GRAY AND BLUE
When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty
historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic
enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he
found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never
lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as
a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with
which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world
of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability
Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed
exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought
that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the
great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had
been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of
romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the
more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in
Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less
conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized
that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.
Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster
and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of
other women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their
company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with
which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost
as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be
independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to
make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to
society.
“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella
irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for
the whole of a hot summer afternoon.
“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained.
“And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a
rotten time really when she was traveling round.”
“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,” said Michael, “and
now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”
“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think
if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so
utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other
people would make me vague.”
“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.
“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to
make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the
vagueness came after she ran away with father.”
Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.
“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he
said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”
“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I
believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her
past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost
dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little
things, you’d think—however, as I know you have rather a dread of
perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”
“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the
freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though
he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted
child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was
really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him
to turn theories into practice.
“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that
professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you
ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly
sympathetic.”
Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which
made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael
grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy
so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever
you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”
For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again
the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a
rage.
A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away
into the country.
“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.
Michael sighed.
“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half
promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up
Mental Science—so interesting and quite different from Christian
Science.”
“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.
Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very
much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.
“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has
been quite long enough in London for the present.”
“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking
coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You
grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really
necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”
“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a
matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall,
and I think I’ll go.”
The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice
Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined
them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in
reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of
England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of
Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a
request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the
reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October,
arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much
money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation
not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.
The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and
they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to
pieces.
“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one
evening.
“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.
Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.
“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”
“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,”
Castleton observed. “The sign-posts are like incantations.”
“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects
me profoundly sometimes.”
Hazlewood laughed.
“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by
anything,” he prophesied.
Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist——”
“Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a
laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”
“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected
sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and
you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I
shall ever come to Cornwall again.”
With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish
novelists—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”
“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.
“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent
weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to
solve their problems and if Maurice weren’t always so facile with the
right emotion at the right moment.”
“I’ve got a presentiment to-night,” said Michael, and not wishing to
say more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to
admit as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.
Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
or was it merely thunder in the air?
Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:
_join me here rather quickly._
Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.
It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.
“I’m really awfully worried,” he said aloud to himself, as through the
stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
Charing Cross.
Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than
the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken
his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of
half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies
and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine
types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and
those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper
windows.
Stella’s address was near the Quai d’Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
found she was living in rooms over a bookseller’s shop with a view of
the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.
Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist’s
justification. Stella’s chestnut hair streamed down her straight back
like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.
Yet, for all Michael’s relief at finding Stella at least superficially
all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa
Vine whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend
for Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that
he had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning,
and Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to
abandon music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris
come walking.
The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river’s
bank.
“Well,” said Michael at last, “why did you wire for me?”
“I wanted you.”
Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
Stella’s impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
fancy for his company.
Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
she had written to a letter.
“Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
an artist, that there was also life to be lived?”
Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just
how she proposed to put her theory to the test.
“I told you that a youth was painting me.”
“But you also said he looked like a corpse,” Michael quickly
interjected. “You surely haven’t fallen in love with somebody who looks
like a corpse?”
“I’m not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,”
Stella admitted.
Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the
fellow’s presumption.
“I never yet met a painter who had very much inside,” he commented.
“But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you’ll confess that your
acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather
small.”
Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive
hostility.
“And I suppose this chap is in Paris now,” he said. “Well, I can’t do
anything. I suppose for a long time now you’ve been making a fool of
yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?”
He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in
love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom
he had never seen.
“I’ve certainly not been making a fool of myself,” Stella flamed. “But
I thought I would rather you were close at hand.”
“And who’s this Clarissa Vine?” Michael indignantly demanded.
“She’s the girl I traveled with to Paris.”
“But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that
studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk.”
By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all
this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of
the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.
“I can’t bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she’ll
sit and talk hot air till three o’clock in the morning. I shall go
mad,” Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the
immediate future.
Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an
unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her
art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable
companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael’s mistrust of
Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could
not stand George Ayliffe.
