CHEYNE WALK
The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house.
Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last
abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and
postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with
Stella’s support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem
of their new home.
Ultimately they fixed upon Chelsea, indeed upon that very house Stella
had chosen for its large studio separated by the length of a queer
little walled garden from the rest of the house. Certainly 173 Cheyne
Walk was better than 64 Carlington Road, thought Michael as, leaning
back against the parapet of the Embankment, he surveyed the mellow
exterior in the unreal sunlight of the January noon. Empty as it was,
it diffused an atmosphere of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and
peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed
to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil
interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering
indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either
side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the
three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the first story
all gave him much contemplative pleasure. He and his mother and Stella
had in three weeks visited every feasible quarter of London and as
Michael thought of Hampstead’s leaf-haunted by-streets, of the still
squares of Kensington, even of Camden Hill’s sky-crowned freedom, he
was sure he regretted none of them in the presence of this sedate house
looking over the sun-flamed river and the crenated line of the long
Battersea shore.
Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott
was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was
anxious to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend
of his father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years
ago, an intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he
was trying to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only
definite impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into
Michael’s palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and
angular with a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the
door. Michael crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr.
Prescott. Himself explained who he was and, opening the front door, led
the way into the empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after
room to Prescott, that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the
observation of the house than with a desire to achieve in regard to
Michael himself a tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun
that sloped thin golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare
rooms expressed for Michael something of the sensation which Prescott’s
attitude conveyed to him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth
that could most easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused
depths of his heart.
“I suppose you knew my father very well,” said Michael at last,
blushing as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.
“About as well as anybody,” said Prescott nervously. “Like to talk to
you about him some time. Better come to dinner. Live in Albany. Have a
soldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important
you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I’m almost what
you might call your guardian. Of course your mother’s a dear woman.
Known her for years. Always splendid to me. But she mustn’t get too
charitable.”
“Do you mean to people’s failings?” Michael asked.
Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what
Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak
out clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard
shyness of preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover,
this empty house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a
frankness and directness of intercourse that made absurd these
roundabout postponements of actual problems.
“Charitable to societies,” Prescott explained. “I don’t want her to
think she’s got to endow half a dozen committees with money and
occupation.”
“Stella’s a little worried about mother’s charities,” Michael admitted.
“Awful good sort, Stella,” Prescott jerked out. “Frightens me
devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very
much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out
of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father,” he
added vaguely.
“Did you know my father when he first met my mother?” Michael asked
directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong
account.
“Oh, yes, rather. I sent in my papers when he did. Chartered a yacht
and sailed all over the Mediterranean. Good gracious, twenty years ago!
How old we’re all getting. Poor old Saxby was always anxious that no
kind of”—Prescott gibbed at the word for a moment or two—“no kind of
slur should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have
had to meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there
was nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan, and yet he was always a
rattling good sort. Only of course your mother was always cut off from
women’s society. Couldn’t be helped, but I don’t want her now to overdo
it. Glad she’s taken this house, though. What are you going to be?”
Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at
the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house.
Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother’s graceful and elusive
presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich
associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance
to muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived
with Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of
chintz and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration
that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in
a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr.
Prescott listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of
admiring perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by
Mrs. Fane, and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it
would fly with greater certainty, until room by room and window by
window and corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and
appropriately arranged.
“I give full marks to Prescott,” said Stella later in the afternoon to
Michael. “He’s like a nice horse.”
“I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room,” said
Michael.
“Why?” demanded Stella.
And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find
one.
“Well, why not?” he at last very lamely replied.
There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between
Michael and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing,
while Mrs. Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street
Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the
multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael,
however, after the first thrills of selection had died down, must be
thinking about going up again and be content to look forward on the
strength of Stella’s energetic promises to coming down for the Easter
vacation and entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.
Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old
friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had
been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather
guilty because he had never been near his old school nor even walked
over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It
seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and
Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends.
All that Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing
past of old associations and of a sense of transition into a new life
that though as yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger
and worthier experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have
happened in Carlington Road.
On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms
in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the
darkness of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming
table in its center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the
soldier-servant and the half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the
walls of the great square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that
brooded outside the heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany
Michael was immeasurably aware of the life of London that was surging
such a little distance away; but in this modish cloister he felt that
the life he was aware of could never be dated, as if indeed were he to
emerge into Piccadilly and behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered
wigs they would not greatly surprise him. The Albany seemed to have
wrung the spirit from the noisy years that swept on their course
outside, to have snatched from each its heart and in the museum of this
decorous glass arcade to have preserved it immortally, exhibiting the
frozen palpitations to a sensitive observer.
“You’re not talking much,” said Prescott.
“I was thinking of old plays,” said Michael.
Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
perpetual present.
“Don’t often go to the theater nowadays,” said Prescott. “When Saxby
was alive”—Michael fancied that “alive” was substituted for something
that might have hurt his feelings—“we used to go a lot, but it’s dull
going alone.”
