 
|
| Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks |
| In Vallombrosa. |
Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to know them so well:
| Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita |
| Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptÆque puellÆ. |
There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
| Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et |
| ... terris apricis. |
Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery
“Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?” he asked.
“Rather,” said Alan, and they both smiled.
“Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst out laughing and had to rush out of the room?”
“Rather,” said Alan. “Boys are ridiculous, aren’t they?”
“Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs. Merivale?” Michael queried.
“I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at anything,” said Alan.
“And yet do you realize that we’re only talking of eight years ago? Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the time when that wedding took place.”
To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life Michael’s calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive mortality.
“You’ll be writing epitaphs next,” said Alan, in rather an aggrieved voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during the silence.
“At any rate,” Michael said. “You can congratulate yourself upon not having wasted time.”
“My god,” cried Alan, stopping suddenly. “I believe I’m the luckiest man alive.”
“I thought you’d found a sovereign,” said Michael. He had never heard Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment later Alan would be blushing at
Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble Place, but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy came, and Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously contemplated marrying her. How well he remembered her in short skirts, and here she was a woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold pince-nez.
“You are a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place,” grumbled Nancy. “Do you realize we haven’t met for years?”
“You’re such a woman of affairs,” said Michael.
“Well, do let’s try to meet next time. I say, don’t you think Maud looks terribly ill since she became a Romanist?”
Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
“I think she’s looking rather well.”
“Absolute destruction of individuality, you know,” said Nancy, shaking her head. “I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must admit that she hasn’t forced her religion down our throats.”
“Did you expect an auto-da-fÉ in the middle of the lawn?” he asked. She thumped him on the shoulder:
“Silly ass! Don’t you try to rag me.”
They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have regretted the step.
Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the ceremony.
“Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?”
“You’ve admitted I’m a married woman,” she exclaimed. “Now surely you can tell me what you’ve been doing since August and where you’ve been.”
“I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every woman,” said Michael. “Alas, you are not!”
“Michael, you’re perfectly horrid to me.”
“Don’t be too much the young wife,” he advised, with mocking earnestness.
“I won’t listen to anything you say, until I know where you’ve been. Of course, if I hadn’t been so busy, I could easily have found you out.”
“Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,” Michael laughed.
“You shan’t stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me.”
“By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful news,” said Michael. “Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but I’ve never heard.”
“We’re going to CompiÈgne,” said Stella. “I wrote to little CastÉra-Verduzan, and he’s lent us the cottage where you and I stayed.”
That choice of Stella’s seemed to mark more decisively than anything she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother, talking.
“I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers,” she told him. “But if you’re going to be here, I could put her off.”
Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother’s loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
“No, no, I’m going away again,” he told her.
“Just as you like, dearest boy.”
“You’re glad about Stella?”
“Very glad.”
“And you like Alan?”
“Of course. Charming—charming.”
The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had been brought up to Mrs. Fane’s sitting-room out of the way of the wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
“It’s really quite chilly this afternoon,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Yes, there’s a good deal of mist along the river,” said Michael. “A pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather dreary in the forest.”
“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”
Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went back to Leppard Street.
THE INNERMOST CIRCLE
November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from Oxford to-night—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him.
They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must begin to frequent the Orient again.
Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost in the air.
Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that. Supposing she did not visit
Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the Orient,” he would say. She should know immediately
It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and run.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.
It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her one of them. He had given his
“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.
“Home. I’m going home,” he said.
“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”
He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard Street.
“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you.”
Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the star-incrusted sky.
“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”
“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”
Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put his foot on the steps of the front door.
“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”
She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the house sleeps down here.”
She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage. When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.
Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy wall.
“Here you are. Here you are.”
The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down three steps
“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp. The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.
“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such a stranger.”
Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a pale blue chest next to a washstand.
“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.
“What cat?”
“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”
She called, and a small black cat came out.
“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under the bed like that.”
Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his
“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very well, so she’s got a good home. But he isn’t stinted. Oh, no. He gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have animals, look after them.”
Michael nodded agreement.
“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better than human beings.”
“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.
“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”
The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the deliberate novelist.
“After my boy.”
“Your boy?” he echoed.
“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened the woman into a fleeting dignity.
“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the converse was more probable.
“He’s not living with you?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything—not ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil Service. I lived with his father for many years—in fact, from the time I was sixteen.
“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”
“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a Catholic myself.”
As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility of spirit.
“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short silence.
“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”
Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her health.
“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one, and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave, they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”
Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a good deal from some of the men?”
“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here for days without anyone knowing about it. Last
“I suppose you’d be glad to give up the life,” said Michael, and as he asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence of this woman a very futile one.
“Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I’m really at anyone’s mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in one way, the harm’s done.”
Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the more obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and at her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
“You see,” she went on, “though I have to put up with a great deal, it’s only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up by my father, and my mother being—well, it’s no use to mince matters as they say—my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this occurred with
“Quite enough, too,” said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was so like the scarred surface of the moon.
“You’re right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I’m my own mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don’t interfere with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking, but really Mrs. Cleghorne—that is the woman who keeps the house—really she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I go all day with only a cup of tea.”
Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own breakfast on a chafing dish.
“I interrupted you,” he said. “You were going to tell me something about Mrs. Cleghorne.”
“Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me. Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she’d seen him going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn’t a nice thing to do, is it? One doesn’t want to go round drinking in public-houses. It looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we’ve fallen out over it. In fact, I haven’t seen him for some months. Still I shouldn’t complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you’ll understand—well, as I was saying—what with one thing and another my rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you’ve paid
“Have you lived in this burrow for two years?” Michael asked in amazement.
“In the week before Christmas it’ll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs. Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round here and abuse me. Her mother’s an old woman, you’ll understand, and her language—well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick.” She put her hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. “She stands in that doorway and bullies me until I’m ashamed to sit on this bed and stand it. I really am. You’d hardly believe there was such things to say to anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I’ve made up my mind she isn’t going to do it again. I’m not going to have it.” She was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs of the bed creaked.
“The mother doesn’t live here?” he asked.
“Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I’m not going to let it occur again. I don’t consider I’ve been well treated. If I’d spent the money on gin, I shouldn’t so much object to what the old woman calls me, for I don’t say my life isn’t a bit of a struggle. But there’s so many things to use up the money, when I’ve got what’s wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little bit smart—really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should I be?—and I never waste money on clothes for clothes’ sake, as they say—well, after that it’s none so easy to find eight-and-six for the week’s rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat’s milk.”
Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her wretchedness.
“I hope your boy will turn out well,” he ventured at last.
“Oh, he’s a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his being in the Civil Service.”
“Or even a priest,” Michael suggested.
“Well, you see, he wasn’t born in wedlock. Would that make a difference?”
“I don’t think so,” said Michael gently. “Oh, no, I hope that wouldn’t make a difference.”
He was finding the imagination of this woman’s life too poignant, and he rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged inwardly that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in which she had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he would have to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged down into his pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had thought an exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity when she had stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he wished he had five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly and hopelessly in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She must have robbed him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the thief’s and liar’s film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into his own? Was it impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns out of his pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had pawed him with her hands in the black passage, and if the money had fallen on the road, he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the unjust theft; he ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant to give her. And yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had said the cat recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken the sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the weight she bore. And if she had taken them, why not?
“I find I haven’t any money with me,” said Michael, looking at her.
“That doesn’t matter. I’ve really quite enjoyed our little talk.”
“But I’ll send you some more,” he promised.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t done anything to have you send your money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn’t think I was really quite your style. Of course, I’ve really come down. It’s no use denying it. I’m not what I was.”
If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.
“I shall send you some money for your boy,” he said, in the darkness by the door.
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
“What’s your name?”
“Well, I’m known here as Mrs. Smith.” Doubtfully she whispered as the cold air came in through the open door: “I don’t expect you’d care about giving me a kiss.”
Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.
When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try
Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face downward upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that anything so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately afterward he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and shamefacedly he put away the broken picture in a drawer.
Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window rattling in the wind.
TINDERBOX LANE
Next morning, when he woke, Michael made up his mind to leave Leppard Street finally in the course of this day. He could not bear the thought that he would only have to lean out of his window to see the actual roof which covered that unforgettable den beneath him. He wondered what would be the best thing to do with the furniture. It might be worth while to install Barnes in these rooms and pay his rent for some months instead of the salary which, now that Lily had been seen, was no longer a justifiable expenditure. He certainly would prefer that Barnes should never meet Lily now, and he regretted he had revealed her name. Still he had a sort of affection for Barnes which precluded the notion of deserting him altogether. These rooms with their simple and unmuffled furniture, the green shelves and narrow white bed, would be good for his character. He would also leave a few chosen books behind, and he would write and ask Nigel Stewart to visit here from time to time. Michael dressed himself and went upstairs to interview Barnes where he lay beneath a heap of bedclothes.
“Oh, I daresay I could make the rooms look all right,” said Barnes. “But what about coal?”
“I shall pay for coal and light as well as the rent.”
“I thought you’d find it a bit dismal here,” said Barnes
“After February,” Michael said, “I may want to come to some other arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you understand that when the three months are up, I shan’t be able to allow you five pounds a week any longer.”
“No, I never supposed you would,” said Barnes, in a tone of resignation.
Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not: however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could do no harm to mention it.
“Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?” he asked.
