Sinister Street

"You mean he's missed the other Stella," said Clarissa.

Michael bowed remotely. He told himself that contradiction or even qualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person of Clarissa's unhumorous earnestness.

"I said so when I first saw it," cried Clarissa triumphantly. "I said, 'my G.o.d, George, you've only given us half of her!'"

Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his initial impression of a full-length study had been correct, and, finding that it was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical conception of her own.

From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to the splendor of the moon.

"I know what you mean," said Clarissa. "But I like suns.h.i.+ne effects best."

"I wasn't really thinking about painting at that moment," Michael observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be occupied with it.

"You know _you're_ very paintable," Clarissa went on. "I suppose you've sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you'd let _me_ paint you. I should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have never noticed."

Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.

"You're very pa.s.sionate, aren't you?" she said, shaking Michael's temperament in the thermometer of her thought.

"No; rather the reverse," said Michael, as he irritably visualized himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa's florid canvases.

"All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me," persisted Clarissa.

Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be, was most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was not here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet ice was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.

There should be some parallel with strawberries to ill.u.s.trate his notion of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any nearer to the Maenad than the evocation of the image of a farouche dairymaid.

All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa's request. "What can you be thinking about?" she asked, and at the moment mere inquisitiveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.

Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing the pitch of his violin. So Michael a.s.sumed the portentous reverence of a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his att.i.tude that he was beyond the range of Clarissa's conversation. He did not know who had made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since, aside from his own partic.i.p.ation in what it gave of unified emotion to the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart of everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk with Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which he had encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his imagination and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But now, when all were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that actually pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being, Michael's aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling from heart to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which justified all that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was flaunting in voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and ambition. Even Clarissa's prematurity seemed transferred from the cause to the effect of her art, so that here and there some strain of music was strong enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of abandon at which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael watching him was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with all the wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in check by the music, Stella's affection for him was just intelligible. He might be said to possess now at least some of the graceful melancholy of a pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was much more in love with Stella than she was or ever could be in love with him. He realized that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and absorbing her music, was aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware it must be for ever impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as it was for him to paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for Ayliffe because he knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were losing her continually even now in complexities that could never by him be unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.

More suggestive, however, than the individual listeners were the players themselves, so essentially typical were they of their respective instruments; and they were even something more than typical, for they did ultimately resemble them. The violinist must himself have answered in these harmonious wails to the lightest question addressed to him. His whole figure had surely that very look of obstinate surprise which belongs to a violin. The bones in that lean body of his might have been of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so little observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circ.u.mstances, could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion, however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure or release of a pedal can swell or

There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella's piano part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes of the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not have been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the normal course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted spirit down to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of this long riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool accompaniment she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael looked sharply across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how often by Stella herself had he been just as gently treated.

The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed.

From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk, until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.

Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael's too polite "Mr. Ayliffe," although he did not perhaps realize all the deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.

"Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie," cried Stella.

"Of course I won't," said Michael, ruffling.

"What do you want him to sit for?" Stella persisted, paying not the least regard to Michael's objection.

"Oh, something ascetic," said Clarie, staring earnestly into s.p.a.ce as if the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.

"Just now it was to be something pa.s.sionate," Michael pointed out scornfully. He suspected Clarissa's courage in the presence of Stella's disdainful frankness.

"Ah, perhaps it will be both!" Clarie promised, and "Good night, most darling Stella," she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness out of the room and up to bed.

"My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She's like a performing leopard!" Michael burst out. "She's utterly stupid and utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes into your face and doesn't wear stays."

"I get something out of all these queer people," Stella explained.

"New-art flower-vases, I should think," scoffed Michael. "Why on earth you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of idiots I can't imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and I'm jolly glad I'm not, if it's to make one depend on the flattery of these fools."

"You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself very much. And you oughtn't to be horrid about my friends. I think they're all so dreadfully touching."

"Yes, and touched," Michael grumbled. "You're simply playing at being in Bohemia. You'd be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions."

"My dear Michael," Stella argued, "do get out of your head the notion that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They're not imported dolls."

