THE LAST DAY
At sunrise when the stones of Oxford were the color of lavender, a
photograph was taken of those who had been dancing at the Christ Church
ball; after which, their gaiety recorded, the revelers went home.
Michael was relieved when Alan offered to drive his mother and Stella
back to the Randolph. He was not wishing for company that morning, but
rather to walk slowly down to college alone. He waited, therefore, to
see the dancers disappear group by group round various corners, until
the High was desolate and he was the only human figure under this
virginal sky. In his bedroom clear and still and sweet with morning
light he did not want to go to bed. The birds fluttering on the lawns,
the sun sparkling with undeterrent rays of gold not yet high and
fierce, and all the buildings of the college dreaming upon the bosom of
this temperate morn made him too vigilant for beauty. It would be wrong
to sleep away this Oxford morning. With deliberate enjoyment he changed
from ruffled evening dress into flannels.
In the sitting-room Michael looked idly through the books, and glanced
with dissatisfaction at the desquamating backs of the magazines. There
was nothing here fit to occupy his attention at such a peerless hour.
Yet he still lingered by the books. Habit was strong enough to make him
feel it necessary at least to pretend to read during the hours before
breakfast. Finally in desperation he pulled out one of the magazines,
and as he did so a small volume bound in paper fell onto the floor. It
was Manon Lescaut, and Michael was pleased that the opportunity was
given to him of reading a book he had for a long time meant to read.
Moreover, if it were disappointing, this edition was so small that it
would fit easily into his pocket and be no bother to carry. He wondered
rather how Manon Lescaut had come into this bookshelf, and he opened it
at an aquatint of ladies deject and lightly clothed—_c’est une douzaine
de filles de joie_, said the inscription beneath. Here, Michael feared,
was the explanation of how the Abbé Prévost found himself squeezed away
between Pearson’s and The Strand. Here at last was evidence in these
rooms of a personal choice. Here spoke, if somewhat ignobly, the
character of the purchaser. Michael slipped the small volume into his
pocket and went out.
The great lawns in front of New Quad stretched for his solitary
pleasure in the golden emptiness of morn. At such an hour it were vain
to repine; so supreme was beauty like this that Michael’s own departure
from Oxford appeared to him as unimportant as the fall of a petal
unshaken by any breath of summer wind. With the air brimming to his
draught and with early bees restless along the herbaceous border by the
stream’s parapet, Michael began to read Manon Lescaut. He would finish
this small volume before breakfast, unless the fumes of the sun should
drug him out of all power to award the Abbé his fast attention. The
great artist was stronger than the weather, and Michael read on while
the sun climbed the sky, while the noises of a new day began, while the
footsteps of hurrying scouts went to and fro.
It was half-past eight when he finished that tale of love. For a few
moments he sat dazed, visualizing that dreadful waste near New Orleans
where in the sand it was so easy for the star-crossed Chevalier to bury
the idol of his heart.
Porcher was surprised to find Michael up and wide awake.
“You oughtn’t to have gone and tired yourself like that, sir,” he said
reproachfully.
Michael rather resented putting back the little book among those
magazines. He felt it would be almost justifiable to deprive the owner
of what he so evidently did not esteem, and he wondered if, when he had
cut the pages with his prurient paper-knife the purchaser had wished at
the end of this most austere tale that he had not spent his money so
barrenly. _C’est une douzaine de filles de joie._ It was a bitter
commentary on human nature, that a mere aquatint of these poor naked
creatures jolting to exile in their tumbril should extort half a crown
from an English undergraduate to probe their history.
“Dirty-minded little beast,” said Michael, as he confiscated the
edition of Manon Lescaut, placing it in his suitcase. Then he went out
into St. Mary’s Walks, and at the end of the longest vista sat down on
a garden-bench beside the Cherwell. Before him stretched the verdurous
way down which he had come; beyond, taking shape among the elms, was
the college; to right and left were vivid meadows where the cattle were
scarcely moving, so lush was the pasturage here; and at his side ran
the slow, the serpentine, the tree-green tranquil Cher.
As he sat here among the bowers of St. Mary’s, the story he had just
read came back to him with a double poignancy. He scarcely thought that
any tale of love could purify so sharply every emotion but that of pity
too profound for words. He wondered if his father had loved with such a
devotion of self-destruction as had inspired des Grieux. It was strange
himself should have been so greatly moved by a story of love at the
moment when he was making ready to enter the world. He had not thought
of love during all the time he had been up at Oxford. Now he went back
in memory to the days when Lily had the power to shake his soul, even
as the soul of des Grieux had been shaken in that inn-yard of Amiens,
when coming by the coach from Arras he first beheld Manon. How trivial
had been Lily’s infidelity compared with Manon’s: how shallow had been
his own devotion beside the Chevalier’s. But the love of des Grieux for
Manon was beyond the love of ordinary youth. The Abbé by his art had
transmuted a wild infatuation, a foolish passion for a wanton into
something above even the chivalry of the noblest lover of the Middle
Ages. It was beyond all tears, this tale; and the dry grief it now
exacted gave to Michael in some inexplicable way a knowledge of life
more truly than any book since Don Quixote. It was an academic tale,
too: it was told within the narrowest confines of the most rigid form.
There was not in this narrative one illegitimate device to excite an
easy compassion in the reader: it was literature of a quality
marmoreal, and it moved as only stone can move. The death of Manon in
the wilderness haunted him even as he sat here: almost he too could
have prostrated himself in humiliation before this tragedy.
“There is no story like it,” said Michael to the sleek river. _N’exigez
point de moi que je vous décrive mes sentiments, ni que je vous
rapporte mes dernières expressions._ And it was bought by an
undergraduate for half a crown because he wanted to stare like the
peasant-folk. _C’est une douzaine de filles de joie._ How really
promising that illustration must have looked: how the coin must have
itched in his pocket: how carefully he must have weighed the slimness
of the book against his modesty: how easy it had been to conceal behind
those magazines.
But he could not sit here any longer reconstructing the shamefaced
curiosity of a dull young freshman, nor even, with so much to arrange
this last morning, could he continue to brood upon the woes of the
Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut. It was time to go and rouse
Lonsdale. Lonsdale had slept long enough in those ground-floor rooms of
his where on the first day of the first term the inextricable Porcher
had arranged his wine. It did not take long to drag Lonsdale out of
bed.
“You slack devil, I’ve not been to bed at all,” said Michael.
“More silly ass you,” Lonsdale yawned. “Now don’t annoy me while I’m
dressing with your impressions of the sunrise.” Michael watched him eat
his breakfast, while he slowly and with the troublesome aid of his
eyeglass managed to focus once again the world.
“I was going to tell you something deuced interesting about myself when
you buzzed off this morning. You’ve heard of Queenie Molyneux—well,
Queenie ...”
“Wait a bit,” Michael interrupted. “I haven’t heard of Queenie
Molyneux.”
“Why, she’s in the Pink Quartette.”
Michael still looked blank, and Lonsdale adjusting his eyeglass looked
at him in amazement.
“The Pink Quartette in My Mistake.”
“Oh, that rotten musical comedy,” said Michael. “I haven’t seen it.”
Lonsdale shook his head in despair, and the monocle tinkled down upon
his plate. When he had wiped it clean of marmalade, he asked Michael in
a compassionate voice if he _never_ went to the theater, and with a
sigh returned to the subject of Queenie.
“It’s the most extraordinary piece of luck. A girl that everyone in
town has been running after falls in love with me. Now the question is,
what ought I to do? I can’t afford to keep her, and I’m not cad enough
to let somebody else keep her, and use the third latchkey. My dear old
chap, I don’t mind telling you I’m in the deuce of a fix.”
“Are you very much in love with her?” Michael asked.
“Of course I am. You don’t get Queenies chucked at your head like
turnips. Of course I’m frightfully keen.”
“Why don’t you marry her?” Michael asked.
“What? Marry her? You don’t seem to understand who I’m talking about.
Queenie Molyneux! She’s in the Pink Quartette in My Mistake.”
“Well?”
“Well, I can’t marry a chorus-girl.”
“Other people have,” said Michael.
“Well, yes, but—er—you know, Queenie has rather a reputation. I
shouldn’t be the first.”
“The problem’s too hard for me,” said Michael.
In his heart he would have liked to push Manon Lescaut into Lonsdale’s
hands and bid him read that for counsel. But he could not help laughing
to himself at the notion of Lonsdale wrestling with the moral of Manon
Lescaut, and if the impulse had ever reached his full consciousness, it
died on the instant.
“Of course, if this motor-car business is any good,” Lonsdale was
saying, “I might be able in a year or two to compete with elderly
financiers. But my advice to you ...”
“You asked for my advice,” said Michael, with a smile.
“I know I did. I know I did. But as you haven’t ever been to see My
Mistake—the most absolutely successful musical comedy for years—why, my
dear fellow, I’ve been thirty-eight times!... and my advice to you is
‘avoid actresses.’ Oh, yes, I know it’s difficult, I know, I know.”
Lonsdale shook his head so often that the monocle fell on the floor,
and his wisdom was speechless until he could find it again.
Michael left him soon afterward, feeling rather sadly that the horizon
before him was clouding over with feminine forms. Alan would soon be
engaged to his sister. It was delightful, of course, but in one way it
already placed a barrier between their perfect intercourse. Maurice
would obviously soon be thinking of nothing but women. Already even up
at Oxford a great deal of his attention had been turned in that
direction: and now Lonsdale had Queenie. This swift severance from
youth by all his friends, this preoccupation with womanhood was likely
to be depressing, thought Michael, unless himself also fell in love.
