now," he said. "Well, I can't do
+anything. I suppose for a long time now you've been making a fool of
+yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?"
+
+He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in
+love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom
+he had never seen.
+
+"I've certainly not been making a fool of myself," Stella flamed. "But
+I thought I would rather you were close at hand."
+
+"And who's this Clarissa Vine?" Michael indignantly demanded.
+
+"She's the girl I traveled with to Paris."
+
+"But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that
+studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk."
+
+By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all
+this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of
+the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.
+
+"I can't bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she'll
+sit and talk hot air till three o'clock in the morning. I shall go mad,"
+Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the immediate
+future.
+
+Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an
+unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her
+art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable
+companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael's mistrust of
+Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could not
+stand George Ayliffe.
+
+Michael announced that, as Miss Vine had scarcely condescended to
+address a single word to him in the quarter of an hour he was waiting
+for Stella to dress, it was impossible for him to say whether he could
+stand her or not, but that he was still inclined to think she was
+thoroughly objectionable.
+
+"Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her," Stella
+promised.
+
+"Party?" interrogated Michael, in dismay.
+
+"We're having a party in our rooms to-night."
+
+"And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And I shall have to meet him?"
+
+She nodded again very cheerfully.
+
+They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently,
+Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so that
+he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a jolly
+afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any more
+confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a
+light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of
+vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.
+
+The party at the girls' rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost
+more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being
+Stella's brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence
+of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and
+that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare of
+the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect at
+which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they did
+from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps and
+shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to relinquish
+slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set Michael's heart
+beating in the imagination of what altitudes it might not have reached
+along the path of romantic passions. Every young woman or young man who
+entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking in search of
+familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay worldlings to
+great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment, and Michael
+tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration personalities so
+pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his ordinary temper
+have plunged him into speechless gloom.
+
+Oxford after this assembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms
+seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of
+callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and
+wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose
+life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as
+romantically real as the sea-sound conjured by a shell. Here were
+gathered people who worked always in that circumfluent inspiration, that
+murmur of liberty, that whisper of humanity. What could Oxford give but
+the bells of out-worn beliefs, and the patter of aimless footsteps? How
+right Stella had been to say that academic perfection was vain without
+the breath of life. How right she was to find in George Ayliffe someone
+whose artistic sympathy would urge her on to achievements impossible to
+attain under Alan's admiration for mere fingers and wrists.
+
+Michael watched this favorite of his sister all through the evening. He
+tried to think that Ayliffe's cigarette-stained fingers were not so very
+unpleasant, that Ayliffe's cadaverous exterior was just a noble
+melancholy, that Ayliffe's high pointed head did not betray an almost
+insufferable self-esteem, and, what was the hardest task of all, he
+tried to persuade himself that Ayliffe's last portrait of Stella had not
+transformed his splendidly unconcerned sister into a self-conscious
+degenerate.
+
+"How do you like George's picture of Stella?"
+
+The direct inquiry close to his ear startled Michael. He had been
+leaning back in his chair, listening vaguely to the hum of the guests'
+conversation and getting from it nothing more definite than a sense of
+the extraordinary ease of social intercourse under these conditions.
+Looking round, he saw that Clarissa Vine had come to sit next to him and
+he felt half nervous of this concentrated gaze that so evidently
+betokened a determination to probe life and art and incidentally himself
+to the very roots.
+
+"I think it's a little thin, don't you?" said Clarie.
+
+Michael hated to have his opinion of a painting invited, and he resented
+the painter's jargon that always seemed to apply equally to the subject
+and the medium. It was impossible to tell from Miss Vine's question
+whether she referred to Stella's figure or to Ayliffe's expenditure upon
+paint.
+
+"I don't think it's very like Stella," Michael replied, and consoled
+himself for the absence of subtlety or cleverness in such an answer by
+the fact that at least it was a direct statement of what he thought.
+
+"I know what you mean," said Clarissa, nodding seriously.
+
+Michael hoped that, she did. He could not conceive an affirmation of
+personal opinion delivered more plainly.
+
+"You mean he's missed the other Stella," said Clarissa.
+
+Michael bowed remotely. He told himself that contradiction or even
+qualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person of
+Clarissa's unhumorous earnestness.
+
+"I said so when I first saw it," cried Clarissa triumphantly. "I said,
+'my god, George, you've only given us half of her!'"
+
+Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his initial
+impression of a full-length study had been correct, and, finding that it
+was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical conception of her
+own.
+
+From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to the
+splendor of the moon.
+
+"I know what you mean," said Clarissa. "But I like sunshine effects
+best."
+
+"I wasn't really thinking about painting at that moment," Michael
+observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be
+occupied with it.
+
+"You know _you're_ very paintable," Clarissa went on. "I suppose you've
+sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you'd let _me_ paint you. I
+should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have never
+noticed."
+
+Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his
+weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.
+
+"You're very passionate, aren't you?" she said, shaking Michael's
+temperament in the thermometer of her thought.
+
+"No; rather the reverse," said Michael, as he irritably visualized
+himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa's florid
+canvases.
+
+"All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me," persisted Clarissa.
+
+Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this
+friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way
+with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be, was
+most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was not
+here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet ice
+was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.
+There should be some parallel with strawberries to illustrate his notion
+of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and
+constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and
+rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any nearer
+to the Maenad than the evocation of the image of a farouche dairymaid.
+
+All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to
+himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa's
+request. "What can you be thinking about?" she asked, and at the moment
+mere inquisitiveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.
+Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing
+the pitch of his violin. So Michael assumed the portentous reverence of
+a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his attitude that he was
+beyond the range of Clarissa's conversation. He did not know who had
+made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since,
+aside from his own participation in what it gave of unified emotion to
+the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart of
+everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk with
+Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which he had
+encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his imagination
+and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But now, when all
+were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that actually
+pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being, Michael's
+aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling from heart
+to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which justified all
+that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was flaunting in
+voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and ambition. Even
+Clarissa's prematurity seemed transferred from the cause to the effect
+of her art, so that here and there some strain of music was strong
+enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of abandon at
+which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael watching him
+was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with all the
+wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in check by the
+music, Stella's affection for him was just intelligible. He might be
+said to possess now at least some of the graceful melancholy of a
+pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was much more in love
+with Stella than she was or ever could be in love with him. He realized
+that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and absorbing her music, was
+aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware it must be for ever
+impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as it was for him to
+paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for Ayliffe because he
+knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were losing her
+continually even now in complexities that could never by him be
+unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.
+
+More suggestive, however, than the individual listeners were the players
+themselves, so essentially typical were they of their respective
+instruments; and they were even something more than typical, for they
+did ultimately resemble them. The violinist must himself have answered
+in these harmonious wails to the lightest question addressed to him. His
+whole figure had surely that very look of obstinate surprise which
+belongs to a violin. The bones in that lean body of his might have been
+of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so little
+observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the
+simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a
+resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted
+with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be
+possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained
+and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances,
+could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion,
+however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure
+or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.
+
+There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella's piano
+part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes of
+the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far
+beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost
+tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height
+from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had
+thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped
+altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not have
+been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the normal
+course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted spirit down
+to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of this long
+riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool accompaniment
+she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael looked sharply
+across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how often by Stella
+herself had he been just as gently treated.
+
+The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly
+inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed.
+From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk,
+until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.
+
+Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael's too
+polite "Mr. Ayliffe," although he did not perhaps realize all the
+deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after
+expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.
+
+"Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie," cried Stella.
+
+"Of course I won't," said Michael, ruffling.
+
+"What do you want him to sit for?" Stella persisted, paying not the
+least regard to Michael's objection.
+
+"Oh, something ascetic," said Clarie, staring earnestly into space as if
+the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.
+
+"Just now it was to be something passionate," Michael pointed out
+scornfully. He suspected Clarissa's courage in the presence of Stella's
+disdainful frankness.
+
+"Ah, perhaps it will be both!" Clarie promised, and "Good night, most
+darling Stella," she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of
+reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness
+out of the room and up to bed.
+
+"My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She's like a
+performing leopard!" Michael burst out. "She's utterly stupid and
+utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes into
+your face and doesn't wear stays."
+
+"I get something out of all these queer people," Stella explained.
+
+"New-art flower-vases, I should think," scoffed Michael. "Why on earth
+you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of
+idiots I can't imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and
+I'm jolly glad I'm not, if it's to make one depend on the flattery of
+these fools."
+
+"You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself
+very much. And you oughtn't to be horrid about my friends. I think
+they're all so dreadfully touching."
+
+"Yes, and touched," Michael grumbled. "You're simply playing at being in
+Bohemia. You'd be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and
+Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and
+walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions."
+
+"My dear Michael," Stella argued, "do get out of your head the notion
+that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They're not
+imported dolls."
+
+"Well, you're not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to you
+because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they might
+feel because you are better at your business than any of them are at
+theirs."
+
+"Rot!" Stella ejaculated.
+
+However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched
+suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael
+simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so
+closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to
+surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The
+contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.
+No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a
+night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the
+moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in
+reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into
+elusive specters of a legendary paradise.
+
+"I suppose what's really been the matter with me all the evening,"
+confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, "is that I've felt out
+of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that
+for them I simply didn't exist. That's rather galling. Now at Oxford,
+supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of men
+in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be out of
+sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we should
+all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella, why did
+you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these unappreciative
+enthusiasts?"
+
+"Perhaps I wanted a standard measure," Stella whispered, with a gesture
+of disarming confidingness. "Something heavy and reliable."
+
+"My dear girl, I'm much too much of a weathercock, or if you insist on
+me being heavy, let's say a pendulum. And there's nothing quite so
+confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night."
+
+There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have been
+a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the ridiculous
+pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St. Cuthbert's quad or
+erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden's garden. He was constantly aware
+of a loss of dignity which worried him considerably and for which he
+took himself to task very sternly. Finally he attributed it to one of
+two reasons, either that he felt a sense of constraint in Stella's
+presence on her account, or that his continued holding back was due to
+his difficulty in feeling any justification for extravagant behavior,
+when he had not the slightest intention of presenting the world with the
+usufruct of his emotions in terms of letters or color or sound.
+
+"I really think I'm rather jealous of all these people," he told Stella.
+"They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and everything that
+happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now, I can do nothing
+with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very short time. I
+begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to criticize, then to be
+bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether and remain just as I was
+before it occurred except that I never can seize the same sort of
+experience again. Perhaps it's being with you. Perhaps you absorb all
+the vitality."
+
+Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.
+
+"Let's go away and leave all these people," she proposed. "Let's go to
+Compiegne together, and we'll see if you're depressed by me then. But if
+you are, oh, Michael, I shan't know what to do! Only you won't be, if
+we're in Compiegne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you know,
+we really met each other there for the first time."
+
+It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to
+produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to
+all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely self-satisfied.
+It was pleasant to arrive in Compiegne and find that Madame Regnier's
+house had not changed in three years, that the three old widows had not
+suffered from time's now slow and kindly progress, that M. Regnier still
+ate his food with the same noisy recklessness, that the front garden
+blazed with just the same vermilion of the geranium flowers.
+
+For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long
+mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the simple
+pleasures of cassis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a sheaf of
+long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who on
+hearing that he was at Compiegne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul de
+Castera-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon
+Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by
+his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince
+Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible
+even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his
+sister must become temporary members of the Societe du Sport de
+Compiegne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.
+Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly
+elated at the prospect of knowing anybody belonging to this club, and
+were so obviously cast down when their guests seemed to hesitate, that
+Michael and Stella, more to please the Pension Regnier than themselves,
+accepted Prince Raoul's offer.
+
+It was amusing, too, this so excessively aristocratic club where every
+afternoon Princesses and Duchesses and the wives of Greek financiers sat
+at tea or watched the tennis and polo of their husbands and brothers and
+sons. Stella and Michael played sets of tennis with Castera-Verduzan and
+the vicomte de Miramont, luxurious sets in which there were always four
+little boys to pick up the balls and at least three dozen balls to be
+picked up. Stella was a great success as a tennis-player, and their
+sponsor introduced the brother and sister to all the languidly beautiful
+women sitting at tea, and also to the over-tailored sportsmen who were
+cultivating a supposedly Britannic seriousness of attitude toward their
+games. Soon Michael and Stella found themselves going out to dinner and
+playing bridge and listening to much admiration of England in a
+Franco-cockney accent that was the result of a foreign language mostly
+acquired from grooms. With all its veneer of English freedom, it was
+still a very ceremonious society, and though money had tempered the
+rigidity of its forms and opinions, there was always visible in the
+background of the noisiest party Black Papalism, a dominant Army and the
+hope of the Orleanist succession. Verduzan also took them for long
+drives in the forest, and altogether time went by very gayly and very
+swiftly, until Stella woke up to the fact that her piano had been silent
+for nearly a fortnight. Verduzan was waiting with his impatient car in
+the prim road outside the Pension Regnier when she made this discovery,
+and he looked very much mortified when she told him that to-day she
+really ought to practice.
+
+"But you must come because I have to go away to-morrow," he declared.
+
+"Ah, but I've been making such wonderful resolutions ever since the sun
+rose," Stella said, shaking her head. "I must work, mustn't I, Michael?"
+
+"Oh, rot, she must come for this last time, mustn't she, Fane?"
+
+Michael thought that once more might not spoil her execution
+irreparably.
+
+"Hurrah, you can't get out of it, Miss Fane!"
+
+The car's horn tooted in grotesque exultation. Stella put on her
+dust-cloak of silver-gray, and in a few minutes they were racing through
+the forest so fast that the trees on either side winked in a continuous
+blur or where the forest was thinner seemed like knitting-needles to
+gather up folds of landscape.
+
+After they had traversed all the wider roads at this speed, somewhere
+in the very heart of the forest Raoul turned sharply off along a
+wagoner's track over whose green ruts the car jolted abominably, but
+just when it would have been impossible to go on, he stopped and they
+all got out.
+
+"You don't know why I've brought you here," he laughed.
+
+Michael and Stella looked their perplexity to the great delight of the
+young man. "Wait a minute and you'll see," he chuckled. He was leading
+the way along a narrow grass-grown lane whose hedges on either side were
+gleaming with big blackberries.
+
+"We shall soon be right out of the world," said Stella. "Won't that
+worry you, Monsieur?"
+
+"Well, yes, it would for a very long time," replied the Prince, in a
+tone of such wistfulness as for the moment made him seem middle-aged.
+"But, look," he cried, and triumphant youth returned to him once more.
+
+The lane had ended in a forest clearing whose vivid turf was looped with
+a chain of small ponds blue as steel. On the farther side stood a
+cottage with diamonded lattices and a gabled roof and a garden full of
+deep crimson phlox glowing against a background of gnarled and somber
+hawthorns. Cottage and clearing were set in a sweeping amphitheater of
+beechwoods.
+
+"It reminds me of Gawaine and the Green Knight," said Michael.
+
+"I'll take you inside," Raoul offered.
+
+They walked across the small common silently, so deeply did they feel
+they were trespassing on some enchantment. From the cottage chimney
+curled a film of smoke that gave a voiceless voice to the silence, and
+when as they paused in the lych-gate, Castera-Verduzan clanged the bell,
+it seemed indeed the summons to waken from a spell sleepers long ago
+bewitched.
+
+"Surely nobody is going to answer that bell," said Stella.
+
+"Why, yes, of course, Ursule will open it. Ursule! Ursule!" he cried.
+"C'est moi, Monsieur Raoul."
+
+The cottage door opened and, evidently much delighted, Ursule came
+stumping down the path. She was an old woman whose rosy face was
+pectinated with fine wrinkles as delicate as the pluming of a moth's
+wing, while everything about her dress gave the same impression of
+extreme fineness, though the stuff was only a black bombazine and the
+tippet round her shoulders was of coarse lace. When she and Raoul had
+talked together in rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them
+graciously within.
+
+They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the
+sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs and
+dryness.
+
+"And there's a piano!" cried Stella, running to it. She played the Cat's
+Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.
+
+"You could practice on that piano?" Raoul anxiously inquired. "It
+belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do. She's
+married now."
+
+The sadness in Raoul's voice had made Michael suppose he was going to
+say his sister was dead.
+
+"Then this divine place belongs to you?" Stella asked.
+
+"To my sister and me. Ursule was once my nurse. Would you be my guests
+here, although I shall be away? For as long as you like. Ursule will
+look after you. Do say 'yes.'"
+
+"Why, what else could we say?" Michael and Stella demanded
+simultaneously.
+
+It was a disappointment to the Regniers when Michael and Stella came
+back to announce their retreat into the fast woodland, but perhaps M.
+Regnier found compensation in going down to his favorite cafe that
+afternoon and speaking of his guests, Monsieur and Mademoiselle Fene,
+now staying with M. le prince de Castera-Verduzan at his hunting-lodge
+in the forest.
+
+Later that afternoon with their luggage and music Raoul brought Michael
+and Stella back to the cottage in his car, after which he said good-bye.
+Ursule was happy to have somebody to look after, and the cottage that
+had seemed so very small against the high beeches of the steep country
+behind was much larger when it was explored. It stretched out a
+rectangular wing of cool and shadowed rooms toward the forest. In this
+portion Ursule lived, and there was the pantry, and the kitchen embossed
+with copper pans, and the still-room which had garnered each flowery
+year in its course. Coterminous with Ursule's wing was a flagged court
+where a stone well-head stained with gray and orange lichen mirrored a
+circumscribed world. Beyond into an ancient orchard whose last red
+apples ripened under the first outstretched boughs of the forest tossed
+an acre of garden with runner-beans still in bloom.
+
+In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the
+white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded
+fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the homely
+meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the cottage
+there were two small bedrooms with frequent changing patterns in dimity
+and chintz, with many tinted china ornaments and holy pictures that all
+combined to present the likeness of two glass cases enshrining an
+immoderately gay confusion of flowers and fruit and birds.
+
+Here in these ultimate September days of summer's reluctant farewell
+life had all the rich placidity of an apricot upon a sun-steeped wall.
+Michael, while Stella practiced really hard, read Gregorovius' History
+of the Papacy; and when she stopped suddenly he would wake half-startled
+from the bloody horrors of the tenth century narrated laboriously with
+such cold pedantry, and hear above the first elusive silence swallows
+gathering on the green common, robins in their autumnal song, and down a
+corridor the footfalls and tinkling keys of Ursule.
+
+It was natural that such surroundings should beget many intimate
+conversations between Michael and Stella, and if anything were wanting
+to give them a sense of perfect ease the thought that here at Compiegne
+three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always
+smoothed away the trace of shyness.
+
+"Whether I had come out to Paris or not," asked Michael earnestly,
+"there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between
+you and that fellow Ayliffe?" He had to recur to this uneasy theme.
+
+"There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow to
+rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people to
+play about with. It's the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating
+cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no need
+to bother to sustain one's personality at highest pitch. George used to
+be grateful for so little. He really wasn't bad."
+
+"But didn't you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might
+fall in love with him? I don't want to be too objectionably fraternal,
+but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of cheapening
+yourself."
+
+"Only to other people," Stella argued, "not to myself. My dear Michael,
+you've no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a
+composition that is really easy--ridiculously, fatuously easy."
+
+"But you wouldn't choose that piece for public performance," Michael
+pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking
+Stella's extravagance.
+
+"Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn't very
+important?" She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.
+
+"Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you
+make out now?"
+
+"I wanted a corrective," Stella explained.
+
+"But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I'm your brother? And,
+you know, I don't believe you would consider that relationship had much
+to do with my importance one way or the other."
+
+"In fact," said Stella, laughing, "what you're really trying to do is to
+work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you're a
+corrective to George is that you're a gentleman."
+
+"There you are!" cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she
+had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions
+of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest
+excavation of life. "We all half apologize for using the word
+'gentleman,' but we can't get on without it. People say it means nothing
+nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more
+nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add
+something to its value. I haven't been able to talk this out before,
+because you're the only person who knows what I was born and at the same
+time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances
+rather a lot doesn't imply any very morbid self-consciousness. _You're_
+all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed
+you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist
+up to your level, one doesn't give a damn for his ancestors or his
+family or his personal features apart from the security of the art's
+consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but
+inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the
+end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a
+way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they
+incline without support, they're most of them inclining away from a
+top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they'll always have
+the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be
+suffocated."
+
+Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices
+at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the
+narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the
+lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of
+delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and
+pale fawn of their last attiring.
+
+"If I could only find in life itself," said Michael, sighing, "a path
+leading to something like this cottage."
+
+"But, meanwhile, go on," Stella urged. "Do go on with your
+self-revelation. It's so fascinating to me. It's like a chord that never
+resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony."
+
+"Something rather pathetic in fact," Michael suggested.
+
+"Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic," she assured
+him.
+
+"My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I'm the possessor of so
+much I can never make use of," Michael began again. "I'm not merely
+discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn't
+enter my head. Indeed, I don't think I'm ever discontented or even
+resentful for one moment, but if I _were_ the head of a great family I
+should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my
+theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down
+with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas
+now----" he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I don't see much difference really," Stella said. "You're not
+prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale
+perhaps."
+
+"Yes, yes," Michael plunged on excitedly. "But crowds of people are
+doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that
+these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather
+irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another
+sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands
+any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us
+to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy
+trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass
+of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his
+existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education
+has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present
+meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we know
+anything about. And they are _not_, they simply and solidly are _not_.
+The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with all it
+connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of the
+educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that the
+average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face, will
+deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have been
+armed with weapons they don't know how to use and are therefore so much
+the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a weapon
+of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I could have
+proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand scale even
+for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good nowadays."
+
+"I wonder if you could," murmured Stella. "Anyway, I don't see why you
+shouldn't ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the
+small scale."
+
+"But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody
+and fades out of memory at the moment of death," Michael grumbled.
+
+"Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid," Stella pointed
+out, "you'll find your niche."
+
+"I shall be a sort of Prescott. That's the most I can hope for," Michael
+gloomily announced. "Yet after all that's pretty good."
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known
+Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an
+atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most
+esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that he
+finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.
+
+"Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so
+wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out
+your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to
+know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?"
+
+Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for keeping
+such an extraordinary event so secret.
+
+"Because I didn't want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into your
+relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you, you
+would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn't looking.
+And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him through
+her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not."
+
+It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the
+woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse
+what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her
+the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in
+the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn
+of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage
+which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella's appeal
+to Raoul de Castera-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own personality had
+scarcely entered. Castera-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe! What folly it had
+been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan. Yet it had seemed
+so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in love with each
+other. Michael wondered whether he were specially privileged in being
+able to see through to a sister's heart, whether other brothers went
+blindly on without an inkling that their sisters were loved. It was
+astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had stepped so far and so
+rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the risk of ridicule for
+proposing to a girl whose mother's love for a friend of his own he had
+spent his life in guarding. Michael put out the lamp and, lighting a
+candle, went along the corridor to bed. From the far end he heard
+Stella's voice calling to him and turned back to ask her what she
+wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and, in that dainty
+room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the soft
+candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet bow
+someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all her
+largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish and
+protect.
+
+"Michael, I've been thinking about what you said," she began, "and you
+mustn't get cranky. I wish you wouldn't bother so much about what you're
+going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy."
+
+"I don't really bother a great deal," Michael assured her. "But I do
+feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a
+nobody."
+
+"The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and
+father," said Stella.
+
+"Yes, logically," Michael agreed. "But I think father did feel the
+responsibility rather heavily, and it's a sort of loyalty I have for him
+which makes me so determined to justify myself."
+
+That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two
+or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves
+trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest
+house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compiegne in time to say
+good-bye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old
+Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty
+was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their
+own that magical corner of the world.
+
+The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine weather
+came back. London welcomed their return with a gracious calm. The Thames
+was a sheet of trembling silver, and the distant roofs and spires and
+trees of the Surrey shore no more than breath upon a glass. In this
+luminous and immaterial city the house in Cheyne Walk stood out with the
+pleasant aspect of its demure reality, and Mrs. Fane like one of those
+clouded rose pastels on the walls of her room was to both of them after
+their absence from London herself for a while as they had known her in
+childhood.
+
+"Dear children, how charming to see you looking so well. I'm not quite
+sure I like that very Scotch-looking skirt, darling Stella. I'm so glad
+you've enjoyed yourselves together. Is it a heather mixture? And I was
+in France, too. But the trains are so oddly inconvenient. Mrs.
+Carruthers' most interesting! I wish, darling Stella, you would take up
+Mental Science. Ah, but I forgot, you have your practicing."
+
+It was time to go up to Oxford after the few days that Stella and
+Michael spent in making arrangements for a series of Brahms recitals in
+one of the smaller concert halls. Alan met Michael on the platform at
+Paddington. This custom they had loyally kept up each term, although
+otherwise their paths seemed to be diverging.
+
+"Good vac?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, rather! I've been working at rather a tricky slow leg-break.
+Fifty-five wickets for 8.4 during the vac. Not bad for a dry summer. I
+was playing for the Tics most of the time. What did you do?"
+
+Michael during the journey up talked mostly about Stella.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+VENNER'S
+
+
+The most of Michael's friends had availed themselves of the right of
+seniority to move into more dignified rooms for their second year. These
+"extensions of premises," as Castleton called them, reached the limit of
+expansion in the case of Lonsdale who, after a year's residence in two
+small ground-floor rooms of St. Cuthbert's populous quad, had acquired
+the largest suite of three in Cloisters. Exalted by palatial ambitions,
+he spent the first week of term in buttonholing people in the lodge, so
+that after whatever irrelevant piece of chatter he had seized upon as
+excuse he might wind up the conversation by observing nonchalantly:
+
+"Oh, I say, have you chaps toddled round to my new rooms yet? Rather
+decent. I'm quite keen on them. I've got a dining-room now. Devilish
+convenient. Thought of asking old Wedders to lay in a stock of pictures.
+It would buck him up rather."
+
+"But why do you want these barracks?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, binges," said Lonsdale. "We ought to be able to run some pretty
+useful binges here. Besides, I'm thinking of learning the bagpipes."
+
+Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room
+in St. Cuthbert's tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous
+Templeton-Collins on Michael's staircase, and had brought back with him
+from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and
+the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael
+alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him. He
+had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their
+participation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for
+himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the
+Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect
+they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative
+purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for himself
+alone. How intimate and personal that sparse lunch laid for one on a
+large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset bookcase
+and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his pleasure! There
+was not now indeed a single book that did not recall the charmed
+idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there one volume that
+could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments eagerly expected
+all the day long.
+
+It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to
+gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds had
+proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the more
+worshipful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the
+miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to
+acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they
+generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their
+material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in
+some dead publishing season more extravagant buyers had spent four or
+five times as much to partake of their accumulated facts and fortuitous
+illustrations. With Michael the passion for remainders was short-lived,
+and he soon pushed them ignobly out of the way for the sake of those
+stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest
+flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to mercantile
+elation and depression.
+
+If among these ambassadors of learning and literature was to be
+distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had been
+extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the
+seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though
+enriched by the classic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the
+eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may
+have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a
+Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the
+universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was
+the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their
+euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every night
+for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a world of
+polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual maladies and
+minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of talismans, to
+fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and strange
+influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so perilously that
+under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half contemptuous of thought
+less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the present danced by in
+thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather perceived as bloodless and
+irresolute ephemerides. When people reproached him for his willful
+prejudice, he pointed out how easy it would always be to overtake the
+ideas of the present and how much waste of intellectual breath would be
+avoided by letting his three or four Oxford years account for the most
+immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed to him to provide an opportunity,
+and more than an opportunity--an inexpugnable command to wave with most
+reluctant hands farewell to the backward of time, around whose brink
+rose up more truthful dreams than those that floated indeterminate,
+beckoning through the mist across the wan mountains of the future.
+
+On the walls Michael's pictures had been collected to achieve through
+another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her
+lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams behind;
+and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he sought in a
+picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room. One hour of
+the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always transform the
+pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some diagrammatic significance.
+Apart from the accumulation of books and pictures, he had changed the
+room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers, chairs and tables, all
+preserved the character of the room itself as something that existed
+outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient inhabitants who read and
+laughed and ate and talked for so comparatively fleeting a space of time
+between its four walls. With all that he had imposed of what in the
+opinion of his contemporaries were eccentricities of adornment, the
+rooms remained, as he would observe to any critic, essentially the same
+as his own. Instead of college groups which marked merely by the height
+of the individual's waistcoat-opening the almost intolerable fugacity of
+their record, there were Leonardo and Blake and Frederick Walker to
+preserve the illusion of permanence, or at least of continuity. Instead
+of the bleached and desiccated ribs of momentarily current magazines
+cast away in sepulchral indignity, there were a hundred quartos whose
+calf bindings had the durableness and sober depth of walnut furniture,
+furniture, moreover, that was still in use.
+
+Yet it was in Venner's office where Michael found the perfect fruit of
+time's infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of
+the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his own
+rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present of
+finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of those
+moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through
+situations or persons or places, the assurance of immortality. Great
+pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always
+remain as the most obvious pledge of man's spiritual potentiality, but
+these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress
+themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke
+of seeing God's forehead pressed against the window panes, could believe
+that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had struggled in
+the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable. To him Blake
+seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to attempt the
+recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith. Every other
+writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur. Most people,
+seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would obtain the
+finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight of St.
+Mary's tower against a green April afterglow, or of the moon-parched
+High Street in frost. Michael, however, found in Venner's office, just
+as he had found in that old print of St. Mary's tower rather than in the
+tower itself, the innermost shrine of Oxford, the profoundest revelation
+of the shining truth round which the mysterious material of Oxford had
+grown through the Middle Ages.
+
+Michael with others of his year had during the summer term ventured
+several times into Venner's, but the entrance of even a comparatively
+obscure senior had always driven them out. They had not yet enjoyed the
+atmosphere of security without which a club unlike an orchard never
+tastes sweet. Now, with the presence of a new year's freshmen and with
+the lordship of the college in their own hands, since to the
+out-of-college men age with merciless finger seemed already to be
+beckoning, Michael and his contemporaries in their pride of prime
+marched into Venner's after hall and drank their coffee.
+
+Venner's office was one of the small ground-floor rooms in Cloisters,
+but it had long ago been converted to the present use. An inner
+storeroom, to which Venner always retired to make a cup of squash or to
+open a bottle of whisky, had once been the bedroom. The office itself
+was not luxuriously furnished, and the accommodation was small. A
+window-seat with a view of the college kitchens, a square table, and a
+couple of Windsor chairs were considered enough for the men who
+frequented Venner's every night after hall, and who on Sunday nights
+after wine in J.C.R. clustered there like a swarm of bees. Venner's own
+high chair stood far back in the corner behind his high sloping desk on
+which, always spread open, lay the great ledger of J.C.R. accounts. On
+the shelves above were the account books of bygone years in which were
+indelibly recorded the extravagances of more than thirty years of St.
+Mary's men. Over the fireplace was a gilt mirror of Victorian design
+stuck round with the fixture cards of the university and the college,
+with notices of grinds and musical clubs and debating societies; in
+fact, with all the printed petty news of Oxford. A few photographs of
+winning crews, a book-case with stores of college stationery, a
+Chippendale sideboard with a glass case of priced cigars on top, and an
+interesting drawerful of Venner's relics above the varnished wainscot
+completed the furniture. The wall-paper was of that indefinite brownish
+yellow which one finds in the rooms of old-fashioned solicitors, and of
+that curious oily texture which seems to produce an impression of great
+age and at the same time of perfect modernity.
+
+Yet the office itself, haunted though it was by the accumulated
+personalities of every generation at St. Mary's, would scarcely have
+possessed the magical effect of fusion which it did possess, had not all
+these personalities endured in a perpetual present through the
+conservative force of Venner himself. John Venables had been Steward of
+the Junior Common Room for thirty-three years, but he seemed to all
+these young men that came within the fragrancy of his charm to be as
+much an intrinsic part of the college as the tower itself. The
+moon-faced Warden, the dry-voiced dons, the deer park, the elms, the
+ancient doors and traceries, the lawns and narrow entries, the groinings
+and the lattices, were all subordinate in the estimation of the
+undergraduates to Venner. He knew the inner history of every rag; he
+realized why each man was popular or unpopular or merely ignored; he was
+a treasure-house of wise counsel and kindly advice; he held the keys of
+every heart. He was an old man with florid, clean-shaven face, a pair of
+benignant eyes intensely blue, a rounded nose, a gentle voice and most
+inimitable laugh. Something there was in him of the old family butler, a
+little more of the yeoman-farmer, a trace of the head game-keeper, a
+suspicion of the trainer of horses, but all these elements were blended
+to produce the effect of someone wise and saintly and simple who could
+trouble himself to heal the lightest wounds and could rouse with a look
+or a gesture undying affection.
+
+With such a tutelary spirit, it was not surprising the freedom of
+Venner's should have been esteemed a privilege that could only be
+conferred by the user's consciousness of his own right. There was no
+formal election to Venner's: there simply happened a moment when the St.
+Mary's man entered unembarrassed that mellow office and basked in that
+sunny effluence. In this ripe old room, generous and dry as sherry wine,
+how pleasant it was to sit and listen to Venner's ripe old stories: how
+amazingly important seemed the trivial gossip of the college in this
+historic atmosphere: how much time was apparently wasted here between
+eight and ten at night, and what a thrill it always was to come into
+college about half-past nine of a murky evening and stroll round
+Cloisters to see if there was anybody in Venner's. It could after all
+scarcely be accounted a waste of time to sit and slowly mature in
+Venner's, and sometimes about half-past nine the old man would be alone,
+the fire would be dying down and during the half-hour that remained of
+his duty, it would be possible to peel a large apple very slowly and
+extract from him more of the essence of social history than could be
+gained from a term's reading of great historians even with all the extra
+lucidity imparted by a course of Mr. So-and-So's lectures.
+
+Michael found that Venner summed up clearly for him all his own
+tentative essays to grasp the meaning of life. He perceived in him the
+finest reaction to the prejudice and nobility, the efficiency and folly
+of aristocratic thought. He found in him the ideal realization of his
+own most cherished opinions. England, and all that was most inexplicable
+in the spirit of England, was expressed by Venner. He was a landscape, a
+piece of architecture, a simple poem of England. One of Venner's
+applauded tricks was to attach a piece of string to the tongs for a
+listener to hold to his ears, while Venner struck the tongs with the
+poker and evoked the sound of St. Mary's chimes. But the poker and tongs
+were unnecessary, for in Venner's own voice was the sound of all the
+bells in England. Communion with this gracious, this tranquil, this
+mellow presence affected Michael with a sense of the calm certainty of
+his own life. It lulled all the discontent and all the unrest. It
+indicated for the remainder of his Oxford time a path which, if it did
+not lead to any outburst of existence, was at least a straight path,
+green bordered and gay with birdsong, with here and there a sight of
+ancient towers and faiths, and here and there an arbor in which he and
+his friends could sit and talk of their hopes.
+
+"Venner," said Lonsdale one evening, "do you remember the Bishop of
+Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him
+in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac."
+
+"Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow," Venner began, full of
+reminiscence. "But we'll look him up."
+
+Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive
+evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were
+photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed for
+the criticism of his irreverent successors.
+
+"There you are," chuckled Venner triumphantly. "What did I say? One
+dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for
+there's another half dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men
+are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college
+as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop--Stebbing he was then. He
+put a cod-fish in the Dean's bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about it!
+The old Warden kicked up such a fuss."
+
+And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided
+from anecdote to anecdote of episcopal youth.
+
+"I thought the old boy liked the governor's port," laughed Lonsdale.
+"'What a pity everybody can't drink in moderation,' said Gaiters. Next
+time he cocks his wicked old eye at me, I shall ask him about that
+cod-fish."
+
+"What's this they tell me about your bringing out a magazine?" Venner
+inquired, turning to Maurice Avery.
+
+"Out next week, Venner," Maurice announced importantly.
+
+"Why, whatever do you find to write about?" asked Venner. "But I suppose
+it's amusing. I've often been asked to write my own life. What an idea!
+As if I had any time. I'm glad enough to go to bed when I get home,
+though I always smoke a pipe first. We had two men here once who brought
+out a paper. Chalfont and Weymouth. I used to have some copies of it
+somewhere. They put in a lot of skits of the college dons. The Warden
+was quite annoyed. 'Most scurrilous, Venables,' he said to me, I
+remember. 'Most scurrilous.'" Venner chuckled at the remembrance of the
+Warden's indignation.
+
+"This is going to be a very serious affair, Venner," explained somebody.
+"It's going to put the world quite straight again."
+
+"Ho-ho, I suppose you're one of these Radicals," said Venner to the
+editor. "Dear me, how anyone can be a Radical I can't understand. I've
+always been a Conservative. We had a Socialist come up here to lecture
+once in a man's rooms--a great Radical this man was--Sir Hugh Gaston--a
+baronet--there's a funny thing, fancy a Radical baronet. Well, the men
+got to hear of this Socialist coming up and what do you think they did?"
+Venner chuckled in anticipatory relish. "Why, they cropped his hair down
+to nothing. Sir Hugh Gaston was quite upset about it, and when he made a
+fuss, they cut his hair too, though it was quite short already. There
+was a terrible rowdy set up then. The men are very much quieter
+nowadays."
+
+The door opened as Venables finished his story, and Smithers came in to
+order rather nervously a tin of biscuits. The familiar frequenters of
+Venner's eyed in cold silence his entrance, his blushful wait and his
+hurried exit.
+
+"That's a scholar called Smithers," Venner explained. "He's a very quiet
+man. I don't suppose any of you know him even by sight."
+
+"We ragged him last term," said Michael, smiling at his friends.
+
+"He's a bounder," declared Avery obstinately.
+
+"He hasn't much money," said Venner. "But he's a very nice fellow. You
+oughtn't to rag him. He's very harmless. Never speaks to anybody. He'll
+get a first, I expect, but there, you don't think anything of that, I
+know. But the dons do. The Warden often has him to dinner. I shouldn't
+rag him any more. He's a very sensitive fellow. His father's a
+carpenter. What a wonderful thing he should have a son come up to St.
+Mary's."
+
+The rebuke was so gently administered that only the momentary silence
+betrayed its efficacy.
+
+One day Michael brought Alan to be introduced to Venables, and it was a
+pleasure to see how immediately the old man appreciated Alan.
+
+"Why ever didn't you come to St. Mary's?" asked Venner. "Just the place
+for you. Don't you find Christ Church a bit large? But they've got some
+very good land. I've often done a bit of shooting over the Christ Church
+farms. The Bursar knows me well. 'Pleased to see you, Mr. Venables, and
+I hope you'll have good sport.' That's what he said to me last time I
+saw him. Oh, he's a very nice man! Do they still make meringues at your
+place? I don't suppose you ever heard the story of the St. Mary's men
+who broke into Christ Church. It caused quite a stir at the time. Well,
+some of our men were very tipsy one night at the Bullingdon wine, and
+one of them left his handkerchief in the rooms of a Christ Church man,
+and what do you think they did? Why, when they got back to college, this
+man said he wasn't going to bed without his handkerchief. Did you ever
+hear of such a thing? So they all climbed out of St. Mary's at about two
+in the morning and actually climbed into Christ Church. At least they
+thought it was Christ Church, but it was really Pembroke. Do you know
+Pembroke? I don't suppose you've even been there. Our men always cheer
+Pembroke in the Eights--Pemmy, as they call it--because their barge is
+next to us. But fancy breaking in there at night to look for a
+handkerchief. They woke up every man in the college, and there was a
+regular set-to in the quad, and the night porter at Pembroke got a most
+terrible black eye. The President of the J.C.R. had to send an apology,
+and it was all put right, but this man who lost his handkerchief,
+Wilberforce his name was, became a regular nuisance, because for ever
+afterward, whenever he got drunk, he used to go looking for this old
+handkerchief. There you see, that's what comes of going to the
+Bullingdon wine. Are you a member of the Bullingdon?"
+
+"He's a cricketer, Venner," Michael explained.
+
+"So was this fellow Wilberforce who lost his handkerchief, and what do
+you think? One day when we were playing Winchester--you're not a
+Wykehamist, are you?--he came out to bat so drunk that the first ball he
+hit, he went and ran after it himself. It caused quite a scandal. But
+you don't look one of that sort. Will you have a squash and a biscuit?
+The men like these biscuits very much. There's been quite a run on
+them."
+
+Michael was anxious to know how deep an impression Venner had made on
+Alan.
+
+"You've got nobody like him at the House?" he asked.
+
+Alan was bound to admit there was indeed nobody.
+
+"He's an extraordinary chap," said Michael. "He's always different, and
+yet he's always absolutely the same. For me he represents Oxford. When
+one's in his company, one feels one's with him for ever, and yet one
+knows that people who have gone down can feel just the same, and that
+people who haven't yet come up will feel just the same. You know, I do
+really think that what it sets out to do St. Mary's does better than any
+other college. And the reason of that is Venner's. It's the only
+successful democracy in the world."
+
+"I shouldn't have called it a democracy," said Alan. "Everybody doesn't
+go there."
+
+"But everybody can go there. It depends entirely on themselves."
+
+"What about that fellow Smithers you were talking about?" Alan asked.
+"He seems barred."
+
+"But he won't be," Michael urged hopefully.
+
+"He'd be happier at the House all the same," Alan said. "He'd find his
+own set there."
+
+"But so he can at St. Mary's."
+
+"Then it isn't a democracy," Alan stoutly maintained.
+
+"I say, Alan," exclaimed Michael, in surprise. "You're getting quite a
+logician."
+
+"Well, you always persist in treating me like an idiot," said Alan. "But
+I _am_ reading Honor Mods. It's a swat, but I've got to get some sort of
+a class."
+
+"You'll probably get a first," said Michael.
+
+Yet how curious it was to think of Alan, whom he still regarded as
+chiefly a good-looking and capable athlete, taking a first class in a
+school he himself had indolently passed over. Of course he would never
+take a first. He was too much occupied with the perfection of new
+leg-breaks. And what would he do after his degree, his third in greats?
+A third was the utmost Michael mentally allowed him in the Final
+Schools.
+
+"I suppose you'll ultimately try for the Indian Civil?" Michael asked.
+"Do you remember when we used to lie awake talking in bed at Carlington
+Road? It was always going to be me who did everything intellectual; you
+were always the sportsman."
+
+"I am still. Michael, I think I've got a chance of my blue this year. If
+I can keep that leg-break," he added fervidly. "There's no slow
+right-hander of much class in the Varsity. I worked like a navvy at that
+leg-break last vac."
+
+"I thought you were grinding for Mods," Michael reminded him, with a
+smile.
+
+"I worked like a navvy at Mods," said Alan.
+
+"You'll be a proconsul, I really believe." Michael looked admiringly at
+his friend. "And do you know, Alan, in appearance you're turning into a
+regular viking."
+
+"I meant to have my hair cut yesterday," said Alan, in grave and
+reflective self-reproof.
+
+"It's not your hair," cried Michael. "It's your whole personality. I
+never appreciated you until this moment."
+
+"I think you talk more rot nowadays than you used to talk even," said
+Alan. "So long, I must go back and work."
+
+The tall figure with the dull gold hair curling out from the green cap
+of Harris tweed faded away in the November fog that was traveling in
+swift and smoky undulations through the Oxford streets. What a strangely
+attractive walk Alan had always had, and now it had gained something of
+determination, whether from leg-breaks or logic Michael did not know.
+But the result was a truer grace in the poise of his neck; a longer and
+more supple swing from his tapering flanks.
+
+Michael went on up the High and stood for a moment, watching the
+confusion caused by the fog at Carfax, listening to the fretful tinkles
+of the numerous bicycles and the jangling of the trams and the shouts of
+the paper-boys. Then he walked down Cornmarket Street past the shops
+splashing through the humid coils of vapor their lights upon the
+townspeople, loiterers and purchasers who thronged the pavements.
+Undergraduates strolled along, linked arm in arm and perpetually
+staring. How faithfully each group resembled its forerunners and
+successors. All had the same fresh complexions, the same ample green
+coats of Harris tweed, the same gray flannel trousers. Only in the
+casual acknowledgments of his greeting when he recognized acquaintances
+was there the least variation, since some would nod or toss their heads,
+others would shudder with their chins, and a few would raise their arms
+in a fanlike gesture of social benediction. Michael turned round into
+the Broad where the fog made mysterious even the tea-tray gothic of
+Balliol, and Trinity with its municipal ampelopsis. A spectral cabman
+saluted him interrogatively from the murk. A fox-terrier went yapping
+down the street at the heels of a don's wife hurrying back to Banbury
+Road. A belated paper-boy yelled, "Varsity and Blackheath Result,"
+hastening toward a more profitable traffic. The fog grew denser every
+minute, and Michael turned round into Turl Street past many-windowed
+Exeter and the monastic silence of Lincoln. There was time to turn aside
+and visit Lampard's bookshop. There was time to buy that Glossary of
+Ducange which he must have, and perhaps that red and golden Dictionary
+of Welby Pugin which he ought to have, and ultimately, as it turned out,
+there was time to buy half a dozen more great volumes whose connection
+with mediaeval history was not too remote to give an excuse to Michael,
+if excuse were needed, for their purchase. Seven o'clock chimed
+suddenly, and Michael hurried to college, snatched a black coat and a
+gown out of Venner's and just avoided the sconce for being more than a
+quarter of an hour late for hall.
+
+Michael was glad he had not missed hall that night. In Lampard's
+alluring case of treasures he had been tempted to linger on until too
+late, and then to take with him two or three new books and in their
+entertainment to eat a solitary and meditative dinner at Buol's. But it
+would have been a pity to have missed hall when the electric light
+failed abruptly and when everybody had just helped themselves to baked
+potatoes. It would have been sad not to have seen the Scholars' table so
+splendidly wrecked or heard the volleys of laughter resounding through
+the darkness.
+
+"By gad," said Lonsdale, when the light was restored and the second year
+leaned over their table in triumphant exhaustion. "Did you see that bad
+man Carben combing the potatoes out of his hair with a fork? I say,
+Porcher," he said to his old scout who was waiting at the table, "do
+bring us some baked potatoes."
+
+"Isn't there none left?" inquired Porcher. "Mr. Lonsdale, sir, you'd
+better keep a bit quiet. The Sub-Warden's looking very savage--very
+savage indeed."
+
+At this moment Maurice Avery came hurrying in to dinner.
+
+"Oh, sconce him!" shouted everybody. "It's nearly five-and-twenty past."
+
+"Couldn't help it," said Maurice very importantly. "Just been seeing the
+first number of the O.L.G. through the press."
+
+"By gad," said Lonsdale. "It's a way we have in the Buffs and the Forty
+Two'th. Look here, have we all got to buy this rotten paper of yours?
+What's it going to cost?"
+
+"A shilling," said Maurice modestly.
+
+"A bob!" cried Lonsdale. "But, my dear old ink-slinger, I can buy the
+five-o'clock Star for a half-penny."
+
+Maurice had to put up with a good deal of chaff from everybody that
+night.
+
+"Let's have the program," Sinclair suggested.
+
+The editor was so much elated at the prospect of to-morrow's great event
+that he rashly produced from his pocket the contents bill, which
+Lonsdale seized and immediately began to read out:
+
+    "THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS.
+    No. I.
+    _"Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
+
+"What are you reflecting on, Mossy?"
+
+"Oh, politics," said Maurice lightly, "and other things."
+
+"My god, he'll be Prime Minister next week," said Cuffe.
+
+    _"Socrates at Balliol. By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+"And just about where he ought to have been," commented Lonsdale. "Oh,
+listen to this! Whoo-oop!
+
+    _"The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
+
+"But wait a minute, who do you think it's by? C. St. C. Wedderburn!
+Jolly old Wedders! The Failure of the Modern Illustrator. Wedders! My
+god, I shall cat with laughing. Wedders! A bee-luddy author."
+
+"Sconce Mr. Lonsdale, please," said Wedderburn, turning gravely to the
+recorder by his chair.
+
+"What, half a crown for not really saying bloody?" Lonsdale protested.
+
+That night after hall there was much to tell Venner of the successful
+bombardment with potatoes, and there was some chaff for Avery and
+Wedderburn in regard to their forthcoming magazine. Parties of
+out-of-college men came in after their dinner, and at half-past eight
+o'clock the little office was fuller than usual, with the college gossip
+being carried on in a helter-skelter of unceasing babble. Just when
+Fitzroy the Varsity bow was enunciating the glories of Wet Bobbery and
+the comparative obscurities of Dry Bobbery and just when all the Dry
+Bobs present were bowling the contrary arguments at him from every
+corner at once, the door opened and a freshman, as fair and floridly
+handsome as a young Bacchus, walked with curious tiptoe steps into the
+very heart of the assembly.
+
+Fitzroy stopped short in his discourse and thrummed impatiently with
+clenched fists upon his inflated chest, as gorillas do. The rest of the
+company eyed the entrance of the newcomer in puzzled, faintly hostile
+silence.
+
+"Oh, Venner," said the intruder, in loftiest self-confidence and
+unabashed clarity of accent. "I haven't had those cigars yet."
+
+He hadn't had his cigars yet! Confound his impudence, and what right had
+he to buy cigars, and what infernal assurance had led him to suppose he
+might stroll into Venner's in the third raw week of his uncuffed
+fresherdom? Who was he? What was he? Unvoiced, these questions quivered
+in the wrathful silence.
+
+"The boy was told to take them up, sir," said Venner. Something in
+Venner's manner toward this newcomer indicated to the familiars that he
+might have deprecated this deliberate entrance armored in
+self-satisfaction. Something there was in Venner's assumption of
+impersonal civility which told the familiars that Venner himself
+recognized and sympathized with their as yet unspoken horror of
+tradition's breach.
+
+"I rather want them to-night," said the newcomer, and then he surveyed
+slowly his seniors and even nodded to one or two of them whom presumably
+he had known at school. "So if the boy hasn't taken them up," he
+continued, "you might send up another box. Thanks very much."
+
+He seemed to debate for a moment with himself whether he should stay,
+but finally decided to go. As he reached the door, he said that, by
+Jove, his cigarette had gone out, and "You've got a light," he added to
+Lonsdale, who was standing nearest to him. "Thanks very much." The door
+of Venner's slammed behind his imperturbableness, and a sigh of pent-up
+stupefaction was let loose.
+
+"Who's your young friend, Lonny?" cried one.
+
+"He thought Lonny was the Common Room boy," cried another.
+
+"Venner, give the cigars to Mr. Lonsdale to take up," shouted a third.
+
+"He's very daring for a freshman," said Venner. "Very daring. I thought
+he was a fourth year Scholar whom I'd never seen, when he first came in
+the other day. Most of the freshmen are very timid at first. They think
+the senior men don't like their coming in too soon. And perhaps it's
+better for them to order what they want when I'm by myself. I can talk
+to them more easily that way. With all the men wanting their coffee and
+whiskies, I really can't attend to orders so well just after hall."
+
+"Who is he, Venner?" demanded half a dozen indignant voices.
+
+"Mr. Appleby. The Honorable George Appleby. But you ought to know him.
+He's an Etonian."
+
+Several Etonians admitted they knew him, and the Wykehamists present
+seized the occasion to point out the impossibility of such manners
+belonging to any other school.
+
+"He's a friend of yours, then?" said Venner to Lonsdale.
+
+"Good lord, no, Venner!" declared Lonsdale.
+
+"He seemed on very familiar terms with you," Venner chuckled wickedly.
+
+Lonsdale thought very hard for two long exasperated moments and then
+announced with conviction that Appleby must be ragged, severely ragged
+this very night.
+
+"Now don't go making a great noise," Venner advised. "The dons don't
+like it, and the Dean won't be in a very good temper after that
+potato-throwing in hall."
+
+"He must be ragged, Venner," persisted Lonsdale inexorably. "There need
+be no noise, but I'm hanged if I'm going to have my cigarette taken out
+of my hand and used by a damned fresher. Who's coming with me to rag
+this man Appleby?"
+
+The third-year men seemed to think the correction beneath their dignity,
+and the duty devolved naturally upon the second-year men.
+
+"I can't come," said Avery. "The O.L.G.'s coming out to-morrow."
+
+"Look here, Mossy, if you say another word about your rotten paper, I
+won't buy a copy," Lonsdale vowed.
+
+Michael offered to go with Lonsdale and at any rate assist as a
+spectator. He was anxious to compare the behavior of Smithers with the
+behavior of Appleby in like circumstances. Grainger offered to come if
+Lonny would promise to fight sixteen rounds without gloves, and in the
+end he, with Lonsdale, Michael, Cuffe, Sinclair, and three or four
+others, marched up to Appleby's rooms.
+
+Lonsdale knocked upon the door, and as he opened it assumed what he
+probably supposed to be an expression of ferocity, though he was told
+afterward he had merely looked rather more funny than usual.
+
+"Oh, hullo, Lonsdale," said Appleby, as the party entered. "Come in and
+have a smoke. How's your governor?"
+
+Lonsdale seemed to choke for breath a moment, and then sat down in a
+chair so deep that for the person once plunged into its recesses an
+offensive movement must have been extremely difficult.
+
+"Come in, you chaps," Appleby pursued in hospitable serenity. "I don't
+know any of your names, but take pews, take pews. Venner hasn't sent up
+the cigars I ordered."
+
+"We know," interrupted Lonsdale severely.
+
+"But I've some pretty decent weeds here," continued Appleby, without a
+tremor of embarrassment. "Who's for whisky?"
+
+"Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you've got
+to understand is that...."
+
+Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale.
+
+"Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?"
+
+"What you require, young Appleby," began Lonsdale.
+
+"You've got it right this time," said Appleby encouragingly.
+
+"What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down."
+
+"Oh, really?" said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest.
+
+"Yes," answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative
+that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably
+unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for
+their more eloquent support.
+
+"Tell him he mustn't come into Venner's and put on all that side. It's
+not done. He's a fresher," gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that
+absorbing chair.
+
+"All right," agreed Appleby cheerfully. "I'll send the order up to you
+next time."
+
+Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could
+never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby's whisky and
+smoking one of Appleby's cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his
+resentment to flame, and he sprang up.
+
+"We ought to debag him!" he cried.
+
+Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the
+divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense
+hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to
+be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on
+a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was
+watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them
+to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.
+
+"Hopeless," sighed Lonsdale. "The man's a hopeless ass."
+
+"I think he had the laugh, though," said Michael.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS
+
+
+Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary's with that scrupulousness of
+outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a
+discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning
+after the attempted adjustment of Appleby's behavior, a raw and vaporous
+November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o'clock ran collarless,
+unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head
+stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal
+appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name fairly entered
+in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started back on the
+taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of his toilet.
+Crossing the gravel space between Cloisters and Cuther's worldly quad,
+he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one minute past
+eight o'clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.
+
+"What on earth.... Are you going to London?" he gasped.
+
+"Rather not. I'm going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G."
+
+Michael shook his head, sighed compassionately, and passed on. Twenty
+minutes later in Common Room he was contemplating distastefully the
+kedgeree which with a more hopeful appetite he had ordered on the
+evening before, when Maurice planked down beside his place the first
+number of The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+"There's a misprint on page thirty-seven, line six. It ought to be 'yet'
+not 'but.' Otherwise I think it's a success. Do you mind reading my
+slashing attack on the policy of the Oxford theater? Or perhaps you'd
+better begin at the beginning and go right through the whole paper and
+give me your absolutely frank opinion of it as a whole. Just tell me
+candidly if you think my Reflections are too individual. I want the
+effect to be more----"
+
+"Maurice," Michael interrupted, "do you like kedgeree?"
+
+"Yes, very much," Maurice answered absently. Then he plunged on again.
+"Also don't forget to tell me if you think that Guy's skit is too
+clever. And if you find any misprints I haven't noticed, mark them down.
+We can't alter them now, of course, but I'll speak to the compositor
+myself. You like the color? I wonder whether it wouldn't have been
+better to have had dark blue after all. Still----"
+
+"Well, if you like kedgeree," Michael interrupted again, "do you like it
+as much in the morning as you thought you were going to like it the
+night before?"
+
+"Oh, how the dickens do I know?" exclaimed Maurice fretfully.
+
+"Well, will you just eat my breakfast and let me know if you think I
+ought to have ordered eggs and bacon last night?"
+
+"Aren't you keen on the success of this paper?" Maurice demanded.
+
+"I'll tell you later on," Michael offered. "We'll lunch together quietly
+in my rooms, and the little mulled claret we shall drink to keep out
+this filthy fog will also enormously conduce to the amiableness of my
+judgment."
+
+"And you won't come out with me and Nigel Stewart to watch people
+buying copies on their way to leckers?" Maurice suggested in a tone of
+disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in
+time to prevent Michael's heart from being softened. The newcomer was at
+once invited to remove the editor.
+
+"Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?" Maurice demanded,
+unabashed.
+
+"Look here, Moss Avery," said Lonsdale seriously, "if you promise to
+spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing
+syrup, I'll ..."
+
+But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and
+left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind Lonsdale
+of last night's encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of The Oxford
+Looking-Glass that lay beside his plate.
+
+It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and
+perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously hatched,
+and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there among the
+articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into the fold
+by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the image of
+Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on the
+variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that Academic
+Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist should be
+praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that without question
+was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not sure. It was a
+promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael played with the
+idea of elaborating his conception in an article for this very
+Looking-Glass which she invisibly supported. The Oxford Looking-Glass
+might serve her like the aegis of Pallas Athene, an aegis that would
+freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the twentieth
+century. Michael began to feel that his classical analogies were
+enmeshing the original idea, involving it already in complexities too
+manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking dreams at
+the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the Academic
+Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols of
+Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the
+dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don's mind,
+the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring
+destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age
+and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by
+its harvest of youth, of sobriety sun-kindled to a radiancy of silver
+joy, of wisdom, peace, and shelter, and Attic glories.
+
+Michael became so nearly stifled by the net of his fancies that he
+almost rose from the table then and there, ambitious to take pen in hand
+and test the power of its sharpness to cut him free. He clearly saw the
+gray-eyed goddess as the personification of the spirit of the
+university: but suddenly all the impulse faded out in self-depreciation.
+Guy Hazlewood would solve the problem with his pranked-out allusiveness,
+would trace more featly the attributes of the Academic Muse and
+establish more convincingly her descent from Apollo or her identity with
+Athene. At least, however, he could offer the idea and if Guy made
+anything of it, the second number of The Oxford Looking-Glass would hold
+more of Michael Fane than the ten pounds he had laid on the table of its
+exchequer. Inspired by the zest of his own fancy, he read on
+deliberately.
+
+    _Some Reflections. By Maurice Avery._
+
+The editor had really succeeded in reflecting accurately the passing
+glance of Oxford, although perhaps the tortuous gilt of the frame with
+which he had tried to impart style to his mirror was more personal to
+Maurice Avery than general to the university. Moreover, his glass would
+certainly never have stood a steady and protracted gaze. Still with all
+their faults these paragraphic reflections did show forth admirably the
+wit and unmatured cynicism of the various Junior Common Rooms, did
+signally flash with all the illusion of an important message, did
+suggest a potentiality for durable criticism.
+
+    _Socrates at Balliol._ _By Guy Hazlewood._
+
+There was enough of Guy in his article to endear it to Michael, and
+there was so much of Oxford in Guy that whatever he wrote spontaneously
+would always enrich the magazine with that adventurous gaiety and
+childlike intolerance of Athene's favorites.
+
+    _The Failure of the Modern Illustrator._
+    _By C. St. C. Wedderburn._
+
+Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have
+expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.
+
+"Let us turn now to the illustrators of the sixties and seventies, and
+we shall see...." Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey
+himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became
+pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so
+much sententiousness.
+
+    _Quo Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._
+
+Nigel's plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the
+decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance,
+was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical
+expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would greatly
+serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its presence in The
+Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest magazine was not
+going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any other had endowed
+Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her poets lacked. Michael
+himself had since he came up let the practice of religion slide, but his
+first fervors had not burned themselves out so utterly as to make him
+despise the warmth they once had kindled. His inclination in any
+argument was always toward the Catholic point of view, and though he
+himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic speech and agnostic
+thought, he was always a little impatient of a skeptical non-age and
+very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had never been tried by
+the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart's challenge with its
+plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would be effective save
+for the personality of the writer, who revealed his formal grace
+notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and the tassels of
+his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of its verbal
+cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in reading it
+that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost cause.
+
+Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart's article, Michael managed to finish
+his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common Room,
+Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which he had
+fortified his place at table.
+
+"Have you been reading that thing of Mossy's?" he asked incredulously.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Isn't it most awful rot?"
+
+"Some of it," Michael assured him.
+
+"I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy," sighed Lonsdale. "I
+suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into supporting
+it. By Jove, I'll write and tell the governor to buy a copy. I want him
+to raise my allowance this year, and he'll think I'm beginning to take
+an interest in what he calls 'affairs.'"
+
+Michael turned into Venner's before going back to his own rooms.
+
+"Hullo, is that the paper?" asked Venner. "Dear me, this looks very
+learned. You should tell him to put some more about sport into it--our
+fellows are all so dreadfully wild about sport. They'd be sure to buy it
+then. Going to work this morning? That's right. I'm always advising the
+men to work in the morning. But bless you, they don't pay any attention
+to me. They only laugh and say, 'what's old Venner know about it?'"
+
+Michael, sitting snugly in the morning quiet of his room, leaned over to
+poke the fire into a blaze, eyed with satisfaction November's sodden
+mists against his window, and settled himself back in the deep chair to
+The Oxford Looking-Glass.
+
+    _Oxford Liberalism. By Vernon Townsend._
+    _A Restatement of Tory Ideals. By William Mowbray._
+
+These two articles Michael decided to take on trust. From their perusal
+he would only work himself up into a condition of irritated neutrality.
+Indeed, he felt inclined to take all the rest of the magazine on trust.
+The tranquillity of his own room was too seductive. Dreaming became a
+duty here. It was so delightful to count from where he sat the books on
+the shelves and to arrive each time at a different estimate of their
+number. It was so restful to stare up at Mona Lisa and traverse without
+fatigue that labyrinth of rocks and streams. His desk not yet deranged
+by work or correspondence possessed a monumental stability of neatness
+that was most soothing to contemplate. It had the restfulness of a
+well-composed landscape where every contour took the eye easily onward
+and where every tree grew just where it was needed for a moment's halt.
+The olive-green magazine dropped unregarded onto the floor, and there
+was no other book within reach. The dancing fire danced on. Far away
+sounded the cries of daily life. The chimes in St. Mary's tower struck
+without proclaiming any suggestion of time. How long these roll-call
+mornings were and how rapidly dream on dream piled its drowsy outline.
+Was there not somewhere at the other end of Oxford a lecture at eleven
+o'clock? This raw morning was not suitable for lectures out of college.
+Was not Maurice coming to lunch? How deliciously far off was the time
+for ordering lunch. He really must get out of the habit of sitting in
+this deep wicker-chair, until evening licensed such repose.
+
+Some people had foolishly attended a ten-o'clock lecture at St. John's.
+What a ludicrous idea! They had ridden miserably through the cold on
+their bicycles and with numb fingers were now trying to record scraps of
+generalization in a notebook that would inevitably be lost long before
+the Schools. At the same time it was rather lazy to lie back like this
+so early in the morning. Why was it so difficult to abandon the Sirenian
+creakings of this chair? He wanted another match for his second pipe,
+but even the need for that was not violent enough to break the luxurious
+catalepsy of his present condition.
+
+Then suddenly Maurice Avery and Nigel Stewart burst into the room, and
+Michael by a supreme effort plunged upward onto his legs to receive
+them.
+
+"My hat, what a frowst!" exclaimed Maurice, rushing to the window and
+letting in the mist and the noise of the High.
+
+"We're very hearty this morning," murmured Stewart. "I heard Mass at
+Barney's for the success of the O.L.G."
+
+"Nigel and I have walked down the High, rounded the Corn, and back along
+the Broad and the Turl," announced Maurice. "And how many copies do you
+think we saw bought by people we didn't know?"
+
+"None," guessed Michael maliciously.
