THE LAST WEEK
Michael’s old rooms in college were lent to him for three or four days
as he had hoped they would be. The present occupant, a freshman, was
not staying up for Commemoration, and though next term he would move
into larger rooms for his second year, his effects had not yet been
transferred. Michael found it interesting to deduce from the evidence
of his books and pictures the character of the owner with whom he had
merely a nodding acquaintance. On the whole, he seemed to be a dull
young man. The photographs of his relatives were dull: his books were
dull and unkempt: his pictures were dull, narrative rather than
decorative. Probably there was nothing in the room that was strictly
individual, nothing that he had acquired to satisfy his own taste.
Every picture had probably been brought to Oxford because its absence
would not be noticed in whatever spare bedroom it had previously been
hung. Every book seemed either a survival of school or the inexpensive
pastime of a railway journey. The very clock on the mantelpiece, which
was still drearily ticking, looked like the first prize of a
consolation race, rather than the gratification of a personal choice.
Michael reproached the young man for being able to spend three terms a
year without an attempt to garnish decently the gothic bookshelves,
without an effort to leave upon this temporary abode the impression of
his lodging. He almost endowed the room itself with a capacity for
criticism, feeling it must deplore three terms of such undistinguished
company. Yet, after all, he had left nothing to tell of his sojourn
here. Although he and the dull young freshman had both used this
creaking wicker-chair, for their successors neither of them could
preserve the indication of their precedence. One relic of his own
occupation, however, he did find in the fragments of envelopes which he
had stuck to the door on innumerable occasions to announce the time of
his return. These bits of paper that straggled in a kite’s tail over
the oak door had evidently resisted all attempts to scrub them off.
There were usually a few on every door in college, but no one had ever
so extensively advertised his movements as Michael, and to see these
obstinate bits of tabs gave him a real pleasure, as if they assured him
of his former existence here. Each one had marked an ubiquitous hour
that was recorded more indelibly than many other occasions of higher
importance.
There was not, however, much time for sentimentalizing over the past,
as somewhere before one o’clock his mother and Stella would arrive, and
they must be met. Alan came with him to the railway station, and it was
delightful to see Wedderburn with them, and in another part of the
train Maurice with his mother and sisters. They must all have lunch at
the Randolph, said Wedderburn immediately. Mrs. Fane was surprised to
find the Randolph such a large hotel, and told Michael that if she had
known it were possible to be at all comfortable in Oxford, she would
have come up to see him long before. In the middle of lunch Lonsdale
appeared, having according to his own account traced Michael’s
movements with tremendous determination. He was introduced to Mrs.
Fane, who evidently took a fancy to him. She was looking, Michael
thought, most absurdly young as Lonsdale rattled away to her, himself
quite unchanged by a year at Scoone’s and a recent failure to enter the
Foreign Office.
“I say, this is awfully sporting of you, Mrs. Fane. You know, one feels
fearfully out of it, coming up like this. Terribly old, and all that.
I’ve been mugging away for the Diplomatic and I’ve just made an awful
ass of myself. So I thought I wouldn’t ask my governor to come up. He’s
choking himself to pieces over my career at present, but I’ve had an
awfully decent offer from a man I know who runs a motor business, and I
don’t think I’ve got the ambassadorial manner, do you? I think I shall
be much better at selling cars, don’t you? I say, which balls are you
going to? Because I must buzz round and see about tickets.”
Lonsdale’s last question seemed to demand an answer, and Mrs. Fane
looked at Michael rather anxiously.
“Michael, what balls are we going to?” she inquired.
“Trinity, the House, and the Apollo,” he told her.
“What house is that? and I don’t think I ever heard of Apollo College.
It sounds very attractive. Have I said something foolish?” Mrs. Fane
looked round her, for everyone was laughing.