“I didn’t know there was one here; but it’s not a very rare occurrence in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to that.”
“If you hear any row going on down there,” said Michael, “you had better interfere at once.”
“Who with?” Barnes inquired indignantly.
“With the row,” said Michael. “If the woman is being badly treated on account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately.”
“Well, I’m not in the old tear’s secret, am I?” asked Barnes, in an injured tone. “You can’t expect me to go routing about after every old fly-by-night stuck in a basement.”
“I’m particularly anxious to know that she is all right,” Michael insisted.
“Oh well, of course, if she’s a friend of yours, Fane, that’s another matter. If it’s any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I’ll do it.”
Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the Solutionist, who was also in bed.
“I’ve got a commission for you,” said Michael.
The Solutionist’s watery eyes brightened faintly.
“You’re fond of animals, aren’t you?” Michael went on. “I see you feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I’m interested in a cat who appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith’s door every morning. Mrs. Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are fond of animals; but you mustn’t mention me. Here’s a check for five pounds. Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits.”
The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
“I couldn’t cash this nowadays,” he said helplessly. “And get a quart of milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst.”
“All right. I’ll send you postal orders,” said Michael. “Now I’m going away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount left every day. You’ll do what I ask? And you’ll promise not to say a word about me?”
The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely puzzled than he had ever seen him.
Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did not know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and asked her to come and speak to him.
“I see,” she said. “Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms,
Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could not help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
“Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?” Michael asked.
“He’s still in his bed, but I’ll go myself.”
This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered. Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it were being bestowed from a superior height.
Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice’s studio in Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange whom himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his big horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending for some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but driving toward Maurice’s studio along the banks of the river, Michael thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
“I’ve brought you these pictures,” he explained to
“Well, I’m rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point of View.”
“You haven’t met your lady-love yet?”
“No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there’s plenty of time. What about you?” Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend as a stone where women were concerned.
“I’ve seen her,” said Michael. He simply had to give himself the pleasure of announcing so much.
“By Jove, have you really? You’ve actually found your fate?” Maurice was evidently very much excited by Michael’s lapse into humanity; he had been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. “What’s she like?”
“I haven’t spoken to her yet. I’ve only seen her in the distance.”
“And you’ve really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with me here. Castleton isn’t coming back from the Temple until after tea.”
Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while he stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very moment herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought if he once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too much, and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist saying that she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be applied to many girls, and it was only for himself that in this case they had all the thrilling significance they did.
“I like fair girls best,” Maurice agreed. “But most fair
“Perhaps you will,” Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had the power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could choose his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the studio, or he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were she to be his, he must hold secrets about her that could never be unfolded.
“I really must bolt off,” he declared. “I’ve got a cab waiting.”
Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
“Life’s really too easy in this house,” he thought. “It’s so impossible to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately. I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here.”
Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily at once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of her raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have made their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the joyful prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was really tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was to be exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington Gardens. However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater had made such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much attention to lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress. Otherwise he was himself again of six years
With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new Lily wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision of her last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the queer adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still higher upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his return to Cheyne Walk had helped to
The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling curtain. Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into Piccadilly. She must be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for her to come casually like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear for weeks. Or was she a
It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that. Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after restaurant, cafÉ after cafÉ, standing in the doorways and staring at the tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him, as people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and ask what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a lunatic.
Michael’s behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions, because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been hers.
By one o’clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to suppose that Lily would be found among these
Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult, impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole time rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline Grey, the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer. Guy explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it seemed he would soon have to choose between love and art; how restrictions were continually being put upon their meeting each other; and how violently difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead, where Michael had prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very sympathetic, and when he met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did think she was beautiful and very much like the wild rose that Guy had taken as the symbol of her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could not imagine problems of conduct in which she could be involved.
For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan had by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to see how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was certainly something very attractive in these two young people moving about that grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and stood at the end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred acres. That it could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns had been defaced by builder’s rubbish was now inconceivable. So too within, Michael could not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan had ever stood in this drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows whose sills scarcely rose above the level of the grass outside; that anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library with its pilasters and calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes of those bag-wigged squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that girl in her chip hat, holding a bunch of cherries.
“No doubt you’ve got a keen scent for tradition,” said Michael to Stella. “But really you have been able to get into the manner surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace—Stella, I’m afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and where do hounds meet to-morrow?”
“We’re simply loving it here,” Stella said. “But I think the piano is feeling a little bit out of his element. He’s stiff with being on his best behavior.”
“I’m hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field,” said Alan. “I’ll show it to you to-morrow morning.”
The butler came in with news of callers:
“The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley.”
“Oh, damn!” Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. “I really don’t think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you’ve both got to come in and be polite.”
Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room, whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas, but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I’ve been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of ours.”
Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella’s interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered if Stella had guessed this.
“And Anne heard you play at King’s Hall. Didn’t you, Anne dear?”
Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
“That child is going to worship Stella,” Michael thought.
“We’re hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr. Fane, you’ll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the pleasure of seeing you as well?”
Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
“What absolute rot!” Stella cried. “Of course you’ll be here.”
But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
“They tell us you’ve been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband was so much interested and is so much
“A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother,” said Lady Anne.
“Wasn’t he in the Eton eleven?” asked Alan.
“Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment,” said Lady Stilton. “Possibly a superior player.”
“Oh, no, mother!” Lady Anne indignantly declared. “He would have played for certain against Harrow, if he hadn’t sprained his ankle at the nets the week before.”
“I do hope you’ll let him come and see you this vacation,” Lady Stilton said.
“Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round here,” Alan replied. “I’m just planning out a new pitch now.”
“How delightful all this is,” thought Michael, with visions of summer evenings.
Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“Of course, you’ve got to marry Anne,” said Stella to Michael, as soon as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
“Alan,” Michael appealed. “Is it impossible for you to nip now forever this bud of matchmaking?”
“I think it’s rather a good idea,” said Alan. “I knew young Varley by sight. He’s a very sound bat.”
“I shan’t come here again,” Michael threatened, “until you’ve dissolved this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to marry me to every girl you meet,
Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year’s morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let himself be deterred by Stella’s gibes.
“I admit you’re as happy as you can be,” he said. “Now surely you, after so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost as well as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet married.”
“Michael, you’re having an affair with some girl,” Stella said accusingly.
He shook his head.
“Swear?”
“By everything I believe in, I vow I’m not having an affair with any girl. I wish I were.”
His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King’s Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist’s in the King’s Road, he saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and sixpence for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
“Ought to be very good,” commented the tobacconist.
“I rather wish I’d got a ticket,” said Michael.
“Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I suppose you’d like one for a lady as well?”
“No, I’ll have two men’s tickets.”
Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress. So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which, having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal loss to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises again in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it now not positively forbidding.
Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many of the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful inventions. The medley of
Suddenly Michael’s heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking away from him along the side of the hall—those two pierrettes in black—that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn’t she turn round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily. He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily’s languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that it was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He hurried down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the ball-room. Where were they now? They were coming toward him: the other pierrette
“Lily! Lily!”
The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what she was going to do.
“I say, how on earth did you recognize me?” Lily murmured, raising her mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and tender, so scornful and so passionate.
“I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across the road to speak to you, but you’d gone
“It’s years since I was there,” said Lily. “Years and years.” She turned to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came closer to be introduced.
“Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren’t I good to remember your name quite correctly?” Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was utterly scornful. “What made you come here? Have you got a friend with you?”
Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an accident.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
“Oh, something to do,” said Lily. “We live near here.”
“So do I,” said Michael hastily.
“Do you?” Her eyebrows went up in what he imagined was an expression of rather cruel interrogation. “This is a silly sort of a show. Still, even Covent Garden is dull now.”
Michael thought what a fool he had been not to include Covent Garden in his search. How well he might have known she would go there.
“Where’s Doris?” he asked.
Lily shrugged her shoulders.
“I never see anything of her nowadays. She married an actor. I don’t often get letters from home, do I, Sylvia?”
The pierrette with rose pompons, who ever since her introduction had still been standing outside the conversation, now raised her mask. Michael liked her face. She had merry eyes, and a wide nose rather Slavonic. Next to Lily she seemed almost dumpy.
“Letters, my dear,” she exclaimed, in a very deep voice, “Who wants letters?”
The music of a waltz was beginning, and Michael asked Lily if she would dance with him. She looked at Sylvia.
“I don’t think....”
“Oh, what rot, Lily! Of course you can dance.”
Michael gave her a grateful smile.
In a moment Lily had lowered her mask, and they were waltzing together.
“My gad, how gloriously you waltz!” he whispered. “Did we ever dance together five years ago?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and he felt the faint movement tremble through the imponderable form he held.
“Lily, I’ve been looking for you since June,” he sighed.
“You’re breaking step,” she said. Though her mask was down, Michael was sure that she was frowning at him.
“Lily, why are you so cold with me? Have you forgotten?”
“What?”
“Why, everything!” Michael gasped.
“You’re absolutely out of time now,” she said sternly.
They waltzed for a while in silence, and Michael felt like a midge spinning upon a dazzle.
“Do you remember when we met in Kensington Gardens?” he ventured. “I remember you had black pompons on your shoes then, and now you have pale blue pompons on your dress.”
She was not answering him.