That was very improbable, however. Love filled him with fear. The Abbé
Prévost that morning had expressed for him in art the quintessence of
what he knew with sharp prevision love for him would mean. He felt a
dread of leaving Oxford that quite overshadowed his regret. Here was
shelter—why had he not shaped his career to stay forever in this cold
peace? And, after all, why should he not? He was independent. Why
should he enter the world and call down upon himself such troubles and
torments as had vexed his youth in London? From the standpoint of moral
experience he had a right to stay here: and yet it would be desolate to
stay here without a vital reason, merely to grow old on the fringe of
the university. Could he have been a Fellow, it would have been
different: but to vegetate, to dream, to linger without any power of
art to put into form even what he had experienced already, that would
inevitably breed a pernicious melancholy. On the other hand, he might
go to Plashers Mead. He might almost make trial of art. Guy would
inspire him, Guy living his secluded existence with books above a
stream. Whatever occurred to him in the way of personal failure, he
could on his side encourage Guy. His opinion might be valuable, for
although he seemed to have no passion to create, he was sure his
judgment was good. How Guy would appreciate Manon; and perhaps like so
many classics he had taken it as read, nor knew yet what depths of
pity, what profundities of beauty awaited his essay.
Michael made up his mind that instead of going to London this afternoon
he would ride over to Wychford and either stay with Guy or in any case
announce his speedy return to stay with him for at least the rest of
the summer. Alan would escort his mother and Stella home. It would be
easier for Alan that way. His mother would be so charming to him, and
everything would soon be arranged. With this plan to unfold, Michael
hurried across to Ninety-nine. Alan was already up. Everything was
packed. Michael realized he could already regard the digs without a
pang for the imminence of final departure. Perhaps the Abbé Prévost had
deprived him of the capacity for a merely sentimental emotion, at any
rate for the present.
Alan looked rather doubtful over Michael’s proposal.
“I hate telling things in the train,” he objected.
“You haven’t got to tell anything in the train,” Michael contradicted.
“My mother is sure to invite you to dinner to-night, and you can tell
her at home. It’s much better for me to be out of it. I shall be back
in a few days to pack up various things I shall want for Plashers
Mead.”
“It’s a most extraordinary thing,” said Alan slowly, “that the moment
you think there’s a chance of my marrying your sister, you drop me like
a hot brick.”
Michael touched his shoulder affectionately.
“I’m more pleased about you and her than about anything that has ever
happened,” he said earnestly. “Now are you content?”
“Of course, I oughtn’t to have spoken to her,” said Alan. “I really
don’t know, looking back at last night, how on earth I had the cheek. I
expect I said a lot of rot. I ought certainly to have waited until I
was in the Home Civil.”
“You must chuck that idea,” said Michael. “Stella would loathe the
Civil Service.”
“I can’t marry ...” Alan began.
“You’ve got to manage her affairs. She has a temperament. She also has
land.” Then Michael explained about Prescott, and so eloquent was he
upon the need for Stella’s happiness that Alan began to give way.
“I always thought I should be too proud to live on a woman,” he said.
“Don’t make me bring forward all my arguments over again,” Michael
begged. “I’m already feeling very fagged. You’ll have all your work cut
out. To manage Stella herself, let alone her piano and let alone her
land, is worth a very handsome salary. But that’s nothing to do with
it. You’re in love with each other. Are you going to be selfish enough
to satisfy your own silly pride at the expense of her happiness? I
could say lots more. I could sing your praises as ...”
“Thanks very much. You needn’t bother,” interrupted Alan gruffly.
“Well, will you not be an ass?”
“I’ll try.”
“Otherwise I shall tell you what a perfect person you are.”
“Get out,” said Alan, flinging a cushion.
Michael left him and went down to the Randolph. He found Stella already
dressed and waiting impatiently in the lobby for his arrival. His
mother was not yet down.
“It’s all right,” he began, “I’ve destroyed the last vestige of Alan’s
masculine vanity. Mother will be all right—if,” said Michael severely,
pausing to relish the flavor of what might be the last occasion on
which he would administer with authority a brotherly admonition. “_If_
you don’t put on a lot of side and talk about being twenty-one in a
couple of months. Do you understand?”
Stella for answer flung her arms round his neck, and Michael grew
purple under the conspicuous affront she had put upon his dignity.
“You absurd piece of pomposity,” she said. “I really adore you.”
“For God’s sake don’t talk in that exaggerated way,” Michael muttered.
“I hope you aren’t going to make a public ass of Alan like that. He’d
be rather sick.”
“If you say another word,” Stella threatened, “I’ll clap my hands and
go dancing all round this hotel.”
At lunch Michael explained that he was not coming to town for a day or
two, and his mother accepted his announcement with her usual gracious
calm. Just before they were getting ready to enter their cab to go to
the station, Michael took her aside.
“Mother, you’ll be very sympathetic, won’t you?” Then he whispered to
her, fondling her arm. “They really are so much in love, but Alan will
never be able to explain how much, and I swear to you he and Stella
were made for each other.”
“But they don’t want to be married at once?” asked Mrs. Fane, in some
alarm.
“Oh, not to-morrow,” Michael admitted. “But don’t ask them to have a
year’s engagement. Will you promise me?”
“Why don’t you come back to-night and talk to me about it?” she asked.
“Because they’ll be so delightful talking to you without me. I should
spoil it. And don’t forget—Alan is a _slow_ bowler, but he gets
wickets.”
Michael watched with a smile his mother waving to him from the cab
while still she was vaguely trying to resolve the parting metaphor he
had flung at her. As soon as the cab had turned the corner, he called
for his bicycle and rode off to Wychford.
He went slowly with many roadside halts, nor was there the gentlest
rise up which he did not walk. It was after five o’clock when he dipped
from the rolling highway down into Wychford. There were pink roses
everywhere on the gray houses. As he went through the gate of Plashers
Mead, he hugged himself with the thought of Guy’s pleasure at seeing
him so unexpectedly on this burnished afternoon of midsummer. The
leaves of the old espalier rustled crisply: they were green and glossy,
and the apples, still scarcely larger than nuts, promised in the autumn
when he and Guy would be together here a ruddy harvest. The house was
unresponsive when he knocked at the door. He waited for a minute or
two, and then he went into the stone-paved hall and up the steep stairs
to the long corridor, at whose far end the framed view of the open
doorway into Guy’s green room glowed as vividly as if it gave upon a
high-walled sunlit garden. The room itself was empty. There were only
the books and a lingering smell of tobacco smoke, and through the
bay-window the burble of the stream swiftly flowing. Michael looked out
over the orchard and away to the far-flung horizon of the wold beyond.
Here assuredly, he told himself, was the perfect refuge. Here in this
hollow waterway was peace. From here sometimes in the morning he and
Guy would ride into Oxford, whence at twilight they would steal forth
again and, dipping down from the bleak road, find Plashers Mead set
safe in a land that was tributary only to the moon. Guy’s diamond
pencil, with which he was wont upon the window to inscribe mottoes, lay
on the sill. Michael picked it up and scratched upon the glass: _The
fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land_, setting the date below.
Then suddenly coming down past the house with the stream he saw in a
canoe Guy with a girl. The canoe swept past the window and was lost
round the bend, hidden immediately by reeds and overarching willows.
Yet Michael had time to see the girl, to see her cheeks of frailest
rose, to know she was a fairy’s child and that Guy was deep in love.
Although the fleet vision thrilled him with a romantic beauty, Michael
was disheartened. Even here at Plashers Mead, where he had counted upon
finding a cloister, the disintegration of life’s progress had begun. It
would be absurd for him to intrude now upon Guy. He would scarcely be
welcomed now in this June weather. After all, he must go to London; so
he left behind him the long gray house and walked up the slanting hill
that led to the nearest railway station. By the gate where he and Guy
had first seen Plashers Mead, he paused to throw one regret back into
that hollow waterway, one regret for the long gray house on its green
island circled by singing streams.
There were two hours to wait at the station before the train would
arrive. He would be in London about half-past nine. Discovering a
meadow pied with daisies, Michael slept in the sun.
When he woke, the grass was smelling fresh in the shadows, and the sun
was westering. He went across to the station and, during the ten
minutes left before his train came in, walked up and down the platform
in the spangled airs of evening, past the tea-roses planted there, slim
tawny buds and ivory cups dabbled with creamy flushes.
It was dark when Michael reached Paddington, and he felt depressed,
wishing he had come back with the others. No doubt they would all be at
the theater. Or should he drive home and perhaps find them there?
“Know anything about this golf-bag, Bill?” one porter was shouting to
another.
Michael went over to look at the label in case it might be Alan’s bag.
But it was an abandoned golf-bag belonging to no one: there were no
initials even painted on the canvas. This forsaken golf-bag doubled
Michael’s depression, and though he had always praised Paddington as
the best of railway stations, he thought to-night it was the gloomiest
in London. Then he remembered in a listless way that he had forgotten
to inquire about his suit-case, which had been sent after him from
Oxford to Shipcott, the station for Wychford. It must be lying there
now with Manon Lescaut inside. He made arrangements to recapture it,
which consummated his depression. Then he called a hansom and drove to
Cheyne Walk. They had all gone to the Opera, the parlormaid told him.
Michael could not bear to stay at home to-night alone: so, getting back
into the hansom, he told the man to drive to the Oxford Music-hall. It
would be grimly amusing to see on the programs there the theatrical
view of St. Mary’s tower.
THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK
BOOK TWO
ROMANTIC EDUCATION
Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae descendam, magnorum haud
umquam indignus avorum. VIRGIL.
For Fancy cannot live on real food: In youth she will despise familiar
joy To dwell in mournful shades, as they grow real, Then buildeth she
of joy her fair ideal. ROBERT BRIDGES.
