PLASHERS MEAD
Stella came back from Vienna for a month in the summer. Indeed she was
already arrived, when Michael reached Cheyne Walk. He was rather
anxious to insist directly to her that her disinclination to marry
Prescott had nothing to do with his death. Michael did not feel it
would be good for Stella at nineteen to believe to that extent in her
power. One or two of her letters had betrayed an amount of
self-interest that Michael considered unhealthy. With this idea in
view, he was surprised when she made no allusion to the subject, and
resented a little that he must be the one to lead up to it.
“Oh, don’t let’s talk of what happened nearly a year ago,” protested
Stella.
“You were very much excited by it at the time,” Michael pointed out.
“Ah, but lots of things have happened since then.”
“What sort of things?”
He disapproved of the suggestion that the suicide of a lifelong friend
was a drop in the ocean of incident that swayed round Stella.
“Oh, loves and deaths and jealousies and ambitions,” said she lightly.
“Things do happen in Vienna. It’s much more eventful than Paris. I
don’t know what made me come back to London. I’m missing so much fun.”
This implication that he and his mother were dull company for her was
really rather irritating.
“You’d better go and look up some of your Bohemian friends,” he advised
severely. “They’re probably all hanging about Chelsea still. It’s not
likely that any of them is farther on with his art than he was two
years ago. Who was that bounder you were so fond of, and that girl who
painted? Clarissa Vine, wasn’t she called? What about her?”
“Poor old George,” said Stella. “I really must try and get hold of him.
I haven’t seen Clarie for some time. She made a fool of herself over
some man.”
The result of Michael’s sarcastic challenge was actually a tea-party in
the big studio at 173 Cheyne Walk, which Stella herself described as
being like turning out a lumber-room of untidy emotions.
“They’re as queer as old-fashioned clothes,” she said. “But rather
touching, don’t you think, Michael? Though after all,” she added
pensively, “I haven’t gone marching at a very great pace along that
triumphant career of mine. I don’t know that I’ve much reason to laugh
at them. Really in one way poor Clarie is in a better position than me.
At least she can afford to keep the man she’s living with. As for
George Ayliffe, since he gave up trying to paint the girls he was in
love with, he has become ‘one of our most promising realists.’”
“He looks it,” said Michael sourly.
What had happened to Stella during this last year? She had lost nearly
all her old air of detachment. Formerly a radiance of gloriously
unpassionate energy had shielded her from any close contact with the
vulgar or hectic or merely ordinary life round her. Michael had doubted
once or twice the wisdom of smoking cigars and had feared that artistic
license of speech and action might be carried too far, but, looking
back on his earlier opinion of Stella, he realized he had only been
doubtful on his own account. He had never really thought she ran the
least danger of doing anything more serious in its consequence than
would have been enough to involve him or his mother in a brief
embarrassment. Now, though he was at a loss to explain how he was aware
of the change, she had become vulnerable. With this new aspect of her
suddenly presented, he began to watch Stella with a trace of anxiety.
He was worried that she seemed so restless, so steadily bored in
London. He mistrusted the brightening of her eyes, when she spoke of
soon going back to Vienna. Then came a week when Stella was much
occupied with speculations about the Austrian post, and another week
when she was perturbed by what she seemed anxious to suppose its
vagaries. A hint from Michael that there was something more attractive
in Vienna than a new technique of the piano made her very angry; and
since she had always taken him into her confidence before, he tried to
persuade himself that his suspicion was absurd and to feel tremendously
at ease when Stella packed up in a hurry and went back with scarcely
two days’ warning of her departure to Vienna.
It was a sign of the new intimacy of relation between himself and his
mother that Michael was able to approach naturally the subject of
Stella’s inquietude.
“My dear boy, I’m just as much worried as you are,” Mrs. Fane assured
him. “I suppose I ought to have been much more unpleasant than I can
ever bear to make myself. No doubt I ought to have forbidden her quite
definitely to go back—or perhaps I should have insisted on going back
with her. Though I don’t know what I would have done in Vienna. They
make pastry there, don’t they? I daresay there are very good
tea-shops.”
“I think it would have been better,” said Michael firmly. Mrs. Fane
turned to him with a shrug of helplessness.
“My dear boy, you know how very unpleasant Stella can be when she is
crossed. Really very unpleasant indeed. Girls are so much more
difficult to manage than boys. And they begin by being so easy. But
after eighteen every month brings a new problem. Their clothes, you
know. And of course their behavior.”
“It’s quite obvious what’s the matter,” said Michael. “Funny thing.