“It’s funny you should still be living near me,” he went on. “I suppose you’re angry with me because I suddenly never saw you again. That was partly your mother’s fault.”
She looked at him in faint perplexity, swaying to the melody of the waltz. Michael thought he had blundered in betraying himself as so obviously lovestruck now. He must be seeming to her like that absurd and sentimental
“But it was much more your fault,” he said savagely. “Do you remember Drake?”
She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
“Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us.”
“Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed by some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that? Couldn’t you say ‘no’? Were you too lazy?”
Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
“Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were flirting with?”
Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that, while she was with him, she was his again.
What did the past matter?
“Ah, Lily, you love me still! I’ll ask no more questions. Am I out of step?”
“No, not now,” she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with the swoon of their dancing.
“Take off that silly mask,” he commanded. “Take it off and give it to me. I can hold you with one arm.”
She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no longer veiled her face;
“Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over.”
She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always known her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything that was happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it were a street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking. Nor with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced with Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall, and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a cab, but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they lived, was only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham Road. The fog was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the girls’ arms with a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of extraordinary freedom from the world, as if they were all three embarked upon an adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their shoes deep down in the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession of their shoes he had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them. The fog was denser and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb, listening for oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far down the Fulham Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of them seemed to sail across to the opposite pavement.
“Here we are, you two dreamers,” said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly, without any dip down into a road.
“Through here? How fascinating!” said Michael.
They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in front of a door set in a wall.
“I’ve got the key,” said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
“But this is extraordinary,” Michael exclaimed. “Aren’t we walking through a garden?”
“Yes, it’s quite a long garden,” Sylvia informed him. There was a smell of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they walked up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
“She’s downstairs,” said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the key. A woman’s figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the passage.
“Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We’re frozen,” Sylvia called. As the woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
“We’ve brought an old friend of Lily’s back from the
“Get along with you, you great saucy thing,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, laughing.
She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger, sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was amused to hear her address Sylvia as “great.”
“We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old mountain,” Sylvia said.
Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest of wheezy laughter.
“Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room table,” and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the diminutive corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near the fire. Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass case of humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell coronated with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on the chair was of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her pierrette’s dress of black with light blue pompons looked strangely remote from present time in that setting. Michael could not connect this secluded house with anything which had made an impression upon him during his experience of the underworld. Here was nothing that was not cozy and old-fashioned; here was no sign of decay, whether in the fabric of the house or in the attitude of the people living there. This small square room with the heavy furniture that occupied so much of the space
“Whose are these rooms?” he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not believe they were her creation or discovery.
“I found them,” said Sylvia. “The old girl who owns the house is bad, but beautiful. Aren’t you, you most astonishing but attractive mammoth?” This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the moment panting into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
“Get along with you,” the landlady chuckled. “Now don’t go to sleep, Lily. Your supper is just on ready.” She went puffing from the room in busy mirthfulness.
“She’s one of the best,” said Sylvia. “This house was given to her by an old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting of him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers. She was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle Rooms and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness.”
It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected him more sharply now with a sense
“Supper! Supper!” Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet, and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and give him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair, up from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so, and she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to follow them across the passage.
It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance. That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside, was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again. So he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
“Oh, my eye, my eye!” laughed Sylvia. “To think that Aunt Enormous was once in the ballet at the Opera.”
“How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!” Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the New Year’s Day which could so change his fortune.
“Were you in the ballet?” he asked.
“Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now.”
“Show the kind gentleman your picture,” said Sylvia. “She wears it round her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank.”
Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy young woman in a pork-pie hat.
“That’s myself,” said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. “Well, and I always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why shouldn’t I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?”
“But show him the others,” Sylvia demanded.
Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait’s wraith: a girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering, with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence of a ghostly bloom.
“Oh, look at her,” cried Sylvia. “In her beautiful pantalettes!”
“Hold your tongue, you!”
They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which lasted on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the other room and sat round the fire.
“Tell us about the General,” said Sylvia.
“Go on, as if you hadn’t heard a score of times all I’ve got to tell about the General—though you know I hate him to be called that. He’ll always be the Captain to me.”
Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough embarked upon tales of gay days in the ’sixties and ’seventies. It was astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could scarcely have changed since then.
“The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in
She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very smoke and grime of the city.
“Who knows what’s going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?” she said, shaking her head. “So enjoy yourselves while you can. That’s my motto. And if there’s a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am now.”
The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company, seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of her youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces. Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story to story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after two o’clock, and Michael rose to go.
“We’ll have one song,” cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough to the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up albums, and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a pleating of claret-colored silk.
Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed in comparison so frail and old, sang in a
“But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me behind my back,” she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face Sylvia when she had finished.
“Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like it.”
“Bless your heart, my dearie.” She laid a hand on Sylvia’s for an instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily and her out to lunch.
“We can lunch to-morrow, can’t we?” Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily’s arm, for she was now fast asleep.
“Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow,” Lily yawned.
He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to shake hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that the outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to speed his departure.
The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls’ shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by nor cat offended his isolation.
He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his good luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing was ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that carnival. Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined to buy all sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had fingered vaguely from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily’s discovery was colored with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze the situation in which he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea through the fog, he was bemused by the romantic memory of her which was traveling along with his thoughts. He could hold very tightly her shoes: he could almost embrace the phantom of her beauty that curled upon the vapors round each lamp: he was intoxicated merely by the sound of the street where she lived.
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!”
He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of the railway-carriage: “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!” he chanted at the fog, and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
“I’m awfully sorry, constable.”
“Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren’t you?”
“Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink my health when you’re off duty.”
He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman’s hand, and
Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and stability, almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety. Mrs. Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would have been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary to assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady’s kindling stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael’s heart leaped with the fancy that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night; and, picking up Lily’s shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about its secrets.
In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dull
“Mrs. Gainsborough ...?” Michael began.
But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his inquiry.
Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman’s next door.
“I’ve come to take the girls out to lunch.”
“That’s a good boy,” she wheezed. “The dearies will be glad to get out and enjoy themselves a bit. Here’s a day. This would have suited Noah, wouldn’t it?”
She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the pretentious gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind, nor even in front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These houses with doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to individuals, and for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by the development of the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long gardens in a row must be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad to think that the flats opposite were no doubt due to the death of someone who had owned a similar house and garden.
Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side. Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently to the kitchen. Two fairly
“Those are my mulberries,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “This is called Mulberry Cottage. I’ve been meaning to have the name painted on the outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There’s a character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his mulberries. But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my flowers are really remarkable. But there, it’s not to be wondered at. M’ father was a nursery gardener.”
She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why. Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of the Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
“The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls,” she wheezed at the door of the sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her book down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the title, and found it was the Contes DrÔlatiques of Balzac. An unusual girl, he thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could not kiss her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now restored, supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at ease again. Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he sat thinking of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The silence here was very like the country. London was a thousand miles away, and he could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and less did he think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage. Yet the apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take Lily away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she might not want to marry him at once.
Lunch at Kettner’s was a great success. At least Michael thought it was a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy walls, and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but rather to give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and wintry sun. Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was conscious that the other people in the restaurant were turning round to envy their table.
The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been disquieting, but that Sylvia talked
For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative, so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
“We’re alone,” he managed to say at last.
“Sylvia’s gone to Brighton. She didn’t want to go a bit.”
“Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven’t kissed for five years.”
He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him, it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the trance of silence.
“Lily, you will marry me, won’t you? Very soon? At once?”
Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears. It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and whatever he found her, but the relief was overwhelming. He had thought of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the sunlight of the morning, that he
Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her, though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection, thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses blowing in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself; and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain had first imagined his gift.
So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had them express, the hour passed.
“We must talk of practical things,” he declared, rising from his knees.
“You always want to talk,” Lily pouted.
“I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes; but it’s so difficult to do things quickly.”
“We’ll be married in a month. We’ll be married on Saint Valentine’s Day,” Michael announced.
“It’s so wet now to think of weddings.” She looked peevishly out of the window.
“You haven’t got to think about it. You’ve got to do it.”
“And it’s so dull,” she objected. “Sylvia says it’s appallingly dull. And she’s been married.”
“What has Sylvia got to do with it?” he demanded.
“Oh, well, she’s been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother died, what was I to do? I couldn’t bear Doris any more. She always gets on my nerves. Anyway, don’t let’s talk about marriage now. In the summer I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather.”
“But look here,” he persisted. “Are you in love with me?”
She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
“Well, if you’re not in love with me....”
“Oh, I am, I am! Don’t shout so, Michael. If I wasn’t awfully fond of you, I shouldn’t have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men coming here.”
“Are you Sylvia’s servant?” said Michael, in exasperation.
“Don’t be stupid. Of course not.”
“It’s ridiculous,” he grumbled, “to quote her with every sentence.”
“Why you couldn’t have stayed where you were,” said Lily fretfully, “I don’t know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If you’re so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up.”
“So, we’re not to talk any more about marriage?”
After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
“Don’t let’s talk about anything,” said Lily. He could not stand aloof from the arms she held wide open.
Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch, it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long. One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey’s. Michael had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what he told himself was the only cafÉ in London which had escaped the cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael suddenly suspicious.
“Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“It depends who we go with. Often I don’t care for them much. And the girls you see there are frightfully common.”
He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If it were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no difference to his resolution. People began to come into the cafÉ, shaking the wet from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was audible above the conversation.
