explained. “We went down to see it last week.”
“Oh, Alan, why did you tell him? He doesn’t deserve to be told.”
“Is it decent?” Michael asked.
“Awfully decent,” said Alan. “Rather large, you know.”
“In fact, we shall belong to the squirearchy,” cried Stella, crashing
down upon the piano with the first bars of Chopin’s most exciting
Polonaise and from the Polonaise going off into an absurd impromptu
recitative.
“We shall have a dog-cart—a high and shining dog-cart—and we shall go
bowling down the lanes of the county of Hunts—because in books about
people who live in the county and of the county and by with or from the
county dog-carts invariably bowl—we shall have a herd of Herefordshire
bulls and bullocks and bullockesses—and my husband Alan with a straw in
his mouth will go every morning with the bailiff to inspect their
well-being—and three days every week from November to March we shall go
hunting in Huntingdon—and when we aren’t actually hunting in Huntingdon
we shall be talking about hunting—and we shall also talk about the
Primrose League and the foot-and-mouth disease and the evolutions of
the new High Church Vicar—we shall....”
But Michael threw a cushion at her, and the recitative came to an end.
They all three talked for a long while more seriously of plans for life
at Hardingham Hall.
“You know dear old Prescott requested me in his will that I would
hyphen his name on to mine, whether I were married or single,” said
Stella. “So we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Alan has been
very good about that, though I think he’s got a dim idea it’s putting
on side. Stella Prescott-Merivale or The Curse of the County! And when
I play I’m going to be Madame Merivale. I decline to be done out of the
Madame! and everybody will pronounce it Marivahleh and I shall receive
the unanimous encomia of the critical press.”
“Life will be rather a rag,” said Michael, with approbation.
“Of course it’s going to be simply wonderful. Can’t you see the
headlines? From Chopin to Sheep. Madame Merivale, the famous Virtuosa,
and her Flock of Barbary Long-tails.”
It was all so very remote from Neptune Crescent, Michael thought. They
really were going to be so ridiculously happy, these two, in their
country life. And now they were talking of finding him a house close to
Hardingham Hall. There must be just that small Georgian house, they
vowed, where with a large garden of stately walks and a
well-proportioned library of books he could stay in contented retreat.
They promised him, too, that beyond the tallest cedar on the lawn a
gazebo should command the widest, the greenest expanse of England ever
beheld.
“It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts,” said
Stella, “if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And
of course you’d ride a nag. I’m not sure really that you wouldn’t have
to wear knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me
feel like Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?”
“I should make up your mind which,” Michael advised.
“But you know what I mean,” she persisted. “The doctor’s wife would
come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or
whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, ‘We must ask
my brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to
know. My brother knows everything.’ And she would agree with a
pursed-up mouth. ‘Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone
says your brother is a great scholar. It’s such a pleasure to have him
at the Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?’”
“If you’re supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you
at once that it’s not a bit like it.”
“But I think you ought to come and live near us,” Alan solemnly put in.
“Of course, my dear, he’s coming,” Stella declared.
“Of course I’m not,” Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they
wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want
him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would
enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would
care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the
shrubbery’s edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In
the quick vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds,
Michael experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he
intended to do.
“And how about Michael’s wife?” Alan asked.
Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
“Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him,” Stella
confidently prophesied.
“No, really,” said Michael to hide his embarrassment. “I object.
Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement.”
Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describe a
lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended
to place him.
“I think rather a Quakerish person, don’t you, Alan? Rather neat and
tiny with a great sense of humor and....”
“In fact, an admirable sick nurse,” Michael interposed, laughing.
Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the
river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how
naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now
that by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in
the long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed
to Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the
security of his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that
fleeting disloyalty to his task.
Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn’s old
white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the
tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and
irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really
it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay
between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in
Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made
no attempt to find Lily.
Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael’s
immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel
the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had
achieved a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or
two of the St. Mary’s dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at
All Souls. The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was
attractive to have anything so remote come suddenly within the region
of feasibleness. He would lose nothing by trying for it, and if he
succeeded what a congenial existence offered itself. With private means
he would be able to divide his time between Oxford and London. There
would really be nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that
seemed to stretch before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he
certainly had not worked hard enough to obtain a first without some
talent) he would prosecute the study of history. He would make himself
famous in a select sort of way. He would become the authority of a
minor tributary to the great stream of research. A set of very
scholarly, very thorough works would testify to his reputation. There
were plenty of archaic problems still to be solved. He cast a
proprietary glance over the centuries, and he had almost decided to
devote himself to the service of Otto I and Sylvester II, when in a
moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly before his mind as the
ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of research into the past
seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the congratulatory letters and
decided to let the future wait a while. This pursuit of Lily was a mad
business, no doubt, but to come to grips with the present called for a
certain amount of madness.
Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of
trying for All Souls.
“You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were
up that you didn’t know what you ought to do, and now when it’s
perfectly obvious you won’t make the slightest attempt to do it.”
“Used I to grumble?” asked Michael.
“Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical
questions which had no answer,” said Alan severely.
“What if I told you I’d found an answer to a great many of them?”
“Ever since I’ve been engaged to Stella you’ve found it necessary to be
very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?”
“It’s imaginable, don’t you think, that I might be making up my mind to
do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at
All Souls?”
“But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch
it.”
“I tell you it was a fluke.”
“My third wasn’t a fluke,” said Alan. “I worked really hard for it.”
“Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run,” Michael
argued. “You have already fitted into your place with the most complete
exactitude. There’s no dimension in your future that can possibly
trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big
for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my
frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be
too small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to
squeeze into it most uncomfortably.”
“You’ll never do anything,” Alan prophesied. “Because you’ll always be
doubting.”
“I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity,” Michael pointed
out. “With all doubts and hesitations I’m perfectly convinced of one
great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which
lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization.
Reason carried to the _nth_ power can always with absurd ease be
debauched by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind’s wretched little
lament for disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because
they are irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she
claims to be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member
of Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The
franchise is to be endowed with a sacramental significance. If the New
Women win, they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men.
But of course they won’t win, because God is so delightfully
irrational. By the way, it’s worth noting that the peculiar vestment
with which popular fancy has clothed the New Woman is called rational
costume. You often hear of ‘rationals’ as a synonym for breeches. What
was I saying? Oh, yes, about God being irrational. You never know what
he’ll do next. He is a dreadful problem for rationalists. That’s why
they have abolished him.”
“You’re confusing two different kinds of reason,” said Alan. “What you
call impulse—unless your impulse is mere madness—is what I might call
reason.”
“In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the
reconstruction of your terminology. I’m not a philosopher, and
therefore I’ve given this vague generic name ‘impulse’ to something
which deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering
impetus does it give to conduct, a very long name indeed.”
“But if you’re going through life depending on impulse,” Alan objected,
“you’ll be no better off than a weathercock. You can’t discount reason
in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by
experience.”
“The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no
reliance whatever.”
“It’s no good arguing with you,” Alan said. “Because what you call
impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect
logic.”
“Alan, I can’t believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your
conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I’m not
going to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a
country squire. Let’s hold on to what certainties we can.”
Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem
of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the
intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he
thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore
he refrained.
There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was
already in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the
burden of it in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and
Stella and Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join
them, if he could get away from London.
“If you can get away!” Stella scoffed. “What rot you do talk.”
But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where
he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others
northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on
which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the
stagnant sheen of the Thames.
That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was
no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from
London for a while. After the performance he visited the Café d’Orange
in Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often
noticed the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the
quality of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the
Café d’Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he
had so far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he
was rather inclined to think that she was someone’s mistress and that
Drake’s view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she
had yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
Downstairs at the Café d’Orange was rather more like a corner of hell
than Michael had anticipated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in
these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and
vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly
down and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner
left by the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy
tunics of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were
grinding out ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking
and laughter, the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of
the waiters made such a din that Michael stood for a moment in
confusion, debating the possibility of one more person threading his
way through the serried tables to a seat.
