spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked
approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The
weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch,
it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long.
One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he
asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey’s. Michael
had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should
seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what
he told himself was the only café in London which had escaped the
cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very
white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her
self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael
suddenly suspicious.
“Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“It depends who we go with. Often I don’t care for them much. And the
girls you see there are frightfully common.”
He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If
it were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no
difference to his resolution. People began to come into the café,
shaking the wet from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was
audible above the conversation.
“I wish we could have had one fine day together,” said Michael
regretfully. “Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the
winter?”
“I must have been very fond of you,” Lily laughed. “I don’t think you
could make me walk like that now.”
“Aren’t you so fond of me now?” he asked reproachfully.
“You ought to know,” she whispered.
All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets,
and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
“Shall I come in?” Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
“Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course.”
He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
“Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink
after midnight?”
“I told you that Sylvia doesn’t like me to,” she said.
“But you would, if she didn’t mind?” Michael went on, torturing
himself.
“How fond you are of ‘ifs,’” she answered. “I can’t bother to think
about ‘ifs’ myself.”
If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips
with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already
he was feeling the influence of Lily’s attitude. He wondered if, when
he married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It
was as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful
woman as in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
“Happiness makes me inactive,” said Michael to himself. “So of course I
shall never really be happy. What a paradox.”
He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a
surrender to-night.
“I’m glad I didn’t suggest staying late,” he thought, as he walked away
down the dripping garden path. “I should have been mad with
unreasonable suspicions, if she had said ‘yes.’”
Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very
much, he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of
malice in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have
dinner with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond.
Michael was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet
until she had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia’s
influence? And who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o’clock as
usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the
fire.
“Lily isn’t down yet,” she told him.
He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he
and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
“Jolly dance?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
“Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out.” Michael
flung down his challenge.
“She’s been talking to me about what you said yesterday,” Sylvia began.
Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her
countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that
out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
“When do you propose to marry her?” Sylvia went on.
“As soon as possible,” he said coolly.
“Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?” she
demanded.
“I really don’t know. You have rather an advantage over me in that
respect.”
“I’m glad you admit that,” interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
“You have personality. You’ve probably been very kind to Lily. You’re
cleverer than she is. You’re with her all the time. I’ve only quite
suddenly come into her life again.”
“I’m glad you think you’ve managed to do that,” she said, glowering.
More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a
cat crouching by the fire.
“Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an
opportunity to be alone with Lily, you now think you’ve come into her
life. My god, you’re like some damned fool in a novel!”
“A novel by whom?” Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off
Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he
never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
“Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp,” she answered savagely.
He bowed.
“I suppose you’re suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?”
she sneered.
Michael was rather startled by her divination.
“What should I redeem her from?”
“I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?”
“I don’t know that I boasted of it,” he replied, in rather an injured
tone. “But I did know her—very well.”
“Couldn’t you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should
have said that Lily’s future must have been obvious from the time she
was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got
out of her life then: what the hell’s your object in coming into it
again now, as you call it, unless you’re a sentimentalist? People don’t
let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without
the help of sentiment.”
Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the conversation was
able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true.
He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia
looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
“Sentiment about what?” he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
“You think Lily’s a tart, don’t you? And you think I am, don’t you?”
He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
“I did think so,” he said. “But of course I’ve changed my mind since
I’ve seen something of you.”
“Oh, of course you’ve changed your mind, have you?” she laughed
contemptuously. “And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?”
“Even if _you_ are,” said Michael hotly, “I needn’t believe that Lily
is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry
her.”
“Sentimentalist,” she jeered. “Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist.”
“Your sneers don’t particularly affect me, you know,” he said politely.
“Oh, for god’s sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut
out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And
I’m sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I’m a perpetual
bugbear to his good form.”
“Because you made a hash of marriage,” Michael pointed out, “it doesn’t
follow that I’m not to marry Lily. I can’t understand your objections.”
“Listen. You couldn’t make her happy. You couldn’t make her any happier
than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time
without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let
any one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the money
myself. And I usually can. Well, why should I stand aside now and let
you carry her off, even though you do want to marry her? I could argue
against it on your side by telling you that you have no chance of
keeping Lily faithful to you? Can’t you see that she has no moral
energy? Can’t you see that she’s vain and empty-headed? Can’t you see
that? But why should I argue with you for your benefit? I don’t care a
damn about your side in the matter.”
“What exactly do you care about?” Michael asked. “If Lily is what you
say, I should have thought you’d be glad to be rid of her. After all,
I’m not proposing to do her any wrong.”
“Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!” Sylvia cried. “Man can
only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be
a success, you’ll have to own Lily. That’s what I rebel against—the
ownership of women. It makes me mad.”
“Yes, it seems to,” Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage
with Sylvia’s unreasonableness. “If it comes to ownership,” he went on
angrily, “I should have thought that handing her over to the highest
bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable
slave of man.”
“Why?” challenged Sylvia. “You sentimental ass, can’t you understand
that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She’s
free. I’m free.”
“You’re not at all free,” Michael indignantly contradicted. “You’re
bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few
less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts,
you’d be a good deal happier.”
“I don’t want to be happier.”
“Oh, I think you’re merely hysterical,” he said disdainfully. “But,
after all, your opinions about yourself don’t matter to me. Only I
can’t see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you
have the right, I don’t grasp your reason for wanting to.”
“When I met Lily first,” said Sylvia, “she had joined the chorus of a
touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I’d just
run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d
ever seen. That’s three years ago. Is she beautiful still?”
“Of course she is,” said Michael.
“Well, it’s I who have kept her beautiful. I’ve kept her free also. If
sometimes I’ve let her have affairs with men, I’ve taken care that they
were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort
of....”
“Look here,” Michael burst in. “I’m sick of this conversation. You’re
talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I’m going to marry her,
whatever you think.”
“I say you won’t, and you shan’t,” Sylvia declared.
The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the
fire, glaring at each other.
“The extraordinary thing is,” said Michael at last, “I thought you had
a sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing
is that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you.
But I can’t help saying it.”
“The opinions of sentimentalists don’t interest me one way or the
other,” Sylvia snapped.
“Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so
pleasant on the evening we met?”
“I really can’t bother to go back as far as that.”
“You weren’t jealous _then_,” Michael persisted.
“Who says I’m jealous now?” she cried.
“I do. What do you think you are, unless you’re jealous? When is Lily
coming down?”
“She isn’t coming down until you’ve gone.”
“Then I shall go and call her.”
“She’s not in London.”
“I don’t believe you.”
A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia
the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He
congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was
obviously going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
“You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because
Lily loves me.”
“It’s not true,” Sylvia declared. “It’s not true. She doesn’t love you,
and what right have you to love her?”
She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
“What college was your husband at?” Michael suddenly inquired.
“Balliol.”
“I wonder if I knew him.”
“Oh, no. He was older than you.”
It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane,
that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so
much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He
would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to
have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he
felt that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let
Lily continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if
Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably
irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no
less than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not
want to marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily,
from whom there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his
theories of behavior were being referred back to his own desires. It
was useless to pretend any longer that his pursuit had been quixotry.
Even if it had seemed so on that night when he first heard the news of
Lily from Drake, the impulse at the back of his resolve had been his
passion for her. When he looked back at his behavior lately, a good
deal of it seemed to have been dictated by self-gratification. He
remembered how deeply hurt he had felt by Poppy’s treatment of what he
had supposed his chivalry. In retrospect his chivalry was seeming
uncommonly like self-satisfaction. His friendship for Daisy; for
Barnes; for the underworld; it had been nothing but self-satisfaction.