“I wish we could have had one fine day together,” said Michael regretfully. “Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the winter?”
“I must have been very fond of you,” Lily laughed. “I don’t think you could make me walk like that now.”
“Aren’t you so fond of me now?” he asked reproachfully.
“You ought to know,” she whispered.
All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets, and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
“Shall I come in?” Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
“Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course.”
He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
“Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink after midnight?”
“I told you that Sylvia doesn’t like me to,” she said.
“But you would, if she didn’t mind?” Michael went on, torturing himself.
“How fond you are of ‘ifs,’” she answered. “I can’t bother to think about ‘ifs’ myself.”
If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already he was feeling the influence of Lily’s attitude. He wondered if, when he married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It was as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful woman as in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
“Happiness makes me inactive,” said Michael to himself. “So of course I shall never really be happy. What a paradox.”
He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a surrender to-night.
“I’m glad I didn’t suggest staying late,” he thought, as he walked away down the dripping garden path. “I should have been mad with unreasonable suspicions, if she had said ‘yes.’”
Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very much, he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of malice in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have dinner with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond. Michael was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet until she had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia’s influence? And who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o’clock as usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the fire.
“Lily isn’t down yet,” she told him.
He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
“Jolly dance?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
“Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out.” Michael flung down his challenge.
“She’s been talking to me about what you said yesterday,” Sylvia began.
Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
“When do you propose to marry her?” Sylvia went on.
“As soon as possible,” he said coolly.
“Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?” she demanded.
“I really don’t know. You have rather an advantage over me in that respect.”
“I’m glad you admit that,” interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
“You have personality. You’ve probably been very kind
“I’m glad you think you’ve managed to do that,” she said, glowering.
More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a cat crouching by the fire.
“Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an opportunity to be alone with Lily, you now think you’ve come into her life. My god, you’re like some damned fool in a novel!”
“A novel by whom?” Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
“Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp,” she answered savagely.
He bowed.
“I suppose you’re suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?” she sneered.
Michael was rather startled by her divination.
“What should I redeem her from?”
“I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?”
“I don’t know that I boasted of it,” he replied, in rather an injured tone. “But I did know her—very well.”
“Couldn’t you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should have said that Lily’s future must have been obvious from the time she was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got out of her life then: what the hell’s your object in coming into it again now, as you call it, unless you’re a sentimentalist? People don’t let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without the help of sentiment.”
Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the
“Sentiment about what?” he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
“You think Lily’s a tart, don’t you? And you think I am, don’t you?”
He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
“I did think so,” he said. “But of course I’ve changed my mind since I’ve seen something of you.”
“Oh, of course you’ve changed your mind, have you?” she laughed contemptuously. “And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?”
“Even if you are,” said Michael hotly, “I needn’t believe that Lily is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry her.”
“Sentimentalist,” she jeered. “Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist.”
“Your sneers don’t particularly affect me, you know,” he said politely.
“Oh, for god’s sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And I’m sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I’m a perpetual bugbear to his good form.”
“Because you made a hash of marriage,” Michael pointed out, “it doesn’t follow that I’m not to marry Lily. I can’t understand your objections.”
“Listen. You couldn’t make her happy. You couldn’t make her any happier than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let any one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the money
“What exactly do you care about?” Michael asked. “If Lily is what you say, I should have thought you’d be glad to be rid of her. After all, I’m not proposing to do her any wrong.”
“Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!” Sylvia cried. “Man can only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be a success, you’ll have to own Lily. That’s what I rebel against—the ownership of women. It makes me mad.”
“Yes, it seems to,” Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage with Sylvia’s unreasonableness. “If it comes to ownership,” he went on angrily, “I should have thought that handing her over to the highest bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable slave of man.”
“Why?” challenged Sylvia. “You sentimental ass, can’t you understand that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She’s free. I’m free.”
“You’re not at all free,” Michael indignantly contradicted. “You’re bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts, you’d be a good deal happier.”
“I don’t want to be happier.”
“Oh, I think you’re merely hysterical,” he said disdainfully. “But, after all, your opinions about yourself don’t
“When I met Lily first,” said Sylvia, “she had joined the chorus of a touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I’d just run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. That’s three years ago. Is she beautiful still?”
“Of course she is,” said Michael.
“Well, it’s I who have kept her beautiful. I’ve kept her free also. If sometimes I’ve let her have affairs with men, I’ve taken care that they were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort of....”
“Look here,” Michael burst in. “I’m sick of this conversation. You’re talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I’m going to marry her, whatever you think.”
“I say you won’t, and you shan’t,” Sylvia declared.
The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the fire, glaring at each other.
“The extraordinary thing is,” said Michael at last, “I thought you had a sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing is that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you. But I can’t help saying it.”
“The opinions of sentimentalists don’t interest me one way or the other,” Sylvia snapped.
“Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so pleasant on the evening we met?”
“I really can’t bother to go back as far as that.”
“You weren’t jealous then,” Michael persisted.
“Who says I’m jealous now?” she cried.
“I do. What do you think you are, unless you’re jealous? When is Lily coming down?”
“She isn’t coming down until you’ve gone.”
“Then I shall go and call her.”
“She’s not in London.”
“I don’t believe you.”
A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was obviously going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
“You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because Lily loves me.”
“It’s not true,” Sylvia declared. “It’s not true. She doesn’t love you, and what right have you to love her?”
She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
“What college was your husband at?” Michael suddenly inquired.
“Balliol.”
“I wonder if I knew him.”
“Oh, no. He was older than you.”
It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane, that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he felt that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let Lily continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no less than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not want to marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily, from whom there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his theories of behavior were
On the next morning, however, all Michael’s plans for his future behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold resolution, were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing a bell at intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for the position he had imagined himself taking up in that small square room. This errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such rapt
“Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?” Michael asked.
The errand-boy shook his head.
“Well, why do you do it?”
“I wasn’t,” said the errand-boy.
“What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing.”
Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to Sylvia:
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
Dear Sylvia,
If you aren’t afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me see Lily?
I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.
Yours,
M. F.
To Lily he wrote:
Darling,
Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to three.
Michael.
Alone, of course.
Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not come. All the time he spent in a second-hand
Come to-morrow at twelve.
S. S.
Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the waste-paper basket.
“I thought I should sting you into giving way,” he exclaimed.
Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
“They’ve gone away, the demons!” was what she said.
Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
“Where have they gone?” he asked blankly.
“Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage. There’s a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I’ll give it to you.”
Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
“We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are,” Mrs. Gainsborough said.
“Very soon,” he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold begonias to-morrow morning.
In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia’s note, a bleak little envelope waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the silence that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his cage. Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia’s
Perhaps you’ll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You’d much better give her up. In a way, I’m rather sorry for you, but not enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear young thing, that you aren’t even beginning to understand women. I admit that there’s precious little to understand in Lily. And for that very reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty, you’ll hate her. Now I hate to think of this happening. She’s a thousand times better off with me than she ever could be with you. Perhaps my maternal instinct has gone off the lines a bit and fixed itself on Lily. And yet I don’t think it’s anything so sickly as sentimental mothering. No, I believe I just like to sit and look at her. Lily’s rather cross with me for taking her away from “such a nice boy.” Does that please you? And doesn’t it exactly describe you? However, I won’t crow. Don’t break the lusters, when you read this. They belong to Fatty. What I suggest for you is a walk in Kensington Gardens to the refrain of “Blast the whole bloody world!” Now look shocked, my little Vandyck.
S. S.
Michael tore the letter up. He did not want to read and re-read it for the rest of the day. His eyelids were pricking unpleasantly, and he went out to find Mrs. Gainsborough. He was really sensitive that even a room should witness such a discomfiture. The landlady was downstairs in the kitchen, where he had not yet been. In this room of copper pots and pans, with only the garden in view, she might have been a farmer’s wife.
“Sit down,” she said. “And make yourself at home.”
“Will you sit down?” Michael asked.
“Oh, well, yes, if it’s any pleasure to you.” She took off her apron and seated herself, smoothing the bombasine skirt over her knees.
A tabby cat purred between them; a kettle was singing; and there was a smell of allspice.
“You really don’t know where the girls have gone?” Michael began.
“No more than you do,” she assured him. “But that Sylvia is really a Turk.”
“I suppose Lily didn’t tell you that I used to know her six years ago?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, she talked about you a lot. A good deal more than Miss Sylvia liked, that’s a sure thing.”
“Well, do you think it’s fair for Sylvia to carry her off like this? I want to marry Lily, Mrs. Gainsborough.”
“There, only fancy what a daring that Sylvia has. She’s a nice girl, and very high-spirited, but she is a Miss Dictatorial.”
Michael felt encouraged by Mrs. Gainsborough’s attitude, and he made up his mind to throw himself upon her mercy. Sentiment would be his only weapon, and he found some irony in the reflection that he had set out this morning to be a brutal cynic in his treatment of the situation.
“Do you think it’s fair to try to prevent Lily from marrying me? You know as well as I do that the life she’s leading now isn’t going to be the best life possible for her. You’re a woman of the world, Mrs. Gainsborough——”
“I was once,” she corrected. “And a very naughty world it was, too.”
“You were glad, weren’t you, when the Captain brought you to this house? You were glad to feel secure? You would have married him?”
“No, I wouldn’t marry him. I preferred to be as I am.
