Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 29

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 n.o.body, 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sent 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 rea.s.sured 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 embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 sn.o.bbishness 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionately 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 f.a.g-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 ba.s.s. 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."