Very well, then. If self was to be the touchstone in future, he could
face that standard as easily as any other. By the time he had reached
the end of Tinderbox Lane Michael was convinced of his profound
cynicism. He felt truly obliged to Sylvia for curing him of sentiment.
He had so often inveighed against sentiment as the spring of human
action, that he was most sincerely grateful for the proof of his own
sentimental bias. He would go to Sylvia to-morrow and say frankly that
he did not care a bit what Lily had been, was now, or would be; he
wanted her. She was something beautiful which he coveted. For the
possession of her he was ready to struggle. He would declare war upon
Sylvia as upon a rival. She should be rather surprised to-morrow
morning, Michael thought, congratulating himself upon this new and
ruthless policy.
On the next morning, however, all Michael’s plans for his future
behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry
Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold
resolution, were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing
a bell at intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for
the position he had imagined himself taking up in that small square
room. This errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such rapt
interest at his ringing of the bell, was by no means the audience he
had pictured.
“Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?” Michael asked.
The errand-boy shook his head.
“Well, why do you do it?”
“I wasn’t,” said the errand-boy.
“What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing.”
Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from
Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no
answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but
there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to
Sylvia:
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
_Dear Sylvia,_
_If you aren’t afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me see
Lily?_
_I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting._
_Yours,_
_M. F._
To Lily he wrote:
_Darling,_
_Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to
three._
_Michael._
Alone, of course.
Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not
come. All the time he spent in a second-hand bookshop with one eye on
the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:
_Come to-morrow at twelve._
_S. S._
Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the
waste-paper basket.
“I thought I should sting you into giving way,” he exclaimed.
Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
“They’ve gone away, the demons!” was what she said.
Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching
behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert
he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
“Where have they gone?” he asked blankly.
“Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage.
There’s a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I’ll give it to you.”
Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
“We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are,” Mrs.
Gainsborough said.
“Very soon,” he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold
begonias to-morrow morning.
In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia’s note, a bleak little envelope
waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read
it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the
silence that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his
cage. Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia’s hostility was
stretching out toward him. “Sweet,” said the canary. Michael tore open
the envelope and read:
_Perhaps you’ll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You’d
much better give her up. In a way, I’m rather sorry for you, but not
enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear young
thing, that you aren’t even beginning to understand women. I admit that
there’s precious little to understand in Lily. And for that very
reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty, you’ll hate her.
Now_ I _hate to think of this happening. She’s a thousand times better
off with me than she ever could be with you. Perhaps my maternal
instinct has gone off the lines a bit and fixed itself on Lily. And yet
I don’t think it’s anything so sickly as sentimental mothering. No, I
believe I just like to sit and look at her. Lily’s rather cross with me
for taking her away from “such a nice boy.” Does that please you? And
doesn’t it exactly describe you? However, I won’t crow. Don’t break the
lusters, when you read this. They belong to Fatty. What I suggest for
you is a walk in Kensington Gardens to the refrain of “Blast the whole
bloody world!” Now look shocked, my little Vandyck._
_S. S._
Michael tore the letter up. He did not want to read and re-read it for
the rest of the day. His eyelids were pricking unpleasantly, and he
went out to find Mrs. Gainsborough. He was really sensitive that even a
room should witness such a discomfiture. The landlady was downstairs in
the kitchen, where he had not yet been. In this room of copper pots and
pans, with only the garden in view, she might have been a farmer’s
wife.
“Sit down,” she said. “And make yourself at home.”
“Will you sit down?” Michael asked.
“Oh, well, yes, if it’s any pleasure to you.” She took off her apron
and seated herself, smoothing the bombasine skirt over her knees.
A tabby cat purred between them; a kettle was singing; and there was a
smell of allspice.
“You really don’t know where the girls have gone?” Michael began.
“No more than you do,” she assured him. “But that Sylvia is really a
Turk.”
“I suppose Lily didn’t tell you that I used to know her six years ago?”
he asked.
“Oh, yes, she talked about you a lot. A good deal more than Miss Sylvia
liked, that’s a sure thing.”
“Well, do you think it’s fair for Sylvia to carry her off like this? I
want to marry Lily, Mrs. Gainsborough.”
“There, only fancy what a daring that Sylvia has. She’s a nice girl,
and very high-spirited, but she _is_ a Miss Dictatorial.”
Michael felt encouraged by Mrs. Gainsborough’s attitude, and he made up
his mind to throw himself upon her mercy. Sentiment would be his only
weapon, and he found some irony in the reflection that he had set out
this morning to be a brutal cynic in his treatment of the situation.
“Do you think it’s fair to try to prevent Lily from marrying me? You
know as well as I do that the life she’s leading now isn’t going to be
the best life possible for her. You’re a woman of the world, Mrs.
Gainsborough——”
“I was once,” she corrected. “And a very naughty world it was, too.”
“You were glad, weren’t you, when the Captain brought you to this
house? You were glad to feel secure? You would have married him?”
“No, I wouldn’t marry him. I preferred to be as I am. Still that’s
nothing for Lily to go by. She’s more suited for marriage than what I
was.”
“Don’t you think,” Michael went on eagerly, “that if after six years
I’m longing to marry her, I ought to marry her? I know that she might
be much worse off than she is, but equally she might be much better
off. Look here, Mrs. Gainsborough, it’s up to you. You’ve got to make
it possible for me to see her. You’ve got to.”
“But if I do anything like that,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “it means I
have an unpleasantness with Sylvia. That girl’s a regular heathen when
she turns nasty. I should be left all alone in my little house. And
what with Spring coming on and all, and the flowers looking so nice in
the garden, I should feel very much the square peg in the round hole.”
“Lily and I would come and see you,” he promised. “And I don’t think
Sylvia would leave you. She’d never find another house like Mulberry
Cottage or another landlady like you.”
“Yes, I daresay; but you can’t tell these things. Once she’s in her
tantrums, there’s no saying what will happen. And, besides, I don’t
know what you want me to do.”
“I want you to send me word the first moment that Lily’s alone for an
hour; and when I ring, do answer the bell.”
“Now that wasn’t my fault yesterday,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Really I
thought we should have the fire-escape in. The way you nagged at that
poor bell! It was really chronic. But would she let me so much as speak
to you, even with the door only on the jar? Certainly not! And all the
time she was snapping round the house like a young crocodile. And yet
I’m really fond of that girl. Well, when the Captain died, she was a
daughter to me. Oh, she was, she was really a daughter to me. Well, you
see, his sister invited me to the funeral, which I thought was very
nice, her being an old maid and very strict. Now, I hardly liked to put
on a widow’s cap and yet I hardly didn’t like to. But Sylvia, she said
not on any account, and I was very glad I didn’t, because there was a
lot of persons there very stand-offish, and I should have been at my
wits to know whatever I was going to say.”
“Look here,” said Michael. “When the Captain gave you this house, he
loved you. You were young, weren’t you? You were young and beautiful?
Well, would you like to think your house was going to be used to
separate two people very much in love with each other? You can say I
climbed over the wall. You can make any excuse you like to Sylvia. But,
Mrs. Gainsborough, do, do let me know when Lily is going to be alone.
If she doesn’t want to come away with me, it will be my fault, and that
will be the end of it. If only you’ll help me at the beginning. Will
you? Will you promise to help me?”
