had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a
picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his
clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael
chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire
beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta
at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.
The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with
Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to
a brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going
to sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar
and two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the
same sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met
that walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or
treasurer of club accounts or vicar’s churchwarden, is always to be
found attached to the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened,
and found he had a deep voice and was unable to get nearer to “th” than
“v.”
“We’re raver finking,” he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate,
“of starting Benediction, vis year.”
“That will be wonderful,” said Michael politely.
“Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver.”
The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish
stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off
their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart,
and Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar
was left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.
“I envy you people,” said Michael, as the three of them sank down into
deep wicker chairs. “I envy this power you have to bring Oxford—or
Cambridge—into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action,
isn’t it? And you’re free from the thought which must often worry dons
that perhaps they are having a very good time without doing very much
to deserve it.”
“We work hard in this parish,” spluttered Chator. “Oh, rather. Very
hard.”
“That’s what I say. You have the true peace that thrives on activity,”
said Michael. “But at the same time, what I’m rather anxious to know is
how nearly you touch the real sinners.”
Stewart and Chator looked at one another across his chair.
“How much do we, brother?” asked Stewart.
“No, really,” protested Michael. “My dear Nigel, I can’t have you being
so affected. Brother! You must give up being archaic now that you’re a
pale young curate.”
“What do you call the real sinners?” asked Chator. “You saw our
congregation to-night. All poor, of course.”
“Shall I say frankly what I think?” Michael asked.
The other two nodded.
“I’m not sure if that congregation is worth a very great deal. I’m not
trying to be offensive, so listen to me patiently. That congregation
would come whatever you did. They came not because they wanted to
worship God or because they desired the forgiveness of their sins, nor
even because they think that going to church is a good habit. No, they
came in a sort of sad drift of aimlessness; they came in out of the
dreariness of their lives to sit for a little while in the glow that a
church like yours can always provide. They went out again with a vague
memory of comfort, material comfort, I mean; but they took away with
them nothing that would kindle a flame to light up the gray week-days.
Do you know, I fancy that when these picture-theaters become more
common, as they will, most of your people will get from them just the
same sensation of warmth and material comfort. Obviously if this is a
true observation on my part, your people regard church from a merely
negative attitude. That isn’t enough, as you’ll admit.”
“But it’s not fair to judge by the evening congregation,” Chator burst
out. “You must remember that we get quite a different crowd at Mass.”
“But do you get the real sinners?” Michael repeated.
“My dear Michael, what does this inquisition forebode?” said Stewart.
“You’re becoming wrapped in mystery. You’re found in Leppard Street for
no reason that I’ve yet heard. And now you attack us in this unkind
way.”
“I’m not attacking you,” Michael said. “I’m trying to extract from you
a point of view. Lately it happens that I’ve found myself in the
company of a certain class, well—the company of bullies and
prostitutes. You must have lots of them in this parish. Do you get hold
of them? I don’t believe you do, because the chief thing which has
struck me is the utter remoteness of the Church or indeed of any kind
of religion from the life of that class. And their standards are
upside-down—actually upside-down. They’re handed over entirely to the
powers of darkness. Now, as far as I can see, the Devil—or whatever you
choose to call him—only cares about people who are worth his while. He
hands the others over to anybody that likes to deal with them. Equally
I would say that God is a little contemptuous of the poor
intermediates. The Church, however, in these hard times for religion is
glad to get hold even of them, and this miserable spirit of mediocrity
runs through the whole organization. The bishops are moderate; the
successful parsons are moderate; and the flock is moderate. To come
back to the sinners. You know, they _would_ be worth getting. You’ve no
idea what a force they would raise. And now, all their industry, all
their ingenuity, all their vitality is devoted to the service of evil.”
Chator could contain himself no longer.
“My dear fellow, you don’t understand how impossible it is to get in
touch with the people you’re talking about. They elude one. Of course,
we should rejoice to get them. But they’re impossible.”
“Christ moved among sinners,” said Michael.
“It’s not because we don’t long to move among them,” Chator spluttered
in exasperation. “We would give anything to move among them. But we
can’t. I don’t know why. But they won’t relax any of their barriers.
They’re notoriously difficult.”
“Then it all comes down to a ‘no’ in answer to my question,” said
Michael. “You don’t get the real sinners. That’s what’s the matter with
St. Chad’s—until you can compel the sinner to come in, you’ll stay in a
spiritual backwater.”
“If you were a priest,” said Chator, “you’d realize our handicap
better.”
“No doubt,” Michael agreed. “But don’t forget that the Salvation Army
gets hold of sinners. In fact, I’ll wager that nine out of ten of the
people with whom I’ve been in contact lately would only understand by
religion the Salvation Army. Personally I loathe the Salvation Army. I
think it is almost a more disruptive organization than anything else in
the world. But at least it is alive; it’s not suet like most of the
Dissenting Sects or a rather rich and heavy plum-pudding like the
greater part of the Church of England. It’s a maddening and atrociously
bad and cheap alcohol, but it does enflame. I tell you, my dear old
Chator and my dear old Nigel, you have the greatest opportunity
imaginable for energy, for living and bringing life to others, if only
you’ll not sit down and be content because you’ve got the children and
can fill the church for Evening Prayer with that colorless, dreary,
dreadfully sorrowful crowd I saw to-night.”
Michael leaned back in his chair; the fire crackled above the silence;
and, outside, the disheartened quiet of the Sabbath was brooding.
Chator was the first to speak.
“Some of what you say may be true, but the rest of it is a mere muddle
of heresies and misconceptions and misstatements. It’s absolute
blasphemy to say that God is contemptuous of what you called the
intermediates, and you apparently believe that evil is only misdirected
good. You apparently think that your harlots and bullies are better for
being more actively harmful.”
“No, no,” Michael corrected. “You didn’t follow my argument. As a
matter of fact, I believe in the absolutism of evil the more, the more
I see of evil men and women. What I meant was that in proportion to the
harm they have power to effect would be the inspiration and advantage
of turning their abilities toward good. But cut out all theological
questions and confess that the Church has failed with the class I speak
of.”
The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without
reaching a conclusion.
“You can’t have friars nowadays,” said Chator in response to Michael’s
last expression of ambition. “Conditions have changed.”
“Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an
absolute Christianity,” Michael pointed out. “Conditions had changed
when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a
host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists
are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions.
Do you believe in Christ?”
“Don’t try to be objectionable, my dear fellow,” said Chator, getting
very red.
“Well, if you do,” persisted Michael, “if you accept the Gospels, it is
utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make ‘change of
conditions’ an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your
parish.”
“Michael,” said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator’s obviously
rising anger. “Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission
are you upon? I believe you’re getting too much wrapped up in private
fads and fancies. Why don’t you come and work for us at St. Chad’s?”
“He’s one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense
fervor,” said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and
Michael felt rather penitent.
