was really envying you and her for being together in May.”
“Together!” Guy repeated. “It’s the object of everyone in Wychford to
keep us apart!”
“Do tell her I’m not cold,” Michael begged. “And say how lovely I think
her; for really, Guy, she is very lovely and strange. She is a fairy’s
child.”
“She is, she is,” Guy said. “Sometimes I’m nearly off my head with the
sense of responsibility I have for her happiness. I wonder and wonder
until I’m nearly crazed.”
“I’m feeling responsible just now about Lily. I’ve never told you, Guy,
but you may hear from other people that I’ve made what is called a
mésalliance. Of course, Lily has been....” He stumbled. He could find
no words that would not humiliate himself and her. “Guy, come up with
me to-morrow and meet her. It’s not fair to leave her like this,” he
suddenly proclaimed.
“I don’t think I can come away.”
“Oh, yes, you can. Of course. You must,” Michael urged.
“Pauline will be more jealous of you than ever, if I do.”
“For one night,” Michael pleaded. “I must see her. And you must meet
her. Everyone has been so rotten about her, and, Guy, you’ll appreciate
her. I won’t bore you by describing her. You must meet her to-morrow.
And the rooms in Ararat House. By Jove, you’ll think them wonderful.
You should see her in candlelight among the mirrors. Pauline won’t mind
your coming away with me for a night. We’ll stay at Cheyne Walk.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I’m rather hard up just now....”
“Oh, what rot! This is my expedition. And when you’ve seen her, you
must talk to my mother about her. She’s so prejudiced against Lily. You
will come, won’t you?”
Guy nodded a promise, and Michael went off to bed on the excitement of
to-morrow’s joy.
Guy would not start before the afternoon, and Michael spent the morning
under a willow beside the river. It was good to lie staring up at the
boughs, and know that every fleecy cloud going by was a cloud nearer to
his seeing Lily again.
Michael and Guy arrived at Paddington about five o’clock.
“We’ll go straight round from here and surprise her,” Michael said,
laughing with excitement, as they got into a taxi. “She’ll have had a
letter from me this morning, in which I was lamenting not seeing her
for six weeks. My gad, supposing she isn’t in! Oh, well, we can wait.
You’ll love the room, and we’ll all three sit out in the garden
to-night, and you’ll tell me as we walk home to Chelsea what you think
of her. Guy you’ve absolutely got to like her. And if you don’t ... oh,
but you will. It isn’t everybody who can appreciate beauty like hers.
And there’s an extraordinary subtlety about her. Of course, she isn’t
at all subtle. She’s simple. In fact, that’s one of the things Stella
has got against her. What I call simplicity and absence of training for
effect Stella calls stupidity. My own belief is that you’ll be quite
content to look at her and not care whether she talks or not. I tell
you, she’s like a Piero della Francesca angel. Cheer up, Guy. Why are
you looking so depressed?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Guy. “I’m thinking what a lucky chap you are.
What’s a little family opposition when you know you’re going to be able
to do what you want? Who can stop you? You’re independent, and you’re
in love.”
“Of course they can’t stop me!” Michael cried, jumping up and down on
the cushions of the taxi in his excitement. “Guy, you’re great! You
really are. You’re the only person who’s seen the advantage of going
right ahead. But don’t look so sad yourself. You’ll marry your
Pauline.”
“Yes, in about four years,” Guy sighed.
“Oh, no, no; in about four months. Will Pauline like Lily? She won’t be
jealous of me when I’m married will she?”
“No, but I think I shall be,” Guy laughed.
“Laugh, you old devil, laugh!” Michael shouted. “Here we are. Did you
ever see such a house? It hasn’t quite the austerity of Plashers Mead,
has it?”
“It looks rather fun,” Guy commented.
“You know,” Michael said solemnly, pausing for a moment at the head of
the steps going down to the front door. “You know, Guy, I believe that
you’ll be able to persuade my mother to withdraw all her opposition
to-night. I believe I’m going to marry Lily this week. And I shall be
so glad—Guy, you don’t know how glad I shall be.”
He ran hurriedly down the steps and had pressed the bell of Number One
before Guy had entered the main door.
“I say, you know, it will be really terrible if she’s out after all my
boasting,” said Michael. “And Miss Harper, too—that’s the
housekeeper—my housekeeper, you know. If they’re both out, we’ll have
to go round and wait in the garden until they come in. Hark, there’s
somebody coming.”
The door opened, and Michael hurried in.
“Hullo, good afternoon, Miss Harper. You didn’t expect to see me, eh?
I’ve brought a friend. Is Miss Haden in the big room?”
“Miss Haden is out, Mr. Fane,” said the housekeeper.
“What’s the matter? You’re looking rather upset.”
“Am I, Mr. Fane?” she asked blankly. “Am I? Oh, no, I’m very well. Oh,
yes, very well. It’s the funny light, I expect, Mr. Fane.”
She seemed to be choking out all her words, and Michael looked at her
sharply.
“Well, we’ll wait in the big room.”
“It’s rather untidy. You see, we—I wasn’t expecting you, Mr. Fane.”
“That’s all right,” said Michael. “Hulloa ...I say, Guy, go on into
that room ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Guy mistook the direction and turned the handle of Lily’s bedroom door.
“No, no,” Michael called. “The double doors opposite.”
“My mistake,” said Guy cheerfully. “But don’t worry: the other door was
locked. So if you’ve got a Bluebeard’s Closet, I’ve done no harm.”
He disappeared into the big room, and the moment he was inside Michael
turned fiercely to Miss Harper.
“Who’s is this hat?” he demanded, snatching it up.
“Hat? What hat?” she choked out.
“Why is the door of her bedroom locked? Why is it locked—locked?”
The stillness of the crepuscular hall seemed to palpitate with the
woman’s breath.
“Miss Haden must have locked it when she went out,” she stammered.
“Is that the truth?” Michael demanded. “It’s not the truth. It’s a lie.
You wouldn’t be panting like a fish in a basket, unless there was
something wrong. I’ll break the door in.”
“No, Mr. Fane, don’t do that!” the woman groaned out, in a cracked
expostulation. “This is the first time since you’ve been away. And it
was an old friend.”
“How dare you tell me anything about him? Guy! Guy!”
Michael rushed into the big room and dragged Guy out.
“Come away, come away, come away! I’ve been sold!”
“If you’d only listen a moment. I could——” Miss Harper began.
Michael pushed her out of their path.
“What on earth is it?” Guy asked.
“Come on, don’t hang about in this hell of a house. Come on, Guy.”
Michael had flung the door back to slam into Miss Harper’s face, and,
seizing Guy by the wrist, he dragged him up the steps, and had started
to run down the road, when Guy shouted:
“Michael, the taxi! The taxi’s waiting with our bags.”
“Oh, very well, in a taxi then, a taxi if you like,” Michael chattered,
and he plunged into it.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Cheyne Walk. But drive quickly. Don’t hang about up and down this
road.”
The driver looked round with an expression of injured dignity, shook
his head in exclamation, and drove off.
“What on earth has happened?” Guy asked. “And why on earth are you
holding a top-hat?”
Michael burst into laughter.
“So I am. Look at it. A top-hat. I say, Guy, did you ever hear of
anyone being cut out by a top-hat, cuckolded by a top-hat? We’ll
present it to the driver. Driver! Do you want a top-hat?”
“Here, who are you having a game with?” demanded the driver, pulling up
the car.
“I’m not having a game with anybody,” Michael said. “But two people and
this top-hat have just been having a hell of a game with me. You’d much
better take it as a present. I shall only throw it away. He refuses,”
Michael went on. “He refuses a perfectly good top-hat. Who’s the maker?
My god, his dirty greasy head has obliterated the name of the maker.
Good-bye, hat! Drive on, drive on!” he shouted to the driver, and
hurled the hat spinning under an omnibus. Then he turned to Guy.
“I’ve been sold by the girl I was going to marry,” he said. “I say,
Guy, I’ve got some jolly good advice for you. Don’t you marry a whore.
Sorry, old chap!—I forgot you were engaged already. Besides, people
don’t marry whores, unless they’re fools like me. Didn’t you say just
now that I was very lucky? Do you know—I think I am lucky. I think it
was a great piece of luck bringing you to see that girl to-day. Don’t
you? Oh, Guy, I could go mad with disappointment. Will nothing in all
the world ever be what it seems?”
“Look here, Michael, are you sure you weren’t too hasty? You didn’t
wait to see if there was any explanation, did you?”
“She was only going back to her old habits,” said Michael bitterly. “I
was a fool to think she wouldn’t. And yet I adored her. Fancy, you’ve
never seen her, after all. Lovely, lovely animal!”
“Oh, you knew what she was?” exclaimed Guy.
“Knew? Yes, of course I knew; but I thought she loved me. I didn’t care
about anything when I was sure she loved me. She could only have gone
such a little way down, I thought. She seemed so easy to bring out.
Seeds of pomegranate. Seeds of pomegranate! She’s only eaten seeds of
pomegranate, but they were enough to keep her behind. Where are we
going? Oh, yes, Cheyne Walk. My mother will be delighted when she hears
my news, and so will everybody. That’s what’s amusing me. Everybody
will clap their hands, and I’m wretched. But you are sorry for me, Guy?
You don’t think I’m just a fool being shown his folly? And at eighteen
I was nearly off my head only because I saw someone kiss her! There’s
one thing over which I score—the only person who can appreciate all the
humor of this situation is myself.”
Nearly all the way to Cheyne Walk Michael was laughing very loudly.
