It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet, and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and give him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair, up from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so, and she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to follow them across the passage.
It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance. That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside, was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again. So he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
“Oh, my eye, my eye!” laughed Sylvia. “To think that Aunt Enormous was once in the ballet at the Opera.”
“How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!” Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the New Year’s Day which could so change his fortune.
“Were you in the ballet?” he asked.
“Certainly I was, though this great teazing thing beside me would like to make out that when I was eighteen I looked just as I do now.”
“Show the kind gentleman your picture,” said Sylvia. “She wears it round her neck in a locket, the vain old mountebank.”
Mrs. Gainsborough opened a gold locket, and Michael looked at a rosy young woman in a pork-pie hat.
“That’s myself,” said Mrs. Gainsborough sentimentally. “Well, and I always loved being young better than anything or anybody, so why shouldn’t I wear next my own heart myself as I used to be?”
“But show him the others,” Sylvia demanded.
Mrs. Gainsborough fetched from a desk two daguerreotypes in stained morocco cases lined with faded piece velvet. By tilting their surfaces against the light could be seen the shadow of a portrait’s wraith: a girl appearing in pantalettes and tartan frock; a ballerina glimmering, with points of faint celeste for eyes, and for cheeks the evanescence of a ghostly bloom.
“Oh, look at her,” cried Sylvia. “In her beautiful pantalettes!”
“Hold your tongue, you!”
They started again with their sparring and mock encounters, which lasted on and off until supper was over. Then they all went back to the other room and sat round the fire.
“Tell us about the General,” said Sylvia.
“Go on, as if you hadn’t heard a score of times all I’ve got to tell about the General—though you know I hate him to be called that. He’ll always be the Captain to me.”
Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough embarked upon tales of gay days in the ’sixties and ’seventies. It was astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could scarcely have changed since then.
“The dear Captain! He bought this house for me ineighteen-sixty-nine before I was twenty, and I’ve lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many’s the summer daybreak we’ve walked back here after dancing all night at Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl’s Court is nothing to Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it’s as well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me the dismals to be going there now without my Captain.”
She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very smoke and grime of the city.
“Who knows what’s going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?” she said, shaking her head. “So enjoy yourselves while you can. That’s my motto. And if there’s a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am now.”
The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company, seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of her youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces. Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story to story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after two o’clock, and Michael rose to go.
“We’ll have one song,” cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough to the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up albums, and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a pleating of claret-colored silk.
Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed in comparison so frail and old, sang in awheezy pipe of a voice:The Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me.
“But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me behind my back,” she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face Sylvia when she had finished.
“Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like it.”
“Bless your heart, my dearie.” She laid a hand on Sylvia’s for an instant. Michael thanked Mrs. Gainsborough for the entertainment, and asked Sylvia if she thought he might come round to-morrow and take Lily and her out to lunch.
“We can lunch to-morrow, can’t we?” Sylvia asked, tugging at Lily’s arm, for she was now fast asleep.
“Is Michael going? Yes, we can lunch with him to-morrow,” Lily yawned.
He promised to call for them about midday. It seemed ridiculous to shake hands so formally with Lily, and he hoped she would suggest that the outside door was difficult to open. Alas, it was Sylvia who came to speed his departure.
The fog was welcome to Michael for his going home. At this hour of the night there was not a sound of anything, and he could walk on, dreaming undisturbed. He supposed he would arrive ultimately at Cheyne Walk. But he did not care. He would have been content to fill the long winter night with his fancies. Plunging his hands down into the pockets of his overcoat, he discovered that he had forgotten to take out the girls’ shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by nor cat offended his isolation.The London night belonged to him; his only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on either side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than a few yards in front.
He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his good luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing was ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that carnival. Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined to buy all sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had fingered vaguely from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily’s discovery was colored with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze the situation in which he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea through the fog, he was bemused by the romantic memory of her which was traveling along with his thoughts. He could hold very tightly her shoes: he could almost embrace the phantom of her beauty that curled upon the vapors round each lamp: he was intoxicated merely by the sound of the street where she lived.
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!”
He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of the railway-carriage: “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
“Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!” he chanted at the fog, and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.
“I’m awfully sorry, constable.”
“Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren’t you?”
“Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink my health when you’re off duty.”