I’ve never concerned myself very much with Stella’s love-affairs
before, but this time she seemed less capable of looking after
herself.”
“Would you like to go out to Vienna?” she suggested.
“Oh, no, really, I must go away and work. Besides I shouldn’t do any
good. Nor would you,” Michael added abruptly.
“I wish Dick Prescott were alive,” his mother sighed. “Really, you
know, Michael, I was shocked at Stella’s callousness over that
business.”
“Well, my dear mother, be fair. It wasn’t anything to do with Stella,
and she has no conventional affections. That’s one comfort—you do know
where you are with her. Now, let’s leave Stella alone and talk about
your plans. You’re sure you don’t mind my burying myself in the
country? I must work. I’m going down into Oxfordshire with Guy
Hazlewood.”
Michael had met Guy the other evening in the lobby of a theater. He had
come back from Macedonia with the intention of settling somewhere in
the country. He was going to devote himself to poetry, although he
exacted Michael’s pledge not to say a word of this plan for fear that
people would accuse him of an affected withdrawal. He was sensitive to
the strenuous creed of his old college, to that atmosphere of faint
contempt which surrounded a man who was not on the way toward
administering mankind or acres. He had not yet chosen his retreat. That
would be revealed in a flash, if his prayer were to be granted.
Meanwhile why should not Michael accompany him to some Cotswold
village? They would ride out from Oxford on bicycles and when they had
found the ideal inn, they would stay there through August and
September, prospecting the country round. Michael was flattered by
Guy’s desire for his companionship. Of all the men he had known, he
used to admire Guy the most. Two months with him would be a pleasure he
would not care to forego, and it was easy enough to convince himself
that he would be powerless to influence Stella in any direction and
that anyway, whether he could or could not, it would be more
serviceable for her character to win or lose her own battles.
Michael and Guy left Oxford in the mellow time of an afternoon in
earliest August and rode lazily along the Cheltenham road. At
nightfall, just as the stripling moon sank behind a spinney of firs
that crowned the farthest visible dip of that rolling way ahead across
the wold, they turned down into Wychford. The wide street of the town
sloped very rapidly to a valley of intertwining streams whence the air
met them still warm with the stored heat of the day, yet humid and
languorous after the dry upland. On either side, as they dipped
luxuriously down with their brakes gently whirring, mostly they were
aware of many white hollyhocks against the gray houses that were
already bloomed with dusk and often tremulous with the voyaging shadows
of candle-light. At the Stag Inn they found a great vaulted parlor, a
delicate roast of lamb, a salad very fragrant with mint and thyme,
cream and gooseberries and ale.
“This is particularly good ale,” said Guy.
“Wonderful ale,” Michael echoed.
Once again they filled their pewter mugs.
“It seems to me exceptionally rich and tawny,” said Guy.
“And it has a very individual tang,” said Michael. “Another quart, I
think, don’t you?”
“Two, almost,” Guy suggested, and Michael agreed at once.
“I vote we stay here,” said Guy.
“I’ll wire them to send along my books to-morrow,” decided Michael.
After supper they went on down the street and came to the low parapet
of a bridge in one of whose triangular bays they stood, leaning over to
count in the stream below the blurred and jigging stars. Behind them in
the darkness was the melodious roar of falling water, and close at hand
the dusty smell of ivy. Farther exploration might have broken the spell
of mystery; so in silence they pored upon the gloom, until the rhythmic
calm and contemplation were destroyed by a belated wagon passing over
the bridge behind them. They went back to the Stag and that night in
four-posters slept soundly.
Next morning Michael and Guy went after breakfast to visit the bridge
on which they had stood in the starlight. It managed curiously to
sustain the romantic associations with which they had endowed it on the
night before. A mighty sycamore, whose roots in their contest with the
floods had long grappled in desperate convolutions with the shelving
bank of the stream below, overshadowed the farther end: here also at
right angles was a line of gabled cottages crumbling into ruin and much
overgrown with creepers. They may have been old almshouses, but there
was no sign of habitation, and they seemed abandoned to chattering
sparrows whose draggled nests were everywhere visible in the ivy.
Beyond on the other side of the bridge the stream gurgled toward a
sluice that was now silent; and beyond this, gray buildings deep
embowered in elms and sycamores surrounded what was evidently a mill
pool. They walked on to where the bridge became a road that in contrast
with the massed trees all round them shone dazzlingly in the sunshine.
