T O Michael it seemed almost incredible that school should be
able to continue as the great background against which his love
stood out like a delicate scene carved by the artist’s caprice
in an obscure corner of a strenuous and heroic decoration.
Michael was hardly less conscious of school on Lily’s account,
and in class he dreamed neither more nor less than formerly;
but his dreams partook more of ecstasy than those nebulous
pictures inspired by the ambitions and ideals and books of
youth’s progress. Nevertheless in the most ultimate refinement
of meditation school weighed down his spirit. It is true that
games had finally departed from the realm of his consideration,
but equally with games much extravagance of intellect and many
morbid pleasures had gone out of cultivation. Balancing loss
with gain, he found himself at the close of his last autumn
term with a surer foothold on the rock-hewn foundations of
truth.
Michael called truth whatever of emotion or action or reaction
or reason or contemplation survived the destruction he was
dealing out to the litter of idols that were beginning to
encumber his passage, many of which he thought he had already
destroyed when he had merely covered them with a new coat of
gilt. During this period he began to enjoy Wordsworth, to whom
he came by way of Matthew Arnold, like a wayfarer who crosses
green fields and finds that mountains are faint upon the
horizon. A successful lover, as he called himself, he began to
despise anything in his reading of poetry that could not
measure its power with the great commonplaces of human thought.
The Christmas holidays came as a relief from the burden of spending so
much of his time in an atmosphere from which he was sure he had drained
the last draught of health-giving breath. Michael no longer regarded,
save in a contemptuous aside, the microcosm of school; the pleasures of
seniority had staled; the whole business was now a tedious sort of
mental quarantine. If he had not had Lily to occupy his leisure, he
would have expired of restless inanition; and he wondered that the
world went on allowing youth’s load of education to be encumbered by a
dead-weight of superfluous information. Alan, for instance, had managed
to obtain a scholarship some time in late December, and would
henceforth devote himself to meditating on cricket for one term and
playing it hard for another term. It would be nine months before he
went to Oxford, and for nine months he would live in a state of mental
catalepsy fed despairingly by the masters of the Upper Sixth with the
few poor last facts they could scrape together from their own
time-impoverished store. Michael, in view of Alan’s necessity for
gaining this scholarship, had never tried to lure him towards Doris and
a share in his own fortune. But he resolved that during the following
term he would do his best to galvanize Alan out of the catalepsy that
he woefully foresaw was imminent.
Meanwhile the Christmas holidays were here, and Michael on their first
night vowed all their leisure to Lily.
There was time now for expeditions farther afield than Kensington
Gardens, which in winter seemed to have lost some of their pastoral
air. The naked trees no longer veiled the houses, and the city with its
dingy railings and dingy people and mud-splashed omnibuses was always
an intrusion. Moreover, fellow-Jacobeans used to haunt their privacy;
and often when it was foggy in London, out in the country there was
winter sunlight.
These were days whose clarity and silence seemed to call
for love’s fearless analysis, and under a sky of turquoise so
faintly blue that scarcely even at the zenith could it survive
the silver dazzle of the low January sun, Michael and Lily
would swing from Barnet into Finchley with Michael talking all
the way.
“Why do you love me?” he would flash.
“Because I do.”
“Oh, can’t you think of any better reason than that?”
“Because—because—oh, Michael, I don’t want to think of reasons,” Lily
would declare.
“You _are_ determined to marry me?” Michael would flash again.
“Yes, some day.”
“You don’t think you’ll fall in love with anybody else?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“Only suppose?” Michael would echo on a fierce pause.
“Well, no, I won’t.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, yes, I promise,” Lily would pout.
Then the rhythm of their walk would be renewed, and arm-in-arm they
would travel on, until the next foolish perplexity demanded solution.
Twilight would often find them still on the road, and when some lofty
avenue engulphed their path, the uneasy warmth of the overarching trees
would draw them very close, while hushed endearments took them slowly
into lampshine.
When the dripping January rains came down, Michael spent many
afternoons in the morning-room of Lily’s house. Here, subject only to
Doris’s exaggerated hesitation to enter, Michael would build up for
himself and Lily the indissoluble ties of a childhood that, though
actually it was spent in ignorance of each other’s existence, possessed
many links of sentimental communion.
