“Because if we are in the same house that doesn’t say you’ve got to pay my board, does it?” she demanded proudly.
“Once in a way won’t matter,” Michael insisted. “And we might go on to a music hall afterward.”
“Yes, we might, if I hadn’t got to pay the woman who’s looking after my kid for some clothes she’s made for him,” said Poppy. “And sitting with you at the Holborn all night won’t do that. No, you can give me dinner and then I’ll P.O. I’m not going to put on a frock even for you, because I never get off only when I’m in a coat and skirt.”
Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.
“Go on, sit down. As you’re going to take me out to dinner, you can talk to me while I dress as a reward.”
In this faded pink room where the sun was by now shining with a splendor that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and overblown, Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape as it were from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters to be written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she was ready.
Michael’s own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this moment such a room as Poppy’s. It could not be. It could not be. And he realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury, craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors. This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of the underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive plainness, her schoolma’am air, her decent unobtrusiveness. Yet she was plucky, and she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her child. There was, too, something admirable in the candor with which she had treated him. There was something friendly and birdlike about her, and he thought how when he had been first aware of her movements below he had compared them to a bird’s fidgeting. There was something really appealing about the gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at her description; and then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed her to forego what might after all have been for her a pleasant evening because she must pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after her child. He could so easily have offered to give her the money. No matter, he could make amends at once and offer it to her now. It would be doubtless an unusual experience for her to come into contact with someone whose rule of life was not dictated by the brutal self-interest of those with whom her commerce must generally lie. She would serve to bring to the proof his theory that so much of the world’s beastliness could be cleansed by having recourse to the natural instincts of decent behavior without any grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael did feel very philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy’s summons.
“I say,” he began at once. “It was stupid of me just now not to suggest that I should find the money for your kid’s clothes. Look here, we’ll go to the Holborn after dinner and——” he paused. He felt a delicacy in inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her company—“and—er—I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?”
“I say, kiddie, you’re a sport,” she said. “Only look here, don’t go and spend more than what you can afford. It isn’t as if we’d met by chance, as you might say.”
“Oh no, I can afford two pounds,” Michael assured her.
“Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for four shillings. That’s not too much, is it?”
He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds was not offered for hire.
“But, kiddie, I can’t bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge here. These aren’t gay rooms.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” said Michael. “The money is a present.”
“Oh, is it?” she flamed out. “Then you can keep your dirty money. Thanks, I haven’t come down to charity. Not yet. If I’m not good enough for you, you can keep your money. I believe you’re nothing more than a dirty ponce. I’ve gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I’m not going to begin now. That’s very certain. Are you going out or am I going out? Because I don’t want to be seen with you. You and your presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I went home with you.”
Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that passage where the little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder with the mean and vicious passions they now veiled. Very soon, however, his disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there was not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively conceal secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous toadstools in rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must flourish here. It was foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a half-aroused curiosity had taken its place, and Michael regretted that he had not stayed to hear what more she would have said. How far she had been from appreciating the motives that prompted his offer of money. Poppy’s injustice began to depress him. He felt, walking southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of her failure to be grateful from his point of view. It hurt him to find sincerity so lightly regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity which had been touched. Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned. The ability to apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave Michael a great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a statement, and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could not expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She could have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could she grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her. Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside. Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the power to effect.
On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the evening.
At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening with much amusement to the people round him. He liked to hear each petty host assure his guests that he had brought them to a place of which very few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of this assurance stared at one another like conspirators.
Just before nine o’clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade. He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its approach his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her suddenly without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of himself. However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who resembled her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving Promenade whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the crowd. That on the stage a lady of the haute école was with a curious wooden rapidity putting a white horse through a number of tricks did not concern his attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was the performance. Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair than that weary heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there was an unity of effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At The Oxford the whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was a real exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days. Indeed, so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the frankness almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of profiting by the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be drugged into perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.
Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of shimmering green plush, the dim foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding circumambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the barrier, the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones—there was nothing that spoiled the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the more nearly was the effect achieved. At intervals women whose close-fitting dresses seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by: and generally the people eyed one another with the indifferent frozen eyes of swimming fish. There was indeed something cold-blooded in the very atmosphere, and it was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of women that he was expecting Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able to imagine her in the luxury of the Orient than sleeping down the sun over a crumpled novelette in such a room as Poppy’s in Camden Town.
The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the assurance that he had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the shock he knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The evening wore itself away. The lady of the haute école was succeeded by a band of Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by half a dozen cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its mechanical course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it was almost possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope’s shifting squares and lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the ballet and whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down there on the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a history, so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the Promenade where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to account for her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life. The ballet was over, and he passed out into the streets.
For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without finding Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the heart of London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the merest chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet he began to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by some enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as if his friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in that circumambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal motion. They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward and forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at any of the restaurants or cafés to which he went after the theater. By the intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself off from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen the night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to Lily; and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a hat, perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never meeting the wearer’s glance.
He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not meet in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it was possible to seclude one’s self from the claims of human intercourse. He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out over the sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream to the distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which every afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books indeed that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs. Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.
“I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do,” she affirmed. “Doesn’t it tire your eyes?”
Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book, looking sideways at it like a fat goose.
“Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn’t it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This is Tuesday, isn’t it?”
After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.
Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a preconception of an elderly chemist reduced by misfortune and misdeeds to the status of one of those individuals who with a discreet manner somewhere between a family doctor and a grocer place themselves at the service of the public in an atmosphere of antiseptics. Mr. Murdoch was not at all like this. He was a squat swarthy man with one very dark eye that stared fixedly regardless of the expression of its fellow. Michael could not make up his mind whether this eye were blind or not. He rather hoped it was, but in any case its fierce blankness was very disconcerting. Conversation between Michael and Mr. Murdoch was not very lively, and Mrs. Murdoch’s adjutant inquisitiveness made Michael the more monosyllabic whenever her husband did commit himself to a direct inquiry.
“I looked for you in the Horseshoe the other evening,” said Michael finally, at a loss how in any other way to give Mr. Murdoch an impression that he took the faintest interest in his existence.
“In the Horseshoe?” repeated Mr. Murdoch, in surprise. “I never go to the Horseshoe only when a friend asks me in to have one.”
Michael saw Mrs. Murdoch frowning at him, and, perceiving that there was a reason why her husband must not suppose she had been to the Horseshoe on the evening of his arrival, he said he had gathered somehow, he did not exactly know where or why or when, that Mr. Murdoch was often to be found in the Horseshoe. He wished this awkward and unpleasant man would leave him and cock his rolling eye anywhere else but in his room.
“Bit of a reader, aren’t you?” inquired the chemist.
Michael admitted he read a good deal.
“Ever read Jibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” continued the chemist.
“Some of it.”
Mr. Murdoch said in that case it was just as well he hadn’t bought some volumes he’d seen on a barrow in the Caledonian Road.
“Four-and-six, with two books out in the middle,” he proclaimed.
Michael could merely nod his comment, though he racked his brains to think of some remark that would betray a vestige of cordiality. Mr. Murdoch got up to retire to the kitchen. He evidently did not find his tenant sympathetic. Outside on the landing Michael heard him say to his wife: “Stuck up la-di-da sort of a ——, isn’t he?”
Presently the wife came up again.
“How did you like my old man?”
“Oh, very much.”
“Did you notice his eye?”
Michael said he had noticed something.
“His brother Fred did that for him.”
She spoke proudly, as if Fred’s act had been a humane achievement. “When they were boys,” she explained. “It gives him a funny look. I remember when I first met him it gave me the creeps, but I don’t notice it really now. Would you believe he couldn’t see an elephant with it?”
“I wondered if it were blind,” said Michael.
“Blind as a leg of mutton,” said Mrs. Murdoch, and still there lingered in her accents a trace of pride. Then suddenly her demeanor changed and there crept over her countenance what Michael was bound to believe to be an expression of coyness.