A high gray wall bounded the easterly side; on the west the road was
bordered by a low quickset hedge that allowed a view of a wide valley
through which the river, having gathered once more its vagrant streams
and brooks, flowed in prodigal curves of silver as far as the eye could
follow. The hills that rose to right and left of the valley in bald
curves were at this season colorless beside the vivider green of the
water-meadows at their base, which was generally indeterminate on
account of plantations whence at long intervals the smoke of hidden
mills and cottages ascended. When the road had traversed the width of
the valley, it trifurcated. One branch followed westward the gentle
undulations of the valley; a second ran straight up the hill,
disappearing over a stark sky-line almost marine in its hint of space
beyond. The main branch climbed the hill diagonally to the right and
conveyed a sense of adventure with a milestone which said fifty miles
to an undecipherable town.
Michael and Guy took this widest road for a while, but they soon paused
by a gate to look back at Wychford. The sun shone high, and the beams
slanting transversely through the smoke of the chimneys in tier upon
tier gave the clustered gray roofs a superficial translucence like that
of an uncut gem. The little town built against the hill nowhere
straggled, and in its fortified economy and simplicity of line it might
have been cut on wood by a mediæval engraver. Higher up along the
hill’s ridge went rocketing east and west the windswept highway from
Oxford over the wold to Gloucestershire. They traced its course by the
telegraph-poles whose inclinations had so long been governed by the
wind that the mechanic trunks were as much a natural feature of the
landscape as the trees, themselves not much less lean and sparse. It
was a view of such extension that roads more remote were faint scars on
the hills, and the streams of the valley narrowed ultimately to thin
blades of steel. The traffic of generations might be thought to have
converged upon this town, so much did it produce the effect of waiting
upon that hillside, so little sense did it have of seeming to obtrude
its presence upon the surroundings.
Gradually the glances of Guy and Michael came back from the fading
horizons of this wide country to concentrate first upon the town and
then upon the spire that with glittering weather-vane rose lightly as
smoke from the gray fabric of its church, until finally they must have
rested simultaneously upon a long low house washed by one stream and by
another imprisoned within a small green island.
“It’s to let,” said Michael.
“I know,” said Guy.
The unspoken thought that went sailing off upon the painted board was
only expressed by the eagerness with which they stared at the proffered
house.
“I might be able to take it,” said Guy at last.
Michael looked at him in admiration. Such a project conceived in his
company did very definitely mark an altogether new stage and, as it
seemed to him, a somewhat advanced stage in his relationship with the
world.
They discovered the entrance immediately behind the almshouses in the
smell of whose ivy they had lingered on the bridge last night. They
passed through a wooden gateway in a high gray wall and, walking down a
stained gravel path between a number of gnarled fruit trees trimmed as
espaliers to conform with an antique mode of insuring fertility, they
came at last round an overgrown corner close against the house. Seen
from the hillside, it had quickly refined itself to be for them at
least the intention of that great view, of that wide country of
etched-in detail. The just background had been given, the only
background that would have enabled them to esteem all that was offered
here in this form of stone well-ordered, gray, indigenous, the sober
crown of the valley.
Guy from the moment he saw it had determined to take this house: his
inquiries about the rent and the drains, his discussion of the terms of
the agreement, of the dampness within, of the size of the garden were
the merest conventions of the house-hunter, empty questions whose
answers really had very slight bearing on the matter in hand. Here he
said to Michael he would retire: here he would live and write poetry:
here life would be escorted to the tread of great verse: here an
eremite of art he would show forth the austerity of his vocation.
Meanwhile, Michael’s books arrived, and at Guy’s exhortation he worked
in the orchard of Plashers Mead—so the small property of some twenty
acres was called. Guy was busy all day with decorators and carpenters
and masons. The old landlord had immediately surrendered his house to
so enterprising a tenant; an agreement for three years had been signed;
and Guy was going to make all ready in summer that this very autumn
with what furniture he had he might inhabit his own house set among
these singing streams.
Michael found it a little hard to pay the keenest attention to Anson’s
or to Dicey’s entertainment of his curiosity about the Constitution,
too much did the idea of Guy’s emancipation alluringly rustle as it
were in the tree-tops, too much did the thought of Guy’s unvexed life
draw Michael away from his books. And even if he could blot out Guy’s
prospect, it was impossible not to follow in fancy the goldfinches to
their thistle-fields remote and sunny, the goldfinches with their
flighted song.
Summer passed, and Michael did not find that the amount of information
he had absorbed quite outweighed a powerful impression, that was
shaping in his mind, of having wasted a good deal of time in staring at
trees and the funnels of light between them, in listening to the wind
and the stream, to the reapers and the progress of time.