He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman’s hand, andas he left the stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on the Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black river flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here, a frore whitish mist that saturated him with a malignant chill. Michael was glad to find himself looking at the dolphin-headed knocker of 173 Cheyne Walk. The effect of being in his own bedroom again, even though the girls’ shoes lay fantastically upon the floor, was at first to make him believe that Tinderbox Lane might have been a dream, and after that, because he knew it was not a dream, to wonder about it.
Yet not even now in this austere and icy bedroom of his own could Michael feel that there was anything really wrong about that small house. It still preserved for him an illusion of sobriety and stability, almost of primness, yet of being rich with a demure gaiety. Mrs. Gainsborough, however, was scarcely a chaperone. Nor was she very demure. And who was Sylvia? And what was Lily doing there? It would have been mysterious, that household, in any case, but was it necessary to assume that there was anything wrong? Sylvia was obviously a girl of high spirits. He had asked her no questions about herself. She might be on the stage. For fun, or perhaps because of their landlady’s kindling stories, Sylvia might have persuaded Lily to come once or twice to the Orient. It did not follow that there was anything wrong. There had been nothing wrong in that carnival. Michael’s heart leaped with the fancy that he was not too late. That would indeed crown this romantic night; and, picking up Lily’s shoe, he held it for a while, wondering about its secrets.
In the morning the fog had turned to a drench of dullJanuary rain; but Michael greeted the outlook as cheerfully as if it had been perfect May weather. He went first to a post office to send off the money he had promised to Mrs. Smith and the Solutionist. After this discharge of business, he felt more cheerful than ever, and, as if to capture the final touch of fantasy necessary to bewitch yesterday night, he suddenly realized, when he was hurrying along Fulham Road in the rain, that he had no idea of the number of Mrs. Gainsborough’s house. He also began to wonder if there really could be such a place as Tinderbox Lane, and as he walked on without discovering any indication of its existence, he wondered if Sylvia had invented the name, so that he might never find her and Lily again. It was an uneasy thought, for without a number and without a name—but just as he was planning an elaborate way to discover the real name of the street, he saw in front of him Tinderbox Lane enameled in the ordinary characters of municipal direction. Here were the two posts: here was the narrow entrance. The rumble of the traffic grew fainter. On one side was a high blank wall; on the other a row of two-storied houses. They were naturally dwellings of the poorer classes, but at intervals a painter had acquired one, and had painted it white or affixed green shutters with heart-shaped openings. The width of the pavement varied continually, but generally at the beginning it was very narrow. Later on, however, it became wide enough to allow trees to be planted down the middle. Beyond this part was a block of new flats round which Tinderbox Lane narrowed again to a mere alley looking now rather dank and gloomy in the rain. Michael could not remember from last night in the fog either the trees or the flats. The door of Lily’s lodging had been set in a wall: here on one side was certainly a wall, but never a door to relieve the grimy blankness. He began to feel discouraged, and he walked roundinto the narrow alley behind the flats. Here were doors in the wall at last, and Michael examined each of them in turn. Two were dark blue: one was green: one was brown. 74: 75: 76: 77. He chose 77 because it was farthest away from the flats. After a very long wait, an old woman holding over herself a very large umbrella opened it.
“Mrs. Gainsborough ...?” Michael began.
But the old woman had slammed the door before he could finish his inquiry.
Michael rang the bell of 76, and again he waited a long time. At last the door was opened, and to his relief he saw Mrs. Gainsborough herself under a green and much larger umbrella than the old woman’s next door.
“I’ve come to take the girls out to lunch.”
“That’s a good boy,” she wheezed. “The dearies will be glad to get out and enjoy themselves a bit. Here’s a day. This would have suited Noah, wouldn’t it?”
She was leading the way up the gravel path, and Michael saw that in the garden-beds there were actually Christmas roses in bloom. The house itself was covered with a mat of Virginia creeper and jasmine, and the astonishing rusticity of it was not at all diminished by the pretentious gray houses of the next road which towered above it behind, nor even in front by the flats with their eruption of windows. These houses with doors in their garden-walls probably all belonged to individuals, and for that reason they had escaped being overwhelmed by the development of the neighborhood twenty years ago. Their four long gardens in a row must be a bower of greenery in summer, and it was sad to think that the flats opposite were no doubt due to the death of someone who had owned a similar house and garden.
