Sinister Street · Book II · Chapter 2 2 (1/2)

II

The Quadruple Intrigue

Michael, although Stella was more of a tie than a companion, was shocked to hear that she would not accompany Miss Carthew and himself to Eastbourne for the summer holidays. He heard with a recurrence of the slight jealousy he had always felt of Stella that, though she was not yet eleven years old, she was going to Germany to live in a German family and study music. To Michael this step seemed a device to spoil Stella beyond the limits of toleration, and he thought with how many new affectations Stella would return to her native land. Moreover, why should Stella have all the excitement of going abroad and living abroad while her brother plodded to school in dull ordinary London? Michael felt very strongly that the balance of life was heavily weighted in favour of girls and he deplored the blindness of grown-up people unable to realize the greater attractiveness of boys. It was useless for Michael to protest, although he wasted an evening of Henty in arguing the point with Miss Carthew. Stella became primed with her own importance before she left England, and Michael tried to discourage her as much as he could by pointing out that in Germany her piano-playing would be laughed at and by warning her that her so evident inclination to show off would prejudice against her the bulk of Teutonic opinion. However, Michael’s well-meant discouragement did not at all abash Stella, who under his most lugubrious prophecies trilled exasperatingly cheerful scales or ostentatiously folded unimportant articles of clothing with an exaggerated carefulness, the while she fussed with her hair and threw conceited glances over her shoulder into the mirror. Then, one day, the bonnet of a pink and yellow Fräulein bobbed from a cab-window, and, after a finale of affectation and condescension on the front-door steps for the benefit of passersby, Stella set out for Germany and Michael turned back into the house with pessimistic fears for her future. The arrangements for Stella’s transportation had caused some delay in Michael’s holidays, and as a reward for having been forced to endure the sight of Stella going abroad, he was told that he might invite a friend to stay with him at Eastbourne during the remainder of the time. Such an unexpected benefaction made Michael incredulous at first.

“Anyone I like?” he said. “For the whole of the hols? Good Lord, how ripping.”

Forthwith he set out to consider the personal advantages of all his friends in turn. The Macalisters as twins were ruled out; besides, of late the old intimacy was wearing thin, and Michael felt there were other chaps with more claim upon him. Norton was ruled out, because it would be the worst of bad form to invite him without the Macalisters and also because Norton was no longer on the Classical side of St. James’. Suddenly the idea of asking Merivale to stay with him occurred like an inspiration. Merivale was not at present a friend with anything like the pretensions of Norton or the Macalisters. Merivale could not be visualized in earliest Randell days, indeed he had been at a different private school, and it was only during this last summer term that he and Michael had taken to walking arm in arm during the “quarter.” Merivale turned to the left when he came out of school and Michael turned to the right, so that they never met on their way nor walked home together afterwards. Nevertheless, in the course of the term, the friendship had grown, and once or twice Michael and Merivale had sat beneath the hawthorn trees, between them a stained bag of cherries in the long cool grass, while intermittently they clapped the boundary hits of a school match that was clicking drowsily its progress through the summer afternoon. Tentative confidences had been exchanged, and by reason of its slower advance towards intimacy the friendship of Michael and Merivale seemed built on a firmer basis than most of the sudden affinities of school life. Now, as Michael recalled the personality of Merivale with his vivid blue eyes and dull gold hair and his laugh and freckled nose and curiously attractive walk, he had a great desire for his company during the holidays. Miss Carthew was asked to write to Mrs. Merivale in order to give the matter the weight of authority; but Michael and Miss Carthew went off to Eastbourne before the answer arrived. The sea sparkled, a cool wind blew down from Beachy Head; the tamarisks on the front quivered; Eastbourne was wonderful, so wonderful that Michael could not believe in the probability of Merivale, and the more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that Mrs. Merivale would write a letter of polite refusal. However, as if they were all people in a book, everything happened according to Michael’s most daringly optimistic hopes. Mrs. Merivale wrote a pleasant letter to Miss Carthew to say that her boy Alan was just now staying at Brighton with his uncle Captain Ross, that she had written to her brother who had written back to say that Alan and he would move on to Eastbourne, as it did not matter a bit to him where he spent the next week. Mrs. Merivale added that, if it were convenient, Alan might stay on with Michael when his uncle left. By the same post came a letter from Merivale himself to say that he and his uncle Kenneth were arriving next day, and that he jolly well hoped Fane was going to meet him at the railway station.