CHAPTER I
OSTIA DITIS
When Michael reached the Oxford Music-hall he wondered why he had
overspurred his fatigue to such a point. There was no possibility of
pleasure here, and he would have done better to stay at home and cure
with sleep what was after all a natural depression. It had been foolish
to expect a sedative from contact with this unquiet assemblage. In the
mass they had nothing but a mechanical existence, subject as they were
to the brightness or dimness of the electrolier that regulated their
attention. Michael did not bother to buy a program. From every podgy
hand he could see dangling the lithograph of St. Mary’s tower with its
glazed moonlight; and he was not sufficiently aware of the glib atom
who bounced about the golden dazzle of the stage to trouble about his
name. He mingled with the slow pace of the men and women on the
promenade. They were going backward and forward like flies, meeting for
a moment in a quick buzz of colloquy and continuing after a momentary
pause their impersonal and recurrent progress. Michael was absorbed in
this ceaseless ebb and flow of motion where the sidelong glances of the
women, as they brushed his elbow in the passing crowd, gave him no
conviction of an individual gaze. Once or twice he diverted his steps
from the stream and tried to watch in a half-hearted way the
performance; but as he leaned over the plush-covered barrier a woman
would sidle up to him, and he would move away in angry embarrassment
from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of
popping corks and the chink of glasses, the whirr of the ventilating
fans, the stentorophonic orchestra, the red-faced raucous atom on the
stage combined to irritate him beyond further endurance; and he had
just resolved to walk seven times up and down the promenade before he
went home, when somebody cried in heartiest greeting over his shoulder,
“Hullo, Bangs!”
Michael turned and saw Drake, and so miserable had been the effect of
the music-hall that he welcomed him almost effusively, although he had
not seen him during four years and would probably like him rather less
now than he had liked him at school.
“_My_ lord! fancy seeing you again!” Drake effused.
Michael found himself shaken warmly by the hand in support of the
enthusiastic recognition. After the less accentuated cordiality of
Oxford manners, it was strange to be standing like this with clasped
hands in the middle of this undulatory crowd.
“I _say_, Bangs, old man, we must have a drink on this.”
Drake led the way to the bar and called authoritatively for two
whiskies and a split Polly.
“Quite a little-bit-of-fluffy-all-right,” he whispered to Michael,
seeming to calculate with geometrical eyes the arcs and semicircles of
the barmaid’s form. She with her nose in the air poured out the liquid,
and Michael wondered how any of it went into the glass. As a matter of
fact, most of it splashed onto the bar, whence Drake presently took his
change all bedewed with alcohol, and, lifting his glass, wished Michael
a jolly good chin-chin.
“’D luck,” Michael muttered in response.
“_My_ lord!” Drake began again. “Fancy meeting you of all people. And
not a bit different. I said to myself: ‘I’m jiggered if that isn’t old
Bangs,’ and—well, _my_ lord! but I was surprised. Do you often come out
on the randan?”
“Not very often,” Michael admitted. “I just happened to be alone
to-night.”
“Good for you, old sport. What have you been doing since you left
school?”
“I’m just down from Oxford,” Michael informed him.
“Pretty good spree up there, eh?”
“Oh, yes, rather,” said Michael.
“Well, I had the chance to go,” said Drake. “But it wasn’t good enough.
It’s against you in the City, you know. Waste of time really, except of
course for a parson or a schoolmaster.”
“Yes, I expect it would have been rather a waste of time for you,”
Michael agreed.
“Oh, rotten! So you moved from—where was it?—Carlington Road?”
“Yes, we moved to Cheyne Walk.”
“Let’s see. That’s in Hampstead, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s rather nearer the river,” suggested Michael. “Are you still
in Trelawny Road?”
“Yes, still in the same old hovel. My hat! Talking of Trelawny Road, it
_is_ a small world. Who do you think I saw last week?”
“Not Lily Haden?” Michael asked, in spite of a wish not to rise so
quickly to Drake’s hook.
“You’re right. I saw the fair Lily. But where do you think I saw her?
Bangs, old boy, I tell you I’m not a fellow who’s easily surprised. But
this knocked me. Of course, you’ll understand the Hadens flitted from
Trelawny Road soon after you stopped calling. So who knows what’s
happened since? I give you three guesses where I saw her.”
“I hate riddles,” said Michael fretfully.
“At the Orient,” said Drake solemnly. “The Orient Promenade. You could
have knocked me down with a feather.”
Michael stared at Drake, scarcely realizing the full implication of
what he just announced. Then suddenly he grasped the horrible fact that
revealed to him here in a music-hall carried a double force. His one
instinct for the moment was to prevent Drake from knowing into what
depths his news had plunged him.
“Has she changed?” asked Michael, and could have kicked himself for the
question.
“Well, of course there was a good deal of powder,” said Drake. “I’m not
easily shocked, but this gave me a turn. She was with a man, but even
if she hadn’t been, I doubt if I’d have had the nerve to talk to her. I
wouldn’t have known what to say. But, of course, you know, her mother
was a bit rapid. That’s where it is. Have another drink. You’re looking
quite upset.”
Michael shook his head. He must go home.
“Aren’t you coming down West a bit?” asked Drake, in disappointment.
“The night’s still young.”
But Michael was not to be persuaded.
“Well, don’t let’s lose sight of each other now we’ve met. What’s your
club? I’ve just joined the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You
get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You ought to join. Or perhaps
you’re already suited?”
“I belong to the Bath,” said Michael.
“Oh, of course, if you’re suited, that’s all right. But any time you
want to join the Primrose just let me know and I’ll put you up. The sub
isn’t really very much. Guinea a year.”
Michael thanked him and escaped as quickly as he could. Outside even in
Oxford Street the air was full of summer, and the cool people
sauntering under the sapphirine sky were as welcome to his vision as if
he had waked from a fever. His head was throbbing with the heat of the
music-hall, and the freshness of night-air was delicious. He called a
hansom and told the driver to go to Blackfriars Bridge, and from there
slowly along the Embankment to Cheyne Walk. For a time he leaned back
in the cab, thinking of nothing, barely conscious of golden
thoroughfares, of figures in silhouette against the glitter, and of the
London roar rising and falling. Presently in the quiet of the shadowy
cross-streets he began to appreciate what seemed the terrible
importance to himself of Drake’s news.
“It concerns me,” he began to reiterate aloud. “It concerns me—me—me.
It’s useless to think that it doesn’t. It concerns me.”
Then a more ghastly suggestion whispered itself. How should he ever
know that he was not primarily responsible? The idea came over him with
sickening intensity; and upright now he saw in the cracked mirrors of
the cab a face blanched, a forehead clammy with sweat, and over his
shoulder like a goblin the wraith of Lily. It was horrible to see so
distorted that beautiful memory which time had etherealized out of a
reality, until of her being nothing had endured but a tenuous image of
earliest love. Now under the shock of her degradation he must be
dragged back by this goblin to face his responsibility. He must behold
again close at hand her shallow infidelity. He must assure himself of
her worthlessness, hammer into his brain that from the beginning she
had merely trifled with him. This must be established for the sake of
his conscience. Where the devil was this driver going?
“I told you down the Embankment,” Michael shouted through the trap.
“I can’t go down the Embankment before I gets there, can I, sir?” the
cabman asked reproachfully.
Michael closed the trap. He was abashed when he perceived they were
still only in Fleet Street. Why had he gone to The Oxford to-night? Why
had he spoken to Drake? Why had he not stayed at Wychford? Why had he
not returned to London with the others? Such regrets were valueless. It
was foredoomed that Lily should come into his life again. Yet there was
no reason why she should. There was no reason at all. Men could hardly
be held responsible for the fall of women, unless themselves had upon
their souls the guilt of betrayal or desertion. It was ridiculous to
argue that he must bother because at eighteen he had loved her, because
at eighteen he had thought she was worthy of being loved. No doubt the
Orient Promenade was the sequel of kissing objectionable actors in the
back gardens of West Kensington. Yet the Orient Promenade? That was a
damnable place. The Orient Promenade? He remembered her kisses. Sitting
in this cab, he was kissing her now. She had ridden for hours deep in
his arms. Not Oxford could cure this relapse into the past. Every spire
and every tower had crashed to ruins around his staid conceptions, so
that they too presently fell away. Four years of plastic calm were
unfashioned, and she was again beside him. Every passing lamp lit up
her face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her
place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered,
pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What
invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to
turn his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He
must remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money,
plead with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the
hansom kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor
Road the onrushing street-lamps flung their balls of light with
monotonous jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to
find her. He would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the
morning perhaps the problem would present itself in less difficult
array.
Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera,
and suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day
he could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so
that he would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful
engagement of Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony
of their happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the
window, staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the
generous night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the
reflected lamps in golden pagodas sprawled across the width of the
river and where the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the
bridge, nuzzled the shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around
the patient barges at their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the
surface of the stream, blurring the golden pagodas of light so that
they jigged and glittered until the motion died away. Eastward in the
sky over London hung a tawny stain that blotted out the stars.
From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city
stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.
He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false
vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the
dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that
London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion,
that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his
memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She
was walking toward him in Kensington Gardens: not a contour of her
delicate progress had been blunted by the rasp of time. Five years ago
he had been the first to speak: now, must it be she who sometimes spoke
first? Seventeen she had told him had been her age, and they had kissed
in the dark midway between two lamps. No doubt she had been kissed
before. In that household of Trelawny Road anything else was
inconceivable. The gray streets of West Kensington in terrace upon
terrace stretched before him, and now as he recalled their barren
stones it seemed to him there was not one corner round which he might
not expect to meet her face to face. “_Michael, why do you make me love
you so?_” That was her voice. It was she who had asked him that
question. Never before this moment had he realized the import of her
demand. Now, when it was years too late to remedy, it came out of the
past like an accusation. He had answered it then with closer kisses. He
had released her then like a ruffled bird, secure that to-morrow and
to-morrow and to-morrow she would nestle to his arms for cherishing.
And now if he thought more of her life beneath that lurid stain he
would go mad; if he conjured to himself the vision of her now—had not
Drake said she was powdered and painted? To this had she come. And she
was here in London. Last week she had been seen. It was no nightmare.
It was real, horrible and real. He must go out again at once and find
her. He must not sit dreaming here, staring at the silly Thames, the
smooth and imperturbable Thames. He must plunge into that
phantasmagoric city; he must fly from haunt to haunt; he must drag the
depths of every small hell; he must find her to-night.
Michael rose, but on the instant of his decision his mother and Stella
drove up. Alan was no longer with them. He must have gone home to
Richmond. How normal sounded their voices from the pavement below.
