Michael thought to himself how he had come to St. Bartholomew’s when Sunday was over. That was strange.

“I wish that boy Wiggins wouldn’t fidget with his zuchetto,” Michael’s friend observed.

Michael felt an impulse to sob, as he mentally offered the best of himself to the worship of Christ, for the words of the lesson were striking on his soul like bells.

“Now you see the other boy has started fidgeting with his ,” complained the young man.

As the lector’s retreating footsteps died away into the choir the words were burned on Michael’s heart, and for the first time he sang the Nunc Dimittis with a sense of the privilege of personally addressing Almighty God. When the Creed was chanted Michael uttered his belief passionately, and while the Third Collect was being read between the exalted candles of the acolytes he wondered why never before had the words struck him with all their power against the fears and fevers of the night.

The acolytes lowered their candles to extinguish them: then they darkened the altar while the hymn was being sung, and Michael’s friend gave a sigh of relief.

“Perfectly all right,” he whispered.

Michael himself was sorry to see the gradual extinction of the altar-lights; he had concentrated upon that radiance his new desire of adoration and a momentary chill fell upon him, as if the fiends without were gaining strength and fury. All dread and doubt was allayed when, after the murmured Grace of Our Lord, the congregation and the choir and the officiant knelt in a silent prayer. The wind still shrieked and thundered: the gas-jets waved uneasily above the huddled forms of the worshippers: but over all that incense-clouded gloom lay a spirit of tranquillity. Michael said the Our Father to himself and allowed his whole being to expand in a warmth of surrender. The purification of sincere prayer, voiced more by his attitude of mind than by any spoken word, made him infinitely at peace with life.

When the choir and clergy had filed out and the sacristan like an old rook came limping down the aisle to usher the congregation forth into the dark wind of Bartlemy-tide, Michael’s friend said:

“Wait just a minute. I want to speak to Father Moneypenny for a moment, and then we can walk back together.”

Michael nodded, and presently his friend came back from the sacristy with Father Moneypenny in cassock and biretta, looking like the photographs of clergymen that Michael remembered in Nurse’s album long ago.

“So you enjoyed the Evensong?” enquired the priest. “Capital! You must come to Mass next Sunday. There will be a procession. By the way, Prout, perhaps your young friend would help us. We shall want extra torch-boys.”

Mr. Prout agreed, and Michael, although he wondered what his mother would say, was greatly excited by the idea. They were standing now by the door of the church and as it opened a gust of wind burst in and whistled round the interior. Father Moneypenny shivered.

“What a night. The end of summer, I’m afraid.”

He closed the door, and Michael and Mr. Prout forced their way through the gale over the wet gravel of the churchyard. The pine trees and the heather made a melancholy concert, and they were glad to reach the blown lamplight of the streets.

“Will you come round to my place?” Mr. Prout asked.

“Well, I ought to go back. My mater will be anxious,” said Michael.

Mr. Prout thereupon invited him to come round to-morrow afternoon.

“I shall be back from the Bank about five. Good night. You’ve got my card? Bernard Prout, Esdraelon, Saxton Road. Good night. Pleased to have met you.”

Mrs. Fane was surprized to hear of Michael’s visit to St. Bartholomew’s.

“You’re getting so secretive, dearest boy. I’d no idea you were becoming interested in religion.”

“Well, it is interesting,” said Michael.

“Of course. I know it must be. So many people think of nothing else. And do you really want to march in the procession?”

“Yes, but don’t you and Stella come,” Michael said.

“Oh, I must, Michael. I’d love to see you in all those pretty clothes.”

“Well, I can go round and see this chap Prout, can’t I?” Michael asked.

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Fane replied. “Of course, I don’t know anything about him. Is he a gentleman?”

“Of course he’s a gentleman,” affirmed Michael warmly. “Besides I don’t see it matters a bit whether he’s a gentleman or not.”

“No, of course it doesn’t really, as it all has to do with religion,” Mrs. Fane agreed. “Nothing is so mixed as religious society.”

Saxton Road possessed no characteristic to distinguish it from many similar roads in Bournemouth. A few hydrangeas debated in sheltered corners whether they should be pink or blue, and the number of each house was subordinate to its title. The gate of Esdraelon clicked behind Michael’s entrance just as the gate of Homeview or Ardagh or Glenside would have clicked. By the bay-window of the ground floor was planted a young passion-flower whose nursery label lisped against the brick-work, and whose tendrils were flattened beneath wads of nail-pierced flannel. Michael was directed upstairs to Mr. Prout’s sitting-room on the first floor, where the owner was arranging the tea-cups.

“I’m so glad you were able to come,” he said.

Michael looked round the room with interest, and while the tea-cake slowly cooled Mr. Prout discussed with enthusiasm his possessions.

“That’s St. Bernardine of Sienna,” he explained, pointing to a coloured statuette. “My patron, you know. Curious I should have been born on his day and be christened Bernard. I thought of changing my name to Bernardine, but it’s so difficult at a Bank. Of course, I have a cult for St. Bernard too, but I never really can forgive him for opposing the Immaculate Conception. Father Moneypenny and I have great arguments on that point. I’m afraid he’s a little bit wobbly. But absolutely sound on the Assumption. Oh, absolutely, I’m glad to say. In fact, I don’t mind telling you that next year we intend to keep it as a Double of the First Class with Octave which , of course, it is . This rosary is made of olive-wood from the Garden of Gethsemane and I’m very anxious to get it blessed by the Pope. Some friends of mine are going to Rome next Easter with a Polytechnic tour, so I may be able to manage it. But it’s difficult. The Cardinals—you know,” said Mr. Prout vaguely. “They’re inclined to be bitter against English Catholics. Of course, Vaughan made the mistake of his life in getting the Pope to pronounce against English Orders. I know a Roman priest told me he considered it a fatal move. However—you’re waiting for your tea?”

Michael ate Mr. Prout’s bread-and-butter and drank his tea, while the host hopped from trinket to trinket.

“This is a sacred amulet which belonged to one of the Macdonalds who fought at Prestonpans. I suppose you’re a Jacobite? Of course, I belong to all the Legitimist Societies—the White Rose, the White Cockade, the White Carnation. Everyone. I wish I were a Scotchman, although my grandmother was a Miss Macmillan, so I’ve got Scotch blood. You are a Jacobite, aren’t you?”

“Rather,” said Michael as enthusiastically as his full mouth would allow him to declare.

“Of course, it’s the only logical political attitude for an English Catholic to adopt,” said Mr. Prout. “All this Erastianism—you know. Terrible. What’s the Privy Council got to do with Vestments? Still the Episcopal appointments haven’t been so bad lately. That’s Lord Salisbury. Of course, we’ve had trouble with our Bishop. Oh, yes. He simply declines to listen to reason on the subject of Reservation for the Sick. Personally I advised Father Moneypenny not to pay any attention to him. I said the Guild of St. Wilfrid—that’s our servers’ guild, you know—was absolutely in favour of defiance, open defiance. But one of the churchwardens got round him. There’s your Established Church. Money’s what churchwardens think of—simply money. And has religion got anything to do with money? Nothing. ‘Blessed are the poor.’ You can’t go against that, as I told Major Wilton—that’s our people’s warden—in the sacristy. He’s a client of ours at the Bank, or I should have said a jolly sight more. I should have told him that in my opinion his attitude was simony—rank simony, and let it go at that. But I couldn’t very well, and, of course, it doesn’t look well for the Ceremonarius and the churchwarden to be bickering after Mass. By the way, will you help us next Sunday?”

“I’d like to,” said Michael, “but I don’t know anything about it.”

“There’ll be a rehearsal,” said Mr. Prout. “And it’s perfectly simple. You elevate your torch first of all at the Sanctus and then at the Consecration. And now, if you’ve finished your tea, I’ll show you my oratory. Of course, you’ll understand that I’m only in rooms here, but the landlady is a very pleasant woman. She let me plant that passion-flower in the garden. Perhaps you noticed it? The same with this oratory. It was a housemaid’s cupboard, but it was very inconvenient—and there isn’t a housemaid as a matter of fact—so I secured it. Come along.”

Mr. Prout led the way on to the landing, at the end of which were two doors.

“We can’t both kneel down, unless the door’s open,” said Mr. Prout. “But when I’m alone, I can just shut myself in.”

He opened the oratory door as he spoke, and Michael was impressed by the appearance of it. The small window had been covered with a rice-paper design of Jesse’s Rod.

“It’s a bit ‘Protty,’” whispered Mr. Prout. “But I thought it was better than plain squares of blue and red.”

“Much better,” Michael agreed.

A ledge nailed beneath the window supported two brass candlesticks and a crucifix. The reredos was an Arundel print of the Last Supper and on corner brackets on either side were statues of the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Victories. A miniature thurible hung on a nail and on another nail was a holy-water stoup which Michael at first thought was intended for soap. In front of the altar was a prie-dieu stacked with books of devotion. There were also blessed palms, very dusty, and a small sanctuary lamp suspended from the ceiling. Referring to this, Mr. Prout explained that really it came from the Turkish Exhibition at Earl’s Court, but that he thought it would do as he had carefully exorcized it according to the use of Sarum.

“Shall we say Vespers?” suggested Mr. Prout. “You know—the Small Office of the Blessed Virgin. It won’t take long. We can say Compline too , if you like.”

“Just as you like,” said Michael.

“You’re sure you don’t mind the door being left open? Because, you see, we can’t both get in otherwise. In fact, I have to kneel sideways when I’m alone.”

“Won’t your landlady think it rather rum?” Michael asked.

“Good gracious, no. Why, when we have Vespers of St. Charles the Martyr, I have fellows kneeling all the way down the stairs, you know—members of the White Rose League. Bournemouth and South of England Branch.”

Michael was handed a thin sky-blue book labelled Office of the B.V.M.

“Latin or English?” queried Mr. Prout.

“Whichever you like,” said Michael.

“Well, Latin, if you don’t mind. I’m anxious to learn Latin, and I find this is good practice.”

“It doesn’t look very good Latin,” said Michael doubtfully.

“Doesn’t it?” said Mr. Prout. “It ought to. It’s the right version.”

“I expect this is Hellenistic—I mean Romanistic—Latin,” said Michael, who was proud of his momentary superiority in knowledge. “Greek Test is Hellenistic Greek.”

“Do you know Greek?” asked Mr. Prout.

“A little.”

Mr. Prout sighed.

When the Office was concluded, Michael promised he would attend a rehearsal of next Sunday’s ceremony and, if he felt at ease, the Solemn High Mass itself. Mr. Prout, before Michael went away, lent him a book called Ritual Reason Why, and advised him to buy The Catholic Religion at One Shilling, and meanwhile to practise direct Invocation of the Saints.

At home Michael applied himself with ardour to the mastery of his religion. He wrestled with the liturgical colours; he tried to grasp the difference between Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation and the Real Presence; and he congratulated himself upon being under the immediate patronage of an Archangel. Also with Charles as his first name he felt he could fairly claim the protection of St. Charles the Martyr, though later on Mr. Prout suggested St. Charles Borromeo as a less ordinary patron. However, there was more than ritualism in Michael’s new attitude, more than the passion to collect new rites and liturgies and ornaments as once he had collected the portraits of famous cricketers or silkworms or silver-paper. To be sure, it soon came to seem to him a terribly important matter whether according to the Roman sequence red were worn at Whitsuntide or whether according to Old English use white were the liturgical colour. Soon he would experience a shock of dismay on hearing that some reputed Catholic had taken the Ablutions at the wrong moment, just as once he had been irritated by ignorant people confusing Mr. W. W. Read of Surrey with Read (M.) of the same county. Beyond all this Michael sincerely tried to correct his morals and manners in the light of aspiration and faith. He experienced a revolt against impurity of any kind and was simultaneously seized with a determination to suffer Stella’s conceit gladly. He really felt a deep-seated avarice for being good. He may not have distinguished between morality due to emotion and morality wrung out of intellectual assent: but he did know that the Magnificat’s incense took him to a higher elation than Dora’s curly head upon his shoulder, or even than Alan’s bewitching company. Under the influence of faith, Michael found himself bursting with an affection for his mother such as he had not felt for a long time. Indeed Michael was in a state of love. He loved the candles on the altar, he loved his mother’s beauty, he loved Stella, he loved the people on the beach and the August mornings and the zest for acquiring and devouring information upon every detail connected with the Catholic religion; and out of his love he gratified Mr. Prout by consenting to bear a torch at the Solemn High Mass on the Sunday within the octave of St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr and Patron of St. Bartholomew’s Church, Bournemouth.

Michael’s first High Mass was an emotional experience deeper even than that windy Evensong. The church was full of people. The altar was brilliant with flowers and lights. The sacristy was crowded with boys in scarlet cassocks and slippers and zuchettos, quarrelling about their cottas and arguing about their heights. Everybody had a favourite banner which he wanted to escort and, to complicate matters still further, everybody had a favourite companion by whose side he wished to walk.

The procession was marshalled before the altar: the organ boomed through the church: the first thurifer started off, swinging his censer towards the clouded roof. After him went the cross of ebony and silver, while one by one at regular intervals between detachments of the choir the banners of the saints floated into action. Michael escorted the blue velvet banner of Our Lady, triumphant, crowned, a crescent moon beneath her feet and round about her stars and Cherubim. The procession was long enough to fill two aisles at once, and as Michael turned up the south aisle on the return to the chancel, he saw the pomp of the procession’s rear—the second thurifer, Mr. Prout in a cotta bordered by lace two feet deep, the golden crucifix aloft, the acolytes with their golden candlesticks, the blood-red dalmatic and tunicle of the deacon and sub-deacon, and solemnly last of all the blood-red cope of the celebrant. Michael took no pleasure in being observed by the congregation; he was simply elated by the privilege of being able to express his desire to serve God, and during the Mass, when the Sanctus bell chimed forth, he raised his torch naturally to the pÆan of the salutation. The service was long: the music was elaborate: it was back-breaking work to kneel on the chancel steps without support; but Michael welcomed the pain with pleasure. During the Elevation of the Host, as he bowed his head before the wonder of bread and wine made God, his brain reeled in an ecstasy of sublime worship. There was a silence save for the censer tinkling steadily and the low whispered words of the priest and the click of the broken wafer. The candles burned with a supernatural intensity: the boys who lately quarrelled over precedence were hushed as angels: the stillness became fearful; the cold steps burned into Michael’s knees and the incense choked him. At last after an age of adoration, the plangent appeal of the Agnus Dei came with a melody that seemed the music of the sobbing world from which all tears had departed in a clarity of harmonious sound.

Before Michael left Bournemouth, Mr. Prout promised to come and see him in London, and Mr. Moneypenny said he would write to a priest who would be glad to prepare him for Confirmation. When Michael reached school again, he felt shy at meeting Alan who would talk about nothing but football and was dismayed to find Michael indifferent to the delights of playing three-quarter on Middle Side. Michael deplored Alan’s failure to advance intellectually beyond mere football and the two of them temporarily lost touch with each other’s ambitions. Michael now read nothing but ecclesiastical books and was greatly insulted by Mr. Viner’s elementary questions. Mr. Viner was the priest to whom Mr. Moneypenny had written about Michael. He had invited him to tea and together they had settled that Michael should be confirmed early in the spring. Michael borrowed half a dozen books from Mr. Viner and returned home to make an attempt to convert the cook and the housemaid to the Catholic faith as a preliminary to converting his mother and Alan. In the end he did actually convert a boy in the Lower Fifth who for his strange beliefs suffered severely at the hands of his father, a Plymouth Brother. Michael wished that Stella had not gone back to Germany, for he felt that in her he would have had a splendid object on whom to practise his power of controversy. At Mr. Viner’s house Michael met another Jacobean called Chator in whom he found a fellow-enthusiast. Chator knew of two other Jacobeans interested in Church matters, Martindale and Rigg, and the four of them founded a society called De Rebus Ecclesiasticis which met every Friday evening in Michael’s room to discuss the Catholic Church in all her aspects. The discussions were often heated because Michael had violently Ultra-montane leanings, Chator was narrowly Sarum, Martindale tried to preserve a happy mean and Rigg always agreed with the last speaker. The Society De Rebus Ecclesiasticis was splendidly quixotic and gloriously unrelated to the dead present. To the quartette of members Archbishop Laud was a far more more vital proposition than Archbishop Temple, the society of cavaliers was more vividly realized than the Fabian Society. As was to be expected from Michael’s preoccupation with the past, he became very anxious again about his parentage. He longed to hear that in some way he was connected with Jacobite heroes and the romantic Stuarts. Mrs. Fane was no longer able to put him off with contradictions and vagueness: Michael demanded his family tree. The hymn ‘Faith of our Fathers’ ringing through a Notting Dale mission-hall moved him to demand his birthright of family history.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Michael,” said his mother at last. “Your father ought to have been the Earl of Saxby—only—something went wrong—some certificate or something.”

“An Earl?” cried Michael, staggered by the splendid news. “But—but, mother, we met Lord Saxby. Who was that?”

“He’s a relation. Only, please don’t tell people about this, because they wouldn’t understand. It’s all very muddled and difficult.”

“My father ought to have been Lord Saxby? Why wasn’t he? Mother, was he illegitimate?”

“Michael, how can you talk like that? Of course not.”

Michael blushed because his mother blushed.

“I’m sorry, mother, I thought he might have been. People are. You read about them often enough.”

Michael decided that as he must not tell Chator, Martindale and Rigg the truth, he would, at any rate, join himself on to the House of Saxby collaterally. To his disappointment, he discovered that the only reference in history to an Earl of Saxby made out that particular one to be a most pestilent Roundhead. So Michael gave up being the Legitimist Earl of Saxby, and settled instead to be descended through the indiscretion of an early king from the Stuarts. Michael grew more and more ecclesiastical as time went on. He joined several Jacobite societies, and accompanied Mr. Prout on the latter’s London visit to a reception at Clifford’s Inn Hall in honour of the Legitimist Emperor of Byzantium. Michael was very much impressed by kissing the hand of an Emperor, and even more deeply impressed by the Scottish piper who marched up and down during the light refreshment at one shilling a head afterwards. Mr. Prout, accompanied by Michael, Chator, Martindale and Rigg, spent the Sunday of his stay in town by attending early Mass in Kensington, High Mass in Holborn, Benediction in Shoreditch and Evensong in Paddington. He also joined several more guilds, confraternities and societies and presented Michael with one hair from the five hairs he possessed of a lock of Prince Charlie’s hair (authentic) before he returned to Bournemouth. This single hair was a great responsibility to Michael, until he placed it in a silver locket to wear round his neck. During that year occurred what the papers called a Crisis in the Church, and Michael and his three friends took in every week The Church Times, The Church Review, The English Churchman, Church Bells, The Record and The Rock in order to play their part in the crisis. They attended Protestant meetings to boo and hiss from the gallery or to applaud violently gentlemen on their side who rose to ask the lecturer what they supposed to be irrefutable questions. In the spring Michael made his first Confession and was confirmed. The first Confession had more effect on his imagination than the Confirmation, which in retrospect seemed chiefly a sensation of disappointment that the Bishop in view of the crisis in the Church refused to wear the mitre temptingly laid out for him by Mr. Viner. The Confession, however, was a true test of Michael’s depth. Mr. Viner was by no means a priest who only thought of candles and lace. He was a gaunt and humorous man, ready to drag out from his penitents their very souls.

Michael found that first Confession an immense strain upon his truthfulness and pluck, and he made up his mind never to commit another mortal sin, so deeply did he blush in the agony of revelation. Venial faults viewed in the aggregate became appalling, and the real sins, as one by one Michael compelled himself to admit them, stabbed his self-consciousness with daggers of shame. Michael had a sense of completeness which prevented him from making a bad Confession, from gliding over his sins and telling half-truths, and having embarked upon the duties of his religion he was not going to avoid them. The Confession seemed to last for ever. Beforehand, Michael had supposed there would be only one commandment whose detailed sins would make his heart beat with the difficulty of confessing them; but when he knelt in the empty church before the severe priest, every breach of the other commandments assumed a demoniac importance. Michael thought that never before could Father Viner have listened to such a narration of human depravity from a boy of fifteen, or even from a man full grown. He half expected to see the priest rise in the middle and leave his chair in disgust. Michael felt beads of sweat trickling from his forehead: the strain grew more terrible: the crucifix before him gave him no help: the book he held fell from his fingers. Then he heard the words of absolution, tranquil as evening bells. The inessentials of his passionate religion faded away in the strength and beauty of God’s acceptation of his penitence. Outside in the April sunlight Michael could have danced his exultation, before he ran home winged with the ecstasy of a light heart.

Chapter VI: Pax

T HE Lower Fifth only knew Michael during the Autumn term. After Christmas he moved up to the Middle Fifth, and, leaving behind him many friends, including Alan, he found himself in an industrious society concentrated upon obtaining the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate for proficiency in Greek, Latin, Mathematics and either Divinity, French or History. Removed from the temptations of a merry company, Michael worked very hard indeed and kept his brain fit by argument instead of football. The prevailing attitude of himself and his contemporaries towards the present was one of profound pessimism. The scholarship of St. James’ was deteriorating; there was a dearth of great English poets; novelists were not so good as once they were in the days of Dickens; the new boys were obviously inferior to their prototypes in the past; the weather was growing worse year by year; the country was plunging into an abyss. In school Michael prophesied more loudly than any of his fellow Jeremiahs, and less and less did it seem worth while in these Certificate-stifled days to seek for romance or poetry or heroism or adventure. Yet as soon as the precincts of discipline and study were left behind, Michael could extract from life full draughts of all these virtues.

Without neglecting the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate he devoured voraciously every scrap of information about Catholicism which it was possible to acquire. Books were bought in tawdry repositories—Catholic Belief, The Credentials of the Catholic Church, The Garden of the Soul, The Glories of Mary by S. Alphonso Liguori, Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, The Clifton Tracts, and on his own side of the eternal controversy, Lee’s Validity of English Orders, The Alcuin Club Transactions with many other volumes. Most of all he liked to pore upon the Tourist’s Church Guide, which showed with asterisks and paragraph marks and sections and daggers what churches throughout the United Kingdom possessed the five points of Incense, Lights, Vestments, Mixed Chalice and Eastward Position. He found it absorbing to compare the progress of ritual through the years.

Michael, as once he had known the ranks of the British Army from Lance-corporal to Field Marshal, could tell the hierarchy from Sexton to Pope. He knew too, as once he knew the history and uniform of Dragoons, Hussars and Lancers, the history and uniform of the religious orders—Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans (how he loved the last in their black and white habit, Domini canes , watchdogs of the Lord), Carmelites, PrÆmonstratensians, Augustinians, Servites, Gilbertines, Carthusians, Redemptorists, Capuchins, Passionists, Jesuits, Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo and the Congregation of St. Philip Neri. Michael outvied Mr. Prout in ecclesiastical possessions, and his bedroom was nearly as full as the repository from which it was stocked. There were images of St. Michael (his own patron), St. Hugh of Lincoln (patron of schoolboys) and St. James of Compostella (patron of the school), together with Our Lady of Seven Dolours, Our Lady Star of the Sea and Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of Victories; there were eikons, scapulars, crucifixes, candlesticks, the Holy Child of Prague, rosaries, and indeed every variety of sacred bric-À-brac. Michael slept in an oriental atmosphere, because he had formed the habit of burning during his prayers cone- shaped pastilles in a saucer. The tenuous spiral of perfumed smoke carried up his emotional apostrophes through the prosaic ceiling of the old night-nursery past the stars, beyond the Thrones and Dominations and Seraphim to God. Michael’s contest with the sins of youth had become much more thrilling since he had accepted the existence of a personal fiend, and in an ecstasy of temptation he would lie in bed and defy the Devil, calling upon his patron the Archangel to descend from heaven and battle with the powers of evil in that airy arena above the coal-wharf beyond the railway lines. But the Father of Lies had many tricks with which to circumvent Michael; he would conjure up sensuous images before his antagonist; succubi materialized as pretty housemaids, feminine devils put on tights and openwork stockings to encounter him from the pages of pink weekly papers, and sometimes Satan himself would sit at the foot of his bed in the darkness and tell him tales of how other boys enjoyed themselves, arguing that it was a pity to waste his opportunities and filling his thoughts with dissolute memories. Michael would leap from his bed and pray before his crucifix, and through the darkness angels and saints would rally to his aid, until Satan slunk off with his tail between his legs, personally humiliated.

At school the fever of the examination made Michael desperate with the best intentions. He almost learned the translations of Thucydides and Sophocles, of Horace and Cicero. He knew by heart a meanly written Roman History, and no passage in Corneille could hold an invincible word. Cricket was never played that summer by the Middle Fifth; it was more useful to wander in corners of the field, murmuring continually the tables of the Kings of Judah from Maclear’s sad-hued abstract of Holy Scripture. In the end Michael passed in Greek and Latin, in French and Divinity and Roman History, even in Algebra and Euclid, but the arithmetical problems of a Stockbroker, a Paper-hanger and a Housewife made all the rest of his knowledge of no account, and Michael failed to see beside his name in the school list that printed bubble which would refer him to the tribe of those who had satisfied the examiners for the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate. This failure depressed Michael, not because he felt implicated in any disgrace, but because he wished very earnestly that he had not wasted so many hours of fine weather in work. He made up his mind that the mistake should never be repeated, and for the rest of his time at St. James’ he resisted all set books. If Demosthenes was held necessary, Michael would read Plato, and when Cicero was set, Michael would feel bound to read Livy.

Michael looked back on the year with dissatisfaction, and wondered if school was going to become more and more boring each new term for nine more terms. The prospect was unendurably grey, and Michael felt that life was not worth living. He talked over with Mr. Viner the flatness of existence on the evening after the result of the examination was known.

“I swotted like anything,” said Michael gloomily. “And what’s the good? I’m sick of everything.”

The priest’s eyes twinkled, as he plunged deeper into his wicker arm-chair and puffed clouds of smoke towards the comfortable shelves of books.

“You want a holiday,” he remarked.

“A holiday?” echoed Michael fretfully. “What’s the good of a holiday with my mater at some beastly seaside place?”

“Oh, come,” said the priest, smiling. “You’ll be able to probe the orthodoxy of the neighbouring clergy.”

“Oh, no really, it’s nothing to laugh at, Mr. Viner. You’ve no idea how beastly it is to dawdle about in a crowd of people, and then at the end go back to another term of school. I’m sick of everything. Will you lend me Lee’s Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Terms?” added Michael in a voice that contained no accent of hope.

“I’ll lend you anything you like, my dear boy,” said the priest, “on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, that you’ll admit life holds a few grains of consolation.”

“But it doesn’t,” Michael declared.

“Wait a bit, I haven’t finished. I was going to say—when I tell you that we are going to keep the Assumption this August.”

Michael’s eyes glittered for a moment with triumph.

“By Jove, how decent.” Then they grew dull again. “And I shan’t be here. The rotten thing is, too, that my mater wants to go abroad. Only she says she couldn’t leave me alone. But of course she could really.”

“Why not stay with a friend—the voluble Chator, for instance, or Martindale, that Solomon of schoolboys, or Rigg who in Medicean days would have been already a cardinal, so admirably does he incline to all parties?”

“I can’t ask myself,” said Michael. “Their people would think it rum. Besides, Chator’s governor has gout, and I wouldn’t care to be six weeks with the other two. Oh, I do hate not being grown up.”

“What about your friend Alan Merivale? I thought him a very charming youth and refreshingly unpietistic.”

“He doesn’t know the difference between a chasuble and a black gown,” said Michael.

“Which seems to me not to matter very much ultimately,” put in Mr. Viner.

“No, of course it doesn’t. But if one is keen on something and somebody else isn’t, it isn’t much fun,” Michael explained. “Besides, he can’t make me out nowadays.”

“Surely the incomprehensible is one of the chief charms of faith and friendship.”

“And anyway he’s going abroad to Switzerland—and I couldn’t possibly fish for an invitation. It is rotten. Everything’s always the same.”

“Except in the Church of England. There you have an almost blatant variety,” suggested the priest.

“You never will be serious when I want you to be,” grumbled Michael.

“Oh, yes I will, and to prove it,” said Mr. Viner, “I’m going to make a suggestion of unparagoned earnestness.”

“What?”

“Now just let me diagnose your mental condition. You are sick of everything—Thucydides, cabbage, cricket, school, schoolfellows, certificates and life.”

“Well, you needn’t rag me about it,” Michael interrupted.

“In the Middle Ages gentlemen in your psychical perplexity betook themselves either to the Crusades or entered a monastery. Now, why shouldn’t you for these summer holidays betake yourself to a monastery? I will write to the Lord Abbot, to your lady mother, and if you consent, to the voluble Chator’s lady mother, humbly pointing out and ever praying, etc., etc.”

“You’re not ragging?” asked Michael suspiciously. “Besides, what sort of a monastery?”

“Oh, an Anglican monastery; but at the same time Benedictines of the most unimpeachable severity. In short, why shouldn’t you and Mark Chator go to Clere Abbas on the Berkshire Downs?”

“Are they strict?” enquired Michael. “You know, saying the proper offices and all that, not the Day Hours of the English Church—that rotten Anglican thing.”

“Strict!” cried Mr. Viner. “Why, they’re so strict that St. Benedict himself, were he to abide again on earth, would seriously consider a revision of his rules as interpreted by Dom Cuthbert Manners, O.S.B., the Lord Abbot of Clere.”

“It would be awfully ripping to go there,” said Michael enthusiastically.

“Well then,” said Mr. Viner, “it shall be arranged. Meanwhile confer with the voluble and sacerdotal Chator on the subject.”

The disappointment of the ungranted certificate, the ineffable tedium of endless school, seaside lodgings and all the weighty ills of Michael’s oppressed soul vanished on that wine-gold July noon when Michael and Chator stood untrammelled by anything more than bicycles and luggage upon the platform of the little station that dreamed its trains away at the foot of the Downs.

“By Jove, we’re just like pilgrims,” said Michael, as his gaze followed the aspiring white road which rippled upward to green summits quivering in the haze of summer. The two boys left their luggage to be fetched later by the Abbey marketing-cart, mounted their bicycles, waved a good-bye to the friendly porter beaming among the red roses of the little station and pressed energetically their obstinate pedals. After about half a mile’s ascent they jumped from their machines and walked slowly upwards until the station and clustering hamlet lay breathless below them like a vision drowned deep in a crystal lake. As they went higher a breeze sighed in the sun-parched grasses, and the lines and curves of the road intoxicated them with naked beauty.

“I like harebells almost best of any flowers,” said Michael. “Do you?”

“They’re awfully like bells,” observed Chator.

“I wouldn’t care if they weren’t,” said Michael. “It’s only in London I want things to be like other things.”

Chator looked puzzled.

“I can’t exactly explain what I mean,” Michael went on. “But they make me want to cry just because they aren’t like anything. You won’t understand what I mean if I explain ever so much. Nobody could. But when I see flowers on a lovely road like this, I get sort of frightened whether God won’t grow tired of bothering about human beings. Because really, you know, Chator, there doesn’t seem much good in our being on the earth at all.”

“I think that’s a heresy,” pronounced Chator. “I don’t know which one, but I’ll ask Dom Cuthbert.”

“I don’t care if it is heresy. I believe it. Besides, religion must be finding out things for yourself that have been found out already.”

“Finding out for yourself,” echoed Chator with a look of alarm. “I say, you’re an absolute Protestant.”

“Oh, no I’m not,” contradicted Michael. “I’m a Catholic.”

“But you set yourself up above the Church.”

“When did I?” demanded Michael.

“Just now.”

“Because I said that harebells were ripping flowers?”

“You said a lot more than that,” objected Chator.

“What did I say?” Michael parried.

“Well, I can’t exactly remember what you said.”

“Then what’s the use of saying I’m a Protestant?” cried Michael in triumph. “I think I’ll play footer again next term,” he added inconsequently.

“I jolly well would,” Chator agreed. “You ought to have played last football term.”

“Except that I like thinking,” said Michael. “Which is rotten in the middle of a game. It’s jolly decent going to the monastery, isn’t it? I could keep walking on this road for ever without getting tired.”

“We can ride again now,” said Chator.

“Well, don’t scorch, because we’ll miss all the decent flowers if you do,” said Michael.

Then silently for awhile they breasted the slighter incline of the summit.

“Only six weeks of these ripping holidays,” Michael sighed. “And then damned old school again.”

“Hark!” shouted Chator suddenly. “I hear the Angelus.”

Both boys dismounted and listened. Somewhere, indeed, a bell was chiming, but a bell of such quality that the sound of it through the summer was like a cuckoo’s song in its unrelation to place. Michael and Chator murmured their salute of the Incarnation, and perhaps for the first time Michael half realized the mysterious condescension of God. Here, high up on these downs, the Word became imaginable, a silence of wind and sunlight.

“I say, Chator,” Michael began.

“What?”

“Would you mind helping me mark this place where we are?”

“Why?”

“Look here, you won’t think I’m pretending? but I believe I was converted at that moment.”

Chator’s well-known look of alarm that always followed one of Michael’s doctrinal or liturgical announcements was more profound than it had ever been before.

“Converted?” he gasped. “What to?”

“Oh, not to anything,” said Michael. “Only different from what I was just now, and I want to mark the place.”

“Do you mean—put up a cross or something?”

“No, not a cross. Because, when I was converted, I felt a sudden feeling of being frightfully alive. I’d rather put a stone and plant harebells round it. We can dig with our spanners. I like stones. They’re so frightfully old, and I’d like to think, if I was ever a long way from here, of my stone and the harebells looking at it—every year new harebells and the same old stone.”

“Do you know what I think you are?” enquired Chator solemnly. “I think you’re a mystic.”

“I never can understand what a mystic was,” said Michael.

“Nobody can,” said Chator encouragingly. “But lots of them were made saints all the same. I don’t think you ever will be, because you do put forward the most awfully dangerous doctrines. I do think you ought to be careful about that. I do really.”

Chator was spluttering under the embarrassment of his own eloquence, and Michael, delicately amused, looked at him with a quizzical smile. Chator was older than Michael, and by reason of the apoplectic earnestness of his appearance and manner, and the natural goodness of him so sincerely, if awkwardly expressed, he had a certain influence which Michael admitted to himself, however much in the public eye he might affect to patronize Chator from his own intellectual eminence. Along the road of speculation, however, Michael would not allow Chator’s right to curb him, and he took a wilful pleasure in galloping ahead over the wildest, loftiest paths. To shock old Chator was Michael’s delight; and he never failed to do so.

“You see,” Chator spluttered, “it’s not so much what you say now; nobody would pay any attention to you, and I know you don’t mean half what you say; but later on you’ll begin to believe in all these heretical ideas of your own. You’ll end up by being an Agnostic. Oh, yes you will,” he raged with torrential prophecies, as Michael leaned over the seat of his bicycle laughing consumedly. “You’ll go on and on wondering this and that and improving the doctrines of the Church until you improve them right away.”

“You are a funny old ass. You really are,” gurgled Michael. “And what’s so funny to me is that just when I had a moment of really believing you dash in with your warnings and nearly spoil it all. By Jove, did you see that Pale Clouded Yellow?” he shouted suddenly. “By Jove, I haven’t seen one in England for an awful long time. I think I’ll begin collecting butterflies again.”

Disputes of doctrine were flung to the wind that sang in their ears as they mounted their bicycles and coasted swiftly from the bare green summits of the downs into a deep lane overshadowed by oak-trees. Soon they came to the Abbey gates, or rather to the place where the Abbey gates would one day rise in Gothic commemoration of the slow subscriptions of the faithful. At present the entrance was only marked by a stony road disappearing abruptly at the behest of a painted finger-post into verdurous solitudes. After wheeling their bicycles for about a quarter of a winding mile, the two boys came to a large open space in the wood and beheld Clere Abbey, a long low wooden building set as piously near to the overgrown foundations of old Clere Abbey as was possible.

“What a rotten shame,” cried Michael, “that they can’t build a decent Abbey. Never mind, I think it’s going to be rather good sport here.”

They walked up to the door that seemed too massive for the flimsy pile to which it gave entrance, and pealed the large bell that hung by the side. Michael was pleased to observe a grille through which peered the eyes of the monastic porter, inquisitive of the wayfarers. Then a bolt shot back, the door opened, and Michael and Chator entered the religious house.

“I’m Brother Ambrose,” said the porter, a stubby man with a flat pock-marked face whose ugliness was redeemed by an expression of wonderful innocence. “Dom Cuthbert is expecting you in the Abbot’s Parlour.”

Michael and Chator followed Brother Ambrose through a pleasant book-lined hall into the paternal haunt where the Lord Abbot of Clere sat writing at a roll-top desk. He rose to greet the boys, who with reverence perceived him to be a tall dark angular man with glowing eyes that seemed very deeply set on either side of his great hooked nose. He could scarcely have been over thirty-five years of age, but he moved with a languid awkwardness that made him seem older. His voice was very remote and melodious as he welcomed them. Michael looked anxiously at Chator to see if he followed any precise ritual of salutation, but Dom Cuthbert solved the problem by shaking hands at once and motioning them to wicker chairs beside the empty hearth.

“Pleasant ride?” enquired Dom Cuthbert.

“Awfully decent,” said Michael. “We heard the Angelus a long way off.”

“A lovely bell,” murmured Dom Cuthbert. “Tubular. It was given to us by the Duke of Birmingham. Come along, I’ll show you the Abbey, if you’re not too tired.”

“Rather not,” Michael and Chator declared.

The Abbot led the way into the book-lined hall.

“This is the library. You can read here as much as you like. The brethren sit here at recreation-time. This is the refectory,” he went on, with distant chimings in his tone.

The two boys gazed respectfully at the bare trestle table and the raised reading-desk and the picture of St. Benedict.

“Of course we haven’t much room yet,” Dom Cuthbert continued. “In fact we have very little. People are very suspicious of monkery.”

He smiled tolerantly, and his voice faded almost out of the refectory, as if it would soothe the harsh criticism of the world, hence infinitely remote.

“But one day”—from worldly adventure his voice came back renewed with hope—“one day, when we have some money, we shall build a real Abbey.”

“This is awfully ripping though, isn’t it?” observed Michael with sympathetic encouragement.

“I dare say the founder of the Order was never so well housed,” agreed the Abbot.

Dom Cuthbert led them to the guest-chamber, from which opened three diminutive bedrooms.

“Your cells,” the monk said. “But of course you’ll feed in here,” he added, indicating the small bare room in which they stood with so wide a sweep of his ample sleeve that the matchboarded ceiling soared into vast Gothic twilights and the walls were of stone. Michael was vaguely reminded of Mr. Prout and his inadequate oratory.

“The guest-brother is Dom Gilbert,” continued the Abbot. “Come and see the cloisters.”

They passed from the guest-room behind the main building and saw that another building formed there the second side of a quadrangle. The other two sides were still open to the hazel coppice that here encroached upon the Abbey. However, there was traceable the foundations of new buildings to complete the quadrangle, and a mass of crimson hollyhocks were shining with rubied chalices in the quiet sunlight. For all its incompleteness, this was a strangely beautiful corner of the green world.

“Are these the cloisters?” Michael asked.

“One day, one day,” replied Dom Cuthbert. “A little rough at present, but before I die I’m sure there will be a mighty edifice in this wood to the glory of God and His saints.”

“I’d like it best that way,” said Michael. “Not all at once.”

He felt an imaginative companionship with the aspirations of the Abbot.

