Sinister Street · Book II · Chapter 2 8 (1/2)

VIII

Mirrors

Michael somehow felt shy when he heard his mother’s voice telling him to come into her room. He had run upstairs and knocked excitedly at her door before the shyness overwhelmed him, but it was too late not to enter, and he sat down to give her the account of his holidays. Rather dull it seemed, and robbed of all vitality by the barrier which both his mother and he hastened to erect between themselves.

“Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself at this Monastery?”

“Oh, rather.”

“Is the⁠—what do you call him?⁠—the head monk a nice man?”

“Oh, yes, awfully decent.”

“And your friend Chator, did he enjoy himself?”

“Oh, rather. Only he had to go before me. Did you enjoy yourself abroad, mother?”

“Very much, dear, thank you. We had lovely weather all the time.”

“We had awfully ripping weather too.”

“Have you got everything ready for school in the morning?”

“There’s nothing much to get. I suppose I’ll go into Cray’s⁠—the Upper Fifth. Do you want me now, mother?”

“No, dear, I have one or two letters to write.”

“I think I’ll go round and see if Chator’s home yet. You don’t mind?”

“Don’t be late for dinner.”

“Oh, no, rather not.”

Going downstairs from his mother’s room, Michael had half an impulse to turn back and confide in her the real account of his holidays. But on reflection he protested to himself that his mother looked upon him as immaculate, and he felt unwilling to disturb by such a revolutionary step the approved tranquillities of maternal ignorance.

Mr. Cray, his new form-master, was a man of distinct personality, and possessed a considerable amount of educative ability; but unfortunately for Michael the zest of classics had withered in his heart after his disappointment over the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Therefore Mr. Cray with his bright archæology and chatty scholarship bored Michael more profoundly than any of his masters so far had bored him. Mr. Cray resented this attitude very bitterly, being used to keenness in his form, and Michael’s dreary indolence, which often came nearer to insolence, irritated him. As for the plodding, inky sycophants who fawned upon Mr. Cray’s informativeness, Michael regarded them with horror and contempt. He sat surrounded by the butts and bugbears of his school-life. All the boys whose existence he had deplored seemed to have clambered arduously into the Upper Fifth just to enrage him with the sight of their industrious propinquity. There they sat with their scraggy wrists protruding from shrinking coat-sleeves, with ambitious noses glued to their books, with pens and pencils neatly disposed for demonstrative annotation, and nearly all of them conscious of having figured in the school-list with the printed bubble of the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate beside their names. Contemplating them in the mass, Michael scarcely knew how he would endure another dusty year of school.

“And now we come to the question of the Homeric gate⁠—the Homeric gate, Fane, when you can condescend to our level,” said Mr. Cray severely.

“I’m listening, sir,” said Michael wearily.

“Of course the earliest type of gate was without hinges⁠—without hinges, Fane! Very much like your attention, Fane!”

Several sycophants giggled at this, and Michael, gazing very earnestly at Mr. Cray’s benign but somewhat dirty bald head, took a bloody revenge upon those in reach of his javelin of quadruple penholders.

“For Monday,” said Mr. Cray, when he had done with listening to the intelligent advice of his favourite pupils on the subject of gates ancient and modern, “for Monday the essay will be on Patriotism.”

Michael groaned audibly.

“Isn’t there an alternative subject, sir?” he gloomily enquired.

“Does Fane dislike abstractions?” said Mr. Cray. “Curious! Well, if Fane wishes for an alternative subject, of course Fane must be obeyed. The alternative subject will be An Examination into the Fundamental Doctrines of Hegelian Idealism. Does that suit Fane?”

“Very well indeed,” said Michael, who had never heard of Hegel until that moment, but vowed to himself that somehow between this muggy Friday afternoon and next Monday morning he would conquer the fellow’s opinions. As a matter of fact, the essay proved perfectly easy with the assistance of The Popular Encyclopedia, though Mr. Cray called it a piece of impudence and looked almost baleful when Michael showed it up.

From this atmosphere of complacent effort Michael withdrew one afternoon to consult Father Viner about his future. Underneath the desire for practical advice was a desire to talk about himself, and Michael was disappointed on arriving at Father Viner’s rooms to hear that he was out. However, learning that there was a prospect of his speedy return, he came in at the landlady’s suggestion to amuse himself with a book while he waited.

Wandering round the big bay-windowed room with its odour of tobacco and books, and casting a careless glance at Father Viner’s desk, Michael caught sight of his own name in the middle of a neatly written letter on the top of a pile of others. He could not resist taking a longer glance to see the address and verify the allusion to himself, and with this longer glance curiosity conquered so completely the prejudice against prying into other people’s correspondence that Michael, breathing nervously under the dread of interruption, took up the letter and read it right through. It was in his present mood of anxiety about himself very absorbing.