There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and
in one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So
paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across
and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and
soon with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before
him in that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always
induced by ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped
alcove, he seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and
voices of the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic
finale. After a time the various groups and individuals were separated
in his mind, so that in their movements he began to take an easily
transferred interest, endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant
characteristics in turn. Round him in the alcove there were strange
contrasts of behavior. At one table four offensive youths were showing
off with exaggerated laughter for the benefit of nobody’s attention.
Behind them in the crepuscule of two broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl;
ivory white and cloying the air with her heavy perfume, was arguing in
low passionate tones with a cold-eyed listener who with a straw was
tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a moist surface of cigarette-ash.
In the deepest corner a girl with a high complexion and bright eyes was
making ardent love to a partially drunk and bearded man, winking the
while over her shoulder at whoever would watch her comedy. The other
places were filled by impersonal women who sipped from their glasses
without relish and stared disdainfully at each other down their
powdered noses. At Michael’s own table was a blotchy man who
alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and immediately
opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat pale face of
the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat trimmed with
daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not catch her eye,
and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward the raffish and
rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall were large
mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in reflection the
throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications.
Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls,
and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay
longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they
must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and
with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless
accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of
alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam
of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested
commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him,
and he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
“You’re very silent, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll give you a penny for
them.”
“I really wasn’t thinking about anything in particular,” said Michael.
“Will you have a drink?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Alphonse!” she shouted, tugging at the arm of the
overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. “Bring me a hot
whisky-and-lemon. There’s a love.”
Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed
on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was
expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a
fountain of glass.
“I’ve taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot,” she informed
Michael. “You know. Anyone does, don’t they? Get a sudden fit and keep
on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This’ll be my sixth to-night. But
I’m a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I
reckon it’ll bring me luck.”
“I expect it will,” Michael said.
“You are serious, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you was
the spitting image of a fellow I know—Bert Saunders, who writes about
the boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He’s more of a bright-eyes
than you are, though.”
The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael’s health.
“Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it,” she said
meditatingly. “What’s your name, kiddie?”
He told her.
“Michael,” she repeated. “You’re a Jew, then?”
He shook his head.
“Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name,
isn’t it? Michael? Of course it is. I don’t mind Jew fellows myself.
One or two of them have been very good to me. My name’s Daisy Palmer.”
The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his
encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very
cautious.
“You look rather French,” was his most audacious sally toward the
personal.
“Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on
the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself.”
Again the conversation dropped.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” Daisy volunteered. “She’s been having a row
with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and
tell me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here
by now. What’s the time, kid?”
It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
“I’m rather worried over Doll,” she confided to Michael, “because this
fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns
nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, ‘Doll, that dirty rotter you’re
so soft over’ll swing for you before he’s done. Why don’t you leave
him,’ I said, ‘and come and live along with me for a bit?’”
“And what did she say?” Michael asked.
But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself
coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
“Oh, doesn’t she look shocking white,” exclaimed Daisy. “Doll!” she
shouted, waving to her. “Over here, duck.”
The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in
exaggerated falsetto.
“—— to you,” she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was
a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased
Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said
to these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Café
d’Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on
otherwise indescribable humanity.
By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating
chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend’s side. She began
immediately a voluble tale:
“Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told
him off so as he could hardly look me in the face. ‘You call yourself a
man,’ I said, ‘why, you dirty little alien.’ That’s what I called him.
I did straight, ‘you dirty little——’”
“This is my friend,” interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed.
It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going
to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember
the convention of their profession.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand
with half-a-simper.
“What will you drink?” asked Michael.
“Mine’s a brandy and soda, please. ‘You dirty little alien,’ I said.”
Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
“Go on, did you? And what did he say?” asked Daisy admiringly.
“He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?”
“That’s right,” nodded Daisy wisely.
“‘For two years,’ I said, ‘you’ve let a girl keep you,’ I said, ‘and
then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get
hold of her,’ I said. ‘I’ll tear her eyes out.’ ‘No, you won’t, now
then,’ he said. ‘Won’t I? I will, then,’ and with that I just lost
control of my feelings, I felt that wild....”
“What did you do, Doll?” asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe
the outraged memory.
“What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to
the Orange. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you can sit drinking tea while you break my
heart.’ Don’t you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a
straight girl when I first knew him. Straight—well, anyway not on the
game like what I am now.” Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter
self-compassion. “I’ve slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me
like dirt.”
“Go on. Don’t cry, duck,” Daisy begged. “Come home with me to-night and
we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn’t cry over
him,” she said fiercely. “There’s no fellow worth crying over. The best
of them isn’t worth crying over.”
The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly’s tears,
and Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive
pugnacity of the underworld, rose to attack them.
“Sit down,” Daisy commanded. “I wouldn’t mess my hands, if I was you,
with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You’ll get us all
into trouble.”
Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute
or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
Gradually Dolly’s tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she
became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen
with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin
expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
“Rotten, I call it, don’t you?” said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing
to Michael.
He agreed with a profound nod.
“And she’s been that good to him. You wouldn’t believe.”
Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of
Dolly’s virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
At this moment the subject of Daisy’s eulogy rose from her seat and
stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the
beerhall.
“My God!” she said, with ominous calm.
“What is it, duck?” asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
“My God!” Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a
volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass
evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy
seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her
back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of
the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in
a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors
began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the
cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man
collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer
winked over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four
offensive youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man
ceased to look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily
his teeth.
It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather
a nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her
friend. She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark
that Florrie for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she
could come it over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do
that; yes, more than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging
his way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using
their best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate.
Though she declared loudly that nothing would make her quit the Orange,
and certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to
be coaxed away.
Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again
and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers,
which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how
it had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and
enmities and friendships of a complete society. He found himself
explaining to several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been
compelled to endure at the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was
extraordinary how suddenly this absurd intrigue of the underworld came
to seem tremendously important. He felt that all his sense of
proportion was rapidly disappearing. In the middle of an excited
justification of Dolly’s tears he was aware that he and his
surroundings and his attitude were to himself incredible. He was
positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the inconsequence of dreams.
Or was all his life until this moment a dream, and was this reality?
One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was the necessity to see
the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the evening. He felt
very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with admirable composure, and
when he asked her advice about the course of action, he agreed at once
with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a cab and be allowed in
Daisy’s rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage and grief that was
here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very imprudent display of
emotion.
“She’ll be barred from coming down here,” said Daisy. “Come on, let’s
get her home.”
“Where’s that Florrie?” screamed Dolly.
“She’s gone home. So what’s the use in your carrying on so mad? The
manager’s got his eye on us, Doll. Come on, Doll, let’s get on home. I
tell you the manager’s looking at us. You are a silly girl.”
“—— the manager,” said Dolly obstinately. “Let him look.”
“Why don’t you come and see if you can find Florrie outside?” Daisy
suggested.
Dolly was moved by this proposal, and presently she agreed to vacate
the Orange, much to Michael’s relief, for he was expecting every moment
to see her attack the manager with the match-stand that was fretting
her fingers. As it happened, Daisy’s well-meant suggestion was very
unlucky because Hungarian Dave, the cause of all the bother, was
standing on the pavement close to the entrance.
Daisy whispered to Michael to get a cab quickly, because Hungarian Dave
was close at hand. He looked at him curiously, this degraded individual
in whose domestic affairs he was now so deeply involved. A very
objectionable creature he was, too, with his greasy hair and large red
mouth. His cap was pulled down over the eyes, and he may have wished
not to be seen; but an instinct for his presence made Dolly turn round,
and in a moment she was in the thick of the delight of telling him off
for the benefit of a crowd increasing with every epithet she flung. It
was useless now to attempt to get her away, and Michael and Daisy could
only drag her back when she seemed inclined to attack him with
finger-nails or hatpin.
“Get a cab,” cried Daisy. “Never mind what she says. Get a cab, and
we’ll put the silly thing into it and drive off. The coppers will be
here in a moment.”
Michael managed to hail a hansom immediately, but when he turned back
to the scene of the pavement the conditions of the dispute were
entirely changed. Hungarian Dave, infuriated or frightened, had knocked
Dolly down, and she was just staggering to her feet, when a policeman
stepped into the circle.