“I never could resist a man,” sighed Mrs. Gainsborough, with
resignation. “There’s a character! Oh, well, it’s my own and no one
else’s, that’s one good job.”
Michael had to wait until February was nearly over before he heard from
her. It had been very difficult to remain quietly at Cheyne Walk, but
he knew that if he were to show any sign of activity, Sylvia would
carry Lily off again.
“A person to see you, sir,” said the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid.
Michael found Mrs. Gainsborough sitting in the hall. She was wearing a
bonnet tied with very bright cerise ribbons.
“They’ve had a rumpus, the pair of them, this afternoon. And Sylvia’s
gone off in the sulks. I really was quite aggravated with her. Oh,
she’s a willful spitfire, that girl, sometimes. She really is.”
Michael was coming away without a coat or hat, and Mrs. Gainsborough
stopped him.
“Now don’t behave like a silly. Dress yourself properly and don’t make
me run. I’m getting stout, you know,” she protested.
“We’ll get a hansom.”
“What, ride in a hansom? Never! A four-wheeler if you _like_.”
It was difficult to find a four-wheeler, and Michael was nearly mad
with impatience.
“Now don’t upset yourself. Sylvia won’t be back to-night, and there’s
no need to tug at me as if I was a cork in a bottle. People will think
we’re a walking poppy-show, if you don’t act more quiet. They’re all
turning round to stare at us.”
A four-wheeler appeared presently, and very soon they were walking down
Tinderbox Lane. Michael felt rather like a little boy out with his
nurse, as he kept turning back to exhort Mrs. Gainsborough to come more
quickly. She grew more and more red in the face, and so wheezy that he
was afraid something would happen to her, and for a few yards made no
attempt to hurry her along. At last they reached Mulberry Cottage.
“Supposing Sylvia has come back!” he said.
“I keep on telling you she’s gone away for the night. Now get on
indoors with you. You’ve nearly been my death.”
“I say, you don’t know how grateful I am to you!” Michael exclaimed,
turning round and grasping her fat hands.
Mrs. Gainsborough shouted upstairs to Lily as loudly as her
breathlessness would permit:
“I’ve brought you back that surprise packet I promised.”
Then she vanished, and Michael waited for Lily at the foot of the
stairs. She came down very soon, looking very straight and slim in her
philamot frock of Chinese crêpe that so well became her. Soon she was
in his arms and glad enough to be petted after Sylvia’s rages.
“Lily, how can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It’s
absolutely intolerable.”
“She’s been horrid to me to-day,” said Lily resentfully.
“Well, why do you put up with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I hate always squabbling. It’s much easier to give
way to her, and usually I don’t much mind.”
“You don’t much mind whether we’re married!” Michael exclaimed. “How
can you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you
marry me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look
beautiful. You’d be happy married to me—you really would.”
“Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father
didn’t get on, and Doris doesn’t get on with the man she’s married to.
In fact, everybody seems to hate it.”
“Do you hate me?” Michael demanded.
“No, I think you’re awfully sweet.”
“Well, why don’t you marry me? You’ll have plenty of money and nothing
to bother about. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy being married.”
For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve.
For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A
chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her
loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting
at the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty,
the bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess
her without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. “_Michael,
why do you make me love you so?_” Was that the last protest she ever
made against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must
primarily be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.
“Lily,” he cried, catching her to him. “You’re coming away with me
now.”
He kissed her a hundred times.
“Now! Now! Do you hear me?”
She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly
what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to
marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her
yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing
frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.
“Quite an elopement,” Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.
“A very virtuous elopement,” said Michael, with a laugh.
“Oh, but shan’t I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!”
“Well, it’s Sylvia’s fault,” said Lily fretfully. “She shouldn’t worry
me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in
the world.”
The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.
“Where are you going?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked. “I declare, you’re like
two babes in the wood.”
“To my sister’s in Huntingdonshire,” said Michael, and he wrote out the
address.
“Oh, in the country! Well, Summer’ll be on us before we know where we
are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished.”
“Is your sister pretty?” Lily asked, as they were driving to King’s
Cross.
“She’s handsome,” said Michael. “You’ll like her, I think. And her
husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to
say we’re coming.”
CHAPTER VII
THE GATE OF IVORY
It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class
compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would
create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure
himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella,
but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he
felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting
outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the
still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of
his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a
little Stella’s judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the
hedgerows monotonously, and the horses’ breath curled round the rigid
form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the
blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if
she were happy.
“It makes me sleepy driving like this,” she murmured. Her head was on
his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she
traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke
her up.
There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they
arrived, though Michael watched Stella’s glances rather anxiously.
Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked
beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem
a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against
the stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock?
Stella, too, whom he had always considered a personality of some
extravagance, seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and
conventional. It used always to be himself who criticized people:
Stella had always been rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married
to Alan; or was Lily the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to
be going all right, especially when he consoled himself by remembering
the abruptness of Lily’s introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily
away with her into the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael
tried to feel that this was what he had expected would happen; but he
could not drive away the consciousness of a new formality brooding over
Hardingham. It was annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed
deliberately to avoid any reference to Lily. He would not even remind
Michael of the evening at the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her
five or six years ago. Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab
with her sister on that occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk
about cricket pitches; and yet he could not bring himself to ask right
out what Alan thought of her, because it would have impinged upon his
pride to do so. In about ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano,
and tacitly they agreed to forego the intimacy of drinking port
together any longer.
Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the
drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.
“Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play.”
It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for
hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good
impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended
almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily
thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very
aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the
slightest movement on her part or Alan’s as an implication of
disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.
When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the
few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to
explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox
Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily’s life would be fatal. He
found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up
and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather
depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he
hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would
smother everything else in a great surprise.
“Of course, that’s what I imagined you were thinking of doing,” said
Stella. “So you’ve made up your quarrel of five years ago?”
“When are you going to get married?” Alan asked.
“Well, I hoped you’d be able to have us here for a week or so, or at
any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live.”
“Oh, of course she can stay here,” said Stella.
“Oh, rather, of course,” Alan echoed.
Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making
signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a
farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was
objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the
billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself
between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed
quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he
was plunged.
A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred
to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance
toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being
slowly chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather
anxious to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any
opportunity. As for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and
saying very little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under
the shadow of disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael
determined to come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning
of strong easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a
walk to Stella.
They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs
scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.
“I don’t think I care much for this country of yours,” said Michael at
last. “It’s flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I
should care to live here, I don’t know.”
“There’s a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of
the wind there.”
Michael resented Stella’s pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and
so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a
fortnight.
“I hate badly trained dogs,” he grumbled when Stella turned round to
whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.
“So do I,” she agreed.
It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually
and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was
easier in the shelter of the wood.
“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for having us to stay down
here,” he began.
Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:
“Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?” she demanded.
Her use of the word “business” annoyed him: it crystallized all the
offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly
attitude these two weeks.
“I shall be delighted to talk about this ‘business.’ Though why you
should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don’t
quite know.”
“Do you want me to speak out frankly—to say exactly what I think of you
and Lily and of your marrying her? You won’t like it, and I won’t do it
unless you ask me.”
“Go on,” said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her
again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis
with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her
shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was
hers: the anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were
all hers. It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella
should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land
forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other
girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already
she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved
her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he
loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on
Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a
royal battle in this wood. Stella with her dogs and trees behind her,
with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her,
might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.
“Go on, I’m waiting for you to begin,” Michael repeated.