One evening in mid-September he and Guy went after supper to see how
some newly painted room looked by candlelight. They sat on a couple of
borrowed windsor chairs in the whitewashed room that Guy had chosen for
his own. Two candles stuck on the mantelpiece burned with motionless
spearheads of gold, and showed to their great satisfaction that by
candlelight as well as by day the green shelves freshly painted were
exactly the green they had expected. When they blew out the candles,
they realized, such a plenitude of silver light was left behind, that
the full moon of harvest was shining straight in through the easterly
bow window which overhung the stream.
“By gad, what a glorious night!” sighed Guy, staring out at the
orchard. “We’ll take a walk, shall we?”
They went through the orchard where the pears and pippins were lustered
by the sheen and glister of the moon. They walked on over grass that
sobbed in the dewfall beneath their footsteps. They faded from the
world into a web of mist when trees rose suddenly like giants before
them and in the depths of whose white glooms on either side they could
hear the ceaseless munching of bullocks at nocturnal pasturage. Then in
a moment they had left the mist behind them and stood in the heart of
the valley, watching for a while the willows jet black against the
moon, and the gleaming water at their base.
“I wish you were going to be up next term,” said Michael. “I really can
hardly bear to think of you here. You are a lucky devil.”
“Why don’t you come and join me?” Guy suggested,
“I wish I could. Perhaps I will after next year. And yet what should I
do? I’ve dreamed enough. I must decide what I’m going to _try_ to do,
at any rate. You see, I’m not a poet. Guy, you ought to start a sort of
lay monastery—a house for people to retreat into for the purpose of
meditation upon their careers.”
“As a matter of fact, it would be a jolly good thing if some people did
do that.”
“I don’t know,” said Michael. “I should get caught in the web of the
meditation. I should hear the world as just now we heard those
bullocks. Guy, Wychford is a place of dreams. You’ll find that. You’ll
live on and on at Plashers Mead until everything about you turns into
the sort of radiant unreality we’ve seen to-night.”
The church-clock with raucous whizz and clangor sounded ten strokes.
“And time,” Michael went on, “will come to mean no more than a brief
disturbance of sound. Really I’m under the enchantment already. I’m
beginning to wonder if life really does hold a single problem that
could not be dissolved at once by this powerful moonshine.”
Next day Michael said he must go back to London to-morrow since he
feared that if he dallied he would never go back. Guy could not
dissuade him from his resolve.
“I don’t want to spoil my picture of you in this valley,” Michael
explained. “You know, I feel inclined to put Plashers Mead into the
farthest recesses of my heart, so that whatever happens when I go down
next year, it will be so securely hidden that I shall have the mere
thought of it for a refuge.”
“And more than the thought of it, you silly ass,” Guy drawled.
They drove together to the railway station five miles away. In the
sleepy September heat the slow train puffed in. Hot people with bunches
of dahlias were bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.
Michael sighed.
“Don’t go,” said Guy. “It’s much too hot.”
Michael shook his head.
“I must.”
Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases
awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.
“Some of my books,” he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael
watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the
wine-dark dahlias of the platform.
“What fun unpacking them,” he thought, and leaned back regretfully to
survey the placid country gliding past.
Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect
seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or
rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great
railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic
strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children,
leaning over scabrous walls to salute the passing train. Always, as one
entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses
whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible.
To Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid
sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through
London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became
unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as
the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and
emerged in that space of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but
the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering
legions of children, was still in Michael’s ears when the hansom pulled
up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.
The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and
informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than
would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of
time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been
unaware of his sister’s arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too
intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he
actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an
affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned
by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the
social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train
sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer conspicuous in
his memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and
the webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant
dream. He was in fact back in town.
Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he
hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very
moment the parlormaid told him of Stella’s return he had feared such a
return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask
abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with
just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by
its demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably
glad to see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side
would have made him kiss her.
“Hullo, I didn’t expect to see you,” was, however, all he said.
“Nor did I you,” was what she answered.
Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey
from Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true
insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.
Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before
lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas
and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more
disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella
back from Vienna?
“Did you come this morning?” he asked.
“Oh, no. Last night. Why?” she demanded. “Do I look as crumpled as all
that?”
For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she
had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was
perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather
wished she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his
own explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment.
Useless indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as
the lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life
where nothing really happens.
After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she
turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her
again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than
he had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray
satin or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at
him for not putting on a dinner jacket.
