99 ST. GILES
It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief
figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way
he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college
itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars.
Very soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he
shared with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that
this last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best,
indeed perhaps of all the years of his life the best.
College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had
ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to
feel the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two,
revisiting Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from
the daily round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which
preserved its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable
losses of each year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with
what now seemed its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had
never given him quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St.
Giles could give. Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November
dusks, when after a long walk through silent country Michael and Alan
came back to the din of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded
and greasy Cornmarket toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when
they would find the tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered
toast was eaten; tea was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was
smoked to idle cracklings of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout
landlady cleared away, and during the temporary disturbance Michael
pulled back the blinds and watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting
out St. John’s and the alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the
Martyrs’ Memorial and even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery.
The room was quiet again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and
Alan, settled in deep chairs, read their History and Philosophy;
outside in the November night footsteps went by; carts and wagons
occasionally rattled; bells chimed; outside in the November murk
present life was manifesting its continuity; here within, the battles
and the glories, the thoughts, the theories and the speculations of the
past for Michael and Alan moved across printed pages under the rich
lamplight.
Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99
St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose
decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael
and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place
during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a
capacity for making apparently the most barren observations flower and
fruit with intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit
of the lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate
revelation of her domestic past.
After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o’clock, at which
hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way
Michael enjoyed the night most. The mediæval chronicles were put back
on their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or
Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael
wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down
came Don Quixote or Adlington’s Apuleius, or Florio’s Montaigne, or
Lucian’s True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the
fog stole into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at
their measured intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city
was there; at that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed
than austere, for it was neither in time nor in space, but the
abstraction of a city. Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go
up to bed by candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open
window the sound of two o’clock striking came very coldly, he could
scarcely fancy himself in the present. The effort of intense reading,
whether of bygone institutions or of past adventure, had left him in
the condition of physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was
aware of nothing but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish
with the triumph of tremendous concentration, to undress in this
stinging acerbity of night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in
this world of dreaming spires.
99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had
anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide
thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of movement,
scarcely ever aroused a petty inquisitiveness into the actions of the
passers-by. The traffic of the thoroughfare like the ships of the sea
went by merely apprehended, but not observed. The big bay-window hung
over the street like the stern-cabin of a frigate, and as Michael sat
there he had the impression of being cut off from communication, the
sense of perpetually leaving life astern. The door of 99 St. Giles did
not open directly on the street, but was reached by a tortuous passage
that ran the whole depth of the house. This entrance helped very much
the illusion of separation from the ebb and flow of ordinary existence,
and was so suggestive of a refuge that involuntarily Michael always
hurried through it that the sooner he might set his foot on the steep
and twisted staircase inside the house. There was always an excitement
in reaching this staircase again, an impulse to run swiftly up, as if
this return to the sitting-room was veritably an escape from the world.
Here the books sprawled everywhere. At 202 High they had filled the
cupboards in orderly fashion. Here they overflowed in dusty cataracts,
and tottered upward in crazy escalades and tremulous piles. All the
shelves were gorged with books. Moreover, Michael every afternoon
bought more books. The landlady held up her hands in dismay as,
crunching up the paper in which they had been wrapped, he considered in
perplexity their accommodation. More space was necessary, and the
sea-green dining-room was awarded shelves. Here every morning after
breakfast came the exiles, the dull and the disappointing books which
had been banished from the sitting-room. Foot by foot the sea-green
walls disappeared behind these shelves. In Lampard’s bookshop Michael
was certainly a personality. Lampard himself even came to tea, and sat
nodding his approbation.
As for Alan, he used to stay unmoved by the invading volumes. He had
stipulated at the beginning that one small bookcase should be reserved
for him. Here Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides always had
room to breathe, without ever being called upon to endure the
contamination of worm-eaten bibliophily.
“Where the deuce has my Stubbs got to?” Michael would grumble, delving
into the musty cascade of old plays and chap books which had
temporarily obliterated the current literature of the week’s work.
Alan would very serenely take down Plato from his own trim and
unimpeded shelves, and his brow would already be knitted with the
effort of fixing half-a-dozen abstractions before Michael had decided
after a long excavation that Stubbs had somehow vanished in the by-ways
of curious reading.