For instance, on the wall hung Cherry Ripe—the same girl in
white frock and pink sash who nearly fourteen years
ago had conjured for Michael the first hazy intimations of
romance. Here she hung, staring down at them as demurely if
not quite so sheerly beautiful as of old. Lily observed that
the picture was not unlike Doris at the same age, and Michael
felt at once that such a resemblance gave it a permanent
value. Certainly his etchings of Montmartre and views of the
Sussex Downs would never be hallowed by the associations that
made sacred this oleograph of a Christmas Annual.
There were the picture-books of Randolph Caldecott tattered identically
with his own, and Michael pointed out to Lily that often they must have
sat by the fire reading the same verse at the same moment. Was not this
thought almost as fine as the actual knowledge of each other’s daily
life would have been? There were other books whose pages, scrawled and
dog-eared, were softened by innumerable porings to the texture of
Japanese fairy-books. In a condition practically indistinguishable all
of these could be found both in Carlington Road and Trelawny Road.
There were the mutilated games that commemorated Christmas after
Christmas of the past. Here was the pack of Happy Families with Mrs.
Chip now a widow, Mr. Block the Barber a widower, and the two young
Grits grotesque orphans of the grocery. There were Ludo and Lotto and
Tiddledy-Winks whose counters, though terribly depleted, were still
eloquent with the undetermined squabbles and favourite colours of
childhood.
Michael was glad that Lily should spring like a lovely ghost from the
dust of familiar and forgotten relics. It had been romantic to snatch
her on a dying cadence of Verlaine out of the opalescent vistas of
October trees; but his perdurable love for her rested on these
immemorial affections whose history they shared.
Lily herself was not so sensitive to this aroma of the past as
Michael. She was indeed apt to consider his enthusiasm
a little foolish, and would wonder why he dragged from the
depths of untidy cupboards so much rubbish that only owed its
preservation to the general carelessness of the household.
Lily cared very little either for the past or the future, and
though she was inclined to envy Doris her dancing-lessons and
likelihood of appearing some time next year on the stage, she
did not seem really to desire any activity of career for
herself. This was a relief to Michael, who frankly feared what
the stage might wreak upon their love.
“But I wish you’d read a little more,” he protested. “You like such
rotten books.”
“I feel lazy when I’m not with you,” she explained. “And, anyway, I
hate reading.”
“Do you think of me all the time I’m away from you?” Michael asked.
Lily told him she thought of nothing else, and his pride in her
admission led him to excuse her laziness, and even made him
encourage it. There was, however, about the atmosphere of
Lily’s home a laxity which would have overcome more forcible
exhortations than Michael’s. He was too much in love with
Lily’s kisses to do more than vaguely criticize her
surroundings. He did not like Mrs. Haden’s pink powder, but
nevertheless the pink powder made him less sensitive than he
might have been to Mrs. Haden’s opinion of his daily visits and
his long unchaperoned expeditions with Lily. The general laxity
tended to obscure his own outlook, and he had no desire to
state even to himself his intentions. He felt himself
tremendously old when he thought of kisses, but when he tried
to visualize Lily and himself even four years hence, he felt
hopelessly young. Mrs. Haden evidently regarded him as a boy,
and since that fact seemed to relieve her of the slightest
anxiety, Michael had no desire to impress upon her his
precocity. The only bann that Mrs. Haden laid on his
intercourse with Lily
was her refusal to allow him to take her out alone at night,
but she had no objection to him escorting Doris and Lily
together to the theatre; nor did she oppose Michael’s plan to
celebrate the last night of the holidays by inviting Alan to
make a quartette for the Drury Lane pantomime. Alan had only
just come back from skating in Switzerland with his father,
and he could not refuse to join Michael’s party, although he
said he was “off girls” at the moment.
“You always are,” Michael protested.
“And I’m not going to fall in love, even to please you,” Alan added.
“All right,” Michael protested. “Just because you’ve been freezing
yourself to death all the holidays, you needn’t come back and throw
cold water over me.”
They all dined with Mrs. Haden, and Michael could not help laughing to
see how seriously and how shyly Alan took the harum-scarum feast at
which, between every course, one of the girls would rush upstairs to
fetch down a fan or a handkerchief or a ribbon.
