Michael left the house early next day that he might make sure of seeing Alan for a moment before Prayers. A snowy aggregation of cumulus sustained the empyrean upon the volume of its mighty curve and swell. The road before him stretched shining in a radiant drench of azure puddles. It was a full-bosomed morning of immense peace.

Michael rather dreaded to see Alan appear in oppressive black, and felt that anything like a costume would embarrass their meeting. But just before the second bell he came quickly up the steps dressed in his ordinary clothes, and Michael in the surging corridor gripped his arm for a moment, saying he would wait for him in the “quarter.”

“Is your mater fearfully cut up?” he asked when they had met and were strolling together along the “gravel.”

“I think she was,” said Alan. “She’s going up to Cobble Place this morning to see Aunt Maud.”

“I wrote to her last night,” said Michael.

“I spent nearly all yesterday in writing to her,” said Alan. “I couldn’t think of anything to say. Could you?”

“No, I couldn’t think of very much,” Michael agreed. “It seemed so unnecessary.”

“I know,” Alan said. “I’d really rather have come to school.”

“I wish you had. I made an awful fool of myself in the morning. I got in a wax with Abercrombie and the chaps, and said I’d never play football again.”

“Whatever for?”

“Oh, because I didn’t think they appreciated what it meant for a chap like your Uncle Kenneth to be killed.”

“Do you mean they said something rotten?” asked Alan, flushing.

“I don’t think you would have thought it rotten. In fact, I think the whole row was my fault. But they seemed to take everything for granted. That’s what made me so wild.”

“Look here, we can’t start a conversation like this just before school. Are you going home to dinner?” Alan asked.

“No, I’ll have dinner down in the Tuck,” said Michael, “and we can go for a walk afterwards, if you like. It’s the first really decent day we’ve had this year.”

So after a lunch of buns, cheesecakes, fruit pastilles, and vanilla biscuits, eaten in the noisy half-light of the Tuckshop, accompanied by the usual storm of pellets, Michael and Alan set out to grapple with the situation Michael had by his own hasty behaviour created.

“The chaps seem rather sick with you,” observed Alan, as they strolled arm-in-arm across the school-ground not yet populous with games.

“Well, they are such a set of sheep,” Michael urged in justification of himself.

“I thought you rather liked them.”

“I did at first. I do still in a way. I do when nothing matters; but that horrible line in the paper did matter most awfully, and I couldn’t stick their bleating. You see, you’re different. You just say nothing. That’s all right. But these fools tried to say something and couldn’t. I always did hate people who tried very obviously. That’s why I like you. You’re so casual and you always seem to fit.”

“I don’t talk, because I know if I opened my mouth I should make an ass of myself,” said Alan.

“There you are, that’s what I say. That’s why it’s possible to talk to you. You see I’m a bit mad.”

“Shut up, you ass,” commanded Alan, smiling.

“Oh, not very mad. And I’m not complaining. But I am a little bit mad. I always have been.”

“Why? You haven’t got a clot on your brain, have you?”

“Oh, Great Scott, no! It’s purely mental, my madness.”

“Well, I think you’re talking tosh,” said Alan firmly. “If you go on thinking you’re mad, you will be mad, and then you’ll be sorry. So shut up trying to horrify me, because if you really were mad I should bar you,” he added coolly.

“All right,” said Michael, a little subdued, as he always was, by Alan’s tranquil snubs. “All right. I’m not mad, but I’m excitable.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” said Alan.

“I can’t help my character, can I?” Michael demanded.

“You’re not a girl,” Alan pointed out.

“Men have very strong emotions often,” Michael argued.

“They may have them, but they don’t show them. Just lately you’ve been holding forth about the rotten way in which everybody gets hysterical over this war. And now you’re getting hysterical over yourself, which is much worse.”

“Damn you, Alan, if I didn’t like you so much I shouldn’t listen to you,” said Michael, fiercely pausing.

“Well, if I didn’t like you, I shouldn’t talk,” answered Alan simply.

