Sinister Street · Book III · Chapter 3 10 (1/2)

X

Stella in Oxford

Alan, when he met Michael at Paddington, was a great deal more cheerful than when they had gone up together for the previous term. He had managed to achieve a second class in Moderations, and he had now in view a term of cricket whose energy might fortunately be crowned with a blue. Far enough away now seemed Greats and not very alarming Plato and Aristotle at these first tentative encounters.

Michael dined with Alan at Christ Church after the Seniors’ match, in which his host had secured in the second innings four wickets at a reasonable price. Alan casually nodded to one or two fellow hosts at the guest table, but did not offer to introduce Michael. All down the hall, men were coming in to dinner and going out of dinner as unconcernedly as if it had been the dining-saloon of a large hotel.

“Who is that man just sitting down?” Michael would ask.

“I don’t know,” Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest the implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to be aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.

“Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in Peck?” asked one of the Christ Church hosts.

“No, really?” answered Alan indifferently.

After hall as they walked back to Meadows’, Michael tried to point out to him that the St. Mary’s method of dining in hall was superior to that of the House.

“The dinner itself is better,” Alan admitted. “But I hate your system of all getting up from table at the same time. It’s like school.”

“But if a guest comes to St. Mary’s he sits at his host’s regular table. He’s introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you’d had another guest tonight, you wouldn’t even have introduced me to him. He and I would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of dummies.”

“Rot!” said Alan. “And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening? All the men at the guests’ table were absolute ticks.”

“I’ve never met a House man who didn’t think every other House man impossible outside the four people in his own set,” retorted Michael. “And yet, I suppose, you’ll say it’s the best college?”

“Of course,” Alan agreed.

Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day’s reluctant death, while the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul’s Awakening faintly kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.

“Will you have a meringue?” Alan asked. “I expect there’s one in the cupboard.”

“I’m sure there is,” said Michael. “It’s very unlikely that there is a single cupboard in the House without a meringue. But no, thanks, all the same.”

They forsook the window-seat and pulled wicker-chairs very near to the tobacco-jar squatting upon the floor between them: they lit their pipes and sipped their coffee. For Alan the glories of the day floated before him in the smoke.

“It’s a pity,” he said, “Sterne missed that catch in the slips. Though of course I wasn’t bowling for the slips. Five for forty-eight would have looked pretty well. Still four for forty-eight isn’t so bad in an innings of 287. The point is whether they can afford to give a place to another bowler who’s no earthly use as a bat. It seems a bit of a tail. I went in eighth wicket both innings. Two⁠—first knock. Blob⁠—second. Still four for forty-eight was certainly the best. I ought to play in the first trial match.” So Alan voiced his hopes.

“Of course you will,” said Michael. “And at Lord’s. I think I shall ask my mother and sister up for Eights,” he added.

Alan looked rather disconcerted.

“What’s the matter?” Michael asked. “You won’t have to worry about them. I’ll explain you’re busy with cricket. Stella inquired after you in a letter this week.”

During the Easter vacation Alan had stayed once or twice in Cheyne Walk, and Stella who had come back from an arduous time with music and musical people in Germany had seemed to take a slightly sharper interest in his existence.

“Give her my⁠—er⁠—love, when you write,” said Alan very nonchalantly. “And I don’t think I’d say anything about those four wickets for forty-eight. I don’t fancy she’s very keen on cricket. It might bore her.”

No more was said about Stella that evening, and nothing indeed was said about anything except the seven or eight men competing for the three vacancies in the Varsity eleven. At about a quarter to ten Alan announced as usual that “those men will be coming down soon for cocoa.”

“Alan, who are these mysterious creatures that come down for cocoa at ten?” asked Michael. “And why am I never allowed to meet them?”

“They’d bore you rather,” said Alan. “They’re people who live on this staircase. I don’t see them any other time.”

Michael thought Alan would be embarrassed if he insisted on staying, so to his friend’s evident relief he got up to go.

“You House men are like a lot of old bachelors with your fads and regularities,” he grumbled.

“Stay, if you like,” said Alan, not very heartily. “But I warn you they’re all awfully dull, and I’ve made a rule to go to bed at half-past ten this term.”

“So long,” said Michael hurriedly, and vanished.

