Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 19

"But the small scale means just a pa.s.sive existence that hurts n.o.body 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 Const.i.tution, he told himself that even this cottage which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella's appeal to Raoul de Castera-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own personality had scarcely entered. Castera-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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sured her. "But I do feel a sort of responsibility for being a n.o.body, so very definitely a n.o.body."

"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 Compiegne in time to say good-bye, 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 sh.o.r.e no more than breath upon a gla.s.s. 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.

CHAPTER VII

VENNER'S

The most of Michael's friends had availed themselves of the right of seniority to move into more dignified rooms for their second year. These "extensions of premises," as Castleton called them, reached the limit of expansion in the case of Lonsdale who, after a year's residence in two small ground-floor rooms of St. Cuthbert's populous quad, had acquired the largest suite of three in Cloisters. Exalted by palatial ambitions, he spent the first week of term in b.u.t.tonholing people in the lodge, so that after whatever irrelevant piece of chatter he had seized upon as excuse he might wind up the conversation by observing nonchalantly:

"Oh, I say, have you chaps toddled round to my new rooms yet? Rather decent. I'm quite keen on them. I've got a dining-room now. Devilish convenient. Thought of asking old Wedders to lay in a stock of pictures.

It would buck him up rather."

"But why do you want these barracks?" Michael asked.

"Oh, binges," said Lonsdale. "We ought to be able to run some pretty useful binges here. Besides, I'm thinking of learning the bagpipes."

Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room in St. Cuthbert's tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous Templeton-Collins on Michael's staircase, and had brought back with him from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him. He had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their partic.i.p.ation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for himself alone. How intimate and personal that spa.r.s.e lunch laid for one on a large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset bookcase and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his pleasure! There was not now indeed a single book that did not recall the charmed idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there one volume that could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments eagerly expected all the day long.

It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds had proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the more wors.h.i.+pful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in some dead publis.h.i.+ng season more extravagant buyers had spent four or five times as much to partake of their acc.u.mulated facts and fortuitous ill.u.s.trations. With Michael the pa.s.sion for remainders was short-lived, and he soon pushed them ign.o.bly out of the way for the sake of those stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to mercantile elation and depression.

If among these amba.s.sadors of learning and literature was to be distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had been extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though enriched by the cla.s.sic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every night for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a world of polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual maladies and minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of talismans, to fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and strange influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so perilously that under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half contemptuous of thought less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the present danced by in thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather perceived as bloodless and irresolute ephemerides. When people reproached him for his willful prejudice, he pointed out how easy it would always be to overtake the ideas of the present and how much waste of intellectual breath would be avoided by letting his three or four Oxford years account for the most immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed to him to provide an opportunity, and more than an opportunity--an inexpugnable command to wave with most reluctant hands farewell to the backward of time, around whose brink rose up more truthful dreams than those that floated indeterminate, beckoning through the mist across the wan mountains of the future.

On the walls Michael's pictures had been collected to achieve through another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams behind; and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he sought in a picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room. One hour of the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always transform the pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some diagrammatic significance.

Apart from the acc.u.mulation of books and pictures, he had changed the room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers, chairs and tables, all preserved the character of the room itself as something that existed outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient inhabitants who read and laughed and ate and talked for so comparatively fleeting a s.p.a.ce of time between its four walls. With all that he had imposed of what in the opinion of his contemporaries were eccentricities of adornment, the rooms remained, as he would observe to any critic, essentially the same as his own. Instead of college groups which marked merely by the height of the individual's waistcoat-opening the almost intolerable fugacity of their record, there were Leonardo and Blake and Frederick Walker to preserve the illusion of permanence, or at least of continuity. Instead of the bleached and desiccated ribs of momentarily current magazines cast away in sepulchral indignity, there were a hundred quartos whose calf bindings had the durableness and sober depth of walnut furniture, furniture, moreover, that was still in use.

Yet it was in Venner's office where Michael found the perfect fruit of time's infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his own rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present of finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of those moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through situations or persons or places, the a.s.surance of immortality. Great pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always remain as the most obvious pledge of man's spiritual potentiality, but these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke of seeing G.o.d's forehead pressed against the window panes, could believe that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had struggled in the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable. To him Blake seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to attempt the recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith. Every other writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur. Most people, seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would obtain the finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight of St.

Mary's tower against a green April afterglow, or of the moon-parched High Street in frost. Michael, however, found in Venner's office, just as he had found in that old print of St. Mary's tower rather than in the tower itself, the innermost shrine of Oxford, the profoundest revelation of the s.h.i.+ning truth round which the mysterious material of Oxford had grown through the Middle Ages.

Michael with others of his year had during the summer term ventured several times into Venner's, but the entrance of even a comparatively obscure senior had always driven them out. They had not yet enjoyed the atmosphere of security without which a club unlike an orchard never tastes sweet. Now, with the presence of a new year's freshmen and with the lords.h.i.+p of the college in their own hands, since to the out-of-college men age with merciless finger seemed already to be beckoning, Michael and his contemporaries in their pride of prime marched into Venner's after hall and drank their coffee.