“I wish I _could_ work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so
offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is
inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight
of workers in coöperation freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I
should probably feel like you that the children were the most
important. Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was
confirmed by the realization of evil? Usually, it’s the other way
about, isn’t it? I’ve met many unbelievers who first began to doubt,
because the problem of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency.
Chator, you have forgiven me, haven’t you?”
“I ought to have realized that you didn’t mean half you were saying,”
said Chator.
Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he
had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he
let Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.
Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he
was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street.
Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to
Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up
sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No
doubt, however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would
benefit greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael
had shut himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan,
and he used to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical
experiments in his solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on
several occasions at Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done
the daring of discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was,
Nigel was still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he
would ever cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his
own diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and
told him that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.
“All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all,” said
Michael. “At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed
through it at the age of sixteen.”
“You must have been horribly precocious,” said Nigel disapprovingly.
“Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give
up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You’ll be telling me
soon that you’ve been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite.”
Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an
experience, and Michael laughed:
“Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He’s just the person you
ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an
æsthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?”
“I really think you _are_ growing very offensive,” said Nigel.
“No, I’m not. I’m illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and
Maurice’s encounters with religion would match each other. Both would
have a very wide, but also a very superficial area.”
November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist
at Stella’s wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his
affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully
planned sallies of curiosity:
“What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine.
Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I’ll tell
you quite enough when the moment comes for telling.”
“Michael, you’re getting dreadfully obstinate,” Stella declared. “I
remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time.”
“It’s not I who am obstinate,” said Michael. “It’s you who are utterly
spoiled by the lovelorn Alan.”
Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day
before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St.
Martin’s summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of
those June Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer
blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer’s image in
this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He
wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the
sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a
summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead
days.
Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa.
Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then
it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could
remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to
know them so well:
Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita Magnanimum heroum, pueri
innuptæque puellæ.
There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory
of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et ... terris apricis.
Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these
lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation
of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park
would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet
because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of
youth, to the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that
was forever overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their
sanctity with sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy
and absurdity also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than
those deeper moments.
“Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?” he asked.
“Rather,” said Alan, and they both smiled.
“Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst
out laughing and had to rush out of the room?”
“Rather,” said Alan. “Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren’t they?”
“Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs.
Merivale?” Michael queried.
“I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at
anything,” said Alan.
“And yet do you realize that we’re only talking of eight years ago?
Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the
time when that wedding took place.”
To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life
Michael’s calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked
on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive
mortality.
“You’ll be writing epitaphs next,” said Alan, in rather an aggrieved
voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during
the silence.
“At any rate,” Michael said. “You can congratulate yourself upon not
having wasted time.”
“My god,” cried Alan, stopping suddenly. “I believe I’m the luckiest
man alive.”
“I thought you’d found a sovereign,” said Michael. He had never heard
Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment
later Alan would be blushing at his want of reserve, he loyally covered
up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.
Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as
none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she
must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her
Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very
anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble
Place, but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy
came, and Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously
contemplated marrying her. How well he remembered her in short skirts,
and here she was a woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold
pince-nez.
“You _are_ a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place,” grumbled
Nancy. “Do you realize we haven’t met for years?”
“You’re such a woman of affairs,” said Michael.
“Well, do let’s try to meet next time. I say, don’t you think Maud
looks terribly ill since she became a Romanist?”
Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
“I think she’s looking rather well.”
“Absolute destruction of individuality, you know,” said Nancy, shaking
her head. “I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must
admit that she hasn’t forced her religion down our throats.”
“Did you expect an auto-da-fé in the middle of the lawn?” he asked. She
thumped him on the shoulder:
“Silly ass! Don’t you try to rag me.”
They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at
eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have
regretted the step.
Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the
ceremony.
“Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?”
“You’ve admitted I’m a married woman,” she exclaimed. “Now surely you
can tell me what you’ve been doing since August and where you’ve been.”
“I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every
woman,” said Michael. “Alas, you are not!”
“Michael, you’re perfectly horrid to me.”
“Don’t be too much the young wife,” he advised, with mocking
earnestness.
“I won’t listen to anything you say, until I know where you’ve been. Of
course, if I hadn’t been so busy, I could easily have found you out.”
“Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,”
Michael laughed.
“You shan’t stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me.”
“By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful
news,” said Michael. “Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your
honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but
I’ve never heard.”
“We’re going to Compiègne,” said Stella. “I wrote to little
Castéra-Verduzan, and he’s lent us the cottage where you and I stayed.”
That choice of Stella’s seemed to mark more decisively than anything
she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother,
talking.
“I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers,” she
told him. “But if you’re going to be here, I could put her off.”
Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother’s
loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
“No, no, I’m going away again,” he told her.
“Just as you like, dearest boy.”
“You’re glad about Stella?”
“Very glad.”
“And you like Alan?”
“Of course. Charming—charming.”
The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who
had been brought up to Mrs. Fane’s sitting-room out of the way of the
wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
“It’s really quite chilly this afternoon,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Yes, there’s a good deal of mist along the river,” said Michael. “A
pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather
dreary in the forest.”
“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a
forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in
love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”
Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went
back to Leppard Street.
CHAPTER V
THE INNERMOST CIRCLE
November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and
these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the
house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even
when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made
more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at
first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would
presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico
magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life
was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall
Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so
unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to
Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk
with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a
dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which
every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater.
At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been
given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet
somebody from Oxford to-night—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round
half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd
about him. How were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiègne? Probably
they were having clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a
smell of woodfires. With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round
Piccadilly, sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side
streets, but always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle.
Here he would stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west
and south and north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were
coming out of the theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to
Daisy? Should he call a hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the
spinning of a polychromatic top, he could not leave the Island.
They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge
one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the
opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to
their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must
begin to frequent the Orient again.
Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a
nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement
to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story
had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had
been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily
had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw
off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the
road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the
stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision
he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and
there was frost in the air.
Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out
his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like
that. Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It
would serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of
those vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together
now; instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark
pavement. How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At
last he knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her
still. What nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry
her in order to rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her
still: he loved her now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of
Green Park rattled to his stick. He loved her more passionately because
the ghost of her whom he had thought of with romantic embellishment all
these years was but a caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer
which had floated through his dreams was become nothing, now that again
he had seen herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and
the delicate poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women
on the pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of
gravel by the curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what
direction had she driven away? Even that he did not know. She might
have driven past this very lamp-post a few minutes back.
Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate
upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and
these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the
imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not
picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape
without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would
put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner
of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How
she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the
Orient,” he would say. She should know immediately that he was not
deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when
he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was
disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid
woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and
huddled against the wall of the King’s garden. He put a sixpence among
her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars
were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold
parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to
Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This
kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One
after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of
doors and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider
thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary
policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous.
And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of
human dwellings, were Michael’s own thoughts thronged with fancies of
himself and Lily.
It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge
across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard
Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly
toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced
across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she
stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment,
and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would
have liked and run.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.