+
+"Don't be an ass. Fifteen. Well, I've calculated that at least four
+times as many were being sold, while we were making our round. That's
+sixty, and it's not half-past ten yet. We ought to do another three
+hundred easily before lunch. In fact, roughly I calculate we shall do
+five hundred and twenty before to-night. Not bad. After two thousand we
+shall be making money."
+
+"Maurice bought twenty-two copies himself," said Stewart, laughing, and
+lest he should seem to be laughing at Maurice thrust an affectionate arm
+through his to reassure him.
+
+"Well, I wanted to encourage the boys who were selling them," Maurice
+explained.
+
+"They'll probably emigrate with the money they've made out of you,"
+predicted Michael. "And what on earth are you going to do with
+twenty-two copies? I find this one copy of mine extraordinarily in the
+way."
+
+"Oh, I shall send them to well-known literary people in town. In fact,
+I'm going to write round and get the best-known old Oxford men to give
+us contributions from time to time, without payment, of course. I expect
+they'll be rather pleased at being asked."
+
+"Don't you think it may turn their heads?" Michael anxiously suggested.
+"It would be dreadful to read of the sudden death of Quiller-Couch from
+apoplectic pride or to hear that Hilaire Belloc or Max Beerbohm had
+burst with exultation in his bath."
+
+"It's a pity you can't be funny in print," said Maurice severely. "You'd
+really be some use on the paper then."
+
+"But what we've really come round to say," interposed Stewart, "is that
+there's an O.L.G. dinner to-night at the Grid; and then afterward we're
+all going across to my digs opposite."
+
+"And what about lunch with me?"
+
+Both Maurice and Nigel excused themselves. Maurice intended to spend all
+day at the Union. Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with three
+hearty Trindogs of Trinity.
+
+"But when did you join the Union?" Michael asked the editor.
+
+"I thought it was policy," he explained. "After all, though we laugh at
+it here, most of the Varsity does belong. Besides, Townsend and Bill
+Mowbray were both keen. You see they think the O.L.G. is going to have
+an influence in Varsity politics. And, after all, I am editor."
+
+"You certainly are," Michael agreed. "Nothing quite so editorial was
+ever conceived by the overwrought brain of a disappointed female
+contributor."
+
+Michael always enjoyed dining at the Grid. Of all the Oxford clubs it
+seemed to him to display the most completely normal undergraduate
+existence. Vincent's, notwithstanding its acknowledged chieftaincy,
+depended ultimately too much on a mechanically apostolic succession. It
+was an institution to be admired without affection. It had every
+justification for calling itself The Club without any qualifying prefix,
+but it produced a type too highly specialized, and was too definitely
+Dark Blue and Leander Pink. In a way, too, it belonged as much to
+Cambridge, and although violently patriotic had merged its individuality
+in brawn. By its substitution of co-option for election, its Olympic
+might was now scarcely much more than the self-deification of Roman
+Emperors. Vincent's was the last stronghold of muscular supremacy. Yet
+it was dreadfully improbable, as Michael admitted to himself, that he
+would have declined the offer of membership.
+
+The O.U.D.S. was at the opposite pole from Vincent's, and if it did not
+offend by its reactionary encouragement of a supreme but discredited
+spirit, it offended even more by fostering a premature worldliness. For
+an Oxford club to take in The Stage and The Era was merely an exotic
+heresy. On the walls of its very ugly room the pictures of actors that
+in Garrick Street would have possessed a romantic dignity produced an
+effect of strain, a proclamation of mounte-bank-worship that differed
+only in degree from the photographs of actresses on the mantelpiece of a
+second-rate room in a second-rate college. The frequenters of the
+O.U.D.S. were always very definitely Oxford undergraduates, but they
+lacked the serenity of Oxford, and seemed already to have planted a foot
+in London. The big modern room over the big cheap shop was a restless
+place, and its pretentiousness and modernity were tinged with
+Thespianism. Scarcely ever did the Academic Muse enter the O.U.D.S.,
+Michael thought. She must greatly dislike Thespianism with all that it
+connoted of mildewed statuary in an English garden. Yet it would be
+possible to transmute the O.U.D.S., he dreamed. It had the advantage of
+a limited membership. It might easily become a grove where Apollo and
+Athene could converse without quarreling. Therefore, he could continue
+to frequent its halls.
+
+The Bullingdon was always delightful; the gray bowlers and the white
+trousers striped with vivid blue displayed its members, in their
+costume, at least, as unchanging types, but the archaism made it a club
+too conservative to register much more than an effect of peculiarity.
+The Bullingdon had too much money, and not enough unhampered humanity to
+achieve the universal. The Union, on the other hand, was too
+indiscriminate. Personality was here submerged in organization.
+Manchester or Birmingham could have produced a result very similar.
+
+The Grid, perhaps for the very fact that it was primarily a dining-club,
+was the abode of discreet good-fellowship. Its membership was very
+strictly limited, and might seem to have been confined to the seven or
+eight colleges that considered themselves the best colleges, but any man
+who deserved to be a member could in the end be sure of his election.
+The atmosphere was neither political nor sporting nor literary, nor
+financial, but it was very peculiarly and very intimately the elusive
+atmosphere of Oxford herself. The old rooms looking out on the
+converging High had recently been redecorated in a very crude shade of
+blue. Members were grumbling at the taste of the executive, but Michael
+thought the unabashed ugliness was in keeping with its character. It was
+as if unwillingly the club released its hold upon the externals of
+Victorianism. Such premises could afford to be anachronistic, since the
+frequenters were always so finely sensitive to fashion's lightest
+breath. Eccentricity was not tolerated at the Grid except in the case of
+the half-dozen chartered personalities who were necessary to set off the
+correctness of the majority. The elective committee probably never made
+a mistake, and when somebody like Nigel Stewart was admitted, it was
+scrupulously ascertained beforehand that his presence would evoke
+affectionate amusement rather than the chill surprise with which the
+Grid would have greeted the entrance of someone who, however superior to
+the dead level of undergraduate life, lacked yet the indefinable
+justification for his humors.
+
+Michael on the evening of the Looking-Glass dinner went up the narrow
+stairs of the club in an aroma of pleasant anticipation, which was not
+even momentarily dispersed by the sudden occurrence of the fact that he
+had forgotten to take his name off hall, and must therefore pay two
+shillings and fourpence to the college for a dinner he would not eat. In
+the Strangers' Room were waiting the typical guests of the typical
+members. Here and there nods were exchanged, but the general atmosphere
+was one of serious expectancy. In the distance the rattle of crockery
+told of dinners already in progress. Vernon Townsend came in soon after
+Michael, and as Townsend was a member, Michael lost that trifling
+malaise of waiting in a club's guest-room which the undergraduate might
+conceal more admirably than any other class of man, but nevertheless
+felt acutely.
+
+"Not here yet, I suppose," said Townsend.
+
+It was unnecessary to mention a name. Nigel Stewart's habits were
+proverbial.
+
+"Read my article?" asked Townsend.
+
+"Splendid," Michael murmured.
+
+"It's going to get me the Librarianship of the Union," Townsend
+earnestly assured Michael.
+
+Michael was about to congratulate the sanguine author without disclosing
+his ignorance of the article's inside, when Bill Mowbray rushed
+breathlessly into the room. Everybody observed his dramatic entrance,
+whereupon he turned round and rushed out again, pausing only for one
+moment to exclaim in the doorway:
+
+"Good god, that fool will never remember!"
+
+"See that?" asked Townsend darkly, as the Tory Democrat vanished.
+
+Michael admitted that he undoubtedly had.
+
+"Bill Mowbray has become a poseur," Townsend declared. "Or else he knows
+his ridiculous article on Toryism was too badly stashed by mine," he
+added.
+
+"We shan't see him again to-night," Michael prophesied.
+
+Townsend shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We shall, if he can make another effective entrance," he said a little
+bitterly.
+
+Maurice Avery and Wedderburn arrived together. The combination of having
+just been elected to the Grid and the birth of the new paper had given
+Maurice such an effervescence of good spirits as even he seldom boasted.
+Wedderburn in contrast seemed graver, supplying in company with Maurice
+a solidity to the pair of them that was undeniably beneficial to their
+joint impression. They were followed almost immediately by Guy
+Hazlewood, who with his long legs came sloping in as self-possessed as
+he always was. Perhaps his left eyelid drooped a little lower than it
+was accustomed, and perhaps the sidelong smile that gave him a
+superficial resemblance to Michael was drawn down to a sharper point of
+mockery, but whatever stored-up flashes of mood and fancy Guy had to
+deliver, he always drawled them out in the same half-tired voice
+emphasized by the same careless indolence of gesture. And so this
+evening he was the same Guy Hazlewood, sure of being with his clear-cut
+pallor and effortless distinction of bearing, the personality that
+everyone would first observe in whatever company he found himself.
+
+"Nigel not here, of course," he drawled. "Let's have a sweep on what
+he's been doing. Five bob all round. I say he's just discovered Milton
+to be a great poet and is now, reading Lycidas to a spellbound group of
+the very heartiest Trindogs in Trinity."
+
+"I think he saw The Perfect Flapper," said Maurice "and has been trying
+ever since to find out whether she were a don's daughter or a theatrical
+bird of passage."
+
+"I think he's forgotten all about it," pronounced Wedderburn very deeply
+indeed.
+
+"I hope he saw that ass Bill Mowbray tearing off in the opposite
+direction and went to fetch him back," said Townsend.
+
+"I think he's saying Vespers for the week before last," Michael proposed
+as his solution.
+
+Stewart himself came in at that moment, and in answer to an united
+demand to know the reason of his lateness embraced in that gentle and
+confiding air of his all the company, included them all as it were in an
+intimate aside, and with the voice and demeanor of a strayed archangel
+explained that the fearful velocity of a pill was responsible for his
+unpunctuality.
+
+"But you're quite all right now, Nigel?" inquired Guy. "You could almost
+send a testimonial?"
+
+"Oh, rather," murmured Nigel, with tender assurance lighting up his
+great, innocent eyes. "I expect, you know, dinner's ready." Then he
+plunged his arm through Guy's, and led the way toward the private
+dining-room he had actually not forgotten to command.
+
+Dinner, owing to Avery's determined steering of the conversation, was
+eaten to the accompaniment of undiluted shop. Never for a moment was any
+topic allowed to oust The Oxford Looking-Glass from discussion. Even Guy
+was powerless against the editor intoxicated by ambition's fulfillment.
+Maurice sat in triumphant headship with only Mowbray's vacant place to
+qualify very slightly the completeness of his satisfaction. He hoped
+they all liked his scheme of inviting well-known, even celebrated, old
+Oxford men to contribute from time to time. He flattered himself they
+would esteem the honor vouchsafed to them. He disclaimed the wish to
+monopolize the paper's criticism and nobly invited Townsend to put in
+their places a series of contemporary dramatists. He congratulated Guy
+upon his satiric article and assured him of his great gifts. He
+reproached Michael for having written nothing, and vowed that many of
+the books for which he had already sent a printed demand to their
+publishers must in the December issue be reviewed by Michael. He
+arranged with Nigel Stewart and Wedderburn at least a dozen prospective
+campaigns to harry advertisers into unwilling publicity.
+
+At nine-o'clock, the staff of The Oxford Looking-Glass, reflecting now a
+very roseate world, marched across the High to wind up the evening in
+Stewart's digs. On the threshold the host paused in sudden dismay.
+
+"Good lord, I quite forgot. There's a meeting of the De Rebus
+Ecclesiasticis in my digs to-night. They'll all be there; what shall I
+do?"
+
+"You can't possibly go," declared everybody.
+
+"Mrs. Arbour," Nigel called out, hurriedly dipping into the landlady's
+quarters. "Mrs. Arbour."
+
+Mrs. Arbour assured him comfortably of her existence as she emerged to
+confer with him in the passage.
+
+"There may be one or two men waiting in my rooms. Will you put out
+syphons and whisky and explain that I shan't be coming."
+
+"Any reason to give, sir?" asked Mrs. Arbour.
+
+The recalcitrant shook his seraphic head.
+
+"No, sir," said Mrs. Arbour cheerfully, "quite so. Just say you're not
+coming? Yes, sir. Oh, they'll make themselves at home without you, I'll
+be bound. It's not likely to be a very noisy party, is it, sir?"
+
+"Oh, no. It's the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, Mrs. Arbour."
+
+"I see, sir. Foreigners. I'll look after them."
+
+Nigel having disposed of the pious debaters, joined his friends again,
+and it was decided to adjourn to Guy's digs in Holywell. Arm in arm the
+six journalists marched down the misted High. Arm in arm they turned
+into Catherine Street, and arm in arm they walked into the Proctor
+outside the Ratcliffe Camera. To him they admitted their membership of
+the university. To him they proffered very politely their names and the
+names of their colleges, and with the same politeness agreed to visit
+him next morning. The Proctor raised his cap and with his escort faded
+into the fog. Arm in arm the six journalists continued their progress
+into Holywell. Guy had digs in an old house whose gabled front leaned
+outward, whose oriel windows were supported by oaken beams worm-eaten
+and grotesquely carved. Within, a wide balustraded staircase went
+billowing upward unevenly. Guy's room that he shared with two
+intellectual athletes from his own college was very large. It was
+paneled all round up to the ceiling, and it contained at least a dozen
+very comfortable armchairs. He had imposed upon his partners his own
+tastes and with that privilege had cut off electric light and gas, so
+that lit only by two Pompeian lamps, the room was very shadowy when they
+all came in.
+
+"Comeragh and Anstruther are working downstairs, I expect," Guy
+explained, as one by one, while his guests waited in the dim light, he
+made a great illumination with wax candles. Then he poked up the fire
+and set glasses ready for anyone's need. Great armchairs were pulled
+round in a semicircle: pipes were lit: the stillness and mystery of the
+Oxford night crept along the ancient street, a stillness which at
+regular intervals was broken by multitudinous chimes, or faintly now and
+then by passing footfalls. Unexcited by argument the talk rippled in
+murmurous contentment.
+
+Michael was in no mood himself for talking, and he sat back listening
+now and then, but mostly dreaming. He thought of the conversation in
+that long riverside room in Paris with its extravagance and
+pretentiousness. Here in this time-haunted Holywell Street was neither.
+To be sure, Christianity and the soul's immortality and the future of
+England and contemporary art were running the gauntlet of youth's
+examination, but the Academic Muse had shown the company her aegis, had
+turned everything to unpassionate stone, and softened all presumption
+with her guarded glances. It was extraordinary how under her guidance
+every subject was stripped of obtrusive reality, how even women,
+discussed never so grossly, remained untarnished; since they ceased to
+be real women, but mere abstractions wanton or chaste in accordance with
+the demands of wit. The ribaldry was Aristophanic or Rabelaisian with as
+little power to offend, so much was it consecrated and refined by
+immemorial usages. Michael wished that all the world could be touched by
+the magical freedom and equally magical restraint of the Academic Muse,
+and as he sat here in this ancient room, hoped almost violently that
+never again would he be compelled to smirch the present clarity and
+steadiness of his vision.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LESSON OF SPAIN
+
+
+Perhaps Michael enjoyed more than anything else during his accumulation
+of books the collection of as many various editions of Don Quixote as
+possible. He had brought up from London the fat volume illustrated by
+Dore over which he had fallen asleep long ago and of which owing to
+Nurse's disapproval he had in consequence been deprived. Half the pages
+still showed where they had been bent under the weight of his small
+body: this honorable scar and the familiar musty smell and the book's
+unquestionable if slightly vulgar dignity prevented Michael from
+banishing it from the shelf that now held so many better editions.
+However much the zest in Dore's illustrations had died away in the
+flavor of Skelton's English, Michael could not abandon the big volume
+with what it held of childhood's first intellectual adventure. The shelf
+of Don Quixotes became in all his room one of the most cherished objects
+of contemplation. There was something in the "Q" and the "X" repeated on
+the back of volume after volume that positively gave Michael an
+impression in literal design of the Knight's fantastic personality. The
+very soul of Spain seemed to be symbolized by those sere quartos of the
+seventeenth century, nor was it imperceptible even in Smollett's cockney
+rendering bound in marbled boards. Staring at the row of Don Quixotes on
+a dull December afternoon, Michael felt overwhelmingly a desire to go to
+Spain himself, to drink at the source of Cervantes' mighty stream of
+imagination which with every year's new reading seemed to him to hold
+more and more certainly all that was most vital to life's appreciation.
+He no longer failed to see the humor of Don Quixote, but even now tears
+came more easily than laughter, and he regretted as poignantly as the
+Knight himself those times of chivalry which with all the extravagance
+of their decay were yet in essence superior to the mode that ousted them
+into ignominy. Something akin to Don Quixote's impulsive dismay Michael
+experienced in his own view of the twentieth century. He felt he needed
+a constructive ideal of conduct to sustain him through the long
+pilgrimage that must ensue after these hushed Oxford dreams.
+
+Term was nearly over. Michael had heard from Stella that she was going
+to spend two or three months in Germany. Her Brahms recitals, she wrote,
+had not been so successful as she ought to have made them. In London she
+was wasting time. Mother was continually wanting her to come to the
+theater. It seemed almost as if mother were trying to throw her in the
+way of marrying Prescott. He had certainly been very good, but she must
+retreat into Germany, and there again work hard. Would not Michael come
+too? Why was he so absurdly prejudiced against Germany? It was the only
+country in which to spend Christmas.
+
+The more Stella praised Germany, the more Michael felt the need of going
+to a country as utterly different from it as possible. He did not want
+to spend the vacation in London. He did not want his mother to talk
+vaguely to him of the advantage for Stella in marrying Prescott. The
+idea was preposterous. He would be angry with his mother, and he would
+blurt out to Prescott his dislike of such a notion. He would thereby
+wound a man whom he admired and display himself in the light of the
+objectionably fraternal youth. In the dreary and wet murk of December
+the sun-dried volumes of Cervantes spoke to him of Spain.
+
+Maurice Avery came up to his room, fatigued with fame and disappointed
+that Castleton with whom he had arranged to go to Rome had felt at the
+last moment he must take his mother to Bath. To him Michael proposed
+Spain.
+
+"But why not Rome?" Maurice argued. "As I originally settled."
+
+"Not with me," Michael pointed out. "I don't want to go to Rome now. I
+always feel luxuriously that there will occur the moment in my life when
+I shall say, 'I am ready to go to Rome. I must go to Rome.' It's a fancy
+of mine and nothing will induce me to spoil it by going to Rome at the
+wrong moment."
+
+Maurice grumbled at him, told him he was affected, unreasonable, and
+even hinted Michael ought to come to Rome simply for the fact that he
+himself had been balked of his intention by the absurdly filial
+Castleton.
+
+"I do think mothers ought not to interfere," Maurice protested. "My
+mother never interferes. Even my sisters are allowed to have their own
+way. Why can't Mrs. Castleton go to Bath by herself? I'm sure Castleton
+overdoes this 'duty' pose. And now you won't come to Rome. Well, will
+you come to Florence?"
+
+"Yes, and be worried by you to move on to Rome the very minute we arrive
+there," said Michael. "No, thanks. If you don't want to come to Spain,
+I'll try to get someone else. Anyway, I don't mind going by myself."
+
+"But what shall we do in Spain?" asked Maurice fretfully.
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+"We can dance the fandango," he pointed out. "Or if the fandango is too
+hard, there always remains the bolero."
+
+"If we went to Rome," Maurice was persisting, but Michael cut him short.
+
+"It's absolutely useless, Mossy. I am not going to Rome."
+
+"Then I suppose I shall have to go to Spain," said Maurice, in a much
+injured tone.
+
+So in the end it was settled chiefly, Michael always maintained, because
+Maurice found out it was advisable to travel with a passport. As not by
+the greatest exaggeration of insecurity could a passport be deemed
+necessary for Rome, Maurice decided it was an overrated city and became
+at once fervidly Spanish, even to the extent of saying "gracias"
+whenever the cruet was passed to him in hall. Wedderburn at the last
+moment thought he would like to join the expedition: so Maurice with the
+passport in his breast pocket preferred to call it.
+
+There were two or three days of packing in London, while Maurice stayed
+at 173 Cheyne Walk and was a great success with Mrs. Fane. The Rugby
+match against Cambridge was visited in a steady downpour. Wedderburn
+fetched his luggage, and the last dinner was eaten together at Cheyne
+Walk. Mrs. Fane was tenderly, if rather vaguely, solicitous for their
+safety.
+
+"Dearest Michael," she said, "do be careful not to be gored by a bull.
+I've never been to Spain. One seems to know nothing about it. Mr. Avery,
+do have some more turkey. I hope you don't dreadfully dislike garlic.
+Such a pungent vegetable. Michael darling, why are you laughing? Isn't
+it a vegetable? Mr. Wedderburn, do have some more turkey. A friend of
+mine, Mrs. Carruthers, who is a great believer in Mental Science ...
+Michael always laughs at me when I try to explain.... Hark, there is the
+cab, really. I hope it won't be raining in Spain. 'Rain, rain, go to
+Spain.' So ominous, isn't it? Good-bye, dearest boy, and write to me at
+Mrs. Carruthers, High Towers, Godalming."
+
+"I say, I know Mrs. Carruthers. She lives near us," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+"Come on," his friends insisted. "You haven't time now to explain the
+complications of Surrey society."
+
+"I'm so glad," said Mrs. Fane. "Because you'll be able to see that
+Michael remembers the address."
+
+"I never forget addresses, mother," protested Michael.
+
+"No, I know. I always think everyone is like me. Merry Christmas, and do
+send a post card to Stella. She was so hurt you wouldn't go to Germany."
+
+In the drench and soak of December weather they drove off in the
+four-wheeler. On such a night it seemed more than ever romantic to be
+setting out to Spain, and all the way to Victoria Maurice tried to
+decide by the occasional gleam of a blurred lamp-light how many pesetas
+one received for an English sovereign.
+
+The crossing to Dieppe was rough, but all memories of the discomfort
+were wiped out when next day they saw the Sud Express looking very long
+and swift and torpedo-like between the high platforms of that white
+drawing-room, the Gare d'Orleans. Down they went all day through France
+with rain speckling the windows of their compartment, past the naked
+poplar trees and rolling fallows until dusk fell sadly on the flooded
+agriculture. Dawn broke as they were leaving behind them the illimitable
+Landes. Westward the Atlantic clouds swept in from the Bay of Biscay,
+parting momentarily to reveal rifts of milky turquoise sky. Wider and
+wider grew the rifts, and when the train passed close to the green
+cliffs of St. Jean de Luz, the air was soft and fragrant: the sea was
+blue. At Irun they were in Spain, and Michael, as he walked up and down
+the platform waiting for dejeuner, watched, with a thrill of conviction
+that this was indeed a frontier, the red and blue toy soldiers and the
+black and green toy soldiers dotted about the toy landscape.
+
+Maurice was rather annoyed that nobody demanded their passports and that
+every official should seem so much more anxious to examine their railway
+tickets, but when they reached Madrid and found that no bull-fights
+would be held before the spring, he began to mutter of Rome and was
+inclined to obliterate the Spaniards from the category of civilization,
+so earnestly had he applied himself by the jiggling light of the train
+to the mastery of all the grades from matador to banderillo.
+
+In Seville, however, Maurice admitted he could not imagine a city more
+perfectly adapted to express all that he desired from life. Seville with
+her guitars and lemon-trees, her castanets and oranges and fans, her
+fountains and carnations and flashing Andalusians, was for him the city
+to which one day he would return and dream. Here one day he could come
+when seriously he began to write or paint or take up whatever destiny in
+art was in store for him. Here he would forget whatever blow life might
+hold in the future. He would send everybody he knew to Seville,
+notwithstanding Michael's objection that such generosity would recoil
+upon himself in his desire to possess somewhere on earth the opportunity
+of oblivion. Maurice and Wedderburn both bought Spanish cloaks and hats
+and went with easels to sit beside the Guadalquiver that sun-stained to
+the hue of its tawny banks was so contemptuous of their gentlemanly
+water-colors, as contemptuous as those cigarette-girls that came
+chattering from the tobacco-factory every noon. Michael preferred to
+wander over the roofs of the cathedral, until drowsed by the scent of
+warm stone he would sit for an hour merely conscious that the city lay
+below and that the sky was blue above.
+
+After Seville they traveled to Granada, to Cadiz and Cordova and other
+famous cities; and in the train they went slowly through La Mancha where
+any windmill might indeed be mistaken for Pentapolin of the Naked Arm,
+and where at the stations the water-carriers even in January cried
+"agua, agua," so that already the railway-carriages seemed parched by
+the fierce summer sun. They traveled to Salamanca and Toledo, and last
+of all they went to Burgos where Maurice and Wedderburn strove in vain
+to draw corner after corner of the cathedral, in the dust and shadows of
+whose more remote chantries Michael heard many Masses. A realization of
+the power of faith was stirred in him by these Masses that every day of
+every year were said without the recognition of humanity. These
+mumblings of ancient priests, these sanctus-bells that rattled like
+shaken ribs, these interminable and ceremonious shufflings were the
+outward expression of the force that sustained this fabric of Burgos and
+had raised in Seville a cathedral that seemed to crush like a stupendous
+monster the houses scattered about in its path, insignificant as a heap
+of white shells. Half of these old priests, thought Michael, were
+probably puppets who did not understand even their own cracked Latinity,
+yet their ministrations were almost frightening in their efficacy: they
+were indeed the very stones of Burgos made vocal.
+
+Listening to these Masses, Michael began to regret he had allowed all
+his interest in religion to peter out in the irritation of compulsory
+chapel-keeping at Oxford. Here in Burgos, he felt less the elevating
+power of faith than the unrelenting and disdainful inevitableness of its
+endurance. At Bournemouth, when he experienced the first thrill of
+conversion, he had been exultingly aware of a personal friendliness
+between himself and God. Here in Burgos he was absorbed into the divine
+purpose neither against his will nor his desire, since he was
+positively aware of the impotency of his individuality to determine
+anything in the presence of omnipotence. He told himself this sense of
+inclusion was a sign of the outpouring once more of the grace of God,
+but he wished with a half whimsical amusement that the sensation were
+rather less like that of being contemptuously swept by a broom into the
+main dust-heap. Yet as on the last morning of his stay in Burgos Michael
+came away from Mass, he came away curiously fortified by his observation
+of the moldy confessionals worn down by the knees of so many penitents.
+That much power of impression at least had the individual on this
+cathedral.
+
+When Michael lay awake in the train going northward he remembered very
+vividly the sense of subordination which in retrospect suddenly seemed
+to him to reveal the essential majesty of Spain. The train stopped at
+some French station. Their carriage was already full enough, but a
+bilious and fussy Frenchman insisted there was still room, and on top of
+him broke in a loud-voiced and assertive Englishman with a meek wife. It
+was intolerable. Michael, Wedderburn, and Maurice displayed their most
+polite obstructiveness, but in the end each of them found himself
+upright, stiff-backed and exasperated. Michael thought regretfully of
+Spain, and remembered those peasants who shared their crusts, those
+peasants with rank skins of wine and flopping turkeys, those peasants
+who wrought so inimitably their cigarettes and would sit on the floor of
+the carriage rather than disarrange the comfort of the three English
+travelers. Michael went off into an uneasy sleep trying to arrange
+synthetically his deductions, trying to put Don Quixote and Burgos
+Cathedral and the grace of God and subordination and feudalism and
+himself into a working theory of life. And just when the theory really
+seemed to be shaping itself, he was awakened by the Englishman prodding
+his wife.
+
+"What is it, dear?" she murmured.
+
+"Did you pack those collars that were in the other chest of drawers?"
+
+"I think so, dear."
+
+"I wish you'd know something for a change," the husband grumbled.
+
+The Frenchman ground his teeth in swollen sleep, exhaling himself upon
+the stale air of the compartment. Maurice was turning over the pages of
+a comic paper. Wedderburn snored. It was difficult to achieve
+subordination of one's personality in the presence of other
+personalities so insistently irritating.
+
+Stella had not come back from Germany when Michael reached home, which
+was a disappointment as he had looked forward to planning with her a
+journey back to Spain as soon as possible. His mother during this
+vacation had lapsed from Mental Science into an association to prevent
+premature burial.
+
+"My dearest boy, you have no idea of the numbers of people buried alive
+every year," she said. "I have been talking to Dick Prescott about it. I
+cannot understand his indifference. I intend to devote all my time to
+it. We are going to organize a large bazaar next season. Banging their
+foreheads against the coffins! It's dreadful to think of. Do be careful,
+Michael. I have written a long letter to Stella explaining all the
+precautions she ought to take. Who knows what may happen in Germany?
+Such an impulsive nation. At least the Kaiser is. Don't laugh, my dear
+boy, it's so much more serious than you think. Would you like to come
+with me to Mrs. Carruthers' and hear some of the statistics? Gruesome,
+but most instructive. At three o'clock. You needn't wait for tea, if
+you're busy. The lecturer is an Eurasian. Where _is_ Eurasia, by the
+by?"
+
+Michael kissed his mother with affectionate amusement.
+
+"Will you wear the mantilla I brought you from Spain? Look, it's as
+light as burnt tissue paper."
+
+"Dearest Michael," she murmured reproachfully, "you ought not to laugh
+about sacred subjects.... I don't really see why we shouldn't have a
+car. We must have a consultation with Dick Prescott."
+
+After dinner that night Michael wrapped up some stained and faded
+vestments he had brought for Viner and went off to see him at Netting
+Hill. He told himself guiltily in the hansom that it was more than a
+year since he had been to see old Viner, but the priest was so heartily
+glad to welcome him and accepted so enthusiastically his propitiatory
+gifts, that he felt as much at ease as ever in the smoke-hung room.
+
+"Well, how's Oxford? I was coming up last term, but I couldn't get away.
+Have you been to see Sandifer yet? Or Pallant at Cowley, or Canon
+Harrowell?"
+
+Michael said he had not yet taken advantage of Viner's letters of
+introduction to these dignitaries. He had indeed heard Pallant preach at
+the church of the Cowley Fathers, but he had thought him too much
+inclined to sacrifice on the altar of empirical science.
+
+"I hate compromise," said Michael.
+
+"I don't think Pallant compromises, but I think he does get hold of men
+by offering them Catholic doctrine in terms of the present."
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"This visit to Spain seems to have made you very bigoted," Viner
+observed, smiling.
+
+"I haven't made up my mind one way or the other about Christianity,"
+Michael said. "But when I do I won't try to include everybody, to say to
+every talkative young Pragmatist with Schiller's last book in his
+pocket, 'come inside, you're really one of us.' I shan't invite every
+callow biologist to hear Mass just because a Cowley Dad sees nothing in
+the last article on spontaneous generation that need dismay the
+faithful. I'm getting rather fed up with toleration, really; the only
+people with any fanaticism now are the rationalists. It's quite
+exhilarating sometimes to see the fire of disbelief glowing in the eyes
+of a passionate agnostic."
+
+"Our Lord Himself was very tolerant," said Viner.
+
+"Yes, tolerant to the weaknesses of the flesh, tolerant to the woman
+taken in adultery, tolerant to the people without wine at Cana, but he
+hadn't much use for people who didn't believe just as He believed."
+
+"Isn't it rather risky to slam the door in the face of the modern man?"
+
+"But, Mr. Viner," Michael protested, "you can't betray the myriads of
+the past because the individual of to-day finds his faith too weak to
+sustain him in their company, because the modern man wants to re-edit
+spiritual truths just as he has been able to re-edit a few physical facts
+that apparently stand the test of practical experiment. While men have
+been rolling along intoxicated by the theory of physical evolution, they
+may have retrograded spiritually."
+
+"Of course, of course," the priest agreed. "By the way, your faith seems
+to be resisting the batterings of external progress very stoutly. I'm
+glad, old chap."
+
+"I'm not sure that I have much faith, but I certainly haven't given up
+hope," Michael said gravely. "I think, you know, that hope, which is
+after all a theological virtue, has never had justice at the hands of
+the theologians. Oh, lord, I wish earnest young believers weren't so
+smug and timid. Or else I wish that I didn't feel the necessity of
+coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the
+Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of
+fanciful private beliefs. But I want to force everything within the
+convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I
+hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the
+possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The
+Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire
+its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue.
+If only earnest young believers wouldn't treat Almighty God with the
+same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite
+mistress."
+
+"Michael, Michael!" cried Viner, "where are you taking me with your
+coordinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young
+believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against
+me? Remember, I've been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn
+mental somersaults. I thought you implied _you_ were a believer."
+
+"Oh, no, I'm watching and hoping. And just now I'm afraid the anchor is
+dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn't she? I'm not asking, you
+know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The psychologists
+have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But I'm hoping with
+all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away except faith.
+Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical moods ... I'm
+groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination. That's
+something, you know. But I haven't found my own place in the scheme."
+
+"You see you're very modern, after all," said Viner, "with your
+coordinations and subordinations."
+
+"But I don't want to assert myself," Michael explained. "I want to
+surrender myself, and I'm not going to surrender anything until I am
+sure by faith that I'm not merely surrendering the wastage of myself."
+
+Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic sameness of the
+mission-priest's existence. He had known so well before he went that,
+because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair,
+smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be
+either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated
+iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to year,
+from month to month, never changed in general character, but always gave
+the same impression of shrill cockney, of boisterous familiarity, of
+self-satisfied election. To-morrow morning he would say Mass to the same
+sparse congregation of sacristan and sisters-of-mercy and devout old
+maids. The same red-wristed server would stump about his liturgical
+business in Viner's wake, and the same coffee pot put in the same place
+on the same table by the same landlady would await his return. There was
+a dreariness about the ministrations of this Notting Hill Mission which
+had been absent from the atmosphere of Burgos Cathedral. No doubt
+superficially even at Burgos there was a sameness, but it was a glorious
+sameness, a sameness that approximated to eternity. Long ago had the
+priests learned subordination. They had been absorbed into the
+omnipotence of the church against which the gates of hell could not
+prevail. Viner remained, however much as he might have surrendered of
+himself to his mission work, essentially an isolated, a pathetic
+individual.
+
+As usual, Michael met Alan at Paddington, and he was concerned to see
+that Alan looked rather pale and worried.
+
+"What problems have you been solving this vac?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, I've been swatting like a pig for Mods," said Alan hopelessly. "You
+are a lucky lazy devil."
+
+Even during the short journey to Oxford Alan furtively fingered his
+text-books, while he talked to Michael about a depressing January in
+London.
+
+"Never mind. Perhaps you'll get your Blue next term," said Michael. "And
+if you aren't determined to play cricket all the Long, we'll go away and
+have a really sporting vac somewhere."
+
+"If I'm plowed," said Alan gloomily, "I've settled to become a chartered
+accountant."
+
+Michael enjoyed his second Lent term. With an easy conscience he
+relegated Rugby football into the limbo of the past. He decided such
+violent exercise was no longer necessary, and he was getting to know so
+many people at other colleges that the cultivation of new personalities
+occupied all his leisure. After Maurice and Wedderburn came back from
+Spain, they devoted much of their time to painting, and The Oxford
+Looking-Glass became a very expensive business on account of the
+reproduction of their drawings. Moreover, the circulation decreased in
+ratio with the increase of these drawings, and the five promoters who
+did not wish to practice art in the pages of their magazine convoked
+several meetings of protest. Finally Maurice was allowed to remain
+editor only on condition that he abstained from publishing any more
+drawings.
+
+Nigel Stewart's meeting of the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis together with the
+visit to Spain induced Michael to turn his attention to that side of
+undergraduate life interested in religion. He went to see Canon
+Harrowell, and even accepted from him an invitation to a breakfast at
+which he met about half a dozen Klebe men who talked about bishops.
+Afterward Canon Harrowell seemed anxious to have a quiet talk with him
+in the library, but Michael made an excuse, not feeling inclined for
+self-revelation so quickly on top of six Klebe men and the eggs and
+bacon. He went to see Father Pallant at Cowley, but Father Pallant
+appeared so disappointed that he had brought him no scientific problems
+to reconcile with Catholic dogma, and was moreover so contemptuous of
+Dom Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B. and Clere Abbey that Michael never went to
+see him again. He preferred old Sandifer, who with all the worldly
+benefits of good wine, good food, and pleasant company, offered in
+addition his own courtly Caroline presence that added to wit and
+learning and trenchant theology made Michael regret he had not called
+upon him sooner.
+
+Nigel Stewart took Michael to a meeting of De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, at
+which he met not only the six Keble men who had talked about bishops at
+Canon Harrowell's breakfast, but about twenty more members of the same
+college, all equally fervid and in his opinion equally objectionable.
+Michael also went with Nigel Stewart to Mass at St. Barnabas', where he
+saw the same Keble men all singing conspicuously and all conveying the
+impression that every Sunday they occupied the same place. By the end of
+the term Michael's aroused interest in religion at Oxford died out. He
+disliked the sensation of belonging to a particular school of thought
+within a university. The ecclesiastical people were like the ampelopsis
+at Trinity: they were highly colored, but so inappropriate to Oxford,
+that they seemed almost vulgar. It was ridiculous they should have to
+worship in Oxford at a very ugly modern church in the middle of very
+ugly modern slums, as ridiculous as it was to call in the aid of
+American creepers to cover up the sins of modern architects.
+
+Yet Michael was at a loss to explain to himself why the ecclesiastical
+people were so obviously out of place in Oxford. After all, they were
+the heirs of a force which had persisted there for many years almost in
+its present aspect: they were the heirs after a fashion of the force
+that kept the Royal Standard flying against the Parliament. But they had
+not inherited the spirit of mediaeval Oxford. They were too
+self-conscious, too congregational. As individuals, perhaps they were in
+tone with Oxford, but, eating bacon and eggs and talking about bishops,
+they belonged evidently to Keble, and Michael could not help feeling
+that Keble like Mansfield and Ruskin Hall was in Oxford, but not in the
+least of Oxford. The spirit of mediaeval Oxford was more typically
+preserved in the ordinary life of the ordinary graduate; and yet it was
+a mistake to think of the spirit of Oxford at any date. That spirit was
+dateless and indefinable, and each new manifestation which Michael was
+inclined to seize upon, even a manifestation so satisfying as Venner's,
+became with the very moment that he was aware of it as impossible to
+determine as a dream which leaves nothing behind but the almost violent
+knowledge that it was and exasperatingly still is.
+
+The revived interest lasted a very short time in its communal aspect,
+and Michael retreated into his mediaeval history, still solicitous of
+Catholicism in so far as to support the papacy against the Empire in the
+balance of his judgment, but no longer mingling with the Anglican
+adherents of the theory, nor even indeed committing himself openly to
+Christianity as a general creed. Indeed, his whole attitude to religion
+was the result of a reactionary bias rather than of any impulse toward
+constructive progression. He would have liked to urge himself forward
+confidently to proclaim his belief in Christianity, but he could acquire
+nothing more positive than a gentle skepticism of the value of every
+other form of thought, a gentleness that only became scornfully
+intolerant when provoked by ignorance or pretentious statement.
+
+Meanwhile, The Oxford Looking-Glass, though inclining officially to
+neither political party, was reflecting a widespread interest in social
+reform. Michael woke up to this phenomenon as he read through the sixth
+number on a withering March day toward the end of term. Knowing Maurice
+to be a chameleon who unconsciously acquired the hue of his
+surroundings, Michael was sure that The Oxford Looking-Glass by this
+earnest tone indicated the probable tendency of undergraduate energy in
+the hear future. Yet himself, as he surveyed his acquaintances, could
+not perceive in their attitude any hint of change. In St. Mary's the
+debating clubs were still debating the existence of ghosts: the essay
+clubs were still listening to papers that took them along the by-ways of
+archaeology or sport. Throughout the university the old habit of mind
+persisted apparently. The New College manner that London journalists
+miscalled the Oxford manner still prevailed in the discussion of
+intellectual subjects. In Balliol when any remark trembled on the edge
+of a generalization, somebody in a corner would protest, "Oh, shut up,
+fish-face!" and the conversation at once veered sharply back to golf or
+scandal, while the intellectual kitten who had been playing with his
+mental tail would be suddenly conscious of himself or his dignity and
+sit still. In Exeter the members of the Literary Society were still
+called the Bloody Lits. Nothing anywhere seemed as yet to hint that the
+traditional flippancy of Oxford which was merely an extension of the
+public-school spirit was in danger of dying out. Oxford was still the
+apotheosis of the amateur. It was still surprising when the Head of a
+House or a don or an undergraduate achieved anything in a manner that
+did not savor of happy chance. It was still natural to regard Cambridge
+as a provincial university, and to take pleasure in shocking the earnest
+young Cambridge man with the metropolitan humors and airy self-assurance
+of Oxford.
+
+Yet The Oxford Looking-Glass reflected another spirit which Michael
+could not account for and the presence of which he vaguely resented.
+
+"The O.L.G. is getting very priggish and serious and rather dull," he
+complained to Maurice.
+
+"Not half so dull as it would be if I depended entirely on casual
+contributions," replied the editor. "I don't seem to get anything but
+earnestness."
+
+"Oxford is becoming the home of living causes," sighed Michael. "That's
+a depressing thought. Do you really think these Rhodes Scholars from
+America and Australia and Germany are going to affect us?"
+
+"I don't know," Maurice said. "But everybody seems keen to speculate on
+the result."
+
+"Why don't you take up a strong line of patronage? Why don't you
+threaten these pug-nosed invaders with the thunders of the past?"
+Michael demanded fiercely.
+
+"Would it be popular?" asked Maurice. "Personally of course I don't care
+one way or the other, but I don't want to let the O.L.G. in for a lot of
+criticism."
+
+"You really ought to be a wonderful editor," said Michael. "You're so
+essentially the servant of the public."
+
+"Well, with all your grumbles,", said Maurice, "ours is the only serious
+paper that has had any sort of a run of late years."
+
+"But it lacks individuality," Michael complained. "It's so damned
+inclusive. It's like The Daily Telegraph. It's voluminous and
+undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything,
+from a man who's going to be hanged for murder to a new record at
+cricket. Why can't you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather
+delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?"
+
+"The Daily Mail," Maurice scoffed. "That rag!"
+
+"A man once said to me," Michael meditatively continued, "that whenever
+he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily
+Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how
+terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his
+Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all," he
+added cheerfully, "nobody does read the O.L.G. The circulation depends
+on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations by
+the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor. Is
+it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found
+in-that great terra incognita--Queen's College?"
+
+But Maurice had left him, and Michael strolled down to the lodge to see
+if there were any letters. Shadbolt handed him an invitation to dinner
+from the Warden. As he opened it, Lonsdale came up with a torn replica
+of his own.
+
+"I say, Michael, this is a rum sort of binge for the Wagger to give. I
+spotted all the notes laid out in a row by old Pumpkin-head's butler.
+You. Me. Tommy Grainger. Fitzroy. That ass Appleby. That worm Carben.
+And Smithers. There may have been some others too. I hope I don't get
+planted next the Pumpkinette."
+
+"Miss Wagger may not be there," said Michael hopefully. "But if she is,
+you're bound to be next her."
+
+"I say, Shadbolt," Lonsdale demanded, "is this going to be a big squash
+at the Wagger's?"
+
+"The Warden has given me no instruction, sir, about carriages. And so I
+think we may take it for granted as it will be mostly confined to
+members of the college, sir. His servant tells me as the Dean is going
+and the Senior Tutor."
+
+"And there won't be any does?"
+
+"Any what, sir?"
+
+"Any ladies?"
+
+"I expect as Miss Crackanthorpe will be present. She very rarely
+absconds from such proceedings," said Shadbolt, drawing every word with
+the sound of popping corks from the depths of his pompousness.
+
+Michael and Lonsdale found out that to the list of guests they had
+established must be added the names of Maurice, Wedderburn and two
+freshmen who were already favorably reported through the college as good
+sportsmen.
+
+Two evenings later, at seven o'clock, Michael, Maurice, Lonsdale,
+Wedderburn, and Grainger, bowed and starched, stood in Venner's,
+drinking peach bitters sharpened by the addition of gin.
+
+"The men have gone in to hall," said Venner. "You ought to start round
+to the Warden's lodgings at ten past seven. Now don't be late. I expect
+you'll have a capital dinner."
+
+"Champagne, Venner?" asked Lonsdale.
+
+"Oh, bound to be! Bound to be," said Venner. "The Warden knows how to
+give a dinner. There's no doubt of that."
+
+"Caviare, Venner?" asked Maurice.
+
+"I wouldn't say for certain. But if you get an opportunity to drink any
+of that old hock, be sure you don't forget. It's a lovely wine. I wish
+we had a few dozen in the J.C.R. Now don't go and get tipsy like some of
+our fellows did once at a dinner given by the Warden."
+
+"Did they, Venner?" asked everybody, greatly interested.
+
+"It was just after the Transvaal war broke out. Only three or four years
+ago. There was a man called Castleton, a cousin of our Castleton, but a
+very different sort of man, such a rowdy fellow. He came out from the
+Warden's most dreadfully tipsy, and the men were taking him back to his
+rooms, when he saw little Barnaby, a Science don, going across New quad.
+He broke away from his friends and shouted out, 'there's a blasted
+Boer,' and before they could stop him, he'd knocked poor little Barnaby,
+a most nervous fellow, down in the wet grass and nearly throttled him.
+It was hushed up, but Castleton was never asked again you may be sure,
+and then soon after he volunteered for the front and died of enteric. So
+you see what comes of getting tipsy. Now you'd better start."
+
+Arm in arm the five of them strolled through Cloisters until they came
+to the gothic door of the Warden's Lodgings. Up the Warden's majestic
+staircase they followed the butler into the Warden's gothic drawing-room
+where they shook hands with the great moon-faced Warden himself, and
+with Miss Crackanthorpe, who was very much like her brother, and nearly
+as round on a much smaller scale. They nodded to the Dean, mentally
+calculating how many roll-calls they were behind, for the Dean
+notwithstanding the geniality of his greeting had one gray eye that
+seemed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded to Mr.
+Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed nervously in
+response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed them. The two
+freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful acknowledgments of
+their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a gesture of such bland
+welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with suppressed mortification and
+rage.
+
+"Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don't sit next the
+Pumpkinette?" whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to
+dinner.
+
+"Not a halfpenny," laughed Michael. "You will. And I shall get Ardle."
+
+Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of three
+dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was to make
+the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that
+Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned
+forerunners had nothing to fear for his own preeminence. Modern life
+found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his
+office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his
+personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its
+ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in
+the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole
+dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which made more
+than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and
+the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.
+
+Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary
+shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness of
+the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by a
+magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing some
+grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many dinners
+in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by
+flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely
+believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so
+ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter
+would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these
+transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the
+commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the
+power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden's great round
+face inclined slowly now toward Fitzroy with his fair complexion and
+military rigor of bearing, now toward Wedderburn whose evening dress
+acquired from the dignity of its owner the richness of black velvet.
+More directly in the light of the first lamp sat Maurice and Appleby
+opposite to one another, both imparting to the assemblage a charming
+worldliness, Maurice by his loose-fronted shirt, Appleby by the
+self-esteem of his restless blue eyes. The two freshmen on either side
+of the Dean wonderfully contrasted with his gauntness, and even more did
+the withered Ardle, who looked like a specimen of humanity dried as
+plants are dried between heavy books, contrast with the sprawling bulk
+of Grainger. On the other side, Michael watched with amusement Miss
+Crackanthorpe with shining apple-face bobbing nervously between Smithers
+pale and solid and domed like a great cheese, and Lonsdale cool and
+pink as an ice. In the background from the shadows at either end of the
+room the sage-green walls materialized in the lamplight: the three dead
+Wardens stared down at the table: and every fifteen minutes bells chimed
+in St. Mary's tower.
+
+"And how is The Oxford Looking-Glass progressing, Avery?" inquired the
+Warden, shining full upon the editor in a steady gaze. "No doubt it
+takes up a great deal of your valuable time?"
+
+The Dean winked his gray decanal eye at the champagne: the Senior Tutor
+coughed remotely like a grasshopper: Lonsdale prodded Michael with his
+elbow and murmured that "the Wagger had laid Mossy a stymie."
+
+Maurice admitted the responsibility of the paper for occupying a
+considerable amount of his _leisure_, but consoled himself for this by
+the fact that certainly, The Oxford Looking-Glass was progressing very
+well indeed.
+
+"We don't altogether know what attitude to take up over the Rhodes
+Bequest," said Maurice. Then boldly he demanded from the Warden what
+would be the effect of these imposed scholars from America and Australia
+and Africa.
+
+"The speculation is not without interest," declared the Warden. "What
+does Fitzroy think?"
+
+Fitzroy threw back his shoulders as if he were going to abuse the Togger
+and said he thought the athletic qualifications were a mistake. "After
+all, sir, we don't want the Tabs--I mean to say we don't want to beat
+Cambridge with the help of a lot of foreigners."
+
+"Foreigners, Fitzroy? Come, come, we can scarcely stigmatize Canadians
+as foreigners. What would become of the Imperial Idea?"
+
+"I think the Imperial Idea will take a lot of living up to," said
+Wedderburn, "when we come face to face with its practical expression.
+Personally I loathe Colonials except at the Earl's Court Exhibition."
+
+"Ah, Wedderburn," said the Warden, "you are luckily young enough to be
+able to be particular. I with increasing age begin to suffer from that
+terrible disease of age--toleration."
+
+"But the Warden is not so very old," whispered Miss Crackanthorpe to
+Lonsdale and Michael.
+
+"Oh, rather not," Lonsdale murmured encouragingly.
+
+"I think they'll wake up Oxford," announced Smithers; then, as everyone
+turned to hear what more he would say, Smithers seemed inclined to melt
+into silence, but with a sudden jerk of defiance, he hardened himself
+and became volubly opinionative.
+
+"There's no doubt," he continued, "that these fellows will make the
+average undergrad look round him a bit." As Smithers curtailed
+undergraduate to the convention of a lady-novelist, a shudder ran round
+the dinner party. Almost the butler instead of putting ice into the
+champagne might have slipped it down the backs of the guests.
+
+"In fact, what ho, she bumps," whispered Lonsdale. "Likewise pip-ip, and
+tootle-oo."
+
+"Anyway, he won't be able to ignore them," said Smithers.
+
+"We hope not, indeed," the Warden gravely wished. "What does Lonsdale
+think? Lord Cleveden wrote to me to say how deeply interested he was by
+the whole scheme--a most appreciative letter, and your father has had a
+great experience of colonial conditions."
+
+"Has he?" said Lonsdale. "Oh, yes, I see what you mean. You mean when he
+was Governor. Oh, rather. But I never knew him in those days." Then
+under his breath he muttered to Michael: "Dive in, dive in, you rotter,
+I'm getting out of my depth."
+
+"I think Oxford will change the Rhodes Scholars much more profoundly
+than the Rhodes Scholars will change Oxford," said Michael. "At least
+they will if Oxford hasn't lost anything lately. Sometimes I'm worried
+by that, and then I'm not, for I do really feel that they must be
+changed. Civilization must have some power, or we should all revert."
+
+"And are we to regard these finished oversea products as barbarians?"
+asked the Warden.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Michael earnestly. "Just as much barbarians as any
+freshmen."
+
+Everybody looked at the two freshmen on either side of the Dean and
+laughed, while they laughed too and tried to appear pleasantly flattered
+by the epithet.
+
+"And what will Oxford give them?" asked the Dean dryly. He spoke with
+that contempt of generalizations of which all dons made a habit.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Michael. "But vaguely I would say that Oxford
+would cure them of being surprised by themselves or of showing surprise
+at anybody else. Marcus Aurelius said what I'm trying to say much better
+than I ever can. Also they will gain a sense of humor, or rather they
+will ripen whatever sense they already possess. And they'll have a sense
+of continuity, too, and perhaps--but of course this will depend very
+much on their dons--perhaps they'll take as much interest in the world
+as in Australia."
+
+"Why will that depend on their dons?" challenged Mr. Ambrose.
+
+"Oh, well, you know," explained Michael apologetically, "dons very often
+haven't much capacity for inquisitiveness. They get frightened very
+easily, don't they?"
+
+"Very true, very true," said the Warden. "But, my dear Fane, your
+optimism and your pessimism are both quixotic, immensely quixotic."
+
+Later on in the quad when the undergraduate members of the dinner party
+discussed the evening, Maurice rallied Michael on his conversation.
+
+"If you can talk your theories, why can't you write them?" he
+complained.
+
+"Because they'd be almost indecently diaphanous," said Michael.
+
+"Good old Fane!" said Grainger. "But, I say, you are an extraordinary
+chap, you know."
+
+"He did it for me," said Lonsdale. "Pumpkin-head would have burst, if
+I'd let out I didn't know what part of the jolly old world my governor
+used to run."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STELLA IN OXFORD
+
+
+Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful
+than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had
+managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in view
+a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a blue.
+Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and
+Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.
+
+Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors' match, in
+which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a
+reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at the
+guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the hall,
+men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as unconcernedly as
+if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.
+
+"Who is that man just sitting down?" Michael would ask.
+
+"I don't know," Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest the
+implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to be
+aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
+
+"Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in
+Peck?" asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
+
+"No, really?" answered Alan indifferently.
+
+After hall as they walked back to Meadows', Michael tried to point out
+to him that the St. Mary's method of dining in hall was superior to that
+of the House.
+
+"The dinner itself is better," Alan admitted. "But I hate your system of
+all getting up from table at the same time. It's like school."
+
+"But if a guest comes to St. Mary's he sits at his host's regular table.
+He's introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you'd had another
+guest to-night, you wouldn't even have introduced me to him. He and I
+would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of dummies."
+
+"Rot!" said Alan. "And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening?
+All the men at the guests' table were absolute ticks."
+
+"I've never met a House man who didn't think every other House man
+impossible outside the four people in his own set," retorted Michael.
+"And yet, I suppose, you'll say it's the best college?"
+
+"Of course," Alan agreed.
+
+Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day's reluctant death, while
+the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul's Awakening faintly
+kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.
+
+"Will you have a meringue?" Alan asked. "I expect there's one in the
+cupboard."
+
+"I'm sure there is," said Michael. "It's very unlikely that there is a
+single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all the
+same."
+
+They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the
+tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes
+and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before
+him in the smoke.
+
+"It's a pity," he said, "Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though
+of course I wasn't bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would
+have looked pretty well. Still four for forty-eight isn't so bad in an
+innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to
+another bowler who's no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail.
+I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two--first knock. Blob--second.
+Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in
+the first trial match." So Alan voiced his hopes.
+
+"Of course you will," said Michael. "And at Lord's. I think I shall ask
+my mother and sister up for Eights," he added.
+
+Alan looked rather disconcerted.
+
+"What's the matter?" Michael asked. "You won't have to worry about them.
+I'll explain you're busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you in a
+letter this week."
+
+During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne Walk,
+and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and musical
+people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper interest in his
+existence.
+
+"Give her my--er--love, when you write," said Alan very nonchalantly.
+"And I don't think I'd say anything about those four wickets for
+forty-eight. I don't fancy she's very keen on cricket. It might bore
+her."
+
+No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said
+about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three
+vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan
+announced as usual that "those men will be coming down soon for cocoa."
+
+"Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at
+ten?" asked Michael. "And why am I never allowed to meet them?"
+
+"They'd bore you rather," said Alan. "They're people who live on this
+staircase. I don't see them any other time."
+
+Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so
+to his friend's evident relief he got up to go.
+
+"You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and
+regularities," he grumbled.
+
+"Stay, if you like," said Alan, not very heartily. "But I warn you
+they're all awfully dull, and I've made a rule to go to bed at half-past
+ten this term."
+
+"So long," said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.
+
+A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his invitation
+for Eights Week:
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     May 5.
+
+     My dearest Michael,
+
+     I wish you'd asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help
+     at the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at
+     Westminster Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the
+     Condition of Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think
+     you'd be interested. It's all about handicrafts. Weren't you
+     reading a book by William Morris the other day? His name is
+     mentioned a great deal always. I've been meeting so many
+     interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask Mrs. Ross to
+     chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about poor Dick
+     Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could
+     understand how _much much_ happier she would be married to a nice
+     man, even though he may be a little older than herself. This
+     tearing all over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks
+     of going to Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly
+     impossible name beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks
+     of unlearning all she has learned and beginning all over again.
+     This is most absurd, and I've tried to explain to her. She should
+     have thought of this man beginning with L before. At her age to
+     start scales and exercises again does seem ridiculous. I really
+     dread Stella's coming of age. Who knows what she may not take it
+     into her head to do? I can't think where she gets this curious vein
+     of eccentricity. I'll write to Mrs. Ross if you like. Stella, of
+     course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that I will not
+     hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she suggests
+     it to you.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad
+rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at Oxford.
+He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would never
+have listened to a word. Stella's view of the visit came soon after her
+mother's.
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     May 8.
+
+     Dear M.,
+
+     What's all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it
+     necessary? At a shot I said to mother, "No, quite unnecessary." But
+     of course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won't. Isn't
+     Mrs. Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn't she rather
+     object to me smoking cigars?
+
+"Great scott!" interjaculated Michael.
+
+     I'm going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very
+     charming to your only sister,
+
+     Stella.
+
+     P.S.--Do crush mother over Prescott.
+
+Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely
+necessary for Stella's visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars
+he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come.
+Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own attitude
+toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating it to her.
+In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured his own
+behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay on the
+view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was as much
+shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year he had
+been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at Eastbourne.
+Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to open the door
+once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter his mind as the
+sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon present themselves. It
+would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came up and saw him playing
+for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was provided to relieve the
+tedium of too much rowing.
+
+So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged
+that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs.
+Ross.
+
+Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of
+assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having
+helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the
+whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every other
+occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who was
+threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart spoke
+mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account he
+could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the High.
+Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael went
+down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.
+
+"I think it was a very bad move bringing me," said Lonsdale, as they
+waited on the platform. "Your sister will probably think me an awful
+ass, and ..."
+
+But the train interrupted Lonsdale's self-depreciation, and he sustained
+himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael thought
+Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as now when
+tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in the
+Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved Michael
+instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might appear in
+a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a very
+peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more like a
+boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide open on
+the city's towers and spires, were more than usually gray and pellucid.
+
+"I say, I ordered a car to meet us," said Lonsdale. "I thought we should
+buzz along quicker."
+
+"What you really thought," said Michael, "was that you would have to
+drive my sister in a hansom."
+
+"Oh, no, I say, really," protested Lonsdale.
+
+"I'm much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me," Stella
+declared.
+
+"Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I'm an awful ass, Miss Fane," said
+Lonsdale encouragingly. "Hallo, here's the jolly old car."
+
+As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the
+county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably
+Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.
+
+"You'll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and
+that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she'll have a pretty good notion
+of the main points of interest in the neighborhood," said Michael.
+
+"He always rags me," explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round at
+the visitors. "I say, isn't Alan Merivale your nephew?" he asked Mrs.
+Ross. "He's playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some very
+hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after lunch and
+watch the game for a bit."
+
+Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met
+them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at
+least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale's
+rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a
+dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that
+Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in Lonsdale's
+rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately accorded.
+
+The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold
+chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going
+to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and
+speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of
+lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of mirthfulness
+as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.
+
+After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the
+Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and
+nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who
+was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully
+Alan's meeting with Stella, watched Alan's face fall when he saw her
+beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves.
+There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan to
+go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant century
+so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much there was in
+him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted to himself the improbability of
+Stella realizing anything at all about the importance of cricket.
+However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw Alan coming
+gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very first ball he
+had received.
+
+"Of course, you know, he isn't played for his batting," he hastened to
+explain to Stella.
+
+She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice
+to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside them,
+unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond though he
+was of Maurice.
+
+The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early
+tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell,
+they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to
+Mrs. Ross and Stella:
+
+"My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do
+that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We
+can't bear our digs any longer."
+
+"Why don't you give a party there on Monday night," suggested Wedderburn
+deeply.
+
+"Let me introduce you to Mrs'sss ... my sissss ... Mr. H'wood," mumbled
+Michael in explanation of Wedderburn's proposal.
+
+"What a charming idea," drawled Guy. "But isn't it rather a shame to ask
+Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren't."
+
+"Oh, no," said Stella. "I should rather like to play in Oxford."
+
+So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper
+river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward glance
+at the trend of the clouds, occurred Guy Hazlewood's party in Holywell,
+which might more truly have been called Wedderburn's party, since he at
+once assumed all responsibility for it.
+
+The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on
+account of the Balliol men invited.
+
+"Half Basutoland seems to be here," Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
+
+"Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial, what
+else can you expect?" replied Michael.
+
+Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention
+more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless
+mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to
+Wedderburn's suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to
+monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation with
+the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for to-morrow. But Michael
+fancied there was another reason.
+
+Stella played three times and was much applauded.
+
+"Very sporting effort, by Jove," said Lonsdale, and this was probably
+the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of
+really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each
+occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in
+such inadequate surroundings.
+
+Michael himself was less moved by Stella's playing than he had ever
+been. Nor was this coldness due to any anxiety for her success. He was
+sure enough of that in this uncritical audience.
+
+"Do you think Stella plays as well as she did?" he asked Mrs. Ross.
+
+"Perhaps this evening she may be a little excited," Mrs. Ross suggested.
+
+"Perhaps," said Michael doubtfully. "But what I mean is that, if she
+isn't going to advance quite definitely, there really isn't any longer
+an excuse for her to arrogate to herself a special code of behavior."
+
+"Stella says a great deal more than she does," Mrs. Ross reassured him.
+"You'd be surprised, as indeed I was surprised, to find how simple and
+childlike she really is. I think an audience is never good for her."
+
+"But, after all, her life is going to be one audience after another in
+quick succession," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Gradually an audience will cease to rouse her into any violence of
+thought or accentuation of superficial action--oh, Michael," Mrs. Ross
+exclaimed, breaking off, "what dreadfully long words you're tempting me
+to use, and why do you make me talk about Stella? I'd really rather talk
+about you."
+
+"Stella is becoming a problem to me," said Michael.
+
+"And you yourself are no longer a problem to yourself?" Mrs. Ross
+inquired.
+
+"Not in the sense I was, when we last talked together."
+
+Michael was a little embarrassed by recalling that conversation. It
+seemed to link him too closely for his pleasure to the behavior which
+had led up to it, to be a part of himself at the time, farouche and
+uncontrolled.
+
+"And all worries have passed away?" persisted Mrs. Ross.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Michael quickly. "For one thing," he added as if he
+thought he had been too abrupt, "I'm too comfortably off to worry much
+about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face.
+Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of
+myself as sixteen and seventeen." Michael was building brick by brick a
+bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. "I seem to
+see myself," he persevered, "with very untidy hair, with very loose
+joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I
+blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with
+Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say
+to the second-year table in hall." Michael paused for a moment, half
+hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self,
+but as she said nothing, he continued: "When I came up to Oxford I found
+that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St.
+James', but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what
+most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I
+remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, 'By gad,
+Valerie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,' and my mother disagreeing,
+'No, no, I'm sure you were right when you said St. James'.' That's so
+like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She
+was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James' and
+Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any
+alteration. I'm telling you all this because, you know, you provided as
+it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I
+ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from
+Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I'm perfectly sure I
+could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or
+seventeen, if I'd not been at a London day-school."
+
+"But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?" asked
+Mrs. Ross. "Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as
+normality is concerned, through St. James'."
+
+"Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman.
+Possibly he benefited by St. James'. Possibly at Eton, and with a
+prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into
+one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. Now
+I was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and
+unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn't always possessed a sort of
+curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience
+of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality.
+No astounding gift of genius, I mean."
+
+"But, Michael," interrupted Mrs. Ross, "I don't fancy the greatest
+geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or
+seventeen."
+
+"No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of
+greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of
+Keats' letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all
+the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and
+never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my
+criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment I
+try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done."
+
+"But still, I don't see why a day-school should have militated against
+the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty."
+
+"It did in this way," said Michael. "It gave me too much with which to
+sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I was
+unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I'm sure of that,
+because since I've been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism so very
+much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say, there's
+no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it's partly due to being
+older."
