SYMPATHY
Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael
was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to
assert her independence of personality would try to smash the glass of
fashion and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions
during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were
when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed
by that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of
Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate
foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music
would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow
belied.
Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was
in a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.
“These hard wickets have finished me off,” he sighed. “I shall take up
golf, I think.”
The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered
with gray fluff under the bed.
“Oh, no, don’t play golf,” protested Michael, “you’ve got two more
years to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a
rotten game and has ruined Varsity cricket.”
“But one can be alone at golf,” said Alan.
“Alone?” repeated Michael. “Why on earth should you want to play an
outdoor game alone?”
“Because I get depressed sometimes,” Alan explained. “What good am I?”
Michael began to laugh.
“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said Alan sadly. “I’ve been thinking of my
future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my
Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan’t even get into
the Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk.
Playing cricket for a suburban club on Saturday afternoons. That’s all
I see before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?”
“I don’t know that she is going,” said Michael. “She always talks a
great deal about things which don’t always come off.”
“I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much,”
Alan said. “But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about
music. I don’t think I care for him.”
“Some people don’t,” Michael admitted. “I think women always like him,
though.”
“Yes, I should think they did,” Alan agreed bitterly. “Sorry I’m so
depressing. Have a meringue or something.”
“Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?” Michael challenged.
“What made you think I was?” countered Alan, looking alarmed.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Michael said. “And curiously enough I can quite
understand it. Generally, of course, a brother finds it difficult to
understand what other people can see in his sister, but I’m never
surprised when they fall in love with Stella.”
“A good many have?” asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a
pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his
bowling.
Michael nodded.
“Oh, I’ve realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,”
Alan sighed. “I’m evidently going to be a failure.”
“Would you care for some advice?” inquired Michael very tentatively.
“What sort of advice?” Alan asked.
Michael took this for assent, and plunged in.
“Let her alone,” he adjured his friend. “Let her absolutely alone.
She’s very young, you know, and you’re not very old. Let her alone for
at least a year. I suggest two years. Don’t see much of her, and don’t
let her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really,
Alan, it’s not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love
with her. I don’t mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned
down.”
“Would he be?” demanded Alan gloomily.
“Of course, of course ... it seems funny to be talking to you about
love ... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know
you’ll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I’m frightfully keen
you should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don’t let her interfere
with your cricket. Don’t take up golf on account of her.”
Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he
picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it
before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy
airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.
“It’s funny,” said Michael, “that I should have an opportunity now of
talking to you about love and cricket.”
“Funny?” Alan repeated.
“Don’t you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished
you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for
cricket?”
“I believe I do remember vaguely,” said Alan.
Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to
let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had
conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to
elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the
retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long
while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique,
the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had
foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her
departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather
strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even
than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects
of next term.
Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed
sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college.
Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs.
Alan offered his fourth year to companionship with Michael, but nothing
would induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so
particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with
whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were
many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so
anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an
arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or
second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice
had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not
wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later
Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage
them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place,
and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.
It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the
indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until
Michael seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had
invited him to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as
well, but they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially
sharing, that is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in
the same house and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to
be thought of. Maurice was a very good fellow but—Maurice was—but—and
Michael in asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company,
asked himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging
with Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could,
and for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who
represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused
himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by
applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time
went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael’s
choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a
desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice’s sensitiveness that it could
not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him?
Soon it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not
want to dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his
feelings, and Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had
receded into the background of casual encountership, he would take
pleasure in his company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as
if Maurice were losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael
wondered why he had never before noticed how infallibly he ran after
each new and petty phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy.
It was intolerable to think of spending a year’s close association with
all those paint-boxes and all that modeling wax and all those
undestroyed proof-sheets of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Finally, he had
never noticed before how many cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what
skill he concealed in every sort of receptacle the stained and twisted
stumps that were left over. That habit would be disastrous to their
friendship, and Michael knew that each fresh cigarette lighted by him
would consume a trace more of the friendship, until at last he would
come to the state of observing him with a cold and mute resentment. He
was in this attitude of mind toward his prospective companion, when
Maurice came to see him. He seemed nervous, lighting and concealing
even more cigarettes than usual.
“About digs in Longwall,” he began.
“I won’t live in Longwall,” affirmed Michael.
“Do you think you could find anybody else?”
“Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?” asked Michael
hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long
as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
Maurice seemed embarrassed.
“No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me.
The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had
fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but
of course I said I was digging with you, and there’s no room for a
third.”
“I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny,” said Michael quickly.
Maurice looked much relieved.
“As long as you don’t feel I’ve treated you badly,” he began.
“That’s all right,” said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice’s
obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon
as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his
fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking
cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice’s invitation to
stay at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the
penitence which had prompted it.