“I think your friend is charming,” said Mrs. Haden loudly, when she and
Michael were alone for a minute in the final confusion of not being
late. Michael wondered why something in her tone made him resent this
compliment. But there was no opportunity to puzzle over his momentary
distaste, because it was time to start for the occupation of the box
which Mrs. Haden had been given by one of her friends.
“I vote we drive home in two hansoms,” suggested Michael as they stood
in the vestibule when the pantomime was over.
Alan looked at him quickly and made a grimace. But Michael was
determined to enjoy Lily’s company during a long uninterrupted drive,
and at the same time to give Alan the opportunity of finding out
whether he could possibly attach himself to Doris.
Michael’s own drive enthralled him. The hot theatre
and the glittering performance had made Lily exquisitely tired
and languorous, and Michael thought she had never surrendered
herself so breathlessly before, that never before had her
flowerlike kisses been so intangible and her eyes so drowsily
passionate. Lulled by the regularity of the motion, Lily lay
along his bended arm as if asleep, and, as he held her,
Michael’s sense of responsibility became more and more
dreamily indistinct. The sensuousness of her abandonment
drugged all but the sweet present and the poignant ecstasy of
possession.
“I adore you,” he whispered. “Lily, are you asleep? Lily! Lily, you are
asleep, asleep in my arms, you lovely girl. Can you hear me talking to
you?”
She stirred in his embrace like a ruffling bird; she sighed and threw a
fevered hand upon his shoulder.
“Michael, why do you make me love you so?” she murmured, and fell again
into her warm trance.
“Are you speaking to me from dreams?” he whispered. “Lily, you almost
frighten me. I don’t think I knew I loved you so much. The whole world
seems to be galloping past. Wake up, wake up. We’re nearly home.”
She stretched herself in a rebellious shudder against consciousness and
looked at Michael wide-eyed.
“I thought you were going to faint or something,” he said.
Hardly another word they spoke, but sat upright staring before them at
the oncoming lamp-posts. Soon Trelawny Road was reached, and in that
last good night was a sense of nearness that never before had Michael
imagined.
By her house they waited for a minute in the empty street,
silent, hand-in-hand, until the other cab swung round the
corner. Alan and Michael watched the two girls disappear
through the flickering doorway, and then they strolled back
towards Carlington Road, where Alan was spending the night.
“Well?” asked Michael. “What do you think of Lily?”
“I think she’s very pretty.”
“And Doris?”
“I didn’t care very much for her really,” said Alan apologetically,
“She’s pretty, not so pretty as Lily, of course; but, I say, Michael, I
suppose you’ll be offended, but I’d better ask right out ... who are
they?”
“The Hadens?”
“Yes. I thought Mrs. Haden rather awful. What’s Mr. Haden? or isn’t
there a Mr. Haden?”
“I believe he’s in Burmah,” said Michael.
“Burmah?”
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
“No reason at all,” Alan admitted, “but ... well ... I thought there
was something funny about that family.”
“You think everything’s funny that’s just a little bit different from
the deadly average,” said Michael. “What exactly was funny, may I ask?”
“I don’t think Mrs. Haden is a lady, for one thing,” Alan blurted out.
“I do,” said Michael shortly, “And, anyway, if she weren’t, I don’t see
that that makes any difference to me and Lily.”
“But what are you going to do?” Alan asked. “Do you think you’re going
to marry her?”
“Some day. Life isn’t a cricket-match, you know,” said Michael
sententiously. “You can’t set your field just as you would like to have
it at the moment.”
“You know best what’s good for you,” Alan sighed.
“Yes ... I think I do. I think it’s better to live than to stagnate as
you’re doing.”
“What does your mother say?” Alan asked.
“I haven’t told her anything about Lily.”
“No, because you’re not in earnest. And if you’re in earnest,
Lily isn’t.”
“What the devil do you know about her?” Michael angrily demanded.
“I know enough to see you’re both behaving like a couple of reckless
kids,” Alan retorted.
“Damn you!” cried Michael in exasperation. “I wish to god you wouldn’t
try to interfere with what doesn’t after all concern you very much.”
“You insisted on introducing me,” Alan pointed out.