Michael announced that, as Miss Vine had scarcely condescended to
address a single word to him in the quarter of an hour he was waiting
for Stella to dress, it was impossible for him to say whether he could
stand her or not, but that he was still inclined to think she was
thoroughly objectionable.
“Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her,” Stella
promised.
“Party?” interrogated Michael, in dismay.
“We’re having a party in our rooms to-night.”
“And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?”
She nodded.
“And I shall have to meet him?”
She nodded again very cheerfully.
They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently,
Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so
that he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a
jolly afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any
more confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a
light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of
vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.
The party at the girls’ rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost
more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being
Stella’s brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence
of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and
that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare
of the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect
at which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they
did from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps
and shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to
relinquish slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set
Michael’s heart beating in the imagination of what altitudes it might
not have reached along the path of romantic passions. Every young woman
or young man who entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking
in search of familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay
worldlings to great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment,
and Michael tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration
personalities so pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his
ordinary temper have plunged him into speechless gloom.
Oxford after this assembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms
seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of
callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and
wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose
life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as
romantically real as the sea-sound conjured by a shell. Here were
gathered people who worked always in that circumfluent inspiration,
that murmur of liberty, that whisper of humanity. What could Oxford
give but the bells of out-worn beliefs, and the patter of aimless
footsteps? How right Stella had been to say that academic perfection
was vain without the breath of life. How right she was to find in
George Ayliffe someone whose artistic sympathy would urge her on to
achievements impossible to attain under Alan’s admiration for mere
fingers and wrists.
Michael watched this favorite of his sister all through the evening. He
tried to think that Ayliffe’s cigarette-stained fingers were not so
very unpleasant, that Ayliffe’s cadaverous exterior was just a noble
melancholy, that Ayliffe’s high pointed head did not betray an almost
insufferable self-esteem, and, what was the hardest task of all, he
tried to persuade himself that Ayliffe’s last portrait of Stella had
not transformed his splendidly unconcerned sister into a self-conscious
degenerate.
“How do you like George’s picture of Stella?”
The direct inquiry close to his ear startled Michael. He had been
leaning back in his chair, listening vaguely to the hum of the guests’
conversation and getting from it nothing more definite than a sense of
the extraordinary ease of social intercourse under these conditions.
Looking round, he saw that Clarissa Vine had come to sit next to him
and he felt half nervous of this concentrated gaze that so evidently
betokened a determination to probe life and art and incidentally
himself to the very roots.
“I think it’s a little thin, don’t you?” said Clarie.
Michael hated to have his opinion of a painting invited, and he
resented the painter’s jargon that always seemed to apply equally to
the subject and the medium. It was impossible to tell from Miss Vine’s
question whether she referred to Stella’s figure or to Ayliffe’s
expenditure upon paint.
“I don’t think it’s very like Stella,” Michael replied, and consoled
himself for the absence of subtlety or cleverness in such an answer by
the fact that at least it was a direct statement of what he thought.
“I know what you mean,” said Clarissa, nodding seriously.
Michael hoped that she did. He could not conceive an affirmation of
personal opinion delivered more plainly.
“You mean he’s missed the other Stella,” said Clarissa.
Michael bowed remotely. He told himself that contradiction or even
qualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person
of Clarissa’s unhumorous earnestness.
“I said so when I first saw it,” cried Clarissa triumphantly. “I said,
‘my god, George, you’ve only given us half of her!’”
Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his
initial impression of a full-length study had been correct, and,
finding that it was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical
conception of her own.
From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to
the splendor of the moon.
“I know what you mean,” said Clarissa. “But I like sunshine effects
best.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about painting at that moment,” Michael
observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be
occupied with it.
“You know _you’re_ very paintable,” Clarissa went on. “I suppose you’ve
sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you’d let _me_ paint you.
I should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have
never noticed.”
Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his
weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.
“You’re very passionate, aren’t you?” she said, shaking Michael’s
temperament in the thermometer of her thought.