“Don’t say anything more to Alf about the Horseshoe. You see, I only gave you the idea I was meeting him, because I didn’t really know you very well at the time. Of course really I’d gone to see my sister. No, without a joke, I was spending the evening with a gentleman friend.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment.
“My old man wouldn’t half knock me about, if he had the least suspicion. But it’s someone I knew before I was married, and that makes a difference, doesn’t it?”
“Does your husband go out with lady friends he knew before he was married?” Michael asked, and wondered if Mrs. Murdoch would see an implied reproof.
“What?” she shrilled. “I’d like to catch him nosing after another woman. He wouldn’t see a hundred elephants before I’d done with him. I’d show him.”
“But why should you have freedom and not he?” Michael asked.
“Never mind about him. You let him try. You see what he’d get.”
Michael did not think the argument could be carried on very profitably. So he showed signs of wanting to return to his book, and Mrs. Murdoch retired. What extraordinary standards she had, and how bitterly she was prepared to defend a convention, for after all in such a marriage the infidelity of the husband was nothing but a conventional offense: she obviously had no affection for him. The point of view became very topsyturvy in Neptune Crescent, Michael decided.
On the last evening of the fortnight during which he had regularly visited the Orient, Michael went straight back to Camden Town without waiting to scan the cafés and restaurants until half-past twelve as he usually had. This abode in Neptune Crescent was empty, and as always when that was the case the personality of the house was very vivid upon his imagination. As he turned up the gas-jet in the hall, the cramped interior with its fusty smell and its thread-bare staircarpet disappearing into the upper gloom round the corner seemed to be dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of having the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent impulse. For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the ineffable depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to glance at every one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the exaggerated defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to lock and double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two clanking chains. He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the summer night, while himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back garden and went climbing over garden wall and garden wall to abandon this curious mixture of salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and solidity, this quite indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way strangely cozy house. He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor front. He peered cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed. The gas-jet was glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue flame, but the light from the passage showed all her clothes still strewn about. From the open door came out the faint perfume of stale scent which mingled with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle expression of the house’s personality. He closed the door gently. In the silence it seemed almost as if the least percussion would rouse the very clothes from their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning another pinhead of gas, and the light from the passage reaching here very dimly was only just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly sheen and to show the mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the luminous face of the clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to unreality, and when Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering his room, even they were scarcely sound guarantors of his own actuality. He had a certain queasiness in opening the door of the Murdochs’ bedroom, and he was rather glad when he was confronted here by a black void whose secrecy he did not feel tempted to violate. With three or four books under his arm he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned out of the window two cats yawled and fizzed at one another among the laurels, and then scampered away into muteness. From a scintillation of colored lights upon the horizon he could hear the scrannel sounds of the railway come thinly along the night air. Nothing else broke the silence of the nocturnal streets. Michael felt tired, and he was disappointed by his failure to find Lily. Just as he was dozing off, he remembered that his Viva Voce at Oxford was due some time this week. He must go back to Cheyne Walk to-morrow, and on this resolution he fell asleep.
Michael woke up with a start and instantly became aware that the house was full of discordant sounds. For a minute or two he lay motionless trying to connect the noise with the present, trying to separate his faculties from the inspissate air that seemed to be throttling them. He was not yet free from the confusion of sleep, and for a few seconds he could only perceive the sound almost visibly churning the clotted darkness that was stifling him. Gradually the clamor resolved itself into the voices of Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. Murdoch and Poppy at the pitch of excitement. Nothing was intelligible except the oaths that came up in a series of explosions detached from the main din. He got out of bed and lit the gas, saw that it was one o’clock, dressed himself roughly, and opened the door of his room.
“Yes, my lad, you thought you was very clever.”
“No, I didn’t think I was clever. Now then.”
“Yes! You can spend all your money on that muck. The sauce of it. In a hansom!”
Here Poppy’s voice came in with a malignant piping sound.
“Muck yourself, you dirty old case-keeper!”
“You call me a case-keeper? What men have I ever let you bring back here?”
Mrs. Murdoch’s voice was swollen with wrath.
