Sinister Street · Book II · Chapter 2 18 (1/3)

XVIII

Eighteen Years Old

To Michael it seemed almost incredible that school should be able to continue as the great background against which his love stood out like a delicate scene carved by the artist’s caprice in an obscure corner of a strenuous and heroic decoration. Michael was hardly less conscious of school on Lily’s account, and in class he dreamed neither more nor less than formerly; but his dreams partook more of ecstasy than those nebulous pictures inspired by the ambitions and ideals and books of youth’s progress. Nevertheless in the most ultimate refinement of meditation school weighed down his spirit. It is true that games had finally departed from the realm of his consideration, but equally with games much extravagance of intellect and many morbid pleasures had gone out of cultivation. Balancing loss with gain, he found himself at the close of his last autumn term with a surer foothold on the rock-hewn foundations of truth.

Michael called truth whatever of emotion or action or reaction or reason or contemplation survived the destruction he was dealing out to the litter of idols that were beginning to encumber his passage, many of which he thought he had already destroyed when he had merely covered them with a new coat of gilt. During this period he began to enjoy Wordsworth, to whom he came by way of Matthew Arnold, like a wayfarer who crosses green fields and finds that mountains are faint upon the horizon. A successful lover, as he called himself, he began to despise anything in his reading of poetry that could not measure its power with the great commonplaces of human thought.

The Christmas holidays came as a relief from the burden of spending so much of his time in an atmosphere from which he was sure he had drained the last draught of health-giving breath. Michael no longer regarded, save in a contemptuous aside, the microcosm of school; the pleasures of seniority had staled; the whole business was now a tedious sort of mental quarantine. If he had not had Lily to occupy his leisure, he would have expired of restless inanition; and he wondered that the world went on allowing youth’s load of education to be encumbered by a deadweight of superfluous information. Alan, for instance, had managed to obtain a scholarship some time in late December, and would henceforth devote himself to meditating on cricket for one term and playing it hard for another term. It would be nine months before he went to Oxford, and for nine months he would live in a state of mental catalepsy fed despairingly by the masters of the Upper Sixth with the few poor last facts they could scrape together from their own time-impoverished store. Michael, in view of Alan’s necessity for gaining this scholarship, had never tried to lure him towards Doris and a share in his own fortune. But he resolved that during the following term he would do his best to galvanize Alan out of the catalepsy that he woefully foresaw was imminent.

Meanwhile the Christmas holidays were here, and Michael on their first night vowed all their leisure to Lily.

There was time now for expeditions farther afield than Kensington Gardens, which in winter seemed to have lost some of their pastoral air. The naked trees no longer veiled the houses, and the city with its dingy railings and dingy people and mud-splashed omnibuses was always an intrusion. Moreover, fellow-Jacobeans used to haunt their privacy; and often when it was foggy in London, out in the country there was winter sunlight.

These were days whose clarity and silence seemed to call for love’s fearless analysis, and under a sky of turquoise so faintly blue that scarcely even at the zenith could it survive the silver dazzle of the low January sun, Michael and Lily would swing from Barnet into Finchley with Michael talking all the way.

“Why do you love me?” he would flash.

“Because I do.”

“Oh, can’t you think of any better reason than that?”

“Because⁠—because⁠—oh, Michael, I don’t want to think of reasons,” Lily would declare.

“You are determined to marry me?” Michael would flash again.

“Yes, some day.”

“You don’t think you’ll fall in love with anybody else?”

“I don’t suppose so.”

“Only suppose?” Michael would echo on a fierce pause.

“Well, no, I won’t.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, yes, I promise,” Lily would pout.

Then the rhythm of their walk would be renewed, and arm-in-arm they would travel on, until the next foolish perplexity demanded solution. Twilight would often find them still on the road, and when some lofty avenue engulfed their path, the uneasy warmth of the overarching trees would draw them very close, while hushed endearments took them slowly into lampshine.

When the dripping January rains came down, Michael spent many afternoons in the morning-room of Lily’s house. Here, subject only to Doris’s exaggerated hesitation to enter, Michael would build up for himself and Lily the indissoluble ties of a childhood that, though actually it was spent in ignorance of each other’s existence, possessed many links of sentimental communion.

For instance, on the wall hung Cherry Ripe⁠—the same girl in white frock and pink sash who nearly fourteen years ago had conjured for Michael the first hazy intimations of romance. Here she hung, staring down at them as demurely if not quite so sheerly beautiful as of old. Lily observed that the picture was not unlike Doris at the same age, and Michael felt at once that such a resemblance gave it a permanent value. Certainly his etchings of Montmartre and views of the Sussex Downs would never be hallowed by the associations that made sacred this oleograph of a Christmas Annual.

