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

“There you are!” cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest excavation of life. “We all half apologize for using the word ‘gentleman,’ but we can’t get on without it. People say it means nothing nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add something to its value. I haven’t been able to talk this out before, because you’re the only person who knows what I was born and at the same time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances rather a lot doesn’t imply any very morbid self-consciousness. You’re all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist up to your level, one doesn’t give a damn for his ancestors or his family or his personal features apart from the security of the art’s consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they incline without support, they’re most of them inclining away from a top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they’ll always have the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be suffocated.”

Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and pale fawn of their last attiring.

“If I could only find in life itself,” said Michael, sighing, “a path leading to something like this cottage.”

“But, meanwhile, go on,” Stella urged. “Do go on with your self-revelation. It’s so fascinating to me. It’s like a chord that never resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony.”

“Something rather pathetic in fact,” Michael suggested.

“Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic,” she assured him.

“My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I’m the possessor of so much I can never make use of,” Michael began again. “I’m not merely discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn’t enter my head. Indeed, I don’t think I’m ever discontented or even resentful for one moment, but if I were the head of a great family I should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas now⁠—” he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t see much difference really,” Stella said. “You’re not prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale perhaps.”

“Yes, yes,” Michael plunged on excitedly. “But crowds of people are doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we know anything about. And they are not, they simply and solidly are not. The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with all it connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of the educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that the average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face, will deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have been armed with weapons they don’t know how to use and are therefore so much the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a weapon of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I could have proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand scale even for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good nowadays.”

“I wonder if you could,” murmured Stella. “Anyway, I don’t see why you shouldn’t ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the small scale.”

“But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody and fades out of memory at the moment of death,” Michael grumbled.

“Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid,” Stella pointed out, “you’ll find your niche.”

“I shall be a sort of Prescott. That’s the most I can hope for,” Michael gloomily announced. “Yet after all that’s pretty good.”

Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that he finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.

“Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?”

Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for keeping such an extraordinary event so secret.

“Because I didn’t want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into your relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you, you would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn’t looking. And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him through her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not.”

It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella’s appeal to Raoul de Castéra-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own personality had scarcely entered. Castéra-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe! What folly it had been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan. Yet it had seemed so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in love with each other. Michael wondered whether he were specially privileged in being able to see through to a sister’s heart, whether other brothers went blindly on without an inkling that their sisters were loved. It was astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had stepped so far and so rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the risk of ridicule for proposing to a girl whose mother’s love for a friend of his own he had spent his life in guarding. Michael put out the lamp and, lighting a candle, went along the corridor to bed. From the far end he heard Stella’s voice calling to him and turned back to ask her what she wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and, in that dainty room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the soft candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet bow someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all her largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish and protect.

“Michael, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began, “and you mustn’t get cranky. I wish you wouldn’t bother so much about what you’re going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy.”

“I don’t really bother a great deal,” Michael assured her. “But I do feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a nobody.”

“The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and father,” said Stella.

“Yes, logically,” Michael agreed. “But I think father did feel the responsibility rather heavily, and it’s a sort of loyalty I have for him which makes me so determined to justify myself.”

That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compiègne in time to say goodbye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their own that magical corner of the world.

The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine weather came back. London welcomed their return with a gracious calm. The Thames was a sheet of trembling silver, and the distant roofs and spires and trees of the Surrey shore no more than breath upon a glass. In this luminous and immaterial city the house in Cheyne Walk stood out with the pleasant aspect of its demure reality, and Mrs. Fane like one of those clouded rose pastels on the walls of her room was to both of them after their absence from London herself for a while as they had known her in childhood.

“Dear children, how charming to see you looking so well. I’m not quite sure I like that very Scotch-looking skirt, darling Stella. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed yourselves together. Is it a heather mixture? And I was in France, too. But the trains are so oddly inconvenient. Mrs. Carruthers’ most interesting! I wish, darling Stella, you would take up Mental Science. Ah, but I forgot, you have your practicing.”

It was time to go up to Oxford after the few days that Stella and Michael spent in making arrangements for a series of Brahms recitals in one of the smaller concert halls. Alan met Michael on the platform at Paddington. This custom they had loyally kept up each term, although otherwise their paths seemed to be diverging.

“Good vac?” Michael asked.

“Oh, rather! I’ve been working at rather a tricky slow leg-break. Fifty-five wickets for 8·4 during the vac. Not bad for a dry summer. I was playing for the Tics most of the time. What did you do?”

Michael during the journey up talked mostly about Stella.