It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his
pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her
one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet
it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied
the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in
her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always
haunt her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She
was not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves,
as at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears
and that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks,
there would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become
even an individual in the multitude of weary London women.
“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.
“Home. I’m going home,” he said.
“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”
He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her
voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let
her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see
her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to
Leppard Street.
“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she
murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of
you.”
Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against
the star-incrusted sky.
“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny
smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were
blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the
question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”
“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”
Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in
what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the
house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with
the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who
slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep
comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping
about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put
his foot on the steps of the front door.
“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”
She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into
the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor
as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the
house sleeps down here.”
She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage.
When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.
Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the
greasy wall.
“Here you are. Here you are.”
The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous
candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his
cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to
light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room
where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door
exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry.
Then she led him down three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety
door, and welcomed him.
“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative
satisfaction.
Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp.
The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of
black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he
had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this
room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his
mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often
noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a
map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a
washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on
which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald
powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she
stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as
iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.
“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put
the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such
a stranger.”
Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was
hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a
pale blue chest next to a washstand.
“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.
“What cat?”
“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”
She called, and a small black cat came out.
“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under
the bed like that.”
Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had
lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that
finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.
“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him
do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His
mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks
very well, so she’s got a good home. But _he_ isn’t stinted. Oh, no. He
gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have
animals, look after them.”
Michael nodded agreement.
“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better
than human beings.”
“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.
“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”
The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the
deliberate novelist.
“After my boy.”
“Your boy?” he echoed.
“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened
the woman into a fleeting dignity.
“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than
what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the
converse was more probable.
“He’s not living with you?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything—not
ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil
Service. I lived with his father for many years—in fact, from the time
I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He’s
been dead about six years now.”
“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”
“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what
they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always
falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a
Catholic myself.”
As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of
the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he
had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect
humility of spirit.
“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short
silence.
“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way
of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”
Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself
discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her
health.
“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one,
and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave,
they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That
isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”
Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a
good deal from some of the men?”
“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment
more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a
provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s
mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might
not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being
always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay
in here for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday—or was
it Thursday?—time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count
the days, does it? One day last week I did what I’ve never done before:
I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and
another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I
thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man—a very rough sort of
a man he was, I’m not surprised poor Peter runs away from them—I heard
him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night.
And will you believe it, he’d gone to my bag and taken out his six
shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had
at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as
they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it
with women like myself. Well now, you can’t say a man like that is any
better than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets.
Though I will say it was a warning.”
“I suppose you’d be glad to give up the life,” said Michael, and as he
asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence
of this woman a very futile one.
“Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I’m really
at anyone’s mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in
one way, the harm’s done.”
Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and
powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the
more obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and
at her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid
flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
“You see,” she went on, “though I have to put up with a great deal,
it’s only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up
by my father, and my mother being—well, it’s no use to mince matters as
they say—my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this
occurred with the Frenchman I told you about—that really was a downward
step, though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good
to me from the beginning to the end. Still, I’m used to refinement, and
I have a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I
dislike the woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent
regular—eight-and-six, that is....”
“Quite enough, too,” said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was
so like the scarred surface of the moon.
“You’re right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I’m my own
mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don’t interfere
with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking,
but really Mrs. Cleghorne—that is the woman who keeps the house—really
she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I
go all day with only a cup of tea.”
Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own
breakfast on a chafing dish.
“I interrupted you,” he said. “You were going to tell me something
about Mrs. Cleghorne.”
“Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this
seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me.
Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she’d seen him
going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn’t a nice thing to
do, is it? One doesn’t want to go round drinking in public-houses. It
looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we’ve fallen out
over it. In fact, I haven’t seen him for some months. Still I shouldn’t
complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some
extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you’ll
understand—well, as I was saying—what with one thing and another my
rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you’ve paid regular for
close on two years, you expect a little consideration.”
“Have you lived in this burrow for two years?” Michael asked in
amazement.
“In the week before Christmas it’ll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs.
Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round
here and abuse me. Her mother’s an old woman, you’ll understand, and
her language—well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick.” She put
her hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. “She stands in that
doorway and bullies me until I’m ashamed to sit on this bed and stand
it. I really am. You’d hardly believe there was such things to say to
anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I’ve made up my
mind she isn’t going to do it again. I’m not going to _have_ it.” She
was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs
of the bed creaked.
“The mother doesn’t live here?” he asked.
“Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I’m
not going to let it occur again. I don’t consider I’ve been well
treated. If I’d spent the money on gin, I shouldn’t so much object to
what the old woman calls me, for I don’t say my life isn’t a bit of a
struggle. But there’s so many things to use up the money, when I’ve got
what’s wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his
half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little
bit smart—really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should
I be?—and I never waste money on clothes for clothes’ sake, as they
say—well, after that it’s none so easy to find eight-and-six for the
week’s rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat’s milk.”
Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by
living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her
wretchedness.
“I hope your boy will turn out well,” he ventured at last.
“Oh, he’s a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps
the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his
being in the Civil Service.”
“Or even a priest,” Michael suggested.
“Well, you see, he wasn’t born in wedlock. Would that make a
difference?”
“I don’t think so,” said Michael gently. “Oh, no, I hope that wouldn’t
make a difference.”
He was finding the imagination of this woman’s life too poignant, and
he rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged
inwardly that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in
which she had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he
would have to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged
down into his pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had
thought an exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity
when she had stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he
wished he had five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly
and hopelessly in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She
must have robbed him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the
thief’s and liar’s film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into
his own? Was it impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns
out of his pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had
pawed him with her hands in the black passage, and if the money had
fallen on the road, he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the
unjust theft; he ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant
to give her. And yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had
said the cat recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken
the sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the
weight she bore. And if she had taken them, why not? The cat was not at
hand to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the
money for herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey
upon others in self-defense.
“I find I haven’t any money with me,” said Michael, looking at her.
“That doesn’t matter. I’ve really quite enjoyed our little talk.”
“But I’ll send you some more,” he promised.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t done anything to have you send your
money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn’t think I
was really quite your style. Of course, I’ve really come down. It’s no
use denying it. I’m _not_ what I was.”
If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had
robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had
feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.
“I shall send you some money for your boy,” he said, in the darkness by
the door.
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
“What’s your name?”
“Well, I’m known here as Mrs. Smith.” Doubtfully she whispered as the
cold air came in through the open door: “I don’t expect you’d care
about giving me a kiss.”
Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he
kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.
When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black
houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure
to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their
fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the
stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try to
rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he
must be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could
encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far
as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary
policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of
lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the
knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now
as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very
much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in
the haggard lamplight.
Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly
in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face
downward upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that
anything so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately
afterward he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and
shamefacedly he put away the broken picture in a drawer.
Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In
twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to
save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy
that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every
time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window
rattling in the wind.
