Sinister Street

"I won't live in Longwall," affirmed Michael.

"Do you think you could find anybody else?"

"Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?" asked Michael hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long as the third person was a tolerably good egg.

Maurice seemed embarra.s.sed.

"No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me.

The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but of course I said I was digging with you, and there's no room for a third."

"I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny," said Michael quickly.

Maurice looked much relieved.

"As long as you don't feel I've treated you badly," he began.

"That's all right," said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice's obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice's invitation to stay at G.o.dalming in July with an inward amus.e.m.e.nt roused by the penitence which had prompted it.

Stella's unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a pa.s.sion for keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery's adorations of Maurice. He found G.o.dalming oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram.

Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fas.h.i.+onable rusticity and carefully pressed trousers.

"Dear Mrs. Avery," he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to France. "I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery."

"Thank Heaven that's done!" he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South Wales.

The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London between his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at Cressingham Hall--a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad Midlands. It was mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb the pastoral calm.

Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden's remonstrances to obtain a grasp of rural administration. So he and his sister Sylvia with Michael drove every day in a high dogcart to various outlying farms of the estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very popular, and after all as he confided to Michael that was the main thing.

"And how's his lords.h.i.+p, sir?" the tenant would inquire.

"Oh, very fit," Lonsdale would reply. "I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a good deal about it."

In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of agriculture and drink d.a.m.nation to all Radicals, while outside in the sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife's raspberries and gooseberries.

"I envy your life," said Michael.

"A bit on the slow side, don't you think?"

"Plenty of time for thinking."

"Ah," said Lonsdale. "But then I've got no brains. I really haven't, you know. The poor old governor's quite worried about it."

However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest draw up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port, he delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and notorieties, Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry him very much, not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of brains in his only son.

"Dear Lady Cleveden," he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty house in Cheyne Walk. "London is quite impossible after Cressingham."

And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the Embankment, the oily river and a lack-l.u.s.ter moon.

Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott, inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot London weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more solicitude than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace for some time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while Prescott lent him a grave attention. At last Michael's conversation exhausted itself, and for a few minutes there was silence, while

"Daresay your mother told you I wanted to marry Stella. Daresay Stella told you. Of course, I realize it's quite absurd. Said so at once, and of course it's all over now. Phew! it's fearfully hot to-night. Always feel curiously stranded in London in August, but I suppose that's the same with most people."

Michael had an impulse to ask Prescott to come away with him, but the moment for doing so vanished in the shyness it begot, and a moment later the impulse seemed awkwardly officious. Yet by Prescott's confidence Michael felt himself committed to a partic.i.p.ation in his existence that called for some response. But he could not with any sincerity express a regret for Stella's point of view.

"Mother was very anxious she should accept you," said Michael, and immediately he had a vision of Prescott like the puppet of an eighteenth-century novelist kneeling to receive Stella's stilted declaration of her refusal.

"Your mother was most extraordinarily gracious and sympathetic. But of course I'm a man of fifty. I suppose you thought the idea very ridiculous."

"I don't think Stella is old enough to marry," said Michael.

"But don't you think it's better for girls to marry when they're young?"

asked Prescott, and as he leaned forward, Michael saw his eyes were very bright and his actions feverish. "I've noticed that tendencies recur in families. Time after time. I don't like this Viennese business, yet if Stella had married me I shouldn't have interfered with her," he added, with a wistfulness that was out of keeping with his severely conventional appearance. "Still, I should have always been in the background."

"Yes, I expect that was what she felt," said Michael.

He did not mean to be brutal, but he saw at once how deeply he had wounded Prescott, and suddenly in a panic of inability to listen any longer, he rose and said he must go.

As he was driving to Waterloo Station on the following afternoon to go down to Basingstead, he saw vaguely on the posters of the starved August journals "Suicide of a Man About Town." At Cobble Place newspapers were read as an afterthought, and it was not until late on the day after that above a short paragraph the headline "Tragedy in the Albany" led him on to learn that actually Prescott was the man about town who had killed himself.