“No; rather the reverse,” said Michael, as he irritably visualized
himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa’s florid
canvases.
“All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me,” persisted Clarissa.
Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this
friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way
with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be,
was most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was
not here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet
ice was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.
There should be some parallel with strawberries to illustrate his
notion of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and
constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and
rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any
nearer to the Mænad than the evocation of the image of a farouche
dairymaid.
All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to
himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa’s
request. “What can you be thinking about?” she asked, and at the moment
mere inquisitiveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.
Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing
the pitch of his violin. So Michael assumed the portentous reverence of
a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his attitude that he was
beyond the range of Clarissa’s conversation. He did not know who had
made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since,
aside from his own participation in what it gave of unified emotion to
the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart
of everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk
with Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which
he had encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his
imagination and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But
now, when all were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that
actually pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being,
Michael’s aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling
from heart to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which
justified all that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was
flaunting in voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and
ambition. Even Clarissa’s prematurity seemed transferred from the cause
to the effect of her art, so that here and there some strain of music
was strong enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of
abandon at which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael
watching him was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with
all the wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in
check by the music, Stella’s affection for him was just intelligible.
He might be said to possess now at least some of the graceful
melancholy of a pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was
much more in love with Stella than she was or ever could be in love
with him. He realized that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and
absorbing her music, was aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware
it must be for ever impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as
it was for him to paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for
Ayliffe because he knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were
losing her continually even now in complexities that could never by him
be unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.
More suggestive, however, than the individual listeners were the
players themselves, so essentially typical were they of their
respective instruments; and they were even something more than typical,
for they did ultimately resemble them. The violinist must himself have
answered in these harmonious wails to the lightest question addressed
to him. His whole figure had surely that very look of obstinate
surprise which belongs to a violin. The bones in that lean body of his
might have been of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so
little observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the
simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a
resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted
with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be
possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained
and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances,
could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion,
however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure
or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.
There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella’s piano
part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes
of the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far
beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost
tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height
from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had
thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped
altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not
have been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the
normal course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted
spirit down to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of
this long riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool
accompaniment she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael
looked sharply across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how
often by Stella herself had he been just as gently treated.
The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly
inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed.
From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk,
until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.
Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael’s
too polite “Mr. Ayliffe,” although he did not perhaps realize all the
deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after
expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.
“Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie,” cried Stella.
“Of course I won’t,” said Michael, ruffling.
“What do you want him to sit for?” Stella persisted, paying not the
least regard to Michael’s objection.
“Oh, something ascetic,” said Clarie, staring earnestly into space as
if the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.
“Just now it was to be something passionate,” Michael pointed out
scornfully. He suspected Clarissa’s courage in the presence of Stella’s
disdainful frankness.
“Ah, perhaps it will be both!” Clarie promised, and “Good night, most
darling Stella,” she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of
reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness
out of the room and up to bed.
“My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She’s like a
performing leopard!” Michael burst out. “She’s utterly stupid and
utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes
into your face and doesn’t wear stays.”
“I get something out of all these queer people,” Stella explained.
“New-art flower-vases, I should think,” scoffed Michael. “Why on earth
you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of
idiots I can’t imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and
I’m jolly glad I’m not, if it’s to make one depend on the flattery of
these fools.”
“You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself
very much. And you oughtn’t to be horrid about my friends. I think
they’re all so dreadfully touching.”
“Yes, and touched,” Michael grumbled. “You’re simply playing at being
in Bohemia. You’d be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and
Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and
walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions.”
“My dear Michael,” Stella argued, “do get out of your head the notion
that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They’re not
imported dolls.”
“Well, you’re not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to
you because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they
might feel because you are better at your business than any of them are
at theirs.”
“Rot!” Stella ejaculated.
However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched
suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael
simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so
closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to
surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The
contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.
No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a
night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the
moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in
reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into
elusive specters of a legendary paradise.
