Sinister Street · Book II · Chapter 2 15 (2/3)

“Yes, that is unfortunately necessary,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Still, Alan is sufficiently typical of the public-school spirit⁠—an odious expression yet always unavoidable⁠—to carry off the burden. If you were poor, I should advise you to buy overcoats. Three smart overcoats are an equipment for a poor man. But I needn’t dwell on social ruses in your case. Remember that going to Oxford is like going to school. Be normal and inconspicuous at first; and when you have established yourself as an utterly undistinguished young creature, you can career into whatever absurdities of thought, action or attire you will. In your first year establish your sanity; in your second year display your charm; and in your third year do whatever you like. Now there is Alan calling, and we’ll leave the paths strewn with these cut stalks as a Memento Mori to the gardener. What a charming woman your mother is. She has that exquisite vagueness which when allied with good breeding is perfectly irresistible, at any rate to a practical and worldly old woman like me. But then I’ve had an immense amount of time in which to tidy up. Pleasant hours to you down here. It’s delightful to hear about the place the sound of boys laughing and shouting.”

Michael left Mrs. Carthew, rather undecided as to what exactly she thought of him or Alan or anybody else. As he walked over the lawn that went sloping down to the stream, he experienced a revulsion from the interest he took in listening to what people thought about him, and he now began to feel an almost morbid sensitiveness to the opinion of others. This destroyed some of the peace which he had sought and cherished down here in the country. He began to wonder if that wise old lady had been laughing at him, whether all she said had been an implied criticism of his attitude towards existence. Her praise must have been grave irony; her endorsement of his behaviour had been disguised reproof. She really admired Alan, and had only been trying as gently as possible to make him come into line with her nephew. He himself must seem to her eccentric, undignified, a flamboyant sort of creature whom she pitied and whose errors she wished to remedy. Michael was mortified by his retrospect of the conversation, and felt inclined when he saw Alan to make an excuse and retire from his society, until his self-esteem had recovered from the rebuke that had lately been inflicted. Indeed, it called for a great effort on Michael’s part to embark in the canoe with his paragon and sit face to face without betraying the wound that was damaging his own sense of personality.

“You had a very long jaw with Aunt Enid,” said Alan. “I thought you were never coming. She polished me off in about three minutes.”

Michael looked darkly at Alan for a moment before he asked with ungracious accentuation what on earth Alan and Mrs. Carthew had talked about.

“She was rather down on me,” said Alan. “I think she must have thought I was putting on side about getting my Eleven.”

Michael was greatly relieved to hear this, and his brow cleared as he enquired what was wrong.

“Well, I can’t remember her exact words,” Alan went on. “But she said I must be careful not to grow up into a strong silent Englishman, because their day was done. She practically told me I was rather an ass, and pretended to be fearfully surprised when she heard I was going to try for a scholarship at Oxford. She was squashing slugs all the time she was talking, and I could do nothing but look a bigger fool than ever and count the slugs. I ventured to remark once that most people thought it was a good thing to be keen on games, and she said half the world was composed of fools which accounted for the preponderation⁠—I mean preponderance⁠—of pink on the map. She said it always looked like an advertisement of successful foxhunting. And when I carefully pointed out that I’d never all my life had a chance to hunt, she said ‘More’s the pity,’ I couldn’t make out what she was driving at; so, feeling rather a worm, I shot off as soon as I could. What did she say to you?”

“Oh, nothing much,” said Michael triumphantly. “She’s a rum old girl, but rather decent.”

“She’s too clever for me,” said Alan, shaking his head. “It’s like batting to a pro.”

Then from the complexities of feminine judgment, the conversation glided easily like the canoe towards a discussion of the umpire’s decision last term in giving Alan out l.b.w. to a ball that pitched at least two feet away from the off stump.

“It was rotten,” said Alan fervidly.

“It was putrid,” Michael agreed.

To avoid the difficulty of a first night in a strange cottage, Mrs. Fane and Michael had supper at Cobble Place; and after a jolly evening spent in looking for pencils to play games that nobody could ever recollect in all their rich perfection of potential incidents, Michael and Mrs. Fane walked with leisurely paces back to Woodbine Cottage through a sweet-savoured moonless night.