Perhaps he would after all go down and greet them. They might wonder
otherwise if something had happened. Looking at himself as he passed
the mirror on his way down, he saw that he really was haggard. If he
pleaded a headache, his countenance would bear him out. In the end he
shouted to them over the balusters, and both of them wanted to come up
with remedies. He would not let them. The last thing his mood desired
was the tending of cool hands.
“I’m only fagged out,” he told them. “I want a night’s sleep.”
Yet he knew how hard it would be to fall asleep. His brain was on fire.
Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut
the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with
the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt
less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted
half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He
seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room
surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects.
The cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a
sense that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had
shaken him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that
he had wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he
could examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going,
and the need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still
all his impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear
view of his attitude.
He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses
nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present
she appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to
bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the
loss of beauty, of passion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so
constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly
incapable was Drake’s account to change his outward picture of her, he
could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It
seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night,
she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years
ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.
Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prostitute in
London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no
account. Were they of no account? _C’est une douzaine de filles de
joie._ When he read Manon this morning—how strange! this morning he had
been reading Manon at Oxford—he was moved with pity for all poor light
women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New
Orleans nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because
he was still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was
because he had known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the
damning weight that in the past she had said, “_Michael, why do you
make me love you so?_” If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If
there was shame, he was shameful. Others after him had sinned against
her casually, counting their behavior no more than a speck of dust in
the garbage of human emotion with which she was already smirched. He
may not have seduced her, but he had sinned against her, because while
loving her he had let her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He
had trifled with her sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for
blame was cowardly. It was that very youth which was the sin, because
under society’s laws, whatever fine figure his love might seem to him
to have cut, he should have known that it was a profitless love for a
girl. He shared in the guilt. He partook of the shame. That was
incontrovertible.
Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not
his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally
incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said
to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to
marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott
must always have deplored the position in which his friend’s mistress
had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one’s mother. It
seemed to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her,
if Lady Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which
he had soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our
rigid divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable
times in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen
had cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been
sinned against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say
that the sinner had in the circumstances behaved very well, that so far
as he was able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse
his father’s initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not
wash out his deliberate sin against—and who was she? Who was his
mother? Valérie ... and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a
clergyman ... a gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had
exposed her to the calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved
chivalrously at any rate by the standards of romance. But by what small
margin had his own mother escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions
of order and safety and custom tottered and reeled at such a thought.
Surely such a realization doubled his obligation to atone by rescuing
Lily, out of very thankfulness to God that his own mother had escaped
the evil which had come to her. How wretchedly puny now seemed all his
own repinings. All he had gained for his own character had been a vague
dissatisfaction that he could not succeed to the earldom in order to
prove the sanctity of good breeding. There had been no gratitude; there
had been nothing but a hurt conceit. The horror of Drake’s news would
at least cure him forever of that pettiness. Already he felt the
strength that comes from the sight of a task that must be conquered. He
had been moved that morning by the tale of Manon Lescaut. This tale of
Lily was in comparison with that as an earthquake to the tunneling of a
mole beneath a croquet-lawn. And now must he regard his father’s memory
with condemnation? Must he hate him? He must hate him, indeed, unless
by his own behavior he could feel he had accepted in substitution the
burden of his father’s responsibility. And he had admired him so much
dying out there in Africa for his country. He had resented his death
for the sake of thousands more unworthy living comfortably at home.
“All my standards are falling to pieces,” thought Michael. “Heroes and
heroines are all turning into cardboard. If I don’t make some effort to
be true to conviction, I shall turn to cardboard with the rest.”
He began to pace the room in a tumult of intentions, vows and
resolutions. Somehow before he slept he must shape his course. Four
years had dreamed themselves away at Oxford. Unless all that education
was as immaterial as the fogs of the Isis, it must provide him now with
an indication of his duty. He had believed in Oxford, believed in her
infallibility and glory, he had worshiped all she stood for. He had
surrendered himself to her to make of him a gentleman, and unless these
four years had been a delusion, his education must bear fruit now.
Michael made up his mind suddenly, and as it seemed to him at the
moment in possession of perfect calm and clarity of judgment, that he
would marry Lily. He had accepted marriage as a law of his society.
Well, then that law should be kept. He would test every article of the
creed of an English gentleman. He would try in the fire of his purpose
honor, pride, courtesy, and humility. All these must come to his aid,
if he were going to marry a whore. Let him stab himself with the word.
Let him not blind himself with euphemisms. His friends would have no
euphemisms for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying
Queenie Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How
everybody would despise his folly. There would not be one friend who
would understand. Least of all would his mother understand. It was a
hard thing to do; and yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could
be granted the grace of faith to sustain him. Principles were rather
barren things to support the soul in a fight with convention.
Principles of honor when so very personal were apt to crumple in the
blast of society’s principles all fiercely kindled against him. Just
now he had thought of the thankfulness he owed to God. Was it more than
a figure of speech, an exaggerative personification under great emotion
of what most people would call chance? At any rate, here was God in a
cynical mood, and the divine justice of this retributive situation
seemed to hint at something beyond mere luck. And if principles were
strong enough to sustain him to the onset, faith might fire him to the
coronation of his self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and
calmly to marry Lily, and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if
to hearten him he saw her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for
his dreams the ways of night like a gazelle.
Next morning when Michael woke, his resolve purified by sleep of
feverish and hysterical promptings was fresh upon his pillow. In the
fatigue and strain of the preceding night the adventure had caught a
hectic glow of exaltation. Now, with the sparrows twittering and the
milkman clanking and yodeling down Cheyne Walk and the young air
puffing the curtains, his course acquired a simplicity in this lucid
hour of deliberation, which made the future normal and even obvious.
There was a great relief in this fresh following breeze after the
becalmed inaction of Oxford: it seemed an augury of life’s importance
that so immediately on top of the Oxford dream he should find such a
complete dispersion of mist and so urgent a fairway before him. The
task of finding Lily might easily occupy him for some time, for a life
like hers would be made up of mutable appearances and sudden strange
eclipses. It might well be a year before she was seen again on the
Orient Promenade. Yet it was just as likely that he would find her at
once. For a moment he caught his breath in thinking of the sudden
plunge which that meeting would involve. He thought of all the
arguments and all the dismay that the revelation of his purpose would
set in motion. However, the marriage had to be. He had threshed it all
out last night. But he might reasonably hope for a brief delay. Such a
hope was no disloyalty to his determination.
Stella was already at breakfast when he came downstairs. Michael raised
his eyebrows in demand for news of her and Alan.
“Mother was the sweetest thing imaginable,” she said. “And so we’re
engaged. I wanted to come and talk to you last night, but I thought you
would rather be left alone.”
“I’m glad you’re happy,” he said gravely. “And I’m glad you’re safe.”
Stella looked at him in surprise.
“I’ve never been anything but safe,” she assured him.
“Haven’t you?” he asked, looking at her and reproving himself for the
thought that this gray-eyed sister of his could ever have exposed
herself to the least likelihood of falling into Lily’s case. Yet there
had been times when he had felt alarmed for her security and happiness.
There had been that fellow Ayliffe, and more serious still there had
been that unknown influence in Vienna. Invulnerable she might seem now
in this cool dining-room on a summer morning, but there had been times
when he had doubted.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, flaunting her imperious
boyishness in his solemn countenance.
“You. Thinking you ought to be damned grateful.”
“What for?”
“Everything.”
“You included, I suppose,” she laughed.
Still it had been rather absurd, Michael thought, as he tapped his egg,
to suppose there was anything in Stella’s temperament which could ever
link her to Lily. Should he announce his quest for her approbation and
sympathy? It was difficult somehow to begin. Already a subtle change
had taken place in their relation to each other since she was engaged
to Alan. Of course, his reserve was ridiculous, but he could not bring
himself to break through now. Besides, in any case it were better to
wait until he had found Lily again. It would all sound very
pretentiously noble in anticipation, and though she would have every
right to laugh, he did not want her to laugh. When he stood on the
brink of marriage, they would none of them be able to laugh. There was
a grim satisfaction in that.
“When does mother suggest you should be married?” he asked.
“We more or less settled November. Alan has given up the Civil Service.
That’s my first piece of self-assertion. He’s coming for me this
morning, and we’re going to lunch at Richmond.”
“You’ve never met Mr. and Mrs. Merivale?”
Stella shook her head.
“Old Merivale’s a ripping old boy. Always making bad puns. And Mrs.
Merivale’s a dear.”
“They must both be perfect to have been the father and mother of Alan,”
said Stella.
“I shouldn’t get too excited over him,” Michael advised. “Or over
yourself, either. You might give me the credit of knowing all about it
long before either of you.”
“Darling Michael,” she cried, bounding at him like a puppy.
“When you’ve done making an ass of yourself you might chuck me a roll.”
Alan arrived soon after breakfast, and he and Michael had a few minutes
together, while Stella was getting ready to go out.
“Were your people pleased?” Michael asked.
“Oh, of course. Naturally the mater was a little nervous. She thought I
seemed young. Talked a good deal about being a little boy only
yesterday and that sort of rot.”
“And your governor?”
“He supposed I was determined to steal her,” said Alan, with a
whimsical look of apology for the pun. “And having worked that off he
spent the rest of the evening relishing his own joke.”
Stella came down ready to start for Richmond. Both she and Alan were in
white, and Michael said they looked like a couple of cricketers. But he
envied them as he waved them farewell from the front door through which
the warm day was deliciously invading the house. Their happiness
sparkled on the air as visibly almost as the sunshine winking on the
river. Those Richmond days belonged imperishably to him and Alan, yet
for Alan this Saturday would triumph over all the others before.
Michael turned back into the house rather sadly. The radiance of the
morning had been dislustered by their departure, and Michael against
his will had to be aware of the sense of exclusion which lovers leave
in their wake. He waited indoors until his mother came down. She was
solicitous for the headache of last night, and while he was with her he
was not troubled by regrets for the break-up of established
intercourse. He asked himself whether he should take her into his
confidence by announcing the tale of Lily. Yet he did not wish to give
her an impression of being more straightly bound to follow his quest
than by the broadest rules of conduct. He felt it would be easier to
explain when the marriage had taken place. How lucky for him that he
was not financially dependent! That he was not, however, laid upon him
the greater obligation. He could find, even if he wished one, no excuse
for unfulfillment.