“Now we’ll visit the Chapel,” said Dom Cuthbert. “We built the Chapel with our own hands of mud and stone and laths. You’ll like the Chapel. Sometimes I feel quite sorry to think of leaving it for the great Abbey Church we shall one day build with the hands of workmen.”

The Chapel was reached by a short cloister of primitive construction, and it was the simplest purest place of worship that Michael had ever seen. It seemed to have gathered beneath its small roof the whole of peace. On one side the hazel bushes grew so close that the windows opened on to the mysterious green heart of life. Two curtains worked with golden blazonries divided the quire from the congregation.

“This is where you’ll sit,” said Dom Cuthbert, pointing to two kneeling-chairs on either side of the opening into the quire. “Perhaps you’ll say a prayer now for the Order. The prayers of children travel very swiftly to God.”

Dom Cuthbert passed to the Abbot’s stall to kneel, while Michael and Chator knelt on the chairs. When they had prayed for awhile, the Abbot took them into the sacristy and showed them the vestments and the sacred vessels of the altar, and from the sacristy door they passed into a straight woodland way.

“The Abbot’s walk,” said Dom Cuthbert, with a beautiful smile. “The brethren cut this wonderful path during their hours of recreation. I cannot envy any cloisters with this to walk in. How soft is the moss beneath our feet, and in Spring how loudly the birds sing here. The leaves come very early, too, and linger very late. It is a wonderful path. Now I must go and work. I have a lot of letters to write. Explore the woods and the downs and enjoy yourselves. You’ll find the rules that the guests must observe pinned to the wall of the guest-room. Enjoy yourselves and be content.”

The tall figure of the monk with its languid awkwardness of gait disappeared from the Abbot’s walk, and the two boys, arm-in-arm, wandered off in the opposite direction.

“Everything was absolutely correct,” burbled Chator. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Not at all Anglican. Perfectly correct. I’m glad. I’m really very glad. I was a bit afraid at first it might be Anglican. But it’s not—oh, no, not at all.”

In the guest-chamber they read the rules for guests, and discovered to their mortification that they were not expected to be present at Matins and Lauds.

“I was looking forward to getting up at two o’clock,” said Michael. “Perhaps Dom Cuthbert will let us sometimes. It’s really much easier to get up at two o’clock than five. Mass is at half-past five, and we must go to that.”

Dom Gilbert, the guest-brother, came in with plates of bread and cheese while the boys were reading the rules, and they questioned him about going to Matins. He laughed and said they would have as much church as they wished without being quite such strict Benedictines as that. Michael was not sure whether he liked Dom Gilbert—he was such a very practical monk.

“If you go to Mass and Vespers and Compline every day,” said Dom Gilbert, “you’ll do very well. And please be punctual for your meals.”

Michael and Chator looked injured.

“Breakfast after Mass. Bread and cheese at twelve. Cup of tea at five, if you’re in. Supper at eight.”

Dom Gilbert left them abruptly to eat their bread and cheese alone.

“He’s rather a surly chap,” grumbled Michael. “He doesn’t seem to me the right one to have chosen for guest-brother at all. I had a lot I wanted to ask him. For one thing I don’t know where the lav. is. I think he’s a rotten guest-brother.”

The afternoon passed in a walk along the wide ridge of the downs through the amber of this fine summer day. Several hares were seen and a kestrel, while Chator disposed very volubly of the claims of several Anglican clergymen to Catholicism. After tea in the hour of recreation they met the other monks, Dom Gregory the organist, Brother George and Brother William. It was not a very large monastery.

Chator found the Vespers somewhat trying to his curiosity, because owing to the interposition of the curtain he was unable to criticize the behaviour of the monks in quire. This made him very fidgety, and rather destroyed Michael’s sense of peace. However, Chator restrained his ritualistic ardour very well at Compline, which in the dimness of the starlit night was a magical experience, as one by one with raised cowls the monks entered in black procession and silence absolute. Michael, where he knelt in the ante-chapel, was profoundly moved by the intimate responses and the severe Compline hymn. He liked, too, the swift departure to bed without chattering good-nights to spoil the solemnity of the last Office. Even Chator kept all conversation for the morning, and Michael felt he had never lain down upon a couch so truly sanctified, nor ever risen from one so pure as when Dom Gilbert knocked with a hammer on the door and, standing dark against the milk-white dawn, murmured ‘Pax vobiscum.’

Chapter VII: Cloven Hoofmarks

I N the first fortnight of their stay at Clere Abbas Michael and Chator lived like vagabond hermits rejoicing in the freedom of fine weather. Mostly they went for long walks over the downs and through the woodlands of the southern slope. To the monks at recreation time they would recount their adventures with gamekeepers and contumacious farmers, their discoveries of flowers and birds and butterflies, their entertainment at remote cottage homes and the hospitalities of gipsy camps. To be sure they would often indulge in theological discussions, and sometimes, when caught by the azure-footed dusk in unfamiliar lanes, they would chant plainsong to the confusion of whatever ghostly pursuers, whether Dryads or mediÆval fiends or early Victorian murderers, that seemed to dog their footsteps. So much nowadays did the unseen world mingle with the ordinary delights of youth.

“Funny thing,” said Michael to Chator. “When I was a kid I used to be frightened at night—always. Then for a long time I wasn’t frightened at all, and now again I have a queer feeling just after sunset, a sort of curious dampness inside me. Do you ever have it?”

“I only have it when you start me off,” said Chator. “But it goes when we sing ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ or chant the Nicene Creed or anything holy.”

“Yes, it goes with me,” Michael agreed dubiously. “But if I drive it away it comes back in the middle of the night. I have all sorts of queer feelings. Sometimes I feel as if there wasn’t any me at all, and I’m surprized to see a letter come addressed to me. But when I see a letter I’ve written, I’m still more surprized. Do you have that feeling? Then often I feel as if all we were doing or saying at a certain moment had been done or said before. Then at other times I have to hold on to a tree or hurt myself with something just to prove I’m there. And then sometimes I think nothing is impossible for me. I feel absolutely great, as if I were Shakespeare. Do you ever have that feeling?”

But Chator was either not sufficiently introspective so to resolve his moods, or else he was too simply set on his own naive religion for his personality to plunge haphazard into such spiritual currents uncharted.

The pleasantest time of the monastic week was Sunday afternoon, when Dom Cuthbert, very lank and pontifical, would lean back in the deepest wicker chair of the library to listen to various Thoughts culled by the brethren from their week’s reading. The Thought he adjudged best was with a diamond pencil immortalized upon a window-pane, and the lucky discoverer derived as much satisfaction from the verdict as was compatible with Benedictine humility. Dom Cuthbert allowed Michael and Chator to share in these occasions, and he evidently enjoyed the variety of choice which displayed so nicely the characters of his flock.

One afternoon Michael chose for his excerpt Don Quixote’s exclamation, “How these enchanters hate me, Sancho,” with Sancho’s reply, “O dismal and ill-minded enchanters.”

The brethren laughed very loudly at this, for though they were English monks, and might have been considered eccentric by the Saxon world, their minds really ran on lines of sophisticated piety over platitudinous sleepers of thought. Michael blushed defiantly, and looked at Dom Cuthbert for comprehension.

“Hark at the idealist’s complaint of disillusionment by the Prince of Darkness,” said Dom Cuthbert, smiling.

“It’s not a complaint,” Michael contradicted. “It’s just a remark. That’s why I chose it. Besides, it gives me a satisfied feeling. Words often make me feel hungry.”

The monks interrupted him with more laughter, and Michael, furiously self-conscious, left the library and went to sit alone in the stillest part of the hazel coppice.

But when he came back in the silent minutes before Vespers he read his sentence on the window-pane, and blinked half tearfully at the westering sun. He never had another Thought enshrined, because he was for ever after this trying to find sentences that would annoy Dom Gilbert, whom he suspected of leading the laughter. Visitors began to come to the Abbey now—and the two boys were much interested in the people who flitted past almost from day to day. Among them was Mr. Prout who kept up a duet of volubility with Chator from morning to night for nearly a week, at the end of which he returned to his Bournemouth bank. These discussions amused Michael most when he was able to break the rhythm of the battledores by knocking down whatever liturgical or theological shuttlecock was being used. He would put forward the most outrageous heresy as his own firm conviction, and scandalize and even alarm poor Mr. Prout, who did not at all relish dogmatic follow-my-leader and prayed for Michael’s reckless soul almost as fervidly as for the confusion of the timid and malignant who annually objected to the forthcoming feast of the Assumption at St. Bartholomew’s. Mr. Prout, however, was only one of a series of ritualistic young men who prattled continually of vestments and ceremonies and ornaments, until Michael began to resent their gossip and withdraw from their society into the woods, there to dream, staring up at the green and blue arch above him, of the past here in wind-stirred solitude so much the more real. Michael was a Catholic because Catholicism assured him of continuity and shrouded him with a sensuous austerity, but in these hours of revolt he found himself wishing for the old days with Alan. He was fond enough of Chator, but to Chator everything was so easy, and when one day a letter arrived to call him back to his family earlier than he expected, Michael was glad. The waning summer was stimulating his imagination with warm noons and gusty twilights; Chator’s gossip broke the spell.

Michael went for solitary walks on the downs, where he loved to lie in hollows and watch the grasses fantastically large against the sky, and the bulky clouds with their slow bewitching motion. He never went to visit sentimentally the spot where stone and harebell commemorated his brief experience of faith’s profundity, for he dreaded lest indifference should rob him of a perfect conception. He knew very well even already the dangerous chill familiarity of repetition. Those cloud-enchanted days of late summer made him listlessly aware of fleeting impulses, and simultaneously dignified with incommunicable richness the passivity and even emptiness of his condition. On the wide spaces of the downs he wandered luxuriously irresolute; his mind, when for a moment it goaded itself into an effort of concentration, faltered immediately, so that dead chivalries, gleaming down below in the rainy dusk of the valleys, suffered in the very instant of perception a transmutation into lamplit streets; and the wind’s dull August booming made embattled drums and fanfares romantic no more than music heard in London on the way home from school. Everything came to seem impossible and intangible; Michael could not conceive that he ever was or ever would be in a class-room again, and almost immediately afterwards he would wonder whether he ever had been or ever would be anywhere else. He began to imagine himself grown up, but this was a nightmare thought, because he would either realize himself decrepit with his own young mind or outwardly the same as he was now with a mind hideously distorted by knowledge and sin. He could never achieve a consistent realization that would give him definite ambitions. He longed to make up his mind to aim at some profession, and the more he longed the more hopeless did it seem to try to fit any existing profession with the depressing idea of himself grown up. Then he would relax his whole being and let himself be once more bewitched into passivity by clouds and waving grasses.

Upon this mental state of Michael intruded one day a visitor to the Abbey. A young man with spectacles and a pear-shaped face, who wore grey flannel shirts that depressed Michael unendurably, made a determined effort to gain his confidence. The more shy that Michael became, the more earnestly did this young man press him with intimate questions about his physical well-being. For Michael it was a strange and odiously embarrassing experience. The young man, whose name was Garrod, spoke of his home in Hornsey and invited Michael to stay with him. Michael shuddered at the idea of staying in a strange suburb: strange suburbs had always seemed to him desolate, abominable and insecure. He always visualized a draughty and ill-lighted railway platform, a rickety and gloomy omnibus, countless Nonconformist chapels and infrequent policemen. Garrod spoke of his work on Sundays at a church that was daily gaining adherents, of a dissolute elder brother and an Agnostic father. Michael could have cried aloud his unwillingness to visit Garrod. But the young man was persistent; the young man was sure that Michael, from ignorance, was leading an unhealthy life. Garrod spoke of ignorance with ferocity: he trampled on it with polytechnical knowledge, and pelted it with all sorts of little books that afflicted Michael with nausea. Michael loathed Garrod, and resented his persistent instructions, his offers to solve lingering physical perplexities. For Michael Garrod defiled the country by his cockney complacency, his attacks upon public schools, his unpleasant interrogations. Michael longed for Alan that together they might rag this worm who wriggled so obscenely into the secret places of a boy’s mind.

“Science is all the go nowadays,” said Garrod. “And Science is what we want. Science and Religion. Some think they don’t go together. Don’t they? I think they do then.”

“I hate science,” said Michael. “Except for doctors, of course—I suppose they’ve got to have it,” he added grudgingly. “At St. James’ the Modern fellows are nearly always bounders.”

“But don’t you want to know what your body’s made of?” demanded Garrod.

“I don’t want to be told. I know quite enough for myself.”

“Well, would you like to read——”

“No, I don’t want to read anything,” interrupted Michael.

“But have you read——”

“The only books I like,” expostulated Michael, “are the books I find for myself.”

“But you aren’t properly educated.”

“I’m at a public school,” said Michael proudly.

“Yes, and public schools have got to go very soon.”

“Who says so?” demanded Michael fiercely.

“We say so. The people.”

“The people?” echoed Michael. “What people? Why, if public schools were done away with we shouldn’t have any gentlemen.”

“You’re getting off of the point,” said Garrod. “You don’t understand what I’m driving at. You’re a fellow I took a fancy to right off, as you might say. I don’t want to see you ruin your health, for the want of the right word at the right moment. Oh, yes, I know.”

“Look here,” said Michael bluntly, “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want to talk about this any more. It makes me feel beastly.”

“False modesty is the worst thing we’ve got to fight against,” declared Garrod.

So the argument continued, while all the time the zealous young man would fling darts of information that however much Michael was unwilling to receive them generally stuck fast. Michael was relieved when Garrod passed on his way, and he vowed to himself never to run the risk of meeting him again.

The visit of Garrod opened for Michael a door to uneasy speculation. At his private school he had known the hostility of ‘cads,’ and later on he had been aware of the existence of ‘bounders’; the cads were always easily defeated by force of arms, but this sudden attack upon his intimacy by a bounder was disquieting and difficult to deal with. He resented Garrod’s iconoclasm, resented it furiously in retrospect, wishing that he had parried more icily his impudent thrusts; and he could almost have rejoiced in Garrod’s reappearance that with disdain he might have wounded the fellow incurably. Yet he had a feeling that Garrod might have turned out proof against the worst weapons he knew how to use, and the memory of the ‘blighter’s’ self-confidence was demoralizing to Michael’s conception of superiority. The vision of a world populated by hostile Garrods rose up, and some of the simplicity of life vanished irredeemably, so that Michael took refuge in dreams of his own fashioning, where in a feudal world the dreamer rode at the head of mankind. Lying awake in the intense blackness of his cell, Michael troubled himself once more with his identity, wishing that he knew more about himself and his father, wishing that his mother were not growing more remote every day, wondering whether Stella over in Germany was encountering Garrods and praying hard with a sense of impotency in the darkness. He tried to make up his mind to consult Dom Cuthbert, but the lank, awkward monk, fond though he was of him, seemed unapproachable by daylight, and the idea of consulting him, still more of confessing to him, never crystallized.

These were still days bedewed with the approach of Autumn; milkwhite at morn and at noon breathless with a silver intensity that yearned upwards against an azure too ethereal, they floated sadly into night with humid, intangible draperies of mist. These were days that forbade Michael to walk afield, and that with haunting, autumnal birdsong held him in a trance. He would find himself at the day’s end conscious of nothing but a remembrance of new stubble trodden mechanically with languors attendant, and it was only by a great effort that he brought himself to converse with the monks working among the harvest or for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin to pick heavy white chrysanthemums from the stony garden of the Abbey.

Michael was the only guest staying in the Abbey on the vigil, and he sat almost in the entrance of the quire between the drawn curtains, not very much unlike the devout figure of some youthful donor in an old Italian picture, sombre against the blazing Vespers beyond. Michael was always hoping for a direct manifestation from above to reward the effort of faith, although he continually reproved himself for this desire and flouted his weakness. He used to gaze into the candles until they actually did seem to burn with angelic eyes that made his heart leap in expectation of the sign awaited; but soon fancy would betray him, and they would become candles again merely flickering.

On this September dusk there were crimson shadows of sunset deepening to purple in the corners of the chapel; the candles were very bright; the brethren in the stalls sang with austere fervour; the figure of Dom Cuthbert veiled from awkwardness by the heavy white cope moved before the altar during the censing of the Magnificat with a majesty that filled the small quire; the thurible tinkled its perfumed harmonies; and above the contentment of the ensuing hush blackbirds were heard in the garden or seen slipping to and fro like shadows across the windows.

Michael at this moment realized that there was a seventh monk in the quire, and wondered vaguely how he had failed to notice this new-comer before. Immediately after being made aware of his presence he caught the stranger’s eye, and blushed so deeply that to cover his confusion he turned over the pages of a psalter. Curiosity made him look up again, but the new monk was devoutly wrapped in contemplation, nor did Michael catch his eye again during the Office. At supper he enquired about the new-comer of Dom Gilbert, who reproved him for inquisitiveness, but told him he was called Brother Aloysius. Again at Compline Michael caught his glance, and for a long time that night in the darkness he saw the eyes of Brother Aloysius gleaming very blue.

On the next day Michael, wandering by the edge of the hazel coppice, came upon Brother Aloysius with deep-stained mouth and hands gathering blackberries.

“Who are you?” asked the monk. “You gave me a very funny look at Vespers.”

Michael thought this was an extremely unusual way for a monk, even a new monk, to speak, and hesitated a moment before he explained who he was.

“I suppose you can help me pick blackberries. I suppose that isn’t against the rules.”

“I often help the brothers,” said Michael simply. “But I don’t much care for picking blackberries. Still, I don’t mind helping you.”

Michael had an impulse to leave Brother Aloysius, but his self-consciousness prevented him from acting on it, and he kept the picker company in silence while the blackberries dropped lusciously into the basket.

“Feel my hand,” said Brother Aloysius suddenly. “It’s as hot as hell.”

This time Michael stared in frank astonishment.

“Well, you needn’t look so frightened,” said the monk. “You don’t look so very good yourself.”

“Well, of course I’m not good,” said Michael. “Only I think it’s funny for a monk to swear. You don’t mind my saying so, do you?”

“I don’t mind. I don’t mind anything,” said Brother Aloysius.

Tension succeeded this statement, a tension that Michael longed to break; but he could do no more than continue to pick the blackberries.

“I suppose you wonder why I’m a monk?” demanded Brother Aloysius.

Michael looked at his questioner’s pale face, at the uncomfortable eyes gleaming blue, at the full stained mouth and the long feverish hands dyed with purple juice.

“Why are you?” he asked.

“Well, I thought I’d try if anything could make me feel good, and then you looked at me in Chapel and set me off again.”

“I set you off?” stammered Michael.

“Yes, you with your big girl’s eyes, just like a girl I used to live with. Oh, you needn’t look so proper. I expect you’ve often thought about girls. I did at your age. Three months with girls, three months with priests. Girls and priests—that’s my life. When I was tired of women, I became religious, and when I was tired of Church, I took to women. It was a priest told me to come here to see if this would cure me, and now, damn you, you come into Chapel and stare and set me thinking of the Seven Sisters Road on that wet night I saw her last. That’s where she lives, and you look exactly like her. God! you’re the image of her. You might almost be her ghost incarnate.”

Brother Aloysius caught hold of Michael’s arm and spoke through clenched teeth. In Michael’s struggle to free himself the basket of blackberries was upset, and they trod the spilt fruit into the grass. Michael broke away finally and gasped angrily:

“Look here, I’m not going to stay here. You’re mad.”

He ran from the monk into the depths of the wood, not stopping until he reached a silent glade. Here on the moss he sat panting, horrified. Yet when he came to compose the sentences in which he should tell Dom Cuthbert of his experience with the new monk, he found himself wishing that he had stayed to hear more. He actually enjoyed in retrospect the humiliation of the man, and his heart beat with the excitement of hearing more. Slowly he turned to seek again Brother Aloysius.

“You may as well tell me some more, now you’ve begun,” said Michael.

For three or four days Michael was always in the company of Brother Aloysius, plying him with questions that sounded abominable to himself, when he remembered with what indignation he had rejected Garrod’s offer of knowledge. Brother Aloysius spared no blushes, whether of fiery shame or furtive desire, and piece by piece Michael learned the fabric of vice. He was informed coldly of facts whose existence he had hitherto put down to his own most solitary and most intimate imaginations. Every vague evil that came wickedly before sleep was now made real with concrete examples; the vilest ideas, that hitherto he had considered peculiar to himself and perhaps a few more sadly tempted dreamers tossing through the vulnerable hours of the night, were commonplace to Brother Aloysius, whose soul was twisted, whose mind was debased to such an extent that he could boast of his delight in making the very priest writhe and wince in the Confessional.

Conversations with Brother Aloysius were sufficiently thrilling journeys, and Michael was always ready to follow his footsteps as one might follow a noctambulatory cat. The Seven Sisters Road was the scene of most of his adventures, if adventures they could be called, these dissolute pilgrimages. Michael came to know this street as one comes to know the street of a familiar dream. He walked along it in lavender sunrises watching the crenellated horizon of housetops; he sauntered through it slowly on dripping midnights, and on foggy November afternoons he speculated upon the windows with their aqueous sheen of incandescent gas. On summer dusks he pushed his way through the fetid population that thronged it, smelling the odour of stale fruit exposed for sale, and on sad grey Sabbaths he saw the ill-corseted servant girls treading down the heels of their ugly boots, and plush-clad children who continually dropped Sunday-school books in the mud.

And not only was Michael cognizant of the sordid street’s exterior. He heard the creak of bells by blistered doors, he tripped over mats in narrow gloomy passages and felt his way up stale rickety stairs. Michael knew many rooms in this street of dreams: but they were all much alike with their muslin and patchouli, their aspidistras and yellowing photographs. The ribbed pianos tintinnabulated harshly with songs cut from the squalid sheets of Sunday papers: in unseen basements children whined, while on the mantelpiece garish vases rattled to the vibration of traffic.

Michael was also aware of the emotional crises that occur in the Seven Sisters Road, from the muttered curses of the old street-walkers with their crape bonnets cocked awry and their draggled musty skirts to Brother Aloysius himself shaken with excess of sin in colloquy with a ghostly voice upon a late winter dawn.

“A ghost?” he echoed incredulously.

“It’s true. I heard a voice telling me to go back. And when I went back, there she was sitting in the arm-chair with the antimacassar round her shoulders because it was cold, and the carving-knife across her knees, waiting up to do for the fellow that was keeping her. I reckon it was God sent me back to save her.”

Even Michael in his vicious mood could not tolerate this hysterical blasphemy, and he scoffed at the supernatural explanation. But Brother Aloysius did not care whether he was believed or not. He himself was sufficient audience to himself, ready to applaud and condemn with equal exaggeration of feeling.

After a week of self-revelation Brother Aloysius suddenly had spiritual qualms about his behaviour, and announced to Michael that he must go to Confession and free himself from the oppressive responsibility of his sin. Michael did not like the thought of Dom Cuthbert being aware of the way in which his last days at the monastery had been spent, and hoped that Brother Aloysius would confess in as general a manner as possible. Yet even so he feared that the perspicacious Abbot would guess the partner of his penitent, and, notwithstanding the sacred impersonality of the Confessional, regard Michael with an involuntary disgust. However, the confession, with all its attendant pangs of self-reproach, passed over, and Michael was unable to detect the slightest alteration in Dom Cuthbert’s attitude towards him. But he avoided Brother Aloysius so carefully during the remainder of his stay, that it was impossible to test the Abbot’s knowledge as directly as he could have wished.

The night before Michael was to leave the monastery, a great gale blew from the south-west and kept him wide awake hour after hour until the bell for Matins. He felt that on this his last night it would be in order for him to attend the Office. So he dressed quickly and hurried through the wind-swept corridor into the Chapel. Here, in a severity of long droning psalms, he tried to purge his mind of all it had acquired from the shamelessness of Brother Aloysius. He was so far successful that he could look Dom Cuthbert fearlessly in the face when he bade him good-bye next day, and as he coasted over the downs through the calm September sunlight, he to himself seemed like the country washed by the serene radiance of the tempest’s aftermath.

Chapter VIII: Mirrors

M ICHAEL somehow felt shy when he heard his mother’s voice telling him to come into her room. He had run upstairs and knocked excitedly at her door before the shyness overwhelmed him, but it was too late not to enter, and he sat down to give her the account of his holidays. Rather dull it seemed, and robbed of all vitality by the barrier which both his mother and he hastened to erect between themselves.

“Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself at this Monastery?”

“Oh, rather.”

“Is the—what do you call him?—the head monk a nice man?”

“Oh, yes, awfully decent.”

“And your friend Chator, did he enjoy himself?”

“Oh, rather. Only he had to go before me. Did you enjoy yourself abroad, mother?”

“Very much, dear, thank you. We had lovely weather all the time.”

“We had awfully ripping weather too.”

“Have you got everything ready for school in the morning?”

“There’s nothing much to get. I suppose I’ll go into Cray’s—the Upper Fifth. Do you want me now, mother?”

“No, dear, I have one or two letters to write.”

“I think I’ll go round and see if Chator’s home yet. You don’t mind?”

“Don’t be late for dinner.”

“Oh, no, rather not.”

Going downstairs from his mother’s room, Michael had half an impulse to turn back and confide in her the real account of his holidays. But on reflection he protested to himself that his mother looked upon him as immaculate, and he felt unwilling to disturb by such a revolutionary step the approved tranquillities of maternal ignorance.

Mr. Cray, his new form-master, was a man of distinct personality, and possessed a considerable amount of educative ability; but unfortunately for Michael the zest of classics had withered in his heart after his disappointment over the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Therefore Mr. Cray with his bright archÆology and chatty scholarship bored Michael more profoundly than any of his masters so far had bored him. Mr. Cray resented this attitude very bitterly, being used to keenness in his form, and Michael’s dreary indolence, which often came nearer to insolence, irritated him. As for the plodding, inky sycophants who fawned upon Mr. Cray’s informativeness, Michael regarded them with horror and contempt. He sat surrounded by the butts and bugbears of his school-life. All the boys whose existence he had deplored seemed to have clambered arduously into the Upper Fifth just to enrage him with the sight of their industrious propinquity. There they sat with their scraggy wrists protruding from shrinking coat-sleeves, with ambitious noses glued to their books, with pens and pencils neatly disposed for demonstrative annotation, and nearly all of them conscious of having figured in the school-list with the printed bubble of the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate beside their names. Contemplating them in the mass, Michael scarcely knew how he would endure another dusty year of school.

“And now we come to the question of the Homeric gate—the Homeric gate, Fane, when you can condescend to our level,” said Mr. Cray severely.

“I’m listening, sir,” said Michael wearily.

“Of course the earliest type of gate was without hinges—without hinges, Fane! Very much like your attention, Fane!”

Several sycophants giggled at this, and Michael, gazing very earnestly at Mr. Cray’s benign but somewhat dirty bald head, took a bloody revenge upon those in reach of his javelin of quadruple penholders.

“For Monday,” said Mr. Cray, when he had done with listening to the intelligent advice of his favourite pupils on the subject of gates ancient and modern, “for Monday the essay will be on Patriotism.”

Michael groaned audibly.

“Isn’t there an alternative subject, sir?” he gloomily enquired.

“Does Fane dislike abstractions?” said Mr. Cray. “Curious! Well, if Fane wishes for an alternative subject, of course Fane must be obeyed. The alternative subject will be An Examination into the Fundamental Doctrines of Hegelian Idealism. Does that suit Fane?”

“Very well indeed,” said Michael, who had never heard of Hegel until that moment, but vowed to himself that somehow between this muggy Friday afternoon and next Monday morning he would conquer the fellow’s opinions. As a matter of fact, the essay proved perfectly easy with the assistance of The Popular Encyclopedia, though Mr. Cray called it a piece of impudence and looked almost baleful when Michael showed it up.

From this atmosphere of complacent effort Michael withdrew one afternoon to consult Father Viner about his future. Underneath the desire for practical advice was a desire to talk about himself, and Michael was disappointed on arriving at Father Viner’s rooms to hear that he was out. However, learning that there was a prospect of his speedy return, he came in at the landlady’s suggestion to amuse himself with a book while he waited.

Wandering round the big bay-windowed room with its odour of tobacco and books, and casting a careless glance at Father Viner’s desk, Michael caught sight of his own name in the middle of a neatly written letter on the top of a pile of others. He could not resist taking a longer glance to see the address and verify the allusion to himself, and with this longer glance curiosity conquered so completely the prejudice against prying into other people’s correspondence that Michael, breathing nervously under the dread of interruption, took up the letter and read it right through. It was in his present mood of anxiety about himself very absorbing.

Michael put this letter back where he had found it, and wondered how much of the contents would be discussed by Father Viner. He was glad that Brother Aloysius had vanished, because Brother Aloysius had become like a bad dream with which he was unwilling in the future to renew acquaintance. On his own character Dom Cuthbert had not succeeded in throwing very much light—at any rate not in this letter. Father Viner came in to interrupt Michael’s meditations, and began at once to discuss the letter.

“The Lord Abbot of Clere thinks you’re a dreamer,” he began abruptly.

“Does he, Mr. Viner?” echoed Michael, who somehow could never bring himself to the point of addressing the priest as ‘Father.’ Shyness always overcame his will.

“What do you dream about, young Joseph?”

“Oh, I only think about a good many things, and wonder what I’m going to be and all that,” Michael replied. “I don’t want to go into the Indian Civil Service or anything with exams. I’m sick of exams. What I most want to do is to get away from school. I’m sick of school, and the fellows in the Upper Fifth are a greasy crowd of swats always sucking up to Cray.”

“And who is the gentleman with the crustacean name that attracts these barnacles?”

“Cray? Oh, he’s my form-master, and tries to be funny.”

“So do I, Michael,” confessed Mr. Viner.

“Oh, well, that’s different. I’m not bound to listen to you, if I don’t want to. But I have to listen to Cray for eighteen hours every week, and he hates me because I won’t take notes for his beastly essays. I think I’ll ask my mater if I can’t leave school after this term.”

“And then what would you do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could settle when I’d left.”

“What about Oxford?”

“Well, I could go to Oxford later on.”

“I don’t think you could quite so easily as you think. Anyway, you’d much better go to Oxford straight from school.”

“Eight more terms before I leave. Phew!” Michael groaned. “It’s such a terrible waste of time, and I know Oxford’s ripping.”

“Perhaps something will come along to interest you. And always, dear boy, don’t forget you have your religion.”

“Yes, I know,” said Michael. “But at the Abbey I met some people who were supposed to be religious, and they were pretty good rotters.”

The priest looked at him and seemed inclined to let Michael elaborate this topic, but almost immediately he dismissed it with a commonplace.

“Oh, well,” Michael sighed, “I suppose something will happen soon to buck me up. I hope so. Perhaps the Kensitites will start making rows in churches again,” he went on hopefully. “Will you lend me the Apocryphal Gospels? We’re going to have a discussion about them at the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis.”

“Oh, the society hasn’t broken up?” enquired Mr. Viner.

“Rather not. Only everybody’s changed rather. Chator’s become frightfully Roman. He was Sarum last term, and he thinks I’m frightfully heretical, only of course I say a lot I don’t mean just to rag him. I say, by the way, who wrote ‘In a Garden’?”

“It sounds a very general title,” commented Mr. Viner, with a smile.

“Well, it’s some poem or other.”

“Swinburne wrote a poem in the Second Series of Poems and Ballads called ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ Is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps. Is it a famous poem?”

“Yes, I should say it was distinctly.”

“Well, that must be it. Cray tried to be funny about it to-day in form, and said to me, ‘Good heavens, haven’t you read “In a Garden”?’ And I said I’d never heard of it. And then he said in his funny way to the class, ‘I suppose you’ve all read it.’ And none of them had, which made him look rather an ass. So he said we’d better read it by next week.”

“I can lend you my Swinburne. Only take care of it,” said Mr. Viner. “It’s a wonderful poem.”

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

“I say,” exclaimed Michael eagerly, “I never knew Swinburne was a really great poet. And fancy, he’s alive now.”

“Alive, and living at Putney,” said Mr. Viner.

“And yet he wrote what you’ve just said!”

“He wrote that, and many other things too. He wrote:

Before the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven,

Summer, with flowers that fell;

Remembrance fallen from heaven,

And madness risen from hell.”

“Good Lord!” sighed Michael. “And he’s in Putney at this very moment.”

Michael went home clasping close the black volume, and in his room that night, while the gas jet flamed excitably in defiance of rule, he read almost right through the Second Series of Poems and Ballads. It was midnight when he turned down the gas and sank feverishly into bed. For a long while he was saying to himself isolated lines: ‘The wet skies harden, the gates are barred on the summer side.’ ‘The rose-red acacia that mocks the rose.’ ‘Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, brother.’ ‘For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, all waters as the shore.’

In school on Monday morning Mr. Cray, to Michael’s regret, did not allude to the command that his class should read ‘In a Garden.’ Michael was desperately anxious at once to tell him how much he had loved the poem and to remind him of the real title, ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ At last he could bear it no longer and went up flushed with enthusiasm to Mr. Cray’s desk, nominally to enquire into an alleged mistake in his Latin Prose, but actually to inform Mr. Cray of his delight in Swinburne. When the grammatical blunder had been discussed, Michael said with as much nonchalance as he could assume:

“I read that poem, sir. I think it’s ripping.”

“What poem?” repeated Mr. Cray vaguely. “Oh, yes, ‘Enoch Arden.’”

“‘Enoch Arden,’” stammered Michael. “I thought you said ‘In a Garden.’ I read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by Swinburne.”

Mr. Cray put on his most patronizing manner.

“My poor Fane, have you never heard of Enoch Arden? Perhaps you’ve never even heard of Tennyson?”

“But Swinburne’s good, isn’t he, sir?”

“Swinburne is very well,” said Mr. Cray. “Oh, yes, Swinburne will do, if you like rose-jam. But I don’t recommend Swinburne for you, Fane.”

Then Mr. Cray addressed his class:

“Did you all read ‘Enoch Arden’?”

“Yes, sir,” twittered the Upper Fifth.

“Fane, however, with that independence of judgment which distinguishes his Latin Prose from, let us say, the prose of Cicero, preferred to read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by one Swinburne.”

The Upper Fifth giggled dutifully.

“Perhaps Fane will recite to us his discovery,” said Mr. Cray, scratching his scurfy head with the gnawed end of a penholder.

Michael blushed resentfully, and walked back to his desk.

“No?” said Mr. Cray with an affectation of great surprise.

Then he and the Upper Fifth, contented with their superiority, began to chew and rend some tough Greek particles which ultimately became digestible enough to be assimilated by the Upper Fifth; while Mr. Cray himself purred over his cubs, looking not very unlike a mangy old lioness.

“Eight more terms,” groaned Michael to himself.

Mr. Cray was not so blind to his pupils’ need for mild intellectual excitement, however much he might scorn the easy emotions of Swinburne. He really grew lyrical over Homeric difficulties, and even spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Mackail’s translation of the Georgics; but always he managed to conceal the nobility of his theme beneath a mass of what he called ‘minor points.’ He would create his own rubbish heap and invite the Upper Fifth to scratch in it for pearls. One day a question arose as to the exact meaning of ??????ta? in Homer. Michael would have been perfectly content to believe that it meant ‘whole barleycorns,’ until Mr. Cray suggested that it might be equivalent to the Latin ‘mola,’ meaning ‘grain coarsely ground.’ An exhausting discussion followed, illustrated by examples from every sort of writer, all of which had to be taken down in notes in anticipation of a still more exhausting essay on the subject.

“The meal may be trite,” said Mr. Cray, “but not the subject,” he added, chuckling. “However, I have only touched the fringe of it: you will find the arguments fully set forth in Buttmann’s Lexilogus. Who possesses that invaluable work?”

Nobody in the Upper Fifth possessed it, but all anxiously made a note of it, in order to acquire it over the counter of the Book Room downstairs.

“No use,” said Mr. Cray. “Buttmann’s Lexilogus is now out of print.”

Michael pricked up at this. The phrase leant a curious flavour of Romance to the dull book.

“No doubt, however, you will be able to obtain it second-hand,” added Mr. Cray.

The notion of tracking down Buttmann’s Lexilogus possessed the Upper Fifth. Eagerly after school the diligent ones discussed ways and means. Parties were formed, almost one might say expeditions, to rescue the valuable work from oblivion. Michael stood contemptuously aside from the buzz of self-conscious effort round him, although he had made up his own mind to be one of the first to obtain the book. Levy, however, secured the first copy for fourpence in Farringdon Street, earning for his sharpness much praise. Another boy bought one for three shillings and sixpence in Paddington, the price one would expect to pay, if not a Levy; and there were rumours of a copy in Kensington High Street. To Michael the mart of London from earliest youth had been Hammersmith Broadway, and thither he hurried, hopeful of discovering Buttmann’s dingy Lexilogus, for the purchase of which he had thoughtfully begged a sovereign from his mother. Michael did not greatly covet Buttmann, but he was sure that the surplus from three shillings and sixpence, possibly even from fourpence, would be very welcome.

He found at last in a turning off Hammersmith Broadway a wonderful bookshop, whose rooms upon rooms leading into one another were all lined and loaded with every kind of book. The proprietor soon found a copy of Buttmann, which he sold to Michael for half a crown, leaving him with fifteen shillings for himself, since he decided that it would be as well to return his mother at least half a crown from her sovereign. The purchase completed, Michael began to wander round the shop, taking down a book here, a book there, dipping into them from the top of a ladder, sniffing them, clapping their covers together to drive away the dust, and altogether thoroughly enjoying himself, while the daylight slowly faded and street-lamps came winking into ken outside. At last, just as the shop-boy was putting up the shutters, Michael discovered a volume bound in half-morocco of a crude gay blue, that proved on inspection to contain the complete poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, for the sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence.

What was now left of his golden sovereign that should have bought so much beside Buttmann’s brown and musty Lexilogus?

Michael approached the proprietor with the volume in his hand.

“How much?” he asked, with a queer choking sensation, a throbbing excitement, for he had never before even imagined the expenditure of seventeen shillings and sixpence on one book.

“What’s this?” said the proprietor, putting on his spectacles. “Oh, yes, Swinburne—pirated American edition. Seventeen shillings and sixpence.”

“Couldn’t you take less?” asked Michael, with a vague hope that he might rescue a shilling for his mother, if not for cigarettes.

“Take less?” repeated the bookseller. “Good gracious, young man, do you know what you’d have to pay for Swinburne’s stuff separate? Something like seven or eight pounds, and then they’d be all in different volumes. Whereas here you’ve got—lemme see—Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Poems and Ballads, Songs before Sunrise, Bothwell, Tristram of Lyonesse, Songs of Two Nations, and heaven knows what not. I call seventeen shillings and sixpence very cheap for what you might almost call a man’s life-work. Shall I wrap it up?”

“Yes, please,” said Michael, gasping with the effect of the plunge.

But when that night he read

Swallow, my sister, O fair swift swallow,

he forgot all about the cost.

The more of Swinburne that Michael read, the more impatient he grew of school. The boredom of Mr. Cray’s class became stupendous; and Michael, searching for some way to avoid it, decided to give up Classics and apply for admission to the History Sixth, which was a small association of boys who had drifted into this appendix for the purpose of defeating the ordinary rules of promotion. For instance, when the Captain of the School Eleven had not attained the privileged Sixth, he was often allowed to enter the History Sixth, in order that he might achieve the intellectual dignity which consorted with his athletic prowess.