+
+"Really, Michael," Mrs. Ross protested, "if you talk like this I shall
+begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up self-confidence
+seems to me not quite normal either."
+
+"Ah, that's only because I'm criticizing my earlier self. I really am
+now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want
+passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of
+social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously
+different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right
+mean between the two extremes. I'm enjoying Oxford enormously. I can't
+tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate
+it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a
+struggle to find that wide normal road on which I'm strolling along now.
+I'm so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England, and that
+the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to apply to the
+world the same standards we tacitly respect--we undergraduates. I
+believe every problem of life can be solved by the transcendency of the
+spirit which has transcended us up here. You remember I used to say you
+were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those qualities in you which made me
+think of that resemblance I find in Oxford. Don't ask me to say what
+they are, because I couldn't explain."
+
+"I think you have a great capacity for idealization," said Mrs. Ross
+gravely. "I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I wonder
+what profession you'll choose."
+
+"I don't suppose I shall choose a profession at all," said Michael.
+"There's no financial reason--at any rate--why I should."
+
+"Well, you won't have to decide against a profession just yet," said
+Mrs. Ross. "And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you think
+Stella's playing has deteriorated--if you really think it has."
+
+"Oh, I didn't say it had," Michael contradicted in some dismay. "I
+merely said that to-night it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she
+was anxious. Perhaps she felt among all these undergraduates, as I felt
+in my first week. Perhaps she's thinking what schoolboys they all are,
+and how infinitely youthful they appear beside those wild and
+worldly-wise Bohemians to whose company she has been accustomed for so
+long. I long to tell her that these undergraduates are really so much
+wiser, even if literature means Mr. Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour, and
+art The Soul's Awakening, and religion putting on a bowler to go and
+have a hot breakfast at the O.U.D.S. after chapel, and politics the
+fag-ends of paternal or rather ancestral opinion, and life a hot bath
+and changing after a fox-hunt or a grouse-drive."
+
+Farther conversation was stopped by Wedderburn driving everybody down to
+supper with pastoral exhortations in his deepest bass. Michael, after
+his talk with Mrs. Ross, was relieved to find himself next to Lonsdale
+and sheltered by a quivering rampart of jellies from more exacting
+company.
+
+"These Basutos aren't so bad when you talk to them," said Lonsdale.
+"Comeragh was at m'tutor's. I wonder if he still collects bugs. I rather
+like that man Hazlewood. I thought him a bit sidy at first, but he's
+rather keen on fishing. I don't think much of the girl that Trinity
+man--what's his name--Stewart has roped in. She looks like something
+left over from a needlework stall. I say, your sister jolly well knows
+how to punch a piano. Topping, what? Mossy's been very much on the spot
+to-night. He and Wedders are behaving like a couple of theatrical
+managers. Why didn't Alan Merivale turn up? I was talking to some of the
+cricket push at the Club, and it doesn't look a hundred quid to a tanner
+on his Blue. Bad luck. He's a very good egg."
+
+Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale's babble. He was watching the
+passage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven,
+Stella had let the cigars go by.
+
+The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of
+gables they stood laughing and talking for a moment. Guy Hazlewood,
+Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting
+guests.
+
+"It's been awfully ripping," these murmured to their hosts. The hosts
+beamed down.
+
+"We've been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to
+Miss Fane."
+
+"You ought all to get Firsts now," said Wedderburn.
+
+Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and
+Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of
+the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright spaces,
+into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled along
+the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died out to
+whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and midnight began
+to clang.
+
+"We must hurry," said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward
+St. Mary's, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.
+
+"Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?" Maurice suggested to Michael.
+
+"I'm rather tired," objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was going
+to talk at great length about Stella.
+
+He was too jealous of Alan's absence that evening to want to hear
+Maurice's facile enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SYMPATHY
+
+
+Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael
+was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to
+assert her independence of personality would try to smash the glass of
+fashion and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions
+during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were
+when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed by
+that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of
+Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate
+foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music
+would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow
+belied.
+
+Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was in
+a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.
+
+"These hard wickets have finished me off," he sighed. "I shall take up
+golf, I think."
+
+The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered
+with gray fluff under the bed.
+
+"Oh, no, don't play golf," protested Michael, "you've got two more years
+to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a rotten game
+and has ruined Varsity cricket."
+
+"But one can be alone at golf," said Alan.
+
+"Alone?" repeated Michael. "Why on earth should you want to play an
+outdoor game alone?"
+
+"Because I get depressed sometimes," Alan explained. "What good am I?"
+
+Michael began to laugh.
+
+"It's nothing to laugh at," said Alan sadly. "I've been thinking of my
+future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my
+Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan't even get into the
+Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk. Playing
+cricket for a suburban club on Saturday afternoons. That's all I see
+before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?"
+
+"I don't know that she is going," said Michael. "She always talks a
+great deal about things which don't always come off."
+
+"I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much," Alan
+said. "But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about music. I
+don't think I care for him."
+
+"Some people don't," Michael admitted. "I think women always like him,
+though."
+
+"Yes, I should think they did," Alan agreed bitterly. "Sorry I'm so
+depressing. Have a meringue or something."
+
+"Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?" Michael challenged.
+
+"What made you think I was?" countered Alan, looking alarmed.
+
+"It's pretty obvious," Michael said. "And curiously enough I can quite
+understand it. Generally, of course, a brother finds it difficult to
+understand what other people can see in his sister, but I'm never
+surprised when they fall in love with Stella."
+
+"A good many have?" asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a
+pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his
+bowling.
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Oh, I've realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,"
+Alan sighed. "I'm evidently going to be a failure."
+
+"Would you care for some advice?" inquired Michael very tentatively.
+
+"What sort of advice?" Alan asked.
+
+Michael took this for assent, and plunged in.
+
+"Let her alone," he adjured his friend. "Let her absolutely alone. She's
+very young, you know, and you're not very old. Let her alone for at
+least a year. I suggest two years. Don't see much of her, and don't let
+her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really,
+Alan, it's not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love
+with her. I don't mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned
+down."
+
+"Would he be?" demanded Alan gloomily.
+
+"Of course, of course ... it seems funny to be talking to you about love
+... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know
+you'll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I'm frightfully keen you
+should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don't let her interfere with
+your cricket. Don't take up golf on account of her."
+
+Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he
+picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it
+before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy
+airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.
+
+"It's funny," said Michael, "that I should have an opportunity now of
+talking to you about love and cricket."
+
+"Funny?" Alan repeated.
+
+"Don't you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished
+you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for
+cricket?"
+
+"I believe I do remember vaguely," said Alan.
+
+Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to
+let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had
+conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to
+elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the
+retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long
+while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique,
+the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had
+foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her
+departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather
+strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even
+than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects
+of next term.
+
+Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed
+sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college.
+Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs. Alan
+offered his fourth year to companionship with Michael, but nothing would
+induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so
+particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with
+whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were
+many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so
+anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an
+arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or
+second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice
+had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not
+wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later
+Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage
+them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place,
+and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.
+
+It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the
+indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until Michael
+seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had invited him
+to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as well, but
+they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially sharing, that
+is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in the same house
+and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to be thought of.
+Maurice was a very good fellow but--Maurice was--but--and Michael in
+asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company, asked
+himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging with
+Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could, and
+for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who
+represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused
+himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by
+applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time
+went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael's
+choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a
+desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice's sensitiveness that it could
+not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him? Soon
+it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not want to
+dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his feelings, and
+Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had receded into the
+background of casual encountership, he would take pleasure in his
+company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as if Maurice were
+losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael wondered why he had
+never before noticed how infallibly he ran after each new and petty
+phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy. It was intolerable to
+think of spending a year's close association with all those paint-boxes
+and all that modeling wax and all those undestroyed proof-sheets of The
+Oxford Looking-Glass. Finally, he had never noticed before how many
+cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what skill he concealed in every sort
+of receptacle the stained and twisted stumps that were left over. That
+habit would be disastrous to their friendship, and Michael knew that
+each fresh cigarette lighted by him would consume a trace more of the
+friendship, until at last he would come to the state of observing him
+with a cold and mute resentment. He was in this attitude of mind toward
+his prospective companion, when Maurice came to see him. He seemed
+nervous, lighting and concealing even more cigarettes than usual.
+
+"About digs in Longwall," he began.
+
+"I won't live in Longwall," affirmed Michael.
+
+"Do you think you could find anybody else?"
+
+"Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?" asked Michael
+hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long
+as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
+
+Maurice seemed embarrassed.
+
+"No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me.
+The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had
+fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but
+of course I said I was digging with you, and there's no room for a
+third."
+
+"I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny," said Michael quickly.
+
+Maurice looked much relieved.
+
+"As long as you don't feel I've treated you badly," he began.
+
+"That's all right," said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice's
+obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon
+as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his
+fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking
+cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice's invitation to stay
+at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the penitence
+which had prompted it.
+
+Stella's unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free
+to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least
+the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little
+contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and
+mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for
+keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son
+and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even
+her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when
+his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the
+tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery's adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming
+oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the
+facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the
+facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited
+the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the
+tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram.
+Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of
+light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully pressed
+trousers.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Avery," he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative
+solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to
+France. "I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been
+called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the
+Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair
+distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery."
+
+"Thank Heaven that's done!" he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of
+Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South
+Wales.
+
+The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London between
+his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at Cressingham
+Hall--a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad Midlands. It was
+mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb the pastoral calm.
+Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden's remonstrances to obtain a
+grasp of rural administration. So he and his sister Sylvia with Michael
+drove every day in a high dogcart to various outlying farms of the
+estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very popular, and after all as
+he confided to Michael that was the main thing.
+
+"And how's his lordship, sir?" the tenant would inquire.
+
+"Oh, very fit," Lonsdale would reply. "I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got
+any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a
+good deal about it."
+
+In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of
+agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the
+sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife's
+raspberries and gooseberries.
+
+"I envy your life," said Michael.
+
+"A bit on the slow side, don't you think?"
+
+"Plenty of time for thinking."
+
+"Ah," said Lonsdale. "But then I've got no brains. I really haven't, you
+know. The poor old governor's quite worried about it."
+
+However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest draw
+up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port, he
+delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and notorieties,
+Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry him very much,
+not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of brains in his
+only son.
+
+"Dear Lady Cleveden," he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty
+house in Cheyne Walk. "London is quite impossible after Cressingham."
+
+And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the
+Embankment, the oily river and a lack-luster moon.
+
+Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott,
+inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot London
+weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more solicitude
+than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace for some
+time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while Prescott lent
+him a grave attention. At last Michael's conversation exhausted itself,
+and for a few minutes there was silence, while Prescott betrayed his
+nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his cigar. At last he burnt
+himself and throwing away the cigar leaped forthwith into the tide of
+emotion that was deepening rapidly around his solitary figure.
+
+"Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella
+told you. Of course, I realize it's quite absurd. Said so at once, and
+of course it's all over now. Phew! it's fearfully hot to-night. Always
+feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that's the
+same with most people."
+
+Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the
+moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment later
+the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott's confidence
+Michael felt himself committed to a participation in his existence that
+called for some response. But he could not with any sincerity express a
+regret for Stella's point of view.
+
+"Mother was very anxious she should accept you," said Michael, and
+immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an
+eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella's stilted
+declaration of her refusal.
+
+"Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of
+course I'm a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very
+ridiculous."
+
+"I don't think Stella is old enough to marry," said Michael.
+
+"But don't you think it's better for girls to marry when they're young?"
+asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes were very
+bright and his actions feverish. "I've noticed that tendencies recur in
+families. Time after time. I don't like this Viennese business, yet if
+Stella had married me I shouldn't have interfered with her," he added,
+with a wistfulness that was out of keeping with his severely
+conventional appearance. "Still, I should have always been in the
+background."
+
+"Yes, I expect that was what she felt," said Michael.
+
+He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had
+wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any
+longer, he rose and said he must go.
+
+As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go
+down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved August
+journals "Suicide of a Man About Town." At Cobble Place newspapers were
+read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on the day after that
+above a short paragraph the headline "Tragedy in the Albany" led him on
+to learn that actually Prescott was the man about town who had killed
+himself.
+
+Michael's first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked
+so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the
+posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined
+with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable
+coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and
+attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner's summing up of the
+evidence of depression and the perspiring jury's delivery of their
+verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of
+a man's life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the
+result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up the
+thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August
+journals he read now with a sharp interest "Cat Saves Household in
+Whitechapel Fire." This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative
+action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the journey
+down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family from an
+inquest's futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would have been
+awarded the commendatory platitudes of the coroner.
+
+Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the
+journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for
+evening. By this time the irony of the cat's fortuitous interference was
+blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to the
+fact of Prescott's death. He was no longer occupied by the strange
+sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous
+daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for
+once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott's life was surely
+a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated
+all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly
+fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a
+death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a
+hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would
+be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in London,
+or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to the very
+portals of the Albany.
+
+Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was
+beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had first
+obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having given away
+to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead man's
+confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting to think
+of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making this
+hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the public,
+so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the
+inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure
+from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals, the
+soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the
+profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of restraint
+whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in unrelaxing
+guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought about the
+business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an earlier mood of
+self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to whose almost
+contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately aspire. He had
+often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of thought and
+action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered into himself
+the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence. And now he
+must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a spiritual
+encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up pitiably
+into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the force of
+its squalid associations. The fresh dust of the Hampshire lanes became a
+gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his progress so that
+he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges were somber and
+monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected rags of a tramp.
+The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost their intimations
+of sane humanity, and turned to horrible abstractions of the dead life
+of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot. The comfortable
+assurance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling away to right and
+left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed along through the
+twilight. "My nerves are in a rotten state," he told himself, and he was
+very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the night below, while
+himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly dusk.
+
+In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael
+thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew's serene old age
+drove out the last memory of the coroner's court, and here was Mrs. Ross
+coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in Cobble
+Place was her small son sleeping.
+
+"You look tired and pale, Michael," said Mrs. Ross. "Why didn't you wire
+which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the chaise."
+
+"Poor fellow, of course he's tired!" said Mrs. Carthew. "A most
+disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good."
+
+The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this
+room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great
+rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in
+words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went
+the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played at
+backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of a
+parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the
+lamplight, met from time to time Michael's glances with a concern that
+never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He
+was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock,
+to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him
+company.
+
+"Unless you want to work?" she added.
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:
+
+"Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott's
+death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarrassed and came
+away."
+
+"Oh, my dear Michael, I think you're probably accusing yourself most
+unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your
+dinner?"
+
+"That's just it. I believe I did know."
+
+"You thought he was going to kill himself?"
+
+"No, I didn't think anything so definite as that, but I had an intuition
+to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he'd think it rather
+cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe I've got
+the gift of understanding people, and yet I'm afraid to use it. Shall I
+ever learn?"
+
+Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own
+futility. He went on to rail at himself.
+
+"The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness
+wrecks the first decent chance I've had to turn it to account."
+
+They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting
+that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him
+false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found
+it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the
+future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and
+straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was
+hinting.
+
+"My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything," she affirmed.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamations of your
+willingness to do anything that you're positive you can do better than
+anything else, I'm quite, quite sure you're still the rather perverse
+Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time
+when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in
+the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I
+think you're going to do--I almost said when you're grown up--but I mean
+when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up
+your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of
+saying, 'I knew it.'"
+
+"I suppose really I know what you think I shall do," said Michael
+slowly. "But you're wrong--at least, I think you're wrong. I lack the
+mainspring of the parson's life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of
+myself. How's he getting on?"
+
+"Oh, he's splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something
+more than I ever managed to give you."
+
+"Naturally," said Michael, smiling. "He's your son."
+
+"Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of...."
+Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. "No, I won't tell you yet."
+
+"You're full of unrevealed mysteries," said Michael.
+
+"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 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     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 re-entering 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 loving
+
+     Mother.
+
+     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 time ago," 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 it was 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. She was 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 it gave 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+2O2 HIGH
+
+
+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
+forces 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
+Durers 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
+aesthetic 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 aesthetic niche that 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 Durer
+woodcuts. These giants in their baggy blanket trousers, their
+brass-buttoned coats and Leander ties nearly as pink as their own
+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 talking of 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
+naive 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 club
+colors: 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-sufficiency of 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.
+
+"I _must_ ask 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 through many 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 probably Calvin'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 been avoided 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 with cognac; 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 felt his 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 of ball 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'll be 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 beguile this 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 is _done_ when 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 another year, 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 thing myself. 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 amiable ragging 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+PLASHERS MEAD
+
+
+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
+revealed in 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 walked on
+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 mediaeval 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 roads more 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 that
+would 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 wasted a 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 decide what I'm going to _try_ to 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.
+
+They drove together to the railway station five miles away. In the
+sleepy September heat the slow train puffed in. Hot people with bunches
+of dahlias were bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.
+Michael sighed.
+
+"Don't go," said Guy. "It's much too hot."
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"I must."
+
+Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases
+awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.
+
+"Some of my books," he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael
+watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the
+wine-dark dahlias of the platform.
+
+"What fun unpacking them," he thought, and leaned back regretfully to
+survey the placid country gliding past.
+
+Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect
+seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or
+rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great
+railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic
+strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children,
+leaning over scabrous walls to salute the passing train. Always, as one
+entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses
+whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible. To
+Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid
+sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through
+London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became
+unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as
+the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and
+emerged in that space of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but
+the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering
+legions of children, was still in Michael's ears when the hansom pulled
+up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.
+
+The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and
+informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than
+would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of
+time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been
+unaware of his sister's arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too
+intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he
+actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an
+affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned
+by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the
+social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train
+sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer conspicuous in his
+memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and the
+webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant dream. He
+was in fact back in town.
+
+Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he
+hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very
+moment the parlormaid told him of Stella's return he had feared such a
+return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask
+abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with
+just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by its
+demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably glad to
+see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side would
+have made him kiss her.
+
+"Hullo, I didn't expect to see you," was, however, all he said.
+
+"Nor did I you," was what she answered.
+
+Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey from
+Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true
+insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.
+
+Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before
+lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas
+and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more
+disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella back
+from Vienna?
+
+"Did you come this morning?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no. Last night. Why?" she demanded. "Do I look as crumpled as all
+that?"
+
+For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she
+had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was
+perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather wished
+she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his own
+explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment. Useless
+indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as the
+lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life where
+nothing really happens.
+
+After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she
+turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her
+again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than he
+had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray satin
+or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at him for
+not putting on a dinner jacket.
+
+"Don't look so horrified at the notion," she cried petulantly. "Can't
+you realize that after a year with long-haired students I want a
+change?"
+
+After dinner Michael asked her to come and play in the studio.
+
+"Play?" she echoed. "I'm never going to play again."
+
+"What perfect rot you are talking," said Michael, in a damnatory
+generalization which was intended to cover not merely all she had been
+saying, but even all she had been doing almost since she first announced
+her intention of going to Vienna.
+
+Stella burst into tears.
+
+"Come on, let's go to the studio," said Michael. He felt that Stella's
+tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that
+she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was
+therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly
+boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked to
+the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an outrage
+to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin, even
+though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to
+himself "Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante
+stark mad in white muslin."
+
+"Come along, come along," he begged her. "You must come to the studio."
+
+Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he
+himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when
+at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently
+whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had
+plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael
+looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an
+ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly
+than before.
+
+"Look here, I say, why don't you tell me what you're crying about? You
+can't go on crying forever, you know," Michael pointed out. "And when
+you've stopped crying, you'll feel such an ass if you haven't explained
+what it was all about."
+
+"I couldn't possibly tell anybody," said Stella, looking very fierce.
+Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that
+Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather unusually
+dramatic.
+
+"But I'm damned if I _will_ give up playing," she proclaimed; and,
+sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her
+weakness.
+
+It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her
+what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of
+self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella's
+calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and
+would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished,
+she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily
+Haden.
+
+"I don't know--really--they've left Trelawny Road," he said, feeling
+vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.
+
+"And you never think of her, I suppose?" demanded Stella.
+
+"Well, no, I don't very much."
+
+"Yet I can remember," said Stella, "when you were absolutely miserable
+because she had been flirting with somebody else."
+
+"Yes, I was very miserable," Michael admitted. "And you were rather
+contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more
+proud."
+
+"And don't you realize," Stella said, "that just because I did remember
+what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?"
+
+Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her
+confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had
+finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and
+masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half
+hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.
+
+Michael made up his mind that Stella's unhappiness was due to a
+love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or
+temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation against
+the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the fellow's
+head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could picture
+himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He went so
+far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale requesting their
+secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to dance before him.
+He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily. Time had softened the
+trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had been guilty. Time with
+night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal charm. He had been reading
+this week of the great imaginative loves of the Middle Ages, and of that
+supple and golden-haired girl he began to weave an abstraction of
+passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He slept upon the evocation of
+her beauty just as he was setting forth upon a delicate and intangible
+pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested to Stella they should revisit
+Carlington Road.
+
+"My god, to think we once lived here!" exclaimed Stella, as they stood
+outside Number 64. "To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of
+course I was much more away from it than you ever were."
+
+Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and
+habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was
+become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in
+possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.
+
+"Well, thank heaven, everything does change," she murmured. "And that
+ugly things become even more ugly."
+
+"Only for a time," objected Michael. "In twenty years if we visit
+Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it
+all is."
+
+"I wasn't thinking so much of Carlington Road," said Stella. "I was
+really thinking of people."
+
+"Even they become beautiful again after a time," argued Michael.
+
+"It would take a very long time for some," said Stella coldly.
+
+Michael had rather dreaded his mother's return, with Stella in this
+mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been
+unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if she
+and not herself had suffered lately.
+
+"I'm so glad you're back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you
+aren't going to Petersburg to-morrow, because the man at Vienna whose
+name begins with that extraordinary letter...."
+
+"Oh, mother," Stella laughed, "the letter was quite ordinary. It was
+only L."
+
+"But the name was dreadful, dear child. It always reminded one of furs.
+A most oppressive name. So that really you'll be in London all this
+winter?"
+
+"Yes, only I shan't play much," said Stella.
+
+"Mrs. Carruthers is so anxious to meet you properly," Mrs. Fane said.
+"And Mabel Carruthers is really very nice. Poor girl! I wish you could
+be friends with her. She's interested in nothing her mother does."
+
+Michael was really amazed when Stella, without a shrug, without even a
+wink at him, promised simply to let Mrs. Carruthers "meet her properly,"
+and actually betrayed as much interest in Mabel Carruthers as to inquire
+how old she was.
+
+Maurice arrived at Cheyne Walk, just before Michael went up for term, to
+say he had taken a most wonderful studio in Grosvenor Road. He was
+anxious that Michael should bring his sister to see it, but Stella would
+not go.
+
+"Thanks very much, my dear," she said to him, "but I've seen too much of
+the real thing. I'm in no mood just now for a sentimental imitation."
+
+"I think you ought to come," said Michael. "It would be fun to see
+Maurice living in Grosvenor Road with all the Muses. Castleton will have
+such a time tidying up after them when he joins him next year."
+
+But Stella would not go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+99 ST. GILES
+
+
+It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief
+figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way
+he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college
+itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars. Very
+soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he shared
+with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that this
+last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best, indeed
+perhaps of all the years of his life the best.
+
+College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had
+ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to feel
+the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two, revisiting
+Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from the daily
+round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which preserved
+its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable losses of each
+year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with what now seemed
+its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had never given him
+quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St. Giles could give.
+Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November dusks, when after a
+long walk through silent country Michael and Alan came back to the din
+of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded and greasy Cornmarket
+toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when they would find the
+tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered toast was eaten; tea
+was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was smoked to idle cracklings
+of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout landlady cleared away, and
+during the temporary disturbance Michael pulled back the blinds and
+watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting out St. John's and the
+alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the Martyrs' Memorial and
+even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery. The room was quiet
+again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and Alan, settled in deep
+chairs, read their History and Philosophy; outside in the November night
+footsteps went by; carts and wagons occasionally rattled; bells chimed;
+outside in the November murk present life was manifesting its
+continuity; here within, the battles and the glories, the thoughts, the
+theories and the speculations of the past for Michael and Alan moved
+across printed pages under the rich lamplight.
+
+Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99
+St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose
+decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael
+and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place
+during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a capacity
+for making apparently the most barren observations flower and fruit with
+intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit of the
+lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate revelation
+of her domestic past.
+
+After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o'clock, at which
+hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way
+Michael enjoyed the night most. The mediaeval chronicles were put back on
+their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or
+Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael
+wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down came
+Don Quixote or Adlington's Apuleius, or Florio's Montaigne, or Lucian's
+True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the fog stole
+into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at their measured
+intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city was there; at
+that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed than austere,
+for it was neither in time nor in space, but the abstraction of a city.
+Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go up to bed by
+candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open window the sound
+of two o'clock striking came very coldly, he could scarcely fancy
+himself in the present. The effort of intense reading, whether of bygone
+institutions or of past adventure, had left him in the condition of
+physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was aware of nothing
+but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish with the triumph
+of tremendous concentration, to undress in this stinging acerbity of
+night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in this world of dreaming
+spires.
+
+99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had
+anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide
+thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of movement,
+scarcely ever aroused a petty inquisitiveness into the actions of the
+passers-by. The traffic of the thoroughfare like the ships of the sea
+went by merely apprehended, but not observed. The big bay-window hung
+over the street like the stern-cabin of a frigate, and as Michael sat
+there he had the impression of being cut off from communication, the
+sense of perpetually leaving life astern. The door of 99 St. Giles did
+not open directly on the street, but was reached by a tortuous passage
+that ran the whole depth of the house. This entrance helped very much
+the illusion of separation from the ebb and flow of ordinary existence,
+and was so suggestive of a refuge that involuntarily Michael always
+hurried through it that the sooner he might set his foot on the steep
+and twisted staircase inside the house. There was always an excitement
+in reaching this staircase again, an impulse to run swiftly up, as if
+this return to the sitting-room was veritably an escape from the world.
+Here the books sprawled everywhere. At 202 High they had filled the
+cupboards in orderly fashion. Here they overflowed in dusty cataracts,
+and tottered upward in crazy escalades and tremulous piles. All the
+shelves were gorged with books. Moreover, Michael every afternoon bought
+more books. The landlady held up her hands in dismay as, crunching up
+the paper in which they had been wrapped, he considered in perplexity
+their accommodation. More space was necessary, and the sea-green
+dining-room was awarded shelves. Here every morning after breakfast came
+the exiles, the dull and the disappointing books which had been banished
+from the sitting-room. Foot by foot the sea-green walls disappeared
+behind these shelves. In Lampard's bookshop Michael was certainly a
+personality. Lampard himself even came to tea, and sat nodding his
+approbation.
+
+As for Alan, he used to stay unmoved by the invading volumes. He had
+stipulated at the beginning that one small bookcase should be reserved
+for him. Here Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides always had
+room to breathe, without ever being called upon to endure the
+contamination of worm-eaten bibliophily.
+
+"Where the deuce has my Stubbs got to?" Michael would grumble, delving
+into the musty cascade of old plays and chap books which had temporarily
+obliterated the current literature of the week's work.
+
+Alan would very serenely take down Plato from his own trim and
+unimpeded shelves, and his brow would already be knitted with the effort
+of fixing half-a-dozen abstractions before Michael had decided after a
+long excavation that Stubbs had somehow vanished in the by-ways of
+curious reading.
+
+Yet notwithstanding the amount of time occupied by arranging and buying
+and finding books, Michael did manage to absorb a good deal of history,
+even of that history whose human nature has to be sought arduously in
+charters, exchequer-rolls and acts of parliament. Schools were drawing
+near; the dates of Kings and Emperors and Popes in their succession
+adorned the walls of his bedroom, so that even while he was cleaning his
+teeth one fact could be acquired.
+
+Only on Sunday evenings did Michael allow himself really to re-enter the
+life of St. Mary's. These Sunday evenings had all the excitement of a
+long-interrupted reunion. To be sure, Venner's was thronged with people
+who seemed to be taking life much too lightly; but Tommy Grainger was
+there, still engaged with a pass-group. People spoke hopefully of going
+head this year. Surely with Tommy and three other Blues in the boat, St.
+Mary's must go head. The conversation was so familiar that it was almost
+a shock to find so many of the faces altered. But Cuffe was still there
+with his mouth perpetually open just as wide as ever. Sterne was still
+there and likely, so one heard, to make no end of runs next summer.
+George Appleby was very much in evidence since Lonsdale's departure.
+George Appleby was certainly there, and Michael rather liked him and
+accepted an invitation to lunch. In hall the second-year men were not
+quite as rowdy as they used to be, and when they were rowdy, somehow to
+Michael and the rest of the fourth year they seemed to lack the
+imagination of themselves when they--but after all the only true judges
+of that were the Princes and Cardinals and Poets staring down from
+their high golden frames. The dons, too, at High Table might know, for
+there they sat, immemorial as ever.
+
+Wine in Common Room was just the same, and it really was very jolly to
+be sitting between Castleton--that very popular President of J.C.R.--and
+Tommy Grainger. There certainly was a great and grave satisfaction in
+leading off with a more ceremonious health drinking than had ever been
+achieved in the three years past. Michael found it amusing to catch the
+name of some freshman and, shouting abruptly a salute, to behold him
+wriggle and blush and drink his answer and wonder who on earth was
+hailing _him_. Michael often asked himself if it really were possible he
+could appear to that merry rout at the other end of J.C.R. in truly
+heroic mold. He supposed, with a smile at himself for so gross a fraud,
+that he really did for them pass mortal stature and that already he had
+a bunch of legends dangling from his halo. Down in Venner's after wine,
+Michael fancied the shouts of the freshmen wandering round Cloisters
+were more raucous than once they had seemed. Sometimes really they were
+almost irritating, but the After was capital, although the new comic
+song of the new college jester lacked perhaps a little the perfect lilt
+of "Father says we're going to beat them." Yet, after all, the Boer war
+had been over three years now: no doubt "Father says we're going to beat
+them" would have sounded a little stale. Last term, however, at Two
+Hundred and Two it had rung as fresh as ever. But the singer was gone
+now. It was meet his song should perish with his withdrawal from the
+Oxford scene. Still the After was quite good sport, and Michael was glad
+to think he and Grainger and Sterne were giving the last After but one
+of this term. He bicycled back to the digs with his head full of
+chatter, of clinking glasses and catchy tunes. Nevertheless, all
+consciousness of the evening's merriment faded out, as he hurried up the
+crooked staircase to the sitting-room where Alan, upright at the table
+amid Thucydidean commentaries, was reading under the lamp's immotionable
+rays, his hair glinting with what was now rare gold.
+
+During this autumn term neither Michael nor Alan spoke of Stella except
+as an essentially third person. She was in London, devoting so much of
+herself so charmingly to her mother that Mrs. Fane nearly abandoned
+every other interest in her favor. There were five Schumann recitals, of
+which press notices were sent to 99 St. Giles. Michael as he read them
+handed them on to Alan.
+
+"Jolly good," said he, in a tone of such conventional praise that
+Michael really began to wonder whether he had after all changed his mind
+instead of merely concealing his intention. However, since conversation
+between these two had been stripped to the bare bones of intercourse,
+Michael could not bring himself to violate this habit of reserve for the
+sake of a curiosity the gratification of which in true friendship should
+never be demanded, nor even accepted with deeper attention than the
+trivial news of the day casually offered. Nor would Michael have felt it
+loyal to Alan to try from Stella to extract a point of view regarding
+him. Anyway, he reassured himself, nothing could be done at present.
+
+Toward the end of term Mrs. Ross wrote a letter to Michael whose news
+was sufficiently unexpected to rouse the two of them to a conversation
+of greater length than any they had had since term began.
+
+     COBBLE PLACE,
+
+     November 30.
+
+     My dear Michael,
+
+     You will be surprised to hear that I have become a Catholic, or I
+     suppose I should say to you, if you still adhere to your theories,
+     a Roman Catholic. My reasons for this step, apart of course from
+     the true reason--the grace of God--were, I think, connected a good
+     deal with my boy. When your friend Mr. Prescott killed himself, I
+     felt very much the real emptiness of such a life that on the
+     surface was so admirable, in some ways so enviable. I am dreadfully
+     anxious that Kenneth--he is Kenneth Michael now--I hope you won't
+     be vexed I should have wished him to have Michael also--well, as I
+     was saying--that Kenneth should grow up with all the help that the
+     experience of the past can give him. It has become increasingly a
+     matter of astonishment to me how so many English boys manage to
+     muddle through the crises of their boyhood without the Sacraments.
+     I'm afraid you'll be reading this letter in rather a critical
+     spirit, and perhaps resenting my implication that you, for
+     instance, have come through so many crises without the Sacraments.
+     But I'm not yet a good enough theologian to argue with you about
+     the claims of your Church. Latterly I've felt positively alarmed by
+     the prospect of grappling with Kenneth's future. I have seen you
+     struggle through, and I know I can say win a glorious victory over
+     one side of yourself. But I have seen other things happen, even
+     from where I live my secluded life. If my husband had not been
+     killed I might not perhaps have felt this dread on Kenneth's
+     account. But I like to think that God in giving me that great
+     sorrow has shown His purpose by offering me this new and unimagined
+     peace and security and assurance. I need scarcely say I have had a
+     rather worrying time lately. It is strange how when love and faith
+     are the springs of action one must listen with greater patience
+     than one could listen for any lesser motive to the opinions of
+     other people.
+
+     Joan and Mary whom I've always thought of as just wrapped up in the
+     good works of their dear good selves, really rose in their wrath
+     and scorched me with the fieriest opposition. I could not have
+     believed they had in them to say as much in all their lives as they
+     said to me when I announced my intention. Nor had I any idea they
+     knew so many English clergymen. I believe that to gratify them I
+     have interviewed half the Anglican ministry. Even a Bishop was
+     invoked to demonstrate my apostacy. Nancy, too, wrote furious
+     letters. She was not outraged so much theologically, but her sense
+     of social fitness was shattered.
+
+     My darling old mother was the only person who took my resolve
+     calmly. "As long as you don't try to convert me," she said, "and
+     don't leave incense burning about the house, well--you're old
+     enough to know your own mind." She was so amusing while Joan and
+     Mary were marshaling arguments against me. She used to sit playing
+     "Miss Milligan" with a cynical smile, and said, when it was all
+     over and in spite of everyone I had been received, that she had
+     really enjoyed Patience for the first time, as Joan and Mary were
+     too busy to prevent her from cheating.
+
+     How are you and dear old Alan getting on? Of course you can read
+     him this letter. I've not written to him because I fancy he won't
+     be very much interested. Forgive me that I did not take you into my
+     confidence beforehand, but I feared a controversy with a real
+     historian about the continuity of the Anglican church.
+
+     My love to you both at Oxford.
+
+     Your affectionate
+
+     Maud Ross.
+
+"Great scott!" Michael exclaimed, as he finished the letter. "Alan!
+could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that Mrs. Ross, the
+most inveterate Whig and Roundhead and Orange bigot, at least whenever
+she used to argue with me, would have gone over?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Alan asked, sinking slowly to earth from his
+Platonic _ovpavos_. "Gone over where?"
+
+"To Rome--become a Roman Catholic."
+
+"Who?" gasped Alan, staggered now more than Michael. "Mrs. Ross--Aunt
+Maud?"
+
+"It's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard," said Michael.
+"She--and Kenneth," he added rather maliciously, seeing that Alan's
+Britannic prejudice was violently aroused. "I'll read you her letter."
+
+Plato was shut up for the evening before Michael was halfway through,
+and almost before the last sentence had been read, Alan's wrath
+exploded.
+
+"It's all very fine for her to laugh like that at Joan and Mary and
+Nancy," he said, coloring hotly. "But they were absolutely right, and
+Mrs. Ross--I mean Aunt Maud----"
+
+"I was afraid you were going to disown the relationship," Michael
+laughed.
+
+"Aunt Maud is absolutely wrong. Why, my uncle would have been furious.
+Even if _she_ became a Catholic she had no business to take Kenneth with
+her. The more I think of it--you know, it really is a bit thick."
+
+"Why do you object?" Michael asked curiously. "I never knew you thought
+about religion at all, except so far as occasionally to escort your
+mother politely to Matins, and that was after all to oblige her more
+than God. Besides, you're reading Greats, and I always thought that the
+Greats people in their fourth year abstained from anything like a
+definite opinion for fear of losing their First."
+
+"I may not have a definite opinion about Christianity," said Alan. "But
+Catholicism is ridiculous, anyway--it doesn't suit English people."
+
+"There you're treading on the heels of the School of Modern History
+which you affect to despise. You really don't know, if I may say so,
+what could or could not suit the English people unless you know what
+has or has not suited them."
+
+"Why don't you become a Catholic yourself," challenged Alan, "if you're
+so keen on them?"
+
+"For a logician," said Michael, "your conclusion is bad, being entirely
+unrelated to any of our premises. Secondly, were I inclined to label
+myself as anything, I should be disposed to label myself as a Catholic
+already."
+
+"Oh, I know that affectation!" scoffed Alan.
+
+"Well, the net result of our commentary is that you, like everybody
+else, object to Mrs. Ross changing her opinions, because you don't like
+it. Her position is negligible, the springs of action being religious.
+Now if my mother went over to Rome I should be rather bucked on her
+account."
+
+"My dear chap, if you don't mind my saying so," suggested Alan as
+apologetically as his outraged conventionality would allow, "your mother
+has always been rather given to--er--all sorts of new cults, and it
+wouldn't be so--er--noticeable in her case. But supposing Stella----"
+
+Michael looked at him sharply.
+
+"Supposing Stella did?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, of course she's artistic and she's traveled and--oh, well, I don't
+know--Stella's different."
+
+At any rate, thought Michael, he was still in love with Stella. She was
+evidently beyond criticism.
+
+"You needn't worry," said Michael. "I don't think she ever will."
+
+"You didn't think Aunt Maud ever would," Alan pointed out.
+
+"And, great scott, it's still absolutely incredible," Michael murmured.
+
+Although in the face of Alan's prejudice Michael had felt very strongly
+that Mrs. Ross had done well by her change of communion, or rather by
+her submission to a communion, for he never could remember her as
+perfervid in favor of any before, at the same time to himself he rather
+regretted the step, since it destroyed for him that idea he had kept of
+her as one who stood gravely holding the balance. He dreaded a little
+the effect upon her of a sudden plunge into Catholicism, just as he had
+felt uneasy when eight or nine years ago Alan had first propounded the
+theory of his uncle being in love with her. Michael remembered how the
+suggestion had faintly shocked his conception of Miss Carthew. It was a
+little disconcerting to have to justify herself to Nancy, or indeed to
+anyone. It seemed to weaken her status. Moreover, his own deep-implanted
+notion of "going over to Rome" as the act of a weakling and a
+weather-cock was hard to allay. His own gray image of Pallas Athene
+seemed now to be decked with meretricious roses. He was curious to know
+what his mother would think about the news. Mrs. Fane received it as
+calmly as if he had told her Mrs. Ross had taken up palmistry; to her
+Catholicism was only one of the numberless fads that made life amusing.
+As for Stella, she did not comment on the news at all. She was too much
+occupied with the diversions of the autumn season. Yet Stella was
+careful to impress on Michael that her new mode of life had not been
+dictated by any experience in Vienna.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Don't think I'm drowning care," she wrote. "I made a damned fool of
+myself and luckily you're almost the only person who knows anything
+about it. I've wiped it out as completely as a composition I've learned
+and played and done with. Really I find this pottering life that mother
+and I lead very good for my music. I'm managing to store up a reserve of
+feeling. The Schumann recitals were in some ways my best efforts so far.
+Just now I'm absolutely mad about dancing and fencing; and as mother's
+life is entirely devoted to the theory of physical culture at this
+exact moment, we're both happy."
+
+Michael told Alan what Stella said about dancing and fencing, and he was
+therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one who
+really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a
+Sword club at Oxford.
+
+"Hadn't you better join as well next term?" he suggested. "Rather good
+ecker, I fancy."
+
+"Much better than golf," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, rather," Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to
+his resolve of last summer.
+
+For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he
+wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford
+time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town
+very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and
+graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had
+called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth or
+sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more desirable.
+Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate visit as to a
+tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill this vision of
+return he refused Guy Hazlewood's invitation to Plashers Mead. It seemed
+to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him the joy of
+charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of England and
+that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.
+
+Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael's mood, and there
+for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political
+economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen
+city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more
+ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist
+destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford
+menaced his action.
+
+Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to
+keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February was
+that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made Oxford
+melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that lured him
+forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the window of
+Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie awake
+infatuated.
+
+Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like
+nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon
+history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term
+surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looked back with
+astonishment at the amount of apposite reading accomplished in what
+seemed, now so cruelly swift were the hours, a mere week of rain.
+
+He obtained leave to stay up during the Easter vacation, and time might
+have seemed to stand still, but that Spring on these rathe mornings of
+wind and scudded blue sky was forward with her traceries, bringing with
+every morning green Summer visibly nearer. The urgency of departure less
+than the need for redoubled diligence in acquiring knowledge obsessed
+Michael all this April. Sitting in the bay-window at Ninety-nine on
+these luminous eves of Spring, he vexed himself with the thought of
+disturbing so soon his books, of violating with change the peaceful
+confusion achieved in two terms. The fancy haunted him that for the
+length of the Long Vacation 99 St. Giles would drowse under the
+landlady's nick-nacks brought out to replace his withdrawn treasures;
+that nothing would keep immortal the memory of him and Alan save their
+photographs in frames of almost royal ostentation. Vaguely through his
+mind ran the notion of becoming a don, that forever he might stay here
+in Oxford, a contemplative intellectual cut-off from the great world.
+For a week the notion ripened swiftly, and Michael worked very hard in
+his determination to proceed from a First to the competition for a
+Fellowship. The notion ripened too swiftly, however, and fell with a
+plump, fit for nothing, when he suddenly realized he would have to stay
+on in Oxford alone, since of all his friends he could see not one who
+would be likely in the academic cloister to accompany his meditations.
+With a gesture of weary contempt Michael flung Stubbs into the corner,
+and resolved that, come what might in the History Schools, for what
+remained of his time at Oxford he would enjoy the proffered anodyne.
+
+After he had disowned his work, he took to wandering rather aimlessly
+about the streets; but their aspect, still unfrequented as yet by the
+familiar figures of term-time, made him feel sad. Guy Hazlewood was
+summoned by telegram from where at Plashers Mead he was presumed to have
+found abiding peace. He came bicycling in from the Witney road at noon
+of a blue April day so richly canopied with rolling clouds that the
+unmatured season took on some of June's ampler dignity. After lunch they
+walked to Witham Woods, and Guy tried to persuade Michael to come to
+Wychford when the summer term was over. He was full of the plan for
+founding that lay monastery, that cloister for artists who wished
+between Oxford and the world a space unstressed by anything save ordered
+meditation. Michael was captured anew by the idea he had first
+propounded, and they talked gayly of its advantages, foreseeing, if the
+right people could be induced to come, a period of intense stimulation
+against a background of serenity. Then Guy began to talk of how day by
+day he was subduing words to rhyme and meter.
+
+"And you, what would you do?" he asked.
+
+At once Michael realized the futility of their scheme for him.
+
+"I should only dream away another year," he said rather sadly, "and so
+if you don't mind, old chap, I think I won't join you."
+
+"Rot!" Guy drawled. "I've got it all clear now in my mind. Up at seven.
+At breakfast we should take it in turns to read aloud great poetry. From
+eight to ten retire to our cells, and work at a set piece--a sonnet or
+six lines of prose. Ten to eleven a discussion on what we'd done. Eleven
+to one work at our own stuff. One o'clock lunch with some reading aloud.
+All the afternoon to do what we like. Dinner at seven with more reading
+aloud, and in the evening reading to ourselves. Not a word to be spoken
+after nine o'clock, and bed at eleven. After tea twice a week we might
+have academic discussions."
+
+"It sounds perfect," said Michael, "if you're already equipped with the
+desire to be an artist, and what is more important if deep down in
+yourself you're convinced you have the least justification for ambition.
+But, Guy, what a curious chap you are. You seem to have grown so much
+younger since you went down."
+
+Guy laughed on a note of exultation that sounded strange indeed in one
+whom when still at Balliol Michael had esteemed as perhaps the most
+perfect contemporary example of the undergraduate tired by the
+consciousness of his own impeccable attitude. Guy had always possessed
+so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of
+seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friendship, of everything indeed
+except parlor rowdiness with cushions and sofas, that Michael was almost
+shocked to hear the elaborately wearied Guy declare boisterously:
+
+"My dear chap, that is the great secret. The moment you go down, you do
+grow younger."
+
+He must be in love, thought Michael suddenly; and, so remote was love
+seeming to him just now, he blushed in the implication by his inner self
+of having penetrated uninvited the secret of a friend.
+
+Guy talked all tea-time of the project, and when they had eaten enough
+bread and honey, they set out for Oxford by way of Godstow. The generous
+sun was blanched by watery clouds. A shrewd wind had risen while they
+sat in the inn, and the primroses looked very wan in the shriveled
+twilight. Michael had Guy's company for a week of long walks and snug
+evenings, but the real intimacy which he had expected would be
+consummated by this visit never effected itself somehow. Guy was more
+remote in his mood of communal ambitions than he was at Oxford, living
+his life of whimsical detachment. After he went back to Plashers Mead,
+Michael only missed the sound of his voice, and was not conscious of
+that more violent wrench when the intercourse of silence is broken.
+
+It happened that year St. Mark's Eve fell upon a Sunday, and Michael,
+having been reading the poems of Keats nearly all the afternoon, was
+struck by the coincidence. Oxford on such an occasion was able to
+provide exactly the same sensation for him as Winchester had given to
+the poet. Michael sat in his window-seat looking out over the broad
+thoroughfare of St. Giles, listening to the patter and lisp of Sabbath
+footfalls, to the burden of the bells; and as he sat there with the city
+receding in the wake of his window, he was aware more poignantly than
+ever of how actually in a few weeks it would recede. The bells and the
+footsteps were quiet for a while: the sun had gone: it was the vesper
+stillness of evening prayer: slowly the printed page before him faded
+from recognition. Already the farther corners of the room were black,
+revealing from time to time, as a tongue of flame leaped up in the
+grate, the golden blazonries of the books on the walls. It was
+everywhere dark when the people came out of church, and the footsteps
+were again audible. Michael envied Keats the power which he had known to
+preserve forever that St. Mark's Eve of eighty years ago in Winchester.
+It was exasperating that now already the footfalls were dying away, that
+already their sensation was evanescent, that he could not with the wand
+of poetry forbid time to disturb this quintessential hour of Oxford. Art
+alone could bewitch the present in the fashion of that enchantress in
+the old fairy tale who sent long ago a court to sleep.
+
+What was the use of reading history unless the alchemy of literature had
+transcended the facts by the immortal presentation of them? These
+charters and acts of parliament, these exchequer-rolls and raked-up
+records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of
+Maitland's fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs' ponderous
+conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends,
+the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through
+the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the same
+directness of divine exposition as faith itself.
+
+Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was
+incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to him,
+and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these moments
+that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical assurances of
+human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for explanation. After
+all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful statement the fact of
+a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why he had wrought it
+forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense of the fact: it
+could not resolve it in such a way that life would cease to be the
+baffling attempt it was on the individual's part to restate to himself
+his personal dreams.
+
+Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it
+was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over
+all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave
+the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the
+breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not
+some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical condition?
+
+The sensation of St. Mark's Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the
+chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the
+psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of
+what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a
+while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull down
+the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit thoroughfare, with
+all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness, the immutable city
+that neither mist nor modern architects could destroy, the immortal
+academy whose spirit would surely outdare the menace of these reforming
+Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither the cowardly betrayers of
+her civilization who, even now before the barbarian was at her gates,
+were cringing to him with offers to sell the half of her heritage of
+learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all about him in the darkness, wished
+he could be a member of Convocation and make a flaming speech in defense
+of compulsory Greek. That happened to be the proposed surrender to
+modern conditions which at the moment was agitating his conservative
+passion.
+
+"Thank heaven I live when I do," he said to himself. "If it were 2000
+A.D., how much more miserable I should be."
+
+He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against
+the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather
+particularly good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LAST TERM
+
+
+Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary's
+tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed
+that he was not seen in the sun's eye. This lapse of enthusiasm saddened
+him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision of speeding
+youth.
+
+The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that
+notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the
+other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He
+was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice
+to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no
+good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days
+were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came round,
+and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the
+achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his
+friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had
+counted upon this bump-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for this
+happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them, and he
+went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure Tommy
+Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not the
+bump-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.
+
+Tired of the howling and the horse-play, tired of the fretful
+fireworks, he turned into Venner's just before ten o'clock.
+
+"Why aren't you with your friends, making a noise?" asked Venner.
+
+"Ought to go home and work," Michael explained.
+
+"But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to
+the fore on these occasions."
+
+"Don't feel like it, Venner."
+
+"You mustn't work too hard, you know," said the old man, blinking kindly
+at him.
+
+"Oh, it's not work, Venner. It's age."
+
+"Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They're having a rare time to-night. I
+don't expect the dons'll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a
+bump-supper. Why ever don't you go out and do your share?"
+
+Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in
+his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no
+good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of
+ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to
+the lodge.
+
+"Don't forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt," he warned
+the porter. "I don't want to be hauled to-morrow morning for damage done
+in my absence."
+
+The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.
+
+"There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing your
+egress, sir," he said pompously, "and had it registered in my book
+before you spoke."
+
+Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pass out into the
+High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary's bridge, and when
+the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood
+for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the
+shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to
+time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman
+candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all as
+the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to listen
+to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people, small as
+emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He regretted
+sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St. Giles,
+roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning. It was
+melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy, but
+outside its participation; and presently he started to walk quickly back
+to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that
+before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.
+
+Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael.
+Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college
+authorities to make him covet a good class: to Alan it was more
+important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to
+try for the Home Civil Service.
+
+"However, I've given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a
+Second, I shall be jolly grateful," he told Michael.
+
+The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be
+sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black
+clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the
+university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four
+days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring
+and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of
+tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had
+even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to
+the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus
+and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black
+coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to
+the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was
+all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended
+with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June
+evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before,
+spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to
+enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing
+seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever,
+and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.
+
+This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her
+graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was
+not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely
+poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about
+it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine
+autumn day.
+
+It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of Oxford
+dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew Arnold had
+said she did not need June for beauty's heightening. That was true. Her
+beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with all the grave
+consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded more the loss of
+this infoliated calm than of any of the people who were enjoying its
+amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that next year would
+not form themselves, that forever indeed would be irremediably
+dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members scattered did
+not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that next year himself
+would have lost the assurance that he was an organic part of this
+tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was already broken
+up: the end of the third year had effected that. This farewell to
+Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the very first
+moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of a
+Fellowship. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have
+withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth in
+the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive, and
+worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course. Now,
+since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather
+opulently fine mocked his exit.
+
+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 Boheme."
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE LAST WEEK
+
+
+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 crepe-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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+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 Abbe Prevost 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 Abbe 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 Abbe 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 decrive mes sentiments, ni que je vous rapporte
+mes dernieres 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 Abbe Prevost
+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 Abbe Prevost 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
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+ROMANTIC EDUCATION
+
+    Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
+    descendam, magnorum haud umquam indignus avorum.
+
+    VIRGIL.
+
+    For Fancy cannot live on real food:
+    In youth she will despise familiar joy
+    To dwell in mournful shades, as they grow real,
+    Then buildeth she of joy her fair ideal.
+
+    ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OSTIA DITIS
+
+
+When Michael reached the Oxford Music-hall he wondered why he had
+overspurred his fatigue to such a point. There was no possibility of
+pleasure here, and he would have done better to stay at home and cure
+with sleep what was after all a natural depression. It had been foolish
+to expect a sedative from contact with this unquiet assemblage. In the
+mass they had nothing but a mechanical existence, subject as they were
+to the brightness or dimness of the electrolier that regulated their
+attention. Michael did not bother to buy a program. From every podgy
+hand he could see dangling the lithograph of St. Mary's tower with its
+glazed moonlight; and he was not sufficiently aware of the glib atom who
+bounced about the golden dazzle of the stage to trouble about his name.
+He mingled with the slow pace of the men and women on the promenade.
+They were going backward and forward like flies, meeting for a moment in
+a quick buzz of colloquy and continuing after a momentary pause their
+impersonal and recurrent progress. Michael was absorbed in this
+ceaseless ebb and flow of motion where the sidelong glances of the
+women, as they brushed his elbow in the passing crowd, gave him no
+conviction of an individual gaze. Once or twice he diverted his steps
+from the stream and tried to watch in a half-hearted way the
+performance; but as he leaned over the plush-covered barrier a woman
+would sidle up to him, and he would move away in angry embarrassment
+from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of popping
+corks and the chink of glasses, the whirr of the ventilating fans, the
+stentorophonic orchestra, the red-faced raucous atom on the stage
+combined to irritate him beyond further endurance; and he had just
+resolved to walk seven times up and down the promenade before he went
+home, when somebody cried in heartiest greeting over his shoulder,
+"Hullo, Bangs!"
+
+Michael turned and saw Drake, and so miserable had been the effect of
+the music-hall that he welcomed him almost effusively, although he had
+not seen him during four years and would probably like him rather less
+now than he had liked him at school.
+
+"_My_ lord! fancy seeing you again!" Drake effused.
+
+Michael found himself shaken warmly by the hand in support of the
+enthusiastic recognition. After the less accentuated cordiality of
+Oxford manners, it was strange to be standing like this with clasped
+hands in the middle of this undulatory crowd.
+
+"I _say_, Bangs, old man, we must have a drink on this."
+
+Drake led the way to the bar and called authoritatively for two whiskies
+and a split Polly.
+
+"Quite a little-bit-of-fluffy-all-right," he whispered to Michael,
+seeming to calculate with geometrical eyes the arcs and semicircles of
+the barmaid's form. She with her nose in the air poured out the liquid,
+and Michael wondered how any of it went into the glass. As a matter of
+fact, most of it splashed onto the bar, whence Drake presently took his
+change all bedewed with alcohol, and, lifting his glass, wished Michael
+a jolly good chin-chin.
+
+"'D luck," Michael muttered in response.
+
+"_My_ lord!" Drake began again. "Fancy meeting you of all people. And
+not a bit different. I said to myself: 'I'm jiggered if that isn't old
+Bangs,' and--well, _my_ lord! but I was surprised. Do you often come out
+on the randan?"
+
+"Not very often," Michael admitted. "I just happened to be alone
+to-night."
+
+"Good for you, old sport. What have you been doing since you left
+school?"
+
+"I'm just down from Oxford," Michael informed him.
+
+"Pretty good spree up there, eh?"
+
+"Oh, yes, rather," said Michael.
+
+"Well, I had the chance to go," said Drake. "But it wasn't good enough.
+It's against you in the City, you know. Waste of time really, except of
+course for a parson or a schoolmaster."
+
+"Yes, I expect it would have been rather a waste of time for you,"
+Michael agreed.
+
+"Oh, rotten! So you moved from--where was it?--Carlington Road?"
+
+"Yes, we moved to Cheyne Walk."
+
+"Let's see. That's in Hampstead, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, it's rather nearer the river," suggested Michael. "Are you still
+in Trelawny Road?"
+
+"Yes, still in the same old hovel. My hat! Talking of Trelawny Road, it
+_is_ a small world. Who do you think I saw last week?"
+
+"Not Lily Haden?" Michael asked, in spite of a wish not to rise so
+quickly to Drake's hook.
+
+"You're right. I saw the fair Lily. But where do you think I saw her?
+Bangs, old boy, I tell you I'm not a fellow who's easily surprised. But
+this knocked me. Of course, you'll understand the Hadens flitted from
+Trelawny Road soon after you stopped calling. So who knows what's
+happened since? I give you three guesses where I saw her."
+
+"I hate riddles," said Michael fretfully.
+
+"At the Orient," said Drake solemnly. "The Orient Promenade. You could
+have knocked me down with a feather."
+
+Michael stared at Drake, scarcely realizing the full implication of what
+he just announced. Then suddenly he grasped the horrible fact that
+revealed to him here in a music-hall carried a double force. His one
+instinct for the moment was to prevent Drake from knowing into what
+depths his news had plunged him.
+
+"Has she changed?" asked Michael, and could have kicked himself for the
+question.
+
+"Well, of course there was a good deal of powder," said Drake. "I'm not
+easily shocked, but this gave me a turn. She was with a man, but even if
+she hadn't been, I doubt if I'd have had the nerve to talk to her. I
+wouldn't have known what to say. But, of course, you know, her mother
+was a bit rapid. That's where it is. Have another drink. You're looking
+quite upset."
+
+Michael shook his head. He must go home.
+
+"Aren't you coming down West a bit?" asked Drake, in disappointment.
+"The night's still young."
+
+But Michael was not to be persuaded.
+
+"Well, don't let's lose sight of each other now we've met. What's your
+club? I've just joined the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You
+get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You ought to join. Or perhaps
+you're already suited?"
+
+"I belong to the Bath," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, of course, if you're suited, that's all right. But any time you
+want to join the Primrose just let me know and I'll put you up. The sub
+isn't really very much. Guinea a year."
+
+Michael thanked him and escaped as quickly as he could. Outside even in
+Oxford Street the air was full of summer, and the cool people sauntering
+under the sapphirine sky were as welcome to his vision as if he had
+waked from a fever. His head was throbbing with the heat of the
+music-hall, and the freshness of night-air was delicious. He called a
+hansom and told the driver to go to Blackfriars Bridge, and from there
+slowly along the Embankment to Cheyne Walk. For a time he leaned back in
+the cab, thinking of nothing, barely conscious of golden thoroughfares,
+of figures in silhouette against the glitter, and of the London roar
+rising and falling. Presently in the quiet of the shadowy cross-streets
+he began to appreciate what seemed the terrible importance to himself of
+Drake's news.
+
+"It concerns me," he began to reiterate aloud. "It concerns me--me--me.
+It's useless to think that it doesn't. It concerns me."
+
+Then a more ghastly suggestion whispered itself. How should he ever know
+that he was not primarily responsible? The idea came over him with
+sickening intensity; and upright now he saw in the cracked mirrors of
+the cab a face blanched, a forehead clammy with sweat, and over his
+shoulder like a goblin the wraith of Lily. It was horrible to see so
+distorted that beautiful memory which time had etherealized out of a
+reality, until of her being nothing had endured but a tenuous image of
+earliest love. Now under the shock of her degradation he must be dragged
+back by this goblin to face his responsibility. He must behold again
+close at hand her shallow infidelity. He must assure himself of her
+worthlessness, hammer into his brain that from the beginning she had
+merely trifled with him. This must be established for the sake of his
+conscience. Where the devil was this driver going?
+
+"I told you down the Embankment," Michael shouted through the trap.
+
+"I can't go down the Embankment before I gets there, can I, sir?" the
+cabman asked reproachfully.
+
+Michael closed the trap. He was abashed when he perceived they were
+still only in Fleet Street. Why had he gone to The Oxford to-night? Why
+had he spoken to Drake? Why had he not stayed at Wychford? Why had he
+not returned to London with the others? Such regrets were valueless. It
+was foredoomed that Lily should come into his life again. Yet there was
+no reason why she should. There was no reason at all. Men could hardly
+be held responsible for the fall of women, unless themselves had upon
+their souls the guilt of betrayal or desertion. It was ridiculous to
+argue that he must bother because at eighteen he had loved her, because
+at eighteen he had thought she was worthy of being loved. No doubt the
+Orient Promenade was the sequel of kissing objectionable actors in the
+back gardens of West Kensington. Yet the Orient Promenade? That was a
+damnable place. The Orient Promenade? He remembered her kisses. Sitting
+in this cab, he was kissing her now. She had ridden for hours deep in
+his arms. Not Oxford could cure this relapse into the past. Every spire
+and every tower had crashed to ruins around his staid conceptions, so
+that they too presently fell away. Four years of plastic calm were
+unfashioned, and she was again beside him. Every passing lamp lit up her
+face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her
+place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered,
+pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What
+invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to turn
+his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He must
+remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money, plead
+with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the hansom
+kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor Road the
+onrushing street-lamps flung their balls of light with monotonous
+jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to find her. He
+would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the morning perhaps the
+problem would present itself in less difficult array.
+
+Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera, and
+suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day he
+could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so that he
+would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful engagement of
+Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony of their
+happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the window,
+staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the generous
+night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the reflected
+lamps in golden pagodas sprawled across the width of the river and where
+the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the bridge, nuzzled the
+shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around the patient barges at
+their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the surface of the stream,
+blurring the golden pagodas of light so that they jigged and glittered
+until the motion died away. Eastward in the sky over London hung a tawny
+stain that blotted out the stars.
+
+From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city
+stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.
+He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false
+vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the
+dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that
+London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion,
+that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his
+memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She
+was walking toward him in Kensington Gardens: not a contour of her
+delicate progress had been blunted by the rasp of time. Five years ago
+he had been the first to speak: now, must it be she who sometimes spoke
+first? Seventeen she had told him had been her age, and they had kissed
+in the dark midway between two lamps. No doubt she had been kissed
+before. In that household of Trelawny Road anything else was
+inconceivable. The gray streets of West Kensington in terrace upon
+terrace stretched before him, and now as he recalled their barren stones
+it seemed to him there was not one corner round which he might not
+expect to meet her face to face. "_Michael, why do you make me love you
+so?_" That was her voice. It was she who had asked him that question.
+Never before this moment had he realized the import of her demand. Now,
+when it was years too late to remedy, it came out of the past like an
+accusation. He had answered it then with closer kisses. He had released
+her then like a ruffled bird, secure that to-morrow and to-morrow and
+to-morrow she would nestle to his arms for cherishing. And now if he
+thought more of her life beneath that lurid stain he would go mad; if he
+conjured to himself the vision of her now--had not Drake said she was
+powdered and painted? To this had she come. And she was here in London.
+Last week she had been seen. It was no nightmare. It was real, horrible
+and real. He must go out again at once and find her. He must not sit
+dreaming here, staring at the silly Thames, the smooth and imperturbable
+Thames. He must plunge into that phantasmagoric city; he must fly from
+haunt to haunt; he must drag the depths of every small hell; he must
+find her to-night.
+
+Michael rose, but on the instant of his decision his mother and Stella
+drove up. Alan was no longer with them. He must have gone home to
+Richmond. How normal sounded their voices from the pavement below.
+Perhaps he would after all go down and greet them. They might wonder
+otherwise if something had happened. Looking at himself as he passed the
+mirror on his way down, he saw that he really was haggard. If he pleaded
+a headache, his countenance would bear him out. In the end he shouted to
+them over the balusters, and both of them wanted to come up with
+remedies. He would not let them. The last thing his mood desired was the
+tending of cool hands.
+
+"I'm only fagged out," he told them. "I want a night's sleep."
+
+Yet he knew how hard it would be to fall asleep. His brain was on fire.
+Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut
+the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with
+the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt
+less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted
+half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He
+seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room
+surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects. The
+cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a sense
+that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had shaken
+him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that he had
+wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he could
+examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going, and the
+need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still all his
+impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear view of his
+attitude.
+
+He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses
+nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present she
+appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to
+bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the
+loss of beauty, of passion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so
+constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly
+incapable was Drake's account to change his outward picture of her, he
+could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It
+seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night,
+she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years
+ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.
+
+Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prostitute in
+London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no
+account. Were they of no account? _C'est une douzaine de filles de
+joie._ When he read Manon this morning--how strange! this morning he had
+been reading Manon at Oxford--he was moved with pity for all poor light
+women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New Orleans
+nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because he was
+still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was because he had
+known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the damning weight
+that in the past she had said, "_Michael, why do you make me love you
+so?_" If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If there was shame, he
+was shameful. Others after him had sinned against her casually, counting
+their behavior no more than a speck of dust in the garbage of human
+emotion with which she was already smirched. He may not have seduced
+her, but he had sinned against her, because while loving her he had let
+her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He had trifled with her
+sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for blame was cowardly.
