_April 18_.
_My adored Pauline,_
_It's really all I can do to stay in Oxford. Even Fane seems dull
and though his rooms are jolly, I long for you._
_Have I told you what you are to me? Have I once been able to tell
you...._
Ah, there were pages crammed full and full of words that she must read
alone. She could not read them here with her mother and sisters looking
at her over the table. She must read them high in her white fastness at
the top of the house. There all the morning she sat, and when she had
read of his love once, she read of it again and then again, and once
again. How foolish her answering letter would be: how disappointed Guy
would be; but since she had promised, she must write to him: and,
sitting at her desk that was full of childish things, she curled herself
over the note paper.
_May_
A pleasant company of thoughts travelled with Guy and his bicycle on the
road to Oxford. In this easy progress the material hindrances to
marriage were not seeming very important, and as he thought of his love
for Pauline it spread before him, untroublous like the road down which
he was spinning before a light breeze. With so much to compensate for
their brief parting it was impossible to feel depressed; and as Guy drew
near the city he felt he was an undergraduate again; and when he greeted
Michael Fane in St. Giles he could positively hear his own Oxford drawl
again. It was really delightful to be sitting here in view of his old
college; and when after lunch he and Michael started for Wytham woods,
more and more Guy was in an Oxford dream and carrying off the fantastic
notion of the Parnassian academy with all the debonair confidence of his
second year. Yet Guy knew that the scheme was absurd and when Michael
argued against it in his solemn way he found himself taking the other
side from a mere undergraduate pleasure in argument. Indeed, Michael
declared he had become a freshman since he went down, which made Guy
stop dead, ankle-deep in kingcups, and laugh aloud for his youth, with
hidden thoughts of Pauline to make him rejoice that he was young. He
laughed again at Michael's seriousness and flung his scheme to the broad
clouds, for on this generous day he and Pauline were enough, and neither
anybody else's opinion nor anybody else's help was worth a second
thought. The heartening warmth, however, did not last; and when toward
evening the sun faded in a blanche of watery clouds with a cold wind
for aftermath, Guy felt Michael might have been more sympathetic. Rather
silently they walked back from Godstow, with Pauline between them; so
that after all, Guy thought, Michael was still an undergraduate, whereas
he had embarked upon life.
That night, however, when the curtains were drawn across Michael's
bay-window that overhung the whispering and ancient thoroughfare; when
the fire burned high and the tobacco-smoke clouded the glimmer of the
books on the walls; when his chair creaked with that old Oxford
creaking, Guy forgave Michael for any lack in his reception of the great
plan. After all, he was writing to Pauline, while his host was reading
the Constitutional History of England at a table littered with heavy
volumes, on which he brooded like a melancholy spectator of ruins. He
must not be hard on Michael, who had not yet touched life, when for
himself the vision of Pauline was wreathing this old room with starry
blooms of wild rose. The letter was finished, and Guy went out to drop
it in the pillar-box. His old college brooded at him across the road;
to-morrow he must go and look up some of the dons; to-morrow Pauline
would get his letter; to-night there would be rain; to-morrow Pauline
would get his letter! The envelope, as it shuffled down into the
letter-box, seemed to say 'yes'.
When Guy was back in the fumy St. Giles room, he decided there was
something rather finely ascetic about Michael seated there and reading
imperturbably in the lamp-light. His courteously fatigued manner was
merely that of the idealist who had overreached himself; there was
nothing bilious about him, not even so much cynicism as had slightly
chilled Guy's own career at Oxford; rather did there emanate from
Michael a kind of mediaeval steadfastness comparable only to those stone
faces that look calmly down upon the transitory congregations of their
church. Michael had this solemn presence that demanded an upward look,
and once again an upward look, until without conversation the solemnity
became a little disquieting. Guy felt bound to interrupt with
light-hearted talk of his own that slow still gaze across the lampshine.
"Dash it, Michael, don't brood there like a Memento Mori. Put away Magna
Charta and talk to me. You used to talk."
"You talk, Guy. You've been living alone all this time. You must have a
great deal to say."
So Guy flung theories of rhyme and metre to overwhelm Magna Charta; and,
next day, he and Michael walked all over Oxford in the rain, he himself
still talking. The day after, there came with the sun a letter from
Pauline which he took away with him to read in the garden of St. John's,
leaving Michael to Magna Charta.
There was nobody on the lawn, and Guy sat down on a wooden seat in air
that was faintly perfumed by the precocious blooms of a lilac breaking
to this unusual warmth of April. Unopened the letter rested in his hand:
for his name written in this girlish charactery took on the romantic
look of a name in an old tale. A breathlessness was in the air, such as
had brooded upon Pauline's first kiss; and Guy sat marmoreal and rapt in
an ecstasy of anticipation that he would never have from any other
letter; so still he was, that an alighting blackbird slipt over the
grass almost to his feet before it realized the mistake and shrilled
away on startled wings into the bushes behind. The trance of expectation
was spoilt, and Guy with a sigh broke the envelope.