Michael's first emotion was a feeling of self-interest in being linked so closely with an event deemed sufficiently important to occupy the posters of an evening paper. For the moment the fact that he had dined with Prescott a few hours beforehand seemed a very remarkable coincidence. It was only after he had had to return to London and attend the inquest, to listen to the coroner's summing up of the evidence of depression and the perspiring jury's delivery of their verdict of temporary insanity he began to realize that in the crisis of a man's life his own words or behavior might easily have altered the result. He was driving to Waterloo Station again in order to take up the thread of his broken visit. On the posters of the starved August journals he read now with a sharp interest "Cat Saves Household in Whitechapel Fire." This cat stood for him as the symbol of imaginative action. He bought the evening papers at Waterloo, and during the journey down to Hamps.h.i.+re read about this cat who had saved a family from an inquest's futile epitaph, and who even if unsuccessful would have been awarded the commendatory plat.i.tudes of the coroner.

Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for evening. By this time the irony of the cat's fortuitous interference was blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to the fact of Prescott's death. He was no longer occupied by the strange sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott's life was surely a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would be kinder to ascribe it to the acc.u.mulative boredom of August in London, or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to the very portals of the Albany.

Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had first obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having given away to the panic of wis.h.i.+ng to listen no longer to the dead man's confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting to think of a man whose att.i.tude to life had seemed so correct making this hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the public, so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals, the soldier-servant, the fas.h.i.+onable cloister in which he lived, the profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of restraint whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in unrelaxing guardians.h.i.+p of his good form. The harder Michael thought about the business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an earlier mood of self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to whose almost contemptuous att.i.tude of withdrawal he might ultimately aspire. He had often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of thought and action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered into himself the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence. And now he must admit that mere austerity unless supported by a spiritual encouragement to endure was liable at any moment to break up pitiably into suicide. The word itself began to strike him with all the force of its squalid a.s.sociations. The fresh dust of the Hamps.h.i.+re lanes became a gray miasma. Loneliness looped itself slowly round his progress so that he hurried on with backward glances. The hazel-hedges were somber and monotonous and defiled here and there by the rejected rags of a tramp.

The names of familiar villages upon the signposts lost their intimations of sane humanity, and turned to horrible abstractions of the dead life of the misshapen boot or empty matchbox at their foot. The comfortable a.s.surance of a prosperous and unvexed country rolling away to right and left forsook him, and only the pallid road writhed along through the twilight. "My nerves are in a rotten state," he told himself, and he was very glad to see Basingstead Manor twinkling in the night below, while himself was still walking shadowless in a sickly dusk.

In the drawing-room of Cobble Place all was calm, as indeed, Michael thought, why on earth should it not be? Mrs. Carthew's serene old age drove out the last memory of the coroner's court, and here was Mrs. Ross coming out of a circle of lamplight to greet him, and here in Cobble Place was her small son sleeping.

"You look tired and pale, Michael," said Mrs. Ross. "Why didn't you wire which train you were coming by? I would have met you with the chaise."

"Poor fellow, of course he's tired!" said Mrs. Carthew. "A most disturbing experience. Come along. Dinner will do him good."

The notion of suicide began to grow more remote from reality in this room, which had always been to Michael soft and fragrant like a great rose in whose heart, for very despair of being able ever to express in words the perfection of it, one swoons to be buried. The evening went the calm course of countless evenings at Cobble Place. Michael played at backgammon with Mrs. Carthew: Joan Carthew worked at the accounts of a parochial charity: May Carthew knitted: Mrs. Ross, reading in the lamplight, met from time to time Michael's glances with a concern that never displayed itself beyond the pitch of an unexacting sympathy. He was glad, as the others rustled to greet the ten strokes of the clock, to hear Mrs. Ross say she would stay up for a while and keep him company.

"Unless you want to work?" she added.

Michael shook his head.

When the others had gone to bed, he turned to her:

"Do you know, Mrs. Ross, I believe I could have prevented Prescott's death. He began to talk about Stella, and I felt embarra.s.sed and came away."

"Oh, my dear Michael, I think you're probably accusing yourself most unfairly. How could you have supposed the terrible sequel to your dinner?"

"That's just it. I believe I did know."

"You thought he was going to kill himself?"