“I suppose what’s really been the matter with me all the evening,”
confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, “is that I’ve felt out
of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that
for them I simply didn’t exist. That’s rather galling. Now at Oxford,
supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of
men in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be
out of sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we
should all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella,
why did you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these
unappreciative enthusiasts?”
“Perhaps I wanted a standard measure,” Stella whispered, with a gesture
of disarming confidingness. “Something heavy and reliable.”
“My dear girl, I’m much too much of a weathercock, or if you insist on
me being heavy, let’s say a pendulum. And there’s nothing quite so
confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night.”
There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have
been a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the
ridiculous pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St.
Cuthbert’s quad or erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden’s garden. He
was constantly aware of a loss of dignity which worried him
considerably and for which he took himself to task very sternly.
Finally he attributed it to one of two reasons, either that he felt a
sense of constraint in Stella’s presence on her account, or that his
continued holding back was due to his difficulty in feeling any
justification for extravagant behavior, when he had not the slightest
intention of presenting the world with the usufruct of his emotions in
terms of letters or color or sound.
“I really think I’m rather jealous of all these people,” he told
Stella. “They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and
everything that happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now,
I can do nothing with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very
short time. I begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to
criticize, then to be bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether
and remain just as I was before it occurred except that I never can
seize the same sort of experience again. Perhaps it’s being with you.
Perhaps you absorb all the vitality.”
Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.
“Let’s go away and leave all these people,” she proposed. “Let’s go to
Compiègne together, and we’ll see if you’re depressed by me then. But
if you are, oh, Michael, I shan’t know what to do! Only you won’t be,
if we’re in Compiègne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you
know, we really met each other there for the first time.”
It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to
produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to
all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely
self-satisfied. It was pleasant to arrive in Compiègne and find that
Madame Regnier’s house had not changed in three years, that the three
old widows had not suffered from time’s now slow and kindly progress,
that M. Regnier still ate his food with the same noisy recklessness,
that the front garden blazed with just the same vermilion of the
geranium flowers.
For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long
mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the
simple pleasures of cassis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a
sheaf of long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who
on hearing that he was at Compiègne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul
de Castéra-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon
Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by
his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince
Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible
even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his
sister must become temporary members of the Société du Sport de
Compiègne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.
Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly
elated at the prospect of knowing anybody belonging to this club, and
were so obviously cast down when their guests seemed to hesitate, that
Michael and Stella, more to please the Pension Regnier than themselves,
accepted Prince Raoul’s offer.
It was amusing, too, this so excessively aristocratic club where every
afternoon Princesses and Duchesses and the wives of Greek financiers
sat at tea or watched the tennis and polo of their husbands and
brothers and sons. Stella and Michael played sets of tennis with
Castéra-Verduzan and the vicomte de Miramont, luxurious sets in which
there were always four little boys to pick up the balls and at least
three dozen balls to be picked up. Stella was a great success as a
tennis-player, and their sponsor introduced the brother and sister to
all the languidly beautiful women sitting at tea, and also to the
over-tailored sportsmen who were cultivating a supposedly Britannic
seriousness of attitude toward their games. Soon Michael and Stella
found themselves going out to dinner and playing bridge and listening
to much admiration of England in a Franco-cockney accent that was the
result of a foreign language mostly acquired from grooms. With all its
veneer of English freedom, it was still a very ceremonious society, and
though money had tempered the rigidity of its forms and opinions, there
was always visible in the background of the noisiest party Black
Papalism, a dominant Army and the hope of the Orleanist succession.
Verduzan also took them for long drives in the forest, and altogether
time went by very gayly and very swiftly, until Stella woke up to the
fact that her piano had been silent for nearly a fortnight. Verduzan
was waiting with his impatient car in the prim road outside the Pension
Regnier when she made this discovery, and he looked very much mortified
when she told him that to-day she really ought to practice.
“But you must come because I have to go away to-morrow,” he declared.
“Ah, but I’ve been making such wonderful resolutions ever since the sun
rose,” Stella said, shaking her head. “I must work, mustn’t I,
Michael?”
