“It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts,” said Stella, “if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And of course you’d ride a nag. I’m not sure really that you wouldn’t have to wear knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me feel like Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?”
“I should make up your mind which,” Michael advised.
“But you know what I mean,” she persisted. “The doctor’s wife would come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, ‘We must ask my brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to know. My brother knows everything.’ And she would agree with a pursed-up mouth. ‘Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone says your brother is a great scholar. It’s such a pleasure to have him at the Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?’”
“If you’re supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you at once that it’s not a bit like it.”
“But I think you ought to come and live near us,” Alan solemnly put in.
“Of course, my dear, he’s coming,” Stella declared.
“Of course I’m not,” Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the shrubbery’s edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In the quick vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds, Michael experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he intended to do.
“And how about Michael’s wife?” Alan asked.
Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
“Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him,” Stella confidently prophesied.
“No, really,” said Michael to hide his embarrassment. “I object. Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement.”
Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describea lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended to place him.
“I think rather a Quakerish person, don’t you, Alan? Rather neat and tiny with a great sense of humor and....”
“In fact, an admirable sick nurse,” Michael interposed, laughing.
Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now that by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in the long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed to Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the security of his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that fleeting disloyalty to his task.
Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn’s old white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made no attempt to find Lily.
Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael’s immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had achieved a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or two of the St. Mary’s dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at All Souls. The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was attractive to have anything so remote come suddenly within the region of feasibleness. He would lose nothing by tryingfor it, and if he succeeded what a congenial existence offered itself. With private means he would be able to divide his time between Oxford and London. There would really be nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that seemed to stretch before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he certainly had not worked hard enough to obtain a first without some talent) he would prosecute the study of history. He would make himself famous in a select sort of way. He would become the authority of a minor tributary to the great stream of research. A set of very scholarly, very thorough works would testify to his reputation. There were plenty of archaic problems still to be solved. He cast a proprietary glance over the centuries, and he had almost decided to devote himself to the service of Otto I and Sylvester II, when in a moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly before his mind as the ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of research into the past seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the congratulatory letters and decided to let the future wait a while. This pursuit of Lily was a mad business, no doubt, but to come to grips with the present called for a certain amount of madness.
Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of trying for All Souls.
“You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were up that you didn’t know what you ought to do, and now when it’s perfectly obvious you won’t make the slightest attempt to do it.”
“Used I to grumble?” asked Michael.
“Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical questions which had no answer,” said Alan severely.
“What if I told you I’d found an answer to a great many of them?”
“Ever since I’ve been engaged to Stella you’ve found itnecessary to be very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?”
“It’s imaginable, don’t you think, that I might be making up my mind to do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at All Souls?”
“But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch it.”
“I tell you it was a fluke.”
“My third wasn’t a fluke,” said Alan. “I worked really hard for it.”
“Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run,” Michael argued. “You have already fitted into your place with the most complete exactitude. There’s no dimension in your future that can possibly trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be too small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to squeeze into it most uncomfortably.”
“You’ll never do anything,” Alan prophesied. “Because you’ll always be doubting.”
“I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity,” Michael pointed out. “With all doubts and hesitations I’m perfectly convinced of one great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization. Reason carried to thenthpower can always with absurd ease be debauched by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind’s wretched little lament for disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because they are irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she claims to be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member of Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The franchise is to be endowed with a sacramental significance. Ifthe New Women win, they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men. But of course they won’t win, because God is so delightfully irrational. By the way, it’s worth noting that the peculiar vestment with which popular fancy has clothed the New Woman is called rational costume. You often hear of ‘rationals’ as a synonym for breeches. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about God being irrational. You never know what he’ll do next. He is a dreadful problem for rationalists. That’s why they have abolished him.”
“You’re confusing two different kinds of reason,” said Alan. “What you call impulse—unless your impulse is mere madness—is what I might call reason.”
“In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the reconstruction of your terminology. I’m not a philosopher, and therefore I’ve given this vague generic name ‘impulse’ to something which deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering impetus does it give to conduct, a very long name indeed.”
“But if you’re going through life depending on impulse,” Alan objected, “you’ll be no better off than a weathercock. You can’t discount reason in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by experience.”
“The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no reliance whatever.”
“It’s no good arguing with you,” Alan said. “Because what you call impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect logic.”
