November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from Oxford to-night—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him.How were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiègne? Probably they were having clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a smell of woodfires. With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round Piccadilly, sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side streets, but always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle. Here he would stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west and south and north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were coming out of the theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to Daisy? Should he call a hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the spinning of a polychromatic top, he could not leave the Island.
They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must begin to frequent the Orient again.
Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost in the air.
Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that. Supposing she did not visitthe Orient again for a long time? It would serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of those vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together now; instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark pavement. How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At last he knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her still. What nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry her in order to rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her still: he loved her now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of Green Park rattled to his stick. He loved her more passionately because the ghost of her whom he had thought of with romantic embellishment all these years was but a caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer which had floated through his dreams was become nothing, now that again he had seen herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and the delicate poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women on the pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of gravel by the curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what direction had she driven away? Even that he did not know. She might have driven past this very lamp-post a few minutes back.
Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the Orient,” he would say. She should know immediatelythat he was not deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and huddled against the wall of the King’s garden. He put a sixpence among her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of doors and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous. And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of human dwellings, were Michael’s own thoughts thronged with fancies of himself and Lily.
It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and run.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.
It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her one of them. He had given hislast silver coin to the match-seller. Yet it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always haunt her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She was not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves, as at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears and that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks, there would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become even an individual in the multitude of weary London women.
“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.
“Home. I’m going home,” he said.
“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”
He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard Street.
“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you.”
Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the star-incrusted sky.
“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”
“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”
Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put his foot on the steps of the front door.
“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”
She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the house sleeps down here.”
She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage. When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.
Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy wall.
“Here you are. Here you are.”
The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down three stepsand up another, unlocked a rickety door, and welcomed him.
“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp. The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.
“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such a stranger.”
Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a pale blue chest next to a washstand.
“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.
“What cat?”
“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”
She called, and a small black cat came out.
“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under the bed like that.”
Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what hiscordiality had lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.
“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very well, so she’s got a good home. Butheisn’t stinted. Oh, no. He gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have animals, look after them.”
Michael nodded agreement.
“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better than human beings.”
“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.
“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”
The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.
“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the deliberate novelist.
“After my boy.”
“Your boy?” he echoed.
“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened the woman into a fleeting dignity.
“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.
“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the converse was more probable.
“He’s not living with you?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything—not ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil Service. I lived with his father for many years—in fact, from the time I was sixteen.His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He’s been dead about six years now.”
“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”
“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a Catholic myself.”
As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility of spirit.
“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short silence.
“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”
Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her health.
“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one, and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave, they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”
Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.
“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a good deal from some of the men?”
“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here for days without anyone knowing about it. LastWednesday—or was it Thursday?—time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count the days, does it? One day last week I did what I’ve never done before: I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man—a very rough sort of a man he was, I’m not surprised poor Peter runs away from them—I heard him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night. And will you believe it, he’d gone to my bag and taken out his six shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it with women like myself. Well now, you can’t say a man like that is any better than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets. Though I will say it was a warning.”
“I suppose you’d be glad to give up the life,” said Michael, and as he asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence of this woman a very futile one.
“Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I’m really at anyone’s mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in one way, the harm’s done.”
Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the more obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and at her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.
“You see,” she went on, “though I have to put up with a great deal, it’s only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up by my father, and my mother being—well, it’s no use to mince matters as they say—my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this occurred withthe Frenchman I told you about—that really was a downward step, though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good to me from the beginning to the end. Still, I’m used to refinement, and I have a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I dislike the woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent regular—eight-and-six, that is....”
“Quite enough, too,” said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was so like the scarred surface of the moon.
“You’re right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I’m my own mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don’t interfere with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking, but really Mrs. Cleghorne—that is the woman who keeps the house—really she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I go all day with only a cup of tea.”
Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own breakfast on a chafing dish.
“I interrupted you,” he said. “You were going to tell me something about Mrs. Cleghorne.”
“Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me. Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she’d seen him going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn’t a nice thing to do, is it? One doesn’t want to go round drinking in public-houses. It looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we’ve fallen out over it. In fact, I haven’t seen him for some months. Still I shouldn’t complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you’ll understand—well, as I was saying—what with one thing and another my rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you’ve paidregular for close on two years, you expect a little consideration.”