+It was that very youth which was the sin, because under society's laws,
+whatever fine figure his love might seem to him to have cut, he should
+have known that it was a profitless love for a girl. He shared in the
+guilt. He partook of the shame. That was incontrovertible.
+
+Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not
+his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally
+incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said
+to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to
+marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott
+must always have deplored the position in which his friend's mistress
+had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one's mother. It seemed
+to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her, if Lady
+Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which he had
+soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our rigid
+divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable times
+in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen had
+cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been sinned
+against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say that the
+sinner had in the circumstances behaved very well, that so far as he was
+able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse his father's
+initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not wash out his
+deliberate sin against--and who was she? Who was his mother? Valerie ...
+and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a clergyman ... a
+gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had exposed her to the
+calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved chivalrously at any rate
+by the standards of romance. But by what small margin had his own mother
+escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions of order and safety and
+custom tottered and reeled at such a thought. Surely such a realization
+doubled his obligation to atone by rescuing Lily, out of very
+thankfulness to God that his own mother had escaped the evil which had
+come to her. How wretchedly puny now seemed all his own repinings. All
+he had gained for his own character had been a vague dissatisfaction
+that he could not succeed to the earldom in order to prove the sanctity
+of good breeding. There had been no gratitude; there had been nothing
+but a hurt conceit. The horror of Drake's news would at least cure him
+forever of that pettiness. Already he felt the strength that comes from
+the sight of a task that must be conquered. He had been moved that
+morning by the tale of Manon Lescaut. This tale of Lily was in
+comparison with that as an earthquake to the tunneling of a mole beneath
+a croquet-lawn. And now must he regard his father's memory with
+condemnation? Must he hate him? He must hate him, indeed, unless by his
+own behavior he could feel he had accepted in substitution the burden of
+his father's responsibility. And he had admired him so much dying out
+there in Africa for his country. He had resented his death for the sake
+of thousands more unworthy living comfortably at home.
+
+"All my standards are falling to pieces," thought Michael. "Heroes and
+heroines are all turning into cardboard. If I don't make some effort to
+be true to conviction, I shall turn to cardboard with the rest."
+
+He began to pace the room in a tumult of intentions, vows and
+resolutions. Somehow before he slept he must shape his course. Four
+years had dreamed themselves away at Oxford. Unless all that education
+was as immaterial as the fogs of the Isis, it must provide him now with
+an indication of his duty. He had believed in Oxford, believed in her
+infallibility and glory, he had worshiped all she stood for. He had
+surrendered himself to her to make of him a gentleman, and unless these
+four years had been a delusion, his education must bear fruit now.
+
+Michael made up his mind suddenly, and as it seemed to him at the moment
+in possession of perfect calm and clarity of judgment, that he would
+marry Lily. He had accepted marriage as a law of his society. Well,
+then that law should be kept. He would test every article of the creed
+of an English gentleman. He would try in the fire of his purpose honor,
+pride, courtesy, and humility. All these must come to his aid, if he
+were going to marry a whore. Let him stab himself with the word. Let him
+not blind himself with euphemisms. His friends would have no euphemisms
+for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying Queenie
+Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How everybody would
+despise his folly. There would not be one friend who would understand.
+Least of all would his mother understand. It was a hard thing to do; and
+yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could be granted the grace of
+faith to sustain him. Principles were rather barren things to support
+the soul in a fight with convention. Principles of honor when so very
+personal were apt to crumple in the blast of society's principles all
+fiercely kindled against him. Just now he had thought of the
+thankfulness he owed to God. Was it more than a figure of speech, an
+exaggerative personification under great emotion of what most people
+would call chance? At any rate, here was God in a cynical mood, and the
+divine justice of this retributive situation seemed to hint at something
+beyond mere luck. And if principles were strong enough to sustain him to
+the onset, faith might fire him to the coronation of his
+self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and calmly to marry Lily,
+and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if to hearten him he saw
+her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for his dreams the ways of
+night like a gazelle.
+
+Next morning when Michael woke, his resolve purified by sleep of
+feverish and hysterical promptings was fresh upon his pillow. In the
+fatigue and strain of the preceding night the adventure had caught a
+hectic glow of exaltation. Now, with the sparrows twittering and the
+milkman clanking and yodeling down Cheyne Walk and the young air puffing
+the curtains, his course acquired a simplicity in this lucid hour of
+deliberation, which made the future normal and even obvious. There was a
+great relief in this fresh following breeze after the becalmed inaction
+of Oxford: it seemed an augury of life's importance that so immediately
+on top of the Oxford dream he should find such a complete dispersion of
+mist and so urgent a fairway before him. The task of finding Lily might
+easily occupy him for some time, for a life like hers would be made up
+of mutable appearances and sudden strange eclipses. It might well be a
+year before she was seen again on the Orient Promenade. Yet it was just
+as likely that he would find her at once. For a moment he caught his
+breath in thinking of the sudden plunge which that meeting would
+involve. He thought of all the arguments and all the dismay that the
+revelation of his purpose would set in motion. However, the marriage had
+to be. He had threshed it all out last night. But he might reasonably
+hope for a brief delay. Such a hope was no disloyalty to his
+determination.
+
+Stella was already at breakfast when he came downstairs. Michael raised
+his eyebrows in demand for news of her and Alan.
+
+"Mother was the sweetest thing imaginable," she said. "And so we're
+engaged. I wanted to come and talk to you last night, but I thought you
+would rather be left alone."
+
+"I'm glad you're happy," he said gravely. "And I'm glad you're safe."
+
+Stella looked at him in surprise.
+
+"I've never been anything but safe," she assured him.
+
+"Haven't you?" he asked, looking at her and reproving himself for the
+thought that this gray-eyed sister of his could ever have exposed
+herself to the least likelihood of falling into Lily's case. Yet there
+had been times when he had felt alarmed for her security and happiness.
+There had been that fellow Ayliffe, and more serious still there had
+been that unknown influence in Vienna. Invulnerable she might seem now
+in this cool dining-room on a summer morning, but there had been times
+when he had doubted.
+
+"What are you looking at?" she asked, flaunting her imperious boyishness
+in his solemn countenance.
+
+"You. Thinking you ought to be damned grateful."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"You included, I suppose," she laughed.
+
+Still it had been rather absurd, Michael thought, as he tapped his egg,
+to suppose there was anything in Stella's temperament which could ever
+link her to Lily. Should he announce his quest for her approbation and
+sympathy? It was difficult somehow to begin. Already a subtle change had
+taken place in their relation to each other since she was engaged to
+Alan. Of course, his reserve was ridiculous, but he could not bring
+himself to break through now. Besides, in any case it were better to
+wait until he had found Lily again. It would all sound very
+pretentiously noble in anticipation, and though she would have every
+right to laugh, he did not want her to laugh. When he stood on the brink
+of marriage, they would none of them be able to laugh. There was a grim
+satisfaction in that.
+
+"When does mother suggest you should be married?" he asked.
+
+"We more or less settled November. Alan has given up the Civil Service.
+That's my first piece of self-assertion. He's coming for me this
+morning, and we're going to lunch at Richmond."
+
+"You've never met Mr. and Mrs. Merivale?"
+
+Stella shook her head.
+
+"Old Merivale's a ripping old boy. Always making bad puns. And Mrs.
+Merivale's a dear."
+
+"They must both be perfect to have been the father and mother of Alan,"
+said Stella.
+
+"I shouldn't get too excited over him," Michael advised. "Or over
+yourself, either. You might give me the credit of knowing all about it
+long before either of you."
+
+"Darling Michael," she cried, bounding at him like a puppy.
+
+"When you've done making an ass of yourself you might chuck me a roll."
+
+Alan arrived soon after breakfast, and he and Michael had a few minutes
+together, while Stella was getting ready to go out.
+
+"Were your people pleased?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, of course. Naturally the mater was a little nervous. She thought I
+seemed young. Talked a good deal about being a little boy only yesterday
+and that sort of rot."
+
+"And your governor?"
+
+"He supposed I was determined to steal her," said Alan, with a whimsical
+look of apology for the pun. "And having worked that off he spent the
+rest of the evening relishing his own joke."
+
+Stella came down ready to start for Richmond. Both she and Alan were in
+white, and Michael said they looked like a couple of cricketers. But he
+envied them as he waved them farewell from the front door through which
+the warm day was deliciously invading the house. Their happiness
+sparkled on the air as visibly almost as the sunshine winking on the
+river. Those Richmond days belonged imperishably to him and Alan, yet
+for Alan this Saturday would triumph over all the others before. Michael
+turned back into the house rather sadly. The radiance of the morning had
+been dislustered by their departure, and Michael against his will had
+to be aware of the sense of exclusion which lovers leave in their wake.
+He waited indoors until his mother came down. She was solicitous for the
+headache of last night, and while he was with her he was not troubled by
+regrets for the break-up of established intercourse. He asked himself
+whether he should take her into his confidence by announcing the tale of
+Lily. Yet he did not wish to give her an impression of being more
+straightly bound to follow his quest than by the broadest rules of
+conduct. He felt it would be easier to explain when the marriage had
+taken place. How lucky for him that he was not financially dependent!
+That he was not, however, laid upon him the greater obligation. He could
+find, even if he wished one, no excuse for unfulfillment.
+
+Michael and his mother talked for a time of the engagement. She was
+still somewhat doubtful of Alan's youth, when called upon to adapt
+itself to Stella's temperament.
+
+"I think you're wrong there," said Michael. "Alan is rather a rigid
+person in fundamentals, you know, and his youth will give just that
+flexibility which Stella would demand. In another five years he would
+have been ensconced behind an Englishman's strong but most unmanageable
+barrier of prejudice. I noticed so much his attitude toward Mrs. Ross
+when she was received into the Roman Church. I asked him what he would
+say if Stella went over. He maintained that she was different. I think
+that's a sign he'll be ready to apply imagination to her behavior."
+
+"Yes, but I hope he won't think that whatever she does is right," Mrs.
+Fane objected.
+
+"Oh, no," laughed Michael. "Imagination will always be rather an effort
+for Alan. Mother, would you be worried if I told you I wanted to go away
+for a while--I mean to say, go away and perhaps more or less not be
+heard of for a while?"
+
+"Abroad?" she asked.
+
+"Not necessarily abroad. I'm not going to involve myself in a dangerous
+undertaking; but I'm just sufficiently tired of my very comfortable
+existence to wish to make an experiment. I may be away quite a short
+time, but I might want to be away a few months. Will you promise me not
+to worry yourself over my movements? Some of the success of this
+undertaking will probably depend on a certain amount of freedom. You can
+understand, can't you, that the claims of home, however delightful,
+might in certain circumstances be a problem?"
+
+"I suppose you're taking steps to prepare my mind for something very
+extremely unpleasant," she said.
+
+"Let's ascribe it all to my incurably romantic temperament," Michael
+suggested.
+
+"And I'm not to worry?"
+
+"No, please don't."
+
+"But when are you going away?"
+
+"I'm not really going away at all," Michael explained. "But if I didn't
+come back to dinner one night or even the next night, would you be
+content to know quite positively that I hadn't been run over?"
+
+"You're evidently going to be thoroughly eccentric. But I suppose," she
+added wistfully, "that after your deserted childhood I can hardly expect
+you to be anything else. Yet it seems so comfortable here." She was
+looking round at the chairs.
+
+"I'm not proposing to go to the North Pole, you know," Michael said,
+"but I don't want to obey dinner-gongs."
+
+"Very noisy and abrupt," she agreed.
+
+Soon they were discussing all kinds of substitutions.
+
+"Mother, what an extraordinary lot you know about noise," Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+"Dearest boy, I'm on the committee of a society for the abatement of
+London street noises."
+
+"So deeply occupied with reform," he said, patting her hand.
+
+"One must do something," she smiled.
+
+"I know," he asserted. "And therefore you'll let me ride this new
+hobby-horse I'm trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?"
+
+"You know perfectly well that you will anyhow," said Mrs. Fane, shaking
+her head.
+
+Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this
+admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in
+order to assist at Castleton's induction, and Michael walked along the
+Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.
+
+The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a
+state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at
+work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and
+at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from
+Tchaikovsky's symphonies.
+
+"Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable," said Castleton. "Do
+you know Cunningham?" He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.
+
+"Making it comfortable," Michael repeated. "My first impression was just
+the reverse. I suppose it's no good asking you people to give me lunch?"
+
+"Rather, of course," Maurice declared. "Castleton, it's your turn to buy
+lunch."
+
+"One extraordinary thing, Michael," said Castleton, "is the way in which
+Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing something.
+You'd think he kept a ledger of all our tasks."
+
+"We can send old Mother Wadman if you're tired," Maurice offered.
+Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and
+Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.
+
+"I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up," Maurice
+explained, "but we shall be three times as comfortable when he's
+finished. He's putting up divans."
+
+Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton was
+at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over
+multitudinous roofs.
+
+"What a great rolling sense of human life they do give," said Michael.
+"A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and
+all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there's the
+lighthouse," he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.
+
+"The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile
+for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church," said Maurice. "We're
+having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a
+secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What
+is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We
+two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I shall
+meet the girl who's meant to share this with me. Then I really think I
+could work."
+
+Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were not
+the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were
+married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be driven
+out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They would be
+suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and yet they
+would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The windows of the
+city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly as the stars.
+Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because to see her in
+a room like this would be to love her. How well he understood Maurice's
+desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody wanted a girl to perfect
+Plashers Mead. Even Guy's fairy child at Plashers Mead had seemed an
+intrusion; but here, to protect one's loneliness against the
+overpowering contemplation of the life around, love was a necessity. And
+perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the ambition his friends had for
+his career. It might be so. Perhaps himself might find an inspiration in
+an attic high up over roofs. It might be. It might be so.
+
+"What are you thinking about?" Maurice asked.
+
+"I was thinking you were probably right," said Michael.
+
+Maurice looked pleasantly surprised. He was rather accustomed to be
+snubbed when he told Michael of his desire for feminine companionship.
+
+"I don't want to get married, you know," he hastily added.
+
+"That would depend," said Michael. "If one married what is called an
+impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to
+make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St.
+Thomas' Church at half-past two."
+
+"But why are you so keen about marriage?" Maurice demanded.
+
+"Well, it has certain advantages," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Not among the sparrows," said Maurice.
+
+"Most of all among the sparrows," Michael contradicted. He was becoming
+absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to remove
+the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he proposed
+to take. They would be able to re-enter the world after a long
+retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the
+opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the
+touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked
+something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he
+had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during that
+first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily had
+assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire for
+the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock of
+disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake's account of
+her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news had
+merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.
+
+"It is really extraordinarily romantic up here," Maurice exclaimed,
+bursting in upon his reverie.
+
+"Yes, I suppose that's the reason," Michael admitted.
+
+"The reason of what?" Maurice asked.
+
+"Of what I was thinking," Michael said.
+
+Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and
+almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.
+
+Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their
+hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house still
+and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a hansom-cab, and
+told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+NEPTUNE CRESCENT
+
+
+The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to
+Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of
+it at Brother Aloysius' behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his
+choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.
+The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a
+deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With
+the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had
+apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no
+farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his
+experience.
+
+That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery;
+that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gruesomeness, for
+ever since Mrs. Pearcey's blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had
+held for him a macaber significance: of the hellish portals mystery and
+gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time
+tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed
+the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown
+London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy onward.
+Maple's and Shoolbred's, those outposts of shopping civilization, were
+left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of roguery began. He was
+not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so disquieting. It was
+probably a mere trick of contrast between present squalor and the
+greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim, but it had a
+nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot from the
+thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those bright
+yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he remembered them
+from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of them skirting the
+Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the pantomime. Even now
+their painted destinations affected him with a dismay that real people
+could be familiar with this sinister route.
+
+Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for years
+as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a tawdry
+and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others. Now the
+cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron railway
+bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town behind a
+huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered through the
+murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the pavement, past a
+wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of humanity chalked
+upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was Kentish Town. It lay to
+the left of this bridge that was the color of stale blood. Michael told
+the driver to stop for one moment, and he leaned forward over the apron
+of the cab to survey the cross-street of swarming feculent humanity that
+was presumably the entering highway. A train roared over the bridge; a
+piano organ gargled its tune; a wagon-load of iron girders drew near in
+a clanging tintamar of slow progress. Michael's brief pause was enough
+to make such an impression of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his
+original conception of Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb.
+But just as the cab reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he caught
+sight of a slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their
+mucid heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the
+stucco was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid
+arabesques and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town
+a putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and noise and
+exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character
+allotted by his prefiguration.
+
+The Camden Road was, in contrast with what had gone before, a wide and
+easy thoroughfare which let in the blue summer sky; and it was not for
+some minutes that Michael began to notice what a queerness came from the
+terraces that branched off on either side. The suggestion these terraces
+could weave extended itself to the detached houses of the main road. In
+the gaps between them long parallelograms of gardens could be seen
+joining others even longer that led up to the backs of another road
+behind. Sometimes it seemed that fifty gardens at once were visible,
+circumscribed secretive pleasure-grounds in the amount of life they
+could conceal, the life that could prosper and decay beneath their
+arbors merely for that conspiracy of gloating windows. It was impossible
+not to speculate upon the quality of existence in these precise
+enclosures; and to this the chapels of obscure sects that the cab
+occasionally passed afforded an indication. To these arid little
+tabernacles the population stole out on Sunday mornings. There would be
+something devilish about these reunions. Upon these pinchbeck creeds
+their souls must surely starve, must slowly shrink to desiccated imps.
+Anything more spiritually malevolent than those announcements chalked
+upon the black notice-board of the advent of the hebdomadal messiah, the
+peregrine cleric, the sacred migrant was impossible to imagine. With
+what apostolic cleverness would he impose himself upon these people, and
+how after the gravid midday meal of the Sabbath he would sit in those
+green arbors like a horrible Chinese fum. The cabman broke in upon
+Michael's fantastic depression by calling down through the trap that
+they were arrived at the Nag's Head and what part of Seven Sisters Road
+did he want.
+
+Michael was disappointed by the Seven Sisters Road. It seemed to be
+merely the garish mart of a moderately poor suburban population. There
+was here nothing to support the diabolic legend with which under the
+suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the
+streets he had passed this afternoon there had been none less
+inferential of romance than this long shopping street.
+
+"What number do you want, sir?" the driver repeated.
+
+"Well, really I want rooms," Michael explained. "Only this seems a bit
+noisy."
+
+"Yes, it is a bit boisterous," the cabman agreed.
+
+Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began
+to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it
+became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and the
+quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he
+wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate
+upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less surreptitious
+than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of the
+parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high into
+the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of Kentish
+Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy slum.
+
+"Try turning off to the left," he called to the driver through the roof.
+
+The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost
+immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each
+street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and
+well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses' declension
+from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.
+
+Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an
+unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy,
+guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal laurels.
+Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on account of
+the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with age,
+carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals and the
+iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery, helped the
+illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old sea-port. A card
+advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number Fourteen. Michael
+signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and rang the bell. The
+Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he could hear the whistle
+of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but the jingle of the
+horse's harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat which was wheedling
+its lean body in and out of the railings of the falciform garden.
+
+Soon the landlady opened the door and stood inquisitively in the narrow
+passage. She was a woman of probably about thirty-five with stubby
+fingers; her skin was rather moist, but she had a good-natured
+expression, and perhaps when the curl-papers were taken out from her
+colorless hair, and when lace frills and common finery should soften her
+turgid outlines she would be handsome in a labored sort of way. The
+discussion with Mrs. Murdoch about her vacant rooms did not take long.
+Michael had made up his mind to any horrors of dirt and discomfort, and
+he was really pleasantly surprised by their appearance. As for Mrs.
+Murdoch, she was evidently too much interested to know what had brought
+Michael to her house to make any difficulties in the way of his
+accommodation.
+
+"Will you want dinner to-night?" she asked doubtfully.
+
+"No, but I'd like some tea now, if you can manage it; and I suppose you
+can let me have a latchkey?"
+
+"I've got the kettle on the boil at this moment. I was going out myself
+for the evening. Meeting my husband at the Horseshoe. There's only one
+other lodger--Miss Carlyle. And she's in the profession."
+
+As Mrs. Murdoch made this announcement, she looked up at the fly-frecked
+ceiling, and Michael thought how extraordinarily light and meaningless
+her eyes were and how curiously dim and heavy this small sitting-room
+was against the brilliancy of the external summer.
+
+"Well, then, tea when I can get it," said Mrs. Murdoch cheerfully. "And
+the double-u is just next your bedroom on the top floor. That's all, I
+think."
+
+She left him with a backward smile over her shoulder, as if she were
+loath to relinquish the study of this unusual visitor to Neptune
+Crescent.
+
+Michael when he was alone examined the chairs that were standing about
+the room as stiff as grenadiers in their red rep. He stripped them of
+their antimacassars and pulled the one that looked least uncomfortable
+close to the window. Outside, the yellow cat was still mewing; but the
+cab was gone and down the gray street that led to Neptune Crescent here
+and there sad-gaited wayfarers were visible. Two or three sparrows were
+cheeping in a battered laburnum, and all along the horizon the blue sky
+descending to the smoke of London had lost its color and had been turned
+to the similitude of tarnished metal. A luxurious mournfulness was in
+the view, and he leaned out over the sill scenting the reasty London
+air.
+
+It was with a sudden shock of conviction that Michael realized he was in
+Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually been
+in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him must
+have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those quixotic
+resolutions roused by Drake's legend of Lily. He would not otherwise
+have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He would have
+waited to test the truth of Drake's story. His first emotional despair
+had vanished with almost unaccountable ease. Certainly he wanted to be
+independent of the criticism of his friends until he had proved his
+purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this withdrawal to a desire for
+a secluded and unflinching contemplation of a life that from Cheyne Walk
+he could never focus. But ultimately he must acknowledge that his
+sojourn here, following as it did straight upon his entrance into the
+underworld through the disappointing portals of the Seven Sisters Road,
+was due to that ancient lure of the shades. This experience was
+foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in childish dreams to
+this day indelible. He could not remember any period in his life when
+the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for his fear that
+shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of most ordinary
+existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat desolately in the
+pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when on his lonely
+walks he had passed askance by Padua Terrace; the shouting of murders by
+newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all those dreadful
+intimations in childhood had procured his present idea of London. With
+the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they still persisted
+behind the outward presentation of a normal and comfortable procedure in
+the midst of money, friends, and well-bred conventions. Nor had that
+speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of childhood, the endowment
+by the young of material things with immaterial potencies. Phantoms
+which had slunk by as terrors invisible to the blind eyes of grown-ups
+had been abominably incarnate for him. Brother Aloysius had been
+something more than a mere personification, and that life which the
+ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below the surface, so easy was it
+to enter, had he not entered it that one night very easily?
+
+Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the
+phantoms and the realities of the underworld. There for him lay very
+easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They
+had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and
+academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the
+victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that he
+was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of philosophers. He
+would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion of evil. He would
+not allow himself to disparage the problem before him by any
+speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet Lily
+again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether
+gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he must
+not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her. Such an
+encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental appeal;
+at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and she would
+forever elude him, she with secret years within her experience. His
+instinct first to sever himself from his own world must have been
+infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now he found
+himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and scenting
+the reasty London air.
+
+And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or
+Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the
+evening's end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into
+Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its red
+rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to
+this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a
+matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar's Feast glowered above
+the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two thorny
+shells upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless
+dim circumnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the bulrushes
+in their conch of nacreous glass.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him
+admiringly.
+
+"Do you think you'll be staying long?" she inquired.
+
+Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
+
+"No. No. I'm really very glad to let them. You'll find it nice and quiet
+here. There's only Miss Carlyle, who's in the profession and comes in
+sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of course he
+hasn't got his own shop now."
+
+She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch's
+loss of independence; so he said, "Of course not," nodding wisely.
+
+"There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a
+servant-girl," said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and
+shaking her curl-papers. "Yes. Though I don't know why I'm telling you
+straight off as you might say. But there, I'm funny sometimes. If I take
+to anybody, there's nothing I won't do for them. Alf--that _is_ my old
+man--he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to get
+into conversation with him, you'd better not let on you know he used to
+have a shop of his own."
+
+Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with
+his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr.
+Murdoch was working now.
+
+"In a chemist's shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know," she said,
+beaming archly. "It's what you might call rather a funny place. Only he
+gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him."
+
+Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch's
+reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a
+postcard.
+
+"Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it's in the kitchen
+dresser, that's a sure thing. Perhaps you'd like to come down and see
+the kitchen?"
+
+Michael followed her downstairs. There were no basements in Neptune
+Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his
+sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above the
+kitchen.
+
+"Miss Carlyle has her room here," said Mrs. Murdoch, pointing next door
+to the kitchen. "Nice and handy for her as she's rather late sometimes.
+I hate to hear anybody go creaking upstairs, I do. It makes me nervous."
+
+The kitchen was pleasant enough and looked out upon a narrow strip of
+garden full of coarse plants.
+
+"They'll be very merry and bright, won't they?" said Mrs. Murdoch,
+smiling encouragement at the greenery. "It's wonderful what you can do
+nowadays for threepence."
+
+Michael asked what they were.
+
+"Why, sunflowers, of course, only they want another month yet. I have
+them every year--yes. They're less trouble than rabbits or chickens. Now
+where did I see that postcard?"
+
+She searched the various utensils, and at last discovered the postcard
+stuck behind a mutilated clock.
+
+"What _will_ they bring out next?" demanded Mrs. Murdoch, surveying it
+with affectionate approbation. "Pretty, I call it."
+
+A pair of lovers in black plush were sitting enlaced beneath a pink
+frosted moon.
+
+"Just the thing, if you're writing to your young lady," said Mrs.
+Murdoch, offering it to Michael.
+
+He accepted it with many expressions of gratitude, but when he was in
+his own room he laughed very much at the idea of sending it to his
+mother in Cheyne Walk. However, as he must write and tell her he would
+not be home for some time, he decided to go out and buy both writing
+materials and unillustrated postcards. When he came back he found Mrs.
+Murdoch feathered for the evening's entertainment. She gave him the
+latchkey, and from his window Michael watched her progress down Neptune
+Crescent. Just before her lavender dress disappeared behind the Portugal
+laurels she turned round and waved to him. He wondered what his mother
+would say if she knew from what curious corner of London the news of his
+withdrawal would reach her to-night.
+
+The house was very still, and the refulgence of the afternoon light
+streaming into the small room fused the raw colors to a fiery
+concordancy. Upon the silence sounded presently a birdlike fidgeting,
+and Michael going out onto the landing to discover what it was, caught
+to his surprise the upward glance of a thin little woman in untidy pink.
+
+"Hulloa!" she cried. "I never knew there was anybody in--you did give me
+a turn. I've only just woke up."
+
+Michael explained the situation, and she seemed relieved.
+
+"I've been asleep all the afternoon," she went on. "But it's only
+natural in this hot weather to go to sleep in the afternoon if you don't
+go out for a walk. Why don't you come down and talk to me while I have
+some tea?"
+
+Michael accepted the invitation with a courtesy which he half suspected
+this peaked pink little creature considered diverting.
+
+"You'll excuse the general untidiness," she said. "But really in this
+weather anyone can't bother to put their things away properly."
+
+Michael assented, and looked round at the room. It certainly was untidy.
+The large bed was ruffled where she had been lying down, and the soiled
+copy of a novelette gave it a sort of stale slovenry. Over the foot hung
+an accumulation of pink clothes. On the chairs, too, there were clothes
+pink and white, and the door bulged with numberless skirts. Miss Carlyle
+herself wore a pink blouse whose front had escaped the constriction of a
+belt. Even her face was a flat unshaded pink, and her thin lips would
+scarcely have showed save that the powder round the edges was slightly
+caked. Yet there was nothing of pink's freshness and pleasant crudity in
+the general effect. It was a tired, a frowsy pink like a fondant that
+has lain a long while in a confectioner's window.
+
+"Take a chair and make yourself at home," she invited him. "What's your
+name?"
+
+He told her "Fane."
+
+"You silly thing, you don't suppose I'm going to call you Mr. Fane, do
+you? What's your other name? Michael? That's Irish, isn't it? I used to
+know a fellow once called Micky Sullivan. I suppose they call you Micky
+at home."
+
+He was afraid he was invariably known as Michael, and Miss Carlyle
+sighed at the stiff sort of a name it was.
+
+"Mine's Poppy," she volunteered. "That's much more free and easy. Or I
+think so," she added rather doubtfully, as Michael did not immediately
+celebrate its license by throwing pillows at her. "Are you really
+lodging here?" she went on. "You don't look much like a pro."
+
+Michael said that was so much the better, as he wasn't one.
+
+"I've got you at last," cried Poppy. "You're a shop-walker at
+Russell's."
+
+He could not help laughing very much at this, and the queer pink room
+seemed to become more faded at the sound of his merriment. Poppy looked
+offended by the reception of her guess, and Michael hastened to restore
+her good temper by asking questions of her.
+
+"You're on the stage, aren't you?"
+
+"I usually get into panto," she admitted.
+
+"Aren't you acting now?"
+
+"Yes, I don't think. You needn't be funny."
+
+"I wasn't trying to be funny."
+
+"You mind your business," she said bitterly. "And I'll look after mine."
+
+"There doesn't seem to be anything very rude in asking if you're acting
+now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, shut up! As if you didn't know."
+
+"Know what?" he repeated.
+
+He looked so genuinely puzzled that Poppy seemed to make an effort to
+overcome her suspicion of his mockery.
+
+"It's five years since I went on the game," she said.
+
+Michael blushed violently, partly on her account, partly for his own
+stupidity, and explained that Mrs. Murdoch had told him she was in the
+profession.
+
+"Well, you didn't expect her to say 'my ground-floor front's a gay
+woman,' did you?"
+
+He agreed that such an abrupt characterization would have surprised him.
+
+"Well, I'm going out to get dinner now," she announced.
+
+"Why don't you dine with me?" Michael suggested.
+
+She looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"Can you afford it?"
+
+"I think I could manage it."
+
+"Because if we _are_ in the same house that doesn't say you've got to
+pay my board, does it?" she demanded proudly.
+
+"Once in a way won't matter," Michael insisted. "And we might go on to a
+music hall afterward."
+
+"Yes, we might, if I hadn't got to pay the woman who's looking after my
+kid for some clothes she's made for him," said Poppy. "And sitting with
+you at the Holborn all night won't do that. No, you can give me dinner
+and then I'll P.O. I'm not going to put on a frock even for you, because
+I never get off only when I'm in a coat and skirt."
+
+Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.
+
+"Go on, sit down. As you're going to take me out to dinner, you can talk
+to me while I dress as a reward."
+
+In this faded pink room where the sun was by now shining with a splendor
+that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and overblown,
+Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape as it were
+from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters to be
+written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she was
+ready.
+
+Michael's own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor
+front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this
+moment such a room as Poppy's. It could not be. It could not be. And he
+realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury,
+craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors.
+This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of the
+underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature
+downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque
+with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course
+her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive plainness,
+her schoolma'am air, her decent unobtrusiveness. Yet she was plucky, and
+she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her child. There was,
+too, something admirable in the candor with which she had treated him.
+There was something friendly and birdlike about her, and he thought how
+when he had been first aware of her movements below he had compared them
+to a bird's fidgeting. There was something really appealing about the
+gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at her description; and
+then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed her to forego what
+might after all have been for her a pleasant evening because she must
+pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after her child. He could
+so easily have offered to give her the money. No matter, he could make
+amends at once and offer it to her now. It would be doubtless an unusual
+experience for her to come into contact with someone whose rule of life
+was not dictated by the brutal self-interest of those with whom her
+commerce must generally lie. She would serve to bring to the proof his
+theory that so much of the world's beastliness could be cleansed by
+having recourse to the natural instincts of decent behavior without any
+grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael did feel very
+philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy's summons.
+
+"I say," he began at once. "It was stupid of me just now not to suggest
+that I should find the money for your kid's clothes. Look here, we'll go
+to the Holborn after dinner and----" he paused. He felt a delicacy in
+inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her
+company--"and--er--I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?"
+
+"I say, kiddie, you're a sport," she said. "Only look here, don't go and
+spend more than what you can afford. It isn't as if we'd met by chance,
+as you might say."
+
+"Oh no, I can afford two pounds," Michael assured her.
+
+"Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for
+four shillings. That's not too much, is it?"
+
+He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he
+stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds
+was not offered for hire.
+
+"But, kiddie, I can't bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge
+here. These aren't gay rooms."
+
+"I don't want to go anywhere with you," said Michael. "The money is a
+present."
+
+"Oh, is it?" she flamed out. "Then you can keep your dirty money.
+Thanks, I haven't come down to charity. Not yet. If I'm not good enough
+for you, you can keep your money. I believe you're nothing more than a
+dirty ponce. I've gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I'm
+not going to begin now. That's very certain. Are you going out or am I
+going out? Because I don't want to be seen with you. You and your
+presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I
+went home with you."
+
+Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front
+door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the
+fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange
+lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the
+houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather
+the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that passage where the
+little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder with the
+mean and vicious passions they now veiled. Very soon, however, his
+disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there was
+not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively conceal
+secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous toadstools in
+rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must flourish here. It was
+foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a half-aroused curiosity had
+taken its place, and Michael regretted that he had not stayed to hear
+what more she would have said. How far she had been from appreciating
+the motives that prompted his offer of money. Poppy's injustice began to
+depress him. He felt, walking southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of
+her failure to be grateful from his point of view. It hurt him to find
+sincerity so lightly regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity
+which had been touched. _Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned._ The
+ability to apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave
+Michael a great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a
+statement, and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He
+experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great
+commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy
+had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He
+hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could not
+expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She could
+have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could she
+grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical
+expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not
+impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her.
+Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his
+tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only
+an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside.
+Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved
+in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck
+him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the
+power to effect.
+
+On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the
+front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the
+evening.
+
+At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance
+of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the
+landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt
+stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and
+top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern
+behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening
+with much amusement to the people round him. He liked to hear each petty
+host assure his guests that he had brought them to a place of which very
+few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of this
+assurance stared at one another like conspirators.
+
+Just before nine o'clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of
+Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding
+all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade.
+He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from
+Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its approach
+his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her suddenly
+without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of himself.
+However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who resembled
+her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving Promenade
+whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the crowd. That on
+the stage a lady of the haute ecole was with a curious wooden rapidity
+putting a white horse through a number of tricks did not concern his
+attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was the performance.
+Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair than that weary
+heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there was an unity of
+effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At The Oxford the
+whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was a real
+exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days. Indeed,
+so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the frankness
+almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of profiting by
+the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be drugged into
+perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.
+
+Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled
+tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of shimmering green plush, the dim
+foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding
+circumambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the barrier,
+the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones--there was nothing that spoiled
+the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the more nearly was
+the effect achieved. At intervals women whose close-fitting dresses
+seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by: and generally the people
+eyed one another with the indifferent frozen eyes of swimming fish.
+There was indeed something cold-blooded in the very atmosphere, and it
+was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of women that he was expecting
+Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able to imagine her in the luxury
+of the Orient than sleeping down the sun over a crumpled novelette in
+such a room as Poppy's in Camden Town.
+
+The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was
+restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the assurance that he
+had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the shock he
+knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The evening wore
+itself away. The lady of the haute ecole was succeeded by a band of
+Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by half a dozen
+cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its mechanical
+course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it was almost
+possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope's shifting squares and
+lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the ballet and
+whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down there on
+the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a history,
+so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the Promenade
+where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to account for
+her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life. The ballet was
+over, and he passed out into the streets.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without finding
+Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the heart of
+London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the merest
+chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet he began
+to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by some
+enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as if his
+friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in that
+circumambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal motion.
+They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward and
+forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at any
+of the restaurants or cafes to which he went after the theater. By the
+intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself off
+from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often
+thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had
+seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had
+never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen the
+night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to Lily;
+and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a hat,
+perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never meeting the
+wearer's glance.
+
+He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their
+unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not meet
+in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in
+avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it
+was possible to seclude one's self from the claims of human intercourse.
+He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out over the
+sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream to the
+distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which every
+afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books indeed
+that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to
+resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed
+their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.
+Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch
+him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.
+
+"I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do," she affirmed.
+"Doesn't it tire your eyes?"
+
+Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book,
+looking sideways at it like a fat goose.
+
+"Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn't
+it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This
+_is_ Tuesday, isn't it?"
+
+After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch
+decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.
+
+Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could
+scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a
+preconception of an elderly chemist reduced by misfortune and misdeeds
+to the status of one of those individuals who with a discreet manner
+somewhere between a family doctor and a grocer place themselves at the
+service of the public in an atmosphere of antiseptics. Mr. Murdoch was
+not at all like this. He was a squat swarthy man with one very dark eye
+that stared fixedly regardless of the expression of its fellow. Michael
+could not make up his mind whether this eye were blind or not. He
+rather hoped it was, but in any case its fierce blankness was very
+disconcerting. Conversation between Michael and Mr. Murdoch was not very
+lively, and Mrs. Murdoch's adjutant inquisitiveness made Michael the
+more monosyllabic whenever her husband did commit himself to a direct
+inquiry.
+
+"I looked for you in the Horseshoe the other evening," said Michael
+finally, at a loss how in any other way to give Mr. Murdoch an
+impression that he took the faintest interest in his existence.
+
+"In the Horseshoe?" repeated Mr. Murdoch, in surprise. "I never go to
+the Horseshoe only when a friend asks me in to have one."
+
+Michael saw Mrs. Murdoch frowning at him, and, perceiving that there was
+a reason why her husband must not suppose she had been to the Horseshoe
+on the evening of his arrival, he said he had gathered somehow, he did
+not exactly know where or why or when, that Mr. Murdoch was often to be
+found in the Horseshoe. He wished this awkward and unpleasant man would
+leave him and cock his rolling eye anywhere else but in his room.
+
+"Bit of a reader, aren't you?" inquired the chemist.
+
+Michael admitted he read a good deal.
+
+"Ever read Jibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?" continued the
+chemist.
+
+"Some of it."
+
+Mr. Murdoch said in that case it was just as well he hadn't bought some
+volumes he'd seen on a barrow in the Caledonian Road.
+
+"Four-and-six, with two books out in the middle," he proclaimed.
+
+Michael could merely nod his comment, though he racked his brains to
+think of some remark that would betray a vestige of cordiality. Mr.
+Murdoch got up to retire to the kitchen. He evidently did not find his
+tenant sympathetic. Outside on the landing Michael heard him say to his
+wife: "Stuck up la-di-da sort of a----, isn't he?"
+
+Presently the wife came up again.
+
+"How did you like my old man?"
+
+"Oh, very much."
+
+"Did you notice his eye?"
+
+Michael said he had noticed something.
+
+"His brother Fred did that for him."
+
+She spoke proudly, as if Fred's act had been a humane achievement. "When
+they were boys," she explained. "It gives him a funny look. I remember
+when I first met him it gave me the creeps, but I don't notice it really
+now. Would you believe he couldn't see an elephant with it?"
+
+"I wondered if it were blind," said Michael.
+
+"Blind as a leg of mutton," said Mrs. Murdoch, and still there lingered
+in her accents a trace of pride. Then suddenly her demeanor changed and
+there crept over her countenance what Michael was bound to believe to be
+an expression of coyness.
+
+"Don't say anything more to Alf about the Horseshoe. You see, I only
+gave you the idea I was meeting him, because I didn't really know you
+very well at the time. Of course really I'd gone to see my sister. No,
+without a joke, I was spending the evening with a gentleman friend."
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"My old man wouldn't half knock me about, if he had the least suspicion.
+But it's someone I knew before I was married, and that makes a
+difference, doesn't it?"
+
+"Does your husband go out with lady friends he knew before he was
+married?" Michael asked, and wondered if Mrs. Murdoch would see an
+implied reproof.
+
+"What?" she shrilled. "I'd like to catch him nosing after another
+woman. He wouldn't see a hundred elephants before I'd done with him. I'd
+show him."
+
+"But why should you have freedom and not he?" Michael asked.
+
+"Never mind about him. You let him try. You see what he'd get."
+
+Michael did not think the argument could be carried on very profitably.
+So he showed signs of wanting to return to his book, and Mrs. Murdoch
+retired. What extraordinary standards she had, and how bitterly she was
+prepared to defend a convention, for after all in such a marriage the
+infidelity of the husband was nothing but a conventional offense: she
+obviously had no affection for him. The point of view became very
+topsyturvy in Neptune Crescent, Michael decided.
+
+On the last evening of the fortnight during which he had regularly
+visited the Orient, Michael went straight back to Camden Town without
+waiting to scan the cafes and restaurants until half-past twelve as he
+usually had. This abode in Neptune Crescent was empty, and as always
+when that was the case the personality of the house was very vivid upon
+his imagination. As he turned up the gas-jet in the hall, the cramped
+interior with its fusty smell and its thread-bare staircarpet
+disappearing into the upper gloom round the corner seemed to be
+dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of having
+the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent impulse.
+For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the ineffable
+depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to glance at every
+one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the exaggerated
+defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to lock and
+double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two clanking chains.
+He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch and
+Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the summer night, while
+himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back garden and went climbing
+over garden wall and garden wall to abandon this curious mixture of
+salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and solidity, this quite
+indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way strangely cozy house.
+He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor front. He peered
+cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed. The gas-jet was
+glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue flame, but the
+light from the passage showed all her clothes still strewn about. From
+the open door came out the faint perfume of stale scent which mingled
+with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle expression of the
+house's personality. He closed the door gently. In the silence it seemed
+almost as if the least percussion would rouse the very clothes from
+their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning another pinhead of
+gas, and the light from the passage reaching here very dimly was only
+just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly sheen and to show the
+mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the luminous face of the
+clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to unreality, and when
+Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering his room, even they
+were scarcely sound guarantors of his own actuality. He had a certain
+queasiness in opening the door of the Murdochs' bedroom, and he was
+rather glad when he was confronted here by a black void whose secrecy he
+did not feel tempted to violate. With three or four books under his arm
+he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned out of the window two cats yawled
+and fizzed at one another among the laurels, and then scampered away
+into muteness. From a scintillation of colored lights upon the horizon
+he could hear the scrannel sounds of the railway come thinly along the
+night air. Nothing else broke the silence of the nocturnal streets.
+Michael felt tired, and he was disappointed by his failure to find
+Lily. Just as he was dozing off, he remembered that his Viva Voce at
+Oxford was due some time this week. He must go back to Cheyne Walk
+to-morrow, and on this resolution he fell asleep.
+
+Michael woke up with a start and instantly became aware that the house
+was full of discordant sounds. For a minute or two he lay motionless
+trying to connect the noise with the present, trying to separate his
+faculties from the inspissate air that seemed to be throttling them. He
+was not yet free from the confusion of sleep, and for a few seconds he
+could only perceive the sound almost visibly churning the clotted
+darkness that was stifling him. Gradually the clamor resolved itself
+into the voices of Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy at the pitch of
+excitement. Nothing was intelligible except the oaths that came up in a
+series of explosions detached from the main din. He got out of bed and
+lit the gas, saw that it was one o'clock, dressed himself roughly, and
+opened the door of his room.
+
+"Yes, my lad, you thought you was very clever."
+
+"No, I didn't think I was clever. Now then."
+
+"Yes! You can spend all your money on that muck. The sauce of it. In a
+hansom!"
+
+Here Poppy's voice came in with a malignant piping sound.
+
+"Muck yourself, you dirty old case-keeper!"
+
+"You call me a case-keeper? What men have I ever let you bring back
+here?"
+
+Mrs. Murdoch's voice was swollen with wrath.
+
+"You don't know how many men I haven't brought back. So now, you great
+ugly mare!" Poppy howled.
+
+"The only fellow you've ever brought to my house is that one-eyed----
+who calls himself my husband. Mister _Mur_doch! Mis-ter _Murdoch!_ And
+you get out of my house in the streets where you belong. I don't want
+no two-and-fours in _my_ house."
+
+"Hark at her!" Poppy cried, in a horrible screaming laugh. "Why don't
+you go back on the streets yourself? Why, I can remember you as one of
+the old fourpenny Hasbeens when I was still dressmaking; a dirty drunken
+old teat that couldn't have got off with a blind tramp."
+
+Michael punctuated each fresh taunt and accusation with a step forward
+to interfere; and every time he held himself back, pondering the
+impossibility of extracting from these charges and countercharges any
+logical assignment of blame. It made him laugh to think how
+extraordinarily in the wrong they all three were and at the same time
+how they were all perfectly convinced they were right. The only factor
+left out of account was Mrs. Murdoch's own behavior. He wondered rather
+what effect that gentleman friend would produce on the husband. He
+decided that he had better go back to bed until the racket subsided.
+Then, just as he was turning away in the midst of an outpouring of
+vileness far more foul than anything uttered so far, he heard what
+sounded like a blow. That of course could not be tolerated, and he
+descended to intervene.
+
+The passage was the field of battle, and the narrow space seemed to give
+not only an added virulence to the fight, but also an added grotesquery.
+When Michael arrived at the head of the staircase, Alf had pinned his
+wife to the wall and was shouting to Poppy over his shoulder to get back
+into her own room. Poppy would go halfway, but always a new insult would
+occur to her, and she would return to fling it at Mrs. Murdoch, stabbing
+the while into its place again a hatpin which during her retreats she
+always half withdrew.
+
+As for Mrs. Murdoch, she was by now weeping hysterically and
+occasionally making sudden forward plunges that collapsed like jelly.
+
+Michael paused at the head of the stairs, wondering what to say. It
+seemed to him really rather a good thing that Alf was restraining his
+wife. It would be extremely unpleasant to have to separate the two women
+if they closed with each other. He had almost decided to retire upstairs
+again, when Poppy caught sight of him and at once turned her abuse in
+his direction.
+
+"What's it got to do with you?" she screamed. "What's the good in you
+standing gaping there? We all know what _you_ are. We all know what
+she's always going up to _your_ room for."
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was heaving and puffing and groaning, and while Alf held
+her, his rolling eye with fierce and meaningless stare nearly made
+Michael laugh. However, he managed to be serious, and gravely advised
+Poppy to go to bed.
+
+"Don't you dare try to order me about!" she shrieked. "Keep your
+poncified ways for that fat old maggot which her husband can't hardly
+hold, and I don't blame him. She's about as big as a omnibus."
+
+"Oh, you wicked woman," sobbed Mrs. Murdoch. "Oh, you mean, hateful
+snake-in-the-grass! Oh, you filth!"
+
+"Hold your jaw," commanded Alf. "If you don't want me to punch into
+you."
+
+"All day she's in his room. Let him stand up and deny it if he can, the
+dirty tyke. Why don't you punch into _him,_ Alf?" Poppy screamed.
+
+Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.
+
+"Let _me_ look after Mrs. Murdoch I _don't_ think!" shouted Poppy. "And
+be a man, even if you can't keep your old woman out of the lodger's
+room. ---- ----! I wouldn't half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man,
+the ---- ----!"
+
+It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being
+nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman's thin magenta
+lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable.
+When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to hold
+on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.
+
+Michael's laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch spat
+in her husband's face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip upon her
+shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other. Michael,
+though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs to part
+them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned and
+attacked him. The hat-stand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat slid up
+and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and dust and
+spirituous breath.
+
+At last Michael managed to secure Poppy's thin twitching arms and to
+hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and he
+was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began fecklessly
+to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf, who had gone
+to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case a policeman's
+bull's-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared in the doorway.
+
+"What a smell of gas!" he exclaimed nervously.
+
+There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in
+her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead
+pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was
+rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried
+to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked the
+door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended upon
+the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the hat-stand,
+while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of tumbled
+hair.
+
+Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very
+cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed
+eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers: of
+last night's tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming
+countenance.
+
+"Quite a set-out we had last night, didn't we?" she said expansively.
+"But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with
+my old man in a hansom cab. There's a nice game to get up to. I was
+bound to let her have it. I couldn't have held myself in."
+
+"I suppose you'll get rid of her now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, well, she's not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She
+was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I'd had one or two myself.
+Oh, well, it wouldn't do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment
+in this life?"
+
+She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his
+standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy
+feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and
+fears. But to-day he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.
+
+Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune Crescent.
+
+"It seems such a pity," she said. "And just as I was beginning to get
+used to your ways. Oh, well, we'll meet again some day, I hope, this
+side of the cemetery."
+
+Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night,
+but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away from
+Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small doorway
+looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also waved rather
+maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose pressed
+against the panes of the ground-floor front.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CAFE D'ORANGE
+
+
+Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding
+that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected
+she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune
+Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not
+subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life,
+the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate and
+gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the
+tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became waxily
+pink under his stare.
+
+"Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir." It was as if she were rebuking
+his observation.
+
+His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.
+
+"Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you
+to send me those postcards."
+
+If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her
+about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did
+not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have seemed
+to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other people
+was a confidence he always resented.
+
+"Stella and Alan are in the studio," she told him.
+
+They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said he
+would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of pallid
+grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could not keep
+back the thought of how utterly Alan's company had replaced his own. Not
+that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted; but a period
+of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were being rather
+ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously glad to see
+him that the fleck of bitterness vanished immediately, and he was at
+their service.
+
+"Where have you been?" Stella demanded. "We go to Richmond. We send
+frantic wires to you to join us on the river, and when we come back
+you're gone. Where have you been?"
+
+"I've been away," Michael answered, with a certain amount of
+embarrassment.
+
+"My dear old Michael, we never supposed you'd been hiding in the
+cistern-cupboard for a fortnight," said Stella, striking three chords of
+cheerful contempt.
+
+"I believe he went back to Oxford," suggested Alan.
+
+"I am going up to-morrow," Michael said. "When is your Viva?"
+
+"Next week. Where are you going to stay?"
+
+"In college, if I can get hold of a room."
+
+"Bother Oxford," interrupted Stella. "We want to know where you've been
+this fortnight."
+
+"You do," Alan corrected.
+
+"I'll tell you both later on," Michael volunteered. "Just at present I
+suppose you won't grudge me a secret. People who are engaged to be
+married should show a very special altruism toward people who are not."
+
+"Michael, I will not have you being important and carrying about a
+secret with you," Stella declared.
+
+"You can manage either me or Alan," Michael offered. "But you simply
+shall not manage both of us. Personally, I recommend you to break-in
+Alan."
+
+With evasive banter he succeeded in postponing the revelation of what he
+was, as Stella said, up to.
+
+"We're going in for Herefords," Alan suddenly announced without
+consideration for the trend of the talk. "You know. Those white-faced
+chaps."
+
+Michael looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"I was thinking about this place of Stella's in Huntingdonshire," Alan
+explained. "We went down to see it last week."
+
+"Oh, Alan, why did you tell him? He doesn't deserve to be told."
+
+"Is it decent?" Michael asked.
+
+"Awfully decent," said Alan. "Rather large, you know."
+
+"In fact, we shall belong to the squirearchy," cried Stella, crashing
+down upon the piano with the first bars of Chopin's most exciting
+Polonaise and from the Polonaise going off into an absurd impromptu
+recitative.
+
+"We shall have a dog-cart--a high and shining dog-cart--and we shall go
+bowling down the lanes of the county of Hunts--because in books about
+people who live in the county and of the county and by with or from the
+county dog-carts invariably bowl--we shall have a herd of Herefordshire
+bulls and bullocks and bullockesses--and my husband Alan with a straw in
+his mouth will go every morning with the bailiff to inspect their
+well-being--- and three days every week from November to March we shall
+go hunting in Huntingdon--and when we aren't actually hunting in
+Huntingdon we shall be talking about hunting--and we shall also talk
+about the Primrose League and the foot-and-mouth disease and the
+evolutions of the new High Church Vicar--we shall...."
+
+But Michael threw a cushion at her, and the recitative came to an end.
+
+They all three talked for a long while more seriously of plans for life
+at Hardingham Hall.
+
+"You know dear old Prescott requested me in his will that I would hyphen
+his name on to mine, whether I were married or single," said Stella. "So
+we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Alan has been very good
+about that, though I think he's got a dim idea it's putting on side.
+Stella Prescott-Merivale or The Curse of the County! And when I play I'm
+going to be Madame Merivale. I decline to be done out of the Madame! and
+everybody will pronounce it Marivahleh and I shall receive the unanimous
+encomia of the critical press."
+
+"Life will be rather a rag," said Michael, with approbation.
+
+"Of course it's going to be simply wonderful. Can't you see the
+headlines? From Chopin to Sheep. Madame Merivale, the famous Virtuosa,
+and her Flock of Barbary Long-tails."
+
+It was all so very remote from Neptune Crescent, Michael thought. They
+really were going to be so ridiculously happy, these two, in their
+country life. And now they were talking of finding him a house close to
+Hardingham Hall. There must be just that small Georgian house, they
+vowed, where with a large garden of stately walks and a
+well-proportioned library of books he could stay in contented retreat.
+They promised him, too, that beyond the tallest cedar on the lawn a
+gazebo should command the widest, the greenest expanse of England ever
+beheld.
+
+"It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts," said Stella,
+"if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And of course
+you'd ride a nag. I'm not sure really that you wouldn't have to wear
+knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me feel like
+Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?"
+
+"I should make up your mind which," Michael advised.
+
+"But you know what I mean," she persisted. "The doctor's wife would
+come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or
+whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, 'We must ask my
+brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to know.
+My brother knows everything.' And she would agree with a pursed-up
+mouth. 'Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone says your
+brother is a great scholar. It's such a pleasure to have him at the
+Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?'"
+
+"If you're supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you
+at once that it's not a bit like it."
+
+"But I think you ought to come and live near us," Alan solemnly put in.
+
+"Of course, my dear, he's coming," Stella declared.
+
+"Of course I'm not," Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they
+wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want
+him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would
+enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would
+care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the shrubbery's
+edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In the quick
+vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds, Michael
+experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he intended to do.
+
+"And how about Michael's wife?" Alan asked.
+
+Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
+
+"Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him," Stella
+confidently prophesied.
+
+"No, really," said Michael to hide his embarrassment. "I object.
+Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement."
+
+Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describe a
+lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended
+to place him.
+
+"I think rather a Quakerish person, don't you, Alan? Rather neat and
+tiny with a great sense of humor and...."
+
+"In fact, an admirable sick nurse," Michael interposed, laughing.
+
+Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the
+river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how
+naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now that
+by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in the
+long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed to
+Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the security of
+his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that fleeting
+disloyalty to his task.
+
+Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn's old
+white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the
+tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and
+irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really
+it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay
+between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in
+Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made
+no attempt to find Lily.
+
+Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael's
+immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel
+the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had achieved
+a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or two of the
+St. Mary's dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at All Souls.
+The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was attractive to have
+anything so remote come suddenly within the region of feasibleness. He
+would lose nothing by trying for it, and if he succeeded what a
+congenial existence offered itself. With private means he would be able
+to divide his time between Oxford and London. There would really be
+nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that seemed to stretch
+before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he certainly had not
+worked hard enough to obtain a first without some talent) he would
+prosecute the study of history. He would make himself famous in a select
+sort of way. He would become the authority of a minor tributary to the
+great stream of research. A set of very scholarly, very thorough works
+would testify to his reputation. There were plenty of archaic problems
+still to be solved. He cast a proprietary glance over the centuries, and
+he had almost decided to devote himself to the service of Otto I and
+Sylvester II, when in a moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly
+before his mind as the ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of
+research into the past seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the
+congratulatory letters and decided to let the future wait a while. This
+pursuit of Lily was a mad business, no doubt, but to come to grips with
+the present called for a certain amount of madness.
+
+Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of
+trying for All Souls.
+
+"You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were
+up that you didn't know what you ought to do, and now when it's
+perfectly obvious you won't make the slightest attempt to do it."
+
+"Used I to grumble?" asked Michael.
+
+"Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical
+questions which had no answer," said Alan severely.
+
+"What if I told you I'd found an answer to a great many of them?"
+
+"Ever since I've been engaged to Stella you've found it necessary to be
+very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?"
+
+"It's imaginable, don't you think, that I might be making up my mind to
+do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at
+All Souls?"
+
+"But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch
+it."
+
+"I tell you it was a fluke."
+
+"My third wasn't a fluke," said Alan. "I worked really hard for it."
+
+"Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run," Michael
+argued. "You have already fitted into your place with the most complete
+exactitude. There's no dimension in your future that can possibly
+trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big
+for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my
+frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be too
+small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to squeeze
+into it most uncomfortably."
+
+"You'll never do anything," Alan prophesied. "Because you'll always be
+doubting."
+
+"I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity," Michael pointed
+out. "With all doubts and hesitations I'm perfectly convinced of one
+great factor in human life--the necessity to follow the impulse which
+lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization. Reason
+carried to the _nth_ power can always with absurd ease be debauched
+by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind's wretched little lament for
+disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because they are
+irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she claims to
+be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member of
+Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The franchise is
+to be endowed with a sacramental significance. If the New Women win,
+they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men. But of course
+they won't win, because God is so delightfully irrational. By the way,
+it's worth noting that the peculiar vestment with which popular fancy
+has clothed the New Woman is called rational costume. You often hear of
+'rationals' as a synonym for breeches. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about
+God being irrational. You never know what he'll do next. He is a
+dreadful problem for rationalists. That's why they have abolished him."
+
+"You're confusing two different kinds of reason," said Alan. "What you
+call impulse--unless your impulse is mere madness--is what I might call
+reason."
+
+"In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the
+reconstruction of your terminology. I'm not a philosopher, and therefore
+I've given this vague generic name 'impulse' to something which
+deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering impetus does
+it give to conduct, a very long name indeed."
+
+"But if you're going through life depending on impulse," Alan objected,
+"you'll be no better off than a weathercock. You can't discount reason
+in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by
+experience."
+
+"The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no
+reliance whatever."
+
+"It's no good arguing with you," Alan said. "Because what you call
+impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect logic."
+
+"Alan, I can't believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your
+conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I'm not going
+to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a country
+squire. Let's hold on to what certainties we can."
+
+Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem
+of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the
+intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he
+thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore
+he refrained.
+
+There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was already
+in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the burden of it
+in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and Stella and
+Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join them, if he
+could get away from London.
+
+"If you can get away!" Stella scoffed. "What rot you do talk."
+
+But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where
+he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others
+northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on
+which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the
+stagnant sheen of the Thames.
+
+That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was
+no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from London
+for a while. After the performance he visited the Cafe d'Orange in
+Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often noticed
+the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the quality
+of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the Cafe
+d'Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he had so
+far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he was
+rather inclined to think that she was someone's mistress and that
+Drake's view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she had
+yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
+
+Downstairs at the Cafe d'Orange was rather more like a corner of hell
+than Michael had anticipated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in
+these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and
+vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly down
+and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner left by
+the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy tunics
+of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were grinding out
+ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking and laughter,
+the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of the waiters made
+such a din that Michael stood for a moment in confusion, debating the
+possibility of one more person threading his way through the serried
+tables to a seat.
+
+There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and in
+one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So
+paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across
+and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and soon
+with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before him in
+that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always induced by
+ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped alcove, he
+seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and voices of
+the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic finale. After
+a time the various groups and individuals were separated in his mind, so
+that in their movements he began to take an easily transferred interest,
+endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant characteristics in turn. Round
+him in the alcove there were strange contrasts of behavior. At one table
+four offensive youths were showing off with exaggerated laughter for the
+benefit of nobody's attention. Behind them in the crepuscule of two
+broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl; ivory white and cloying the air with
+her heavy perfume, was arguing in low passionate tones with a cold-eyed
+listener who with a straw was tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a
+moist surface of cigarette-ash. In the deepest corner a girl with a high
+complexion and bright eyes was making ardent love to a partially drunk
+and bearded man, winking the while over her shoulder at whoever would
+watch her comedy. The other places were filled by impersonal women who
+sipped from their glasses without relish and stared disdainfully at each
+other down their powdered noses. At Michael's own table was a blotchy
+man who alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and
+immediately opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat
+pale face of the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat
+trimmed with daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not
+catch her eye, and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward
+the raffish and rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall
+were large mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in
+reflection the throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications.
+Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls,
+and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay
+longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they
+must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and
+with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless
+accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of
+alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam
+of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
+
+Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested
+commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him, and
+he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
+
+"You're very silent, kiddie," she said. "I'll give you a penny for
+them."
+
+"I really wasn't thinking about anything in particular," said Michael.
+"Will you have a drink?"
+
+"Don't mind if I do. Alphonse!" she shouted, tugging at the arm of the
+overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. "Bring me a hot
+whisky-and-lemon. There's a love."
+
+Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed
+on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was
+expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a
+fountain of glass.
+
+"I've taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot," she informed
+Michael. "You know. Anyone does, don't they? Get a sudden fit and keep
+on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This'll be my sixth to-night. But
+I'm a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I reckon
+it'll bring me luck."
+
+"I expect it will," Michael said.
+
+"You are serious, aren't you? When I first saw you I thought you was the
+spitting image of a fellow I know--Bert Saunders, who writes about the
+boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He's more of a bright-eyes than
+you are, though."
+
+The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael's health.
+
+"Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it," she said
+meditatingly. "What's your name, kiddie?"
+
+He told her.
+
+"Michael," she repeated. "You're a Jew, then?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name, isn't
+it? Michael? Of course it is. I don't mind Jew fellows myself. One or
+two of them have been very good to me. My name's Daisy Palmer."
+
+The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his
+encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very
+cautious.
+
+"You look rather French," was his most audacious sally toward the
+personal.
+
+"Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on
+the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself."
+
+Again the conversation dropped.
+
+"I'm waiting for a friend," Daisy volunteered. "She's been having a row
+with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and tell
+me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here by
+now. What's the time, kid?"
+
+It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
+
+"I'm rather worried over Doll," she confided to Michael, "because this
+fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns
+nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, 'Doll, that dirty rotter you're so
+soft over'll swing for you before he's done. Why don't you leave him,' I
+said, 'and come and live along with me for a bit?'"
+
+"And what did she say?" Michael asked.
+
+But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself
+coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
+
+"Oh, doesn't she look shocking white," exclaimed Daisy. "Doll!" she
+shouted, waving to her. "Over here, duck."
+
+The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in
+exaggerated falsetto.
+
+"---- to you," she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was
+a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased
+Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said to
+these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Cafe
+d'Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on
+otherwise indescribable humanity.
+
+By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating
+chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend's side. She began
+immediately a voluble tale:
+
+"Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told him
+off so as he could hardly look me in the face. 'You call yourself a
+man,' I said, 'why, you dirty little alien.' That's what I called him. I
+did straight, 'you dirty little---- '"
+
+"This is my friend," interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed.
+It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going
+to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember the
+convention of their profession.
+
+"Pleased to meet you," said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand with
+half-a-simper.
+
+"What will you drink?" asked Michael.
+
+"Mine's a brandy and soda, please. 'You dirty little alien,' I said."
+Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
+
+"Go on, did you? And what did he say?" asked Daisy admiringly.
+
+"He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?"
+
+"That's right," nodded Daisy wisely.
+
+"'For two years,' I said, 'you've let a girl keep you,' I said, 'and
+then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get
+hold of her,' I said. 'I'll tear her eyes out.' 'No, you won't, now
+then,' he said. 'Won't I? I will, then,' and with that I just lost
+control of my feelings, I felt that wild...."
+
+"What did you do, Doll?" asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe
+the outraged memory.
+
+"What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to the
+Orange. 'Yes,' I said, 'you can sit drinking tea while you break my
+heart.' Don't you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a
+straight girl when I first knew him. Straight--well, anyway not on the
+game like what I am now." Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter
+self-compassion. "I've slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me like
+dirt."
+
+"Go on. Don't cry, duck," Daisy begged. "Come home with me to-night and
+we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn't cry over
+him," she said fiercely. "There's no fellow worth crying over. The best
+of them isn't worth crying over."
