Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 18

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 gra.s.s-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 trespa.s.sing 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 n.o.body 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 coa.r.s.e 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 circ.u.mscribed 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 gla.s.s 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 circ.u.mstances 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 d.a.m.n 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 a.s.sured 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 n.o.ble Savage and invites us to worship him. Only now the n.o.ble Savage has been put into corduroy trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular ma.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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."