Michael had for some time envied the leisure of the History Sixth, with its general air of slackness and its form-master, Mr. Kirkham, who, on account of holding many administrative positions important to the athletic life of the school, was so often absent from his class-room. He now racked his brains for an excuse to achieve the idle bliss of these charmed few. Finally he persuaded his mother to write to the Headmaster and apply for his admission, on the grounds of the greater utility of History in his future profession.

“But what are you going to be, Michael?” asked his mother.

“I don’t know, but you can say I’m going to be a barrister or something.”

“Is History better for a barrister?”

“I don’t know, but you can easily say you think it is.”

In the end his mother wrote to Dr. Brownjohn, and one grey November afternoon the Headmaster sailed into the class-room of the Upper Fifth, extricated Michael with a roar, and marched with him up and down the dusky corridor in a ferocious discussion of the proposal.

“Why do you want to give up your Classics?” bellowed Dr. Brownjohn.

In the echoing corridor Michael’s voice sounded painfully weak against his monitor’s.

“I don’t want to give them up, sir. Only I would like to learn History as well,” he explained.

“What’s the good of History?” roared the Doctor.

“I thought I’d like to learn it,” said Michael.

“You shouldn’t think, you infamous young sluggard.”

“And I could go on reading Classics, sir, I could really.”

“Bah!” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Impudent nonsense, you young sloth. Why didn’t you get your Certificate?”

“I failed in Arithmetic, sir.”

“You’ll fail in your whole life, boy,” prophesied Dr. Brownjohn in bull-deep accents of reproach. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “I don’t think I am, because I worked jolly hard.”

“Worked, you abominable little loafer? You’ve never worked in your life. You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you’re merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste. Bah! What do you expect to do when you leave school? Um?”

“I want to go to Oxford.”

“Then get the Balliol Scholarship.”

“I don’t want to be at Balliol,” said Michael.

“Then get the major scholarship at Trinity, Cambridge.”

“I don’t intend to go to Cambridge,” said Michael.

“Good heavens, boy,” roared Dr. Brownjohn, “are you trying to arrange your own career?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “But I want to go to St. Mary’s, Oxford.”

“Then get a scholarship at St. Mary’s.”

“But I don’t want to be a Scholar of any college. I want to go up as a Commoner.”

The veins on Dr. Brownjohn’s forehead swelled with wrath, astonishment and dismay.

“Get out of my sight,” he thundered. “Get back into your class-room. I’ve done with you; I take no more interest in you. You’re here to earn glory for your school, you’re here to gain a scholarship, not to air your own opinions. Get out of my sight, you young scoundrel. How dare you argue with me? You shan’t go into the History Sixth! You shall stew in your own obstinate juice in the Upper Fifth until I choose to move you out of it. Do you hear? Go back into your class-room. I’ll write to your mother. She’s an idiotic woman, and you’re a slovenly, idle, good-for-nothing cub.”

Overwhelmed with failure and very sensitive to the inquisitive glances of his classmates, Michael sat down in his own desk again as unobtrusively as he could.

Michael’s peace of mind was not increased by the consciousness of Mr. Cray’s knowledge of his appeal to withdraw from the Upper Fifth, and he became exposed to a large amount of sarcasm in allusion to his expressed inclination towards history. He was continually referred to as an authority on Constitutions; he was invited to bring forward comparisons from more modern times to help the elucidation of the Syracusan expedition or the Delian Confederacy.

All that Michael gained from Mr. Cray was a passion for second-hand books—the latest and most fervid of all his collecting hobbies.

One wintry evening in Elson’s Bookshop at Hammersmith he was enjoying himself on the top of a ladder, when he became aware of an interested gaze directed at himself over the dull-gilt edges of a large and expensive work on Greek sculpture. The face that so regarded him was at once fascinating and repulsive. The glittering blue eyes full of laughter were immediately attractive, but something in the pointed ears and curled-back lips, something in the peculiarly white fingers faintly pencilled about the knuckles with fine black hairs, and after a moment something cruel in the bright blue eyes themselves restrained him from an answering smile.

“What is the book, Hyacinthus?” asked the stranger, and his voice was so winning and so melodious in the shadowy bookshop that Michael immediately fell into the easiest of conversations.

“Fond of books?” asked the stranger. “Oh, by the way, my name is Wilmot, Arthur Wilmot.”

Something in Wilmot’s manner made Michael suppose that he ought to be familiar with the name, and he tried to recall it.

“What’s your name?” the stranger went on.

Michael told his name, and also his school, and before very long a good deal about himself.

“I live near you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “We’ll walk along presently. I’d like you to dine with me one night soon. When?”

“Oh, any time,” said Michael, trying to speak as if invitations to dinner occurred to him three or four times a day.

“Here’s my card,” said the stranger. “You’d better show it to your mother—so that she’ll know it’s all right. I’m a writer, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” Michael vaguely agreed.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of my stuff. I don’t publish much. Sometimes I read my poems to Interior people.”

Michael looked puzzled.

“Interior is my name for the people who understand. So few do. I should say you’d be sympathetic. You look sympathetic. You remind me of those exquisite boys who in scarlet hose run delicately with beakers of wine or stand in groups about the corners of old Florentine pictures.”

Michael tried to look severe, and yet, after the Upper Fifth, even so direct and embarrassing a compliment was slightly pleasant.

“Shall we go along? To-night the Hammersmith Road is full of mystery. But, first, shall I not buy you a book—some exquisite book full of strange perfumes and passionate courtly gestures? And so you are at school? How wonderful to be at school! How Sicilian! Strange youth, you should have been sung by Theocritus, or, better, been crowned with myrtle by some wonderful unknown Greek, some perfect blossom of the Anthology.”

Michael laughed rather foolishly. There seemed nothing else to do.

“Won’t you smoke? These Chian cigarettes in their diaphanous paper of mildest mauve would suit your oddly remote, your curiously shy glance. You had better not smoke so near to the savage confines of St. James’ School? How ascetic! How stringent! What book shall I buy for you, O greatly to be envied dreamer of Sicilian dreams? Shall I buy you Mademoiselle de Maupin, so that all her rococo soul may dance with gilded limbs across your vision? Or shall I buy you A Rebours, and teach you to live? And yet I think neither would suit you perfectly. So here is a volume of Pater—Imaginary Portraits. You will like to read of Denys l’Auxerrois. One day I myself will write an imaginary portrait of you, wherein your secret, sidelong smile will reveal to the world the whole art of youth.”

“But really—thanks very much,” stammered Michael, who was beginning to suspect the stranger of madness—“it’s awfully kind of you, but, really, I think I’d rather not.”

“Do not be proud,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Pride is for the pure in heart, and you are surely not pure in heart. Or are you? Are you indeed like one of those wonderful white statues of antiquity, unaware of the soul with all its maladies?”

In the end, so urgent was Mr. Wilmot, Michael accepted the volume of Pater, and walked with the stranger through the foggy night. Somehow the conversation was so destructive of all experience that, as Michael and his new friend went by the school-gates and perceived beyond the vast bulk of St. James’ looming, Michael felt himself a stranger to it all, as if he never again would with a crowd of companions surge out from afternoon school. The stranger came as far as the corner of Carlington Road with Michael.

“I will write to your mother and ask her to let you dine with me one night next week. You interest me so much.”

Mr. Wilmot waved a pontifical good-bye and vanished in the direction of Kensington.

At home Michael told his mother of the adventure. She looked a little doubtful at his account of Mr. Wilmot.

“Oh, he’s all right, really, Mother. Only, you know, a little peculiar. But then he’s a poet.”

Next day came a letter from Mr. Wilmot.

“This is a perfectly sensible letter,” said Mrs. Fane.

“Perhaps I thought he was funnier than he really was. Does he say anything else except about me sitting on the top of a ladder?”

Somehow Michael was disappointed to hear that this was all.

Chapter IX: The Yellow Age

D INNER with Mr. Arthur Wilmot occupied most of Michael’s thoughts for a week. He was mainly concerned about his costume, and he was strenuously importunate for a tail-coat. Mrs. Fane, however, was sure that a dinner-jacket would better become his youthfulness. Then arose the question of stick-up collars. Michael pointed out that very soon he would be sixteen, and that here was a fine opportunity to leave behind the Polo or Shakespeare collar.

“You’re growing up so quickly, dearest boy,” sighed his mother.

Michael was anxious to have one of the new double collars.

“But don’t they look rather outrÉ ?” protested Mrs. Fane.

“Well, Abercrombie, the Secretary of the Fifteen, wears one,” observed Michael.

“Have your own way, dear,” said Mrs. Fane gently.

Two or three days before the dinner-party Michael braved everything and wore one of the new double collars to school. Its extravagant advent among the discreet neckwear of the Upper Fifth caused a sensation. Mr. Cray himself looked curiously once or twice at Michael, who assumed in consequence a particularly nonchalant air, and lounged over his desk even more than usual.

“Are you going on the stage, Fane?” enquired Mr. Cray finally, exasperated by Michael’s indolent construing.

“Not that I know of,” said Michael.

“I wasn’t sure whether that collar was part of your get-up as an eccentric comedian.”

The Upper Fifth released its well-worn laugh, and Michael scowled at his master.

However, he endured the sarcasm of the first two days and still wore the new collars, vowing to himself that presently he would make fresh attacks upon the convention of school attire, since apparently he was able thereby to irritate old Cray.

After all, the dinner-party was not so exciting as he had hoped from the sample of his new friend’s conversation. To be sure he was able to smoke as much as he liked, and drink as much champagne as he knew how without warning headshakes; but Mr. Johnstone, the Member for West Kensington, was a moon-faced bore, and his nephew turned out to be a lank nonentity on the despised Modern side. Mr. Johnstone talked a good deal about the Catholic movement, which somehow during the last few weeks was ceasing to interest Michael so much as formerly. Michael himself ascribed this apostasy to his perusal, ladder-high, of Zola’s novel Lourdes with its damaging assaults upon Christian credulity. The Member of Parliament seemed to Michael, after his psychical adventures of the past few months, curiously dull and antique, and he evidently considered Michael affected. However, he encouraged the idea of ecclesiastical law, and promised to talk to Dr. Brownjohn about Michael’s release from the thraldom of Classics. As for the nephew, he seemed to be able to do nothing but stretch the muscles of his chicken-like neck and ask continually whether Michael was going to join the Field Club that some obscure Modern Lower Master was in travail with at the moment. He also invited Michael to join a bicycling club that apparently met at Surbiton every other Saturday afternoon. Mr. Wilmot contented himself with silence and the care of his guests’ entertainment.

Finally the Member for West Kensington with his crudely jointed nephew departed into the fog, and Mr. Wilmot, with an exaggerated sigh, shut the front door.

“I must be going too,” said Michael grudgingly.

“My dear boy, the evening has scarcely begun,” objected Mr. Wilmot. “Come upstairs to my library, and tell me all about your opinions, and whether you do not think that everything is an affectation.”

They went up together.

“Every year I redecorate this room,” Mr. Wilmot explained. “Last year it was apple-green set out with cherry-red. Now I am become a mysterious peacock-blue, for lately I have felt terribly old. How well this uncertain tint suits your fresh languor.”

Michael admired the dusky blue chamber with the plain mirrors of tarnished gilt, the gleaming books and exotic engravings, and the heterogeneous finery faintly effeminate. He buried himself in a deep embroidered chair, with an ebony box of cigarettes at his feet, while Mr. Wilmot, after a myriad mincing preliminaries, sought out various highly coloured bottles of liqueurs.

“This is a jolly ripping room,” sighed Michael.

“It represents a year’s moods,” said Mr. Wilmot.

“And then will you change it?” asked Michael.

“Perhaps. The most subtly painted serpent casts ultimately its slough. CrÈme-de-Menthe?”

“Yes, please,” said Michael, who would have accepted anything in his present receptive condition.

“And what do you think of life?” enquired Mr. Wilmot, taking his place on a divan opposite Michael. “Do you mind if I smoke my Jicky-scented hookah?” he added.

“Not at all,” said Michael. “These cigarettes are jolly ripping. I think life at school is frightfully dull—except, of course, when one goes out. Only I don’t often.”

“Dull?” repeated Mr. Wilmot. “Listen to the amazing cruelty of youth, that finds even his adventurous Sicilian existence dull.”

“Well, it is,” said Michael. “I think I used to like it, but nowadays everything gets fearfully stale almost at once.”

“Already your life has been lived?” queried Mr. Wilmot very anxiously.

“Well, not exactly,” Michael replied, with a quick glance towards his host to make sure he was not joking. “I expect that when I leave school I shall get interested again. Only just lately I’ve given up everything. First I was keen on Footer, and then I got keen on Ragging, and then I got keen on Work even (this was confessed apologetically), and just lately I’ve been keen on the Church—only now I find that’s pretty stale.”

“The Church!” echoed Mr. Wilmot. “How wonderful! The dim Gothic glooms, the sombre hues of stained glass, the incense-wreathÈd acolytes, the muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah, elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!”

“Then I got keen on Swinburne,” said Michael.

“You advance along the well-worn path of the Interior and Elect,” said Mr. Wilmot.

“I’m still keen on Swinburne, but he makes me feel hopeless. Sad and hopeless,” said Michael.

“Under the weight of sin?” asked Mr. Wilmot.

“Not exactly—because he seems to have done everything and——”

“You’d like to?”

“Yes, I would,” said Michael. “Only one can’t live like a Roman Emperor at a public school. What I hate is the way everybody thinks you ought to be interested in things that aren’t really interesting at all. What people can’t understand about me is that I could be keener than anybody about things schoolmasters and that kind don’t think right or at any rate important. I don’t mean to say I want to be dissipated, but——”

“Dissipated?” echoed Mr. Wilmot, raising his eyebrows.

“Well, you know what I mean,” blushed Michael.

“Dissipation is a condition of extreme old age. I might be dissipated, not you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Why not say wanton? How much more beautiful, how much more intense a word.”

“But wanton sounds so beastly affected,” said Michael. “As if it was taken out of the Bible. And you aren’t so very old. Not more than thirty.”

“I think what you’re trying to say is that, under your present mode of life, you find self-expression impossible. Let me diagnose your symptoms.”

Michael leaned forward eagerly at this proposal. Nothing was so entertaining to his egoism just now as diagnosis. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot seemed inclined to take him more seriously than Mr. Viner, or, indeed, any of his spiritual directors so far. Mr. Wilmot prepared himself for the lecture by lighting a very long cigarette wrapped in brittle fawn-coloured paper, whose spirals of smoke Michael followed upward to their ultimate evanescence, as if indeed they typified with their tenuous plumes and convolutions the intricate discourse that begot them.

“In a sense, my dear boy, your charm has waned—the faerie charm, that is, which wraps in heedless silver armour the perfect boyhood of man. You are at present a queer sort of mythical animal whom we for want of a better term call ‘adolescent.’ Intercourse with anything but your own self shocks both you and the world with a sense of extravagance, as if a centaur pursued a nymph or fought with a hero. The soul—or what we call the soul—is struggling in the bondage of your unformed body. Lately you had no soul, you were ethereal and cold, yet withal in some remote way passionate, like your own boy’s voice. Now the silly sun is melting the snow, and what was a little while since crystalline clear virginity is beginning to trickle down towards a headlong course, carrying with it the soiled accumulation of the years to float insignificantly into the wide river of manhood. But I am really being almost intolerably allegorical—or is it metaphorical?”

“Still, I think I understand what you mean,” Michael said encouragingly.

“Thrown back upon your own resources, it is not surprizing that you attempt to allay your own sense of your own incongruity by seeking for its analogy in the decorative excitements of religion or poetry. Love would supply the solution, but you are still too immature for love. And if you do fall in love, you will sigh for some ample and unattainable matron rather than the slim, shy girl that would better become your pastoral graces. At present you lack all sense of proportion. You are only aware of your awkwardness. Your corners have not yet been, as they say, knocked off. You are still somewhat proud of their Gothic angularity. You feel at home in the tropic dawns of Swinburne’s poetry, in the ceremonious exaggerations of Mass, because neither of these conditions of thought and behaviour allow you to become depressed over your oddity, to see yourself crawling with bedraggled wings from the cocoon of mechanical education. The licentious ingenuity of Martial, Petronius and Apuleius with their nightmare comedies and obscene phantasmagoria, Lucian, that boulevardier of Olympic glades, all these could allow you to feel yourself more at home than does Virgil with his peaceful hexameters or the cold relentless narrations of Thucydides.”

“Yes, that’s all very well,” objected Michael. “But other chaps seem to get on all right without being bored by ordinary things.”

“Already spurning the gifts of Apollo, contemptuous of Artemis, ignorant of Bacchus and Aphrodite, you are bent low before Pallas Athene. Foolish child, do not pray for wisdom in this overwise thin-faced time of ours. Rather demand of the gods folly, and drive ever furiously your temperament like a chariot before you.”

“I met an odd sort of chap the other day,” Michael said thoughtfully. “A monk he was, as a matter of fact—who told me a skit of things—you know—about a bad life. It’s funny, though I hate ugly things and common things, he gave me a feeling that I’d like to go right away from everything and live in one of those horrible streets that you pass in an omnibus when the main road is up. Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean?”

Mr. Wilmot’s eyes glittered through the haze of smoke.

“Why shouldn’t I understand? Squalor is the Parthenope of the true Romantic. You’ll find it in all the poets you love best—if not in their poetry, certainly in their lives. Even romantic critics are not without temptation. One day you shall read of Hazlitt and Sainte-Beuve. And now, dear boy, here is my library which holds as many secrets as the Spintrian books of Elephantis, long ago lost and purified by the sea. I am what the wise world would call about to corrupt your mind, and yet I believe that for one who like you must some day make trial of the uttermost corruption, I am prescribing more wisely than Chiron, that pig-headed or rather horse-bodied old prototype of all schoolmasters, who sent his hero pupils one after another into the world, proof against nothing but a few spear-thrusts. I offer you better than fencing-bouts and wrestling-matches. I offer you a good library. Read every day and all night, and when you are a man full grown, you will smile at the excesses of your contemporaries, at their divorces and disgraces. You will stand aloof like a second Aurelius, coining austere aphorisms and mocking the weakness of your unlearned fellows. Why are priests generally so inept in the confessional? Because they learn their knowledge of life from a frowsy volume of Moral Theology that in the most utterly barbarous Latin emits an abstract of humanity’s immeasurable vice. In the same way most young men encounter wickedness in some sudden shock of depravity from which they retire blushing and mumbling, ‘Who’d have thought it!’ ‘Who’d have thought it!’ they cry, and are immediately empanelled on a jury.

“Not so you, O more subtle youth, with the large deep eyes and secret sidelong smile.

“There on my shelves are all the ages. I have spoken to you of Petronius, of Lucian and Apuleius. There is Suetonius, with his incredibly improper tales that show how beastliness takes root and flowers from the deposited muck of a gossip’s mind. There is Tacitus, ever willing to sacrifice decency to antithesis, and Ausonius, whose ribald verses are like monkish recreation; yet he had withal a pretty currency of honest silver Latin, Christian though he was. You must read your Latin authors well, for, since you must be decadent, it is better to decay from a good source. And neglect not the Middle Ages. You will glide most easily into them from the witches and robbers of Apuleius. You will read Boccaccio, whose tales are intaglios carved with exquisitely licentious and Lilliputian scenes. Neither forget Villon, whose light ladies seem ever to move elusively in close-cut gowns of cloth-of-gold and incredibly tall steeple-hats. But even with Villon the world becomes complicated, and you will soon reach the temperamental entanglements of the nineteenth century, for you may avoid the coarse, the beery and besotted obviousness of the Georgian age.

“But I like the eighteenth century almost best of all,” protested Michael.

“Then cure yourself of that most lamentable and most dÉmodÉ taste, or I shall presently believe that you read a page or two of Boswell’s Life of Johnson every morning, while the water is running into your bath. You can never be a true decadent, treading delicately over the garnered perfection of the world’s art, if you really admire and enjoy the eighteenth century.”

Michael, however, looked very doubtful over his demanded apostasy.

“But, never mind,” Mr. Wilmot went on. “When you have read Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire, MallarmÉ, Verlaine, Catulle MendÈs and Verhaeren, when the Parnassians and Symbolists have illuminated you, and you become an Interior person, when Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rops have printed their fierce debauchery upon your imagination, then you will be glad you have forsaken the eighteenth century. How crude is the actual number eighteen, how far from the passionate mystery of seventeen or the tired wisdom of nineteen! O wonderful nineteenth century, in whose grey humid dusk you and I are lucky enough to live!”

“But what about the twentieth century?” asked Michael.

Mr. Wilmot started.

“Listen, and I will tell you my intention. Two more years have yet to run before that garish and hideous date, prophetic of all that is bright and new and abominably raw. But I shall have fled, how I know not; haply mandragora will lure my weary mind to rest. I think I should like to die as La Gioconda was painted, listening to flute-players in a curtained alcove; or you, Michael, shall read to me some diabolic and funereal song of Baudelaire, so that I may fearfully pass away.”

Michael, sitting in the dim room of peacock-blue made tremendously nocturnal by the heavy smoke of all the cigarettes, did not much care for the turn the conversation of Mr. Wilmot had taken. It had been interesting enough, while the discussion applied directly to himself; but all this vague effusion of learning meant very little to him. At the same time, there was an undeniable eccentricity in a member of the Upper Fifth sitting thus in fantastic communion with a figure completely outside the imagination of Mr. Cray or any of his inky groundlings. Michael began to feel a contemptuous pity for his fellows now buried in bedclothes, hot and heavy with Ciceronian sentences and pious preparation. He began to believe that if he wished to keep pace with this new friendship, he must acquire something of Mr. Wilmot’s heightened air. And however mad he might seem, there stood the books, and there stood the cigarettes for Michael’s pleasure. It was all very exciting, and it would not have been possible to say that before he met Wilmot.

The friendship progressed through the rest of the autumn-term, and Michael drifted farther away from the normal life of the school than even his incursion into Catholicism had taken him. That phase of his development had penetrated deeper than any other, and from time to time Michael knew bitter repentances and made grim resolutions. From time to time letters would arrive from Dom Cuthbert asking him down to Clere Abbey; Mr. Viner, too, would question him narrowly about his new set of friends, and Michael’s replies never seemed perfectly satisfactory to the shrewd priest.

It was by his costume more than by anything else that Michael expressed at first his sense of emancipation. He took to coming to school in vivid bow-ties that raised Mr. Cray’s most sarcastic comments.

“The sooner you go to the History Sixth, Fane, and take that loathsome ribbon with you, the better for us all. Where did you get it? Out of the housemaid’s trunk, one would say, by its appearance.”

“It happens to be a tie,” said Michael with insolence in his tone.

“Oh, it happens to be a tie, does it? Well, it also happens to be an excellent rule of St. James’ School that all boys, however clever, wear dark suits and black ties. There also happens to be an excellent cure for pretentious and flamboyant youths who disregard this rule. There happens to be a play by one Euripides called the Alcestis. I suggest you write me out the first two hundred lines of it.”

Michael’s next encounter was with Mr. Viner, on the occasion of his producing in the priest’s pipe-seasoned sitting-room a handkerchief inordinately perfumed with an Eastern scent lately discovered by Wilmot.

“Good heavens, Michael, what Piccadilly breezes are you wafting into my respectable and sacerdotal apartment?”

“I rather like scent,” explained Michael lamely.

“Well, I don’t, so, for goodness’ sake don’t bring any more of it in here. Pah! Phew! It’s worse than a Lenten address at a fashionable church. Really, you know, these people you’re in with now are not at all good for you, Michael.”

“They’re more interesting than any of the chaps at school.”

“Are they? There used to be a saying in my undergraduate days, ‘Distrust a freshman that’s always seen with third-year men.’ No doubt the inference is often unjust, but still the proverb remains.”

“Ah, but these people aren’t at school with me,” Michael observed.

“No, I wish they were. They might be licked into better shape, if they were,” retorted the priest.

“I think you’re awfully down on Wilmot just because I didn’t meet him in some churchy set. If it comes to that, I met some much bigger rotters than him at Clere.”

“My dear Michael,” argued Father Viner, “the last place I should have been surprized to see Master Wilmot would be in a churchy set. Don’t forget that if religion is a saving grace, religiosity is a constitutional weakness. Can’t you understand that a priest like myself who has taken the average course, public-school, ‘varsity, and theological college, meets a thundering lot of Wilmots by the way? My dear fellow, many of my best friends, many of the priests you’ve met in my rooms, were once upon a time every bit as decadent as the lilified Wilmot. They took it like scarlet fever or chicken-pox, and feel all the more secure now for having had it. Decadence, as our friend knows it, is only a new-fangled name for green-sickness. It’s a healthy enough mental condition for the young, but it’s confoundedly dangerous for the grown-up. The first pretty girl that looks his way cures it in a boy, if he’s a normal decent boy. I shouldn’t offer any objection to your behaviour, if you were being decadent with Mark Chator or Martindale or Rigg. Good heavens, the senior curate at the best East-end Mission, when he was at Oxford, used to walk down the High leading a lobster on a silver chain, and even that wasn’t original, for he stole the poor little fantastic idea from some precious French poet. But that senior curate is a very fine fellow to-day. No, no, this fellow Wilmot and all his set are very bad company for you, and I do not like your being decadent with these half-baked fancy-cakes.”

Michael, however, would not admit that Mr. Viner was right, and frequented the dangerous peacock-blue room in Edwardes Square more than ever. He took Chator there amongst others, and was immensely gratified to be solemnly warned at the end of the visit that he was playing with Hell-fire. This seemed to him an interesting and original pastime, and he hinted to solemn, simple, spluttering old Chator of more truly Satanic mysteries.

After Christmas Michael had his way and was moved into the History Sixth, mainly owing to the intervention of the Member for West Kensington. The History Sixth was presided over by Mr. Kirkham, whose nominal aim in life was the amelioration of Jacobean athletics. From the fact that he wore an M.C.C. ribbon round his straw hat, and an Oxford University Authentic tie, it is probable that the legend of his former skill at cricket was justified. In reality he was much more interested in Liberalism than anything else, and persistently read Blue Books, under-lining the dramatic moments of Royal Commissions and chewing his moustache through pages of dialogue hostile to his opinions. A rumour sped round the school that he had been invited to stand for Parliament, a rumour which Michael, on the strength of dining with the Member for West Kensington, flatly contradicted.

The History Sixth class-room was a pleasant place, the only class-room in the school that ever saw the sun. Its windows looked out on the great green expanse of the school ground, where during the deserted hours of work the solitary roller moved sedately and ancient women weeded the pitches.

There were only seven boys in the History Sixth. There was Strang, the Captain of the Eleven, who lounged through the dull Lent term and seemed, as he spread his bulk over the small desk, like a half-finished statue to which still adhered a fragment of uncarved stone. There was Terry, the Vice-Captain of the Fifteen and most dapper half-back that ever cursed forwards. He spent his time trying to persuade Strang to take an interest in Noughts and Crosses. There was beak-nosed Thomson who had gained an Exhibition at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and dark-eyed Mallock, whose father wrote columnar letters to The Times. Burnaby, who shocked Michael very much by prophesying that a certain H. G. Wells, now writing about Martian invasions, was the coming man, and Railton, a weedy and disconsolate recluse, made up with Michael himself the class-list.

There was an atmosphere of rest about the History Sixth, a leisured dignity that contrasted very delightfully with the spectacled industry of the Upper Fifth. To begin with, Mr. Kirkham was always ten minutes after every other master in entering his class-room. This habit allowed the members of his form to stroll gracefully along the corridors and watch one by one the cavernous doors of other class-rooms absorb their victims. Michael would often go out of his way to pass Mr. Cray’s room, in order to see with a luxurious sense of relief the intellectual convicts of the Upper Fifth hurrying to their prison. Many other conventions of school-life were slackened in the History Sixth. A slight eccentricity of attire was not considered unbecoming in what was, at any rate in its own opinion, a faintly literary society. The room was always open between morning and afternoon school, and it was not an uncommon sight to see members of the form reading novels in tip-tilted chairs. Most of the home work was set a week in advance, which did away with the unpleasant necessity of speculating on the ‘construe’ or hurriedly cribbing with a hastily peppered variety of mistakes the composition of one’s neighbour. Much of the work was simple reading, and as for the essays, by a legal fiction they were always written during the three hours devoted to Mathematics. Tradition forbade any member of the History Sixth to take Mathematics seriously, and Mr. Gaskell, the overworked Mathematical master, was not inclined to break this tradition. He used to write out a problem or two on the blackboard for the sake of appearances, and then settle down to the correction of his more serious pupils’ work, while the History Sixth devoted themselves to their more serious work. One of the great social earthquakes that occasionally devastate all precedent occurred when Mr. Gaskell was away with influenza, and his substitute, an earnest young novice, tried to make Strang and Terry do a Quadratic Equation.

“But, sir, we never do Mathematics.”

“Well, what are you here for?” asked the novice. “What am I here for?”

“We don’t know,” replied the History Sixth in unison; and the vendetta that followed the complaint of their behaviour to Mr. Kirkham made the novice’s mastership a burden to him during Mr. Gaskell’s illness. Enraged conservatism called for reprisals, until Mr. Kirkham pointed out with a felicity acquired from long perusal of Parliamentary humour, “You are Jacobeans, not Jacobins,” and with this mild joke quenched the feud.

The effect of his transference to the History Sixth made Michael more decadent than ever, for the atmosphere of his new class encouraged him along the orchidaceous path pointed out by Arthur Wilmot. He was not now decadent from any feeling of opposition to established things, but he was decadent from conviction of the inherent rightness of such a state. At first the phase had manifested itself in outward signs, a little absurdly; now his actual point of view was veering into accord with the externals.

Sunday was a day at Edwardes Square from which Michael returned almost phosphorescent with decay. Sunday was the day on which Mr. Wilmot gathered from all over London specimens of corruption that fascinated Michael with their exotic and elaborate behaviour. Nothing seemed worth while in such an assembly except a novel affectation. Everything was a pose. It was a pose to be effeminate in speech and gesture; it was a pose to drink absinthe; it was a pose to worship the devil; it was a pose to buy attenuated volumes of verse at an unnatural price, for the sake of owning a sonnet that was left out in the ordinary edition; it was a pose to admire pictures that to Michael at first were more like wall-papers than pictures; it was really a pose to live at all. Conversation at these delicate entertainments was like the conversations overheard in the anterooms of private asylums. Everyone was very willowy in his movements, whether he were smoking or drinking or looking for a box of matches. Michael attempted to be willowy at school once, but gave it up on being asked if he had fleas.

One of the main charms at first of these Sunday afternoon gatherings was the way in which, one after another, every one of the guests would take Michael aside and explain how different he (the guest) was from all the rest of humanity. Michael was flattered, and used to become very intense and look very soul-searching, and interject sympathetic exclamations until he discovered that the confidant usually proceeded to another corner of the room to entrust someone else with his innermost heart. He became cynical after a while, especially when he found that the principal points of difference from the rest of the world were identical in every one of the numerous guests who sought his counsel and his sympathy.

However, he never became cynical enough to distrust the whole school of thought and admit that Father Viner’s contempt was justifiable. If ever he had any doubts, he was consoled by assuring himself that at any rate these new friends were very artistic, and how important it was to be artistic no one could realize who was not at school.

Under the pressure of his insistent temperament, Michael found his collection of statuettes and ecclesiastical bric-À-brac very depressing. As a youth of the Florentine Renaissance he could not congratulate himself upon his room, which was much too much unlike either a Carpaccio interior or an Aubrey Beardsley bedroom. Between these two his ambition wavered.

One by one the statuettes were moved to the top of a wardrobe where for a while they huddled, a dusty and devoted crowd, until one by one they met martyrdom at the hands of the housemaid. In their place appeared Della Robbia reliefs and terra-cotta statuettes of this or that famous Greek youth. The muscular and tearful pictures of Guido Reni, the bland insipidities of Bouguereau soon followed the statuettes, meeting a comparable martyrdom by being hung in the servants’ bedroom. The walls of Michael’s room were papered with a brown paper, which was intended to be very artistic, but was really merely sad. It was lightened, however, by various daring pictures in black and red that after only a very short regard really did take shape as scenes of Montmartre. There were landscapes of the Sussex downs, with a slight atmosphere of Japan and landscapes of Japan that were not at all like Japan, but none the less beautiful for that. The books of devotion were banished to the company of superannuated Latin and Greek textbooks on the lower shelf of a cupboard in the morning-room, whose upper shelf was stacked with tinned fruits. Incense was still burnt, not as once to induce prayers to ascend, but to stupefy Michael with scent and warmth into an imitation of a drug-taker’s listless paradise. This condition was accentuated by erecting over the head of his bed a canopy of faded green satin, which gave him acute Æsthetic pleasure, until one night it collapsed upon him in the middle of the night. Every piece of upholstery in the room was covered with art linens that with the marching years had ousted the art muslins of Michael’s childhood. He also covered with squares of the same material the gas brackets, pushing them back against the wall and relying for light upon candles only. Notwithstanding Wilmot’s talk about literature, the influence of Wilmot’s friends was too strong, and Michael could not resist the deckle-edges of negligible poets. As these were expensive, Michael’s library lacked scope, and he himself, reflecting his pastime, came to believe in the bitterness and sweetness and bitter-sweetness of the plaintive sinners who printed so elegantly on such permanent paper the versification of their irregularity.

Irregularity was now being subjected to Michael’s process of idealistic alchemy, and since his conception of irregularity was essentially romantic, and since he shrank from sentiment, he was able to save himself, when presently all this decoration fell to pieces, and revealed naked unpleasantness. Nothing in his present phase had yet moved him so actually as his brief encounter with Brother Aloysius. That glimpse of a fearful and vital underworld had been to him romantic without trappings; it was a glimpse into an underworld to which one day he might descend, since it asked no sighing for the vanished joys of the past, for the rose-gardens of Rome. He began to play with the idea of departing suddenly from his present life and entering the spectral reality of the Seven Sisters Road, treading whatever raffish raddled pavement knew the hollow steps of a city’s prowlers. Going home on Sunday nights from the perfumed house in Edwardes Square and passing quickly and apprehensively figures that materialized in a circle of lamplight, he would contrast their existence with what remained in his senses of stale cigarette-smoke and self-conscious airs and attitudes. Yet the very picture he conjured of the possibility that haunted him made him the more anxious to substitute for the stark descent to hell the Sicilian or Satanic affectations of the luxurious mimes who postured against a background of art. Much of the talk at Edwardes Square concerned itself with the pastoral side of school-life, and Michael found himself being cross-questioned by elderly faun-like men who had a conception of an English public-school that was more Oriental than correct. Michael vainly tried to dispel these illusions, which made him resentful and for the moment crudely normal. He felt towards them much as he felt towards Garrod’s attempt to cure his ignorance at Clere. These were excellent fellows from whom to accept a cigarette or sometimes even an invitation to lunch at a Soho restaurant, but when they presumed upon his condescension and dared to include in their tainted outlook himself as a personal factor, Michael shrivelled with a virginal disdain.

Unreasonably to the others, Michael did not object very much to Wilmot’s oracular addresses on the delights of youth. He felt that so much of Wilmot was in the mere word, and he admired so frankly his embroideries of any subject, and above all he liked Wilmot so much personally, that he listened to him, and was even so far influenced by him as to try to read into the commonplace of a summer term all that Wilmot would suggest.

“O fortunate shepherd, to whom will you pipe to-morrow, or what slim and agile companion will you crown for his prowess? O lucky youth, able to drowse in the tempered sunlight that the elm-trees give, while your friend splendidly cool in his white flannels bats and bowls for your delight!”

“But I haven’t got any particular friend that I can watch,” objected Michael.

“One day you will terribly regret the privileges of your pastoral life.”

“Do you really think I am not getting all I can out of school?” demanded Michael.

“I’m sure you’re not,” said Wilmot.

Michael began to trouble himself over Wilmot’s warning, and also he began to look back with sentimental regret to what had really been his happiest time, his friendship with Alan. Pride kept him from approaching Alan with nothing to offer for nearly two years’ indifference. There had been no quarrel. They had merely gradually drifted apart, yet it was with a deep pang of remorse that one day he realized in passing the dusty Upper Fifth that Alan was now wrestling with that imprisonment. Michael racked his brains to think of some way by which he and Alan might come together in their old amity, their perfect fellowship. He sought some way that would make it natural and inevitable, but no way presented itself. He could, so deep was his sudden regret, have stifled his own pride and deliberately invited Alan to be friends; he would even have risked a repulse; but with the renewal of his longing for the friendship came a renewal of the old sympathy and utter comprehension of Alan’s most secret moods, and Michael realized that his old friend would be too shy to accept this strange, inexplicable revival, unless it were renewed, as it was begun, by careless, artless intercourse.

The immediate result of this looking back to an earlier period was to arouse in Michael an interest in boys younger than himself, and through his idealism to endow them with a conscious joy of life which he fell to envying. He had a desire to warn them of the enchantment under whose benign and dulcet influence they lived, to warn them that soon the lovely spell would be broken, and bid them make the most of their stripling time. Continually he was seeing boys in the lower forms whose friendship blooming like two flowers on a spray shed a fragrance so poignant that tears came springing to his eyes. He began to imagine himself very old, to feel that by some unkind gift of temperament he had nothing left to live for. It chanced that summer term the History Sixth learned for repetition the Odes of Keats, and in the Ode on a Grecian Urn Michael found the expression of his mood:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

These lines were learnt in June, and for Michael they enshrined immortally his yearning. Never had the fugitive summer glided so fast, since never before had he sat in contemplation of its flight. Until this moment he had been one with the season’s joy like a bird or a sunbeam, but now for the first time he had the opportunity of regarding the empty field during the hours of school, and of populating it with the merry ghosts of the year with Caryll. All through schooltime the mowing-machine hummed its low harmony of perishable minutes and wasted sunlight. The green field was scattered with the wickets of games in progress that stood luminously in golden trios, so brightly did the sunny weather enhance their wood. The scoring-board of the principal match stared like a stopped clock with the record of the last breathless run, and as if to mock the stillness from a distant corner came a sound of batting, where at the nets the two professionals practised idly. A bluebottle buzzed upon the window-pane; pigeons flapped from pinnacle to pinnacle of the chapel; sparrows cheeped on a persistent note; pens scratched paper; Mr. Kirkham turned a Blue Book’s page at regular intervals.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied

For ever piping songs for ever new.

Thus for him would the trancÈd scene for ever survive.

The History Sixth were for the purposes of cricket linked to the Classical Lower Sixth, but Michael did not play that term. Instead, a strayed reveller, he would move from game to game of the Junior School, hearing the shrill encouragement and pondering the rose-red agility of a Classical lower form, in triumph over minor Moderns. Michael was continually trying to perceive successors to himself and Alan, and he would often enter into shy colloquy with the juniors, who were awed by his solemn smile, and shuffled uneasily from leg to leg.

Two boys whom Michael finally determined should stand as types of Alan and him gradually emerged from the white throng of Lower School cricket. One of them was indeed very like Alan, and had the same freckled smile. With this pair Michael became intimate, as one becomes intimate with two puppies. He would pet and scold them, encourage them to be successful in their sport, and rebuke them for failure. They perhaps found him entertaining, and were certainly proud to be seen in conversation with him, for though Michael himself was not an athletic hero, he was the companion of heroes, and round him clung the shining mirage of their immortality.