“Have you lived in this burrow for two years?” Michael asked in amazement.
“In the week before Christmas it’ll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs. Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round here and abuse me. Her mother’s an old woman, you’ll understand, and her language—well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick.” She put her hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. “She stands in that doorway and bullies me until I’m ashamed to sit on this bed and stand it. I really am. You’d hardly believe there was such things to say to anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I’ve made up my mind she isn’t going to do it again. I’m not going tohaveit.” She was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs of the bed creaked.
“The mother doesn’t live here?” he asked.
“Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I’m not going to let it occur again. I don’t consider I’ve been well treated. If I’d spent the money on gin, I shouldn’t so much object to what the old woman calls me, for I don’t say my life isn’t a bit of a struggle. But there’s so many things to use up the money, when I’ve got what’s wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little bit smart—really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should I be?—and I never waste money on clothes for clothes’ sake, as they say—well, after that it’s none so easy to find eight-and-six for the week’s rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat’s milk.”
Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her wretchedness.
“I hope your boy will turn out well,” he ventured at last.
“Oh, he’s a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his being in the Civil Service.”
“Or even a priest,” Michael suggested.
“Well, you see, he wasn’t born in wedlock. Would that make a difference?”
“I don’t think so,” said Michael gently. “Oh, no, I hope that wouldn’t make a difference.”
He was finding the imagination of this woman’s life too poignant, and he rose from the light blue chest to bid her good-bye. He begged inwardly that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in which she had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he would have to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged down into his pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had thought an exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity when she had stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he wished he had five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly and hopelessly in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She must have robbed him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the thief’s and liar’s film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into his own? Was it impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns out of his pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had pawed him with her hands in the black passage, and if the money had fallen on the road, he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the unjust theft; he ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant to give her. And yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had said the cat recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken the sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the weight she bore. And if she had taken them, why not?The cat was not at hand to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the money for herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey upon others in self-defense.
“I find I haven’t any money with me,” said Michael, looking at her.
“That doesn’t matter. I’ve really quite enjoyed our little talk.”
“But I’ll send you some more,” he promised.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t done anything to have you send your money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn’t think I was really quite your style. Of course, I’ve really come down. It’s no use denying it. I’mnotwhat 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 tryto rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he must be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in the haggard lamplight.
Michael turned and went back to his rooms.
He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face downward upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that anything so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately afterward he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and shamefacedly he put away the broken picture in a drawer.
Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window rattling in the wind.
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 Barnesknowingly. “I wonder you’ve stuck it out as long as you have.”
“After February,” Michael said, “I may want to come to some other arrangement; but you can count on being here till then. Of course, you understand that when the three months are up, I shan’t be able to allow you five pounds a week any longer.”
“No, I never supposed you would,” said Barnes, in a tone of resignation.
Michael hesitated whether to speak to him about Mrs. Smith or not: however, probably he was aware of her existence already, and it could do no harm to mention it.
“Did you know that there was a woman living down in the basement here?” he asked.
“I didn’t know there was one here; but it’s not a very rare occurrence in this part of London, nor any other part of London, if it comes to that.”
“If you hear any row going on down there,” said Michael, “you had better interfere at once.”
“Who with?” Barnes inquired indignantly.
“With the row,” said Michael. “If the woman is being badly treated on account of money she owes, you must let me know immediately.”
“Well, I’m not in the old tear’s secret, am I?” asked Barnes, in an injured tone. “You can’t expect me to go routing about after every old fly-by-night stuck in a basement.”
“I’m particularly anxious to know that she is all right,” Michael insisted.
“Oh well, of course, if she’s a friend of yours, Fane, that’s another matter. If it’s any little thing to oblige you, why certainly I’ll do it.”
Michael said good-bye and left him in bed. Then he called in to see the Solutionist, who was also in bed.
“I’ve got a commission for you,” said Michael.
The Solutionist’s watery eyes brightened faintly.
“You’re fond of animals, aren’t you?” Michael went on. “I see you feeding your Belgian hares. Well, I’m interested in a cat who appreciated my point of view. I want you to see that this cat has a quart of milk left for her outside Mrs. Smith’s door every morning. Mrs. Smith lives in the basement. You must explain to her that you are fond of animals; but you mustn’t mention me. Here’s a check for five pounds. Spend half this on the cat and the other half on your rabbits.”