+
+The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly's tears, and
+Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive pugnacity of
+the underworld, rose to attack them.
+
+"Sit down," Daisy commanded. "I wouldn't mess my hands, if I was you,
+with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You'll get us all
+into trouble."
+
+Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute
+or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
+
+Gradually Dolly's tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she
+became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen
+with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin
+expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
+
+"Rotten, I call it, don't you?" said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing to
+Michael.
+
+He agreed with a profound nod.
+
+"And she's been that good to him. You wouldn't believe."
+
+Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of
+Dolly's virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
+
+At this moment the subject of Daisy's eulogy rose from her seat and
+stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the
+beerhall.
+
+"My God!" she said, with ominous calm.
+
+"What is it, duck?" asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
+
+"My God!" Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a
+volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass
+evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy
+seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her
+back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of
+the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in
+a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors
+began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the
+cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man
+collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer winked
+over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four offensive
+youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man ceased to
+look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily his teeth.
+
+It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather a
+nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her friend.
+She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark that Florrie
+for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she could come it
+over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do that; yes, more
+than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
+
+The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging his
+way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using their
+best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate. Though she
+declared loudly that nothing would make her quit the Orange, and
+certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to be
+coaxed away.
+
+Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again
+and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers,
+which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how it
+had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and enmities
+and friendships of a complete society. He found himself explaining to
+several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been compelled to endure at
+the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was extraordinary how suddenly this
+absurd intrigue of the underworld came to seem tremendously important.
+He felt that all his sense of proportion was rapidly disappearing. In
+the middle of an excited justification of Dolly's tears he was aware
+that he and his surroundings and his attitude were to himself
+incredible. He was positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the
+inconsequence of dreams. Or was all his life until this moment a dream,
+and was this reality? One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was
+the necessity to see the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the
+evening. He felt very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with
+admirable composure, and when he asked her advice about the course of
+action, he agreed at once with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a
+cab and be allowed in Daisy's rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage
+and grief that was here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very
+imprudent display of emotion.
+
+"She'll be barred from coming down here," said Daisy. "Come on, let's
+get her home."
+
+"Where's that Florrie?" screamed Dolly.
+
+"She's gone home. So what's the use in your carrying on so mad? The
+manager's got his eye on us, Doll. Come on, Doll, let's get on home. I
+tell you the manager's looking at us. You are a silly girl."
+
+"---- the manager," said Dolly obstinately. "Let him look."
+
+"Why don't you come and see if you can find Florrie outside?" Daisy
+suggested.
+
+Dolly was moved by this proposal, and presently she agreed to vacate the
+Orange, much to Michael's relief, for he was expecting every moment to
+see her attack the manager with the match-stand that was fretting her
+fingers. As it happened, Daisy's well-meant suggestion was very unlucky
+because Hungarian Dave, the cause of all the bother, was standing on the
+pavement close to the entrance.
+
+Daisy whispered to Michael to get a cab quickly, because Hungarian Dave
+was close at hand. He looked at him curiously, this degraded individual
+in whose domestic affairs he was now so deeply involved. A very
+objectionable creature he was, too, with his greasy hair and large red
+mouth. His cap was pulled down over the eyes, and he may have wished not
+to be seen; but an instinct for his presence made Dolly turn round, and
+in a moment she was in the thick of the delight of telling him off for
+the benefit of a crowd increasing with every epithet she flung. It was
+useless now to attempt to get her away, and Michael and Daisy could only
+drag her back when she seemed inclined to attack him with finger-nails
+or hatpin.
+
+"Get a cab," cried Daisy. "Never mind what she says. Get a cab, and
+we'll put the silly thing into it and drive off. The coppers will be
+here in a moment."
+
+Michael managed to hail a hansom immediately, but when he turned back to
+the scene of the pavement the conditions of the dispute were entirely
+changed. Hungarian Dave, infuriated or frightened, had knocked Dolly
+down, and she was just staggering to her feet, when a policeman stepped
+into the circle.
+
+"Come on, move along," he growled.
+
+The bully had merged himself in the ring of onlookers, and Dolly, with a
+cry of fury, flung herself in his direction.
+
+"Stop that, will you?" the policeman said savagely, seizing her by the
+arm.
+
+"Go on, it's a dirty shame," cried Daisy. "Why don't you take the fellow
+as knocked her down?"
+
+Michael by this time had forced his way through the crowd, rage beating
+upon his brain like a great scarlet hammer.
+
+"You infernal ass," he shouted to the constable. "Haven't you got the
+sense to see that this woman was attacked first? Where is the blackguard
+who did it?" he demanded of the stupid, the gross, the vilely curious
+press of onlookers. No one came forward to support him, and Hungarian
+Dave had slipped away.
+
+"Move on, will you?" the policeman repeated.
+
+"Damn you," cried Michael. "Will you let go of that woman's arm?"
+
+The constable with a bovine density of purpose proceeded apparently to
+arrest the wretched Dolly, and Michael maddened by his idiocy felt that
+the only thing to do was to hit him as hard as he could. This he did.
+The constable immediately blew his whistle. Other masses of inane bulk
+loomed up, and Michael was barely able to control himself sufficiently
+not to resist all the way to Vine Street, as two of them marched him
+along, and four more followed with Daisy and Dolly. A spumy trail of
+nocturnal loiterers clung to their wake.
+
+Next morning Michael appeared before the magistrate. He listened to the
+charge against him and nearly laughed aloud in court, because the whole
+business so much resembled the trial in Alice in Wonderland. It was not
+that the magistrate was quite so illogical as the King of Hearts; but he
+was so obviously biassed in favor of the veracity of a London
+policeman, that the inconsequence of the nightmare which had begun last
+night was unalterably preserved. Michael, aware of the circumstances
+which had led up to what was being made to appear as wantonly riotous
+behavior in Leicester Square, could not fail to be exasperated by the
+inability of the magistrate to understand his own straightforward story.
+He began to sympathize with the lawless population. The law could only
+seem to them an unintelligent machine for crushing their freedom. If the
+conduct of this case were a specimen of administration, it was obvious
+that arrest must be synonymous with condemnation. The magistrate in the
+first place seemed dreadfully overcome by the sorrow of beholding a
+young man in Michael's position on the police-court.
+
+"I cannot help wondering when I see a young man who has had every
+opportunity ..." the magistrate went on in a voice that worked on the
+stale air of the court like a rusty file.
+
+"I'm not a defaulting bank clerk," Michael interrupted. "Is it
+impossible for you to understand----"
+
+"Don't speak to me like that. Keep quiet. I've never been spoken to like
+that in all my experience as a magistrate. Keep quiet."
+
+Michael sighed in compassion for his age and stupidity.
+
+"Are there any previous convictions against Wearne and Palmer?" the
+magistrate inquired. He was told that the woman Palmer had not hitherto
+appeared, but that Wearne had been previously fined for disorderly
+conduct in Shaftesbury Avenue. "Ah!" said the magistrate. "Ah!" he
+repeated, looking over the rim of his glasses. "And the case against the
+male defendant? I will take the evidence of Constable C11254."
+
+"Your worship, I was on duty yesterday evening at 12.25 in Leicester
+Square. Hearing a noise in the direction of the Caffy Dorringe and
+observing a crowd collect, I moved across the road to disperse it. The
+defendant Wearne was using obscene language to an unknown man; and
+wishing to get her to move on I took hold of her arm. The male
+defendant, also using very obscene language, attempted to rescue her and
+struck me on the chest. I blew my whistle...."
+
+The ponderous constable with his thick red neck continued a sing-song
+narrative.
+
+When Michael's turn came to refute some of the evidence against him, he
+merely shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It's really useless, you know, for me to say anything. If 'damn you' is
+obscene, then I was obscene. If a girl is knocked down by a bully and on
+rising to her feet is instantly arrested by a dunderhead in a blue
+uniform, and if an onlooker punches this functionary, then I did assault
+the constable."
+
+"This sort of insolence won't do," said the magistrate trembling with a
+curious rarefied passion. "I have a very good mind to send you to prison
+without the option of a fine, but in consideration...."
+
+Somehow or other it was made to appear a piece of extraordinary
+magnanimity on the part of the magistrate that Michael was only fined
+three guineas and costs.
+
+"I wish to pay the fines of Miss Palmer and Miss Wearne," he announced.
+
+Later in the morning Michael, with the two girls, emerged into the
+garish summer day. Not even yet was the illusion of a nightmare
+dissipated, for as he looked at his two companions, feathered, frilled
+and bedraggled, who were walking beside him, he could scarcely
+acknowledge even their probable reality here in the sun.
+
+"I shan't drink hot whisky-and-lemon again in a hurry," vowed Daisy. "I
+knew it was going to bring me bad luck when I said it tasted so funny."
+
+"But you said your hat was going to be lucky," Michael pointed out.
+
+"Yes, I've been properly sucked in over that," Daisy agreed.
+
+"Nothing ever brings me luck," grumbled Dolly resentfully.
+
+As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he
+was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal
+mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.
+
+"I reckon I'll go home and have a good lay down," said Daisy. "Are you
+going to have dinner with me?" she asked, turning to Dolly.
+
+"Dinner?" echoed Dolly. "Nice time to talk to anyone about their dinner,
+when they've got the sick like I have! Dinner!"
+
+They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he
+might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He
+found it embarrassing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and
+Edgar's window to stare instead at him and his companions.
+
+Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call
+upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the
+second five-pound note into which the law had broken.
+
+"Is this for us?" she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll's going to
+live with me a bit now, aren't you, Doll?"
+
+"I suppose so," said Doll.
+
+Michael really admired the hospitality which was willing to shelter
+this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the
+sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with
+Hungarian Dave.
+
+When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary appearance
+by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo was almost
+to make him incredulous of the night's event, and he could not help
+paying a visit to the Cafe d'Orange, to verify the alcove in which he
+had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and he stood
+for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the night before
+he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the bar, he thought
+he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes, it was certainly
+Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder, addressing him by
+name. Meats turned round with a start.
+
+"Don't you remember me?" asked Michael.
+
+"Of course I do," said Meats nervously. "But for the love of Jerusalem
+drop calling me by that name. Here, let's go outside."
+
+In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.
+
+"Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble," said Meats.
+
+"You are a strange chap," said Michael. "When I first met you it was
+Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now----"
+
+"Look here," said Meats, "give over, will you? I've told you once. If
+you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now
+don't forget."
+
+"Come and have a drink, and tell me what you've been doing in the four
+years since we met," Michael suggested.
+
+"B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?"
+
+Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had
+vanished from his mind.
+
+"Come on, then," said Barnes. "We'll go into the Afrique, upstairs."
+
+Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was
+causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness which
+had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had seemed the
+predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at the round
+marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled an actor
+out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was the cheesy
+complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season too much worn
+and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with its dismoded
+exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness; perhaps,
+thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it had merely
+been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an exception.
+Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a compassionate
+amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity as of a puppet
+temporarily put out of action testified to his own morbid heightening of
+common things in the past. How incredible it seemed now that this Barnes
+had once been able to work upon his soul with influential doctrine.
+
+"What have you been doing with yourself?" Michael asked again.
+
+"Oh, hopping and popping about. I've got the rats at present."
+
+"Where are you living?"
+
+Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. "What do you want
+to know for?" he asked.
+
+"Mere inquisitiveness," Michael assured him. "You really needn't treat
+me like a detective, you know."
+
+"My mistake," said Barnes. "But really, Fane. Let's see, that is your
+name? Thought it was. I don't often forget a name. No, without swank,
+Fane, I've been hounded off my legs lately. I'm living in Leppard
+Street. Pimlico way."
+
+"I'd like to come and see you some time," said Michael.
+
+"Here, straight, what _is_ your game?" Barnes could not conceal his
+suspicion.
+
+"Inquisitiveness," Michael declared again. "Also I rather want a Sancho
+Panza."
+
+"Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige," said Barnes very
+sarcastically.
+
+It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming,
+but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that
+he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEPPARD STREET
+
+
+While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes an
+outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present narrative
+was probably not less cynical than the account of his life related to
+Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps because his
+imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality, he could no
+longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals calmly, neither
+blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental goose-flesh. Yet amid
+all the frankness accorded to him he could not find out why Barnes had
+changed his name. He was curious about this, because he could not
+conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for Barnes to reveal. It would
+be interesting to find out what could really make even him pause; no
+doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the underworld, it would turn
+out to be something that Michael himself would consider trivial in
+comparison with so much of what Barnes had boasted. Anyway, whether he
+discovered the secret or not, it would certainly be interesting to study
+Barnes, since in him good and evil might at any moment display
+themselves as clearly as a hidden substance to a reagent flung into a
+seething alembic. It might perhaps be assuming too much to say that
+there was any good in him; and yet Michael was unwilling to suppose that
+all his conversions were merely the base drugs of a disordered morality.
+Apart from his philosophic value, Barnes might very actually be of
+service in the machinery of finding Lily.
+
+At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.
+
+"Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this," he commented.
+
+Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse to
+be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing in
+that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably
+than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had
+civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a
+commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased
+with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the
+reverse true?
+
+"Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?" Michael
+asked. "I do wish you could understand it's really so much more
+difficult. I can't distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly
+so well as you can."
+
+"Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell
+you," said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. "In my experience most
+of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we haven't
+got. I don't care what it is--a woman or a drink or a new suit of
+clothes. Money'll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I
+could be a bloody angel."
+
+"Supposing I offered you half as much for three months," suggested
+Michael. "Do you think you'd find life any easier while it lasted?"
+
+"Well, don't be silly," said Barnes. "Of course I should. If you'd
+walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody had
+dropped a threepenny bit, you'd think it was easier. It's not a bit of
+good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you'd be just the same.
+Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man who
+first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey's ears on his
+nob. What's it done for me? I ask you. Why, it's made me so that I'd
+steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid on
+another."
+
+"Tell me about Leppard Street," said Michael, laughing. "What's it
+like?"
+
+"Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That's what it
+looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who's lost all his
+teeth, and you've got what it feels like to be living in it."
+
+"Supposing I said I'd like to try?" asked Michael. "What would you
+think?"
+
+"Think? I shouldn't think two seconds. I should know you were having a
+game. What good's Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing
+up and down all day on cushions?"
+
+"Experience," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, rats! Nothing's experience that you haven't had to do."
+
+"Well, I'll give you five pounds a week," Michael offered, "if you'll
+keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn't want
+anything very dreadful, of course," he added.
+
+It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest,
+so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and
+offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason
+for wishing to go to Leppard Street.
+
+"You see, I want to find a girl," he explained.
+
+"Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you'll lose the best girl
+you've got straight off. That's all there is to it."
+
+"You don't understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I
+want to find her and marry her."
+
+It seemed to Michael that Barnes' manner changed in some scarcely
+definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five
+pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked.
+He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an
+almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his
+former attitude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve
+had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap.
+Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no allusion
+to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to emotion. This was
+proving really a most delightful example of the truth of his theory. And
+it was clever of Barnes--it was more than clever, it was truly
+imaginative of him--to realize without another question the need to
+leave for a while Cheyne Walk.
+
+"But is there a vacant room?" Michael asked in sudden dread of
+disappointment.
+
+"Look here, you'd better see the place before you decide on leaving
+here," Barnes advised. "It isn't a cross between Buckingham Palace and
+the Carlton, you know."
+
+"I suppose it's the name that attracts me," said Michael. "It sounds
+ferocious."
+
+"I don't know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house
+is ferocious enough. Never mind." He jingled the five sovereigns.
+
+"I'll go up and pack," said Michael. "By the way, I haven't told you yet
+that I was run in last night."
+
+"In quod you mean?" asked Barnes. "Whatever for?"
+
+"Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square."
+
+"These coppers are the limit," said Barnes emphatically. "The absolute
+limit. Really. They'll pinch the Archbishop of Canterbury for looking
+into Stagg and Mantle's window before we know where we are."
+
+Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the doorway
+to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the macaw on
+its perch were about equally exotic.
+
+They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along the
+river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the adventurousness of
+London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the high spring-tide
+without exulting in the movement of the stream that was washing out with
+its flood all the listlessness of the hot August afternoon. When Chelsea
+Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the banks of a great river
+sweeping through a great city began to be more evident. The whole
+character of the Embankment changed at every hundred yards. First there
+was that somber canal which, flowing under the road straight from the
+Thames, reappeared between a canyon of gloomy houses and vanished again
+underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what was apparently a
+large private house which had been gutted of the tokens of humanity and
+filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and pistons, all moving
+perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of noise. Under Grosvenor
+Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering forward and a train crashing
+overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and girders dripping with the
+excrement of railway-engines, they came into Grosvenor Road. They passed
+the first habitations of Pimlico, two or three terraces and isolated
+houses all different in character. There could scarcely be another road
+in London so varied as this. Maurice had been wise to have his studio in
+Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an
+epitome of London.
+
+The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide
+thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray
+street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so
+insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton
+Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the
+poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister
+respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and
+very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off
+by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the
+horse's hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every
+evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was
+impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in
+Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here
+but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and
+hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose
+wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
+
+"I wouldn't mind having lodgings here," said Barnes. He had caught sight
+of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the
+outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of
+them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of
+final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the
+middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now
+very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost
+attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to
+Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each
+one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently
+inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast,
+occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so
+uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable
+decadency.
+
+Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem
+endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just
+before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it
+swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street
+ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken glass:
+these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal
+yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two
+rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however,
+that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty
+yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very
+tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the
+embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on
+either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of
+quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong
+windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built
+of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the
+same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the
+draff of the neighborhood's rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child's
+boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter
+undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
+
+"Here we are," said Barnes. "Here's Leppard Street that you've been so
+anxious to see."
+
+"It looks rather exciting," Michael commented.
+
+"Oh, it's the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don't think.
+Exciting?" Barnes repeated. "You know, Fane, there's something wrong
+with you. If you think this is exciting, you'd go raving mad when I
+showed you some of the places where I've lived. Well, here we are,
+anyhow. Number One--the corner house."
+
+They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening
+ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a
+parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato
+parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
+
+Barnes opened the door.
+
+"We'll take your bag up to my room first, and then we'll go downstairs
+and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don't change
+your mind when you've seen the inside."
+
+Michael had no time to notice Barnes' room very much. But vaguely he saw
+a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by
+cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits.
+After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet
+that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in
+the basement.
+
+"She'll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her," he said to
+Michael. "You see, just lately I've been very anxious to avoid meeting
+her."
+
+He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
+
+They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale
+soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by:
+here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a
+Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury,
+so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the
+whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight
+of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It
+was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated
+everything else.
+
+"That's Cleghorne," said Barnes. "I reckon he'd sleep Rip van Winkle
+barmy."
+
+"What's he do?" whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
+
+"He snores for a living, he does," said Barnes.
+
+They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the
+landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two
+trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and
+chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a
+moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the
+carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
+
+"I've brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne," said Barnes.
+
+"Have you brought your five weeks' rent owing?" she asked sourly.
+
+He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered
+up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose
+angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought
+she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the
+wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.
+
+"Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms
+on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to
+come up and show you?"
+
+She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along her
+sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ..." Michael began.
+
+"Mis-ter Cleghorne!" she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she
+began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked
+continuously.
+
+"Oh, I don't want to disturb him," said Michael.
+
+"Disturb him!" she sneered. "Why, half Bedlam could drive through his
+brains in a omnibus before he'd move a little finger to trouble hisself.
+Yes," she shouted, "Yes!" Her voice mingling with the creak of the
+roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it grew
+more strident. "Why, the blessed house might burn before he'd even put
+on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his wife can
+work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if anyone could
+disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the larder, he'd only
+grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people 'ud be very pleased to be asthmatic,
+if they could lie snorting on a bed from morning to night."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne's hands were dry now, and she led the way along the
+passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She
+unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was
+not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of
+fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some
+dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant
+the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window,
+catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a
+landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.
+
+"That's all I got for two months' rent," said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly,
+surveying it. "And it's just about fit for my old man to go and bury his
+good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that's all. The bedroom's in here, of
+course." She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had been
+picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far as
+some child had been able to reach.
+
+The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much
+darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the
+window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square
+of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small
+pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary
+engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.
+
+"Do you want to see the top-floor back?" Mrs. Cleghorne asked.
+
+"Well, if you wouldn't mind." Michael felt bound to apologize to her,
+whatever was suggested.
+
+She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to
+enter the vacant room.
+
+The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the
+permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over
+another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and
+even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was
+less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no fireplace
+and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than the positive
+emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at the gimcrack
+washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was visible in
+long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with its pleated
+iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress exuding
+flock like clustered maggots.
+
+"This is furnished, of course," said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently
+sucking a tooth. "Well, which will you have?"
+
+"I think perhaps I'll take the ground-floor rooms. I'll have them done
+up."
+
+"Oh, they're quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave
+them an extra-special clear-out."
+
+"But you wouldn't object to my doing them up?" persisted Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, I shouldn't _object,"_ said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent
+was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very
+much pleasure from the fruition of Michael's proposal.
+
+They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently
+beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because
+somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two
+empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she
+was endowing them with a value and a character they did not possess.
+
+"I've always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth
+any other two rooms in the house. And of course that's the reason I'm
+really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to everyone
+right out--if you want the two best rooms in the house, why, you must
+pay according. They're only empty now because I've always been
+particular about letting them. I won't have anybody, and that's a fact.
+Mr. Barnes here knows I'm really fond of those rooms."
+
+They had re-entered them, and Mrs. Cleghorne stood with arms admiringly
+akimbo.
+
+"They really are a beautiful lodging," she declared. "When would you
+want them from?"
+
+"Well, as soon as I can get them done up," said Michael.
+
+"I see. Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly just what you
+was thinking of doing?"
+
+Michael gave some of his theories of decoration, while Mrs. Cleghorne
+waited in critical audience; as it were, feeling the pulse of the
+apartments under the stimulus of Michael's sketch of their potentiality.
+
+"All white?" the landlady echoed pessimistically. "That sounds very
+gloomy, doesn't it? More like a outhouse or a coal-cellar than a nice
+couple of rooms."
+
+"Well, they couldn't look rottener than what they do at present," Barnes
+put in. "So if you take my advice, you'll say 'yes' and be very
+thankful. They'll look clean, anyway."
+
+The landlady threw back her head and surveyed Barnes like a snake about
+to strike.
+
+"Rotten?" she sniffed. "I'm sure this gentleman here isn't likely to
+find a nicer and cheaper pair of rooms or a more convenient and a
+quieter pair of rooms anywhere in Pimlico. A lot of people is very
+anxious to be in this neighborhood."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was much offended by Barnes' criticism, and there was a
+long period of dubiety before it was settled that Michael should be
+accepted as a tenant.
+
+"I've never cared for white," she said, in final protest. "Not since I
+was married."
+
+Reminded of Mr. Cleghorne's existence in the basement, she hurried
+forthwith to rout him out. As she disappeared, Michael saw that she was
+searching in the musty folds of her skirt in order to deposit in her
+purse the month's rent he had paid in advance.
+
+A couple of weeks passed while the decorators worked hard; and Michael
+returned from an unwilling visit to Scotland to find them ready for him.
+He got together a certain amount of furniture, and toward the end of
+August he moved into Leppard Street.
+
+Barnes on account of the prosperity which had come to him through
+Michael's money had managed to dress himself in a series of outrageously
+new and fashionable suits, and on the afternoon of his patron's arrival
+he strutted about the apartments.
+
+"Very nice," he said. "Very nice, indeed. I reckon old Ma Cleghorne
+ought to be very pleased with herself. Some of these pictures are a bit
+too religious for me just at present, but everyone to their own taste,
+that's what I always say. To their own taste," he repeated. "Otherwise,
+what's the good in being given an opinion of your own?"
+
+Michael felt it was time to explain to Barnes more particularly his
+quest of Lily.
+
+"You don't know a girl called Lily Haden?" he asked.
+
+"Lily Haden," said Barnes thoughtfully. "Lily Hopkins. A great fat girl
+with red...."
+
+"No, no," Michael interrupted. "Lily Haden. Tall. Slim. Very fair hair.
+Of course she may have another name now."
+
+"That's it, you see," said Barnes wisely.
+
+"Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, I must find her," Michael went
+on.
+
+"Well, if you go about it in that spirit, you'll soon find her," Barnes
+prophesied.
+
+Michael looked at him sharply. He thought he noticed in Barnes' manner a
+suggestion of humoring him. He rather resented the way in which Barnes
+seemed to encourage him as one might encourage a child.
+
+"You understand I want to marry her?" Michael asked fiercely.
+
+"That's all right, old chap. I'm not trying to stop you, am I?"
+
+"But why are you talking as if I weren't in earnest?" Michael demanded.
+"When I first told you about it you were evidently very pleased, and now
+you've got a sneer which frankly I tell you I find extraordinarily
+objectionable."
+
+Barnes looked much alarmed by Michael's sudden attack, and explained
+that he meant nothing by his remarks beyond a bit of fun.
+
+"Is it funny to marry somebody?" Michael demanded.
+
+"Sometimes it's very funny to marry a tart," said Barnes.
+
+Michael flushed. This was a directness of speech for which he was not
+prepared.
+
+"But when I first told you," Michael said, "you seemed very pleased."
+
+"I was very pleased to find I'd evidently struck a nice-mannered
+lunatic," said Barnes. "You offered me five quid a week, didn't you?
+Well, you didn't offer me that to give you good advice, now did you?"
+
+Michael tried to conceal the mortification that was being inflicted
+upon him. He had been very near to making a fool of himself by supposing
+that his announcement had aroused admiration. Instead of admiring him,
+Barnes evidently regarded him as an idiot whom it were politic to
+encourage on account of the money this idiot could provide. It was an
+humiliating discovery. The chivalry on which he congratulated himself
+had not touched a single chord in Barnes. Was it likely that in Lily
+herself he would find someone more responsive to what he still
+obstinately maintained to himself was really rather a fine impulse?
+Michael began to feel half sorry for Barnes because he could not
+appreciate nobility of motive. It began to seem worth while trying to
+impose upon him the appreciation which he felt he owed. Michael was
+sorry for his uncultivated ideals, and he took a certain amount of
+pleasure in the thought of how much Barnes might benefit from a close
+association with himself. He did not regret the whim which had brought
+them to Leppard Street. Whatever else might happen, it would always be
+consoling to think that he would be helping Barnes. In half a dream
+Michael began to build up the vision of a newer and a finer Barnes, a
+Barnes with sensitiveness and decent instincts, a Barnes who would
+forsake very willingly the sordid existence he had hitherto led in order
+to rise under Michael's guidance and help to a wider and better life.
+Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the
+affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him
+his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his
+mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem at
+its true value the step he proposed to take.
+
+Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out
+of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would
+surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He
+could not fail to be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so
+much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It
+was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect.
+Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few
+books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and
+those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had
+managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as yet
+he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a small
+secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh
+atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived
+perpetually in a social twilight. Michael's missionary affection began
+to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He
+felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with
+their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in
+their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence
+hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and
+everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to
+fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be
+his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had
+an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes
+were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down,
+and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned
+himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long
+time.
+
+Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with
+blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the
+corner.
+
+"Come in," Michael cheerfully invited him.
+
+The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all
+his clothes were on the verge of coming off, so much like a frayed
+accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a
+space of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the
+bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.
+
+"What I really came down for was a match," the stranger explained.
+
+Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in
+one of his pockets.
+
+"You don't go in for puzzles, I suppose?" he asked tentatively. "But any
+time I can help. I'm the Solutionist, you know. Don't let me keep you.
+Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I'm worrying out this week's lot in The
+Golden Penny very slowly. I've really had a sort of a headache the last
+few days--a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about cricketers?"
+he asked, turning to Michael. "Famous cricketers, of course, that is?
+For instance, I cannot think what this one can be."
+
+He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny
+weekly.
+
+"I've got all the others," he said to Michael. "But one picture will
+often stump you like this. No joke intended." He smiled feebly and
+pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the
+letter T.
+
+"What about Hirst?" Michael asked.
+
+"Hirst," repeated the Solutionist. "Her S T. That's it. That's it." In
+his excitement he began to dribble. "I'm very much obliged to you, sir.
+Her S. T. Yes, that's it."
+
+He began to shuffle toward the door.
+
+"Anything you want solved at any time," he said to Michael. "I'm only
+just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be most
+delighted to solve anything--anything!"
+
+He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his
+problems would puzzle the Solutionist.
+
+"What's his name?" he inquired of Barnes.
+
+"Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a
+living at it."
+
+"At what?" Michael asked.
+
+"Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took
+fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his
+advertisement in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be a
+conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me more
+like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You should
+see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular dust-hole,
+that's what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve anything--anything!
+He hasn't solved how to earn more than ten bob a week, year in year out.
+Silly----! That's what he is, barmy."
+
+Michael's hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers of
+1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once
+visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a
+staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various
+personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow
+windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly
+arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to observe
+them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the mass. No doubt
+Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained by
+Michael's subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael how
+Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the
+inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers
+ultimately escaped owing her money.
+
+It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would
+doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the
+landlady's strict regulation no longer to take them in could be relaxed.
+All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted by
+children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In
+Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and
+occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to
+play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish
+that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little
+girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer's shop
+of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to the
+basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear below at
+twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above the walls of
+the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered what sort of a
+desolate appearance these five houses must present for voyagers to and
+from Victoria. They must surely stand up very forbidding in abandonment
+to those who were traveling back to their cherished dolls-houses in
+Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not actually see the trains,
+but always he could hear their shrieking and their clangor, and he
+looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in her high serene
+four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall. Nothing except the
+trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a perpetual silence.
+Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing with her husband, the
+noise of her rage down in the basement among the quilts and coverlets
+never penetrated beyond the door at the head of the inclosing staircase,
+save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So silent was the house that
+had it not been for the variety of the smells, Michael might easily have
+supposed that it really was empty and that life here was indeed an
+illusion. The smells, however, of onions or hot blankets or machine-oil
+or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed emphatically that a community
+shared these ascending mustard-colored walls, that human beings passed
+along the stale landings to frowst behind those finger-stained doors of
+salmon-pink. Sometimes, too, Michael emerging into the passage from his
+room would hear from dingy altitudes descend the noise of a door
+hurriedly slammed; and sometimes he would see go down the ulcerous steps
+in front of the house depressing women in black, or unshaven men with
+the debtor's wary and furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be
+permanent were Barnes and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength
+of Michael's allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every
+night. He used to assure Michael, when toward two o'clock of the next
+afternoon he extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with
+the greatest pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The
+Solutionist occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of
+newspaper, and often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple
+of Belgian hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the
+nettles of the back-yard.
+
+After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard
+Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any rate
+into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish, would be
+welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger of being
+drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting surface. He felt
+inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer, and to hear from
+her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and Hungarian Dave. He
+found her card with the Guilford Street address and went over to
+Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady looked surprised
+when he inquired for Miss Palmer.
+
+"Oh, she's been gone this fortnight," the woman informed him. Michael
+asked where she was living now.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure," said the landlady, and as she was already
+slowly and very unpleasantly closing the door, Michael came away a
+little disconsolate. These abrupt dematerializations of the underworld
+were really very difficult to grapple with. It gave him a sense of the
+futility of his search for Lily (though lately he had prosecuted it
+somewhat lazily) when girls, who a month ago offered what was presumably
+a permanent address, could have vanished completely a fortnight later.
+Perhaps Daisy would be at the Orange. He would take Barnes with him this
+evening and ask his opinion of her and Dolly and Hungarian Dave.
+
+The beerhall downstairs looked exactly the same as when he had visited
+it a month ago. Michael could sympathize with the affection such places
+roused in the hearts of their frequenters. There was a great deal to be
+said for an institution that could present, day in, day out, a steady
+aspect to a society whose life was spent in such extremes of elation and
+despair, of prosperity and wretchedness, and whose actual lodging was
+liable to be changed at any moment for better or worse.
+
+"Not a bad place, is it?" said Barnes, looking round in critical
+approval at the prostitutes and bullies hoarded round the tables puddly
+with the overflow of mineral waters and froth of beer.
+
+"You really like it?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, it's cheerful," said Barnes. "And that's something nowadays."
+
+Michael perceived Daisy before they were halfway across the room. He
+greeted her with particular friendliness as an individual among these
+hard-eyed constellations.
+
+"Hulloa!" she cried. "Wherever have you been all this time?"
+
+"I called at Guilford Street, but you were gone."
+
+"Oh, yes. I left there. I couldn't stand the woman there any longer. Sit
+down. Who's your friend?"
+
+Michael brought Barnes into the conversation, and suggested moving into
+one of the alcoves where it was easier to talk.
+
+"No, come on, sit down here. Fritz won't like it, if we move."
+
+Michael looked round for the protector, and she laughed.
+
+"You silly thing! Fritz is the waiter."
+
+Michael presently grew accustomed to being jogged in the back by
+everyone who passed, and so powerful was the personality of the Orange
+that very soon he, like the rest of the crowd, was able to discuss
+private affairs without paying any heed to the solitary smoking
+listeners around.
+
+"Where's Dolly?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I had to get rid of her very sharp," said Daisy. "She served me a
+very nasty trick after I'd been so good to her. Besides, I've taken up
+with a fellow. Bert Saunders. He does the boxing for Crime Illustrated."
+
+"You told me I was like him," Michael reminded her.
+
+"That's right. I remember now. I'm living down off Judd Street in a
+flat. Why don't you come round and see me there?"
+
+"I will," Michael promised.
+
+"Wasn't Bert Saunders the fellow who was keeping Kitty Metcalfe?" asked
+Barnes.
+
+"That's right. Only he gave her the push after she hit Maudie Clive over
+the head with a port-wine glass in the Half Moon upstairs."
+
+"I knew Kitty," said Barnes, shaking his head to imply that acquaintance
+with Kitty had involved a wider experience than fell to most men.
+"What's happened to her?"
+
+"Oh, Gard, don't ask me," said Daisy. "She's got in with a fellow who
+kept a fried-fish place in the Caledonian Road, and I've never even seen
+her since."
+
+"And what's happened to Dolly?" asked Michael.
+
+"Oh, good job if that love-boy of hers does punch into her. Silly cow!
+She ought to know better. Fancy going off as soft as you like with that
+big-mouthed five-to-two, and after I'd just given her six of my new
+handkerchiefs."
+
+Michael wished he could have an opportunity of explaining to Barnes that
+on account of Daisy's friendship for Dolly, he and she and the cast-off
+had spent a night in the police-cells. He thought it would have amused
+him.
+
+"Where's the Half Moon?" he asked instead.
+
+Daisy said it was a place in Glasshouse Street for which she had no very
+great affection. However, Michael was anxious to see it; and soon they
+left the Orange to visit the Half Moon.
+
+It was a public-house with nothing that was demirep in its exterior; but
+upstairs there was a room frequented after eleven o'clock by ladies of
+the town. They walked up a narrow twisting staircase carpeted with
+bright red felt and lit by a red-shaded lamp, and found themselves in a
+room even more densely fumed with tobacco smoke than downstairs at the
+Orange. In a corner was an electric organ which was fed with a stream of
+pennies and blared forth its repertory of ten tunes with maddening
+persistence. One of these tunes was gay enough to make the girls wish to
+dance, and always with its recurrence there was a certain amount of
+cake-walking which was immediately stopped by a commissionaire who stood
+in the doorway and shouted "Order, please! Quiet, please! No dancing,
+ladies!" To the nearest couple he always whispered that the police were
+outside.
+
+Daisy, having stigmatized the Half Moon as the rottenest hole within a
+mile of the Dilly, proceeded to become more cheerful with every penny
+dropped into the slot; and finally she invited Michael to come back with
+her to Judd Street, as her boy had gone down to Margate to see Young
+Sancy, a prospective lightweight champion, who was training there.
+
+"Anyway, you can see me home," she said. "Even if you don't come in.
+Besides, my flat's all right. It is, really. You know. Comfortable. He's
+very good to me, is Bert, though he's a bit soppified. He dresses very
+nice, and he earns good money. Well, three pound a week. That's not so
+bad, is it?"
+
+"That's all right," said Barnes. "With what you earn as well."
+
+"There's a nerve," said Daisy. "Well, I can't stay moping indoors all
+the evening, can I? But he's most shocking jealous is Bert. And he calls
+me his pussy-cat. Puss, puss! There's a scream. He's really a bit soft,
+and his eyes is awful. But it's nice, so here's luck." She drained her
+glass. "'Do you love me, puss?' he says. Silly thing! But they think a
+lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see him the other
+morning about something he's been writing. I don't know what it was. I
+hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him something dreadful, and
+then he says, 'My pussy-cat mustn't disturb me.'"
+
+Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was
+beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a good
+move.
+
+"I shan't go if you don't come back with me," she declared.
+
+Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and he
+promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however; nor
+would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and Michael
+went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm September
+night.
+
+Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of
+her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey. He
+flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here at
+last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship with a
+woman of that class with whom mere friendship would be more improbable
+than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with her
+homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on while she
+chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any other
+relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was proud
+as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign trees
+that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he felt a
+thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings of
+Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to
+think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this
+friendship that was giving to all the houses they passed a strange
+peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking
+at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown
+bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and
+beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was
+indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and
+presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.
+
+"Our flat's in here. Agnes House, it's called. Come in and have one
+before you go home," she invited.
+
+Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his confidence
+in their new friendship.
+
+Agnes House was only entitled to the distinction of a name rather than a
+number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby,
+small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was
+already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been
+exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This
+collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of
+age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more
+admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain.
+Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt in
+itself apart from any association with depravity: it was like a young
+person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without arousing
+pity.
+
+"Rather nice, eh?" said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the
+flat. "Sit down. I'll get some whisky. There's a bathroom, you know. And
+it's grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we was
+upstairs. I always swore I'd never live in a flat. Well, I don't really
+call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever be found
+out."
+
+Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn
+about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous
+when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled
+throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a
+placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great deal
+of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to fright her
+fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at the sound of a
+key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike existence of the
+underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael could see the
+villainous paper used for every kind of domestic service--to wrap up a
+piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the cat's dinner, and
+spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon the disks of
+grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very natural, when the
+eyes never rested from these views of sordid violence, to expect evil
+everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was already half inclined to accept
+the underworld's preoccupation with crime as a truer judgment of human
+nature than was held by a sentimental civilization, and he began to
+wonder whether a good deal of his own privacy had not been spent in a
+fool's paradise of security. The moated grange and the dark tower were
+harmless rococo terrors beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes
+House.
+
+"The kitchen's in a rare old mess, isn't it?" said Daisy looking round
+her. "It gives Bert the rats to see it like this."
+
+"Are you fond of him?" Michael asked. He was anxious to display his
+friendly interest.
+
+"Oh, he's all right. But I wouldn't ever get fond of _any_body. It
+doesn't pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they
+can do as they like with you."
+
+"I don't understand why you live with him, if he's nothing better than
+all right," said Michael.
+
+"Well, I'm used to him, and he's not always in the way like some fellows
+are."
+
+Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as
+it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it
+was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her
+ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and
+beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches of
+Francois Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing
+pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be
+wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first
+from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard
+subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably despise
+it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the quality of
+the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove to her the
+reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the relation in
+which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.
+
+"There's something extraordinarily attractive about being friends," he
+began. "Isn't it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to
+be nothing more than a friend?"
+
+"Friends," Daisy repeated. "I don't know that I think much of friends.
+You don't get much out of _them_, do you?"
+
+"Is that all anybody is for," Michael asked in disappointment. "To get
+something out of?"
+
+"Well, naturally. Anyone can't live on nothing, can they?"
+
+"But I don't see why a friend shouldn't be as profitable as an ephemeral
+... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at eleven and
+say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as generous."
+
+"I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted
+twice as much back in return," said Daisy.
+
+"Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine in
+the police court?" he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was so
+anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he could
+not help making the allusion.
+
+"I suppose you wanted to," she said.
+
+"As a friend," he persisted.
+
+"Oh, all right," she agreed with him lazily. "Have it your own way. I'm
+too sleepy to argue."
+
+"Then we are friends?" Michael asked gravely.
+
+"Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a
+clothes-line. Get on with it, Roy--or what's your name? Michael, eh?
+That's right."
+
+"Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?"
+
+"Advice is very cheap," said Daisy.
+
+"I used to know a girl," Michael began.
+
+"A straight-cut?"
+
+"Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was."
+
+"I see. And now she's got a naughty little twinkle in her eye."
+
+"Look here. Do listen seriously," Michael begged. "She isn't a
+straight-cut any longer."
+
+"Well, what did I tell you? That's what I said. She's gone gay."
+
+"I want to get her away from this life," Michael announced, with such
+solemnity that Daisy was insulted.
+
+"Why, what's the matter with it? You're as bad as a German ponce I knew
+who joined the Salvation Army. Don't you try taking me home to-night to
+our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick."
+
+"But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a
+'lady.'"
+
+"More shame for her then," said Daisy indignantly. "She ought to have
+known better."
+
+It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily's fall gave to one so
+deeply plunged. There was in Daisy's attitude something of the
+unionist's toward foreign blackleg labor.
+
+"Well, you see," Michael pointed out. "As even you have no pity for her,
+wouldn't it be right for me to try to get her out of the life
+altogether?"
+
+"How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade
+all day, before you sprang it on her...."
+
+"I had nothing to do with it," Michael interrupted. "At least not
+directly."
+
+"Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?" she demanded in
+surprise.
+
+"I feel a certain responsibility," he explained. "Go on with what you
+were saying."
+
+"If she left a nice home," Daisy continued, "to live gay, she isn't
+going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now,
+is she?"
+
+"But I want to marry her," said Michael simply.
+
+Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.
+
+"You must be worse than potty over her," she gasped.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why? Why, because it doesn't pay to marry that sort of girl. She'll
+only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you'll wish you hadn't
+been such a grass-eyes."
+
+A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael sitting
+in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was right.
+Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was coeval with
+all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility, so that he
+felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal pessimism. Yet in
+the same instant he was aware of the need for him to do something, even
+if his action were to carry within itself the potential destruction of
+more than he was setting out to accomplish.
+
+"When do you see her?" asked Daisy. "And what does _she_ say about being
+married?"
+
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I haven't seen her for nearly five years,"
+Michael explained rather apologetically. "I'm searching for her now.
+I've got to find her."
+
+"Strike me, if you aren't the funniest---- I ever met," Daisy exclaimed.
+
+She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for
+Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing.
+The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed
+plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter seemed
+to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of emptiness was
+due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of the room,
+whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so homely was the
+behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast suddenly they
+made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no more
+substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its hollowness. It
+became an interior very much like those glimpses of interiors in Crime
+Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would have shown Daisy Palmer
+cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even in sanguinary death to
+display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped edge of a white
+petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to dream in Leppard
+Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither as here he would
+enter sensationally.
+
+Daisy ceased to rock herself with mirth.
+
+"No, really," she said. "It's a shame to laugh, but you are the limit.
+Only you did ask my advice, and I tell you straight you'll be sorry if
+you do marry her. What's she like, Wandering Willie? Have some cocoa if
+I make it? Go on, do. I'll boil it on the gas-ring."
+
+Michael was touched by her attention, and he accepted the offer of
+cocoa. Then he began to describe Lily's appearance. He could not,
+however much she might laugh, keep off the object of his quest. Lily
+was, after all, the only rational explanation of his present mode of
+life.
+
+"She sounds a bit washed out according to your description of her,"
+Daisy commented. "Still, everyone to their own fancy, and if you like
+blue-eyed bottles of peroxide, that's your look-out."
+
+They were drinking the cocoa she had made, and the flame of the gas-ring
+gave just the barren comfort that the kitchen seemed to demand. Another
+blackbeetle hurried over the oilcloth. A belated fly buzzed angrily
+against the shade of the electric light. Daisy yawned and looked up at
+the metal clock with its husky tick.
+
+Suddenly there was the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. She leaped
+up.
+
+"Gard, supposing that's Bert come back from Margate!"
+
+She pushed Michael hurriedly across the passage into the front room,
+commanding him to keep quiet and stay in an empty curtained recess. Then
+she hurried back to the kitchen, leaving him in a very unpleasant frame
+of mind. He heard through the closed door Daisy's voice in colloquy with
+a deeper voice. Evidently Bert had come back; but his return had been so
+abrupt that he had had no time to prevent himself being placed in this
+ridiculous position. Would he have to stay in this recess all night? He
+peered out into the room, which was in a filigree of bleak shadows made
+by the street lamp shining through the muslin curtains of the window.
+Through a desolation of undrawn blinds the houses of Little Quondam
+Street were visible across the road. The unused room smelt moldy, and if
+Michael had ever pictured himself in the complexity of a clandestine
+affair, this was not at all the romantic environment he would have
+chosen for his drama. This was really damned annoying, and he made a
+step in the direction of the kitchen to put an end to the
+misunderstanding. Surely Saunders would have realized that his visit to
+Daisy was harmless: and yet would he? How stupid she had been to hustle
+him out of the way like this. Naturally the fellow would be suspicious
+now. Would that hum of conversation never stop? It reminded him of the
+fly which had been buzzing round the lamp. Supposing Saunders came in
+here to fetch something? Was he to hide ignominiously behind this
+confounded curtain, and what on earth would happen if he were
+discovered? Michael boiled with rage at the prospect of such an
+indignity. Saunders would probably want to fight him. A man who spent
+his life helping to produce Crime Illustrated was no doubt deep-dyed
+himself in the vulgar crudity of his material.
+
+Ten minutes passed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten
+more minutes passed; and Michael began to estimate the difficulty of
+climbing out of the window into the street. It had been delightful, this
+experience, until he had entered this cursed flat. He should have parted
+from Daisy on the doorstep, and then he would have carried home with him
+the memory of a friendship that belonged to the London starlight. The
+whole relation had been ruined by entering this scabrous building.
+
+He must have been here for more than an hour. It was insufferable. He
+would go boldly into the kitchen and brave Saunders' violence. Yet he
+could not do that because Daisy would be involved by such a step. What
+could they be talking about? It was really unreasonable for people who
+lived together to sit up chatting half the night. At last he heard the
+sound of an opening door; there were footsteps in the passage; another
+door-opened; after a minute or two somebody walked out into the street.
+Michael had just sighed with relief, when he heard footsteps coming
+back; and the buzz of conversation began again in a lighter timbre. This
+was simply intolerable. He was evidently going to stay here until the
+filigree of shadows faded in the dawn. Saunders must have brought in a
+friend with him. Another half hour passed and Michael had reached a
+stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friendship. Not again
+would he so easily let himself be made ridiculous. Then he became
+conscious of a keen desire to see this Saunders whom, by the way, he was
+supposed to resemble. It was tantalizing to miss the opportunity of
+comparison.
+
+The hum of conversation stopped. Soon afterward Daisy came into the room
+and whispered that he could creep out now, but that he must not slam the
+front door. She would see him at the Orange to-morrow.
+
+When they reached the passage, she called back through the kitchen:
+
+"Bert, do you know you left the front door open?"
+
+Idiotically and uxoriously floated from the inner bedroom: "Did I, pussy
+cat? Puss must shut it then."
+
+Daisy dug Michael violently in the ribs to express her inward hilarity;
+then suddenly she pulled him to her and kissed him roughly. In another
+second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a
+nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some
+garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him
+in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.
+
+Barnes was sitting in Michael's room, when he got back to Leppard
+Street.
+
+"What ho," he said sleepily. "You've been enjoying yourself with that
+piece, then?"
+
+Michael regarded him angrily.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn't look so solemn; she's not a bad bit of
+goods, either. I've heard of her before."
+
+Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to
+convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover,
+if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out
+utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a
+reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had
+slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations
+had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it
+had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld's
+distorting mirror.
+
+On the following night Michael went to the Cafe d'Orange, and heard
+Daisy's account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert
+Saunders.
+
+"But really, you know," she said. "It did give me a turn. Fancy him
+coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting
+fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there
+and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert's all right with his
+pussy-cat."
+
+"But why didn't you let me stay where I was?" Michael asked. "And
+introduce me quite calmly. He couldn't have said anything."
+
+"Couldn't he?" Daisy cried. "I reckon he could then. I reckon he could
+have said a lot. If he hadn't, I'd have given him the chuck right away.
+I don't want no fellow hanging around me that hasn't got the pluck to go
+for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. _Couldn't_ he have said
+anything?"
+
+Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time to
+meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the
+underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been
+devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from the
+standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes,
+Daisy--they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral
+antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer.
+They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they
+were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it
+possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure
+to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the
+absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a
+great constructive force?
+
+Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence
+as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid
+darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he
+was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to
+stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against the
+light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the
+chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante's obscure wood
+of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events.
+Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he
+knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance;
+at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former
+pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told
+himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that
+through her salvation he would save himself.
+
+Michael did not re-enter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems
+would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the
+problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve
+the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not
+tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to
+him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a
+terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give
+her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He
+was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call
+upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the
+Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex himself over the failure to
+discover Lily's whereabauts. Having placed himself at the nod of
+destiny, he was content to believe that if he never found her he must be
+content to look elsewhere for the expression of himself. September
+became October. It would be six years this month since first they met,
+and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be captured anew?
+
+One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated season
+whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because no fall
+of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled walls
+from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk was
+perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he knew.
+Yes, he could. It was Chator's, the dear, the pious and the bubbling
+Chator's; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the corridors
+of St. James'. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized and shaken
+his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however, he was
+twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a fountain of
+questions about his progress during these years with a great deal of
+information about his own. He came in eagerly at Michael's invitation,
+and so much had he still to ask and tell that it was a long time before
+he wanted to know what had brought Michael to Leppard Street.
+
+"How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn't my
+district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I
+say, what a dreadful slum!" Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as
+if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. "I
+never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what
+really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a man
+who's just come to us from Ely was talking about you only yesterday. My
+goodness, how ..."
+
+"It's no larger than a grain of sand," Michael interrupted quickly.
+
+"What is?" asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at
+Michael.
+
+"You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren't you?"
+
+"I suppose you'll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute." Chator
+was beaming with delight at the prospect. "But seriously, this man
+Stewart--Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know
+him?"
+
+"Nigel isn't here, too?" Michael exclaimed.
+
+"He's our deacon."
+
+"Oh, how priceless you'll both be in the pulpit," said Michael. "And
+to-morrow's Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Mass?"
+
+"My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be preaching
+at Evening Prayer. Why don't you come to supper in the Clergy House
+afterward?"
+
+"How do you like your Vicar?"
+
+"Oh, very sound, very sound," said Chator, shaking his head.
+
+"Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?" asked Michael,
+twinkling.
+
+"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He's very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at
+first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he's not. Not a bit.
+We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it.
+And of course we've got the children."
+
+They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and
+Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.
+
+"You will come on Sunday?"
+
+"Of course. But what's the name of your church?"
+
+"My dear fellow, that shows you haven't heard your parochial Mass," said
+Chator, with mock seriousness. "St. Chad's is our church."
+
+"It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron," said Michael.
+
+"I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield."
+
+Michael laughed loudly.
+
+"My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven't
+changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad's--Sunday."
+
+From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled
+walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be
+bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a
+coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.
+
+Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on
+Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference
+to Michael's wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening
+through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior
+of St. Chad's with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense
+was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine
+edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built
+of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any other
+material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing deliberately
+beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat thawing in a
+stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in London streets,
+and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves. The Stations of
+the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in
+their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians was familiar
+music.
+
+As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his
+companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom,
+but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the
+past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the
+forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any
+longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the
+craving of his soul for God.
+
+Chator's discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering
+simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect upon
+the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic way.
+The sermon had the naive obviousness and the sweet seriousness of a
+child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see
+that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or
+indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself,
+a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its
+expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having
+upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a
+sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of
+the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of the
+homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were in
+his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with its
+tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael's opinion
+of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his eloquence:
+these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse one so deep in
+the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that a positive
+sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe it did; he
+would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of truth was
+posited among these perishable streets.
+
+The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn,
+Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people pouring
+forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come here to rest
+from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the chill vapors of
+the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their journey home.
+Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had leisure to
+sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or shops that
+made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit for neither
+good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered together for a
+little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now already they were
+trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps would shuffle for a
+space over the dark pavements; a few would have pickled cabbage and
+cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life in this limbo between
+Hell and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be judged with the bulk of
+the congregation: another reason must be found for the influence of
+Evening Prayer or of Chator's words upon him.
+
+"Did you like the sermon?" Michael asked in the porch.
+
+"I didn't listen to a word of it," said Barnes emphatically.
+
+"Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested," said
+Michael.
+
+"I was thinking what a mug I'd been not to back The Clown for the
+Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I'll tell you what it is.
+I'm not used to money, and that's a fact. I don't know how to spend it.
+I'm afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks."
+
+"I thought you enjoyed the service," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, I'm used to services. You know. On and off I've done a lot of
+churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow
+preaching to curdle me up. I've gone through it. Religion, love, and
+measles; they're all about the same. I don't reckon anybody gets them
+more than once properly."
+
+Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and
+though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much
+irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went
+back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What
+puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to be
+impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a mean
+and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was
+amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical
+powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius' blue
+eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice.
+Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his
+expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when he
+met him again at Earl's Court he had been kindled by those blue eyes.
+Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was now that
+lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times lately, but
+they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll's.
+
+"I really must have been mad when I was young," Michael said to himself.
+"And yet other people have preserved the influence they used to have
+over me. Other people haven't changed. Why should he? I wonder whether
+it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?"
+
+Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes' lapse into
+unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the
+Clergy House.
+
+Nigel Stewart's room, which they visited in the minutes before supper,
+had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a
+picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his
+clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael
+chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire
+beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta
+at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.
+
+The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with
+Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to a
+brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going to
+sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar and
+two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the same
+sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met that
+walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or treasurer of
+club accounts or vicar's churchwarden, is always to be found attached to
+the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened, and found he had a
+deep voice and was unable to get nearer to "th" than "v."
+
+"We're raver finking," he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate,
+"of starting Benediction, vis year."
+
+"That will be wonderful," said Michael politely.
+
+"Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver."
+
+The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish
+stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off
+their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart, and
+Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar was
+left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.
+
+"I envy you people," said Michael, as the three of them sank down into
+deep wicker chairs. "I envy this power you have to bring Oxford--or
+Cambridge--into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action,
+isn't it? And you're free from the thought which must often worry dons
+that perhaps they are having a very good time without doing very much to
+deserve it."
+
+"We work hard in this parish," spluttered Chator. "Oh, rather. Very
+hard."
+
+"That's what I say. You have the true peace that thrives on activity,"
+said Michael. "But at the same time, what I'm rather anxious to know is
+how nearly you touch the real sinners."
+
+Stewart and Chator looked at one another across his chair.
+
+"How much do we, brother?" asked Stewart.
+
+"No, really," protested Michael. "My dear Nigel, I can't have you being
+so affected. Brother! You must give up being archaic now that you're a
+pale young curate."
+
+"What do you call the real sinners?" asked Chator. "You saw our
+congregation to-night. All poor, of course."
+
+"Shall I say frankly what I think?" Michael asked.
+
+The other two nodded.
+
+"I'm not sure if that congregation is worth a very great deal. I'm not
+trying to be offensive, so listen to me patiently. That congregation
+would come whatever you did. They came not because they wanted to
+worship God or because they desired the forgiveness of their sins, nor
+even because they think that going to church is a good habit. No, they
+came in a sort of sad drift of aimlessness; they came in out of the
+dreariness of their lives to sit for a little while in the glow that a
+church like yours can always provide. They went out again with a vague
+memory of comfort, material comfort, I mean; but they took away with
+them nothing that would kindle a flame to light up the gray week-days.
+Do you know, I fancy that when these picture-theaters become more
+common, as they will, most of your people will get from them just the
+same sensation of warmth and material comfort. Obviously if this is a
+true observation on my part, your people regard church from a merely
+negative attitude. That isn't enough, as you'll admit."
+
+"But it's not fair to judge by the evening congregation," Chator burst
+out. "You must remember that we get quite a different crowd at Mass."
+
+"But do you get the real sinners?" Michael repeated.
+
+"My dear Michael, what does this inquisition forebode?" said Stewart.
+"You're becoming wrapped in mystery. You're found in Leppard Street for
+no reason that I've yet heard. And now you attack us in this unkind
+way."
+
+"I'm not attacking you," Michael said. "I'm trying to extract from you a
+point of view. Lately it happens that I've found myself in the company
+of a certain class, well--the company of bullies and prostitutes. You
+must have lots of them in this parish. Do you get hold of them? I don't
+believe you do, because the chief thing which has struck me is the utter
+remoteness of the Church or indeed of any kind of religion from the
+life of that class. And their standards are upside-down--actually
+upside-down. They're handed over entirely to the powers of darkness.
+Now, as far as I can see, the Devil--or whatever you choose to call
+him--only cares about people who are worth his while. He hands the
+others over to anybody that likes to deal with them. Equally I would say
+that God is a little contemptuous of the poor intermediates. The Church,
+however, in these hard times for religion is glad to get hold even of
+them, and this miserable spirit of mediocrity runs through the whole
+organization. The bishops are moderate; the successful parsons are
+moderate; and the flock is moderate. To come back to the sinners. You
+know, they _would_ be worth getting. You've no idea what a force they
+would raise. And now, all their industry, all their ingenuity, all their
+vitality is devoted to the service of evil."
+
+Chator could contain himself no longer.
+
+"My dear fellow, you don't understand how impossible it is to get in
+touch with the people you're talking about. They elude one. Of course,
+we should rejoice to get them. But they're impossible."
+
+"Christ moved among sinners," said Michael.
+
+"It's not because we don't long to move among them," Chator spluttered
+in exasperation. "We would give anything to move among them. But we
+can't. I don't know why. But they won't relax any of their barriers.
+They're notoriously difficult."
+
+"Then it all comes down to a 'no' in answer to my question," said
+Michael. "You don't get the real sinners. That's what's the matter with
+St. Chad's--until you can compel the sinner to come in, you'll stay in a
+spiritual backwater."
+
+"If you were a priest," said Chator, "you'd realize our handicap
+better."
+
+"No doubt," Michael agreed. "But don't forget that the Salvation Army
+gets hold of sinners. In fact, I'll wager that nine out of ten of the
+people with whom I've been in contact lately would only understand by
+religion the Salvation Army. Personally I loathe the Salvation Army. I
+think it is almost a more disruptive organization than anything else in
+the world. But at least it is alive; it's not suet like most of the
+Dissenting Sects or a rather rich and heavy plum-pudding like the
+greater part of the Church of England. It's a maddening and atrociously
+bad and cheap alcohol, but it does enflame. I tell you, my dear old
+Chator and my dear old Nigel, you have the greatest opportunity
+imaginable for energy, for living and bringing life to others, if only
+you'll not sit down and be content because you've got the children and
+can fill the church for Evening Prayer with that colorless, dreary,
+dreadfully sorrowful crowd I saw to-night."
+
+Michael leaned back in his chair; the fire crackled above the silence;
+and, outside, the disheartened quiet of the Sabbath was brooding. Chator
+was the first to speak.
+
+"Some of what you say may be true, but the rest of it is a mere muddle
+of heresies and misconceptions and misstatements. It's absolute
+blasphemy to say that God is contemptuous of what you called the
+intermediates, and you apparently believe that evil is only misdirected
+good. You apparently think that your harlots and bullies are better for
+being more actively harmful."
+
+"No, no," Michael corrected. "You didn't follow my argument. As a matter
+of fact, I believe in the absolutism of evil the more, the more I see of
+evil men and women. What I meant was that in proportion to the harm they
+have power to effect would be the inspiration and advantage of turning
+their abilities toward good. But cut out all theological questions and
+confess that the Church has failed with the class I speak of."
+
+The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without
+reaching a conclusion.
+
+"You can't have friars nowadays," said Chator in response to Michael's
+last expression of ambition. "Conditions have changed."
+
+"Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an
+absolute Christianity," Michael pointed out. "Conditions had changed
+when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a
+host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists
+are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions. Do
+you believe in Christ?"
+
+"Don't try to be objectionable, my dear fellow," said Chator, getting
+very red.
+
+"Well, if you do," persisted Michael, "if you accept the Gospels, it is
+utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make 'change of
+conditions' an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your
+parish."
+
+"Michael," said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator's obviously
+rising anger. "Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission
+are you upon? I believe you're getting too much wrapped up in private
+fads and fancies. Why don't you come and work for us at St. Chad's?"
+
+"He's one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense
+fervor," said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and
+Michael felt rather penitent.
+
+"I wish I _could_ work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so
+offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is
+inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight of
+workers in cooperation freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I
+should probably feel like you that the children were the most important.
+Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was confirmed by
+the realization of evil? Usually, it's the other way about, isn't it?
+I've met many unbelievers who first began to doubt, because the problem
+of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency. Chator, you have
+forgiven me, haven't you?"
+
+"I ought to have realized that you didn't mean half you were saying,"
+said Chator.
+
+Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he
+had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he let
+Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.
+
+Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he
+was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street.
+Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to
+Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up
+sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No doubt,
+however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would benefit
+greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael had shut
+himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan, and he used
+to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical experiments in his
+solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on several occasions at
+Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done the daring of
+discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was, Nigel was
+still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he would ever
+cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his own
+diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and told him
+that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.
+
+"All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all," said
+Michael. "At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed
+through it at the age of sixteen."
+
+"You must have been horribly precocious," said Nigel disapprovingly.
+
+"Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give
+up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You'll be telling me
+soon that you've been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite."
+
+Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an
+experience, and Michael laughed:
+
+"Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He's just the person you
+ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an
+aesthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?"
+
+"I really think you _are_ growing very offensive," said Nigel.
+
+"No, I'm not. I'm illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and
+Maurice's encounters with religion would match each other. Both would
+have a very wide, but also a very superficial area."
+
+November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist at
+Stella's wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his
+affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully
+planned sallies of curiosity:
+
+"What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine.
+Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I'll tell
+you quite enough when the moment comes for telling."
+
+"Michael, you're getting dreadfully obstinate," Stella declared. "I
+remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time."
+
+"It's not I who am obstinate," said Michael. "It's you who are utterly
+spoiled by the lovelorn Alan."
+
+Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before
+the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin's
+summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June
+Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a
+wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer's image in this wraith
+of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan
+were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from
+Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term
+recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.
+
+    Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
+    In Vallombrosa.
+
+Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then
+it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could
+remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to
+know them so well:
+
+    Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
+    Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae.
+
+There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory
+of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
+
+    Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et
+    ... terris apricis.
+
+Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these
+lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of
+other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would
+soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because
+those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of youth, to
+the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that was forever
+overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their sanctity with
+sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy and absurdity
+also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than those deeper
+moments.
+
+"Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?" he asked.
+
+"Rather," said Alan, and they both smiled.
+
+"Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst
+out laughing and had to rush out of the room?"
+
+"Rather," said Alan. "Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren't they?"
+
+"Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs.
+Merivale?" Michael queried.
+
+"I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at
+anything," said Alan.
+
+"And yet do you realize that we're only talking of eight years ago?
+Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the
+time when that wedding took place."
+
+To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life
+Michael's calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked
+on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive
+mortality.
+
+"You'll be writing epitaphs next," said Alan, in rather an aggrieved
+voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during
+the silence.
+
+"At any rate," Michael said. "You can congratulate yourself upon not
+having wasted time."
+
+"My god," cried Alan, stopping suddenly. "I believe I'm the luckiest man
+alive."
+
+"I thought you'd found a sovereign," said Michael. He had never heard
+Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment
+later Alan would be blushing at his want of reserve, he loyally covered
+up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.
+
+Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as
+none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she
+must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her
+Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very
+anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble Place,
+but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy came, and
+Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously contemplated marrying
+her. How well he remembered her in short skirts, and here she was a
+woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold pince-nez.
+
+"You _are_ a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place," grumbled
+Nancy. "Do you realize we haven't met for years?"