Michael and his mother talked for a time of the engagement. She was
still somewhat doubtful of Alan’s youth, when called upon to adapt
itself to Stella’s temperament.
“I think you’re wrong there,” said Michael. “Alan is rather a rigid
person in fundamentals, you know, and his youth will give just that
flexibility which Stella would demand. In another five years he would
have been ensconced behind an Englishman’s strong but most unmanageable
barrier of prejudice. I noticed so much his attitude toward Mrs. Ross
when she was received into the Roman Church. I asked him what he would
say if Stella went over. He maintained that she was different. I think
that’s a sign he’ll be ready to apply imagination to her behavior.”
“Yes, but I hope he won’t think that whatever she does is right,” Mrs.
Fane objected.
“Oh, no,” laughed Michael. “Imagination will always be rather an effort
for Alan. Mother, would you be worried if I told you I wanted to go
away for a while—I mean to say, go away and perhaps more or less not be
heard of for a while?”
“Abroad?” she asked.
“Not necessarily abroad. I’m not going to involve myself in a dangerous
undertaking; but I’m just sufficiently tired of my very comfortable
existence to wish to make an experiment. I may be away quite a short
time, but I might want to be away a few months. Will you promise me not
to worry yourself over my movements? Some of the success of this
undertaking will probably depend on a certain amount of freedom. You
can understand, can’t you, that the claims of home, however delightful,
might in certain circumstances be a problem?”
“I suppose you’re taking steps to prepare my mind for something very
extremely unpleasant,” she said.
“Let’s ascribe it all to my incurably romantic temperament,” Michael
suggested.
“And I’m not to worry?”
“No, please don’t.”
“But when are you going away?”
“I’m not really going away at all,” Michael explained. “But if I didn’t
come back to dinner one night or even the next night, would you be
content to know quite positively that I hadn’t been run over?”
“You’re evidently going to be thoroughly eccentric. But I suppose,” she
added wistfully, “that after your deserted childhood I can hardly
expect you to be anything else. Yet it seems so comfortable here.” She
was looking round at the chairs.
“I’m not proposing to go to the North Pole, you know,” Michael said,
“but I don’t want to obey dinner-gongs.”
“Very noisy and abrupt,” she agreed.
Soon they were discussing all kinds of substitutions.
“Mother, what an extraordinary lot you know about noise,” Michael
exclaimed.
“Dearest boy, I’m on the committee of a society for the abatement of
London street noises.”
“So deeply occupied with reform,” he said, patting her hand.
“One must do something,” she smiled.
“I know,” he asserted. “And therefore you’ll let me ride this new
hobby-horse I’m trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?”
“You know perfectly well that you will anyhow,” said Mrs. Fane, shaking
her head.
Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this
admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in
order to assist at Castleton’s induction, and Michael walked along the
Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.
The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a
state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at
work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and
at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from
Tchaikovsky’s symphonies.
“Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable,” said Castleton. “Do
you know Cunningham?” He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.
“Making it comfortable,” Michael repeated. “My first impression was
just the reverse. I suppose it’s no good asking you people to give me
lunch?”
“Rather, of course,” Maurice declared. “Castleton, it’s your turn to
buy lunch.”
“One extraordinary thing, Michael,” said Castleton, “is the way in
which Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing
something. You’d think he kept a ledger of all our tasks.”
“We can send old Mother Wadman if you’re tired,” Maurice offered.
Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and
Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.
“I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up,” Maurice
explained, “but we shall be three times as comfortable when he’s
finished. He’s putting up divans.”
Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton
was at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over
multitudinous roofs.
“What a great rolling sense of human life they do give,” said Michael.
“A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and
all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there’s the
lighthouse,” he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.
“The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile
for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church,” said Maurice. “We’re
having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a
secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What
is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We
two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I
shall meet the girl who’s meant to share this with me. Then I really
think I could work.”
Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were
not the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were
married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be
driven out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They
would be suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and
yet they would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The
windows of the city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly
as the stars. Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because
to see her in a room like this would be to love her. How well he
understood Maurice’s desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody
wanted a girl to perfect Plashers Mead. Even Guy’s fairy child at
Plashers Mead had seemed an intrusion; but here, to protect one’s
loneliness against the overpowering contemplation of the life around,
love was a necessity. And perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the
ambition his friends had for his career. It might be so. Perhaps
himself might find an inspiration in an attic high up over roofs. It
might be. It might be so.
“What are you thinking about?” Maurice asked.
“I was thinking you were probably right,” said Michael.
Maurice looked pleasantly surprised. He was rather accustomed to be
snubbed when he told Michael of his desire for feminine companionship.
“I don’t want to get married, you know,” he hastily added.
“That would depend,” said Michael. “If one married what is called an
impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to
make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St.
Thomas’ Church at half-past two.”
“But why are you so keen about marriage?” Maurice demanded.
“Well, it has certain advantages,” Michael pointed out.
“Not among the sparrows,” said Maurice.
“Most of all among the sparrows,” Michael contradicted. He was becoming
absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to
remove the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he
proposed to take. They would be able to reënter the world after a long
retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the
opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the
touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked
something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he
had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during
that first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily
had assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire
for the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock
of disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake’s account
of her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news
had merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.
“It is really extraordinarily romantic up here,” Maurice exclaimed,
bursting in upon his reverie.
“Yes, I suppose that’s the reason,” Michael admitted.
“The reason of what?” Maurice asked.
“Of what I was thinking,” Michael said.
Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and
almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.
Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their
hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house
still and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a
hansom-cab, and told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.
CHAPTER II
NEPTUNE CRESCENT
The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to
Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of
it at Brother Aloysius’ behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his
choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.
The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a
deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With
the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had
apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no
farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his
experience.
That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery;
that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gruesomeness, for
ever since Mrs. Pearcey’s blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had
held for him a macaber significance: of the hellish portals mystery and
gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time
tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed
the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown
London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy
onward. Maple’s and Shoolbred’s, those outposts of shopping
civilization, were left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of
roguery began. He was not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so
disquieting. It was probably a mere trick of contrast between present
squalor and the greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim,
but it had a nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot
from the thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those
bright yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he
remembered them from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of
them skirting the Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the
pantomime. Even now their painted destinations affected him with a
dismay that real people could be familiar with this sinister route.
Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for
years as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a
tawdry and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others.
Now the cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron
railway bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town
behind a huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered
through the murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the
pavement, past a wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of
humanity chalked upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was
Kentish Town. It lay to the left of this bridge that was the color of
stale blood. Michael told the driver to stop for one moment, and he
leaned forward over the apron of the cab to survey the cross-street of
swarming feculent humanity that was presumably the entering highway. A
train roared over the bridge; a piano organ gargled its tune; a
wagon-load of iron girders drew near in a clanging tintamar of slow
progress. Michael’s brief pause was enough to make such an impression
of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his original conception of
Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb. But just as the cab
reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he caught sight of a
slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their mucid
heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the stucco
was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid arabesques
and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town a
putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and noise and
exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character
allotted by his prefiguration.
The Camden Road was, in contrast with what had gone before, a wide and
easy thoroughfare which let in the blue summer sky; and it was not for
some minutes that Michael began to notice what a queerness came from
the terraces that branched off on either side. The suggestion these
terraces could weave extended itself to the detached houses of the main
road. In the gaps between them long parallelograms of gardens could be
seen joining others even longer that led up to the backs of another
road behind. Sometimes it seemed that fifty gardens at once were
visible, circumscribed secretive pleasure-grounds in the amount of life
they could conceal, the life that could prosper and decay beneath their
arbors merely for that conspiracy of gloating windows. It was
impossible not to speculate upon the quality of existence in these
precise enclosures; and to this the chapels of obscure sects that the
cab occasionally passed afforded an indication. To these arid little
tabernacles the population stole out on Sunday mornings. There would be
something devilish about these reunions. Upon these pinchbeck creeds
their souls must surely starve, must slowly shrink to desiccated imps.
Anything more spiritually malevolent than those announcements chalked
upon the black notice-board of the advent of the hebdomadal messiah,
the peregrine cleric, the sacred migrant was impossible to imagine.
With what apostolic cleverness would he impose himself upon these
people, and how after the gravid midday meal of the Sabbath he would
sit in those green arbors like a horrible Chinese fum. The cabman broke
in upon Michael’s fantastic depression by calling down through the trap
that they were arrived at the Nag’s Head and what part of Seven Sisters
Road did he want.
Michael was disappointed by the Seven Sisters Road. It seemed to be
merely the garish mart of a moderately poor suburban population. There
was here nothing to support the diabolic legend with which under the
suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the
streets he had passed this afternoon there had been none less
inferential of romance than this long shopping street.
“What number do you want, sir?” the driver repeated.
“Well, really I want rooms,” Michael explained. “Only this seems a bit
noisy.”
“Yes, it is a bit boisterous,” the cabman agreed.
Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began
to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it
became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and
the quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he
wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate
upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less
surreptitious than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of
the parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high
into the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of
Kentish Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy
slum.
“Try turning off to the left,” he called to the driver through the
roof.
The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost
immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each
street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and
well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses’ declension
from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.
Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an
unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy,
guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal
laurels. Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on
account of the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with
age, carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals
and the iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery,
helped the illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old
sea-port. A card advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number
Fourteen. Michael signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and
rang the bell. The Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he
could hear the whistle of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but
the jingle of the horse’s harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat
which was wheedling its lean body in and out of the railings of the
falciform garden.
Soon the landlady opened the door and stood inquisitively in the narrow
passage. She was a woman of probably about thirty-five with stubby
fingers; her skin was rather moist, but she had a good-natured
expression, and perhaps when the curl-papers were taken out from her
colorless hair, and when lace frills and common finery should soften
her turgid outlines she would be handsome in a labored sort of way. The
discussion with Mrs. Murdoch about her vacant rooms did not take long.