Yet notwithstanding the amount of time occupied by arranging and buying
and finding books, Michael did manage to absorb a good deal of history,
even of that history whose human nature has to be sought arduously in
charters, exchequer-rolls and acts of parliament. Schools were drawing
near; the dates of Kings and Emperors and Popes in their succession
adorned the walls of his bedroom, so that even while he was cleaning
his teeth one fact could be acquired.
Only on Sunday evenings did Michael allow himself really to reënter the
life of St. Mary’s. These Sunday evenings had all the excitement of a
long-interrupted reunion. To be sure, Venner’s was thronged with people
who seemed to be taking life much too lightly; but Tommy Grainger was
there, still engaged with a pass-group. People spoke hopefully of going
head this year. Surely with Tommy and three other Blues in the boat,
St. Mary’s must go head. The conversation was so familiar that it was
almost a shock to find so many of the faces altered. But Cuffe was
still there with his mouth perpetually open just as wide as ever.
Sterne was still there and likely, so one heard, to make no end of runs
next summer. George Appleby was very much in evidence since Lonsdale’s
departure. George Appleby was certainly there, and Michael rather liked
him and accepted an invitation to lunch. In hall the second-year men
were not quite as rowdy as they used to be, and when they were rowdy,
somehow to Michael and the rest of the fourth year they seemed to lack
the imagination of themselves when they—but after all the only true
judges of that were the Princes and Cardinals and Poets staring down
from their high golden frames. The dons, too, at High Table might know,
for there they sat, immemorial as ever.
Wine in Common Room was just the same, and it really was very jolly to
be sitting between Castleton—that very popular President of J.C.R.—and
Tommy Grainger. There certainly was a great and grave satisfaction in
leading off with a more ceremonious health drinking than had ever been
achieved in the three years past. Michael found it amusing to catch the
name of some freshman and, shouting abruptly a salute, to behold him
wriggle and blush and drink his answer and wonder who on earth was
hailing _him_. Michael often asked himself if it really were possible
he could appear to that merry rout at the other end of J.C.R. in truly
heroic mold. He supposed, with a smile at himself for so gross a fraud,
that he really did for them pass mortal stature and that already he had
a bunch of legends dangling from his halo. Down in Venner’s after wine,
Michael fancied the shouts of the freshmen wandering round Cloisters
were more raucous than once they had seemed. Sometimes really they were
almost irritating, but the After was capital, although the new comic
song of the new college jester lacked perhaps a little the perfect lilt
of “Father says we’re going to beat them.” Yet, after all, the Boer war
had been over three years now: no doubt “Father says we’re going to
beat them” would have sounded a little stale. Last term, however, at
Two Hundred and Two it had rung as fresh as ever. But the singer was
gone now. It was meet his song should perish with his withdrawal from
the Oxford scene. Still the After was quite good sport, and Michael was
glad to think he and Grainger and Sterne were giving the last After but
one of this term. He bicycled back to the digs with his head full of
chatter, of clinking glasses and catchy tunes. Nevertheless, all
consciousness of the evening’s merriment faded out, as he hurried up
the crooked staircase to the sitting-room where Alan, upright at the
table amid Thucydidean commentaries, was reading under the lamp’s
immotionable rays, his hair glinting with what was now rare gold.
During this autumn term neither Michael nor Alan spoke of Stella except
as an essentially third person. She was in London, devoting so much of
herself so charmingly to her mother that Mrs. Fane nearly abandoned
every other interest in her favor. There were five Schumann recitals,
of which press notices were sent to 99 St. Giles. Michael as he read
them handed them on to Alan.
“Jolly good,” said he, in a tone of such conventional praise that
Michael really began to wonder whether he had after all changed his
mind instead of merely concealing his intention. However, since
conversation between these two had been stripped to the bare bones of
intercourse, Michael could not bring himself to violate this habit of
reserve for the sake of a curiosity the gratification of which in true
friendship should never be demanded, nor even accepted with deeper
attention than the trivial news of the day casually offered. Nor would
Michael have felt it loyal to Alan to try from Stella to extract a
point of view regarding him. Anyway, he reassured himself, nothing
could be done at present.