The Solutionist held the check between his tremulous fingers.
“I couldn’t cash this nowadays,” he said helplessly. “And get a quart of milk for a cat? Why, the thing would burst.”
“All right. I’ll send you postal orders,” said Michael. “Now I’m going away for a bit. Never mind if a quart is too much. I want that amount left every day. You’ll do what I ask? And you’ll promise not to say a word about me?”
The Solutionist promised, and Michael left him looking more completely puzzled than he had ever seen him.
Michael could not bring himself to the point either of going down into the basement or of calling to Mrs. Cleghorne from the entrance to her cave; and as the bell-pull in his room had never been mended, he did not know how to reach her. The existence of Mrs. Smith had dreadfully complicated the mechanism of Number One. He ought to have made Barnes get out of bed and fetch her. By good luck Michael saw from his window the landlady standing at the top of the area steps. He ran out and asked her to come and speak to him.
“I see,” she said. “Mr. Barnes is to have your rooms,and you’re paying in advance up to February. Oh, and his coal and his gas as well? I see. Well, that you can settle month by month. Through me? Oh, yes.”
Mrs. Cleghorne was in a very good temper this morning. Michael could not help wondering if Mrs. Smith had paid some arrears of her rent.
“Do you think Mr. Cleghorne would go and fetch me a hansom?” Michael asked.
“He’s still in his bed, but I’ll go myself.”
This cheerfulness was really extraordinary; and Michael was flattered. Already he was beginning to feel some of the deference mixed with hate which throughout the underworld was felt toward landladies. Her condescension struck him with the sense of a peculiar favor, as if it were being bestowed from a superior height.
Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice’s studio in Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange whom himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his big horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending for some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.
As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but driving toward Maurice’s studio along the banks of the river, Michael thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.
“I’ve brought you these pictures,” he explained toMaurice, and let the gift account for his own long disappearance from communion with his friends. “They’re pretty hackneyed, but I think it’s rather good for you to have a few hackneyed things amid the riot of originality here. What are you doing, Mossy?”
“Well, I’m rather hoping to get a job as dramatic critic on The Point of View.”
“You haven’t met your lady-love yet?”
“No, rather not, worse luck. Still, there’s plenty of time. What about you?” Maurice asked the question indifferently. He regarded his friend as a stone where women were concerned.
“I’ve seen her,” said Michael. He simply had to give himself the pleasure of announcing so much.
“By Jove, have you really? You’ve actually found your fate?” Maurice was evidently very much excited by Michael’s lapse into humanity; he had been snubbed so often when he had rhapsodized over girls. “What’s she like?”
“I haven’t spoken to her yet. I’ve only seen her in the distance.”
“And you’ve really fallen in love? I say, do stay and have lunch with me here. Castleton isn’t coming back from the Temple until after tea.”
Michael would have liked to sit at the window and talk of Lily, while he stared out over the sea of roofs under one of which at this very moment herself might be looking in his direction. However, he thought if he once began to talk about Lily to Maurice, he would tell him too much, and he might regret that afterward. Yet he could not resist saying that she was tall and fair and slim. Such epithets might be applied to many girls, and it was only for himself that in this case they had all the thrilling significance they did.
“I like fair girls best,” Maurice agreed. “But most fairgirls are dolls. If I met one who wasn’t, I should be hopelessly in love with her.”
“Perhaps you will,” Michael said. Since he had seen Lily he felt very generous, and even more than generosity he felt that he actually had the power to offer to Maurice dozens of fair girls from whom he could choose his own ideal. Really he must not stay a moment longer in the studio, or he would be blurting out the whole tale of Lily; and were she to be his, he must hold secrets about her that could never be unfolded.
“I really must bolt off,” he declared. “I’ve got a cab waiting.”
Michael drove along to Cheyne Walk, and when he reached home, it caused the parlormaid not a flicker to receive him and to take his luggage and inquire what should be obtained for his lunch.