Then one day, unknown to Michael, these two boys became involved in a scandal; the inquisition of a great public school pinned them down desperately struggling, miserably afraid; the rumour of their expulsion went callously round the gossiping ranks of their fellows. Michael was informed of their disgrace by dark-eyed Mallock whose father wrote columnar letters to The Times. Michael said bitter things to the complacent Mallock and offered with serious want of dignity for a member of the leisurely and cultivated History Sixth, to punch Mallock’s damned head.

Mallock said sneeringly that he supposed Michael sympathized with the little beasts. Michael replied that he merely sympathized with them because he was profoundly sure that it was a pack of lies.

“You’d better go and tell the Old Man that, because they say he’s going to expel them to-day.”

Michael turned pale with fury.

“I damned well will go, and when I come back I’ll ram you upside down in the Tuck Shop butter-tub.”

Mallock flushed under the ignominy of this threat, and muttered his conviction that Michael was talking through his hat. Just then Mr. Kirkham entered the class-room, and Michael immediately went up to him and asked if he might go and speak to the Headmaster.

Mr. Kirkham stared with amazement, and his voice, which always seemed to hesitate whether it should come out through his mouth or his nose, on this occasion never came out at all, but stayed in the roof of Mr. Kirkham’s mouth.

“Can I, sir?” Michael repeated.

“I suppose you can,” said Mr. Kirkham.

The class followed Michael’s exit with wide eyes; even the phlegmatic Strang was so deeply moved that he sat upright in his chair and tapped his head to indicate midsummer madness.

Outside in the echoing corridor, where the plaster casts looked coldly down, Michael wrestled with his leaping heart, forcing it into tranquillity so that he could grapple with the situation he had created for himself. By the LaocoÖn he paused. Immediately beyond was the sombre doorway of the Head’s room. As he paused on the threshold two ridiculous thoughts came to him—that Lessing’s LaocoÖn was one of the set books for the English Literature prize, and that he would rather be struggling in the coils of that huge stone snake than standing thus invertebrate before this portentous door.

Then Michael tapped. There was no answer but a dull buzz of voices. Again Michael tapped and, beating down his heart, turned the handle that seemed as he held it to swell to pumpkin size in his grasp. Slowly he pushed the door before him, expecting to hear a bellowed summons to appear, and wondering whether he could escape unknown to his class-room if his nerve failed him even now. Then he heard the sound of tears, and indignation drove him onwards, drove him so urgently that actually he slammed the great door behind him, and made the intent company aware of his presence.

“What do you want?” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I want to speak to you, sir.” The words actually seemed to come from his mouth winged with flames, such a volcano was Michael now.

“I’m busy. Go outside and wait,” roared the Headmaster.

Michael paused to regard the scene—the two boys sobbing with painful regular intake of breath, oblivious of him; the witnesses, a sheepish crew; the school-porter waiting for his prey; old Mr. Caryll coughing nervously and apparently on the verge of tears himself; the odious Paul Pry of a Secretary nibbling his pen; and in the background other masters waiting with favourable or damning testimony.

The drama of gloating authority shook Michael to the very foundation of his being, and he came rapidly into the middle of the room, came right up to the Headmaster, until he felt engulfed in the black silk gown, and at last said slowly and with simple conviction:

“I think you’re all making a mistake.”

When he had spoken Michael could have kicked himself for not shouting furiously the torrid denunciations which had come surging up for utterance. Then he immediately began to talk again, to his own great surprize, calmly and very reasonably.

“I know these kids—these two boys, I mean—quite well. It’s impossible for any of this to be true. I’ve seen them a lot this term—practically every day. Really, sir, you’ll make a terrible mistake if you expel them. They’re awfully decent little chaps. They are really, sir. Of course they’re too frightened now to say anything for themselves. It’s not fair for everybody to be set at them like this.”

Michael looked despairingly at the masters assembled.

“And these other boys who’ve been brought in to tell what they know. Why, they’re frightened too. They’d say anything. Why don’t you, why don’t you——”

Michael looked round in despair, stammered, broke down, and then to his own eternal chagrin burst into tears. He moved hastily over to the window, striving to pull himself together, seeing through an overpowering blur the great green field in the garish sunlight. Yet his tears, shameful to him, may have turned the scale, for one by one the masters came forward with eager testimony of good; and with every word of praise the tears rushed faster and faster to Michael’s eyes. Then he heard old Caryll’s rasping cough and broken benignant sentences, which with all their memories lulled his emotion to quietude again.

“Hope you’ll bring it in non probatum, Headmaster”—cough—cough—“good boys both”—cough—cough—“sure it’s a mistake—Fane’s a good boy too—idle young rascal—but a good heart”—cough—cough—“had him under me for a year—know him well——”

Dr. Brownjohn, with a most voluminous wave, dismissed the matter. Everyone, even the Paul Pry of a Secretary, went out of the room, and as the door closed Michael heard Mr. Caryll addressing the victims.

“Now then, don’t cry any more, you young boobies.”

Michael’s thoughts followed them upstairs to the jolly class-room, and he almost smiled at the imagination of Mr. Caryll’s entrance and the multitudinous jokes that would demonstrate his relief at his pupils’ rescue. Michael recovered from his dream to find the Headmaster speaking to him in his most rumbling bass.

“I don’t know why I allowed you to interfere in this disgraceful affair, boy. Um?”

“No, sir,” Michael agreed.

“But since you are here, I will take the opportunity of warning you that the company you keep is very vile.”

Michael looked apprehensive.

“If you think nothing is known of your habits out of school, you are much mistaken. I will not have any boy at my school frequenting the house of that deboshed nincompoop Wilmot.”

Dr. Brownjohn’s voice was now so deep that it vibrated in the pit of Michael’s stomach like the diapason of the school organ.

“Give up that detestable association of mental impostors and be a boy again. You have disappointed me during the whole of your career; but you’re a winning boy. Um? Go back to your work.”

Michael left the august room with resolves swaying in his brain, wondering what he could do to repay the Old Man. It was too late to take a very high place in the summer examinations. Yet somehow, so passionate was his gratitude, he managed to come out third.

Michael never told his mother about his adventure, but in the reaction against Wilmot and all that partook of decadence, and in his pleasure at having done something, however clumsily, he felt a great wish to include his mother in his emotion of universal love.

“Where are we going these holidays?” he asked.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to stay at your monastery again,” said Mrs. Fane. “I was thinking of going abroad.”

Michael’s face fell, and his mother was solicitously penitent.

“My dearest boy, I never dreamed you would want to be with me. You’ve always gone out on Sundays.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I won’t again,” Michael assured her.

“And I’ve made my arrangements now. I wish I’d known. But why shouldn’t you go and see Stella? It seems a pity that you and she should grow up so much apart.”

“Well, I will, if you like,” said Michael.

“Dearest boy, what has happened to you? You are so agreeable,” exclaimed Mrs. Fane.

In the end it was arranged that Michael should accompany Mr. Viner on his holiday in France, and afterwards stay with Stella with a family at CompiÈgne for the rest of the time. Michael went to see his mother off at Charing Cross before he joined Mr. Viner.

“Darling Michael,” she murmured as the train began to move slowly forward. “You’re looking so well and happy—just like you were two years ago. Just like——”

The rest of the comparison was lost in the noise of the speeding train.

Chapter X: Stella

M ICHAEL spent a charming fortnight with Father Viner in Amiens, Chartres and Rouen. The early Masses to which they went along the cool, empty streets of the morning, and the shadowy, candle-lit Benedictions from which they came home through the deepening dusk gave to Michael at least a profound hope, if not the astonishing faith of his first religious experience. Sitting with the priest at the open window of their inn, while down below the footsteps of the wayfarers were pattering like leaves, Michael recaptured some of that emotion of universal love which with sacramental force had filled his heart during the wonder of transition from boyhood to adolescence. He did not wish to know more about these people than could be told by the sound of their progress so light, so casual, so essentially becoming to the sapphirine small world in which they hurried to and fro. The passion of hope overwhelmed Michael’s imagination with a beauty that was perfectly expressed by the unseen busy populations of a city’s waning twilight. Love, birth, death, greed, ambition, all humanity’s stress of thought and effort, were merged in a murmurous contentment of footfalls and faint-heard voices. Michael supposed that somehow to God the universe must sound much as this tall street of Rouen sounded now to him at his inn window, and he realized for the first time how God must love the world. Later, the twilight and voices and footfalls would fade together into night, and through long star-scattered silences Michael would brood with a rapture that became more than hope, if less than faith with restless, fiery heart. Then clocks would strike sonorously; the golden window-panes would waver and expire; Mr. Viner would tap his pipe upon the sill; and Michael and he would follow their own great shadows up into bedrooms noisy in the night-wind and prophetic of sleep’s immense freedom, until with the slanting beams of dawn Michael would wake and at Mass time seek to enchain with prayers indomitable dreams.

The gravity of Michael’s demeanour suited the grey town in which he sojourned, and though Mr. Viner used to teaze him about his saintly exterior, the priest seemed to enjoy his company.

“But don’t look so solemn when you meet your sister, or she’ll think you’re sighing for a niche in Chartres Cathedral, which for a young lady emancipated from Germany would be a most distressing thought.”

“I’m enjoying myself,” said Michael earnestly.

“My dear old chap, I’m not questioning that for a moment, and personally I find your attitude consorts very admirably with the mood in which these northern towns of France always throw me,” said Mr. Viner.

The fortnight came to an end, and to commemorate this chastening interlude of a confidence and a calm whose impermanence Michael half dreaded, half desired, he bought a pair of old candlesticks for the Notting Dale Mission. Michael derived a tremendous consolation from this purchase, for he felt that, even if in the future he should be powerless to revive this healing time, its austere hours would be immortalized, mirrored somehow in the candlesticks’ bases as durably as if engraved upon a Grecian urn. There was in this impulse nothing more sentimental than in his erection last year of the small cairn to celebrate a fleeting moment of faith on the Berkshire downs.

Stella was already settled in the bosom of the French family when Michael reached CompiÈgne, and as he drove towards the Pension he began for the first time to wonder what his sister would be like after these two years. He was inclined to suppose that she would be a problem, and he already felt qualms about the behaviour of her projected suddenly like this from Germany into an atmosphere of romance. For Michael, France always stood out as typically romantic to his fancy. Spain and Italy were not within his realization as yet, and Germany he conceived of as a series of towns filled with the noise of piano-scales and hoarse gutturals. He hoped that Stella was not even now plunged into a girlish love-affair with one of the idle young Frenchmen who haunted so amorously the sunshine of this gay land. He even began to rehearse, as his carriage jolted along the cobbled embankment of the Oise, a particularly scathing scene in which he coldly denounced the importunate lover, while Stella stood abashed by fraternal indignation. Then he reflected that after all Stella was only fifteen and, as he remembered her, too much wrapped up in a zest for public appreciation to be very susceptible of private admiration. Moreover, he knew that most of her time was occupied by piano-practice. An emotion of pride in his accomplished sister displaced the pessimism of his first thoughts. He took pleasure in the imagination of her swaying the whole Pension by her miraculous execution, and he began to build up the picture of his entrance upon the last crashing chords of a sonata, when after the applause had ceased he would modestly step forward as the brother of this paragon.

The carriage was now bowling comfortably along a wide tree-shaded avenue bordered on either side by stretches of greenery which were dappled with children and nursemaids and sedate little girls with bobbing pigtails. Michael wondered if Stella was making a discreet promenade with the ladies of the family, half hoped she was, that he might reach the Pension before her and gracefully welcome her, as she, somewhat flustered by being late for his arrival, hurried up the front-door steps. Then, just as he was wondering whether there would or would not be front-door steps to the Pension, the cab drew up by a house with a green verandah and front-garden geranium-dyed to right and left of a vivid gravel path. Michael perceived, with a certain disapproval, that the verandah sheltered various ladies in wicker chairs. He disliked the notion of carrying up his bag in the range of their cool criticism, nor did he relish the conversation that would have to be embarked upon with the neat maid already hurrying to meet him. But most contrary to his preconceived idea of arrival was the affectionate ambush laid for him by Stella just when he was trying to remember whether ‘chambre’ were masculine or feminine. Yet, even as he felt Stella’s dewy lips on his, and her slim fingers round his neck, he reproached himself for his silly shyness, although he could only say:

“Hullo, look out for my collar.”

Stella laughed ripplingly.

“Oh, Michael,” she cried, “I’m most frightfully glad to see you, you darling old Michael.”

Michael looked much alarmed at the amazing facility of her affectionate greeting, and vaguely thought how much easier existence must be to a girl who never seemed to be hampered by any feeling of what people within earshot would think of her. Yet almost immediately Stella herself relapsed into shyness at the prospect of introducing Michael to the family, and it was only the perfectly accomplished courtesy of Madame Regnier which saved Michael from summarily making up his mind that these holidays were going to be a most ghastly failure.

The business of unpacking composed his feelings slightly, and a tap at his door, followed by Stella’s silvery demand to come in, gave him a thrill of companionship. He suddenly realized, too, that he and his sister had corresponded frequently during their absence, and that this queer shyness at meeting her in person was really absurd. Stella, wandering round the room with his ties on her arm, gave Michael real pleasure, and she for her part seemed highly delighted at the privilege of superintending his unpacking.

He noted with a sentimental fondness that she still hummed, and he was very much impressed by the flowers which she had arranged in the cool corners of the pleasant room. On her appearance, too, as she hung over the rail of his bed chatting to him gaily, he congratulated himself. He liked the big apple-green bows in her chestnut hair; he liked her slim white hands and large eyes; and he wondered if her smile were like his, and hoped it was, since it was certainly very subtle and attractive.

“What sort of people hang out in this place?” he asked.

“Oh, nice people,” Stella assured him. “Madame Regnier is a darling, and she loves my playing, and Monsieur is fearfully nice, with a grey beard. We always play billiards in the evening, and drink cassis. It’s lovely. There are three darling old ladies, widows I think. They sit and listen to me playing, and when I’ve finished pay me all sorts of compliments, which sound so pretty in French. One of them said I was ‘ravissante.’”

“Are there any kids?” asked Michael.

Stella said there were no kids, and Michael sighed his relief.

“Do you practise much?”

“Oh, no, I’m having a holiday, I only practise three hours a day.”

“How much?” asked Michael. “Good Lord, do you call that a holiday?”

“Why, you silly old thing, of course it is,” rippled Stella.

Presently it was time for dÉjeuner, and they sat down to eat in a room, of shaded sunlight, watching the green jalousies that glowed like beryls, and listening to a canary’s song. Michael was introduced to Madame Graves, Madame Lamarque and Madame Charpentier, the three old widows who lived at the Pension, and who all looked strangely alike, with their faces and hands of aged ivory and their ruffles and wristbands starched to the semblance of fretted white coral. They ate mincingly in contrast to M. Regnier who, guarded by a very large napkin, pitchforked his food into his mouth with noisy recklessness. Later in the mellow August afternoon Michael and he walked solemnly round the town together, and Michael wondered if he had ever before raised his hat so many times.

After dinner, when the coffee and cassis had been drunk, Madame Regnier invited Stella to play to them. Dusk was falling in the florid French drawing-room, but so rich was the approach of darkness that no lamps brooded with rosy orbs, and only a lighted candle on either side of Stella stabbed the gloom in which the listeners leaned quietly back against the tropic tapestries of their chairs, without trying to occupy themselves with books or crochet-work.

Michael sat by the scented window, watching the stars twinkle, it almost seemed, in tune with the vibrant melodies that Stella rang out. In the bewitching candlelight the keyboard trembled and shimmered like water to a low wind. Deep in the shadow the three old ladies sat in a waxen ecstasy, so still that Michael wondered whether they were alive. He did not know whose tunes they were that Stella played; he did not know what dreams they wove for the old ladies, whether of spangled opera-house or ball; he did not care, being content to watch the lissome hands that from time to time went dancing away on either side from the curve of Stella’s straight back, whether to play with raindrops in the treble or marshal thunders from the bass. The candlelight sprayed her flowing chestnut hair with a golden mist that might have been an aureole over which the apple-green bows floated unsubstantial like amazing moths.

Michael continually tried to shape his ideas to the inspiration of the music, but every image that rose battling for expression lost itself in a peerless stupefaction.

Then suddenly Stella stopped playing, and the enchantment was dispelled by murmurous praise and entering lamplight. Stella, slim as a fountain, stood upright in the centre of the drawing-room and, like a fountain, swayed now this way, now that, to catch the compliments so dear to her. Michael wished the three old ladies would not appeal to him to endorse their so perfectly phrased enthusiasm, and grew very conscious of the gradual decline of ‘oui’ into ‘wee’ as he supported their laudation. He was glad when M. Regnier proposed a game of billiards, and glad to see that Stella could romp, romp so heartily indeed that once or twice he had to check a whispered rebuke.

But later on when he said good night to her outside his bedroom, he had an impulse to hug her close for the unimaginable artistry of this little sister.

Michael and Stella went out next day to explore the forest of CompiÈgne. They wandered away from the geometrical forest roads into high glades and noble chases; they speculated upon the whereabouts of the wild-boars that were hunted often, and therefore really did exist; they lay deep in the bracken utterly remote in the ardent emerald light, utterly quiet save for the thrum of insects rising and falling. In this intimate seclusion Michael found it easy enough to talk to Stella. Somehow her face, magnified by the proportions of the surrounding vegetation, scarcely seemed to belong to her, and Michael had a sensation of a fairy fellowship, as he felt himself being absorbed into her wide and strangely magical eyes. Seen like this they were as overwhelmingly beautiful as two flowers, holding mysteries of colour and form that could never be revealed save thus in an abandonment of contemplation.

“Why do you stare at me, Michael?” she asked.

“Because I think it’s funny to realize that you and I are as nearly as it’s possible to be the same person, and yet we’re as different from each other as we are from the rest of people. I wonder, if you didn’t know I was your brother, and I didn’t know you were my sister, if we should have a sort of—what’s the word?—intuition about it? For instance, you can play the piano, and I can’t even understand the feeling of being able to play the piano. I wish we knew our father. It must be interesting to have a father and a mother, and see what part of one comes from each.”

“I always think father and mother weren’t married,” said Stella.

Michael blushed hotly, taken utterly aback.

“I say, my dear girl, don’t say things like that. That’s a frightful thing to say.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why, because people would be horrified to hear a little girl talking like that,” Michael explained.

“Oh, I thought you meant they’d be shocked to think of people not being married.”

“I say, really, you know, Stella, you ought to be careful. I wouldn’t have thought you even knew that people sometimes—very seldom, though, mind—don’t get married.”

“You funny old boy,” rippled Stella. “You must think I’m a sort of doll just wound up to play the piano. If I didn’t know that much after going to Germany, why—oh, Michael, I do think you’re funny.”

“I was afraid these beastly foreigners would spoil you,” muttered Michael.

“It’s not the foreigners. It’s myself.”

“Stella!”

“Well, I’m fifteen and a half.”

“I thought girls were innocent,” said Michael with disillusion in his tone.

“Girls grow older quicker than boys.”

“But I mean always innocent,” persisted Michael. “I don’t mean all girls, of course. But—well—a girl like you.”

“Very innocent girls are usually very stupid girls,” Stella asserted.

Michael made a resolution to watch his sister’s behaviour when she came back to London next year to make her first public appearance at a concert. For the moment, feeling overmatched, he changed the trend of his reproof.

“Well, even if you do talk about people not being married, I think it’s rotten to talk about mother like that.”

“You stupid old thing, as if I should do it with anyone but you, and I only talked about her to you because you look so sort of cosy and confidential in these ferns.”

“They’re not ferns—they’re bracken. If I thought such a thing was possible,” declared Michael, “I believe I’d go mad. I don’t think I could ever again speak to anybody I knew.”

“Why not, if they didn’t know?”

“How like a girl! Stella, you make me feel uncomfortable, you do really.”

Stella stretched her full length in the luxurious greenery.

“Well, mother never seems unhappy.”

“Exactly,” said Michael eagerly. “Therefore, what you think can’t possibly be true. If it were, she’d always look miserable.”

“Well, then who was our father?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Michael gloomily. “I believe he’s in prison—or perhaps he’s in an asylum, or deformed.”

Stella shuddered.

“Michael, what a perfectly horrible idea. Deformed!”

“Well, wouldn’t you sooner he were deformed than that you were—than that—than the other idea?” Michael stammered.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Stella cried. “I’d much, much, much rather that mother was never married.”

Michael tried to drag his mind towards the comprehension of this unnatural sentiment, but the longer he regarded it the worse it seemed, and with intense irony he observed to Stella:

“I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you’re in love.”

“I’m not in love just at the moment,” said Stella blandly.

“Do you mean to say you have been in love?”

“A good deal,” she admitted.

Michael leaped to his feet, and looked down on her recumbent in the bracken.

“But only in a stupid schoolgirly way?” he gasped.

“Yes, I suppose it was,” Stella paused. “But it was fearfully thrilling all the same—especially in duets.”

“Duets?”

“I used to read ahead, and watch where our hands would come together, and then the notes used to get quite slippery with excitement.”

“Look here,” Michael demanded, drawing himself up, “are you trying to be funny?”

“No,” Stella declared, rising to confront Michael. “He was one of my masters. He was only about thirty, and he was killed in Switzerland by an avalanche.”

Michael was staggered by the confession of this shocking and precocious child, as one after another his chimeras rose up to leer at him triumphantly.

“And did he make love to you? Did he try to kiss you?” Michael choked out.

“Oh, no,” said Stella. “That would have spoilt it all.”

Michael sighed under a faint lightening of his load, and Stella came up to him engagingly to slip her arm into his.

“Don’t be angry with me, Michael, because I have wanted so dreadfully to be great friends with you and tell you all my secrets. I want to tell you what I think about when I’m playing; and, Michael, you oughtn’t to be angry with me, because you were simply just made to be told secrets. That’s why I played so well last night. I was telling you a secret all the time.”

“Do you know what it is, Stella?” said Michael, with a certain awe in his voice. “I believe our father is in an asylum, and I believe you and I are both mad—not raving mad, of course—but slightly mad.”

“All geniuses are,” said Stella earnestly.

“But we aren’t geniuses.”

“I am,” murmured Stella in a strangely quiet little voice that sounded in Michael’s ears like the song of a furtive melodious bird.

“Are you?” he whispered, half frightened by this assertion, delivered under huge overarching trees in the burning silence of the forest. “Who told you so?”

“I told myself so. And when I tell myself something very solemnly, I can’t be anything but myself, and I must be speaking the truth.”

“But even if you’re a genius—and I suppose you might be—I’m not a genius. I’m clever, but I’m not a genius.”

“No, but you’re the nearest person to being me, and if you’re not a genius, I think you can understand. Oh, Michael,” Stella cried, clasping his arm to her heart, “you do understand, because you never laughed when I told you I was a genius. I’ve told lots of girl-friends, and they laugh and say I’m conceited.”

“Well, you are,” said Michael, feeling bound not to lose the opportunity of impressing Stella with disapproval as well as comprehension.

“I know I am. But I must be to go on being myself. Oh, you darling brother, you do understand me. I’ve longed for someone to understand me. Mother’s only proud of me.”

“I’m not at all proud of you,” said Michael crushingly.

“I don’t want you to be. If you were proud of me, you’d think I belonged to you, and I don’t ever want to belong to anybody.”

“I shouldn’t think you ever would,” said Michael encouragingly, as they paced the sensuous mossy path in a rapture of avowals. “I should think you’d frighten anybody except me. But why do you fall in love, then?”

“Oh, because I want to make people die with despair.”

“Great Scott, you are an unearthly kid.”

“Oh, I’m glad I’m unearthly,” said Stella. “I’d like to be a sort of Undine. I think I am. I don’t think I’ve got a soul, because when I play I go rushing out into the darkness to look for my soul, and the better I play the nearer I get.”

Michael stopped beneath an oak-tree and surveyed this extraordinary sister of his.

“Well, I always thought I was a mystic, but, good Lord, you’re fifty times as much of a mystic as I am,” he exclaimed with depressed conviction.

Suddenly Stella gave a loud scream.

“What on earth are you yelling at?” said Michael.

“Oh, Michael, look—a most enormous animal. Oh, look, oh, let me get up a tree. Oh, help me up. Push me up this tree.”

“It’s a wild-boar,” declared Michael in a tone of astonished interest.

Stella screamed louder than ever and clung to Michael, sobbing. The boar, however, went on its way, routing among the herbage.

“Well, you may be a genius,” said Michael, “but you’re an awful little funk.”

“But I was frightened.”

“Wild-boars aren’t dangerous except when they’re being hunted,” Michael asserted positively.

Stella soon became calm under the influence of her brother’s equanimity. Arm-in-arm they sauntered back towards CompiÈgne, and so for a month of serene weather they sauntered every day, and every day Michael pondered more and more deeply the mystery of woman. He was sorry to say good-bye to Stella when she went back to Germany, and longed for the breathless hour of her first concert, wishful that all his life he might stand between her and the world, the blundering wild-boar of a world.

Chapter XI: Action and Reaction

A LMOST before the confusion of a new term had subsided, Michael put his name down to play football again, and it was something in the nature of an occasion when in the first sweltering Middle-side game he scored six tries. Already his contemporaries had forgotten that he was once a fleet and promising three-quarter, so that his resurrection was regarded as an authentic apparition, startling in its unexpectedness. Michael was the only person not much surprized when he was invited by Abercrombie to play as substitute for one of the Seniors absent from a Big-side trial. Yet even Michael was surprized when in the opening match between Classics and Moderns he read his name on the notice-board as sixteenth man; and when, through the continued illness of the first choice, he actually found himself walking on to the field between the black lines of spectators, he was greatly content. Yet the finest thrill of all came when in the line-out he found himself on the left wing with Alan, with Alan not very unlike the old Alan even now in the coveted Tyrian vest of the Classical First Fifteen.

Into that game Michael poured all he felt of savage detestation for everything that the Modern side stood for. Not an opponent was collared that did not in his falling agony take on the likeness of Percy Garrod; not a Modern half-back was hurled into touch who was not in Michael’s imagination insolent with damnably destructive theories of life. It was exhilarating, it was superb, it was ineffable, the joy of seeing Alan hand off a Modern bounder and swing the ball out low to him crouching vigilant upon the left. It was intoxicating, it was divine to catch the ball, and with zigzag leap and plunge to tear wildly on towards the Modern goal, to hear the Classical lower boys shriek their high-voiced thrilling exhortations, to hear the maledictions of the enemy ricochetting from a force of speed that spun its own stability. Back went the ball to Alan, shouting with flushed face on his right, just as one of the Modern three-quarters, with iron grip round Michael’s faltering knees, fetched him crashing down.

“Good pass,” cried the delighted Classical boys, and “Well run, sir, well run, sir!” they roared as Alan whizzed the ball along to the dapper, the elusive, the incomparable Terry. “Go in, yourself,” they prayed, as Terry like a chamois bounded straight at the despairing full-back, then with a gasp that triumphed over the vibrant hush, checked himself, and in one peerless spring breasted the shoulders of the back to come thudding down upon the turf with a glorious try.

Now the game swayed desperately, and with Alan ever beside him Michael lived through every heroic fight of man. They were at Thermopylae, stemming the Persian charges with hack and thrust and sweeping cut; they were at Platea with Aristides and Pausanias, vowing death rather than subjugation; the body of Terry beneath a weight of Modern forwards, crying, “Let me up, you stinkers!” was fought for as long ago beneath the walls of Troy the battle raged about the body of Patroclus. And when the game was over, when the Moderns had been defeated for the first time in four resentful years of scientific domination, when the Classical Fifteen proudly strode from the field, immortal in muddied Tyrian, it was easy enough to walk across the gravel arm-in-arm with Alan and, while still the noise of the contest and the cries of the onlookers echoed in their ears, it was easy to span the icy floes of two drifting years in one moment of careless, artless intercourse.

“You’ll get your Second Fifteen colours,” said Alan confidently.

“Not this year,” Michael thought.

“You’ll get your Third Fifteen cap for a snip.”

“Yes, I ought to get that,” Michael agreed.

“Well, that’s damned good, considering you haven’t played for two years,” Alan vowed.

And as he spoke Michael wondered if Alan had ever wished for his company in the many stressful games from which he had been absent.

Michael now became one of that group of happy immortals in the entrance-hall, whose attitudes of noble ease graced the hot-water pipes below the ‘board’ on which the news of the school fluctuated daily. This society, to which nothing gave admission but a profound sense of one’s own right to enter it, varied from time to time only in details. As a whole composition it was immutable, as permanent, as decorative and as appropriate as the frieze of the Parthenon. From twenty minutes past nine until twenty-seven minutes past nine, from twenty-five minutes past eleven until twenty-eight minutes past eleven, from ten minutes to three until two minutes to three the heroes of the school met in a large familiarity whose Olympian laughter awed the fearful small boy that flitted uneasily past and chilled the slouching senior that rashly paused to examine the notices in assertion of an unearned right. Even masters entering through the swinging doors seemed glad to pass beyond the range of the heroes’ patronizing contemplation.

Michael found a pedestal here, and soon idealized the heedless stupidity of these immortals into a Lacedemonian rigour which seemed to him very fine. He accepted their unimaginative standards, their coarseness, their brutality as virtues, and in them he saw the consummation of all that England should cherish. He successfully destroyed a legend that he was clever, and though at first he found it difficult to combat the suspicion of Æsthetic proclivities and religious eccentricity, even of poetic ambitions which overshadowed his first welcome, he was at last able to get these condoned as a blemish upon an otherwise diverting personality with a tongue nimble enough to make heroes guffaw. Moreover, he was a friend of Alan, who with his slim disdain and perfectly stoic bearing was irreproachable, and since Michael frankly admired his new friends, and since he imparted just enough fantasy to their stolid fellowship to lend it a faint distinction, he was very soon allowed to preserve a flavour of oddity, and became in time arbiter of whatever elegance they could claim. Michael on his side was most anxious to conform to every prejudice of the Olympians, esteeming their stolidity far above his own natural demeanour, envious too of their profoundly ordinary point of view and their commonplace expression of it.

Upon this assembly descended the news of war with the Transvaal, and for three months at least Michael shared in the febrile elation and arrogance and complacent outlook of the average Englishman. The Olympians recalled from early schooldays the forms of heroes who were even now gazetted to regiments on their way to the front, and who but a little while ago had lounged against these very hot-water pipes. Sandhurst and Woolwich candidates lamented their ill-luck in being born too young, and consoled themselves with proclaiming that after all the war was so easy that scarcely were they missing anything at all. Then came the first low rumble of defeat, the first tremulous breath of doubt.

Word went round that meetings were being held to stop the war, and wrathfully the heroes mounted a London Road Car omnibus, snatched the Union Jack from its socket, and surged into Hammersmith Town Hall to yell and hoot at the farouche Irishmen and dirty Socialists who were mouthing their hatred of the war and exulting in the unlucky capture of two regiments. The School Cadet Corps could not accept the mass of recruits that demanded to be enrolled. Drums were bought by subscription, and in the armoury down under the School tattoo and rataplan voiced the martial spirit of St. James’.

One day Alan brought back the news that his Uncle Kenneth was ordered to the front, that he would sail from Southampton in a few days. Leave was granted Alan to go and say good-bye, and in the patriotic fervour that now burned even in the hearts of schoolmasters, Michael was accorded leave to accompany him.

They travelled down to Southampton on a wet, windy November day, proud to think as they sat opposite one another in the gloomy railway-carriage that in some way since this summons they were both more intimately connected with the war.

In a dreary Southampton hotel they met Mrs. Ross, and Michael thought that she was very beautiful and very brave waiting in the chilly fly-blown dining-room of the hotel. Three years of marriage scarcely seemed to have altered his dear Miss Carthew; yet there was a dignity, a carven stillness that Michael had never associated with the figure of his governess, or perhaps it was that now he was older, more capable of appreciating the noble lines of this woman.

It gave Michael a sentimental pang to watch Mrs. Ross presiding over their lunch as she had in the past presided over so many lunches. They spoke hardly at all of Captain Ross’s departure, but they talked of Nancy, and how well she was doing as secretary to Lord Perham, of Mrs. Carthew, still among the roses and plums of Cobble Place, and of a hundred jolly bygone events. Mrs. Ross was greatly interested to hear of Stella, and greatly amused by Michael’s arrangement of her future.

Then Captain Ross came in, and after a few jokes, which fell very flat in the bleak dining-room—perhaps because the two boys were in awe of this soldier going away to the wars, or perhaps because they knew that there was indeed nothing to joke about—said:

“The regiment comes in by the 2.45. We shall embark at once. What’s the time now?”

Everyone, even the mournful waiter, stared up at the wall. It was two o’clock.

“Half an hour before I need go down to the station,” said Captain Ross, and then he began to whistle very quietly. The wind was getting more boisterous, and the rain rattled on the windows as if, without, a menacing hand flung gravel for a signal.

“Can you two boys amuse yourselves for a little while?” asked Captain Ross.

“Oh, rather,” said Michael and Alan.

“I’ve just one or two things I wanted to say to you, dear,” said Captain Ross, turning to his wife. They left the dining-room together. Michael and Alan sat silently at the table, crumbling bread and making patterns in the salt-cellar. They could hear the gaunt clock ticking away on the stained wall above them. From time to time far-off bugles sounded above the tossing wind. So they sat for twenty solemn minutes. Then the husband and wife came back. The bill was paid; the door of the hotel swung back; the porter said ‘Good luck, sir,’ very solemnly, and in a minute they were walking down the street towards the railway-station through the wind and rain.

“I’ll see you on the dock in a moment,” said Captain Ross. “You’d better take a cab down and wait under cover.”

Thence onwards for an hour or more all was noise, excitement and bustle in contrast to the brooding, ominous calm of the dingy hotel. Regiments were marching down to the docks; bands were playing; there were drums and bugles, shouts of command, clatter of horses, the occasional rumble of a gun-carriage, enquiries, the sobbing of children and women, oaths, the hooting of sirens, a steam-engine’s whistle, and at last, above everything else, was heard the wail of approaching pipes.

Nearer and nearer swirled the maddening, gladdening, heart-rending tune they played; the Kintail Highlanders were coming; they swung into view; they halted, company after company of them; there were shouts of command very close; suddenly Michael found his hand clenched and saw Captain Ross’s grey eyes smiling good-bye; Alan’s sleeve seemed to have a loose thread that wanted biting off; the sirens of the great transport trumpeted angrily and, resounding through the sinking hearts of those who were not going, robbed them of whatever pluck was left. Everywhere in view sister, mother, and wife were held for a moment by those they loved. The last man was aboard; the gangway was hauled up; the screw pounded the water; the ship began to glide away from the dock with slow, sickening inevitableness. Upon the air danced handkerchiefs, feeble fluttering envoys of the passionate farewells they flung to the wind. Spellbound, intolerably powerless, the watchers on shore waved and waved; smaller grew the faces leaning over the rail; smaller and smaller, until at last they were unrecognizable to those left behind; and now the handkerchiefs were waved in a new fever of energy as if with the fading of the faces there had fallen upon the assembly a fresh communal grief, a grief that, no longer regarding personal heartbreaks, frantically pursued the great graceful ship herself whose prow was straining for the open sea. Still, though now scarcely even were human forms discernible upon the decks, the handkerchiefs jigged on for horribly mechanic gestures, as if those who waved them were become automatons through sorrow.

Glad of the musty peace of a railway-carriage after the tears and confusion of the docks, Michael and Alan and Mrs. Ross spoke very little on the journey back to London.

“Aren’t you going to stay the night with us at Richmond?” Alan asked.

“No, I must get down to Cobble Place. My large son has already gone there with his nurse.”

“Your son?” exclaimed Michael. “Oh, of course, I forgot.”

So Alan and he put Mrs. Ross into her train and rode back together on an omnibus, proud citizens of an Empire whose inspiration they had lately beheld in action.

Next morning the Olympians on their frieze were considerably impressed by Michael’s account of the stirring scene at Southampton.

“Oh, the war will be over almost at once. We’re not taking any risks. We’re sending out enough men to conquer more than the Transvaal,” said the heroes wisely.

But soon there came the news of fresh defeats, and when in the middle of January school reassembled there were actually figures missing from the familiar composition itself. Actually contemporary heroes had left, had enlisted in the Volunteers and Yeomanry, were even now waiting for orders and meantime self-consciously wandering round the school-grounds in militant khaki. Sandhurst and Woolwich candidates passed with incredible ease; boys were coming to school in mourning; Old Jacobeans died bravely, and their deaths were recorded in the school magazine; one Old Jacobean gained the Victoria Cross, and everyone walked from prayers very proudly upon that day.

Michael was still conventionally patriotic, but sometimes with the progress of the war a doubt would creep into his mind whether this increasing blazonry of a country’s emotion were so fine as once he had thought it, whether England were losing some of her self-control under reverses, and, worst of all, whether in her victories she were becoming blatant. He remembered how he had been sickened by the accounts of American hysteria during the war with Spain, whose weaker cause, true to his earliest inclinations, he had been compelled to champion. And now when the tide was turning in England’s favour, when every other boy came to school wearing a khaki tie quartered with blue or red and some of them even came tricked out with Union Jack waistcoats, when the wearing of a British general’s head on a button and the hissing of Kruger’s name at a pantomime were signs of high emotion, when many wastrels of his acquaintance had uniforms, and when the patriotism of their friends consisted of making these undignified supernumeraries drunk, Michael began to wonder whether war conducted by a democracy had ever been much more than a circus for the populace.

And when one bleak morning in early spring he read in a fatal column that Captain Kenneth Ross had been killed in action, his smouldering resentment blazed out, and as he hurried to school with sickened heart and eyes in a mist of welling tears, he could have cursed everyone of the rosetted patriots for whose vainglory such a death paid the price. Alan, as he expected, was not at school, and Michael spent a restless, miserable morning. He hated the idea of discussing the news with his friends of the hot-water pipes, and when one by one the unimaginative, flaccid comments flowed easily forth upon an event that was too great for them even to hear, much less to speak of, Michael’s rage burst forth:

“For God’s sake, you asses, don’t talk so much. I’m sick of this war. I’m sick of reading that a lot of decent chaps have died for nothing, because it is for nothing, if this country is never again going to be able to stand defeat or victory. War isn’t anything to admire in itself. All the good of war is what it makes of the people who fight, and what it makes of the people who stay at home.”

The Olympians roared with laughter, and congratulated Michael on his humorous oration.

“Can’t you see that I’m serious? that it is important to be gentlemen?” Michael shouted.

“Who says we aren’t gentlemen?” demanded a very vapid, but slightly bellicose hero.

“Nobody says you aren’t a gentleman, you ass; at least nobody says you eat peas with a knife, but, my God, if you think it’s decent to wear that damned awful button in your coat when fellows are being killed every day for you, for your pleasure, for your profit, for your existence, all I can say is I don’t.”

Michael felt that the climax of this speech was somewhat weak, and he relapsed into silence, biting his nails with the unexpressed rage of limp words.

“You might as well say that the School oughtn’t to cheer at a football match,” said Abercrombie the Captain.

“I would say so, if I thought that all the cheerers never expected and never even intended to play themselves. That’s why professional football is so rotten.”

“You were damned glad to get your Third Fifteen cap,” Abercrombie pointed out gruffly.

The laugh that followed this rebuke from the mightiest of the immortals goaded Michael into much more than he had intended to say when he began his unlucky tirade.

“Oh, was I?” he sneered. “That’s just where you’re quite wrong, because, as a matter of fact, I don’t intend to play football any more, if School Footer is simply to be a show for a lot of wasters. I’m not going to exert myself like an acrobat in a circus, if it all means nothing.”