“Because I thought it would be a rag if we were both in love
with sisters. But you’re turning into a machine. Since you’ve
swotted up into the Upper Sixth, you’ve turned into a very good
imitation of the prigs you associate with. Everybody isn’t like
you. Some people develop.... I could have been just like you if
I had cared to be. I could have been Captain of the School and
Scholar of Balliol with my nose ground down to εἱ and ἑἁν ,
hammering out tenth-rate Latin lyrics and reading Theocritus
with the amusing parts left out. But what’s the good of arguing
with you? You’re perfectly content and you think you can be as
priggish as you like, as long as you conceal it by making fifty
runs in the Dulford match. I suppose you consider my behaviour
unwholesome at eighteen. Well, I dare say it is by your
standards. But are your standards worth anything? I doubt it. I
think they’re fine up to a point. I’m perfectly willing to
admit that we behaved like a pair of little blighters with
those girls at Eastbourne. But this is something altogether
different.”
“We shall see,” said Alan simply. “I’m not going to quarrel with you.
So shut up.”
Michael walked along in silence, angry with himself for having caused
this ill-feeling by his obstinacy in making an unsuitable introduction,
and angry with Alan because he would accentuate by his attitude the
mistake.
By the steps of his house Michael stopped and looked at Alan
severely.
“This is the last time I shall attempt to cure you,” he announced.
“All right,” said Alan with perfect equanimity. “You can do anything
you like but quarrel. You needn’t talk to me or look at me or think
about me until you want to. I shall feel a bit bored, of course, but,
oh, my dear old chap, do get over this love-sickness soon.”
“This isn’t like that silly affair at Bournemouth last Easter,” Michael
challenged.
“I know that, my dear chap. I wish it was.”
With the subject of love finally sealed between him and Alan, Michael
receded farther and farther from the world of school. He condescended
indeed to occupy a distinguished position by the hot-water pipes of the
entrance-hall, where his aloofness and ability to judge men and gods
made him a popular, if slightly incomprehensible, figure. Towards all
the masters he emanated a compassion which he really felt very deeply.
Those whom he liked he conversed with as equals; those whom he disliked
he talked to as inferiors. But he pitied both sections. In class he was
polite, but somewhat remote, though he missed very few opportunities of
implicitly deriding the Liberal views of Mr. Kirkham. The whole school
with its ant-like energy, whose ultimate object and obvious result were
alike inscrutable to Michael, just idly amused him, and he reserved for
Lily all his zest in life.
The Lent term passed away with parsimonious February sunlight,
with March lying grey upon the houses until it proclaimed
itself suddenly in a booming London gale. The Easter holidays
arrived, and Mrs. Fane determined to go to Germany and see
Stella. Would Michael come? Michael pleaded many disturbed
plans of cricket-practice; of Matriculation at St. Mary’s
College, Oxford; of working for the English Literature Prize;
of anything indeed but his desire to see with Lily April break
to May. In the end
he had his own way, and Mrs. Fane went to the continent
without his escort.
Lily was never eager for the discussions and the contingencies and the
doubts of love; in all their walks it had been Michael who flashed the
questions, she who let slip her answers. The strange fatigue of spring
made much less difference to her than to him, and however insistent he
was for her kisses, she never denied him. Michael tried to feel that
the acquiescence of the hard, the reasonable, the intellectual side of
him to April’s passionate indulgence merely showed that he was more
surely and more sanely growing deeper in love with Lily every day.
Sometimes he had slight tremors of malaise, a sensation of weakening
fibres, and dim stirrings of responsibility; but too strong for them
was his heart’s-ease, too precious was Lily’s rose-bloomed grace of
submission. The more sharply imminent her form became upon his thought,
the more surely deathless did he suppose his love. Michael’s mind was
always framing moments in eternity, and of all these moments the sight
of her lying upon the vivid grass, the slim, the pastoral, the fair
immortal girl stood unparagoned by any. There was no landscape that
Lily did not make more inevitably composed. There was no place of which
she did not become tutelary, whether she lay among the primroses that
starred the steep brown banks of woodland or whether she fronted the
great sunshine of the open country; but most of all when she sat in
cowslips, looking over arched knees at the wind.
Michael fell into the way of talking to her as if he were playing upon
Dorian pipes the tale of his love:
“I must buy you a ring, Lily. What ring shall I buy for you?