“Life’s really too easy in this house,” he thought. “It’s so impossible to surprise the servants here that one would give up trying ultimately. I suppose that will be the beginning of settling down. At this rate, I shall settle down much too soon. Yes, life is too easy here.”
Michael went to the Orient that night certain that he would meet Lily at once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of her raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have made their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the joyful prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was really tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was to be exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington Gardens. However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater had made such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much attention to lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress. Otherwise he was himself again of six yearsago, with only the delightful difference that he was now independent and could carry her forthwith into marriage. The knowledge that from a material point of view he could do this filled him with a magnificent consciousness of life’s plenitude. So far, all his experiments in living had been bounded by ignorance or credulity on his own side, and on the side of other people by their unsuitableness for experiments. Certainly he had made discoveries, but they might better be called disillusionments. Now here was Lily who would give him herself to discover, who would open for him, not a looking-glass world in which human nature reflected itself in endless reduplications of perversity, but a world such as lovers only know, wherein the greatest deeps are themselves. Michael scarcely bothered to worry himself with the thought that Lily had embarked upon her own discoveries apart from him; she had been bewitched again by his romantic spells into the innocent girl of seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged upon her. Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior was discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this intoxication of happiness.
With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new Lily wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision of her last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the queer adventure with the woman in the basement had exalted him still higher upon his determination; his flight from Leppard Street and his return to Cheyne Walk had helped tostrengthen his hopefulness. Now he had returned to this circumambient crowd, looking round as each newcomer came up the steps, and all the while horribly aware that this evening Lily was not coming to the Orient. He had never been upset like this since his resolve was taken. The glimpse of her last night had made him very impatient, and he reviled himself again for having been such a fool as to let her escape. He fell in a rage with his immobility here in London. He demanded why it was not possible to swirl in widening circles round the city until he found her. He was no longer content to remain in this aquarium, stuck like a mollusc to the side of the tank. He wanted to see her again. He was fretful for her slow contemptuous walk and her debonair smile. He wanted to see her again. Already this quest was becoming the true torment of love. Every single other person in sight was a dreary automaton in whom he took no trace of interest. Every movement, every laugh, every shadow made him repine at its uselessness to him. All those years at Oxford of dreams and hesitations had let him store up within himself a very fury of love. He had been living falsely all this time: there had never been one dull hour which could not have been enchanted by her to the most glorious hour imaginable. He had realized that when he saw her last night; he had realized all the waste, all the deadness, all the idiotic philosophy and impotence of these years without her. How the fancy of her vexed him now; how easily could he in his frustration knock down the individuals of this senseless restless crowd, one after another, like the dummies of humanity they were.
The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling curtain. Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into Piccadilly. She must be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for her to come casually like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear for weeks. Or was she aman’s mistress, the mistress of a man of forty? He could picture him. He would be a stockbroker, the sort of man whom one saw in first-class railway carriages traveling up to town in the morning and reading The Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid in his buttonhole and take her to Brighton for week-ends. He knew just the shade of bluish pink that his cheeks were; and the way his neck looked against his collar; the shape of his mustache, the smell of his cigar, and his handicap at golf.
It was impossible that Lily could be the mistress of a man like that. Last night she had come out of the Orient with a girl. Obviously they must at this moment be somewhere near Piccadilly. Michael rushed along as wildly as a cat running after its tail. He entered restaurant after restaurant, café after café, standing in the doorways and staring at the tables one after another. The swinging doors would often hit him, as people came in; the drinkers or the diners would often laugh at his frown and his pale, eager gaze; often the manager would hurry up and ask what he could do for him, evidently suspecting the irruption of a lunatic.
Michael’s behavior in the street was even more noticeable. He often ricocheted from the inside to the outside of the pavement to get a nearer view of a passing hansom whose occupant had faintly resembled Lily. He mounted omnibuses going in all sorts of strange directions, because he fancied for an instant that he had caught a glimpse of Lily among the passengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been hers.
By one o’clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to suppose that Lily would be found among thesefurtive women with their waylaying eyes in the gloom. Michael went back tired out to Cheyne Walk. On the following night he visited the Orient again and afterward searched every likely and unlikely place in the neighborhood of the heart of pleasure. He went also to the Empire and to the Alhambra; sometimes hurrying from one to the other twice in the evening, when panics that he was missing Lily overtook him. He met Lonsdale one night at the Empire, and Lonsdale took him to several night-clubs which gave a great zest to Michael’s search; for he became a member of them himself, and so possessed every night another hour or more before he had to give up hope of finding her.
