Sinister Street · Book III · Chapter 3 6 (1/4)

VI

Gray and Blue

When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.

Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of other women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to society.

“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for the whole of a hot summer afternoon.

“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained. “And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a rotten time really when she was traveling round.”

“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,” said Michael, “and now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”

“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other people would make me vague.”

“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.

“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the vagueness came after she ran away with father.”

Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.

“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”

“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little things, you’d think⁠—however, as I know you have rather a dread of perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”

“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him to turn theories into practice.

“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly sympathetic.”

Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.

“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”

For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a rage.

A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into the country.

“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.

Michael sighed.

“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up Mental Science⁠—so interesting and quite different from Christian Science.”

“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.

Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.

“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has been quite long enough in London for the present.”

“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”

“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall, and I think I’ll go.”

The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October, arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.

The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing, cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.

“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one evening.

“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.

Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.

“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”

“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,” Castleton observed. “The signposts are like incantations.”

“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects me profoundly sometimes.”

Hazlewood laughed.

“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by anything,” he prophesied.

Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.

“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist⁠—”

“Maurice is plumbing the lead tonight,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”

“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I shall ever come to Cornwall again.”

With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.

“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish novelists⁠—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”

“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.

“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to solve their problems and if Maurice weren’t always so facile with the right emotion at the right moment.”

“I’ve got a presentiment tonight,” said Michael, and not wishing to say more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to admit as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.

Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt, or was it merely thunder in the air?

Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:

join me here rather quickly.

Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.

It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the streetlamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.

“I’m really awfully worried,” he said aloud to himself, as through the stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to Charing Cross.

Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning, and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holidaymakers, something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.

Stella’s address was near the Quai d’Orsay; and when Michael arrived he found she was living in rooms over a bookseller’s shop with a view of the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.

Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist’s justification. Stella’s chestnut hair streamed down her straight back like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet, and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen. This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers, pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the windowsill of an inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.

Yet, for all Michael’s relief at finding Stella at least superficially all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa Vine whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend for Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that he had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning, and Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to abandon music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris come walking.

The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river’s bank.

“Well,” said Michael at last, “why did you wire for me?”

“I wanted you.”

Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by Stella’s impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a fancy for his company.

Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript she had written to a letter.

“Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for an artist, that there was also life to be lived?”

Michael said he remembered the letter very well indeed, and asked just how she proposed to put her theory to the test.

“I told you that a youth was painting me.”

“But you also said he looked like a corpse,” Michael quickly interjected. “You surely haven’t fallen in love with somebody who looks like a corpse?”

“I’m not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,” Stella admitted.

Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the fellow’s presumption.

“I never yet met a painter who had very much inside,” he commented.

“But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you’ll confess that your acquaintanceship with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather small.”

Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive hostility.

“And I suppose this chap is in Paris now,” he said. “Well, I can’t do anything. I suppose for a long time now you’ve been making a fool of yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?”

He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom he had never seen.

“I’ve certainly not been making a fool of myself,” Stella flamed. “But I thought I would rather you were close at hand.”

“And who’s this Clarissa Vine?” Michael indignantly demanded.

“She’s the girl I traveled with to Paris.”

“But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk.”

By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.

“I can’t bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she’ll sit and talk hot air till three o’clock in the morning. I shall go mad,” Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the immediate future.

Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael’s mistrust of Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could not stand George Ayliffe.