Sinister Street

"Is there nothing I can do for you?"

"Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don't get off to-night."

He offered them to her eagerly.

"Go on, you silly thing," she said, pus.h.i.+ng the money away. "As if I meant it."

"If you didn't, I did," said Michael.

"Oh, all right," she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her purse. "Well, chin-chin, Clive, don't be so long coming down here next time."

"Michael is my name," he said, for he was rather distressed to think that she would pa.s.s forever from his life supposing him to be called Clive.

"As if I didn't know that," she said. "I remember, because it's a Jew name."

"But it isn't," Michael contradicted.

"Jews are called that."

"Very likely," he admitted.

"Oh, well, it'll be all the same in a hundred years."

She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him.

Then she disappeared.

Michael sat on in the Cafe d'Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to imagine that material h.e.l.l of the trial. The bandage dropped from the eyes of justice, and he saw her pig's-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful; and her scales were like a grocer's. He pitied Barnes in the clutches of anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist. After all, Daisy's story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to himself's hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to account for his dislike of Janie Filson's salute without supposing murder.

Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the thought used to come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed, the thought of murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was absurd to think of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling hansoms and all that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes not met him at the Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an appointment when his pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie c.u.mmings had traveled even to Leppard Street?

Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o'clock, and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.

The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the houses confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars. Several windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals of habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers behind, and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows of his old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door quietly and stood listening for a moment in the pa.s.sage. He could hear a low snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a word was distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening close to the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the blackness, fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was seeming

Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and every instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the house like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose and fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then without warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion. Every word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.

"I say he gave you thirty s.h.i.+llings. Now then!" Barnes yapped.

"And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you've had."

"Don't I hear through the door what you get?"

Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night, which smelled so sweet after that pa.s.sage.

He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of black basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the speculation of their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning and brooded upon the builders that built them and the sphinx that commanded them to be built.

In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher and higher... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a wild, irregular walk in Michael's direction. He had a sensation that she had known he was standing here against this wall, that she had watched him all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been standing here against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he could not advance to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the wall. Michael saw her very plainly as she pa.s.sed him in the lamplight. Her hat was askew, and a black ostrich plume hung down over her big chalky face: her lips were glistening as if they had been smeared with jam. She was wearing a black satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts swept past him, like an overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by a wire from the scene.

Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to have been given a glimpse of a mere ma.s.s of woman, a soft obscene primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One with the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather startled as he walked up the steps to see Barnes' face pressed against the window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave rea.s.suringly to a mask like that.

Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.

"Here, I couldn't get down to the Orange to-night. I've had a bit of trouble with this girl."

The gas was flaring in the sitting-room by now, and the night, which outside had been lightening for dawn, was black as ink upon the panes.

"Sit on the bed. The chairs are all full of her dirty clothes. I'll pull the blinds down. I'm going to leave here to-morrow, Fane. Did you see her going down the road? She must have pa.s.sed you by. I tell you straight, Fane, half an hour back I was in two minds to do her in. I was, straight. And I would have, if... Oh, well, I kept my temper and threw her out instead. Grat.i.tude! It's my belief grat.i.tude doesn't exist in this world. You sit down and have a smoke. He left some cigarettes behind."

"Who did?" Michael asked sharply.

"Who did what?"

"Left these cigarettes."

"Oh, they're some I bought yesterday," said Barnes.

"I think it's just as well for you that you are going to-morrow morning.

I hope you quite realize that otherwise I should have turned you out."

"Well, don't look at me in that tone of voice," Barnes protested. "I've had quite enough to worry me without any nastiness between old friends to make it worse."

"You can't expect me to be pleased at the way you've treated my rooms,"

Michael said.

"Oh, the gas-stove, you mean?"

"It's not a question of gas-stoves. It's a question of living on a woman."

"Who did?"

"You."

"If I'd had to live on her earnings, I should be very poorly off now,"

grumbled Barnes, in an injured voice.

Under Michael's attack he was regaining his old perkiness.

"At any rate, you must go to-morrow morning," Michael insisted.

"Don't I keep on telling you that I'm going? It's no good for you to nag at me, Fane."

"And what about the woman?"

"Her? Let her go to----," said Barnes contemptuously. "She can't do me any harm. What if she does tell the coppers I've been living on her?

They won't worry me unless they've nothing better to do, and I'll have hooked it by then."

"You're sure she can't do you any harm?" Michael asked gravely. "There's nothing else she could tell the police?"

"Here, what are you talking about?" asked Barnes, coming close to Michael and staring at him fixedly. Michael debated whether he should mention Cissie c.u.mmings, but he lacked the courage either to frighten Barnes with the suggestion of his guilt or to preserve a superior att.i.tude in the face of his enraged innocence.

"I shall come round to-morrow morning, or rather this morning, at nine,"