Rings are all so dull. Perhaps your hands would look wrong with
a ring, unless I could find a star-sapphire set in silver. I
thought you were lovely in autumn, but I think you are more
lovely in spring. How the days are
going by; it will soon be May. Lily, if you had the choice of
everything in the world, what would you choose?”
“I would choose to do nothing.”
“If you had the choice of all the people in the world, would you choose
me?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Lily, you make me curiously lazy. I want never again to do anything
but sit in the sun with you. Why can’t we stay like this for ever?”
“I shouldn’t mind.”
“I wish that you could be turned into a primrose, and that I could be
turned into a hazel-bush looking down at you for ever. Or I wish you
could be a cowslip and I could be a plume of grass. Lily, why is it
that the longer I know you, the less you say?”
“You talk enough for both,” said Lily.
“I talk less to you than to anyone. I really only want to look at you,
you lovely thing.”
But the Easter holidays were almost over, and Michael had to go to
Oxford for his Matriculation. On their last long day together, Lily and
he went to Hampton Court and dreamed the sad time away. When twilight
was falling Michael said he had a sovereign to spend on whatever they
liked best to do. Why should they not have dinner on a balcony over the
river, and after dinner drive all the way home in a hansom cab?
So they sat grandly on the chilly balcony and had dinner, until Lily in
her thin frock was cold.
“But never mind,” said Michael. “I’ll hold you close to me all the way
to London.”
They found their driver and told him where to go. The man was very much
pleased to think he had a fare all the way to London, and asked Michael
if he wanted to drive fast.
“No, rather slow, if anything,” said Michael.
The fragrant miles went slowly past, and all the way
they drove between the white orchards, and all the way like a
spray of bloom Lily was his. Past the orchards they went, past
the twinkling roadside houses, past the gates where the
shadows of lovers fell across the road, past the breaking
limes and lilac, past the tulips stiff and dark in the
moonlight, through the high narrow street of Brentford, past
Kew Bridge and the slow trams with their dim people nodding,
through Chiswick and into Hammersmith where a piano-organ was
playing and the golden streets were noisy. It was Doris who
opened the door.
“Eleven o’clock,” she said. “Mother’s rather angry.”
“You’d better not come in,” said Lily to Michael. “She’ll be all right
again by next week, when you come back.”
“Oh, no, I’ll come in,” he insisted. “I’d rather explain why we’re so
late.”
“It’s no use arguing with mother when she’s unreasonable,” said Lily.
“I shall go up to bed; I don’t want to have a row.”
“That’s right,” Doris sneered. “Always take the shortest and easiest
way. You are a coward.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Lily, and without another word went upstairs.
“You’ve spoilt her,” said Doris. “Well, are you going to see mother?
She isn’t in a very pleasant mood, I warn you.”
“She’s never been angry before,” said Michael hopelessly.
“Well, she has really,” Doris explained. “Only she’s vented it on me.”
“I say, I’m awfully sorry. I had no idea—” Michael began.
“Oh, don’t apologize,” said Doris. “I’m used to it. Thank god,
I’m going on the stage next year; and then Lily and mother will
be able to squabble to their heart’s content.”
Mrs. Haden was sitting in what was called The Cosy Corner; and she
treated Michael’s entrance with exaggerated politeness.
“Won’t you sit down? It’s rather late, but do sit down.”
All the time she was speaking the plate-rack above The Cosy Corner was
catching the back of her hair, and Michael wondered how long it would
be before she noticed this.
“Really, I think it’s very wrong of you to bring my daughter home at
this hour,” Mrs. Haden clattered. “I’m sure nobody likes young people
to enjoy themselves more than I do. But eleven o’clock! Where is Lily
now?”
“Gone to bed,” said Doris, who seized the opportunity to depart also.
“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Haden,” said Michael awkwardly “But as it was
my last night, I suggested driving back from Hampton Court. It was all
my fault; I do hope you won’t be angry with Lily.”
“But I am angry with Lily,” said Mrs. Haden. “Very angry. She’s old
enough to know better, and you’re old enough to know better. How will
people think I’m bringing up my daughters, if they return at midnight
with young men in hansoms? I never heard of such a thing. You’re
presuming on your age. You’ve no business to compromise a girl like
this.”
“Compromise?” stammered Michael.
“None of the young people but you has ever ventured to behave like
this,” Mrs. Haden went on with sharply metallic voice. “Not one of
them. And, goodness knows, every Sunday the house is full of them.”