“Come on, move along,” he growled.
The bully had merged himself in the ring of onlookers, and Dolly, with
a cry of fury, flung herself in his direction.
“Stop that, will you?” the policeman said savagely, seizing her by the
arm.
“Go on, it’s a dirty shame,” cried Daisy. “Why don’t you take the
fellow as knocked her down?”
Michael by this time had forced his way through the crowd, rage beating
upon his brain like a great scarlet hammer.
“You infernal ass,” he shouted to the constable. “Haven’t you got the
sense to see that this woman was attacked first? Where is the
blackguard who did it?” he demanded of the stupid, the gross, the
vilely curious press of onlookers. No one came forward to support him,
and Hungarian Dave had slipped away.
“Move on, will you?” the policeman repeated.
“Damn you,” cried Michael. “Will you let go of that woman’s arm?”
The constable with a bovine density of purpose proceeded apparently to
arrest the wretched Dolly, and Michael maddened by his idiocy felt that
the only thing to do was to hit him as hard as he could. This he did.
The constable immediately blew his whistle. Other masses of inane bulk
loomed up, and Michael was barely able to control himself sufficiently
not to resist all the way to Vine Street, as two of them marched him
along, and four more followed with Daisy and Dolly. A spumy trail of
nocturnal loiterers clung to their wake.
Next morning Michael appeared before the magistrate. He listened to the
charge against him and nearly laughed aloud in court, because the whole
business so much resembled the trial in Alice in Wonderland. It was not
that the magistrate was quite so illogical as the King of Hearts; but
he was so obviously biassed in favor of the veracity of a London
policeman, that the inconsequence of the nightmare which had begun last
night was unalterably preserved. Michael, aware of the circumstances
which had led up to what was being made to appear as wantonly riotous
behavior in Leicester Square, could not fail to be exasperated by the
inability of the magistrate to understand his own straightforward
story. He began to sympathize with the lawless population. The law
could only seem to them an unintelligent machine for crushing their
freedom. If the conduct of this case were a specimen of administration,
it was obvious that arrest must be synonymous with condemnation. The
magistrate in the first place seemed dreadfully overcome by the sorrow
of beholding a young man in Michael’s position on the police-court.
“I cannot help wondering when I see a young man who has had every
opportunity ...” the magistrate went on in a voice that worked on the
stale air of the court like a rusty file.
“I’m not a defaulting bank clerk,” Michael interrupted. “Is it
impossible for you to understand——”
“Don’t speak to me like that. Keep quiet. I’ve never been spoken to
like that in all my experience as a magistrate. Keep quiet.”
Michael sighed in compassion for his age and stupidity.
“Are there any previous convictions against Wearne and Palmer?” the
magistrate inquired. He was told that the woman Palmer had not hitherto
appeared, but that Wearne had been previously fined for disorderly
conduct in Shaftesbury Avenue. “Ah!” said the magistrate. “Ah!” he
repeated, looking over the rim of his glasses. “And the case against
the male defendant? I will take the evidence of Constable C11254.”
“Your worship, I was on duty yesterday evening at 12.25 in Leicester
Square. Hearing a noise in the direction of the Caffy Dorringe and
observing a crowd collect, I moved across the road to disperse it. The
defendant Wearne was using obscene language to an unknown man; and
wishing to get her to move on I took hold of her arm. The male
defendant, also using very obscene language, attempted to rescue her
and struck me on the chest. I blew my whistle....”
The ponderous constable with his thick red neck continued a sing-song
narrative.
When Michael’s turn came to refute some of the evidence against him, he
merely shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s really useless, you know, for me to say anything. If ‘damn you’
is obscene, then I was obscene. If a girl is knocked down by a bully
and on rising to her feet is instantly arrested by a dunderhead in a
blue uniform, and if an onlooker punches this functionary, then I did
assault the constable.”
“This sort of insolence won’t do,” said the magistrate trembling with a
curious rarefied passion. “I have a very good mind to send you to
prison without the option of a fine, but in consideration....”
Somehow or other it was made to appear a piece of extraordinary
magnanimity on the part of the magistrate that Michael was only fined
three guineas and costs.
“I wish to pay the fines of Miss Palmer and Miss Wearne,” he announced.
Later in the morning Michael, with the two girls, emerged into the
garish summer day. Not even yet was the illusion of a nightmare
dissipated, for as he looked at his two companions, feathered, frilled
and bedraggled, who were walking beside him, he could scarcely
acknowledge even their probable reality here in the sun.
“I shan’t drink hot whisky-and-lemon again in a hurry,” vowed Daisy. “I
knew it was going to bring me bad luck when I said it tasted so funny.”
“But you said your hat was going to be lucky,” Michael pointed out.
“Yes, I’ve been properly sucked in over that,” Daisy agreed.
“Nothing ever brings me luck,” grumbled Dolly resentfully.
As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he
was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal
mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.
“I reckon I’ll go home and have a good lay down,” said Daisy. “Are you
going to have dinner with me?” she asked, turning to Dolly.
“Dinner?” echoed Dolly. “Nice time to talk to anyone about their
dinner, when they’ve got the sick like I have! Dinner!”
They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he
might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He
found it embarrassing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and
Edgar’s window to stare instead at him and his companions.
Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call
upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the
second five-pound note into which the law had broken.
“Is this for us?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll’s going
to live with me a bit now, aren’t you, Doll?”
“I suppose so,” said Doll.
Michael really admired the hospitality which was willing to shelter
this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the
sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with
Hungarian Dave.
When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary
appearance by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo
was almost to make him incredulous of the night’s event, and he could
not help paying a visit to the Café d’Orange, to verify the alcove in
which he had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and
he stood for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the
night before he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the
bar, he thought he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes,
it was certainly Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder,
addressing him by name. Meats turned round with a start.
“Don’t you remember me?” asked Michael.
“Of course I do,” said Meats nervously. “But for the love of Jerusalem
drop calling me by that name. Here, let’s go outside.”
In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.
“Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble,” said Meats.
“You are a strange chap,” said Michael. “When I first met you it was
Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now——”
“Look here,” said Meats, “give over, will you? I’ve told you once. If
you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now
don’t forget.”
“Come and have a drink, and tell me what you’ve been doing in the four
years since we met,” Michael suggested.
“B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?”
Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had
vanished from his mind.
“Come on, then,” said Barnes. “We’ll go into the Afrique, upstairs.”
Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was
causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness
which had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had
seemed the predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at
the round marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled
an actor out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was
the cheesy complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season
too much worn and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with
its dismoded exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness;
perhaps, thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it
had merely been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an
exception. Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a
compassionate amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity
as of a puppet temporarily put out of action testified to his own
morbid heightening of common things in the past. How incredible it
seemed now that this Barnes had once been able to work upon his soul
with influential doctrine.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Michael asked again.
“Oh, hopping and popping about. I’ve got the rats at present.”
“Where are you living?”
Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. “What do you want
to know for?” he asked.
“Mere inquisitiveness,” Michael assured him. “You really needn’t treat
me like a detective, you know.”
“My mistake,” said Barnes. “But really, Fane. Let’s see, that is your
name? Thought it was. I don’t often forget a name. No, without swank,
Fane, I’ve been hounded off my legs lately. I’m living in Leppard
Street. Pimlico way.”
“I’d like to come and see you some time,” said Michael.
“Here, straight, what _is_ your game?” Barnes could not conceal his
suspicion.
“Inquisitiveness,” Michael declared again. “Also I rather want a Sancho
Panza.”
“Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige,” said Barnes very
sarcastically.
It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming,
but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that
he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.