“Straight off, then,” she said, “I may as well tell you that this
marriage is impossible. I don’t know where you found her again, and I
don’t care. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me what she
had been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else.
But, Michael, she’s flabby. You’ll hate me for saying so, but she is,
she really is! In a year you’ll admit that; you’ll see her growing
older and flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that’s
possible. Even her beauty won’t last. These very fair girls fall to
pieces like moth-eaten dolls. I’ve tried to find something in her
during this fortnight. I’ve tried and tried; but there’s nothing. You
may be in love with her now, though I don’t believe you are. I think
it’s all a piece of sentimentalism. I’ve often teased you about getting
married, but please don’t suppose that I haven’t realized how almost
impossible it would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear
and tear of your idealism. I’m prepared to bet that behind your
determination to marry this girl there’s a reason, a lovely,
unpractical, idealistic reason. Isn’t there? You’ve been away with her
for a week-end, and have tortured yourself into a theory of reparation.
Is that it? Or you’ve fallen in love with the notion of yourself in
love at eighteen. Oh, you can’t marry her, you foolish old darling.”
“Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn’t keep whistling to
that infernal dog,” said Michael. “If this marriage is so terrible, I
should have thought you’d have forgotten there were such animals as
cocker-spaniels. It’s rubbish for you to say you’ve tried to find
something in Lily. You haven’t made the slightest attempt. You’ve
criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You’re sunk deep
already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is
the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when
you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I
didn’t talk as you’ve been talking to me.”
“No, you were always very cautiously fraternal,” said Stella. “Ah, no,
I won’t say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you’ll break
my heart if you marry this girl.”
“You won’t do anything of the kind,” he contradicted. “You’ll be
whistling to spaniels all the time.”
“Michael, it’s really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I’m
feeling so wretched about you.”
“It’s all fine for you to sneer at Lily,” said Michael. “But I can
remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room
over some man who’d made a fool of you. _You_ looked pretty flabby
then.”
“How dare you remind me of that?” Stella cried, in a fury. “How dare
you? How dare you?”
“You brought it on yourself,” said Michael coldly.
“You’re going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry
her, then! But don’t come to me for sympathy, when she’s forced you to
drag yourself through the divorce court.”
“No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again,”
said Michael bitterly. “Unless it’s for advice when I want to buy a
spaniel.”
They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy
fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having
referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion
on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had
always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked
sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she
would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far
they had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with
marriage. Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally
were smashed by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about
Stella’s music lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage?
The sooner he and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he
ought to suggest going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until
he could find a place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her.
They would be married next month, and he would take her abroad. He
would be able to see her at last in some of the places where in days
gone by he had dreamed of seeing her.
“I suppose you wouldn’t object to keeping Lily here two or three days
more, while I find a place in town?” said Michael. It only struck him
when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor.
Stella would despise him more than ever.
“Michael,” Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path.
“Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can
realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I’m
willing actually to plead with you. It’s intolerable to think of you
tied to her!”
“It’s too late,” said Michael. “I must marry her. Not for any reasons
that the world would consider reasons,” he went on. “But because I want
to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me
before the world.”
“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! It’s all wrong. She’s all wrong. Her people
are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know
how casual he is about people he doesn’t like. He usually flings them
out of his mind at once.”
“Oh, Alan’s amazing in every way,” said Michael. He longed to say that
he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so
much the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite
place to which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for
a few days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the
problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that
he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily
to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like
this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and
Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could
not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be
better to pocket his pride.
Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.
“Look here,” she said. “You absurd old Quixote, listen. I’m going to do
all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town
and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if
you’ll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a
truce I mean that I’ll be charming to her and take no steps to
influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war,
even if you win in the end and marry her.”
“Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?”
“Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we
shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands
you in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you’ll
come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair
of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Lily,” said Michael,
frowning.
“The truce has begun,” Stella declared. “For a fortnight I’ll be an
angel.”
Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded
Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to
the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning.
Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.
“Lily, you look adorable in this glade,” he told her. “I believe, if
you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch
tree.”
The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich
deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body
of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the
ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some
primroses and brought them to Lily.
“These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you
let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house
you’re going to live in? Will you not be lonely?”
“I like to have you with me always,” she murmured.
He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were
usually mute.
“We shall be married in a month,” he cried. “Can you smell violets?”
“Something sweet I smell.”
But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets
themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open
fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering
companies.
“These eves of early Spring are like swords,” Michael exclaimed.
“Like what?” Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.
“Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their
sharpness and sweetness.”
“Oh, you mean it’s cold,” she said. “Take my arm.”
“Well, I meant rather more than that, really,” Michael laughed. But
because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had
been from following his thoughts.
Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before
the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.
“Not more than a fortnight, mind,” were Stella’s last words.
He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice
about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.
“Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and
Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill,
Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent’s Canal, Adelphi
Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is
impossible. But you’re living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to
move from there?”
Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He
supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be
sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much
delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who
she was or where Michael had met her.
“By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don’t think I’m
desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal,
if we can find the right one.”
That afternoon they set out.
They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was
very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about
fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor
Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that
the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing
press.
“Yes, but we don’t want to start a printing press,” Michael objected.
“And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant
can manage.”
It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this
house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering
anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they
went off to Regent’s Park.
“I don’t think you’re likely to find anything so good as that house,”
Maurice said gloomily. “In fact, I know you won’t. I wish I could
afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at
the Temple just as soon from there.”
“I don’t see why he should bother about the Temple,” said Michael.
“That house was rather bigger.”
“You’ll never find another house like it,” Maurice prophesied. “Look at
this neighborhood we’re driving through now. Impossible to live here!”
They were in the Hampstead Road.
“I haven’t any intention of doing so,” Michael laughed. “But there
remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally
suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought.”
“Wonderful house!” Maurice sighed. “I shall always regret you didn’t
take it.”
However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the
new prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic
railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that
seemed to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close
around them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near
Regent’s Park; and they crossed St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale, walking
on until they reached a point where at the confluence of two branches
the canal became a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole
length of the base of this triangle and almost level with the water,
stood the garden of a very large square house.
“There’s a curious place,” said Michael. “How on earth does one get at
it?”
They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of
the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance
down a flight of steps.
“Ararat House,” Michael read.
“Flat to let,” Maurice read.
“I think this looks rather promising,” said Michael.
It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A
portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house,
under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and
so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion.
The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor
buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the
windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with
plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must
have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and
rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house
would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat
to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes,
there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the
ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms
on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like
a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat
called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them
had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without
much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The
dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very
brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling
and walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky
kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors
into the drawing-room.
As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily
must live here.
It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic
saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he
decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a
room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and
the cameos of Théophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with
orient gewgaws; Barbey d’Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a
corner Villiers de l’Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a
tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic
embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts
with whom Michael had identified it.
“But this is like a scene in a pantomime,” Maurice exclaimed.
It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted
to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the
ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were
gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of
nymphs and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces
fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of
black and yellow lozenges.
“It’s hideous,” Maurice exclaimed.
The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
“Hideous but rather fascinating,” Michael said. “Look at the queer
melancholy light, and look at the view.”
It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the
room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper
had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much
subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their
leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues
and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown
magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they
walked out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries
of slag and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright
green slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path
running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the
sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet
and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep
everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply
down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air
diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city’s breath: the circling of
the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
“In summer this will be wonderful,” Michael predicted.
“On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,”
Maurice said.