“The House is Christ Church, mother,” said Michael, and then swiftly he
remembered his father might have made that name familiar to her. If he
had, she gave no sign; and Michael blushing fiercely, went on quickly
to explain that the Apollo was the name of the Masonic Lodge of the
university. Stella and Mrs. Fane rested that afternoon, and Michael
with Wedderburn, Lonsdale, and several other contemporaries spent a
jolly time in St. Mary’s, walking round and reviving the memories of
former rags. Alan had suggested that, as he would be near the Randolph,
he might as well call in and escort Mrs. Fane and Stella down to tea in
Michael’s rooms. Mrs. Avery with Blanche and Eileen Avery had also been
invited, and there was very little space left for teacups. Wedderburn,
however, assisted by Porcher on whom alone of these familiar people
time had not laid a visible finger, managed to make everybody think
they had enjoyed their tea. Afterward there was a general move to the
river for a short time, but as Lonsdale said, it must be for a very
short time in order that everyone might be in good form for the Trinity
ball. Mrs. Fane thought she would like to stay with Michael and talk to
him for a while. It was strange to see her sitting here in his old
room, and to be in a way more sharply aware of her than he had ever
been, as he watched her fanning herself and looking round at the
furniture, while the echoes of laughter and talk died away down the
stone staircase without.
“Dear Michael,” she said. “I wish I’d seen this room when you lived in
it properly.”
He laughed.
“When I lived in it properly,” he answered, “I should have been made so
shy by your visit that I think you’d have hated me and the room.”
“You must have been so domestic,” said his mother. “Such a curious
thing has happened.”
“Apropos of what?” asked Michael, smiling.
“You know Dick Prescott left Stella all his money, well——”
“But, mother, I didn’t know anything about it.”
“It was rather vague. He left it first to some old lady whom he
intended to live four or five years, but she died this week, and so
Stella inherits it at once. About two thousand a year. It’s all in
land, and will have to be managed. Huntingdonshire, or some country
nobody believes in. It’s all very difficult. She must marry at once.”
“But, mother, why because she is to be better off and own land in
Huntingdonshire, is she to marry at once?” asked Michael.
“To avoid fortune-hunters, odd foreign counts, and people.”
“But she’s not twenty-one yet,” he objected.
“My dearest boy, I know, I know. That’s why she must marry. Don’t you
see, when she’s of age, she’ll be able to marry whom she likes, and you
know how headstrong Stella is.”
“Mother,” said Michael suddenly, “supposing she married Alan?”
“Delightful boy,” she commented.
“You mean he’s too young?”
“For the present, yes.”
“But you wouldn’t try to stop an engagement, would you?” he asked very
earnestly.
“My dearest Michael, if two young people I were fond of fell in love, I
should be the last person to try to interfere,” Mrs. Fane promised.
“Well, don’t say anything to Alan about Stella having more money. I
think he might be sensitive about it.”
“Darling Stella!” she sighed. “So intoxicated with poverty—the notion
of it, I mean.”
“Mother,” said Michael suddenly and nervously, “you know, don’t you,
that the day after to-morrow is the House ball—the Christ Church ball?”
“Where your father was?” she said gently, pondering the past.
He nodded.
“I’ll show you his old rooms,” Michael promised.
“Darling boy,” she murmured, putting out her hand. He held it very
tightly for a moment.
Next day after the Trinity ball Alan, who was very cheerful, told
Michael he thought it would be good sport to invite everybody to tea at
99 St. Giles.
“Oh, I particularly didn’t want that to happen,” said Michael, taken
aback.
Alan was puzzled to know his reason.
“You’ll probably think me absurd,” said Michael. “But I rather wanted
to keep Ninety-nine for a place that I could remember as more than all
others the very heart of Oxford, the most intimate expression of all I
have cared for up here.”
“Well, so you can, still,” said Alan severely. “My asking a few people
there to tea won’t stop you.”
“All the same, I wish you wouldn’t,” Michael persisted. “I moved into
college for Commem just to avoid taking anybody to St. Giles.”
“Not even Stella?” demanded Alan.
Michael shook his head.
“Well, of course, if you don’t want me to, I won’t,” said Alan
grudgingly. “But I think you’re rather ridiculous.”