+
+"You're such a woman of affairs," said Michael.
+
+"Well, do let's try to meet next time. I say, don't you think Maud looks
+terribly ill since she became a Romanist?"
+
+Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
+
+"I think she's looking rather well."
+
+"Absolute destruction of individuality, you know," said Nancy, shaking
+her head. "I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must admit
+that she hasn't forced her religion down our throats."
+
+"Did you expect an auto-da-fe in the middle of the lawn?" he asked. She
+thumped him on the shoulder:
+
+"Silly ass! Don't you try to rag me."
+
+They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at
+eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have regretted
+the step.
+
+Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the
+ceremony.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?"
+
+"You've admitted I'm a married woman," she exclaimed. "Now surely you
+can tell me what you've been doing since August and where you've been."
+
+"I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every
+woman," said Michael. "Alas, you are not!"
+
+"Michael, you're perfectly horrid to me."
+
+"Don't be too much the young wife," he advised, with mocking
+earnestness.
+
+"I won't listen to anything you say, until I know where you've been. Of
+course, if I hadn't been so busy, I could easily have found you out."
+
+"Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,"
+Michael laughed.
+
+"You shan't stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me."
+
+"By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful
+news," said Michael. "Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your
+honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but
+I've never heard."
+
+"We're going to Compiegne," said Stella. "I wrote to little
+Castera-Verduzan, and he's lent us the cottage where you and I stayed."
+
+That choice of Stella's seemed to mark more decisively than anything she
+had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
+
+When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother,
+talking.
+
+"I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers," she
+told him. "But if you're going to be here, I could put her off."
+
+Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother's
+loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
+
+"No, no, I'm going away again," he told her.
+
+"Just as you like, dearest boy."
+
+"You're glad about Stella?"
+
+"Very glad."
+
+"And you like Alan?"
+
+"Of course. Charming--charming."
+
+The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had
+been brought up to Mrs. Fane's sitting-room out of the way of the
+wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
+
+"It's really quite chilly this afternoon," said Mrs. Fane.
+
+"Yes, there's a good deal of mist along the river," said Michael. "A
+pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather
+dreary in the forest."
+
+"Why did they go to a forest?" she asked. "So like Stella to choose a
+forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in
+love, one doesn't notice the mud."
+
+Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went
+back to Leppard Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE INNERMOST CIRCLE
+
+
+November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and
+these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the
+house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even
+when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made
+more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at
+first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would
+presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico
+magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life
+was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall
+Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so
+unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
+
+One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to
+Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk
+with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a
+dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which
+every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At
+the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a
+sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from
+Oxford to-night--Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half expectant
+of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him. How
+were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiegne? Probably they were having
+clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a smell of woodfires.
+With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round Piccadilly,
+sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side streets, but
+always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle. Here he would
+stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west and south and
+north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were coming out of the
+theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to Daisy? Should he call a
+hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the spinning of a polychromatic
+top, he could not leave the Island.
+
+They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge
+one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the
+opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to
+their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must
+begin to frequent the Orient again.
+
+Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a
+nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to
+a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake's story had
+been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been
+slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had
+become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off
+the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road.
+A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had
+passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to
+walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost
+in the air.
+
+Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out
+his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that.
+Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It would
+serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of those
+vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together now;
+instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark pavement.
+How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At last he
+knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her still. What
+nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry her in order to
+rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her still; he loved her
+now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of Green Park rattled to
+his stick. He loved her more passionately because the ghost of her whom
+he had thought of with romantic embellishment all these years was but a
+caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer which had floated
+through his dreams was become nothing, now that again he had seen
+herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and the delicate
+poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women on the
+pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of gravel by the
+curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what direction had she
+driven away? Even that he did not know. She might have driven past this
+very lamp-post a few minutes back.
+
+Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate
+upon a hansom's progress. Here already were main roads branching, and
+these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the
+imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not
+picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape
+without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would
+put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of
+that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she
+would turn toward him in her black dress. "I saw you outside the
+Orient," he would say. She should know immediately that he was not
+deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when
+he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was
+disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid
+woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and
+huddled against the wall of the King's garden. He put a sixpence among
+her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars
+were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold
+parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to
+Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This
+kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One
+after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of doors
+and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider
+thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary
+policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous.
+And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of
+human dwellings, were Michael's own thoughts thronged with fancies of
+himself and Lily.
+
+It was nearly one o'clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across
+the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street.
+From the opposite pavement a woman's figure stepped quickly toward him
+out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road
+made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once
+and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could
+not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and
+run.
+
+"Where are you off to in such a hurry?" he heard her say.
+
+It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his
+pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her
+one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet
+it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied
+the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in
+her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always haunt
+her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She was
+not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves, as
+at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears and
+that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks, there
+would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become even an
+individual in the multitude of weary London women.
+
+"Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?" she repeated.
+
+"Home. I'm going home," he said.
+
+"Let's walk a bit of the way together."
+
+He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her
+voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her
+know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her
+materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard
+Street.
+
+"Why don't you come back with me? I live quite near here," she murmured.
+"Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you."
+
+Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the
+star-incrusted sky.
+
+"Come on, dear. I live in the corner house."
+
+Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny
+smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were
+blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the
+question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
+
+"Go on, dear, you've got some money with you?"
+
+"It's not that," said Michael. "I don't want to come in with you."
+
+Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in
+what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the
+house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with
+the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who
+slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep
+comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping
+about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put
+his foot on the steps of the front door.
+
+"Not that door," she said. "Down here."
+
+She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into
+the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as
+the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
+
+"Don't make a noise," she whispered. "Because the woman who keeps the
+house sleeps down here."
+
+She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage.
+When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
+
+"Got a vesta with you?" she whispered.
+
+Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy
+wall.
+
+"Here you are. Here you are."
+
+The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle
+she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek,
+but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the
+candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne
+snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous
+breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down
+three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety door, and welcomed him.
+
+"I'm quite on my own, you see," she said, in a voice of tentative
+satisfaction.
+
+Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp.
+The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of
+black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he
+had seen in Barnes' room above. He tried to recall how much of this room
+he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind
+with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The
+action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the
+moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a
+light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with
+a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons.
+The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame,
+Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what
+remained of henna and peroxide.
+
+"That's more cheerful. Though I must say it's a pity they haven't put
+the gas in here. Oh, don't sit on that old box. It makes you look such a
+stranger."
+
+Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was
+hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a
+pale blue chest next to a washstand.
+
+"Are you looking at my cat?" she asked.
+
+"What cat?"
+
+"He's under the bed, I'll be bound."
+
+She called, and a small black cat came out.
+
+"Isn't he lovely? But, fancy, he's afraid of me. He always gets under
+the bed like that."
+
+Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had
+lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that
+finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.
+
+"Well, there!" the woman exclaimed. "Did you ever? I've never seen him
+do that before. He knows you're a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His
+mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very
+well, so she's got a good home. But _he_ isn't stinted. Oh, no. He gets
+his milk every day. What I say is, if you're going to have animals, look
+after them."
+
+Michael nodded agreement.
+
+"Because to my mind," she went on, "a great many animals are better than
+human beings."
+
+"Oh, yes, I think they probably are," said Michael.
+
+"Poor Peter!" she crooned. "I wouldn't starve you, would I?"
+
+The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
+
+"Why do you call it Peter?" he asked. The name savored rather of the
+deliberate novelist.
+
+"After my boy."
+
+"Your boy?" he echoed.
+
+"Oh, he's a fine boy, and a good boy." The mention of her son stiffened
+the woman into a fleeting dignity.
+
+"I suppose he's about twelve?" Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
+
+"Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I'm a little older than what
+I look." As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the
+converse was more probable.
+
+"He's not living with you?"
+
+"Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn't have him here for anything--not
+ever. Oh, no, he's at school with the Jesuits. He's to go in the Civil
+Service. I lived with his father for many years--in fact, from the time
+I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He's
+been dead about six years now."
+
+"I suppose he left money to provide for the boy."
+
+"Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren't what
+they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always
+falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I'm a
+Catholic myself."
+
+As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the
+bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had
+entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility
+of spirit.
+
+"I suppose you don't care for this life?" he asked after a short
+silence.
+
+"Well, no, I do not. It's not at all what I should call a refined way of
+living, and often it's really very unpleasant."
+
+Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself
+discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her
+health.
+
+"For one thing," she continued, "the police are very rough with one, and
+if anyone doesn't behave just as they'd like for them to behave, they
+make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn't
+right, is it? It's really not as it should be, I don't think."
+
+Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
+
+"It's damnable!" he growled. "And I suppose you have to put up with a
+good deal from some of the men?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment
+more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer's shop in a
+provincial town. "Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I'm at anyone's
+mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might
+not. Really, if it wasn't for the woman who keeps the house being always
+so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here
+for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday--or was it
+Thursday?--time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count
+the days, does it? One day last week I did what I've never done before:
+I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and
+another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I
+thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man--a very rough sort of
+a man he was, I'm not surprised poor Peter runs away from them--I heard
+him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night.
+And will you believe it, he'd gone to my bag and taken out his six
+shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had
+at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as
+they say. I wouldn't be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it with
+women like myself. Well now, you can't say a man like that is any better
+than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets. Though
+I will say it was a warning."
+
+"I suppose you'd be glad to give up the life," said Michael, and as he
+asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence of
+this woman a very futile one.
+
+"Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I'm really
+at anyone's mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in
+one way, the harm's done."
+
+Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and
+powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the more
+obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and at
+her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid
+flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
+
+"You see," she went on, "though I have to put up with a great deal, it's
+only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up by my
+father, and my mother being--well, it's no use to mince matters as they
+say--my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this occurred
+with the Frenchman I told you about--that really was a downward step,
+though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good to me
+from the beginning to the end. Still, I'm used to refinement, and I have
+a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I dislike the
+woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent regular--eight-and-six, that
+is...."
+
+"Quite enough, too," said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was so
+like the scarred surface of the moon.
+
+"You're right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I'm my own
+mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don't interfere
+with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking,
+but really Mrs. Cleghorne--that is the woman who keeps the house--really
+she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I
+go all day with only a cup of tea."
+
+Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own
+breakfast on a chafing dish.
+
+"I interrupted you," he said. "You were going to tell me something about
+Mrs. Cleghorne."
+
+"Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this
+seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me.
+Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she'd seen him
+going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn't a nice thing to
+do, is it? One doesn't want to go round drinking in public-houses. It
+looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we've fallen out
+over it. In fact, I haven't seen him for some months. Still I shouldn't
+complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some
+extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you'll
+understand--well, as I was saying--what with one thing and another my
+rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you've paid regular for
+close on two years, you expect a little consideration."
+
+"Have you lived in this burrow for two years?" Michael asked in
+amazement.
+
+"In the week before Christmas it'll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs.
+Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round
+here and abuse me. Her mother's an old woman, you'll understand, and her
+language--well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick." She put her
+hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. "She stands in that
+doorway and bullies me until I'm ashamed to sit on this bed and stand
+it. I really am. You'd hardly believe there was such things to say to
+anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I've made up my
+mind she isn't going to do it again. I'm not going to _have_ it." She
+was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs
+of the bed creaked.
+
+"The mother doesn't live here?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I'm
+not going to let it occur again. I don't consider I've been well
+treated. If I'd spent the money on gin, I shouldn't so much object to
+what the old woman calls me, for I don't say my life isn't a bit of a
+struggle. But there's so many things to use up the money, when I've got
+what's wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his
+half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little
+bit smart--really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should
+I be?--and I never waste money on clothes for clothes' sake, as they
+say--well, after that it's none so easy to find eight-and-six for the
+week's rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat's milk."
+
+Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by
+living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her
+wretchedness.
+
+"I hope your boy will turn out well," he ventured at last.
+
+"Oh, he's a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps
+the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his
+being in the Civil Service."
+
+"Or even a priest," Michael suggested.
+
+"Well, you see, he wasn't born in wedlock. Would that make a
+difference?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Michael gently. "Oh, no, I hope that wouldn't
+make a difference."
+
+He was finding the imagination of this woman's life too poignant, and he
+rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged inwardly
+that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in which she
+had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he would have
+to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged down into his
+pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had thought an
+exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity when she had
+stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he wished he had
+five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly and hopelessly
+in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She must have robbed
+him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the thief's and liar's
+film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into his own? Was it
+impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns out of his
+pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had pawed him with
+her hands in the black passage, and if the money had fallen on the road,
+he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the unjust theft; he
+ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant to give her. And
+yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had said the cat
+recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken the
+sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the weight
+she bore. And if she had taken them, why not? The cat was not at hand
+to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the money for
+herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey upon others
+in self-defense.
+
+"I find I haven't any money with me," said Michael, looking at her.
+
+"That doesn't matter. I've really quite enjoyed our little talk."
+
+"But I'll send you some more," he promised.
+
+"No, it doesn't matter. I haven't done anything to have you send your
+money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn't think I was
+really quite your style. Of course, I've really come down. It's no use
+denying it. I'm _not_ what I was."
+
+If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had
+robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had
+feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.
+
+"I shall send you some money for your boy," he said, in the darkness by
+the door.
+
+"No, it doesn't matter."
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Well, I'm known here as Mrs. Smith." Doubtfully she whispered as the
+cold air came in through the open door: "I don't expect you'd care about
+giving me a kiss."
+
+Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he
+kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.
+
+When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black
+houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure
+to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their
+fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the
+stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try to
+rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he must
+be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could
+encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far
+as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary
+policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of
+lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the
+knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now
+as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very
+much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in
+the haggard lamplight.
+
+Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
+
+He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly
+in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face downward
+upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that anything
+so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately afterward
+he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and shamefacedly he
+put away the broken picture in a drawer.
+
+Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In
+twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to
+save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy
+that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every
+time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window
+rattling in the wind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TINDERBOX LANE
+
+
+Next morning, when he woke, Michael made up his mind to leave Leppard
+Street finally in the course of this day. He could not bear the thought
+that he would only have to lean out of his window to see the actual roof
+which covered that unforgettable den beneath him. He wondered what would
+be the best thing to do with the furniture. It might be worth while to
+install Barnes in these rooms and pay his rent for some months instead
+of the salary which, now that Lily had been seen, was no longer a
+justifiable expenditure. He certainly would prefer that Barnes should
+never meet Lily now, and he regretted he had revealed her name. Still he
+had a sort of affection for Barnes which precluded the notion of
+deserting him altogether. These rooms with their simple and unmuffled
+furniture, the green shelves and narrow white bed, would be good for his
+character. He would also leave a few chosen books behind, and he would
+write and ask Nigel Stewart to visit here from time to time. Michael
+dressed himself and went upstairs to interview Barnes where he lay
+beneath a heap of bedclothes.
+
+"Oh, I daresay I could make the rooms look all right," said Barnes. "But
+what about coal?"
+
+"I shall pay for coal and light as well as the rent."
+
+"I thought you'd find it a bit dismal here," said Barnes knowingly. "I
+wonder you've stuck it out as long as you have."
+
+"After February," Michael said, "I may want to come to some other
+arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you
+understand that when the three months are up, I shan't be able to allow
+you five pounds a week any longer."
+
+"No, I never supposed you would," said Barnes, in a tone of resignation.
+
+Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not:
+however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could do
+no harm to mention it.
+
+"Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?"
+he asked.
+
+"I didn't know there was one here; but it's not a very rare occurrence
+in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to
+that."
+
+"If you hear any row going on down there," said Michael, "you had better
+interfere at once."
+
+"Who with?" Barnes inquired indignantly.
+
+"With the row," said Michael. "If the woman is being badly treated on
+account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately."
+
+"Well, I'm not in the old tear's secret, am I?" asked Barnes, in an
+injured tone. "You can't expect me to go routing about after every old
+fly-by-night stuck in a basement."
+
+"I'm particularly anxious to know that she is all right," Michael
+insisted.
+
+"Oh well, of course, if she's a friend of yours, Fane, that's another
+matter. If it's any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I'll do
+it."
+
+Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the
+Solutionist, who was also in bed.
+
+"I've got a commission for you," said Michael.
+
+The Solutionist's watery eyes brightened faintly.
+
+"You're fond of animals, aren't you?" Michael went on. "I see you
+feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I'm interested in a cat who
+appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a
+quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith's door every morning. Mrs.
+Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are fond
+of animals; but you mustn't mention me. Here's a check for five pounds.
+Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits."
+
+The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
+
+"I couldn't cash this nowadays," he said helplessly. "And get a quart of
+milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst."
+
+"All right. I'll send you postal orders," said Michael. "Now I'm going
+away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount
+left every day. You'll do what I ask? And you'll promise not to say a
+word about me?"
+
+The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely
+puzzled than he had ever seen him.
+
+Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into
+the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her
+cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did not
+know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully
+complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes
+get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window
+the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and asked
+her to come and speak to him.
+
+"I see," she said. "Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms, and you're paying
+in advance up to February. Oh, and his coal and his gas as well? I see.
+Well, that you can settle month by month. Through me? Oh, yes."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could not
+help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
+
+"Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?" Michael
+asked.
+
+"He's still in his bed, but I'll go myself."
+
+This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered.
+Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate
+which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her
+condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it
+were being bestowed from a superior height.
+
+Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white
+rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with
+him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice's studio in
+Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange whom
+himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his big
+horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending for
+some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and
+presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
+
+As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily
+again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good
+deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It
+had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but
+driving toward Maurice's studio along the banks of the river, Michael
+thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
+
+"I've brought you these pictures," he explained to Maurice, and let the
+gift account for his own long disappearance from communion with his
+friends. "They're pretty hackneyed, but I think it's rather good for you
+to have a few hackneyed things amid the riot of originality here. What
+are you doing, Mossy?"
+
+"Well, I'm rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point of
+View."
+
+"You haven't met your lady-love yet?"
+
+"No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there's plenty of time. What about
+you?" Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend
+as a stone where women were concerned.
+
+"I've seen her," said Michael. He simply had to give himself the
+pleasure of announcing so much.
+
+"By Jove, have you really? You've actually found your fate?" Maurice was
+evidently very much excited by Michael's lapse into humanity; he had
+been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. "What's she
+like?"
+
+"I haven't spoken to her yet. I've only seen her in the distance."
+
+"And you've really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with me
+here. Castleton isn't coming back from the Temple until after tea."
+
+Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while he
+stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very moment
+herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought if he
+once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too much,
+and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist saying that
+she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be applied to many
+girls, and it was only for himself that in this case they had all the
+thrilling significance they did.
+
+"I like fair girls best," Maurice agreed. "But most fair girls are
+dolls. If I met one who wasn't, I should be hopelessly in love with
+her."
+
+"Perhaps you will," Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very
+generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had the
+power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could choose
+his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the studio, or
+he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were she to be his,
+he must hold secrets about her that could never be unfolded.
+
+"I really must bolt off," he declared. "I've got a cab waiting."
+
+Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused
+the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and
+inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
+
+"Life's really too easy in this house," he thought. "It's so impossible
+to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately.
+I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I
+shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here."
+
+Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily at
+once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of her
+raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have made
+their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the joyful
+prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was really
+tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was to be
+exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington Gardens.
+However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater had made
+such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much attention to
+lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress. Otherwise he
+was himself again of six years ago, with only the delightful difference
+that he was now independent and could carry her forthwith into marriage.
+The knowledge that from a material point of view he could do this filled
+him with a magnificent consciousness of life's plenitude. So far, all
+his experiments in living had been bounded by ignorance or credulity on
+his own side, and on the side of other people by their unsuitableness
+for experiments. Certainly he had made discoveries, but they might
+better be called disillusionments. Now here was Lily who would give him
+herself to discover, who would open for him, not a looking-glass world
+in which human nature reflected itself in endless reduplications of
+perversity, but a world such as lovers only know, wherein the greatest
+deeps are themselves. Michael scarcely bothered to worry himself with
+the thought that Lily had embarked upon her own discoveries apart from
+him; she had been bewitched again by his romantic spells into the
+innocent girl of seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his
+capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged
+upon her. Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior
+was discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this
+intoxication of happiness.
+
+With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit
+the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment
+threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had
+come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when
+he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new Lily
+wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision of her
+last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the queer
+adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still higher
+upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his return to
+Cheyne Walk had helped to strengthen his hopefulness. Now he had
+returned to this circumambient crowd, looking round as each newcomer
+came up the steps, and all the while horribly aware that this evening
+Lily was not coming to the Orient. He had never been upset like this
+since his resolve was taken. The glimpse of her last night had made him
+very impatient, and he reviled himself again for having been such a fool
+as to let her escape. He fell in a rage with his immobility here in
+London. He demanded why it was not possible to swirl in widening circles
+round the city until he found her. He was no longer content to remain in
+this aquarium, stuck like a mollusc to the side of the tank. He wanted
+to see her again. He was fretful for her slow contemptuous walk and her
+debonair smile. He wanted to see her again. Already this quest was
+becoming the true torment of love. Every single other person in sight
+was a dreary automaton in whom he took no trace of interest. Every
+movement, every laugh, every shadow made him repine at its uselessness
+to him. All those years at Oxford of dreams and hesitations had let him
+store up within himself a very fury of love. He had been living falsely
+all this time: there had never been one dull hour which could not have
+been enchanted by her to the most glorious hour imaginable. He had
+realized that when he saw her last night; he had realized all the waste,
+all the deadness, all the idiotic philosophy and impotence of these
+years without her. How the fancy of her vexed him now; how easily could
+he in his frustration knock down the individuals of this senseless
+restless crowd, one after another, like the dummies of humanity they
+were.
+
+The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling curtain.
+Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into Piccadilly. She must
+be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for her to come casually
+like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear for weeks. Or was she
+a man's mistress, the mistress of a man of forty? He could picture him.
+He would be a stockbroker, the sort of man whom one saw in first-class
+railway carriages traveling up to town in the morning and reading The
+Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid in his buttonhole and
+take her to Brighton for week-ends. He knew just the shade of bluish
+pink that his cheeks were; and the way his neck looked against his
+collar; the shape of his mustache, the smell of his cigar, and his
+handicap at golf.
+
+It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that.
+Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they
+must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along
+as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after
+restaurant, cafe after cafe, standing in the doorways and staring at the
+tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him, as
+people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his
+frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and ask
+what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a
+lunatic.
+
+Michael's behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often
+ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a
+nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled
+Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions,
+because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily
+among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been
+searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked
+up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry
+Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been
+hers.
+
+By one o'clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to
+suppose that Lily would be found among these furtive women with their
+waylaying eyes in the gloom. Michael went back tired out to Cheyne Walk.
+On the following night he visited the Orient again and afterward
+searched every likely and unlikely place in the neighborhood of the
+heart of pleasure. He went also to the Empire and to the Alhambra;
+sometimes hurrying from one to the other twice in the evening, when
+panics that he was missing Lily overtook him. He met Lonsdale one night
+at the Empire, and Lonsdale took him to several night-clubs which gave a
+great zest to Michael's search; for he became a member of them himself,
+and so possessed every night another hour or more before he had to give
+up hope of finding her.
+
+Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was
+greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for
+Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt
+qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult,
+impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
+
+Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers
+Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole time
+rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline Grey,
+the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer. Guy
+explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it seemed
+he would soon have to choose between love and art; how restrictions were
+continually being put upon their meeting each other; and how violently
+difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead, where Michael had
+prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very sympathetic, and when he
+met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did think she was beautiful
+and very much like the wild rose that Guy had taken as the symbol of
+her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could not imagine problems of
+conduct in which she could be involved. Nevertheless, it was impossible
+not to feel that over Plashers Mead brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet
+it seemed ridiculous to compare Guy's difficulties with his own.
+
+For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan had
+by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to see
+how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was certainly
+something very attractive in these two young people moving about that
+grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and stood at the
+end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred acres. That it
+could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns had been defaced
+by builder's rubbish was now inconceivable. So too within, Michael could
+not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan had ever stood in this
+drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows whose sills scarcely rose
+above the level of the grass outside; that anyone else but Stella and
+Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library with its pilasters and
+calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that anyone else but Stella
+and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes of those bag-wigged
+squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that girl in her chip hat,
+holding a bunch of cherries.
+
+"No doubt you've got a keen scent for tradition," said Michael to
+Stella. "But really you have been able to get into the manner
+surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you
+both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace--Stella, I'm
+afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and
+where do hounds meet to-morrow?"
+
+"We're simply loving it here," Stella said. "But I think the piano is
+feeling a little bit out of his element. He's stiff with being on his
+best behavior."
+
+"I'm hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field," said Alan.
+"I'll show it to you to-morrow morning."
+
+The butler came in with news of callers:
+
+"The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley."
+
+"Oh, damn!" Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. "I really
+don't think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you've
+both got to come in and be polite."
+
+Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room,
+whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and
+Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+"We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas,
+but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer
+really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I've
+been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of
+ours."
+
+Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella's
+interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered
+if Stella had guessed this.
+
+"And Anne heard you play at King's Hall. Didn't you, Anne dear?"
+
+Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
+
+"That child is going to worship Stella," Michael thought.
+
+"We're hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth
+Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr.
+Fane, you'll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the
+pleasure of seeing you as well?"
+
+Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
+
+"What absolute rot!" Stella cried. "Of course you'll be here."
+
+But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
+
+"They tell us you've been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband was
+so much interested and is so much looking forward to seeing your stock;
+but at present he must not drive far. I've also heard of you from my
+youngest boy who went up to Christ Church last October year. He is very
+much excited to think that Hardingham is going to have such a
+famous--what is it called, Anne?--some kind of a bowler."
+
+"A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother," said Lady Anne.
+
+"Wasn't he in the Eton eleven?" asked Alan.
+
+"Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment," said Lady
+Stilton. "Possibly a superior player."
+
+"Oh, no, mother!" Lady Anne indignantly declared. "He would have played
+for certain against Harrow, if he hadn't sprained his ankle at the nets
+the week before."
+
+"I do hope you'll let him come and see you this vacation," Lady Stilton
+said.
+
+"Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round
+here," Alan replied. "I'm just planning out a new pitch now."
+
+"How delightful all this is," thought Michael, with visions of summer
+evenings.
+
+Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a
+great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
+
+"Of course, _you've_ got to marry Anne," said Stella to Michael, as soon
+as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
+
+"Alan," Michael appealed. "Is it impossible for you to nip now forever
+this bud of matchmaking?"
+
+"I think it's rather a good idea," said Alan. "I knew young Varley by
+sight. He's a very sound bat."
+
+"I shan't come here again," Michael threatened, "until you've dissolved
+this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to
+marry me to every girl you meet, why don't you devote yourself to the
+task of making Huntingdon a first-class county in cricket? Stella might
+captain the team."
+
+Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with
+long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year's
+morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let himself
+be deterred by Stella's gibes.
+
+"I admit you're as happy as you can be," he said. "Now surely you, after
+so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost as well
+as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet married."
+
+"Michael, you're having an affair with some girl," Stella said
+accusingly.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Swear?"
+
+"By everything I believe in, I vow I'm not having an affair with any
+girl. I wish I were."
+
+His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King's
+Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that
+it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
+
+Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a
+carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive
+with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in
+the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist's in the King's Road, he
+saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham
+Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit
+of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on
+sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and sixpence
+for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
+
+"Ought to be very good," commented the tobacconist. "Well, we want a
+bit of brightening up nowadays down this way, and that's a fact. Why, I
+can remember Cremorne Gardens. Tut-tut! Bless my soul. Yes, and the old
+World's End. That's going back into the seventies, that is. And it seems
+only yesterday."
+
+"I rather wish I'd got a ticket," said Michael.
+
+"Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I
+suppose you'd like one for a lady as well?"
+
+"No, I'll have two men's tickets."
+
+Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany
+him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio
+was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed
+to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go
+alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they
+seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch
+other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of
+spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress.
+So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
+
+Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was
+deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to
+contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which,
+having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal loss
+to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises again
+in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese
+lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it
+now not positively forbidding.
+
+Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many of
+the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also
+professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful
+inventions. The medley of colors, the motion of the dance, the sound of
+the music, the streamers of bunting and the ribbons fluttering round the
+Maypole in the middle of the room, all combined to give Michael an
+illusion of a very jocund assemblage. There were plenty of men dancing
+without masks, which was rather a pity, as their dull, ordinary faces
+halted abruptly the play of fancy. On second thoughts he was glad such
+revelers were allowed upon the floor, since as the scene gradually began
+to affect him he felt it might be amusing for himself to dance once or
+twice before the evening ended. With this notion in view, he began to
+follow more particularly the progress of different girls, balancing
+their charms one against another, and always deriving a good deal of
+pleasure from the reflection that, while at this moment they did not
+know of his existence, in an hour's time he might have entered their
+lives. This thought did give a romantic zest to an entertainment which
+would otherwise have been quite cut off from his appreciation.
+
+Suddenly Michael's heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and
+swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking
+away from him along the side of the hall--those two pierrettes in
+black--that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn't she turn
+round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The
+pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be
+sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily.
+He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below
+him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily's
+languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that it
+was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He hurried
+down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the ball-room. Where
+were they now? They were coming toward him: the other pierrette with
+the rose pompons said something as they passed. It could only be Lily
+who bowed her head like that in lazy assent. It was Lily! Should he call
+out to her, when next they passed him? If it were not Lily, what a fool
+he would look. If it were not Lily, it would not matter what he looked,
+for the disappointment would outweigh everything else. They were going
+up the room again. They were turning the corner again. They were
+sweeping toward him again. They were passing him again. He called "Lily!
+Lily!" in a voice sharp with eagerness. Neither girl gave a sign of
+attention. It was not she, after all. Yet his voice might have been
+drowned in the noise of the dance. He would call again; but again they
+passed him by unheeding. The dance was over. They had stopped at the
+other end of the room. He pressed forward against the egress of the
+dancers. He pressed forward roughly, and once or twice he heard
+grumbling murmurs because he had deranged a difficult piece of
+costumery. He was conscious of angry masks regarding him; and then he
+was free of the crowd, and before him, talking together under a canopy
+of holly were the two pierrettes. The musicians sat among the palms
+looking at him as they rested upon their instruments. Michael felt that
+his voice was going to refuse to utter her name:
+
+"Lily! Lily!"
+
+The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his
+voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were
+Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what
+she was going to do.
+
+"I say, how on earth did you recognize me?" Lily murmured, raising her
+mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and
+tender, so scornful and so passionate.
+
+"I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across
+the road to speak to you, but you'd gone before I could manage it.
+Where have you been all these years? Once I went to Trelawny Road, but
+the house was empty." He could not tell her that Drake had been the
+first to bring him news of her.
+
+"It's years since I was there," said Lily. "Years and years." She turned
+to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came closer
+to be introduced.
+
+"Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren't I good to remember your
+name quite correctly?" Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was
+utterly scornful. "What made you come here? Have you got a friend with
+you?"
+
+Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an
+accident.
+
+"Why did _you_ come?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, something to do," said Lily. "We live near here."
+
+"So do I," said Michael hastily.
+
+"Do you?" Her eyebrows went up in what he imagined was an expression of
+rather cruel interrogation. "This is a silly sort of a show. Still, even
+Covent Garden is dull now."
+
+Michael thought what a fool he had been not to include Covent Garden in
+his search. How well he might have known she would go there.
+
+"Where's Doris?" he asked.
+
+Lily shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I never see anything of her nowadays. She married an actor. I don't
+often get letters from home, do I, Sylvia?"
+
+The pierrette with rose pompons, who ever since her introduction had
+still been standing outside the conversation, now raised her mask.
+Michael liked her face. She had merry eyes, and a wide nose rather
+Slavonic. Next to Lily she seemed almost dumpy.
+
+"Letters, my dear," she exclaimed, in a very deep voice, "Who wants
+letters?"
+
+The music of a waltz was beginning, and Michael asked Lily if she would
+dance with him. She looked at Sylvia.
+
+"I don't think...."
+
+"Oh, what rot, Lily! Of course you can dance."
+
+Michael gave her a grateful smile.
+
+In a moment Lily had lowered her mask, and they were waltzing together.
+
+"My gad, how gloriously you waltz!" he whispered. "Did we ever dance
+together five years ago?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and he felt the faint movement tremble
+through the imponderable form he held.
+
+"Lily, I've been looking for you since June," he sighed.
+
+"You're breaking step," she said. Though her mask was down, Michael was
+sure that she was frowning at him.
+
+"Lily, why are you so cold with me? Have you forgotten?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Why, everything!" Michael gasped.
+
+"You're absolutely out of time now," she said sternly.
+
+They waltzed for a while in silence, and Michael felt like a midge
+spinning upon a dazzle.
+
+"Do you remember when we met in Kensington Gardens?" he ventured. "I
+remember you had black pompons on your shoes then, and now you have pale
+blue pompons on your dress."
+
+She was not answering him.
+
+"It's funny you should still be living near me," he went on. "I suppose
+you're angry with me because I suddenly never saw you again. That was
+partly your mother's fault."
+
+She looked at him in faint perplexity, swaying to the melody of the
+waltz. Michael thought he had blundered in betraying himself as so
+obviously lovestruck now. He must be seeming to her like that absurd and
+sentimental boy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him, for
+she could compare him with other men. Ejaculations of wonder at her
+beauty would no longer serve, with all the experience she might bring to
+mock them. She was smiling at him now, and the mask she wore made the
+smile seem a sneer. He grew so angry with her suddenly that almost he
+stopped in the swing of the dance to shake her.
+
+"But it was much more your fault," he said savagely. "Do you remember
+Drake?"
+
+She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
+
+"Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us."
+
+"Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed by
+some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that?
+Couldn't you say 'no'? Were you too lazy?"
+
+Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
+
+"Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or
+did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were
+flirting with?"
+
+Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no
+gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his
+arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that,
+while she was with him, she was his again.
+
+What did the past matter?
+
+"Ah, Lily, you love me still! I'll ask no more questions. Am I out of
+step?"
+
+"No, not now," she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with the
+swoon of their dancing.
+
+"Take off that silly mask," he commanded. "Take it off and give it to
+me. I can hold you with one arm."
+
+She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as
+if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no
+longer veiled her face; her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her
+lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm
+until he could touch her shoulder.
+
+"Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over."
+
+She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and
+danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and
+Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood
+in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
+
+Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always known
+her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything that was
+happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it were a
+street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking. Nor
+with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced with
+Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after
+midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall,
+and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a cab,
+but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they lived, was
+only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham Road. The fog
+was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the girls' arms with
+a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of extraordinary
+freedom from the world, as if they were all three embarked upon an
+adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their shoes deep down in
+the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession of their shoes he
+had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them. The fog was denser
+and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb, listening for
+oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far down the Fulham
+Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of them seemed to
+sail across to the opposite pavement. He had nothing to say because he
+was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she talked now no more
+than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to carry on the
+conversation, and since most of this consisted of questions to Lily and
+Michael about their former friendship, which neither Lily nor Michael
+answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last; and they walked on
+silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls close to him and
+watching all the time Lily's hand holding up her big black cloak.
+
+"Here we are, you two dreamers," said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by
+a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly,
+without any dip down into a road.
+
+"Through here? How fascinating!" said Michael.
+
+They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in
+front of a door set in a wall.
+
+"I've got the key," said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
+
+"But this is extraordinary," Michael exclaimed. "Aren't we walking
+through a garden?"
+
+"Yes, it's quite a long garden," Sylvia informed him. There was a smell
+of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael
+thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following
+Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden
+like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they walked
+up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
+
+"She's downstairs," said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the key.
+A woman's figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the passage.
+
+"Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We're frozen," Sylvia called. As the
+woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
+
+"We've brought an old friend of Lily's back from the dance. It wasn't
+really worth going to. Oh, I oughtn't to have said that, ought I?" she
+laughed, turning round to Michael. "Come in and get warm. This is Mrs.
+Gainsborough, who's the queen of cards."
+
+"Get along with you, you great saucy thing," said Mrs. Gainsborough,
+laughing.
+
+She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her
+crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her
+black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the
+middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger,
+sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was
+amused to hear her address Sylvia as "great."
+
+"We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old
+mountain," Sylvia said.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest
+of wheezy laughter.
+
+"Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room table,"
+and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the diminutive
+corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near the fire.
+Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass case of
+humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell coronated
+with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on the chair was
+of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her pierrette's dress of
+black with light blue pompons looked strangely remote from present time
+in that setting. Michael could not connect this secluded house with
+anything which had made an impression upon him during his experience of
+the underworld. Here was nothing that was not cozy and old-fashioned;
+here was no sign of decay, whether in the fabric of the house or in the
+attitude of the people living there. This small square room with the
+heavy furniture that occupied so much of the space had no demirep
+demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped sides and back of
+floriated wood; that brass birdcage hanging in the window against the
+curtains of maroon serge; those cabinets in miniature, some lacquered,
+some of plain wood with tiny drop-handles of brass; those black chairs
+with seats of gilded cane; those trays with marquetery in
+mother-of-pearl of wreaths and rivulets and parrots; that table-cloth
+like a dish of black Sevres; those simpering steel engravings--there was
+nothing that did not bespeak the sobriety of the Victorian prime here
+miraculously preserved. Lily and Sylvia in such dresses belonged to a
+period of fantasy; Mrs. Gainsborough was in keeping with her furniture;
+and Michael, as he looked at himself in the glass overmantel, did not
+think that he was seeming very intrusive.
+
+"Whose are these rooms?" he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not
+believe they were her creation or discovery.
+
+"I found them," said Sylvia. "The old girl who owns the house is bad,
+but beautiful. Aren't you, you most astonishing but attractive mammoth?"
+This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the moment panting
+into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
+
+"Get along with you," the landlady chuckled. "Now don't go to sleep,
+Lily. Your supper is just on ready." She went puffing from the room in
+busy mirthfulness.
+
+"She's one of the best," said Sylvia. "This house was given to her by an
+old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting of
+him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers. She
+was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle Rooms
+and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness."
+
+It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have
+mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected him
+more sharply now with a sense of the appropriateness of this house in
+Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood of
+this foggy night.
+
+"Supper! Supper!" Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
+
+It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet,
+and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and give
+him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair, up
+from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so, and
+she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to follow
+them across the passage.
+
+It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table
+with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance.
+That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside,
+was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a
+woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
+
+Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again. So
+he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
+
+"Oh, my eye, my eye!" laughed Sylvia. "To think that Aunt Enormous was
+once in the ballet at the Opera."
+
+"How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!" Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of
+muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them
+frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue
+eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that
+Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the
+New Year's Day which could so change his fortune.
+
+"Were you in the ballet?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like
+to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now."
+
+"Show the kind gentleman your picture," said Sylvia. "She wears it round
+her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank."
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy
+young woman in a pork-pie hat.
+
+"That's myself," said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. "Well, and I
+always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why
+shouldn't I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?"
+
+"But show him the others," Sylvia demanded.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained
+morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces
+against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait's wraith: a
+girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering,
+with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence of
+a ghostly bloom.
+
+"Oh, look at her," cried Sylvia. "In her beautiful pantalettes!"
+
+"Hold your tongue, you!"
+
+They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which lasted
+on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the other
+room and sat round the fire.
+
+"Tell us about the General," said Sylvia.
+
+"Go on, as if you hadn't heard a score of times all I've got to tell
+about the General--though you know I hate him to be called that. He'll
+always be the Captain to me."
+
+Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough
+embarked upon tales of gay days in the 'sixties and 'seventies. It was
+astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could
+scarcely have changed since then.
+
+"The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in eighteen-sixty-nine
+before I was twenty, and I've lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many's
+the summer daybreak we've walked back here after dancing all night at
+Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl's Court is nothing to
+Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it's as
+well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me the
+dismals to be going there now without my Captain."
+
+She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very
+smoke and grime of the city.
+
+"Who knows what's going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?" she
+said, shaking her head. "So enjoy yourselves while you can. That's my
+motto. And if there's a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be
+very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am
+now."
+
+The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company,
+seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it
+was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of her
+youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces.
+Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead
+singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes
+reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young
+subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story to
+story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after two
+o'clock, and Michael rose to go.
+
+"We'll have one song," cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough to
+the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up albums,
+and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a pleating of
+claret-colored silk.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed in
+comparison so frail and old, sang in a wheezy pipe of a voice: _The
+Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me._
+
+"But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me
+behind my back," she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face
+Sylvia when she had finished.
+
+"Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like it."
+
+"Bless your heart, my dearie." She laid a hand on Sylvia's for an
+instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and
+asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily
+and her out to lunch.
+
+"We can lunch to-morrow, can't we?" Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily's arm,
+for she was now fast asleep.
+
+"Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow," Lily yawned.
+
+He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to shake
+hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that the
+outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to
+speed his departure.
+
+The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the
+night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming
+undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But
+he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter
+night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his
+overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls'
+shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most
+fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers
+which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse
+blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by
+nor cat offended his isolation. The London night belonged to him; his
+only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on either
+side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than a few
+yards in front.
+
+He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his good
+luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing was
+ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that carnival.
+Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined to buy all
+sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had fingered vaguely
+from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily's discovery was colored
+with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze the situation in which
+he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea through the fog, he was
+bemused by the romantic memory of her which was traveling along with his
+thoughts. He could hold very tightly her shoes: he could almost embrace
+the phantom of her beauty that curled upon the vapors round each lamp:
+he was intoxicated merely by the sound of the street where she lived.
+
+"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!"
+
+He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed
+to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of
+the railway-carriage: "Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?"
+
+"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!" he chanted at the fog,
+and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on
+ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, constable."
+
+"Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren't you?"
+
+"Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink
+my health when you're off duty."
+
+He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman's hand, and as he left the
+stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was
+the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on the
+Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black river
+flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with
+monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here, a frore
+whitish mist that saturated him with a malignant chill. Michael was glad
+to find himself looking at the dolphin-headed knocker of 173 Cheyne
+Walk. The effect of being in his own bedroom again, even though the
+girls' shoes lay fantastically upon the floor, was at first to make him
+believe that Tinderbox Lane might have been a dream, and after that,
+because he knew it was not a dream, to wonder about it.
+
+Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could
+Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small
+house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and stability,
+almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety. Mrs.
+Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very
+demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would have
+been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary to
+assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of
+high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be
+on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady's kindling
+stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the
+Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been
+nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael's heart leaped with the fancy
+that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night;
+and, picking up Lily's shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about its
+secrets.
+
+In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dull January rain; but
+Michael greeted the outlook as cheerfully as if it had been perfect May
+weather. He went first to a post office to send off the money he had
+promised to Mrs. Smith and the Solutionist. After this discharge of
+business, he felt more cheerful than ever, and, as if to capture the
+final touch of fantasy necessary to bewitch yesterday night, he suddenly
+realized, when he was hurrying along Fulham Road in the rain, that he
+had no idea of the number of Mrs. Gainsborough's house. He also began to
+wonder if there really could be such a place as Tinderbox Lane, and as
+he walked on without discovering any indication of its existence, he
+wondered if Sylvia had invented the name, so that he might never find
+her and Lily again. It was an uneasy thought, for without a number and
+without a name--but just as he was planning an elaborate way to discover
+the real name of the street, he saw in front of him Tinderbox Lane
+enameled in the ordinary characters of municipal direction. Here were
+the two posts: here was the narrow entrance. The rumble of the traffic
+grew fainter. On one side was a high blank wall; on the other a row of
+two-storied houses. They were naturally dwellings of the poorer classes,
+but at intervals a painter had acquired one, and had painted it white or
+affixed green shutters with heart-shaped openings. The width of the
+pavement varied continually, but generally at the beginning it was very
+narrow. Later on, however, it became wide enough to allow trees to be
+planted down the middle. Beyond this part was a block of new flats round
+which Tinderbox Lane narrowed again to a mere alley looking now rather
+dank and gloomy in the rain. Michael could not remember from last night
+in the fog either the trees or the flats. The door of Lily's lodging had
+been set in a wall: here on one side was certainly a wall, but never a
+door to relieve the grimy blankness. He began to feel discouraged, and
+he walked round into the narrow alley behind the flats. Here were doors
+in the wall at last, and Michael examined each of them in turn. Two were
+dark blue: one was green: one was brown. 74: 75: 76: 77. He chose 77
+because it was farthest away from the flats. After a very long wait, an
+old woman holding over herself a very large umbrella opened it.
+
+"Mrs. Gainsborough ...?" Michael began.
+
+But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his
+inquiry.
+
+Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last
+the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself
+under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman's next door.
+
+"I've come to take the girls out to lunch."
+
+"That's a good boy," she wheezed. "The dearies will be glad to get out
+and enjoy themselves a bit. Here's a day. This would have suited Noah,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the
+garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house
+itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the
+astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the pretentious
+gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind, nor even in
+front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These houses with
+doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to individuals, and
+for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by the development of
+the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long gardens in a row must
+be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad to think that the flats
+opposite were no doubt due to the death of someone who had owned a
+similar house and garden.
+
+Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side.
+Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently to
+the kitchen. Two fairly large trees were planted in the grass that ran
+up to the house on either side of the balcony.
+
+"Those are my mulberries," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "This is called
+Mulberry Cottage. I've been meaning to have the name painted on the
+outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There's a
+character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his mulberries.
+But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my flowers are really
+remarkable. But there, it's not to be wondered at. M' father was a
+nursery gardener."
+
+She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why.
+Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of the
+Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
+
+"The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls," she wheezed at the door of the
+sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of
+bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily
+was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her book
+down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the title, and
+found it was the Contes Drolatiques of Balzac. An unusual girl, he
+thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could not kiss
+her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now restored,
+supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at ease again.
+Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he sat thinking
+of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The silence here
+was very like the country. London was a thousand miles away, and he
+could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and less did he
+think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage. Yet the
+apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take Lily
+away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she might not
+want to marry him at once. The discovery of her in this pleasant house
+with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of rescue which he had
+planned. She would not presumably be escaping from a situation she
+abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was it Sylvia who was
+making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and explain that he had no
+predatory intentions. She would surely be glad that he wanted to marry
+Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and tinkled the lusters on the
+mantelshelf. "Sweet," said the canary in the brass cage: the rain
+sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small square room was the
+malaise of someone's jealousy. The tentative solution that was
+propounding itself did not come from his own impression of Sylvia, but
+it seemed positively to be an emanation from the four walls of the room
+which in the stillness was able to force its reality upon him. "Sweet,"
+said the canary: the lusters stopped their tinkling: the rain sizzled
+steadily outside.
+
+Lunch at Kettner's was a great success. At least Michael thought it was
+a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy walls,
+and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but rather to
+give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and wintry sun.
+Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was conscious that
+the other people in the restaurant were turning round to envy their
+table.
+
+The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less
+he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been
+comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she
+displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly
+herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid
+question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and
+Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been
+disquieting, but that Sylvia talked of them with such a really
+tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more
+than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the
+river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and balls.
+Quite definitely Michael was able to assure himself that out of the host
+of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored above
+the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were
+independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be
+Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and
+perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm's length from Lily, as
+he felt himself being held now. Her attitude might have nothing to do
+with jealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she was,
+indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who read
+the Contes Drolatiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a girl
+who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had said
+something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet he
+knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the
+conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what
+was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy
+walls.
+
+For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the
+girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be
+alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To
+find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a
+room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative,
+so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
+
+"We're alone," he managed to say at last.
+
+"Sylvia's gone to Brighton. She didn't want to go a bit."
+
+"Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven't kissed for five years."
+
+He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him,
+it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He
+heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from
+perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the
+trance of silence.
+
+"Lily, you will marry me, won't you? Very soon? At once?"
+
+Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him
+from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the
+remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue
+relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such
+a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of
+action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his
+arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most
+poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded
+at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely
+knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of
+caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears.
+It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring
+huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and
+whatever he found her, but the relief was overwhelming. He had thought
+of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic
+colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at
+least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this
+loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had
+eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in
+dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the
+sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could believe he held her
+now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his cheeks, when her mouth
+was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon this airy beauty must
+have perished; and even now what was she? A shred of goldleaf on his
+open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and destructible in a
+moment of adversity.
+
+Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been
+aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was
+placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her,
+though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He
+could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about
+whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous
+promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he
+would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for
+her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection,
+thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses blowing
+in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her
+kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself;
+and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink
+loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain
+had first imagined his gift.
+
+So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably
+vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had
+them express, the hour passed.
+
+"We must talk of practical things," he declared, rising from his knees.
+
+"You always want to talk," Lily pouted.
+
+"I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?"
+
+"Yes; but it's so difficult to do things quickly."
+
+"We'll be married in a month. We'll be married on Saint Valentine's
+Day," Michael announced.
+
+"It's so wet now to think of weddings." She looked peevishly out of the
+window.
+
+"You haven't got to think about it. You've got to do it."
+
+"And it's so dull," she objected. "Sylvia says it's appallingly dull.
+And she's been married."
+
+"What has Sylvia got to do with it?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, well, she's been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother
+died, what was I to do? I couldn't bear Doris any more. She always gets
+on my nerves. Anyway, don't let's talk about marriage now. In the summer
+I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather."
+
+"But look here," he persisted. "Are you in love with me?"
+
+She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
+
+"Well, if you're not in love with me...."
+
+"Oh, I am, I am! Don't shout so, Michael. If I wasn't awfully fond of
+you, I shouldn't have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men
+coming here."
+
+"Are you Sylvia's servant?" said Michael, in exasperation.
+
+"Don't be stupid. Of course not."
+
+"It's ridiculous," he grumbled, "to quote her with every sentence."
+
+"Why you couldn't have stayed where you were," said Lily fretfully, "I
+don't know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If
+you're so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up."
+
+"So, we're not to talk any more about marriage?"
+
+After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that
+Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not
+the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
+
+"Don't let's talk about anything," said Lily. He could not stand aloof
+from the arms she held wide open.
+
+Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael
+spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked
+approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The
+weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch,
+it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long.
+One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he
+asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey's. Michael
+had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should
+seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what he
+told himself was the only cafe in London which had escaped the
+cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
+
+As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very
+white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her
+self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael suddenly
+suspicious.
+
+"Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?" he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"It depends who we go with. Often I don't care for them much. And the
+girls you see there are frightfully common."
+
+He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If it
+were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no difference
+to his resolution. People began to come into the cafe, shaking the wet
+from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was audible above the
+conversation.
+
+"I wish we could have had one fine day together," said Michael
+regretfully. "Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the
+winter?"
+
+"I must have been very fond of you," Lily laughed. "I don't think you
+could make me walk like that now."
+
+"Aren't you so fond of me now?" he asked reproachfully.
+
+"You ought to know," she whispered.
+
+All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets,
+and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
+
+"Shall I come in?" Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
+
+"Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course."
+
+He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
+
+"Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink after
+midnight?"
+
+"I told you that Sylvia doesn't like me to," she said.
+
+"But you would, if she didn't mind?" Michael went on, torturing himself.
+
+"How fond you are of 'ifs,'" she answered. "I can't bother to think
+about 'ifs' myself."
+
+If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips
+with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already
+he was feeling the influence of Lily's attitude. He wondered if, when he
+married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It was
+as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful woman as
+in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
+
+"Happiness makes me inactive," said Michael to himself. "So of course I
+shall never really be happy. What a paradox."
+
+He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a surrender
+to-night.
+
+"I'm glad I didn't suggest staying late," he thought, as he walked away
+down the dripping garden path. "I should have been mad with unreasonable
+suspicions, if she had said 'yes.'"
+
+Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very much,
+he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of malice
+in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have dinner
+with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond. Michael
+was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet until she
+had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia's influence? And
+who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
+
+The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o'clock as
+usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the
+fire.
+
+"Lily isn't down yet," she told him.
+
+He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he
+and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
+
+"Jolly dance?" he asked.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
+
+"Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out." Michael
+flung down his challenge.
+
+"She's been talking to me about what you said yesterday," Sylvia began.
+
+Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her
+countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that
+out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
+
+"When do you propose to marry her?" Sylvia went on.
+
+"As soon as possible," he said coolly.
+
+"Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?" she
+demanded.
+
+"I really don't know. You have rather an advantage over me in that
+respect."
+
+"I'm glad you admit that," interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
+
+"You have personality. You've probably been very kind to Lily. You're
+cleverer than she is. You're with her all the time. I've only quite
+suddenly come into her life again."
+
+"I'm glad you think you've managed to do that," she said, glowering.
+
+More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a
+cat crouching by the fire.
+
+"Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an opportunity
+to be alone with Lily, you now think you've come into her life. My god,
+you're like some damned fool in a novel!"
+
+"A novel by whom?" Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off
+Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he
+never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
+
+"Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp," she answered savagely.
+
+He bowed.
+
+"I suppose you're suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?"
+she sneered.
+
+Michael was rather startled by her divination.
+
+"What should I redeem her from?"
+
+"I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?"
+
+"I don't know that I boasted of it," he replied, in rather an injured
+tone. "But I did know her--very well."
+
+"Couldn't you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should
+have said that Lily's future must have been obvious from the time she
+was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got
+out of her life then: what the hell's your object in coming into it
+again now, as you call it, unless you're a sentimentalist? People don't
+let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without
+the help of sentiment."
+
+Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the conversation was
+able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true.
+He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia
+looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
+
+"Sentiment about what?" he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
+
+"You think Lily's a tart, don't you? And you think I am, don't you?"
+
+He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
+
+"I did think so," he said. "But of course I've changed my mind since
+I've seen something of you."
+
+"Oh, of course you've changed your mind, have you?" she laughed
+contemptuously. "And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?"
+
+"Even if _you_ are," said Michael hotly, "I needn't believe that Lily
+is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry
+her."
+
+"Sentimentalist," she jeered. "Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist."
+
+"Your sneers don't particularly affect me, you know," he said politely.
+
+"Oh, for god's sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut
+out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And I'm
+sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I'm a perpetual
+bugbear to his good form."
+
+"Because you made a hash of marriage," Michael pointed out, "it doesn't
+follow that I'm not to marry Lily. I can't understand your objections."
+
+"Listen. You couldn't make her happy. You couldn't make her any happier
+than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time
+without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let any
+one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the money myself.
+And I usually can. Well, why should I stand aside now and let you carry
+her off, even though you do want to marry her? I could argue against it
+on your side by telling you that you have no chance of keeping Lily
+faithful to you? Can't you see that she has no moral energy? Can't you
+see that she's vain and empty-headed? Can't you see that? But why should
+I argue with you for your benefit? I don't care a damn about your side
+in the matter."
+
+"What exactly do you care about?" Michael asked. "If Lily is what you
+say, I should have thought you'd be glad to be rid of her. After all,
+I'm not proposing to do her any wrong."
+
+"Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!" Sylvia cried. "Man can
+only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be
+a success, you'll have to own Lily. That's what I rebel against--the
+ownership of women. It makes me mad."
+
+"Yes, it seems to," Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage
+with Sylvia's unreasonableness. "If it comes to ownership," he went on
+angrily, "I should have thought that handing her over to the highest
+bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable
+slave of man."
+
+"Why?" challenged Sylvia. "You sentimental ass, can't you understand
+that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She's
+free. I'm free."
+
+"You're not at all free," Michael indignantly contradicted. "You're
+bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few
+less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts, you'd
+be a good deal happier."
+
+"I don't want to be happier."
+
+"Oh, I think you're merely hysterical," he said disdainfully. "But,
+after all, your opinions about yourself don't matter to me. Only I
+can't see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you
+have the right, I don't grasp your reason for wanting to."
+
+"When I met Lily first," said Sylvia, "she had joined the chorus of a
+touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I'd just
+run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I'd
+ever seen. That's three years ago. Is she beautiful still?"
+
+"Of course she is," said Michael.
+
+"Well, it's I who have kept her beautiful. I've kept her free also. If
+sometimes I've let her have affairs with men, I've taken care that they
+were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort of...."
+
+"Look here," Michael burst in. "I'm sick of this conversation. You're
+talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I'm going to marry her,
+whatever you think."
+
+"I say you won't, and you shan't," Sylvia declared.
+
+The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the
+fire, glaring at each other.
+
+"The extraordinary thing is," said Michael at last, "I thought you had a
+sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing is
+that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you. But I
+can't help saying it."
+
+"The opinions of sentimentalists don't interest me one way or the
+other," Sylvia snapped.
+
+"Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so pleasant
+on the evening we met?"
+
+"I really can't bother to go back as far as that."
+
+"You weren't jealous _then_," Michael persisted.
+
+"Who says I'm jealous now?" she cried.
+
+"I do. What do you think you are, unless you're jealous? When is Lily
+coming down?"
+
+"She isn't coming down until you've gone."
+
+"Then I shall go and call her."
+
+"She's not in London."
+
+"I don't believe you."
+
+A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia
+the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He
+congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was obviously
+going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
+
+On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
+
+"You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because
+Lily loves me."
+
+"It's not true," Sylvia declared. "It's not true. She doesn't love you,
+and what right have you to love her?"
+
+She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
+
+"What college was your husband at?" Michael suddenly inquired.
+
+"Balliol."
+
+"I wonder if I knew him."
+
+"Oh, no. He was older than you."
+
+It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane,
+that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so
+much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He
+would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to
+have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he felt
+that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let Lily
+continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if
+Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably
+irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no less
+than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not want to
+marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily, from whom
+there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his theories of
+behavior were being referred back to his own desires. It was useless to
+pretend any longer that his pursuit had been quixotry. Even if it had
+seemed so on that night when he first heard the news of Lily from Drake,
+the impulse at the back of his resolve had been his passion for her.
+When he looked back at his behavior lately, a good deal of it seemed to
+have been dictated by self-gratification. He remembered how deeply hurt
+he had felt by Poppy's treatment of what he had supposed his chivalry.
+In retrospect his chivalry was seeming uncommonly like self-satisfaction.
+His friendship for Daisy; for Barnes; for the underworld; it had been
+nothing but self-satisfaction. Very well, then. If self was to be the
+touchstone in future, he could face that standard as easily as any
+other. By the time he had reached the end of Tinderbox Lane Michael was
+convinced of his profound cynicism. He felt truly obliged to Sylvia for
+curing him of sentiment. He had so often inveighed against sentiment as
+the spring of human action, that he was most sincerely grateful for the
+proof of his own sentimental bias. He would go to Sylvia to-morrow and
+say frankly that he did not care a bit what Lily had been, was now, or
+would be; he wanted her. She was something beautiful which he coveted.
+For the possession of her he was ready to struggle. He would declare war
+upon Sylvia as upon a rival. She should be rather surprised to-morrow
+morning, Michael thought, congratulating himself upon this new and
+ruthless policy.
+
+On the next morning, however, all Michael's plans for his future
+behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry
+Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold resolution,
+were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing a bell at
+intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for the position
+he had imagined himself taking up in that small square room. This
+errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such rapt interest at
+his ringing of the bell, was by no means the audience he had pictured.
+
+"Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?" Michael asked.
+
+The errand-boy shook his head.
+
+"Well, why do you do it?"
+
+"I wasn't," said the errand-boy.
+
+"What are you doing, then?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from
+Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no
+answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but
+there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to
+Sylvia:
+
+     173 CHEYNE WALK,
+
+     S.W.
+
+     Dear Sylvia,
+
+     If you aren't afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me
+     see Lily?
+
+     I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     M. F.
+
+To Lily he wrote:
+
+     Darling,
+
+     Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to
+     three.
+
+     Michael.
+
+     Alone, of course.
+
+Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not
+come. All the time he spent in a second-hand bookshop with one eye on
+the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:
+
+     Come to-morrow at twelve.
+
+     S. S.
+
+Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the
+waste-paper basket.
+
+"I thought I should sting you into giving way," he exclaimed.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
+
+"They've gone away, the demons!" was what she said.
+
+Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching
+behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert
+he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
+
+"Where have they gone?" he asked blankly.
+
+"Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage.
+There's a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I'll give it to you."
+
+Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
+
+"We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are," Mrs.
+Gainsborough said.
+
+"Very soon," he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold
+begonias to-morrow morning.
+
+In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia's note, a bleak little envelope
+waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read
+it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the silence
+that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his cage.
+Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
+
+From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia's hostility was
+stretching out toward him. "Sweet," said the canary. Michael tore open
+the envelope and read:
+
+     Perhaps you'll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You'd
+     much better give her up. In a way, I'm rather sorry for you, but
+     not enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear
+     young thing, that you aren't even beginning to understand women. I
+     admit that there's precious little to understand in Lily. And for
+     that very reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty,
+     you'll hate her. Now _I_ hate to think of this happening. She's a
+     thousand times better off with me than she ever could be with you.
+     Perhaps my maternal instinct has gone off the lines a bit and fixed
+     itself on Lily. And yet I don't think it's anything so sickly as
+     sentimental mothering. No, I believe I just like to sit and look at
+     her. Lily's rather cross with me for taking her away from "such a
+     nice boy." Does that please you? And doesn't it exactly describe
+     you? However, I won't crow. Don't break the lusters, when you read
+     this. They belong to Fatty. What I suggest for you is a walk in
+     Kensington Gardens to the refrain of "Blast the whole bloody
+     world!" Now look shocked, my little Vandyck.
+
+     S. S.
+
+Michael tore the letter up. He did not want to read and re-read it for
+the rest of the day. His eyelids were pricking unpleasantly, and he went
+out to find Mrs. Gainsborough. He was really sensitive that even a room
+should witness such a discomfiture. The landlady was downstairs in the
+kitchen, where he had not yet been. In this room of copper pots and
+pans, with only the garden in view, she might have been a farmer's wife.
+
+"Sit down," she said. "And make yourself at home."
+
+"Will you sit down?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, well, yes, if it's any pleasure to you." She took off her apron and
+seated herself, smoothing the bombasine skirt over her knees.
+
+A tabby cat purred between them; a kettle was singing; and there was a
+smell of allspice.
+
+"You really don't know where the girls have gone?" Michael began.
+
+"No more than you do," she assured him. "But that Sylvia is really a
+Turk."
+
+"I suppose Lily didn't tell you that I used to know her six years ago?"
+he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, she talked about you a lot. A good deal more than Miss Sylvia
+liked, that's a sure thing."
+
+"Well, do you think it's fair for Sylvia to carry her off like this? I
+want to marry Lily, Mrs. Gainsborough."
+
+"There, only fancy what a daring that Sylvia has. She's a nice girl, and
+very high-spirited, but she _is_ a Miss Dictatorial."
+
+Michael felt encouraged by Mrs. Gainsborough's attitude, and he made up
+his mind to throw himself upon her mercy. Sentiment would be his only
+weapon, and he found some irony in the reflection that he had set out
+this morning to be a brutal cynic in his treatment of the situation.
+
+"Do you think it's fair to try to prevent Lily from marrying me? You
+know as well as I do that the life she's leading now isn't going to be
+the best life possible for her. You're a woman of the world, Mrs.
+Gainsborough----"
+
+"I was once," she corrected. "And a very naughty world it was, too."
+
+"You were glad, weren't you, when the Captain brought you to this house?
+You were glad to feel secure? You would have married him?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't marry him. I preferred to be as I am. Still that's
+nothing for Lily to go by. She's more suited for marriage than what I
+was."
+
+"Don't you think," Michael went on eagerly, "that if after six years I'm
+longing to marry her, I ought to marry her? I know that she might be
+much worse off than she is, but equally she might be much better off.
+Look here, Mrs. Gainsborough, it's up to you. You've got to make it
+possible for me to see her. You've got to."
+
+"But if I do anything like that," said Mrs. Gainsborough, "it means I
+have an unpleasantness with Sylvia. That girl's a regular heathen when
+she turns nasty. I should be left all alone in my little house. And what
+with Spring coming on and all, and the flowers looking so nice in the
+garden, I should feel very much the square peg in the round hole."
+
+"Lily and I would come and see you," he promised. "And I don't think
+Sylvia would leave you. She'd never find another house like Mulberry
+Cottage or another landlady like you."
+
+"Yes, I daresay; but you can't tell these things. Once she's in her
+tantrums, there's no saying what will happen. And, besides, I don't know
+what you want me to do."