Michael remembered the balcony in front with steps on either side. Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently to the kitchen. Two fairlylarge trees were planted in the grass that ran up to the house on either side of the balcony.
“Those are my mulberries,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “This is called Mulberry Cottage. I’ve been meaning to have the name painted on the outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There’s a character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his mulberries. But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my flowers are really remarkable. But there, it’s not to be wondered at. M’ father was a nursery gardener.”
She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why. Possibly it was a comic association in her mind with the behavior of the Captain in carrying her off from such a home.
“The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls,” she wheezed at the door of the sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her book down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the title, and found it was the Contes Drôlatiques of Balzac. An unusual girl, he thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could not kiss her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now restored, supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at ease again. Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he sat thinking of Lily, while the canary chirped in the brass cage. The silence here was very like the country. London was a thousand miles away, and he could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and less did he think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage. Yet the apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take Lily away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she might not want to marry him at once.The discovery of her in this pleasant house with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of rescue which he had planned. She would not presumably be escaping from a situation she abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was it Sylvia who was making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and explain that he had no predatory intentions. She would surely be glad that he wanted to marry Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and tinkled the lusters on the mantelshelf. “Sweet,” said the canary in the brass cage: the rain sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small square room was the malaise of someone’s jealousy. The tentative solution that was propounding itself did not come from his own impression of Sylvia, but it seemed positively to be an emanation from the four walls of the room which in the stillness was able to force its reality upon him. “Sweet,” said the canary: the lusters stopped their tinkling: the rain sizzled steadily outside.
Lunch at Kettner’s was a great success. At least Michael thought it was a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy walls, and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but rather to give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and wintry sun. Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was conscious that the other people in the restaurant were turning round to envy their table.
The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been disquieting, but that Sylvia talkedof them with such a really tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and balls. Quite definitely Michael was able to assure himself that out of the host of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored above the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm’s length from Lily, as he felt himself being held now. Her attitude might have nothing to do with jealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she was, indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who read the Contes Drôlatiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a girl who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had said something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet he knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy walls.
For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative, so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.
“We’re alone,” he managed to say at last.
“Sylvia’s gone to Brighton. She didn’t want to go a bit.”
“Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven’t kissed for five years.”
He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him, it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the trance of silence.
“Lily, you will marry me, won’t you? Very soon? At once?”
Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears. It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and whatever he found her, but the relief was overwhelming. He had thought of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the sunlight of the morning, that hescarcely could believe he held her now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his cheeks, when her mouth was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon this airy beauty must have perished; and even now what was she? A shred of goldleaf on his open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and destructible in a moment of adversity.
Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her, though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection, thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses blowing in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself; and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain had first imagined his gift.
So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had them express, the hour passed.
“We must talk of practical things,” he declared, rising from his knees.
“You always want to talk,” Lily pouted.
“I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes; but it’s so difficult to do things quickly.”
“We’ll be married in a month. We’ll be married on Saint Valentine’s Day,” Michael announced.
“It’s so wet now to think of weddings.” She looked peevishly out of the window.
“You haven’t got to think about it. You’ve got to do it.”
“And it’s so dull,” she objected. “Sylvia says it’s appallingly dull. And she’s been married.”
“What has Sylvia got to do with it?” he demanded.
“Oh, well, she’s been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother died, what was I to do? I couldn’t bear Doris any more. She always gets on my nerves. Anyway, don’t let’s talk about marriage now. In the summer I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather.”
“But look here,” he persisted. “Are you in love with me?”
She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.
“Well, if you’re not in love with me....”
“Oh, I am, I am! Don’t shout so, Michael. If I wasn’t awfully fond of you, I shouldn’t have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men coming here.”
“Are you Sylvia’s servant?” said Michael, in exasperation.
“Don’t be stupid. Of course not.”
“It’s ridiculous,” he grumbled, “to quote her with every sentence.”
“Why you couldn’t have stayed where you were,” said Lily fretfully, “I don’t know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If you’re so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up.”
“So, we’re not to talk any more about marriage?”
After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not the same. She did not mean to discourage him.
“Don’t let’s talk about anything,” said Lily. He could not stand aloof from the arms she held wide open.
Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch, it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long. One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey’s. Michael had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what he told himself was the only café in London which had escaped the cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.