CHAPTER IX
THE GATE OF HORN
Guy thought it would be better if he went straight back to Plashers
Mead; but Michael asked him to stay until the next day. He was in no
mood, he said, for a solitary evening, and he could not bear the notion
of visiting friends, or of talking to his mother without the
restriction that somebody else’s presence would produce.
So Guy agreed to spend the night in London, and they dined with Mrs.
Fane. Michael in the sun-colored Summer room felt smothered by a
complete listlessness; and talking very little, he sat wondering at the
swiftness with which a strong fabric of the imagination had tumbled
down. The quiet of Cheyne Walk became a consciousness of boredom and
futility, and he suggested on a sudden impulse that he and Guy should
go and visit Maurice in the studio. It would be pleasant walking along
the Embankment, he said.
“But I thought you wanted to keep quiet,” Guy exclaimed.
“No, I’ve grown restless during dinner; and, besides, I want to make a
few arrangements about the flat, and then be done with that
business—forever.”
They started off without waiting for coffee. It was a calm Summer
evening of shadows blue and amethyst, of footfalls and murmurs, an
evening plumy as a moth, warm and gentle as the throat of a pigeon.
Nobody on any pavement was hurrying; and maidservants loitered in area
gates, looking up and down the roads.
The big room at the top of 422 Grosvenor Road had never seemed so
romantic. There were half a dozen people sitting at the open windows;
and Cunningham was playing a sonata of Brahms, a sonata with a melody
that was drawing the London night into this big room where the
cigarettes dimmed and brightened like stars. The player sat at the
piano for an hour, and Maurice unexpectedly made no attempt to disturb
the occasion. Michael thought that perhaps he was wondering what had
brought himself and Guy here, and for that reason did not rush to show
Guy his studio by gaslight: Maurice was probably thinking how strange
it was for Michael to revisit him suddenly like this after their
quarrel.
When the room was lighted up, Michael and Guy were introduced to the
men they did not know. Among them was Ronnie Walker, the painter whom
Maurice had mentioned to Michael as an old lover of Lily. Michael knew
now why Maurice had allowed the music to go on so long, and he was
careful to talk as much as possible to Walker in order to embarrass
Maurice, who could scarcely pay any attention to Guy, so nervously was
he watching over his shoulder the progress of the conversation.
Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the
window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a
distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the
piano again.
“I say, I’m awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here
to-night,” Maurice began. “I have been rather cursing myself for
telling you about him and....”
“It doesn’t matter at all,” Michael interrupted. “I’m not going to
marry her.”
“Oh, that’s splendid!” Maurice exclaimed. “I’ve been tremendously
worried about you.”
Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that
Maurice could be “tremendously worried” by anything.
“I want you to arrange matters,” said Michael. “I can’t go near the
place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The
rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you
like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the
money. Get rid of the woman who’s there—Miss Harper her name is.”
“But I shall feel rather awkward....”
“Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it, then!” Michael broke in fretfully. “I’ll
ask Guy.”
“You’re getting awfully irascible,” Maurice complained. “Of course I’ll
do anything you want, if you won’t always jump down my throat at the
first word I utter. What has happened, though?”
“What do you expect to happen when you’re engaged to a girl like that?”
Michael asked.
Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then,
you see, I’m not a very great believer in women. What are you going to
do yourself?”
“I haven’t settled yet. I’ve got to arrange one or two things in town,
and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about
a week?”
“I daresay I might,” Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room.
Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile
comprehension.
The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
“This is where you ought to be, if you want to write,” Maurice
proclaimed to Guy. “It’s ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the
country. You’ll expire of stagnation.”
“Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are,” said
Castleton. “I’m almost expiring from the violence with which I am being
precipitated from one to another of Maurice’s energies.”
Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and
next morning Guy went back to Wychford.
Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of
the betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly
made financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man
whom only yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred
for the part he had played in Lily’s life. Perhaps he had lost the
power to feel anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of
Maurice; already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more
clearly remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was
calling her a shade his present emotion proved that she was much more
than that, for the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart.
Then the indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill
remained.
Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and
they went to Bohême. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat
unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if
she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of
all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at
night and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life
itself, but he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any
activity in the conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here
at supper and for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was
spiritually withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to
the notion of a debased material comfort as the only condition worth
achieving for a body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it
almost seemed.
“Michael, have you been bored to-night?” his mother asked, when they
had come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while
Michael finished a cigar.
He shook his head.
“You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy
Puccini, don’t you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?”
“I think summer in London is always tiring,” he said.
She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures
of her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.
“Dear child, what is it?” she whispered, with fluttering arms
outstretched to comfort him.
“Oh, I’ve finished with all that! I’ve finished with all that! You’ll
be delighted—you mustn’t be worried because I seem upset for the
moment. I found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I’m not
going to marry her or even see her again.”
“Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?”
“Finished! Finished! Finished!” he sobbed.
“Nothing is finished at twenty-three,” she murmured, leaning over to
pet him.
“I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day.”
It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It
seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on
account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself
again; and he went off to bed.
Next day Michael’s depression was profound because he could perceive no
reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in
the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her.
She was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen
to her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he
had lately been involved? Must he withdraw entirely and confess defeat?
No doubt a cynic would argue that Lily was hopeless, and indeed he knew
that from any point of view where marriage was concerned she was
hopeless. He must leave her where he had found her, in that pretty
paradise of evil which now she well adorned. If her destiny was to
whirl downward through the labyrinths of the underworld, he could do no
more. That himself had issued with the false dreams through the ivory
gate was her fault, and she must pay the penalty of her misdirection.
He would revisit Leppard Street, and from the innermost circle where he
had beheld Mrs. Smith he would seek a way out through the gate of true
dreams. He would be glad to see if the amount of security he had been
able to guarantee to Barnes had helped him at all. He had money and he
could leave money behind in Leppard Street, money that might preserve
the people in the house where he had lived. Was this a quixotic notion,
to leave one set of people free from the necessity to hand themselves
over to evil? Michael’s spirits began to rise as he looked forward to
what he could still effect in Leppard Street. And for Lily what could
he still do? He would visit Sylvia and consult with her. She was
strong, and if she had chosen harlotry, she was still strong. She was
not lazy nor languid. Lazy, laughing, languid Lily! Lily did not laugh
much; she was too lazy even for that. How beautiful she had been! Her
beauty stabbed him with the poignancy of what was past. How beautiful
she had been! When Maurice went to tell her of the final ending of it
all, she would pout and shrug her shoulders. That was all she would do;
and she would be faintly resentful at having been disturbed in her lazy
life. Perhaps Maurice would fall in love with her, and it would be
ironical and just that she should fall violently in love with Maurice
and be cast off by him. Maurice would never suffer; as soon as a woman
showed a sign of upsetting his theories about feminine behavior he
would be done with her. He would jilt her as easily as he jilted one
Muse for another. Why was he being so hard on Maurice?
“I believe that down in my heart I still don’t really like him,”
Michael said to himself. “Right back from the time I met him in
Macrae’s form at Randell’s I’ve never really liked him.”
It was curious how one could grow more and more intimate with a person,
and all the time never really like him; so intimate with him as to
intrust him with the disposal of a wrecked love-affair, and all the
while never really like him. Why, then, had he invited Maurice to go
abroad? Perhaps he wanted the company of someone he could faintly
despise. Even friendship must pay tribute to human vanity. Life became
a merciless business when one ceased to stand alone. The herding
instinct of man was responsible for the corruption of civilization, and
Michael thought of the bestiality of a crowd. How loathsome humanity
was in the aggregate, but individually how rare, how wonderful.
Michael walked boldly enough toward Tinderbox Lane; and when he rang
the bell of Mulberry Cottage not a qualm of sentiment assailed him. He
was definitely pleased with himself, as he stood outside the door in
the wall, to think with what a serenity of indifference he was able to
visit a place so much endeared to him a little time ago.
Mrs. Gainsborough answered the door and nearly fell upon Michael’s
neck.
“Good Land! Here’s a surprise.”
“It’s almost more of a surprise for me to see you, Mrs. Gainsborough.”
“Why, who else should you see?”
“I was beginning to think you never existed. Can I come in?”
“Sylvia’s indoors,” she said warningly.
“I rather wanted to see her.”
“She’s been carrying on alarming about you ever since you stole her
Lily. And she didn’t take me on her knee and cuddle me, when she found
you were gone off. How do you like me new frock?”
Michael thought that in her checkered black and green gingham she
looked like an old Summer number of an illustrated magazine, and he
told her so.
“Well, there! Did you ever? I never did. There’s a bouquet to hand a
lady! Back number! Whatever next? I wonder you hadn’t the liberty to
say I’d rose from the grave.”
“Aren’t I to see Sylvia?” Michael asked, laughing.
“Well, don’t blame me if she packs you off with a flea in your ear, as
they say—well, she is a Miss Temper, and no mistake. How do you like me
garden?”
Mulberry Cottage was just the bower of greenery that Michael had
supposed he would find in early June.
“Actually roses,” he exclaimed. “Or at least there will be very soon.”
“Oh, yes. Glory de Die-Johns. That was always Pa’s favorite. That and a
good snooze of a Sunday afternoon was about what he cared most for in
this world. But my Captain he used to like camellias, and gardenias of
course—oh, he had a very soft corner in his heart for a nice gardenia.
Ah dear, what a masher he was to be sure!”
Sylvia had evidently seen them walking up the garden path, for leaning
over the railings of the balcony she was waiting for them.
“Here’s quite a stranger come to see you,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, with
a propitiatory glance in Sylvia’s direction.
“I rather want to have a talk with you,” said Michael, and he, too,
found himself rather annoyingly adopting a deprecating manner.
Sylvia came slowly down the balcony steps.