“You don’t know how many men I haven’t brought back. So now, you great ugly mare!” Poppy howled.
“The only fellow you’ve ever brought to my house is that one-eyed —— who calls himself my husband. Mister Murdoch! Mis-ter Murdoch! And you get out of my house in the streets where you belong. I don’t want no two-and-fours in my house.”
“Hark at her!” Poppy cried, in a horrible screaming laugh. “Why don’t you go back on the streets yourself? Why, I can remember you as one of the old fourpenny Hasbeens when I was still dressmaking; a dirty drunken old teat that couldn’t have got off with a blind tramp.”
Michael punctuated each fresh taunt and accusation with a step forward to interfere; and every time he held himself back, pondering the impossibility of extracting from these charges and countercharges any logical assignment of blame. It made him laugh to think how extraordinarily in the wrong they all three were and at the same time how they were all perfectly convinced they were right. The only factor left out of account was Mrs. Murdoch’s own behavior. He wondered rather what effect that gentleman friend would produce on the husband. He decided that he had better go back to bed until the racket subsided. Then, just as he was turning away in the midst of an outpouring of vileness far more foul than anything uttered so far, he heard what sounded like a blow. That of course could not be tolerated, and he descended to intervene.
The passage was the field of battle, and the narrow space seemed to give not only an added virulence to the fight, but also an added grotesquery. When Michael arrived at the head of the staircase, Alf had pinned his wife to the wall and was shouting to Poppy over his shoulder to get back into her own room. Poppy would go halfway, but always a new insult would occur to her, and she would return to fling it at Mrs. Murdoch, stabbing the while into its place again a hatpin which during her retreats she always half withdrew.
As for Mrs. Murdoch, she was by now weeping hysterically and occasionally making sudden forward plunges that collapsed like jelly.
Michael paused at the head of the stairs, wondering what to say. It seemed to him really rather a good thing that Alf was restraining his wife. It would be extremely unpleasant to have to separate the two women if they closed with each other. He had almost decided to retire upstairs again, when Poppy caught sight of him and at once turned her abuse in his direction.
“What’s it got to do with you?” she screamed. “What’s the good in you standing gaping there? We all know what you are. We all know what she’s always going up to your room for.”
Mrs. Murdoch was heaving and puffing and groaning, and while Alf held her, his rolling eye with fierce and meaningless stare nearly made Michael laugh. However, he managed to be serious, and gravely advised Poppy to go to bed.
“Don’t you dare try to order me about!” she shrieked. “Keep your poncified ways for that fat old maggot which her husband can’t hardly hold, and I don’t blame him. She’s about as big as a omnibus.”
“Oh, you wicked woman,” sobbed Mrs. Murdoch. “Oh, you mean, hateful snake-in-the-grass! Oh, you filth!”
“Hold your jaw,” commanded Alf. “If you don’t want me to punch into you.”
“All day she’s in his room. Let him stand up and deny it if he can, the dirty tyke. Why don’t you punch into him, Alf?” Poppy screamed.
Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.
“Let me look after Mrs. Murdoch I don’t think!” shouted Poppy. “And be a man, even if you can’t keep your old woman out of the lodger’s room. —— ——! I wouldn’t half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man, the —— ——!”
It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman’s thin magenta lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable. When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to hold on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.
Michael’s laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch spat in her husband’s face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip upon her shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other. Michael, though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs to part them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned and attacked him. The hat-stand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat slid up and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and dust and spirituous breath.
At last Michael managed to secure Poppy’s thin twitching arms and to hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and he was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began fecklessly to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf, who had gone to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case a policeman’s bull’s-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared in the doorway.
“What a smell of gas!” he exclaimed nervously.
There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked the door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended upon the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the hat-stand, while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of tumbled hair.
Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers: of last night’s tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming countenance.
“Quite a set-out we had last night, didn’t we?” she said expansively. “But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with my old man in a hansom cab. There’s a nice game to get up to. I was bound to let her have it. I couldn’t have held myself in.”
“I suppose you’ll get rid of her now,” said Michael.
