Michael | Page 6

and I should so much prefer being his nephew. However, you come next; that's one comfort."
He paused a moment.
"You see, the fact is that he doesn't like me," he said. "He has no sympathy whatever with my tastes, nor with what I am. I'm an awful trial to him, and I don't see how to help it. It's pure waste of time, my going on in the Guards. I do it badly, and I hate it. Now, you're made for it; you're that sort, and that sort is my father's sort. But I'm not; no one knows that better than myself. Then there's the question of marriage, too."
Michael gave a mirthless laugh.
"I'm twenty-five, you see," he said, "and it's the family custom for the eldest son to marry at twenty-five, just as he's baptised when he's a certain number of weeks old, and confirmed when he is fifteen. It's part of the family plan, and the Medes and Persians aren't in it when the family plan is in question. Then, again, the lucky young woman has to be suitable; that is to say, she must be what my father calls 'one of us.' How I loathe that phrase! So my mother has a list of the suitable, and they come down to Ashbridge in gloomy succession, and she and I are sent out to play golf together or go on the river. And when, to our unutterable relief, that is over, we hurry back to the house, and I escape to my piano, and she goes and flirts with you, if you are there. Don't deny it. And then another one comes, and she is drearier than the last--at least, I am."
Francis lay back and laughed at this dismal picture of the rejection of the fittest.
"But you're so confoundedly hard to please, Mike," he said. "There was an awfully nice girl down at Ashbridge at Easter when I was there, who was simply pining to take you. I've forgotten her name."
Michael clicked his fingers in a summary manner.
"There you are!" he said. "You and she flirted all the time, and three months afterwards you don't even remember her name. If you had only been me, you would have married her. As it was, she and I bored each other stiff. There's an irony for you! But as for pining, I ask you whether any girl in her senses could pine for me. Look at me, and tell me! Or rather, don't look at me; I can't bear to be looked at."
Here was one of Michael's morbid sensitivenesses. He seldom forgot his own physical appearance, the fact of which was to him appalling. His stumpy figure with its big body, his broad, blunt- featured face, his long arms, his large hands and feet, his clumsiness in movement were to him of the nature of a constant nightmare, and it was only with Francis and the ease that his solitary presence gave, or when he was occupied with music that he wholly lost his self-consciousness in this respect. It seemed to him that he must be as repulsive to others as he was to himself, which was a distorted view of the case. Plain without doubt he was, and of heavy and ungainly build; but his belief in the finality of his uncouthness was morbid and imaginary, and half his inability to get on with his fellows, no less than with the maidens who were brought down in single file to Ashbridge, was due to this. He knew very well how light-heartedly they escaped to the geniality and attractiveness of Francis, and in the clutch of his own introspective temperament he could not free himself from the handicap of his own sensitiveness, and, like others, take himself for granted. He crushed his own power to please by the weight of his judgments on himself.
"So there's another reason to complain of the irony of fate," he said. "I don't want to marry anybody, and God knows nobody wants to marry me. But, then, it's my duty to become the father of another Lord Ashbridge, as if there had not been enough of them already, and his mother must be a certain kind of girl, with whom I have nothing in common. So I say that if only we could have changed places, you would have filled my niche so perfectly, and I should have been free to bury myself in Leipzig or Munich, and lived like the grub I certainly am, and have drowned myself in a sea of music. As it is, goodness knows what my father will say to the letter I wrote him yesterday, which he will have received this morning. However, that will soon be patent, for I go down there to-morrow. I wish you were coming with me.