“I suppose you want my help,” she said, and her underlip had a warning
out-thrust.
“I’ll get on with my fal-lals,” Mrs. Gainsborough muttered, and she
bundled herself quickly indoors.
Sylvia and Michael sat down on the garden-seat under the mulberry tree
whose leaves were scarcely yet uncurling. Michael found a great charm
in sitting close to Sylvia like this: she and Stella both possessed a
capacity for bracing him that he did not find in anyone else. Sylvia
was really worth quarreling with; but it would be very delightful to be
friends with her. He had never liked a person so much whom he had so
little reason to like. He could not help thinking that in her heart
Sylvia must like him. It was a strangely provocative fancy.
“Lily and I have parted,” he began at once.
“And why do you suppose that piece of information will interest me?”
Sylvia asked.
Michael was rather taken aback. When he came to consider it, there did
seem no good reason why Sylvia should any longer be interested after
the way in which Lily had been snatched away from her. He was silent
for a moment.
“But it would have interested you a short time ago,” he said.
“No doubt,” Sylvia agreed. “But luckily for me one of the benefits
conferred by my temperament is an ability to throw aside things that
have disappointed me, things that have ceased to be useful—and what
applies to things applies even more strongly to people.”
“You mean to say you’ve put Lily right out of your life?” Michael
exclaimed.
He was shocked by the notion, for he did not realize until this moment
how much he had been depending upon Sylvia for peace of mind.
“Haven’t you put her out of _your_ life?” she asked, looking round at
him sharply. Until this question she had been staring sullenly down at
the grass.
“Well, I had to,” said Michael.
“You’re bearing up very well under the sad necessity,” she sneered.
“I don’t know that I am bearing up very well. I don’t think that coming
to you to talk about it is a special sign of fortitude.”
“What do you want me to do?” Sylvia demanded. “Get her back into your
life again? Isn’t that the phrase you like?”
“Oh, no, that’s unimaginable,” said Michael. “You see, it was really
the second time. Once six years ago, and again now, very much more—more
utterly. You said that your temperament enables you to throw off things
and people. Mine makes me bow to what I fancy are irremediable strokes
of fate.”
“Unimaginable! Irremediable! We’re turning this interview into a
Rossetti sonnet,” Sylvia scoffed.
“I was thinking about that poem Jenny to-day. It’s funny you should
mention Rossetti.”
“Impervious youth!” she exclaimed.
“It’s hopeless for you to try to wound me with words,” Michael assured
her, with grave earnestness. “I was wounded the day before yesterday
into complete immunity from small pains.”
“I suppose you found her ...”
Michael flushed and gripped her by the wrist.
“No, no, don’t say something brutal and beastly!” he stammered. “You
know what happened. You prophesied it. Well, I thought you were wrong,
and you were right. That’s a victory for you. You couldn’t wish for me
to be more humbled than I am by having to admit that I wasn’t strong
enough to keep her faithful for six weeks. But we did agree, I think,
about one thing.” He smiled sadly. “We did agree that she was
beautiful. You were as proud of that as I was, and of course you had a
great deal more reason to be proud. You did own her. I never owned her,
and isn’t that your great objection to the relation between man and
woman?”
“What are you trying to make me do?” Sylvia asked.
“I want you to have Lily to live with you again.”
“To relieve yourself of all responsibility, I suppose,” she said
bitterly.
“No, no; why will you persist in ascribing the worst motive to
everything I say? Isn’t your jealousy fed full enough even yet?”
Sylvia made the garden-seat quiver with an irritable movement.
“You will persist in thinking that jealousy solved all problems,” she
cried.
“Oh, don’t let us turn aside into what isn’t very important. You can’t
care whether I think you’re jealous or not.”
“I don’t care in so far as it is your opinion,” Sylvia admitted. “But I
object to inaccurate thinking. If your life was spent in a confusion of
all moral values as mine is, you would be anxious for a little
straightforward computation for a change.”
“Perhaps you are right,” Michael admitted, “in thinking that I’m asking
you to look after Lily to relieve myself of a responsibility. But it’s
only because I see no chance of doing it in any other way. I mean—it’s
not laziness on my part. It’s a confession of absolute failure.”
“In fact, you’re throwing yourself on my mercy,” Sylvia said.
“Yes; and also her,” he added gently.
“Am I such a moral companion—such an ennobling influence?”
“I would sooner think of her under your influence than think of her
drifting. What I want you to understand is that I’m not consigning her
to you for sentimental reasons. I would sooner that Lily were dragged
down by you at a gallop than that she should sink slowly and lazily of
her own accord. You have a strong personality. You are well-read. You
are quite out of the common, and in the life you have chosen, so far as
I have had experience, you are unique.”
Sylvia stared in front of her, and Michael waited anxiously for the
reply.
“Have you ever read Petronius?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are—have you ever read
Petronius?”
“It’s the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could
behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare,
too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses.
Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and
incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me.
Man revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly
contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic
in it. Not any religion I’ve ever heard of, for in all religions man is
set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my
conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as
less repulsive than—ugh! it makes me shudder—but oh, my son, doesn’t it
make me laugh....” She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a
moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely,
fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. “So I
worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily
was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don’t want to worship
anything but beauty. I don’t care about purity or uprightness, but I
must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely
girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and
you can’t understand that I’m only able to see you in the shape of a
frog. It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so
earnestly and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy
frog.”
“But what has all this to do with Petronius? There’s nothing in that
romance particularly complimentary to women,” Michael argued.
“It’s the nightmare effect of it that I adore,” Sylvia exclaimed. “It’s
the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from
which there’s no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It
is gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that’s all I want in my
reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having
been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the
truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not
one moderately decent person all through.”
“And you will take Lily back?” Michael asked.
“Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don’t
for heaven’s sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I’m doing
anything except gratify myself in this matter.”
“I don’t want you to do it for any other reason,” he said. “I shall
feel more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By
the way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker—a painter. He
had an affair with Lily, didn’t he?”
“Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything
more.”
“And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?”
“Who? The Honorable Arthur?”
Michael nodded.
“Yes, we met him first at Covent Garden, and went to Brighton with him
and another boy—Clarehaven—Lord Clarehaven.”
“Oh, I remember him at the House,” said Michael.
“Money is necessary sometimes, you know,” Sylvia laughed.
“Of course it is. Look here. Will you in future, whenever you feel
you’re in a nightmare—will you write to me and let me send money?” he
asked. “I know you despise me and of course ... I understand; but I
can’t bear to think of anyone being haunted as you must be haunted
sometimes. Don’t be proud about this, because _I’ve_ got no pride left.
I’m only terribly anxious to be of service to somebody. There’s really
no reason for you to be proud. You see, I should always be so very much
more anxious to help than you would to be helped. And it really isn’t
only because of Lily that I say this. I’ve got a good many books you’d
enjoy, and I think I’ll send them to you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” she said, looking at him curiously.
Michael turned away from her down the gravel-path, and a moment later
slammed the door. He had only gone a few steps away, when he heard
Sylvia calling after him.
“You stupid!” she said. “You never told me Lily’s address.”
“I’ll give you a card.”
“Mr. Michael Fane,” she read, “1 Ararat House, Island Road.” She looked
at him and raised her eyebrows.
“You see, I expected to live there myself,” Michael explained. “I told
a friend of mine, Maurice Avery, to clear up everything. The furniture
can all be sold. If you want anything for here, take it of course; but
I think most of the things will be too large for Mulberry Cottage.”
“And what shall I say to Lily?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t think I should say anything about me.”
“Who was the man?”
“I never saw him,” said Michael. “I only saw his hat.”
She pulled him to her and kissed him.
“How many women have done that suddenly like that?” she demanded.
“One—well, perhaps two.” He was wondering if Mrs. Smith’s kiss ought to
count in the comparison.
“I never have to any man,” she said, and vanished through the door in
the wall.
Michael hoped that Sylvia intended to imply by that kiss that his offer
of help was accepted. Fancy her having read Petronius! He could send
her his Adlington’s Apuleius. She would enjoy reading that, and he
would write in it: _I’ve eaten rose-leaves and I am no longer a golden
ass._ Perhaps he would also send her his Shelton’s Don Quixote.
When Michael turned out of Tinderbox Lane into the Fulham Road, each
person of humanity he passed upon the pavement seemed to him strange
with unrevealed secrets. The people of London were somehow
transfigured, and he longed to see their souls, if it were only in the
lucid flashes of a nightmare. Yet for nearly a year he had been peering
into the souls of people. Had he, indeed. Had he not rather been
peering to see in their souls the reflection of his own? He was moved
by the thought of Sylvia in London, and suddenly he was swept from his
feet by the surging against him of the thoughts of all the passers-by
and, struggling in the trough of these thoughts, he was more and more
conscious that unless he fought for himself he would be lost. The
illusion fled on the instant of its creation; and the people were
themselves again—dull, quick, slow, ordinary, depressed, gay; political
busy-bodies, political fools, political slaves, political animals. How
they huddled together, each one of them afraid to stand for himself. It
was political passion that made them animals, each dependent in turn on
the mimicry of his neighbor. Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or
envious of his neighbor’s opinion. God was meaningless to the political
state: this herd cared only for idols. Michael began to make a
catalogue of the Golden Calves that the Golden Asses of green England
worshiped. They were bowing down and braying to their Golden Calves,
these Golden Asses, and they could not see that there were rose-trees
growing everywhere, most prodigally of all in the gutter, any one petal
of which (what did the thorns matter?) would have given back to them
their humanity. Yet even then, Michael dismally concluded, they would
continue to bow down to the Golden Calves, because they would fancy
that it was the Calves who had planted and cultivated the rose-trees.