Stella’s unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free
to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least
the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little
contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and
mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for
keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son
and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even
her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially
when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the
tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery’s adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming
oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the
facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the
facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that
suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and
the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a
telegram. Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world
of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully
pressed trousers.
“Dear Mrs. Avery,” he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative
solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to
France. “I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been
called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the
Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair
distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery.”
“Thank Heaven that’s done!” he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of
Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South
Wales.
The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London
between his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at
Cressingham Hall—a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad
Midlands. It was mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb
the pastoral calm. Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden’s
remonstrances to obtain a grasp of rural administration. So he and his
sister Sylvia with Michael drove every day in a high dogcart to various
outlying farms of the estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very
popular, and after all as he confided to Michael that was the main
thing.
“And how’s his lordship, sir?” the tenant would inquire.
“Oh, very fit,” Lonsdale would reply. “I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got
any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a
good deal about it.”
In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of
agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the
sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife’s
raspberries and gooseberries.
“I envy your life,” said Michael.
“A bit on the slow side, don’t you think?”
“Plenty of time for thinking.”
“Ah,” said Lonsdale. “But then I’ve got no brains. I really haven’t,
you know. The poor old governor’s quite worried about it.”
However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest
draw up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port,
he delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and
notorieties, Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry
him very much, not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of
brains in his only son.
“Dear Lady Cleveden,” he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty
house in Cheyne Walk. “London is quite impossible after Cressingham.”
And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the
Embankment, the oily river and a lack-luster moon.
Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott,
inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot
London weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more
solicitude than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace
for some time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while
Prescott lent him a grave attention. At last Michael’s conversation
exhausted itself, and for a few minutes there was silence, while
Prescott betrayed his nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his
cigar. At last he burnt himself and throwing away the cigar leaped
forthwith into the tide of emotion that was deepening rapidly around
his solitary figure.
“Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella
told you. Of course, I realize it’s quite absurd. Said so at once, and
of course it’s all over now. Phew! it’s fearfully hot to-night. Always
feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that’s the
same with most people.”
Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the
moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment
later the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott’s
confidence Michael felt himself committed to a participation in his
existence that called for some response. But he could not with any
sincerity express a regret for Stella’s point of view.
“Mother was very anxious she should accept you,” said Michael, and
immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an
eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella’s stilted
declaration of her refusal.
“Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of
course I’m a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very
ridiculous.”
“I don’t think Stella is old enough to marry,” said Michael.
“But don’t you think it’s better for girls to marry when they’re
young?” asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes
were very bright and his actions feverish. “I’ve noticed that
tendencies recur in families. Time after time. I don’t like this
Viennese business, yet if Stella had married me I shouldn’t have
interfered with her,” he added, with a wistfulness that was out of
keeping with his severely conventional appearance. “Still, I should
have always been in the background.”
“Yes, I expect that was what she felt,” said Michael.
He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had
wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any
longer, he rose and said he must go.
As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go
down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved
August journals “Suicide of a Man About Town.” At Cobble Place
newspapers were read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on
the day after that above a short paragraph the headline “Tragedy in the
Albany” led him on to learn that actually Prescott was the man about
town who had killed himself.
Michael’s first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked
so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the
posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined
with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable
coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and
attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner’s summing up of the
evidence of depression and the perspiring jury’s delivery of their
verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of
a man’s life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the
result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up
the thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August
journals he read now with a sharp interest “Cat Saves Household in
Whitechapel Fire.” This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative
action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the
journey down to Hampshire read about this cat who had saved a family
from an inquest’s futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would
have been awarded the commendatory platitudes of the coroner.
Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the
journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for
evening. By this time the irony of the cat’s fortuitous interference
was blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to
the fact of Prescott’s death. He was no longer occupied by the strange
sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous
daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for
once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott’s life was surely
a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated
all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly
fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a
death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a
hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would
be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in
London, or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to
the very portals of the Albany.
Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was
beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had
first obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having
given away to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead
man’s confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting
to think of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making
this hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the
public, so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the
inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure
from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals,
the soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the
profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of
restraint whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in
unrelaxing guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought
about the business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an
earlier mood of self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to
whose almost contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately
aspire. He had often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of
thought and action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered
into himself the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence.
And now he must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a
spiritual encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up
pitiably into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the
force of its squalid associations. The fresh dust of the Hampshire
lanes became a gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his
progress so that he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges
were somber and monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected
rags of a tramp. The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost
their intimations of sane humanity, and turned to horrible abstractions
of the dead life of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot.
The comfortable assurance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling
away to right and left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed
along through the twilight. “My nerves are in a rotten state,” he told
himself, and he was very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the
night below, while himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly
dusk.
In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael
thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew’s serene old age
drove out the last memory of the coroner’s court, and here was Mrs.