Michael enjoyed the intimate good night beneath so small a roof, and wished that Stella were with them. He lay awake, reading from each in turn of the tower of books he had erected by his bedside to fortify himself against sleeplessness. It was a queer enough mixture⁠—Swinburne, Keats, Matthew Arnold, Robinson Crusoe, Half-Hours with the Mystics, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Daudet’s Sappho, the second volume of The Savoy, The Green Carnation, Holy Living and Dying; and as each time he changed his mind and took another volume, on the gabled ceiling the monstrous shadow that was himself filled him with a dreadful uncertainty. After an hour or so, he went to sit by the low window, leaning out and seeming to hear the dark world revolve in its course. Stars shook themselves clear from great rustling trees, and were in time enmeshed by others. The waning moon came up behind a rounded hill. A breeze fluttered down the dusty road, and was silent.

Michael fell to wondering whether he could ever bring himself in tune with these slow progressions of nature, whether he could renounce after one haggard spell of experience the mazy stir of transitory emotions that danced always beyond this dream. An Half-hour with St. John of the Cross made him ask himself whether this were the dark night of the soul through which he was passing. But he had never travelled yet, nor was he travelling now. He was simply sitting quiescent, allowing himself to be passed. These calm and stately figures of humanity whom he admired in their seclusion had only reached it after long strife. Mrs. Carthew had lost a husband and a son, had seen her daughter leave her house as a governess. Joan and May had for many years sunk their hopes in tending their mother. Nancy was away earning money, and would be entitled to retire here one day. Mrs. Ross had endured himself and Stella for several years, had married and lost her husband, and had borne a child. All these had won their timeless repose and their serene uncloying ease. They were not fossils, but perdurable images of stone. And his mother, she was⁠—he stopped his reverie. Of his mother he knew nothing. Outside the dust stirred in the road fretfully; a malaise was in the night air. Michael shivered and went back to bed, and as he turned to blow out his candle he saw above him huge and menacing his own shadow. A cock crowed.

“Silly ass,” muttered Michael, “he thinks it’s already morning,” and turning over after a dreamless sleep he found it was morning. So he rose and dressed himself serenely for a long sunburnt day.

On his way up the road to call for Alan he met the postman, who in answer to his enquiries handed him a letter from South Africa stamped all over with mysterious official abbreviations. He took it up to his mother curiously.

At lunch he asked her about the news from the war.

“Yes, dear, I had a letter,” she murmured.

“From Lord Saxby, I suppose?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Anything interesting?” Michael persisted.

“Oh, no, it’s only about marches and not being able to wash properly.”

“I thought it might be interesting,” Michael speculated.

“No, dear. It wouldn’t interest you,” said Mrs. Fane in her tone of gentle discouragement.

“I don’t want to be inquisitive,” said Michael resentfully.

“No, dear, I’m sure you don’t,” his mother softly agreed.

The holidays ran their pastoral course of sun and rain, of clouds and winds, until the last week arrived with September in her most majestic mood of flawless halcyon. These were days that more than any hitherto enhanced for Michael the reverence he felt for the household of Cobble Place. These were days when Mrs. Carthew stepped wisely along her flowery enclosure, pondering the plums and peaches on the warm walls that in a transcendency of mellow sunlight almost took on the texture of living sunburnt flesh. These were days when Joan and May Carthew went down the village street with great bunches of Michaelmas daisies, of phloxes and Japanese anemones, or sat beneath the mulberry tree, sewing in the bee-drowsed air.

At the foot of the hill beyond the stream was a straggling wind-frayed apple-orchard, fresh pasturage for lambs in spring, and now in September a jolly haunt for the young son of Mrs. Ross. Here one afternoon, when Alan was away at Basingstead Major playing the last cricket match of the year, Michael plunged down in the grass beside her.

They sat for a while in silence, and Mrs. Ross seemed to Michael to be waiting for him to speak first, as if by her own attitude of mute expectation she could lure him on to express himself more openly than by direct question and shy answer. He felt the air pregnant with confidences, and kept urging himself on to begin the statement and revelation of his character, sure that whatever he desired to ask must be asked now while he was perhaps for the last time liable to this grave woman’s influence, conscious of the security of goodness, envious of the maternity of peace. This grey-eyed woman seemed to sit above him like a proud eagle, careless of homage, never to be caught, never to be tamed, a figure for worship and inspiration. Michael wondered why all the women who awed him had grey eyes. Blue eyes fired his senses, striking sparks and kindling answering flames from his own blue eyes. Brown eyes left him indifferent. But grey eyes absorbed his very being, whether they were lustrous and violet-shaded like his mother’s and Stella’s, or whether, like Mrs. Ross’s, they were soft as grey seawater that in a moment could change to the iron-bound rocks they were so near.