Then out of all the thronging thoughts made visible he began to pursue
the fancy of Sylvia in London, and, as he did so, she faded farther and
farther from his vision like a butterfly seen from a train, that keeps
pace, it seems for a moment, and is lost upon the flowery embankment
behind.
Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk
under the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he
had stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained
Leppard Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on
through the Chelsea slums.
Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever
seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the
corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a
breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number
One; and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the
blank wall opposite.
Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one
o’clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the
creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract
Mrs. Cleghorne’s attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out
into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight
must have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand.
With her fibrous neck working and with an old cap of her husband’s
pinned on a skimpy bun at the back of her head, she was horrible after
Mrs. Gainsborough in the black and green gingham. Michael looked down
at her over the railings; and she, recognizing him at last, pounced
back to come up and open the door.
“I couldn’t think who it was. We had a man round selling pots of musk
this morning, and I didn’t want to come trapesing upstairs for
nothing.”
Mrs. Cleghorne was receiving him so pleasantly that Michael scarcely
knew what to say. No doubt his regular payment of rent had a good deal
to do with it.
“Is Mr. Barnes up?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I’m sure. I never go inside his door now. No.”
“Oh, really? Why not?”
“I’m the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don’t consider
he has treated us fair.”
“Oh, really?”
“He’s got a woman here living with him. Now of course that’s a thing I
should never allow, but seeing as you weren’t here and was paying the
rent regular I thought to myself that I’ll just shut my eyes until you
came back. It’s really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with
the other lodgers. It’s quite upset me, it has; and _Mis_-ter Cleghorne
has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma’s been so
bad lately—it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him.”
This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently
the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent
for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it
was locked.
“I’ll get on down again to my oven,” said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike
glance at the closed door. “I’m just cooking a bit of fish for my old
man’s dinner.”
She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin
in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.
Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the
passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes’ voice called out to know
who was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to
somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited
Michael to come in.
It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of
the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still
there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled
picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of
St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had
novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow
moirette lay over Michael’s narrow bed, which he was surprised to see
in the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and
the old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and
dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the
folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for
him to explain the alterations.
“Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn’t it?” said Barnes,
blinking round him.
A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely
the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it
was as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man’s eyes; but
there clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a
touch he would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.
“You look pretty pasty,” said Michael severely.
“Worry, old man, worry,” said Barnes. “Well, to put it straight, I fell
in with a girl who was down on her luck, and I knew you’d be the very
one to encourage a bit of charity. So I brought her here.”
“Why are you sleeping in this room?” Michael asked.
“You’re getting a Mr. Smart, aren’t you?” said Barnes. “Fancy you’re
noticing that. Oh, well, I suppose you’ve come to ask for your rooms
back?”
Michael with the consciousness of the woman behind those curtained
doors knew that he could discuss nothing at present. He felt that all
the time her ear was at the keyhole, and he went out suddenly, telling
Barnes to meet him at the Orange that night.
Again the beerhall impressed him with its eternal sameness. It was as
if a cinema film had broken when he last went out of the Café d’Orange,
and had been set in action again at the moment of his return. He looked
round to see if Daisy was there, and she was. Her hat which had
formerly been black and trimmed with white daisies was now, to mark the
season, white and trimmed with black daisies.
“Hulloa, little stranger!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
So exactly the same was the Orange that Michael was almost surprised
that she should have observed a passage of time.
“You never seem to come here now,” she said reproachfully. “Come on.
Sit down. Don’t stand about like a man selling matches on the curb.”
“How’s Bert?” Michael asked.
“Who?”
“Bert Saunders. The man you were living with in Little Quondam Street.”
“Oh, him! Oh, I had to get rid of him double quick. What? Yes, when it
came to asking me to go to Paris with a fighting fellow. Only fancy the
cheek of it! It would help him, he said, with his business. Dirty
Ecnop! I soon shoved him down the Apples-and-pears.”
“I haven’t understood a word of that last sentence,” said Michael.
“Don’t you know back-slang and rhyming-slang? Oh, it’s grand! Here, I
forgot, there’s something I wanted to tell you. Do you remember you was
in here with a fellow who you said his name was Burns?”
“Barnes, you mean, I expect. Yes, he’s supposed to be meeting me here
to-night, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, you be careful of him. He’ll get you into trouble.”
Michael looked incredulous.
“It’s true as I sit here,” said Daisy earnestly. “Come over in the
corner and let’s have our drink there. I can’t talk here with that
blue-nosed —— behind me, squinting at us across his lager.” She looked
round indignantly at the man in question.
They moved across to one of the alcoves, and Daisy leaned over and
spoke quietly and rather tensely, so differently from the usual rollick
of her voice that Michael began to feel a presentiment of dread.
“I was out on the Dilly one night soon after you’d been round to my
place, and I was with a girl called Janie Filson. ‘Oo-er,’ she said to
me. ‘Did you see who that was passed?’ I looked round and saw this
fellow Burns.”
“Barnes,” Michael corrected.
“Oh, well, Barnes. His name doesn’t matter, because it isn’t his own,
anyway. ‘That’s Harry Meats,’ she said. And she called out after him.
‘Hulloa, Harry, where’s Cissie?’ He went as white as ... oh, he did go
shocking white. He just turned to see who it was had called out after
him, and then he slid up Swallow Street like a bit of paper. ‘Who’s
Cissie?’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember Cissie Cummings?’ she said. ‘That
fair girl who always wore a big purple hat and used to be in the
Leicester Lounge and always carried a box of chocolates for swank?’ I
did remember the girl when Janie spoke about her. Only I never knew
her, see? ‘He wasn’t very pleased when you mentioned her,’ I said.
‘Didn’t he look awful?’ said Janie, and just then she got off with a
fellow and I couldn’t ask her any more.”
“I don’t think that’s enough to make me very much afraid of Barnes,”
Michael commented.
“Wait a minute, I haven’t finished yet. Don’t be in such a hurry. The
other day I saw Janie Filson again. She’s been away to Italy—is there a
place called Italy? Of course there is. Well, as I was saying, she’d
been to Italy with her fellow who’s a commercial traveler and that’s
why I hadn’t seen her. And Janie said to me, ‘Do you know what they’re
saying?’ I said, ‘No, what?’ And she said, ‘Did you read nearly a year
ago about a woman who was found murdered in the Euston Road? A gay
woman it was,’ she said. So I said, ‘Lots of women is found murdered,
my dear. I can’t remember every one I see the picture of.’ Well, anyone
can’t, can they?” Daisy broke off to ask Michael in an injured voice.
Then she resumed her tale. “When I was with that fellow Bert I used to
read nothing else but murders all the time. Give anyone the rats, it
would. ‘Lots of women, my dear,’ I said. And she said, ‘Well, there was
one in particular who the police never found out the name of, because
there wasn’t any clothing or nothing found.’ So I did remember about
it, and she said, ‘Well, they’re saying now it was Cissie Cummings.’
And I said, ‘Well, what of it, if it was?’ And she said, ‘What of it?’
she said. ‘Well, if it was her,’ she said, ‘I know who done it.’ ‘Who
done it?’ I asked—because, you see, I’d forgotten about this fellow
Burns. ‘Why, Harry Meats,’ she said. ‘That fellow I saw on the Dilly
the night when I was along with you.’”
“I don’t think you have enough evidence for the police,” Michael
decided, with half a smile. Yet nevertheless a malaise chilled him, and
he looked over his shoulder at the mob in the beer hall.
“—— the police!” Daisy exclaimed. “I don’t care about them when I’m
positive certain of something. I tell you, I know that fellow Burns, or
Meats, or whatever his name is, done it.”
“But what am I to do about it?” Michael asked.
“Well, you’ll get into trouble, that’s all,” Daisy prophesied. “You’d
look very funny if he was pinched for murder while you was out walking
with him. Ugh! It gives me the creeps. Order me a gin, there’s a good
boy.”
Michael obtained for Daisy her drink, and sat waiting for Barnes to
appear.
“He won’t come,” Daisy scoffed. “If he’s feeling funny about the neck,
he won’t come down here. He’s never been down since that night he came
down with you. Fancy, to go and do a poor girl in like that! I’d spit
in his face, if I saw him.”
“Daisy, you really mustn’t assume such horrible things about a man.
He’s as innocent as you or me.”
“Is he?” Daisy retorted. “I don’t think so then. You never saw how
shocking white his face went when Janie asked him about Cissie.”
“But if there were any suspicion of him,” Michael pointed out, “the
police would have tackled him long ago.”
“Oh, they aren’t half artful, the police aren’t,” said Daisy. “Nothing
they’d like better than get waiting about and seeing if he didn’t go
and murder another poor girl, so as they could have him for the two,
and be all the more pleased about it.”
“That’s talking nonsense,” Michael protested. “The police don’t do that
sort of thing.”
“I don’t know,” Daisy argued. “One or two poor girls more or less
wouldn’t worry them. After all, that’s what we’re for—to get pinched
when they’ve got nothing better to do. Of course, I know it’s part of
the game, but there it is. If you steal my purse and I follow you round
and tell a copper, what would he do? Why, pinch me for soliciting. No,
my motto is, ‘Keep out of the way of the police.’ And if you take my
advice, you’ll do the same. If this fellow didn’t do the girl in,”
Daisy asked earnestly, leaning forward over the table, “why doesn’t he
come down here and keep his appointment with you to-night? Don’t you
worry. He knows the word has gone round, and he’s going to lie very low
for a bit. I wouldn’t say the tecs aren’t watching out for him even
now.”