Toward the end of term Mrs. Ross wrote a letter to Michael whose news
was sufficiently unexpected to rouse the two of them to a conversation
of greater length than any they had had since term began.
COBBLE PLACE,
_November 30._
_My dear Michael,_
_You will be surprised to hear that I have become a Catholic, or I
suppose I should say to you, if you still adhere to your theories, a
Roman Catholic. My reasons for this step, apart of course from the true
reason—the grace of God—were, I think, connected a good deal with my
boy. When your friend Mr. Prescott killed himself, I felt very much the
real emptiness of such a life that on the surface was so admirable, in
some ways so enviable. I am dreadfully anxious that Kenneth—he is
Kenneth Michael now—I hope you won’t be vexed I should have wished him
to have Michael also—well, as I was saying—that Kenneth should grow up
with all the help that the experience of the past can give him. It has
become increasingly a matter of astonishment to me how so many English
boys manage to muddle through the crises of their boyhood without the
Sacraments. I’m afraid you’ll be reading this letter in rather a
critical spirit, and perhaps resenting my implication that you, for
instance, have come through so many crises without the Sacraments. But
I’m not yet a good enough theologian to argue with you about the claims
of your Church. Latterly I’ve felt positively alarmed by the prospect
of grappling with Kenneth’s future. I have seen you struggle through,
and I know I can say win a glorious victory over one side of yourself.
But I have seen other things happen, even from where I live my secluded
life. If my husband had not been killed I might not perhaps have felt
this dread on Kenneth’s account. But I like to think that God in giving
me that great sorrow has shown His purpose by offering me this new and
unimagined peace and security and assurance. I need scarcely say I have
had a rather worrying time lately. It is strange how when love and
faith are the springs of action one must listen with greater patience
than one could listen for any lesser motive to the opinions of other
people._
_Joan and Mary whom I’ve always thought of as just wrapped up in the
good works of their dear good selves, really rose in their wrath and
scorched me with the fieriest opposition. I could not have believed
they had in them to say as much in all their lives as they said to me
when I announced my intention. Nor had I any idea they knew so many
English clergymen. I believe that to gratify them I have interviewed
half the Anglican ministry. Even a Bishop was invoked to demonstrate my
apostacy. Nancy, too, wrote furious letters. She was not outraged so
much theologically, but her sense of social fitness was shattered._
_My darling old mother was the only person who took my resolve calmly.
“As long as you don’t try to convert me,” she said, “and don’t leave
incense burning about the house, well—you’re old enough to know your
own mind.” She was so amusing while Joan and Mary were marshaling
arguments against me. She used to sit playing “Miss Milligan” with a
cynical smile, and said, when it was all over and in spite of everyone
I had been received, that she had really enjoyed Patience for the first
time, as Joan and Mary were too busy to prevent her from cheating._
_How are you and dear old Alan getting on? Of course you can read him
this letter. I’ve not written to him because I fancy he won’t be very
much interested. Forgive me that I did not take you into my confidence
beforehand, but I feared a controversy with a real historian about the
continuity of the Anglican church._
_My love to you both at Oxford._
_Your affectionate_
_Maud Ross._
“Great scott!” Michael exclaimed, as he finished the letter. “Alan!
could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that Mrs. Ross, the
most inveterate Whig and Roundhead and Orange bigot, at least whenever
she used to argue with me, would have gone over?”
“What do you mean?” Alan asked, sinking slowly to earth from his
Platonic _ovpavos_. “Gone over where?”
“To Rome—become a Roman Catholic.”
“Who?” gasped Alan, staggered now more than Michael. “Mrs. Ross—Aunt
Maud?”
“It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard,” said Michael.
“She—and Kenneth,” he added rather maliciously, seeing that Alan’s
Britannic prejudice was violently aroused. “I’ll read you her letter.”
Plato was shut up for the evening before Michael was halfway through,
and almost before the last sentence had been read, Alan’s wrath
exploded.
