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.