“Oh, rot, she must come for this last time, mustn’t she, Fane?”
Michael thought that once more might not spoil her execution
irreparably.
“Hurrah, you can’t get out of it, Miss Fane!”
The car’s horn tooted in grotesque exultation. Stella put on her
dust-cloak of silver-gray, and in a few minutes they were racing
through the forest so fast that the trees on either side winked in a
continuous blur or where the forest was thinner seemed like
knitting-needles to gather up folds of landscape.
After they had traversed all the wider roads at this speed, somewhere
in the very heart of the forest Raoul turned sharply off along a
wagoner’s track over whose green ruts the car jolted abominably, but
just when it would have been impossible to go on, he stopped and they
all got out.
“You don’t know why I’ve brought you here,” he laughed.
Michael and Stella looked their perplexity to the great delight of the
young man. “Wait a minute and you’ll see,” he chuckled. He was leading
the way along a narrow grass-grown lane whose hedges on either side
were gleaming with big blackberries.
“We shall soon be right out of the world,” said Stella. “Won’t that
worry you, Monsieur?”
“Well, yes, it would for a very long time,” replied the Prince, in a
tone of such wistfulness as for the moment made him seem middle-aged.
“But, look,” he cried, and triumphant youth returned to him once more.
The lane had ended in a forest clearing whose vivid turf was looped
with a chain of small ponds blue as steel. On the farther side stood a
cottage with diamonded lattices and a gabled roof and a garden full of
deep crimson phlox glowing against a background of gnarled and somber
hawthorns. Cottage and clearing were set in a sweeping amphitheater of
beechwoods.
“It reminds me of Gawaine and the Green Knight,” said Michael.
“I’ll take you inside,” Raoul offered.
They walked across the small common silently, so deeply did they feel
they were trespassing on some enchantment. From the cottage chimney
curled a film of smoke that gave a voiceless voice to the silence, and
when as they paused in the lych-gate, Castéra-Verduzan clanged the
bell, it seemed indeed the summons to waken from a spell sleepers long
ago bewitched.
“Surely nobody is going to answer that bell,” said Stella.
“Why, yes, of course, Ursule will open it. Ursule! Ursule!” he cried.
“C’est moi, Monsieur Raoul.”
The cottage door opened and, evidently much delighted, Ursule came
stumping down the path. She was an old woman whose rosy face was
pectinated with fine wrinkles as delicate as the pluming of a moth’s
wing, while everything about her dress gave the same impression of
extreme fineness, though the stuff was only a black bombazine and the
tippet round her shoulders was of coarse lace. When she and Raoul had
talked together in rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them
graciously within.
They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the
sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs
and dryness.
“And there’s a piano!” cried Stella, running to it. She played the
Cat’s Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.
“You could practice on that piano?” Raoul anxiously inquired. “It
belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do.
She’s married now.”
The sadness in Raoul’s voice had made Michael suppose he was going to
say his sister was dead.
“Then this divine place belongs to you?” Stella asked.
“To my sister and me. Ursule was once my nurse. Would you be my guests
here, although I shall be away? For as long as you like. Ursule will
look after you. Do say ‘yes.’”
“Why, what else could we say?” Michael and Stella demanded
simultaneously.
It was a disappointment to the Regniers when Michael and Stella came
back to announce their retreat into the fast woodland, but perhaps M.
Regnier found compensation in going down to his favorite café that
afternoon and speaking of his guests, Monsieur and Mademoiselle Fêne,
now staying with M. le prince de Castéra-Verduzan at his hunting-lodge
in the forest.
Later that afternoon with their luggage and music Raoul brought Michael
and Stella back to the cottage in his car, after which he said
good-bye. Ursule was happy to have somebody to look after, and the
cottage that had seemed so very small against the high beeches of the
steep country behind was much larger when it was explored. It stretched
out a rectangular wing of cool and shadowed rooms toward the forest. In
this portion Ursule lived, and there was the pantry, and the kitchen
embossed with copper pans, and the still-room which had garnered each
flowery year in its course. Coterminous with Ursule’s wing was a
flagged court where a stone well-head stained with gray and orange
lichen mirrored a circumscribed world. Beyond into an ancient orchard
whose last red apples ripened under the first outstretched boughs of
the forest tossed an acre of garden with runner-beans still in bloom.