CHAPTER IV
LEPPARD STREET
While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes
an outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present
narrative was probably not less cynical than the account of his life
related to Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps
because his imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality,
he could no longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals
calmly, neither blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental
goose-flesh. Yet amid all the frankness accorded to him he could not
find out why Barnes had changed his name. He was curious about this,
because he could not conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for
Barnes to reveal. It would be interesting to find out what could really
make even him pause; no doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the
underworld, it would turn out to be something that Michael himself
would consider trivial in comparison with so much of what Barnes had
boasted. Anyway, whether he discovered the secret or not, it would
certainly be interesting to study Barnes, since in him good and evil
might at any moment display themselves as clearly as a hidden substance
to a reagent flung into a seething alembic. It might perhaps be
assuming too much to say that there was any good in him; and yet
Michael was unwilling to suppose that all his conversions were merely
the base drugs of a disordered morality. Apart from his philosophic
value, Barnes might very actually be of service in the machinery of
finding Lily.
At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.
“Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this,” he commented.
Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse
to be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing
in that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably
than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had
civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a
commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased
with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the
reverse true?
“Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?”
Michael asked. “I do wish you could understand it’s really so much more
difficult. I can’t distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly
so well as you can.”
“Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell
you,” said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. “In my experience most
of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we
haven’t got. I don’t care what it is—a woman or a drink or a new suit
of clothes. Money’ll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I
could be a bloody angel.”
“Supposing I offered you half as much for three months,” suggested
Michael. “Do you think you’d find life any easier while it lasted?”
“Well, don’t be silly,” said Barnes. “Of course I should. If you’d
walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody
had dropped a threepenny bit, you’d think it was easier. It’s not a bit
of good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you’d be just the
same. Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man
who first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey’s ears
on his nob. What’s it done for me? I ask you. Why, it’s made me so that
I’d steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid
on another.”
“Tell me about Leppard Street,” said Michael, laughing. “What’s it
like?”
“Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That’s what it
looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who’s lost all his
teeth, and you’ve got what it feels like to be living in it.”
“Supposing I said I’d like to try?” asked Michael. “What would you
think?”
“Think? I shouldn’t think two seconds. I should know you were having a
game. What good’s Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing
up and down all day on cushions?”
“Experience,” said Michael.
“Oh, rats! Nothing’s experience that you haven’t had to do.”
“Well, I’ll give you five pounds a week,” Michael offered, “if you’ll
keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn’t want
anything very dreadful, of course,” he added.
It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest,
so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and
offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason
for wishing to go to Leppard Street.
“You see, I want to find a girl,” he explained.
“Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you’ll lose the best girl
you’ve got straight off. That’s all there is to it.”
“You don’t understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I
want to find her and marry her.”
It seemed to Michael that Barnes’ manner changed in some scarcely
definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five
pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked.
He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an
almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his
former attitude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve
had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap.
Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no
allusion to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to
emotion. This was proving really a most delightful example of the truth
of his theory. And it was clever of Barnes—it was more than clever, it
was truly imaginative of him—to realize without another question the
need to leave for a while Cheyne Walk.
“But is there a vacant room?” Michael asked in sudden dread of
disappointment.
“Look here, you’d better see the place before you decide on leaving
here,” Barnes advised. “It isn’t a cross between Buckingham Palace and
the Carlton, you know.”
“I suppose it’s the name that attracts me,” said Michael. “It sounds
ferocious.”
“I don’t know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house
is ferocious enough. Never mind.” He jingled the five sovereigns.
“I’ll go up and pack,” said Michael. “By the way, I haven’t told you
yet that I was run in last night.”
“In quod you mean?” asked Barnes. “Whatever for?”
“Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square.”
“These coppers are the limit,” said Barnes emphatically. “The absolute
limit. Really. They’ll pinch the Archbishop of Canterbury for looking
into Stagg and Mantle’s window before we know where we are.”
Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the
doorway to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the
macaw on its perch were about equally exotic.
They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along
the river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the
adventurousness of London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the
high spring-tide without exulting in the movement of the stream that
was washing out with its flood all the listlessness of the hot August
afternoon. When Chelsea Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the
banks of a great river sweeping through a great city began to be more
evident. The whole character of the Embankment changed at every hundred
yards. First there was that somber canal which, flowing under the road
straight from the Thames, reappeared between a cañon of gloomy houses
and vanished again underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what
was apparently a large private house which had been gutted of the
tokens of humanity and filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and
pistons, all moving perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of
noise. Under Grosvenor Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering
forward and a train crashing overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and
girders dripping with the excrement of railway-engines, they came into
Grosvenor Road. They passed the first habitations of Pimlico, two or
three terraces and isolated houses all different in character. There
could scarcely be another road in London so varied as this. Maurice had
been wise to have his studio in Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of
Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an epitome of London.
The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide
thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray
street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so
insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton
Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains
the poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily
sinister respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very
wide and very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were
checked off by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the
noise of the horse’s hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to
which every evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home.
It was impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in
Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here
but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and
hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose
wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
“I wouldn’t mind having lodgings here,” said Barnes. He had caught
sight of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This
was the outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was
full of them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the
period of final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison
with the middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older
and now very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was
almost attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew
nearer to Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its
predecessor, each one being a little less able to resist the corrosion
of a persistently inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp
effect of contrast, occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with
their houses so uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of
irremediable decadency.
Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem
endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just
before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge,
it swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the
street ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of
broken glass: these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on
the other a coal yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an
exit between two rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an
exit, however, that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts.
Some fifty yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in
which five very tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very
edge of the embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and
flanked on either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an
impression of quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the
narrow oblong windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The
houses were built of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened
from yellow to the same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as
an appendix for the draff of the neighborhood’s rubbish. The ribs of an
umbrella; a child’s boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here
in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
“Here we are,” said Barnes. “Here’s Leppard Street that you’ve been so
anxious to see.”
“It looks rather exciting,” Michael commented.
“Oh, it’s the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don’t think.
Exciting?” Barnes repeated. “You know, Fane, there’s something wrong
with you. If you think this is exciting, you’d go raving mad when I
showed you some of the places where I’ve lived. Well, here we are,
anyhow. Number One—the corner house.”
They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening
ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a
parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato
parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
Barnes opened the door.
“We’ll take your bag up to my room first, and then we’ll go downstairs
and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don’t change
your mind when you’ve seen the inside.”
Michael had no time to notice Barnes’ room very much. But vaguely he
saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses
masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and
crimson fruits. After that glimpse they went down again over the
grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted
to the landlady in the basement.
“She’ll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her,” he said to
Michael. “You see, just lately I’ve been very anxious to avoid meeting
her.”
He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale
soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by:
here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a
Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury,
so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the
whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight
of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It
was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated
everything else.
“That’s Cleghorne,” said Barnes. “I reckon he’d sleep Rip van Winkle
barmy.”
“What’s he do?” whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
“He snores for a living, he does,” said Barnes.
They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the
landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two
trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and
chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a
moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the
carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
“I’ve brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne,” said Barnes.
“Have you brought your five weeks’ rent owing?” she asked sourly.
He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered
up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose
angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought
she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the
wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.
“Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms
on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to
come up and show you?”
She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along
her sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.
“Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ...” Michael began.
“Mis-ter Cleghorne!” she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she
began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked
continuously.
“Oh, I don’t want to disturb him,” said Michael.
“Disturb him!” she sneered. “Why, half Bedlam could drive through his
brains in a omnibus before he’d move a little finger to trouble
hisself. Yes,” she shouted, “Yes!” Her voice mingling with the creak of
the roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it
grew more strident. “Why, the blessed house might burn before he’d even
put on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his
wife can work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if
anyone could disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the
larder, he’d only grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people ’ud be very
pleased to be asthmatic, if they could lie snorting on a bed from
morning to night.”
Mrs. Cleghorne’s hands were dry now, and she led the way along the
passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She
unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was
not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of
fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some
dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant
the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window,
catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a
landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.
“That’s all I got for two months’ rent,” said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly,
surveying it. “And it’s just about fit for my old man to go and bury
his good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that’s all. The bedroom’s in
here, of course.” She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had
been picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far
as some child had been able to reach.
The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much
darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the
window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square
of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small
pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary
engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.
“Do you want to see the top-floor back?” Mrs. Cleghorne asked.
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind.” Michael felt bound to apologize to her,
whatever was suggested.
She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to
enter the vacant room.