Still Michael did not speak, but watched Mrs. Ross solemnly hand back to the rosy child sitting beside her in the grass the fallen apples that he would always fling from him exuberantly, panting the while at laughter’s highest pitch.

“I wonder if I ever laughed like that,” said Michael.

“You were a very serious little boy, when I first knew you,” Mrs. Ross told him.

“I must have been rather depressing,” Michael sighed.

“No, indeed you were not, dear Michael,” she answered. “You had much too much personality.”

“Have I now?” Michael asked sharply.

“Yes, of course you have.”

“Well, what gives it to me?”

“Surely personality is something that is born with one. Personality can’t be made,” said Mrs. Ross.

“You don’t think experience has got anything to do with it?” Michael pressed.

“I think experience makes the setting, and according to the experience the personality is perfected or debased, but nothing can destroy personality, not even death,” she murmured, far away for a moment from this orchard.

“Which would you say had the stronger personality⁠—Alan or I?” asked Michael.

“I should say you had,” said Mrs. Ross. “Or at any rate you have a personality that will affect a larger number of people, either favourably or unfavourably.”

“But Alan influences me more than I influence him,” Michael argued.

“That may be,” Mrs. Ross admitted. “Though I think your influence over Alan is very strong in this way. I think Alan is always very eager to see you at your best, and probably as your friendship goes on he will be more solicitous for you than for himself. I should say that he would be likely to sink himself in you. I wonder if you realize what a passionately loyal soul he is.”

Michael flushed with pleasure at this appreciation of his friend, and his ambition went flying over to Basingstead Major to inspire Alan to bat his best. Then he burst forth in praise of him; he spoke of his changelessness, his freedom from moods, his candour and toleration and modesty.

“But the terrible thing is,” said Michael suddenly, “that I always feel that without noticing it I shall one day leave Alan behind.”

“But when you turn back, you’ll find him just the same, don’t forget; and you may be glad that he did not come with you. You may be glad that from his slowness you can find an indication of the road that I’m sure you yourself will one day try to take. Alan will travel by it all his life. You’ll travel by it ultimately. Alan will never really appreciate its beauty. You will. That will be your recompense for what you suffer before you find it.”

Mrs. Ross, as if to conceal emotion, turned quickly to romp with her son. Then she looked at Michael:

“And haven’t you already once or twice left Alan behind?”

Suddenly to Michael her grey eyes seemed accusing.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” he granted. “But isn’t that the reason why my personality affects more people than his? You said just now that experience was only the setting, but I’m sure in my case it’s more than a mere setting.”

And even as he spoke all his experience seemed to cloud his brow, knitting and lining it with perplexed wrinkles.

“Mrs. Ross, you won’t think me very rude if I say you always remind me of Pallas Athene? You always have, you know. At first it was just a vague outward resemblance, because you’re tall and sort of cool-looking, and I really think your nose is rather Greek, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Oh, Michael,” Mrs. Ross smiled. “I think you’re even more unalterable than Alan. I seem to see you as a little boy again, when you talk like that.”

Michael, however, was too keen on the scent of his comparison to be put off by smiles, and he went on eagerly:

“Now I realize that you actually are like Athene. You’re one of those people who seem to have sprung into the world fully armed. I can’t imagine that you were ever young.”

Mrs. Ross laughed outright at this.

“Wait a minute,” cried Michael. “Or ever old for that matter. And you know all about me. No, you needn’t shake your head like that. Because you do.”

Young Kenneth was so much roused by Michael’s triumphant asseverations that he began to shout and kick in delighted tune and fling the apples from him with a vigour that he had never yet reached.

“You know,” Michael continued breathlessly, while the boy on the grass gurgled his endorsement of every word. “You know that I’m old for my age, that I’ve already done things that other chaps at school only whisper about.”

He stopped suddenly, for the grey eyes had become like rocks, and though the baby still panted ecstatically, there fell a chill.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” said Mrs. Ross.

“Well, why did you lead me on to confide in you?” said Michael sullenly. “I thought you would sympathize.”

“Michael, I apologize,” she said, melting. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I dare say⁠—ah, Michael, you see how easily all my shining armour falls to pieces.”

“Another broken bottle,” Michael muttered.

He got up abruptly and, though there were tears in his eyes, she could not win him back.

“Dear old boy, do tell me. Don’t make the mistake of going back into yourself, because I failed you for a moment.”

Mrs. Ross held out her hand, but Michael walked away.