“Don’t you think,” Michael went on eagerly, “that if after six years I’m longing to marry her, I ought to marry her? I know that she might be much worse off than she is, but equally she might be much better off. Look here, Mrs. Gainsborough, it’s up to you. You’ve got to make it possible for me to see her. You’ve got to.”
“But if I do anything like that,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “it means I have an unpleasantness with Sylvia. That girl’s a regular heathen when she turns nasty. I should be left all alone in my little house. And what with Spring coming on and all, and the flowers looking so nice in the garden, I should feel very much the square peg in the round hole.”
“Lily and I would come and see you,” he promised. “And I don’t think Sylvia would leave you. She’d never find another house like Mulberry Cottage or another landlady like you.”
“Yes, I daresay; but you can’t tell these things. Once she’s in her tantrums, there’s no saying what will happen. And, besides, I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“I want you to send me word the first moment that Lily’s alone for an hour; and when I ring, do answer the bell.”
“Now that wasn’t my fault yesterday,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Really I thought we should have the fire-escape in. The way you nagged at that poor bell! It was really chronic. But would she let me so much as speak to you, even with the door only on the jar? Certainly not! And all the time she was snapping round the house like a young crocodile. And yet I’m really fond of that girl. Well, when the Captain died, she was a daughter to me. Oh, she was, she was really a daughter to me. Well, you see, his sister invited me to the funeral, which I thought was very
“Look here,” said Michael. “When the Captain gave you this house, he loved you. You were young, weren’t you? You were young and beautiful? Well, would you like to think your house was going to be used to separate two people very much in love with each other? You can say I climbed over the wall. You can make any excuse you like to Sylvia. But, Mrs. Gainsborough, do, do let me know when Lily is going to be alone. If she doesn’t want to come away with me, it will be my fault, and that will be the end of it. If only you’ll help me at the beginning. Will you? Will you promise to help me?”
“I never could resist a man,” sighed Mrs. Gainsborough, with resignation. “There’s a character! Oh, well, it’s my own and no one else’s, that’s one good job.”
Michael had to wait until February was nearly over before he heard from her. It had been very difficult to remain quietly at Cheyne Walk, but he knew that if he were to show any sign of activity, Sylvia would carry Lily off again.
“A person to see you, sir,” said the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid.
Michael found Mrs. Gainsborough sitting in the hall. She was wearing a bonnet tied with very bright cerise ribbons.
“They’ve had a rumpus, the pair of them, this afternoon. And Sylvia’s gone off in the sulks. I really was quite aggravated with her. Oh, she’s a willful spitfire, that girl, sometimes. She really is.”
Michael was coming away without a coat or hat, and Mrs. Gainsborough stopped him.
“Now don’t behave like a silly. Dress yourself properly and don’t make me run. I’m getting stout, you know,” she protested.
“We’ll get a hansom.”
“What, ride in a hansom? Never! A four-wheeler if you like.”
It was difficult to find a four-wheeler, and Michael was nearly mad with impatience.
“Now don’t upset yourself. Sylvia won’t be back to-night, and there’s no need to tug at me as if I was a cork in a bottle. People will think we’re a walking poppy-show, if you don’t act more quiet. They’re all turning round to stare at us.”
A four-wheeler appeared presently, and very soon they were walking down Tinderbox Lane. Michael felt rather like a little boy out with his nurse, as he kept turning back to exhort Mrs. Gainsborough to come more quickly. She grew more and more red in the face, and so wheezy that he was afraid something would happen to her, and for a few yards made no attempt to hurry her along. At last they reached Mulberry Cottage.
“Supposing Sylvia has come back!” he said.
“I keep on telling you she’s gone away for the night. Now get on indoors with you. You’ve nearly been my death.”
“I say, you don’t know how grateful I am to you!” Michael exclaimed, turning round and grasping her fat hands.
Mrs. Gainsborough shouted upstairs to Lily as loudly as her breathlessness would permit:
“I’ve brought you back that surprise packet I promised.”
Then she vanished, and Michael waited for Lily at the
“Lily, how can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It’s absolutely intolerable.”
“She’s been horrid to me to-day,” said Lily resentfully.
“Well, why do you put up with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I hate always squabbling. It’s much easier to give way to her, and usually I don’t much mind.”
“You don’t much mind whether we’re married!” Michael exclaimed. “How can you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you marry me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look beautiful. You’d be happy married to me—you really would.”
“Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father didn’t get on, and Doris doesn’t get on with the man she’s married to. In fact, everybody seems to hate it.”
“Do you hate me?” Michael demanded.
“No, I think you’re awfully sweet.”
“Well, why don’t you marry me? You’ll have plenty of money and nothing to bother about. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy being married.”
For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve. For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting at the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty, the bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess her without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. “Michael, why do you make me love you so?” Was that the last protest she ever made against the thralldom of
“Lily,” he cried, catching her to him. “You’re coming away with me now.”
He kissed her a hundred times.
“Now! Now! Do you hear me?”
She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.
“Quite an elopement,” Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.
“A very virtuous elopement,” said Michael, with a laugh.
“Oh, but shan’t I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!”
“Well, it’s Sylvia’s fault,” said Lily fretfully. “She shouldn’t worry me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in the world.”
The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.
“Where are you going?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked. “I declare, you’re like two babes in the wood.”
“To my sister’s in Huntingdonshire,” said Michael, and he wrote out the address.
“Oh, in the country! Well, Summer’ll be on us before we know where we are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished.”
“Is your sister pretty?” Lily asked, as they were driving to King’s Cross.
“She’s handsome,” said Michael. “You’ll like her, I think. And her husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to say we’re coming.”
THE GATE OF IVORY
It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella, but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a little Stella’s judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the hedgerows monotonously, and the horses’ breath curled round the rigid form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if she were happy.
“It makes me sleepy driving like this,” she murmured. Her head was on his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.
There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they arrived, though Michael watched Stella’s glances rather anxiously.
Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black:
Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.
“Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play.”
It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good impression. Everything seemed
When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily’s life would be fatal. He found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother everything else in a great surprise.
“Of course, that’s what I imagined you were thinking of doing,” said Stella. “So you’ve made up your quarrel of five years ago?”
“When are you going to get married?” Alan asked.
“Well, I hoped you’d be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live.”
“Oh, of course she can stay here,” said Stella.
“Oh, rather, of course,” Alan echoed.
Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks
A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being slowly chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather anxious to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any opportunity. As for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and saying very little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under the shadow of disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael determined to come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning of strong easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a walk to Stella.
They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.
“I don’t think I care much for this country of yours,” said Michael at last. “It’s flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I should care to live here, I don’t know.”
“There’s a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of the wind there.”
Michael resented Stella’s pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a fortnight.
“I hate badly trained dogs,” he grumbled when Stella turned round to whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.
“So do I,” she agreed.
It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was easier in the shelter of the wood.
“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for having us to stay down here,” he began.
Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:
“Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?” she demanded.
Her use of the word “business” annoyed him: it crystallized all the offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly attitude these two weeks.
“I shall be delighted to talk about this ‘business.’ Though why you should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don’t quite know.”
“Do you want me to speak out frankly—to say exactly what I think of you and Lily and of your marrying her? You won’t like it, and I won’t do it unless you ask me.”
“Go on,” said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers. It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood. Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.
“Go on, I’m waiting for you to begin,” Michael repeated.
“Straight off, then,” she said, “I may as well tell you that this marriage is impossible. I don’t know where you found her again, and I don’t care. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me what she had been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else. But, Michael, she’s flabby. You’ll hate me for saying so, but she is, she really is! In a year you’ll admit that; you’ll see her growing older and flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that’s possible. Even her beauty won’t last. These very fair girls fall to pieces like moth-eaten dolls. I’ve tried to find something in her during this fortnight. I’ve tried and tried; but there’s nothing. You may be in love with her now, though I don’t believe you are. I think it’s all a piece of sentimentalism. I’ve often teased you about getting married, but please don’t suppose that I haven’t realized how almost impossible it would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear and tear of your idealism. I’m prepared to bet that behind your determination to marry this girl there’s a reason, a lovely, unpractical, idealistic reason. Isn’t there? You’ve been away with her for a week-end, and have tortured yourself into a theory of reparation. Is that it? Or you’ve fallen in love with the notion of yourself in love at eighteen. Oh, you can’t marry her, you foolish old darling.”
“Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn’t keep whistling to that infernal dog,” said Michael. “If this marriage is so terrible, I should have thought you’d have forgotten there were such animals as cocker-spaniels. It’s rubbish for you to say you’ve tried to find something in Lily. You haven’t made the slightest attempt. You’ve criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You’re sunk deep already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when you were
“No, you were always very cautiously fraternal,” said Stella. “Ah, no, I won’t say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you’ll break my heart if you marry this girl.”
“You won’t do anything of the kind,” he contradicted. “You’ll be whistling to spaniels all the time.”
“Michael, it’s really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I’m feeling so wretched about you.”
“It’s all fine for you to sneer at Lily,” said Michael. “But I can remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room over some man who’d made a fool of you. You looked pretty flabby then.”
“How dare you remind me of that?” Stella cried, in a fury. “How dare you? How dare you?”
“You brought it on yourself,” said Michael coldly.