Ross coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in
Cobble Place was her small son sleeping.
“You look tired and pale, Michael,” said Mrs. Ross. “Why didn’t you
wire which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the
chaise.”
“Poor fellow, of course he’s tired!” said Mrs. Carthew. “A most
disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good.”
The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this
room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great
rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in
words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went
the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played
at backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of
a parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the
lamplight, met from time to time Michael’s glances with a concern that
never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He
was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock,
to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him
company.
“Unless you want to work?” she added.
Michael shook his head.
When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:
“Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott’s
death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarrassed and came
away.”
“Oh, my dear Michael, I think you’re probably accusing yourself most
unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your
dinner?”
“That’s just it. I believe I did know.”
“You thought he was going to kill himself?”
“No, I didn’t think anything so definite as that, but I had an
intuition to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he’d think
it rather cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe
I’ve got the gift of understanding people, and yet I’m afraid to use
it. Shall I ever learn?”
Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own
futility. He went on to rail at himself.
“The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness
wrecks the first decent chance I’ve had to turn it to account.”
They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting
that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him
false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found
it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the
future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and
straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was
hinting.
“My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything,” she affirmed.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamations of your
willingness to do anything that you’re positive you can do better than
anything else, I’m quite, quite sure you’re still the rather perverse
Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time
when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in
the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I
think you’re going to do—I almost said when you’re grown up—but I mean
when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up
your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of
saying, ‘I knew it.’”
“I suppose really I know what you think I shall do,” said Michael
slowly. “But you’re wrong—at least, I think you’re wrong. I lack the
mainspring of the parson’s life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of
myself. How’s he getting on?”
“Oh, he’s splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something
more than I ever managed to give you.”
“Naturally,” said Michael, smiling. “He’s your son.”
“Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of....”
Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. “No, I won’t tell you yet.”
“You’re full of unrevealed mysteries,” said Michael.
“Yes, it’s bedtime for me. Good night.”
Two mornings later Michael had a letter from his mother in London. He
wondered why he should be vaguely surprised by her hurried return.
Surely Prescott’s death could not have been a reason to bring her home.
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
_My dearest Michael,_
_I’m so dreadfully upset about poor Dick Prescott. I have so few old
friends, so very few, that I can’t afford to lose him. His devotion to
your father was perfectly wonderful. He gave up everything to us. He
remained in society just enough to be of use to your father, but he was
nearly always with us. I think he was fond of me, but he worshiped him.
Perhaps I was wrong in trying to encourage the idea of marrying Stella.
But I console myself by saying that that had nothing to do with this
idea of his to take his own life. You see, when your father died, he
found himself alone. I’ve been so selfishly interested in reëntering
life. He had no wish to do so. Michael, I can’t write anything more
about it. Perhaps, dearest boy, you wouldn’t mind giving up some of
your time with the Carthews, and will come back earlier to be with me
in London for a little time._
_Your loving_
_Mother._
_P.S.—I hope the funeral was properly done._
Michael realized with a start the loneliness of his mother, and in his
mood of self-reproachfulness attacked himself for having neglected her
ever since the interests of Oxford had arisen to occupy his own life so
satisfyingly. He told Mrs. Ross of the letter, and she agreed with him
in thinking he ought to go back to London at once. Michael had only
time for a very short talk with old Mrs. Carthew before the chaise
would arrive.
“There has been a fate upon this visit,” said the old lady. “And I’m
sorry for it. I’d promised myself a great many talks with you. Besides,
you’ll miss Alan now, and he’ll be disappointed, and as for Nancy,
she’ll be miserable.”
“But I must go,” Michael said.
“Of course you must go,” said Mrs. Carthew, thumping with her stick on
the gravel path. “You must always think first of your mother.”
“You told me that before on this very path a long time ago,” said
Michael thoughtfully. “I didn’t understand so well why at the time.
Now, of course,” he added shyly, “I understand everything. I used to
wonder what the mystery could be. I used to imagine all sorts of the
most extraordinary things. Prisons and lunatic asylums among others.”
Mrs. Carthew chuckled to herself.
“It’s surprising you didn’t imagine a great deal more than you did.
How’s Oxford?”
“Ripping,” said Michael. “And so was your advice about Oxford. I’ve
never forgotten. It was absolutely right.”
“I always am absolutely right,” said Mrs. Carthew.
The wheels of the chaise were audible; and Michael must go at once.
“If I’m alive in two years, when you go down,” said Mrs. Carthew, “I’d
like to give you some advice about the world. I’m even more infallible
about the world. Although I married a sailor, I’m a practical and
worldly old woman.”
Michael said good-bye to all the family standing by the gate of Cobble
Place, to Mrs. Ross with the young Kenneth now in knickerbockers by her
side and soon, thought Michael, a subject fit for speculation; to
delightful May and Joan; to the smiling Carthew cook; all waving to him
in the sunlight with the trim cotoneaster behind them.