A few days later Michael had an answer from his mother to his invitation for Eights Week:

My dearest Michael,

I wish you’d asked me sooner. Now I have made arrangements to help at the Italian Peasant Jewelry Stall in this big bazaar at Westminster Hall for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Agricultural Laborers all over the world. I think you’d be interested. It’s all about handicrafts. Weren’t you reading a book by William Morris the other day? His name is mentioned a great deal always. I’ve been meeting so many interesting people. If Stella comes, why not ask Mrs. Ross to chaperone her? Such a capital idea. And do be nice about poor Dick Prescott. Stella is so young and impulsive. I wish she could understand how much much happier she would be married to a nice man, even though he may be a little older than herself. This tearing all over Europe cannot be good for her. And now she talks of going to Vienna and studying under somebody with a perfectly impossible name beginning with L. Not only that, but she also talks of unlearning all she has learned and beginning all over again. This is most absurd, and I’ve tried to explain to her. She should have thought of this man beginning with L before. At her age to start scales and exercises again does seem ridiculous. I really dread Stella’s coming of age. Who knows what she may not take it into her head to do? I can’t think where she gets this curious vein of eccentricity. I’ll write to Mrs. Ross if you like. Stella, of course, says she can go to Oxford by herself, but that I will not hear of, and I beg you not to encourage the idea, if she suggests it to you.

Michael thought Mrs. Ross would solve the difficulty, and he was glad rather to relieve himself of the responsibility of his mother at Oxford. He would have had to be so steadily informative, and she would never have listened to a word. Stella’s view of the visit came soon after her mother’s.

Dear M.,

What’s all this about Mrs. Ross chaperoning me at Oxford? Is it necessary? At a shot I said to mother, “No, quite unnecessary.” But of course, if I should disgrace you by coming alone, I won’t. Isn’t Mrs. Ross a little on the heavy side? I mean, wouldn’t she rather object to me smoking cigars?

“Great scott!” interjaculated Michael.

I’m going to Vienna soon to begin music all over again, so be very charming to your only sister,

Michael agreed with his mother in thinking a chaperone was absolutely necessary for Stella’s visit to Oxford, and since the threat of cigars he cordially approved of the suggestion that Mrs. Ross should come. Moreover, he felt his former governess would approve of his own attitude toward Oxford, and he rather looked forward to demonstrating it to her. In the full-blooded asceticism of Oxford Michael censured his own behavior when he was seventeen and looked back with some dismay on the view of himself at that time as it appeared to him now. He was as much shocked by that period now as at school in his fifteenth year he had been shocked by the memory of the two horrid little girls at Eastbourne. Altogether this invitation seemed an admirable occasion to open the door once again to Mrs. Ross and to let her personality enter his mind as the sane adjudicator of whatever problems should soon present themselves. It would be jolly for Alan, too, if his aunt came up and saw him playing for the Varsity in whatever cricket match was provided to relieve the tedium of too much rowing.

So finally, after one or two more protests from Stella, it was arranged that she should come up for Eights Week under the guardianship of Mrs. Ross.

Michael took care some time beforehand to incorporate a body of assistant entertainers. Lonsdale in consideration of Michael having helped him with his people for one day last year was engaged for the whole visit. Maurice was made to vow attendance for at least every other occasion. Wedderburn volunteered his services. Guy Hazlewood, who was threatened with Schools, was let off with a lunch. Nigel Stewart spoke mysteriously of a girl whose advent he expected on which account he could not pledge himself too straightly. Rooms were taken in the High. Trains were looked out. On Saturday morning Lonsdale and Michael went down to the station to meet Mrs. Ross and Stella.

“I think it was a very bad move bringing me,” said Lonsdale, as they waited on the platform. “Your sister will probably think me an awful ass, and⁠ ⁠…”

But the train interrupted Lonsdale’s self-depreciation, and he sustained himself well through the crisis of the introductions. Michael thought Mrs. Ross had never so well been suited by her background as now when tall and straight and in close-fitting gray dress she stood in the Oxford sunlight. Stella, too, in that flowered muslin relieved Michael instantly of the faint anxiety he had conceived lest she might appear in a Munich garb unbecoming to a reserved landscape. It was a very peculiarly feminine dress, but somehow she had never looked more like a boy, and her gray eyes, as for one moment she let them rest wide open on the city’s towers and spires, were more than usually gray and pellucid.

“I say, I ordered a car to meet us,” said Lonsdale. “I thought we should buzz along quicker.”

“What you really thought,” said Michael, “was that you would have to drive my sister in a hansom.”

“Oh, no, I say, really,” protested Lonsdale.

“I’m much more frightened of you than you could ever be of me,” Stella declared.

“Oh no, I say, really, are you? But I’m an awful ass, Miss Fane,” said Lonsdale encouragingly. “Hallo, here’s the jolly old car.”

As they drove past the castle, Lonsdale informed Stella it was the county gaol, and when they reached the gaol he told her it was probably Worcester College, or more familiarly Wuggins.

“You’ll only have to tell her that All Souls is the County Asylum and that Queens is a marmalade factory, and she’ll have a pretty good notion of the main points of interest in the neighborhood,” said Michael.

“He always rags me,” explained Lonsdale, smiling confidentially round at the visitors. “I say, isn’t Alan Merivale your nephew?” he asked Mrs. Ross. “He’s playing for the Varsity against Surrey. Sent down some very hot stuff yesterday. We ought to buzz round to the Parks after lunch and watch the game for a bit.”

Wedderburn, who had been superintending the preparations for lunch, met them in the lodge with a profound welcome, having managed to put at least twenty years on to his age. Lunch had been laid in Lonsdale’s rooms, since he was one of the few men in college who possessed a dining-room in addition to a sitting-room. Yet, notwithstanding that Michael had invited the guests and that they were lunching in Lonsdale’s rooms, to Wedderburn by all was the leadership immediately accorded.

The changeless lunch of Eights Week with its salmon mayonnaise and cold chicken and glimpses through the windows of pink and blue dresses going to and fro across the green quadrangles, with its laughter and talk and speculations upon the weather, with its overheated scout and scent of lilac and hawthorn, went its course: as fugitive a piece of mirthfulness as the dance of the mayflies over the Cher.

After lunch they walked to the Parks to watch Alan playing for the Varsity. Wedderburn, who with people to entertain feared nothing and nobody, actually went coolly into the pavilion and fetched out Alan who was already in pads, waiting to go in. Michael watched very carefully Alan’s meeting with Stella, watched Alan’s face fall when he saw her beside Maurice and marked how nervously he fidgeted with his gloves. There was a broken click from the field of play. It was time for Alan to go in. Michael wished very earnestly he could score a brilliant century so that Stella hearing the applause could realize how much there was in him to admire. Yet ruefully he admitted to himself the improbability of Stella realizing anything at all about the importance of cricket. However, he had scarcely done with his wishing, when he saw Alan coming gloomily back from the wicket, clean bowled by the very first ball he had received.

“Of course, you know, he isn’t played for his batting,” he hastened to explain to Stella.

She, however, was too deeply engaged in discussing Vienna with Maurice to pay much attention, even when Alan sat down despondently beside them, unbuckling his pads. It was just as Michael had feared, fond though he was of Maurice.

The last Varsity player was soon out, and Wedderburn proposed an early tea in his rooms to be followed by the river. Turning into Holywell, they met Guy Hazlewood, who said without waiting to be introduced to Mrs. Ross and Stella:

“My dear people, I fall upon your necks. Suggest something for me to do that for one day and one night will let me entirely forget Schools. We can’t bear our digs any longer.”

“Why don’t you give a party there on Monday night,” suggested Wedderburn deeply.

“Let me introduce you to Mrs.’sss⁠ ⁠… my sissss⁠ ⁠… Mr. H’wood,” mumbled Michael in explanation of Wedderburn’s proposal.

“What a charming idea,” drawled Guy. “But isn’t it rather a shame to ask Miss Fane to play? Anyway, I daren’t.”

“Oh, no,” said Stella. “I should rather like to play in Oxford.”

So after a kaleidoscope of racing and a Sunday picnic on the upper river, when everybody ate as chickens drink with a pensive upward glance at the trend of the clouds, occurred Guy Hazlewood’s party in Holywell, which might more truly have been called Wedderburn’s party, since he at once assumed all responsibility for it.

The digs were much more crowded than anybody had expected, chiefly on account of the Balliol men invited.

“Half Basutoland seems to be here,” Lonsdale whispered to Michael.

“Well, with Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther, all sons of Belial, what else can you expect?” replied Michael.

Stella had seemed likely at first to give the favor of her attention more to Hazlewood than to anybody else, but Maurice was in a dauntless mood and, with Guy handicapped by having to pretend to assent to Wedderburn’s suggestions for entertainment, he managed at last to monopolize Stella almost entirely. Alan had declined the invitation with the excuse of wanting a steady hand and eye for tomorrow. But Michael fancied there was another reason.

Stella played three times and was much applauded.

“Very sporting effort, by Jove,” said Lonsdale, and this was probably the motive of most of the commendation, though there was a group of really musical people in the darkest corner who emerged between each occasion and condoled with Michael on having to hear his sister play in such inadequate surroundings.