“My dear Daisy, you’re getting absolutely fanciful,” Michael declared.
“Oh, well, good luck to fanciful,” said Daisy, draining her glass.
“Here, why don’t you come home with me to-night?”
“What, and spend another three hours hiding in a cupboard?”
“No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel,
because the woman I’m living with’s got her son come home from being a
soldier and she wouldn’t like for him to know anything. Well, it’s
better not. You’re much more comfortable when you aren’t in gay rooms,
because they haven’t got a hold over you. Are you coming?”
For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him.
For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the
underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He
could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with
her. No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet
not much more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He
had always escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not
again more completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld
without having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a
spectator, intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies,
but never intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He
thought, as he sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid
roguery, that it would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There
would be no strain in living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had
loved Lily would be a joke to her. Why should not he take her for what
she was—shrewd, mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He
would do her no wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in
the scheme of the universe.
Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he
remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that
Daisy could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage
to plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought
of the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this
nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks
ago—yesterday, indeed—he might have joined himself to Daisy under the
pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he
must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion
might enter, were too dangerous.
“No, I won’t come home with you, dear Daisy,” he said, taking her hand
over the puddly table. “You know, you didn’t kiss me that night in
Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you,
did you?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s the good of asking me why I kissed you?” she said, embarrassed
and almost made angry by his reminder. “Perhaps I was twopence on the
can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if
you aren’t coming home, you aren’t, and I must get along. Sitting
talking to you isn’t paying my rent, is it?”
He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming
to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a
token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and
he was at a loss to find a symbol service.
“Is there nothing I can do for you?”
“Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don’t get off to-night.”
He offered them to her eagerly.
“Go on, you silly thing,” she said, pushing the money away. “As if I
meant it.”
“If you didn’t, I did,” said Michael.
“Oh, all right,” she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her
purse. “Well, chin-chin, Clive, don’t be so long coming down here next
time.”
“Michael is my name,” he said, for he was rather distressed to think
that she would pass forever from his life supposing him to be called
Clive.
“As if I didn’t know that,” she said. “I remember, because it’s a Jew
name.”
“But it isn’t,” Michael contradicted.
“Jews are called that.”
“Very likely,” he admitted.
“Oh, well, it’ll be all the same in a hundred years.”
She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded
beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him.
Then she disappeared.
Michael sat on in the Café d’Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not
arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale
of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her
suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was
shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably
murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he
feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to
imagine that material hell of the trial. The bandage dropped from the
eyes of justice, and he saw her pig’s-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful;
and her scales were like a grocer’s. He pitied Barnes in the clutches
of anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist.
After all, Daisy’s story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to
himself’s hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to
account for his dislike of Janie Filson’s salute without supposing
murder. Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the
thought used to come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed,
the thought of murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was
absurd to think of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling
hansoms and all that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes
not met him at the Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an
appointment when his pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie
Cummings had traveled even to Leppard Street?
Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction
for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his
mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the
curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with
double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in
Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o’clock,
and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever
brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for
Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.
The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the
houses confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars.
Several windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals
of habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers
behind, and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows
of his old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door
quietly and stood listening for a moment in the passage. He could hear
a low snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a
word was distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening
close to the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the
blackness, fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was
seeming so sinister in this house. It was incredible that a brief
movement would open the front door again and let in the starlight; for,
as he stood here, Leppard Street was under the earth deep down. He
moved a little farther into the hall, and, putting out his hand to feel
for the balusters, drew back with a start, for he might have clapped it
down upon a cold bald head, so much like that was the newel’s wooden
knob. Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and
every instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the
house like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose
and fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then
without warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion.
Every word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.
“I say he gave you thirty shillings. Now then!” Barnes yapped.
“And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you’ve had.”
“Don’t I hear through the door what you get?”
Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment
to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had
been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was
the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The
recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing
longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night,
which smelled so sweet after that passage.
He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the
five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he
pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of
black basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the
speculation of their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning
and brooded upon the builders that built them and the sphinx that
commanded them to be built.
In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather
prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of
brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped
and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher
and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number
One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a
moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a
wild, irregular walk in Michael’s direction. He had a sensation that
she had known he was standing here against this wall, that she had
watched him all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been
standing here against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he
could not advance to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the
wall. Michael saw her very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight.
Her hat was askew, and a black ostrich plume hung down over her big
chalky face: her lips were glistening as if they had been smeared with
jam. She was wearing a black satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts
swept past him, like an overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by
a wire from the scene.
Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to
have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene
primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He
realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could
hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he
had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the
reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One
with the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather
startled as he walked up the steps to see Barnes’ face pressed against
the window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave
reassuringly to a mask like that.
Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key
from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.
“Here, I couldn’t get down to the Orange to-night. I’ve had a bit of
trouble with this girl.”
The gas was flaring in the sitting-room by now, and the night, which
outside had been lightening for dawn, was black as ink upon the panes.
“Sit on the bed. The chairs are all full of her dirty clothes. I’ll
pull the blinds down. I’m going to leave here to-morrow, Fane. Did you
see her going down the road? She must have passed you by. I tell you
straight, Fane, half an hour back I was in two minds to do her in. I
was, straight. And I would have, if ... Oh, well, I kept my temper and
threw her out instead. Gratitude! It’s my belief gratitude doesn’t
exist in this world. You sit down and have a smoke. He left some
cigarettes behind.”
“Who did?” Michael asked sharply.
“Who did what?”
“Left these cigarettes.”
“Oh, they’re some I bought yesterday,” said Barnes.
“I think it’s just as well for you that you are going to-morrow
morning. I hope you quite realize that otherwise I should have turned
you out.”
“Well, don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” Barnes protested. “I’ve
had quite enough to worry me without any nastiness between old friends
to make it worse.”
“You can’t expect me to be pleased at the way you’ve treated my rooms,”
Michael said.
“Oh, the gas-stove, you mean?”
“It’s not a question of gas-stoves. It’s a question of living on a
woman.”
“Who did?”
“You.”
“If I’d had to live on her earnings, I should be very poorly off now,”
grumbled Barnes, in an injured voice.
Under Michael’s attack he was regaining his old perkiness.
“At any rate, you must go to-morrow morning,” Michael insisted.
“Don’t I keep on telling you that I’m going? It’s no good for you to
nag at me, Fane.”
“And what about the woman?”
“Her? Let her go to ——,” said Barnes contemptuously. “She can’t do me
any harm. What if she does tell the coppers I’ve been living on her?
They won’t worry me unless they’ve nothing better to do, and I’ll have
hooked it by then.”
“You’re sure she can’t do you any harm?” Michael asked gravely.
“There’s nothing else she could tell the police?”
“Here, what are you talking about?” asked Barnes, coming close to
Michael and staring at him fixedly. Michael debated whether he should
mention Cissie Cummings, but he lacked the courage either to frighten
Barnes with the suggestion of his guilt or to preserve a superior
attitude in the face of his enraged innocence.
“I shall come round to-morrow morning, or rather this morning, at
nine,” said Michael. “And I shall expect to find you ready to clear out
of here for good.”
“You’re very short with a fellow, aren’t you?” said Barnes. “What do
you want to go away for? Why don’t you stay so as you can see me off
the premises?”
Michael thought that he could observe underneath all the assurance a
sharp anxiety on Barnes’ part not to be left alone.
“You can lay down and have a sleep in here. I’ll get on into the
bedroom.”
Michael consented to stay, and Barnes was obviously relieved. He put
out the gas and retired into the bedroom. The dawn was graying the
room, and the sun would be up in less than an hour. Early sparrows were
beginning to chirp. The woman who had burst out of the door and fled up
the street seemed now a chimera of the night. Half-dozing, Michael lay
on the bed, half dozing and faintly oppressed by the odor of patchouli
coming from the clothes heaped upon the chairs. St. George was visible
already, and even the outlines of The Knight in Armor were tremulously
apparent. Michael wondered why he did not feel a greater resentment at
the profanation of these rooms. And why did Barnes keep fidgeting on
the other side of the folding doors? The sparrows were cheeping more
loudly: the trains were more frequent. Michael woke from sleep with a
start and saw that Barnes was throwing the clothes from the chairs on
the floor: stirred up thus in this clear light the scent of patchouli
was even more noticeable. What on earth was Barnes doing? He was
turning the whole room upside-down.
“What the deuce are you looking for?” Michael yawned.
“That’s all right, old man, you get on with your sleep. I’m just
putting my things together,” Barnes told him.
Michael turned over and was beginning to doze again when Barnes woke
him by the noise he made in taking the dirty dishes out of the old
grate.
“How on earth can I sleep, when you’re continually fidgeting?” Michael
demanded fretfully. “What’s the time?”
“Just gone half-past five.”
Barnes paid no more attention to Michael’s rest, but began more
feverishly than ever to rummage among all the things in the room.
Michael could not stand his activity any longer, and dry-mouthed from
an uncomfortable sleep, he sat up.
“What _are_ you looking for?”
“Well, if you want to know, I’m looking for a watch-bracelet.”
“It’s not likely to be under the carpet,” said Michael severely.
Barnes was wrenching out the tacks to Michael’s annoyance.
“Perhaps it isn’t,” Barnes agreed. “But I’ve got to find this
watch-bracelet. It’s gold. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Was it a woman’s?”
Barnes looked round at him like a small animal alarmed.
“Yes, it was a woman’s. What makes you ask?”
“What’s it like?”
“Gold. Gold, I keep telling you.”
“When did you have it last?”
“Last night.”
“Well, it can’t have gone far.”