“It’s all very fine for her to laugh like that at Joan and Mary and
Nancy,” he said, coloring hotly. “But they were absolutely right, and
Mrs. Ross—I mean Aunt Maud——”
“I was afraid you were going to disown the relationship,” Michael
laughed.
“Aunt Maud is absolutely wrong. Why, my uncle would have been furious.
Even if _she_ became a Catholic she had no business to take Kenneth
with her. The more I think of it—you know, it really is a bit thick.”
“Why do you object?” Michael asked curiously. “I never knew you thought
about religion at all, except so far as occasionally to escort your
mother politely to Matins, and that was after all to oblige her more
than God. Besides, you’re reading Greats, and I always thought that the
Greats people in their fourth year abstained from anything like a
definite opinion for fear of losing their First.”
“I may not have a definite opinion about Christianity,” said Alan. “But
Catholicism is ridiculous, anyway—it doesn’t suit English people.”
“There you’re treading on the heels of the School of Modern History
which you affect to despise. You really don’t know, if I may say so,
what could or could not suit the English people unless you know what
has or has not suited them.”
“Why don’t you become a Catholic yourself,” challenged Alan, “if you’re
so keen on them?”
“For a logician,” said Michael, “your conclusion is bad, being entirely
unrelated to any of our premises. Secondly, were I inclined to label
myself as anything, I should be disposed to label myself as a Catholic
already.”
“Oh, I know that affectation!” scoffed Alan.
“Well, the net result of our commentary is that you, like everybody
else, object to Mrs. Ross changing her opinions, because you don’t like
it. Her position is negligible, the springs of action being religious.
Now if my mother went over to Rome I should be rather bucked on her
account.”
“My dear chap, if you don’t mind my saying so,” suggested Alan as
apologetically as his outraged conventionality would allow, “your
mother has always been rather given to—er—all sorts of new cults, and
it wouldn’t be so—er—noticeable in her case. But supposing Stella——”
Michael looked at him sharply.
“Supposing Stella did?” he asked.
“Oh, of course she’s artistic and she’s traveled and—oh, well, I don’t
know—Stella’s different.”
At any rate, thought Michael, he was still in love with Stella. She was
evidently beyond criticism.
“You needn’t worry,” said Michael. “I don’t think she ever will.”
“You didn’t think Aunt Maud ever would,” Alan pointed out.
“And, great scott, it’s still absolutely incredible,” Michael murmured.
Although in the face of Alan’s prejudice Michael had felt very strongly
that Mrs. Ross had done well by her change of communion, or rather by
her submission to a communion, for he never could remember her as
perfervid in favor of any before, at the same time to himself he rather
regretted the step, since it destroyed for him that idea he had kept of
her as one who stood gravely holding the balance. He dreaded a little
the effect upon her of a sudden plunge into Catholicism, just as he had
felt uneasy when eight or nine years ago Alan had first propounded the
theory of his uncle being in love with her. Michael remembered how the
suggestion had faintly shocked his conception of Miss Carthew. It was a
little disconcerting to have to justify herself to Nancy, or indeed to
anyone. It seemed to weaken her status. Moreover, his own
deep-implanted notion of “going over to Rome” as the act of a weakling
and a weather-cock was hard to allay. His own gray image of Pallas
Athene seemed now to be decked with meretricious roses. He was curious
to know what his mother would think about the news. Mrs. Fane received
it as calmly as if he had told her Mrs. Ross had taken up palmistry; to
her Catholicism was only one of the numberless fads that made life
amusing. As for Stella, she did not comment on the news at all. She was
too much occupied with the diversions of the autumn season. Yet Stella
was careful to impress on Michael that her new mode of life had not
been dictated by any experience in Vienna.
“Don’t think I’m drowning care,” she wrote. “I made a damned fool of
myself and luckily you’re almost the only person who knows anything
about it. I’ve wiped it out as completely as a composition I’ve learned
and played and done with. Really I find this pottering life that mother
and I lead very good for my music. I’m managing to store up a reserve
of feeling. The Schumann recitals were in some ways my best efforts so
far. Just now I’m absolutely mad about dancing and fencing; and as
mother’s life is entirely devoted to the theory of physical culture at
this exact moment, we’re both happy.”
Michael told Alan what Stella said about dancing and fencing, and he
was therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one
who really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a
Sword club at Oxford.
“Hadn’t you better join as well next term?” he suggested. “Rather good
ecker, I fancy.”
“Much better than golf,” said Michael.
“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to
his resolve of last summer.
For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he
wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford
time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town
very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and
graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had
called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth
or sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more
desirable. Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate
visit as to a tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill
this vision of return he refused Guy Hazlewood’s invitation to Plashers
Mead. It seemed to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him
the joy of charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of
England and that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.
Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael’s mood, and there
for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political
economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen
city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more
ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist
destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford
menaced his action.
Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to
keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February
was that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made
Oxford melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that
lured him forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the
window of Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie
awake infatuated.
Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like
nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon
history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term
surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looked back with
astonishment at the amount of apposite reading accomplished in what
seemed, now so cruelly swift were the hours, a mere week of rain.
He obtained leave to stay up during the Easter vacation, and time might
have seemed to stand still, but that Spring on these rathe mornings of
wind and scudded blue sky was forward with her traceries, bringing with
every morning green Summer visibly nearer. The urgency of departure
less than the need for redoubled diligence in acquiring knowledge
obsessed Michael all this April. Sitting in the bay-window at
Ninety-nine on these luminous eves of Spring, he vexed himself with the
thought of disturbing so soon his books, of violating with change the
peaceful confusion achieved in two terms. The fancy haunted him that
for the length of the Long Vacation 99 St. Giles would drowse under the
landlady’s nick-nacks brought out to replace his withdrawn treasures;
that nothing would keep immortal the memory of him and Alan save their
photographs in frames of almost royal ostentation. Vaguely through his
mind ran the notion of becoming a don, that forever he might stay here
in Oxford, a contemplative intellectual cut-off from the great world.
For a week the notion ripened swiftly, and Michael worked very hard in
his determination to proceed from a First to the competition for a
Fellowship. The notion ripened too swiftly, however, and fell with a
plump, fit for nothing, when he suddenly realized he would have to stay
on in Oxford alone, since of all his friends he could see not one who
would be likely in the academic cloister to accompany his meditations.
With a gesture of weary contempt Michael flung Stubbs into the corner,
and resolved that, come what might in the History Schools, for what
remained of his time at Oxford he would enjoy the proffered anodyne.
After he had disowned his work, he took to wandering rather aimlessly
about the streets; but their aspect, still unfrequented as yet by the
familiar figures of term-time, made him feel sad. Guy Hazlewood was
summoned by telegram from where at Plashers Mead he was presumed to
have found abiding peace. He came bicycling in from the Witney road at
noon of a blue April day so richly canopied with rolling clouds that
the unmatured season took on some of June’s ampler dignity. After lunch
they walked to Witham Woods, and Guy tried to persuade Michael to come
to Wychford when the summer term was over. He was full of the plan for
founding that lay monastery, that cloister for artists who wished
between Oxford and the world a space unstressed by anything save
ordered meditation. Michael was captured anew by the idea he had first
propounded, and they talked gayly of its advantages, foreseeing, if the
right people could be induced to come, a period of intense stimulation
against a background of serenity. Then Guy began to talk of how day by
day he was subduing words to rhyme and meter.
“And you, what would you do?” he asked.
At once Michael realized the futility of their scheme for him.
“I should only dream away another year,” he said rather sadly, “and so
if you don’t mind, old chap, I think I won’t join you.”
“Rot!” Guy drawled. “I’ve got it all clear now in my mind. Up at seven.
At breakfast we should take it in turns to read aloud great poetry.
From eight to ten retire to our cells, and work at a set piece—a sonnet
or six lines of prose. Ten to eleven a discussion on what we’d done.
Eleven to one work at our own stuff. One o’clock lunch with some
reading aloud. All the afternoon to do what we like. Dinner at seven
with more reading aloud, and in the evening reading to ourselves. Not a
word to be spoken after nine o’clock, and bed at eleven. After tea
twice a week we might have academic discussions.”
