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 a.s.s?"
"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 G.o.d"s sake don"t talk in that exaggerated way," Michael muttered.
"I hope you aren"t going to make a public a.s.s 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 a.s.suredly, 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 gla.s.s: _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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.semblage. In the ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of popping corks and the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s, wished Michael a jolly good chin-chin.