“You’re going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry her, then! But don’t come to me for sympathy, when she’s forced you to drag yourself through the divorce court.”
“No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again,” said Michael bitterly. “Unless it’s for advice when I want to buy a spaniel.”
They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far they had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with marriage. Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally were smashed
“I suppose you wouldn’t object to keeping Lily here two or three days more, while I find a place in town?” said Michael. It only struck him when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor. Stella would despise him more than ever.
“Michael,” Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path. “Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I’m willing actually to plead with you. It’s intolerable to think of you tied to her!”
“It’s too late,” said Michael. “I must marry her. Not for any reasons that the world would consider reasons,” he went on. “But because I want to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me before the world.”
“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! It’s all wrong. She’s all wrong. Her people are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know how casual he is about people he doesn’t like. He usually flings them out of his mind at once.”
“Oh, Alan’s amazing in every way,” said Michael. He longed to say that he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so much the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite place to which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for a few
Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.
“Look here,” she said. “You absurd old Quixote, listen. I’m going to do all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if you’ll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce I mean that I’ll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win in the end and marry her.”
“Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?”
“Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you’ll come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Lily,” said Michael, frowning.
“The truce has begun,” Stella declared. “For a fortnight I’ll be an angel.”
Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to the wood where he
“Lily, you look adorable in this glade,” he told her. “I believe, if you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree.”
The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses and brought them to Lily.
“These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you’re going to live in? Will you not be lonely?”
“I like to have you with me always,” she murmured.
He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were usually mute.
“We shall be married in a month,” he cried. “Can you smell violets?”
“Something sweet I smell.”
But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering companies.
“These eves of early Spring are like swords,” Michael exclaimed.
“Like what?” Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.
“Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their sharpness and sweetness.”
“Oh, you mean it’s cold,” she said. “Take my arm.”
“Well, I meant rather more than that, really,” Michael laughed. But because she had offered him her arm he forgot
Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.
“Not more than a fortnight, mind,” were Stella’s last words.
He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.
“Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill, Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent’s Canal, Adelphi Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is impossible. But you’re living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to move from there?”
Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who she was or where Michael had met her.
“By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don’t think I’m desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal, if we can find the right one.”
That afternoon they set out.
They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.
“Yes, but we don’t want to start a printing press,”
It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they went off to Regent’s Park.
“I don’t think you’re likely to find anything so good as that house,” Maurice said gloomily. “In fact, I know you won’t. I wish I could afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the Temple just as soon from there.”
“I don’t see why he should bother about the Temple,” said Michael. “That house was rather bigger.”
“You’ll never find another house like it,” Maurice prophesied. “Look at this neighborhood we’re driving through now. Impossible to live here!”
They were in the Hampstead Road.
“I haven’t any intention of doing so,” Michael laughed. “But there remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought.”
“Wonderful house!” Maurice sighed. “I shall always regret you didn’t take it.”
However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the new prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that seemed to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close around them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near Regent’s Park; and they crossed St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale, walking on until they reached a point where at the confluence of two branches the canal became a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole length of
“There’s a curious place,” said Michael. “How on earth does one get at it?”
They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance down a flight of steps.
“Ararat House,” Michael read.
“Flat to let,” Maurice read.
“I think this looks rather promising,” said Michael.
It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house, under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion. The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes, there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms:
As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must live here.
It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and the cameos of ThÉophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with orient gewgaws; Barbey d’Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a corner Villiers de l’Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts with whom Michael had identified it.
“But this is like a scene in a pantomime,” Maurice exclaimed.
It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of nymphs and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of black and yellow lozenges.
“It’s hideous,” Maurice exclaimed.
The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
“Hideous but rather fascinating,” Michael said. “Look at the queer melancholy light, and look at the view.”
It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they walked out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries of slag and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright green slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city’s breath: the circling of the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
“In summer this will be wonderful,” Michael predicted.
“On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,” Maurice said.
“Except that they’ll probably have retired to bed,” Michael pointed out.
“I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,” Maurice laughed.
“Let’s ask the housekeeper,” Michael said solemnly.
They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead water without.
“Who lives in the other flats?” Michael inquired of the housekeeper.
“There’s four others,” she began. “Up above there’s Colonel and Mrs....”
“I see,” Michael interrupted. “Just ordinary people. Do they ever go out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange curtains?”
The housekeeper stared at him.
“They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The courts is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman to see about the flat.”
She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take Number One, Ararat House.
“It absolutely was made to set her off,” he told Maurice. “You wait till I’ve furnished it as it ought to be furnished.”
“And we’ll have amazing fÊtes aqueuses in the summer,” Maurice declared. “We’ll buy a barge and—why, of course—the canal flows into the Thames at Grosvenor Road.”
“Underground—like the Styx,” said Michael, nodding.
“Of course, it’s going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other except by water.”
“Like splendid dead Venetians,” said Michael.
The fortnight of Lily’s stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian glass; oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small round mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls were hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There were slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and lemon satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over the parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous
“You know,” said Maurice seriously, “she’ll have to be very beautiful to carry this off.”
“She is very beautiful,” said Michael. “And there’s room for her to walk about here. She’ll move about this room as wonderfully as those swans upon the canal.”
“Michael, what’s happened to you? You’re becoming as eccentric as me.” Maurice looked at him rather jealously. “And, I say, do you really want me to come with you to King’s Cross to-morrow afternoon?”
Michael nodded.
“After you’ve helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see the person we’ve done it for.”
“Yes, but look here. Who’s going to stay in the flat with her? You can’t leave her alone until you’re married. As you told me the story, it sounded very romantic; but if she’s going to be your wife, you’ve got to guard her reputation.”
Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.
“I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman,” he said.
“That’s all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this time.”
“You don’t know anybody?”
“I? Great scott, no!”
They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave him for an appointment.
“To-morrow afternoon then at King’s Cross,” he said, and jumped on an omnibus.
Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth
Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught sight of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of the automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk? Then he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip the kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered the Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read in a sing-song the virtues of a procession of various automatons seeking situations as cooks and housemaids.
“What wages do you wish to give?”
“Oh, the usual wages,” Michael said. “But I rather want these servants to-day.”
He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her promise to suit him by to-morrow at midday. She suggested a capable housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort was perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o’clock, and he drove off to King’s Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for him on the platform.
Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that he was free this afternoon.
“Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home to-night,” said Maurice. “Or will you be very late?”
“Oh, no, I shan’t be late,” Michael answering, flushing. He had a notion that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation. It seemed as if he were testing his behavior.
Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio
“And of course,” said Michael, “you’ve got to buy lots and lots of clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two hundred—three hundred pounds?”
The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time, in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that he had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had been given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed through his mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux, and, remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad that Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined Manon.
“And do you like Miss Harper?” he inquired.
“Yes, she seems all right.”
They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest in household affairs.
“I think I ought to go now,” said Michael.
“Oh, no, stay a little longer.”
But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.
“Oh, you’re going now?” said Miss Harper, looking at him rather curiously.
“I shall be round in the morning. You’ll finish making the lists of what you still want?”
Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he drove to Grosvenor Road.
Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.
“Look here, old chap,” Maurice began at once, “you can’t possibly marry that girl.”
Michael frowned.
“You too?”
“I know all about her,” Maurice went on. “I’ve never actually met her, but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five years ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened in between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who’s had an affair with her—a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He’s often up here. You’re bound to meet him some time.”
“Not at all, if I never come here again,” said Michael, in a cold rage.
“It’s no use for you to be angry with me,” said Maurice. “I should be a rotten friend, if I didn’t warn you.”
“Oh, go to hell!” said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.
“I’ll die first,” retorted Maurice, grinning.
Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.
“So much for 422 Grosvenor Road,” he said, slamming the big front door behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he walked on without turning his head.
It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know about her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If Maurice chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would have to be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from the
A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room. Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her taste. Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old silver, or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was London and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the enchantment of her presence. Often they walked up and down the still deserted garden, by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide nearer to them, waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand with her hair in a stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly like the necks of the birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful in the long luminous dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening star that were shining upon them as they walked by the edge of the water.
For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic; that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at midnight, to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden stuffs and candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by going away at midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every night he went away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black dress, to leave in the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were not forbidding
The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten. They could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else did the weather deprive him.
Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers and mirrors.
“Why didn’t you wire me to say you were coming?” he asked.
“I came because Stella wrote to me.”
Michael frowned, and his mother went on:
“It wasn’t very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it yourself.”
Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from them so utterly engrossed in his secluded
“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me,” he admitted. “But life has been such a whirl lately that I’ve somehow taken for granted the obvious courtesies. Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather choked me off taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why do you begin on the subject at once, before you’ve even taken your things off?”
She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.
“Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are standing at the edge of this terrible step?”
“Oh, I think I’m perfectly level-headed,” he said, “even on the brink of disaster.”
“Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I’d come back in March as I meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn’t very well leave her. She’s always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I did not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in the next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you, and now you ask most cruelly why I don’t take my things off.”
“There wasn’t any need for you to worry yourself,” he said hotly. “Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices.”
“Prejudices!” his mother repeated. “Prejudice is a very mild word for what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry.”
“But it is prejudice,” Michael insisted. “She knows nothing against her.”
“She knows a great deal.”
“How?” he demanded incredulously.