Dear Brother,

I have been intending to write to you about young Michael Fane ever since he left us, and your letter of enquiry has had the effect of bringing me up to the point.

I hardly know what to tell you. He’s a curious youth, very lovable, and with enough brains to make one wish that he might have a vocation for the priesthood. At the same time I noticed while he was with us, especially after the admirable Chator departed, an overwhelming languor which I very much deplored.

He spent much of his time with a very bad hat indeed, whom I have just sent away from Clere. If you ever come across Mr. Henry Meats, be careful of him. Arbuthnot of St. Aidan’s, Holloway, sent him to me. You know Arbuthnot’s expansive (and for his friends expensive) Christianity. This last effort of his was a snorter, a soft, nasty, hysterical, little blob of vice. I ought to have seen through the fellow before I did. Heaven knows I get enough of the tag-rag of the Movement trying to be taken on at Clere. I suppose the monastic life will always make an imperishable appeal to the worst, and, thank God, some of the best. I mention this fellow to you because I’m afraid he and Michael may meet again, and I don’t at all like the idea of their acquaintanceship progressing, especially as it was unluckily begun beneath a religious roof. So keep an eye on Mr. Henry Meats. He’s really bad.

Another fellow I don’t recommend for Michael is Percy Garrod. Not that I think there is much danger in that direction, for I fancy Michael was very cold with him. Percy is a decent, honest, hardworking, common ass, with a deep respect for the Pope and the Polytechnic. He’s a trifle zealous, however, with bastard information about physical science, and not at all the person I should choose to lecture Michael on the complications of adolescence.

We are getting on fairly well at Clere, but it’s hard work trying to make this country believe there is the slightest necessity for the contemplative life. I hope all goes well with you and your work.

Michael put this letter back where he had found it, and wondered how much of the contents would be discussed by Father Viner. He was glad that Brother Aloysius had vanished, because Brother Aloysius had become like a bad dream with which he was unwilling in the future to renew acquaintance. On his own character Dom Cuthbert had not succeeded in throwing very much light⁠—at any rate not in this letter. Father Viner came in to interrupt Michael’s meditations, and began at once to discuss the letter.

“The Lord Abbot of Clere thinks you’re a dreamer,” he began abruptly.

“Does he, Mr. Viner?” echoed Michael, who somehow could never bring himself to the point of addressing the priest as “Father.” Shyness always overcame his will.

“What do you dream about, young Joseph?”

“Oh, I only think about a good many things, and wonder what I’m going to be and all that,” Michael replied. “I don’t want to go into the Indian Civil Service or anything with exams. I’m sick of exams. What I most want to do is to get away from school. I’m sick of school, and the fellows in the Upper Fifth are a greasy crowd of swats always sucking up to Cray.”

“And who is the gentleman with the crustacean name that attracts these barnacles?”

“Cray? Oh, he’s my form-master, and tries to be funny.”

“So do I, Michael,” confessed Mr. Viner.

“Oh, well, that’s different. I’m not bound to listen to you, if I don’t want to. But I have to listen to Cray for eighteen hours every week, and he hates me because I won’t take notes for his beastly essays. I think I’ll ask my mater if I can’t leave school after this term.”

“And then what would you do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could settle when I’d left.”

“What about Oxford?”

“Well, I could go to Oxford later on.”

“I don’t think you could quite so easily as you think. Anyway, you’d much better go to Oxford straight from school.”

“Eight more terms before I leave. Phew!” Michael groaned. “It’s such a terrible waste of time, and I know Oxford’s ripping.”

“Perhaps something will come along to interest you. And always, dear boy, don’t forget you have your religion.”

“Yes, I know,” said Michael. “But at the Abbey I met some people who were supposed to be religious, and they were pretty good rotters.”

The priest looked at him and seemed inclined to let Michael elaborate this topic, but almost immediately he dismissed it with a commonplace.

“Oh, well,” Michael sighed, “I suppose something will happen soon to buck me up. I hope so. Perhaps the Kensitites will start making rows in churches again,” he went on hopefully. “Will you lend me the Apocryphal Gospels? We’re going to have a discussion about them at the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis.”

“Oh, the society hasn’t broken up?” enquired Mr. Viner.

“Rather not. Only everybody’s changed rather. Chator’s become frightfully Roman. He was Sarum last term, and he thinks I’m frightfully heretical, only of course I say a lot I don’t mean just to rag him. I say, by the way, who wrote ‘In a Garden’?”

