STELLA IN OXFORD
Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful
than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had
managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in
view a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a
blue. Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and
Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.
Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors’ match, in
which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a
reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at
the guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the
hall, men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as
unconcernedly as if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.
“Who is that man just sitting down?” Michael would ask.
“I don’t know,” Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest
the implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to
be aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
“Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in
Peck?” asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
“No, really?” answered Alan indifferently.
After hall as they walked back to Meadows’, Michael tried to point out
to him that the St. Mary’s method of dining in hall was superior to
that of the House.
“The dinner itself is better,” Alan admitted. “But I hate your system
of all getting up from table at the same time. It’s like school.”
“But if a guest comes to St. Mary’s he sits at his host’s regular
table. He’s introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you’d had
another guest to-night, you wouldn’t even have introduced me to him. He
and I would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of
dummies.”
“Rot!” said Alan. “And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening?
All the men at the guests’ table were absolute ticks.”
“I’ve never met a House man who didn’t think every other House man
impossible outside the four people in his own set,” retorted Michael.
“And yet, I suppose, you’ll say it’s the best college?”
“Of course,” Alan agreed.
Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day’s reluctant death, while
the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul’s Awakening faintly
kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.
“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked. “I expect there’s one in the
cupboard.”
“I’m sure there is,” said Michael. “It’s very unlikely that there is a
single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all
the same.”
They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the
tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes
and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before
him in the smoke.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though
of course I wasn’t bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would
have looked pretty well. Still four for forty-eight isn’t so bad in an
innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to
another bowler who’s no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail.
I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two—first knock. Blob—second.
Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in
the first trial match.” So Alan voiced his hopes.
“Of course you will,” said Michael. “And at Lord’s. I think I shall ask
my mother and sister up for Eights,” he added.
Alan looked rather disconcerted.
“What’s the matter?” Michael asked. “You won’t have to worry about
them. I’ll explain you’re busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you
in a letter this week.”
During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne
Walk, and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and
musical people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper
interest in his existence.
“Give her my—er—love, when you write,” said Alan very nonchalantly.
“And I don’t think I’d say anything about those four wickets for
forty-eight. I don’t fancy she’s very keen on cricket. It might bore
her.”
No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said
about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three
vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan
announced as usual that “those men will be coming down soon for cocoa.”
“Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at
ten?” asked Michael. “And why am I never allowed to meet them?”
“They’d bore you rather,” said Alan. “They’re people who live on this
staircase. I don’t see them any other time.”
Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so
to his friend’s evident relief he got up to go.
“You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and
regularities,” he grumbled.
“Stay, if you like,” said Alan, not very heartily. “But I warn you
they’re all awfully dull, and I’ve made a rule to go to bed at
half-past ten this term.”
“So long,” said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.
A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his
invitation for Eights Week:
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
_May 5._
_My dearest Michael,_
_I wish you’d asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help at
the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at Westminster
Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of
Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think you’d be interested.
It’s all about handicrafts. Weren’t you reading a book by William
Morris the other day? His name is mentioned a great deal always. I’ve
been meeting so many interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask
Mrs. Ross to chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about
poor Dick Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could
understand how_ much much _happier she would be married to a nice man,
even though he may be a little older than herself. This tearing all
over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks of going to
Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly impossible name
beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks of unlearning all
she has learned and beginning all over again. This is most absurd, and
I’ve tried to explain to her. She should have thought of this man
beginning with L before. At her age to start scales and exercises again
does seem ridiculous. I really dread Stella’s coming of age. Who knows
what she may not take it into her head to do? I can’t think where she
gets this curious vein of eccentricity. I’ll write to Mrs. Ross if you
like. Stella, of course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that
I will not hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she
suggests it to you._
_Your loving_
_Mother._
Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad
rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at
Oxford. He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would
never have listened to a word. Stella’s view of the visit came soon
after her mother’s.
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
_May 8._
_Dear M.,_
_What’s all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it
necessary? At a shot I said to mother, “No, quite unnecessary.” But of
course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won’t. Isn’t Mrs.
Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn’t she rather object to
me smoking cigars?_
“Great scott!” interjaculated Michael.
_I’m going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very
charming to your only sister,_
_Stella._
_P.S.—Do crush mother over Prescott._
Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely
necessary for Stella’s visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars
he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come.
Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own
attitude toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating
it to her. In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured
his own behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay
on the view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was
as much shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year
he had been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at
Eastbourne. Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to
open the door once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter
his mind as the sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon
present themselves. It would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came
up and saw him playing for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was
provided to relieve the tedium of too much rowing.
So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged
that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs.
Ross.
Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of
assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having
helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the
whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every
other occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who
was threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart
spoke mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account
he could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the
High. Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael
went down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.
“I think it was a very bad move bringing me,” said Lonsdale, as they
waited on the platform. “Your sister will probably think me an awful
ass, and ...”