“Oh, well, she’s not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I’d had one or two myself. Oh, well, it wouldn’t do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment in this life?”
She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and fears. But to-day he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.
Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune Crescent.
“It seems such a pity,” she said. “And just as I was beginning to get used to your ways. Oh, well, we’ll meet again some day, I hope, this side of the cemetery.”
Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night, but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away from Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small doorway looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also waved rather maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose pressed against the panes of the ground-floor front.
Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life, the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate and gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became waxily pink under his stare.
“Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir.” It was as if she were rebuking his observation.
His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.
“Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you to send me those postcards.”
If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have seemed to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other people was a confidence he always resented.
“Stella and Alan are in the studio,” she told him.
They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said he would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of pallid grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could not keep back the thought of how utterly Alan’s company had replaced his own. Not that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted; but a period of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were being rather ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously glad to see him that the fleck of bitterness vanished immediately, and he was at their service.
“Where have you been?” Stella demanded. “We go to Richmond. We send frantic wires to you to join us on the river, and when we come back you’re gone. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been away,” Michael answered, with a certain amount of embarrassment.
“My dear old Michael, we never supposed you’d been hiding in the cistern-cupboard for a fortnight,” said Stella, striking three chords of cheerful contempt.
“I believe he went back to Oxford,” suggested Alan.
“I am going up to-morrow,” Michael said. “When is your Viva?”
“Next week. Where are you going to stay?”
“In college, if I can get hold of a room.”
“Bother Oxford,” interrupted Stella. “We want to know where you’ve been this fortnight.”
“You do,” Alan corrected.
“I’ll tell you both later on,” Michael volunteered. “Just at present I suppose you won’t grudge me a secret. People who are engaged to be married should show a very special altruism toward people who are not.”
“Michael, I will not have you being important and carrying about a secret with you,” Stella declared.
“You can manage either me or Alan,” Michael offered. “But you simply shall not manage both of us. Personally, I recommend you to break-in Alan.”
With evasive banter he succeeded in postponing the revelation of what he was, as Stella said, up to.
“We’re going in for Herefords,” Alan suddenly announced without consideration for the trend of the talk. “You know. Those white-faced chaps.”
Michael looked at him in astonishment.
“I was thinking about this place of Stella’s in Huntingdonshire,” Alan explained. “We went down to see it last week.”
“Oh, Alan, why did you tell him? He doesn’t deserve to be told.”
“Is it decent?” Michael asked.
“Awfully decent,” said Alan. “Rather large, you know.”
“In fact, we shall belong to the squirearchy,” cried Stella, crashing down upon the piano with the first bars of Chopin’s most exciting Polonaise and from the Polonaise going off into an absurd impromptu recitative.
“We shall have a dog-cart—a high and shining dog-cart—and we shall go bowling down the lanes of the county of Hunts—because in books about people who live in the county and of the county and by with or from the county dog-carts invariably bowl—we shall have a herd of Herefordshire bulls and bullocks and bullockesses—and my husband Alan with a straw in his mouth will go every morning with the bailiff to inspect their well-being—and three days every week from November to March we shall go hunting in Huntingdon—and when we aren’t actually hunting in Huntingdon we shall be talking about hunting—and we shall also talk about the Primrose League and the foot-and-mouth disease and the evolutions of the new High Church Vicar—we shall....”
But Michael threw a cushion at her, and the recitative came to an end.
They all three talked for a long while more seriously of plans for life at Hardingham Hall.
“You know dear old Prescott requested me in his will that I would hyphen his name on to mine, whether I were married or single,” said Stella. “So we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Alan has been very good about that, though I think he’s got a dim idea it’s putting on side. Stella Prescott-Merivale or The Curse of the County! And when I play I’m going to be Madame Merivale. I decline to be done out of the Madame! and everybody will pronounce it Marivahleh and I shall receive the unanimous encomia of the critical press.”
“Life will be rather a rag,” said Michael, with approbation.
“Of course it’s going to be simply wonderful. Can’t you see the headlines? From Chopin to Sheep. Madame Merivale, the famous Virtuosa, and her Flock of Barbary Long-tails.”