As they walked on again in silence for a while, Michael continually tried to get a perspective view of his friend, puzzling over his self-assurance, which was never offensive, and wondering how a person so much less clever than himself could possibly make him feel so humble. Alan was good-looking and well-dressed; he was essentially debonair; he was certainly in appearance the most attractive boy in the school. It always gave Michael the most acute thrill of admiration to see Alan swinging himself along so lithe and so graceful. It made him want to go up and pat Alan’s shoulder and say, “You fine and lovely creature, go on walking forever.” But mere good looks were not enough to explain the influence which Alan wielded, an influence which had steadily increased during the period of their greatest devotion to each other, and had never really ceased during the period of their comparative estrangement. Yet, if Michael looked back on their joint behaviour, it had always been he who apparently led and Alan who followed.

“Do you know, old chap,” said Michael suddenly, “you’re a great responsibility to me.”

“Thanks very much and all that,” Alan answered, with a mocking bow.

“Have you ever imagined yourself the owner of some frightfully famous statue?” Michael went on earnestly.

“Why, have you?” Alan countered, with his familiar look of embarrassed persiflage.

Michael, however, kept tight hold of the thread that was guiding him through the labyrinth that led to the arcana of Alan’s disposition.

“You’ve the same sort of responsibility,” he asserted. “I always feel that if I were the owner of the Venus of Milo, though I could move her about all over the place and set her up wherever I liked, I should be responsible to her in some way. I should feel she was looking at me, and if I put her in a wrong position, I should feel ashamed of myself and half afraid of the statue.”

“Are you trying to prove you’re mad?” Alan enquired.

“Do be serious,” Michael begged, “and tell me if you think you understand what I mean. Alan, you used to discuss everything with me when we were kids, why won’t you discuss yourself now?”

Alan looked up at the sky for a moment, blinking in the sun, perhaps to hide the tremor of feeling that touched for one instant the corners of his mouth. Then he said:

“Do you remember years ago, when we were at Eastbourne and you met Uncle Kenneth for the first time, he told me at dinner not to be a showman? I’ve always remembered that remark of his, and I think it applies to one showing off oneself as much as to showing off other people. I think that’s why I’m different from you.”

Michael glanced up at this.

“You can be damned rude when you like,” he murmured.

“Well, you asked me.”

“So I’m a showman?” said Michael.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t begin to worry over it. It doesn’t make any odds to me what you are. I don’t think it ever would,” he added simply, and in this avowal was all that Michael craved for. Under a sudden chill presentiment that before long he would test this friend of his to the last red throb of his proud heart, Michael took comfort from this declaration and asked no more for comprehension or sympathy. Those were shifting sands of feeling compared with this rock-hewn permanence of Alan. He remembered the stones upon the Berkshire downs, the stolid, unperceiving, eternal stones. Comparable to them alone stood Alan.

They had turned out of the gates of the school-ground by now, and were strolling heedless of direction through the streets of West Kensington that to Michael seemed all at once strangely alluring with their display of a sedate and cosy life. He could not recall that he had ever before been so sensitive to the atmosphere of sunlit security which was radiated by these windows with their visions of rosy babies bobbing and laughing, of demure and saucy maids, of polished birdcages and pots of daffodils. The white steps were in tune with the billowy clouds, and the scarlet pillar-box at the corner had a friendly, human smile. It was a doll’s-house world, whose dainty offer of intimate citizenship refreshed Michael’s imagination like a child’s picture-book.

He began to reflect that the opinions of Abercrombie and his friends round the hot-water pipes were wrought out in such surroundings as these, and he arrived gradually at a sort of compassion for them, picturing the lives of small effort that would inevitably be their portion. He perceived that they would bear the burden of existence in the future, struggling to preserve their gentility against the envy of the class beneath them and the contempt of those above. These gay little houses, half of whose charm lay in their similarity, were as near as they would ever come to any paradise of being. Michael had experienced many spasms of love for his fellow-men, and now in one of these outbursts he suddenly realized himself in sympathy with mediocrity.