“You’d better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off these furs. It’s stifling in London. So very much hotter than the Riviera.”
Mrs. Fane left him with Stella’s letter.
LONG’S HOTEL,
April 9.
Darling Mother,
When you get this you must come at once to London. You are the only person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible creature imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he was eighteen, and I think she treated him badly even then—I remember his being very upset about it in the summer before my first concert. Apparently he rediscovered her this winter, and for some reason or other wants to marry her now. He brought her down to Hardingham, and I saw then that she was a minx. Alan remembers her mother as a dreadful woman who tried to make love to him. Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!
Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row about it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by herself), and we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to say, and nothing to do except look at herself in the glass. I had declared war on the marriage from the moment she left, but I had only a fortnight to stop it. I was rather in a difficulty because I knew nothing definite against her, though I was sure that if she wasn’t a bad lot already, she would be later on. I wrote first of all to Maurice Avery, who told me that she’d had a not at all reputable affair with a painter friend of his. It seems, however, that he had already spoken to Michael about this
Your loving
Stella.
Michael was touched by Lonsdale’s attitude. It showed, he thought, an exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing was going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother to come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such a very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she must have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought her downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.
“Have you read Stella’s letter?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at once. It’s dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella and not resent her interference.”
“I see that you feel bound to apologize for her,” Michael observed.
“Now, that is so bitter.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find out things I know already.”
“Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?”
“I didn’t know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been people. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to marry her.”
“But you’ll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go on knowing Lonsdale, for instance.”
“Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case,” Michael said. “You couldn’t have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay I shall be able to make new friends.”
“But, darling boy,” she said pleadingly, “your position will be so terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be dragged down by this horrible creature!”
“Mother, believe me, you’re getting a very distorted idea of Lily. She’s beautiful, you know; and if she’s not so clever as Stella, I’m rather glad of it. I don’t think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she hasn’t committed the sin of being common. She won’t disgrace you outwardly, and if Stella hadn’t gone round raking up all this abominable
“My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren’t too young to know that it’s impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without reproach.”
“But, mother, you ...” he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.
“Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won’t marry her, you won’t, will you?”
“Yes, mother. I’m going to,” he said coldly.
“But why so impetuously?” she asked. “Why won’t you wait a little time?”
“There’s no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts.”
“If only your father were alive!” she exclaimed. “It would have shocked him so inexpressibly.”
“He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn’t he?” Michael said, and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.
She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical and heroic dignity of reproach:
“I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” he murmured. “It was inexcusable.”
“Michael,” she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, “won’t you give up this marriage?”
He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.
“Mother, I must keep faith with myself.”
“Only with yourself? Then she doesn’t care for you? And you’re not thinking of her?”
“Of course she cares for me.”
“But she’d get over it almost at once?”
“Perhaps,” he admitted.
“Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?”
“That will be my look-out,” he said impatiently. “If she fails, it will be my fault. It’s always the man’s fault. Always.”
“Very well,” said his mother resignedly. “I can say no more, can I? You must do as you like.”
The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would show his penitence.
“Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for her, there is a deeper cause, a reason that’s bound up with my whole theory of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not back out of this marriage.”
“Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?” she asked.
He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called her “this girl,” half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or abstractions of morality to obscure it.
“Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you.”
“Except not marry her.”
“That wouldn’t be a sacrifice worth making,” he argued. “Because if I did that I should destroy myself to myself,
“Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?”
He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?
“Not merely for your own sake,” she urged; “but for all our sakes. We shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three months’ time.”
He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.
“I won’t marry her for three months,” he promised.
“And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel.”
She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately self again.
Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had promised his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She pouted over her frocks.
“I wish you’d settled that before. What good will all these dresses be now?”
“You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here without me?”
“Without you? Why are you going away?”
“Because I must, Lily. Because ... oh, dearest girl, can’t you see that I’m too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day and every night as I have been all this fortnight?”
“If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather dull, shan’t I?”
“And shan’t I?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“Perhaps.”
“I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me.”
He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.
Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time of trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must be married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well. He was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid the people who had brought it about.
Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that would take him down into Berkshire at once.
SEEDS OF POMEGRANATE
It was almost dark when Michael reached the little station at the foot of the Downs. He was half inclined to put up at the village inn and arrive at the Abbey in the morning; but he was feeling depressed by the alteration of his plans, and longed to withdraw immediately into the monastic peace. He had bought what he needed for the couple of nights before any luggage could reach him, and he thought that with so little to carry he might as well walk the six miles to the Abbey. He asked when the moon would be up.
“Oh, not much before half-past nine, sir,” the porter said.
Michael suddenly remembered that to-morrow was Easter Sunday, and, thinking it would be as well not to arrive too late, in case there should be a number of guests, he managed to get hold of a cart. The wind blew very freshly as they slowly climbed the Downs, and the man who was driving him was very voluble on the subject of the large additions which had been made to the Abbey buildings during the last few years.
“They’ve put up a grand sort of a lodge—Gatehouse, so some do call it. A bit after the style of the Tower of London, I’ve heard some say.”
Michael was glad to think that Dom Cuthbert’s plans seemed to be coming to perfection in their course. How
The Abbey Gatehouse was majestic in the darkness, and the driver pealed the great bell with a portentous clangor. Michael recognized the pock-marked brother who opened the door; but he could not remember his name. He felt it would be rather absurd to ask the monk if he recognized him by this wavering lanthorn-light.
“Is the Reverend—is Dom Cuthbert at the Abbey now?” he asked. “You don’t remember me, I expect? Michael Fane. I stayed here one Autumn eight or nine years ago.”
The monk held up the lanthorn and stared at him.
“The Reverend Father is in the Guest Room now,” said Brother Ambrose. Michael had suddenly recalled his name.
“Do you think I shall be able to stay here to-night? Or have you a lot of guests for Easter?”
“We can always find room,” said Brother Ambrose. Michael dismissed his driver and followed the monk along the drive.
Dom Cuthbert knew him at once, and seemed very glad that he had come to the Abbey.
“You can have a cell in the Gatehouse. Our new Gatehouse. It’s copied from the one at Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. Very beautiful. Very beautiful.”
Michael was introduced to the three or four guests, all types of ecclesiastical laymen, who had been talking with the Abbot. The Compline bell rang almost at once, and the Office was still held in the little chapel of mud and laths built by the hands of the monks.
| Keep me as the apple of an eye. |
| Hide me in the shadow of thy wing. |
Here was worship unhampered by problems of social behavior: here was peace.
Lying awake that night in his cell; watching the lattices very luminous in the moonlight; hearing the April wind in the hazel coppice, Michael tried to reach a perspective of his life these nine months since Oxford, but sleep came to him and pacified all confusions. He went to Mass next morning, but did not make his Communion, because he had a feeling that he could only have done so under false pretenses. There was no reason why he should have felt thus, he assured himself; but this morning there had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill. He went for a walk on the Downs, over the great green spaces that marked no season save in the change of the small flowers blowing in their turf. He wondered if he would be able to find the stones he had erected that July day when he first came here with Chator. He found what, as far as he could remember, was the place; and he also found a group of stones that might have been the ruins of his little monument. More remarkable than old stones now seemed to him a Pasque anemone colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously reminded him of the evening in March when he had walked with Lily in the wood at Hardingham.
The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael’s partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke. He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring his sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a feverish adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions for Lily’s entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart, begging him to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being pursued and
Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.
“Stay at least to-night,” he urged, and Michael gave way.
He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany. He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak he dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the primroses limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs; and when the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway station. To-day he ought to have married Lily.
At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting, unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne Walk.
“I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,” was the explanation he gave himself of what already seemed mere sleeplessness.
Michael found his mother very much worried by his disappearance; she had assumed that he had broken his promise. He consoled her, but excused himself from staying with her in town.
“You mustn’t ask too much of me,” he said.
“No, no, dearest boy; I’m glad for you to go away, but where will you go?”
He thought he would pay an overdue visit to Cobble Place.
Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Carthew were delighted to see him, and he felt as he always felt at Cobble Place the persistent tranquillity which not the greatest inquietude of spirit could
Yet every day when Michael sat down to write to Lily, he almost wrote to say he was coming to London as soon as his letter. Her letters to him, written in a sprawling girlish hand, were always very much alike.
1 ARARAT HOUSE,
ISLAND ROAD, W.
My dear,
Come back soon. I’m getting bored. Miss Harper isn’t bad. Can’t write a long letter because this nib is awful. Kisses.
Your loving
Lily.
This would stand for any of them.
May month had come in: Michael and Kenneth were finding whitethroats’ nests in the nettle-beds of the paddock, before a word to Mrs. Ross was said about the marriage.
“Stella has written to me about it,” she told him.
They were sitting in the straggling wind-frayed orchard beyond the stream: lamps were leaping: apple-blossom stippled the grass: Kenneth was chasing Orange Tips up the slope toward Grogg’s Folly.
“Stella has been very busy all round,” said Michael. “I suppose according to her I’m going to marry an impossible creature. Creature is as far as she usually gets in particular description of Lily.”
“She certainly wasn’t very complimentary about your choice,” Mrs. Ross admitted.
“I wish somebody could understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m mad because I’m going to marry a beautiful girl who isn’t very clever.”