“No, blast it, of course it can’t,” said Barnes, searching with renewed
impatience. He was throwing the clothes about the room again, and the
odor of staleness became nauseating.
“I’m going to wash,” Michael announced, moving across to the bedroom.
“You’ll excuse the untidiness,” Barnes called out after him, in a tone
of rather strained jocularity.
Of Michael’s old room no vestige remained. A very large double-bed took
up almost all the space, and all the furniture was new and tawdry. The
walls were hung with studies of cocottes pretending to be naiads and
dryads, horrible women posed in the silvanity of a photographer’s
studio. The room was littered with clothes, and Michael could not move
a step without entangling his feet in a petticoat or treading upon
hidden shoes. He tried to splash his face, but the very washstand was
sickly.
“Well, you’ve managed to debauch my bedroom quite successfully,” he
said to Barnes, when he came back to the sitting-room.
“That’s all right. I’ll get rid of all the new furniture. I can pop the
lot. Well, it’s mine. If I could find this bloody watch-bracelet, I
could begin to make some arrangements.”
“What about breakfast?” Michael began to look for something to eat.
Every plate and knife was dirty, and there were three or four
half-finished tins of condensed milk which had turned pistachio green
and stank abominably.
“There’s a couple of herrings somewhere,” said Barnes. “Or there was.
But everything seems upside-down this morning. Where the hell is that
watch? It can’t have walked away on its own. If that mare took it! I’ve
a very particular reason for not wanting to lose that watch. Oh, —— ——!
wherever can it have got to?”
“Well, anyway shut up using such filthy language. When does the milkman
come round?”
“I don’t know when he comes round. Here, Fane, have you ever heard of
anyone talking in their sleep?”
“Of course I’ve heard of people talking in their sleep,” Michael
answered. “It’s not very unusual.”
“Ah, hollering out, yes—but talking in a sensible sort of a way, so
that if you came in and listened to what they said, you’d think it was
the truth? Have you ever heard of that?”
“I don’t suppose I can give you an instance, but obviously it must
often happen.”
“Must it?” said Barnes, in a depressed voice. “You see, I set
particular value by this watch-bracelet; and I thought perhaps I might
have talked about it in my sleep, and that mare just to spite me have
gone and taken it. I wonder where it is now.”
Michael also began to wonder where it was now, and Barnes’ anxiety was
transferred to him, so that he began to fancy the whole of this fine
morning was tremendously bound up with exactly where the watch-bracelet
now was. Barnes had begun to turn over everything for about the sixth
time.
“If the watch is here,” said Michael irritably, “it will be found when
you move your things out, and if it’s not here, it’s useless to go on
worrying about it.”
“Ah, it’s all very nice for you to be so calm! But what price it’s
being my watch that’s lost, not yours, old sport?”
“I’m not going to talk about it any more,” Michael declared. “I want to
know what you’re going to do when you leave here.”
“Ah, that’s it! What am I?”
“Would you like to go to the Colonies?”
“What, say good-bye to dear old Leicester Square and pop off for good
and all? I wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” said Michael, “that if I’d discovered you
here a week ago living like this, I should have had nothing more to do
with you. As it is, I’ve a good mind to sling you out to look after
yourself. However, I’m willing to get you a ticket for wherever you
think you’d like to go, and when I hear you’ve arrived, I’ll send you
enough money to keep you going for a time.”
“Fane, I don’t mind saying it. You’ve been a good pal to me.”
“Hark, there’s the milkman at last!” Michael exclaimed. He went out
into the sparkling air of the fine Summer morning and came back with
plenty of milk for breakfast. After they had made a sort of meal, he
suggested that Barnes ought to come with him and visit some of the
Colonial Agencies. They walked down Victoria Street and across St.
James’ Park, and in the Strand he made Barnes have a shave. The visit
to the barber took away some of his nocturnal raffishness, and Michael
found him very amusing during the various discussions that took place
in the Agencies.
“I think the walk has done you good.”
“Yes,” Barnes doubtfully admitted. “I don’t think it has done me much
harm.”
They had lunch at Romano’s, where Barnes drank a good deal of Chianti
and became full of confidence in his future.
“That’s where it is, Fane. A fellow like you is lucky. But that’s no
reason why I shouldn’t be lucky in my turn. My life has been a failure
so far. Yes, I’m not going to attempt to deny it. There are lots of
things in my life that might have been different. You’ll understand
when I say different I mean pleasanter for everybody all round, myself
included. But that’s all finished. With this fruit-farm—well, of course
it’s no good grumbling and running down good things—those apples we saw
were big enough to make anybody’s fortune. Cawdashit, Fane, I can see
myself sitting under one of those apple-trees and counting the bloody
fruit falling down at my feet and me popping them into baskets and
selling them—where was it he said we sold them?” Barnes poured out more
Chianti. “Really, it seems a sin on a fine day like this to be hanging
about in London. Well, I’ve had some sprees in old London, and that’s a
fact; so I’m not going to start running it down now. If I hadn’t lost
that watch-bracelet, I wouldn’t give a damn for anybody. Good old
London,” he went on meditatively. “Yes, I’ve had some times—good times
and bad times—and here I am.”
He gradually became incoherent, and Michael thought it would be as well
to escort him back to Leppard Street and impress on him once again that
he must remove all his things immediately.
“You’ll have to be quick with your packing-up. You ought to sail next
week. I shall go and see about your passage to-morrow.”
They drove back to Leppard Street in a taxi, and as they got out Barnes
said emphatically:
“You know what it is, Fane? Cawdashit! I feel like a marquis when I’m
out with you, and it I hadn’t have lost that watch-bracelet I’d feel
like the bloody German Emperor. That’s me. All up in the air one
minute, and yet worry myself barmy over a little thing like a watch the
next.”
“Hullo!” he exclaimed, looking up the road as their taxi drove off.
“Somebody else is playing at being a millionaire.”
Another taxi was driving into Leppard Street.
Michael had already opened the front door, and he told Barnes not to
hang about on the steps. Barnes turned reluctantly from his inspection
of the new taxi’s approach. It pulled up at Number One, and three men
jumped out.
“That’s your man,” Michael heard one of them say, and in another moment
he heard, “Henry Meats ... I hold a warrant ... murder of Cissie ...
anything you say ... used against you,” all in the mumbo-jumbo of a
nightmare.
Michael came down the steps again very quickly; and Barnes, now
handcuffed, turned to him despairingly.
“Tell ’em my name isn’t Meats, Fane. Tell ’em they’ve made a mistake.
Oh, my God, I never done it! I never done it!”
The two men were pushing him, dead white, crumpled, sobbing, into the
taxi; he seemed very small beside the big men with their square
shoulders and bristly mustaches. Michael heard him still moaning as the
taxi jangled and whirred abruptly forward. The third man watched it
disappear between the two walls; then he strolled up the steps to enter
the house. Mrs. Cleghorne was already in the hall, and over the
balusters of each landing faces could be seen peering down. As if the
word were uttered by the house itself, “murder” floated in a whisper
upon the air. The faces shifted; doors opened and shut far above;
footsteps hurried to and fro; and still of all these sounds “murder”
was the most audible.
“This is the gentleman who rents the rooms,” Mrs. Cleghorne was saying.
“But I’ve not been near them till yesterday evening for six months,”
Michael hurriedly explained.
“That’s quite right,” Mrs. Cleghorne echoed.
“Well, I’m afraid we must go through them,” said the officer.
“Oh, of course.”
“Let me see, is this your address?”
“Well, no—Cheyne Walk—173.”
“We might want to have a little talk with you about this here Meats.”
Michael was enraged with himself for not asseverating “Barnes! Barnes!
Barnes!” as he had been begged to do. He despised himself for not
trying to save that white crumpled thing huddled between those big men
with their bristly mustaches; yet all the while he felt violently
afraid that the police officer would think him involved in these
disgraceful rooms, that he would suppose the pictures and the tawdry
furniture belonged to him, that he would imagine the petticoats and
underlinen strewn about the floor had something to do with him.
“If you want me,” he found himself saying, “you have my address.”
Quickly he hurried away from Leppard Street, and traveled in a trance
of shame to Hardingham. Alan was just going in to bat, when Michael
walked across from the Hall to the cricket-field.
Stella came from her big basket chair to greet him, and for a while he
sat with her in the buttercups, watching Alan at the wicket. Nothing
had ever seemed so easy as the bowling of the opposite side on this
fine June evening, and Michael tried to banish the thought of Barnes in
the spaciousness of these level fields. Stella was evidently being very
careful not to convey the impression that she had lately won a victory
over him. It was really ridiculous, Michael thought, as he plucked idly
the buttercups and made desultory observations to Stella about the
merit of a stroke by Alan, it was more than ridiculous, it was
deliberate folly to enmesh himself with such horrors as he had beheld
at Leppard Street. There were doubtless very unpleasant events
continually happening in this world, but willfully to drag one’s self
into misery on account of them was merely to show an incapacity to
appreciate the more fortunate surroundings of one’s allotted niche. The
avoidance of even the sight of evil was as justifiable as the avoidance
of evil itself, and the moral economy of the world might suffer a
dangerous displacement, if everyone were to involve themselves in such
events as those in which himself had lately been involved. Duty was
owing all the time to people nearer at hand than Barnes. No doubt the
world would be better for being rid of him; diseases of the body must
be fought, and the corruption of human society must be cleansed. Any
pity for Barnes was a base sentimentalism; it was merely a reaction of
personal discomfort at having seen an unpleasant operation. The
sentimentalism of that cry “Don’t hurt him!” was really contemptible,
and since it seemed that he was likely to be too weak to bear the sight
of the cleansing knife, he must in future avoid the occasion of its
use. Otherwise his intellectual outlook was going to be sapped, and he
would find himself in the ranks of the faddists.