“Must you go alone?” asked Michael.
“Oh, no, of course I needn’t. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,”
repeated the host.
Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.
“Oh, yes, I think you are very like,” said Prescott. “Good Lord, what a
pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
more brain than many people thought, but of course,” Prescott hurriedly
added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
equipment, “of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary.”
“I like to be ordinary,” Michael said; “but I’m not.”
“Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
over by a train,” said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. “You
know, I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he added. “Here you are all
provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
sister. Why, you might do anything.”
“What, for example?” queried Michael.
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s the Diplomatic Service. But don’t be in a
hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
hundred a year at St. Mary’s. And when you’re twenty-one you come into
roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you’ll have at
least two thousand a year. But don’t be a young ass. You’ve been
brought up quietly. You haven’t _got_ to cut a dash. Don’t get in a
mess with women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get
out of it.”
“I don’t care much about women,” said Michael. “They’re disappointing.”
“What, already?” exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.
Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to
the attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark
discreet room, and the Albany’s atmosphere of passion squeezed into the
mold of contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of
Thackeray’s books, all combined to affect Michael with the idea that
his life had been lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his
host, and as the rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he
beheld the old impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious,
the sensitive slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the
gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity
to-morrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of
finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the
circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table
he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it
was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the
other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some
of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of
his host was receding farther and farther every moment, and his
conversation reached Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of
light, while finally he was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly
and with a half-defiant independence of precisely what he wished to
say. The evening swam past comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of
the cigar smoke the figure of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy
armchair took on once again a definite corporeal existence. A clock on
the mantelpiece chimed the twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of
silvery apology for obtruding the hour. Michael came back into himself
with a start of confusion.
“I say, I must go.”
Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.
“I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I
think I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night.”
“No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted
Prescott.
And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the
labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would
lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably
have mildly entertained his host.
“Nothing,” he finally decided.
Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle
of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal
and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth
more beautiful.
After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped
endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
before.
Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner
with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his
birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair
before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of
the dinner.
“You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott,”
he affirmed. “I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant.”
“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”
“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should
have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the
silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
third cigar.”
Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his
outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the
terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better
suit his mantelpiece.
“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.
“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery.
“You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the
Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”
“What, for example?” Michael asked.
“Oh, write perhaps.”
“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed
to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy,
what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”
“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling
you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”
Michael laughed.
“And you’ll contribute,” Avery went on eagerly.
“How much?”
“I’m talking about articles. I shall call my paper—well, I haven’t
thought about the title—but I shall get a good one. It won’t be like
the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with
art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won’t be decadent.
It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it
might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass.”
“Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production,” said Michael. “I
should call it The World Turned Upside Down.”
“I’m perfectly serious about this paper,” said Avery reproachfully.
“And I’m taking you very seriously,” said Michael. “That’s why I won’t
write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?”
“We might have one drawing. I’m not quite sure how much it costs to
reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather
advanced stuff.”
“Well, as long as you don’t publish drawings that look as if the
compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at
it, and as long as——”
“Oh, shut up,” interrupted the dreaming editor, “and don’t fall into
that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It’s so young.”
“But I am young,” Michael pointed out with careful gravity. “So are
you. And, Maurice, really you know for me my own ambitions are best.
I’ve got a great sense of responsibility, and if I were to start going
through life trying to do things, I should worry myself all the time.
The only chance for me is to find a sort of negative attitude to life
like Prescott. You’ll do lots of things. I think you’re capable of
them. But I’d rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I’d
give anything to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are.
But I’m not. I’ve got a sister whom you ought to meet. She’s got all
the positive energy in our family. I can’t explain, Maurice, just
exactly what I’m feeling about existence at this moment, unless I tell
you more about myself than I possibly can—anyway yet a while. I don’t
want to do any harm, and I don’t think I could ever feel I was in a
position to do any good. Look here, don’t let’s talk any more. I meant
to dream myself into an attitude to-night, and you’ve made me talk like
an earnest young convert.”
“I think I’ll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper,” said
Avery excitedly.
“He thinks you’re patronizing,” Michael warned him.
Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:
“Does he? I wonder why.”
“But he won’t, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced
drawings.”
“Doesn’t he like me?” persisted Avery. “I’d better not go round to his
rooms.”
“Don’t be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled
vanity.”
When Avery had hesitatingly embarked upon his expedition to Wedderburn,
Michael thought rather regretfully of his presence and wished he had
been more sympathetic in his reception of the great scheme. Yet perhaps
that was the best way to have begun his own scheme for not being
disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to
reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be
no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life,
Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books should give him
his adventures. Actually he almost made up his mind to retire even from
the observation of reality, so much had he felt, all this Christmas
vacation, the dominance of Stella and so deeply had he been impressed
by Prescott’s attitude of inscrutable commentary.
Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled
round to Wedderburn’s rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in
contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford
Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old
lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling
touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm
friendship—so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be
nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the
birth of this undergraduate bantling.