“I am, I know,” Michael agreed. “But thanks for honoring me. Do you
think Stella has altered much since she was in Vienna, and during this
year in town?”
“Not a bit,” Alan declared enthusiastically. “And yet in one way she
has,” he corrected himself. “She seems less out of one’s reach.”
“Or else you know better how to stretch,” Michael laughed.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of her attitude to me,” said Alan a little
stiffly.
“Most generalizations come down to a particular fact,” Michael
answered. But he would not tease Alan too much because he really wished
him to have confidence.
After the Trinity ball it seemed to Michael now not very rash to sound
Stella about her point of view with regard to Alan. For this purpose he
invited her to come in a canoe with him on the Cher. Yet when together
they were gliding down the green tunnels of the stream, when all the
warmth of June was at their service, when neither question nor answer
could have cast on either more than a momentary shadow, Michael could
not bring himself to approach the subject even indirectly. They
discussed lazily the success of the Trinity ball, without reference to
the fact that Stella had danced three-quarters of her program with
Alan. She did not even bother to say he was a good dancer, so much was
the convention of indifference demanded by the brother and sister in
their progress along this fronded stream.
That night in the Town Hall Michael did not dance a great deal himself
at the Masonic ball. He sat with Lonsdale in the gallery, and together
they much diverted themselves with the costumes of the Freemasons. It
was really ridiculous to see Wedderburn in a red cloak and inconvenient
sword dancing the Templars quadrille.
“I think the English are curious people,” said Michael. “How absurd
that all these undergraduates should belong to an Apollo Lodge and wear
these aprons and dress up like this! Look at Wedders!”
“Enter Second Ruffian, what?” Lonsdale chuckled.
“I suppose it does take the place of religion,” Michael ejaculated, in
a tone of bewilderment. “Can you see my sister and Alan Merivale
anywhere?” he added casually.
“When’s that coming off?” asked Lonsdale. He had taken to an eyeglass
since he had been in London, and the enhanced eye glittered very wisely
at Michael.
“You think?”
“What? Rather! My dear old bird, I’ll lay a hundred to thirty. Look at
them now.”
“They’re only dancing,” said Michael.
“But what dancing! Beautiful action. I never saw a pair go down so
sweetly to the gate. By the way, what are you going to do now you’re
down?”
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
“I suppose you wouldn’t like to come into the motor business?”
“No, thanks very much,” said Michael.
“Well, you must do something, you know,” said Lonsdale, letting fall
his eyeglass in disapproval. “You’ll find that out in town.”
Michael was engaged for the next dance to one of Maurice’s sisters.
Amid the whirl of frocks, as he swung round this pretty and insipid
creature in pink crêpe-de-chine, he was dreadfully aware that neither
his nor her conversation mattered at all, and that valuable time was
being robbed from him to the strains of the Choristers waltz. Really he
would have preferred to leave Oxford in a manner more solemn than this,
not tangled up with frills and misses and obvious music. Looking down
at Blanche Avery, he almost hated her. And to-morrow there would be
another ball. He must dance with her again, with her and with her
sister and with a dozen more dolls like her.
Next morning, or rather next noon, for it was noon before people woke
after these balls that were not over until four o’clock, Michael looked
out of his bedroom window with a sudden dismay at the great elms of the
deer park, deep-bosomed, verdurous, entranced beneath the June sky.
“This is the last whole day,” he said, “the last day when I shall have
a night at the end of it; and it’s going to be absolutely wasted at a
picnic with all these women.”
Michael scarcely knew how to tolerate that picnic, and wondered
resentfully why everybody else seemed to enjoy it so much.
“Delicious life,” said his mother, as he punted her away from the
tinkling crowd on the bank. “I’m not surprised you like Oxford, dear
Michael.”
“I like it—I liked it, I mean, very much more when it was altogether
different from this sort of thing. The great point of Oxford—in fact,
the whole point of Oxford—is that there are no girls.”
“How charmingly savage you are, dear boy,” said his mother. “And how
absurd to pretend you don’t care for girls.”