+
+"I want you to send me word the first moment that Lily's alone for an
+hour; and when I ring, do answer the bell."
+
+"Now that wasn't my fault yesterday," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Really I
+thought we should have the fire-escape in. The way you nagged at that
+poor bell! It was really chronic. But would she let me so much as speak
+to you, even with the door only on the jar? Certainly not! And all the
+time she was snapping round the house like a young crocodile. And yet
+I'm really fond of that girl. Well, when the Captain died, she was a
+daughter to me. Oh, she was, she was really a daughter to me. Well, you
+see, his sister invited me to the funeral, which I thought was very
+nice, her being an old maid and very strict. Now, I hardly liked to put
+on a widow's cap and yet I hardly didn't like to. But Sylvia, she said
+not on any account, and I was very glad I didn't, because there was a
+lot of persons there very stand-offish, and I should have been at my
+wits to know whatever I was going to say."
+
+"Look here," said Michael. "When the Captain gave you this house, he
+loved you. You were young, weren't you? You were young and beautiful?
+Well, would you like to think your house was going to be used to
+separate two people very much in love with each other? You can say I
+climbed over the wall. You can make any excuse you like to Sylvia. But,
+Mrs. Gainsborough, do, do let me know when Lily is going to be alone. If
+she doesn't want to come away with me, it will be my fault, and that
+will be the end of it. If only you'll help me at the beginning. Will
+you? Will you promise to help me?"
+
+"I never could resist a man," sighed Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+resignation. "There's a character! Oh, well, it's my own and no one
+else's, that's one good job."
+
+Michael had to wait until February was nearly over before he heard from
+her. It had been very difficult to remain quietly at Cheyne Walk, but he
+knew that if he were to show any sign of activity, Sylvia would carry
+Lily off again.
+
+"A person to see you, sir," said the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid.
+
+Michael found Mrs. Gainsborough sitting in the hall. She was wearing a
+bonnet tied with very bright cerise ribbons.
+
+"They've had a rumpus, the pair of them, this afternoon. And Sylvia's
+gone off in the sulks. I really was quite aggravated with her. Oh, she's
+a willful spitfire, that girl, sometimes. She really is."
+
+Michael was coming away without a coat or hat, and Mrs. Gainsborough
+stopped him.
+
+"Now don't behave like a silly. Dress yourself properly and don't make
+me run. I'm getting stout, you know," she protested.
+
+"We'll get a hansom."
+
+"What, ride in a hansom? Never! A four-wheeler if you _like_."
+
+It was difficult to find a four-wheeler, and Michael was nearly mad with
+impatience.
+
+"Now don't upset yourself. Sylvia won't be back to-night, and there's no
+need to tug at me as if I was a cork in a bottle. People will think
+we're a walking poppy-show, if you don't act more quiet. They're all
+turning round to stare at us."
+
+A four-wheeler appeared presently, and very soon they were walking down
+Tinderbox Lane. Michael felt rather like a little boy out with his
+nurse, as he kept turning back to exhort Mrs. Gainsborough to come more
+quickly. She grew more and more red in the face, and so wheezy that he
+was afraid something would happen to her, and for a few yards made no
+attempt to hurry her along. At last they reached Mulberry Cottage.
+
+"Supposing Sylvia has come back!" he said.
+
+"I keep on telling you she's gone away for the night. Now get on indoors
+with you. You've nearly been my death."
+
+"I say, you don't know how grateful I am to you!" Michael exclaimed,
+turning round and grasping her fat hands.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough shouted upstairs to Lily as loudly as her
+breathlessness would permit:
+
+"I've brought you back that surprise packet I promised."
+
+Then she vanished, and Michael waited for Lily at the foot of the
+stairs. She came down very soon, looking very straight and slim in her
+philamot frock of Chinese crepe that so well became her. Soon she was in
+his arms and glad enough to be petted after Sylvia's rages.
+
+"Lily, how can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It's
+absolutely intolerable."
+
+"She's been horrid to me to-day," said Lily resentfully.
+
+"Well, why do you put up with it?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I hate always squabbling. It's much easier to give
+way to her, and usually I don't much mind."
+
+"You don't much mind whether we're married!" Michael exclaimed. "How can
+you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you marry
+me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look beautiful.
+You'd be happy married to me--you really would."
+
+"Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father
+didn't get on, and Doris doesn't get on with the man she's married to.
+In fact, everybody seems to hate it."
+
+"Do you hate me?" Michael demanded.
+
+"No, I think you're awfully sweet."
+
+"Well, why don't you marry me? You'll have plenty of money and nothing
+to bother about. I think you'd thoroughly enjoy being married."
+
+For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve.
+For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A
+chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her
+loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting at
+the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty, the
+bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess her
+without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. "_Michael, why do
+you make me love you so?_" Was that the last protest she ever made
+against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must primarily
+be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.
+
+"Lily," he cried, catching her to him. "You're coming away with me now."
+
+He kissed her a hundred times.
+
+"Now! Now! Do you hear me?"
+
+She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly
+what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to
+marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her
+yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing
+frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.
+
+"Quite an elopement," Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.
+
+"A very virtuous elopement," said Michael, with a laugh.
+
+"Oh, but shan't I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!"
+
+"Well, it's Sylvia's fault," said Lily fretfully. "She shouldn't worry
+me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in
+the world."
+
+The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.
+
+"Where are you going?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked. "I declare, you're like
+two babes in the wood."
+
+"To my sister's in Huntingdonshire," said Michael, and he wrote out the
+address.
+
+"Oh, in the country! Well, Summer'll be on us before we know where we
+are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished."
+
+"Is your sister pretty?" Lily asked, as they were driving to King's
+Cross.
+
+"She's handsome," said Michael. "You'll like her, I think. And her
+husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to
+say we're coming."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GATE OF IVORY
+
+
+It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class
+compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would
+create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure
+himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella,
+but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he
+felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting
+outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the
+still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of
+his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a
+little Stella's judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the
+hedgerows monotonously, and the horses' breath curled round the rigid
+form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the
+blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if
+she were happy.
+
+"It makes me sleepy driving like this," she murmured. Her head was on
+his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled
+until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.
+
+There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they
+arrived, though Michael watched Stella's glances rather anxiously.
+
+Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked
+beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem
+a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against the
+stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock? Stella,
+too, whom he had always considered a personality of some extravagance,
+seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and conventional. It used
+always to be himself who criticized people: Stella had always been
+rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married to Alan; or was Lily
+the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to be going all right,
+especially when he consoled himself by remembering the abruptness of
+Lily's introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily away with her into
+the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael tried to feel that
+this was what he had expected would happen; but he could not drive away
+the consciousness of a new formality brooding over Hardingham. It was
+annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed deliberately to avoid any
+reference to Lily. He would not even remind Michael of the evening at
+the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her five or six years ago.
+Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab with her sister on that
+occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk about cricket pitches;
+and yet he could not bring himself to ask right out what Alan thought of
+her, because it would have impinged upon his pride to do so. In about
+ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano, and tacitly they agreed
+to forego the intimacy of drinking port together any longer.
+
+Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the
+drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.
+
+"Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play."
+
+It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for
+hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good
+impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended
+almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily
+thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very
+aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the
+slightest movement on her part or Alan's as an implication of
+disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.
+
+When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few
+details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to
+explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox
+Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily's life would be fatal. He
+found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up
+and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing
+home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the
+declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother
+everything else in a great surprise.
+
+"Of course, that's what I imagined you were thinking of doing," said
+Stella. "So you've made up your quarrel of five years ago?"
+
+"When are you going to get married?" Alan asked.
+
+"Well, I hoped you'd be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any
+rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live."
+
+"Oh, of course she can stay here," said Stella.
+
+"Oh, rather, of course," Alan echoed.
+
+Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making
+signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a
+farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was
+objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the
+billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself
+between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed
+quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he
+was plunged.
+
+A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred
+to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance
+toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being slowly
+chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather anxious
+to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any opportunity. As
+for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and saying very
+little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under the shadow of
+disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael determined to
+come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning of strong
+easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a walk to
+Stella.
+
+They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs
+scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.
+
+"I don't think I care much for this country of yours," said Michael at
+last. "It's flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I
+should care to live here, I don't know."
+
+"There's a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of
+the wind there."
+
+Michael resented Stella's pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so
+launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a
+fortnight.
+
+"I hate badly trained dogs," he grumbled when Stella turned round to
+whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.
+
+"So do I," she agreed.
+
+It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually
+and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was
+easier in the shelter of the wood.
+
+"I don't think I've properly thanked you for having us to stay down
+here," he began.
+
+Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:
+
+"Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?" she demanded.
+
+Her use of the word "business" annoyed him: it crystallized all the
+offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly
+attitude these two weeks.
+
+"I shall be delighted to talk about this 'business.' Though why you
+should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don't
+quite know."
+
+"Do you want me to speak out frankly--to say exactly what I think of you
+and Lily and of your marrying her? You won't like it, and I won't do it
+unless you ask me."
+
+"Go on," said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her
+again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis
+with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders
+like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the
+anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers.
+It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able
+to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against
+the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this
+consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that
+rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and
+indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he
+hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he
+had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood.
+Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all
+round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it
+difficult to discomfit Sylvia.
+
+"Go on, I'm waiting for you to begin," Michael repeated.
+
+"Straight off, then," she said, "I may as well tell you that this
+marriage is impossible. I don't know where you found her again, and I
+don't care. It wouldn't make the slightest difference to me what she had
+been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else. But,
+Michael, she's flabby. You'll hate me for saying so, but she is, she
+really is! In a year you'll admit that; you'll see her growing older and
+flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that's possible.
+Even her beauty won't last. These very fair girls fall to pieces like
+moth-eaten dolls. I've tried to find something in her during this
+fortnight. I've tried and tried; but there's nothing. You may be in love
+with her now, though I don't believe you are. I think it's all a piece
+of sentimentalism. I've often teased you about getting married, but
+please don't suppose that I haven't realized how almost impossible it
+would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear and tear of
+your idealism. I'm prepared to bet that behind your determination to
+marry this girl there's a reason, a lovely, unpractical, idealistic
+reason. Isn't there? You've been away with her for a week-end, and have
+tortured yourself into a theory of reparation. Is that it? Or you've
+fallen in love with the notion of yourself in love at eighteen. Oh, you
+can't marry her, you foolish old darling."
+
+"Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn't keep whistling to
+that infernal dog," said Michael. "If this marriage is so terrible, I
+should have thought you'd have forgotten there were such animals as
+cocker-spaniels. It's rubbish for you to say you've tried to find
+something in Lily. You haven't made the slightest attempt. You've
+criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You're sunk deep
+already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is
+the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when
+you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I
+didn't talk as you've been talking to me."
+
+"No, you were always very cautiously fraternal," said Stella. "Ah, no, I
+won't say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you'll break my
+heart if you marry this girl."
+
+"You won't do anything of the kind," he contradicted. "You'll be
+whistling to spaniels all the time."
+
+"Michael, it's really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I'm
+feeling so wretched about you."
+
+"It's all fine for you to sneer at Lily," said Michael. "But I can
+remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room
+over some man who'd made a fool of you. _You_ looked pretty flabby
+then."
+
+"How dare you remind me of that?" Stella cried, in a fury. "How dare
+you? How dare you?"
+
+"You brought it on yourself," said Michael coldly.
+
+"You're going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry
+her, then! But don't come to me for sympathy, when she's forced you to
+drag yourself through the divorce court."
+
+"No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again," said
+Michael bitterly. "Unless it's for advice when I want to buy a spaniel."
+
+They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy
+fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having
+referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion
+on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had
+always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked
+sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she
+would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far they
+had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with marriage.
+Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally were smashed
+by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about Stella's music
+lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage? The sooner he
+and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he ought to suggest
+going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until he could find a
+place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her. They would be
+married next month, and he would take her abroad. He would be able to
+see her at last in some of the places where in days gone by he had
+dreamed of seeing her.
+
+"I suppose you wouldn't object to keeping Lily here two or three days
+more, while I find a place in town?" said Michael. It only struck him
+when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor.
+Stella would despise him more than ever.
+
+"Michael," Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path.
+"Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can
+realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I'm
+willing actually to plead with you. It's intolerable to think of you
+tied to her!"
+
+"It's too late," said Michael. "I must marry her. Not for any reasons
+that the world would consider reasons," he went on. "But because I want
+to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me
+before the world."
+
+"I won't, I won't, I won't! It's all wrong. She's all wrong. Her people
+are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know
+how casual he is about people he doesn't like. He usually flings them
+out of his mind at once."
+
+"Oh, Alan's amazing in every way," said Michael. He longed to say that
+he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so much
+the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite place to
+which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for a few
+days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the
+problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that
+he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily
+to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like
+this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and
+Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could
+not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be
+better to pocket his pride.
+
+Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.
+
+"Look here," she said. "You absurd old Quixote, listen. I'm going to do
+all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town
+and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if
+you'll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce
+I mean that I'll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her
+to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win
+in the end and marry her."
+
+"Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?"
+
+"Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we
+shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you
+in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you'll come
+and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all
+the eligible young women in the neighborhood."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Lily," said Michael, frowning.
+
+"The truce has begun," Stella declared. "For a fortnight I'll be an
+angel."
+
+Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded
+Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to
+the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning.
+Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.
+
+"Lily, you look adorable in this glade," he told her. "I believe, if you
+were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree."
+
+The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps
+of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the
+missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged
+sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses
+and brought them to Lily.
+
+"These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you
+let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you're
+going to live in? Will you not be lonely?"
+
+"I like to have you with me always," she murmured.
+
+He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were
+usually mute.
+
+"We shall be married in a month," he cried. "Can you smell violets?"
+
+"Something sweet I smell."
+
+But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets
+themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open
+fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering
+companies.
+
+"These eves of early Spring are like swords," Michael exclaimed.
+
+"Like what?" Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.
+
+"Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their
+sharpness and sweetness."
+
+"Oh, you mean it's cold," she said. "Take my arm."
+
+"Well, I meant rather more than that, really," Michael laughed. But
+because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had
+been from following his thoughts.
+
+Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before
+the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.
+
+"Not more than a fortnight, mind," were Stella's last words.
+
+He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice
+about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.
+
+"Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and
+Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill,
+Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent's Canal, Adelphi
+Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is
+impossible. But you're living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to
+move from there?"
+
+Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He
+supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be
+sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much
+delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who
+she was or where Michael had met her.
+
+"By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don't think I'm
+desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal,
+if we can find the right one."
+
+That afternoon they set out.
+
+They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was
+very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about
+fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor
+Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the
+stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.
+
+"Yes, but we don't want to start a printing press," Michael objected.
+"And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant
+can manage."
+
+It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this
+house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering
+anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they
+went off to Regent's Park.
+
+"I don't think you're likely to find anything so good as that house,"
+Maurice said gloomily. "In fact, I know you won't. I wish I could afford
+to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the
+Temple just as soon from there."
+
+"I don't see why he should bother about the Temple," said Michael. "That
+house was rather bigger."
+
+"You'll never find another house like it," Maurice prophesied. "Look at
+this neighborhood we're driving through now. Impossible to live here!"
+
+They were in the Hampstead Road.
+
+"I haven't any intention of doing so," Michael laughed. "But there
+remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally
+suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought."
+
+"Wonderful house!" Maurice sighed. "I shall always regret you didn't
+take it."
+
+However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the new
+prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic
+railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that seemed
+to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close around
+them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near Regent's Park;
+and they crossed St. John's Wood and Maida Vale, walking on until they
+reached a point where at the confluence of two branches the canal became
+a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole length of the
+base of this triangle and almost level with the water, stood the garden
+of a very large square house.
+
+"There's a curious place," said Michael. "How on earth does one get at
+it?"
+
+They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of
+the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance down
+a flight of steps.
+
+"Ararat House," Michael read.
+
+"Flat to let," Maurice read.
+
+"I think this looks rather promising," said Michael.
+
+It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A
+portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house,
+under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so
+irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion. The
+stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor
+buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the
+windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with
+plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must
+have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and
+rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house
+would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to
+be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
+
+They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes,
+there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the
+ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms
+on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like a
+plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat
+called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
+
+They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them
+had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without
+much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The
+dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very
+brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling and
+walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky
+kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors
+into the drawing-room.
+
+As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must
+live here.
+
+It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic
+saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he
+decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a
+room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and
+the cameos of Theophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with
+orient gewgaws; Barbey d'Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a
+corner Villiers de l'Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a
+tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic
+embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts
+with whom Michael had identified it.
+
+"But this is like a scene in a pantomime," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted
+to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the
+ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were
+gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of nymphs
+and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces
+fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of
+black and yellow lozenges.
+
+"It's hideous," Maurice exclaimed.
+
+The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
+
+"Hideous but rather fascinating," Michael said. "Look at the queer
+melancholy light, and look at the view."
+
+It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the
+room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper
+had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much
+subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their
+leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues
+and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown
+magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they walked
+out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries of slag
+and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright green
+slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path
+running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the
+sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet
+and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep
+everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply
+down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air
+diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city's breath: the circling of
+the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
+
+"In summer this will be wonderful," Michael predicted.
+
+"On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,"
+Maurice said.
+
+"Except that they'll probably have retired to bed," Michael pointed out.
+
+"I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,"
+Maurice laughed.
+
+"Let's ask the housekeeper," Michael said solemnly.
+
+They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem
+exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead
+water without.
+
+"Who lives in the other flats?" Michael inquired of the housekeeper.
+
+"There's four others," she began. "Up above there's Colonel and Mrs...."
+
+"I see," Michael interrupted. "Just ordinary people. Do they ever go
+out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange
+curtains?"
+
+The housekeeper stared at him.
+
+"They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The courts
+is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman to see
+about the flat."
+
+She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take
+Number One, Ararat House.
+
+"It absolutely was made to set her off," he told Maurice. "You wait till
+I've furnished it as it ought to be furnished."
+
+"And we'll have amazing fetes aqueuses in the summer," Maurice declared.
+"We'll buy a barge and--why, of course--the canal flows into the Thames
+at Grosvenor Road."
+
+"Underground--like the Styx," said Michael, nodding.
+
+"Of course, it's going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other
+except by water."
+
+"Like splendid dead Venetians," said Michael.
+
+The fortnight of Lily's stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice
+in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian glass;
+oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small round
+mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many
+mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls were
+hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There were
+slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and lemon
+satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over the
+parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous
+roses as deep as damsons or burgundy; and from the ceiling hung two
+chandeliers of cut glass.
+
+"You know," said Maurice seriously, "she'll have to be very beautiful to
+carry this off."
+
+"She is very beautiful," said Michael. "And there's room for her to walk
+about here. She'll move about this room as wonderfully as those swans
+upon the canal."
+
+"Michael, what's happened to you? You're becoming as eccentric as me."
+Maurice looked at him rather jealously. "And, I say, do you really want
+me to come with you to King's Cross to-morrow afternoon?"
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"After you've helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see
+the person we've done it for."
+
+"Yes, but look here. Who's going to stay in the flat with her? You can't
+leave her alone until you're married. As you told me the story, it
+sounded very romantic; but if she's going to be your wife, you've got to
+guard her reputation."
+
+Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the
+tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic
+Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt
+inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.
+
+"I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman," he said.
+
+"That's all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this
+time."
+
+"You don't know anybody?"
+
+"I? Great scott, no!"
+
+They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave him
+for an appointment.
+
+"To-morrow afternoon then at King's Cross," he said, and jumped on an
+omnibus.
+
+Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth could he get to stay
+with Lily? Would it not be better to marry at once? But that would
+involve breaking his promise to Stella. If he asked Mrs. Gainsborough,
+it would mean Sylvia knowing where Lily was. If, on the other hand, he
+should employ a strange woman, Lily might dislike her. Could he ask Mrs.
+Ross to come up to town? No, of course, that was absurd. It looked as if
+he would have to ask Mrs. Gainsborough. Or why not ask Sylvia herself?
+In that case, why establish Lily at Ararat House before they were
+married? This marriage had seemed so very easy an achievement; but
+slowly it was turning into an insoluble complex. He might sound Sylvia
+upon her attitude. It would enormously simplify everything if she would
+consent; and if she consented she would, he believed, play fair with
+him. The longer Michael thought about it, the more it seemed the safest
+course to call in Sylvia's aid. He was almost hailing a hansom to go to
+Tinderbox Lane, when he realized how foolish it would be not to try to
+sever Lily completely from the life she had been leading in Sylvia's
+company. Not even ought he to expose her to the beaming laxity of Mrs.
+Gainsborough.
+
+Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem
+which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught sight
+of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of the
+automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk? Then
+he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip the
+kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered the
+Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read in a
+sing-song the virtues of a procession of various automatons seeking
+situations as cooks and housemaids.
+
+"What wages do you wish to give?"
+
+"Oh, the usual wages," Michael said. "But I rather want these servants
+to-day."
+
+He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose
+the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to
+Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to
+make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the
+spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman
+in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her
+promise to suit him by to-morrow at midday. She suggested a capable
+housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well
+dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She
+undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the
+absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to
+Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up
+his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort was
+perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o'clock, and he drove off to
+King's Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of
+introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for
+him on the platform.
+
+Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when
+he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry
+into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that he
+was free this afternoon.
+
+"Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home to-night," said Maurice. "Or
+will you be very late?"
+
+"Oh, no, I shan't be late," Michael answering, flushing. He had a notion
+that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation. It
+seemed as if he were testing his behavior.
+
+Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio bedroom
+was a little bare, it was soon strewn with her clothes, and made thereby
+inhabitable.
+
+"And of course," said Michael, "you've got to buy lots and lots of
+clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two
+hundred--three hundred pounds?"
+
+The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to
+delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time,
+in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that he
+had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had been
+given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed through his
+mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux, and,
+remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad that
+Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined Manon.
+
+"And do you like Miss Harper?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes, she seems all right."
+
+They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the
+flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had
+forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest
+in household affairs.
+
+"I think I ought to go now," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, no, stay a little longer."
+
+But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as
+much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how
+important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be
+lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.
+
+"Oh, you're going now?" said Miss Harper, looking at him rather
+curiously.
+
+"I shall be round in the morning. You'll finish making the lists of what
+you still want?"
+
+Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he drove
+to Grosvenor Road.
+
+Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.
+
+"Look here, old chap," Maurice began at once, "you can't possibly marry
+that girl."
+
+Michael frowned.
+
+"You too?"
+
+"I know all about her," Maurice went on. "I've never actually met her,
+but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five years
+ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened in
+between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who's had an affair
+with her--a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He's often up here.
+You're bound to meet him some time."
+
+"Not at all, if I never come here again," said Michael, in a cold rage.
+
+"It's no use for you to be angry with me," said Maurice. "I should be a
+rotten friend, if I didn't warn you."
+
+"Oh, go to hell!" said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.
+
+"I'll die first," retorted Maurice, grinning.
+
+Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not
+to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.
+
+"So much for 422 Grosvenor Road," he said, slamming the big front door
+behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he
+walked on without turning his head.
+
+It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know about
+her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If Maurice
+chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would have to
+be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from the first
+moment of his resolve that this sort of thing was bound to happen. It
+left him curiously indifferent.
+
+A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden
+round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the
+very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room.
+Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her taste.
+Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old silver,
+or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was London
+and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the enchantment of
+her presence. Often they walked up and down the still deserted garden,
+by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide nearer to them,
+waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand with her hair in a
+stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly like the necks of the
+birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful in the long luminous
+dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening star that were shining
+upon them as they walked by the edge of the water.
+
+For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to
+the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in
+the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that
+people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic;
+that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this
+room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a
+hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at midnight,
+to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden stuffs and
+candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by going away at
+midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every night he went
+away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black dress, to leave in
+the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were not forbidding him
+to stay. Or when she stood under the portico sleepily resting in his
+arms, it was difficult to let her turn back alone. How close were their
+kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness! This was no London that he
+knew, this scented city of Spring, this tropic gloom, this mad
+innominate cavern that engorged them. The very stars were melting in the
+water of the canal: the earth bedewed with fevers of the Spring was warm
+as blood: why should he forsake her each night of this week? Yet every
+midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and clamored, Michael left her,
+saying that May would come, and June, and another April, when she would
+have been his a year.
+
+The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness
+and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these
+days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten. They
+could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else did
+the weather deprive him.
+
+Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back
+from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so
+deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in
+the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of
+taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers and
+mirrors.
+
+"Why didn't you wire me to say you were coming?" he asked.
+
+"I came because Stella wrote to me."
+
+Michael frowned, and his mother went on:
+
+"It wasn't very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage
+through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it
+yourself."
+
+Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from
+them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the
+past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his
+mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very
+inconsiderately.
+
+"I'm sorry. It was wrong of me," he admitted. "But life has been such a
+whirl lately that I've somehow taken for granted the obvious courtesies.
+Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather choked me off
+taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why do you begin on
+the subject at once, before you've even taken your things off?"
+
+She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.
+
+"Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are
+standing at the edge of this terrible step?"
+
+"Oh, I think I'm perfectly level-headed," he said, "even on the brink of
+disaster."
+
+"Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I'd come back in March as I
+meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn't very well leave
+her. She's always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I did
+not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in the
+next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the
+washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to
+think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you,
+and now you ask most cruelly why I don't take my things off."
+
+"There wasn't any need for you to worry yourself," he said hotly.
+"Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices."
+
+"Prejudices!" his mother repeated. "Prejudice is a very mild word for
+what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry."
+
+"But it is prejudice," Michael insisted. "She knows nothing against
+her."
+
+"She knows a great deal."
+
+"How?" he demanded incredulously.
+
+"You'd better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off
+these furs. It's stifling in London. So very much hotter than the
+Riviera."
+
+Mrs. Fane left him with Stella's letter.
+
+     LONG'S HOTEL,
+
+     April 9.
+
+     Darling Mother,
+
+     When you get this you must come _at once_ to London. You are the
+     only person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible
+     creature imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he
+     was eighteen, and I think she treated him badly even then--I
+     remember his being very upset about it in the summer before my
+     first concert. Apparently he rediscovered her this winter, and for
+     some reason or other wants to _marry_ her now. He brought her down
+     to Hardingham, and I saw then that she was a minx. Alan remembers
+     her mother as a dreadful woman who tried to make love to him.
+     Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!
+
+     Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row
+     about it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by
+     herself), and we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to
+     say, and nothing to do except look at herself in the glass. I had
+     declared war on the marriage from the moment she left, but I had
+     only a fortnight to stop it. I was rather in a difficulty because I
+     knew nothing definite against her, though I was sure that if she
+     wasn't a bad lot already, she would be later on. I wrote first of
+     all to Maurice Avery, who told me that she'd had a not at all
+     reputable affair with a painter friend of his. It seems, however,
+     that he had already spoken to Michael about this and that Michael
+     walked out of the house in a rage. Then I came up to town with Alan
+     and saw Wedderburn, who knew nothing about her and hadn't seen
+     Michael for months. Then we got hold of Lonsdale. He has apparently
+     met her at Covent Garden, and _I'm perfectly sure_ that he has
+     actually been away with her himself. Though, of course, he was much
+     too polite to tell me so. He was absolutely horrified when he heard
+     about her and Michael. I asked him to tell Michael anything he knew
+     against her, but he didn't see how he could. He said he wouldn't
+     have the heart. I told him it was his duty, but he said he wouldn't
+     be able to bear the sight of Michael's face when he told him. Of
+     course, the poor darling knows nothing about her. You must come at
+     once to London and talk to him yourself. You've no time to lose.
+     I'll meet you if you send me a wire. I've no influence over Michael
+     any more. You're the only person who can stop it. He's so sweet
+     about her. She's rather lovely to look at, I must say. Lots of love
+     from Alan and from me.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Stella.
+
+Michael was touched by Lonsdale's attitude. It showed, he thought, an
+exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had
+certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing was
+going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother to
+come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in
+argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had
+weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such a
+very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she must
+have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought her
+downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.
+
+"Have you read Stella's letter?" she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at
+once. It's dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you
+must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella
+and not resent her interference."
+
+"I see that you feel bound to apologize for her," Michael observed.
+
+"Now, that is so bitter."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find
+out things I know already."
+
+"Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?"
+
+"I didn't know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been
+people. That's one of the reasons I'm going to marry her."
+
+"But you'll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go
+on knowing Lonsdale, for instance."
+
+"Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case," Michael said. "You
+couldn't have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay I
+shall be able to make new friends."
+
+"But, darling boy," she said pleadingly, "your position will be so
+terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly
+want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be
+dragged down by this horrible creature!"
+
+"Mother, believe me, you're getting a very distorted idea of Lily. She's
+beautiful, you know; and if she's not so clever as Stella, I'm rather
+glad of it. I don't think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she hasn't
+committed the sin of being common. She won't disgrace you outwardly, and
+if Stella hadn't gone round raking up all this abominable information
+about her you would have liked her very much."
+
+"My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren't too young to
+know that it's impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without
+reproach."
+
+"But, mother, you ..." he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of
+the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious
+that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.
+
+"Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I
+knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won't marry
+her, you won't, will you?"
+
+"Yes, mother. I'm going to," he said coldly.
+
+"But why so impetuously?" she asked. "Why won't you wait a little time?"
+
+"There's no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts."
+
+"If only your father were alive!" she exclaimed. "It would have shocked
+him so inexpressibly."
+
+"He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn't he?" Michael said,
+and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.
+
+She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical
+and heroic dignity of reproach:
+
+"I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," he murmured. "It was inexcusable."
+
+"Michael," she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, "won't you give up
+this marriage?"
+
+He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.
+
+"Mother, I must keep faith with myself."
+
+"Only with yourself? Then she doesn't care for you? And you're not
+thinking of _her?_"
+
+"Of course she cares for me."
+
+"But she'd get over it almost at once?"
+
+"Perhaps," he admitted.
+
+"Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?"
+
+"That will be my look-out," he said impatiently. "If she fails, it will
+be my fault. It's always the man's fault. Always."
+
+"Very well," said his mother resignedly. "I can say no more, can I? You
+must do as you like."
+
+The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else
+would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his
+own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would
+show his penitence.
+
+"Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked
+out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for her,
+there is a deeper cause, a reason that's bound up with my whole theory
+of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not back out of
+this marriage."
+
+"Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?" she asked.
+
+He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called
+her "this girl," half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the
+happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or
+abstractions of morality to obscure it.
+
+"Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you."
+
+"Except not marry her."
+
+"That wouldn't be a sacrifice worth making," he argued. "Because if I
+did that I should destroy myself to myself, and what was left of me
+wouldn't be a complete Michael. It wouldn't be your son."
+
+"Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?"
+
+He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?
+
+"Not merely for your own sake," she urged; "but for all our sakes. We
+shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three
+months' time."
+
+He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.
+
+"I won't marry her for three months," he promised.
+
+"And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly
+missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel."
+
+She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately
+self again.
+
+Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had promised
+his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She pouted over
+her frocks.
+
+"I wish you'd settled that before. What good will all these dresses be
+now?"
+
+"You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here
+without me?"
+
+"Without you? Why are you going away?"
+
+"Because I must, Lily. Because ... oh, dearest girl, can't you see that
+I'm too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day
+and every night as I have been all this fortnight?"
+
+"If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather dull,
+shan't I?"
+
+"And shan't I?" he asked.
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me."
+
+He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.
+
+Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry
+with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time of
+trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must be
+married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well. He
+was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid the
+people who had brought it about.
+
+Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he
+turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that
+would take him down into Berkshire at once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE
+
+
+It was almost dark when Michael reached the little station at the foot
+of the Downs. He was half inclined to put up at the village inn and
+arrive at the Abbey in the morning; but he was feeling depressed by the
+alteration of his plans, and longed to withdraw immediately into the
+monastic peace. He had bought what he needed for the couple of nights
+before any luggage could reach him, and he thought that with so little
+to carry he might as well walk the six miles to the Abbey. He asked when
+the moon would be up.
+
+"Oh, not much before half-past nine, sir," the porter said.
+
+Michael suddenly remembered that to-morrow was Easter Sunday, and,
+thinking it would be as well not to arrive too late, in case there
+should be a number of guests, he managed to get hold of a cart. The wind
+blew very freshly as they slowly climbed the Downs, and the man who was
+driving him was very voluble on the subject of the large additions which
+had been made to the Abbey buildings during the last few years.
+
+"They've put up a grand sort of a lodge--Gatehouse, so some do call it.
+A bit after the style of the Tower of London, I've heard some say."
+
+Michael was glad to think that Dom Cuthbert's plans seemed to be coming
+to perfection in their course. How long was it since he and Chator were
+here? Eight or nine years; now Chator was a priest, and himself had done
+nothing.
+
+The Abbey Gatehouse was majestic in the darkness, and the driver pealed
+the great bell with a portentous clangor. Michael recognized the
+pock-marked brother who opened the door; but he could not remember his
+name. He felt it would be rather absurd to ask the monk if he recognized
+him by this wavering lanthorn-light.
+
+"Is the Reverend--is Dom Cuthbert at the Abbey now?" he asked. "You
+don't remember me, I expect? Michael Fane. I stayed here one Autumn
+eight or nine years ago."
+
+The monk held up the lanthorn and stared at him.
+
+"The Reverend Father is in the Guest Room now," said Brother Ambrose.
+Michael had suddenly recalled his name.
+
+"Do you think I shall be able to stay here to-night? Or have you a lot
+of guests for Easter?"
+
+"We can always find room," said Brother Ambrose. Michael dismissed his
+driver and followed the monk along the drive.
+
+Dom Cuthbert knew him at once, and seemed very glad that he had come to
+the Abbey.
+
+"You can have a cell in the Gatehouse. Our new Gatehouse. It's copied
+from the one at Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. Very beautiful. Very
+beautiful."
+
+Michael was introduced to the three or four guests, all types of
+ecclesiastical laymen, who had been talking with the Abbot. The Compline
+bell rang almost at once, and the Office was still held in the little
+chapel of mud and laths built by the hands of the monks.
+
+    Keep me as the apple of an eye.
+    Hide me in the shadow of thy wing.
+
+Here was worship unhampered by problems of social behavior: here was
+peace.
+
+Lying awake that night in his cell; watching the lattices very luminous
+in the moonlight; hearing the April wind in the hazel coppice, Michael
+tried to reach a perspective of his life these nine months since Oxford,
+but sleep came to him and pacified all confusions. He went to Mass next
+morning, but did not make his Communion, because he had a feeling that
+he could only have done so under false pretenses. There was no reason
+why he should have felt thus, he assured himself; but this morning there
+had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill. He went for a walk
+on the Downs, over the great green spaces that marked no season save in
+the change of the small flowers blowing in their turf. He wondered if he
+would be able to find the stones he had erected that July day when he
+first came here with Chator. He found what, as far as he could remember,
+was the place; and he also found a group of stones that might have been
+the ruins of his little monument. More remarkable than old stones now
+seemed to him a Pasque anemone colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously
+reminded him of the evening in March when he had walked with Lily in the
+wood at Hardingham.
+
+The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael's
+partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke.
+He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here
+on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He
+hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring his
+sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a feverish
+adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions for Lily's
+entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart, begging him
+to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being pursued and
+haunted; an intolerable idea that he was the quarry of an evil chase. He
+could not stay at the Abbey any longer: he was being rejected by the
+spirit of the place.
+
+Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.
+
+"Stay at least to-night," he urged, and Michael gave way.
+
+He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed
+Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany.
+He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt
+more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak he
+dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the primroses
+limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs; and when
+the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway station.
+To-day he ought to have married Lily.
+
+At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting,
+unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of
+Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne
+Walk.
+
+"I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,"
+was the explanation he gave himself of what already seemed mere
+sleeplessness.
+
+Michael found his mother very much worried by his disappearance; she had
+assumed that he had broken his promise. He consoled her, but excused
+himself from staying with her in town.
+
+"You mustn't ask too much of me," he said.
+
+"No, no, dearest boy; I'm glad for you to go away, but where will you
+go?"
+
+He thought he would pay an overdue visit to Cobble Place.
+
+Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Carthew were delighted to see him, and he felt as he
+always felt at Cobble Place the persistent tranquillity which not the
+greatest inquietude of spirit could long withstand. It was now nearly
+three years since he had been there, and he was surprised to see how
+very old Mrs. Carthew had grown in that time. This and the active
+presence of Kenneth, now a jolly boy of nine, were the only changes in
+the aspect of the household. Michael enjoyed himself in firing Kenneth
+with a passion for birds' eggs and butterflies, and they went long walks
+together and made expeditions in the canoe.
+
+Yet every day when Michael sat down to write to Lily, he almost wrote to
+say he was coming to London as soon as his letter. Her letters to him,
+written in a sprawling girlish hand, were always very much alike.
+
+     1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+
+     ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+     My dear,
+
+     Come back soon. I'm getting bored. Miss Harper isn't bad. Can't
+     write a long letter because this nib is awful. Kisses.
+
+     Your loving
+
+     Lily.
+
+This would stand for any of them.
+
+May month had come in: Michael and Kenneth were finding whitethroats'
+nests in the nettle-beds of the paddock, before a word to Mrs. Ross was
+said about the marriage.
+
+"Stella has written to me about it," she told him.
+
+They were sitting in the straggling wind-frayed orchard beyond the
+stream: lamps were leaping: apple-blossom stippled the grass: Kenneth
+was chasing Orange Tips up the slope toward Grogg's Folly.
+
+"Stella has been very busy all round," said Michael. "I suppose
+according to her I'm going to marry an impossible creature. Creature is
+as far as she usually gets in particular description of Lily."
+
+"She certainly wasn't very complimentary about your choice," Mrs. Ross
+admitted.
+
+"I wish somebody could understand that it doesn't necessarily mean that
+I'm mad because I'm going to marry a beautiful girl who isn't very
+clever."
+
+"But I gathered from Stella," Mrs. Ross said, "that her past ...
+Michael, you must be very tolerant of me if I upset you, because we
+happen to be sitting just where I was stupid and unsympathetic once
+before. You see what an impression that made on me. I actually remember
+the very place."
+
+"She probably has done things in the past," said Michael. "But she's
+scarcely twenty-three yet, and I love her. Her past becomes a trifle.
+Besides, I was in love with her six years ago, and I--well, six years
+ago I was rather thoughtless very often. I don't want you to think that
+I'm going to marry her now from any sense of duty. I love her. At the
+same time when people argue that she's not the correct young Miss they
+apparently expect me to marry, I'm left unmoved. Pasts belong to men as
+well as to women."
+
+Mrs. Ross nodded slowly. Kenneth came rushing up, shouting that he had
+caught a frightfully rare butterfly. Michael looked at it.
+
+"A female Orange Tip," was the verdict.
+
+"But isn't that frightfully rare?"
+
+Michael shook his head.
+
+"No rarer than the males; but you don't notice them, that's all."
+
+Kenneth retired to find some more.
+
+"And you're sure you'll be happy with her?" Mrs. Ross asked.
+
+"As sure as I am that I shall be happy with anybody. I ought to be
+married to her by now. This delay that I've so weakly allowed isn't
+going to effect much."
+
+Michael sighed. He had meant to be in Provence this month of May.
+
+"But the delay can't do any harm," Mrs. Ross pointed out. "At any rate,
+it will enable you to feel more sure of yourself, and more sure of her,
+too."
+
+"I don't know," said Michael doubtfully. "My theory has always been that
+if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing at once."
+
+"And after you're married," she asked, "what are you going to do? Just
+lead a lazy life?"
+
+"Oh, no; I suppose I shall find some occupation that will keep me out of
+mischief."
+
+"That sounds a little cynical. Ah, well, I suppose it is a
+disappointment to me."
+
+"What's a disappointment?"
+
+"I've hoped and prayed so much lately that you would have a
+vocation...."
+
+"A priest," he interrupted quickly, "It's no good, Mrs. Ross. I have
+thought of being one, but I'm always put off by the professional side of
+it. And there are ways of doing what a priest does without being one."
+
+"Of course, I can't agree with you there," she said.
+
+"Well, apart from the sacraments, I mean. Lately I've seen something of
+the underworld, and I shall think of some way of being useful down
+there. Already I believe I've done a bit."
+
+They talked of the problems of the underworld and Michael was encouraged
+by what he fancied was a much greater breadth in her point of view
+nowadays to speak of things that formerly would have made her gray eyes
+harden in fastidious disapproval.
+
+"I feel happier about you since this talk," she said. "As long as you
+won't be content to let your great gift of humanity be wasted, as long
+as you won't be content to think that in marrying your Lily you have
+done with all your obligations."
+
+"Oh, no, I shan't feel that. In fact, I shall be all the more anxious to
+justify myself."
+
+Kenneth came back to importune Michael for a walk as far as Grogg's
+Folly.
+
+"It's such fun for Kenneth to have you here!" Mrs. Ross exclaimed. "I've
+never seen him so boisterously happy."
+
+"I used to enjoy myself here just as much as he does," said Michael.
+"Though perhaps I didn't show it. I always think of myself as rather a
+dreary little beast when I was a kid."
+
+"On the contrary, you were a most attractive boy; such a wide-eyed
+little boy," said Mrs. Ross softly, looking back into time. "I've seldom
+seen you so happy as just before I blew out your candle the first night
+of your first stay here."
+
+"I say, do come up the hill," interrupted Kenneth despairingly.
+
+"A thousand apologies, my lord," said Michael. "We'll go now."
+
+They did not stop until they reached the tower on the summit.
+
+"When I was your age," Michael told him, "I used to think that I could
+see the whole of England from here."
+
+"Could you really?" said Kenneth, in admiration. "Could you see any of
+France, too?"
+
+"I expect so," Michael answered. "I expect really I thought I could see
+the whole world. Kenneth, what are you going to be when you grow up? A
+soldier?"
+
+"Yes, if I can--or what is a philosopher?"
+
+"A philosopher philosophizes."
+
+"Does he really? Is that a difficult thing to do, to philosopherize?"
+
+"Yes; it's almost harder to do than to pronounce."
+
+Soon they were tearing down the hill, frightening the larks to right and
+left of their progress.
+
+The weather grew warmer every day, and at last Mrs. Carthew came out in
+a wheel-chair to see the long-spurred columbines, claret and gold,
+watchet, rose and white.
+
+"Really quite a display," she said to Michael. "And so you're to get
+married?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"What for?" the old lady demanded, looking at him over her spectacles.
+
+"Well, principally because I want to," Michael answered, after a short
+pause.
+
+"The best reason," she agreed. "But in your case insufficient, and I'll
+tell you why--you aren't old enough yet to know what you do want."
+
+"Twenty-three," Michael reminded her.
+
+"Twenty-fiddlesticks!" she snapped. "And isn't there a good deal of
+opposition?"
+
+"A good deal."
+
+"And no doubt you feel a fine romantical heroical young fellow?"
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, I'm not going to argue against your marrying her," said Mrs.
+Carthew. "Because I know quite well that the more I proved you to be
+wrong, the more you'd be determined to prove _I_ was. But I can give you
+advice about marriage, because I've been married and you haven't. Is she
+dark? If she's dark, be very cold for a year, and if she doesn't leave
+you in that time, she'll adore you for the rest of her life."
+
+"But she's fair," said Michael. "Very fair indeed."
+
+"Then beat her. Not actually, of course; but beat her figuratively for a
+year. If you don't, she'll either be a shrew or a whiner. Both
+impossible to live with."
+
+"Which did Captain Carthew do to you?" asked Michael, twinkling.
+
+"Neither; I ruled him with a rod of iron."
+
+"But do you think I'm wise to wait like this before marrying her?"
+Michael asked.
+
+"There's no wisdom in waiting to do an unwise thing."
+
+"You're so sure it is unwise?"
+
+"All marriages are unwise," said Mrs. Carthew sharply. "That's why
+everybody gets married. For most people it is the only imprudence they
+have an opportunity of committing. After that, they're permanently cured
+of rashness, and settle down. There are exceptions, of course: they take
+to drink. I must say I'm greatly pleased with these long-spurred
+columbines."
+
+Michael thought she had finished the discussion of his marriage, but
+suddenly she said:
+
+"I thought I told you to come and see me when you went down from
+Oxford."
+
+"I ought to have come," Michael agreed rather humbly. He always felt
+inclined to propitiate the old lady.
+
+"Here we have the lamentable result. Marriage at twenty-three."
+
+"Alan married at twenty-three," he pointed out.
+
+"Two fools don't make a wise-man," said Mrs. Carthew.
+
+"He's very happy."
+
+"He would be satisfied with much less than you, and he has married a
+delightful girl."
+
+"I'm going to marry a delightful girl."
+
+The old lady made no reply. Nor did she comment again upon his prospect
+of happiness.
+
+In mid-May, after a visit of nearly a month, Michael left Cobble Place
+and went to stay at Plashers Mead. Guy Hazlewood was the only friend he
+still had who could not possibly have come into contact with Lily or her
+former surroundings. Moreover, Guy was deep in love himself, and he had
+been very sympathetic when he wrote to Michael about his engagement.
+
+"Do I intrude upon your May idyll?" Michael asked.
+
+"My dear chap, don't be so absurd. But why aren't you married? You're as
+bad as me."
+
+"Why aren't _you_ married?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Guy sighed. "Everybody seems to be conspiring to put
+it off."
+
+They were sitting in Guy's green library. The windows wide open let in
+across the sound of the burbling stream the warm air of the lucid May
+night, where bats and owls and evejars flew across the face of the
+decrescent moon.
+
+"It's this dreamy country in which you live," said Michael.
+
+"What about you? You've let people put off your marriage."
+
+"Only for another two months," Michael explained.
+
+"You see I'm down to one hundred and fifty pounds a year now," Guy
+muttered. "I can't marry on that, and I can't leave this place, and her
+people can't afford to make her an allowance. They think I ought to go
+away and work at journalism. However, I'm not going to worry you with my
+troubles."
+
+Guy was a good deal with Pauline every day: Michael wrote long letters
+to Lily and read poetry.
+
+"Browning?" asked Guy one afternoon, looking over Michael's shoulder.
+
+"Yes; The Statue and The Bust."
+
+"Oh, don't remind me of that poem. It haunts me," Guy declared.
+
+A week passed. There was no moon now, and the nights grew warmer. It was
+weather to make lovers happy, but Guy seemed worried. He would not come
+for walks with Michael through the dark and scented water-meadows, and
+Michael used to think that often at night he was meeting Pauline. It
+made him jealous to imagine them lost in this amaranthine profundity.
+They were happy now, if through all their lives they should never be
+happy again. Yet Guy was obviously fretted: he was getting spoiled by
+good fortune. "And I have had about a fortnight of incomplete
+happiness," Michael said to himself. Supposing that a calamity fell upon
+him during this delay. He would never cease to regret his weakness in
+granting his mother's request: he would hate Stella for having
+interfered: his life would be miserable forever. Yet what calamity did
+he fear? In a sudden apprehension, he struck a match and read her last
+letter:
+
+     1 ARARAT HOUSE,
+
+     ISLAND ROAD, W.
+
+     My dear,
+
+     It's getting awfully dull in London. Miss Harper asked me to call
+     her "Mabel." Rather cheek, I thought, don't you think so? But she's
+     really awfully decent. I can't write a long letter because we're
+     going to the Palace. I say, do buck up and come back to London, I'm
+     getting bored. Love and kisses.
+
+     Lily.
+
+     What's the good of _writing_ "kisses"?
+
+What indeed was the good of writing "kisses"? Michael thought, as the
+match fizzed out in the dewy grass at his feet. It was not fair to treat
+Lily like this. He had captured her from life with Sylvia, because he
+had meant to marry her at once. Now he had left her alone in that flat
+with a woman he did not know at all. Whatever people might say against
+Lily, she was very patient and trustful. "She must love me a good
+deal," Michael said. "Or she wouldn't stand this casual treatment."
+
+Pauline came to tea next day with her sisters Margaret and Monica.
+Michael had an idea that she did not like him very much. She talked
+shyly and breathlessly to him; and he, embarrassed by her shyness,
+answered in monosyllables.
+
+"Pauline is rather jealous of you," said Guy that evening, as they sat
+in the library.
+
+"Jealous of me?" Michael was amazed.
+
+"She has some fantastic idea that you don't approve of our engagement.
+Of course, I told her what nonsense she was thinking; but she vowed that
+this afternoon you showed quite plainly your disapproval of her. She
+insists that you are very cold and severe."
+
+"I'm afraid I was very dull," Michael confessed apologetically. "But I
+was really envying you and her for being together in May."
+
+"Together!" Guy repeated. "It's the object of everyone in Wychford to
+keep us apart!"
+
+"Do tell her I'm not cold," Michael begged. "And say how lovely I think
+her; for really, Guy, she is very lovely and strange. She is a fairy's
+child."
+
+"She is, she is," Guy said. "Sometimes I'm nearly off my head with the
+sense of responsibility I have for her happiness. I wonder and wonder
+until I'm nearly crazed."
+
+"I'm feeling responsible just now about Lily. I've never told you, Guy,
+but you may hear from other people that I've made what is called a
+mesalliance. Of course, Lily has been...." He stumbled. He could find no
+words that would not humiliate himself and her. "Guy, come up with me
+to-morrow and meet her. It's not fair to leave her like this," he
+suddenly proclaimed.
+
+"I don't think I can come away."
+
+"Oh, yes, you can. Of course. You must," Michael urged.
+
+"Pauline will be more jealous of you than ever, if I do."
+
+"For one night," Michael pleaded. "I must see her. And you must meet
+her. Everyone has been so rotten about her, and, Guy, you'll appreciate
+her. I won't bore you by describing her. You must meet her to-morrow.
+And the rooms in Ararat House. By Jove, you'll think them wonderful. You
+should see her in candlelight among the mirrors. Pauline won't mind your
+coming away with me for a night. We'll stay at Cheyne Walk."
+
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I'm rather hard up just now...."
+
+"Oh, what rot! This is my expedition. And when you've seen her, you must
+talk to my mother about her. She's so prejudiced against Lily. You will
+come, won't you?"
+
+Guy nodded a promise, and Michael went off to bed on the excitement of
+to-morrow's joy.
+
+Guy would not start before the afternoon, and Michael spent the morning
+under a willow beside the river. It was good to lie staring up at the
+boughs, and know that every fleecy cloud going by was a cloud nearer to
+his seeing Lily again.
+
+Michael and Guy arrived at Paddington about five o'clock.
+
+"We'll go straight round from here and surprise her," Michael said,
+laughing with excitement, as they got into a taxi. "She'll have had a
+letter from me this morning, in which I was lamenting not seeing her for
+six weeks. My gad, supposing she isn't in! Oh, well, we can wait. You'll
+love the room, and we'll all three sit out in the garden to-night, and
+you'll tell me as we walk home to Chelsea what you think of her. Guy
+you've absolutely got to like her. And if you don't ... oh, but you
+will. It isn't everybody who can appreciate beauty like hers. And
+there's an extraordinary subtlety about her. Of course, she isn't at all
+subtle. She's simple. In fact, that's one of the things Stella has got
+against her. What I call simplicity and absence of training for effect
+Stella calls stupidity. My own belief is that you'll be quite content to
+look at her and not care whether she talks or not. I tell you, she's
+like a Piero della Francesca angel. Cheer up, Guy. Why are you looking
+so depressed?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Guy. "I'm thinking what a lucky chap you are.
+What's a little family opposition when you know you're going to be able
+to do what you want? Who can stop you? You're independent, and you're in
+love."
+
+"Of course they can't stop me!" Michael cried, jumping up and down on
+the cushions of the taxi in his excitement. "Guy, you're great! You
+really are. You're the only person who's seen the advantage of going
+right ahead. But don't look so sad yourself. You'll marry your Pauline."
+
+"Yes, in about four years," Guy sighed.
+
+"Oh, no, no; in about four months. Will Pauline like Lily? She won't be
+jealous of me when I'm married will she?"
+
+"No, but I think I shall be," Guy laughed.
+
+"Laugh, you old devil, laugh!" Michael shouted. "Here we are. Did you
+ever see such a house? It hasn't quite the austerity of Plashers Mead,
+has it?"
+
+"It looks rather fun," Guy commented.
+
+"You know," Michael said solemnly, pausing for a moment at the head of
+the steps going down to the front door. "You know, Guy, I believe that
+you'll be able to persuade my mother to withdraw all her opposition
+to-night. I believe I'm going to marry Lily this week. And I shall be
+so glad--Guy, you don't know how glad I shall be."
+
+He ran hurriedly down the steps and had pressed the bell of Number One
+before Guy had entered the main door.
+
+"I say, you know, it will be really terrible if she's out after all my
+boasting," said Michael. "And Miss Harper, too--that's the
+housekeeper--my housekeeper, you know. If they're both out, we'll have
+to go round and wait in the garden until they come in. Hark, there's
+somebody coming."
+
+The door opened, and Michael hurried in.
+
+"Hullo, good afternoon, Miss Harper. You didn't expect to see me, eh?
+I've brought a friend. Is Miss Haden in the big room?"
+
+"Miss Haden is out, Mr. Fane," said the housekeeper.
+
+"What's the matter? You're looking rather upset."
+
+"Am I, Mr. Fane?" she asked blankly. "Am I? Oh, no, I'm very well. Oh,
+yes, very well. It's the funny light, I expect, Mr. Fane."
+
+She seemed to be choking out all her words, and Michael looked at her
+sharply.
+
+"Well, we'll wait in the big room."
+
+"It's rather untidy. You see, we--I wasn't expecting you, Mr. Fane."
+
+"That's all right," said Michael. "Hulloa ...I say, Guy, go on into that
+room ahead. I'll be with you in a minute."
+
+Guy mistook the direction and turned the handle of Lily's bedroom door.
+
+"No, no," Michael called. "The double doors opposite."
+
+"My mistake," said Guy cheerfully. "But don't worry: the other door was
+locked. So if you've got a Bluebeard's Closet, I've done no harm."
+
+He disappeared into the big room, and the moment he was inside Michael
+turned fiercely to Miss Harper.
+
+"Who's is this hat?" he demanded, snatching it up.
+
+"Hat? What hat?" she choked out.
+
+"Why is the door of her bedroom locked? Why is it locked--locked?"
+
+The stillness of the crepuscular hall seemed to palpitate with the
+woman's breath.
+
+"Miss Haden must have locked it when she went out," she stammered.
+
+"Is that the truth?" Michael demanded. "It's not the truth. It's a lie.
+You wouldn't be panting like a fish in a basket, unless there was
+something wrong. I'll break the door in."
+
+"No, Mr. Fane, don't do that!" the woman groaned out, in a cracked
+expostulation. "This is the first time since you've been away. And it
+was an old friend."
+
+"How dare you tell me anything about him? Guy! Guy!"
+
+Michael rushed into the big room and dragged Guy out.
+
+"Come away, come away, come away! I've been sold!"
+
+"If you'd only listen a moment. I could----" Miss Harper began.
+
+Michael pushed her out of their path.
+
+"What on earth is it?" Guy asked.
+
+"Come on, don't hang about in this hell of a house. Come on, Guy."
+
+Michael had flung the door back to slam into Miss Harper's face, and,
+seizing Guy by the wrist, he dragged him up the steps, and had started
+to run down the road, when Guy shouted:
+
+"Michael, the taxi! The taxi's waiting with our bags."
+
+"Oh, very well, in a taxi then, a taxi if you like," Michael chattered,
+and he plunged into it.
+
+"Where to?" the driver asked.
+
+"Cheyne Walk. But drive quickly. Don't hang about up and down this
+road."
+
+The driver looked round with an expression of injured dignity, shook his
+head in exclamation, and drove off.
+
+"What on earth has happened?" Guy asked. "And why on earth are you
+holding a top-hat?"
+
+Michael burst into laughter.
+
+"So I am. Look at it. A top-hat. I say, Guy, did you ever hear of anyone
+being cut out by a top-hat, cuckolded by a top-hat? We'll present it to
+the driver. Driver! Do you want a top-hat?"
+
+"Here, who are you having a game with?" demanded the driver, pulling up
+the car.
+
+"I'm not having a game with anybody," Michael said. "But two people and
+this top-hat have just been having a hell of a game with me. You'd much
+better take it as a present. I shall only throw it away. He refuses,"
+Michael went on. "He refuses a perfectly good top-hat. Who's the maker?
+My god, his dirty greasy head has obliterated the name of the maker.
+Good-bye, hat! Drive on, drive on!" he shouted to the driver, and hurled
+the hat spinning under an omnibus. Then he turned to Guy.
+
+"I've been sold by the girl I was going to marry," he said. "I say, Guy,
+I've got some jolly good advice for you. Don't you marry a whore. Sorry,
+old chap!--I forgot you were engaged already. Besides, people don't
+marry whores, unless they're fools like me. Didn't you say just now that
+I was very lucky? Do you know--I think I am lucky. I think it was a
+great piece of luck bringing you to see that girl to-day. Don't you? Oh,
+Guy, I could go mad with disappointment. Will nothing in all the world
+ever be what it seems?"
+
+"Look here, Michael, are you sure you weren't too hasty? You didn't
+wait to see if there was any explanation, did you?"
+
+"She was only going back to her old habits," said Michael bitterly. "I
+was a fool to think she wouldn't. And yet I adored her. Fancy, you've
+never seen her, after all. Lovely, lovely animal!"
+
+"Oh, you knew what she was?" exclaimed Guy.
+
+"Knew? Yes, of course I knew; but I thought she loved me. I didn't care
+about anything when I was sure she loved me. She could only have gone
+such a little way down, I thought. She seemed so easy to bring out.
+Seeds of pomegranate. Seeds of pomegranate! She's only eaten seeds of
+pomegranate, but they were enough to keep her behind. Where are we
+going? Oh, yes, Cheyne Walk. My mother will be delighted when she hears
+my news, and so will everybody. That's what's amusing me. Everybody will
+clap their hands, and I'm wretched. But you are sorry for me, Guy? You
+don't think I'm just a fool being shown his folly? And at eighteen I was
+nearly off my head only because I saw someone kiss her! There's one
+thing over which I score--the only person who can appreciate all the
+humor of this situation is myself."
+
+Nearly all the way to Cheyne Walk Michael was laughing very loudly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GATE OF HORN
+
+
+Guy thought it would be better if he went straight back to Plashers
+Mead; but Michael asked him to stay until the next day. He was in no
+mood, he said, for a solitary evening, and he could not bear the notion
+of visiting friends, or of talking to his mother without the restriction
+that somebody else's presence would produce.
+
+So Guy agreed to spend the night in London, and they dined with Mrs.
+Fane. Michael in the sun-colored Summer room felt smothered by a
+complete listlessness; and talking very little, he sat wondering at the
+swiftness with which a strong fabric of the imagination had tumbled
+down. The quiet of Cheyne Walk became a consciousness of boredom and
+futility, and he suggested on a sudden impulse that he and Guy should go
+and visit Maurice in the studio. It would be pleasant walking along the
+Embankment, he said.
+
+"But I thought you wanted to keep quiet," Guy exclaimed.
+
+"No, I've grown restless during dinner; and, besides, I want to make a
+few arrangements about the flat, and then be done with that
+business--forever."
+
+They started off without waiting for coffee. It was a calm Summer
+evening of shadows blue and amethyst, of footfalls and murmurs, an
+evening plumy as a moth, warm and gentle as the throat of a pigeon.
+Nobody on any pavement was hurrying; and maidservants loitered in area
+gates, looking up and down the roads.
+
+The big room at the top of 422 Grosvenor Road had never seemed so
+romantic. There were half a dozen people sitting at the open windows;
+and Cunningham was playing a sonata of Brahms, a sonata with a melody
+that was drawing the London night into this big room where the
+cigarettes dimmed and brightened like stars. The player sat at the piano
+for an hour, and Maurice unexpectedly made no attempt to disturb the
+occasion. Michael thought that perhaps he was wondering what had brought
+himself and Guy here, and for that reason did not rush to show Guy his
+studio by gaslight: Maurice was probably thinking how strange it was for
+Michael to revisit him suddenly like this after their quarrel.
+
+When the room was lighted up, Michael and Guy were introduced to the men
+they did not know. Among them was Ronnie Walker, the painter whom
+Maurice had mentioned to Michael as an old lover of Lily. Michael knew
+now why Maurice had allowed the music to go on so long, and he was
+careful to talk as much as possible to Walker in order to embarrass
+Maurice, who could scarcely pay any attention to Guy, so nervously was
+he watching over his shoulder the progress of the conversation.
+
+Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the
+window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a
+distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the
+piano again.
+
+"I say, I'm awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here
+to-night," Maurice began. "I have been rather cursing myself for telling
+you about him and...."
+
+"It doesn't matter at all," Michael interrupted. "I'm not going to marry
+her."
+
+"Oh, that's splendid!" Maurice exclaimed. "I've been tremendously
+worried about you."
+
+Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that Maurice
+could be "tremendously worried" by anything.
+
+"I want you to arrange matters," said Michael. "I can't go near the
+place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The
+rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you
+like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the money.
+Get rid of the woman who's there--Miss Harper her name is."
+
+"But I shall feel rather awkward...."
+
+"Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, then!" Michael broke in fretfully. "I'll
+ask Guy."
+
+"You're getting awfully irascible," Maurice complained. "Of course I'll
+do anything you want, if you won't always jump down my throat at the
+first word I utter. What has happened, though?"
+
+"What do you expect to happen when you're engaged to a girl like that?"
+Michael asked.
+
+Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then, you
+see, I'm not a very great believer in women. What are you going to do
+yourself?"
+
+"I haven't settled yet. I've got to arrange one or two things in town,
+and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a
+week?"
+
+"I daresay I might," Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room.
+Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile
+comprehension.
+
+The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
+
+"This is where you ought to be, if you want to write," Maurice
+proclaimed to Guy. "It's ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the
+country. You'll expire of stagnation."
+
+"Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are," said Castleton.
+"I'm almost expiring from the violence with which I am being
+precipitated from one to another of Maurice's energies."
+
+Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next
+morning Guy went back to Wychford.
+
+Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the
+betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made
+financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only
+yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part
+he had played in Lily's life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel
+anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice;
+already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly
+remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a
+shade his present emotion proved that she was much more than that, for
+the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart. Then the
+indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill remained.
+
+Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and
+they went to Boheme. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat
+unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if
+she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of
+all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at night
+and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life itself, but
+he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any activity in the
+conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here at supper and
+for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was spiritually
+withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to the notion of
+a debased material comfort as the only condition worth achieving for a
+body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it almost seemed.
+
+"Michael, have you been bored to-night?" his mother asked, when they had
+come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while
+Michael finished a cigar.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy
+Puccini, don't you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?"
+
+"I think summer in London is always tiring," he said.
+
+She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures of
+her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.
+
+"Dear child, what is it?" she whispered, with fluttering arms
+outstretched to comfort him.
+
+"Oh, I've finished with all that! I've finished with all that! You'll be
+delighted--you mustn't be worried because I seem upset for the moment. I
+found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I'm not going to
+marry her or even see her again."
+
+"Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?"
+
+"Finished! Finished! Finished!" he sobbed.
+
+"Nothing is finished at twenty-three," she murmured, leaning over to pet
+him.
+
+"I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day."
+
+It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It
+seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on
+account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself
+again; and he went off to bed.
+
+Next day Michael's depression was profound because he could perceive no
+reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in
+the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her. She
+was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen to
+her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he had
+lately been involved? Must he withdraw entirely and confess defeat? No
+doubt a cynic would argue that Lily was hopeless, and indeed he knew
+that from any point of view where marriage was concerned she was
+hopeless. He must leave her where he had found her, in that pretty
+paradise of evil which now she well adorned. If her destiny was to whirl
+downward through the labyrinths of the underworld, he could do no more.