“But I gathered from Stella,” Mrs. Ross said, “that her past ... Michael, you must be very tolerant of me if I upset you, because we happen to be sitting just where I was stupid and unsympathetic once before. You see what an impression that made on me. I actually remember the very place.”
“She probably has done things in the past,” said Michael. “But she’s scarcely twenty-three yet, and I love her. Her past becomes a trifle. Besides, I was in love with her six years ago, and I—well, six years ago I was rather thoughtless very often. I don’t want you to think that I’m going to marry her now from any sense of duty. I love her. At the same time when people argue that she’s not the correct young Miss they apparently expect me to marry, I’m left unmoved. Pasts belong to men as well as to women.”
Mrs. Ross nodded slowly. Kenneth came rushing up, shouting that he had caught a frightfully rare butterfly. Michael looked at it.
“A female Orange Tip,” was the verdict.
“But isn’t that frightfully rare?”
Michael shook his head.
“No rarer than the males; but you don’t notice them, that’s all.”
Kenneth retired to find some more.
“And you’re sure you’ll be happy with her?” Mrs. Ross asked.
“As sure as I am that I shall be happy with anybody. I ought to be married to her by now. This delay that I’ve so weakly allowed isn’t going to effect much.”
Michael sighed. He had meant to be in Provence this month of May.
“But the delay can’t do any harm,” Mrs. Ross pointed out. “At any rate, it will enable you to feel more sure of yourself, and more sure of her, too.”
“I don’t know,” said Michael doubtfully. “My theory has always been that if a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing at once.”
“And after you’re married,” she asked, “what are you going to do? Just lead a lazy life?”
“Oh, no; I suppose I shall find some occupation that will keep me out of mischief.”
“That sounds a little cynical. Ah, well, I suppose it is a disappointment to me.”
“What’s a disappointment?”
“I’ve hoped and prayed so much lately that you would have a vocation....”
“A priest,” he interrupted quickly, “It’s no good, Mrs. Ross. I have thought of being one, but I’m always put off by the professional side of it. And there are ways of doing what a priest does without being one.”
“Of course, I can’t agree with you there,” she said.
“Well, apart from the sacraments, I mean. Lately I’ve seen something of the underworld, and I shall think of some way of being useful down there. Already I believe I’ve done a bit.”
They talked of the problems of the underworld and Michael was encouraged by what he fancied was a much greater breadth in her point of view nowadays to speak of things that formerly would have made her gray eyes harden in fastidious disapproval.
“I feel happier about you since this talk,” she said. “As long as you won’t be content to let your great gift of humanity be wasted, as long as you won’t be content to think
“Oh, no, I shan’t feel that. In fact, I shall be all the more anxious to justify myself.”
Kenneth came back to importune Michael for a walk as far as Grogg’s Folly.
“It’s such fun for Kenneth to have you here!” Mrs. Ross exclaimed. “I’ve never seen him so boisterously happy.”
“I used to enjoy myself here just as much as he does,” said Michael. “Though perhaps I didn’t show it. I always think of myself as rather a dreary little beast when I was a kid.”
“On the contrary, you were a most attractive boy; such a wide-eyed little boy,” said Mrs. Ross softly, looking back into time. “I’ve seldom seen you so happy as just before I blew out your candle the first night of your first stay here.”
“I say, do come up the hill,” interrupted Kenneth despairingly.
“A thousand apologies, my lord,” said Michael. “We’ll go now.”
They did not stop until they reached the tower on the summit.
“When I was your age,” Michael told him, “I used to think that I could see the whole of England from here.”
“Could you really?” said Kenneth, in admiration. “Could you see any of France, too?”
“I expect so,” Michael answered. “I expect really I thought I could see the whole world. Kenneth, what are you going to be when you grow up? A soldier?”
“Yes, if I can—or what is a philosopher?”
“A philosopher philosophizes.”
“Does he really? Is that a difficult thing to do, to philosopherize?”
“Yes; it’s almost harder to do than to pronounce.”
Soon they were tearing down the hill, frightening the larks to right and left of their progress.
The weather grew warmer every day, and at last Mrs. Carthew came out in a wheel-chair to see the long-spurred columbines, claret and gold, watchet, rose and white.
“Really quite a display,” she said to Michael. “And so you’re to get married?”
He nodded.
“What for?” the old lady demanded, looking at him over her spectacles.
“Well, principally because I want to,” Michael answered, after a short pause.
“The best reason,” she agreed. “But in your case insufficient, and I’ll tell you why—you aren’t old enough yet to know what you do want.”
“Twenty-three,” Michael reminded her.
“Twenty-fiddlesticks!” she snapped. “And isn’t there a good deal of opposition?”
“A good deal.”
“And no doubt you feel a fine romantical heroical young fellow?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, I’m not going to argue against your marrying her,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Because I know quite well that the more I proved you to be wrong, the more you’d be determined to prove I was. But I can give you advice about marriage, because I’ve been married and you haven’t. Is she dark? If she’s dark, be very cold for a year, and if she doesn’t leave you in that time, she’ll adore you for the rest of her life.”
“But she’s fair,” said Michael. “Very fair indeed.”
“Then beat her. Not actually, of course; but beat her figuratively for a year. If you don’t, she’ll either be a shrew or a whiner. Both impossible to live with.”
“Which did Captain Carthew do to you?” asked Michael, twinkling.
“Neither; I ruled him with a rod of iron.”
“But do you think I’m wise to wait like this before marrying her?” Michael asked.
“There’s no wisdom in waiting to do an unwise thing.”
“You’re so sure it is unwise?”
“All marriages are unwise,” said Mrs. Carthew sharply. “That’s why everybody gets married. For most people it is the only imprudence they have an opportunity of committing. After that, they’re permanently cured of rashness, and settle down. There are exceptions, of course: they take to drink. I must say I’m greatly pleased with these long-spurred columbines.”
Michael thought she had finished the discussion of his marriage, but suddenly she said:
“I thought I told you to come and see me when you went down from Oxford.”
“I ought to have come,” Michael agreed rather humbly. He always felt inclined to propitiate the old lady.
“Here we have the lamentable result. Marriage at twenty-three.”
“Alan married at twenty-three,” he pointed out.
“Two fools don’t make a wise-man,” said Mrs. Carthew.
“He’s very happy.”
“He would be satisfied with much less than you, and he has married a delightful girl.”
“I’m going to marry a delightful girl.”
The old lady made no reply. Nor did she comment again upon his prospect of happiness.
In mid-May, after a visit of nearly a month, Michael left Cobble Place and went to stay at Plashers Mead. Guy Hazlewood was the only friend he still had who could not possibly have come into contact with Lily or her former
“Do I intrude upon your May idyll?” Michael asked.
“My dear chap, don’t be so absurd. But why aren’t you married? You’re as bad as me.”
“Why aren’t you married?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Guy sighed. “Everybody seems to be conspiring to put it off.”
They were sitting in Guy’s green library. The windows wide open let in across the sound of the burbling stream the warm air of the lucid May night, where bats and owls and evejars flew across the face of the decrescent moon.
“It’s this dreamy country in which you live,” said Michael.
“What about you? You’ve let people put off your marriage.”
“Only for another two months,” Michael explained.
“You see I’m down to one hundred and fifty pounds a year now,” Guy muttered. “I can’t marry on that, and I can’t leave this place, and her people can’t afford to make her an allowance. They think I ought to go away and work at journalism. However, I’m not going to worry you with my troubles.”
Guy was a good deal with Pauline every day: Michael wrote long letters to Lily and read poetry.
“Browning?” asked Guy one afternoon, looking over Michael’s shoulder.
“Yes; The Statue and The Bust.”
“Oh, don’t remind me of that poem. It haunts me,” Guy declared.
A week passed. There was no moon now, and the nights grew warmer. It was weather to make lovers happy, but Guy seemed worried. He would not come for walks with
1 ARARAT HOUSE,
ISLAND ROAD, W.
My dear,
It’s getting awfully dull in London. Miss Harper asked me to call her “Mabel.” Rather cheek, I thought, don’t you think so? But she’s really awfully decent. I can’t write a long letter because we’re going to the Palace. I say, do buck up and come back to London, I’m getting bored. Love and kisses.
Lily.
What’s the good of writing “kisses”?
What indeed was the good of writing “kisses”? Michael thought, as the match fizzed out in the dewy grass at his feet. It was not fair to treat Lily like this. He had captured her from life with Sylvia, because he had meant to marry her at once. Now he had left her alone in that flat with a woman he did not know at all. Whatever people might say against Lily, she was very patient and trustful.
Pauline came to tea next day with her sisters Margaret and Monica. Michael had an idea that she did not like him very much. She talked shyly and breathlessly to him; and he, embarrassed by her shyness, answered in monosyllables.
“Pauline is rather jealous of you,” said Guy that evening, as they sat in the library.
“Jealous of me?” Michael was amazed.
“She has some fantastic idea that you don’t approve of our engagement. Of course, I told her what nonsense she was thinking; but she vowed that this afternoon you showed quite plainly your disapproval of her. She insists that you are very cold and severe.”
“I’m afraid I was very dull,” Michael confessed apologetically. “But I 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
“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
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?
“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.
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
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,”
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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,
“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
“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
“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
Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk under the mulberry tree: he realized what an
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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
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:
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
“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
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
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
“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
“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
“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.
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,
“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
“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
“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
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
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
“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
“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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