Michael, much excited, waited until the train steamed in with its blurred line of carriage windows, from one of which Merivale was actually leaning. Michael waved: Merivale waved: the train stopped: Merivale jumped out: a tall man with a very fair moustache and close-cropped fair hair alighted after Merivale and was introduced and shook hands and made several jokes and was on terms of equality before he and Merivale and Michael had got into the blue-lined fly that was to drive them to Captain Ross’s hotel. During the few days of Captain Ross’s stay, he and Michael and Merivale and Miss Carthew went sailing and climbed up Beachy Head and watched a cricket match in Devonshire Park and generally behaved like all the other summer visitors to Eastbourne. Michael noticed that Captain Ross was very polite to Miss Carthew and heard with interest that they both had many friends in common⁠—soldiers and sailors and Royal Marines. Michael listened to a great deal of talk about “when I was quartered there” and “when he was stationed at Malta” and about Gunners and Sappers and the Service. He himself spoke of General Mace and was greatly flattered when Captain Ross said he knew him by reputation as a fine old soldier. Michael was rather disappointed that Captain Ross was not in the Bengal Lancers, but he concluded that next to being in the Bengal Lancers, it was best to be with him in the Kintail Highlanders (the Duke of Clarence’s own Inverness-shire Buffs).

“Uncle Ken looks jolly ripping in a kilt,” Merivale informed Miss Carthew, when on the last evening of Captain Ross’s stay they were all sitting in the rubied light of the hotel table.

“Shut up, showman,” said Captain Ross, banging his nephew on the head with a Viennese roll.

“Oh, I say, Uncle Kenneth, that loaf hurts most awfully,” protested Merivale.

“Well, don’t play Barnum,” said the Captain as he twirled his little moustache. “It’s not done, my lad.”

When Captain Ross went away next morning, Miss Carthew at his earnest invitation accompanied the boys to see him off, and, as they walked out of the station, Merivale nudged Michael to whisper:

“I say, I believe my uncle’s rather gone on Miss Carthew.”

“Rot,” said Michael. “Why, she’d be most frightfully annoyed. Besides, chaps’ uncles don’t get gone on⁠—” Michael was going to add “chaps’ sisters’ governesses,” but somehow he felt the remark was all wrong, and blushed the conclusion of the sentence.

The weather grew very hot, and Miss Carthew took to sitting in a canvas chair and reading books on the beach, so that Michael and Merivale were left free to do very much as they wanted which, as Michael pointed out, was rather decent of her.

“I say, Merivale,” Michael began one day, as he and his friend, arm in arm, were examining the credentials of the front on a shimmering morning, “I say, did you notice that Miss Carthew called you Alan?”

“I know. She often does,” replied Merivale.

“I say, Merivale,” said Michael shyly, “supposing I call you Alan and you call me Michael⁠—only during the hols, of course,” he added hastily.

“I don’t mind,” Alan agreed.

“Because I suppose there couldn’t be two chaps more friends than you and me,” speculated Michael.

“I like you more than I do any other chap,” said Alan simply.

“So I do you,” said Michael. “And it’s rather decent just to have one great friend who you call by his Christian name.”

After this Michael and Alan became very intimate and neither held a secret from the other, as through the crowds of seaside folk they threaded their way along the promenade to whatever band of minstrels had secured their joint devotion. They greatly preferred the Pierrots to the Niggers, and very soon by a week’s unbroken attendance at the three daily sessions, Michael and Alan knew the words and music of most of the repertory. Of the comic songs they liked best The Dandy Coloured Coon, although they admired almost equally a duet whose refrain was:

“We are a couple of barmy chaps, hush, not a word!

A little bit loose in our tiles, perhaps, hush, not a word!

We’re lunatics, lunatics, everybody declares

We’re a couple of fellows gone wrong in our bellows,

As mad as a pair of March hares.”

Gradually, however, and more especially under the influence of Japanese lanterns and a moon-splashed sea, Michael and Alan avowed openly their fondness for the more serious songs sung by the Pierrettes. The words of one song in particular were by a reiteration of passionate utterance deeply printed on their memory:

“Two little girls in blue, lad,

Two little girls in blue,

They were sisters, we were brothers,

And learnt to love the two.

And one little girl in blue, lad,

Who won your father’s heart,

Became your mother: I married the other,

And now we have drifted apart.”

This lyric seemed to Michael and Alan the most profoundly moving accumulation of words ever known. The sad words and poignant tune wrung their hearts with the tears always imminent in life. This lyric expressed for the two boys the incommunicable aspirations of their most sacred moments. As they leaned over the rail of the promenade and gazed down upon the pretty Pierrette whose tremolo made the night air vibrant with emotion, Michael and Alan were moved by a sense of fleeting time, by thoughts of old lovers and by an intense self-pity.