It gave Michael a consciousness of a new and most affectionate intimacy
to find his mother alone in the house in Cheyne Walk. It was scarcely
yet September, and the desolation of London all around seemed the more
sharply to intagliate upon his senses the fineness of his mother’s
figure set in the frame of that sedate house. They had tea together in
her own room, and it struck him with a sudden surprise to see her once
again in black. The room with its rose du Barri and clouded pastels
sustained her beauty and to her somber attire lent a deeper poignancy;
or perhaps it was something apart from the influence of the room, this
so incontestable pathos, and was rather the effect of the imprisonment
of her elusiveness by a chain whose power Michael had not suspected.
Always, for nearly as many years as he could remember, when he had
kissed her she had seemed to evade the statement of any positive and
ordinary affection. Her personality had fluttered for a moment to his
embrace and fled more than swiftly. In one moment as Michael kissed her
now, the years were swept away, and he was sitting up for an extra half
hour at the seaside, while she with her face flushed by another August
sunset was leaning over him. The river became the sea, and the noise of
the people on the Embankment were the people walking on the promenade
below. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, her embrace gave to him
what it had not given during all the years between—a consciousness that
he depended upon her life.
“Dearest boy,” she murmured, “how good of you to come back so quickly
from the Carthews!”
“But I would much rather be with you,” said Michael.
Indeed, as he sat beside her holding her hand, he wondered to himself
how he had been able to afford to miss so many opportunities of sitting
like this, and immediately afterward wondered at himself for being able
to sit like this without any secret dread that he was making himself
absurd by too much demonstrativeness. After all, it was very easy to
show emotion even to one’s mother without being ridiculous.
“Poor Dicky Prescott,” she said, and tears quickly blurred her great
gray eyes and hung quivering on the shadowy lashes beneath. Michael
held her hand closer when he saw she was beginning to cry. He felt no
awe of her grief, as he had when she told him of his father’s death.
This simpler sorrow brought her so much nearer to him. She was speaking
of Prescott’s death as she might have spoken of the loss of a cherished
possession, a dog perhaps or some familiar piece of jewelry.
“I shall never get used to not having him to advise me. Besides, he was
the only person to whom I could talk about Charles—about your father.
Dicky was so bound up with all my life. So long as he was alive, I had
some of the past with me.”
Michael nodded with comprehending gravity of assent.
“Darling boy, I don’t mean that you and darling Stella are not of
course much more deeply precious to me. You are. But I can’t help
thinking of that poor dear man, and the way he and Charles used to walk
up and down the quarter-deck, and I remember once Charles lent him a
stud. It’s the silly little sentimental memories like that which are so
terribly upsetting when they’re suddenly taken away.”
Now she broke down altogether, and Michael with his arms about her,
held her while she wept.
“Dearest mother, when you cry I seem to hold you very safely,” he
whispered. “I don’t feel you’ll ever again be able to escape.”
She had ceased from her sobbing with a sudden shiver and catch of the
breath and looked at him with frightened eyes.
“Michael, he once said that to me ... before you were born. Before ...
on a hillside it was ... how terribly well I remember.”
Michael did not want her to speak of his father. He felt too helpless
in the presence of that memory. The death of Prescott was another
matter, a trivial and pathetic thing. Quickly he brought his mother
back to that, until she was tired with the flowing of many tears.
Michael spent the rest of the Long Vacation with his mother in London,
and gradually he made himself a companion to her. They went to theaters
together, because it gave her a sentimental pleasure to think how much
poor Dicky Prescott would have enjoyed this piece once upon a time.
Between them was the unspoken thought of how much somebody else would
have enjoyed this piece also. Michael teased his mother lightly about
her bazaars, until she told him he was turning into a second Prescott
himself. He discussed seriously the problem of Stella, but he did not
say a word of his hope that she would fall in love with Alan. Alan,
however, who was already back in town, came to spend week-ends that
were very much like the week-ends spent at Carlington Road in the past.
Mrs. Fane enjoyed dining with her son and his friend. She asked the
same sort of delightfully foolish questions about Oxford that she used
to ask about school. In October Mrs. Carruthers arrived back in town,
and by this time Mrs. Fane was ready to begin again to flit from
charity to charity, and from fad to fad. Yet, however much she seemed
to become again her old elusive, exquisite self, Michael never again
let her escape entirely from the intimacy which had been created by the
sentimental shock of Prescott’s death, and he went up for his third
year at Oxford with a feeling that somehow during this vacation he had
grown more sure of himself and to his mother more precious.
“What have you done this vac?” they asked him in Venner’s on the night
of reunion.
“Nothing very much,” he said, and to himself he thought less than usual
in fact, and yet really in one way such a very great deal.