The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the
permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over
another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and
even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was
less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no
fireplace and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than
the positive emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at
the gimcrack washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was
visible in long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with
its pleated iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress
exuding flock like clustered maggots.
“This is furnished, of course,” said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently
sucking a tooth. “Well, which will you have?”
“I think perhaps I’ll take the ground-floor rooms. I’ll have them done
up.”
“Oh, they’re quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave
them an extra-special clear-out.”
“But you wouldn’t object to my doing them up?” persisted Michael.
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t _object,”_ said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent
was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very
much pleasure from the fruition of Michael’s proposal.
They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently
beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because
somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two
empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she
was endowing them with a value and a character they did not possess.
“I’ve always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth
any other two rooms in the house. And of course that’s the reason I’m
really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to
everyone right out—if you want the two best rooms in the house, why,
you must pay according. They’re only empty now because I’ve always been
particular about letting them. I won’t have anybody, and that’s a fact.
Mr. Barnes here knows I’m really fond of those rooms.”
They had reentered them, and Mrs. Cleghorne stood with arms admiringly
akimbo.
“They really are a beautiful lodging,” she declared. “When would you
want them from?”
“Well, as soon as I can get them done up,” said Michael.
“I see. Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly just what you
was thinking of doing?”
Michael gave some of his theories of decoration, while Mrs. Cleghorne
waited in critical audience; as it were, feeling the pulse of the
apartments under the stimulus of Michael’s sketch of their
potentiality.
“All white?” the landlady echoed pessimistically. “That sounds very
gloomy, doesn’t it? More like a outhouse or a coal-cellar than a nice
couple of rooms.”
“Well, they couldn’t look rottener than what they do at present,”
Barnes put in. “So if you take my advice, you’ll say ‘yes’ and be very
thankful. They’ll look clean, anyway.”
The landlady threw back her head and surveyed Barnes like a snake about
to strike.
“Rotten?” she sniffed. “I’m sure this gentleman here isn’t likely to
find a nicer and cheaper pair of rooms or a more convenient and a
quieter pair of rooms anywhere in Pimlico. A lot of people is very
anxious to be in this neighborhood.”
Mrs. Cleghorne was much offended by Barnes’ criticism, and there was a
long period of dubiety before it was settled that Michael should be
accepted as a tenant.
“I’ve never cared for white,” she said, in final protest. “Not since I
was married.”
Reminded of Mr. Cleghorne’s existence in the basement, she hurried
forthwith to rout him out. As she disappeared, Michael saw that she was
searching in the musty folds of her skirt in order to deposit in her
purse the month’s rent he had paid in advance.
A couple of weeks passed while the decorators worked hard; and Michael
returned from an unwilling visit to Scotland to find them ready for
him. He got together a certain amount of furniture, and toward the end
of August he moved into Leppard Street.
Barnes on account of the prosperity which had come to him through
Michael’s money had managed to dress himself in a series of
outrageously new and fashionable suits, and on the afternoon of his
patron’s arrival he strutted about the apartments.
“Very nice,” he said. “Very nice, indeed. I reckon old Ma Cleghorne
ought to be very pleased with herself. Some of these pictures are a bit
too religious for me just at present, but everyone to their own taste,
that’s what I always say. To their own taste,” he repeated. “Otherwise,
what’s the good in being given an opinion of your own?”
Michael felt it was time to explain to Barnes more particularly his
quest of Lily.
“You don’t know a girl called Lily Haden?” he asked.
“Lily Haden,” said Barnes thoughtfully. “Lily Hopkins. A great fat girl
with red....”
“No, no,” Michael interrupted. “Lily Haden. Tall. Slim. Very fair hair.
Of course she may have another name now.”
“That’s it, you see,” said Barnes wisely.
“Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, I must find her,” Michael went
on.
“Well, if you go about it in that spirit, you’ll soon find her,” Barnes
prophesied.
Michael looked at him sharply. He thought he noticed in Barnes’ manner
a suggestion of humoring him. He rather resented the way in which
Barnes seemed to encourage him as one might encourage a child.
“You understand I want to marry her?” Michael asked fiercely.
“That’s all right, old chap. I’m not trying to stop you, am I?”
“But why are you talking as if I weren’t in earnest?” Michael demanded.
“When I first told you about it you were evidently very pleased, and
now you’ve got a sneer which frankly I tell you I find extraordinarily
objectionable.”
Barnes looked much alarmed by Michael’s sudden attack, and explained
that he meant nothing by his remarks beyond a bit of fun.
“Is it funny to marry somebody?” Michael demanded.
“Sometimes it’s very funny to marry a tart,” said Barnes.
Michael flushed. This was a directness of speech for which he was not
prepared.
“But when I first told you,” Michael said, “you seemed very pleased.”
“I was very pleased to find I’d evidently struck a nice-mannered
lunatic,” said Barnes. “You offered me five quid a week, didn’t you?
Well, you didn’t offer me that to give you good advice, now did you?”
Michael tried to conceal the mortification that was being inflicted
upon him. He had been very near to making a fool of himself by
supposing that his announcement had aroused admiration. Instead of
admiring him, Barnes evidently regarded him as an idiot whom it were
politic to encourage on account of the money this idiot could provide.
It was an humiliating discovery. The chivalry on which he congratulated
himself had not touched a single chord in Barnes. Was it likely that in
Lily herself he would find someone more responsive to what he still
obstinately maintained to himself was really rather a fine impulse?
Michael began to feel half sorry for Barnes because he could not
appreciate nobility of motive. It began to seem worth while trying to
impose upon him the appreciation which he felt he owed. Michael was
sorry for his uncultivated ideals, and he took a certain amount of
pleasure in the thought of how much Barnes might benefit from a close
association with himself. He did not regret the whim which had brought
them to Leppard Street. Whatever else might happen, it would always be
consoling to think that he would be helping Barnes. In half a dream
Michael began to build up the vision of a newer and a finer Barnes, a
Barnes with sensitiveness and decent instincts, a Barnes who would
forsake very willingly the sordid existence he had hitherto led in
order to rise under Michael’s guidance and help to a wider and better
life. Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the
affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him
his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his
mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem
at its true value the step he proposed to take.
Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out
of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would
surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He
could not fail to be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so
much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It
was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect.
Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few
books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and
those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had
managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as
yet he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a
small secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh
atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived
perpetually in a social twilight. Michael’s missionary affection began
to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He
felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with
their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in
their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence
hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and
everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to
fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be
his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had
an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes
were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down,
and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned
himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long
time.
Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with
blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the
corner.
“Come in,” Michael cheerfully invited him.
The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all
his clothes were on the verge of coming off, so much like a frayed
accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a
space of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the
bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.
“What I really came down for was a match,” the stranger explained.
Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in
one of his pockets.
“You don’t go in for puzzles, I suppose?” he asked tentatively. “But
any time I can help. I’m the Solutionist, you know. Don’t let me keep
you. Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I’m worrying out this week’s lot in
The Golden Penny very slowly. I’ve really had a sort of a headache the
last few days—a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about
cricketers?” he asked, turning to Michael. “Famous cricketers, of
course, that is? For instance, I cannot think what this one can be.”
He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny
weekly.
“I’ve got all the others,” he said to Michael. “But one picture will
often stump you like this. No joke intended.” He smiled feebly and
pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the
letter T.
“What about Hirst?” Michael asked.
“Hirst,” repeated the Solutionist. “Her S T. That’s it. That’s it.” In
his excitement he began to dribble. “I’m very much obliged to you, sir.
Her S. T. Yes, that’s it.”
He began to shuffle toward the door.
“Anything you want solved at any time,” he said to Michael. “I’m only
just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be
most delighted to solve anything—anything!”
He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his
problems would puzzle the Solutionist.
“What’s his name?” he inquired of Barnes.
“Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a
living at it.”
“At what?” Michael asked.
“Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took
fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his
advertisement in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be
a conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me
more like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You
should see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular
dust-hole, that’s what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve
anything—anything! He hasn’t solved how to earn more than ten bob a
week, year in year out. Silly——! That’s what he is, barmy.”