“Alan, I can’t believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I’m not going to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a country squire. Let’s hold on to what certainties we can.”
Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussionof the problem of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore he refrained.
There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was already in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the burden of it in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and Stella and Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join them, if he could get away from London.
“If you can get away!” Stella scoffed. “What rot you do talk.”
But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the stagnant sheen of the Thames.
That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from London for a while. After the performance he visited the Café d’Orange in Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often noticed the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the quality of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the Café d’Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he had so far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he was rather inclined to think that she was someone’s mistress and that Drake’s view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she had yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
Downstairs at the Café d’Orange was rather more like a corner of hell than Michael had anticipated. The tobaccosmoke which could not rise in these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly down and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner left by the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy tunics of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were grinding out ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking and laughter, the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of the waiters made such a din that Michael stood for a moment in confusion, debating the possibility of one more person threading his way through the serried tables to a seat.
There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and in one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and soon with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before him in that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always induced by ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped alcove, he seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and voices of the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic finale. After a time the various groups and individuals were separated in his mind, so that in their movements he began to take an easily transferred interest, endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant characteristics in turn. Round him in the alcove there were strange contrasts of behavior. At one table four offensive youths were showing off with exaggerated laughter for the benefit of nobody’s attention. Behind them in the crepuscule of two broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl; ivory white and cloying the air with her heavy perfume, was arguing in low passionate tones with a cold-eyed listener who with a straw was tracing niggling hieroglyphicsupon a moist surface of cigarette-ash. In the deepest corner a girl with a high complexion and bright eyes was making ardent love to a partially drunk and bearded man, winking the while over her shoulder at whoever would watch her comedy. The other places were filled by impersonal women who sipped from their glasses without relish and stared disdainfully at each other down their powdered noses. At Michael’s own table was a blotchy man who alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and immediately opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat pale face of the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat trimmed with daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not catch her eye, and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward the raffish and rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall were large mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in reflection the throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications. Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls, and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him, and he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
“You’re very silent, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll give you a penny for them.”
“I really wasn’t thinking about anything in particular,” said Michael. “Will you have a drink?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Alphonse!” she shouted, tugging at the arm of the overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. “Bring me a hot whisky-and-lemon. There’s a love.”
Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a fountain of glass.
“I’ve taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot,” she informed Michael. “You know. Anyone does, don’t they? Get a sudden fit and keep on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This’ll be my sixth to-night. But I’m a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I reckon it’ll bring me luck.”
“I expect it will,” Michael said.
“You are serious, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you was the spitting image of a fellow I know—Bert Saunders, who writes about the boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He’s more of a bright-eyes than you are, though.”
The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael’s health.
“Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it,” she said meditatingly. “What’s your name, kiddie?”
He told her.
“Michael,” she repeated. “You’re a Jew, then?”
He shook his head.
“Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name, isn’t it? Michael? Of course it is. I don’t mind Jew fellows myself. One or two of them have been very good to me. My name’s Daisy Palmer.”
The conversation languished slightly, because Michaelsince his encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very cautious.
“You look rather French,” was his most audacious sally toward the personal.
“Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself.”
Again the conversation dropped.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” Daisy volunteered. “She’s been having a row with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and tell me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here by now. What’s the time, kid?”
It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
“I’m rather worried over Doll,” she confided to Michael, “because this fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, ‘Doll, that dirty rotter you’re so soft over’ll swing for you before he’s done. Why don’t you leave him,’ I said, ‘and come and live along with me for a bit?’”
“And what did she say?” Michael asked.
But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
“Oh, doesn’t she look shocking white,” exclaimed Daisy. “Doll!” she shouted, waving to her. “Over here, duck.”
The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in exaggerated falsetto.
“—— to you,” she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said to these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Caféd’Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on otherwise indescribable humanity.
By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend’s side. She began immediately a voluble tale:
“Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told him off so as he could hardly look me in the face. ‘You call yourself a man,’ I said, ‘why, you dirty little alien.’ That’s what I called him. I did straight, ‘you dirty little——’”
“This is my friend,” interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed. It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember the convention of their profession.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand with half-a-simper.
“What will you drink?” asked Michael.
“Mine’s a brandy and soda, please. ‘You dirty little alien,’ I said.” Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
“Go on, did you? And what did he say?” asked Daisy admiringly.
“He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?”