“But I don’t,” he asserted. “In Oxford I actually dislike them very
much. They’re out of place except in Banbury Road. Dons should never
have been allowed to marry. Really, mother, women in Oxford are wrong.”
“Of course, I can’t argue with you. But there seem to me to be a great
many of them.”
“Great scott, you don’t think it’s like this in term-time, do you?”
“Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Fane, apparently very much surprised. “I thought
undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I’m sure they are, too.”
“Do you mean to say you really thought this Commem herd was always
roaming about Oxford?”
“Michael, your Oxford expressions are utterly unintelligible to me.”
“Don’t you realize you are up here for Commem—for Commemoration?” he
asked.
“How wonderful!” she said. “Don’t tell me any more. It’s so romantic,
to be told one is ‘up’ for something.”
Michael began to laugh, and the irritation of seeing the peaceful banks
of the upper river dappled with feminine forms, so that everywhere the
cattle had moved away to browse in the remote corners of the meadows,
vanished.
The ball at Christ Church seemed likely to be the most successful and
to be the one that would remain longest in the memories of those who
had taken part in this Commemoration. Nowhere could an arbiter of
pleasure have found so perfect a site for his most elaborate
entertainment. There was something very strangely romantic in this gay
assembly dancing in the great hall of the House, so that along the
cloisters sounded the unfamiliar noise of fiddles; but what gave
principally the quality of romance and strangeness was that beyond the
music, beyond the fantastically brilliant hall, stretched all around
the dark quadrangles deserted now save where about their glooms dresses
indeterminate as moths were here and there visible. The decrescent moon
would scarcely survive the dawn, and meanwhile there would be darkness
everywhere away from the golden heart of the dance in that great hall
spinning with light and motion.
Alan was evidently pleased that he was being able to show Stella his
own college. He wore about him an air of confidence that Michael did
not remember to have seen so plainly marked before. He and Stella were
dancing together all the time here at Christ Church, and Michael felt
he, too, must dance vigorously, so that he should not find himself
overlooking them. He was shy somehow of overlooking them, and when
Blanche Avery and Eileen Avery and half a dozen more cousins and
sisters of friends had been led back to their chaperones, Michael went
over to his mother and invited her to walk with him in the quadrangles
of Christ Church. She knew why he wanted her to walk with him, and as
she took his arm gently, she pressed it to her side. He thought again
how ridiculously young she seemed and how the lightness of her touch
was no less than that of the ethereal Eileen or the filmy Blanche. He
wished he had asked her to dance with him, but yet on second thoughts
was glad he had not, since to walk with her thus along these dark
cloisters, down which traveled fainter and fainter the fiddles of the
Eton Boating Song, was even better than dancing. Soon they were in
Peckwater, standing silent on the gravel, almost overweighted by that
heavy Georgian quadrangle.
“He lived either on that staircase or that one,” said Michael. “But all
the staircases and all the rooms in Peck are just the same, and all the
men who have lived in them for the past fifty years are just the same.
The House is a wonderful place, and the type it displays best changes
less easily than any other.”
“I didn’t know him when he lived here,” she murmured.
With her hand still resting lightly upon his sleeve, Michael felt the
palpitation of long-stored-up memories and emotions. As she stood here
pensive in the darkness, the years were rolling back.
“I expect if he were alive,” she went on softly, “he would wonder how
time could have gone by so quickly since he was here. People always do,
don’t they, when they revisit places they’ve known in younger days?
When he was here, I must have been about fifteen. Funny, severe,
narrow-minded old father!”
Michael waited rather anxiously. She had never yet spoken of her life
before she met his father, and he had never brought himself to ask her.
“Funny old man! He was at Cambridge—Trinity College, I think it was
called.”
Then she was silent for a while, and Michael knew that she was linking
her father and his father in past events; but still she did not voice
her thoughts, and whatever joys or miseries of that bygone time were
being recalled were still wrapped up in her reserve: nor did Michael
feel justified in trying to persuade her to unloose them, even here in
this majestic enclosure that would have engulfed them all as soon as
they were free.