“Though what exactly you want me to do,” protested Michael, “I don’t
quite know.”
“We want money, anyway,” Avery frankly admitted. “Oh, and by the way,
Michael, I’ve asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you
up.”
“What on earth for?” gasped Michael.
“Oh, they’ll want supers. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. Great
sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of
Morocco.”
“But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?”
Michael inquired gently.
In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and
not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary’s freshmen,
including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the
rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though
Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of
seeing Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco
and Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional
actresses who came up from London to take part in the production.
“I think I ought to have played Lorenzo,” said Lonsdale seriously to
Michael, just before the first night. “I think Miss Delacourt would
have preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I’m only a
gondolier, an attendant, and a soldier.”
Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It
seemed to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs.
There had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in “my
Lorenzo.”
“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael
observed.
“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,”
Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I
wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign
Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a
chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t
forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she
threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I
never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”
Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice
Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy
all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals
in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping
sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a
gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men
from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the
individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the
individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one
day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to
lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.
“Well, what of it?” said Michael. “He probably wants to borrow your
dog.”
“He says he’s at Lincoln,” Lonsdale stammered.
“So he is.”
“Well, I don’t know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something
of Oxford?”
The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great
success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old
members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told
long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the
auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the
disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their
various Toggers to victory.
Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger
almost swinging the St. Mary’s boat into the apprehensive stern of the
only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening
his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The
Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in
that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and
Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path
beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary’s failed to catch the
boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his
own way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.
Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement
of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his
mother’s particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him,
but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room
in turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.
There was his mother’s own sitting-room whose rose du Barri cushions
and curtains conformed exactly to his own preconceptions, and there was
Stella’s bedroom very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly
mediæval, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room
with wallpaper of brilliant Chinese birds and in a brass cage a blue
and crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.
“I haven’t done anything but just have it whitewashed,” she said. “I
wanted you to choose the scheme, as I’m going to make all the noise.”
The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
his sister entered it.
“But it’s absolutely empty,” he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
in all that space except Stella’s piano, looking now almost as small
and graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.
“You shall decorate the room,” she said. “What will you choose?”
Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries
and blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude
and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples,
with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet,
even as Michael’s fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions,
his mind swiftly returned to the keyboard’s alternations of white and
black, so that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric
significance.
“I don’t think we want anything,” he finally proclaimed. “Just two or
three tall chairs and a mask of somebody—Beethoven perhaps—and black
silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn’t go with elaborate
decorations.”
So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
listen to the muffled sound of Stella’s notes. Never had any entrance
seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the
power and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room
was larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed
chair, Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the
sun, would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these
clear melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the
high-backed chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space
itself. Alan sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played
and played, Michael would wonder if ever these two would make for him
the union that already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the
joy of life on the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have
always someone fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.
“By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers,” said
Alan.
Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark’s powerful
wings.
April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had
been none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the
contemporary residents could ever have walked along its moderately
cheerful uniformity.
Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a
visit to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more
depressing than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the
sensation of constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that
was imposed upon his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as
he wandered between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom
of the river Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess
the narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses
did not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost
seeming to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather
the impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of
insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to
the tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble
flaunting of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically
by the dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a
spirit haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former
territory so much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington
Road. When he reached the house itself, he was able to expel his
sentiment for the past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new
owner had dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the
door, the number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him
that this was indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so
hardly with the problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree
that, once an object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction
to the threshold of this house when every area down the road owned a
lime-tree identical in age and growth.
Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
lived.
It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that
never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past.
Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself
the game of vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of
clouds which the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he
had done this a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure
again the vision he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible
ever to remember the exact moment of falling asleep.
After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
moments so impossible to recapture, or he would not have come to
himself with so acute a consciousness of her former actuality here at
the corner of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of
Ulalume, and Michael found himself murmuring, “Of my most immemorial
year,” half expectant of Lily’s slim form swaying toward him, half
blushful already in breathless anticipation of the meeting.
Down the road a door opened. Michael’s heart jumped annoyingly out of
control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated
in the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed,
and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps.
Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names
of house-agents, that several “to let” boards leaned confidentially
over the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who
was whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew
where Mrs. Haden had gone.
“I wish I did,” said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. “No, sir,
I’m afraid I don’t. Nor anybody else.”
“You mean they went away in a hurry,” said Michael shamefaced.
“Yes, sir.”
“And left no address?”
“Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen’s bills in the hall.”
Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but
glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with
the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably
defeated.
In the sunset that night, as he and Stella sat in the drawing-room
staring over the incarnadined river, Michael told his sister of his
discovery.
“I’m glad you’re not going to start that business again,” she said.
“And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall
soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for
me disinterestedly and without prejudice.”
“What sort of difficulties?” Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her
cheeks warm with the evening light.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she half whispered. “But let’s go away together in
the summer and not even take a piano.”