“But they don’t come to see Lily,” Michael pointed out. “They come to
see you.”
“Are you trying to be rude to me?” Mrs. Haden asked.
“No, no,” Michael assured her. “And, honestly, Mrs. Haden, I
didn’t think you minded me taking Lily out.”
“But what’s going to happen?” Mrs. Haden demanded.
“Well—I—I suppose I want to marry Lily.”
Michael wondered if this statement sounded as absurd to Mrs. Haden as
it sounded to himself.
“What nonsense!” she snapped. “What utter nonsense! A schoolboy talking
such nonsense. Marriage indeed! You know as well as I do that you’ve
never thought about such a step.”
“But I have,” said Michael. “Very often, as it happens.”
“Then you mustn’t go out with Lily again. Why, it’s worse than I
thought. I’m horrified.”
“Do you mean I’m never to come here again?” Michael asked in despair.
“Come occasionally,” said Mrs. Haden. “But only occasionally.”
“All right. Thanks,” said Michael, feeling stunned by this unexpected
rebuke. “Good night, Mrs. Haden.”
In the hall he found Doris.
“Well?” she asked.
“Your mother says I’m only to come occasionally.”
“Oh, that won’t last,” said Doris encouragingly.
“Yes, but I’m not sure that she isn’t right,” said Michael. “Oh, Doris,
damn. I wish I couldn’t always see other people’s point of view.”
“Mother often has fits of violent morality,” said Doris. “And then we
always catch it. But really they don’t last.”
“Doris, you don’t understand. It isn’t your mother’s disapproval I’m
worrying over. It’s myself. Lily might have waited to say good-night,”
Michael murmured miserably.
But straight upon his complaint he saw Lily leaning over from the
landing above and blowing kisses, and he felt more calm.
“Don’t worry too much about Lily,” whispered Doris, as she held the
door open for him.
“Why?”
“I shouldn’t, that’s all,” she said enigmatically, and closed the door
very gently.
At the time Michael was not conscious of any deep impression made by
the visit to Oxford for his Matriculation; he was too much worried by
the puzzle of his future conduct with regard to Lily. He felt dull in
the rooms where he spent two nights alone; he felt shy among the forty
or fifty boys from other public-schools; he was glad to go back to
London. Vaguely the tall grey tower remained in his mind, and vaguely
the cool Gothic seemed to offer a shelter from the problems of
behaviour, but that was all.
When he returned, the torment of Lily’s desired presence became more
acute. His mother wrote to say that she would not be back for three
days, and the only consolation was the hint that most probably Stella
would come back with her.
Meanwhile this was Saturday, and school did not begin until Tuesday.
Time after time Michael set out towards Trelawny Road; time after time
he checked himself and fought his way home again. Mrs. Haden had been
right; he had behaved badly. Lily was too young to bear the burden of
their passionate love. And was she happy without him? Was she sighing
for him? Or would she forget him and resume an existence undisturbed by
him? But the thought of wasted time, of her hours again unoccupied, of
her footsteps walking to places ignorant of him was intolerable.
Sunday came round, and Michael thought that he would fling himself into
the stream of callers; but the idea of doing so became humiliating, and
instead he circled drearily round the neighbouring roads, circled in
wide curves, and sometimes even swooped into the forbidden diameter of
Trelawny Road. But always before he could bring himself to pass her
very door, he would turn back into his circle and the melancholy
Sabbath sunlight of May.
Twilight no more entranced him, and the lovers leaning
over to one another languorously in their endearments, moving
with intertwined arms and measured steps between the wine-dark
houses, annoyed him with their fatuous complacency and their
bland eyes. He wanted her, his slim and silent Lily, who
blossomed in the night-time like a flower. Her wrists were
cool as porcelain and the contact of her form swaying to his
progress was light as silk. Everyone else had their
contentment, and he must endure wretchedly without the visible
expression of his beauty. It was not yet too late to see her;
and Michael circled nearer to Trelawny Road. This time he came
to Lily’s house; he paused within sound of laughter upon the
easeful step; and then again he turned away and walked
furiously on through the empty Sabbath streets.
In his room, when it was now too late to think of calling, Michael
laughed at himself for being so sensitive to Mrs. Haden’s reproaches.
He told himself that all she said was due to the irritation of the
moment, that to-morrow he must go again as if nothing had happened,
that people had no right to interfere between lovers. But then, in all
its florid bulk, St. James’ School rose up, and Michael admitted to
himself that to the world he was merely a foolish schoolboy. He, the
dauntless lover, must be chained to a desk for five hours every day. A
boy and girl affair! Michael ground his teeth with exasperation. He
must simply prove by renouncing for a term his part in Lily’s life that
he was a schoolboy by an accident of time. A man is as old as he feels!
He would see Lily once more, and tell her that for the sake of their
ultimate happiness, he would give her up for the term of his bondage.
Other great and romantic lovers had done the same; they may not have
gone to school, but they had accepted menial tasks for the sake of
their love.
Yet in the very middle of the night when the thickest darkness
seemed to stifle self-deception, Michael knew that
he had bowed to authority so easily because his conscience had
already told him what Mrs. Haden so crudely hinted. When he
was independent of school it would be different. Michael made
up his mind that the utmost magnanimity would be possible, if
he could see Lily once to tell her of his resolution. But on
the next day Lily was out, and Mrs. Haden talked to him
instead.
“I’ve forbidden Lily to go out with you alone,” she said. “And I would
prefer that you only came here when I am in the house.”
“I was going to suggest that I shouldn’t come at all until July—until
after I had left school, in fact,” answered Michael.
“Perhaps that would be best. Then you and Lily will be more sensible.”
“Good-bye,” said Michael hurriedly, for he felt that he must get out of
this stifling room, away from this overwhelming woman with her loud
voice and dyed hair and worldly-wise morality. Then he had a sudden
conception of himself as part of a scene, perceiving himself in the
rôle of the banished lover nobly renouncing all. “I won’t write to her.
I won’t make any attempt to see her,” he offered.
“You’ll understand,” said Mrs. Haden, “that I’m afraid of—that I
think,” she corrected, “it is quite likely that Lily is just as bad for
you as you are for Lily. But of course the real reason I feel I ought
to interfere is on account of what people say. If Mr. Haden were not in
Burmah ... it would be different.”
Michael pitied himself profoundly for the rest of that day; but after a
long luxury of noble grief the image of Lily came to agitate and
disconcert his acquiescence, and the insurgent fevers of love goaded
his solitude.
Mrs. Fane and Stella returned during the first week of school.
The great Steinway Grand that came laboriously
in through the unsashed window of the third story gave
Michael, as it lay like a boulder over Carlington Road, a
wonderful sense of Stella’s establishment at home. Stella’s
music-room was next to his bedroom, and when in her nightgown
she came to practise in the six o’clock sunshine Michael
thought her music seemed the very voice of day. So joyously
did the rills and ripples and fountains of her harmony rouse
him from sleep that he refrained from criticizing her apparel,
and sat contented in the sunlight to listen.
Suddenly Stella wheeled round and said:
“Do tell me about Lily.”
“Well, there’s been rather a row,” Michael began. “You see, I took her
to Hampton Court and we drove....” Michael stopped, and for the first
time he obtained a cold clear view of his behaviour, when he found he
was hesitating to tell Stella lest he might set her a bad example.
“Go on,” she urged. “Don’t stop.”
“Well, we were rather late. But of course it was the first time, and I
hope you won’t think you can drive back at eleven o’clock with somebody
because I did once—only once.”
“Why, was there any harm in it?” asked Stella quickly, and, as if to
allay Michael’s fear by so direct a question, one hand went trilling in
scale towards the airy unrealities of the treble.
“No, of course there was no harm in it,” said Michael.
“Then why shouldn’t I drive back at eleven o’clock if I wanted to?”
asked Stella, striking elfin discords as she spoke.
“It’s a question of what people think,” said Michael, falling back upon
Mrs. Haden’s line of defence.
“Bother people!” cried Stella, and immediately she put them in their
place somewhere very far down in the bass.
“Well, anyway,” said Michael, “I understood what
Mrs. Haden meant, and I’ve agreed not to see Lily until after
I leave school.”
“And then?”
“Well, then I shall see her,” said Michael.
“And drive back at eleven o’clock in hansoms?”
“Not unless I can be engaged,” Michael surrendered to convention.