“You’re not cold?” he tenderly demanded.
Surely upon his arm she had shivered.
“No, but I think we’ll go back to the ballroom,” she sighed.
Michael felt awed when their feet grated again in movement over the
gravel. Behind them in the quadrangle there were ghosts, and the noise
of walking here seemed sacrilegious upon this moonless and heavy summer
night. Presently, however, two couples came laughing into the lamplight
at the corner. The sense of decorous creeds outraged by his mother’s
behavior of long ago vanished in the relief that present youth gave
with its laughing company and fashionable frocks. Beside such
heedlessness it were vain to conjure too remorsefully the past. After
all, Peckwater was a place in which young men should crack whips and
shout to one another across window-boxes; here there should be no
tombs. Michael and his mother went on their way to the hall, and soon
the music of the waltzing filled magically the lamplit entries of the
great college, luring them to come back with light hearts, so
importunate was the gaiety.
Michael rather reproached himself afterward for not trying to take
advantage of his mother’s inclination to yield him a more extensive
confidence. He was sure Stella would not have allowed the opportunity
to slip by so in a craven embarrassment; or was it rather a fine
sensitiveness, an imaginative desire to let the whole of that history
lie buried in whatever poor shroud romance could lend it? As he was
thinking of Stella, herself came toward him over the shining floor of
the ballroom emptied for the interval between two dances. How
delicately flushed she was and how her gray eyes were lustered with joy
of the evening, or perhaps with fortunate tidings. Michael was struck
by the direct way in which she was coming toward him without bothering
through self-consciousness to seem to find him unexpectedly.
“Come for a walk with me in the moonlight,” she said, taking his arm.
“There’s no moon yet, but I’ll take you for a walk.”
The clock was striking two, as they reached Tom quad, and the
decrescent moon to contradict him was already above the roofs. They
strolled over to the fountain and stood there captured by loveliness,
silent themselves and listening to the talk and laughter of shimmering
figures that reached them subdued and intermittent from the flagged
terraces in the distance.
“I suppose,” said Stella suddenly, “you’re very fond of Alan?”
“Rather, of course I am.”
“So am I.”
Then she blushed, and her cheeks were very crimson in the moonlight.
Michael had never seen her blush like this, had never been aware before
of her maidenhood that now flooded his consciousness like a bouquet of
roses. Hitherto she had always been for Michael a figure untouched by
human weakness. Even when last summer he had seen her break down
disconsolate, he had been less shocked by her grief than by its
incongruity in her. This blush gave to him his only sister as a woman.
“The trouble with Alan is that he thinks he can’t marry me because I
have money, whereas he will be dependent on what he earns. That’s
rubbish, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” he agreed warmly. “I’ll tell him so, if you like.”
“I don’t think he’d pay much attention,” she said. “But you know, poor
old Prescott left me a lot of land.”
Michael nodded.
“Well, it’s got to be managed, hasn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Michael. “You’ll want a land agent.”
“Why not Alan?” she asked. “I don’t want to marry somebody in the Home
Civil Service. I want him to be with me all day. Wouldn’t you?”
“You’ve not told mother?” Michael suggested cautiously.
“Not yet. I shall be twenty-one almost at once, you know.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He was determined that in Stella’s behavior there should be no
reflection, however pale, of what long ago had come into the life of an
undergraduate going down from Christ Church. He wished for Stella and
Alan to have all the benisons of the world. “You’ve no right to assume
that mother will object,” he told her.
But Stella did not begin to speak, as she was used, of her
determination to have her own way in spite of everybody. She was a
softer Stella to-night; and that alone showed to Michael how right he
had been to wish with all his heart that she would fall in love with
Alan.
“There he is!” she cried, clapping her hands.
Michael looked up, and saw him coming across the great moonlit space,
tall and fair and flushed as he should be coming like this to claim
Stella. Michael punched Alan to express his pleasure, and then he
quickly left them standing by the fountain close together.