As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very white swaying from the somber mufflings of her cloak. Something in her self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael suddenly suspicious.
“Do you enjoy Covent Garden balls?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“It depends who we go with. Often I don’t care for them much. And the girls you see there are frightfully common.”
He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If it were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no difference to his resolution. People began to come into the café, shaking the wet from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was audible above the conversation.
“I wish we could have had one fine day together,” said Michael regretfully. “Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the winter?”
“I must have been very fond of you,” Lily laughed. “I don’t think you could make me walk like that now.”
“Aren’t you so fond of me now?” he asked reproachfully.
“You ought to know,” she whispered.
All the way home the raindrops were flashing in the road like bayonets, and her cheeks were dabbled with the wet.
“Shall I come in?” Michael asked, as he waited by the door in the wall.
“Yes, come in and have something to drink, of course.”
He was stabbed by the ease of her invitation.
“Do you ask all these friends of yours to come in and have a drink after midnight?”
“I told you that Sylvia doesn’t like me to,” she said.
“But you would, if she didn’t mind?” Michael went on, torturing himself.
“How fond you are of ‘ifs,’” she answered. “I can’t bother to think about ‘ifs’ myself.”
If only he had the pluck to avoid allusions and come at once to grips with truth. Sharply he advised himself to let the truth alone. Already he was feeling the influence of Lily’s attitude. He wondered if, when he married her, all his activity would swoon upon Calypso like this. It was as easy to dream life away in the contemplation of a beautiful woman as in the meditation of the Oxford landscape.
“Happiness makes me inactive,” said Michael to himself. “So of course I shall never really be happy. What a paradox.”
He would not take off his overcoat. He was feeling afraid of a surrender to-night.
“I’m glad I didn’t suggest staying late,” he thought, as he walked away down the dripping garden path. “I should have been mad with unreasonable suspicions, if she had said ‘yes.’”
Sylvia came back next day, and though Michael still liked her very much, he was certain now of her hostility to him. He was conscious of malice in the air, when she said to Lily that Jack wanted them to have dinner with him to-night and go afterward to some dance at Richmond. Michael was furious that Lily should be invited to Richmond, and yet until she had promised to marry him how could he combat Sylvia’s influence? And who was Jack? And with whom had Sylvia been to Brighton?
The day after the dance, Michael came round about twelve o’clock as usual, but when he reached the sitting-room only Sylvia was before the fire.
“Lily isn’t down yet,” she told him.
He was aware of a breathlessness in the atmosphere, and he knew that he and Sylvia were shortly going to clash.
“Jolly dance?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a long pause.
“Will Lily be dressed soon? I rather want to take her out.” Michael flung down his challenge.
“She’s been talking to me about what you said yesterday,” Sylvia began.
Michael could not help liking her more and more, although her countenance was set against him. He could not help admiring that out-thrust underlip and those wide-set, deep and bitter brown eyes.
“When do you propose to marry her?” Sylvia went on.
“As soon as possible,” he said coolly.
“Which of us do you think has the greater influence over her?” she demanded.
“I really don’t know. You have rather an advantage over me in that respect.”
“I’m glad you admit that,” interrupted Sylvia, with sarcastic chill.
“You have personality. You’ve probably been very kindto Lily. You’re cleverer than she is. You’re with her all the time. I’ve only quite suddenly come into her life again.”
“I’m glad you think you’ve managed to do that,” she said, glowering.
More and more, Michael thought, with her wide-set eyes was she like a cat crouching by the fire.
“Just because I had to go away for three days and you had an opportunity to be alone with Lily, you now think you’ve come into her life. My god, you’re like some damned fool in a novel!”
“A novel by whom?” Michael asked. Partly he was trying to score off Sylvia, but at the same time he was sincerely curious to know, for he never could resist the amplification of a comparison.
“Oh, any ink-slinger with a brain of pulp,” she answered savagely.
He bowed.
“I suppose you’re suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?” she sneered.
Michael was rather startled by her divination.
“What should I redeem her from?”
“I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?”
“I don’t know that I boasted of it,” he replied, in rather an injured tone. “But I did know her—very well.”
“Couldn’t you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should have said that Lily’s future must have been obvious from the time she was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got out of her life then: what the hell’s your object in coming into it again now, as you call it, unless you’re a sentimentalist? People don’t let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without the help of sentiment.”
Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of theconversation was able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true. He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
“Sentiment about what?” he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
“You think Lily’s a tart, don’t you? And you think I am, don’t you?”
He frowned at the brutality of the expression.
“I did think so,” he said. “But of course I’ve changed my mind since I’ve seen something of you.”
“Oh, of course you’ve changed your mind, have you?” she laughed contemptuously. “And what made you do that? My visit to Brighton?”
“Even ifyouare,” said Michael hotly, “I needn’t believe that Lily is. And even if she is, it makes no difference to my wanting to marry her.”
“Sentimentalist,” she jeered. “Damned sugar-and-water sentimentalist.”
“Your sneers don’t particularly affect me, you know,” he said politely.
“Oh, for god’s sake, be less the well-brought-up little gentleman. Cut out the undergraduate. You fool, I was married to an Oxford man. And I’m sitting here now with the glorious knowledge that I’m a perpetual bugbear to his good form.”
“Because you made a hash of marriage,” Michael pointed out, “it doesn’t follow that I’m not to marry Lily. I can’t understand your objections.”
“Listen. You couldn’t make her happy. You couldn’t make her any happier than the dozens of men who want to be fond of her for a short time without accepting the responsibility of marriage. Do you think I let any one of those dozens touch her? Not one, if I can get the moneymyself. And I usually can. Well, why should I stand aside now and let you carry her off, even though you do want to marry her? I could argue against it on your side by telling you that you have no chance of keeping Lily faithful to you? Can’t you see that she has no moral energy? Can’t you see that she’s vain and empty-headed? Can’t you see that? But why should I argue with you for your benefit? I don’t care a damn about your side in the matter.”
“What exactly do you care about?” Michael asked. “If Lily is what you say, I should have thought you’d be glad to be rid of her. After all, I’m not proposing to do her any wrong.”
“Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!” Sylvia cried. “Man can only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be a success, you’ll have to own Lily. That’s what I rebel against—the ownership of women. It makes me mad.”
“Yes, it seems to,” Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage with Sylvia’s unreasonableness. “If it comes to ownership,” he went on angrily, “I should have thought that handing her over to the highest bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable slave of man.”
“Why?” challenged Sylvia. “You sentimental ass, can’t you understand that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She’s free. I’m free.”
“You’re not at all free,” Michael indignantly contradicted. “You’re bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts, you’d be a good deal happier.”
“I don’t want to be happier.”
“Oh, I think you’re merely hysterical,” he said disdainfully. “But, after all, your opinions about yourself don’tmatter to me. Only I can’t see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you have the right, I don’t grasp your reason for wanting to.”
“When I met Lily first,” said Sylvia, “she had joined the chorus of a touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I’d just run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. That’s three years ago. Is she beautiful still?”
“Of course she is,” said Michael.
“Well, it’s I who have kept her beautiful. I’ve kept her free also. If sometimes I’ve let her have affairs with men, I’ve taken care that they were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort of....”
“Look here,” Michael burst in. “I’m sick of this conversation. You’re talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I’m going to marry her, whatever you think.”
“I say you won’t, and you shan’t,” Sylvia declared.
The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the fire, glaring at each other.
“The extraordinary thing is,” said Michael at last, “I thought you had a sense of humor when I first met you. And another extraordinary thing is that I still like you very much. Which probably rather annoys you. But I can’t help saying it.”
“The opinions of sentimentalists don’t interest me one way or the other,” Sylvia snapped.
“Will you answer one question? Will you tell me why you were so pleasant on the evening we met?”
“I really can’t bother to go back as far as that.”
“You weren’t jealousthen,” Michael persisted.
“Who says I’m jealous now?” she cried.
“I do. What do you think you are, unless you’re jealous? When is Lily coming down?”
“She isn’t coming down until you’ve gone.”
“Then I shall go and call her.”
“She’s not in London.”
“I don’t believe you.”
A second deadlock was reached. Finally Michael decided to give Sylvia the pleasure of supposing that he was beaten for the moment. He congratulated himself upon the cunning of such a move. She was obviously going to be rather difficult to circumvent.
On the steps of the balcony he turned to her:
“You hate me because I love Lily, and you hate me twice as much because Lily loves me.”
