Sinister Street

Michael listened vaguely to Lonsdale's babble. He was watching the pa.s.sage of the cigars and cigarettes down the table. Thank heaven, Stella had let the cigars go by.

The party of 196 Holywell broke up. Outside in the shadowy street of gables they stood laughing and talking for a moment. Guy Hazlewood, Comeragh and Anstruther looked down from the windows at their parting guests.

"It's been awfully ripping," these murmured to their hosts. The hosts beamed down.

"We've been awfully bucked up by everything. Special vote of thanks to Miss Fane."

"You ought all to get Firsts now," said Wedderburn.

Then he and Lonsdale and Michael and Maurice set off with Stella and Mrs. Ross to the High Street rooms. In different directions the rest of the party vanished on echoing footsteps into the moon-bright s.p.a.ces, into the dark and narrow entries. Voices faint and silvery rippled along the spell-bound airs of the May night. The echoing footsteps died out to whispers. There was a whizzing of innumerable clocks, and midnight began to clang.

"We must hurry," said the escort, and they ran off down the High toward St. Mary's, reaching the lodge on the final stroke.

"Shall I come up to your rooms for a bit?" Maurice suggested to Michael.

"I'm rather tired," objected Michael, who divined that Maurice was going to talk at great length about Stella.

He was too jealous of Alan's absence that evening to want to hear Maurice's facile enthusiasm.

CHAPTER XI

SYMPATHY

Mrs. Ross and Stella left Oxford two days after the party, and Michael was really glad to be relieved of the dread that Stella in order to a.s.sert her independence of personality would try to smash the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on and dint the mold of form. Really he thought the two occasions during her visit on which he liked her best and admired her most were when she was standing on the station platform. Here she was expressed by that city of spires confusing with added beauty that clear sky of Summer. Here, too, her personality seemed to add an appropriate foreground to the scene, to promise the interpretation that her music would give, a promise, however, that Michael felt she had somehow belied.

Alan dropped out of the Varsity Eleven the following week, and he was in a very gloomy mood when Michael paid him a visit of condolence.

"These hard wickets have finished me off," he sighed. "I shall take up golf, I think."

The bag of clubs he had brought up on his first day was lying covered with gray fluff under the bed.

"Oh, no, don't play golf," protested Michael, "you've got two more years to get your Blue and all your life to play golf, which is a rotten game and has ruined Varsity cricket."

"But one can be alone at golf," said Alan.

"Alone?" repeated Michael. "Why on earth should you want to play an outdoor game alone?"

"Because I get depressed sometimes," Alan explained. "What good am I?"

Michael began to laugh.

"It's nothing to laugh at," said Alan sadly. "I've been thinking of my future. I shall never have enough money to marry. I shall never get my Blue. I shall get a fourth in Greats. Perhaps I shan't even get into the Egyptian Civil Service. I expect I shall end as a bank clerk. Playing cricket for a suburban club on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. That's all I see before me. When is Stella going to Vienna?"

"I don't know that she is going," said Michael. "She always talks a great deal about things which don't always come off."

"I was rather surprised she seemed to like that man Avery so much," Alan said. "But I suppose he pretended to know an awful lot about music. I don't think I care for him."

"Some people don't," Michael admitted. "I think women always like him, though."

"Yes, I should think they did," Alan agreed bitterly. "Sorry I'm so depressing. Have a meringue or something."

"Alan, why, are you in love with Stella?" Michael challenged.

"What made you think I was?" countered Alan, looking alarmed.

"It's pretty obvious," Michael

"A good many have?" asked Alan, and his blue eyes were sharpened by a pain deeper than that of seeing a catch in the slips missed off his bowling.

Michael nodded.

"Oh, I've realized for a long time how utterly hopeless it was for me,"

Alan sighed. "I'm evidently going to be a failure."

"Would you care for some advice?" inquired Michael very tentatively.

"What sort of advice?" Alan asked.

Michael took this for a.s.sent, and plunged in.

"Let her alone," he adjured his friend. "Let her absolutely alone. She's very young, you know, and you're not very old. Let her alone for at least a year. I suggest two years. Don't see much of her, and don't let her think you care. That would interest her for a week, and really, Alan, it's not good for Stella to think that everybody falls in love with her. I don't mind about Maurice. It would do him good to be turned down."

"Would he be?" demanded Alan gloomily.

"Of course, of course... it seems funny to be talking to you about love... you used to be so very scornful about it.... I expect you know you'll fall in love pretty deeply now.... Alan, I'm frightfully keen you should marry Stella. But let her alone. Don't let her interfere with your cricket. Don't take up golf on account of her."

Michael was so much in earnest with his exhortation to Alan that he picked up a meringue and was involved in the difficulties of eating it before he was aware he was doing so. Alan began to laugh, and the heavy airs of disappointment and hopelessness were lightened.

"It's funny," said Michael, "that I should have an opportunity now of talking to you about love and cricket."

"Funny?" Alan repeated.

"Don't you remember three years ago on the river one night how I wished you would fall in love, and you said something about it being bad for cricket?"

"I believe I do remember vaguely," said Alan.

Michael saw that after the explanation of his depression he wanted to let the subject drop, and since that was the very advice he had conferred upon Alan, he felt it would be unfair to tempt him to elaborate this depression merely to gratify his own pleasure in the retrospect of emotion. So Stella was not discussed again for a long while, and as she did after all go to Vienna to study a new technique, the abstention was not difficult. Michael was glad, since he had foreseen the possibility of a complication raveled by Maurice. Her departure straightened this out, for Maurice was not inclined to gather strength from absence. Other problems more delicate of adjustment even than Stella began to arise, problems connected with the social aspects of next term.

Alan would still be in college. Scholars at Christ Church were allowed sometimes to spend even the whole of their four years in college.

Michael tried in vain to persuade him to ask leave to go into digs. Alan offered his fourth year to companions.h.i.+p with Michael, but nothing would induce him to emerge from college sooner. And why did Michael so particularly want him? There were surely men in his own college with whom he was intimate enough to share digs. Michael admitted there were many, but he did not tell Alan that the real reason he had been so anxious for his partners.h.i.+p was to have an excuse to escape from an arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not wis.h.i.+ng to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place, and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.

It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until Michael seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had invited him to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as well, but they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially sharing, that is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in the same house and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to be thought of.

Maurice was a very good fellow but--Maurice was--but--and Michael in asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company, asked himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging with Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could, and for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused himself in fact of sn.o.bbishness, and justified the sn.o.bbishness by applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael's choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the a.s.sumption of a desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice's sensitiveness that it could not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him? Soon it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not want to dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his feelings, and Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had receded into the background of casual encounters.h.i.+p, he would take pleasure in his company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as if Maurice were losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael wondered why he had never before noticed how infallibly he ran after each new and petty phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy. It was intolerable to think of spending a year's close a.s.sociation with all those paint-boxes and all that modeling wax and all those undestroyed proof-sheets of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s. Finally, he had never noticed before how many cigarettes Maurice smoked and with what skill he concealed in every sort of receptacle the stained and twisted stumps that were left over. That habit would be disastrous to their friends.h.i.+p, and Michael knew that each fresh cigarette lighted by him would consume a trace more of the friends.h.i.+p, until at last he would come to the state of observing him with a cold and mute resentment. He was in this att.i.tude of mind toward his prospective companion, when Maurice came to see him. He seemed nervous, lighting and concealing even more cigarettes than usual.

"About digs in Longwall," he began.