Venner's office was one of the small ground-floor rooms in Cloisters, but it had long ago been converted to the present use. An inner storeroom, to which Venner always retired to make a cup of squash or to open a bottle of whisky, had once been the bedroom. The office itself was not luxuriously furnished, and the accommodation was small. A window-seat with a view of the college kitchens, a square table, and a couple of Windsor chairs were considered enough for the men who frequented Venner's every night after hall, and who on Sunday nights after wine in J.C.R. cl.u.s.tered there like a swarm of bees. Venner's own high chair stood far back in the corner behind his high sloping desk on which, always spread open, lay the great ledger of J.C.R. accounts. On the shelves above were the account books of bygone years in which were indelibly recorded the extravagances of more than thirty years of St.

Mary's men. Over the fireplace was a gilt mirror of Victorian design stuck round with the fixture cards of the university and the college, with notices of grinds and musical clubs and debating societies; in fact, with all the printed petty news of Oxford. A few photographs of winning crews, a book-case with stores of college stationery, a Chippendale sideboard with a gla.s.s case of priced cigars on top, and an interesting drawerful of Venner's relics above the varnished wainscot completed the furniture. The wall-paper was of that indefinite brownish yellow which one finds in the rooms of old-fas.h.i.+oned solicitors, and of that curious oily texture which seems to produce an impression of great age and at the same time of perfect modernity.

Yet the office itself, haunted though it was by the acc.u.mulated personalities of every generation at St. Mary's, would scarcely have possessed the magical effect of fusion which it did possess, had not all these personalities endured in a perpetual present through the conservative force of Venner himself. John Venables had been Steward of the Junior Common Room for thirty-three years, but he seemed to all these young men that came within the fragrancy of his charm to be as much an intrinsic part of the college as the tower itself. The moon-faced Warden, the dry-voiced dons, the deer park, the elms, the ancient doors and traceries, the lawns and narrow entries, the groinings and the lattices, were all subordinate in the estimation of the undergraduates to Venner. He knew the inner history of every rag; he realized why each man was popular or unpopular or merely ignored; he was a treasure-house of wise counsel and kindly advice; he held the keys of every heart. He was an old man with florid, clean-shaven face, a pair of benignant eyes intensely blue, a rounded nose, a gentle voice and most inimitable laugh. Something there was in him of the old family butler, a little more of the yeoman-farmer, a trace of the head game-keeper, a suspicion of the trainer of horses, but all these elements were blended to produce the effect of someone wise and saintly and simple who could trouble himself to heal the lightest wounds and could rouse with a look or a gesture undying affection.

With such a tutelary spirit, it was not surprising the freedom of Venner's should have been esteemed a privilege that could only be conferred by the user's consciousness of his own right. There was no formal election to Venner's: there simply happened a moment when the St.

Mary's man entered unembarra.s.sed that mellow office and basked in that sunny effluence. In this ripe old room, generous and dry as sherry wine, how pleasant it was to sit and listen to Venner's ripe old stories: how amazingly important seemed the trivial gossip of the college in this historic atmosphere: how much time was apparently wasted here between eight and ten at night, and what a thrill it always was to come into college about half-past nine of a murky evening and stroll round Cloisters to see if there was anybody in Venner's. It could after all scarcely be accounted a waste of time to sit and slowly mature in Venner's, and sometimes about half-past nine the old man would be alone, the fire would be dying down and during the half-hour that remained of his duty, it would be possible to peel a large apple very slowly and extract from him more of the essence of social history than could be gained from a term's reading of great historians even with all the extra lucidity imparted by a course of Mr. So-and-So's lectures.

Michael found that Venner summed up clearly for him all his own tentative essays to grasp the meaning of life. He perceived in him the finest reaction to the prejudice and n.o.bility, the efficiency and folly of aristocratic thought. He found in him the ideal realization of his own most cherished opinions. England, and all that was most inexplicable in the spirit of England, was expressed by Venner. He was a landscape, a piece of architecture, a simple poem of England. One of Venner's applauded tricks was to attach a piece of string to the tongs for a listener to hold to his ears, while Venner struck the tongs with the poker and evoked the sound of St. Mary's chimes. But the poker and tongs were unnecessary, for in Venner's own voice was the sound of all the bells in England. Communion with this gracious, this tranquil, this mellow presence affected Michael with a sense of the calm certainty of his own life. It lulled all the discontent and all the unrest. It indicated for the remainder of his Oxford time a path which, if it did not lead to any outburst of existence, was at least a straight path, green bordered and gay with birdsong, with here and there a sight of ancient towers and faiths, and here and there an arbor in which he and his friends could sit and talk of their hopes.

"Venner," said Lonsdale one evening, "do you remember the Bishop of Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac."

"Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow," Venner began, full of reminiscence. "But we'll look him up."

Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed for the criticism of his irreverent successors.

"There you are," chuckled Venner triumphantly. "What did I say? One dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for there's another half dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop--Stebbing he was then. He put a cod-fish in the Dean's bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about it!

The old Warden kicked up such a fuss."

And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided from anecdote to anecdote of episcopal youth.

"I thought the old boy liked the governor's port," laughed Lonsdale.

"'What a pity everybody can't drink in moderation,' said Gaiters. Next time he c.o.c.ks his wicked old eye at me, I shall ask him about that cod-fish."

"What's this they tell me about your bringing out a magazine?" Venner inquired, turning to Maurice Avery.

"Out next week, Venner," Maurice announced importantly.