CHAPTER VI
TINDERBOX LANE
Next morning, when he woke, Michael made up his mind to leave Leppard
Street finally in the course of this day. He could not bear the thought
that he would only have to lean out of his window to see the actual
roof which covered that unforgettable den beneath him. He wondered what
would be the best thing to do with the furniture. It might be worth
while to install Barnes in these rooms and pay his rent for some months
instead of the salary which, now that Lily had been seen, was no longer
a justifiable expenditure. He certainly would prefer that Barnes should
never meet Lily now, and he regretted he had revealed her name. Still
he had a sort of affection for Barnes which precluded the notion of
deserting him altogether. These rooms with their simple and unmuffled
furniture, the green shelves and narrow white bed, would be good for
his character. He would also leave a few chosen books behind, and he
would write and ask Nigel Stewart to visit here from time to time.
Michael dressed himself and went upstairs to interview Barnes where he
lay beneath a heap of bedclothes.
“Oh, I daresay I could make the rooms look all right,” said Barnes.
“But what about coal?”
“I shall pay for coal and light as well as the rent.”
“I thought you’d find it a bit dismal here,” said Barnes knowingly. “I
wonder you’ve stuck it out as long as you have.”
“After February,” Michael said, “I may want to come to some other
arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you
understand that when the three months are up, I shan’t be able to allow
you five pounds a week any longer.”
“No, I never supposed you would,” said Barnes, in a tone of
resignation.
Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not:
however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could
do no harm to mention it.
“Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?”
he asked.
“I didn’t know there was one here; but it’s not a very rare occurrence
in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to
that.”
“If you hear any row going on down there,” said Michael, “you had
better interfere at once.”
“Who with?” Barnes inquired indignantly.
“With the row,” said Michael. “If the woman is being badly treated on
account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately.”
“Well, I’m not in the old tear’s secret, am I?” asked Barnes, in an
injured tone. “You can’t expect me to go routing about after every old
fly-by-night stuck in a basement.”
“I’m particularly anxious to know that she is all right,” Michael
insisted.
“Oh well, of course, if she’s a friend of yours, Fane, that’s another
matter. If it’s any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I’ll do
it.”
Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the
Solutionist, who was also in bed.
“I’ve got a commission for you,” said Michael.
The Solutionist’s watery eyes brightened faintly.
“You’re fond of animals, aren’t you?” Michael went on. “I see you
feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I’m interested in a cat who
appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a
quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith’s door every morning.
Mrs. Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are
fond of animals; but you mustn’t mention me. Here’s a check for five
pounds. Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits.”
The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
“I couldn’t cash this nowadays,” he said helplessly. “And get a quart
of milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst.”
“All right. I’ll send you postal orders,” said Michael. “Now I’m going
away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount
left every day. You’ll do what I ask? And you’ll promise not to say a
word about me?”
The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely
puzzled than he had ever seen him.
Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into
the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her
cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did
not know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully
complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes
get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window
the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and
asked her to come and speak to him.
“I see,” she said. “Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms, and you’re paying
in advance up to February. Oh, and his coal and his gas as well? I see.
Well, that you can settle month by month. Through me? Oh, yes.”
Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could
not help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
“Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?” Michael
asked.
“He’s still in his bed, but I’ll go myself.”
This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered.
Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate
which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her
condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it
were being bestowed from a superior height.
Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white
rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with
him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice’s studio in
Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange
whom himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his
big horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending
for some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and
presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily
again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good
deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It
had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but
driving toward Maurice’s studio along the banks of the river, Michael
thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
“I’ve brought you these pictures,” he explained to Maurice, and let the
gift account for his own long disappearance from communion with his
friends. “They’re pretty hackneyed, but I think it’s rather good for
you to have a few hackneyed things amid the riot of originality here.
What are you doing, Mossy?”
“Well, I’m rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point
of View.”
“You haven’t met your lady-love yet?”
“No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there’s plenty of time. What about
you?” Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend
as a stone where women were concerned.
“I’ve seen her,” said Michael. He simply had to give himself the
pleasure of announcing so much.
“By Jove, have you really? You’ve actually found your fate?” Maurice
was evidently very much excited by Michael’s lapse into humanity; he
had been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. “What’s
she like?”
“I haven’t spoken to her yet. I’ve only seen her in the distance.”
“And you’ve really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with
me here. Castleton isn’t coming back from the Temple until after tea.”
Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while
he stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very
moment herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought
if he once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too
much, and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist
saying that she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be
applied to many girls, and it was only for himself that in this case
they had all the thrilling significance they did.
“I like fair girls best,” Maurice agreed. “But most fair girls are
dolls. If I met one who wasn’t, I should be hopelessly in love with
her.”
“Perhaps you will,” Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very
generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had
the power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could
choose his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the
studio, or he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were
she to be his, he must hold secrets about her that could never be
unfolded.
“I really must bolt off,” he declared. “I’ve got a cab waiting.”
Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused
the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and
inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
“Life’s really too easy in this house,” he thought. “It’s so impossible
to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately.
I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I
shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here.”
Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily
at once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of
her raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have
made their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the
joyful prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was
really tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was
to be exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington
Gardens. However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater
had made such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much
attention to lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress.
Otherwise he was himself again of six years ago, with only the
delightful difference that he was now independent and could carry her
forthwith into marriage. The knowledge that from a material point of
view he could do this filled him with a magnificent consciousness of
life’s plenitude. So far, all his experiments in living had been
bounded by ignorance or credulity on his own side, and on the side of
other people by their unsuitableness for experiments. Certainly he had
made discoveries, but they might better be called disillusionments. Now
here was Lily who would give him herself to discover, who would open
for him, not a looking-glass world in which human nature reflected
itself in endless reduplications of perversity, but a world such as
lovers only know, wherein the greatest deeps are themselves. Michael
scarcely bothered to worry himself with the thought that Lily had
embarked upon her own discoveries apart from him; she had been
bewitched again by his romantic spells into the innocent girl of
seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his capacity for
idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged upon her.
Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior was
discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this
intoxication of happiness.
With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit
the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment
threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had
come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when
he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new
Lily wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision
of her last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the
queer adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still
higher upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his
return to Cheyne Walk had helped to strengthen his hopefulness. Now he
had returned to this circumambient crowd, looking round as each
newcomer came up the steps, and all the while horribly aware that this
evening Lily was not coming to the Orient. He had never been upset like
this since his resolve was taken. The glimpse of her last night had
made him very impatient, and he reviled himself again for having been
such a fool as to let her escape. He fell in a rage with his immobility
here in London. He demanded why it was not possible to swirl in
widening circles round the city until he found her. He was no longer
content to remain in this aquarium, stuck like a mollusc to the side of
the tank. He wanted to see her again. He was fretful for her slow
contemptuous walk and her debonair smile. He wanted to see her again.
Already this quest was becoming the true torment of love. Every single
other person in sight was a dreary automaton in whom he took no trace
of interest. Every movement, every laugh, every shadow made him repine
at its uselessness to him. All those years at Oxford of dreams and
hesitations had let him store up within himself a very fury of love. He
had been living falsely all this time: there had never been one dull
hour which could not have been enchanted by her to the most glorious
hour imaginable. He had realized that when he saw her last night; he
had realized all the waste, all the deadness, all the idiotic
philosophy and impotence of these years without her. How the fancy of
her vexed him now; how easily could he in his frustration knock down
the individuals of this senseless restless crowd, one after another,
like the dummies of humanity they were.
The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling
curtain. Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into
Piccadilly. She must be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for
her to come casually like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear
for weeks. Or was she a man’s mistress, the mistress of a man of forty?
He could picture him. He would be a stockbroker, the sort of man whom
one saw in first-class railway carriages traveling up to town in the
morning and reading The Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid
in his buttonhole and take her to Brighton for week-ends. He knew just
the shade of bluish pink that his cheeks were; and the way his neck
looked against his collar; the shape of his mustache, the smell of his
cigar, and his handicap at golf.
It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that.
Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they
must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along
as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after
restaurant, café after café, standing in the doorways and staring at
the tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him,
as people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his
frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and
ask what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a
lunatic.
Michael’s behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often
ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a
nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled
Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions,
because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily
among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been
searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked
up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry
Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been
hers.
By one o’clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to
suppose that Lily would be found among these furtive women with their
waylaying eyes in the gloom. Michael went back tired out to Cheyne
Walk. On the following night he visited the Orient again and afterward
searched every likely and unlikely place in the neighborhood of the
heart of pleasure. He went also to the Empire and to the Alhambra;
sometimes hurrying from one to the other twice in the evening, when
panics that he was missing Lily overtook him. He met Lonsdale one night
at the Empire, and Lonsdale took him to several night-clubs which gave
a great zest to Michael’s search; for he became a member of them
himself, and so possessed every night another hour or more before he
had to give up hope of finding her.
Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was
greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for
Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt
qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult,
impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers
Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole
time rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline
Grey, the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer.
Guy explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it
seemed he would soon have to choose between love and art; how
restrictions were continually being put upon their meeting each other;
and how violently difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead,
where Michael had prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very
sympathetic, and when he met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did
think she was beautiful and very much like the wild rose that Guy had
taken as the symbol of her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could
not imagine problems of conduct in which she could be involved.
Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel that over Plashers Mead
brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet it seemed ridiculous to compare
Guy’s difficulties with his own.
For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan
had by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to
see how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was
certainly something very attractive in these two young people moving
about that grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and
stood at the end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred
acres. That it could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns
had been defaced by builder’s rubbish was now inconceivable. So too
within, Michael could not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan
had ever stood in this drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows
whose sills scarcely rose above the level of the grass outside; that
anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library
with its pilasters and calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that
anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes
of those bag-wigged squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that
girl in her chip hat, holding a bunch of cherries.
“No doubt you’ve got a keen scent for tradition,” said Michael to
Stella. “But really you have been able to get into the manner
surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you
both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace—Stella, I’m
afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and
where do hounds meet to-morrow?”
“We’re simply loving it here,” Stella said. “But I think the piano is
feeling a little bit out of his element. He’s stiff with being on his
best behavior.”
“I’m hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field,” said Alan.
“I’ll show it to you to-morrow morning.”
The butler came in with news of callers:
“The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley.”
“Oh, damn!” Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. “I really
don’t think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you’ve
both got to come in and be polite.”
Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room,
whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and
Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas,
but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer
really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I’ve
been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of
ours.”
Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella’s
interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered
if Stella had guessed this.
“And Anne heard you play at King’s Hall. Didn’t you, Anne dear?”
Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
“That child is going to worship Stella,” Michael thought.
“We’re hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth
Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr.
Fane, you’ll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the
pleasure of seeing you as well?”
Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
“What absolute rot!” Stella cried. “Of course you’ll be here.”
But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
“They tell us you’ve been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband
was so much interested and is so much looking forward to seeing your
stock; but at present he must not drive far. I’ve also heard of you
from my youngest boy who went up to Christ Church last October year. He
is very much excited to think that Hardingham is going to have such a
famous—what is it called, Anne?—some kind of a bowler.”
“A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother,” said Lady Anne.
“Wasn’t he in the Eton eleven?” asked Alan.
“Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment,” said
Lady Stilton. “Possibly a superior player.”
“Oh, no, mother!” Lady Anne indignantly declared. “He would have played
for certain against Harrow, if he hadn’t sprained his ankle at the nets
the week before.”
“I do hope you’ll let him come and see you this vacation,” Lady Stilton
said.
“Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round
here,” Alan replied. “I’m just planning out a new pitch now.”
“How delightful all this is,” thought Michael, with visions of summer
evenings.
Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a
great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“Of course, _you’ve_ got to marry Anne,” said Stella to Michael, as
soon as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
“Alan,” Michael appealed. “Is it impossible for you to nip now forever
this bud of matchmaking?”
“I think it’s rather a good idea,” said Alan. “I knew young Varley by
sight. He’s a very sound bat.”
“I shan’t come here again,” Michael threatened, “until you’ve dissolved
this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to
marry me to every girl you meet, why don’t you devote yourself to the
task of making Huntingdon a first-class county in cricket? Stella might
captain the team.”
Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with
long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year’s
morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let
himself be deterred by Stella’s gibes.
“I admit you’re as happy as you can be,” he said. “Now surely you,
after so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost
as well as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet
married.”
“Michael, you’re having an affair with some girl,” Stella said
accusingly.
He shook his head.
“Swear?”
“By everything I believe in, I vow I’m not having an affair with any
girl. I wish I were.”
His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King’s
Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that
it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a
carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive
with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in
the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist’s in the King’s Road, he
saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham
Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit
of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on
sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and
sixpence for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
“Ought to be very good,” commented the tobacconist. “Well, we want a
bit of brightening up nowadays down this way, and that’s a fact. Why, I
can remember Cremorne Gardens. Tut-tut! Bless my soul. Yes, and the old
World’s End. That’s going back into the seventies, that is. And it
seems only yesterday.”
“I rather wish I’d got a ticket,” said Michael.
“Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I
suppose you’d like one for a lady as well?”
“No, I’ll have two men’s tickets.”
Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany
him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio
was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed
to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go
alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they
seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch
other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of
spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress.
So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was
deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to
contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which,
having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal
loss to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises
again in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese
lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it
now not positively forbidding.
Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many
of the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also
professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful
inventions. The medley of colors, the motion of the dance, the sound of
the music, the streamers of bunting and the ribbons fluttering round
the Maypole in the middle of the room, all combined to give Michael an
illusion of a very jocund assemblage. There were plenty of men dancing
without masks, which was rather a pity, as their dull, ordinary faces
halted abruptly the play of fancy. On second thoughts he was glad such
revelers were allowed upon the floor, since as the scene gradually
began to affect him he felt it might be amusing for himself to dance
once or twice before the evening ended. With this notion in view, he
began to follow more particularly the progress of different girls,
balancing their charms one against another, and always deriving a good
deal of pleasure from the reflection that, while at this moment they
did not know of his existence, in an hour’s time he might have entered
their lives. This thought did give a romantic zest to an entertainment
which would otherwise have been quite cut off from his appreciation.
Suddenly Michael’s heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and
swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking
away from him along the side of the hall—those two pierrettes in
black—that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn’t she turn
round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The
pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be
sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily.
He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below
him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily’s
languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that
it was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He
hurried down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the
ball-room. Where were they now? They were coming toward him: the other
pierrette with the rose pompons said something as they passed. It could
only be Lily who bowed her head like that in lazy assent. It was Lily!
Should he call out to her, when next they passed him? If it were not
Lily, what a fool he would look. If it were not Lily, it would not
matter what he looked, for the disappointment would outweigh everything
else. They were going up the room again. They were turning the corner
again. They were sweeping toward him again. They were passing him
again. He called “Lily! Lily!” in a voice sharp with eagerness. Neither
girl gave a sign of attention. It was not she, after all. Yet his voice
might have been drowned in the noise of the dance. He would call again;
but again they passed him by unheeding. The dance was over. They had
stopped at the other end of the room. He pressed forward against the
egress of the dancers. He pressed forward roughly, and once or twice he
heard grumbling murmurs because he had deranged a difficult piece of
costumery. He was conscious of angry masks regarding him; and then he
was free of the crowd, and before him, talking together under a canopy
of holly were the two pierrettes. The musicians sat among the palms
looking at him as they rested upon their instruments. Michael felt that
his voice was going to refuse to utter her name:
“Lily! Lily!”
The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his
voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were
Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what
she was going to do.
“I say, how on earth did you recognize me?” Lily murmured, raising her
mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and
tender, so scornful and so passionate.
“I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across
the road to speak to you, but you’d gone before I could manage it.
Where have you been all these years? Once I went to Trelawny Road, but
the house was empty.” He could not tell her that Drake had been the
first to bring him news of her.
“It’s years since I was there,” said Lily. “Years and years.” She
turned to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came
closer to be introduced.
“Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren’t I good to remember your
name quite correctly?” Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was
utterly scornful. “What made you come here? Have you got a friend with
you?”
Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an
accident.
“Why did _you_ come?” he asked.
“Oh, something to do,” said Lily. “We live near here.”
“So do I,” said Michael hastily.
“Do you?” Her eyebrows went up in what he imagined was an expression of
rather cruel interrogation. “This is a silly sort of a show. Still,
even Covent Garden is dull now.”
Michael thought what a fool he had been not to include Covent Garden in
his search. How well he might have known she would go there.
“Where’s Doris?” he asked.
Lily shrugged her shoulders.
“I never see anything of her nowadays. She married an actor. I don’t
often get letters from home, do I, Sylvia?”
The pierrette with rose pompons, who ever since her introduction had
still been standing outside the conversation, now raised her mask.
Michael liked her face. She had merry eyes, and a wide nose rather
Slavonic. Next to Lily she seemed almost dumpy.
“Letters, my dear,” she exclaimed, in a very deep voice, “Who wants
letters?”
The music of a waltz was beginning, and Michael asked Lily if she would
dance with him. She looked at Sylvia.
“I don’t think....”
“Oh, what rot, Lily! Of course you can dance.”
Michael gave her a grateful smile.
In a moment Lily had lowered her mask, and they were waltzing together.
“My gad, how gloriously you waltz!” he whispered. “Did we ever dance
together five years ago?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and he felt the faint movement tremble
through the imponderable form he held.
“Lily, I’ve been looking for you since June,” he sighed.
“You’re breaking step,” she said. Though her mask was down, Michael was
sure that she was frowning at him.
“Lily, why are you so cold with me? Have you forgotten?”
“What?”
“Why, everything!” Michael gasped.
“You’re absolutely out of time now,” she said sternly.
They waltzed for a while in silence, and Michael felt like a midge
spinning upon a dazzle.
“Do you remember when we met in Kensington Gardens?” he ventured. “I
remember you had black pompons on your shoes then, and now you have
pale blue pompons on your dress.”
She was not answering him.
“It’s funny you should still be living near me,” he went on. “I suppose
you’re angry with me because I suddenly never saw you again. That was
partly your mother’s fault.”
She looked at him in faint perplexity, swaying to the melody of the
waltz. Michael thought he had blundered in betraying himself as so
obviously lovestruck now. He must be seeming to her like that absurd
and sentimental boy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him,
for she could compare him with other men. Ejaculations of wonder at her
beauty would no longer serve, with all the experience she might bring
to mock them. She was smiling at him now, and the mask she wore made
the smile seem a sneer. He grew so angry with her suddenly that almost
he stopped in the swing of the dance to shake her.
“But it was much more your fault,” he said savagely. “Do you remember
Drake?”
She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
“Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us.”
“Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed
by some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that?
Couldn’t you say ‘no’? Were you too lazy?”
Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
“Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or
did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were
flirting with?”
Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no
gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his
arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that,
while she was with him, she was his again.
What did the past matter?
“Ah, Lily, you love me still! I’ll ask no more questions. Am I out of
step?”
“No, not now,” she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with
the swoon of their dancing.
“Take off that silly mask,” he commanded. “Take it off and give it to
me. I can hold you with one arm.”
She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as
if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no
longer veiled her face; her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her
lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm
until he could touch her shoulder.
“Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over.”
She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and
danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and
Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood
in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always
known her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything
that was happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it
were a street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking.
Nor with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced
with Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after
midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall,
and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a
cab, but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they
lived, was only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham
Road. The fog was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the
girls’ arms with a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of
extraordinary freedom from the world, as if they were all three
embarked upon an adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their
shoes deep down in the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession
of their shoes he had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them.
The fog was denser and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb,
listening for oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far
down the Fulham Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of
them seemed to sail across to the opposite pavement. He had nothing to
say because he was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she
talked now no more than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to
carry on the conversation, and since most of this consisted of
questions to Lily and Michael about their former friendship, which
neither Lily nor Michael answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last;
and they walked on silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls
close to him and watching all the time Lily’s hand holding up her big
black cloak.
“Here we are, you two dreamers,” said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by
a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly,
without any dip down into a road.
“Through here? How fascinating!” said Michael.
They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in
front of a door set in a wall.
“I’ve got the key,” said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
“But this is extraordinary,” Michael exclaimed. “Aren’t we walking
through a garden?”
“Yes, it’s quite a long garden,” Sylvia informed him. There was a smell
of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael
thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following
Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden
like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they
walked up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
“She’s downstairs,” said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the
key. A woman’s figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the
passage.
“Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We’re frozen,” Sylvia called. As the
woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
“We’ve brought an old friend of Lily’s back from the dance. It wasn’t
really worth going to. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, ought I?” she
laughed, turning round to Michael. “Come in and get warm. This is Mrs.
Gainsborough, who’s the queen of cards.”
“Get along with you, you great saucy thing,” said Mrs. Gainsborough,
laughing.
She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her
crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her
black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the
middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger,
sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was
amused to hear her address Sylvia as “great.”
“We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old
mountain,” Sylvia said.
Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest
of wheezy laughter.
“Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room
table,” and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the
diminutive corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near
the fire. Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass
case of humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell
coronated with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on
the chair was of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her
pierrette’s dress of black with light blue pompons looked strangely
remote from present time in that setting. Michael could not connect
this secluded house with anything which had made an impression upon him
during his experience of the underworld. Here was nothing that was not
cozy and old-fashioned; here was no sign of decay, whether in the
fabric of the house or in the attitude of the people living there. This
small square room with the heavy furniture that occupied so much of the
space had no demirep demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped
sides and back of floriated wood; that brass birdcage hanging in the
window against the curtains of maroon serge; those cabinets in
miniature, some lacquered, some of plain wood with tiny drop-handles of
brass; those black chairs with seats of gilded cane; those trays with
marquetery in mother-of-pearl of wreaths and rivulets and parrots; that
table-cloth like a dish of black Sèvres; those simpering steel
engravings—there was nothing that did not bespeak the sobriety of the
Victorian prime here miraculously preserved. Lily and Sylvia in such
dresses belonged to a period of fantasy; Mrs. Gainsborough was in
keeping with her furniture; and Michael, as he looked at himself in the
glass overmantel, did not think that he was seeming very intrusive.
“Whose are these rooms?” he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not
believe they were her creation or discovery.
“I found them,” said Sylvia. “The old girl who owns the house is bad,
but beautiful. Aren’t you, you most astonishing but attractive
mammoth?” This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the
moment panting into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
“Get along with you,” the landlady chuckled. “Now don’t go to sleep,
Lily. Your supper is just on ready.” She went puffing from the room in
busy mirthfulness.
“She’s one of the best,” said Sylvia. “This house was given to her by
an old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting
of him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers.
She was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle
Rooms and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness.”
It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have
mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected
him more sharply now with a sense of the appropriateness of this house
in Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood
of this foggy night.
“Supper! Supper!” Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet,
and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and
give him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair,
up from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so,
and she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to
follow them across the passage.
It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table
with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance.
That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside,
was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a
woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again.
So he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
“Oh, my eye, my eye!” laughed Sylvia. “To think that Aunt Enormous was
once in the ballet at the Opera.”
“How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!” Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of
muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them
frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue
eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that
Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the
New Year’s Day which could so change his fortune.
“Were you in the ballet?” he asked.
“Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like
to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now.”
“Show the kind gentleman your picture,” said Sylvia. “She wears it
round her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank.”
Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy
young woman in a pork-pie hat.
“That’s myself,” said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. “Well, and I
always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why
shouldn’t I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?”
“But show him the others,” Sylvia demanded.
Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained
morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces
against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait’s wraith: a
girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering,
with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence
of a ghostly bloom.
“Oh, look at her,” cried Sylvia. “In her beautiful pantalettes!”
“Hold your tongue, you!”
They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which
lasted on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the
other room and sat round the fire.
“Tell us about the General,” said Sylvia.
“Go on, as if you hadn’t heard a score of times all I’ve got to tell
about the General—though you know I hate him to be called that. He’ll
always be the Captain to me.”
Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough
embarked upon tales of gay days in the ’sixties and ’seventies. It was
astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could
scarcely have changed since then.
“The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in eighteen-sixty-nine
before I was twenty, and I’ve lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many’s
the summer daybreak we’ve walked back here after dancing all night at
Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl’s Court is nothing to
Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it’s as
well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me
the dismals to be going there now without my Captain.”
She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very
smoke and grime of the city.
“Who knows what’s going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?” she
said, shaking her head. “So enjoy yourselves while you can. That’s my
motto. And if there’s a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be
very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am
now.”
The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company,
seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it
was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of
her youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces.
Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead
singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes
reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young
subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story
to story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after
two o’clock, and Michael rose to go.
“We’ll have one song,” cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough
to the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up
albums, and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a
pleating of claret-colored silk.
Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed
in comparison so frail and old, sang in a wheezy pipe of a voice: _The
Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me._
“But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me
behind my back,” she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face
Sylvia when she had finished.
“Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like
it.”
“Bless your heart, my dearie.” She laid a hand on Sylvia’s for an
instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and
asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily
and her out to lunch.
“We can lunch to-morrow, can’t we?” Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily’s
arm, for she was now fast asleep.
“Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow,” Lily yawned.
He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to
shake hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that
the outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to
speed his departure.
The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the
night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming
undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But
he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter
night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his
overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls’
shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most
fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers
which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse
blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by
nor cat offended his isolation. The London night belonged to him; his
only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on
either side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than
a few yards in front.
He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his
good luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing
was ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that
carnival. Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined
to buy all sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had
fingered vaguely from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily’s
discovery was colored with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze
the situation in which he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea
through the fog, he was bemused by the romantic memory of her which was
traveling along with his thoughts. He could hold very tightly her
shoes: he could almost embrace the phantom of her beauty that curled
upon the vapors round each lamp: he was intoxicated merely by the sound
of the street where she lived.
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!”
He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed
to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of
the railway-carriage: “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!” he chanted at the
fog, and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on
ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
“I’m awfully sorry, constable.”
“Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren’t you?”
“Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink
my health when you’re off duty.”
He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman’s hand, and as he left the
stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was
the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on
the Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black
river flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with
monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here, a frore
whitish mist that saturated him with a malignant chill. Michael was
glad to find himself looking at the dolphin-headed knocker of 173
Cheyne Walk. The effect of being in his own bedroom again, even though
the girls’ shoes lay fantastically upon the floor, was at first to make
him believe that Tinderbox Lane might have been a dream, and after
that, because he knew it was not a dream, to wonder about it.
Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could
Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small
house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and
stability, almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety.
Mrs. Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very
demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would
have been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary
to assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of
high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be
on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady’s kindling
stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the
Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been
nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael’s heart leaped with the fancy
that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night;
and, picking up Lily’s shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about
its secrets.
In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dull January rain; but
Michael greeted the outlook as cheerfully as if it had been perfect May
weather. He went first to a post office to send off the money he had
promised to Mrs. Smith and the Solutionist. After this discharge of
business, he felt more cheerful than ever, and, as if to capture the
final touch of fantasy necessary to bewitch yesterday night, he
suddenly realized, when he was hurrying along Fulham Road in the rain,
that he had no idea of the number of Mrs. Gainsborough’s house. He also
began to wonder if there really could be such a place as Tinderbox
Lane, and as he walked on without discovering any indication of its
existence, he wondered if Sylvia had invented the name, so that he
might never find her and Lily again. It was an uneasy thought, for
without a number and without a name—but just as he was planning an
elaborate way to discover the real name of the street, he saw in front
of him Tinderbox Lane enameled in the ordinary characters of municipal
direction. Here were the two posts: here was the narrow entrance. The
rumble of the traffic grew fainter. On one side was a high blank wall;
on the other a row of two-storied houses. They were naturally dwellings
of the poorer classes, but at intervals a painter had acquired one, and
had painted it white or affixed green shutters with heart-shaped
openings. The width of the pavement varied continually, but generally
at the beginning it was very narrow. Later on, however, it became wide
enough to allow trees to be planted down the middle. Beyond this part
was a block of new flats round which Tinderbox Lane narrowed again to a
mere alley looking now rather dank and gloomy in the rain. Michael
could not remember from last night in the fog either the trees or the
flats. The door of Lily’s lodging had been set in a wall: here on one
side was certainly a wall, but never a door to relieve the grimy
blankness. He began to feel discouraged, and he walked round into the
narrow alley behind the flats. Here were doors in the wall at last, and
Michael examined each of them in turn. Two were dark blue: one was
green: one was brown. 74: 75: 76: 77. He chose 77 because it was
farthest away from the flats. After a very long wait, an old woman
holding over herself a very large umbrella opened it.
“Mrs. Gainsborough ...?” Michael began.
But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his
inquiry.
Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last
the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself
under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman’s next door.
“I’ve come to take the girls out to lunch.”
“That’s a good boy,” she wheezed. “The dearies will be glad to get out
and enjoy themselves a bit. Here’s a day. This would have suited Noah,
wouldn’t it?”
She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the
garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house
itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the
astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the
pretentious gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind,
nor even in front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These
houses with doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to
individuals, and for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by
the development of the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long
gardens in a row must be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad
to think that the flats opposite were no doubt due to the death of
someone who had owned a similar house and garden.
Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side.
Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently
to the kitchen. Two fairly large trees were planted in the grass that
ran up to the house on either side of the balcony.
“Those are my mulberries,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “This is called
Mulberry Cottage. I’ve been meaning to have the name painted on the
outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There’s a
character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his
mulberries. But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my
flowers are really remarkable. But there, it’s not to be wondered at.
M’ father was a nursery gardener.”
She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why.
Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of
the Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
“The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls,” she wheezed at the door of the
sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of
bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily
was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her
book down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the
title, and found it was the Contes Drôlatiques of Balzac. An unusual
girl, he thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could
not kiss her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now
restored, supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at
ease again. Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he
sat thinking of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The
silence here was very like the country. London was a thousand miles
away, and he could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and
less did he think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage.
Yet the apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take
Lily away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she
might not want to marry him at once. The discovery of her in this
pleasant house with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of
rescue which he had planned. She would not presumably be escaping from
a situation she abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was
it Sylvia who was making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and
explain that he had no predatory intentions. She would surely be glad
that he wanted to marry Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and
tinkled the lusters on the mantelshelf. “Sweet,” said the canary in the
brass cage: the rain sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small
square room was the malaise of someone’s jealousy. The tentative
solution that was propounding itself did not come from his own
impression of Sylvia, but it seemed positively to be an emanation from
the four walls of the room which in the stillness was able to force its
reality upon him. “Sweet,” said the canary: the lusters stopped their
tinkling: the rain sizzled steadily outside.
Lunch at Kettner’s was a great success. At least Michael thought it was
a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy
walls, and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but
rather to give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and
wintry sun. Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was
conscious that the other people in the restaurant were turning round to
envy their table.
The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less
he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been
comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she
displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly
herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid
question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and
Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been
disquieting, but that Sylvia talked of them with such a really
tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more
than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the
river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and balls.
Quite definitely Michael was able to assure himself that out of the
host of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored
above the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were
independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be
Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and
perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm’s length from Lily,
as he felt himself being held now. Her attitude might have nothing to
do with jealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she
was, indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who
read the Contes Drôlatiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a
girl who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had
said something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet
he knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the
conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what
was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy
walls.
For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the
girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be
alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To
find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a
room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative,
so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
“We’re alone,” he managed to say at last.
“Sylvia’s gone to Brighton. She didn’t want to go a bit.”
“Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven’t kissed for five years.”
He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him,
it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He
heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from
perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the
trance of silence.
“Lily, you will marry me, won’t you? Very soon? At once?”
Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him
from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the
remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue
relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was
such a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of
action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his
arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet
most poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had
dreaded at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition,
scarcely knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This
tranquillity of caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a
lullaby to his fears. It was the very rhapsody of his intention to
kneel beside her, murmuring huskily the little words of love. He would
have married her wherever and whatever he found her, but the relief was
overwhelming. He had thought of a beautiful thing ruined; he had
foreshadowed glooms and tragic colloquies; he had desperately hoped his
devotion might be granted at least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he
found this ivory girl, this loveliness of rose and coral within his
arms. So many times she had eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the
night, and so often in dreams he had held her for kisses that were
robbed from him by the sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could
believe he held her now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his
cheeks, when her mouth was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon
this airy beauty must have perished; and even now what was she? A shred
of goldleaf on his open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and
destructible in a moment of adversity.
Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been
aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she
was placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her,
though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He
could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about
whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous
promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he
would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for
her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection,
thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses
blowing in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in
her kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in
itself; and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the
fat pink loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which
the Captain had first imagined his gift.
So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet
ineffably vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would
have had them express, the hour passed.
“We must talk of practical things,” he declared, rising from his knees.
“You always want to talk,” Lily pouted.
“I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes; but it’s so difficult to do things quickly.”
“We’ll be married in a month. We’ll be married on Saint Valentine’s
Day,” Michael announced.
“It’s so wet now to think of weddings.” She looked peevishly out of the
window.
“You haven’t got to think about it. You’ve got to do it.”
“And it’s so dull,” she objected. “Sylvia says it’s appallingly dull.
And she’s been married.”
“What has Sylvia got to do with it?” he demanded.
“Oh, well, she’s been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother
died, what was I to do? I couldn’t bear Doris any more. She always gets
on my nerves. Anyway, don’t let’s talk about marriage now. In the
summer I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather.”
“But look here,” he persisted. “Are you in love with me?”
She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
“Well, if you’re not in love with me....”
“Oh, I am, I am! Don’t shout so, Michael. If I wasn’t awfully fond of
you, I shouldn’t have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men
coming here.”
“Are you Sylvia’s servant?” said Michael, in exasperation.
“Don’t be stupid. Of course not.”
“It’s ridiculous,” he grumbled, “to quote her with every sentence.”
“Why you couldn’t have stayed where you were,” said Lily fretfully, “I
don’t know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If
you’re so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up.”
“So, we’re not to talk any more about marriage?”
After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that
Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not
the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
“Don’t let’s talk about anything,” said Lily. He could not stand aloof
from the arms she held wide open.