“It sounds a very general title,” commented Mr. Viner, with a smile.

“Well, it’s some poem or other.”

“Swinburne wrote a poem in the Second Series of Poems and Ballads called ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ Is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps. Is it a famous poem?”

“Yes, I should say it was distinctly.”

“Well, that must be it. Cray tried to be funny about it today in form, and said to me, ‘Good heavens, haven’t you read “In a Garden”?’ And I said I’d never heard of it. And then he said in his funny way to the class, ‘I suppose you’ve all read it.’ And none of them had, which made him look rather an ass. So he said we’d better read it by next week.”

“I can lend you my Swinburne. Only take care of it,” said Mr. Viner. “It’s a wonderful poem.”

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

“I say,” exclaimed Michael eagerly, “I never knew Swinburne was a really great poet. And fancy, he’s alive now.”

“Alive, and living at Putney,” said Mr. Viner.

“And yet he wrote what you’ve just said!”

“He wrote that, and many other things too. He wrote:

Before the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven,

Summer, with flowers that fell;

Remembrance fallen from heaven,

And madness risen from hell.”

“Good Lord!” sighed Michael. “And he’s in Putney at this very moment.”

Michael went home clasping close the black volume, and in his room that night, while the gas jet flamed excitably in defiance of rule, he read almost right through the Second Series of Poems and Ballads. It was midnight when he turned down the gas and sank feverishly into bed. For a long while he was saying to himself isolated lines: “The wet skies harden, the gates are barred on the summer side.” “The rose-red acacia that mocks the rose.” “Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, brother.” “For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, all waters as the shore.”

In school on Monday morning Mr. Cray, to Michael’s regret, did not allude to the command that his class should read “In a Garden.” Michael was desperately anxious at once to tell him how much he had loved the poem and to remind him of the real title, “A Forsaken Garden.” At last he could bear it no longer and went up flushed with enthusiasm to Mr. Cray’s desk, nominally to enquire into an alleged mistake in his Latin Prose, but actually to inform Mr. Cray of his delight in Swinburne. When the grammatical blunder had been discussed, Michael said with as much nonchalance as he could assume:

“I read that poem, sir. I think it’s ripping.”

“What poem?” repeated Mr. Cray vaguely. “Oh, yes, Enoch Arden.”

“Enoch Arden,” stammered Michael. “I thought you said ‘In a Garden.’ I read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by Swinburne.”

Mr. Cray put on his most patronizing manner.

“My poor Fane, have you never heard of Enoch Arden? Perhaps you’ve never even heard of Tennyson?”

“But Swinburne’s good, isn’t he, sir?”

“Swinburne is very well,” said Mr. Cray. “Oh, yes, Swinburne will do, if you like rose-jam. But I don’t recommend Swinburne for you, Fane.”

Then Mr. Cray addressed his class:

“Did you all read Enoch Arden?”

“Yes, sir,” twittered the Upper Fifth.

“Fane, however, with that independence of judgment which distinguishes his Latin Prose from, let us say, the prose of Cicero, preferred to read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by one Swinburne.”

The Upper Fifth giggled dutifully.

“Perhaps Fane will recite to us his discovery,” said Mr. Cray, scratching his scurfy head with the gnawed end of a penholder.

Michael blushed resentfully, and walked back to his desk.

“No?” said Mr. Cray with an affectation of great surprise.

Then he and the Upper Fifth, contented with their superiority, began to chew and rend some tough Greek particles which ultimately became digestible enough to be assimilated by the Upper Fifth; while Mr. Cray himself purred over his cubs, looking not very unlike a mangy old lioness.

“Eight more terms,” groaned Michael to himself.

Mr. Cray was not so blind to his pupils’ need for mild intellectual excitement, however much he might scorn the easy emotions of Swinburne. He really grew lyrical over Homeric difficulties, and even spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Mackail’s translation of the Georgics; but always he managed to conceal the nobility of his theme beneath a mass of what he called “minor points.” He would create his own rubbish heap and invite the Upper Fifth to scratch in it for pearls. One day a question arose as to the exact meaning of οὑλοχὑται in Homer. Michael would have been perfectly content to believe that it meant “whole barleycorns,” until Mr. Cray suggested that it might be equivalent to the Latin mola, meaning “grain coarsely ground.” An exhausting discussion followed, illustrated by examples from every sort of writer, all of which had to be taken down in notes in anticipation of a still more exhausting essay on the subject.

“The meal may be trite,” said Mr. Cray, “but not the subject,” he added, chuckling. “However, I have only touched the fringe of it: you will find the arguments fully set forth in Buttmann’s Lexilogus. Who possesses that invaluable work?”