"Well, you're not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to you because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they might feel because you are better at your business than any of them are at theirs."

"Rot!" Stella e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.

No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a night; no one could wish for Stella better a.s.sociates than the moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into elusive specters of a legendary paradise.

"I suppose what's really been the matter with me all the evening,"

confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, "is that I've felt out of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that for them I simply didn't exist. That's rather galling. Now at Oxford, supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of men in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be out of sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we should all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella, why did you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these unappreciative enthusiasts?"

"Perhaps I wanted a standard measure," Stella whispered, with a gesture of disarming confidingness. "Something heavy and reliable."

"My dear girl, I'm much too much of a weatherc.o.c.k, or if you insist on me being heavy, let's say a pendulum. And there's nothing quite so confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night."

There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have been a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the ridiculous pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St. Cuthbert's quad or erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden's garden. He was constantly aware of a loss of dignity which worried him considerably and for which he took himself to task very sternly. Finally he attributed it to one of two reasons, either that he felt a sense of constraint in Stella's presence on her account, or that his continued holding back was due to his difficulty in feeling any justification for extravagant behavior, when he had not the slightest intention of presenting the world with the usufruct of his emotions in terms of letters or color or sound.

"I really think I'm rather jealous of all these people," he told Stella.

"They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and everything that happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now, I can do nothing with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very short time. I begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to criticize, then to be bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether and remain just as I was before it occurred except that I never can seize the same sort of experience again. Perhaps it's being with you. Perhaps you absorb all the vitality."

Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.

"Let's go away and leave all these people," she proposed. "Let's go to Compiegne together, and we'll see if you're depressed by me then. But if you are, oh, Michael, I shan't know what to do! Only you won't be, if we're in Compiegne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you know, we really met each other there for the first time."

It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely self-satisfied.

It was pleasant to arrive in Compiegne and find that Madame Regnier's house had not changed in three years, that the three old widows had not suffered from time's now slow and kindly progress, that M. Regnier still ate his food with the same noisy recklessness, that the front garden blazed with just the same vermilion of the geranium flowers.

For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the simple pleasures of ca.s.sis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a sheaf of long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who on hearing that he was at Compiegne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul de Castera-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his sister must become temporary members of the Societe du Sport de Compiegne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.

Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly elated at the prospect of knowing anybody belonging to this club, and were so obviously cast down when their guests seemed to hesitate, that Michael and Stella, more to please the Pension Regnier than themselves, accepted Prince Raoul's offer.

It was amusing, too, this so excessively aristocratic club where every afternoon Princesses and d.u.c.h.esses and the wives of Greek financiers sat at tea or watched the tennis and polo of their husbands and brothers and sons. Stella and Michael played sets of tennis with Castera-Verduzan and the vicomte de Miramont, luxurious sets in which there were always four little boys to pick up the b.a.l.l.s and at least three dozen b.a.l.l.s to be picked up. Stella was a great success as a tennis-player, and their sponsor introduced the brother and sister to all the languidly beautiful women sitting at tea, and also to the over-tailored sportsmen who were cultivating a supposedly Britannic seriousness of att.i.tude toward their games. Soon Michael and Stella found themselves going out to dinner and playing bridge and listening to much admiration of England in a Franco-c.o.c.kney accent that was the result of a foreign language mostly acquired from grooms. With all its veneer of English freedom, it was still a very ceremonious society, and though money had tempered the rigidity of its forms and opinions, there was always visible in the background of the noisiest party Black Papalism, a dominant Army and the hope of the Orleanist succession. Verduzan also took them for long drives in the forest, and altogether time went by very gayly and very swiftly, until Stella woke up to the fact that her piano had been silent for nearly a fortnight. Verduzan was waiting with his impatient car in the prim road outside the Pension Regnier when she made this discovery, and he looked very much mortified when she told him that to-day she really ought to practice.

"But you must come because I have to go away to-morrow," he declared.

"Ah, but I've been making such wonderful resolutions ever since the sun rose," Stella said, shaking her head. "I must work, mustn't I, Michael?"

"Oh, rot, she must come for this last time, mustn't she, Fane?"