The heroes regarded Michael with surprize and distaste; they shrank from him coldly as if his unreasonable outburst in some way involved their honour. They laughed uncomfortably, each one hiding himself behind another’s shoulders, as if they mocked a madman. The bell for school rang, and the heroes left him. Michael, still enraged, went back to his class-room. Then he wondered if Alan would hate him for having made his uncle’s death an occasion for this breach of a school’s code of manners. He supposed sadly that Alan would not understand any more than the others what he felt. He cursed himself for having let these ordinary, obvious, fat-headed fools impose upon his imagination, as to lead him to consider them worthy of his respect. He had wasted three months in this society; he had thought he was happy and had congratulated himself upon at last finding school endurable. School was a prison, such as it always had been. He was seventeen and a schoolboy. It was ignominious. At one o’clock he waited for nobody, but walked quickly home to lunch, still fuming with the loss of his self-control and, as he looked back on the scene, of his dignity.

His mother came down to lunch with signs of a morning’s tears, and Michael looked at her in astonishment. He had not supposed that she would be much affected by the death of Captain Ross, and he enquired if she had been writing to Mrs. Ross.

“No, dear,” said Mrs. Fane. “Why should I have written to Mrs. Ross this morning?”

“Didn’t you see in the paper?” Michael asked.

“See what?”

“That Captain Ross was killed in action.”

“Oh, no,” gasped his mother, white and shuddering. “Oh, Michael, how horrible, and on the same day.”

“The same day as what?”

Mrs. Fane looked at her son for a moment very intently, as if she were minded to tell him something. Then the parlour-maid came into the room, and she seemed to change her mind, and finally said in perfectly controlled accents:

“The same day as the announcement is made that—that your old friend Lord Saxby has raised a troop of horse—Saxby’s horse. He is going to Africa almost at once.”

“Another gentleman going to be killed for the sake of these rowdy swine at home!” said Michael savagely.

“Michael! What do you mean? Don’t you admire a man for—for trying to do something for his country?”

“It depends on the country,” Michael answered, “If you think it’s worth while doing anything for what England is now, I don’t. I wouldn’t raise a finger, if London were to be invaded to-morrow.”

“I don’t understand you, dearest boy. You’re talking rather like a Radical, and rather like old Conservative gentlemen I remember as a girl. It’s such a strange mixture. I don’t think you quite understand what you’re saying.”

“I understand perfectly what I’m saving,” Michael contradicted.

“Well, then I don’t think you ought to talk like that. I don’t think it’s kind or considerate to me and, after you’ve just heard about Captain Ross’s death, I think it’s irreverent. And I thought you attached so much importance to reverence,” Mrs. Fane added in a complaining tone.

Michael was vexed by his mother’s failure to understand his point of view, and became harder and more perverse every minute.

“Lord Saxby would be shocked to hear you talking like this, shocked and horrified,” she went on.

“I’m very sorry for hurting Lord Saxby’s feelings,” said Michael with elaborate sarcasm. “But really I don’t see that it matters much to him what I think.”

“He wants to see you before he sails,” said Mrs. Fane.

“To see me? Why?” gasped Michael. “Why on earth should he want to see me?”

“Well, he’s—he’s in a way the head of our family.”

“He’s not taken much interest in me up to the present. It’s rather odd he should want to see me now when he’s going away.”

“Michael, don’t be so bitter and horrid. Lord Saxby’s so kind, and he—and he—might never come back.”

“Dearest mother,” said Michael, “I think you’re a little unreasonable. Why should I go and meet a man now, and perhaps grow to like him—and then say good-bye to him, perhaps for ever?”

“Michael, do not talk like that. You are selfish and brutal. You’ve grown up to be perfectly heartless, although you can be charming. I think you’d better not see Lord Saxby. He’d be ashamed of you.”

Michael rose in irritation.

“My dear mother, what on earth business is it of Lord Saxby’s how I behave? I don’t understand what you mean by being ashamed of me. I have lived all these years, and I’ve seen Lord Saxby once. He sent me some Siamese stamps and some soldiers. I dare say he’s a splendid chap. I know I liked him terrifically, when I was a kid, and if he’s killed I shall be sorry—I shall be more than sorry—I shall be angry, furious that for the sake of these insufferable rowdies another decent chap is going to risk his life.”

Mrs. Fane put out her hand to stop Michael’s flowing tirade, but he paid no attention, talking away less to her than to himself. Indeed, long before he had finished, she made no pretence of listening, but merely sat crying quietly.

“I’ve been thinking a good deal lately about this war,” Michael declared. “I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s a just war, whether we didn’t simply set out on it for brag and money. I’m not sure that I want to see the Boers conquered. They’re a small independent nation, and they have old-fashioned ideas and they’re narrow-minded Bible-worshippers, but there’s something noble about them, something much nobler than there is in these rotten adventurers who go out to fight them. Of course, I don’t mean by that people like Captain Ross or Lord Saxby. They’re gentlemen. They go either because it’s their duty or because they think it’s their duty. And they’re the ones that get killed. You don’t hear of these swaggerers in khaki being killed. I haven’t heard yet of many of them even going to the front at all. Oh, mother, I am fed up with the rotten core of everything that looks so fine on the outside.”

Mrs. Fane was now crying loud enough to make Michael stop in sudden embarrassment.

“I say, mother, don’t cry. I expect I’ve been talking nonsense,” he softly told her.

“I don’t know where you get these views. I was always so proud of you. I thought you were charming and mysterious, and you’re simply vulgar!”

“Vulgar?” echoed Michael in dismay.

Mrs. Fane nodded vehemently.

“Oh, well, if I’m vulgar, I’ll go.”

Michael hurried to the door.

“Where are you going?” asked his mother in alarm.

“Oh, Lord, only to school. That’s what makes a scene like this so funny. After I’ve worked myself up and made you angry——”

“Not angry, dear. Only grieved,” interrupted his mother.

“You were more than grieved when you said I was vulgar. At least I hope you were. But, after it’s all over, I go trotting off like a good little boy to school—to school—to school. Oh, mother, what is the good of expecting me to believe in the finest fellows in the world being killed, while I’m still at school? What’s the good of making me more wretched, more discontented, more alive to my own futile existence by asking me now, when he’s going away, to make friends with Lord Saxby? Oh, darling mother, can’t you realize that I’m no longer a little boy who wants to clap his hands at the sight of a red coat? Let me kiss you, mother, I’m sorry I was vulgar, but I’ve minded so dreadfully about Captain Ross, and it’s all for nothing.”

Mrs. Fane let herself be petted by her son, but she did not again ask Michael to see Lord Saxby before he went away to the war.

Alan was still absent at afternoon school, and Michael, disdaining his place in the heroic group, passed quickly into the class-room and read in Alison of Salamanca and Albuera and of the storming of Badajoz, wondering what had happened to his country since those famous dates. He supposed that then was the nation’s zenith, for from what he could make out of the Crimean War, that had been as little creditable to England as this miserable business of the present.

In the afternoon Michael thought he would walk over to Notting Dale and see Mr. Viner—perhaps he would understand some of his indignation—and this evening when all was quiet he must write to Mrs. Ross. On his way down the Kensington Road he met Wilmot, whom he had not seen since the summer, for luckily about the time of the row Wilmot had been going abroad and was only lately back. He recognized Wilmot’s fanciful walk from a distance, and nearly crossed over to the opposite pavement to avoid meeting him; but on second thoughts decided he would like to hear a fresh opinion of the war.

“Why, here’s a delightful meeting,” said Wilmot, “I have been wondering why you didn’t come round to see me. You got my cards?”

“Oh, yes, rather,” said Michael.

“I have been in Greece and Italy. I wish you had been with me. I thought of you, as I sat in the ruined rose-gardens of Paestum. You’ve no idea how well those columns of honey-coloured Travertine would become you, Michael. But I’m so glad to see that you have not yet clothed yourself in khaki. This toy war is so utterly absurd. I feel as if I were living in a Christmas bazaar. How dreadfully these puttees and haversacks debase even the most beautiful figures. What is a haversack? It sounds so Lenten, so eloquent of mortification. I have discovered some charming Cyprian cigarettes. Do come and let me watch you enjoy them. How young you look, and yet how old!”

“I’m feeling very fit,” said Michael loftily.

“How abruptly informative you are! What has happened to you?”

“I’m thinking about this war.”

“Good gracious,” cried Wilmot in mincing amazement. “What an odd subject. Soon you will be telling me that by moonlight you brood upon the Albert Memorial. But perhaps your mind is full of trophies. Perhaps you are picturing to yourself in Piccadilly a second column of Trajan displacing the amorous and acrobatic Cupid who now presides over the painted throng. Come with me some evening to the Long Bar at the Criterion, and while the Maori-like barmaids titter in their dÉvergondage , we will select the victorious site and picture to ourselves the Boer commanders chained like hairy Scythians to the chariot of whatever absurd general chooses to accept the triumph awarded to him by our legislative bourgeoisie .”

“I think I must be getting on,” said Michael.

“How urgent! You speak like Phaeton or Icarus, and pray remember the calamities that befell them. But seriously, when are you coming to see me?”

“Oh, I’m rather busy,” said Michael briefly.

Wilmot looked at him curiously with his glittering eyes for a moment. Then he spoke again:

“Farewell, Narcissus. Have you learnt that I was but a shallow pool in which to watch your reflection? Did I flatter you too much or not enough? Who shall say? But you know I’m always your friend, and when this love-affair is done, I shall always be interested to hear the legend of it told movingly when and where you will, but perhaps best of all in October when the full moon lies like a huge apricot upon the chimneys of the town. Farewell, Narcissus. Does she display your graces very clearly?”

“I’m not in love with anybody, if that’s what you mean,” said Michael.

“No? But you are on the margin of a strange pool, and soon you will be peeping over the bulrushes to stare at yourself again.”

Then Mr. Wilmot, making his pontifical and undulatory adieu, passed on.

“Silly ass!” said Michael to himself. “And he always thinks he knows everything.”

Michael turned out of the noisy main road into the sylvan urbanity of Holland Walk. A haze of tender diaphanous green clung to the boles of the smirched elms, softening the sooty decay that made their antiquity so grotesque and so dishonourable. Michael sat down for a while on a bench, inhaling the immemorial perfume of a London spring and listening to the loud courtship of the blackbirds in the ragged shrubberies that lined the railings of Holland Park. He was not made any the more content with himself by this effluence of revivified effort that impregnated the air around him. He was out of harmony with every impulse of the season, and felt just as tightly fettered now as long ago he used to feel on waits by this same line of blackened trees with Nurse to quell his lightest step towards freedom. Where was Nurse now? The pungent odour of privet blown along a dying wind of March was quick with old memories of forbidden hiding-places, and he looked up, half expectant of her mummified shape peering after his straying steps round the gnarled and blackened trunk of the nearest elm. Michael rose quickly and went on his way towards Notting Dale. This Holland Walk had always been a haunted spot, not at all a place to hearten one, especially where at the top it converged to a silent passage between wooden palings whose twinkling interstices and exudations of green slime had always been queerly sinister. Even now Michael was glad when he could hear again the noise of traffic in the Bayswater Road. As he walked on towards Mr. Viner’s house he gave rein to fanciful moralizings upon these two great roads on either side of the Park that ran a parallel course, but never met. How foreign it all seemed on this side with unfamiliar green omnibuses instead of red, with never even a well-known beggar or pavement-artist. The very sky had an alien look, seeming vaster somehow than the circumscribed clouds of Kensington. Perhaps after all the people of this intolerably surprizing city were not so much to be blamed for their behaviour during a period of war. They had nothing to hold them together, to teach them to endure and enjoy, to suffer and rejoice in company. These great main roads sweeping West and East with multitudinous chimney-pots between were symbolic of the whole muddle of existence.

“But what do I want?” Michael asked himself so loudly that an errand-boy stayed his whistling and stared after him until he turned the corner.

“I don’t know,” he muttered in the face of a fussy little woman, who jumped aside to let him pass.

Soon he was deep in one of Mr. Viner’s arm-chairs and, without waiting even to produce one of the attenuated pipes he still affected, exclaimed with desolating conviction:

“I’m absolutely sick of everything!”

“What, again?” said the priest, smiling.

“It’s this war.”

“You’re not thinking of enlisting in the Imperial Yeomanry?”

“Oh, no, but a friend of mine—Alan Merivale’s uncle—has been killed. It seems all wrong.”

“My dear old chap,” said Mr. Viner earnestly, “I’m sorry for you.”

“Oh, it isn’t me you’ve got to pity,” Michael cried. “I’d be glad of his death. It’s the finest death a fellow can have. But there’s nothing fine about it, when one sees these gibbering blockheads shouting and yelling about nothing. I don’t know what’s the matter with England.”

“Is England any worse than the rest of the world?” asked Mr. Viner.

“All this wearing of buttons and khaki ties!” Michael groaned.

“But that’s the only way the man in the street can show his devotion. You don’t object to ritualism, do you? You cross yourself and bow down. The church has colours and lights and incense. Do all these dishonour Our Lord’s death?”

“That’s different,” said Michael. “And anyway I don’t know that the comparison is much good to me now. I think I’ve lost my faith. I am sorry to shock you, Mr. Viner.”

“You don’t shock me at all, my dear boy.”

“Don’t I?” said Michael in slightly disappointed tones.

“You forget that a priest is more difficult to shock than anyone on earth.”

“I like the way you take yourself as a typical priest. Very few of them are like you.”

“Come, that’s rather a stupid remark, I think,” said Mr. Viner coldly.

“Is it? I’m sorry. It doesn’t seem to worry you very much that I’ve lost my faith,” Michael went on in an aggrieved voice.

“No, because I don’t think you have. I’ve got a high enough opinion of you to believe that if you really had lost your faith, you wouldn’t plunge comfortably down into one of my arm-chairs and give me the information in the same sort of tone you’d tell me you’d forgotten to bring back a book I’d lent you.”

“I know you always find it very difficult to take me seriously,” Michael grumbled. “I suppose that’s the right method with people like me.”

“I thought you’d come up to talk about the South African War. If I’d known the war was so near home, I shouldn’t have been so frivolous,” said the priest. His eyes were so merry in the leaping firelight that Michael was compelled against his will to smile.

“Of course, you make me laugh at the time and I forget how serious I meant to be when I arrived, and it’s not until I’m at home again that I realize I’m no nearer to what I wanted to say than when I came up,” protested Michael.

“I’m not the unsympathetic boor you’d make me out,” Mr. Viner said.

“Oh, I perfectly understand that all this heart-searching becomes a nuisance. But honestly, Mr. Viner, I think I’ve done nothing long enough.”

“Then you do want to enlist?” said the priest quickly.

“Why must ‘doing’ mean only one thing nowadays? Surely South Africa hasn’t got a monopoly of whatever’s being done,” Michael argued. “No, I don’t want to enlist,” he went on. “And I don’t want to go into a monastery, and I’m not sure that I really even want to go to church again.”

“Give up going for a bit,” advised the priest.

Michael jumped up from the chair and walked over to the bay-window, through which came a discordant sound of children playing in the street outside.

“It’s impossible to be serious with you. I suppose you’re fed up with people like me,” Michael complained. “I know I’m moody and irritating, but I’ve got a lot to grumble about. I don’t seem to have any natural inclination for any profession. I’m not a musical genius like my young sister. That’s pretty galling, you know, really. After all, girls can get along better than boys without any special gifts, and she simply shines compared with me. I have no father. I’ve no idea who I was, where I came from, what I’m going to be. I keep on trying to be optimistic and think everything is good and beautiful, and then almost at once it turns out bad and ugly.”

“Has your religion really turned out bad and ugly?” asked the priest gently.

“Not right through, but here and there, yes.”

“The religion itself or the people who profess it?” Mr. Viner persisted.

“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing ultimately?” Michael parried. “But leave out religion for the moment, and consider this war. The only justification for such a war is the moral effect it has on the nations engaged. Now, I ask you, do you sincerely believe there has been a trace of any purifying influence since we started waving Union Jacks last September? It’s no good; we simply have not got it in us to stand defeat or victory. At any rate, if the Boers win, it will mean the preservation of something. Whereas if we win, we shall just destroy everything.”

“Michael, what do you think is the important thing for this country at this moment?” Mr. Viner asked.

“Well, I suppose I still think it is that the people—the great mass of the nation, that is—should be happier and better. No, I don’t think that’s it at all. I think the important thing is that the people should be able to use the power that’s coming to them in bigger lumps every day. I’d like to think it wasn’t, I’d like to believe that democracy always will be as it always has been—a self-made failure. But against my own will I can’t help believing that this time democracy is going to carry everything before it. And this war is going to hurry it on. Of course it is. The masses will learn their power. They’ll learn that generals can make fools of themselves, that officers can be done without, that professional soldiers can be cowards, but that simply by paying we can still win. And where’s the money coming from? Why, from the class that tried to be clever and bluff the people out of their power by staging this war. Well, do you mean to tell me that it’s good for a democracy, this sudden realization of their omnipotence? Look here, you think I’m an excitable young fool, but I tell you I’ve been pitching my ideals at a blank wall like so many empty bottles and——”

“Were they empty?” asked Mr. Viner. “Are you sure they were empty? May they not have been cruses of ointment the more precious for being broken?”

“Well, I wish I could keep one for myself,” Michael said.

“My dear boy, you’ll never be able to do that. You’ll always be too prodigal of your ideals. I should have no qualms about your future, whatever you did meanwhile. And, do you know, I don’t think I have many qualms about this England of ours, however badly she behaves sometimes. I’m glad you recognize that the people are coming into their own. I wish that you were glad, but you will be one day. The Catholic religion must be a popular religion. The Sabbath was made for man, you know. Catholicism is God’s method of throwing bottles at a blank wall—but not empty bottles, Michael. On the whole, I would sooner that now you were a reactionary than a Dantonist. Your present attitude of mind at any rate gives you the opportunity of going forward, instead of going back; there will be plenty of ideals to take the places of those you destroy, however priceless. And the tragedy of age is not having any more bottles to throw.”

During these words that came soothingly from Mr. Viner’s firm lips Michael had settled himself down again in the arm-chair and lighted his pipe.

“Come, now,” said the priest, “you and I have muddled through our discussion long enough, let’s gossip for a change. What’s Mark Chator doing?”

“I haven’t seen much of him this term. He’s still going to take orders. I find old Chator’s eternal simplicity and goodness rather wearing. Life’s pretty easy for him. I wish I could get as much out of it as easily,” Michael answered.

“Well, I can’t make any comment on that last remark of yours without plunging into platitudes that would make you terribly contemptuous of my struggles to avoid them. But don’t despise the Chators of this world.”

“Oh, I don’t. I envy them. Well, I must go. Thanks awfully for putting up with me again.”

Michael picked up his cap and hurried home. When he reached Carlington Road, he was inclined to tell his mother that, if she liked, he would go and visit Lord Saxby before he sailed; but when it came to the point he felt too shy to reopen the subject, and decided to let the proposal drop.

He was surprized to find that it was much easier to write to Mrs. Ross about her husband than he thought it would be. Whether this long and stormy day (he could scarcely believe that he had only read the news about Captain Ross that morning) had purged him of all complexities of emotion, he did not know; but certainly the letter was easy enough.

In bed that night Michael thought what a beast he had made of himself that day, and flung the blankets feverishly away from his burnt-out self. Figures of well-loved people kept trooping through the darkness, and he longed to converse with them, inspired by the limitless eloquence of the night-time. All that he would say to Mr. Viner, to Mrs. Ross, to Alan, even to good old Chator, splashed the dark with fiery sentences. He longed to be with Stella in a cool woodland. He almost got up to go down and pour his soul out upon his mother’s breast; but the fever of fatigue mocked his impulse and he fell tossing into sleep.

Chapter XII: Alan

M ICHAEL left the house early next day that he might make sure of seeing Alan for a moment before Prayers. A snowy aggregation of cumulus sustained the empyrean upon the volume of its mighty curve and swell. The road before him stretched shining in a radiant drench of azure puddles. It was a full-bosomed morning of immense peace.

Michael rather dreaded to see Alan appear in oppressive black, and felt that anything like a costume would embarrass their meeting. But just before the second bell he came quickly up the steps dressed in his ordinary clothes, and Michael in the surging corridor gripped his arm for a moment, saying he would wait for him in the ‘quarter.’

“Is your mater fearfully cut up?” he asked when they had met and were strolling together along the ‘gravel.’

“I think she was,” said Alan. “She’s going up to Cobble Place this morning to see Aunt Maud.”

“I wrote to her last night,” said Michael.

“I spent nearly all yesterday in writing to her,” said Alan. “I couldn’t think of anything to say. Could you?”

“No, I couldn’t think of very much,” Michael agreed. “It seemed so unnecessary.”

“I know,” Alan said. “I’d really rather have come to school.”

“I wish you had. I made an awful fool of myself in the morning. I got in a wax with Abercrombie and the chaps, and said I’d never play football again.”

“Whatever for?”

“Oh, because I didn’t think they appreciated what it meant for a chap like your Uncle Kenneth to be killed.”

“Do you mean they said something rotten?” asked Alan, flushing.

“I don’t think you would have thought it rotten. In fact, I think the whole row was my fault. But they seemed to take everything for granted. That’s what made me so wild.”

“Look here, we can’t start a conversation like this just before school. Are you going home to dinner?” Alan asked.

“No, I’ll have dinner down in the Tuck,” said Michael, “and we can go for a walk afterwards, if you like. It’s the first really decent day we’ve had this year.”

So after a lunch of buns, cheese-cakes, fruit pastilles, and vanilla biscuits, eaten in the noisy half-light of the Tuckshop, accompanied by the usual storm of pellets, Michael and Alan set out to grapple with the situation Michael had by his own hasty behaviour created.

“The chaps seem rather sick with you,” observed Alan, as they strolled arm-in-arm across the school-ground not yet populous with games.

“Well, they are such a set of sheep,” Michael urged in justification of himself.

“I thought you rather liked them.”

“I did at first. I do still in a way. I do when nothing matters; but that horrible line in the paper did matter most awfully, and I couldn’t stick their bleating. You see, you’re different. You just say nothing. That’s all right. But these fools tried to say something and couldn’t. I always did hate people who tried very obviously. That’s why I like you. You’re so casual and you always seem to fit.”

“I don’t talk, because I know if I opened my mouth I should make an ass of myself,” said Alan.

“There you are, that’s what I say. That’s why it’s possible to talk to you. You see I’m a bit mad.”

“Shut up, you ass,” commanded Alan, smiling.

“Oh, not very mad. And I’m not complaining. But I am a little bit mad. I always have been.”

“Why? You haven’t got a clot on your brain, have you?”

“Oh, Great Scott, no! It’s purely mental, my madness.”

“Well, I think you’re talking tosh,” said Alan firmly. “If you go on thinking you’re mad, you will be mad, and then you’ll be sorry. So shut up trying to horrify me, because if you really were mad I should bar you,” he added coolly.

“All right,” said Michael, a little subdued, as he always was, by Alan’s tranquil snubs. “All right. I’m not mad, but I’m excitable.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” said Alan.

“I can’t help my character, can I?” Michael demanded.

“You’re not a girl,” Alan pointed out.

“Men have very strong emotions often,” Michael argued.

“They may have them, but they don’t show them. Just lately you’ve been holding forth about the rotten way in which everybody gets hysterical over this war. And now you’re getting hysterical over yourself, which is much worse.”

“Damn you, Alan, if I didn’t like you so much I shouldn’t listen to you,” said Michael, fiercely pausing.

“Well, if I didn’t like you, I shouldn’t talk,” answered Alan simply.

As they walked on again in silence for a while, Michael continually tried to get a perspective view of his friend, puzzling over his self-assurance, which was never offensive, and wondering how a person so much less clever than himself could possibly make him feel so humble. Alan was good-looking and well-dressed; he was essentially debonair; he was certainly in appearance the most attractive boy in the school. It always gave Michael the most acute thrill of admiration to see Alan swinging himself along so lithe and so graceful. It made him want to go up and pat Alan’s shoulder and say, “You fine and lovely creature, go on walking for ever.” But mere good looks were not enough to explain the influence which Alan wielded, an influence which had steadily increased during the period of their greatest devotion to each other, and had never really ceased during the period of their comparative estrangement. Yet, if Michael looked back on their joint behaviour, it had always been he who apparently led and Alan who followed.

“Do you know, old chap,” said Michael suddenly, “you’re a great responsibility to me.”

“Thanks very much and all that,” Alan answered, with a mocking bow.

“Have you ever imagined yourself the owner of some frightfully famous statue?” Michael went on earnestly.

“Why, have you?” Alan countered, with his familiar look of embarrassed persiflage.

Michael, however, kept tight hold of the thread that was guiding him through the labyrinth that led to the arcana of Alan’s disposition.

“You’ve the same sort of responsibility,” he asserted. “I always feel that if I were the owner of the Venus of Milo, though I could move her about all over the place and set her up wherever I liked, I should be responsible to her in some way. I should feel she was looking at me, and if I put her in a wrong position, I should feel ashamed of myself and half afraid of the statue.”

“Are you trying to prove you’re mad?” Alan enquired.

“Do be serious,” Michael begged, “and tell me if you think you understand what I mean. Alan, you used to discuss everything with me when we were kids, why won’t you discuss yourself now?”

Alan looked up at the sky for a moment, blinking in the sun, perhaps to hide the tremor of feeling that touched for one instant the corners of his mouth. Then he said:

“Do you remember years ago, when we were at Eastbourne and you met Uncle Kenneth for the first time, he told me at dinner not to be a showman? I’ve always remembered that remark of his, and I think it applies to one showing off oneself as much as to showing off other people. I think that’s why I’m different from you.”

Michael glanced up at this.

“You can be damned rude when you like,” he murmured.

“Well, you asked me.”

“So I’m a showman?” said Michael.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t begin to worry over it. It doesn’t make any odds to me what you are. I don’t think it ever would,” he added simply, and in this avowal was all that Michael craved for. Under a sudden chill presentiment that before long he would test this friend of his to the last red throb of his proud heart, Michael took comfort from this declaration and asked no more for comprehension or sympathy. Those were shifting sands of feeling compared with this rock-hewn permanence of Alan. He remembered the stones upon the Berkshire downs, the stolid, unperceiving, eternal stones. Comparable to them alone stood Alan.

They had turned out of the gates of the school-ground by now, and were strolling heedless of direction through the streets of West Kensington that to Michael seemed all at once strangely alluring with their display of a sedate and cosy life. He could not recall that he had ever before been so sensitive to the atmosphere of sunlit security which was radiated by these windows with their visions of rosy babies bobbing and laughing, of demure and saucy maids, of polished bird-cages and pots of daffodils. The white steps were in tune with the billowy clouds, and the scarlet pillar-box at the corner had a friendly, human smile. It was a doll’s-house world, whose dainty offer of intimate citizenship refreshed Michael’s imagination like a child’s picture-book.

He began to reflect that the opinions of Abercrombie and his friends round the hot-water pipes were wrought out in such surroundings as these, and he arrived gradually at a sort of compassion for them, picturing the lives of small effort that would inevitably be their portion. He perceived that they would bear the burden of existence in the future, struggling to preserve their gentility against the envy of the class beneath them and the contempt of those above. These gay little houses, half of whose charm lay in their similarity, were as near as they would ever come to any paradise of being. Michael had experienced many spasms of love for his fellow-men, and now in one of these outbursts he suddenly realized himself in sympathy with mediocrity.

“Rather jolly round here,” said Alan. “I suppose a tremendous lot of chaps from the school live about here. Funny thing, if you come to think of it. Practically everybody at St. James’ slides into a little house like this. A few go into the Army; a few go to the ‘Varsity. But this is really the School.”

Alan indicated an empty perambulator standing outside one of the houses. “Funny thing if the kid that’s waiting for should be Captain of the School in another eighteen years. I wouldn’t be surprized.”

Alan had just expressed so much of what Michael himself was thinking that he felt entitled to put the direct question which a moment ago he had been shy of asking.

“Do you feel as if you belonged to all this?”

“No,” said Alan very coolly.

“Nor do I,” Michael echoed.

“And that’s why it was rotten of you to give yourself away to Abercrombie and the other chaps,” Alan went on severely.

“Yes, I think it was,” Michael agreed.

Then they retraced their steps unconsciously, wandering along silently in the sunlight towards the school. Michael did not want to converse because he was too much elated by this walk, and the satisfying way in which Alan had lived up to his ideal of him. He began to weave a fine romance of himself and Alan going through life together in a lofty self-sufficiency from which they would condescend to every aspect of humanity. He was not sure whether Alan would condescend so far and so widely as himself, and he was not sure whether he wanted him to, whether it would not always be a relief to be aware of Alan as a cold supernal sanctuary from the vulgar struggles in which he foresaw his own frequent immersion. Meanwhile he must make it easy for Alan by apologizing to Abercrombie and the rest for his ridiculous passion of yesterday. He did not wish to imperil Alan’s superb aloofness by involving him in the acrimonious and undignified defence of a friend. There should be no more outbreaks. So much Michael vowed to his loyalty. However, the apology must be made quickly—if possible, this afternoon before school—and as they entered the school-ground again, Michael looked up at the clock, and said:

“Do you mind if I bunk on? I’ve something I must do before the bell goes.”

Alan shook his head.

To Abercrombie and the other immortals Michael came up quickly and breathlessly.

“I say, you chaps, I’m sorry I made such an ass of myself yesterday; I felt chippy over that friend of mine being killed.”

“That’s all right, old bangabout,” said Abercrombie cordially, and the chorus guffawed their forgiveness. They did more. They called him ‘Bangs’ thereafter, commemorating, as schoolboys use, with an affectionate nickname their esteem.

The next day a letter came for Michael from Mrs. Ross, and impressed with all the clarity of writing much of what he had dimly reached out for in his friendship with Alan. He read the letter first hurriedly on his way to school in the morning; but he read it a second and third time along those serene and intimate streets where he and Alan had walked the day before.

Chapter XIII: Sentiment

B ACK once more upon his pedestal in the frieze, Michael devoted himself to enjoying, while still they were important to his life, the conversation and opinions of the immortals. He gave up worrying about the war and yielded himself entirely either to the blandishments of his seniority in the school or of dreams about himself at Oxford, now within sight of attainment. Four more terms of school would set him free, and he had ambitions to get into the Fifteen in his last year. He would then be able to look back with satisfaction to the accomplishment of something. He actually threw himself into the rowdiest vanguard of Mafeking’s celebrators, and accepted the occasion as an excuse to make a noise without being compelled to make the noise alone. These Bacchanalia of patriotism were very amusing, and perhaps it was a good thing for the populace to be merry; moreover, since he now had Alan to idealize, he could afford to let his high thoughts of England’s duty and England’s honour become a little less stringent.

He spent much time with Alan in discussing Oxford and in building up a most elaborate and logical scheme of their life at the University. He was anxious that Alan should leave the classical Lower Sixth, into which he had climbed somewhat hardly, and come to join him in the leisure of the History Sixth. He spoke of Strang whose Captaincy of Cricket shed such lustre on the form, of Terry whose Captaincy of Football next year would shed an equal lustre. But Alan, having found the journey to the Lower Sixth so arduous, was disinclined to be cheated of the intellectual eminence of the Upper Sixth which had been his Valhalla so long.

Michael and Alan had been looking forward to a visit to Cobble Place during the Easter holidays; but Mrs. Fane was much upset by the idea of being left alone, and Michael had to decline the invitation, which was a great disappointment. In the end he and his mother went to Bournemouth, staying rather grandly at one of the large hotels, and Michael was able to look up some old friends, including Father Moneypenny of St. Bartholomew’s, Mrs. Rewins, their landlady of three years back, and Mr. Prout.

The passion-flower at Esdraelon had grown considerably, but that was the only thing which showed any signs of expansion, unless Mr. Prout’s engagement to be married could be accepted as evidence of expansion. Michael thought it had a contrary effect, and whether from that cause or from his own increased age he found poor Prout sadly dull. It was depressing to hear that unpleasantness was expected at the Easter vestry that year; Michael could not recall any year in which that had not been the case. It was depressing to learn that the People’s Churchwarden was still opposed to the Assumption. It was most depressing of all to be informed that Prout saw no prospect of being married for at least five years. Michael, having failed with Prout, tried to recapture the emotion of his first religious experience at St. Bartholomew’s. But the church that had once seemed so inspiring now struck him as dingily and poorly designed, without any of the mystery which once had made it beautiful. He wondered if everything that formerly had appealed to his imagination were going to turn out dross, and he made an expedition to Christchurch Priory to test this idea. Here he was relieved to find himself able to recapture the perfect thrill of his first visit, and he spent a rich day wandering between the grey church and the watery meadows near by, about whose plashy levels the green rushes were springing up in the fleecy April weather.

Michael concluded that all impermanent emotions of beauty proved that it was merely the emotion which had created an illusion of beauty, and he was glad to have discovered for himself a touchstone for his Æsthetic judgments in the future. He would have liked to see Alan in the cloistral glooms of the Priory, and thought how he would have enhanced with his own eternity of classic shape the knights and ladies praying there. Michael sympathized with the trousered boy whom Flaxman, contrary to every canon, might almost be said to have perpetrated. He felt slightly muddled between classic and romantic art, and could not make up his mind whether Flaxman’s attempt or the mediÆval sculptor’s achievement were worthier of admiration. He tried to apply his own test, and came to the conclusion that Flaxman was really all wrong. He decided that he only liked the trousered boy because the figure gave him sentimental pleasure, and he was sure that true classical art was not sentimental. Finally he got himself in a complete muddle, sitting among these hollow chantries and pondering art’s evaluations; so he left the Priory behind him, and went dreamily through the water-meadows under the spell of a simple beauty that needed no analysis. Oxford would be like this, he thought; a place of bells and singing streams and towers against the horizon.

He waited by a stile, watching the sky of which sunset had made a tranced archipelago set in a tideless sea. The purple islands stood out more and more distinct against the sheeted gold that lapped their indentations; then in a few moments the gold went out to primrose, the purple isles were grey as mice, and by an imperceptible breath of time became merged in a luminous green that held the young moon led downwards through the west by one great sulphur star.

This speculation of the sky made Michael late for dinner, and gave his mother an opportunity to complain of his daylong desertion of her.

“I rather wish we hadn’t come to Bournemouth,” said Michael. “I think it’s a bad place for us to choose to come together. I remember last time we stayed here you were always criticizing me.”

“I suppose Bournemouth must have a bad effect on you, dearest boy,” said Mrs. Fane in her most gentle, most discouraging voice.

Michael laughed a little bitterly.

“You’re wonderful at always being able to put me in the wrong,” he said.

“You’re sometimes not very polite, are you, nowadays? But I dare say you’ll grow out of this curious manner you’ve lately adopted towards me.”

“Was I rude?” asked Michael, quickly penitent.

“I think you were rather rude, dear,” said Mrs. Fane. “Of course, I don’t want you never to have an opinion of your own, and I quite realize that school has a disastrous effect on manners, but you didn’t apologize very gracefully for being late for dinner, did you, dear?”

“I’m sorry. I won’t ever be again,” said Michael shortly.

Mrs. Fane sighed, and the meal progressed in silence. Michael, however, could never bear to sulk, and he braced himself to be pleasant.

“You ought to come over to Christchurch, mother. Shall we drive over one day?”

“Well, I’m not very fond of looking at churches,” said Mrs. Fane. “But if you want to go, let us. I always like you to do everything you want.”

Michael sighed at the ingenuity of his mother’s method, and changed the subject to their fellow-guests.

“That’s rather a pretty girl, don’t you think?”

“Where, dear?” asked Mrs. Fane, putting up her lorgnette and staring hard at the wife of a clergyman sitting across the room from their table.

“No, no, mother,” said Michael, beaming with pleasure at the delightful vagueness of his mother which only distressed him when it shrouded his own sensations. “The next table—the girl in pink.”

“Yes, decidedly,” said Mrs. Fane. “But dreadfully common. I can’t think why those sort of people come to nice hotels. I suppose they read about them in railway guides.”

“I don’t think she’s very common,” said Michael.

“Well, dear, you’re not quite at the best age for judging, are you?”

“Hang it, mother, I’m seventeen.”

“It’s terrible to think of,” said Mrs. Fane. “And only such a little while ago you were the dearest baby boy. Then Stella must be sixteen,” she went on. “I think it’s time she came back from the Continent.”

“What about her first concert?”

“Oh, I must think a lot before I settle when that is to be.”

“But Stella is counting on it being very soon.”

“Dear children, you’re both rather impetuous,” said Mrs. Fane, deprecating with the softness of her implied rebuke the quality, and in Michael at any rate for the moment quenching all ardour.

“I wonder if it’s wise to let a girl be a professional musician,” she continued. “Dear me, children are a great responsibility, especially when one is alone.”

Here was an opportunity for Michael to revive the subject of his father, but he had now lost the cruel frankness of childhood and shrank from the directness of the personal encounter such a topic would involve. He was seized with one of his fits of shy sensitiveness, and he became suddenly so deeply embarrassed that he could scarcely even bring himself to address his mother as ‘you.’ He felt that he must go away by himself until he had shaken off this uncomfortable sensation. He actually felt a kind of immodesty in saying ‘you’ to his mother, as if in saying so much he was trespassing on the forbidden confines of her individuality. It would not endure for more than an hour or so, this fear of approach, this hyperÆsthesia of contact and communication. Yet not for anything could he kiss her good night and, mumbling a few bearish excuses, he vanished as soon as dinner was over, vowing that he would cure himself of this mood by walking through the pine trees and blowy darkness of the cliffs.

As he passed through the hotel lounge, he saw the good-looking girl, whom his mother had stigmatized as common, waiting there wrapped up in a feathery cloak. He decided that he would sit down and observe her until the sister came down. He wished he knew this girl, since it would be pleasant after dinner to stroll out either upon the pier or to listen to the music in the Winter Garden in such attractive company. Michael fancied that the girl, as she walked slowly up and down the lounge, was conscious of his glances, and he felt an adventurous excitement at his heart. It would be a daring and delightful novelty to speak to her. Then the sister came down, and the two girls went out through the swinging doors of the hotel, leaving Michael depressed and lonely. Was it a trick of the lamplight, or did he really perceive her head turn outside to regard him for a moment?

During his walk along the cliffs Michael played with this idea. By the time he went to bed his mind was full of this girl, and it was certainly thrilling to come down to breakfast next morning and see what blouse she was wearing. Mrs. Fane always had breakfast in her room, so Michael was free to watch this new interest over the cricket matches in The Sportsman. He grew almost jealous of the plates and forks and cups which existed so intimately upon her table, and he derived a sentimental pleasure from the thought that nothing was more likely than that to-morrow there would be an exchange of cups between his table and hers. He conceived the idea of chipping a piece out of his own cup and watching every morning on which table it would be laid, until it reached her.

At lunch Michael, as nonchalantly as he could speak, asked his mother whether she did not think the pretty girl dressed rather well.

“Very provincial,” Mrs. Fane judged.

“But prettily, I think,” persisted Michael. “And she wears a different dress every day.”

“Do you want to know her?” asked Mrs. Fane.

“Oh, mother, of course not,” said Michael, blushing hotly.

“I dare say they’re very pleasant people,” Mrs. Fane remarked. “I’ll speak to them after lunch, and tell them how anxious you are to make their acquaintance.”

“I say, mother,” Michael protested. “Oh, no, don’t, mother. I really don’t want to know them.”