“And don’t you mind?”
“Of course I mind,” he confessed gloomily.
“Why did you agree, then?” Stella asked.
“I had to think about Lily, just as I should have to think about you,”
he challenged.
“Darling Michael, I love you dreadfully, but I really should not pay
the least little tiny bit of attention to you—or anybody else, if
that’s any consolation,” she added. “As it happens, I’ve never yet met
anybody with whom I’d care to drive about in a hansom at eleven
o’clock, but if I did, three o’clock in the morning would be the same
as three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Stella, you ought not to talk like that,” Michael said earnestly. “You
don’t realize what people would suppose. And really I don’t think you
ought to practise in your nightgown.”
“Oh, Michael, if I practised in my chemise, I shouldn’t expect you to
mind.”
“Stella! Really, you know!”
“Listen,” she said, swinging away from him back to the keyboard. “This
is the Lily Sonata.”
Michael listened, and as he listened he could not help owning to
himself that in her white nightgown, straight-backed against the
shimmering ebony instrument, little indeed would matter very much among
those dancing black and white notes.
“Or in nothing at all,” said Stella, stopping suddenly.
Then she ran across to Michael and, after kissing him
on the top of his head, waltzed very slowly out of the room.
But not even Stella could for long take away from Michael the torment
of Lily’s withheld presence. As a month went by, the image of her
gained in elusive beauty, and the desire to see became a madness. He
tried to evade his promise by haunting the places she would be likely
to frequent, but he never saw her. He wondered if she could be in
London, and he nearly wrote to ask. There was no consolation to be
gained from books; there was no sentiment to be culled from the spots
they had known together. He wanted herself, her fragility, her swooning
kisses, herself, herself. She was the consummation of idyllic life, the
life he longed for, the passionate life of beauty expressed in her.
Stella had her music; Alan had his cricket; Mrs. Ross had her son; and
he must have Lily. How damnable were these silver nights of June, how
their fragrance musk-like even here in London fretted him with the
imagination of wasted beauty. These summer nights demanded love; they
enraged him with their uselessness.
“Isn’t Chopin wonderful?” cried Stella. “Just when the window-boxes are
dripping and the earth’s warm and damp and the air is all turning into
velvet.”
“Oh, very wonderful,” said Michael bitterly.
And he would go out on the dreaming balcony and, looking down on the
motionless lamps, he would hear the murmur and rustle of people. But he
was starving amid this rich plenitude of colour and scent; he was idle
upon these maddening, these music-haunted, these royal nights that
mocked his surrender.
And in the silent heart of the night when the sheets were
fibrous and the mattress was jagged, when the pillow seared him
and his eyes were like sand, what resolutions he made to carry
her away from Kensington; but in the morning how coldly
impossible it was to do so at eighteen.
One afternoon coming out of school, Michael met Drake.
“Hullo!” said Drake. “How’s the fair Lily? I haven’t seen you around
lately.”
“Haven’t you?” said Michael. “No, I haven’t been round so much lately.”
He spoke as if he had suddenly noticed he had forgotten something.
“I asked her about you—over the garden-wall; so don’t get jealous,”
Drake said with his look of wise rakishness. “And she didn’t seem
particularly keen on helping out the conversation. So I supposed you’d
had a quarrel. Funny girl, Lily,” Drake went on. “I suppose she’s all
right when you know her. Why don’t you come in to my place?”
“Thanks,” said Michael.
He felt that fate had given him this opportunity. He had not sought it.
He might be able to speak to Lily, and if he could, he would ask her to
meet him, and promises could go to the devil. He determined that no
more of summer’s treasure should be wasted.
He had a thrill in Drake’s dull drawing-room from the sense of nearness
to Lily, and from the looking-glass room it was back to back with the
more vital drawing-room next door.
Michael could hardly bear to look out of the window into the oblong
gardens; two months away from Lily made almost unendurable the thought
that in one tremulous instant he might be imparadised in the vision of
her reality.
“Hullo! She’s there,” said Drake from the window. “With another chap.”
Michael with thudding heart and flaming cheeks stood close to Drake.
“Naughty girl!” said Drake. “She’s flirting.”
“I don’t think she was,” said Michael, but, even as he spoke,
the knowledge that she was tore him to pieces.