But the train interrupted Lonsdale’s self-depreciation, and he
sustained himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael
thought Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as
now when tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in
the Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved
Michael instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might
appear in a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a
very peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more
like a boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide
open on the city’s towers and spires, were more than usually gray and
pellucid.
“I say, I ordered a car to meet us,” said Lonsdale. “I thought we
should buzz along quicker.”
“What you really thought,” said Michael, “was that you would have to
drive my sister in a hansom.”
“Oh, no, I say, really,” protested Lonsdale.
“I’m much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me,” Stella
declared.
“Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I’m an awful ass, Miss Fane,” said
Lonsdale encouragingly. “Hallo, here’s the jolly old car.”
As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the
county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably
Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.
“You’ll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and
that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she’ll have a pretty good
notion of the main points of interest in the neighborhood,” said
Michael.
“He always rags me,” explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round
at the visitors. “I say, isn’t Alan Merivale your nephew?” he asked
Mrs. Ross. “He’s playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some
very hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after
lunch and watch the game for a bit.”
Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met
them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at
least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale’s
rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a
dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that
Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in
Lonsdale’s rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately
accorded.
The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold
chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going
to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and
speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of
lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of
mirthfulness as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.
After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the
Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and
nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who
was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully
Alan’s meeting with Stella, watched Alan’s face fall when he saw her
beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves.
There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan
to go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant
century so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much
there was in him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted to himself the
improbability of Stella realizing anything at all about the importance
of cricket. However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw
Alan coming gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very
first ball he had received.
“Of course, you know, he isn’t played for his batting,” he hastened to
explain to Stella.
She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice
to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside
them, unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond
though he was of Maurice.
The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early
tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell,
they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to
Mrs. Ross and Stella:
“My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do
that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We
can’t bear our digs any longer.”
“Why don’t you give a party there on Monday night,” suggested
Wedderburn deeply.
“Let me introduce you to Mrs’sss ... my sissss ... Mr. H’wood,” mumbled
Michael in explanation of Wedderburn’s proposal.
“What a charming idea,” drawled Guy. “But isn’t it rather a shame to
ask Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren’t.”
“Oh, no,” said Stella. “I should rather like to play in Oxford.”
So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper
river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward
glance at the trend of the clouds, occurred Guy Hazlewood’s party in
Holywell, which might more truly have been called Wedderburn’s party,
since he at once assumed all responsibility for it.
The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on
account of the Balliol men invited.
“Half Basutoland seems to be here,” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.
“Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial,
what else can you expect?” replied Michael.
Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention
more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless
mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to
Wedderburn’s suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to
monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation
with the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for to-morrow. But
Michael fancied there was another reason.
Stella played three times and was much applauded.
“Very sporting effort, by Jove,” said Lonsdale, and this was probably
the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of
really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each
occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in
such inadequate surroundings.
Michael himself was less moved by Stella’s playing than he had ever
been. Nor was this coldness due to any anxiety for her success. He was
sure enough of that in this uncritical audience.
“Do you think Stella plays as well as she did?” he asked Mrs. Ross.
“Perhaps this evening she may be a little excited,” Mrs. Ross
suggested.
“Perhaps,” said Michael doubtfully. “But what I mean is that, if she
isn’t going to advance quite definitely, there really isn’t any longer
an excuse for her to arrogate to herself a special code of behavior.”
“Stella says a great deal more than she does,” Mrs. Ross reassured him.
“You’d be surprised, as indeed I was surprised, to find how simple and
childlike she really is. I think an audience is never good for her.”
“But, after all, her life is going to be one audience after another in
quick succession,” Michael pointed out.
“Gradually an audience will cease to rouse her into any violence of
thought or accentuation of superficial action—oh, Michael,” Mrs. Ross
exclaimed, breaking off, “what dreadfully long words you’re tempting me
to use, and why do you make me talk about Stella? I’d really rather
talk about you.”
“Stella is becoming a problem to me,” said Michael.
“And you yourself are no longer a problem to yourself?” Mrs. Ross
inquired.
“Not in the sense I was, when we last talked together.”
Michael was a little embarrassed by recalling that conversation. It
seemed to link him too closely for his pleasure to the behavior which
had led up to it, to be a part of himself at the time, farouche and
uncontrolled.
“And all worries have passed away?” persisted Mrs. Ross.
“Yes, yes,” said Michael quickly. “For one thing,” he added as if he
thought he had been too abrupt, “I’m too comfortably off to worry much
about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face.
Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of
myself as sixteen and seventeen.” Michael was building brick by brick a
bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. “I seem to
see myself,” he persevered, “with very untidy hair, with very loose
joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I
blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with
Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then,
say to the second-year table in hall.” Michael paused for a moment,
half hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former
self, but as she said nothing, he continued: “When I came up to Oxford
I found that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school
like St. James’, but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a
term what most of my contemporaries had been given several years to
acquire. I remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, ‘By
gad, Valérie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,’ and my mother
disagreeing, ‘No, no, I’m sure you were right when you said St.