It was all so very remote from Neptune Crescent, Michael thought. They really were going to be so ridiculously happy, these two, in their country life. And now they were talking of finding him a house close to Hardingham Hall. There must be just that small Georgian house, they vowed, where with a large garden of stately walks and a well-proportioned library of books he could stay in contented retreat. They promised him, too, that beyond the tallest cedar on the lawn a gazebo should command the widest, the greenest expanse of England ever beheld.
“It would so add to our reputation in the county of Hunts,” said Stella, “if you were near by. We should feel so utterly Augustan. And of course you’d ride a nag. I’m not sure really that you wouldn’t have to wear knee-breeches. I declare, Michael, that the very idea makes me feel like Jane Austen, or do I mean Doctor Johnson?”
“I should make up your mind which,” Michael advised.
“But you know what I mean,” she persisted. “The doctor’s wife would come in to tea and tell us that her husband had dug up a mummy or whatever it was the Romans left about. And I should say, ‘We must ask my brother about it. My brother, my dear Mrs. Jumble, will be sure to know. My brother knows everything.’ And she would agree with a pursed-up mouth. ‘Oh, pray do, my dear Mrs. Prescott-Merivale. Everyone says your brother is a great scholar. It’s such a pleasure to have him at the Lodge. So very distinguished, is it not?’”
“If you’re supposed to be imitating Jane Austen, I may as well tell you at once that it’s not a bit like it.”
“But I think you ought to come and live near us,” Alan solemnly put in.
“Of course, my dear, he’s coming,” Stella declared.
“Of course I’m not,” Michael contradicted. But he was very glad they wanted him; and then he thought with a pang how little they would want him with Lily in that well-proportioned library. How little Lily would enjoy the fat and placid Huntingdon meadows. How little, too, she would care to see the blackbird swagger with twinkling rump by the shrubbery’s edge or hear him scatter the leaves in shrill affright. In the quick vision that came to him of a sleek lawn possessed by birds, Michael experienced his first qualm about the wisdom of what he intended to do.
“And how about Michael’s wife?” Alan asked.
Michael looked quite startled by a query so coincident with his own.
“Oh, of course we shall find someone quite perfect for him,” Stella confidently prophesied.
“No, really,” said Michael to hide his embarrassment. “I object. Matchmaking ought not to begin during an engagement.”
Stella paid no heed to the protest, and she began to describe a lady-love who should well become the surroundings in which she intended to place him.
“I think rather a Quakerish person, don’t you, Alan? Rather neat and tiny with a great sense of humor and....”
“In fact, an admirable sick nurse,” Michael interposed, laughing.
Soon he left them in the studio and went for a walk by the side of the river, thinking, as he strolled in the shade of the plane-trees, how naturally Stella would enter the sphere of English country life now that by fortune the opportunity had been given to her of following in the long line of her ancestors. That she would be able to do so seemed to Michael an additional reason why he should consider less the security of his own future, and he was vexed with himself for that fleeting disloyalty to his task.
Michael stayed at 202 High for his Viva. He occupied Wedderburn’s old white-paneled room, which he noted with relief was still sacred to the tradition of a carefully chosen decorousness. The Viva was short and irrelevant. He supposed he had obtained a comfortable third, and really it seemed of the utmost unimportance in view of what a gulf now lay between him and Oxford. However, he mustered enough interest to stay in Cheyne Walk until the lists were out, and during those ten days he made no attempt to find Lily.
