Plashers Mead Part 19

"I shall be glad to see Michael again," said Guy. "But I suppose I must not say anything about you. No, I won't talk about you. Oxford will be wonderfully quiet without undergraduates, and I shall have letters from you."

Mrs. Grey came out into the garden.

"Now, Guy, I think you ought to go. Because really the Rector is getting worried about you and Pauline."

"I'm going into Oxford, Mrs. Grey."

"Well, that is a charming idea--charming, yes."

"But I'll be back for Pauline's birthday."

"Charming--charming," Mrs. Grey still declared. "The Rector will have forgotten all about it by then."

So Guy left Pauline for a week, and perhaps for more than a week.

Margaret and Monica came home next day, and really, she thought, it was upsetting all the old ways of her life when she found herself not very much interested in what they had been doing. Miss Verney with her ecstatic praise of Guy was better company; but next morning her first love-letter arrived, and she could not resist peeping into it at breakfast.

99 ST. GILES, OXFORD, _April 18th_.

MY ADORED PAULINE,--It's really all I can do to stay in Oxford.

Even Fane seems dull, and though his rooms are jolly, I long for you.

Have I told you what you are to me? Have I once been able to tell you....

Ah, there were pages crammed full and full of words that she must read alone. She could not read them here with her mother and sisters looking at her over the table. She must read them high in her white fastness at the top of the house. There all the morning she sat, and when she had read of his love once, she read of it again and then again, and once again. How foolish her answering letter would be; how disappointed Guy would be; but since she had promised, she must write to him; and, sitting at her desk that was full of childish things, she curled herself over the note-paper.

MAY

A pleasant company of thoughts traveled with Guy and his bicycle on the road to Oxford. In this easy progress the material hindrances to marriage were not seeming very important, and as he thought of his love for Pauline it spread before him, untroublous like the road down which he was spinning before a light breeze. With so much to compensate for their brief parting it was impossible to feel depressed; and as Guy drew near the city he felt he was an undergraduate again; and when he greeted Michael Fane in St. Giles he could positively hear his own Oxford drawl again. It was really delightful to be sitting here in view of his old college; and when after lunch he and Michael started for Wytham woods, more and more Guy was in an Oxford dream and carrying off the fantastic notion of the Parna.s.sian academy with all the debonair confidence of his second year. Yet Guy knew that the scheme was absurd, and when Michael argued against it in his solemn way he found himself taking the other side from a mere undergraduate pleasure in argument. Indeed, Michael declared he had become a freshman since he went down, which made Guy stop dead, ankle-deep in kingcups, and laugh aloud for his youth, with hidden thoughts of Pauline to make him rejoice that he was young. He laughed again at Michael's seriousness and flung his scheme to the broad clouds, for on this generous day he and Pauline were enough, and neither anybody else's opinion nor anybody else's help was worth a second thought. The heartening warmth, however, did not last; and when towards evening the sun faded in a blanch of watery clouds with a cold wind for aftermath, Guy felt Michael might have been more sympathetic. Rather silently they walked back from G.o.dstow, with Pauline between them; so that, after all, Guy thought, Michael was still an undergraduate, whereas he had embarked upon life.

That night, however, when the curtains were drawn across Michael's bay window that overhung the whispering and ancient thoroughfare; when the fire burned high and the tobacco smoke clouded the glimmer of the books on the walls; when his chair creaked with that old Oxford creaking--Guy forgave Michael for any lack in his reception of the great plan. After all, he was writing to Pauline while his host was reading the Const.i.tutional History of England at a table littered with heavy volumes, on which he brooded like a melancholy spectator of ruins. He must not be hard on Michael, who had not yet touched life, when for himself the vision of Pauline was wreathing this old room with starry blooms of wild rose. The letter was finished, and Guy went out to drop it in the pillar-box. His old college brooded at him across the road; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter; to-night there would be rain; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter! The envelope, as it shuffled down into the letter-box, seemed to say "yes."

When Guy was back in the funny St. Giles room, he decided there was something rather finely ascetic about Michael seated there and reading imperturbably in the lamplight. His courteously fatigued manner was merely that of the idealist who had overreached himself; there was nothing bilious about him, not even so much cynicism as had slightly chilled Guy's own career at Oxford; rather did there emanate from Michael a kind of medieval steadfastness comparable only to those stone faces that look calmly down upon the transitory congregations of their church. Michael had this solemn presence that demanded an upward look, and once again an upward look, until without conversation the solemnity became a little disquieting. Guy felt bound to interrupt with light-hearted talk of his own that slow, still gaze across the lamps.h.i.+ne.

"Dash it, Michael! don't brood there like a Memento Mori. Put away Magna Charta and talk to me. You used to talk."

"_You_ talk, Guy. You've been living alone all this time. You must have a great deal to say."

So Guy flung theories of rhyme and meter to overwhelm Magna Charta; and, next day, he and Michael walked all over Oxford in the rain, he himself still talking. The day after there came with the sun a letter from Pauline which he took away with him to read in the garden of St. John's, leaving Michael to Magna Charta.

There was n.o.body on the lawn, and Guy sat down on a wooden seat in air that was faintly perfumed by the precocious blooms of a lilac breaking to this unusual warmth of April. Unopened the letter rested in his hand; for his name written in this girlish charactery took on the romantic look of a name in an old tale. A breathlessness was in the air, such as had brooded upon Pauline's first kiss; and Guy sat marmoreal and rapt in an ecstasy of antic.i.p.ation that he would never have from any other letter; so still he was that an alighting blackbird slipped over the gra.s.s almost to his feet before it realized the mistake and shrilled away on startled wings into the bushes behind. The trance of expectation was spoiled, and Guy with a sigh broke the envelope.

WYCHFORD RECTORY, OXON, _Wednesday_.

I am writing to you at my desk. I began this morning but it was time to go out when I began. Now it's after tea. Margaret came in just now and said I looked all crinkled up like a sh.e.l.l: it's because I simply don't know how to write to you. I have read your letter over and over again. I never thought there could be such a wonderful letter in the world. But I feel very sorry for poor Richard who can't write letters as exquisite as yours. I really feel miserable about him. And this letter to you makes me feel miserable because I can't write letters even as well as Richard.

Mother was glad you thought of going to Oxford because she says we are a great responsibility to her. Isn't she sweet? She really is, you know. So I talked to Father myself very seriously. I explained to him that I was quite old enough to know my own mind, and he listened to all the things I told him about you. He said he supposed it was innevitable, which looks very funny somehow. Are you laughing at my spelling? And then he said it was nothing to do with him. So of course I rushed off to Mother and told her and when you come back we are to be allowed to go out twice a week and in three more months we can be engaged properly. Are you happy?

Only, dear Guy, Mother doesn't want you to come back till my birthday. She thinks the idea of you and me will be better when Father has got an Iris lorti or some name like that. He has never had a flower of it before and he's so excited about it's coming out just when my birthday is. Every day he goes down and pinches the stalk of it. He says it's the loveliest flower in the world and grows on Mount Lebanon. So if it comes out on my birthday, you and I can certainly be engaged in August. Guy, I do hate my handwriting.

Your loving PAULINE.

It was a letter of gloriously good news, thought Guy, though he was a little disappointed not to have had the thrill of Pauline's endearment.

Then, on the blank outside page, he saw scrawled in writing that went tumbling head over heels down the paper: _My darling Guy, I love you and underneath I have kissed the letter for you._

The sentence died out in faint ink that seemed to show forth the whisper in which it had been written. For Guy the tumble-down letters were written in fire; and with the treasure in his heart of that small sentence, read a hundred times, he did not know how he should endure ten long days without Pauline, and in this old college garden, on this sedate and academic lawn, he cried out that he adored her as if indeed she were beside him in this laylocked air. At the sound of his voice the birds close at hand were all silent; they might have stopped to listen.

Then a green finch called, "Sweet! sweet!" whose gentle and persistent proclamation was presently echoed by all the other birds twittering together again in the confused raptures of their Spring.

The days with Michael at St. Giles went by slowly enough, and their fairness was a wasted boon. Guy wrote many long letters to Pauline and received from her another letter in which she began with "_My dearest_,"

as he had begged her. Yet when he read the herald vocative, he wished he had not tried to alter that old abrupt opening, for never again would she write in the faint ink of shyness such a sentence as had tumbled down the back of her first letter.

Michael seemed to divine that he was in love, and Guy wondered why he could not tell him about it. Once or twice he nearly brought himself to the point, but the thought of describing Pauline kept him mute; Michael must see her first. The canoe would be ready at the end of the week, and Guy announced he should paddle it up to Wychford, traveling from the Isis to the upper Thames, and from the upper Thames turning aside at Oldbridge to follow the romantic course of the Greenrush even to his own windows.

"Rather fun," said Michael, "if the weather stays all right."

"By Jove!" Guy exclaimed, "I believe it was at Oldbridge Inn that I first met you."

"On May Day three years ago," Michael agreed.

And, thought Guy, with a compa.s.sionate feeling for mere friends.h.i.+p, what a much more wonderful May Day should be this when Pauline was twenty.

There was now her birthday present to buy, and Guy set out on the quest of it with as much exaltation as Percival may have sought the Holy Grail. He wished it were a ring he could buy for her; and indeed ultimately he could not resist a crystal set on a thin gold circlet that she, his rose of girls, would wear like a dewdrop. This ring, however, could not be his formal gift, but it would have to be offered when they were alone, and it must be worn nowhere but in the secret country they haunted with their love. The ring, uncostly as it was, took nearly all Guy's spare money, and he decided to buy a book for her, because in Oxford bookshops he still had accounts running. The April afternoon wore away while in his own particular bookshop kept by Mr. Brough, an ancient man with a white beard, he took down from the shelves volume after volume. At last he found a small copy of Blake's Lyrics bound in faded apple-green calf and tooled in a golden design of birds, berries, and daisies. This must be for Pauline, he decided, since some one must have known the pattern of that nursery wall-paper and, loving it, have wished it to be recorded more endurably. What more exquisite coincidence could a.s.sure him that this book was meant for Pauline? Yet he was half jealous of the unknown designer who had thought of something of which himself might have thought. Oh yes, this must be for Pauline; and as Guy rescued it from the dust and darkness of the old shop he ascribed to the green volume an emotion of relief, and was half aware of promising to it a new and dearer owner who with cheris.h.i.+ng would atone for whatever misfortune had brought it to these gloomy shelves.

Next morning, when Guy was ready to start, Michael presented him with a glazier's diamond pencil.

"When you fall in love, Guy, this will serve to scribble sonnets to your lady on the lattices of Plashers Mead. I shall probably come there myself when term's over."

"I wish you'd come and live there with me," said Guy in a last effort to persuade Michael. "You see, if you shared the house it wouldn't cost so much."

"Perhaps I will," said Michael. "Who knows? I wonder what your Rectory people would think of me?"

"Oh, Pauline would like you. Pauline's the youngest, you know," added Guy. "And I'm pretty certain you'd like Monica."

Michael laughed.

"Really, Guy, I must tell them in Balliol that since you went down you've become an idle matchmaker. Good-by."

"Good-by. You're sure you won't mind the f.a.g of forwarding my bicycle?

I'll send you a post-card from Oldbridge."

Guy, although there was still more than a week before he would see Pauline, felt, as he hurried towards the boat-builder's moorings, that he would see her within an hour, such airy freedom did the realization of being on his way give to his limbs.

The journey to Wychford seemed effortless, for whatever the arduousness of a course steadily up-stream, it was nullified by the knowledge that every time the paddle was dipped into the water it brought him by his own action nearer to Pauline. A railway journey would have given him none of this endless antic.i.p.ation, traveling through what at this time of the year, before the season of boating, was a delicious solitude. Guy could sing all the way if he wished, for there was nothing but b.u.t.tercups and daisies, lambs and meadows and greening willows, to overlook his progress. He glided beneath ancient bridges and rested at ancient inns, nearer every night to Pauline. Scarcely had such days a perceptible flight, and were not May Morning marked in flame on his mind's calendar, he could have forgotten time in this slow, undated diminution.

"O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

Oh, stay and hear; your true love's coming, That can sing both high and low: Trip no further, pretty sweeting; Journeys end in lovers meeting, Every wise man's son doth know."

This was the song Guy flung before his prow to the vision of Pauline leading him.