Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 40

He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather particularly good.

CHAPTER XV

THE LAST TERM

Michael meant to attend the celebration of May Morning on St. Mary's tower, but when the moment came it was so difficult to get out of bed that he was not seen in the sun's eye. This lapse of enthusiasm saddened him rather. It seemed to conjure a little cruelly the vision of speeding youth.

The last summer-term was a period of tension. Michael found that notwithstanding his vow of idleness the sight of the diligence of the other men in view of Schools impelled him also to labor feverishly. He was angry with himself for his weakness, and indeed tried once or twice to join on the river the careless parties of juniors, but it was no good. The insistent Schools forbade all pleasure, and these leafy days were spent hour after hour of them at his table. Eights Week came round, and though the college went head of the river, for Michael the achievement was merely a stroke of irony. For three years he and his friends, most of whom were now fled, had waited for this moment, had counted upon this b.u.mp-supper, had planned a hundred diversions for this happy date. Michael now must attend without the majority of them, and he went in rather a critical frame of mind, for though to be sure Tommy Grainger was drunk in honor of his glorious captaincy, it was not the b.u.mp-supper of his dreams. Victory had come too late.

Tired of the howling and the horse-play, tired of the fretful fireworks, he turned into Venner's just before ten o'clock.

"Why aren't you with your friends, making a noise?" asked Venner.

"Ought to go home and work," Michael explained.

"But surely you can take one night off. You used always to be well to the fore on these occasions."

"Don't feel like it, Venner."

"You mustn't work too hard, you know," said the old man, blinking kindly at him.

"Oh, it's not work, Venner. It's age."

"Why, what a thing to say. Hark! They're having a rare time to-night. I don't expect the dons'll say much. They expect a bit of noise after a b.u.mp-supper. Why ever don't you go out and do your share?"

Venner was ready to go home, and Michael leaving the little office in his company paused irresolutely in Cloisters for a moment. It was no good. He could not bring himself to be flung into that vortex of ululation. He turned away from its direction and walked with Venner to the lodge.

"Don't forget to mark me down as out of college, Shadbolt," he warned the porter. "I don't want to be hauled to-morrow morning for damage done in my absence."

The porter held up his hand in unctuous deprecation.

"There is no fear of my making a mistake, Mr. Fane. I was observing your egress, sir," he said pompously, "and had it registered in my book before you spoke."

Shadbolt unlocked the door for Michael and Venner to pa.s.s out into the High. Michael walked with Venner as far as St. Mary's bridge, and when the old man had said good night and departed on his way home, he stood for a while watching the tower in the May moonlight. He could hear the shouts of those doing honor to the prowess of the Eight. From time to time the sky was stained with blue and green and red from the Roman candles. To himself standing here now he seemed as remote from it all as the townsfolk loitering on the bridge in the balmy night air to listen to the fun. Already, thought Michael, he was one of the people, small as emmets, swarming at the base of this slim and lovely tower. He regretted sharply now that he had not once more, even from distant St. Giles, roused himself to salute from the throbbing summit May Morning. It was melancholy to stand here within the rumor of the communal joy, but outside its partic.i.p.ation; and presently he started to walk quickly back to his digs, telling himself with dreadful warning as he went that before Schools now remained scarcely more than a week.

Alan was in a condition of much greater anxiety even than Michael.

Michael had nothing much beyond a moral pact with the college authorities to make him covet a good cla.s.s: to Alan it was more important, especially as he had given up the Sudan and was intending to try for the Home Civil Service.

"However, I've given up thinking of a First, and if I can squeeze a Second, I shall be jolly grateful," he told Michael.

The day of Schools arrived. The Chief Examiner had caused word to be sent round that he would insist on the rigor of the law about black clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before, spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever, and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.

This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine autumn day.

It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of Oxford dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew Arnold had said she did not need June for beauty's heightening. That was true. Her beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with all the grave consciousness of an una.s.sertive renown. Michael dreaded more the loss of this infoliated calm than of any of the people who were enjoying its amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that next year would not form themselves, that forever indeed would be irremediably dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members scattered did not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that next year himself would have lost the a.s.surance that he was an organic part of this tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was already broken up: the end of the third year had effected that. This farewell to Oxford herself was harder, and Michael wished that from the very first moment of his arrival he had concentrated upon the object of a Fellows.h.i.+p. Such a life would have suited him well. He would not have withered like so many dons: he would each year have renewed his youth in the stream of freshmen. He would have been sympathetic, receptive, and worldly enough not to be despised by each generation in its course. Now, since he had not aimed at such a career, he must go. The weather opulently fine mocked his exit.