Michael had made up his mind to any horrors of dirt and discomfort, and
he was really pleasantly surprised by their appearance. As for Mrs.
Murdoch, she was evidently too much interested to know what had brought
Michael to her house to make any difficulties in the way of his
accommodation.
“Will you want dinner to-night?” she asked doubtfully.
“No, but I’d like some tea now, if you can manage it; and I suppose you
can let me have a latchkey?”
“I’ve got the kettle on the boil at this moment. I was going out myself
for the evening. Meeting my husband at the Horseshoe. There’s only one
other lodger—Miss Carlyle. And she’s in the profession.”
As Mrs. Murdoch made this announcement, she looked up at the
fly-frecked ceiling, and Michael thought how extraordinarily light and
meaningless her eyes were and how curiously dim and heavy this small
sitting-room was against the brilliancy of the external summer.
“Well, then, tea when I can get it,” said Mrs. Murdoch cheerfully. “And
the double-u is just next your bedroom on the top floor. That’s all, I
think.”
She left him with a backward smile over her shoulder, as if she were
loath to relinquish the study of this unusual visitor to Neptune
Crescent.
Michael when he was alone examined the chairs that were standing about
the room as stiff as grenadiers in their red rep. He stripped them of
their antimacassars and pulled the one that looked least uncomfortable
close to the window. Outside, the yellow cat was still mewing; but the
cab was gone and down the gray street that led to Neptune Crescent here
and there sad-gaited wayfarers were visible. Two or three sparrows were
cheeping in a battered laburnum, and all along the horizon the blue sky
descending to the smoke of London had lost its color and had been
turned to the similitude of tarnished metal. A luxurious mournfulness
was in the view, and he leaned out over the sill scenting the reasty
London air.
It was with a sudden shock of conviction that Michael realized he was
in Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually
been in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him
must have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those
quixotic resolutions roused by Drake’s legend of Lily. He would not
otherwise have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He
would have waited to test the truth of Drake’s story. His first
emotional despair had vanished with almost unaccountable ease.
Certainly he wanted to be independent of the criticism of his friends
until he had proved his purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this
withdrawal to a desire for a secluded and unflinching contemplation of
a life that from Cheyne Walk he could never focus. But ultimately he
must acknowledge that his sojourn here, following as it did straight
upon his entrance into the underworld through the disappointing portals
of the Seven Sisters Road, was due to that ancient lure of the shades.
This experience was foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in
childish dreams to this day indelible. He could not remember any period
in his life when the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for
his fear that shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of
most ordinary existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat
desolately in the pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when
on his lonely walks he had passed askance by Padua Terrace; the
shouting of murders by newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all
those dreadful intimations in childhood had procured his present idea
of London. With the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they
still persisted behind the outward presentation of a normal and
comfortable procedure in the midst of money, friends, and well-bred
conventions. Nor had that speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of
childhood, the endowment by the young of material things with
immaterial potencies. Phantoms which had slunk by as terrors invisible
to the blind eyes of grown-ups had been abominably incarnate for him.
Brother Aloysius had been something more than a mere personification,
and that life which the ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below
the surface, so easy was it to enter, had he not entered it that one
night very easily?
Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the
phantoms and the realities of the underworld. There for him lay very
easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They
had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and
academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the
victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that
he was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of
philosophers. He would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion
of evil. He would not allow himself to disparage the problem before him
by any speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet
Lily again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether
gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he
must not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her.
Such an encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental
appeal; at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and
she would forever elude him, she with secret years within her
experience. His instinct first to sever himself from his own world must
have been infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now
he found himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and
scenting the reasty London air.
And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or
Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the
evening’s end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into
Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its
red rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to
this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a
matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar’s Feast glowered above
the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two thorny
shells upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless
dim circumnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the
bulrushes in their conch of nacreous glass.
Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him
admiringly.
“Do you think you’ll be staying long?” she inquired.
Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
“No. No. I’m really very glad to let them. You’ll find it nice and
quiet here. There’s only Miss Carlyle, who’s in the profession and
comes in sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of
course he hasn’t got his own shop now.”
She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch’s
loss of independence; so he said, “Of course not,” nodding wisely.
“There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a
servant-girl,” said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and
shaking her curl-papers. “Yes. Though I don’t know why I’m telling you
straight off as you might say. But there, I’m funny sometimes. If I
take to anybody, there’s nothing I won’t do for them. Alf—that _is_ my
old man—he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to
get into conversation with him, you’d better not let on you know he
used to have a shop of his own.”
Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with
his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr.
Murdoch was working now.
“In a chemist’s shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know,” she said,
beaming archly. “It’s what you might call rather a funny place. Only he
gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him.”
Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch’s
reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a
postcard.
“Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it’s in the kitchen
dresser, that’s a sure thing. Perhaps you’d like to come down and see
the kitchen?”
Michael followed her downstairs. There were no basements in Neptune
Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his
sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above
the kitchen.
“Miss Carlyle has her room here,” said Mrs. Murdoch, pointing next door
to the kitchen. “Nice and handy for her as she’s rather late sometimes.
I hate to hear anybody go creaking upstairs, I do. It makes me
nervous.”
The kitchen was pleasant enough and looked out upon a narrow strip of
garden full of coarse plants.
“They’ll be very merry and bright, won’t they?” said Mrs. Murdoch,
smiling encouragement at the greenery. “It’s wonderful what you can do
nowadays for threepence.”
Michael asked what they were.
“Why, sunflowers, of course, only they want another month yet. I have
them every year—yes. They’re less trouble than rabbits or chickens. Now
where did I see that postcard?”
She searched the various utensils, and at last discovered the postcard
stuck behind a mutilated clock.
“What _will_ they bring out next?” demanded Mrs. Murdoch, surveying it
with affectionate approbation. “Pretty, I call it.”
A pair of lovers in black plush were sitting enlaced beneath a pink
frosted moon.
“Just the thing, if you’re writing to your young lady,” said Mrs.
Murdoch, offering it to Michael.
He accepted it with many expressions of gratitude, but when he was in
his own room he laughed very much at the idea of sending it to his
mother in Cheyne Walk. However, as he must write and tell her he would
not be home for some time, he decided to go out and buy both writing
materials and unillustrated postcards. When he came back he found Mrs.
Murdoch feathered for the evening’s entertainment. She gave him the
latchkey, and from his window Michael watched her progress down Neptune
Crescent. Just before her lavender dress disappeared behind the
Portugal laurels she turned round and waved to him. He wondered what
his mother would say if she knew from what curious corner of London the
news of his withdrawal would reach her to-night.
The house was very still, and the refulgence of the afternoon light
streaming into the small room fused the raw colors to a fiery
concordancy. Upon the silence sounded presently a birdlike fidgeting,
and Michael going out onto the landing to discover what it was, caught
to his surprise the upward glance of a thin little woman in untidy
pink.
“Hulloa!” she cried. “I never knew there was anybody in—you did give me
a turn. I’ve only just woke up.”
Michael explained the situation, and she seemed relieved.
“I’ve been asleep all the afternoon,” she went on. “But it’s only
natural in this hot weather to go to sleep in the afternoon if you
don’t go out for a walk. Why don’t you come down and talk to me while I
have some tea?”
Michael accepted the invitation with a courtesy which he half suspected
this peaked pink little creature considered diverting.
“You’ll excuse the general untidiness,” she said. “But really in this
weather anyone can’t bother to put their things away properly.”
Michael assented, and looked round at the room. It certainly was
untidy. The large bed was ruffled where she had been lying down, and
the soiled copy of a novelette gave it a sort of stale slovenry. Over
the foot hung an accumulation of pink clothes. On the chairs, too,
there were clothes pink and white, and the door bulged with numberless
skirts. Miss Carlyle herself wore a pink blouse whose front had escaped
the constriction of a belt. Even her face was a flat unshaded pink, and
her thin lips would scarcely have showed save that the powder round the
edges was slightly caked. Yet there was nothing of pink’s freshness and
pleasant crudity in the general effect. It was a tired, a frowsy pink
like a fondant that has lain a long while in a confectioner’s window.
“Take a chair and make yourself at home,” she invited him. “What’s your
name?”
He told her “Fane.”
“You silly thing, you don’t suppose I’m going to call you Mr. Fane, do
you? What’s your other name? Michael? That’s Irish, isn’t it? I used to
know a fellow once called Micky Sullivan. I suppose they call you Micky
at home.”
He was afraid he was invariably known as Michael, and Miss Carlyle
sighed at the stiff sort of a name it was.
“Mine’s Poppy,” she volunteered. “That’s much more free and easy. Or I
think so,” she added rather doubtfully, as Michael did not immediately
celebrate its license by throwing pillows at her. “Are you really
lodging here?” she went on. “You don’t look much like a pro.”
Michael said that was so much the better, as he wasn’t one.
“I’ve got you at last,” cried Poppy. “You’re a shop-walker at
Russell’s.”
He could not help laughing very much at this, and the queer pink room
seemed to become more faded at the sound of his merriment. Poppy looked
offended by the reception of her guess, and Michael hastened to restore
her good temper by asking questions of her.
“You’re on the stage, aren’t you?”
“I usually get into panto,” she admitted.
“Aren’t you acting now?”
“Yes, I don’t think. You needn’t be funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“You mind your business,” she said bitterly. “And I’ll look after
mine.”
“There doesn’t seem to be anything very rude in asking if you’re acting
now,” said Michael.
“Oh, shut up! As if you didn’t know.”
“Know what?” he repeated.
He looked so genuinely puzzled that Poppy seemed to make an effort to
overcome her suspicion of his mockery.
“It’s five years since I went on the game,” she said.
Michael blushed violently, partly on her account, partly for his own
stupidity, and explained that Mrs. Murdoch had told him she was in the
profession.
“Well, you didn’t expect her to say ‘my ground-floor front’s a gay
woman,’ did you?”