“Except that they’ll probably have retired to bed,” Michael pointed
out.
“I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,”
Maurice laughed.
“Let’s ask the housekeeper,” Michael said solemnly.
They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem
exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead
water without.
“Who lives in the other flats?” Michael inquired of the housekeeper.
“There’s four others,” she began. “Up above there’s Colonel and
Mrs....”
“I see,” Michael interrupted. “Just ordinary people. Do they ever go
out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange
curtains?”
The housekeeper stared at him.
“They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The
courts is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman
to see about the flat.”
She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take
Number One, Ararat House.
“It absolutely was made to set her off,” he told Maurice. “You wait
till I’ve furnished it as it ought to be furnished.”
“And we’ll have amazing fêtes aqueuses in the summer,” Maurice
declared. “We’ll buy a barge and—why, of course—the canal flows into
the Thames at Grosvenor Road.”
“Underground—like the Styx,” said Michael, nodding.
“Of course, it’s going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other
except by water.”
“Like splendid dead Venetians,” said Michael.
The fortnight of Lily’s stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice
in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian
glass; oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small
round mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many
mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls
were hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There
were slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and
lemon satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over
the parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous
roses as deep as damsons or burgundy; and from the ceiling hung two
chandeliers of cut glass.
“You know,” said Maurice seriously, “she’ll have to be very beautiful
to carry this off.”
“She is very beautiful,” said Michael. “And there’s room for her to
walk about here. She’ll move about this room as wonderfully as those
swans upon the canal.”
“Michael, what’s happened to you? You’re becoming as eccentric as me.”
Maurice looked at him rather jealously. “And, I say, do you really want
me to come with you to King’s Cross to-morrow afternoon?”
Michael nodded.
“After you’ve helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see
the person we’ve done it for.”
“Yes, but look here. Who’s going to stay in the flat with her? You
can’t leave her alone until you’re married. As you told me the story,
it sounded very romantic; but if she’s going to be your wife, you’ve
got to guard her reputation.”
Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the
tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic
Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt
inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.
“I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman,” he said.
“That’s all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this
time.”
“You don’t know anybody?”
“I? Great scott, no!”
They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave
him for an appointment.
“To-morrow afternoon then at King’s Cross,” he said, and jumped on an
omnibus.
Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth could he get to stay
with Lily? Would it not be better to marry at once? But that would
involve breaking his promise to Stella. If he asked Mrs. Gainsborough,
it would mean Sylvia knowing where Lily was. If, on the other hand, he
should employ a strange woman, Lily might dislike her. Could he ask
Mrs. Ross to come up to town? No, of course, that was absurd. It looked
as if he would have to ask Mrs. Gainsborough. Or why not ask Sylvia
herself? In that case, why establish Lily at Ararat House before they
were married? This marriage had seemed so very easy an achievement; but
slowly it was turning into an insoluble complex. He might sound Sylvia
upon her attitude. It would enormously simplify everything if she would
consent; and if she consented she would, he believed, play fair with
him. The longer Michael thought about it, the more it seemed the safest
course to call in Sylvia’s aid. He was almost hailing a hansom to go to
Tinderbox Lane, when he realized how foolish it would be not to try to
sever Lily completely from the life she had been leading in Sylvia’s
company. Not even ought he to expose her to the beaming laxity of Mrs.
Gainsborough.
Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem
which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught
sight of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of
the automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk?
Then he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip
the kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered
the Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read
in a sing-song the virtues of a procession of various automatons
seeking situations as cooks and housemaids.
“What wages do you wish to give?”
“Oh, the usual wages,” Michael said. “But I rather want these servants
to-day.”
He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose
the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to
Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to
make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the
spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman
in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her
promise to suit him by to-morrow at midday. She suggested a capable
housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well
dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She
undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the
absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to
Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up
his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort
was perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o’clock, and he drove off
to King’s Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of
introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for
him on the platform.
Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when
he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry
into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that
he was free this afternoon.
“Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home to-night,” said Maurice.
“Or will you be very late?”
“Oh, no, I shan’t be late,” Michael answering, flushing. He had a
notion that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation.
It seemed as if he were testing his behavior.
Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio bedroom
was a little bare, it was soon strewn with her clothes, and made
thereby inhabitable.
“And of course,” said Michael, “you’ve got to buy lots and lots of
clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two
hundred—three hundred pounds?”
The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to
delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time,
in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that
he had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had
been given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed
through his mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux,
and, remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad
that Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined
Manon.
“And do you like Miss Harper?” he inquired.
“Yes, she seems all right.”
They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the
flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had
forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest
in household affairs.
“I think I ought to go now,” said Michael.
“Oh, no, stay a little longer.”
But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as
much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how
important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be
lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.
“Oh, you’re going now?” said Miss Harper, looking at him rather
curiously.
“I shall be round in the morning. You’ll finish making the lists of
what you still want?”
Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he
drove to Grosvenor Road.
Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.
“Look here, old chap,” Maurice began at once, “you can’t possibly marry
that girl.”
Michael frowned.
“You too?”
“I know all about her,” Maurice went on. “I’ve never actually met her,
but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five
years ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened
in between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who’s had an
affair with her—a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He’s often up
here. You’re bound to meet him some time.”
“Not at all, if I never come here again,” said Michael, in a cold rage.
“It’s no use for you to be angry with me,” said Maurice. “I should be a
rotten friend, if I didn’t warn you.”
“Oh, go to hell!” said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.
“I’ll die first,” retorted Maurice, grinning.
Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not
to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.
“So much for 422 Grosvenor Road,” he said, slamming the big front door
behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he
walked on without turning his head.
It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know
about her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If
Maurice chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would
have to be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from
the first moment of his resolve that this sort of thing was bound to
happen. It left him curiously indifferent.
A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden
round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the
very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room.
Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her
taste. Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old
silver, or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was
London and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the
enchantment of her presence. Often they walked up and down the still
deserted garden, by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide
nearer to them, waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand
with her hair in a stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly
like the necks of the birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful
in the long luminous dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening
star that were shining upon them as they walked by the edge of the
water.
For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to
the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in
the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that
people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic;
that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this
room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a
hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at
midnight, to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden
stuffs and candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by
going away at midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every
night he went away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black
dress, to leave in the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were
not forbidding him to stay. Or when she stood under the portico
sleepily resting in his arms, it was difficult to let her turn back
alone. How close were their kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness!
This was no London that he knew, this scented city of Spring, this
tropic gloom, this mad innominate cavern that engorged them. The very
stars were melting in the water of the canal: the earth bedewed with
fevers of the Spring was warm as blood: why should he forsake her each
night of this week? Yet every midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and
clamored, Michael left her, saying that May would come, and June, and
another April, when she would have been his a year.
The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness
and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these
days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten.
They could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else
did the weather deprive him.
Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back
from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so
deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in
the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of
taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers
and mirrors.
“Why didn’t you wire me to say you were coming?” he asked.
“I came because Stella wrote to me.”
Michael frowned, and his mother went on:
“It wasn’t very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage
through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it
yourself.”
Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from
them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the
past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his
mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very
inconsiderately.
“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me,” he admitted. “But life has been such a
whirl lately that I’ve somehow taken for granted the obvious
courtesies. Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather
choked me off taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why
do you begin on the subject at once, before you’ve even taken your
things off?”
She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.
“Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are
standing at the edge of this terrible step?”
“Oh, I think I’m perfectly level-headed,” he said, “even on the brink
of disaster.”
“Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I’d come back in March as
I meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn’t very well leave
her. She’s always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I
did not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in
the next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the
washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to
think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you,
and now you ask most cruelly why I don’t take my things off.”
“There wasn’t any need for you to worry yourself,” he said hotly.
“Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices.”
“Prejudices!” his mother repeated. “Prejudice is a very mild word for
what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry.”
“But it is prejudice,” Michael insisted. “She knows nothing against
her.”
“She knows a great deal.”
“How?” he demanded incredulously.
“You’d better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off
these furs. It’s stifling in London. So very much hotter than the
Riviera.”
Mrs. Fane left him with Stella’s letter.
LONG’S HOTEL,
_April 9._
_Darling Mother,_
_When you get this you must come_ at once _to London. You are the only
person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible creature
imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he was eighteen,
and I think she treated him badly even then—I remember his being very
upset about it in the summer before my first concert. Apparently he
rediscovered her this winter, and for some reason or other wants to_
marry _her now. He brought her down to Hardingham, and I saw then that
she was a minx. Alan remembers her mother as a dreadful woman who tried
to make love to him. Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!_
_Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row about
it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by herself), and
we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to say, and nothing to
do except look at herself in the glass. I had declared war on the
marriage from the moment she left, but I had only a fortnight to stop
it. I was rather in a difficulty because I knew nothing definite
against her, though I was sure that if she wasn’t a bad lot already,
she would be later on. I wrote first of all to Maurice Avery, who told
me that she’d had a not at all reputable affair with a painter friend
of his. It seems, however, that he had already spoken to Michael about
this and that Michael walked out of the house in a rage. Then I came up
to town with Alan and saw Wedderburn, who knew nothing about her and
hadn’t seen Michael for months. Then we got hold of Lonsdale. He has
apparently met her at Covent Garden, and_ I’m perfectly sure _that he
has actually been away with her himself. Though, of course, he was much
too polite to tell me so. He was absolutely horrified when he heard
about her and Michael. I asked him to tell Michael anything he knew
against her, but he didn’t see how he could. He said he wouldn’t have
the heart. I told him it was his duty, but he said he wouldn’t be able
to bear the sight of Michael’s face when he told him. Of course, the
poor darling knows nothing about her. You must come at once to London
and talk to him yourself. You’ve no time to lose. I’ll meet you if you
send me a wire. I’ve no influence over Michael any more. You’re the
only person who can stop it. He’s so sweet about her. She’s rather
lovely to look at, I must say. Lots of love from Alan and from me._
_Your loving_
_Stella._
Michael was touched by Lonsdale’s attitude. It showed, he thought, an
exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had
certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing
was going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother
to come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in
argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had
weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such
a very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she
must have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought
her downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.
“Have you read Stella’s letter?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at
once. It’s dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you
must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella
and not resent her interference.”
“I see that you feel bound to apologize for her,” Michael observed.
“Now, that is so bitter.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find
out things I know already.”
“Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?”
“I didn’t know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been
people. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to marry her.”
“But you’ll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go
on knowing Lonsdale, for instance.”
“Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case,” Michael said. “You
couldn’t have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay
I shall be able to make new friends.”
“But, darling boy,” she said pleadingly, “your position will be so
terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly
want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be
dragged down by this horrible creature!”
“Mother, believe me, you’re getting a very distorted idea of Lily.
She’s beautiful, you know; and if she’s not so clever as Stella, I’m
rather glad of it. I don’t think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she
hasn’t committed the sin of being common. She won’t disgrace you
outwardly, and if Stella hadn’t gone round raking up all this
abominable information about her you would have liked her very much.”
“My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren’t too young to
know that it’s impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without
reproach.”
“But, mother, you ...” he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of
the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious
that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.
“Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I
knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won’t marry
her, you won’t, will you?”
“Yes, mother. I’m going to,” he said coldly.
“But why so impetuously?” she asked. “Why won’t you wait a little
time?”
“There’s no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts.”
“If only your father were alive!” she exclaimed. “It would have shocked
him so inexpressibly.”
“He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn’t he?” Michael
said, and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.
She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical
and heroic dignity of reproach:
“I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” he murmured. “It was inexcusable.”
“Michael,” she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, “won’t you give up
this marriage?”
He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.
“Mother, I must keep faith with myself.”
“Only with yourself? Then she doesn’t care for you? And you’re not
thinking of _her?_”
“Of course she cares for me.”
“But she’d get over it almost at once?”
“Perhaps,” he admitted.
“Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?”
“That will be my look-out,” he said impatiently. “If she fails, it will
be my fault. It’s always the man’s fault. Always.”
“Very well,” said his mother resignedly. “I can say no more, can I? You
must do as you like.”
The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else
would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his
own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would
show his penitence.
“Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked
out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for
her, there is a deeper cause, a reason that’s bound up with my whole
theory of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not
back out of this marriage.”
“Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?” she asked.
He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called
her “this girl,” half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the
happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or
abstractions of morality to obscure it.
“Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you.”
“Except not marry her.”
“That wouldn’t be a sacrifice worth making,” he argued. “Because if I
did that I should destroy myself to myself, and what was left of me
wouldn’t be a complete Michael. It wouldn’t be your son.”
“Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?”
He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?
“Not merely for your own sake,” she urged; “but for all our sakes. We
shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three
months’ time.”
He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.
“I won’t marry her for three months,” he promised.
“And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly
missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel.”
She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately
self again.
Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had
promised his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She
pouted over her frocks.
“I wish you’d settled that before. What good will all these dresses be
now?”
“You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here
without me?”
“Without you? Why are you going away?”
“Because I must, Lily. Because ... oh, dearest girl, can’t you see that
I’m too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day
and every night as I have been all this fortnight?”
“If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather
dull, shan’t I?”
“And shan’t I?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“Perhaps.”
“I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me.”
He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.
Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry
with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time
of trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must
be married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well.
He was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid
the people who had brought it about.
Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he
turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that
would take him down into Berkshire at once.
CHAPTER VIII
SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE
It was almost dark when Michael reached the little station at the foot
of the Downs. He was half inclined to put up at the village inn and
arrive at the Abbey in the morning; but he was feeling depressed by the
alteration of his plans, and longed to withdraw immediately into the
monastic peace. He had bought what he needed for the couple of nights
before any luggage could reach him, and he thought that with so little
to carry he might as well walk the six miles to the Abbey. He asked
when the moon would be up.
“Oh, not much before half-past nine, sir,” the porter said.
Michael suddenly remembered that to-morrow was Easter Sunday, and,
thinking it would be as well not to arrive too late, in case there
should be a number of guests, he managed to get hold of a cart. The
wind blew very freshly as they slowly climbed the Downs, and the man
who was driving him was very voluble on the subject of the large
additions which had been made to the Abbey buildings during the last
few years.
“They’ve put up a grand sort of a lodge—Gatehouse, so some do call it.
A bit after the style of the Tower of London, I’ve heard some say.”
Michael was glad to think that Dom Cuthbert’s plans seemed to be coming
to perfection in their course. How long was it since he and Chator were
here? Eight or nine years; now Chator was a priest, and himself had
done nothing.
The Abbey Gatehouse was majestic in the darkness, and the driver pealed
the great bell with a portentous clangor. Michael recognized the
pock-marked brother who opened the door; but he could not remember his
name. He felt it would be rather absurd to ask the monk if he
recognized him by this wavering lanthorn-light.