Mrs. Fane smiled at him, and told him not to be a foolish boy. After lunch, in her own gracious and distinguished manner which Michael always admired, Mrs. Fane spoke to the two sisters and presently beckoned to Michael who crossed the room, feeling rather as if he were going in to bat first for his side.

“I don’t think I know your name,” said Mrs. Fane to the elder sister.

“McDonnell—Norah McDonnell, and this is my sister Kathleen.”

“Scotch?” asked Mrs. Fane vaguely and pleasantly.

“No, Irish,” contradicted the younger sister. “At least by extraction. McDonnell is an Irish name. But we live in Burton-on-Trent. Father and mother are coming down later on.”

She spoke with the jerky speech of the Midlands, and Michael rather wished she did not come from Burton-on-Trent, not on his own account, but because his mother would be able to point out to him how right she had been about their provincialism.

“Are you going anywhere this evening?” Michael managed to ask at last.

“I suppose we shall go on the pier. We usually go on the pier. Eh, but it’s rather dull in Bournemouth. I like Llandudno better. Llandudno’s fine,” said the elder Miss McDonnell with fervour.

Mrs. Fane came to the rescue of an awkward conversation by asking the Miss McDonnells if they would take pity on her son and invite him to accompany them. And so it was arranged.

“Happy, Michael?” asked his mother when the ladies, with many smiles, had withdrawn to their rooms.

“Yes. I’m all right,” said Michael. “Only I rather wish you hadn’t asked them so obviously. It made me feel rather a fool.”

“Dearest boy, they were delighted at the idea of your company. They seem quite nice people too. Only, as I said, very provincial. Older, too, than I thought at first.”

Michael asked how old his mother thought they were, and she supposed them to be about twenty-seven and thirty. Michael was inclined to protest against this high estimate, but since he had spoken to the Miss McDonnells, he felt that after all his mother might be right.

In the evening his new friends came down to dinner much enwrapped in feathers, and Michael thought that Kathleen looked very beautiful in the crimson lamplight of the dinner-table.

“How smart you are, Michael, to-night!” said Mrs. Fane.

“Oh, well, I thought as I’d got my dinner-jacket down here I might as well put it on. I say, mother, I think I’ll get a tail-coat. Couldn’t I have one made here?”

“Isn’t that collar rather tight?” asked Mrs. Fane anxiously. “And it seems dreadfully tall.”

“I like tall collars with evening dress,” said Michael severely.

“You know best, dear, but you look perfectly miserable.”

“It’s only because my chin is a bit sore after shaving.”

“Do you have to shave often?” enquired Mrs. Fane, tenderly horrified.

“Rather often,” said Michael. “About once a week now.”

“She has pretty hands, your lady love,” said Mrs. Fane, suddenly looking across to the McDonnells’ table.

“I say, mother, for goodness’ sake mind. She’ll hear you,” whispered Michael.

“Oh, Michael dear, don’t be so foolishly self-conscious.”

After dinner Michael retired to his room, and came down again smoking a cigarette.

Mrs. Fane made a little moue of surprise.

“I say, mother, don’t keep on calling attention to everything I do. You know I’ve smoked for ages.”

“Yes, but not so very publicly, dear boy.”

“Well, you don’t mind, do you? I must begin some time,” said Michael.

“Michael, don’t be cross with me. You’re so deliciously amusing, and so much too nice for those absurd women,” Mrs. Fane laughed.

Just then the Miss McDonnells appeared on the staircase, and Michael frowned at his mother not to say any more about them. It was a fairly successful evening. The elder Miss McDonnell bored Michael rather with a long account of why her father had left Ireland, and what a blow it had been to him to open a large hotel in Burton-on-Trent. He was also somewhat fatigued by the catalogue of Mr. McDonnell’s virtues, of his wit and courage and good looks and shrewdness.

“He has a really old-fashioned sense of humour,” said Miss McDonnell. “But then, of course, he’s Irish. He’s accounted quite the cleverest man in Burton, but then, being Irish, that’s not to be wondered at.”

Michael wished she would not say ‘wondered’ as if it were ‘wandered,’ and indeed he was beginning to think that Miss McDonnell was a great trial, when he suddenly discovered that by letting his arm hang very loosely from his shoulder it was possible without the slightest hint of intention occasionally to touch Kathleen’s hand as they walked along. The careful calculation that this proceeding demanded occupied his mind so fully that he was able to give mechanical assents to Miss McDonnell’s praise of her father, and apparently at the same time impress her with his own intelligence.

As the evening progressed Michael slightly increased the number of times he tapped Kathleen’s hand with his, and after about an hour’s promenade of the pier he was doing a steady three taps a minute. He now began to speculate whether Kathleen was aware of these taps, and from time to time he would glance round at her over his shoulder, hopeful of catching her eyes.

“Are you admiring my sister’s brooch?” asked Miss McDonnell. “Eh, I think it’s grand. Don’t you?”

Kathleen giggled lightly at this, and asked her sister how she could, and then Michael with a boldness that on reflection made him catch his breath at the imagination of it, said that while he was admiring Miss Kathleen’s brooch he was admiring her eyes still more.

“Oh, Mr. Fane. How can you!” exclaimed Kathleen.

“Well, he’s got good taste, I’m sure,” said Miss McDonnell. “But, there, after all, what can you expect from an Irish girl? All Irish girls have fine eyes.”

When Michael went to bed he felt that on the whole he had acquitted himself that first evening with considerable success, and as he fell asleep he dreamed triumphantly of a daring to-morrow.

It was an April day, whose deeps of azure sky made the diverse foliage of spring burn in one ardent green. Such a day spread out before his windows set Michael on fire for its commemoration, and he made up his mind to propose a long bicycling expedition to the two Miss McDonnells. He wished that it were not necessary to invite the elder sister, but not even this April morning could embolden him so far as to ask Kathleen alone. Mrs. Fane smilingly approved of his proposal, but suggested that on such a warm day it would be wiser not to start until after lunch. So it was arranged, and Michael thoroughly enjoyed the consciousness of escorting these girls out of Bournemouth on their trim bicycles. Indeed, he enjoyed his position so much that he continually looked in the shop-windows, as they rode past, to observe the effect and was so much charmed by the result that he crossed in front of Miss McDonnell, and upset her and her bicycle in the middle of the town.

“Eh, that’s a nuisance,” said Miss McDonnell, surveying bent handlebars and inner tyre swelling like a toy balloon along the rim. “That was quite a mishap,” she added, shaking the dust from her skirt.

Michael was in despair over his clumsiness, especially when Miss Kathleen McDonnell remarked that there went the ride she’d been looking forward to all day.

“Well, you two go on an I’ll walk back,” Miss McDonnell offered.

“Oh, but I can easily hire another machine,” said Michael.

“No. I’ll go back. I’ve grazed my knee a bit badly.”

Michael was so much perturbed to hear this that without thinking he anxiously asked to be allowed to look, and wished that the drain by which he was standing would swallow him up when he realized by Kathleen’s giggling what he had said.

“It’s all right,” said Miss McDonnell kindly. “There’s no need to worry. I hope you’ll have a pleasant ride.”

“I say, it’s really awfully ripping of you to be so jolly good-tempered about it,” Michael exclaimed. “Are you sure I can’t do anything?”

“No, you can just put my bicycle in the shop along there, and I’ll take the tram back. Mind and enjoy yourselves, and don’t be late.”

The equable Miss McDonnell then left her sister and Michael to their own devices.

They rode along in alert silence until they left Branksome behind them and came into hedgerows, where an insect earned Michael’s cordial gratitude by invading his eye. He jumped off his bicycle immediately and called for Kathleen’s aid, and as he stood in the quiet lane with the girl’s face close to his and her hand brushing his cheeks, Michael felt himself to be indeed a favourite of fortune.

“There it is, Mr. Fane,” said Miss Kathleen McDonnell. And, though he tried to be sceptical for a while of the insect’s discovery, he was bound to admit the evidence of the handkerchief.

“Thanks awfully,” said Michael. “And I say, I wish you wouldn’t call me Mr. Fane. You know my Christian name.”

“Oh, but I’d feel shy to call you Michael,” said Miss McDonnell.

“Not if I called you Kathleen,” Michael suggested, and felt inclined to shake his own hand in congratulation of his own magnificent daring.

“Well, I must say one thing. You don’t waste much time. I think you’re a bit of a flirt, you know,” said Kathleen.

“A flirt,” Michael echoed. “Oh, I say, do you really think so?”

“I’m afraid I do,” murmured Kathleen. “Shall we go on again?”

They rode along in renewed silence for several miles, and then they suddenly came upon Poole Harbour lying below them, washed in the tremulous golden airs of the afternoon.

“I say, how ripping!” cried Michael, leaping from his machine and flinging it away from him against a bank of vivid grass. “We must sit down here for a bit.”

“It is pretty,” said Kathleen. “It’s almost like a picture.”

“I’m glad you’re fond of beautiful things,” said Michael earnestly.

“Well, one can’t help it, can one?” sighed Kathleen.

“Some people can,” said Michael darkly. “There’s rather a good place to sit over there,” he added, pointing to a broken gate that marked the entrance to an oak wood, and he faintly touched the sleeve of Kathleen’s blouse to guide her towards the chosen spot.

Then they sat leaning against the gate, she idly plucking sun-faded primroses, he brooding upon the nearness of her hand. In such universal placidity it could not be wrong to hold that hand wasting itself amid small energies. Without looking into her eyes, without turning his gaze from the great tranquil water before him, Michael took her hand in his so lightly that save for the pulsing of his heart he scarcely knew he held it. So he sat breathless, enduring pins and needles, tolerating the uncertain pilgrimage of ants rather than move an inch and break the yielding spell which made her his.

“Are you holding my hand?” she asked, after they had sat a long while pensively.

“I suppose I am,” said Michael. Then he turned and with full-blooded cheeks and swimming eyes met unabashed Kathleen’s demure and faintly mocking glance.

“Do you think you ought to?” she enquired.

“I haven’t thought anything about that,” said Michael. “I simply thought I wanted to.”

“You’re rather old for your age,” she went on, with an inflection of teazing surprize in her soft voice. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” said Michael simply.

“Goodness!” cried Kathleen, withdrawing her hand suddenly. “And I wonder how old you think I am?”

“I suppose you’re about twenty-five.”

Kathleen got up and said in a brisk voice that destroyed all Michael’s bravery, “Come, let’s be getting back. Norah will be thinking I’m lost.”

Just when they were nearing the outskirts of Branksome, Kathleen dismounted suddenly and said:

“I suppose you’ll be surprized when I tell you I’m engaged to be married?”

“Are you?” faltered Michael; and the road swam before him.

“At least I’m only engaged secretly, because my fiancÉ is poor. He’s coming down soon. I’d like you to meet him.”

“I should like to meet him very much,” said Michael politely.

“You won’t tell anybody what I’ve told you?”

“Good Lord, no. Perhaps I might be of some use,” said Michael. “You know, in arranging meetings.”

“Eh, you’re a nice boy,” exclaimed Kathleen suddenly.

And Michael was not perfectly sure whether he thought himself a hero or a martyr.

Mrs. Fane was very much diverted by Michael’s account of Miss McDonnell’s accident, and teazed him gaily about Kathleen. Michael would assume an expression of mystery, as if indeed he had been entrusted with the dark secrets of a young woman’s mind; but the more mysterious he looked the more his mother laughed. In his own heart he cultivated assiduously his devotion, and regretted most poignantly that each new blouse and each chosen evening-dress was not for him. He used to watch Kathleen at dinner, and depress himself with the imagination of her spirit roaming out over the broad Midlands to meet her lover. He never made the effort to conjure up the lover, but preferred to picture him and Kathleen gathering like vague shapes upon the immeasurable territories of the soul.

Then one morning Kathleen took him aside after breakfast to question his steadfastness.

“Were you in earnest about what you said?” she asked.

“Of course I was,” Michael affirmed.

“He’s come down. He’s staying in rooms. Why don’t you ask me to go out for a bicycle ride?”

“Well, will you?” Michael dutifully invited.

“I’m so excited,” said Kathleen, fluttering off to tell her sister of this engagement to go riding with Michael.

In about half an hour they stood outside the small red-brick house which cabined the bold spirit of Michael’s depressed fancies.

“You’ll come in and say ‘how do you do’?” suggested Kathleen.

“I suppose I’d better,” Michael agreed.

They entered together the little efflorescent parlour of the house.

“This is my fiancÉ—Mr. Walter Trimble,” Kathleen proudly announced.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Trimble. “Kath tells me you’re on to do us a good turn.”

Michael looked at Mr. Trimble, resolutely anxious to find in him the creator of Kathleen’s noble destiny. He saw a thick-set young man in a splendidly fitting, but ill-cut blue serge suit; he saw a dark moustache of silky luxuriance growing amid regular features; in fact, he saw someone that might have stepped from one of the grandiose frames of that efflorescent little room. But he was Kathleen’s choice, and Michael refused to let himself feel at all disappointed.

“I think it’s bad luck not to be able to marry, if one wants to,” said Michael deeply.

“You’re right,” Mr. Trimble agreed. “That’s why I want Kath here to marry me first and tell her dad afterwards.”

“I only wish I dared,” sighed Kathleen. “Well, if we’re going to have our walk, we’d better be getting along. Will I meet you by the side-gate into the Winter Garden at a quarter to one?”

“Right-o,” said Michael.

“I wonder if you’d lend Mr. Trimble your bicycle?”

“Of course,” said Michael.

“Because we could get out of the town a bit,” suggested Kathleen. “And that’s always pleasanter.”

Michael spent a dull morning in wandering about Bournemouth, while Kathleen and her Trimble probably rode along the same road he and she had gone a few days back. He tried to console himself with thoughts of self-sacrifice, and he took a morbid delight in the imagination of the pleasure he had made possible for others. But undeniably his own morning was dreary, and not even could Swinburne’s canorous Triumph of Time do much more than echo somewhat sadly through the resonant emptiness of his self-constructed prison, whose windows opened on to a sentimental if circumscribed view of unattainable sweetness.

Michael sat on a bench in a sophisticated pine-grove and, having lighted a cigarette, put out the match with his sighing exhalation of ‘O love, my love, and no love for me.’ It was wonderful to Michael how perfectly Swinburne expressed his despair. ‘O love, my love, had you loved but me.’ And why had she not loved him? Why did she prefer Trimble? Did Trimble ever read Swinburne? Could Trimble sit like this smoking calmly a cigarette and breathing out deathless lines of love’s despair? Michael began to feel a little sorry for Kathleen, almost as sorry for her as he felt for himself. Soon the Easter holidays would be over, and he would go back to school. He began to wonder whether he would wear the marks of suffering on his countenance, and whether his friends would eye him curiously, asking themselves in whispers what man this was that came among them with so sad and noble an expression of resignation. As Michael thought of Trimble and Kathleen meeting in Burton-on-Trent and daily growing nearer to each other in love, he became certain that his grief would indeed be manifest. He pictured himself sitting in the sunlit serene class-room of the History Sixth, a listless figure of despair, an object of wondering, whispering compassion. And so his life would lose itself in a monotone of discontent. Grey distances of time presented themselves to him with a terrible menace of loneliness; the future was worse than ever, a barren waste whose horizon would never darken to the silhouette of Kathleen coming towards him with open arms. Never would he hold her hand again; never would he touch those lips at all; never would he even know what dresses she wore in summer. ‘O love, my love, and no love for me.’

When Michael met Kathleen by the side-gate of the Winter Gardens, and received his bicycle back from Trimble, he suddenly wondered whether Kathleen had told her betrothed that another had held her hand. Michael rather hoped she had, and that the news of it had made Trimble jealous. Trimble, however, seemed particularly pleased with himself, and invited Michael to spend the afternoon with him, which Michael promised to do, if his mother did not want his company.

“Well, did you have a decent morning?” Michael enquired of Kathleen, as together they rode towards their hotel.

“Oh, we had a grand time; we sat down where you and me sat the other day.”

Michael nearly mounted the pavement at this news, and looked very gloomy.

“What’s the matter?” Kathleen pursued. “You’re not put out, are you?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Michael sardonically. “All the same, I think you might have turned off and gone another road. I sat and thought of you all the morning. But I don’t mind really,” he added, remembering that at any rate for Kathleen he must remain that chivalrous and selfless being which had been created by the loan of a bicycle. “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. I always want you to be happy. All my life I shall want that.”

Michael was surprized to find how much more eloquent he was in the throes of disappointment than he had ever been through the prompting of passion. He wished that the hotel were not already in sight, for he felt that he could easily say much more about his renunciation, and indeed he made up his mind to do so at the first opportunity. In the afternoon he told his mother he was going to pay a visit to Father Moneypenny. He did not tell her about Trimble, because he feared her teazing; although he tried to deceive himself that the lie was due to his loyalty to Kathleen.

“What shall we do?” asked Trimble. “Shall we toddle round to the Shades and have a drink?”

“Just as you like,” Michael said.

“Well, I’m on for a drink. It’s easier to talk down at the Shades than in here.”

Michael wondered why, but he accepted a cigar, and with Trimble sought the speech-compelling Shades.

“It’s like this,” Trimble began, when they were seated on the worn leather of the corner lounge. “I took a fancy to you right off. Eh, I’m from the North, and I may be a bit blunt, but by gum I liked you, and that’s how it is. Yes. I’m going to talk to you the same as I might to my own brother, only I haven’t got one.”

Michael looked a little apprehensive of the sack of confidences that would presently be emptied over his head, and, seeking perhaps to turn Trimble from his intention, asked him to guess his age.

“Well, I suppose you’re anything from twenty-two to twenty-three.”

Michael choked over his lemon-and-dash before he announced grimly that he was seventeen.

“Get out,” said Trimble sceptically. “You’re more than that. Seventeen? Eh, I wouldn’t have thought it. Never mind, I said I was going to tell you. And by gum I will, if you say next you haven’t been weaned.”

Michael resented the freedom of this expression and knitted his eyebrows in momentary distaste.

“It’s like this,” Mr. Trimble began again, “I made up my mind to-day that Kath’s the lass for me. Now am I right? That’s what I want to ask you. Am I right?”

“I suppose if you’re in love with her and she’s in love with you, yes,” said Michael.

“Well, she is. Now you wouldn’t think she was passionate, would you? You’d say she was a bit of ice, wouldn’t you? Well, by gum, I tell you, lad, she’s a furnace. Would you believe that?” Mr. Trimble leaned back triumphantly.

Michael did not know what comment to make on this information, and took another sip of his lemon-and-dash.

“Well, now what I say is—and I’m not a chap who’s flung round a great deal with the girls—what I say is,” Trimble went on, banging the marble table before him, “it’s not fair on a lass to play around like this, and so I’ve made up my mind to marry her. Am I right? By gum, lad, I know I’m right.”

“I think you are,” said Michael solemnly. “And I think you’re awfully lucky.”

“Lucky?” echoed Trimble, “I’m lucky enough, if it wasn’t for her domned old father. The lass is fine, but him—well, if I was to tell you what he is, you’d say I was using language. So it’s like this. I want Kath to marry me down here. I’ll get the license. I’ve saved up a hundred pounds. I’m earning two hundred a year now. Am I right?”

“Perfectly right,” said Michael earnestly, who, now that Trimble was showing himself to possess real fervour of soul, was ready to support him, even at the cost of his own suffering. He envied Trimble his freedom from the trammels of education, which for such a long while would prevent himself from taking such a step as marriage by license. Indeed, Michael scarcely thought he ever would take such a step now, since it was unlikely that anyone with Kathleen’s attraction would lure him on to such a deed.

Trimble’s determination certainly went a long way to excuse the failings of his outer person in Michael’s eyes, and indeed, as he pledged him a stirrup-cup of lemon-and-dash, Trimble and Young Lochinvar were not seriously distinct in Michael’s imaginative anticipation of the exploit.

So all day and every day for ten days Michael presumably spent his time with Kathleen, notwithstanding Mrs. Fane’s tenderly malicious teazing, notwithstanding the elder Miss McDonnell’s growing chill, and notwithstanding several very pointed questions from the interfering old spinsters and knitters in the sun of the hotel-gardens. That actually he spent his time alone in watching slow-handed clocks creep on towards a quarter to one or a quarter to five or a quarter to seven, filled Michael daily more full with the spiritual rewards of his sacrifice. He had never known before the luxury of grief, and he had no idea what a variety of becoming attitudes could be wrought of sadness, and not merely attitudes, but veritable dramas. One of the most heroically poignant of these was founded on the moment when Kathleen should ask him to be godfather to her first-born. “No, no,” Michael would exclaim. “Don’t ask me to do that. I have suffered enough.” And Kathleen would remorsefully and silently steal from the dusky room a-flicker with sad firelight, leaving Michael a prey to his own noble thoughts. There was another drama scarcely less moving, in which the first-born died, and Michael, on hearing the news, took the night express to Burton in order to speak words of hope above the little duplicate of Trimble now for ever still in his cradle. Sometimes in the more expansive moments of Michael’s celibacy Trimble and Kathleen would lose all their money, and Michael, again taking the night express to Burton-on-Trent, would offer to adopt about half a dozen duplicates of Trimble.

Finally the morning of the marriage arrived, and Michael, feeling that this was an excellent opportunity to have the first of his dramas staged in reality, declined to be present. His refusal was a little less dramatic than he had intended, because Kathleen was too much excited by her own reckless behaviour to act up. While Michael waited for the ceremony’s conclusion, he began a poem called ‘Renunciation.’ Unfortunately the marriage service was very much faster than his Muse, and he never got farther than half the opening line, ‘If I renounce.’ Michael, however, ascribed his failure to a little girl who would persist in bouncing a tennis ball near his seat in the gardens.

The wedding was only concluded just in time, because Mr. and Mrs. McDonnell arrived on the following day and Michael’s expeditions with Kathleen were immediately forbidden. Possibly the equable Miss McDonnell had been faintly alarmed for her sister’s good name. At any rate she had certainly been annoyed by her continuous neglect.

Michael, however, had a long interview with Trimble, and managed to warn Kathleen that her husband was going to present himself after dinner. Trimble and he had thought this was more likely to suit Mr. McDonnell’s digestion than an after-breakfast confession. Michael expressed himself perfectly willing to take all the blame, and privately made up his mind that if Mr. McDonnell tried to be ‘too funny,’ he would summon his mother to ‘polish him off’ with the vision of her manifest superiority.

Somewhat to Michael’s chagrin his share in the matter was overlooked by Mr. McDonnell, and the oration he had prepared to quell the long-lipped Irish father was never delivered. Whatever scenes of domestic strife occurred, occurred without Michael’s assistance, and he was not a little dismayed to be told by Kathleen in the morning that all had passed off well, but that in the circumstances her father had thought they had better leave Bournemouth at once.

“You’re going?” stammered Michael.

“Yes. We must be getting back. It’s all been so sudden, and Walter’s coming into the business, and eh, I’m as happy as the day is long.” Michael watched them all depart, and after a few brave good-byes and three flutters from Kathleen’s handkerchief turned sadly back into the large, unfriendly hotel. He knew the number of Kathleen’s room, and in an access of despair that was, however, not so overwhelming as to preclude all self-consciousness, he wandered down the corridor and peeped into the late haunt of his love. The floor was littered with tissue paper, broken cardboard-boxes, empty toilet-bottles, and all the disarray of departure. Michael caught his breath at the sudden revelation of this abandoned room’s appeal. Here was the end of Kathleen’s maidenhood; here still lingered the allurement of her presence; but Trimble could never see this last virginal abode, this elusive shrine that Michael wished he could hire for sentimental meditations. Along the corridor came the sound of a dustpan. He looked round hastily for one souvenir of Kathleen, and perceived still moist from her last quick ablution a piece of soap. He seized it quickly and surrendered the room to the destructive personality of the housemaid.

“Well, dear,” asked Mrs. Fane at lunch, “did your lady love give you anything to commemorate your help? Darling Michael, you must have made a most delicious knight-errant.”

“Oh, no, she didn’t give me anything,” said Michael. “Why should she?”

Then he blushed, thinking of the soap that was even now enshrined in a drawer and scenting his handkerchiefs and ties. He wondered if Alan would understand the imperishable effluence from that slim cenotaph of soap.

Chapter XIV: Arabesque

I N the air of the Easter holidays that year there must have been something unusually amorous even for April, for when Michael came back to school he found that most of his friends and contemporaries had been wounded by love’s darts. Alan, to be sure, returned unscathed, but as he had been resting in the comparatively cloistral seclusion of Cobble Place, Michael did not count his whole heart much honour to anything except his lack of opportunity. Everybody else had come back in possession of girls; some even had acquired photographs. There was talk of gloves and handkerchiefs, of flowers and fans, but nobody, as far as Michael could cautiously ascertain, had thought of soap; and he congratulated himself upon his relic. Also, apparently, all his friends in their pursuit of Eastertide nymphs had been successful, and he began to take credit to himself for being unlucky. His refusal (to this already had come Kathleen’s suddenly withdrawn hand) gave him a peculiar interest, and those of his friends in whom he confided looked at him with awe, and listened respectfully to his legend of despair.

Beneath the hawthorns on the golden afternoons and lingering topaz eves of May, Michael would wait for Alan to finish his game of cricket, and between lazily applauded strokes and catches he would tell the tale of Kathleen to his fellows:

“I asked her to wait for me. Of course she was older than me. I said I was ready to marry her when I was twenty-one, but there was another chap, a decent fellow, devilish handsome, too. He was frightfully rich, and so she agreed to elope with him. I helped them no end. I told her father he simply must not attempt to interfere. But, of course, I was frightfully cut up—oh, absolutely knocked out. We’re all of us unlucky in love in our family. My sister was in love with an Austrian who was killed by an avalanche. I don’t suppose I shall ever be in love again. They say you never really fall in love more than once in your life. I feel a good deal older this term. I suppose I look ... oh, well hit indeed—run it out, and again, sir, and again ...!”

So Michael would break off the tale of his love, until one of his listeners would seek to learn more of passion’s frets and fevers.

“But, Bangs, what about the day she eloped? What did you do?”

“I wrote poetry,” Michael would answer.

“Great Scott, that’s a bit of a swat, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s a bit difficult,” Michael would agree. “Only, of course, I only write vers libre . No rhymes or anything.”

And then an argument would arise as to whether poetry without rhymes could fairly be called poetry at all. This argument, or another like it, would last until the cricket stopped, when Michael and his fellows would stroll into the pavilion and examine the scoring-book or criticize the conduct of the game.

It was a pleasant time, that summer term, and life moved on very equably for Michael, notwithstanding his Eastertide heartbreak. Alan caused him a little trouble by his indifference to anything but cricket, and one Sunday, when May had deepened into June, Michael took him to task for his attitude. Alan had asked Michael over to Richmond for the week-end, and the two of them had punted down the river towards Kew. They had moored their boat under a weeping willow about the time when the bells for church, begin to chime across the level water-meadows.

“Alan, aren’t you ever going to fall in love?” Michael began.

“Why should I?” Alan countered in his usual way.

“I don’t know. I think it’s time you did,” said Michael. “You’ve no idea how much older it makes you feel. And I suppose you don’t want to remain a kid for ever. Because, you know, old chap, you are an awful kid beside me.”

“Thanks very much,” said Alan. “I believe you’re exactly one month older, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes, in actual time,” said Michael earnestly. “But in experience I’m years older than you.”

“That must be why you’re such a rotten field,” commented Alan. “After forty the joints get stiff.”

“Oh, chuck being funny,” said Michael severely. “I’m in earnest. Now you know as well as I do that last term and the term before I was miserable. Well, look at me now. I’m absolutely happy.”

“I thought you were so frightfully depressed,” said Alan, twinkling. “I thought you’d had an unlucky love affair. It seems to take you differently from the way it takes most people.”

“Oh, of course, I was miserable,” Michael explained. “But now I’m happy in her happiness. That’s love.”

Alan burst out laughing, and Michael observed that if he intended to receive his confidences in such a flippant way, he would in future take care to be more secretive.

“I’m showing you what a lot I care about you,” Michael went on in tones of deepest injury, “by telling you about myself. I think it’s rather rotten of you to laugh.”

“But you’ve told everybody,” Alan pointed out.

Michael took another tack, and explained to Alan that he wanted the spur of his companionship in everything.

“It would be so ripping if we were both in love,” he sighed. “Honestly, Alan, don’t you feel I’m much more developed since last term? I say, you played awfully well yesterday against Dulford Second. If you go on improving at the rate you are now, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get your Blue at Oxford. By Jove, you know, in eighteen months we shall be at Oxford. Are you keen?”

“Frightfully keen,” said Alan. “Especially if I haven’t got to be in love all the time.”

“I’m not going to argue with you any more,” Michael announced. “But you’re making a jolly big mistake. Still, of course, I do understand about your cricket, and I dare say love might make you a bit boss-eyed. Perhaps when footer begins again next term, I shall get over this perpetual longing I have for Kathleen. You’ve no idea how awful I felt when she said she loved Trimble. He was rather a bounder too, but of course I had to help them. I say, Alan, do you remember Dora and Winnie?”

“Rather,” said Alan, smiling. “We made pretty good asses of ourselves over them. Do you remember how fed up Nancy got?”

So, very easily the conversation drifted into reminiscences of earlier days, until the sky was quilted with rose-tipped pearly clouds. Then they swung a Japanese lantern in the prow and worked up-stream towards Richmond clustering dark against the west, while an ivory moon shimmered on the dying azure of the day behind.

Throughout June the image of Kathleen became gradually fainter and fainter with each materialization that Michael evoked. Then one evening before dinner he found that the maid had forgotten to put a fresh cake of soap in the dish. It was a question of ringing the bell or of callously using Kathleen’s commemorative tablet. Michael went to his drawer and, as he slowly washed his hands, he washed from his mind the few insignificant outlines of Kathleen that were printed there. The soap was TrÈfle Incarnat, and somewhat cynically Michael relished the savour of it, and even made up his mind to buy a full fat cake when this one should be finished. Kathleen, however, even in the fragrant moment of her annihilation, had her revenge, for Michael experienced a return of the old restlessness and discontent that was not mitigated by Alan’s increasing preoccupation with cricket. He did not complain of this, for he respected the quest of School Colours, and was proud for Alan. At the same time something must be done to while away these warm summer evenings until at Basingstead Minor, where his mother had delightfully agreed to take a cottage for the summer, he and Alan could revive old days at Cobble Place.

One evening Michael went out about nine o’clock to post a letter and, finding the evening velvety and calm, strolled on through the enticing streets of twilight. The violet shadows in which the white caps and aprons of gossiping maids took on a moth-like immaterial beauty, the gliding, enraptured lovers, the scent of freshly watered flower-boxes, the stars winking between the chimney-pots, and all the drowsy alertness of a fine London dusk drew him on to turn each new corner as it arrived, until he saw the sky stained with dull gold from the reflection of the lively crater of the Earl’s Court Exhibition, and heard over the vague intervening noises music that was sometimes clearly melodious, sometimes a mere confusion of spasmodic sound.

Michael suddenly thought he would like to spend his evening at the Exhibition, and wondered to himself why he had never thought of going there casually like this, why always he had considered it necessary to devote a hot afternoon and flurried evening to its exploitation. By the entrance he met a fellow-Jacobean, one Drake, whose accentuated mannishness, however disagreeable in the proximity of the school, might be valuable at the Exhibition. Michael therefore accepted his boisterous greeting pleasantly enough, and they passed through the turnstiles together.

“I’ll introduce you to a smart girl, if you like,” Drake offered, as they paused undecided between the attractions of two portions of the Exhibition. “She sells Turkish Delight by the Cave of the Four Winds. Very O.T., my boy,” Drake went on.

“Do you mean——” Michael began.

“What? Rather,” said Drake. “I’ve been home to her place.”

“No joking?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” affirmed Drake with a triumphant inhalation of sibilant breath.

“Rather lucky, wasn’t it?” Michael asked. “I mean to say, it was rather lucky to meet her.”

“She might take you home,” suggested Drake, examining Michael critically.

“But I mightn’t like her,” Michael expostulated.

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Drake, struck by a point of view that was obviously dismaying in its novelty, “you don’t mean to say you’d bother about that, if you could?”

“Well, I rather think I should,” Michael admitted. “I think I’d want to be in love.”

“You are an extraordinary chap,” said Drake. “Now if I were dead nuts on a girl, the last thing I’d think of would be that.”

They walked along silently, each one pondering the other’s incomprehensibleness, until they came to the stall presided over by Miss Mabel Bannerman, who in Michael’s opinion bore a curious resemblance to the Turkish Delight she sold. With the knowledge of her he had obtained from Drake, Michael regarded Miss Bannerman very much as he would have looked at an animal in the Zoological Gardens with whose habits he had formed a previous acquaintanceship through a book of natural history. He tried to perceive beyond her sachet-like hands and watery blue eyes and spongy hair and full-blown breast the fascination which had made her man’s common property. Then he looked at Drake, and came to the conclusion that the problem was not worth the difficulty of solution.

“I think I’ll be getting back,” said Michael awkwardly.

“Why, it’s not ten,” gasped Drake. “Don’t be an ass. Mabel gets out at eleven, and we can take her home. Can’t we, Mabel?”

“Sauce!” Mabel archly snapped.

This savoury monosyllable disposed of Michael’s hesitation, and, as the personality of Mabel cloyed him with a sudden nausea like her own Turkish Delight, he left her to Drake without another word and went home to bed.

The night was hot and drew Michael from vain attempts at sleep to the open window where, as he sat thinking, a strange visionary survey of the evening, a survey that he himself could scarcely account for, was conjured up. He had not been aware at the time of much more than Drake and the Turkish Delight stall. Now he realized that he too craved for a Mabel, not a peony of a woman who could be flaunted like a vulgar button-hole, but a more shy, a more subtle creature, yet conquerable. Then, as Michael stared out over the housetops at the brooding pavilion of sky which enclosed the hectic city, he began to recall the numberless glances, the countless attitudes, all the sensuous phantasmagoria of the Exhibition’s population. He remembered a slim hand, a slanting eye, lips translucent in a burst of light. He caught at scents that, always fugitive, were now utterly incommunicable; he trembled at the remembrance of some contact in a crowd that had been at once divinely intimate and unendurably remote. The illusion of all the city’s sleepers calling to him became more and more vivid under each stifling breath of the night. Somewhere beneath that sable diadem of chimney-tops she lay, that lovely girl of his desire. He would not picture her too clearly lest he should destroy the charm of this amazing omnipotence of longing. He would be content to enfold the imagination of her, and at dawn let her slip from his arms like a cloud. He would sit all the night time at his window, aware of kisses. Was this the emotion that prompted poets to their verses? Michael broke his trance to search for paper and pencil, and wrote ecstatically.

In the morning, when he read what he had written, he hastily tore it up, and made up his mind that the Earl’s Court Exhibition would feed his fire more satisfactorily than bad verses. Half a guinea would buy a season-ticket, and July should be a pageant of sensations.

Every night Michael went to Earl’s Court, and here a hundred brilliant but evanescent flames were kindled in his heart, just as in the Exhibition gardens every night for three hours the fairy-lamps spangled the edge of the paths in threads of many-tinted lights. Michael always went alone, because he did not desire any but his own discoveries to reward his excited speculation. At first he merely enjoyed the sensation of the slow stream of people that continually went up and down, or strolled backwards and forwards, or circled round the bandstand that was set out like a great gaudy coronet upon the parterres of lobelias and geraniums and calceolarias that with nightfall came to seem brocaded cushions.

It was a time profitable with a thousand reflections, this crowded hour of the promenade. There was always the mesmeric sighing of silk skirts and the ceaseless murmur of conversation; there was the noise of the band and the tapping of canes; there was, in fact, a regularity of sound that was as infinitely soothing as breaking waves or a wind-ruffled wood. There were the sudden provocative glances which flashed as impersonally as precious stones, and yet lanced forth a thrill that no faceted gem could give. There were hands whose white knuckles, as they rippled over Michael’s hands in some momentary pressure of the throng, gave him a sense of being an instrument upon which a chord had been clearly struck. There were strands of hair that floated against his cheeks with a strange, but exquisitely elusive intimacy of communication. It was all very intoxicating and very sensuous; but the spell crept over him as imperceptibly as if he were merely yielding himself to the influence of a beautiful landscape, as if he were lotus-eating in a solitude created by numbers.

Michael, however, was not content to dream away in a crowd these passionate nights of July; and after a while he set out to find adventures in the great bazaar of the Exhibition, wandering through the golden corridors and arcades with a queer sense of suppressed expectancy. So many fantastic trades were carried on here, that it was natural to endow the girls behind the counters with a more romantic life than that of ordinary and anÆmic shop-assistants. Even Miss Mabel Bannerman amid her Turkish Delight came to seem less crude in such surroundings, and Michael once or twice had thoughts of prosecuting his acquaintanceship; for as yet he had not been able to bring himself to converse with any of the numerous girls, so much more attractive than Mabel, who were haunting him with their suggestion of a strange potentiality.

Michael wandered on past the palmists who went in and out of their tapestried tents; past the physiognomists and phrenologists and graphologists; past the vendors of scents and silver; past the languid women who spread out their golden rugs from Samarcand; past the Oriental shops fuming with odorous pastilles, where lamps encrusted in deep-hued jewels of glass glimmered richly; past that slant-eyed cigarette-seller with the crimson fez crowning her dark hair.

July was nearing its end; the holidays were in sight; and still Michael had got no farther with his ambitions; still at the last moment he would pass on and neglect some perfect opportunity for speech. He used to rail at his cowardice, and repeat to himself all his academic knowledge of frail womanhood. He even took the trouble to consult the Ars Amatoria, and was so much impressed by Ovid’s prescription for behaviour at a circus that he determined to follow his advice. To put his theory into practice, Michael selected a booth where seals performed for humanity at sixpence a head. But all his resolutions ended in sitting mildly amused by the entertainment in a condition of absolute decorum.

School broke up with the usual explosion of self-congratulatory rhetoric from which Michael, owing to his Exhibition ticket, failed to emerge with any calf-bound souvenir of intellectual achievement. He minded this less than his own pusillanimous behaviour on the brink of experience. It made him desperate to think that in two days he would be at Basingstead with his mother and Alan and Mrs. Ross, utterly remote even from the pretence of temptation.

“Dearest Michael, you really must get your things together,” expostulated Mrs. Fane, when he announced his intention of going round to the Exhibition as usual on the night before they were to leave town.

“Well, mother, I can pack when I come in, and I do want to get all I can out of this ‘season.’ You see it will be absolutely wasted for August and half September.”

“Michael,” said Mrs. Fane suddenly, “you’re not keeping anything from me?”

“Good gracious, no. What makes you ask?” Michael demanded, blushing.

“I was afraid that perhaps some horrid girl might have got hold of you,” said Mrs. Fane.

“Why, would you mind very much?” asked Michael, with a curious hopefulness that his mother would pursue the subject, as if by so doing she would give him an opportunity of regarding himself and his behaviour objectively.

“I don’t know that I should mind very much,” said Mrs. Fane, “if I thought you were quite certain not to do anything foolish.” Then she seemed to correct the laxity of her point of view, and substituted, “anything that you might regret.”

“What could I regret?” asked Michael, seeking to drive his mother on to the rocks of frankness.

“Surely you know what better than I can tell you. Don’t you?” The note of interrogation caught the wind, and Mrs. Fane sailed off on the starboard tack.