“I think I shall stay down here the rest of the summer, if I may,” he
said to Stella.
“My dear, of course you can. We’ll have a wonderful time. Hullo, Alan
is retiring.”
Alan came up and sat beside them in the buttercups.
“I thought I saw you just as I was going in,” he said. “Anything going
on in town?”
“No, nothing much,” said Michael. “I saw a man arrested for murder this
afternoon.”
“Did you really? How beastly! Our team’s just beginning to get into
shape. I say, Stella. That youth working on old Rundle’s farm is going
to be pret-ty good. Did you see him lift their fast bowlers twice
running over the pond?”
Michael strolled away to take a solitary walk. It seemed incredible now
to think that he had brought Lily down here, that he had wandered with
her over this field. What an infringement it must have seemed to Stella
and Alan of their already immemorial peace. They had really been very
good about his invasion. And here was the wood where he and Stella had
fought. Michael sat down in the glade and listened to the busy
flutterings of the birds. Why had Stella objected to his marriage with
Lily? All the superficial answers were ready at once; but was not her
real objection only another facet of the diamond of selfishness?
Selfishness was a diamond. Precious, hard, and very often
beautiful—when seen by itself.
Michael spent a week at Hardingham, during which he managed to put out
of his mind the thought of Barnes in prison awaiting his trial. Then
one day the butler informed him of a person wishing to speak to him. In
the library he found the detective who had asked for his address at
Leppard Street.
“Sorry to have to trouble you, sir, but there was one or two little
questions we wanted to ask.”
Michael feared he would have to appear at the trial, and asked at once
if that was going to be necessary.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so. We’ve got it all marked out fair and square
against Mr. Meats. He doesn’t stand a chance of getting off. How did
you come to be mixed up with him?”
Michael explained the circumstances which had led up to his knowing
Meats.
“I see; and you just wanted to give him a bit of a helping hand. Oh,
well, the feeling does you credit, I’m bound to say; but another time,
sir, I should make a few inquiries first. We should probably have had
him before, if he hadn’t been helped by you. Of course, I quite
understand you knew nothing about this murder, but anyone can often do
a lot of harm by helping undeserving people. We mightn’t have nabbed
him even now, if some woman hadn’t brought us a nice little bit of
evidence, and I found some more things myself after a search. Oh, yes,
he doesn’t stand an earthly. We knew for a moral cert who did it,
straightaway; but the police don’t get a fair chance in England. We let
all these blooming Radicals interfere too much. That’s my opinion.
Anyone would think the police was a lot of criminals by the way some
people talk about them.”
“Is anybody defending him?” Michael asked.
“Oh, he’ll be awarded a counsel,” said the detective indignantly. “For
which you and me has to pay. That’s a nice thing, isn’t it? But he
doesn’t stand an earthly.”
“Where will he be hanged?”
“Pentonville.”
Michael thought how Mrs. Murdoch in Neptune Crescent would shudder some
Tuesday morning in the near future.
“I’m sorry you should have had to come all this way to find me,”
Michael said. He hated himself for being polite to the inspector, but
he could not help it. He rang the bell.
“Oh, Dawkins, will you give Inspector—what is your name, by the bye?”
“Dawkins,” said the inspector.
“How curious!” Michael laughed.
“Yes, sir,” the inspector laughed.
“Lunch in the gun room, Dawkins. You must be hungry.”
“Well, sir, I could do with a snack, I daresay.” He followed his
namesake from the room, and outside Michael could hear them begin to
chatter of the coincidence.
“But supposing I’d been in the same state of life as Meats,” Michael
said to himself. “What devil’s web wouldn’t they be trying to spin
round me?”
He was seized with fury at himself for his cowardice. He had thought of
nothing but his own reputation ever since Meats had been arrested. He
had worried over the opinion of a police inspector; had been ashamed of
the appearance of the rooms; had actually been afraid that he would be
implicated in the disgraceful affair. So long as it had been easy to
flatter himself with the pleasure he was giving or the good he was
doing to Meats, he had kept him with money. Now when Meats had been
dragged away, he was anxious to disclaim the whole acquaintanceship for
fear of the criticism of a big man with a bristly mustache. The despair
in Meats’ last cry to him echoed round this library. He had seen
society in action: not all the devils and fiends imagined by mediæval
monks were so horrible as those big men with bristly mustaches. What
did they know of Meats and his life? What did they care, but that they
were paid by society to remove rubbish? Justice had decreed that Meats
should be arrested, and like a dead rat in the gutter he was swept up
by these scavengers. What compact had he broken that men should freeze
to stones and crush him? He had broken the laws of men and the laws of
God; he had committed murder. And were not murders as foul being
committed every moment? Murdered ambition, murdered love, murdered
pity, murdered gratitude, murdered faith, did none of these cry out for
vengeance?
Society had seized the murderer, and it was useless to cry out. Himself
was as impotent as the prisoner. Meats had sinned against the hive:
this infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he
felt to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was
become a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by
fear. Something was needed to destroy this gregarious organism. War and
pestilence must come; but in the past these two had come often enough,
and mankind was the same afterward. This ant-hill of a globe had been
ravaged often enough, but the ants were all busy again carrying their
mean little burdens of food hither and thither in affright for the
comfort of their mean little lives.
“And I’m as bad as any of them,” said Michael to himself. “I know I
have obligations in Leppard Street, and I’ve run away from them because
I’m afraid of what people will think. Of course, I always fail. I’m a
coward.”
He could not stay any longer at Hardingham. He must go and see about
Mrs. Smith now. Society would be seizing her soon and bringing her
miserable life to an end in whitewashed prison corridors. He must do
something for Meats. Perhaps he would not be able to save him from
death, but he must not sit here ringing bells for butlers called
Dawkins to feed inspectors called Dawkins.
Stella came in with the first roses of the year.
“Aren’t they beauties?”
“Yes, splendid. I’m going up to town this afternoon.”
“But not for long?”
“I don’t know. It depends. Do you know, Stella, it’s an extraordinary
thing, but ever since you’ve practically given up playing, I feel very
much more alive. How do you account for that?”
“Well, I haven’t given up playing for one thing,” Stella contradicted.
“Stella do you ever feel inspired nowadays?”
“Not so much as I did,” she admitted.
“I feel now as if I were on the verge of an inspiration.”
“Not another Lily,” she said quickly, with half a laugh.
“You’ve no right to sneer at me about that,” he said fiercely. “You
must be very careful, you know. _You’ll_ become flabby, if you aren’t
careful, here at Hardingham.”
“Oh, Michael!” she laughed. “Don’t look at me as if you were a Major
Prophet. I won’t become flabby. I shall start composing at once.”
“There you are!” he cried triumphantly. “Never say again that I can’t
wake you up.”
“You did not wake me up.”
“I did. I did. And do you know I believe I’ve discovered that I’m an
anarchist?”
“Is that your inspiration?”
“Who knows? It may be.”
“Well, don’t come and be anarchical down here, because Alan is going to
stand at the next election.”
“What on earth good would Alan be in Parliament?” Michael asked
derisively. “He’s much too happy.”
“Michael, why are you so horrid about Alan nowadays?”
He was penitent in a moment at the suggestion, but when he said
good-bye to Stella he had a curious feeling that from henceforth he was
going to be stronger than her.
On reaching London, Michael went to see Castleton at the Temple, and he
found him in chambers at the top of dusty stairs in King’s Beach Walk.
“Lucky to get these, wasn’t I?” said Castleton. By craning out of the
window, the river was visible.
“I suppose you’ve never had a murder case yet?” Michael asked.
“Not yet,” said Castleton. “In fact, I’m going in for Chancery work.
And I shall get my first brief in about five years, with luck.”
Michael inquired how one went to work to retain the greatest criminal
advocate of the day, and Castleton said he would have to be approached
through a solicitor.
“Well, will you get hold of him for me?”
Castleton looked rather blank.
“If you can’t get him, get the next best, and so on. Tell him the man I
want to defend hasn’t a chance, and that’s why I’m particularly anxious
he should get off.”
They discussed details for some time, and Castleton was astonished at
Michael’s wish to aid Meats.
“It seems very perverse,” he said.
“Perverse!” Michael echoed. “And what about your profession? That is
really the most perverse factor in modern life.”
“But in this case,” Castleton argued, “the victim seems so utterly
worthless.”
“Exactly,” said Michael. “But as society never interfered when he was
passively offensive, why, the moment he becomes actively offensive,
should society have the right to put him out of the way? They never
tried to cure him for his own good. Why should they kill him for their
own?”
“You want to strike at the foundations of the legal system,” said the
barrister.
“Exactly,” Michael agreed; and the argument came to an end because
there was obviously nothing more to be said.
Castleton promises to do all he could for Meats, and also to keep
Michael’s name out of the business. As Michael walked down the stairs,
it gave him a splendid satisfaction to think how already the law was
being set in motion against the law. A blow for Inspector Dawkins. And
what about the murdered girl? “She won’t be helped by Meats’ death,”
said Michael to himself. “Society is not considering her protection now
any more than it did when she was alive.” _No slops must be emptied
here_: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the
stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a
sentimentalist.
Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.
“A nice set-out and no mistake!” she declared. “Half of the
neighborhood have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder
had been done in here. Mr. Cleghorne’s quite hoarse with hollering out
to them to keep off. And it never rains but what it pours. There’s a
poor woman gone and died here now. However, a funeral’s a little more
lively than the police nosing round, though her not having a blessed
halfpenny and owing me three weeks on the rent it certainly won’t be
anything better than a pauper’s funeral.”