“Is the Reverend—is Dom Cuthbert at the Abbey now?” he asked. “You
don’t remember me, I expect? Michael Fane. I stayed here one Autumn
eight or nine years ago.”
The monk held up the lanthorn and stared at him.
“The Reverend Father is in the Guest Room now,” said Brother Ambrose.
Michael had suddenly recalled his name.
“Do you think I shall be able to stay here to-night? Or have you a lot
of guests for Easter?”
“We can always find room,” said Brother Ambrose. Michael dismissed his
driver and followed the monk along the drive.
Dom Cuthbert knew him at once, and seemed very glad that he had come to
the Abbey.
“You can have a cell in the Gatehouse. Our new Gatehouse. It’s copied
from the one at Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. Very beautiful. Very
beautiful.”
Michael was introduced to the three or four guests, all types of
ecclesiastical laymen, who had been talking with the Abbot. The
Compline bell rang almost at once, and the Office was still held in the
little chapel of mud and laths built by the hands of the monks.
Keep me as the apple of an eye. Hide me in the shadow of thy wing.
Here was worship unhampered by problems of social behavior: here was
peace.
Lying awake that night in his cell; watching the lattices very luminous
in the moonlight; hearing the April wind in the hazel coppice, Michael
tried to reach a perspective of his life these nine months since
Oxford, but sleep came to him and pacified all confusions. He went to
Mass next morning, but did not make his Communion, because he had a
feeling that he could only have done so under false pretenses. There
was no reason why he should have felt thus, he assured himself; but
this morning there had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill.
He went for a walk on the Downs, over the great green spaces that
marked no season save in the change of the small flowers blowing in
their turf. He wondered if he would be able to find the stones he had
erected that July day when he first came here with Chator. He found
what, as far as he could remember, was the place; and he also found a
group of stones that might have been the ruins of his little monument.
More remarkable than old stones now seemed to him a Pasque anemone
colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously reminded him of the evening
in March when he had walked with Lily in the wood at Hardingham.
The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael’s
partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke.
He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here
on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He
hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring
his sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a
feverish adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions
for Lily’s entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart,
begging him to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being
pursued and haunted; an intolerable idea that he was the quarry of an
evil chase. He could not stay at the Abbey any longer: he was being
rejected by the spirit of the place.
Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.
“Stay at least to-night,” he urged, and Michael gave way.
He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed
Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany.
He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt
more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak
he dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the
primroses limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs;
and when the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway
station. To-day he ought to have married Lily.
At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting,
unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of
Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne
Walk.
“I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,”
was the explanation he gave himself of what already seemed mere
sleeplessness.
Michael found his mother very much worried by his disappearance; she
had assumed that he had broken his promise. He consoled her, but
excused himself from staying with her in town.
“You mustn’t ask too much of me,” he said.
“No, no, dearest boy; I’m glad for you to go away, but where will you
go?”
He thought he would pay an overdue visit to Cobble Place.
Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Carthew were delighted to see him, and he felt as he
always felt at Cobble Place the persistent tranquillity which not the
greatest inquietude of spirit could long withstand. It was now nearly
three years since he had been there, and he was surprised to see how
very old Mrs. Carthew had grown in that time. This and the active
presence of Kenneth, now a jolly boy of nine, were the only changes in
the aspect of the household. Michael enjoyed himself in firing Kenneth
with a passion for birds’ eggs and butterflies, and they went long
walks together and made expeditions in the canoe.
Yet every day when Michael sat down to write to Lily, he almost wrote
to say he was coming to London as soon as his letter. Her letters to
him, written in a sprawling girlish hand, were always very much alike.
1 ARARAT HOUSE,
ISLAND ROAD, W.
_My dear,_
_Come back soon. I’m getting bored. Miss Harper isn’t bad. Can’t write
a long letter because this nib is awful. Kisses._
_Your loving_
_Lily._
This would stand for any of them.
May month had come in: Michael and Kenneth were finding whitethroats’
nests in the nettle-beds of the paddock, before a word to Mrs. Ross was
said about the marriage.
“Stella has written to me about it,” she told him.
They were sitting in the straggling wind-frayed orchard beyond the
stream: lamps were leaping: apple-blossom stippled the grass: Kenneth
was chasing Orange Tips up the slope toward Grogg’s Folly.
“Stella has been very busy all round,” said Michael. “I suppose
according to her I’m going to marry an impossible creature. Creature is
as far as she usually gets in particular description of Lily.”
“She certainly wasn’t very complimentary about your choice,” Mrs. Ross
admitted.
“I wish somebody could understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean that
I’m mad because I’m going to marry a beautiful girl who isn’t very
clever.”
“But I gathered from Stella,” Mrs. Ross said, “that her past ...
Michael, you must be very tolerant of me if I upset you, because we
happen to be sitting just where I was stupid and unsympathetic once
before. You see what an impression that made on me. I actually remember
the very place.”
“She probably has done things in the past,” said Michael. “But she’s
scarcely twenty-three yet, and I love her. Her past becomes a trifle.
Besides, I was in love with her six years ago, and I—well, six years
ago I was rather thoughtless very often. I don’t want you to think that
I’m going to marry her now from any sense of duty. I love her. At the
same time when people argue that she’s not the correct young Miss they
apparently expect me to marry, I’m left unmoved. Pasts belong to men as
well as to women.”
Mrs. Ross nodded slowly. Kenneth came rushing up, shouting that he had
caught a frightfully rare butterfly. Michael looked at it.
“A female Orange Tip,” was the verdict.
“But isn’t that frightfully rare?”
Michael shook his head.
“No rarer than the males; but you don’t notice them, that’s all.”
Kenneth retired to find some more.
“And you’re sure you’ll be happy with her?” Mrs. Ross asked.
“As sure as I am that I shall be happy with anybody. I ought to be
married to her by now. This delay that I’ve so weakly allowed isn’t
going to effect much.”
Michael sighed. He had meant to be in Provence this month of May.
“But the delay can’t do any harm,” Mrs. Ross pointed out. “At any rate,
it will enable you to feel more sure of yourself, and more sure of her,
too.”
“I don’t know,” said Michael doubtfully. “My theory has always been
that if a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing at once.”
“And after you’re married,” she asked, “what are you going to do? Just
lead a lazy life?”
“Oh, no; I suppose I shall find some occupation that will keep me out
of mischief.”
“That sounds a little cynical. Ah, well, I suppose it is a
disappointment to me.”
“What’s a disappointment?”
“I’ve hoped and prayed so much lately that you would have a
vocation....”
“A priest,” he interrupted quickly, “It’s no good, Mrs. Ross. I have
thought of being one, but I’m always put off by the professional side
of it. And there are ways of doing what a priest does without being
one.”
“Of course, I can’t agree with you there,” she said.
“Well, apart from the sacraments, I mean. Lately I’ve seen something of
the underworld, and I shall think of some way of being useful down
there. Already I believe I’ve done a bit.”
They talked of the problems of the underworld and Michael was
encouraged by what he fancied was a much greater breadth in her point
of view nowadays to speak of things that formerly would have made her
gray eyes harden in fastidious disapproval.
“I feel happier about you since this talk,” she said. “As long as you
won’t be content to let your great gift of humanity be wasted, as long
as you won’t be content to think that in marrying your Lily you have
done with all your obligations.”
“Oh, no, I shan’t feel that. In fact, I shall be all the more anxious
to justify myself.”