In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the
white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded
fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the
homely meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the
cottage there were two small bedrooms with frequent changing patterns
in dimity and chintz, with many tinted china ornaments and holy
pictures that all combined to present the likeness of two glass cases
enshrining an immoderately gay confusion of flowers and fruit and
birds.
Here in these ultimate September days of summer’s reluctant farewell
life had all the rich placidity of an apricot upon a sun-steeped wall.
Michael, while Stella practiced really hard, read Gregorovius’ History
of the Papacy; and when she stopped suddenly he would wake
half-startled from the bloody horrors of the tenth century narrated
laboriously with such cold pedantry, and hear above the first elusive
silence swallows gathering on the green common, robins in their
autumnal song, and down a corridor the footfalls and tinkling keys of
Ursule.
It was natural that such surroundings should beget many intimate
conversations between Michael and Stella, and if anything were wanting
to give them a sense of perfect ease the thought that here at Compiègne
three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always
smoothed away the trace of shyness.
“Whether I had come out to Paris or not,” asked Michael earnestly,
“there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between
you and that fellow Ayliffe?” He had to recur to this uneasy theme.
“There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow
to rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people
to play about with. It’s the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating
cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no
need to bother to sustain one’s personality at highest pitch. George
used to be grateful for so little. He really wasn’t bad.”
“But didn’t you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might
fall in love with him? I don’t want to be too objectionably fraternal,
but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of
cheapening yourself.”
“Only to other people,” Stella argued, “not to myself. My dear Michael,
you’ve no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a
composition that is really easy—ridiculously, fatuously easy.”
“But you wouldn’t choose that piece for public performance,” Michael
pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking
Stella’s extravagance.
“Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn’t very
important?” She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.
“Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you
make out now?”
“I wanted a corrective,” Stella explained.
“But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I’m your brother? And,
you know, I don’t believe you would consider that relationship had much
to do with my importance one way or the other.”
“In fact,” said Stella, laughing, “what you’re really trying to do is
to work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you’re a
corrective to George is that you’re a gentleman.”
“There you are!” cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she
had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions
of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest
excavation of life. “We all half apologize for using the word
‘gentleman,’ but we can’t get on without it. People say it means
nothing nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean
more nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should
add something to its value. I haven’t been able to talk this out
before, because you’re the only person who knows what I was born and at
the same time is able to understand that for me to think about my
circumstances rather a lot doesn’t imply any very morbid
self-consciousness. _You’re_ all right. You have this astonishing gift
which would have guaranteed you self-expression whatever you had been
born. When one sees an artist up to your level, one doesn’t give a damn
for his ancestors or his family or his personal features apart from the
security of the art’s consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination
toward art myself, but inclinations are no good without something to
lean up against at the end. These people who came to your party that
night in Paris are in a way much happier, or rather much more secure
than me. However far they incline without support, they’re most of them
inclining away from a top-heavy suburban life. So if they become
failures, they’ll always have the consolation of knowing they had
either got to incline outward or be suffocated.”
Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices
at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the
narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the
lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of
delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and
pale fawn of their last attiring.
“If I could only find in life itself,” said Michael, sighing, “a path
leading to something like this cottage.”
“But, meanwhile, go on,” Stella urged. “Do go on with your
self-revelation. It’s so fascinating to me. It’s like a chord that
never resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony.”
“Something rather pathetic in fact,” Michael suggested.
“Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic,” she assured
him.
“My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I’m the possessor of so
much I can never make use of,” Michael began again. “I’m not merely
discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn’t
enter my head. Indeed, I don’t think I’m ever discontented or even
resentful for one moment, but if I _were_ the head of a great family I
should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my
theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down
with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas
now——” he shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t see much difference really,” Stella said. “You’re not
prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale
perhaps.”