“Don’t look so horrified at the notion,” she cried petulantly. “Can’t
you realize that after a year with long-haired students I want a
change?”
After dinner Michael asked her to come and play in the studio.
“Play?” she echoed. “I’m never going to play again.”
“What perfect rot you are talking,” said Michael, in a damnatory
generalization which was intended to cover not merely all she had been
saying, but even all she had been doing almost since she first
announced her intention of going to Vienna.
Stella burst into tears.
“Come on, let’s go to the studio,” said Michael. He felt that Stella’s
tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that
she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was
therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly
boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked
to the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an
outrage to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin,
even though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to
himself “Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante
stark mad in white muslin.”
“Come along, come along,” he begged her. “You must come to the studio.”
Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he
himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but
when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently
whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had
plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael
looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely
an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly
than before.
“Look here, I say, why don’t you tell me what you’re crying about? You
can’t go on crying forever, you know,” Michael pointed out. “And when
you’ve stopped crying, you’ll feel such an ass if you haven’t explained
what it was all about.”
“I couldn’t possibly tell anybody,” said Stella, looking very fierce.
Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that
Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather
unusually dramatic.
“But I’m damned if I _will_ give up playing,” she proclaimed; and,
sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion
her weakness.
It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her
what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of
self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella’s
calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and
would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished,
she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily
Haden.
“I don’t know—really—they’ve left Trelawny Road,” he said, feeling
vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.
“And you never think of her, I suppose?” demanded Stella.
“Well, no, I don’t very much.”
“Yet I can remember,” said Stella, “when you were absolutely miserable
because she had been flirting with somebody else.”
“Yes, I was very miserable,” Michael admitted. “And you were rather
contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more
proud.”
“And don’t you realize,” Stella said, “that just because I did remember
what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?”
Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her
confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had
finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and
masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half
hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.
Michael made up his mind that Stella’s unhappiness was due to a
love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or
temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation
against the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the
fellow’s head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could
picture himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He
went so far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale
requesting their secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to
dance before him. He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily.
Time had softened the trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had
been guilty. Time with night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal
charm. He had been reading this week of the great imaginative loves of
the Middle Ages, and of that supple and golden-haired girl he began to
weave an abstraction of passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He
slept upon the evocation of her beauty just as he was setting forth
upon a delicate and intangible pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested
to Stella they should revisit Carlington Road.
“My god, to think we once lived here!” exclaimed Stella, as they stood
outside Number 64. “To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of
course I was much more away from it than you ever were.”
Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and
habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was
become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in
possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.
“Well, thank heaven, everything does change,” she murmured. “And that
ugly things become even more ugly.”
“Only for a time,” objected Michael. “In twenty years if we visit
Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it
all is.”
“I wasn’t thinking so much of Carlington Road,” said Stella. “I was
really thinking of people.”
“Even they become beautiful again after a time,” argued Michael.
“It would take a very long time for some,” said Stella coldly.
Michael had rather dreaded his mother’s return, with Stella in this
mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been
unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if
she and not herself had suffered lately.
“I’m so glad you’re back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you
aren’t going to Petersburg to-morrow, because the man at Vienna whose
name begins with that extraordinary letter....”
“Oh, mother,” Stella laughed, “the letter was quite ordinary. It was
only L.”
“But the name was dreadful, dear child. It always reminded one of furs.
A most oppressive name. So that really you’ll be in London all this
winter?”
“Yes, only I shan’t play much,” said Stella.
“Mrs. Carruthers is so anxious to meet you properly,” Mrs. Fane said.
“And Mabel Carruthers is really very nice. Poor girl! I wish you could
be friends with her. She’s interested in nothing her mother does.”
Michael was really amazed when Stella, without a shrug, without even a
wink at him, promised simply to let Mrs. Carruthers “meet her
properly,” and actually betrayed as much interest in Mabel Carruthers
as to inquire how old she was.
Maurice arrived at Cheyne Walk, just before Michael went up for term,
to say he had taken a most wonderful studio in Grosvenor Road. He was
anxious that Michael should bring his sister to see it, but Stella
would not go.
“Thanks very much, my dear,” she said to him, “but I’ve seen too much
of the real thing. I’m in no mood just now for a sentimental
imitation.”
“I think you ought to come,” said Michael. “It would be fun to see
Maurice living in Grosvenor Road with all the Muses. Castleton will
have such a time tidying up after them when he joins him next year.”
But Stella would not go.