Michael and Alan had decided to stay up for Commemoration. Stella and Mrs. Fane had been invited: Lonsdale and Wedderburn were coming up: Maurice was bringing his mother and sisters. For a brief carnival they would all be reunited, and rooms would be echoing to the voices of their rightful owners. Yet after all it would be but a pretense of reviving their merry society. It was not a genuine reunion this, that was requiring women to justify it. Oxford, as Michael esteemed her, was already out of his reach. She would be symbolized in the future by these rooms at 99 St. Giles, and Michael made up his mind that no intrusion of women should spoil for him their monastic a.s.sociations. He would stay here until the last day, and for Commemoration he would try to borrow his old rooms in college, thus fading from this wide thoroughfare without a formal leave-taking. He would drop astern from the bay-window whence for a time he had watched the wrack and spume of the world drifting toward the horizon in its wake. Himself would recede so with the world, and without him the bay-window would hold a tranquil course, unrocked by the loss or gain of him or the transient voyagers of each new generation. Very few eves and sunsets were still his to enjoy from this window-seat. Already the books were being stacked in preparation for their removal to the studio at 173 Cheyne Walk. Dusty and derelict belongings of him and Alan were already strewn about the landings outside their bedrooms. Even the golf-bag of Alan's first term, woolly now with the acc.u.mulated mildew of neglect, had been dragged from its obscurity. Perhaps it would be impossible to drop astern as imperceptibly as he would have liked. Too many reminders of departure littered the rooms with their foreboding of finality.

"I'm sh.o.r.e I for one am quite sorry you're going," said the landlady. "I never wish to have a nicer norer quieter pair of gentlemen. It's to be hoped, I'm sh.o.r.e, that next term's comings-ins from St. John's will be half as nice. Yerse, I shall be very pleased to have these coverlets--I suppose you would call them coverlets--and you're leaving the shelves in the dining-room? Yerse, I'm sh.o.r.e they'll be as handy as anything for the cruets and what not. And so you're going to have a dinner here to eleven gentlemen--oh, eleven in all, yerse, I see."

It was going to be rather difficult, Michael thought, to find exactly the ten people he wished to invite to this last terminal dinner. Alan, Grainger, and Castleton, of course. Bill Mowbray and Vernon Townsend.

And Smithers. Certainly, he would ask Smithers. And why not George Appleby, who was Librarian of the Union this term, and no longer conceivable as that lackadaisical red rag which had fluttered Lonsdale to fury? What about the Dean? And if the Dean, why not Harbottle, his History tutor? And for the tenth place? It was really impossible to choose from the dozen or so acquaintances who had an equal claim upon it. He would leave the tenth place vacant, and just to amuse his own fancy he would fill it with the ghost of himself in the December of his first term.

Michael, when he saw his guests gathered in the sea-green dining-room of 99 St. Giles, knew that this last terminal dinner was an anachronism.

After all, the prime and bloom of these eclectic entertainments had been in the two previous years. This was not the intimate and unusual society he had designed to gather round him as representative of his four years at the Varsity. This was merely representative of the tragical incompleteness of Oxford. It was certainly a very urbane evening, but it was somehow not particularly distinctive of Oxford, still less of Michael's existence there. Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite the two dons. Perhaps everyone was tired under the strain of Schools.

Michael was glad when the guests went and he sat alone in the window-seat with Alan.

"To-morrow, my mother and Stella are coming up," he reminded Alan. "It's rather curious my mother shouldn't have been up all the time, until I'm really down."

"Is that man Avery coming up?" Alan asked.

Michael nodded.

"I suppose your people see a good deal of him now he's in town," said Alan, trying to look indifferent to the answer.

"Less than before he went," said Michael. "Stella's rather off studios and the Vie de Boheme."

"Oh, he has a studio?"

"Didn't you know?"

"I don't take very much interest in his movements," Alan loftily explained.

They smoked on for a while without speaking.

"I must go to bed," announced Alan at last.

"Not yet, not yet," Michael urged him. "I don't think you've quite realized that this is our last night in Ninety-nine."

"I've settled to stay on here during Commem Week," said Alan. "Your people are staying at the Randolph?"

Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan could really have been so far-sighted as to stay on in St. Giles for the sake of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and Stella home.

"But why aren't you going into college?" he asked.

"Oh, I thought it would be rather a f.a.g moving in for so short a time.

Besides, it's been rather ripping in these digs."

Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental enough to dread on Alan's side a grudging a.s.sent to his enthusiasm.

"Yes, it has been awfully ripping," he agreed.

"I should like to have had another year," sighed Alan. "I think I was just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder how much of it is really applicable?"

"To what? To G.o.d?" asked Michael.