“Yes, yes,” Michael plunged on excitedly. “But crowds of people are
doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that
these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather
irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another
sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands
any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us
to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy
trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass
of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his
existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education
has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present
meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we
know anything about. And they are _not_, they simply and solidly are
_not_. The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with
all it connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of
the educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that
the average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face,
will deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have
been armed with weapons they don’t know how to use and are therefore so
much the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a
weapon of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I
could have proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand
scale even for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good
nowadays.”
“I wonder if you could,” murmured Stella. “Anyway, I don’t see why you
shouldn’t ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the
small scale.”
“But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody
and fades out of memory at the moment of death,” Michael grumbled.
“Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid,” Stella pointed
out, “you’ll find your niche.”
“I shall be a sort of Prescott. That’s the most I can hope for,”
Michael gloomily announced. “Yet after all that’s pretty good.”
Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known
Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an
atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most
esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that
he finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.
“Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so
wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out
your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to
know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?”
Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for
keeping such an extraordinary event so secret.
“Because I didn’t want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into
your relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you,
you would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn’t
looking. And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him
through her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not.”
It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the
woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse
what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her
the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in
the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn
of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage
which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella’s
appeal to Raoul de Castéra-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own
personality had scarcely entered. Castéra-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe!
What folly it had been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan.
Yet it had seemed so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in
love with each other. Michael wondered whether he were specially
privileged in being able to see through to a sister’s heart, whether
other brothers went blindly on without an inkling that their sisters
were loved. It was astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had
stepped so far and so rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the
risk of ridicule for proposing to a girl whose mother’s love for a
friend of his own he had spent his life in guarding. Michael put out
the lamp and, lighting a candle, went along the corridor to bed. From
the far end he heard Stella’s voice calling to him and turned back to
ask her what she wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and,
in that dainty room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the
soft candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet
bow someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all
her largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish
and protect.
“Michael, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began, “and you
mustn’t get cranky. I wish you wouldn’t bother so much about what
you’re going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy.”
“I don’t really bother a great deal,” Michael assured her. “But I do
feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a
nobody.”
“The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and
father,” said Stella.
“Yes, logically,” Michael agreed. “But I think father did feel the
responsibility rather heavily, and it’s a sort of loyalty I have for
him which makes me so determined to justify myself.”
That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two
or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves
trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest
house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compiègne in time to say
good-bye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old
Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty
was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their
own that magical corner of the world.
The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine
weather came back. London welcomed their return with a gracious calm.
The Thames was a sheet of trembling silver, and the distant roofs and
spires and trees of the Surrey shore no more than breath upon a glass.
In this luminous and immaterial city the house in Cheyne Walk stood out
with the pleasant aspect of its demure reality, and Mrs. Fane like one
of those clouded rose pastels on the walls of her room was to both of
them after their absence from London herself for a while as they had
known her in childhood.
“Dear children, how charming to see you looking so well. I’m not quite
sure I like that very Scotch-looking skirt, darling Stella. I’m so glad
you’ve enjoyed yourselves together. Is it a heather mixture? And I was
in France, too. But the trains are so oddly inconvenient. Mrs.
Carruthers’ most interesting! I wish, darling Stella, you would take up
Mental Science. Ah, but I forgot, you have your practicing.”
It was time to go up to Oxford after the few days that Stella and
Michael spent in making arrangements for a series of Brahms recitals in
one of the smaller concert halls. Alan met Michael on the platform at
Paddington. This custom they had loyally kept up each term, although
otherwise their paths seemed to be diverging.
“Good vac?” Michael asked.
“Oh, rather! I’ve been working at rather a tricky slow leg-break.
Fifty-five wickets for 8.4 during the vac. Not bad for a dry summer. I
was playing for the Tics most of the time. What did you do?”
Michael during the journey up talked mostly about Stella.