“It’s not true,” Sylvia declared. “It’s not true. She doesn’t love you, and what right have you to love her?”
She tossed back her mane of brown hair, biting her nails.
“What college was your husband at?” Michael suddenly inquired.
“Balliol.”
“I wonder if I knew him.”
“Oh, no. He was older than you.”
It was satisfactory, Michael thought as he walked down Tinderbox Lane, that the conversation had ended normally. At least, he had effected so much. She had really been rather wonderful, that strange Sylvia. He would very much like to pit her against Stella. It was satisfactory to have his doubts allayed: notwithstanding her present opposition, he felt that he did owe Sylvia a good deal. But it would be absurd to let Lily continue in such a life: women always quarreled ultimately, and if Sylvia were to leave her, her fall would be rapid and probably irredeemable. Besides, he wanted her for himself. She was to him no less than to Sylvia the most beautiful thing in the world. He did not want to marry a clever woman: he would be much more content with Lily, from whom there could be no reaction upon his nerves. Somehow all his theories of behavior werebeing referred back to his own desires. It was useless to pretend any longer that his pursuit had been quixotry. Even if it had seemed so on that night when he first heard the news of Lily from Drake, the impulse at the back of his resolve had been his passion for her. When he looked back at his behavior lately, a good deal of it seemed to have been dictated by self-gratification. He remembered how deeply hurt he had felt by Poppy’s treatment of what he had supposed his chivalry. In retrospect his chivalry was seeming uncommonly like self-satisfaction. His friendship for Daisy; for Barnes; for the underworld; it had been nothing but self-satisfaction. Very well, then. If self was to be the touchstone in future, he could face that standard as easily as any other. By the time he had reached the end of Tinderbox Lane Michael was convinced of his profound cynicism. He felt truly obliged to Sylvia for curing him of sentiment. He had so often inveighed against sentiment as the spring of human action, that he was most sincerely grateful for the proof of his own sentimental bias. He would go to Sylvia to-morrow and say frankly that he did not care a bit what Lily had been, was now, or would be; he wanted her. She was something beautiful which he coveted. For the possession of her he was ready to struggle. He would declare war upon Sylvia as upon a rival. She should be rather surprised to-morrow morning, Michael thought, congratulating himself upon this new and ruthless policy.
On the next morning, however, all Michael’s plans for his future behavior were knocked askew by being unable to get into Mulberry Cottage. His brutal frankness; his cynical egotism; his cold resolution, were ignominiously repulsed by a fast-closed door. Ringing a bell at intervals of a minute was a very undignified substitute for the position he had imagined himself taking up in that small square room. This errand-boy who stood at his elbow, gazing with such raptinterest at his ringing of the bell, was by no means the audience he had pictured.
“Does it amuse you to watch a bell being rung?” Michael asked.
The errand-boy shook his head.
“Well, why do you do it?”
“I wasn’t,” said the errand-boy.
“What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing.”
Michael could not grapple with the errand-boy, and he retired from Tinderbox Lane until after lunch. He rang again, but he could get no answer to his ringing. At intervals until midnight he came back, but there was never an answer all the time. He went home and wrote to Sylvia:
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.Dear Sylvia,If you aren’t afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me see Lily?I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.Yours,M. F.
173 CHEYNEWALK,S.W.
Dear Sylvia,
If you aren’t afraid of being beaten, why are you afraid to let me see Lily?
I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.
Yours,M. F.
To Lily he wrote:
Darling,Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to three.Michael.Alone, of course.
Darling,
Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to three.
Michael.
Alone, of course.
Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not come. All the time he spent in a second-handbookshop with one eye on the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:
Come to-morrow at twelve.S. S.
Come to-morrow at twelve.
S. S.
Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the waste-paper basket.
“I thought I should sting you into giving way,” he exclaimed.
Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.
“They’ve gone away, the demons!” was what she said.
Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.
“Where have they gone?” he asked blankly.
“Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage. There’s a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I’ll give it to you.”
Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.
“We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are,” Mrs. Gainsborough said.
“Very soon,” he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold begonias to-morrow morning.
In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia’s note, a bleak little envelope waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the silence that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his cage. Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.
From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia’shostility was stretching out toward him. “Sweet,” said the canary. Michael tore open the envelope and read: