Sinister Street

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 sentimental boy of five years ago. Perhaps she was despising him, for she could compare him with other men. e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns 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 pa.s.sionate languor. Soon after midnight both the girls declared they

"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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s door with the key.

A woman's figure appeared with an orange-shaded lamp in the pa.s.sage.

"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 the dance. 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 gla.s.s 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 antimaca.s.sar 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-fas.h.i.+oned; here was no sign of decay, whether in the fabric of the house or in the att.i.tude of the people living there. This small square room with the heavy furniture that occupied so much of the s.p.a.ce had no demirep demeanor. That horsehair sofa with lyre-shaped sides and back of floriated wood; that bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s; 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 Sevres; 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 gla.s.s 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 sense of 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.