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

“I suppose I might be,” said Michael, “if I wanted to proclaim myself anything at all, but I’d much rather watch you sprawling effectively and proclaiming yourself a supporter of Conservatism. I’ve really very little inclination to criticize people like you. It’s only in books I think you’re a little boring.”

Term wore on, and a pleasurable anticipation was lent to the coming vacation by a letter which Michael received from his mother.

Dearest Michael,

I’m so glad you’re still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you, though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve got rid of this tiresome house. I’ve sold it to a retired Colonel⁠—such an objectionable old man, and I’m really so pleased he’s bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn because the people next door were continually complaining of Stella’s piano, and really Carlington Road has become impossible. Such an air of living next door, and whenever I look out of the window the maid is shaking a mat and looking up to see if I’m interested. We must try to settle on a new house when you’re back in town. We’ll stay in a hotel for a while. Stella has had to take a studio, which I do not approve of her doing, and I cannot bear to see the piano going continually in and out of the house. There are so many things I want to talk to you about⁠—money, and whether you would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we could find a house at some other time.

From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.

My dear old Michael,

I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and I’ve taken a studio here because the man next door⁠—a most frightful bounder⁠—said the noise I made went through and through his wife. As she’s nearly as big round as the world, I wasn’t flattered. Mother is getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange women come to the house and talk about some society for dealing with Life with a capital letter. I think we’re going to be rather well off, and Mother wants to live in a house she’s seen in Park Street, but I want to take a house in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like Cheyne Walk, because this house has got a splendid studio in the garden and I thought with some mauve brocades it would look perfectly lovely. There’s a very good paneled room that you could have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am working at a Franck concerto. I’m being painted by rather a nice youth, at least he would be nice, if he weren’t so much like a corpse. I suppose you’ll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term.

Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.

Term drew to a close, and Michael determined to mark the occasion by giving a dinner in which he thought he would try the effect of his friends all together. Hitherto the celebrations of the freshmen had been casual entertainments arranged haphazard out of the idle chattering groups in the lodge. This dinner was to be carefully thought out and balanced to the extreme of nice adjustment. This terminal dinner might, Michael thought, almost become with him a regular function, so that people would learn to speak with interest and respect of Fane’s terminal dinners. In a way, it would be tantamount to forming a club, a club strictly subjective, indeed so personal in character as really to preclude the employment of the sociable world. At any rate, putting aside all dreams of the future, Michael made up his mind to try the effect of the first. It should be held in the Mitre, he decided, since that would give the company an opportunity of sailing homeward arm-in-arm along the whole length of the High. The guests should be Avery, Lonsdale, Wedderburn, Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose a number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests would change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he felt that some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven as the number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more must be invited, and Michael without much further consideration selected five freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness drew them into prominence. But when he had given all the invitations Michael was a little depressed by the conventional appearance of his list. With the exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and Avery, his list was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn up by Grainger. As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of correctness that overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at the head of the table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed round the table his terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that on this occasion he had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe moment of self-examination he characterized as “snobbishness.” In this room at the Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun and steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more eclectic society would have been out of place.

Only Avery’s loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the group.

“Who’s that man wearing a pie-frill?” whispered Alan sternly from Michael’s right.

Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.

“Avery allows himself a little license,” said Michael. “But, Alan, he’s really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you saw him on Sunday you’d think he was perfectly dressed. All Old Carthusians are.”

But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had in common.

Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called Castleton.

Michael was glad of this, for Castleton in some respects was the strongest influence in Michael’s year, and his friendship would be good for Avery. Wedderburn had implied to Michael that he considered Castleton rather overrated, but there was a superficial similarity between the two in the sort of influence they both possessed, and jealousy, if jealousy could lurk in the deep-toned and immaculate Wedderburn, might be responsible for that opinion. Michael sometimes wondered what made Castleton so redoubtable, since he was no more apparently than an athlete of ordinary ability, but Wykehamist opinion in the college was emphatic in proclaiming his solid merit, and as he seemed utterly unaware of possessing any quality at all, and as he seemed to add to every room in which he sat a serenity and security, he became each day more and more a personality impossible to neglect.

Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman, and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of St. Mary’s freshmen as this one might be considered. But a representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne, and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael’s desire to have him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However, it was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to see his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.

Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale discussed their individual excellencies.

“First of all,” said Lonsdale, “I want to propose the health of our distinguished friend, Mr. Merivale of Christ Church. For he’s a jolly good fellow and all that. My friend Mr. Wedderburn’s a jolly good fellow, too, and my friend Mr. Sterne on my center is a jolly good fellow and a jolly good bowler and so say all of us. As for my friend Tommy Grainger⁠—whom I will not call Mister, having known him since we were boys together⁠—I will here say that I confidently anticipate he will get his blue next term and show the Tabs that he’s a jolly good fellow. I will not mention the rest of us by name⁠—all jolly good fellows⁠—except our host. He’s given us a good dinner and good wine and good company, which nobody can deny. So here’s his health.”

Then, in a phantasmagoria in which brilliant liqueurs and a meandering procession of linked arms and the bells of Oxford and a wet night were all indistinguishably confused in one strong impression, Michael passed through his first terminal dinner.