+That himself had issued with the false dreams through the ivory gate was
+her fault, and she must pay the penalty of her misdirection. He would
+revisit Leppard Street, and from the innermost circle where he had
+beheld Mrs. Smith he would seek a way out through the gate of true
+dreams. He would be glad to see if the amount of security he had been
+able to guarantee to Barnes had helped him at all. He had money and he
+could leave money behind in Leppard Street, money that might preserve
+the people in the house where he had lived. Was this a quixotic notion,
+to leave one set of people free from the necessity to hand themselves
+over to evil? Michael's spirits began to rise as he looked forward to
+what he could still effect in Leppard Street. And for Lily what could he
+still do? He would visit Sylvia and consult with her. She was strong,
+and if she had chosen harlotry, she was still strong. She was not lazy
+nor languid. Lazy, laughing, languid Lily! Lily did not laugh much; she
+was too lazy even for that. How beautiful she had been! Her beauty
+stabbed him with the poignancy of what was past. How beautiful she had
+been! When Maurice went to tell her of the final ending of it all, she
+would pout and shrug her shoulders. That was all she would do; and she
+would be faintly resentful at having been disturbed in her lazy life.
+Perhaps Maurice would fall in love with her, and it would be ironical
+and just that she should fall violently in love with Maurice and be cast
+off by him. Maurice would never suffer; as soon as a woman showed a sign
+of upsetting his theories about feminine behavior he would be done with
+her. He would jilt her as easily as he jilted one Muse for another. Why
+was he being so hard on Maurice?
+
+"I believe that down in my heart I still don't really like him," Michael
+said to himself. "Right back from the time I met him in Macrae's form at
+Randell's I've never really liked him."
+
+It was curious how one could grow more and more intimate with a person,
+and all the time never really like him; so intimate with him as to
+intrust him with the disposal of a wrecked love-affair, and all the
+while never really like him. Why, then, had he invited Maurice to go
+abroad? Perhaps he wanted the company of someone he could faintly
+despise. Even friendship must pay tribute to human vanity. Life became a
+merciless business when one ceased to stand alone. The herding instinct
+of man was responsible for the corruption of civilization, and Michael
+thought of the bestiality of a crowd. How loathsome humanity was in the
+aggregate, but individually how rare, how wonderful.
+
+Michael walked boldly enough toward Tinderbox Lane; and when he rang the
+bell of Mulberry Cottage not a qualm of sentiment assailed him. He was
+definitely pleased with himself, as he stood outside the door in the
+wall, to think with what a serenity of indifference he was able to visit
+a place so much endeared to him a little time ago.
+
+Mrs. Gainsborough answered the door and nearly fell upon Michael's
+neck.
+
+"Good Land! Here's a surprise."
+
+"It's almost more of a surprise for me to see you, Mrs. Gainsborough."
+
+"Why, who else should you see?"
+
+"I was beginning to think you never existed. Can I come in?"
+
+"Sylvia's indoors," she said warningly.
+
+"I rather wanted to see her."
+
+"She's been carrying on alarming about you ever since you stole her
+Lily. And she didn't take me on her knee and cuddle me, when she found
+you were gone off. How do you like me new frock?"
+
+Michael thought that in her checkered black and green gingham she looked
+like an old Summer number of an illustrated magazine, and he told her
+so.
+
+"Well, there! Did you ever? I never did. There's a bouquet to hand a
+lady! Back number! Whatever next? I wonder you hadn't the liberty to say
+I'd rose from the grave."
+
+"Aren't I to see Sylvia?" Michael asked, laughing.
+
+"Well, don't blame me if she packs you off with a flea in your ear, as
+they say--well, she is a Miss Temper, and no mistake. How do you like me
+garden?"
+
+Mulberry Cottage was just the bower of greenery that Michael had
+supposed he would find in early June.
+
+"Actually roses," he exclaimed. "Or at least there will be very soon."
+
+"Oh, yes. Glory de Die-Johns. That was always Pa's favorite. That and a
+good snooze of a Sunday afternoon was about what he cared most for in
+this world. But my Captain he used to like camellias, and gardenias of
+course--oh, he had a very soft corner in his heart for a nice gardenia.
+Ah dear, what a masher he was to be sure!"
+
+Sylvia had evidently seen them walking up the garden path, for leaning
+over the railings of the balcony she was waiting for them.
+
+"Here's quite a stranger come to see you," said Mrs. Gainsborough, with
+a propitiatory glance in Sylvia's direction.
+
+"I rather want to have a talk with you," said Michael, and he, too,
+found himself rather annoyingly adopting a deprecating manner.
+
+Sylvia came slowly down the balcony steps.
+
+"I suppose you want my help," she said, and her underlip had a warning
+out-thrust.
+
+"I'll get on with my fal-lals," Mrs. Gainsborough muttered, and she
+bundled herself quickly indoors.
+
+Sylvia and Michael sat down on the garden-seat under the mulberry tree
+whose leaves were scarcely yet uncurling. Michael found a great charm in
+sitting close to Sylvia like this: she and Stella both possessed a
+capacity for bracing him that he did not find in anyone else. Sylvia was
+really worth quarreling with; but it would be very delightful to be
+friends with her. He had never liked a person so much whom he had so
+little reason to like. He could not help thinking that in her heart
+Sylvia must like him. It was a strangely provocative fancy.
+
+"Lily and I have parted," he began at once.
+
+"And why do you suppose that piece of information will interest me?"
+Sylvia asked.
+
+Michael was rather taken aback. When he came to consider it, there did
+seem no good reason why Sylvia should any longer be interested after the
+way in which Lily had been snatched away from her. He was silent for a
+moment.
+
+"But it would have interested you a short time ago," he said.
+
+"No doubt," Sylvia agreed. "But luckily for me one of the benefits
+conferred by my temperament is an ability to throw aside things that
+have disappointed me, things that have ceased to be useful--and what
+applies to things applies even more strongly to people."
+
+"You mean to say you've put Lily right out of your life?" Michael
+exclaimed.
+
+He was shocked by the notion, for he did not realize until this moment
+how much he had been depending upon Sylvia for peace of mind.
+
+"Haven't you put her out of _your_ life?" she asked, looking round at
+him sharply. Until this question she had been staring sullenly down at
+the grass.
+
+"Well, I had to," said Michael.
+
+"You're bearing up very well under the sad necessity," she sneered.
+
+"I don't know that I am bearing up very well. I don't think that coming
+to you to talk about it is a special sign of fortitude."
+
+"What do you want me to do?" Sylvia demanded. "Get her back into your
+life again? Isn't that the phrase you like?"
+
+"Oh, no, that's unimaginable," said Michael. "You see, it was really the
+second time. Once six years ago, and again now, very much more--more
+utterly. You said that your temperament enables you to throw off things
+and people. Mine makes me bow to what I fancy are irremediable strokes
+of fate."
+
+"Unimaginable! Irremediable! We're turning this interview into a
+Rossetti sonnet," Sylvia scoffed.
+
+"I was thinking about that poem Jenny to-day. It's funny you should
+mention Rossetti."
+
+"Impervious youth!" she exclaimed.
+
+"It's hopeless for you to try to wound me with words," Michael assured
+her, with grave earnestness. "I was wounded the day before yesterday
+into complete immunity from small pains."
+
+"I suppose you found her ..."
+
+Michael flushed and gripped her by the wrist.
+
+"No, no, don't say something brutal and beastly!" he stammered. "You
+know what happened. You prophesied it. Well, I thought you were wrong,
+and you were right. That's a victory for you. You couldn't wish for me
+to be more humbled than I am by having to admit that I wasn't strong
+enough to keep her faithful for six weeks. But we did agree, I think,
+about one thing." He smiled sadly. "We did agree that she was beautiful.
+You were as proud of that as I was, and of course you had a great deal
+more reason to be proud. You did own her. I never owned her, and isn't
+that your great objection to the relation between man and woman?"
+
+"What are you trying to make me do?" Sylvia asked.
+
+"I want you to have Lily to live with you again."
+
+"To relieve yourself of all responsibility, I suppose," she said
+bitterly.
+
+"No, no; why will you persist in ascribing the worst motive to
+everything I say? Isn't your jealousy fed full enough even yet?"
+
+Sylvia made the garden-seat quiver with an irritable movement.
+
+"You will persist in thinking that jealousy solved all problems," she
+cried.
+
+"Oh, don't let us turn aside into what isn't very important. You can't
+care whether I think you're jealous or not."
+
+"I don't care in so far as it is your opinion," Sylvia admitted. "But I
+object to inaccurate thinking. If your life was spent in a confusion of
+all moral values as mine is, you would be anxious for a little
+straightforward computation for a change."
+
+"Perhaps you are right," Michael admitted, "in thinking that I'm asking
+you to look after Lily to relieve myself of a responsibility. But it's
+only because I see no chance of doing it in any other way. I mean--it's
+not laziness on my part. It's a confession of absolute failure."
+
+"In fact, you're throwing yourself on my mercy," Sylvia said.
+
+"Yes; and also her," he added gently.
+
+"Am I such a moral companion--such an ennobling influence?"
+
+"I would sooner think of her under your influence than think of her
+drifting. What I want you to understand is that I'm not consigning her
+to you for sentimental reasons. I would sooner that Lily were dragged
+down by you at a gallop than that she should sink slowly and lazily of
+her own accord. You have a strong personality. You are well-read. You
+are quite out of the common, and in the life you have chosen, so far as
+I have had experience, you are unique."
+
+Sylvia stared in front of her, and Michael waited anxiously for the
+reply.
+
+"Have you ever read Petronius?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are--have you ever read
+Petronius?"
+
+"It's the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could
+behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare,
+too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses.
+Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and
+incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man
+revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly
+contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic
+in it. Not any religion I've ever heard of, for in all religions man is
+set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my
+conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as
+less repulsive than--ugh! it makes me shudder--but oh, my son, doesn't
+it make me laugh...." She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a
+moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely,
+fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. "So I
+worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily
+was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don't want to worship
+anything but beauty. I don't care about purity or uprightness, but I
+must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely
+girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and you
+can't understand that I'm only able to see you in the shape of a frog.
+It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so earnestly
+and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy frog."
+
+"But what has all this to do with Petronius? There's nothing in that
+romance particularly complimentary to women," Michael argued.
+
+"It's the nightmare effect of it that I adore," Sylvia exclaimed. "It's
+the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from
+which there's no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It is
+gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that's all I want in my
+reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having
+been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the
+truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not
+one moderately decent person all through."
+
+"And you will take Lily back?" Michael asked.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don't for
+heaven's sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I'm doing anything
+except gratify myself in this matter."
+
+"I don't want you to do it for any other reason," he said. "I shall feel
+more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By the
+way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker--a painter. He had
+an affair with Lily, didn't he?"
+
+"Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything
+more."
+
+"And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?"
+
+"Who? The Honorable Arthur?"
+
+Michael nodded.
+
+"Yes, we met him first at Covent Garden, and went to Brighton with him
+and another boy--Clarehaven--Lord Clarehaven."
+
+"Oh, I remember him at the House," said Michael.
+
+"Money is necessary sometimes, you know," Sylvia laughed.
+
+"Of course it is. Look here. Will you in future, whenever you feel
+you're in a nightmare--will you write to me and let me send money?" he
+asked. "I know you despise me and of course ... I understand; but I
+can't bear to think of anyone being haunted as you must be haunted
+sometimes. Don't be proud about this, because _I've_ got no pride left.
+I'm only terribly anxious to be of service to somebody. There's really
+no reason for you to be proud. You see, I should always be so very much
+more anxious to help than you would to be helped. And it really isn't
+only because of Lily that I say this. I've got a good many books you'd
+enjoy, and I think I'll send them to you. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye," she said, looking at him curiously.
+
+Michael turned away from her down the gravel-path, and a moment later
+slammed the door. He had only gone a few steps away, when he heard
+Sylvia calling after him.
+
+"You stupid!" she said. "You never told me Lily's address."
+
+"I'll give you a card."
+
+"Mr. Michael Fane," she read, "1 Ararat House, Island Road." She looked
+at him and raised her eyebrows.
+
+"You see, I expected to live there myself," Michael explained. "I told a
+friend of mine, Maurice Avery, to clear up everything. The furniture can
+all be sold. If you want anything for here, take it of course; but I
+think most of the things will be too large for Mulberry Cottage."
+
+"And what shall I say to Lily?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't think I should say anything about me."
+
+"Who was the man?"
+
+"I never saw him," said Michael. "I only saw his hat."
+
+She pulled him to her and kissed him.
+
+"How many women have done that suddenly like that?" she demanded.
+
+"One--well, perhaps two." He was wondering if Mrs. Smith's kiss ought to
+count in the comparison.
+
+"I never have to any man," she said, and vanished through the door in
+the wall.
+
+Michael hoped that Sylvia intended to imply by that kiss that his offer
+of help was accepted. Fancy her having read Petronius! He could send her
+his Adlington's Apuleius. She would enjoy reading that, and he would
+write in it: _I've eaten rose-leaves and I am no longer a golden ass._
+Perhaps he would also send her his Shelton's Don Quixote.
+
+When Michael turned out of Tinderbox Lane into the Fulham Road, each
+person of humanity he passed upon the pavement seemed to him strange
+with unrevealed secrets. The people of London were somehow transfigured,
+and he longed to see their souls, if it were only in the lucid flashes
+of a nightmare. Yet for nearly a year he had been peering into the
+souls of people. Had he, indeed. Had he not rather been peering to see
+in their souls the reflection of his own? He was moved by the thought of
+Sylvia in London, and suddenly he was swept from his feet by the surging
+against him of the thoughts of all the passers-by and, struggling in the
+trough of these thoughts, he was more and more conscious that unless he
+fought for himself he would be lost. The illusion fled on the instant of
+its creation; and the people were themselves again--dull, quick, slow,
+ordinary, depressed, gay; political busy-bodies, political fools,
+political slaves, political animals. How they huddled together, each one
+of them afraid to stand for himself. It was political passion that made
+them animals, each dependent in turn on the mimicry of his neighbor.
+Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or envious of his neighbor's
+opinion. God was meaningless to the political state: this herd cared
+only for idols. Michael began to make a catalogue of the Golden Calves
+that the Golden Asses of green England worshiped. They were bowing down
+and braying to their Golden Calves, these Golden Asses, and they could
+not see that there were rose-trees growing everywhere, most prodigally
+of all in the gutter, any one petal of which (what did the thorns
+matter?) would have given back to them their humanity. Yet even then,
+Michael dismally concluded, they would continue to bow down to the
+Golden Calves, because they would fancy that it was the Calves who had
+planted and cultivated the rose-trees. Then out of all the thronging
+thoughts made visible he began to pursue the fancy of Sylvia in London,
+and, as he did so, she faded farther and farther from his vision like a
+butterfly seen from a train, that keeps pace, it seems for a moment, and
+is lost upon the flowery embankment behind.
+
+Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk under
+the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he had
+stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained Leppard
+Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on through the
+Chelsea slums.
+
+Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever
+seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the
+corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a
+breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number One;
+and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the blank
+wall opposite.
+
+Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one
+o'clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the
+creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract
+Mrs. Cleghorne's attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out
+into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight must
+have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand. With her
+fibrous neck working and with an old cap of her husband's pinned on a
+skimpy bun at the back of her head, she was horrible after Mrs.
+Gainsborough in the black and green gingham. Michael looked down at her
+over the railings; and she, recognizing him at last, pounced back to
+come up and open the door.
+
+"I couldn't think who it was. We had a man round selling pots of musk
+this morning, and I didn't want to come trapesing upstairs for nothing."
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was receiving him so pleasantly that Michael scarcely
+knew what to say. No doubt his regular payment of rent had a good deal
+to do with it.
+
+"Is Mr. Barnes up?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure. I never go inside his door now. No."
+
+"Oh, really? Why not?"
+
+"I'm the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don't consider he
+has treated us fair."
+
+"Oh, really?"
+
+"He's got a woman here living with him. Now of course that's a thing I
+should never allow, but seeing as you weren't here and was paying the
+rent regular I thought to myself that I'll just shut my eyes until you
+came back. It's really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with
+the other lodgers. It's quite upset me, it has; and _Mis_-ter Cleghorne
+has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma's been so
+bad lately--it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him."
+
+This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently
+the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent
+for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it was
+locked.
+
+"I'll get on down again to my oven," said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike
+glance at the closed door. "I'm just cooking a bit of fish for my old
+man's dinner."
+
+She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin
+in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.
+
+Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the
+passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes' voice called out to know who
+was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to
+somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited
+Michael to come in.
+
+It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of
+the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still
+there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled
+picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of
+St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had
+novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow
+moirette lay over Michael's narrow bed, which he was surprised to see in
+the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and the
+old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and
+dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the
+folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for
+him to explain the alterations.
+
+"Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn't it?" said Barnes,
+blinking round him.
+
+A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely
+the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it was
+as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man's eyes; but there
+clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a touch he
+would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.
+
+"You look pretty pasty," said Michael severely.
+
+"Worry, old man, worry," said Barnes. "Well, to put it straight, I fell
+in with a girl who was down on her luck, and I knew you'd be the very
+one to encourage a bit of charity. So I brought her here."
+
+"Why are you sleeping in this room?" Michael asked.
+
+"You're getting a Mr. Smart, aren't you?" said Barnes. "Fancy you're
+noticing that. Oh, well, I suppose you've come to ask for your rooms
+back?"
+
+Michael with the consciousness of the woman behind those curtained doors
+knew that he could discuss nothing at present. He felt that all the time
+her ear was at the keyhole, and he went out suddenly, telling Barnes to
+meet him at the Orange that night.
+
+Again the beerhall impressed him with its eternal sameness. It was as if
+a cinema film had broken when he last went out of the Cafe d'Orange, and
+had been set in action again at the moment of his return. He looked
+round to see if Daisy was there, and she was. Her hat which had
+formerly been black and trimmed with white daisies was now, to mark the
+season, white and trimmed with black daisies.
+
+"Hulloa!, little stranger!" she exclaimed. "Where have you been?"
+
+So exactly the same was the Orange that Michael was almost surprised
+that she should have observed a passage of time.
+
+"You never seem to come here now," she said reproachfully. "Come on. Sit
+down. Don't stand about like a man selling matches on the curb."
+
+"How's Bert?" Michael asked.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Bert Saunders. The man you were living with in Little Quondam Street."
+
+"Oh, him! Oh, I had to get rid of him double quick. What? Yes, when it
+came to asking me to go to Paris with a fighting fellow. Only fancy the
+cheek of it! It would help him, he said, with his business. Dirty Ecnop!
+I soon shoved him down the Apples-and-pears."
+
+"I haven't understood a word of that last sentence," said Michael.
+
+"Don't you know back-slang and rhyming-slang? Oh, it's grand! Here, I
+forgot, there's something I wanted to tell you. Do you remember you was
+in here with a fellow who you said his name was Burns?"
+
+"Barnes, you mean, I expect. Yes, he's supposed to be meeting me here
+to-night, as a matter of fact."
+
+"Well, you be careful of him. He'll get you into trouble."
+
+Michael looked incredulous.
+
+"It's true as I sit here," said Daisy earnestly. "Come over in the
+corner and let's have our drink there. I can't talk here with that
+blue-nosed---- behind me, squinting at us across his lager." She looked
+round indignantly at the man in question.
+
+They moved across to one of the alcoves, and Daisy leaned over and spoke
+quietly and rather tensely, so differently from the usual rollick of her
+voice that Michael began to feel a presentiment of dread.
+
+"I was out on the Dilly one night soon after you'd been round to my
+place, and I was with a girl called Janie Filson. 'Oo-er,' she said to
+me. 'Did you see who that was passed?' I looked round and saw this
+fellow Burns."
+
+"Barnes," Michael corrected.
+
+"Oh, well, Barnes. His name doesn't matter, because it isn't his own,
+anyway. 'That's Harry Meats,' she said. And she called out after him.
+'Hulloa, Harry, where's Cissie?' He went as white as ... oh, he did go
+shocking white. He just turned to see who it was had called out after
+him, and then he slid up Swallow Street like a bit of paper. 'Who's
+Cissie?' I said. 'Don't you remember Cissie Cummings?' she said. 'That
+fair girl who always wore a big purple hat and used to be in the
+Leicester Lounge and always carried a box of chocolates for swank?' I
+did remember the girl when Janie spoke about her. Only I never knew her,
+see? 'He wasn't very pleased when you mentioned her,' I said. 'Didn't he
+look awful?' said Janie, and just then she got off with a fellow and I
+couldn't ask her any more."
+
+"I don't think that's enough to make me very much afraid of Barnes,"
+Michael commented.
+
+"Wait a minute, I haven't finished yet. Don't be in such a hurry. The
+other day I saw Janie Filson again. She's been away to Italy--is there a
+place called Italy? Of course there is. Well, as I was saying, she'd
+been to Italy with her fellow who's a commercial traveler and that's why
+I hadn't seen her. And Janie said to me, 'Do you know what they're
+saying?' I said, 'No, what?' And she said, 'Did you read nearly a year
+ago about a woman who was found murdered in the Euston Road? A gay woman
+it was,' she said. So I said, 'Lots of women is found murdered, my dear.
+I can't remember every one I see the picture of.' Well, anyone can't,
+can they?" Daisy broke off to ask Michael in an injured voice. Then she
+resumed her tale. "When I was with that fellow Bert I used to read
+nothing else but murders all the time. Give anyone the rats, it would.
+'Lots of women, my dear,' I said. And she said, 'Well, there was one in
+particular who the police never found out the name of, because there
+wasn't any clothing or nothing found.' So I did remember about it, and
+she said, 'Well, they're saying now it was Cissie Cummings.' And I said,
+'Well, what of it, if it was?' And she said, 'What of it?' she said.
+'Well, if it was her,' she said, 'I know who done it.' 'Who done it?' I
+asked--because, you see, I'd forgotten about this fellow Burns. 'Why,
+Harry Meats,' she said. 'That fellow I saw on the Dilly the night when I
+was along with you.'"
+
+"I don't think you have enough evidence for the police," Michael
+decided, with half a smile. Yet nevertheless a malaise chilled him, and
+he looked over his shoulder at the mob in the beer hall.
+
+"---- the police!" Daisy exclaimed. "I don't care about them when I'm
+positive certain of something. I tell you, I know that fellow Burns, or
+Meats, or whatever his name is, done it."
+
+"But what am I to do about it?" Michael asked.
+
+"Well, you'll get into trouble, that's all," Daisy prophesied. "You'd
+look very funny if he was pinched for murder while you was out walking
+with him. Ugh! It gives me the creeps. Order me a gin, there's a good
+boy."
+
+Michael obtained for Daisy her drink, and sat waiting for Barnes to
+appear.
+
+"He won't come," Daisy scoffed. "If he's feeling funny about the neck,
+he won't come down here. He's never been down since that night he came
+down with you. Fancy, to go and do a poor girl in like that! I'd spit in
+his face, if I saw him."
+
+"Daisy, you really mustn't assume such horrible things about a man. He's
+as innocent as you or me."
+
+"Is he?" Daisy retorted. "I don't think so then. You never saw how
+shocking white his face went when Janie asked him about Cissie."
+
+"But if there were any suspicion of him," Michael pointed out, "the
+police would have tackled him long ago."
+
+"Oh, they aren't half artful, the police aren't," said Daisy. "Nothing
+they'd like better than get waiting about and seeing if he didn't go and
+murder another poor girl, so as they could have him for the two, and be
+all the more pleased about it."
+
+"That's talking nonsense," Michael protested. "The police don't do that
+sort of thing."
+
+"I don't know," Daisy argued. "One or two poor girls more or less
+wouldn't worry them. After all, that's what we're for--to get pinched
+when they've got nothing better to do. Of course, I know it's part of
+the game, but there it is. If you steal my purse and I follow you round
+and tell a copper, what would he do? Why, pinch me for soliciting. No,
+my motto is, 'Keep out of the way of the police.' And if you take my
+advice, you'll do the same. If this fellow didn't do the girl in," Daisy
+asked earnestly, leaning forward over the table, "why doesn't he come
+down here and keep his appointment with you to-night? Don't you worry.
+He knows the word has gone round, and he's going to lie very low for a
+bit. I wouldn't say the tecs aren't watching out for him even now."
+
+"My dear Daisy, you're getting absolutely fanciful," Michael declared.
+
+"Oh, well, good luck to fanciful," said Daisy, draining her glass.
+"Here, why don't you come home with me to-night?"
+
+"What, and spend another three hours hiding in a cupboard?"
+
+"No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel,
+because the woman I'm living with's got her son come home from being a
+soldier and she wouldn't like for him to know anything. Well, it's
+better not. You're much more comfortable when you aren't in gay rooms,
+because they haven't got a hold over you. Are you coming?"
+
+For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him.
+For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the
+underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He
+could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with her.
+No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet not much
+more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He had always
+escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not again more
+completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld without
+having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a spectator,
+intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies, but never
+intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He thought, as he
+sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid roguery, that it
+would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There would be no strain in
+living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had loved Lily would be a
+joke to her. Why should not he take her for what she was--shrewd,
+mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He would do her no
+wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in the scheme of the
+universe.
+
+Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he
+remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that Daisy
+could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage to
+plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought of
+the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this
+nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks
+ago--yesterday, indeed--he might have joined himself to Daisy under the
+pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he
+must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion
+might enter, were too dangerous.
+
+"No, I won't come home with you, dear Daisy," he said, taking her hand
+over the puddly table. "You know, you didn't kiss me that night in
+Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you,
+did you?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What's the good of asking me why I kissed you?" she said, embarrassed
+and almost made angry by his reminder. "Perhaps I was twopence on the
+can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if you
+aren't coming home, you aren't, and I must get along. Sitting talking to
+you isn't paying my rent, is it?"
+
+He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming
+to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a
+token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and
+he was at a loss to find a symbol service.
+
+"Is there nothing I can do for you?"
+
+"Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don't get off to-night."
+
+He offered them to her eagerly.
+
+"Go on, you silly thing," she said, pushing the money away. "As if I
+meant it."
+
+"If you didn't, I did," said Michael.
+
+"Oh, all right," she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her
+purse. "Well, chin-chin, Clive, don't be so long coming down here next
+time."
+
+"Michael is my name," he said, for he was rather distressed to think
+that she would pass forever from his life supposing him to be called
+Clive.
+
+"As if I didn't know that," she said. "I remember, because it's a Jew
+name."
+
+"But it isn't," Michael contradicted.
+
+"Jews are called that."
+
+"Very likely," he admitted.
+
+"Oh, well, it'll be all the same in a hundred years."
+
+She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded
+beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him.
+Then she disappeared.
+
+Michael sat on in the Cafe d'Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not
+arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale
+of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her
+suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was
+shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably
+murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he
+feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to
+imagine that material hell of the trial. The bandage dropped from the
+eyes of justice, and he saw her pig's-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful;
+and her scales were like a grocer's. He pitied Barnes in the clutches of
+anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist. After
+all, Daisy's story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to himself's
+hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to account for
+his dislike of Janie Filson's salute without supposing murder.
+Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the thought used to
+come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed, the thought of
+murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was absurd to think
+of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling hansoms and all
+that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes not met him at the
+Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an appointment when his
+pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie Cummings had traveled even to
+Leppard Street?
+
+Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction
+for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his
+mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the
+curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with
+double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in
+Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o'clock,
+and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever
+brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for
+Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.
+
+The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the houses
+confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars. Several
+windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals of
+habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers behind,
+and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows of his
+old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door quietly and
+stood listening for a moment in the passage. He could hear a low
+snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a word was
+distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening close to
+the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the blackness,
+fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was seeming so
+sinister in this house. It was incredible that a brief movement would
+open the front door again and let in the starlight; for, as he stood
+here, Leppard Street was under the earth deep down. He moved a little
+farther into the hall, and, putting out his hand to feel for the
+balusters, drew back with a start, for he might have clapped it down
+upon a cold bald head, so much like that was the newel's wooden knob.
+Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and every
+instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the house
+like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose and
+fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then without
+warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion. Every
+word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.
+
+"I say he gave you thirty shillings. Now then!" Barnes yapped.
+
+"And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you've had."
+
+"Don't I hear through the door what you get?"
+
+Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment
+to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had
+been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was
+the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The
+recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing
+longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night,
+which smelled so sweet after that passage.
+
+He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the
+five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he
+pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of black
+basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the speculation of
+their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning and brooded upon
+the builders that built them and the sphinx that commanded them to be
+built.
+
+In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather
+prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of
+brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped
+and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher
+and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number
+One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a
+moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a wild,
+irregular walk in Michael's direction. He had a sensation that she had
+known he was standing here against this wall, that she had watched him
+all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been standing here
+against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he could not advance
+to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the wall. Michael saw her
+very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight. Her hat was askew, and
+a black ostrich plume hung down over her big chalky face: her lips were
+glistening as if they had been smeared with jam. She was wearing a black
+satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts swept past him, like an
+overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by a wire from the scene.
+
+Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to
+have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene
+primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He
+realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could
+hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he
+had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the
+reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One with
+the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather startled
+as he walked up the steps to see Barnes' face pressed against the
+window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave
+reassuringly to a mask like that.
+
+Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key
+from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.
+
+"Here, I couldn't get down to the Orange to-night. I've had a bit of
+trouble with this girl."
+
+The gas was flaring in the sitting-room by now, and the night, which
+outside had been lightening for dawn, was black as ink upon the panes.
+
+"Sit on the bed. The chairs are all full of her dirty clothes. I'll pull
+the blinds down. I'm going to leave here to-morrow, Fane. Did you see
+her going down the road? She must have passed you by. I tell you
+straight, Fane, half an hour back I was in two minds to do her in. I
+was, straight. And I would have, if ... Oh, well, I kept my temper and
+threw her out instead. Gratitude! It's my belief gratitude doesn't exist
+in this world. You sit down and have a smoke. He left some cigarettes
+behind."
+
+"Who did?" Michael asked sharply.
+
+"Who did what?"
+
+"Left these cigarettes."
+
+"Oh, they're some I bought yesterday," said Barnes.
+
+"I think it's just as well for you that you are going to-morrow morning.
+I hope you quite realize that otherwise I should have turned you out."
+
+"Well, don't look at me in that tone of voice," Barnes protested. "I've
+had quite enough to worry me without any nastiness between old friends
+to make it worse."
+
+"You can't expect me to be pleased at the way you've treated my rooms,"
+Michael said.
+
+"Oh, the gas-stove, you mean?"
+
+"It's not a question of gas-stoves. It's a question of living on a
+woman."
+
+"Who did?"
+
+"You."
+
+"If I'd had to live on her earnings, I should be very poorly off now,"
+grumbled Barnes, in an injured voice.
+
+Under Michael's attack he was regaining his old perkiness.
+
+"At any rate, you must go to-morrow morning," Michael insisted.
+
+"Don't I keep on telling you that I'm going? It's no good for you to nag
+at me, Fane."
+
+"And what about the woman?"
+
+"Her? Let her go to----," said Barnes contemptuously. "She can't do me
+any harm. What if she does tell the coppers I've been living on her?
+They won't worry me unless they've nothing better to do, and I'll have
+hooked it by then."
+
+"You're sure she can't do you any harm?" Michael asked gravely. "There's
+nothing else she could tell the police?"
+
+"Here, what are you talking about?" asked Barnes, coming close to
+Michael and staring at him fixedly. Michael debated whether he should
+mention Cissie Cummings, but he lacked the courage either to frighten
+Barnes with the suggestion of his guilt or to preserve a superior
+attitude in the face of his enraged innocence.
+
+"I shall come round to-morrow morning, or rather this morning, at nine,"
+said Michael. "And I shall expect to find you ready to clear out of here
+for good."
+
+"You're very short with a fellow, aren't you?" said Barnes. "What do you
+want to go away for? Why don't you stay so as you can see me off the
+premises?"
+
+Michael thought that he could observe underneath all the assurance a
+sharp anxiety on Barnes' part not to be left alone.
+
+"You can lay down and have a sleep in here. I'll get on into the
+bedroom."
+
+Michael consented to stay, and Barnes was obviously relieved. He put out
+the gas and retired into the bedroom. The dawn was graying the room, and
+the sun would be up in less than an hour. Early sparrows were beginning
+to chirp. The woman who had burst out of the door and fled up the street
+seemed now a chimera of the night. Half-dozing, Michael lay on the bed,
+half dozing and faintly oppressed by the odor of patchouli coming from
+the clothes heaped upon the chairs. St. George was visible already, and
+even the outlines of The Knight in Armor were tremulously apparent.
+Michael wondered why he did not feel a greater resentment at the
+profanation of these rooms. And why did Barnes keep fidgeting on the
+other side of the folding doors? The sparrows were cheeping more loudly:
+the trains were more frequent. Michael woke from sleep with a start and
+saw that Barnes was throwing the clothes from the chairs on the floor:
+stirred up thus in this clear light the scent of patchouli was even more
+noticeable. What on earth was Barnes doing? He was turning the whole
+room upside-down.
+
+"What the deuce are you looking for?" Michael yawned.
+
+"That's all right, old man, you get on with your sleep. I'm just putting
+my things together," Barnes told him.
+
+Michael turned over and was beginning to doze again when Barnes woke him
+by the noise he made in taking the dirty dishes out of the old grate.
+
+"How on earth can I sleep, when you're continually fidgeting?" Michael
+demanded fretfully. "What's the time?"
+
+"Just gone half-past five."
+
+Barnes paid no more attention to Michael's rest, but began more
+feverishly than ever to rummage among all the things in the room.
+
+Michael could not stand his activity any longer, and dry-mouthed from an
+uncomfortable sleep, he sat up.
+
+"What _are_ you looking for?"
+
+"Well, if you want to know, I'm looking for a watch-bracelet."
+
+"It's not likely to be under the carpet," said Michael severely.
+
+Barnes was wrenching out the tacks to Michael's annoyance.
+
+"Perhaps it isn't," Barnes agreed. "But I've got to find this
+watch-bracelet. It's gold. I don't want to lose it."
+
+"Was it a woman's?"
+
+Barnes looked round at him like a small animal alarmed.
+
+"Yes, it was a woman's. What makes you ask?"
+
+"What's it like?"
+
+"Gold. Gold, I keep telling you."
+
+"When did you have it last?"
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Well, it can't have gone far."
+
+"No, blast it, of course it can't," said Barnes, searching with renewed
+impatience. He was throwing the clothes about the room again, and the
+odor of staleness became nauseating.
+
+"I'm going to wash," Michael announced, moving across to the bedroom.
+
+"You'll excuse the untidiness," Barnes called out after him, in a tone
+of rather strained jocularity.
+
+Of Michael's old room no vestige remained. A very large double-bed took
+up almost all the space, and all the furniture was new and tawdry. The
+walls were hung with studies of cocottes pretending to be naiads and
+dryads, horrible women posed in the silvanity of a photographer's
+studio. The room was littered with clothes, and Michael could not move a
+step without entangling his feet in a petticoat or treading upon hidden
+shoes. He tried to splash his face, but the very washstand was sickly.
+
+"Well, you've managed to debauch my bedroom quite successfully," he said
+to Barnes, when he came back to the sitting-room.
+
+"That's all right. I'll get rid of all the new furniture. I can pop the
+lot. Well, it's mine. If I could find this bloody watch-bracelet, I
+could begin to make some arrangements."
+
+"What about breakfast?" Michael began to look for something to eat.
+Every plate and knife was dirty, and there were three or four
+half-finished tins of condensed milk which had turned pistachio green
+and stank abominably.
+
+"There's a couple of herrings somewhere," said Barnes. "Or there was.
+But everything seems upside-down this morning. Where the hell is that
+watch? It can't have walked away on its own. If that mare took it! I've
+a very particular reason for not wanting to lose that watch. Oh, ----
+----! wherever can it have got to?"
+
+"Well, anyway shut up using such filthy language. When does the milkman
+come round?"
+
+"I don't know when he comes round. Here, Fane, have you ever heard of
+anyone talking in their sleep?"
+
+"Of course I've heard of people talking in their sleep," Michael
+answered. "It's not very unusual."
+
+"Ah, hollering out, yes--but talking in a sensible sort of a way, so
+that if you came in and listened to what they said, you'd think it was
+the truth? Have you ever heard of that?"
+
+"I don't suppose I can give you an instance, but obviously it must often
+happen."
+
+"Must it?" said Barnes, in a depressed voice. "You see, I set particular
+value by this watch-bracelet; and I thought perhaps I might have talked
+about it in my sleep, and that mare just to spite me have gone and taken
+it. I wonder where it is now."
+
+Michael also began to wonder where it was now, and Barnes' anxiety was
+transferred to him, so that he began to fancy the whole of this fine
+morning was tremendously bound up with exactly where the watch-bracelet
+now was. Barnes had begun to turn over everything for about the sixth
+time.
+
+"If the watch is here," said Michael irritably, "it will be found when
+you move your things out, and if it's not here, it's useless to go on
+worrying about it."
+
+"Ah, it's all very nice for you to be so calm! But what price it's being
+my watch that's lost, not yours, old sport?"
+
+"I'm not going to talk about it any more," Michael declared. "I want to
+know what you're going to do when you leave here."
+
+"Ah, that's it! What am I?"
+
+"Would you like to go to the Colonies?"
+
+"What, say good-bye to dear old Leicester Square and pop off for good
+and all? I wouldn't mind."
+
+"I don't mind telling you," said Michael, "that if I'd discovered you
+here a week ago living like this, I should have had nothing more to do
+with you. As it is, I've a good mind to sling you out to look after
+yourself. However, I'm willing to get you a ticket for wherever you
+think you'd like to go, and when I hear you've arrived, I'll send you
+enough money to keep you going for a time."
+
+"Fane, I don't mind saying it. You've been a good pal to me."
+
+"Hark, there's the milkman at last!" Michael exclaimed. He went out into
+the sparkling air of the fine Summer morning and came back with plenty
+of milk for breakfast. After they had made a sort of meal, he suggested
+that Barnes ought to come with him and visit some of the Colonial
+Agencies. They walked down Victoria Street and across St. James' Park,
+and in the Strand he made Barnes have a shave. The visit to the barber
+took away some of his nocturnal raffishness, and Michael found him very
+amusing during the various discussions that took place in the Agencies.
+
+"I think the walk has done you good."
+
+"Yes," Barnes doubtfully admitted. "I don't think it has done me much
+harm."
+
+They had lunch at Romano's, where Barnes drank a good deal of Chianti
+and became full of confidence in his future.
+
+"That's where it is, Fane. A fellow like you is lucky. But that's no
+reason why I shouldn't be lucky in my turn. My life has been a failure
+so far. Yes, I'm not going to attempt to deny it. There are lots of
+things in my life that might have been different. You'll understand when
+I say different I mean pleasanter for everybody all round, myself
+included. But that's all finished. With this fruit-farm--well, of course
+it's no good grumbling and running down good things--those apples we saw
+were big enough to make anybody's fortune. Cawdashit, Fane, I can see
+myself sitting under one of those apple-trees and counting the bloody
+fruit falling down at my feet and me popping them into baskets and
+selling them--where was it he said we sold them?" Barnes poured out more
+Chianti. "Really, it seems a sin on a fine day like this to be hanging
+about in London. Well, I've had some sprees in old London, and that's a
+fact; so I'm not going to start running it down now. If I hadn't lost
+that watch-bracelet, I wouldn't give a damn for anybody. Good old
+London," he went on meditatively. "Yes, I've had some times--good times
+and bad times--and here I am."
+
+He gradually became incoherent, and Michael thought it would be as well
+to escort him back to Leppard Street and impress on him once again that
+he must remove all his things immediately.
+
+"You'll have to be quick with your packing-up. You ought to sail next
+week. I shall go and see about your passage to-morrow."
+
+They drove back to Leppard Street in a taxi, and as they got out Barnes
+said emphatically:
+
+"You know what it is, Fane? Cawdashit! I feel like a marquis when I'm
+out with you, and it I hadn't have lost that watch-bracelet I'd feel
+like the bloody German Emperor. That's me. All up in the air one minute,
+and yet worry myself barmy over a little thing like a watch the next."
+
+"Hullo!" he exclaimed, looking up the road as their taxi drove off.
+"Somebody else is playing at being a millionaire."
+
+Another taxi was driving into Leppard Street.
+
+Michael had already opened the front door, and he told Barnes not to
+hang about on the steps. Barnes turned reluctantly from his inspection
+of the new taxi's approach. It pulled up at Number One, and three men
+jumped out.
+
+"That's your man," Michael heard one of them say, and in another moment
+he heard, "Henry Meats ... I hold a warrant ... murder of Cissie ...
+anything you say ... used against you," all in the mumbo-jumbo of a
+nightmare.
+
+Michael came down the steps again very quickly; and Barnes, now
+handcuffed, turned to him despairingly.
+
+"Tell 'em my name isn't Meats, Fane. Tell 'em they've made a mistake.
+Oh, my God, I never done it! I never done it!"
+
+The two men were pushing him, dead white, crumpled, sobbing, into the
+taxi; he seemed very small beside the big men with their square
+shoulders and bristly mustaches. Michael heard him still moaning as the
+taxi jangled and whirred abruptly forward. The third man watched it
+disappear between the two walls; then he strolled up the steps to enter
+the house. Mrs. Cleghorne was already in the hall, and over the
+balusters of each landing faces could be seen peering down. As if the
+word were uttered by the house itself, "murder" floated in a whisper
+upon the air. The faces shifted; doors opened and shut far above;
+footsteps hurried to and fro; and still of all these sounds "murder" was
+the most audible.
+
+"This is the gentleman who rents the rooms," Mrs. Cleghorne was saying.
+
+"But I've not been near them till yesterday evening for six months,"
+Michael hurriedly explained.
+
+"That's quite right," Mrs. Cleghorne echoed.
+
+"Well, I'm afraid we must go through them," said the officer.
+
+"Oh, of course."
+
+"Let me see, is this your address?"
+
+"Well, no--Cheyne Walk--173."
+
+"We might want to have a little talk with you about this here Meats."
+
+Michael was enraged with himself for not asseverating "Barnes! Barnes!
+Barnes!" as he had been begged to do. He despised himself for not trying
+to save that white crumpled thing huddled between those big men with
+their bristly mustaches; yet all the while he felt violently afraid that
+the police officer would think him involved in these disgraceful rooms,
+that he would suppose the pictures and the tawdry furniture belonged to
+him, that he would imagine the petticoats and underlinen strewn about
+the floor had something to do with him.
+
+"If you want me," he found himself saying, "you have my address."
+
+Quickly he hurried away from Leppard Street, and traveled in a trance of
+shame to Hardingham. Alan was just going in to bat, when Michael walked
+across from the Hall to the cricket-field.
+
+Stella came from her big basket chair to greet him, and for a while he
+sat with her in the buttercups, watching Alan at the wicket. Nothing had
+ever seemed so easy as the bowling of the opposite side on this fine
+June evening, and Michael tried to banish the thought of Barnes in the
+spaciousness of these level fields. Stella was evidently being very
+careful not to convey the impression that she had lately won a victory
+over him. It was really ridiculous, Michael thought, as he plucked idly
+the buttercups and made desultory observations to Stella about the merit
+of a stroke by Alan, it was more than ridiculous, it was deliberate
+folly to enmesh himself with such horrors as he had beheld at Leppard
+Street. There were doubtless very unpleasant events continually
+happening in this world, but willfully to drag one's self into misery on
+account of them was merely to show an incapacity to appreciate the more
+fortunate surroundings of one's allotted niche. The avoidance of even
+the sight of evil was as justifiable as the avoidance of evil itself,
+and the moral economy of the world might suffer a dangerous
+displacement, if everyone were to involve themselves in such events as
+those in which himself had lately been involved. Duty was owing all the
+time to people nearer at hand than Barnes. No doubt the world would be
+better for being rid of him; diseases of the body must be fought, and
+the corruption of human society must be cleansed. Any pity for Barnes
+was a base sentimentalism; it was merely a reaction of personal
+discomfort at having seen an unpleasant operation. The sentimentalism of
+that cry "Don't hurt him!" was really contemptible, and since it seemed
+that he was likely to be too weak to bear the sight of the cleansing
+knife, he must in future avoid the occasion of its use. Otherwise his
+intellectual outlook was going to be sapped, and he would find himself
+in the ranks of the faddists.
+
+"I think I shall stay down here the rest of the summer, if I may," he
+said to Stella.
+
+"My dear, of course you can. We'll have a wonderful time. Hullo, Alan is
+retiring."
+
+Alan came up and sat beside them in the buttercups.
+
+"I thought I saw you just as I was going in," he said. "Anything going
+on in town?"
+
+"No, nothing much," said Michael. "I saw a man arrested for murder this
+afternoon."
+
+"Did you really? How beastly! Our team's just beginning to get into
+shape. I say, Stella. That youth working on old Rundle's farm is going
+to be pret-ty good. Did you see him lift their fast bowlers twice
+running over the pond?"
+
+Michael strolled away to take a solitary walk. It seemed incredible now
+to think that he had brought Lily down here, that he had wandered with
+her over this field. What an infringement it must have seemed to Stella
+and Alan of their already immemorial peace. They had really been very
+good about his invasion. And here was the wood where he and Stella had
+fought. Michael sat down in the glade and listened to the busy
+flutterings of the birds. Why had Stella objected to his marriage with
+Lily? All the superficial answers were ready at once; but was not her
+real objection only another facet of the diamond of selfishness?
+Selfishness was a diamond. Precious, hard, and very often
+beautiful--when seen by itself.
+
+Michael spent a week at Hardingham, during which he managed to put out
+of his mind the thought of Barnes in prison awaiting his trial. Then one
+day the butler informed him of a person wishing to speak to him. In the
+library he found the detective who had asked for his address at Leppard
+Street.
+
+"Sorry to have to trouble you, sir, but there was one or two little
+questions we wanted to ask."
+
+Michael feared he would have to appear at the trial, and asked at once
+if that was going to be necessary.
+
+"Oh, no, I don't think so. We've got it all marked out fair and square
+against Mr. Meats. He doesn't stand a chance of getting off. How did you
+come to be mixed up with him?"
+
+Michael explained the circumstances which had led up to his knowing
+Meats.
+
+"I see; and you just wanted to give him a bit of a helping hand. Oh,
+well, the feeling does you credit, I'm bound to say; but another time,
+sir, I should make a few inquiries first. We should probably have had
+him before, if he hadn't been helped by you. Of course, I quite
+understand you knew nothing about this murder, but anyone can often do a
+lot of harm by helping undeserving people. We mightn't have nabbed him
+even now, if some woman hadn't brought us a nice little bit of evidence,
+and I found some more things myself after a search. Oh, yes, he doesn't
+stand an earthly. We knew for a moral cert who did it, straightaway; but
+the police don't get a fair chance in England. We let all these blooming
+Radicals interfere too much. That's my opinion. Anyone would think the
+police was a lot of criminals by the way some people talk about them."
+
+"Is anybody defending him?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll be awarded a counsel," said the detective indignantly. "For
+which you and me has to pay. That's a nice thing, isn't it? But he
+doesn't stand an earthly."
+
+"Where will he be hanged?"
+
+"Pentonville."
+
+Michael thought how Mrs. Murdoch in Neptune Crescent would shudder some
+Tuesday morning in the near future.
+
+"I'm sorry you should have had to come all this way to find me," Michael
+said. He hated himself for being polite to the inspector, but he could
+not help it. He rang the bell.
+
+"Oh, Dawkins, will you give Inspector--what is your name, by the bye?"
+
+"Dawkins," said the inspector.
+
+"How curious!" Michael laughed.
+
+"Yes, sir," the inspector laughed.
+
+"Lunch in the gun room, Dawkins. You must be hungry."
+
+"Well, sir, I could do with a snack, I daresay." He followed his
+namesake from the room, and outside Michael could hear them begin to
+chatter of the coincidence.
+
+"But supposing I'd been in the same state of life as Meats," Michael
+said to himself. "What devil's web wouldn't they be trying to spin round
+me?"
+
+He was seized with fury at himself for his cowardice. He had thought of
+nothing but his own reputation ever since Meats had been arrested. He
+had worried over the opinion of a police inspector; had been ashamed of
+the appearance of the rooms; had actually been afraid that he would be
+implicated in the disgraceful affair. So long as it had been easy to
+flatter himself with the pleasure he was giving or the good he was doing
+to Meats, he had kept him with money. Now when Meats had been dragged
+away, he was anxious to disclaim the whole acquaintanceship for fear of
+the criticism of a big man with a bristly mustache. The despair in
+Meats' last cry to him echoed round this library. He had seen society in
+action: not all the devils and fiends imagined by mediaeval monks were so
+horrible as those big men with bristly mustaches. What did they know of
+Meats and his life? What did they care, but that they were paid by
+society to remove rubbish? Justice had decreed that Meats should be
+arrested, and like a dead rat in the gutter he was swept up by these
+scavengers. What compact had he broken that men should freeze to stones
+and crush him? He had broken the laws of men and the laws of God; he had
+committed murder. And were not murders as foul being committed every
+moment? Murdered ambition, murdered love, murdered pity, murdered
+gratitude, murdered faith, did none of these cry out for vengeance?
+
+Society had seized the murderer, and it was useless to cry out. Himself
+was as impotent as the prisoner. Meats had sinned against the hive: this
+infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he felt
+to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was become
+a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by fear.
+Something was needed to destroy this gregarious organism. War and
+pestilence must come; but in the past these two had come often enough,
+and mankind was the same afterward. This ant-hill of a globe had been
+ravaged often enough, but the ants were all busy again carrying their
+mean little burdens of food hither and thither in affright for the
+comfort of their mean little lives.
+
+"And I'm as bad as any of them," said Michael to himself. "I know I have
+obligations in Leppard Street, and I've run away from them because I'm
+afraid of what people will think. Of course, I always fail. I'm a
+coward."
+
+He could not stay any longer at Hardingham. He must go and see about
+Mrs. Smith now. Society would be seizing her soon and bringing her
+miserable life to an end in whitewashed prison corridors. He must do
+something for Meats. Perhaps he would not be able to save him from
+death, but he must not sit here ringing bells for butlers called Dawkins
+to feed inspectors called Dawkins.
+
+Stella came in with the first roses of the year.
+
+"Aren't they beauties?"
+
+"Yes, splendid. I'm going up to town this afternoon."
+
+"But not for long?"
+
+"I don't know. It depends. Do you know, Stella, it's an extraordinary
+thing, but ever since you've practically given up playing, I feel very
+much more alive. How do you account for that?"
+
+"Well, I haven't given up playing for one thing," Stella contradicted.
+
+"Stella do you ever feel inspired nowadays?"
+
+"Not so much as I did," she admitted.
+
+"I feel now as if I were on the verge of an inspiration."
+
+"Not another Lily," she said quickly, with half a laugh.
+
+"You've no right to sneer at me about that," he said fiercely. "You must
+be very careful, you know. _You'll_ become flabby, if you aren't
+careful, here at Hardingham."
+
+"Oh, Michael!" she laughed. "Don't look at me as if you were a Major
+Prophet. I won't become flabby. I shall start composing at once."
+
+"There you are!" he cried triumphantly. "Never say again that I can't
+wake you up."
+
+"You did not wake me up."
+
+"I did. I did. And do you know I believe I've discovered that I'm an
+anarchist?"
+
+"Is that your inspiration?"
+
+"Who knows? It may be."
+
+"Well, don't come and be anarchical down here, because Alan is going to
+stand at the next election."
+
+"What on earth good would Alan be in Parliament?" Michael asked
+derisively. "He's much too happy."
+
+"Michael, why are you so horrid about Alan nowadays?"
+
+He was penitent in a moment at the suggestion, but when he said
+good-bye to Stella he had a curious feeling that from henceforth he was
+going to be stronger than her.
+
+On reaching London, Michael went to see Castleton at the Temple, and he
+found him in chambers at the top of dusty stairs in King's Beach Walk.
+
+"Lucky to get these, wasn't I?" said Castleton. By craning out of the
+window, the river was visible.
+
+"I suppose you've never had a murder case yet?" Michael asked.
+
+"Not yet," said Castleton. "In fact, I'm going in for Chancery work. And
+I shall get my first brief in about five years, with luck."
+
+Michael inquired how one went to work to retain the greatest criminal
+advocate of the day, and Castleton said he would have to be approached
+through a solicitor.
+
+"Well, will you get hold of him for me?"
+
+Castleton looked rather blank.
+
+"If you can't get him, get the next best, and so on. Tell him the man I
+want to defend hasn't a chance, and that's why I'm particularly anxious
+he should get off."
+
+They discussed details for some time, and Castleton was astonished at
+Michael's wish to aid Meats.
+
+"It seems very perverse," he said.
+
+"Perverse!" Michael echoed. "And what about your profession? That is
+really the most perverse factor in modern life."
+
+"But in this case," Castleton argued, "the victim seems so utterly
+worthless."
+
+"Exactly," said Michael. "But as society never interfered when he was
+passively offensive, why, the moment he becomes actively offensive,
+should society have the right to put him out of the way? They never
+tried to cure him for his own good. Why should they kill him for their
+own?"
+
+"You want to strike at the foundations of the legal system," said the
+barrister.
+
+"Exactly," Michael agreed; and the argument came to an end because there
+was obviously nothing more to be said.
+
+Castleton promises to do all he could for Meats, and also to keep
+Michael's name out of the business. As Michael walked down the stairs,
+it gave him a splendid satisfaction to think how already the law was
+being set in motion against the law. A blow for Inspector Dawkins. And
+what about the murdered girl? "She won't be helped by Meats' death,"
+said Michael to himself. "Society is not considering her protection now
+any more than it did when she was alive." _No slops must be emptied
+here_: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the
+stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a sentimentalist.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.
+
+"A nice set-out and no mistake!" she declared. "Half of the neighborhood
+have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder had been done
+in here. Mr. Cleghorne's quite hoarse with hollering out to them to keep
+off. And it never rains but what it pours. There's a poor woman gone and
+died here now. However, a funeral's a little more lively than the police
+nosing round, though her not having a blessed halfpenny and owing me
+three weeks on the rent it certainly won't be anything better than a
+pauper's funeral."
+
+"What woman?" Michael asked.
+
+"Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I've been very good to--a Mrs. Smith."
+
+"Dead?" he echoed.
+
+"Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body.
+What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I _should_ say. It quite worried Mr.
+Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around
+so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he's read a lot about these
+Roman Catholics, and he doesn't hold with them. They're that underhand,
+he says, it makes him nervous."
+
+"Can I see this priest?" Michael asked.
+
+"Well, it's hardly the room you're accustomed to. I've really looked at
+her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old mother
+has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her."
+
+"I think I should like to see this priest," Michael persisted.
+
+Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and
+she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They
+descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out
+to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused
+herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was
+sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look
+up from his Office.
+
+"Is that you, Sister?" he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited
+for him to explain his business.
+
+"I wanted to ask about this poor woman."
+
+Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing
+was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
+
+"I was interested in her," Michael exclaimed.
+
+"Indeed!" said the priest dryly. "I wouldn't have thought so."
+
+"Is her cat here?"
+
+"There was some sort of an animal, but the woman of the house took it
+off."
+
+A silence followed, and Michael was aware of the priest's hostility.
+
+"I suppose she didn't see her son before she died?" Michael went on.
+"Her son is with the Jesuits."
+
+"You seem to know a great deal about the poor soul?"
+
+"I thought I had managed to help her," said Michael, in a sad voice.
+
+"Indeed?" commented the priest, even more dryly.
+
+"And there is nothing I can do now?"
+
+"Almighty God has taken her," said the priest. "There is nothing you can
+do."
+
+"I could have some Masses said for her."
+
+"Are you a Catholic?" the priest asked.
+
+"No; but I fancy I shall be a Catholic," Michael said; and as he spoke
+it was like a rushing wind. He hurried out into the passage where a nun
+passed him in the gloom. "She will be praying," Michael thought, and,
+looking back over his shoulder, he said:
+
+"Pray for me, Sister."
+
+The nun was evidently startled by the voice, and went on quickly down
+the three steps and up the other into Mrs. Smith's den.
+
+Michael climbed upstairs to interview the Solutionist. He found him
+lying in bed.
+
+"Why wasn't that money paid regularly?" he asked severely.
+
+"Who is it?" the Solutionist muttered, in fuddled accents. "Wanted the
+money myself. Had a glorious time. The cat's all right, and the poor old
+rabbits are dead. Can't give everybody a good time. Somebody's got to
+suffer in this world."
+
+Michael left him, and without entering his old rooms again went away
+from Leppard Street.
+
+The moment had come to visit Rome, and remembering how he had once
+dissuaded Maurice from going there, he felt some compunction now in
+telling him that he wanted to travel alone. However, it would be
+impossible to visit Rome for the first time with Maurice. In the studio
+he led up to his backing out of the engagement.
+
+"About this going abroad," he began.
+
+"I say, Michael, I don't think I can come just now. The editor of The
+Point of View wants a series of articles on the ballet, and I'm going to
+start on them at once."
+
+It was a relief to Michael, and he wished Maurice good luck.
+
+"Yes, I think they're going to be rather good," he said confidently.
+"I'm going to begin with the Opera: then the Empire and the Alhambra:
+and in September there will be the new ballet at the Orient. Of course,
+I've got a theory about English ballet."
+
+"Is there anything about which you haven't got a theory?" Michael asked.
+"Hullo, you've got the Venetian mirror from Ararat House. I'm so glad!"
+
+"I've arranged all that," Maurice said. "Lily Haden has gone to live
+with a girl called Sylvia Scarlett. Rather a terror, I thought."
+
+"Yes, I had an idea you'd find her a bit difficult."
+
+"Oh, but I scored off her in the end," said Maurice quickly.
+
+"Congratulations," said Michael. "Well, I'm going to Rome."
+
+"I say, rather hot."
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"I used to be rather keen on Rome, but I've a theory it's generally a
+disappointment. However, I suppose I shall have to go one day."
+
+"Yes, I don't think Rome ought to miss your patronage, Maurice."
+
+They parted as intimate friends, but while Michael was going downstairs
+from the studio he thought that it might very easily be for the last
+time.
+
+His mother was at home for tea; lots of women and a bishop were having a
+committee about something. When they had all rustled away into the
+mellow June evening, Michael asked what had been accomplished.
+
+"It's this terrible state of the London streets," said Mrs. Fane.
+"Something has got to be done about these miserable women. The Bishop of
+Chelsea has promised to bring in some kind of a bill in Parliament. He
+feels so strongly about it."
+
+"What does he feel?" Michael asked.
+
+"Why, of course, that they shouldn't be allowed."
+
+"The remedy lies with him," Michael said. "He must take them the
+Sacraments."
+
+"My dearest boy, what are you talking about? He does his best. He's
+always picking them up and driving them home in his brougham. He can't
+do more than that. Really he quite thrilled us with some of his
+experiences."
+
+Michael laughed and took hold of her hand.
+
+"What would you say if I told you that I was thinking very seriously of
+being a priest?"
+
+"Oh, my dear Michael, and you look so particularly nice in tweeds!"
+
+Michael laughed and went upstairs to pack. He would leave London
+to-morrow morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OLD WORLD
+
+
+The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn
+was quivering upon the meadows near Chambery Michael was sure with an
+almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hardships
+of thought. Waterfalls swayed from the mountains, and the gray torrents
+they fed plunged along beside the train. Down through Italy they
+traveled all day, past the cypresses, and the olive-trees wise and
+graceful in the sunlight. It was already dusk when they reached the
+Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses
+shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset;
+but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train
+reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter
+carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down
+the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber
+shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide
+street in Rome.
+
+"There has been nothing like this," he said, "since I walked down the
+High. There will be nothing like this ever again."
+
+Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups of
+ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one mighty
+column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was figured with
+innumerable horses and warriors.
+
+"We must seek for truth in the past," he said.
+
+How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was
+only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in
+Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues,
+rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived as
+shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this
+column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name.
+What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the
+morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct
+of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this
+solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.
+
+"All that I have done and experienced so far," Michael thought, "would
+not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of other
+people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have been given
+knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself
+to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man. Man for man
+standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader. The reason why
+the modern world is so critical of the fruits of Christianity after
+nineteen hundred years is because they have expected it from the
+beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to the individual
+the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is much more anxious
+about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds are destroyed,
+whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake, or by the great
+illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a great war, and
+everybody will discover it has come either because people are Christians
+or because they are not Christians. Nobody will think it is because each
+man wants to interfere with the conduct of his neighbor. That woman in
+Leppard Street who died in the peace of God, how much more was she a
+Christian than me, who, without perceiving the beam in my own eye, have
+trotted round operating on the motes of other people. And once I had to
+make an effort to kiss her in fellowship. Rome! Rome! How parochial you
+make my youth!"
+
+The last exclamation was uttered aloud.
+
+"Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?" said a
+voice.
+
+A man in a black cloak was speaking.
+
+"No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies," said
+Michael.
+
+"There is only one tragedy for youth."
+
+"And that is?"
+
+"Age," said the stranger.
+
+"And what is the tragedy of age?"
+
+"There is no tragedy of age," said the stranger.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGICAL LETTER
+
+TO
+
+JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO
+
+
+MY DEAR JOHN,
+
+There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in
+prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it
+thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have
+himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the
+book.
+
+You will remember that last year "Youth's Encounter," the first part of
+Michael Fane's story, obtained a great advertisement through the action
+of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be
+drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of
+compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the
+realities of war will obtain me a pardon in "Sinister Street," the
+second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the
+sensitive or affronted the simple.
+
+Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the question
+of the form of the English novel. There has lately been noticeable in
+the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel is thinly
+disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are peculiarly
+formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack upon the form
+of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted in regarding
+"Youth's Encounter" merely as an achievement of memory, and I have felt
+sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of literary Datas,
+rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist. You know from
+many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could remember of my
+childhood, the book would not by this time have reached much beyond my
+fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public school and my
+own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I fancy it would
+have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a place of which
+I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that nowadays it is a
+much better university than Oxford, and in thinking thus you are the
+only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy. Obviously, too, it was
+unavoidable in writing about St. James' that I should draw certain
+characters from the life, and for doing this I have been attacked on
+grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of schoolmasters to
+be exempt from the privilege of public men to be sometimes caricatured.
+Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With regard to the Oxford
+dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to them what is after all
+much more likely to be a true impression of their virtues and follies
+than those formed by a schoolboy of his masters. Therefore, in this
+second volume, "Sinister Street," there is not a single portrait of a
+don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the undergraduate a much less
+important factor than the schoolmaster is to the schoolboy, and the few
+shadows of dons which appear in this volume are as vital as most dons in
+the flesh seem to the normal undergraduate.
+
+The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably will
+be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as such
+rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own existence
+up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth writing at
+such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of people who can
+bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the capacity of the
+spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your authority was said by
+Aristotle. "Art," says _The Sydney Bulletin_, a curious antipodean
+paper, "is selection." "It is time to protest," says an American paper,
+"against these long books." At this rate, we shall soon be spending all
+our time with books. "The enormous length must make it formless," other
+critics have decided. Ultimately I believe Aristotle's remark to be the
+truest guide, and I am tempted to hope that with the publication of the
+second volume many irrelevancies have established their relevancy.
+
+It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the
+end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes
+as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life,
+but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for
+me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new
+adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society
+preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences
+that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be
+determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these
+influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same time
+I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he is
+not myself in a looking-glass.
+
+I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional
+use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any
+"preciousness," but to efforts at finding the only word that will say
+what I mean. To take two examples: "Reasty" signifies "covered with a
+kind of rust and having a rancid taste," and it seems to me exactly to
+describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several
+suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects.
+"Inquiline" sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been
+sentimentalized like "pilgrim"; it is not an Americanism like
+"transients," and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay;
+whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given
+votes.
+
+We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world,
+and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure
+Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of
+the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to a
+duke.
+
+There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of
+this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this
+year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other readers
+who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second volume
+have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have seemed
+above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe there is
+nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of obligation
+as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his anonymous critics.
+
+Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our
+enduring friendship.
+
+Yours ever,
+
+COMPTON MACKENZIE.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie
+
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