“That’s right,” nodded Daisy wisely.
“‘For two years,’ I said, ‘you’ve let a girl keep you,’ I said, ‘and then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get hold of her,’ I said. ‘I’ll tear her eyes out.’ ‘No, you won’t, now then,’ he said. ‘Won’t I? I will, then,’ and with that I just lost control of my feelings, I felt that wild....”
“What did you do, Doll?” asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe the outraged memory.
“What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to the Orange. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you can sit drinkingtea while you break my heart.’ Don’t you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a straight girl when I first knew him. Straight—well, anyway not on the game like what I am now.” Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter self-compassion. “I’ve slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me like dirt.”
“Go on. Don’t cry, duck,” Daisy begged. “Come home with me to-night and we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn’t cry over him,” she said fiercely. “There’s no fellow worth crying over. The best of them isn’t worth crying over.”
The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly’s tears, and Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive pugnacity of the underworld, rose to attack them.
“Sit down,” Daisy commanded. “I wouldn’t mess my hands, if I was you, with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You’ll get us all into trouble.”
Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
Gradually Dolly’s tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
“Rotten, I call it, don’t you?” said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing to Michael.
He agreed with a profound nod.
“And she’s been that good to him. You wouldn’t believe.”
Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of Dolly’s virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
At this moment the subject of Daisy’s eulogy rose from her seat and stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the beerhall.
“My God!” she said, with ominous calm.
“What is it, duck?” asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
“My God!” Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer winked over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four offensive youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man ceased to look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily his teeth.
It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather a nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her friend. She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark that Florrie for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she could come it over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do that; yes, more than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging his way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using their best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate. Though she declared loudly that nothing would make her quit theOrange, and certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to be coaxed away.
Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers, which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how it had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and enmities and friendships of a complete society. He found himself explaining to several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been compelled to endure at the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was extraordinary how suddenly this absurd intrigue of the underworld came to seem tremendously important. He felt that all his sense of proportion was rapidly disappearing. In the middle of an excited justification of Dolly’s tears he was aware that he and his surroundings and his attitude were to himself incredible. He was positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the inconsequence of dreams. Or was all his life until this moment a dream, and was this reality? One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was the necessity to see the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the evening. He felt very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with admirable composure, and when he asked her advice about the course of action, he agreed at once with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a cab and be allowed in Daisy’s rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage and grief that was here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very imprudent display of emotion.
“She’ll be barred from coming down here,” said Daisy. “Come on, let’s get her home.”
“Where’s that Florrie?” screamed Dolly.
“She’s gone home. So what’s the use in your carrying on so mad? The manager’s got his eye on us, Doll. Come on, Doll, let’s get on home. I tell you the manager’s looking at us. You are a silly girl.”
“—— the manager,” said Dolly obstinately. “Let him look.”
“Why don’t you come and see if you can find Florrie outside?” Daisy suggested.
Dolly was moved by this proposal, and presently she agreed to vacate the Orange, much to Michael’s relief, for he was expecting every moment to see her attack the manager with the match-stand that was fretting her fingers. As it happened, Daisy’s well-meant suggestion was very unlucky because Hungarian Dave, the cause of all the bother, was standing on the pavement close to the entrance.
Daisy whispered to Michael to get a cab quickly, because Hungarian Dave was close at hand. He looked at him curiously, this degraded individual in whose domestic affairs he was now so deeply involved. A very objectionable creature he was, too, with his greasy hair and large red mouth. His cap was pulled down over the eyes, and he may have wished not to be seen; but an instinct for his presence made Dolly turn round, and in a moment she was in the thick of the delight of telling him off for the benefit of a crowd increasing with every epithet she flung. It was useless now to attempt to get her away, and Michael and Daisy could only drag her back when she seemed inclined to attack him with finger-nails or hatpin.
“Get a cab,” cried Daisy. “Never mind what she says. Get a cab, and we’ll put the silly thing into it and drive off. The coppers will be here in a moment.”
Michael managed to hail a hansom immediately, but when he turned back to the scene of the pavement the conditions of the dispute were entirely changed. Hungarian Dave, infuriated or frightened, had knocked Dolly down, and she was just staggering to her feet, when a policeman stepped into the circle.
“Come on, move along,” he growled.
The bully had merged himself in the ring of onlookers, and Dolly, with a cry of fury, flung herself in his direction.
“Stop that, will you?” the policeman said savagely, seizing her by the arm.
“Go on, it’s a dirty shame,” cried Daisy. “Why don’t you take the fellow as knocked her down?”
Michael by this time had forced his way through the crowd, rage beating upon his brain like a great scarlet hammer.
“You infernal ass,” he shouted to the constable. “Haven’t you got the sense to see that this woman was attacked first? Where is the blackguard who did it?” he demanded of the stupid, the gross, the vilely curious press of onlookers. No one came forward to support him, and Hungarian Dave had slipped away.
“Move on, will you?” the policeman repeated.
“Damn you,” cried Michael. “Will you let go of that woman’s arm?”
The constable with a bovine density of purpose proceeded apparently to arrest the wretched Dolly, and Michael maddened by his idiocy felt that the only thing to do was to hit him as hard as he could. This he did. The constable immediately blew his whistle. Other masses of inane bulk loomed up, and Michael was barely able to control himself sufficiently not to resist all the way to Vine Street, as two of them marched him along, and four more followed with Daisy and Dolly. A spumy trail of nocturnal loiterers clung to their wake.
Next morning Michael appeared before the magistrate. He listened to the charge against him and nearly laughed aloud in court, because the whole business so much resembled the trial in Alice in Wonderland. It was not that the magistrate was quite so illogical as the King of Hearts; but he was so obviously biassed in favor of the veracity ofa London policeman, that the inconsequence of the nightmare which had begun last night was unalterably preserved. Michael, aware of the circumstances which had led up to what was being made to appear as wantonly riotous behavior in Leicester Square, could not fail to be exasperated by the inability of the magistrate to understand his own straightforward story. He began to sympathize with the lawless population. The law could only seem to them an unintelligent machine for crushing their freedom. If the conduct of this case were a specimen of administration, it was obvious that arrest must be synonymous with condemnation. The magistrate in the first place seemed dreadfully overcome by the sorrow of beholding a young man in Michael’s position on the police-court.
“I cannot help wondering when I see a young man who has had every opportunity ...” the magistrate went on in a voice that worked on the stale air of the court like a rusty file.
“I’m not a defaulting bank clerk,” Michael interrupted. “Is it impossible for you to understand——”
“Don’t speak to me like that. Keep quiet. I’ve never been spoken to like that in all my experience as a magistrate. Keep quiet.”
Michael sighed in compassion for his age and stupidity.
“Are there any previous convictions against Wearne and Palmer?” the magistrate inquired. He was told that the woman Palmer had not hitherto appeared, but that Wearne had been previously fined for disorderly conduct in Shaftesbury Avenue. “Ah!” said the magistrate. “Ah!” he repeated, looking over the rim of his glasses. “And the case against the male defendant? I will take the evidence of Constable C11254.”
“Your worship, I was on duty yesterday evening at 12.25in Leicester Square. Hearing a noise in the direction of the Caffy Dorringe and observing a crowd collect, I moved across the road to disperse it. The defendant Wearne was using obscene language to an unknown man; and wishing to get her to move on I took hold of her arm. The male defendant, also using very obscene language, attempted to rescue her and struck me on the chest. I blew my whistle....”
The ponderous constable with his thick red neck continued a sing-song narrative.
When Michael’s turn came to refute some of the evidence against him, he merely shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s really useless, you know, for me to say anything. If ‘damn you’ is obscene, then I was obscene. If a girl is knocked down by a bully and on rising to her feet is instantly arrested by a dunderhead in a blue uniform, and if an onlooker punches this functionary, then I did assault the constable.”
“This sort of insolence won’t do,” said the magistrate trembling with a curious rarefied passion. “I have a very good mind to send you to prison without the option of a fine, but in consideration....”
Somehow or other it was made to appear a piece of extraordinary magnanimity on the part of the magistrate that Michael was only fined three guineas and costs.
“I wish to pay the fines of Miss Palmer and Miss Wearne,” he announced.
Later in the morning Michael, with the two girls, emerged into the garish summer day. Not even yet was the illusion of a nightmare dissipated, for as he looked at his two companions, feathered, frilled and bedraggled, who were walking beside him, he could scarcely acknowledge even their probable reality here in the sun.
“I shan’t drink hot whisky-and-lemon again in a hurry,”vowed Daisy. “I knew it was going to bring me bad luck when I said it tasted so funny.”
“But you said your hat was going to be lucky,” Michael pointed out.
“Yes, I’ve been properly sucked in over that,” Daisy agreed.
“Nothing ever brings me luck,” grumbled Dolly resentfully.
As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.
“I reckon I’ll go home and have a good lay down,” said Daisy. “Are you going to have dinner with me?” she asked, turning to Dolly.
“Dinner?” echoed Dolly. “Nice time to talk to anyone about their dinner, when they’ve got the sick like I have! Dinner!”
They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He found it embarrassing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and Edgar’s window to stare instead at him and his companions.
Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the second five-pound note into which the law had broken.
“Is this for us?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll’s going to live with me a bit now, aren’t you, Doll?”
“I suppose so,” said Doll.
Michael really admired the hospitality which was willingto shelter this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with Hungarian Dave.
When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary appearance by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo was almost to make him incredulous of the night’s event, and he could not help paying a visit to the Café d’Orange, to verify the alcove in which he had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and he stood for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the night before he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the bar, he thought he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes, it was certainly Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder, addressing him by name. Meats turned round with a start.
“Don’t you remember me?” asked Michael.
“Of course I do,” said Meats nervously. “But for the love of Jerusalem drop calling me by that name. Here, let’s go outside.”
In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.
“Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble,” said Meats.
“You are a strange chap,” said Michael. “When I first met you it was Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now——”
“Look here,” said Meats, “give over, will you? I’ve told you once. If you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now don’t forget.”
“Come and have a drink, and tell me what you’ve been doing in the four years since we met,” Michael suggested.
“B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?”
Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had vanished from his mind.
“Come on, then,” said Barnes. “We’ll go into the Afrique, upstairs.”
Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness which had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had seemed the predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at the round marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled an actor out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was the cheesy complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season too much worn and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with its dismoded exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness; perhaps, thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it had merely been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an exception. Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a compassionate amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity as of a puppet temporarily put out of action testified to his own morbid heightening of common things in the past. How incredible it seemed now that this Barnes had once been able to work upon his soul with influential doctrine.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Michael asked again.
“Oh, hopping and popping about. I’ve got the rats at present.”
“Where are you living?”
Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. “What do you want to know for?” he asked.
“Mere inquisitiveness,” Michael assured him. “You really needn’t treat me like a detective, you know.”
“My mistake,” said Barnes. “But really, Fane. Let’s see, that is your name? Thought it was. I don’t often forget a name. No, without swank, Fane, I’ve been houndedoff my legs lately. I’m living in Leppard Street. Pimlico way.”
“I’d like to come and see you some time,” said Michael.
“Here, straight, whatisyour game?” Barnes could not conceal his suspicion.
“Inquisitiveness,” Michael declared again. “Also I rather want a Sancho Panza.”
“Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige,” said Barnes very sarcastically.
It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming, but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.
While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes an outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present narrative was probably not less cynical than the account of his life related to Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps because his imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality, he could no longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals calmly, neither blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental goose-flesh. Yet amid all the frankness accorded to him he could not find out why Barnes had changed his name. He was curious about this, because he could not conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for Barnes to reveal. It would be interesting to find out what could really make even him pause; no doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the underworld, it would turn out to be something that Michael himself would consider trivial in comparison with so much of what Barnes had boasted. Anyway, whether he discovered the secret or not, it would certainly be interesting to study Barnes, since in him good and evil might at any moment display themselves as clearly as a hidden substance to a reagent flung into a seething alembic. It might perhaps be assuming too much to say that there was any good in him; and yet Michael was unwilling to suppose that all his conversions were merely the base drugs of a disordered morality. Apart from his philosophicvalue, Barnes might very actually be of service in the machinery of finding Lily.
At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.
“Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this,” he commented.
Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse to be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing in that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the reverse true?
“Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?” Michael asked. “I do wish you could understand it’s really so much more difficult. I can’t distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly so well as you can.”
“Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell you,” said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. “In my experience most of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we haven’t got. I don’t care what it is—a woman or a drink or a new suit of clothes. Money’ll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I could be a bloody angel.”
“Supposing I offered you half as much for three months,” suggested Michael. “Do you think you’d find life any easier while it lasted?”
“Well, don’t be silly,” said Barnes. “Of course I should. If you’d walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody had dropped a threepenny bit, you’d think it was easier. It’s not a bit of good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you’d be just the same. Thosemonks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man who first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey’s ears on his nob. What’s it done for me? I ask you. Why, it’s made me so that I’d steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid on another.”
“Tell me about Leppard Street,” said Michael, laughing. “What’s it like?”
“Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That’s what it looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who’s lost all his teeth, and you’ve got what it feels like to be living in it.”
“Supposing I said I’d like to try?” asked Michael. “What would you think?”
“Think? I shouldn’t think two seconds. I should know you were having a game. What good’s Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing up and down all day on cushions?”
“Experience,” said Michael.
“Oh, rats! Nothing’s experience that you haven’t had to do.”
“Well, I’ll give you five pounds a week,” Michael offered, “if you’ll keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn’t want anything very dreadful, of course,” he added.
It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest, so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason for wishing to go to Leppard Street.
“You see, I want to find a girl,” he explained.
“Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you’ll lose the best girl you’ve got straight off. That’s all there is to it.”
“You don’t understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I want to find her and marry her.”
It seemed to Michael that Barnes’ manner changed in some scarcely definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked. He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his former attitude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap. Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no allusion to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to emotion. This was proving really a most delightful example of the truth of his theory. And it was clever of Barnes—it was more than clever, it was truly imaginative of him—to realize without another question the need to leave for a while Cheyne Walk.
“But is there a vacant room?” Michael asked in sudden dread of disappointment.
“Look here, you’d better see the place before you decide on leaving here,” Barnes advised. “It isn’t a cross between Buckingham Palace and the Carlton, you know.”
“I suppose it’s the name that attracts me,” said Michael. “It sounds ferocious.”
“I don’t know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house is ferocious enough. Never mind.” He jingled the five sovereigns.
“I’ll go up and pack,” said Michael. “By the way, I haven’t told you yet that I was run in last night.”
“In quod you mean?” asked Barnes. “Whatever for?”
“Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square.”
“These coppers are the limit,” said Barnes emphatically. “The absolute limit. Really. They’ll pinch the Archbishopof Canterbury for looking into Stagg and Mantle’s window before we know where we are.”
Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the doorway to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the macaw on its perch were about equally exotic.
They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along the river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the adventurousness of London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the high spring-tide without exulting in the movement of the stream that was washing out with its flood all the listlessness of the hot August afternoon. When Chelsea Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the banks of a great river sweeping through a great city began to be more evident. The whole character of the Embankment changed at every hundred yards. First there was that somber canal which, flowing under the road straight from the Thames, reappeared between a cañon of gloomy houses and vanished again underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what was apparently a large private house which had been gutted of the tokens of humanity and filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and pistons, all moving perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of noise. Under Grosvenor Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering forward and a train crashing overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and girders dripping with the excrement of railway-engines, they came into Grosvenor Road. They passed the first habitations of Pimlico, two or three terraces and isolated houses all different in character. There could scarcely be another road in London so varied as this. Maurice had been wise to have his studio in Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an epitome of London.
The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, avery wide and very gray street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the horse’s hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
“I wouldn’t mind having lodgings here,” said Barnes. He had caught sight of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast, occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable decadency.
Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginningto seem endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken glass: these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however, that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the draff of the neighborhood’s rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child’s boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
“Here we are,” said Barnes. “Here’s Leppard Street that you’ve been so anxious to see.”
“It looks rather exciting,” Michael commented.
“Oh, it’s the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don’t think. Exciting?” Barnes repeated. “You know, Fane, there’s something wrong with you. If you think this is exciting, you’d go raving mad when I showed you some of the places where I’ve lived. Well, here we are, anyhow. Number One—the corner house.”
They walked up the steps which were gradually scalingin widening ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
Barnes opened the door.
“We’ll take your bag up to my room first, and then we’ll go downstairs and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don’t change your mind when you’ve seen the inside.”
Michael had no time to notice Barnes’ room very much. But vaguely he saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits. After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in the basement.
“She’ll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her,” he said to Michael. “You see, just lately I’ve been very anxious to avoid meeting her.”
He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by: here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury, so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated everything else.
“That’s Cleghorne,” said Barnes. “I reckon he’d sleep Rip van Winkle barmy.”
“What’s he do?” whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
“He snores for a living, he does,” said Barnes.
They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
“I’ve brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne,” said Barnes.
“Have you brought your five weeks’ rent owing?” she asked sourly.
He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.
“Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to come up and show you?”
She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along her sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.
“Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ...” Michael began.
“Mis-ter Cleghorne!” she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked continuously.
“Oh, I don’t want to disturb him,” said Michael.
“Disturb him!” she sneered. “Why, half Bedlam could drive through his brains in a omnibus before he’d move a little finger to trouble hisself. Yes,” she shouted, “Yes!” Her voice mingling with the creak of the roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it grew more strident. “Why, the blessed house might burn beforehe’d even put on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his wife can work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if anyone could disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the larder, he’d only grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people ’ud be very pleased to be asthmatic, if they could lie snorting on a bed from morning to night.”
Mrs. Cleghorne’s hands were dry now, and she led the way along the passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window, catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.
“That’s all I got for two months’ rent,” said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly, surveying it. “And it’s just about fit for my old man to go and bury his good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that’s all. The bedroom’s in here, of course.” She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had been picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far as some child had been able to reach.
The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.
“Do you want to see the top-floor back?” Mrs. Cleghorne asked.
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind.” Michael felt bound to apologize to her, whatever was suggested.
She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to enter the vacant room.
The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no fireplace and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than the positive emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at the gimcrack washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was visible in long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with its pleated iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress exuding flock like clustered maggots.
“This is furnished, of course,” said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently sucking a tooth. “Well, which will you have?”
“I think perhaps I’ll take the ground-floor rooms. I’ll have them done up.”
“Oh, they’re quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave them an extra-special clear-out.”
“But you wouldn’t object to my doing them up?” persisted Michael.
“Oh, no, I shouldn’tobject,”said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very much pleasure from the fruition of Michael’s proposal.
They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she was endowingthem with a value and a character they did not possess.
“I’ve always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth any other two rooms in the house. And of course that’s the reason I’m really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to everyone right out—if you want the two best rooms in the house, why, you must pay according. They’re only empty now because I’ve always been particular about letting them. I won’t have anybody, and that’s a fact. Mr. Barnes here knows I’m really fond of those rooms.”
They had reentered them, and Mrs. Cleghorne stood with arms admiringly akimbo.
“They really are a beautiful lodging,” she declared. “When would you want them from?”
“Well, as soon as I can get them done up,” said Michael.
“I see. Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly just what you was thinking of doing?”
Michael gave some of his theories of decoration, while Mrs. Cleghorne waited in critical audience; as it were, feeling the pulse of the apartments under the stimulus of Michael’s sketch of their potentiality.
“All white?” the landlady echoed pessimistically. “That sounds very gloomy, doesn’t it? More like a outhouse or a coal-cellar than a nice couple of rooms.”
“Well, they couldn’t look rottener than what they do at present,” Barnes put in. “So if you take my advice, you’ll say ‘yes’ and be very thankful. They’ll look clean, anyway.”
The landlady threw back her head and surveyed Barnes like a snake about to strike.
“Rotten?” she sniffed. “I’m sure this gentleman here isn’t likely to find a nicer and cheaper pair of rooms or a more convenient and a quieter pair of rooms anywhere inPimlico. A lot of people is very anxious to be in this neighborhood.”
Mrs. Cleghorne was much offended by Barnes’ criticism, and there was a long period of dubiety before it was settled that Michael should be accepted as a tenant.
“I’ve never cared for white,” she said, in final protest. “Not since I was married.”
Reminded of Mr. Cleghorne’s existence in the basement, she hurried forthwith to rout him out. As she disappeared, Michael saw that she was searching in the musty folds of her skirt in order to deposit in her purse the month’s rent he had paid in advance.
A couple of weeks passed while the decorators worked hard; and Michael returned from an unwilling visit to Scotland to find them ready for him. He got together a certain amount of furniture, and toward the end of August he moved into Leppard Street.
Barnes on account of the prosperity which had come to him through Michael’s money had managed to dress himself in a series of outrageously new and fashionable suits, and on the afternoon of his patron’s arrival he strutted about the apartments.
“Very nice,” he said. “Very nice, indeed. I reckon old Ma Cleghorne ought to be very pleased with herself. Some of these pictures are a bit too religious for me just at present, but everyone to their own taste, that’s what I always say. To their own taste,” he repeated. “Otherwise, what’s the good in being given an opinion of your own?”
Michael felt it was time to explain to Barnes more particularly his quest of Lily.
“You don’t know a girl called Lily Haden?” he asked.
“Lily Haden,” said Barnes thoughtfully. “Lily Hopkins. A great fat girl with red....”
“No, no,” Michael interrupted. “Lily Haden. Tall.Slim. Very fair hair. Of course she may have another name now.”
“That’s it, you see,” said Barnes wisely.
“Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, I must find her,” Michael went on.
“Well, if you go about it in that spirit, you’ll soon find her,” Barnes prophesied.
Michael looked at him sharply. He thought he noticed in Barnes’ manner a suggestion of humoring him. He rather resented the way in which Barnes seemed to encourage him as one might encourage a child.
“You understand I want to marry her?” Michael asked fiercely.
“That’s all right, old chap. I’m not trying to stop you, am I?”
“But why are you talking as if I weren’t in earnest?” Michael demanded. “When I first told you about it you were evidently very pleased, and now you’ve got a sneer which frankly I tell you I find extraordinarily objectionable.”
Barnes looked much alarmed by Michael’s sudden attack, and explained that he meant nothing by his remarks beyond a bit of fun.
“Is it funny to marry somebody?” Michael demanded.
“Sometimes it’s very funny to marry a tart,” said Barnes.
Michael flushed. This was a directness of speech for which he was not prepared.
“But when I first told you,” Michael said, “you seemed very pleased.”
“I was very pleased to find I’d evidently struck a nice-mannered lunatic,” said Barnes. “You offered me five quid a week, didn’t you? Well, you didn’t offer me that to give you good advice, now did you?”
Michael tried to conceal the mortification that was beinginflicted upon him. He had been very near to making a fool of himself by supposing that his announcement had aroused admiration. Instead of admiring him, Barnes evidently regarded him as an idiot whom it were politic to encourage on account of the money this idiot could provide. It was an humiliating discovery. The chivalry on which he congratulated himself had not touched a single chord in Barnes. Was it likely that in Lily herself he would find someone more responsive to what he still obstinately maintained to himself was really rather a fine impulse? Michael began to feel half sorry for Barnes because he could not appreciate nobility of motive. It began to seem worth while trying to impose upon him the appreciation which he felt he owed. Michael was sorry for his uncultivated ideals, and he took a certain amount of pleasure in the thought of how much Barnes might benefit from a close association with himself. He did not regret the whim which had brought them to Leppard Street. Whatever else might happen, it would always be consoling to think that he would be helping Barnes. In half a dream Michael began to build up the vision of a newer and a finer Barnes, a Barnes with sensitiveness and decent instincts, a Barnes who would forsake very willingly the sordid existence he had hitherto led in order to rise under Michael’s guidance and help to a wider and better life. Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem at its true value the step he proposed to take.
Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He could not failto be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect. Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as yet he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a small secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived perpetually in a social twilight. Michael’s missionary affection began to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down, and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long time.
Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the corner.
“Come in,” Michael cheerfully invited him.
The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all his clothes were on the verge of coming off,so much like a frayed accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a space of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.
“What I really came down for was a match,” the stranger explained.
Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in one of his pockets.
“You don’t go in for puzzles, I suppose?” he asked tentatively. “But any time I can help. I’m the Solutionist, you know. Don’t let me keep you. Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I’m worrying out this week’s lot in The Golden Penny very slowly. I’ve really had a sort of a headache the last few days—a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about cricketers?” he asked, turning to Michael. “Famous cricketers, of course, that is? For instance, I cannot think what this one can be.”
He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny weekly.
“I’ve got all the others,” he said to Michael. “But one picture will often stump you like this. No joke intended.” He smiled feebly and pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the letter T.
“What about Hirst?” Michael asked.
“Hirst,” repeated the Solutionist. “Her S T. That’s it. That’s it.” In his excitement he began to dribble. “I’m very much obliged to you, sir. Her S. T. Yes, that’s it.”
He began to shuffle toward the door.
“Anything you want solved at any time,” he said to Michael. “I’m only just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be most delighted to solve anything—anything!”
He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his problems would puzzle the Solutionist.
“What’s his name?” he inquired of Barnes.
“Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a living at it.”
“At what?” Michael asked.