Sinister Street · Book III · Chapter 3 16 (1/2)

XVI

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 tomorrow 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 tomorrow 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.