“But as long as you’re not keeping anything from me,” she went on, “I don’t mind. So go out, dear child, and enjoy yourself by all means. But don’t be very late.”

“I never am,” said Michael quickly, and a little resentfully as he thought of his very decorous homecomings.

“I know you’re not. You’re really a very dear fellow,” his mother murmured, now safe in port.

So at nine o’clock as usual Michael passed through the turnstiles and began his feverish progress across the Exhibition grounds, trying as he had never tried before to screw himself up to the pitch of the experience he craved.

He was standing by one of the entrances to the Court of Marvels, struggling with his self-consciousness and egging himself on to be bold on this his last night, when he heard himself accosted as Mr. Michael Fane. He looked round and saw a man whom he instantly recognized, but for the moment could not name.

“It is Mr. Michael Fane?” the stranger asked. “You don’t remember me? I met you at Clere Abbey.”

“Brother Aloysius!” Michael exclaimed, and as he uttered the high-sounding religious appellation he almost laughed at the incongruity of it in connection with this slightly overdressed and dissolute-looking person he so entitled.

“Well, not exactly, old chap. At least not in this get-up. Meats is my name.”

“Oh, yes,” said Michael vaguely. There seemed no other comment on such a name, and Mr. Meats himself appeared sensitive to the implication of uncertainty, for he made haste to put Michael at ease by commenting on its oddity.

“I suppose you’re thinking it’s a damned funny exchange for Brother Aloysius. But a fellow can’t help his name, and that’s a fact.”

“You’ve left the Abbey then?” enquired Michael.

“Oh Lord, yes. Soon after you went. It was no place for me. Manners, O.S.B., gave me the push pretty quick. And I don’t blame him. Well, what are you doing? Have a drink? Or have you got to meet your best girl? My, you’ve grown since I saw you last. Quite the Johnny nowadays. But I spotted you all right. Something about your eyes that would be very hard to forget.”

Michael thought that if it came to unforgettable eyes, the eyes of Mr. Meats would stand as much chance of perpetual remembrance as any, since their unholy light would surely set any heart beating with the breathless imagination of sheer wickedness.

“Yes, I have got funny eyes, haven’t I?” said Meats in complacent realization of Michael’s thoughts. And as he spoke he seemed consciously to exercise their vile charm, so that his irises kindled slowly with lambent blue flames.

“Come on, let’s have this drink,” urged Meats, and he led the way to a scattered group of green tables. They sat down, and Michael ordered a lemon-squash.

“Very good drink too,” commented Meats. “I think I’ll have the same, Rosie,” he said to the girl who served them.

“Do you know that girl?” Michael asked.

“Used to. About three years ago. She’s gone oil though,” said Meats indifferently.

Michael, to hide his astonishment at the contemptuous suggestion of damaged goods, enquired what Meats had been doing since he left the Monastery.

“Want to know?” asked Meats.

Michael assured him that he did.

“You’re rather interested in me, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you a few things and that’s a fact. I don’t suppose that there’s anybody in London who could tell you more. But you might be shocked.”

“Oh, shut up!” scoffed Michael, blushing with indignation.

Then began the shameless narration of the late Brother Aloysius, whom various attainments had enabled to gain an equal profit from religion and vice. Sometimes as Michael listened to the adventures he was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini or Casanova, but almost immediately the comparison would be shattered by a sudden sanctimonious blasphemy which he found nauseating. Moreover, he disliked the sly procurer that continually leered through the man’s personality.

“You seem to have done a lot of dirty work for other people,” Michael bluntly observed at last.

“My dear old chap,” replied Meats, “of course I have. You see, in this world there are lots of people who can always square their own consciences, if the worst of what they want to do is done for them behind the scenes as it were. You never yet heard a man confess that he ruined a girl. Now, did you? Why, I’ve heard the most shocking out-and-outers anyone could wish to meet brag that they’ve done everything, and then turn up their eyes and thank God they’ve always respected real purity. Well, I never respected anything or anybody. And why should I? I never had a chance. Who was my mother? A servant. Who was my father? A minister, a Nonconformist minister in Wales. And what did the old tyke do? Why, he took the case to court and swore my mother was out for blackmail. So she went to prison, and he came smirking home behind the village band; and all the old women in the place hung out Union Jacks to show they believed in him. And then his wife gave a party.”

Michael looked horrified and felt horrified at this revelation of vileness, and yet, all the time he was listening, through some grotesquery of his nerves he was aware of thinking to himself the jingle of Little Bo-peep.

“Ah, that’s touched you up, hasn’t it?” said Meats, eagerly leaning forward. “But wait a bit. What did my mother do when she came out? Went on the streets. Do you hear? On the streets, and mark you, she was a servant, a common village servant, none of your flash Empire goods. Oh, no, she never knew what it was like to go up the river on a Sunday afternoon. And she drank. Well, of course she drank. Gin was as near as she ever got to paradise. And where was I brought up? Not among the buttercups, my friend, you may lay on that. No, I was down underneath, underneath, underneath where a chap like you will never go because you’re a gentleman. And so, though, of course, you’re never likely to ruin a girl, you’ll always have your fun. Why shouldn’t you? Being a nicely brought-up young gentleman, it’s your birthright.”

“But how on earth did you ever become a monk?” asked Michael, anxious to divert the conversation away from himself.

“Well, it does sound a bit improbable, I must say. I was recommended there by a priest—a nice chap called Arbuthnot who’d believe a chimney-sweep was a miller. But Manners was very sharp on to me, and I was very sharp on to Manners. Picking blackberries and emptying slops! What a game! I came with a character and left without one. Probationer was what they called me. Silly mug was what I called myself.”

“You seem to know a lot of priests,” said Michael.

“Oh, I’ve been in with parsons since I was at Sunday-school. Well, don’t look so surprized. You don’t suppose my mother wanted me hanging round all the afternoon! Now I very soon found out that one can always get round a High Church slum parson, and very often a Catholic priest by turning over a new leaf and confessing. It gets them every time, and being by nature generous, it gets their pockets. That’s why I gave up Dissenters and fashionable Vicars. Dissenters want more than they give, and fashionable Vicars are too clever. That’s why they become fashionable Vicars, I suppose,” said Meats pensively.

“But you couldn’t go on taking in even priests for ever,” Michael objected.

“Ah, now I’ll tell you something. I do feel religious sometimes,” Meats declared solemnly. “And I do really want to lead a new life. But it doesn’t last. It’s like love. Never mind, perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to die when I’m working off a religious stretch. I give you my word, Fane, that often in these fits I’ve felt like committing suicide just to cheat the devil. Would you believe that?”

“I don’t think you’re as bad as you make out,” said Michael sententiously.

“Oh, yes, I am,” smiled the other. “I’m rotten bad. But I reckon the first man I meet in hell will be my father, and if it’s possible to hurt anyone down there more than they’re being hurt already, I’ll do it. But look here, I shall get the hump with this blooming conversation you’ve started me off on. Come along, drink up and have another, and tell us something about yourself.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to tell,” Michael sighed. “My existence is pretty dull after yours.”

“I suppose it is,” said Meats, as if struck by a new thought. “Everything has its compensations, as they say.”

“Frightfully dull,” Michael vowed. “Why, here am I still at school! You know I wouldn’t half mind going down underneath, as you call it, for a while. I believe I’d like it.”

“If you knew you could get up again all right,” commented Meats.

“Oh, of course,” Michael answered. “I don’t suppose Æneas would have cared much about going down to hell, if he hadn’t been sure he could come up again quite safely.”

“Well, I don’t know your friend with the Jewish name,” said Meats. “But I’ll lay he didn’t come out much wiser than he went in if he knew he could get out all right by pressing a button and taking the first lift up.”

“Oh, well, I was only speaking figuratively,” Michael explained.

“So was I. The same here, and many of them, old chap,” retorted Meats enigmatically.

“Ah, you don’t think I’m in earnest. You think I’m fooling,” Michael complained.

“Oh, yes, I think you’d like to take a peep without letting go of Nurse’s apron,” sneered Meats.

“Well, perhaps one day you’ll see me underneath,” Michael almost threatened.

“No offence, old chap,” said Meats cordially. “It’s no good my giving you an address because it won’t last, but London isn’t very big, and we’ll run up against one another again, that’s a cert. Now I’ve got to toddle off and meet a girl.”

“Have you?” asked Michael, and his enquiry was tinged with a faint longing that the other noticed at once.

“Jealous?” enquired Meats. “Why, look at all the girls round about you. It’s up to you not to feel lonely.”

“I know,” said Michael fretfully. “But how the deuce can I tell whether they want me to talk to them?”

Meats laughed shrilly.

“What are you afraid of? Leading some innocent lamb astray?”

Again to Michael occurred the ridiculous rhyme of Bo-peep. So insistent was it that he could scarcely refrain from humming it aloud.

“Of course I’m not afraid of that,” he protested. “But how am I to tell they won’t think me a brute?”

“What would it matter if they did?” asked Meats.

“Well, I should feel a fool.”

“Oh, dear. You’re very young, aren’t you?”

“It’s nothing to do with being young,” Michael asserted. “I simply don’t want to be a cad.”

“Somebody else is to be the cad first and then it’s all right, eh?” chuckled Meats. “But it’s a shame to teaze a nice chap like you. I dare say Daisy’ll have a friend with her.”

“Is Daisy the girl you’re going to see?”

“You’ve guessed my secret,” said Meats. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

As Michael rose to follow Meats, he felt that he was like Faust with Mephistopheles. But Faust had asked for his youth back again. Michael only demanded the courage not to waste youth while it was his to enjoy. He felt that his situation was essentially different from the other, and he hesitated no longer.

The next half-hour passed in a whirl. Michael was conscious of a slim brunette in black and scarlet, and of a fairy-like figure by her side in a dress of shimmering blue; he was conscious too of a voice insinuating, softly metallic, and of fingers that touched his wrist as lightly as silk. There were whispers and laughters and sudden sweeping embarrassments. There was a horrible sense of publicity, of curious mocking eyes that watched his progress. There was an overwhelming knowledge of money burning in his pocket, of money hard and round and powerful. There were hot waves of remorse and the thought of his heart hammering him on to be brave. A cabman leaned over from his box like a gargoyle. A key clicked.

Then, it seemed a century afterwards, Carlington Road stretched dim, austere, forbidding to Michael’s ingress. A policeman’s deep salutation sounded portentously reproachful. The bloom of dawn was on the windows. The flames in the street-lamps were pale as primroses. At his own house Michael saw the red and amber sparrows in their crude blue vegetation horribly garish against the lighted entrance-hall. The Salve printed funereally upon the mat was the utterance of blackest irony. He hastily turned down the gas, and the stairs caught a chill unreality from the creeping dawn. The balustrade stuck to his parched hands; the stairs creaked grotesquely to his breathless ascent. His mother stood like a ghost in her doorway.

“Michael, how dreadfully late you are.”

“Am I?” said Michael. “I suppose it is rather late. I met a fellow I know.”

He spoke petulantly to conceal his agitation, and his one thought was to avoid kissing her before he went up to his own room.

“It’s all right about my packing,” he murmured hastily. “In the morning I shall have time. I’m sorry I woke you. Good night.”

He had passed; and he looked back compassionately, as she faded in her rosy and indefinite loveliness away to her room.

Then, with the patterns of foulard ties crawling like insects before his strained eyes, with collars coiling and uncoiling like mainsprings, with all his clothes in one large intolerable muddle, Michael pressed the cold sheets to his forehead and tried to imagine that to-morrow he would be in the country.

Chapter XV: Grey Eyes

A S Michael sat opposite to his mother in the railway-carriage on the following morning, he found it hard indeed to realize that an ocean did not stretch between them. He did not feel ashamed; he had no tremors for the straightforward regard; he had no uneasy sensation that possibly even now his mother was perplexing herself on account of his action. He simply felt that he had suffered a profound change and that his action of yesterday called for a readjustment of his entire standpoint. Or rather, he felt that having since yesterday travelled so far and lived so violently, he could now only meet his mother as a friend from whom one has been long parted and whose mental progress during many years must be gradually apprehended.

“Why do you look at me with such a puzzled expression, Michael?” asked Mrs. Fane. “Is my hat crooked?”

Michael assured her that nothing was the matter with her hat.

“Do you want to ask me something?” persisted Mrs. Fane.

Michael shook his head and smiled, wondering whether he did really wish to ask her a question, whether he would be relieved to know what attitude she would adopt towards his adventure. With so stirring a word did he enhance what otherwise would have seemed base. His mother evidently was aware of a tension in this ridiculously circumscribed railway-carriage. Would it be released if he were to inform her frankly of what had happened, or would such, an admission be an indiscretion from which their relationship would never recover? After all she was his mother, and there must positively exist in her inmost self the power of understanding what he had done. Some part of the impulse which had actuated his behaviour would surely find a root in the heart of the handsome woman who travelled with such becoming repose on the seat opposite to him. He forgot to bother about himself in this sudden new pleasure of observation that seemed to endow him with undreamed-of opportunities of distraction and, what was more important, with a stable sense of his own individuality. How young his mother looked! Until now he had taken her youth for granted, but she must be nearly forty. It was scarcely credible that this tall slim creature with the proud, upcurving mouth and lustrous grey eyes was his own mother. He thought of his friends’ homes that were presided over by dumpy women in black silk with greying hair. Even Alan’s mother, astonishingly pretty though she was, seemed in the picture he conjured of her to look faded beside his own.

And while he was pondering his mother’s beauty, the train reached the station at which they must alight for Basingstead. There was Alan in white flannels on the platform, there too was Mrs. Ross; and as she greeted his mother Michael’s thoughts went back to the day he saw these two come together at Carlington Road, and by their gracious encounter drive away the shadow of Nurse.

“I vote we walk,” said Alan. “Mrs. Fane and Aunt Maud can drive in the pony-chaise, and then your luggage can all come up at once in the cart.”

So it was arranged, and as Michael watched his mother and Mrs. Ross drive off, he was strangely reminded of a picture that he had once dearly loved, a picture by Flaxman of Hera and Athene driving down from Olympus to help the Greeks. ?e????e??? ??? —that was his mother, and ??a???p?? ????? —that was Mrs. Ross. He could actually remember the line in the Iliad that told of the gates of heaven, where the Hours keep watch, opening for the goddesses’ descent— a?t?ata? d? p??a? ????? ???a??? ?? ???? ??a? . At the same time for all his high quotations, Michael could not help smiling at the dolefully senescent dun pony being compared to the golden steeds of Hera or at the pleasant old porter who hastened to throw open the white gate of the station-drive serving as a substitute for the Hours.

The country air was still sweet between the hazel hedgerows, although the grass was drouthy and the scabious blooms were already grey with dust. Nothing for Michael could have been more charged with immemorial perfume than this long walk at July’s end. It held the very quintessence of holiday airs through all the marching years of boyhood. It was haunted by the memory of all the glad anticipations of six weeks’ freedom that time after time had succeeded the turmoil of breaking up for the August holidays. The yellow amoret swinging from the tallest shoot of the hedge was the companion of how many summer walks. The acrid smell of nettles by the roadside was prophetic of how many pastoral days. The butterflies, brown and white and tortoiseshell, that danced away to right and left over the green bushes, to what winding paths did they not summon. And surely Alan gave a final grace to this first walk of the holidays. Surely he crystallized all hopes, all memories, all delights of the past in a perfection of present joy.

Yet Michael, as he walked beside him, could only think of Alan as a beautiful inanimate object for whom perception did not exist. Inanimate, however, was scarcely the word to describe one who was so very definitely alive: Michael racked his invention to discover a suitable label for Alan, but he could not find the word. With a shock of misgiving he asked himself whether he had outgrown their friendship, and partly to test, but chiefly to allay his dread, he took Alan’s arm with a gesture of almost fierce possession. He was relieved to find that Alan’s touch was still primed with consolation, that companionship with him still soothed the turbulence of his own spirit reaching out to grasp what could never be expressed in words, and therefore could never be grasped. Michael was seized with a longing to urge Alan to grow up more quickly, to make haste lest he should be left behind by his adventurous friend. Michael remembered how he used to dread being moved up, hating to leave Alan in a class below him, how he had deliberately dallied to allow Alan to overtake him. But idleness in school-work was not the same as idleness in experience of life, and unless Alan would quickly grow up, he knew that he must soon leave him irremediably behind. It was distressing to reflect that Alan would be shocked by the confidence which he longed to impose upon him, and it was disquieting to realize that these last summer holidays of school, however complete with the quiet contentment of familiar pleasures, would for himself grow slowly irksome with deferred excitement.

But as the green miles slowly unfolded themselves, as the dauntless yellow amoret still swung from a lissome stem, as Alan spoke of the river and the grey tower on the hill, Michael saw the fretful colours of the Exhibition grow dim; and when dreaming in the haze of the slumberous afternoon they perceived the village and heard the mysterious murmur of human tranquillity, Michael’s heart overflowed with gratitude for the sight of Alan by his side. Then the church-clock that struck a timeless hour sounded for him one of those moments whose significance would resist eternally whatever lying experience should endeavour to assail the truth which had made of one flashing scene a revelation.

Michael was ineffably refreshed by his vision of the imperishable substance of human friendship, and he could not but jeer at himself now for having a little while back put Alan into the domain of objects inanimate.

“There’s your cottage,” said Alan. “It’s practically next door to Cobble Place. Rather decent, eh?”

Michael could not say how decent he thought it, nor how decent he thought Alan.

“I vote we go up the river after tea,” he suggested.

“Rather,” said Alan. “I expect you’ll come round to tea with us. Don’t be long unpacking.”

“I shan’t, you bet,” said Michael.

Nor was he, and after a few minutes he and his mother were sitting in the drawing-room at Cobble Place, eating a tea that must have been very nearly the same as an unforgettable tea of nine years ago. Mrs. Carthew did not seem quite so old; nor indeed did anybody, and as for Joan and May Carthew, they were still girls. Yet even when he and Alan had stayed down here for the wedding only four years ago, Michael had always been conscious of everybody’s age. And now he was curiously aware of everybody’s youth. He supposed vaguely that all this change of outlook was due to his own remarkable precocity and rapid advance; but nevertheless he still ate with all the heartiness of childhood.

After tea Mrs. Ross with much tact took up Michael by himself to see her son and, spared the necessity of comment, Michael solemnly regarded the fair-haired boy of two who was squeaking an india-rubber horse for his mother’s benefit.

“O you attractive son of mine,” Mrs. Ross sighed in a whisper.

“He’s an awfully sporting kid,” Michael said.

Then he suddenly remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Ross since her husband was killed. Yet from this chintz-hung room whose casements were flooded with the amber of the westering sun, how far off seemed fatal Africa. He remembered also that to this very same gay room he had long ago gone with Miss Carthew after tea, that here in a ribboned bed he had first heard the news of her coming to live at 64 Carlington Road.

“We must have a long talk together soon,” said Mrs. Ross, seeming to divine his thoughts. “But I expect you’re anxious to revive old memories and visit old haunts with Alan. I’m going to stay here and talk to Kenneth while Nurse has her tea.”

Michael lingered for a moment in the doorway to watch the two. Then he said abruptly, breathlessly:

“Mrs. Ross, I think painters and sculptors are lucky fellows. I’d like to paint you now. I wish one could understand the way people look, when one’s young. But I’m just beginning to realize how lucky I was when you came to us. And yet I used to be ashamed of having a governess. Still, I believe I did appreciate you, even when I was eight.”

Then he fled, and to cover his retreat sang out loudly for Alan all the way downstairs.

“I say, Aunt Enid wants to talk to you,” said Alan.

“Aunt Enid?” Michael echoed.

“Mrs. Carthew,” Alan explained.

“I vote we go for a walk afterwards, don’t you?” Michael suggested.

“Rather,” said Alan. “I’ll shout for you, when I think you’ve jawed long enough.”

Michael found Mrs. Carthew in her sun-coloured garden, cutting down the withering lupins whose silky seed-pods were strewn all about the paths.

“Can you spare ten minutes for an old friend?” asked Mrs. Carthew.

Michael thought how tremendously wise she looked, and lest he should be held to be staring unduly, he bent down to sweep together the shimmering seed-pods, while Mrs. Carthew snipped away, talking in sentences that matched the quick snickasnack of her weapon.

“I must say you’ve grown up into an attractive youth. Let me see, you must be seventeen and a half. I suppose you think yourself a man now? Dear me, these lupins should have been cut back a fortnight ago. And now I have destroyed a hollyhock. Tut-tut, I’m getting very blind. What did you think of Maud’s son? A healthy rosy child, and not at all amenable to discipline, I’m glad to say. Well, are you enjoying school?”

The old lady paused with her scissors gaping, and looked shrewdly at Michael.

“I’m getting rather fed up with it,” Michael admitted. “It goes on for such a long time. It wasn’t so bad this term, though.”

Then he remembered that whatever pleasures had mitigated the exasperation of school last term were decidedly unscholastic, and he blushed.

“I simply loathed it for a time,” he added.

“Alan informs me he acquired his first eleven cap this term and will be in the first fifteen as Lord Treasurer or something,” Mrs. Carthew went on. “Naturally he must enjoy this shower of honours. Alan is decidedly typical of the better class of unthinking young Englishman. He is pleasant to look at—a little colt-like perhaps, but that will soon wear off. My own dear boy was very like him, and Maud’s dear husband was much the same. You, I’m afraid, think too much, Michael.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think very much,” said Michael, disclaiming philosophy, and greatly afraid that Mrs. Carthew was supposing him a prig.

“You needn’t be ashamed of thinking,” she said. “After all, the amount you think now won’t seriously disorganize the world. But you seem to me old for your age, much older than Alan for instance, and though your conversation with me at any rate is not mature, nevertheless you convey somehow an impression of maturity that I cannot quite account for.”

Michael could not understand why, when for the first time he was confronted with somebody who gave his precocity its due, he was unable to discuss it eagerly and voluminously, why he should half resent being considered older than Alan.

“Don’t look so cross with me,” Mrs. Carthew commanded. “I am an old woman, and I have a perfect right to say what I please to you. Besides, you and I have had many conversations, and I take a great interest in you. What are you going to be?”

“Well, that’s what I can’t find out,” said Michael desperately. “I know what I’m not going to be, and that’s all.”

“That’s a good deal, I think,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Pray tell me what professions you have condemned.”

“I’m not going into the Army. I’m not going into the Civil Service. I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer.”

“Or a parson?” asked Mrs. Carthew, crunching through so many lupin stalks at once that they fell with a rattle on to the path.

“Well, I have thought about being a parson,” Michael slowly granted. “But I don’t think parsons ought to marry.”

“Good gracious,” exclaimed Mrs. Carthew, “you’re surely not engaged?”

“Oh, no,” said Michael; but he felt extremely flattered by the imputation. “Still, I might want to be.”

“Then you’re in love,” decided Mrs. Carthew. “No wonder you look so careworn. I suppose she’s nearly thirty and has promised to wait until you come of age. I can picture her. If I had my stick with me I could draw her on the gravel. A melon stuck on a bell-glass, I’ll be bound.”

“I’m not in love, and if I were in love,” said Michael with dignity, “I certainly shouldn’t be in love with anyone like that. But I could be in love at any moment, and so I don’t think I shall be a parson.”

“You’ve got plenty of time,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Alan says you’re going to Oxford next year.”

Michael’s heart leapt—next year had never before seemed so imminent.

“I suppose you’ll say that I’m an ignorant and foolish old woman, if I attempt to give you advice about Oxford; but I gave you advice once about school, and I’ll do the same again. To begin with, I think you’ll find having been to St. James’ a handicap. I have an old friend, the wife of a don, who assures me that many of the boys who go up from your school suffer at Oxford from their selfish incubation by Dr. Brownjohn. They’re fit for killing too soon. In fact, they have been forced.”

“Ah, but I saw that for myself,” said Michael. “I had a row with Brownjohn about my future.”

“How delighted I am to hear that!” said Mrs. Carthew. “I think that I’ll cut back the delphiniums also. Then you’re not going in for a scholarship?”

“No,” said Michael. “I don’t want to be hampered, and I think my mother’s got plenty of money. But Alan’s going to get a scholarship.”

“Yes, that is unfortunately necessary,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Still, Alan is sufficiently typical of the public-school spirit—an odious expression yet always unavoidable—to carry off the burden. If you were poor, I should advise you to buy overcoats. Three smart overcoats are an equipment for a poor man. But I needn’t dwell on social ruses in your case. Remember that going to Oxford is like going to school. Be normal and inconspicuous at first; and when you have established yourself as an utterly undistinguished young creature, you can career into whatever absurdities of thought, action or attire you will. In your first year establish your sanity; in your second year display your charm; and in your third year do whatever you like. Now there is Alan calling, and we’ll leave the paths strewn with these cut stalks as a Memento Mori to the gardener. What a charming woman your mother is. She has that exquisite vagueness which when allied with good breeding is perfectly irresistible, at any rate to a practical and worldly old woman like me. But then I’ve had an immense amount of time in which to tidy up. Pleasant hours to you down here. It’s delightful to hear about the place the sound of boys laughing and shouting.”

Michael left Mrs. Carthew, rather undecided as to what exactly she thought of him or Alan or anybody else. As he walked over the lawn that went sloping down to the stream, he experienced a revulsion from the interest he took in listening to what people thought about him, and he now began to feel an almost morbid sensitiveness to the opinion of others. This destroyed some of the peace which he had sought and cherished down here in the country. He began to wonder if that wise old lady had been laughing at him, whether all she said had been an implied criticism of his attitude towards existence. Her praise must have been grave irony; her endorsement of his behaviour had been disguised reproof. She really admired Alan, and had only been trying as gently as possible to make him come into line with her nephew. He himself must seem to her eccentric, undignified, a flamboyant sort of creature whom she pitied and whose errors she wished to remedy. Michael was mortified by his retrospect of the conversation, and felt inclined when he saw Alan to make an excuse and retire from his society, until his self-esteem had recovered from the rebuke that had lately been inflicted. Indeed, it called for a great effort on Michael’s part to embark in the canoe with his paragon and sit face to face without betraying the wound that was damaging his own sense of personality.

“You had a very long jaw with Aunt Enid,” said Alan. “I thought you were never coming. She polished me off in about three minutes.”

Michael looked darkly at Alan for a moment before he asked with ungracious accentuation what on earth Alan and Mrs. Carthew had talked about.

“She was rather down on me,” said Alan. “I think she must have thought I was putting on side about getting my Eleven.”

Michael was greatly relieved to hear this, and his brow cleared as he enquired what was wrong.

“Well, I can’t remember her exact words,” Alan went on. “But she said I must be careful not to grow up into a strong silent Englishman, because their day was done. She practically told me I was rather an ass, and pretended to be fearfully surprized when she heard I was going to try for a scholarship at Oxford. She was squashing slugs all the time she was talking, and I could do nothing but look a bigger fool than ever and count the slugs. I ventured to remark once that most people thought it was a good thing to be keen on games, and she said half the world was composed of fools which accounted for the preponderation—I mean preponderance—of pink on the map. She said it always looked like an advertizement of successful fox-hunting. And when I carefully pointed out that I’d never all my life had a chance to hunt, she said ‘More’s the pity,’ I couldn’t make out what she was driving at; so, feeling rather a worm, I shot off as soon as I could. What did she say to you?”

“Oh, nothing much,” said Michael triumphantly. “She’s a rum old girl, but rather decent.”

“She’s too clever for me,” said Alan, shaking his head. “It’s like batting to a pro.”

Then from the complexities of feminine judgment, the conversation glided easily like the canoe towards a discussion of the umpire’s decision last term in giving Alan out l.b.w. to a ball that pitched at least two feet away from the off stump.

“It was rotten,” said Alan fervidly.

“It was putrid,” Michael agreed.

To avoid the difficulty of a first night in a strange cottage, Mrs. Fane and Michael had supper at Cobble Place; and after a jolly evening spent in looking for pencils to play games that nobody could ever recollect in all their rich perfection of potential incidents, Michael and Mrs. Fane walked with leisurely paces back to Woodbine Cottage through a sweet-savoured moonless night.

Michael enjoyed the intimate good night beneath so small a roof, and wished that Stella were with them. He lay awake, reading from each in turn of the tower of books he had erected by his bedside to fortify himself against sleeplessness. It was a queer enough mixture—Swinburne, Keats, Matthew Arnold, Robinson Crusoe, Half-hours with the Mystics, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Daudet’s Sappho, the second volume of The Savoy, The Green Carnation, Holy Living and Dying; and as each time he changed his mind and took another volume, on the gabled ceiling the monstrous shadow that was himself filled him with a dreadful uncertainty. After an hour or so, he went to sit by the low window, leaning out and seeming to hear the dark world revolve in its course. Stars shook themselves clear from great rustling trees, and were in time enmeshed by others. The waning moon came up behind a rounded hill. A breeze fluttered down the dusty road, and was silent.

Michael fell to wondering whether he could ever bring himself in tune with these slow progressions of nature, whether he could renounce after one haggard spell of experience the mazy stir of transitory emotions that danced always beyond this dream. An Half-hour with St. John of the Cross made him ask himself whether this were the dark night of the soul through which he was passing. But he had never travelled yet, nor was he travelling now. He was simply sitting quiescent, allowing himself to be passed. These calm and stately figures of humanity whom he admired in their seclusion had only reached it after long strife. Mrs. Carthew had lost a husband and a son, had seen her daughter leave her house as a governess. Joan and May had for many years sunk their hopes in tending their mother. Nancy was away earning money, and would be entitled to retire here one day. Mrs. Ross had endured himself and Stella for several years, had married and lost her husband, and had borne a child. All these had won their timeless repose and their serene uncloying ease. They were not fossils, but perdurable images of stone. And his mother, she was—he stopped his reverie. Of his mother he knew nothing. Outside the dust stirred in the road fretfully; a malaise was in the night air. Michael shivered and went back to bed, and as he turned to blow out his candle he saw above him huge and menacing his own shadow. A cock crowed.

“Silly ass,” muttered Michael, “he thinks it’s already morning,” and turning over after a dreamless sleep he found it was morning. So he rose and dressed himself serenely for a long sunburnt day.

On his way up the road to call for Alan he met the postman, who in answer to his enquiries handed him a letter from South Africa stamped all over with mysterious official abbreviations. He took it up to his mother curiously.

At lunch he asked her about the news from the war.

“Yes, dear, I had a letter,” she murmured.

“From Lord Saxby, I suppose?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Anything interesting?” Michael persisted.

“Oh, no, it’s only about marches and not being able to wash properly.”

“I thought it might be interesting,” Michael speculated.

“No, dear. It wouldn’t interest you,” said Mrs. Fane in her tone of gentle discouragement.

“I don’t want to be inquisitive,” said Michael resentfully.

“No, dear, I’m sure you don’t,” his mother softly agreed.

The holidays ran their pastoral course of sun and rain, of clouds and winds, until the last week arrived with September in her most majestic mood of flawless halcyon. These were days that more than any hitherto enhanced for Michael the reverence he felt for the household of Cobble Place. These were days when Mrs. Carthew stepped wisely along her flowery enclosure, pondering the plums and peaches on the warm walls that in a transcendency of mellow sunlight almost took on the texture of living sunburnt flesh. These were days when Joan and May Carthew went down the village street with great bunches of Michaelmas daisies, of phloxes and Japanese anemones, or sat beneath the mulberry tree, sewing in the bee-drowsed air.

At the foot of the hill beyond the stream was a straggling wind-frayed apple-orchard, fresh pasturage for lambs in spring, and now in September a jolly haunt for the young son of Mrs. Ross. Here one afternoon, when Alan was away at Basingstead Major playing the last cricket match of the year, Michael plunged down in the grass beside her.

They sat for a while in silence, and Mrs. Ross seemed to Michael to be waiting for him to speak first, as if by her own attitude of mute expectation she could lure him on to express himself more openly than by direct question and shy answer. He felt the air pregnant with confidences, and kept urging himself on to begin the statement and revelation of his character, sure that whatever he desired to ask must be asked now while he was perhaps for the last time liable to this grave woman’s influence, conscious of the security of goodness, envious of the maternity of peace. This grey-eyed woman seemed to sit above him like a proud eagle, careless of homage, never to be caught, never to be tamed, a figure for worship and inspiration. Michael wondered why all the women who awed him had grey eyes. Blue eyes fired his senses, striking sparks and kindling answering flames from his own blue eyes. Brown eyes left him indifferent. But grey eyes absorbed his very being, whether they were lustrous and violet-shaded like his mother’s and Stella’s, or whether, like Mrs. Ross’s, they were soft as grey sea-water that in a moment could change to the iron-bound rocks they were so near.

Still Michael did not speak, but watched Mrs. Ross solemnly hand back to the rosy child sitting beside her in the grass the fallen apples that he would always fling from him exuberantly, panting the while at laughter’s highest pitch.

“I wonder if I ever laughed like that,” said Michael.

“You were a very serious little boy, when I first knew you,” Mrs. Ross told him.

“I must have been rather depressing,” Michael sighed.

“No, indeed you were not, dear Michael,” she answered. “You had much too much personality.”

“Have I now?” Michael asked sharply.

“Yes, of course you have.”

“Well, what gives it to me?”

“Surely personality is something that is born with one. Personality can’t be made,” said Mrs. Ross.

“You don’t think experience has got anything to do with it?” Michael pressed.

“I think experience makes the setting, and according to the experience the personality is perfected or debased, but nothing can destroy personality, not even death,” she murmured, far away for a moment from this orchard.

“Which would you say had the stronger personality—Alan or I?” asked Michael.

“I should say you had,” said Mrs. Ross. “Or at any rate you have a personality that will affect a larger number of people, either favourably or unfavourably.”

“But Alan influences me more than I influence him,” Michael argued.

“That may be,” Mrs. Ross admitted. “Though I think your influence over Alan is very strong in this way. I think Alan is always very eager to see you at your best, and probably as your friendship goes on he will be more solicitous for you than for himself. I should say that he would be likely to sink himself in you. I wonder if you realize what a passionately loyal soul he is.”

Michael flushed with pleasure at this appreciation of his friend, and his ambition went flying over to Basingstead Major to inspire Alan to bat his best. Then he burst forth in praise of him; he spoke of his changelessness, his freedom from moods, his candour and toleration and modesty.

“But the terrible thing is,” said Michael suddenly, “that I always feel that without noticing it I shall one day leave Alan behind.”

“But when you turn back, you’ll find him just the same, don’t forget; and you may be glad that he did not come with you. You may be glad that from his slowness you can find an indication of the road that I’m sure you yourself will one day try to take. Alan will travel by it all his life. You’ll travel by it ultimately. Alan will never really appreciate its beauty. You will. That will be your recompense for what you suffer before you find it.”

Mrs. Ross, as if to conceal emotion, turned quickly to romp with her son. Then she looked at Michael:

“And haven’t you already once or twice left Alan behind?”

Suddenly to Michael her grey eyes seemed accusing.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” he granted. “But isn’t that the reason why my personality affects more people than his? You said just now that experience was only the setting, but I’m sure in my case it’s more than a mere setting.”

And even as he spoke all his experience seemed to cloud his brow, knitting and lining it with perplexed wrinkles.

“Mrs. Ross, you won’t think me very rude if I say you always remind me of Pallas Athene? You always have, you know. At first it was just a vague outward resemblance, because you’re tall and sort of cool-looking, and I really think your nose is rather Greek, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Oh, Michael,” Mrs. Ross smiled. “I think you’re even more unalterable than Alan. I seem to see you as a little boy again, when you talk like that.”

Michael, however, was too keen on the scent of his comparison to be put off by smiles, and he went on eagerly:

“Now I realize that you actually are like Athene. You’re one of those people who seem to have sprung into the world fully armed. I can’t imagine that you were ever young.”

Mrs. Ross laughed outright at this.

“Wait a minute,” cried Michael. “Or ever old for that matter. And you know all about me. No, you needn’t shake your head like that. Because you do.”

Young Kenneth was so much roused by Michael’s triumphant asseverations that he began to shout and kick in delighted tune and fling the apples from him with a vigour that he had never yet reached.

“You know,” Michael continued breathlessly, while the boy on the grass gurgled his endorsement of every word. “You know that I’m old for my age, that I’ve already done things that other chaps at school only whisper about.”

He stopped suddenly, for the grey eyes had become like rocks, and though the baby still panted ecstatically, there fell a chill.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” said Mrs. Ross.

“Well, why did you lead me on to confide in you?” said Michael sullenly. “I thought you would sympathize.”

“Michael, I apologize,” she said, melting. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I dare say—ah, Michael, you see how easily all my shining armour falls to pieces.”

“Another broken bottle,” Michael muttered.

He got up abruptly and, though there were tears in his eyes, she could not win him back.

“Dear old boy, do tell me. Don’t make the mistake of going back into yourself, because I failed you for a moment.”

Mrs. Ross held out her hand, but Michael walked away.

“You don’t understand,” he turned to say. “You couldn’t understand. And I don’t want you to be able to understand. You mustn’t think I’m sulking, or being rude, and really I’d rather you didn’t understand. That boy of yours won’t ever want you to understand. I don’t think he’ll ever do anything that isn’t perfectly comprehensible.”

“Michael,” said Mrs. Ross, “don’t be so bitter. You’ll be sorry soon.”

“Soon?” asked Michael fiercely. “Soon? Why soon? What’s going to happen to make me sorry soon? Something is going to happen. I know. I feel it.”

He fled through the wind-frayed orchard up the hill-side. With his back against the tower called Grogg’s Folly he looked over four counties and vowed he would go heedless of everything that stood between him and experience. He would deny himself nothing; he would prove to the hilt everything.

“I must know,” he wrung out of himself. “Everything that has happened must have happened for some reason. I will believe that. I can’t believe in God, until I can believe in myself. And how can I believe in myself yet?”

The four counties under September’s munificence mocked him with their calm.

“I know that all these people at Cobble Place are all right,” he groaned. “I know that, just as I know Virgil is a great poet. But I never knew Virgil was great until I read Swinburne. Oh, I want to be calm and splendid and proud of myself, but I want to understand life while I’m alive. I want to believe in immortality, but in case I never can be convinced of it, I want to be convinced of something. Everything seems to be tumbling down nowadays. What’s so absurd is that nobody can understand anybody else, let alone the universe. Mrs. Ross can understand why I like Alan, but she can’t understand why I want love. Viner can understand why I get depressed, but he can’t understand why I can’t be cured immediately. Wilmot could understand why I wanted to read his rotten books, but he can’t understand why the South African War upset me. And so on with everybody. I’m determined to understand everybody,” Michael vowed, “even if I can’t have faith,” he sighed to the four counties.

Chapter XVI: Blue Eyes

M ICHAEL managed to avoid during the rest of the week any reference, direct or indirect, to his interrupted conversation with Mrs. Ross, though he fancied a reproachfulness in her manner towards him, especially at the moment of saying good-bye. He was not therefore much surprized to receive a letter from her soon after he was back in Carlington Road.

Michael merely pondered this letter coldly. He was still under the influence of the disappointment, and when he answered Mrs. Ross he answered her without regard to any wound he might inflict.

Mrs. Ross made one more brief attempt to recapture him, but Michael put her off with the most superficial gossip of school-life, and she did not try again. He meant to play football, notwithstanding the hot weather, but finding that his boots were worn out, he continually put off buying another pair and let himself drift into October before he began. Then he hurt his leg, and had to stop for a while. This spoiled his faint chance for the First Fifteen, and in the end he gave up football altogether without much regret.