There were the picture-books of Randolph Caldecott tattered identically with his own, and Michael pointed out to Lily that often they must have sat by the fire reading the same verse at the same moment. Was not this thought almost as fine as the actual knowledge of each other’s daily life would have been? There were other books whose pages, scrawled and dog-eared, were softened by innumerable porings to the texture of Japanese fairy-books. In a condition practically indistinguishable all of these could be found both in Carlington Road and Trelawny Road.

There were the mutilated games that commemorated Christmas after Christmas of the past. Here was the pack of Happy Families with Mrs. Chip now a widow, Mr. Block the Barber a widower, and the two young Grits grotesque orphans of the grocery. There were Ludo and Lotto and Tiddledy-Winks whose counters, though terribly depleted, were still eloquent with the undetermined squabbles and favourite colours of childhood.

Michael was glad that Lily should spring like a lovely ghost from the dust of familiar and forgotten relics. It had been romantic to snatch her on a dying cadence of Verlaine out of the opalescent vistas of October trees; but his perdurable love for her rested on these immemorial affections whose history they shared.

Lily herself was not so sensitive to this aroma of the past as Michael. She was indeed apt to consider his enthusiasm a little foolish, and would wonder why he dragged from the depths of untidy cupboards so much rubbish that only owed its preservation to the general carelessness of the household. Lily cared very little either for the past or the future, and though she was inclined to envy Doris her dancing-lessons and likelihood of appearing some time next year on the stage, she did not seem really to desire any activity of career for herself. This was a relief to Michael, who frankly feared what the stage might wreak upon their love.

“But I wish you’d read a little more,” he protested. “You like such rotten books.”

“I feel lazy when I’m not with you,” she explained. “And, anyway, I hate reading.”

“Do you think of me all the time I’m away from you?” Michael asked.

Lily told him she thought of nothing else, and his pride in her admission led him to excuse her laziness, and even made him encourage it. There was, however, about the atmosphere of Lily’s home a laxity which would have overcome more forcible exhortations than Michael’s. He was too much in love with Lily’s kisses to do more than vaguely criticize her surroundings. He did not like Mrs. Haden’s pink powder, but nevertheless the pink powder made him less sensitive than he might have been to Mrs. Haden’s opinion of his daily visits and his long unchaperoned expeditions with Lily. The general laxity tended to obscure his own outlook, and he had no desire to state even to himself his intentions. He felt himself tremendously old when he thought of kisses, but when he tried to visualize Lily and himself even four years hence, he felt hopelessly young. Mrs. Haden evidently regarded him as a boy, and since that fact seemed to relieve her of the slightest anxiety, Michael had no desire to impress upon her his precocity. The only bann that Mrs. Haden laid on his intercourse with Lily was her refusal to allow him to take her out alone at night, but she had no objection to him escorting Doris and Lily together to the theatre; nor did she oppose Michael’s plan to celebrate the last night of the holidays by inviting Alan to make a quartet for the Drury Lane pantomime. Alan had only just come back from skating in Switzerland with his father, and he could not refuse to join Michael’s party, although he said he was “off girls” at the moment.

“You always are,” Michael protested.

“And I’m not going to fall in love, even to please you,” Alan added.

“All right,” Michael protested. “Just because you’ve been freezing yourself to death all the holidays, you needn’t come back and throw cold water over me.”

They all dined with Mrs. Haden, and Michael could not help laughing to see how seriously and how shyly Alan took the harum-scarum feast at which, between every course, one of the girls would rush upstairs to fetch down a fan or a handkerchief or a ribbon.

“I think your friend is charming,” said Mrs. Haden loudly, when she and Michael were alone for a minute in the final confusion of not being late. Michael wondered why something in her tone made him resent this compliment. But there was no opportunity to puzzle over his momentary distaste, because it was time to start for the occupation of the box which Mrs. Haden had been given by one of her friends.

“I vote we drive home in two hansoms,” suggested Michael as they stood in the vestibule when the pantomime was over.

Alan looked at him quickly and made a grimace. But Michael was determined to enjoy Lily’s company during a long uninterrupted drive, and at the same time to give Alan the opportunity of finding out whether he could possibly attach himself to Doris.

