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. Λευκὡλενος Ἡρη
—that was his mother,
and γλαυκὡπις Ἁθἡνη —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— αὑτὑμαται δἑ πὑλαι μὑκοον οὑρανοι ἁς ἑχον Ὡραι . 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.