He agreed that such an abrupt characterization would have surprised
him.
“Well, I’m going out to get dinner now,” she announced.
“Why don’t you dine with me?” Michael suggested.
She looked at him doubtfully.
“Can you afford it?”
“I think I could manage it.”
“Because if we _are_ in the same house that doesn’t say you’ve got to
pay my board, does it?” she demanded proudly.
“Once in a way won’t matter,” Michael insisted. “And we might go on to
a music hall afterward.”
“Yes, we might, if I hadn’t got to pay the woman who’s looking after my
kid for some clothes she’s made for him,” said Poppy. “And sitting with
you at the Holborn all night won’t do that. No, you can give me dinner
and then I’ll P.O. I’m not going to put on a frock even for you,
because I never get off only when I’m in a coat and skirt.”
Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.
“Go on, sit down. As you’re going to take me out to dinner, you can
talk to me while I dress as a reward.”
In this faded pink room where the sun was by now shining with a
splendor that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and
overblown, Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape
as it were from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters
to be written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she
was ready.
Michael’s own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor
front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this
moment such a room as Poppy’s. It could not be. It could not be. And he
realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury,
craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors.
This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of
the underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature
downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque
with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course
her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive
plainness, her schoolma’am air, her decent unobtrusiveness. Yet she was
plucky, and she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her
child. There was, too, something admirable in the candor with which she
had treated him. There was something friendly and birdlike about her,
and he thought how when he had been first aware of her movements below
he had compared them to a bird’s fidgeting. There was something really
appealing about the gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at
her description; and then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed
her to forego what might after all have been for her a pleasant evening
because she must pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after
her child. He could so easily have offered to give her the money. No
matter, he could make amends at once and offer it to her now. It would
be doubtless an unusual experience for her to come into contact with
someone whose rule of life was not dictated by the brutal self-interest
of those with whom her commerce must generally lie. She would serve to
bring to the proof his theory that so much of the world’s beastliness
could be cleansed by having recourse to the natural instincts of decent
behavior without any grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael
did feel very philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy’s
summons.
“I say,” he began at once. “It was stupid of me just now not to suggest
that I should find the money for your kid’s clothes. Look here, we’ll
go to the Holborn after dinner and——” he paused. He felt a delicacy in
inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her
company—“and—er—I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?”
“I say, kiddie, you’re a sport,” she said. “Only look here, don’t go
and spend more than what you can afford. It isn’t as if we’d met by
chance, as you might say.”
“Oh no, I can afford two pounds,” Michael assured her.
“Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for
four shillings. That’s not too much, is it?”
He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he
stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds
was not offered for hire.
“But, kiddie, I can’t bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge
here. These aren’t gay rooms.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” said Michael. “The money is a
present.”
“Oh, is it?” she flamed out. “Then you can keep your dirty money.
Thanks, I haven’t come down to charity. Not yet. If I’m not good enough
for you, you can keep your money. I believe you’re nothing more than a
dirty ponce. I’ve gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I’m
not going to begin now. That’s very certain. Are you going out or am I
going out? Because I don’t want to be seen with you. You and your
presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I
went home with you.”
Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front
door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the
fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange
lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the
houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather
the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that passage where
the little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder
with the mean and vicious passions they now veiled. Very soon, however,
his disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there
was not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively
conceal secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous
toadstools in rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must
flourish here. It was foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a
half-aroused curiosity had taken its place, and Michael regretted that
he had not stayed to hear what more she would have said. How far she
had been from appreciating the motives that prompted his offer of
money. Poppy’s injustice began to depress him. He felt, walking
southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of her failure to be grateful
from his point of view. It hurt him to find sincerity so lightly
regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity which had been
touched. _Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned._ The ability to
apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave Michael a
great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a statement,
and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He
experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great
commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy
had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He
hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could
not expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She
could have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could
she grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical
expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not
impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her.
Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his
tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only
an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside.
Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved
in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck
him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the
power to effect.
On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the
front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the
evening.
At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance
of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the
landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt
stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and
top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern
behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening
with much amusement to the people round him. He liked to hear each
petty host assure his guests that he had brought them to a place of
which very few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of
this assurance stared at one another like conspirators.
Just before nine o’clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of
Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding
all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade.
He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from
Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its
approach his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her
suddenly without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of
himself. However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who
resembled her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving
Promenade whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the
crowd. That on the stage a lady of the haute école was with a curious
wooden rapidity putting a white horse through a number of tricks did
not concern his attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was
the performance. Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair
than that weary heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there
was an unity of effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At
The Oxford the whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was
a real exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days.
Indeed, so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the
frankness almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of
profiting by the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be
drugged into perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.
Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled
tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of shimmering green plush, the dim
foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding
circumambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the
barrier, the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones—there was nothing
that spoiled the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the
more nearly was the effect achieved. At intervals women whose
close-fitting dresses seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by:
and generally the people eyed one another with the indifferent frozen
eyes of swimming fish. There was indeed something cold-blooded in the
very atmosphere, and it was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of
women that he was expecting Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able
to imagine her in the luxury of the Orient than sleeping down the sun
over a crumpled novelette in such a room as Poppy’s in Camden Town.
The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was
restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the assurance that
he had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the
shock he knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The
evening wore itself away. The lady of the haute école was succeeded by
a band of Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by
half a dozen cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its
mechanical course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it
was almost possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope’s shifting
squares and lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the
ballet and whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down
there on the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a
history, so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the
Promenade where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to
account for her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life.
The ballet was over, and he passed out into the streets.
For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without
finding Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the
heart of London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the
merest chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet
he began to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by
some enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as
if his friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in
that circumambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal
motion. They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward
and forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at
any of the restaurants or cafés to which he went after the theater. By
the intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself
off from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often
thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had
seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had
never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen
the night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to
Lily; and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a
hat, perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never
meeting the wearer’s glance.
He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their
unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not
meet in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in
avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it
was possible to seclude one’s self from the claims of human
intercourse. He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out
over the sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream
to the distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which
every afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books
indeed that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to
resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed
their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.
Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch
him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.
“I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do,” she affirmed.
“Doesn’t it tire your eyes?”
Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book,
looking sideways at it like a fat goose.
“Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn’t
it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This
_is_ Tuesday, isn’t it?”
After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch
decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.
Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could
scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a
preconception of an elderly chemist reduced by misfortune and misdeeds
to the status of one of those individuals who with a discreet manner
somewhere between a family doctor and a grocer place themselves at the
service of the public in an atmosphere of antiseptics. Mr. Murdoch was
not at all like this. He was a squat swarthy man with one very dark eye
that stared fixedly regardless of the expression of its fellow. Michael
could not make up his mind whether this eye were blind or not. He
rather hoped it was, but in any case its fierce blankness was very
disconcerting. Conversation between Michael and Mr. Murdoch was not
very lively, and Mrs. Murdoch’s adjutant inquisitiveness made Michael
the more monosyllabic whenever her husband did commit himself to a
direct inquiry.
“I looked for you in the Horseshoe the other evening,” said Michael
finally, at a loss how in any other way to give Mr. Murdoch an
impression that he took the faintest interest in his existence.
“In the Horseshoe?” repeated Mr. Murdoch, in surprise. “I never go to
the Horseshoe only when a friend asks me in to have one.”
Michael saw Mrs. Murdoch frowning at him, and, perceiving that there
was a reason why her husband must not suppose she had been to the
Horseshoe on the evening of his arrival, he said he had gathered
somehow, he did not exactly know where or why or when, that Mr. Murdoch
was often to be found in the Horseshoe. He wished this awkward and
unpleasant man would leave him and cock his rolling eye anywhere else
but in his room.
“Bit of a reader, aren’t you?” inquired the chemist.
Michael admitted he read a good deal.
“Ever read Jibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” continued
the chemist.
“Some of it.”
Mr. Murdoch said in that case it was just as well he hadn’t bought some
volumes he’d seen on a barrow in the Caledonian Road.
“Four-and-six, with two books out in the middle,” he proclaimed.
Michael could merely nod his comment, though he racked his brains to
think of some remark that would betray a vestige of cordiality. Mr.
Murdoch got up to retire to the kitchen. He evidently did not find his
tenant sympathetic. Outside on the landing Michael heard him say to his
wife: “Stuck up la-di-da sort of a ——, isn’t he?”
Presently the wife came up again.
“How did you like my old man?”
“Oh, very much.”
“Did you notice his eye?”
Michael said he had noticed something.
“His brother Fred did that for him.”
She spoke proudly, as if Fred’s act had been a humane achievement.
“When they were boys,” she explained. “It gives him a funny look. I
remember when I first met him it gave me the creeps, but I don’t notice
it really now. Would you believe he couldn’t see an elephant with it?”
“I wondered if it were blind,” said Michael.
“Blind as a leg of mutton,” said Mrs. Murdoch, and still there lingered
in her accents a trace of pride. Then suddenly her demeanor changed and
there crept over her countenance what Michael was bound to believe to
be an expression of coyness.
“Don’t say anything more to Alf about the Horseshoe. You see, I only
gave you the idea I was meeting him, because I didn’t really know you
very well at the time. Of course really I’d gone to see my sister. No,
without a joke, I was spending the evening with a gentleman friend.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment.
“My old man wouldn’t half knock me about, if he had the least
suspicion. But it’s someone I knew before I was married, and that makes
a difference, doesn’t it?”
“Does your husband go out with lady friends he knew before he was
married?” Michael asked, and wondered if Mrs. Murdoch would see an
implied reproof.
“What?” she shrilled. “I’d like to catch him nosing after another
woman. He wouldn’t see a hundred elephants before I’d done with him.
I’d show him.”
“But why should you have freedom and not he?” Michael asked.
“Never mind about him. You let him try. You see what he’d get.”
Michael did not think the argument could be carried on very profitably.