“What woman?” Michael asked.
“Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I’ve been very good to—a Mrs. Smith.”
“Dead?” he echoed.
“Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body.
What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I _should_ say. It quite worried Mr.
Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around
so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he’s read a lot about these
Roman Catholics, and he doesn’t hold with them. They’re that underhand,
he says, it makes him nervous.”
“Can I see this priest?” Michael asked.
“Well, it’s hardly the room you’re accustomed to. I’ve really looked at
her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old
mother has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her.”
“I think I should like to see this priest,” Michael persisted.
Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and
she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They
descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out
to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused
herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was
sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look
up from his Office.
“Is that you, Sister?” he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited
for him to explain his business.
“I wanted to ask about this poor woman.”
Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing
was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
“I was interested in her,” Michael exclaimed.
“Indeed!” said the priest dryly. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Is her cat here?”
“There was some sort of an animal, but the woman of the house took it
off.”
A silence followed, and Michael was aware of the priest’s hostility.
“I suppose she didn’t see her son before she died?” Michael went on.
“Her son is with the Jesuits.”
“You seem to know a great deal about the poor soul?”
“I thought I had managed to help her,” said Michael, in a sad voice.
“Indeed?” commented the priest, even more dryly.
“And there is nothing I can do now?”
“Almighty God has taken her,” said the priest. “There is nothing you
can do.”
“I could have some Masses said for her.”
“Are you a Catholic?” the priest asked.
“No; but I fancy I shall be a Catholic,” Michael said; and as he spoke
it was like a rushing wind. He hurried out into the passage where a nun
passed him in the gloom. “She will be praying,” Michael thought, and,
looking back over his shoulder, he said:
“Pray for me, Sister.”
The nun was evidently startled by the voice, and went on quickly down
the three steps and up the other into Mrs. Smith’s den.
Michael climbed upstairs to interview the Solutionist. He found him
lying in bed.
“Why wasn’t that money paid regularly?” he asked severely.
“Who is it?” the Solutionist muttered, in fuddled accents. “Wanted the
money myself. Had a glorious time. The cat’s all right, and the poor
old rabbits are dead. Can’t give everybody a good time. Somebody’s got
to suffer in this world.”
Michael left him, and without entering his old rooms again went away
from Leppard Street.
The moment had come to visit Rome, and remembering how he had once
dissuaded Maurice from going there, he felt some compunction now in
telling him that he wanted to travel alone. However, it would be
impossible to visit Rome for the first time with Maurice. In the studio
he led up to his backing out of the engagement.
“About this going abroad,” he began.
“I say, Michael, I don’t think I can come just now. The editor of The
Point of View wants a series of articles on the ballet, and I’m going
to start on them at once.”
It was a relief to Michael, and he wished Maurice good luck.
“Yes, I think they’re going to be rather good,” he said confidently.
“I’m going to begin with the Opera: then the Empire and the Alhambra:
and in September there will be the new ballet at the Orient. Of course,
I’ve got a theory about English ballet.”
“Is there anything about which you haven’t got a theory?” Michael
asked. “Hullo, you’ve got the Venetian mirror from Ararat House. I’m so
glad!”
“I’ve arranged all that,” Maurice said. “Lily Haden has gone to live
with a girl called Sylvia Scarlett. Rather a terror, I thought.”
“Yes, I had an idea you’d find her a bit difficult.”
“Oh, but I scored off her in the end,” said Maurice quickly.
“Congratulations,” said Michael. “Well, I’m going to Rome.”
“I say, rather hot.”
“So much the better.”
“I used to be rather keen on Rome, but I’ve a theory it’s generally a
disappointment. However, I suppose I shall have to go one day.”
“Yes, I don’t think Rome ought to miss your patronage, Maurice.”
They parted as intimate friends, but while Michael was going downstairs
from the studio he thought that it might very easily be for the last
time.
His mother was at home for tea; lots of women and a bishop were having
a committee about something. When they had all rustled away into the
mellow June evening, Michael asked what had been accomplished.
“It’s this terrible state of the London streets,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Something has got to be done about these miserable women. The Bishop
of Chelsea has promised to bring in some kind of a bill in Parliament.
He feels so strongly about it.”
“What does he feel?” Michael asked.
“Why, of course, that they shouldn’t be allowed.”
“The remedy lies with him,” Michael said. “He must take them the
Sacraments.”
“My dearest boy, what are you talking about? He does his best. He’s
always picking them up and driving them home in his brougham. He can’t
do more than that. Really he quite thrilled us with some of his
experiences.”
Michael laughed and took hold of her hand.
“What would you say if I told you that I was thinking very seriously of
being a priest?”
“Oh, my dear Michael, and you look so particularly nice in tweeds!”
Michael laughed and went upstairs to pack. He would leave London
to-morrow morning.
CHAPTER X
THE OLD WORLD
The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn
was quivering upon the meadows near Chambéry Michael was sure with an
almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hardships
of thought. Waterfalls swayed from the mountains, and the gray torrents
they fed plunged along beside the train. Down through Italy they
traveled all day, past the cypresses, and the olive-trees wise and
graceful in the sunlight. It was already dusk when they reached the
Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses
shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset;
but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train
reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter
carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down
the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber
shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide
street in Rome.
“There has been nothing like this,” he said, “since I walked down the
High. There will be nothing like this ever again.”
Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups
of ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one
mighty column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was
figured with innumerable horses and warriors.
“We must seek for truth in the past,” he said.
How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was
only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in
Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues,
rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived
as shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this
column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name.
What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the
morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct
of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this
solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.
“All that I have done and experienced so far,” Michael thought, “would
not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of
other people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have
been given knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I
offer myself to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man.
Man for man standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader.
The reason why the modern world is so critical of the fruits of
Christianity after nineteen hundred years is because they have expected
it from the beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to
the individual the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is
much more anxious about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds
are destroyed, whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake,
or by the great illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a
great war, and everybody will discover it has come either because
people are Christians or because they are not Christians. Nobody will
think it is because each man wants to interfere with the conduct of his
neighbor. That woman in Leppard Street who died in the peace of God,
how much more was she a Christian than me, who, without perceiving the
beam in my own eye, have trotted round operating on the motes of other
people. And once I had to make an effort to kiss her in fellowship.
Rome! Rome! How parochial you make my youth!”
The last exclamation was uttered aloud.
“Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?” said a
voice.
A man in a black cloak was speaking.
“No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies,” said
Michael.
“There is only one tragedy for youth.”
“And that is?”
“Age,” said the stranger.
“And what is the tragedy of age?”
“There is no tragedy of age,” said the stranger.
THE END
EPILOGICAL LETTER
TO
JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO
MY DEAR JOHN,
There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in
prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it
thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have
himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the
book.
You will remember that last year “Youth’s Encounter,” the first part of
Michael Fane’s story, obtained a great advertisement through the action
of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be
drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of
compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the
realities of war will obtain me a pardon in “Sinister Street,” the
second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the
sensitive or affronted the simple.
Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the
question of the form of the English novel. There has lately been
noticeable in the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel
is thinly disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are
peculiarly formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack
upon the form of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted
in regarding “Youth’s Encounter” merely as an achievement of memory,
and I have felt sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of
literary Datas, rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist.
You know from many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could
remember of my childhood, the book would not by this time have reached
much beyond my fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public
school and my own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I
fancy it would have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a
place of which I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that
nowadays it is a much better university than Oxford, and in thinking
thus you are the only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy.
Obviously, too, it was unavoidable in writing about St. James’ that I
should draw certain characters from the life, and for doing this I have
been attacked on grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of
schoolmasters to be exempt from the privilege of public men to be
sometimes caricatured. Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With
regard to the Oxford dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to
them what is after all much more likely to be a true impression of
their virtues and follies than those formed by a schoolboy of his
masters. Therefore, in this second volume, “Sinister Street,” there is
not a single portrait of a don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the
undergraduate a much less important factor than the schoolmaster is to
the schoolboy, and the few shadows of dons which appear in this volume
are as vital as most dons in the flesh seem to the normal
undergraduate.
The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably
will be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as
such rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own
existence up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth
writing at such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of
people who can bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the
capacity of the spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your
authority was said by Aristotle. “Art,” says _The Sydney Bulletin_, a
curious antipodean paper, “is selection.” “It is time to protest,” says
an American paper, “against these long books.” At this rate, we shall
soon be spending all our time with books. “The enormous length must
make it formless,” other critics have decided. Ultimately I believe
Aristotle’s remark to be the truest guide, and I am tempted to hope
that with the publication of the second volume many irrelevancies have
established their relevancy.
It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the
end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes
as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life,
but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for
me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new
adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society
preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences
that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be
determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these
influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same
time I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he
is not myself in a looking-glass.
I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional
use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any
“preciousness,” but to efforts at finding the only word that will say
what I mean. To take two examples: “Reasty” signifies “covered with a
kind of rust and having a rancid taste,” and it seems to me exactly to
describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several
suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects.
“Inquiline” sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been
sentimentalized like “pilgrim”; it is not an Americanism like
“transients,” and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay;
whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given
votes.
We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world,
and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure
Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of
the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to
a duke.
There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of
this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this
year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other
readers who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second
volume have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have
seemed above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe
there is nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of
obligation as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his
anonymous critics.
Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our
enduring friendship.
Yours ever,
COMPTON MACKENZIE.
End of Project Gutenberg's Sinister Street, vol. 2, by Compton Mackenzie