“It’s frightfully decent, isn’t it?” murmured Michael.

“Ripping,” sighed Alan. “I wish I could give her more than a penny.”

“So do I,” echoed Michael. “It’s beastly being without much tin.”

Then “Encore” they both shouted as the Pierrette receded from the crimson lantern-light into obscurity. Again she sang that song, so that when Michael and Alan looked solemnly up at the stars, they became blurred. They could not bear The Dandy Coloured Coon on such a night, and, seeing no chance of luring Pierrette once more into the lantern-light, they pushed their way through the crowd of listeners and walked arm in arm along the murmurous promenade.

“It’s beastly rotten to go to bed at a quarter past nine,” Michael declared.

“We can talk up in our room,” suggested Alan.

“I vote we talk about the Pierrots,” said Michael, affectionately clasping his chum’s arm.

“Yes, I vote we do too,” Alan agreed.

The next day the Pierrots were gone. Apparently they had had a quarrel with the Corporation and moved farther along the South Coast. Michael and Alan were dismayed, and in their disgust forsook the beach for the shrubberies of Devonshire Park where in gloomy byways, laurel-shaded, they spoke quietly of their loss.

“I wonder if we shall ever see that girl again,” said Michael. “I’d know her anywhere. If I was grown up I’d know her. I swear I would.”

“She was a clinker,” Alan regretted.

“I don’t suppose we shall ever see a girl half as pretty,” Michael thought.

“Not by a long chalk,” Alan agreed. “I don’t suppose there is a girl anywhere in the world a quarter as pretty. I think that girl was simply fizzing.”

They paced the mossy path in silence and suddenly round a corner came upon a bench on which were seated two girls in blue dresses. Michael and Alan found the coincidence so extraordinary that they stared hard, even when the two girls put their heads down and looked sidelong and giggled and thumped each other and giggled again.

“I say, are you laughing at us?” demanded Michael.

“Well, you looked at us first,” said the fairer of the two girls.

In that moment Michael fell in love.

“Come away,” whispered Alan. “They’ll follow us if we don’t.”

“Do you think they’re at all decent?” asked Michael. “Because if you do, I vote we talk to them. I say, Alan, do let’s anyway, for a lark.”

“Supposing anyone we know saw us?” queried Alan.

“Well, we could say something,” Michael urged. He was on fire to prosecute this adventure and, lest Alan should still hold back, he took from his pocket a feverish bag of Satin Pralines and boldly offered them to the girl of his choice.

“I say, would you like some tuck?”

The girls giggled and sat closer together; but Michael still proffered the sweets and at last the girl whom he admired dipped her hand into the bag. As all the Satin Pralines were stuck together, she brought out half a dozen and was so much embarrassed that she dropped the bag, after which she giggled.

“It doesn’t matter a bit,” said Michael. “I can get some more. These are beastly squashed. I say, what’s your name?”

So began the quadruple intrigue of Dora and Winnie and Michael and Alan.

Judged merely by their dress, one would have unhesitatingly set down Dora and Winnie as sisters; but they were unrelated and dressed alike merely to accentuate, as girl friends do, the unanimity of their minds. They were both of them older by a year or more than Michael and Alan; while in experience they were a generation ahead of either. The possession of this did not prevent them from giggling foolishly and from time to time looking at each other with an expression compounded of interrogation and shyness. Michael objected to this look, inasmuch as it implied their consciousness of a mental attitude in which neither he nor Alan had any part. He was inclined to be sulky whenever he noticed an exchange of glances, and very soon insisted upon a temporary separation by which he and Dora took one path, while Alan with Winnie pursued another.

Dora was a neatly made child, and Michael thought the many-pleated blue skirt that reached down to her knees and showed as she swung along a foam of frizzy white petticoats very lovely. He liked, too, the curve of her leg and the high buttoned boots and the big blue bow in her curly golden hair. He admired immensely her large shady hat trimmed with cornflowers and the string of bangles on her wrist and her general effect of being almost grown up and at the same time still obviously a little girl. As for Dora’s face, Michael found it beautiful with the long-lashed blue eyes and rose-leaf complexion and cleft chin and pouting bow mouth. Michael congratulated himself upon securing the prettier of the two. Winnie with her grey eyes and ordinary hair and dark eyebrows and waxen skin was certainly not comparable to this exquisite doll of his own.

At first Michael was too shy to make any attempt to kiss Dora. Nevertheless the kissing of her ran in his mind from the beginning, and he would lie awake planning how the feat was to be accomplished. He was afraid that if suddenly he threw his arms round her, she might take offence and refuse to see him again. Finally he asked Alan’s advice.