Sinister Street

It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first cla.s.s compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to rea.s.sure himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella, but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a little Stella's judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the hedgerows monotonously, and the horses' breath curled round the rigid form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if she were happy.

"It makes me sleepy driving like this," she murmured. Her head was on his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.

There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they arrived, though Michael watched Stella's glances rather anxiously.

Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against the stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock? Stella, too, whom he had always considered a personality of some extravagance, seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and conventional. It used always to be himself who criticized people: Stella had always been rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married to Alan; or was Lily the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to be going all right, especially when he consoled himself by remembering the abruptness of Lily's introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily away with her into the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael tried to feel that this was what he had expected would happen; but he could not drive away the consciousness of a new formality brooding over Hardingham. It was annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed deliberately to avoid any reference to Lily. He would not even remind Michael of the evening at the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her five or six years ago.

Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab with her sister on that occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk about cricket pitches; and yet he could not bring himself to ask right out what Alan thought of her, because it would have impinged upon his pride to do so. In about ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano, and tacitly they agreed to forego the intimacy of drinking port together any longer.

Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.

"Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play."

It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the slightest movement on her part or Alan's as an implication of disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.

When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily's life would be fatal. He found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up and of wis.h.i.+ng to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother everything else in a great surprise.

"Of course, that's what I imagined you were thinking of doing," said Stella. "So you've made up your quarrel of five years ago?"

"When are you going to get married?" Alan asked.

"Well, I hoped you'd be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live."

"Oh, of course she can stay here," said Stella.

"Oh, rather, of course," Alan echoed.

Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he was plunged.

A fortnight pa.s.sed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance toward the topic, he felt that his friends.h.i.+p

They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.

"I don't think I care much for this country of yours," said Michael at last. "It's flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I should care to live here, I don't know."

"There's a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of the wind there."

Michael resented Stella's pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a fortnight.

"I hate badly trained dogs," he grumbled when Stella turned round to whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.

"So do I," she agreed.

It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was easier in the shelter of the wood.

"I don't think I've properly thanked you for having us to stay down here," he began.

Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:

"Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?" she demanded.

Her use of the word "business" annoyed him: it crystallized all the offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly att.i.tude these two weeks.

"I shall be delighted to talk about this 'business.' Though why you should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don't quite know."

"Do you want me to speak out frankly--to say exactly what I think of you and Lily and of your marrying her? You won't like it, and I won't do it unless you ask me."

"Go on," said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the anemones flus.h.i.+ng and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers.

It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood.

Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.

"Go on, I'm waiting for you to begin," Michael repeated.

"Straight off, then," she said, "I may as well tell you that this marriage is impossible. I don't know where you found her again, and I don't care. It wouldn't make the slightest difference to me what she had been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else. But, Michael, she's flabby. You'll hate me for saying so, but she is, she really is! In a year you'll admit that; you'll see her growing older and flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that's possible.

Even her beauty won't last. These very fair girls fall to pieces like moth-eaten dolls. I've tried to find something in her during this fortnight. I've tried and tried; but there's nothing. You may be in love with her now, though I don't believe you are. I think it's all a piece of sentimentalism. I've often teased you about getting married, but please don't suppose that I haven't realized how almost impossible it would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear and tear of your idealism. I'm prepared to bet that behind your determination to marry this girl there's a reason, a lovely, unpractical, idealistic reason. Isn't there? You've been away with her for a week-end, and have tortured yourself into a theory of reparation. Is that it? Or you've fallen in love with the notion of yourself in love at eighteen. Oh, you can't marry her, you foolish old darling."

"Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn't keep whistling to that infernal dog," said Michael. "If this marriage is so terrible, I should have thought you'd have forgotten there were such animals as c.o.c.ker-spaniels. It's rubbish for you to say you've tried to find something in Lily. You haven't made the slightest attempt. You've criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You're sunk deep already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is the most devastating joint egotism in the world. d.a.m.n it, Stella, when you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I didn't talk as you've been talking to me."

"No, you were always very cautiously fraternal," said Stella. "Ah, no, I won't say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you'll break my heart if you marry this girl."

"You won't do anything of the kind," he contradicted. "You'll be whistling to spaniels all the time."

"Michael, it's really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I'm feeling so wretched about you."

"It's all fine for you to sneer at Lily," said Michael. "But I can remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room over some man who'd made a fool of you. _You_ looked pretty flabby then."

"How dare you remind me of that?" Stella cried, in a fury. "How dare you? How dare you?"

"You brought it on yourself," said Michael coldly.

"You're going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry her, then! But don't come to me for sympathy, when she's forced you to drag yourself through the divorce court."

"No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again," said Michael bitterly. "Unless it's for advice when I want to buy a spaniel."

They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far they had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with marriage.

Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally were smashed by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about Stella's music lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage? The sooner he and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he ought to suggest going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until he could find a place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her. They would be married next month, and he would take her abroad. He would be able to see her at last in some of the places where in days gone by he had dreamed of seeing her.

"I suppose you wouldn't object to keeping Lily here two or three days more, while I find a place in town?" said Michael. It only struck him when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor.

Stella would despise him more than ever.

"Michael," Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path.

"Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I'm willing actually to plead with you. It's intolerable to think of you tied to her!"

"It's too late," said Michael. "I must marry her. Not for any reasons that the world would consider reasons," he went on. "But because I want to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me before the world."

"I won't, I won't, I won't! It's all wrong. She's all wrong. Her people are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know how casual he is about people he doesn't like. He usually flings them out of his mind at once."

"Oh, Alan's amazing in every way," said Michael. He longed to say that he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so much the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite place to which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for a few days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be better to pocket his pride.