Mrs. Fane wrote to him from Cannes to say she thought that, as she was greatly enjoying herself on the Riviera, she would not come home for Christmas. Michael was relieved by her letter, because he had felt qualms about deserting her, and he would have found it difficult, impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.
Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole time rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline Grey, the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer. Guy explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it seemed he would soon have to choose between love and art; how restrictions were continually being put upon their meeting each other; and how violently difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead, where Michael had prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very sympathetic, and when he met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did think she was beautiful and very much like the wild rose that Guy had taken as the symbol of her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could not imagine problems of conduct in which she could be involved.Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel that over Plashers Mead brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet it seemed ridiculous to compare Guy’s difficulties with his own.
For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan had by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to see how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was certainly something very attractive in these two young people moving about that grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and stood at the end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred acres. That it could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns had been defaced by builder’s rubbish was now inconceivable. So too within, Michael could not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan had ever stood in this drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows whose sills scarcely rose above the level of the grass outside; that anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library with its pilasters and calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that anyone else but Stella and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes of those bag-wigged squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that girl in her chip hat, holding a bunch of cherries.
“No doubt you’ve got a keen scent for tradition,” said Michael to Stella. “But really you have been able to get into the manner surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you both round, and the deerhound on the steps of the terrace—Stella, I’m afraid the concert platform has taught you the value of effect; and where do hounds meet to-morrow?”
“We’re simply loving it here,” Stella said. “But I think the piano is feeling a little bit out of his element. He’s stiff with being on his best behavior.”
“I’m hoping to get rather a good pitch in Six Ash field,” said Alan. “I’ll show it to you to-morrow morning.”
The butler came in with news of callers:
“The Countess of Stilton and Lady Anne Varley.”
“Oh, damn!” Stella exclaimed, when the butler had retired. “I really don’t think people ought to call just before Christmas. However, you’ve both got to come in and be polite.”
Michael managed to squeeze himself into a corner of the drawing-room, whence he could watch Lady Stilton and her daughter talking to Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“We ought not to have bothered you in this busy week before Christmas, but my husband has been so ill in Marienbad, ever since the summer really, that we only got home a fortnight ago. So very trying. And I’ve been longing to meet you. Poor Dick Prescott was a great friends of ours.”
Michael had a sudden intuition that Prescott had bequeathed Stella’s interests to Lady Stilton, who probably knew all about her. He wondered if Stella had guessed this.
“And Anne heard you play at King’s Hall. Didn’t you, Anne dear?”
Lady Anne nodded and blushed.
“That child is going to worship Stella,” Michael thought.
“We’re hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr. Fane, you’ll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the pleasure of seeing you as well?”
Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.
“What absolute rot!” Stella cried. “Of course you’ll be here.”
But Michael insisted that he would be gone.
“They tell us you’ve been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband was so much interested and is so muchlooking forward to seeing your stock; but at present he must not drive far. I’ve also heard of you from my youngest boy who went up to Christ Church last October year. He is very much excited to think that Hardingham is going to have such a famous—what is it called, Anne?—some kind of a bowler.”
“A googlie bowler, I expect you mean, mother,” said Lady Anne.
“Wasn’t he in the Eton eleven?” asked Alan.
“Well, no. Something happened to oust him at the last moment,” said Lady Stilton. “Possibly a superior player.”
“Oh, no, mother!” Lady Anne indignantly declared. “He would have played for certain against Harrow, if he hadn’t sprained his ankle at the nets the week before.”
“I do hope you’ll let him come and see you this vacation,” Lady Stilton said.
“Oh, rather. I shall be awfully keen to talk about the cricket round here,” Alan replied. “I’m just planning out a new pitch now.”
“How delightful all this is,” thought Michael, with visions of summer evenings.
Soon Lady Stilton and her daughter went away, having plainly been a great success with Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale.
“Of course,you’vegot to marry Anne,” said Stella to Michael, as soon as they were comfortably round the great fire in the library.