Games were a great impediment after all, when October’s thin blue skies and sheen of pearl-soft airs led him on to dream along the autumnal streets. Sometimes he would wander by himself through the groves of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, or on some secluded green chair he would sit reading Verlaine, while continuously about him the slow leaves of the great planes swooped and fluttered down ambiguously like silent birds.

One Saturday afternoon he was sitting thus, when through the silver fog that on every side wrought the ultimate dissolution of the view Michael saw the slim figure of a girl walking among the trees. His mind was gay with Verlaine’s delicate and fantastic songs, and this slim girl, as she moved wraith-like over the ground marbled with fallen leaves, seemed to express the cadence of the verse which had been sighing across the printed page.

The girl with downcast glance walked on, seeming to follow her path softly as one might follow through embroidery a thread of silk, and as she drew nearer to Michael out of the fog’s enchantment she lost none of her indefinite charm; but she seemed still exquisite and silver-dewed. There was no one else in sight, and now already Michael could hear the lisping of her steps; then a breath of air among the tree-tops more remote sent floating, swaying, fluttering about her a flight of leaves. She paused, startled by the sudden shower, and at that moment the down-going autumnal sun glanced wanly through the glades and lighted her gossamer-gold hair with kindred gleams. The girl resumed her dreaming progress, and Michael now frankly stared in a rapture. She was dressed in deepest green box-cloth, and the heavy folds that clung to that lissome form made her ankles behind great pompons of black silk seem astonishingly slender. One hand was masked by a small muff of astrakhan; the other curled behind to gather close her skirt. Her hair tied back with a black bow sprayed her tall neck with its beaten gold. She came along downcast until she was within a few feet of Michael; then she looked at him. He smiled, and her mouth when she answered him with answering smile was like a flower whose petals have been faintly stirred. Indeed, it was scarcely a smile, scarcely more than a tremor, but her eyes deepened suddenly, and Michael drawn into their dusky blue exclaimed simply:

“I say, I’ve been watching you for a long time.”

“I don’t think you ought to talk to me like this in Kensington Gardens. Why, there’s not a soul in sight. And I oughtn’t to let you talk.”

Her voice was low with a provocative indolence of tone, and while she spoke her lips scarcely moved, so that their shape was never for an instant lost, and the words seemed to escape like unwilling fugitives.

“What are you reading?” she idly asked, tapping Michael’s book with her muff.

“Verlaine.”

“French?”

He nodded, and she pouted in delicious disapproval of his learned choice.

“Fancy reading French unless you’ve got to.”

“But I enjoy these poems,” Michael declared. “As a matter of fact you’re just like them. At least you were when I saw you first in the distance. Now you’re more real somehow.”

Her gaze had wandered during his comparison and Michael, a little hurt by her inattention, asked if she were expecting somebody.

“Oh, no. I just came out for a walk. I get a headache if I stay in all the afternoon. Now I must go on. Good-bye.”

She scattered with a light kick the little heap of leaves that during their conversation she had been amassing, and with a half-mocking wave of her muff prepared to leave him.

“I say, don’t tear off,” Michael begged. “Where do you live?”

“Oh, a long way from here,” she said.

“But where?”

“West Kensington.”

“So do I,” cried Michael, thinking to himself that all the gods of luck and love were fighting on his side this afternoon. “We’ll walk home together.”

“Shall we?” murmured the girl, poised on bent toes as if she were minded to flee from him in a breath.

“Oh, we must,” vowed Michael.

“But I mustn’t dawdle,” she protested.

“Of course not,” he affirmed with almost an inflexion of puritanical rigour.

“You’re leaving your book, stupid,” she laughed, as he rose to take his place by her side.

“I wouldn’t have minded, because all that’s in that book is in you,” he declared. “I think I’ll leave it behind for a lark.”

She ran back lightly and opened it to see whether his name were on the front page.

“Michael Fane,” she murmured. “What does ‘ex libris’ mean?” Yet even as she asked the question her concentration failed, and she seemed not to hear his answer.

“You didn’t really want to know, you funny girl,” said Michael.

“Know what?” she echoed, blinking round at him over her shoulder as they walked on.

“The meaning of ‘ex libris.’”

“But I found out your name,” she challenged. “And you don’t know mine.”

“What is it?” Michael dutifully asked.

“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

“Ah, do.”

“Well, then, it’s Lily—and I’ve got a sister called Doris.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think?”

“Seventeen?” Michael hazarded.

She nodded. It was on the tip of his tongue to claim kinship on the score of their similar years, but discretion defeated honesty, and he said aloofly, gazing up at the sky:

“I’m nineteen and a half.”

She told him more as they mingled with the crowds in Kensington High Street, that her mother was Mrs. Haden, who recited in public sometimes, that her sister Doris wanted to go on the stage, and that they lived in Trelawny Road.

“I know Trelawny Road,” Michael interjected, and in the gathering crowds she was perforce closer to him, so that he was fain to guide her gently past the glittering shops, immensely conscious of the texture of her dress. They emerged into wider, emptier pavements, and the wind came chilly down from Camden Hill, so that she held her muff against her cheek, framing its faint rose. Twilight drew them closer, and Michael wishful of an even less frequented pavement suggested they should cross the road by Holland Park. A moment she paused while a scarlet omnibus clattered past, then she ran swiftly to where the trees overhung the railings. It was exhilarating to follow her over the wooden road that answered to his footsteps like castanets, and as he caught up with her to fondle her bent arm. Their walk died away to a saunter, while the street-lamps beamed upon them with longer intervals of dark between each succeeding lampshine. More slowly still they moved towards West Kensington and parting. Her arm was twined round his like ivy, and their two hands came together like leaves. At last the turning she must take appeared on the other side of the road, and again she ran and again he caught her arm. But this time it was still warm with long contact and divinely familiar, since but for a moment had it been relinquished. The dim side-street enfolded them, and no dismaying passers-by startled their intercourse.

“But soon it will be Trelawny Road,” she whispered.

“Then kiss me quickly,” said Michael. “Lily, you must.”

It was in the midmost gloom between two lamps that they kissed first.

“Lily, once again.”

“No, no,” she whispered.

“But you’re mine,” he called exultantly. “You are. You know you are.”

“Perhaps,” she whispered, but even as his arms drew her towards him, she slipped from his embrace, laughed very low and sweet, bounded forward, waved her muff, ran swiftly to the next lamp-post, paused and blew him kisses, then vanished round the corner of her road.

But a long time ago they had said they would meet to-morrow, and as Michael stood in a maze all the clocks in the world ding-donged in his ears the hour of their tryst.

There was only one thing to do for the expression of his joy, and that was to run as hard as he could. So he ran, and when he saw two coal-holes, he would jump from one to the other, rejoicing in the ring of their metal covers. And all the time out of breath he kept saying, “I’m in love, in love, in love.”

Every passer-by into whose eyes he looked seemed to have the most beautiful expression; every poor man seemed to demand that he should stay awhile from his own joy to comfort him. The lamp-posts bloomed like tropic flowers, swaying and nodding languorously. Every house took on a look of the most unutterable completeness; the horses galloped like Arabian barbs; policemen expanded like beneficent genii; errand boys whistled like nightingales; all familiarity was enchanted, and seven-leagued boots took him forward as easily as if he travelled a world subdued to the effortless transitions of sleep. Carlington Road stretched before him bright, kindly, beckoning to his ingress. Against the lighted entrance-hall of Number 64 Michael saw the red and amber sparrows like humming-birds, ruby-throated, topaz-winged. The parlour-maid’s cap and apron were of snow, and the banisters of sandalwood.

Michael went to bed early that he might meet her in dreams, but still for a long time he sat by his window peering at the tawny moon, while at intervals trains went quickly past sparkling and swift as lighted fuses. The scent of the leaves lying in the gardens all along Carlington Road was vital with the airs from which she had been evoked that afternoon, and his only regret was that his bedroom looked out on precisely the opposite direction from that where now she was sleeping. Then he himself became envious of sleep, and undressed quickly like one who stands hot-footed by a lake’s edge, eager for the water’s cool.

Michael met Lily next day by the dusky corner of a street whose gradual loss of outline he had watched occur through a patient hour. It was not that Lily was late, but that Michael was so early. Yet in his present mood of elation he could enjoy communion even with bricks and mortar. He used every guileful ruse to cheat time of his determined moment. He would walk along with closed eyes for ten paces and with open eyes for ten paces, the convention with himself, almost the wager, being that Lily should appear while his eyes were closed. It would have been truly disappointing had she swung round the corner while his eyes were open. But as it still lacked half an hour of her appointment, there was not much fear of that. Then, as really her time drew near, a tenser game was played, by which Lily was to appear when his left foot was advanced. This match between odd and even lasted until in all its straightness of perfect division six o’clock was inscribed upon his watch. No other hour could so well have suited her form.

Now began the best game of all, since it was played less with himself than with fortune. Michael went to the next turning, and, hiding himself from the view of Trelawny Road, only allowed himself to peep at each decade. At a hundred and sixty-three he said “She’s in sight,” one hundred and sixty-four, “She’s coming.” The century was eliminated, too cumbersome for his fiery enumeration. Sixty-five, “I know she is.” Sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine! One hundred and seventy was said slowly with an exquisite dragging deliberation. Then Michael could look, and there she was with muff signalling through the azure mists of twilight.

“I say, I told mother about you,” murmured Lily. “And she said, ‘Why didn’t you ask him to come in to tea?’ But of course she doesn’t know I’m meeting you this evening. I’m supposed to be going to church.”

Michael’s heart leaped at the thought that soon he would be able to see her in her own home among her own belongings, so that in future no conjured picture of her would be incomplete.

“Rather decent of your mother,” he said.

“Oh, well, she’s got to be very easy-going and all that, though of course she doesn’t like us to get talked about. What shall we do now?”

“Walk about, I suppose,” said Michael. “Unless we get on top of a bus and ride somewhere? Why not ride up to Hammersmith Broadway and then walk along the towing-path?”

They found a seat full in the frore wind’s face, but yet the ride was all too short, and almost by the time Michael had finished securing the waterproof rug in which they sat incapable of movement, so tightly were they braced in, it was time to undo it again and dismount. While the church bells were ringing, they crossed Hammersmith Suspension Bridge ethereal in the creeping river-mist and faintly motionable like a ship at anchor. Then they wandered by the river that lapped the dead reeds and gurgled along the base of the shelving clay bank. The wind drearily stirred the osier-beds, and from time to time the dull tread of indefinite passing forms was heard upon the sodden path. Michael could feel the humid fog lying upon Lily’s sleeve, and when he drew her cheek to his own it was bedewed with the falling night. But when their lips met, the moisture and October chill were all consumed, and like a burning rose she flamed upon his vision. Words to express his adoration tumbled around him like nightmare speech, evasive, mocking, grotesquely inadequate.

“There are no words to say how much I love to hold you, Lily,” he complained. “It’s like holding a flower. And even in the dark I can see your eyes.”

“I can’t see yours,” she murmured, and therefore nestled closer, “I like you to kiss me,” she sighed.

“Oh, why do you?” Michael asked. “Why me?”

“You’re nice,” she less than whispered.

“Lily, I do love you.”

And Michael bit his lip at the close of “love” for the sweet pain of making the foolish word more powerful, more long.

“What a funny husky voice,” she murmured in her own deep indolent tones.

“Do you like me to call you ‘darling’ or ‘dearest’ best?” he asked.

“Both.”

“Ah, but which do you like best?”

To Michael the two words were like melodies which he had lately learned to play. Indeed, they seemed to him his own melodies never played before, and he was eager for Lily to pronounce judgment.

“Why do you ask questions?” she wondered.

“Say ‘dearest’ to me,” Michael begged.

“No, no,” she blushed against his heart.

“But say which you like best,” he urged. “Darling or dearest?”

“Well, darling,” she pouted.

“You’ve said it,” cried Michael rapturously. “Now you can say it of your own accord. Oh, Lily, say it when you kiss me.”

“But supposing I never kiss you ever again?” asked Lily, pulling away from his arms. “And besides we must go back.”

“Well, we needn’t hurry.”

“Not if you come at once,” she agreed.

One more kiss, one more gliding dreaming walk, one more pause to bid the river farewell from the towering bridge, one more wrestle with the waterproof-rug, one more slow lingering and then suddenly swift escaping finger, one more wave of the muff, one last aerial salutation, and she was gone till Wednesday.

Michael was left alone between the tall thin houses of Kensington, but beneath his feet he seemed to feel the world swing round through space; and all the tall thin houses, all the fluted lamp-posts, all the clustering chimney-pots reeled about him in the ecstasy of his aroused existence.

Chapter XVII: Lily

W HEN Michael came into the dining-room after he had left Lily, his mother said: “Dearest boy, what have you been doing? Your eyes are shining like stars.”

Here was the opportunity to tell her about Lily, but Michael could not avail himself of it. These last two days seemed as yet too incomplete for revelation. Somehow he felt that he was creating a work of art, and that to tell his mother of conception or progress would be to spoil the perfection of his impulse. There was only one person on earth to whom he could confide this cataclysmic experience, and that was Alan. He and Alan had dreamed enough together in the past to make him unashamed to announce at last his foothold on reality. But supposing Alan were to laugh, as he had laughed over the absurdity of Kathleen? Such a reception of his news would ruin their friendship; and yet if their friendship could not endure the tale of true love, was it not already ruined? He must tell Alan, at whatever cost. And where should he tell him? Such a secret must not be lightly entrusted. Time and place must come harmoniously, befalling with that rare felicity which salutes the inevitable hours of a human life.

“Mother,” said Michael, “would you mind if I stayed the night over at Richmond?”

“To-night?” Mrs. Fane echoed in astonishment.

“Well, perhaps not to-night,” conceded Michael unwillingly. “But to-morrow night?”

“To-morrow night by all means,” Mrs. Fane agreed.

“Nothing has happened?” she asked anxiously. “You seem so flushed and strange.”

“I’m just the same as usual,” Michael declared. “It’s hot in this room. I think I’ll take a short walk.”

“But you’ve been out all the afternoon,” Mrs. Fane protested.

“Oh, well, I’ve nothing to do at home.”

“You’re not feverish?”

“No, no, mother,” Michael affirmed, disengaging his parched hand from her solicitous touch. “But you know I often feel restless.”

She released him, tenderly smiling; and for one moment he nearly threw himself down beside her, covetous of childhood’s petting. But the impulse spent itself before he acted upon it, and soon he was wandering towards Trelawny Road. How empty the corner of it looked, how stark and melancholy soared the grey houses guarding its consecrated entrance, how solitary shone the lamp-posts, and how sadly echoed the footsteps of people going home. Yet only three hours ago they had met on this very flagstone that must almost have palpitated to the pressure of her shoes.

Michael walked on until he stood opposite her house. There was a light in the bay-window by the front door; perhaps she would come out to post a letter. O breathless thought! Surely he heard the sound of a turning handle. Ah, why had he not begged her to draw aside the blind at a fixed time that he could be cured of his longing by the vision of her darling form against the pane? How bitter was the irony of her sitting behind that brooding window-pane, unconscious of him. Two days must crawl past before she would meet him again, before he would touch her hand, look actually into her eyes, watch every quiver and curve of her mouth. Places would be enriched with the sight of her, while he ached with the torment of love. School must drag through ten intolerable hours; he must chatter with people unaware of her; and she must live two days apart from his life, two days whose irresponsible minutes and loveless occupations made him burn with jealousy of time itself.

Suddenly the door of Lily’s house opened, and Michael felt the blood course through his body, flooding his heart, swaying his very soul. There was a voice in the glimmering hall, but not her voice. Nor was it her form that hurried down the steps. It was only the infinitely fortunate maidservant whose progress to the letter-box he watched with a sickening disappointment. There went one who every day could see Lily. Every morning she was privileged to wake her from her rose-fired sleep. Every night she could gossip with her outside the magical door of her room. Lily must sometimes descend into the kitchen, and there they must talk. And yet the idiotic creature was staring curiously at some unutterably dull policeman, and wasting moments she did not appreciate. Then a leaping thought came to Michael, that if she wasted enough time Lily might look round the front-door in search of her. But too soon for such an event the maidservant pattered back; the door slammed; and only the window-panes of dull gold brooded immutably. How long before Lily went up to bed? And did she sleep in a room that fronted the road? Michael could bear it no longer and turned away from the exasperation of her withheld presence; and he made up his mind that he must know every detail of her daily life before he again came sighing ineffectively like this in the night-time.

Michael was vexed to find that he could not even conjure Lily to his side in sleep, but that even there he must be surrounded by the tiresome people of ordinary life. However, there was always a delicious moment, just before he lost complete consciousness, when the image of her dissolved and materialized elusively above the nebulous confines of semi-reality; while always at the very instant of awakening he was aware of her moth-winged kisses trembling upon the first liquid flash of daylight.

In the ‘quarter’ Michael suggested to Alan that he should come back to Richmond with him, and when Alan looked a little astonished at this Monday night proposal, he explained that he had a lot to talk over.

“I nearly came over at nine o’clock last night,” Michael announced.

Alan seemed to realize that it must indeed be something of importance and could scarcely wait for the time when they should be fast alone and primed for confidences.

After dinner Michael proposed a walk up Richmond Hill, and without any appearance of strategy managed to persuade Alan to rest awhile on one of the seats along the Terrace. In this late autumnal time there was no view of the Thames gleaming beneath the sorcery of a summer night. There was nothing now but a vast airiness of mist damascening the blades of light with which the street-lamps pierced the darkness.

“Pretty wet,” said Alan distastefully patting the seat.

“We needn’t stay long, but it’s rather ripping, don’t you think?” Michael urged. “Alan, do you remember once we sat here on a night before exams at the end of a summer term?”

“Yes, but it was a jolly sight warmer than it is now,” said Alan.

“I know. We were in ‘whites,’” said Michael pensively. “Alan, I’m in love. I am really. You mustn’t laugh. I was a fool over that first girl, but now I am in love. Alan, she’s only seventeen, and she has hair the colour of that rather thick honey you get at chemists. Only it isn’t thick, but as foamy as a lemon-sponge. And her mouth is truly a bow and her voice is gloriously deep and exciting, and her eyes are the most extraordinary blue—as blue as ink in a bottle when you hold it up to the light—and her chin is in two pieces rather like yours, and her ankles—well—her ankles are absolutely divine. The extraordinary luck is that she loves me, and I want you to meet her. I’m describing her very accurately like this because I don’t want you to think I’m raving or quoting poetry. You see, you don’t appreciate poetry, or I could describe her much better.”

“I do appreciate poetry,” protested Alan.

“Oh, I know you like Kipling and Adam Lindsay Gordon, but I mean real poetry. Well, I’m not going to argue about that. But, Alan, you must be sympathetic and believe that I really am in love. She has a sister called Doris. I haven’t met her yet, but she’s sure to be lovely, and I think you ought to fall in love with her. Now wouldn’t that be splendid? Alan, you do believe I’m in love this time?”

Michael paused anxiously.

“I suppose you must be,” said Alan slowly.

“And you’re glad?” asked Michael a little wistfully.

“What’s going to happen?” Alan wondered.

“Well, of course not much can happen just now. Not much can happen while one is still at school,” Michael went on. “But don’t let’s talk about what is going to be. Let’s talk about what is now.”

Alan looked at him reproachfully.

“You used to enjoy talking about the future.”

“Because it used always to be more interesting,” Michael explained.

Alan rose from the seat and taking Michael’s arm drew him down the hill.

“And will you come and meet her sister?” Michael asked.

“I expect so,” said Alan.

“Hurrah!” cried the lover.

“I suppose this means the end of football, the end of cricket, in fact the end of school as far as you’re concerned,” Alan complained. “I wish you’d waited a little.”

“I told you I was years older than you,” Michael pointed out, involuntarily making excuses.

“Only because you would encourage yourself to think so. Well, I hope everything will go well. I hope you won’t take it into your head to think you’ve got to marry her immediately, or any rot like that.”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Michael.

“Well, you’re such an impulsive devil. By Jove, the fellow that first called you ‘Bangs’ was a bit of a spotter.”

“It was Abercrombie,” Michael reminded him.

“I should think that was the only clever thing he ever did in his life,” said Alan.

“Why, I thought you considered him no end of a good man.”

“He was a good forward and a good deep field,” Alan granted. “But that doesn’t make him Shakespeare.”

Thence onwards war, or rather sport the schoolboys’ substitute, ousted love from the conversation, and very soon solo whist with Mr. and Mrs. Merivale disposed of both.

On Tuesday night Michael in a fever of enthusiasm for Wednesday’s approach wrote a letter to Stella.

Michael had meant to say much more to Stella, but ink and paper seemed to violate the secluded airs in which Lily had her being. However, Stella would understand by his writing at all that he was in deadly earnest, and she was unearthly enough to supply what was missing from his account.

Meanwhile to-morrow was Wednesday, the mate of Saturday and certainly of all the days in the week his second favourite. Monday, of course, was vile. Tuesday was colourless. Thursday was nearly as bad as Monday. Friday was irksome and only a little less insipid than Tuesday. Sunday had many disadvantages. Saturday was without doubt the best day, and Wednesday was next best, for though it was not a half-holiday, as long ago it had been at Randell House, still it had never quite lost its suggestion of holiday. Wednesday—the very word said slowly had a rich individuality. Wednesday—how promptly it sprang to the lips for any occasion of festivity that did not require full-blown reckless Saturday. Monday was dull red. Tuesday was cream-coloured. Thursday was dingy purple. Friday was a harsh scarlet, but Wednesday was vivid apple-green, or was it a clear cool blue? One or the other.

So, tantalizing himself by not allowing a single thought of Lily while he was undressing, Michael achieved bed very easily. Here all trivialities were dismissed, and like one who falls asleep when a star is shining through his window-pane Michael fell asleep, with Lily radiant above the horizon.

It was rather a disappointing Wednesday, for Lily said she could not stay out more than a minute, since her mother was indoors and would wonder what she was doing. However on Saturday she would see Michael again, and announce to her mother that she was going to see him, so that on Sunday Michael could be invited to tea.

“And then if mother likes you, why, you can often come in,” Lily pointed out. “That is, if you want to.”

“Saturday,” sighed Michael.

“Well, don’t spoil the few minutes we’ve got by being miserable.”

“But I can’t kiss you.”

“Think how much nicer it will be when we can kiss,” said Lily philosophically.

“I don’t believe you care a damn whether we kiss or not,” said Michael.

“Don’t I?” murmured Lily, quickly touching his hand and as quickly withdrawing it to the prison of the muff.

“Ah, do you, Lily?” Michael throbbed out.

“Of course. Now I must go. Good-bye. Don’t forget Saturday in the Gardens, where we met last time. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!” She was running from him backwards, forbidding with a wave his sudden step towards her. “No, if you dare to move, I shan’t meet you on Saturday. Be good, be good.”

By her corner she paused, stood on tiptoe for one provocative instant, blew a kiss, laughed her elfin laugh and vanished more swift than any Ariel.

“Damn!” cried Michael sorely, and forthwith set out to walk round West Kensington at five miles an hour, until his chagrin, his disappointment and his heartsick emptiness were conquered, or at any rate sufficiently humbled to make him secure against unmanly tears.

When Saturday finally did arrive, Michael did not sit reading Verlaine, but wandered from tree-trunk to tree-trunk like Orlando in despair. Then Lily came at last sedately, and brought the good news that to-morrow Michael should come to tea at her house.

“But where does your mother think we met?” he asked in perplexity.

“Oh, I told her it was in Kensington Gardens,” said Lily carelessly.

“But doesn’t she think I must be an awful bounder?”

“Why, you silly, I told her you were at St. James’ School.”

“But I never told you I was at school,” exclaimed Michael, somewhat aghast.

“I know you didn’t, and you never told me that you weren’t eighteen yet.”

“I am in a month or two,” said Michael. “But, good Lord, who have you been talking to?”

“Ah, that’s the greatest secret in the world,” laughed Lily.

“Oh, no, do tell me.”

“Well, I know a boy called Drake who knows you.”

“That beast!” cried Michael.

“I think he’s quite a nice boy. He lives next door to us and——”

Michael kicked angrily the dead leaves lying about his feet, and almost choked with astonished fury.

“Why, my dear girl, he’s absolutely barred. He’s as unpopular as anybody I know. I hope you won’t discuss me with that hulking brute. What the deuce right has he got to tell you anything about me?”

“Because I asked him, and you needn’t look so enraged, because if you want to know why you’re coming to tea, it’s because I asked Arthur——”

“Who’s Arthur?” growled Michael.

“Arthur Drake.”

“Go on,” said Michael icily.

“I shan’t go on, if you look like that.”

“I can’t help how I look. I don’t carry a glass round with me,” said Michael. “So I suppose this worm Drake had the cheek to tell your mother I was all right. Drake! Wait till I see the brute on Monday morning.”

“Well, if you take my advice,” said Lily, “you’ll be nice to him, because he’s supposed to have introduced us.”

“What lies! What lies!” Michael stamped.

“You told me a lie about your age,” Lily retorted. “And I’ve told mother a lie on your account, so you needn’t be so particular. And if you think you’re going to make me cry, you’re not.”

She sat down on a seat and looked out at the bare woodland with sullen eyes.

“Has Drake ever dared to make love to you?” demanded Michael.

“That’s my business,” said Lily. “You’ve no right to ask me questions like that.”

Michael looked at her so adorable even now, and suddenly throwing his dignity to the dead leaves, he sat close beside her caressingly.

“Darling Lily,” he whispered, “it was my fault. I lied first. I don’t care how much you talked about me. I don’t care about anything but you. I’ll even say Drake is a decent chap—though he really isn’t even moderately decent. Lily, we had such a rotten Wednesday, and to-day ought to be perfect. Will you forgive me? Will you?”

And the quarrel was over.

“But you don’t care anything about Drake?” Michael asked, when half an hour had dreamed itself away.

“Of course not,” she reassured him. “Arthur likes Doris better than me.”

“But he mustn’t like Doris,” said Michael eagerly. “At least she mustn’t like him. Because I’ve got a friend—at least three million times as decent as Drake—who wants to be in love with Doris, or rather he will want to be when he sees her.”

“Why, you haven’t seen Doris yourself yet,” laughed Lily.

“Oh, of course my plan may all come to nothing,” Michael admitted. “But look here, I vote we don’t bother about anybody else in the world but ourselves for the rest of the afternoon.”

Nor did they.

“Shall I wear a top-hat to-morrow?” Michael asked even in the very poignancy of farewell. “I mean—will your mother prefer it?”

“Oh, no, the people who come to tea with us on Sunday are mostly artists and actors,” decided Lily judicially.

“Do lots of people come then?” asked Michael, quickly jealous.

“A good many.”

“I might as well have fallen in love with one of the Royal Family,” sighed Michael in despair.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I never can see you alone,” he declared.

“Why, we’ve had the whole of this afternoon,” she told him.

“Do you call sitting in the middle of Kensington Gardens being alone? Why, it was crammed with people,” he ejaculated in disgust.

“I must go, I must go, I must go,” Lily whispered and almost seemed to be preening her wings in the lamplight before she flew away.

“I say, what number is Drake’s house?” Michael asked, with a consummate affectation of casual enquiry.

She told him laughingly, and in a most malicious hurry would not even linger a moment to ask him why he wanted to know. Coldly and deliberately Michael after dinner rang the bell of Drake’s house.

“Is—er—Master Arthur at home?” he asked the maid.

“Master Arthur,” she cried. “Someone to see you.”

“Hullo, Bangs,” shouted Drake, emerging effusively from a doorway.

“Oh, hullo,” said Michael loftily. “I thought I’d call to see if you felt like coming out.”

“Right-o,” said Drake. “Wait half a tick while I tell my mater. Come in, and meet my people.”

“Oh, no,” said Michael. “I’m beastly untidy.”

He would condescend to Drake for the sake of his love, but he did not think that love demanded the sacrifice of condescending to a possibly more expansive acquaintance with Drake’s family.

“So you’ve met the fair Lily,” Drake said, as they strolled along. “Pretty smart, what, my boy?”

“I’m going to tea with them to-morrow,” Michael informed him.

“Mrs. Haden’s a bit thick,” said Drake confidentially. “And Doris is of a very coming-on disposition.”

Michael thought of Alan and sighed; then he thought of himself listening to this and he was humiliated.

“But Lily is a bit stand-offish,” said Drake. “Of course I never could stand very fair girls, myself. I say, talking of girls, there’s a girl in Sherringham Road, well—she’s an actress’s French maid, as a matter of fact, but, my gad, if you like cayenne, you ought to come along with me, and I’ll introduce you. She’ll be alone now. Are you on?”

“Oh, thanks very much,” said Michael. “But I must get back. Good-night, Drake.”

“Well, you’re a nice chap to ask a fellow to come out. Come on, don’t be an ass. Her name’s Marie.”

“I don’t care if her name’s Marie or Mabel or what it is,” Michael declared in exasperation. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go home. Thanks for coming out.”

He turned abruptly and walked off, leaving Drake to apostrophize his eccentricity and seek consolation with Marie.

On Sunday afternoon Michael, torn between a desire to arrive before the crowd of artists and actors who thronged the house and an unwillingness to obtrude upon the Sabbath lethargy of half-past three o’clock, set out with beating heart to invade Lily’s home. Love made him reckless and luck rewarded him, for when he enquired for Mrs. Haden the maid told him that only Miss Lily was in.

“Who shall I say?” she asked.

“Mr. Fane.”

“Step this way, please. Miss Lily’s down in the morning-room.”

And this so brief and so bald a colloquy danced in letters of fire across the darkling descent of the enclosed stairs down to the ground-floor.

“Someone to see you, Miss Lily.”

Not Iris could have delivered a richer message.

Deep in a wicker chair by a dull red fire sat Lily with open book upon her delicate dress of lavender. The door closed; the daylight of the grey October afternoon seemed already to have fled this room. Dusky in a corner stood a great dolls’ house, somewhat sad like a real house that has been left long untenanted.

“Well, now we’re alone enough,” murmured Lily.

He knelt beside her chair and let his head fall upon her silken shoulder.

“I’m glad you’re in your own room,” Michael sighed in answer.

Outside, a muffin-man went ringing through the sombre Sabbath chill; and sometimes, disturbing the monotonous railings above the area, absurd legs were seen hurrying to their social tasks. No other sign was given of a life that went on unaware of these two on whom time showered twenty golden minutes.

“Mother and Doris will be back at four,” Lily said. “Is my face flushed?”

Fresh carnations would have seemed faded near her, when she looked at Michael for an answer.

“Only very slightly,” he reassured her.

“Come up to the drawing-room,” she commanded.

“Can I look at your dolls’ house?” Michael asked.

“That old thing,” said Lily scornfully.

Reverently he pulled aside the front of the battered dwelling-place, and saw the minute furniture higgledy-piggledy.

“I wonder if anyone has ever thought of burning an old dolls’ house,” said Michael thoughtfully. “It would be rather a rag. I’ve got an old toy fire-engine somewhere at home.”

“You baby,” said Lily.

“Well, it depresses me to see that dolls’ house all disused and upside down and no good any more. My kiddy sister gave hers to a hospital. What a pity I never thought of burning that,” sighed Michael regretfully. “I say, some time we must explore this room. It reminds me of all sorts of things.”

“What sort of things?” asked Lily indifferently.

“Oh, being a kid.”

“Well, I don’t want to be reminded of that,” said Lily. “I wish I was older than I am.”

“Oh, so do I,” said Michael. “I don’t want to be a kid again.”

Upstairs in the drawing-room it was still fairly light, but the backs of the grey houses opposite and the groups of ghostly trees that filmed the leaden air seemed to call for curtains to be drawn across the contemplation of their melancholy. Yet before they sat down by the crackling fire, Michael and Lily stood with their cheeks against the cold window-panes in a luxury of bodeful silence.

“No, you’re not to sit so close now,” Lily ordained, when by a joint impulse they turned to inhabit the room in which they had been standing. Michael saw a large photograph album and seized it.

“No, you’re not to look in that,” Lily cried.

“Why not?” he asked, holding it high above his head.

“Because I don’t want you to,” said Lily. “Put it down.”

“I want to see if there are any photographs of you when you were a kid.”

“Well, I don’t want you to see them,” Lily persisted.

In the middle of a struggle for possession of the album, Mrs. Haden and Doris came in, and Michael felt rather foolish.

“What a dreadfully noisy girl you are, Lily,” said Mrs. Haden. “And is this your friend Mr. Fane? How d’ye do?”

“I’m afraid it was my fault,” said Michael. “I was trying to bag the photograph album.”

“Oh, Lily hates anyone to see that picture of her,” Doris interposed. “She’s so conceited, and just because——”

“Shut up, you beast,” cried Lily.

“Her legs——”

“Doris!” interposed Mrs. Haden. “You must remember you’re grown up now.”

“Mother, can’t I burn the photograph?” said Lily.

“No, she’s not to, mother,” Doris interrupted. “She’s not to, is she? You jealous thing. You’d love to burn it because it’s good of me.”

“Well, really,” said Mrs. Haden, “what Mr. Fane can be thinking of you two girls, I shouldn’t like to guess.”

The quarrel over the album died down as easily as it had begun, and the entrance of the tea adjusted the conversation to a less excited plane.

Mrs. Haden was a woman whom Michael could not help liking for her open breezy manner and a certain large-handed toleration which suited her loud deep voice. But he was inclined to deprecate her obviously dyed hair and the plentifulness of pink powder; nor could he at first detect in her any likeness to Lily who, though Mrs. Haden persistently reproached her as a noisy girl, stood for Michael as the slim embodiment of a subtle and easy tranquillity. Gradually, however, during the afternoon he perceived slight resemblances between the mother and daughter that showed them vaguely alike, as much alike at any rate as an elk and a roedeer.

Doris Haden was much less fair than Lily, though she could only have been called dark in comparison with her sister. She had a high complexion, wide almond-shaped eyes of a very mutable hazel, and a ripe, sanguine mouth. She was dressed in a coat and skirt of crushed-strawberry frieze, whose cool folds seemed to enhance her slightly exotic air. Michael could not help doubting whether she and Alan were perfectly suited to one another. He could not imagine that she would not care for him, but he wondered about Alan’s feelings; and Drake’s overnight description stuck unpleasantly in his mind with a sensation of disloyalty to Lily whose sister after all Doris was.

They were not left very long without visitors, for one by one young men came in with a self-possession and an assumption of familiarity that Michael resented very much, and all the more deeply because he felt himself at a disadvantage. He wondered if Lily were despising him, and wished that she would not catch hold of these detestable young men by the lapels of their coats, or submit to their throaty persiflage. Once when the most absolutely self-possessed of all, a tall thin creature with black fuzzy hair and stilted joints, pulled Lily on to his knee to talk to him, Michael nearly dived through the window in a fury of resentment.

All these young men seemed to him to revel in their bad taste, and their conversation, half-theatrical, half-artistic, was of a character that he could not enter into. Mrs. Haden’s loud laugh rang out over the clatter of tea-cups; Doris walked about the room smoking a cigarette and humming songs; Lily moved from group to group with a nonchalance that seriously perturbed Michael, who retired more and more deeply behind a spreading palm in the darkest corner of the room. Yet he could not tear himself away from the fascination of watching Lily’s grace; he could not surrender her to these marionettes of vulgar fashion; he could not go coldly out into the Sabbath night without the consolation of first hustling these intruders before him.

The afternoon drew on to real dusk; the gas was lighted; songs were sung and music was played. All these young men seemed accomplished performers of insignificant arts. Mrs. Haden recited, and in this drawing-room her heightened air and accentuated voice made Michael blush. Doris went upstairs for a moment and presently came down in a Spanish dancing-dress, in which she swayed about and rattled castanets and banged a tambourine, while the young men sat round and applauded through the smoke of their cigarettes. These cigarettes began to affect Michael’s nerves. Wherever he looked he could see their flattened corpses occupying nooks. They were in the flower-pots; they littered the grate; they were strewn on brass ash-trays; and even here and there on uninflammable and level spots they stood up like little rakish mummies slowly and acridly cremating themselves. Michael wondered uneasily what Lily was going to do to entertain these voracious listeners. He hoped she would not debase her beauty by dancing on the hearthrug like her sister. In the end, Lily was persuaded to sing, and her voice very low and sweet singing some bygone coon song, was tremendously applauded.

Supper-time drew on, and at last the parlour-maid came in and enquired with a martyred air how many she should lay for.

“You must all stay to supper,” cried Mrs. Haden in deafening hospitality. “Everybody. Mr. Fane, you’ll stay, won’t you?”

“Oh, thanks very much,” said Michael shyly, and wished that these confounded young men would not all look at him as if they had perceived him suddenly for the first time. Everybody seemed as a matter of course to help to get supper ready, and Michael found himself being bumped about and handed plates and knives and glasses and salad-bowls. Even at supper he found himself as far as it was possible to be from Lily, and he thought that never in his life had food tasted so absolutely of nothing. But the evening came to an end, and Michael was consoled for his purgatory by Mrs. Haden’s invitation to call whenever he liked. In the hall too Lily came out to see him off, and he besought her anxiously to assure him truthfully that to all these young men she was indifferent.

“Of course, I don’t care for any of them. Why, you silly, they all think I’m still a little girl.”

Then since a friendly draught had closed the drawing-room door, she kissed him; and he forgot all that had happened before, and sailed home on thoughts that carried him high above the iron-bound sadness of the Sunday night.

Some time early in the week came a letter from Stella in answer to his, and when Michael read it he wished that Stella would come home, since only she seemed to appreciate what love meant. Yet Stella was even younger than Lily.

S TUTTGART ,
Sunday .

Darling Michael ,

I’m writing a sonata about Lily. It’s not very good unfortunately, so you’ll never be able to hear it. But after all, as you don’t understand music, perhaps I will let you hear it. I wish you had told me more about Lily. I think she’s lucky. You must be simply a perfect person to be in love with. Most boys are so silly. That’s why only men of at least thirty attract me. But of course if I could find someone younger who would be content to love me and not mind whether I loved him, I should prefer that. You say I don’t know what love is. How silly you are, Michael. Now isn’t it thrilling to take Lily’s hand? I do know what love is. But don’t look shocked, because if you can still look shocked, you don’t know what love is. Don’t forget I’m seventeen next month, and don’t forget I’m a girl as well as Lily. Lily is a good name for her, if she is very fair. I expect she really has cendrÉ hair. I hope she’s rather tall and delicate-looking. I hope she’s a violin sort of girl, or like those notes half-way up the treble. It must have been perfect when you met her. I can just imagine you, especially if you like October as much as I do. Did the leaves come falling down all round you, when you kissed her? Oh, Michael, it must have been enchanting. I want to come back soon, soon, soon, and see this Lily of yours. Will she like me? Is she fond of music?

I must have my first concert next summer. Mother must not put me off. Why doesn’t she let me come home now? There’s some reason for it, I believe. Thank goodness, you’ll have left school soon. You must be sick of it, especially since you’ve fallen in love .

I think of you meeting Lily when I play Schumann, and when I play Chopin I think of you walking about underneath her window, and when I play Beethoven I think of you kissing her .

Darling Michael, I love you more than ever. Be interested in me still, because I’m not interested in anybody but you, except, of course, myself and my music .

Oh, do bring Lily to my first concert, and I’ll see you two alone of all the people in the Hall and play you so close together that you’ll nearly faint. Now you think I’m gushing, I suppose, so I’ll shut up .

With a most tremendous amount of love ,

Your delightful sister ,
Stella .