“Rather jolly round here,” said Alan. “I suppose a tremendous lot of chaps from the school live about here. Funny thing, if you come to think of it. Practically everybody at St. James’ slides into a little house like this. A few go into the Army; a few go to the ’Varsity. But this is really the School.”

Alan indicated an empty perambulator standing outside one of the houses. “Funny thing if the kid that’s waiting for should be Captain of the School in another eighteen years. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Alan had just expressed so much of what Michael himself was thinking that he felt entitled to put the direct question which a moment ago he had been shy of asking.

“Do you feel as if you belonged to all this?”

“No,” said Alan very coolly.

“Nor do I,” Michael echoed.

“And that’s why it was rotten of you to give yourself away to Abercrombie and the other chaps,” Alan went on severely.

“Yes, I think it was,” Michael agreed.

Then they retraced their steps unconsciously, wandering along silently in the sunlight towards the school. Michael did not want to converse because he was too much elated by this walk, and the satisfying way in which Alan had lived up to his ideal of him. He began to weave a fine romance of himself and Alan going through life together in a lofty self-sufficiency from which they would condescend to every aspect of humanity. He was not sure whether Alan would condescend so far and so widely as himself, and he was not sure whether he wanted him to, whether it would not always be a relief to be aware of Alan as a cold supernal sanctuary from the vulgar struggles in which he foresaw his own frequent immersion. Meanwhile he must make it easy for Alan by apologizing to Abercrombie and the rest for his ridiculous passion of yesterday. He did not wish to imperil Alan’s superb aloofness by involving him in the acrimonious and undignified defence of a friend. There should be no more outbreaks. So much Michael vowed to his loyalty. However, the apology must be made quickly⁠—if possible, this afternoon before school⁠—and as they entered the school-ground again, Michael looked up at the clock, and said:

“Do you mind if I bunk on? I’ve something I must do before the bell goes.”

Alan shook his head.

To Abercrombie and the other immortals Michael came up quickly and breathlessly.

“I say, you chaps, I’m sorry I made such an ass of myself yesterday; I felt chippy over that friend of mine being killed.”

“That’s all right, old bangabout,” said Abercrombie cordially, and the chorus guffawed their forgiveness. They did more. They called him “Bangs” thereafter, commemorating, as schoolboys use, with an affectionate nickname their esteem.

The next day a letter came for Michael from Mrs. Ross, and impressed with all the clarity of writing much of what he had dimly reached out for in his friendship with Alan. He read the letter first hurriedly on his way to school in the morning; but he read it a second and third time along those serene and intimate streets where he and Alan had walked the day before.

Cobble Place,

March, 1900.

My dearest Michael,

You and Alan are the only people to whom I can bear to write today. I am grieving most for my young son, because he will have to grow up without his father’s splendid example always before him. I won’t write of my own sorrow. I could not.

My husband, as you know, was very devoted to you and Alan, and he had been quite worried (and so had I) that you and he seemed to have grown away from one another. It was a moment of true delight to him, when he read a long letter from dear old Alan describing his gladness at playing football again with you. Alan expresses himself much less eloquently than you do, but he is as deeply fond of you as I know you are of him. His letters are full of you and your cleverness and popularity; and I pray that all your lives you will pull together for the good. Kenneth used always to admire you both so much for your ability to “cope with a situation.” He was shot, as you know, leading his men (who adored him) into action. Ah, how I wish he could lead his own little son into action. You and Alan will have that responsibility now.

It is sweet of you to thank me for being so “stunning” to you. It wasn’t very difficult. But you know how high my hopes have always been and always will be for you, and I know that you will never disappoint me. There may come times which with your restless, sensitive temperament you will find very hard to bear. Always remember that you have a friend in me. I have suffered very much, and suffering makes the heart yearn to comfort others. Be very chivalrous always, and remember that of all your ideals your mother should be the highest. I hope that you’ll be able to come and stay with us soon after Easter. God bless you, dear boy, and thank you very much for your expression of the sorrow I know you share with me.