“Alan,” Michael appealed. “Is it impossible for you to nip now forever this bud of matchmaking?”
“I think it’s rather a good idea,” said Alan. “I knew young Varley by sight. He’s a very sound bat.”
“I shan’t come here again,” Michael threatened, “until you’ve dissolved this alliance of mutual admiration. Instead of agreeing with Stella to marry me to every girl you meet,why don’t you devote yourself to the task of making Huntingdon a first-class county in cricket? Stella might captain the team.”
Time passed very pleasantly with long walks and rides and drives, with long evenings of cut-throat bridge and Schumann; but on New Year’s morning Michael said he must go back to London. Nor would he let himself be deterred by Stella’s gibes.
“I admit you’re as happy as you can be,” he said. “Now surely you, after so much generosity on my side, will admit that I may know almost as well as yourselves how to make myself happy, though not yet married.”
“Michael, you’re having an affair with some girl,” Stella said accusingly.
He shook his head.
“Swear?”
“By everything I believe in, I vow I’m not having an affair with any girl. I wish I were.”
His luggage was in the hall, and the dogcart was waiting. At King’s Cross he found a taxi, which was so difficult to do in those days that it made him hail the achievement as a good omen for the New Year.
Near South Kensington Station he caught sight of a poster advertising a carnival in the neighborhood: he thought it looked rather attractive with the bright colors glowing into the gray January day. Later on in the afternoon, when he went to his tobacconist’s in the King’s Road, he saw the poster again and read that to-night at Redcliffe Hall, Fulham Road, would take place a Grand Carnival and Masked Ball for the benefit of some orphanage connected with licensed victualing. Tickets were on sale in various public-houses of the neighborhood, at seven and sixpence for gentlemen and five shillings for ladies.
“Ought to be very good,” commented the tobacconist.“Well, we want a bit of brightening up nowadays down this way, and that’s a fact. Why, I can remember Cremorne Gardens. Tut-tut! Bless my soul. Yes, and the old World’s End. That’s going back into the seventies, that is. And it seems only yesterday.”
“I rather wish I’d got a ticket,” said Michael.
“Why not let me get you one, sir, and send it round to Cheyne Walk? I suppose you’d like one for a lady as well?”
“No, I’ll have two men’s tickets.”
Michael had a vague notion of getting Maurice or Lonsdale to accompany him, and he went off immediately to 422 Grosvenor Road; but the studio was deserted. Nor was he successful in finding Lonsdale. Nobody seemed to have finished his holidays yet. It would be rather boring to go alone, he thought; but when he found the tickets waiting for him, they seemed to promise a jolly evening, even if he did no more than watch other people enjoying themselves. No doubt there would be plenty of spectators without masks, like himself, and in ordinary evening dress. So about half-past nine Michael set off alone to the carnival.
Redcliffe Hall, viewed from the outside in the January fog which was deepening over the city, seemed the last place in the world likely to contain a carnival. It was one of those dismal gothic edifices which, having passed through ecclesiastical and municipal hands with equal loss to both, awaits a suitable moment for destruction before it rises again in a phoenix of new flats. However, the awning hung with Japanese lanterns that ran from the edge of the curb up to the entrance made it now not positively forbidding.
Michael went up to the gallery and watched the crowd of dancers. Many of the fancy dresses had a very homely look, but there were also professional equipments from costumiers and a very few really beautiful inventions. The medley ofcolors, the motion of the dance, the sound of the music, the streamers of bunting and the ribbons fluttering round the Maypole in the middle of the room, all combined to give Michael an illusion of a very jocund assemblage. There were plenty of men dancing without masks, which was rather a pity, as their dull, ordinary faces halted abruptly the play of fancy. On second thoughts he was glad such revelers were allowed upon the floor, since as the scene gradually began to affect him he felt it might be amusing for himself to dance once or twice before the evening ended. With this notion in view, he began to follow more particularly the progress of different girls, balancing their charms one against another, and always deriving a good deal of pleasure from the reflection that, while at this moment they did not know of his existence, in an hour’s time he might have entered their lives. This thought did give a romantic zest to an entertainment which would otherwise have been quite cut off from his appreciation.