Michael’s hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers
of 1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once
visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a
staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various
personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow
windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly
arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to
observe them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the mass. No
doubt Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained
by Michael’s subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael
how Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the
inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers
ultimately escaped owing her money.
It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would
doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the
landlady’s strict regulation no longer to take them in could be
relaxed. All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted
by children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In
Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and
occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to
play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish
that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little
girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer’s shop
of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to
the basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear
below at twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above
the walls of the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered
what sort of a desolate appearance these five houses must present for
voyagers to and from Victoria. They must surely stand up very
forbidding in abandonment to those who were traveling back to their
cherished dolls-houses in Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not
actually see the trains, but always he could hear their shrieking and
their clangor, and he looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in
her high serene four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall.
Nothing except the trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a
perpetual silence. Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing
with her husband, the noise of her rage down in the basement among the
quilts and coverlets never penetrated beyond the door at the head of
the inclosing staircase, save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So
silent was the house that had it not been for the variety of the
smells, Michael might easily have supposed that it really was empty and
that life here was indeed an illusion. The smells, however, of onions
or hot blankets or machine-oil or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed
emphatically that a community shared these ascending mustard-colored
walls, that human beings passed along the stale landings to frowst
behind those finger-stained doors of salmon-pink. Sometimes, too,
Michael emerging into the passage from his room would hear from dingy
altitudes descend the noise of a door hurriedly slammed; and sometimes
he would see go down the ulcerous steps in front of the house
depressing women in black, or unshaven men with the debtor’s wary and
furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be permanent were Barnes
and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength of Michael’s
allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every night. He used
to assure Michael, when toward two o’clock of the next afternoon he
extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with the greatest
pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The Solutionist
occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of newspaper, and
often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple of Belgian
hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the nettles of
the back-yard.
After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard
Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any
rate into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish,
would be welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger
of being drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting
surface. He felt inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer,
and to hear from her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and
Hungarian Dave. He found her card with the Guilford Street address and
went over to Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady
looked surprised when he inquired for Miss Palmer.
“Oh, she’s been gone this fortnight,” the woman informed him. Michael
asked where she was living now.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said the landlady, and as she was already
slowly and very unpleasantly closing the door, Michael came away a
little disconsolate. These abrupt dematerializations of the underworld
were really very difficult to grapple with. It gave him a sense of the
futility of his search for Lily (though lately he had prosecuted it
somewhat lazily) when girls, who a month ago offered what was
presumably a permanent address, could have vanished completely a
fortnight later. Perhaps Daisy would be at the Orange. He would take
Barnes with him this evening and ask his opinion of her and Dolly and
Hungarian Dave.
The beerhall downstairs looked exactly the same as when he had visited
it a month ago. Michael could sympathize with the affection such places
roused in the hearts of their frequenters. There was a great deal to be
said for an institution that could present, day in, day out, a steady
aspect to a society whose life was spent in such extremes of elation
and despair, of prosperity and wretchedness, and whose actual lodging
was liable to be changed at any moment for better or worse.
“Not a bad place, is it?” said Barnes, looking round in critical
approval at the prostitutes and bullies hoarded round the tables puddly
with the overflow of mineral waters and froth of beer.
“You really like it?” Michael asked.
“Oh, it’s cheerful,” said Barnes. “And that’s something nowadays.”
Michael perceived Daisy before they were halfway across the room. He
greeted her with particular friendliness as an individual among these
hard-eyed constellations.
“Hulloa!” she cried. “Wherever have you been all this time?”
“I called at Guilford Street, but you were gone.”
“Oh, yes. I left there. I couldn’t stand the woman there any longer.
Sit down. Who’s your friend?”
Michael brought Barnes into the conversation, and suggested moving into
one of the alcoves where it was easier to talk.
“No, come on, sit down here. Fritz won’t like it, if we move.”
Michael looked round for the protector, and she laughed.
“You silly thing! Fritz is the waiter.”
Michael presently grew accustomed to being jogged in the back by
everyone who passed, and so powerful was the personality of the Orange
that very soon he, like the rest of the crowd, was able to discuss
private affairs without paying any heed to the solitary smoking
listeners around.
“Where’s Dolly?” he asked.
“Oh, I had to get rid of her very sharp,” said Daisy. “She served me a
very nasty trick after I’d been so good to her. Besides, I’ve taken up
with a fellow. Bert Saunders. He does the boxing for Crime
Illustrated.”
“You told me I was like him,” Michael reminded her.
“That’s right. I remember now. I’m living down off Judd Street in a
flat. Why don’t you come round and see me there?”
“I will,” Michael promised.
“Wasn’t Bert Saunders the fellow who was keeping Kitty Metcalfe?” asked
Barnes.
“That’s right. Only he gave her the push after she hit Maudie Clive
over the head with a port-wine glass in the Half Moon upstairs.”
“I knew Kitty,” said Barnes, shaking his head to imply that
acquaintance with Kitty had involved a wider experience than fell to
most men. “What’s happened to her?”
“Oh, Gard, don’t ask me,” said Daisy. “She’s got in with a fellow who
kept a fried-fish place in the Caledonian Road, and I’ve never even
seen her since.”
“And what’s happened to Dolly?” asked Michael.
“Oh, good job if that love-boy of hers does punch into her. Silly cow!
She ought to know better. Fancy going off as soft as you like with that
big-mouthed five-to-two, and after I’d just given her six of my new
handkerchiefs.”
Michael wished he could have an opportunity of explaining to Barnes
that on account of Daisy’s friendship for Dolly, he and she and the
cast-off had spent a night in the police-cells. He thought it would
have amused him.
“Where’s the Half Moon?” he asked instead.
Daisy said it was a place in Glasshouse Street for which she had no
very great affection. However, Michael was anxious to see it; and soon
they left the Orange to visit the Half Moon.
It was a public-house with nothing that was demirep in its exterior;
but upstairs there was a room frequented after eleven o’clock by ladies
of the town. They walked up a narrow twisting staircase carpeted with
bright red felt and lit by a red-shaded lamp, and found themselves in a
room even more densely fumed with tobacco smoke than downstairs at the
Orange. In a corner was an electric organ which was fed with a stream
of pennies and blared forth its repertory of ten tunes with maddening
persistence. One of these tunes was gay enough to make the girls wish
to dance, and always with its recurrence there was a certain amount of
cake-walking which was immediately stopped by a commissionaire who
stood in the doorway and shouted “Order, please! Quiet, please! No
dancing, ladies!” To the nearest couple he always whispered that the
police were outside.
Daisy, having stigmatized the Half Moon as the rottenest hole within a
mile of the Dilly, proceeded to become more cheerful with every penny
dropped into the slot; and finally she invited Michael to come back
with her to Judd Street, as her boy had gone down to Margate to see
Young Sancy, a prospective lightweight champion, who was training
there.
“Anyway, you can see me home,” she said. “Even if you don’t come in.
Besides, my flat’s all right. It is, really. You know. Comfortable.
He’s very good to me, is Bert, though he’s a bit soppified. He dresses
very nice, and he earns good money. Well, three pound a week. That’s
not so bad, is it?”
“That’s all right,” said Barnes. “With what you earn as well.”
“There’s a nerve,” said Daisy. “Well, I can’t stay moping indoors all
the evening, can I? But he’s most shocking jealous is Bert. And he
calls me his pussy-cat. Puss, puss! There’s a scream. He’s really a bit
soft, and his eyes is awful. But it’s nice, so here’s luck.” She
drained her glass. “‘Do you love me, puss?’ he says. Silly thing! But
they think a lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see
him the other morning about something he’s been writing. I don’t know
what it was. I hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him
something dreadful, and then he says, ‘My pussy-cat mustn’t disturb
me.’”
Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was
beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a
good move.
“I shan’t go if you don’t come back with me,” she declared.
Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and
he promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however;
nor would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and
Michael went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm
September night.
Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of
her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey.
He flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here
at last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship
with a woman of that class with whom mere friendship would be more
improbable than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with
her homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on
while she chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any
other relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was
proud as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign
trees that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he
felt a thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings
of Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to
think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this
friendship that was giving to all the houses they passed a strange
peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking
at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown
bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and
beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was
indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and
presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.
“Our flat’s in here. Agnes House, it’s called. Come in and have one
before you go home,” she invited.
Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his
confidence in their new friendship.
Agnes House was only entitled to the distinction of a name rather than
a number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby,
small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was
already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been
exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This
collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of
age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more
admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain.
Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt
in itself apart from any association with depravity: it was like a
young person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without
arousing pity.
“Rather nice, eh?” said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the
flat. “Sit down. I’ll get some whisky. There’s a bathroom, you know.
And it’s grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we
was upstairs. I always swore I’d never live in a flat. Well, I don’t
really call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever
be found out.”
Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn
about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous
when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled
throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a
placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great
deal of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to
fright her fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at
the sound of a key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike
existence of the underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael
could see the villainous paper used for every kind of domestic
service—to wrap up a piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the
cat’s dinner, and spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon
the disks of grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very
natural, when the eyes never rested from these views of sordid
violence, to expect evil everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was
already half inclined to accept the underworld’s preoccupation with
crime as a truer judgment of human nature than was held by a
sentimental civilization, and he began to wonder whether a good deal of
his own privacy had not been spent in a fool’s paradise of security.
The moated grange and the dark tower were harmless rococo terrors
beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes House.
“The kitchen’s in a rare old mess, isn’t it?” said Daisy looking round
her. “It gives Bert the rats to see it like this.”
“Are you fond of him?” Michael asked. He was anxious to display his
friendly interest.
“Oh, he’s all right. But I wouldn’t ever get fond of _any_body. It
doesn’t pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they
can do as they like with you.”
“I don’t understand why you live with him, if he’s nothing better than
all right,” said Michael.
“Well, I’m used to him, and he’s not always in the way like some
fellows are.”
Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as
it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it
was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her
ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and
beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches
of François Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing
pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be
wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first
from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard
subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably
despise it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the
quality of the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove
to her the reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the
relation in which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.
“There’s something extraordinarily attractive about being friends,” he
began. “Isn’t it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to
be nothing more than a friend?”
“Friends,” Daisy repeated. “I don’t know that I think much of friends.
You don’t get much out of _them_, do you?”
“Is that all anybody is for,” Michael asked in disappointment. “To get
something out of?”
“Well, naturally. Anyone can’t live on nothing, can they?”
“But I don’t see why a friend shouldn’t be as profitable as an
ephemeral ... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at
eleven and say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as
generous.”
“I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted
twice as much back in return,” said Daisy.
“Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine
in the police court?” he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was
so anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he
could not help making the allusion.
“I suppose you wanted to,” she said.
“As a friend,” he persisted.
“Oh, all right,” she agreed with him lazily. “Have it your own way. I’m
too sleepy to argue.”
“Then we are friends?” Michael asked gravely.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a
clothes-line. Get on with it, Roy—or what’s your name? Michael, eh?
That’s right.”
“Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?”
“Advice is very cheap,” said Daisy.
“I used to know a girl,” Michael began.
“A straight-cut?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was.”
“I see. And now she’s got a naughty little twinkle in her eye.”
“Look here. Do listen seriously,” Michael begged. “She isn’t a
straight-cut any longer.”
“Well, what did I tell you? That’s what I said. She’s gone gay.”
“I want to get her away from this life,” Michael announced, with such
solemnity that Daisy was insulted.
“Why, what’s the matter with it? You’re as bad as a German ponce I knew
who joined the Salvation Army. Don’t you try taking me home to-night to
our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick.”
“But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a
‘lady.’”
“More shame for her then,” said Daisy indignantly. “She ought to have
known better.”
It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily’s fall gave to one so
deeply plunged. There was in Daisy’s attitude something of the
unionist’s toward foreign blackleg labor.
“Well, you see,” Michael pointed out. “As even you have no pity for
her, wouldn’t it be right for me to try to get her out of the life
altogether?”
“How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade
all day, before you sprang it on her....”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Michael interrupted. “At least not
directly.”
“Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?” she demanded in
surprise.
“I feel a certain responsibility,” he explained. “Go on with what you
were saying.”
“If she left a nice home,” Daisy continued, “to live gay, she isn’t
going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now,
is she?”
“But I want to marry her,” said Michael simply.
Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.
“You must be worse than potty over her,” she gasped.
“Why?”
“Why? Why, because it doesn’t pay to marry that sort of girl. She’ll
only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you’ll wish you
hadn’t been such a grass-eyes.”
A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael
sitting in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was
right. Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was
coeval with all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility,
so that he felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal
pessimism. Yet in the same instant he was aware of the need for him to
do something, even if his action were to carry within itself the
potential destruction of more than he was setting out to accomplish.
“When do you see her?” asked Daisy. “And what does _she_ say about
being married?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her for nearly five years,”
Michael explained rather apologetically. “I’m searching for her now.
I’ve got to find her.”
“Strike me, if you aren’t the funniest —— I ever met,” Daisy exclaimed.
She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for
Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing.
The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed
plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter
seemed to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of
emptiness was due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of
the room, whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so
homely was the behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast
suddenly they made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no
more substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its
hollowness. It became an interior very much like those glimpses of
interiors in Crime Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would
have shown Daisy Palmer cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even
in sanguinary death to display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped
edge of a white petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to
dream in Leppard Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither
as here he would enter sensationally.
Daisy ceased to rock herself with mirth.
“No, really,” she said. “It’s a shame to laugh, but you are the limit.
Only you did ask my advice, and I tell you straight you’ll be sorry if
you do marry her. What’s she like, Wandering Willie? Have some cocoa if
I make it? Go on, do. I’ll boil it on the gas-ring.”
Michael was touched by her attention, and he accepted the offer of
cocoa. Then he began to describe Lily’s appearance. He could not,
however much she might laugh, keep off the object of his quest. Lily
was, after all, the only rational explanation of his present mode of
life.
“She sounds a bit washed out according to your description of her,”
Daisy commented. “Still, everyone to their own fancy, and if you like
blue-eyed bottles of peroxide, that’s your look-out.”
They were drinking the cocoa she had made, and the flame of the
gas-ring gave just the barren comfort that the kitchen seemed to
demand. Another blackbeetle hurried over the oilcloth. A belated fly
buzzed angrily against the shade of the electric light. Daisy yawned
and looked up at the metal clock with its husky tick.
Suddenly there was the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. She
leaped up.
“Gard, supposing that’s Bert come back from Margate!”
She pushed Michael hurriedly across the passage into the front room,
commanding him to keep quiet and stay in an empty curtained recess.
Then she hurried back to the kitchen, leaving him in a very unpleasant
frame of mind. He heard through the closed door Daisy’s voice in
colloquy with a deeper voice. Evidently Bert had come back; but his
return had been so abrupt that he had had no time to prevent himself
being placed in this ridiculous position. Would he have to stay in this
recess all night? He peered out into the room, which was in a filigree
of bleak shadows made by the street lamp shining through the muslin
curtains of the window. Through a desolation of undrawn blinds the
houses of Little Quondam Street were visible across the road. The
unused room smelt moldy, and if Michael had ever pictured himself in
the complexity of a clandestine affair, this was not at all the
romantic environment he would have chosen for his drama. This was
really damned annoying, and he made a step in the direction of the
kitchen to put an end to the misunderstanding. Surely Saunders would
have realized that his visit to Daisy was harmless: and yet would he?
How stupid she had been to hustle him out of the way like this.
Naturally the fellow would be suspicious now. Would that hum of
conversation never stop? It reminded him of the fly which had been
buzzing round the lamp. Supposing Saunders came in here to fetch
something? Was he to hide ignominiously behind this confounded curtain,
and what on earth would happen if he were discovered? Michael boiled
with rage at the prospect of such an indignity. Saunders would probably
want to fight him. A man who spent his life helping to produce Crime
Illustrated was no doubt deep-dyed himself in the vulgar crudity of his
material.