Michael’s own drive enthralled him. The hot theatre and the glittering performance had made Lily exquisitely tired and languorous, and Michael thought she had never surrendered herself so breathlessly before, that never before had her flowerlike kisses been so intangible and her eyes so drowsily passionate. Lulled by the regularity of the motion, Lily lay along his bended arm as if asleep, and, as he held her, Michael’s sense of responsibility became more and more dreamily indistinct. The sensuousness of her abandonment drugged all but the sweet present and the poignant ecstasy of possession.

“I adore you,” he whispered. “Lily, are you asleep? Lily! Lily, you are asleep, asleep in my arms, you lovely girl. Can you hear me talking to you?”

She stirred in his embrace like a ruffling bird; she sighed and threw a fevered hand upon his shoulder.

“Michael, why do you make me love you so?” she murmured, and fell again into her warm trance.

“Are you speaking to me from dreams?” he whispered. “Lily, you almost frighten me. I don’t think I knew I loved you so much. The whole world seems to be galloping past. Wake up, wake up. We’re nearly home.”

She stretched herself in a rebellious shudder against consciousness and looked at Michael wide-eyed.

“I thought you were going to faint or something,” he said.

Hardly another word they spoke, but sat upright staring before them at the oncoming lampposts. Soon Trelawny Road was reached, and in that last good night was a sense of nearness that never before had Michael imagined.

By her house they waited for a minute in the empty street, silent, hand-in-hand, until the other cab swung round the corner. Alan and Michael watched the two girls disappear through the flickering doorway, and then they strolled back towards Carlington Road, where Alan was spending the night.

“Well?” asked Michael. “What do you think of Lily?”

“I think she’s very pretty.”

“And Doris?”

“I didn’t care very much for her really,” said Alan apologetically, “She’s pretty, not so pretty as Lily, of course; but, I say, Michael, I suppose you’ll be offended, but I’d better ask right out⁠ ⁠… who are they?”

“The Hadens?”

“Yes. I thought Mrs. Haden rather awful. What’s Mr. Haden? or isn’t there a Mr. Haden?”

“I believe he’s in Burma,” said Michael.

“Burma?”

“Why shouldn’t he be?”

“No reason at all,” Alan admitted, “but⁠ ⁠… well⁠ ⁠… I thought there was something funny about that family.”

“You think everything’s funny that’s just a little bit different from the deadly average,” said Michael. “What exactly was funny, may I ask?”

“I don’t think Mrs. Haden is a lady, for one thing,” Alan blurted out.

“I do,” said Michael shortly, “And, anyway, if she weren’t, I don’t see that that makes any difference to me and Lily.”

“But what are you going to do?” Alan asked. “Do you think you’re going to marry her?”

“Some day. Life isn’t a cricket-match, you know,” said Michael sententiously. “You can’t set your field just as you would like to have it at the moment.”

“You know best what’s good for you,” Alan sighed.

“Yes⁠ ⁠… I think I do. I think it’s better to live than to stagnate as you’re doing.”

“What does your mother say?” Alan asked.

“I haven’t told her anything about Lily.”

“No, because you’re not in earnest. And if you’re in earnest, Lily isn’t.”

“What the devil do you know about her?” Michael angrily demanded.

“I know enough to see you’re both behaving like a couple of reckless kids,” Alan retorted.

“Damn you!” cried Michael in exasperation. “I wish to god you wouldn’t try to interfere with what doesn’t after all concern you very much.”

“You insisted on introducing me,” Alan pointed out.

“Because I thought it would be a rag if we were both in love with sisters. But you’re turning into a machine. Since you’ve swotted up into the Upper Sixth, you’ve turned into a very good imitation of the prigs you associate with. Everybody isn’t like you. Some people develop.⁠ ⁠… I could have been just like you if I had cared to be. I could have been Captain of the School and Scholar of Balliol with my nose ground down to εἱ and ἑἁν, hammering out tenth-rate Latin lyrics and reading Theocritus with the amusing parts left out. But what’s the good of arguing with you? You’re perfectly content and you think you can be as priggish as you like, as long as you conceal it by making fifty runs in the Dulford match. I suppose you consider my behaviour unwholesome at eighteen. Well, I dare say it is by your standards. But are your standards worth anything? I doubt it. I think they’re fine up to a point. I’m perfectly willing to admit that we behaved like a pair of little blighters with those girls at Eastbourne. But this is something altogether different.”

“We shall see,” said Alan simply. “I’m not going to quarrel with you. So shut up.”

Michael walked along in silence, angry with himself for having caused this ill-feeling by his obstinacy in making an unsuitable introduction, and angry with Alan because he would accentuate by his attitude the mistake.

By the steps of his house Michael stopped and looked at Alan severely.

“This is the last time I shall attempt to cure you,” he announced.