So he showed signs of wanting to return to his book, and Mrs. Murdoch
retired. What extraordinary standards she had, and how bitterly she was
prepared to defend a convention, for after all in such a marriage the
infidelity of the husband was nothing but a conventional offense: she
obviously had no affection for him. The point of view became very
topsyturvy in Neptune Crescent, Michael decided.
On the last evening of the fortnight during which he had regularly
visited the Orient, Michael went straight back to Camden Town without
waiting to scan the cafés and restaurants until half-past twelve as he
usually had. This abode in Neptune Crescent was empty, and as always
when that was the case the personality of the house was very vivid upon
his imagination. As he turned up the gas-jet in the hall, the cramped
interior with its fusty smell and its thread-bare staircarpet
disappearing into the upper gloom round the corner seemed to be
dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of
having the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent
impulse. For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the
ineffable depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to
glance at every one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the
exaggerated defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to
lock and double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two
clanking chains. He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and
Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the
summer night, while himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back
garden and went climbing over garden wall and garden wall to abandon
this curious mixture of salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and
solidity, this quite indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way
strangely cozy house. He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor
front. He peered cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed.
The gas-jet was glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue
flame, but the light from the passage showed all her clothes still
strewn about. From the open door came out the faint perfume of stale
scent which mingled with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle
expression of the house’s personality. He closed the door gently. In
the silence it seemed almost as if the least percussion would rouse the
very clothes from their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning
another pinhead of gas, and the light from the passage reaching here
very dimly was only just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly
sheen and to show the mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the
luminous face of the clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to
unreality, and when Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering
his room, even they were scarcely sound guarantors of his own
actuality. He had a certain queasiness in opening the door of the
Murdochs’ bedroom, and he was rather glad when he was confronted here
by a black void whose secrecy he did not feel tempted to violate. With
three or four books under his arm he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned
out of the window two cats yawled and fizzed at one another among the
laurels, and then scampered away into muteness. From a scintillation of
colored lights upon the horizon he could hear the scrannel sounds of
the railway come thinly along the night air. Nothing else broke the
silence of the nocturnal streets. Michael felt tired, and he was
disappointed by his failure to find Lily. Just as he was dozing off, he
remembered that his Viva Voce at Oxford was due some time this week. He
must go back to Cheyne Walk to-morrow, and on this resolution he fell
asleep.
Michael woke up with a start and instantly became aware that the house
was full of discordant sounds. For a minute or two he lay motionless
trying to connect the noise with the present, trying to separate his
faculties from the inspissate air that seemed to be throttling them. He
was not yet free from the confusion of sleep, and for a few seconds he
could only perceive the sound almost visibly churning the clotted
darkness that was stifling him. Gradually the clamor resolved itself
into the voices of Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy at the pitch of
excitement. Nothing was intelligible except the oaths that came up in a
series of explosions detached from the main din. He got out of bed and
lit the gas, saw that it was one o’clock, dressed himself roughly, and
opened the door of his room.
“Yes, my lad, you thought you was very clever.”
“No, I didn’t think I was clever. Now then.”
“Yes! You can spend all your money on that muck. The sauce of it. In a
hansom!”
Here Poppy’s voice came in with a malignant piping sound.
“Muck yourself, you dirty old case-keeper!”
“You call me a case-keeper? What men have I ever let you bring back
here?”
Mrs. Murdoch’s voice was swollen with wrath.
“You don’t know how many men I haven’t brought back. So now, you great
ugly mare!” Poppy howled.
“The only fellow you’ve ever brought to my house is that one-eyed ——
who calls himself my husband. Mister _Mur_doch! Mis-ter _Murdoch!_ And
you get out of my house in the streets where you belong. I don’t want
no two-and-fours in _my_ house.”
“Hark at her!” Poppy cried, in a horrible screaming laugh. “Why don’t
you go back on the streets yourself? Why, I can remember you as one of
the old fourpenny Hasbeens when I was still dressmaking; a dirty
drunken old teat that couldn’t have got off with a blind tramp.”
Michael punctuated each fresh taunt and accusation with a step forward
to interfere; and every time he held himself back, pondering the
impossibility of extracting from these charges and countercharges any
logical assignment of blame. It made him laugh to think how
extraordinarily in the wrong they all three were and at the same time
how they were all perfectly convinced they were right. The only factor
left out of account was Mrs. Murdoch’s own behavior. He wondered rather
what effect that gentleman friend would produce on the husband. He
decided that he had better go back to bed until the racket subsided.
Then, just as he was turning away in the midst of an outpouring of
vileness far more foul than anything uttered so far, he heard what
sounded like a blow. That of course could not be tolerated, and he
descended to intervene.
The passage was the field of battle, and the narrow space seemed to
give not only an added virulence to the fight, but also an added
grotesquery. When Michael arrived at the head of the staircase, Alf had
pinned his wife to the wall and was shouting to Poppy over his shoulder
to get back into her own room. Poppy would go halfway, but always a new
insult would occur to her, and she would return to fling it at Mrs.
Murdoch, stabbing the while into its place again a hatpin which during
her retreats she always half withdrew.
As for Mrs. Murdoch, she was by now weeping hysterically and
occasionally making sudden forward plunges that collapsed like jelly.
Michael paused at the head of the stairs, wondering what to say. It
seemed to him really rather a good thing that Alf was restraining his
wife. It would be extremely unpleasant to have to separate the two
women if they closed with each other. He had almost decided to retire
upstairs again, when Poppy caught sight of him and at once turned her
abuse in his direction.
“What’s it got to do with you?” she screamed. “What’s the good in you
standing gaping there? We all know what _you_ are. We all know what
she’s always going up to _your_ room for.”
Mrs. Murdoch was heaving and puffing and groaning, and while Alf held
her, his rolling eye with fierce and meaningless stare nearly made
Michael laugh. However, he managed to be serious, and gravely advised
Poppy to go to bed.
“Don’t you dare try to order me about!” she shrieked. “Keep your
poncified ways for that fat old maggot which her husband can’t hardly
hold, and I don’t blame him. She’s about as big as a omnibus.”
“Oh, you wicked woman,” sobbed Mrs. Murdoch. “Oh, you mean, hateful
snake-in-the-grass! Oh, you filth!”
“Hold your jaw,” commanded Alf. “If you don’t want me to punch into
you.”
“All day she’s in his room. Let him stand up and deny it if he can, the
dirty tyke. Why don’t you punch into _him,_ Alf?” Poppy screamed.
Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.
“Let _me_ look after Mrs. Murdoch I _don’t_ think!” shouted Poppy. “And
be a man, even if you can’t keep your old woman out of the lodger’s
room. —— ——! I wouldn’t half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man, the ——
——!”
It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being
nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman’s thin magenta
lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable.
When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to
hold on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.
Michael’s laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch
spat in her husband’s face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip
upon her shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other.
Michael, though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs
to part them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned
and attacked him. The hat-stand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat
slid up and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and
dust and spirituous breath.
At last Michael managed to secure Poppy’s thin twitching arms and to
hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and
he was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began
fecklessly to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf,
who had gone to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case
a policeman’s bull’s-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared
in the doorway.
“What a smell of gas!” he exclaimed nervously.
There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in
her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead
pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was
rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried
to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked
the door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended
upon the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the
hat-stand, while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of
tumbled hair.
Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very
cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed
eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers:
of last night’s tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming
countenance.
“Quite a set-out we had last night, didn’t we?” she said expansively.
“But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with
my old man in a hansom cab. There’s a nice game to get up to. I was
bound to let her have it. I couldn’t have held myself in.”
“I suppose you’ll get rid of her now,” said Michael.
“Oh, well, she’s not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She
was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I’d had one or two myself.
Oh, well, it wouldn’t do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment
in this life?”
She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his
standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy
feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and
fears. But to-day he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.
Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune
Crescent.
“It seems such a pity,” she said. “And just as I was beginning to get
used to your ways. Oh, well, we’ll meet again some day, I hope, this
side of the cemetery.”
Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night,
but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away
from Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small
doorway looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also
waved rather maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose
pressed against the panes of the ground-floor front.
CHAPTER III
THE CAFÉ D’ORANGE
Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding
that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected
she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune
Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not
subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life,
the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate
and gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the
tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became
waxily pink under his stare.
“Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir.” It was as if she were rebuking
his observation.
His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.
“Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you
to send me those postcards.”
If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her
about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did
not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have
seemed to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other
people was a confidence he always resented.
“Stella and Alan are in the studio,” she told him.
They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said
he would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of
pallid grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could
not keep back the thought of how utterly Alan’s company had replaced
his own. Not that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted;
but a period of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were
being rather ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously
glad to see him that the fleck of bitterness vanished immediately, and
he was at their service.
“Where have you been?” Stella demanded. “We go to Richmond. We send
frantic wires to you to join us on the river, and when we come back
you’re gone. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been away,” Michael answered, with a certain amount of
embarrassment.
“My dear old Michael, we never supposed you’d been hiding in the
cistern-cupboard for a fortnight,” said Stella, striking three chords
of cheerful contempt.
“I believe he went back to Oxford,” suggested Alan.
“I am going up to-morrow,” Michael said. “When is your Viva?”
“Next week. Where are you going to stay?”
“In college, if I can get hold of a room.”
“Bother Oxford,” interrupted Stella. “We want to know where you’ve been
this fortnight.”
“You do,” Alan corrected.
“I’ll tell you both later on,” Michael volunteered. “Just at present I
suppose you won’t grudge me a secret. People who are engaged to be
married should show a very special altruism toward people who are not.”
“Michael, I will not have you being important and carrying about a
secret with you,” Stella declared.
“You can manage either me or Alan,” Michael offered. “But you simply
shall not manage both of us. Personally, I recommend you to break-in
Alan.”
With evasive banter he succeeded in postponing the revelation of what
he was, as Stella said, up to.
“We’re going in for Herefords,” Alan suddenly announced without
consideration for the trend of the talk. “You know. Those white-faced
chaps.”
Michael looked at him in astonishment.