“It sounds perfect,” said Michael, “if you’re already equipped with the
desire to be an artist, and what is more important if deep down in
yourself you’re convinced you have the least justification for
ambition. But, Guy, what a curious chap you are. You seem to have grown
so much younger since you went down.”
Guy laughed on a note of exultation that sounded strange indeed in one
whom when still at Balliol Michael had esteemed as perhaps the most
perfect contemporary example of the undergraduate tired by the
consciousness of his own impeccable attitude. Guy had always possessed
so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of
seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friendship, of everything
indeed except parlor rowdiness with cushions and sofas, that Michael
was almost shocked to hear the elaborately wearied Guy declare
boisterously:
“My dear chap, that is the great secret. The moment you go down, you do
grow younger.”
He must be in love, thought Michael suddenly; and, so remote was love
seeming to him just now, he blushed in the implication by his inner
self of having penetrated uninvited the secret of a friend.
Guy talked all tea-time of the project, and when they had eaten enough
bread and honey, they set out for Oxford by way of Godstow. The
generous sun was blanched by watery clouds. A shrewd wind had risen
while they sat in the inn, and the primroses looked very wan in the
shriveled twilight. Michael had Guy’s company for a week of long walks
and snug evenings, but the real intimacy which he had expected would be
consummated by this visit never effected itself somehow. Guy was more
remote in his mood of communal ambitions than he was at Oxford, living
his life of whimsical detachment. After he went back to Plashers Mead,
Michael only missed the sound of his voice, and was not conscious of
that more violent wrench when the intercourse of silence is broken.
It happened that year St. Mark’s Eve fell upon a Sunday, and Michael,
having been reading the poems of Keats nearly all the afternoon, was
struck by the coincidence. Oxford on such an occasion was able to
provide exactly the same sensation for him as Winchester had given to
the poet. Michael sat in his window-seat looking out over the broad
thoroughfare of St. Giles, listening to the patter and lisp of Sabbath
footfalls, to the burden of the bells; and as he sat there with the
city receding in the wake of his window, he was aware more poignantly
than ever of how actually in a few weeks it would recede. The bells and
the footsteps were quiet for a while: the sun had gone: it was the
vesper stillness of evening prayer: slowly the printed page before him
faded from recognition. Already the farther corners of the room were
black, revealing from time to time, as a tongue of flame leaped up in
the grate, the golden blazonries of the books on the walls. It was
everywhere dark when the people came out of church, and the footsteps
were again audible. Michael envied Keats the power which he had known
to preserve forever that St. Mark’s Eve of eighty years ago in
Winchester. It was exasperating that now already the footfalls were
dying away, that already their sensation was evanescent, that he could
not with the wand of poetry forbid time to disturb this quintessential
hour of Oxford. Art alone could bewitch the present in the fashion of
that enchantress in the old fairy tale who sent long ago a court to
sleep.
What was the use of reading history unless the alchemy of literature
had transcended the facts by the immortal presentation of them? These
charters and acts of parliament, these exchequer-rolls and raked-up
records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of
Maitland’s fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs’ ponderous
conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends,
the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through
the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the
same directness of divine exposition as faith itself.
Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was
incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to
him, and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these
moments that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical
assurances of human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for
explanation. After all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful
statement the fact of a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why
he had wrought it forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense
of the fact: it could not resolve it in such a way that life would
cease to be the baffling attempt it was on the individual’s part to
restate to himself his personal dreams.
Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it
was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over
all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave
the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the
breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not
some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical
condition?
The sensation of St. Mark’s Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the
chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the
psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of
what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a
while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull
down the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit
thoroughfare, with all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness,
the immutable city that neither mist nor modern architects could
destroy, the immortal academy whose spirit would surely outdare the
menace of these reforming Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither
the cowardly betrayers of her civilization who, even now before the
barbarian was at her gates, were cringing to him with offers to sell
the half of her heritage of learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all
about him in the darkness, wished he could be a member of Convocation
and make a flaming speech in defense of compulsory Greek. That happened
to be the proposed surrender to modern conditions which at the moment
was agitating his conservative passion.
“Thank heaven I live when I do,” he said to himself. “If it were 2000
A.D., how much more miserable I should be.”
He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against
the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather
particularly good.