Sinister Street

Michael packed up his kitbags and turned for a last look at the white rooms in Leppard Street. Suddenly it struck him that he would take with him one or two of the pictures and present them to Maurice's studio in Grosvenor Road. Mona Lisa should go there, and the Prince of Orange whom himself was supposed to resemble slightly, and Don Baltazar on his big horse. They should be the contribution which he had been intending for some time to pay to that household. The cab was at the door, and presently Michael drove away from Leppard Street.

As soon as he was in the hansom he felt he could begin to think of Lily again, and though he knew that probably he was going to suffer a good deal when they met, he nevertheless thought of her now with elation. It had not seemed to be so sparkling a morning in Leppard Street; but driving toward Maurice's studio along the banks of the river, Michael thought it was the most crystalline morning he had ever known.

"I've brought you these pictures," he explained to Maurice, 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 fair girls 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 years ago, 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-gla.s.s 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

The last tableau of the ballet had dissolved behind the falling curtain.

Lily was not here to-night, and he hurried out into Piccadilly. She must be somewhere close at hand. It was impossible for her to come casually like that to the Orient and afterward to disappear for weeks. Or was she a man'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-cla.s.s railway carriages traveling up to town in the morning and reading The Financial Times. He would wear a hideous orchid in his b.u.t.tonhole 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, cafe after cafe, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sengers. It was closing-time before he thought he had been searching for five minutes; and when the lights were dimmed, he walked up and down Regent Street, up and down Piccadilly, up and down Coventry Street, hurrying time after time to pursue a walk that might have been hers.

By one o'clock Piccadilly was nearly empty, and it was an insult to suppose that Lily would be found among these furtive 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s 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 c.o.c.ker-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, d.a.m.n!" 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 d.i.c.k 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 wors.h.i.+p Stella," Michael thought.

"We're hoping you will all be able to come and dine with us for Twelfth Night. My husband is so fond of keeping up old English festivals. Mr.

Fane, you'll still be at Hardingham, I hope, so that we may have the pleasure of seeing you as well?"

Michael said he was afraid he would have to be back in town.

"What absolute rot!" Stella cried. "Of course you'll be here."

But Michael insisted that he would be gone.

"They tell us you've been buying Herefords, Mr. Merivale. My husband was so much interested and is so much looking 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."