Kenneth came back to importune Michael for a walk as far as Grogg’s
Folly.
“It’s such fun for Kenneth to have you here!” Mrs. Ross exclaimed.
“I’ve never seen him so boisterously happy.”
“I used to enjoy myself here just as much as he does,” said Michael.
“Though perhaps I didn’t show it. I always think of myself as rather a
dreary little beast when I was a kid.”
“On the contrary, you were a most attractive boy; such a wide-eyed
little boy,” said Mrs. Ross softly, looking back into time. “I’ve
seldom seen you so happy as just before I blew out your candle the
first night of your first stay here.”
“I say, do come up the hill,” interrupted Kenneth despairingly.
“A thousand apologies, my lord,” said Michael. “We’ll go now.”
They did not stop until they reached the tower on the summit.
“When I was your age,” Michael told him, “I used to think that I could
see the whole of England from here.”
“Could you really?” said Kenneth, in admiration. “Could you see any of
France, too?”
“I expect so,” Michael answered. “I expect really I thought I could see
the whole world. Kenneth, what are you going to be when you grow up? A
soldier?”
“Yes, if I can—or what is a philosopher?”
“A philosopher philosophizes.”
“Does he really? Is that a difficult thing to do, to philosopherize?”
“Yes; it’s almost harder to do than to pronounce.”
Soon they were tearing down the hill, frightening the larks to right
and left of their progress.
The weather grew warmer every day, and at last Mrs. Carthew came out in
a wheel-chair to see the long-spurred columbines, claret and gold,
watchet, rose and white.
“Really quite a display,” she said to Michael. “And so you’re to get
married?”
He nodded.
“What for?” the old lady demanded, looking at him over her spectacles.
“Well, principally because I want to,” Michael answered, after a short
pause.
“The best reason,” she agreed. “But in your case insufficient, and I’ll
tell you why—you aren’t old enough yet to know what you do want.”
“Twenty-three,” Michael reminded her.
“Twenty-fiddlesticks!” she snapped. “And isn’t there a good deal of
opposition?”
“A good deal.”
“And no doubt you feel a fine romantical heroical young fellow?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, I’m not going to argue against your marrying her,” said Mrs.
Carthew. “Because I know quite well that the more I proved you to be
wrong, the more you’d be determined to prove _I_ was. But I can give
you advice about marriage, because I’ve been married and you haven’t.
Is she dark? If she’s dark, be very cold for a year, and if she doesn’t
leave you in that time, she’ll adore you for the rest of her life.”
“But she’s fair,” said Michael. “Very fair indeed.”
“Then beat her. Not actually, of course; but beat her figuratively for
a year. If you don’t, she’ll either be a shrew or a whiner. Both
impossible to live with.”
“Which did Captain Carthew do to you?” asked Michael, twinkling.
“Neither; I ruled him with a rod of iron.”
“But do you think I’m wise to wait like this before marrying her?”
Michael asked.
“There’s no wisdom in waiting to do an unwise thing.”
“You’re so sure it is unwise?”
“All marriages are unwise,” said Mrs. Carthew sharply. “That’s why
everybody gets married. For most people it is the only imprudence they
have an opportunity of committing. After that, they’re permanently
cured of rashness, and settle down. There are exceptions, of course:
they take to drink. I must say I’m greatly pleased with these
long-spurred columbines.”
Michael thought she had finished the discussion of his marriage, but
suddenly she said:
“I thought I told you to come and see me when you went down from
Oxford.”
“I ought to have come,” Michael agreed rather humbly. He always felt
inclined to propitiate the old lady.
“Here we have the lamentable result. Marriage at twenty-three.”
“Alan married at twenty-three,” he pointed out.
“Two fools don’t make a wise-man,” said Mrs. Carthew.
“He’s very happy.”
“He would be satisfied with much less than you, and he has married a
delightful girl.”
“I’m going to marry a delightful girl.”
The old lady made no reply. Nor did she comment again upon his prospect
of happiness.
In mid-May, after a visit of nearly a month, Michael left Cobble Place
and went to stay at Plashers Mead. Guy Hazlewood was the only friend he
still had who could not possibly have come into contact with Lily or
her former surroundings. Moreover, Guy was deep in love himself, and he
had been very sympathetic when he wrote to Michael about his
engagement.
“Do I intrude upon your May idyll?” Michael asked.
“My dear chap, don’t be so absurd. But why aren’t you married? You’re
as bad as me.”
“Why aren’t _you_ married?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Guy sighed. “Everybody seems to be conspiring to
put it off.”
They were sitting in Guy’s green library. The windows wide open let in
across the sound of the burbling stream the warm air of the lucid May
night, where bats and owls and evejars flew across the face of the
decrescent moon.
“It’s this dreamy country in which you live,” said Michael.
“What about you? You’ve let people put off your marriage.”
“Only for another two months,” Michael explained.
“You see I’m down to one hundred and fifty pounds a year now,” Guy
muttered. “I can’t marry on that, and I can’t leave this place, and her
people can’t afford to make her an allowance. They think I ought to go
away and work at journalism. However, I’m not going to worry you with
my troubles.”
Guy was a good deal with Pauline every day: Michael wrote long letters
to Lily and read poetry.
“Browning?” asked Guy one afternoon, looking over Michael’s shoulder.
“Yes; The Statue and The Bust.”
“Oh, don’t remind me of that poem. It haunts me,” Guy declared.
A week passed. There was no moon now, and the nights grew warmer. It
was weather to make lovers happy, but Guy seemed worried. He would not
come for walks with Michael through the dark and scented water-meadows,
and Michael used to think that often at night he was meeting Pauline.
It made him jealous to imagine them lost in this amaranthine
profundity. They were happy now, if through all their lives they should
never be happy again. Yet Guy was obviously fretted: he was getting
spoiled by good fortune. “And I have had about a fortnight of
incomplete happiness,” Michael said to himself. Supposing that a
calamity fell upon him during this delay. He would never cease to
regret his weakness in granting his mother’s request: he would hate
Stella for having interfered: his life would be miserable forever. Yet
what calamity did he fear? In a sudden apprehension, he struck a match
and read her last letter:
1 ARARAT HOUSE,
ISLAND ROAD, W.
_My dear,_
_It’s getting awfully dull in London. Miss Harper asked me to call her
“Mabel.” Rather cheek, I thought, don’t you think so? But she’s really
awfully decent. I can’t write a long letter because we’re going to the
Palace. I say, do buck up and come back to London, I’m getting bored.
Love and kisses._
_Lily._
What’s the good of _writing_ “kisses”?
What indeed was the good of writing “kisses”? Michael thought, as the
match fizzed out in the dewy grass at his feet. It was not fair to
treat Lily like this. He had captured her from life with Sylvia,
because he had meant to marry her at once. Now he had left her alone in
that flat with a woman he did not know at all. Whatever people might
say against Lily, she was very patient and trustful. “She must love me
a good deal,” Michael said. “Or she wouldn’t stand this casual
treatment.”
Pauline came to tea next day with her sisters Margaret and Monica.
Michael had an idea that she did not like him very much. She talked
shyly and breathlessly to him; and he, embarrassed by her shyness,
answered in monosyllables.
“Pauline is rather jealous of you,” said Guy that evening, as they sat
in the library.
“Jealous of me?” Michael was amazed.
“She has some fantastic idea that you don’t approve of our engagement.
Of course, I told her what nonsense she was thinking; but she vowed
that this afternoon you showed quite plainly your disapproval of her.
She insists that you are very cold and severe.”