Ten minutes passed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten
more minutes passed; and Michael began to estimate the difficulty of
climbing out of the window into the street. It had been delightful,
this experience, until he had entered this cursed flat. He should have
parted from Daisy on the doorstep, and then he would have carried home
with him the memory of a friendship that belonged to the London
starlight. The whole relation had been ruined by entering this scabrous
building.
He must have been here for more than an hour. It was insufferable. He
would go boldly into the kitchen and brave Saunders’ violence. Yet he
could not do that because Daisy would be involved by such a step. What
could they be talking about? It was really unreasonable for people who
lived together to sit up chatting half the night. At last he heard the
sound of an opening door; there were footsteps in the passage; another
door-opened; after a minute or two somebody walked out into the street.
Michael had just sighed with relief, when he heard footsteps coming
back; and the buzz of conversation began again in a lighter timbre.
This was simply intolerable. He was evidently going to stay here until
the filigree of shadows faded in the dawn. Saunders must have brought
in a friend with him. Another half hour passed and Michael had reached
a stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friendship. Not
again would he so easily let himself be made ridiculous. Then he became
conscious of a keen desire to see this Saunders whom, by the way, he
was supposed to resemble. It was tantalizing to miss the opportunity of
comparison.
The hum of conversation stopped. Soon afterward Daisy came into the
room and whispered that he could creep out now, but that he must not
slam the front door. She would see him at the Orange to-morrow.
When they reached the passage, she called back through the kitchen:
“Bert, do you know you left the front door open?”
Idiotically and uxoriously floated from the inner bedroom: “Did I,
pussy cat? Puss must shut it then.”
Daisy dug Michael violently in the ribs to express her inward hilarity;
then suddenly she pulled him to her and kissed him roughly. In another
second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a
nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some
garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him
in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.
Barnes was sitting in Michael’s room, when he got back to Leppard
Street.
“What ho,” he said sleepily. “You’ve been enjoying yourself with that
piece, then?”
Michael regarded him angrily.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn’t look so solemn; she’s not a bad bit of
goods, either. I’ve heard of her before.”
Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to
convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover,
if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out
utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a
reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had
slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations
had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it
had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld’s
distorting mirror.
On the following night Michael went to the Café d’Orange, and heard
Daisy’s account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert
Saunders.
“But really, you know,” she said. “It did give me a turn. Fancy him
coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting
fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there
and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert’s all right with his
pussy-cat.”
“But why didn’t you let me stay where I was?” Michael asked. “And
introduce me quite calmly. He couldn’t have said anything.”
“Couldn’t he?” Daisy cried. “I reckon he could then. I reckon he could
have said a lot. If he hadn’t, I’d have given him the chuck right away.
I don’t want no fellow hanging around me that hasn’t got the pluck to
go for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. _Couldn’t_ he have
said anything?”
Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time
to meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the
underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been
devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from
the standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes,
Daisy—they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral
antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer.
They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they
were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it
possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure
to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the
absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived
a great constructive force?
Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough
evidence as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through
the rapid darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very
often he was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street
came to stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against
the light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through
the chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante’s obscure
wood of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual
events. Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom,
because he knew that he was winning here with each new experience a
small advance; at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the
former pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition
he told himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily,
that through her salvation he would save himself.
Michael did not reënter his own world, whose confusion of minor
problems would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed
before the problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help
to solve the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He
did not tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their
letters came to him at his club. They did not worry him, although
Stella threatened a terrible punishment if he did not appear in their
midst in time to give her away in November. This he promised to do in
spite of everything. He was faithful to his search for Lily, and he
even went so far as to call upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her
since that night at the Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex
himself over the failure to discover Lily’s whereabauts. Having placed
himself at the nod of destiny, he was content to believe that if he
never found her he must be content to look elsewhere for the expression
of himself. September became October. It would be six years this month
since first they met, and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be
captured anew?
One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated
season whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because
no fall of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled
walls from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk
was perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he
knew. Yes, he could. It was Chator’s, the dear, the pious and the
bubbling Chator’s; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the
corridors of St. James’. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized
and shaken his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however,
he was twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a
fountain of questions about his progress during these years with a
great deal of information about his own. He came in eagerly at
Michael’s invitation, and so much had he still to ask and tell that it
was a long time before he wanted to know what had brought Michael to
Leppard Street.
“How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn’t my
district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I
say, what a dreadful slum!” Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as
if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. “I
never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what
really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a
man who’s just come to us from Ely was talking about you only
yesterday. My goodness, how ...”
“It’s no larger than a grain of sand,” Michael interrupted quickly.
“What is?” asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at
Michael.
“You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren’t you?”
“I suppose you’ll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute.” Chator
was beaming with delight at the prospect. “But seriously, this man
Stewart—Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know
him?”
“Nigel isn’t here, too?” Michael exclaimed.
“He’s our deacon.”
“Oh, how priceless you’ll both be in the pulpit,” said Michael. “And
to-morrow’s Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Mass?”
“My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be
preaching at Evening Prayer. Why don’t you come to supper in the Clergy
House afterward?”
“How do you like your Vicar?”
“Oh, very sound, very sound,” said Chator, shaking his head.
“Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?” asked Michael,
twinkling.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He’s very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at
first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he’s not. Not a bit.
We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it.
And of course we’ve got the children.”
They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and
Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.
“You will come on Sunday?”
“Of course. But what’s the name of your church?”
“My dear fellow, that shows you haven’t heard your parochial Mass,”
said Chator, with mock seriousness. “St. Chad’s is our church.”
“It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron,” said Michael.
“I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield.”
Michael laughed loudly.
“My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven’t
changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad’s—Sunday.”
From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled
walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be
bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a
coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.
Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on
Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference
to Michael’s wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening
through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior
of St. Chad’s with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense
was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine
edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built
of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any
other material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing
deliberately beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat
thawing in a stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in
London streets, and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves.
The Stations of the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the
lithographs in their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians
was familiar music.
As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his
companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom,
but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the
past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the
forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any
longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the
craving of his soul for God.
Chator’s discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering
simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect
upon the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic
way. The sermon had the naïve obviousness and the sweet seriousness of
a child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see
that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or
indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself,
a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its
expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having
upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a
sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of
the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of
the homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were
in his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with
its tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael’s
opinion of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his
eloquence: these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse
one so deep in the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that
a positive sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe
it did; he would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of
truth was posited among these perishable streets.
The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn,
Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people
pouring forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come
here to rest from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the
chill vapors of the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their
journey home. Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had
leisure to sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or
shops that made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit
for neither good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered
together for a little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now
already they were trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps
would shuffle for a space over the dark pavements; a few would have
pickled cabbage and cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life
in this limbo between Hell and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be
judged with the bulk of the congregation: another reason must be found
for the influence of Evening Prayer or of Chator’s words upon him.
“Did you like the sermon?” Michael asked in the porch.
“I didn’t listen to a word of it,” said Barnes emphatically.
“Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested,”
said Michael.
“I was thinking what a mug I’d been not to back The Clown for the
Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I’ll tell you what it is.
I’m not used to money, and that’s a fact. I don’t know how to spend it.
I’m afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks.”
“I thought you enjoyed the service,” said Michael.
“Oh, I’m used to services. You know. On and off I’ve done a lot of
churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow
preaching to curdle me up. I’ve gone through it. Religion, love, and
measles; they’re all about the same. I don’t reckon anybody gets them
more than once properly.”
Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and
though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much
irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went
back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What
puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to
be impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a
mean and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was
amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical
powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius’ blue
eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice.
Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his
expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when
he met him again at Earl’s Court he had been kindled by those blue
eyes. Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was
now that lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times
lately, but they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll’s.
“I really must have been mad when I was young,” Michael said to
himself. “And yet other people have preserved the influence they used
to have over me. Other people haven’t changed. Why should he? I wonder
whether it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?”
Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes’ lapse into
unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the
Clergy House.