Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 39

"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 G.o.d. 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-c.o.c.k 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 d.a.m.ned 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 trans.m.u.tations 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 compet.i.tion for a Fellows.h.i.+p. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tude. Guy had always possessed so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friends.h.i.+p, of everything indeed except parlor rowdiness with cus.h.i.+ons 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 G.o.dstow. 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 a.s.surances 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 d.a.m.nably 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 pa.s.sion.

"Thank heaven I live when I do," he said to himself. "If it were 2000 A.D., how much more miserable I should be."