Suddenly Michael’s heart began to quicken: the blood came in rushes and swift recessions that made him feel cold and sick. Two girls walking away from him along the side of the hall—those two pierrettes in black—that one with the pale blue pompons was Lily! Why didn’t she turn round? It must be Lily. The figure, the walk, the hair were hers. The pierrettes turned, but as they were masked Michael could still not be sure if one were Lily. They were dancing together now. It must be Lily. He leaned over the rail of the gallery to watch them sweep round below him, so that he might listen if by chance above the noise Lily’s languorous voice could reach him. Michael became almost positive that it was she. There could not be another girl to seem so like her. He hurried down from the gallery and stood in the entrance to the ball-room. Where were they now? They were coming toward him: the other pierrettewith the rose pompons said something as they passed. It could only be Lily who bowed her head like that in lazy assent. It was Lily! Should he call out to her, when next they passed him? If it were not Lily, what a fool he would look. If it were not Lily, it would not matter what he looked, for the disappointment would outweigh everything else. They were going up the room again. They were turning the corner again. They were sweeping toward him again. They were passing him again. He called “Lily! Lily!” in a voice sharp with eagerness. Neither girl gave a sign of attention. It was not she, after all. Yet his voice might have been drowned in the noise of the dance. He would call again; but again they passed him by unheeding. The dance was over. They had stopped at the other end of the room. He pressed forward against the egress of the dancers. He pressed forward roughly, and once or twice he heard grumbling murmurs because he had deranged a difficult piece of costumery. He was conscious of angry masks regarding him; and then he was free of the crowd, and before him, talking together under a canopy of holly were the two pierrettes. The musicians sat among the palms looking at him as they rested upon their instruments. Michael felt that his voice was going to refuse to utter her name:
“Lily! Lily!”
The pierrette with the pale blue pompons turned at the sound of his voice. Why did she not step forward to greet him, if indeed she were Lily? She was, she was Lily: the other pierrette had turned to see what she was going to do.
“I say, how on earth did you recognize me?” Lily murmured, raising her mask and looking at Michael with her smile that was so debonair and tender, so scornful and so passionate.
“I saw you in November coming out of the Orient. I tried to get across the road to speak to you, but you’d gonebefore I could manage it. Where have you been all these years? Once I went to Trelawny Road, but the house was empty.” He could not tell her that Drake had been the first to bring him news of her.
“It’s years since I was there,” said Lily. “Years and years.” She turned to call her friend, and the pierrette with the rose pompons came closer to be introduced.
“Miss Sylvia Scarlett: Mr. Michael Fane. Aren’t I good to remember your name quite correctly?” Michael thought that her mouth for a moment was utterly scornful. “What made you come here? Have you got a friend with you?”
Michael explained that he was alone, and that his visit here was an accident.
“Why didyoucome?” 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 sentimentalboy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him, for she could compare him with other men. Ejaculations of wonder at her beauty would no longer serve, with all the experience she might bring to mock them. She was smiling at him now, and the mask she wore made the smile seem a sneer. He grew so angry with her suddenly that almost he stopped in the swing of the dance to shake her.
“But it was much more your fault,” he said savagely. “Do you remember Drake?”
She shook her head; then she corrected herself.
“Oh, yes. Arthur Drake who lived next door to us.”
“Well, I saw you in the garden from his window. You were being kissed by some terrible bounder. That was jolly for me. Why did you do that? Couldn’t you say ‘no’? Were you too lazy?”
Michael thought she moved closer to him as they danced.
“Answer me, will you; answer me, I say. Were you too lazy to resist, or did you enjoy being cheapened by that insufferable brute you were flirting with?”
Michael in his rage of remembrance twisted her hand. But she made no gesture, nor uttered any sound of pain. Instead she sank closer to his arms, and as the dance rolled on, he told himself triumphantly that, while she was with him, she was his again.
What did the past matter?
“Ah, Lily, you love me still! I’ll ask no more questions. Am I out of step?”
“No, not now,” she whispered, and he saw that her face was pale with the swoon of their dancing.
“Take off that silly mask,” he commanded. “Take it off and give it to me. I can hold you with one arm.”
She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no longer veiled her face;her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm until he could touch her shoulder.
“Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over.”