James’.’ That’s so like mother. She probably had never thought the
matter out at all. She was probably perfectly vague about the
difference between St. James’ and Eton, but because it had been
arranged so, she disliked the idea of any alteration. I’m telling you
all this because, you know, you provided as it were the public-school
influence for my early childhood. After you I ought to have passed on
to a private school entirely different from Randell House, and then to
Eton or Winchester. I’m perfectly sure I could have avoided everything
that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, if I’d not been at a
London day-school.”
“But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?” asked
Mrs. Ross. “Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as
normality is concerned, through St. James’.”
“Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young
Englishman. Possibly he benefited by St. James’. Possibly at Eton, and
with a prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere
athlete, into one of the rather objectionable bigots of the
public-school theory. Now I was never perfectly normal. I might even
have been called morbid and unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn’t
always possessed a sort of curious lonely humor which was about twice
as severe as the conscience of tradition. At the same time, I had
nothing to justify my abnormality. No astounding gift of genius, I
mean.”
“But, Michael,” interrupted Mrs. Ross, “I don’t fancy the greatest
geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or
seventeen.”
“No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of
greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of
Keats’ letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all
the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and
never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my
criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment
I try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done.”
“But still, I don’t see why a day-school should have militated against
the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty.”
“It did in this way,” said Michael. “It gave me too much with which to
sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I
was unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I’m sure of
that, because since I’ve been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism
so very much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say,
there’s no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it’s partly due to
being older.”
“Really, Michael,” Mrs. Ross protested, “if you talk like this I shall
begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up
self-confidence seems to me not quite normal either.”
“Ah, that’s only because I’m criticizing my earlier self. I really am
now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want
passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of
social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously
different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right
mean between the two extremes. I’m enjoying Oxford enormously. I can’t
tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate
it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a
struggle to find that wide normal road on which I’m strolling along
now. I’m so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England,
and that the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to
apply to the world the same standards we tacitly respect—we
undergraduates. I believe every problem of life can be solved by the
transcendency of the spirit which has transcended us up here. You
remember I used to say you were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those
qualities in you which made me think of that resemblance I find in
Oxford. Don’t ask me to say what they are, because I couldn’t explain.”
“I think you have a great capacity for idealization,” said Mrs. Ross
gravely. “I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I
wonder what profession you’ll choose.”
“I don’t suppose I shall choose a profession at all,” said Michael.
“There’s no financial reason—at any rate—why I should.”
“Well, you won’t have to decide against a profession just yet,” said
Mrs. Ross. “And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you
think Stella’s playing has deteriorated—if you really think it has.”
“Oh, I didn’t say it had,” Michael contradicted in some dismay. “I
merely said that to-night it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she
was anxious. Perhaps she felt among all these undergraduates, as I felt
in my first week. Perhaps she’s thinking what schoolboys they all are,
and how infinitely youthful they appear beside those wild and
worldly-wise Bohemians to whose company she has been accustomed for so
long. I long to tell her that these undergraduates are really so much
wiser, even if literature means Mr. Soapy Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and
art The Soul’s Awakening, and religion putting on a bowler to go and
have a hot breakfast at the O.U.D.S. after chapel, and politics the
fag-ends of paternal or rather ancestral opinion, and life a hot bath
and changing after a fox-hunt or a grouse-drive.”
Farther conversation was stopped by Wedderburn driving everybody down
to supper with pastoral exhortations in his deepest bass. Michael,
after his talk with Mrs. Ross, was relieved to find himself next to
Lonsdale and sheltered by a quivering rampart of jellies from more
exacting company.
“These Basutos aren’t so bad when you talk to them,” said Lonsdale.
“Comeragh was at m’tutor’s. I wonder if he still collects bugs. I
rather like that man Hazlewood. I thought him a bit sidy at first, but
he’s rather keen on fishing. I don’t think much of the girl that
Trinity man—what’s his name—Stewart has roped in. She looks like
something left over from a needlework stall. I say, your sister jolly
well knows how to punch a piano. Topping, what? Mossy’s been very much
on the spot to-night. He and Wedders are behaving like a couple of
theatrical managers. Why didn’t Alan Merivale turn up? I was talking to
some of the cricket push at the Club, and it doesn’t look a hundred
quid to a tanner on his Blue. Bad luck. He’s a very good egg.”
Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale’s babble. He was watching the
passage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven,
Stella had let the cigars go by.
The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of
gables they stood laughing and talking for a moment. Guy Hazlewood,
Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting
guests.
“It’s been awfully ripping,” these murmured to their hosts. The hosts
beamed down.
“We’ve been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to
Miss Fane.”
“You ought all to get Firsts now,” said Wedderburn.
Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and
Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of
the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright spaces,
into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled
along the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died
out to whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and
midnight began to clang.
“We must hurry,” said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward
St. Mary’s, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.
“Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?” Maurice suggested to
Michael.
“I’m rather tired,” objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was
going to talk at great length about Stella.
He was too jealous of Alan’s absence that evening to want to hear
Maurice’s facile enthusiasm.