She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always known her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything that was happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it were a street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking. Nor with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced with Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall, and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a cab, but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they lived, was only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham Road. The fog was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the girls’ arms with a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of extraordinary freedom from the world, as if they were all three embarked upon an adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their shoes deep down in the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession of their shoes he had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them. The fog was denser and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb, listening for oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far down the Fulham Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of them seemed to sail across to the opposite pavement.He had nothing to say because he was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she talked now no more than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to carry on the conversation, and since most of this consisted of questions to Lily and Michael about their former friendship, which neither Lily nor Michael answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last; and they walked on silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls close to him and watching all the time Lily’s hand holding up her big black cloak.
“Here we are, you two dreamers,” said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly, without any dip down into a road.
“Through here? How fascinating!” said Michael.
They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in front of a door set in a wall.
“I’ve got the key,” said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
“But this is extraordinary,” Michael exclaimed. “Aren’t we walking through a garden?”
“Yes, it’s quite a long garden,” Sylvia informed him. There was a smell of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they walked up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.
“She’s downstairs,” said Sylvia, tapping upon a glass door with the key. A woman’s figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the passage.
“Open quickly, Mrs. Gainsborough. We’re frozen,” Sylvia called. As the woman opened the door, Sylvia went on in her deep voice:
“We’ve brought an old friend of Lily’s back from thedance. It wasn’t really worth going to. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, ought I?” she laughed, turning round to Michael. “Come in and get warm. This is Mrs. Gainsborough, who’s the queen of cards.”
“Get along with you, you great saucy thing,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, laughing.
She was a woman of enormous size with a triplication of chins. Her crimson cheeks shone with the same glister as her black dress; and her black hair, so black that it must have been dyed, was parted in the middle and lay in a chignon upon her neck. She seemed all the larger, sitting in this small room full of Victorian finery, and Michael was amused to hear her address Sylvia as “great.”
“We want something to eat and something to drink, you lovely old mountain,” Sylvia said.
Mrs. Gainsborough doubled herself up and smacked her knees in a tempest of wheezy laughter.
“Sit here, you terrors, while I get the cloth on the dining-room table,” and out she went, her laughter dying in sibilations along the diminutive corridor. Lily had flung herself down in an armchair near the fire. Behind her stood a small mahogany table on which was a glass case of humming-birds; by her elbow on the wall was a white china bell coronated with a filigree of gilt, and by chance the antimacassar on the chair was of Berlin wool checkered black and blue. She in her pierrette’s dress of black with light blue pompons looked strangely remote from present time in that setting. Michael could not connect this secluded house with anything which had made an impression upon him during his experience of the underworld. Here was nothing that was not cozy and old-fashioned; here was no sign of decay, whether in the fabric of the house or in the attitude of the people living there. This small square room with the heavy furniture that occupied so much of the spacehad no demirep demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped sides and back of floriated wood; that brass birdcage hanging in the window against the curtains of maroon serge; those cabinets in miniature, some lacquered, some of plain wood with tiny drop-handles of brass; those black chairs with seats of gilded cane; those trays with marquetery in mother-of-pearl of wreaths and rivulets and parrots; that table-cloth like a dish of black Sèvres; those simpering steel engravings—there was nothing that did not bespeak the sobriety of the Victorian prime here miraculously preserved. Lily and Sylvia in such dresses belonged to a period of fantasy; Mrs. Gainsborough was in keeping with her furniture; and Michael, as he looked at himself in the glass overmantel, did not think that he was seeming very intrusive.
“Whose are these rooms?” he asked. Lily was adorable, but he did not believe they were her creation or discovery.
“I found them,” said Sylvia. “The old girl who owns the house is bad, but beautiful. Aren’t you, you most astonishing but attractive mammoth?” This was addressed to Mrs. Gainsborough, who was at the moment panting into the room for some accessory to the dining-table.
“Get along with you,” the landlady chuckled. “Now don’t go to sleep, Lily. Your supper is just on ready.” She went puffing from the room in busy mirthfulness.
“She’s one of the best,” said Sylvia. “This house was given to her by an old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting of him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers. She was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle Rooms and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness.”
It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected him more sharply now with a senseof the appropriateness of this house in Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood of this foggy night.
“Supper! Supper!” Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.