Alan got a third in Greats and Michael a first in History. Michael’s immediate emotion was of gladness that Alan had no reason now to feel the disappointment. Then he began to wonder how on earth he had achieved a first. Many letters of congratulation arrived; and one or two of the St. Mary’s dons suggested he should try for a fellowship at All Souls. The idea occupied his fancy a good deal, for it was attractive to have anything so remote come suddenly within the region of feasibleness. He would lose nothing by trying for it, and if he succeeded what a congenial existence offered itself. With private means he would be able to divide his time between Oxford and London. There would really be nothing to mar the perfect amenity of the life that seemed to stretch before him. Since he apparently had some talent (he certainly had not worked hard enough to obtain a first without some talent) he would prosecute the study of history. He would make himself famous in a select sort of way. He would become the authority of a minor tributary to the great stream of research. A set of very scholarly, very thorough works would testify to his reputation. There were plenty of archaic problems still to be solved. He cast a proprietary glance over the centuries, and he had almost decided to devote himself to the service of Otto I and Sylvester II, when in a moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly before his mind as the ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of research into the past seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the congratulatory letters and decided to let the future wait a while. This pursuit of Lily was a mad business, no doubt, but to come to grips with the present called for a certain amount of madness.
Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of trying for All Souls.
“You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were up that you didn’t know what you ought to do, and now when it’s perfectly obvious you won’t make the slightest attempt to do it.”
“Used I to grumble?” asked Michael.
“Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical questions which had no answer,” said Alan severely.
“What if I told you I’d found an answer to a great many of them?”
“Ever since I’ve been engaged to Stella you’ve found it necessary to be very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?”
“It’s imaginable, don’t you think, that I might be making up my mind to do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at All Souls?”
“But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch it.”
“I tell you it was a fluke.”
“My third wasn’t a fluke,” said Alan. “I worked really hard for it.”
“Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run,” Michael argued. “You have already fitted into your place with the most complete exactitude. There’s no dimension in your future that can possibly trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be too small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to squeeze into it most uncomfortably.”
“You’ll never do anything,” Alan prophesied. “Because you’ll always be doubting.”
“I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity,” Michael pointed out. “With all doubts and hesitations I’m perfectly convinced of one great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization. Reason carried to the nth power can always with absurd ease be debauched by sentiment, and sentiment is mankind’s wretched little lament for disobeying impulse. Women preserve this divinity because they are irrational. The New Woman claims equality with man because she claims to be as reasonable as men. She has fixed on voting for a Member of Parliament as the medium to display her reasonableness. The franchise is to be endowed with a sacramental significance. If the New Women win, they will degrade themselves to the slavery of modern men. But of course they won’t win, because God is so delightfully irrational. By the way, it’s worth noting that the peculiar vestment with which popular fancy has clothed the New Woman is called rational costume. You often hear of ‘rationals’ as a synonym for breeches. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about God being irrational. You never know what he’ll do next. He is a dreadful problem for rationalists. That’s why they have abolished him.”
“You’re confusing two different kinds of reason,” said Alan. “What you call impulse—unless your impulse is mere madness—is what I might call reason.”
“In that case I recommend you as a philosopher to set about the reconstruction of your terminology. I’m not a philosopher, and therefore I’ve given this vague generic name ‘impulse’ to something which deserves, such a powerful and infallible and overmastering impetus does it give to conduct, a very long name indeed.”
“But if you’re going through life depending on impulse,” Alan objected, “you’ll be no better off than a weathercock. You can’t discount reason in this way. You must admit that our judgments are modified by experience.”
“The chief thing we learn from experience is to place upon it no reliance whatever.”
“It’s no good arguing with you,” Alan said. “Because what you call impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect logic.”
“Alan, I can’t believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I’m not going to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a country squire. Let’s hold on to what certainties we can.”
Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore he refrained.
There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was already in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the burden of it in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and Stella and Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join them, if he could get away from London.
“If you can get away!” Stella scoffed. “What rot you do talk.”
But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the stagnant sheen of the Thames.
That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from London for a while. After the performance he visited the Café d’Orange in Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often noticed the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the quality of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the Café d’Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he had so far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he was rather inclined to think that she was someone’s mistress and that Drake’s view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she had yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.
Downstairs at the Café d’Orange was rather more like a corner of hell than Michael had anticipated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly down and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner left by the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy tunics of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were grinding out ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking and laughter, the chink of glasses and the shouted acknowledgments of the waiters made such a din that Michael stood for a moment in confusion, debating the possibility of one more person threading his way through the serried tables to a seat.
There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and in one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and soon with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before him in that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always induced by ceaseless circumfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped alcove, he seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and voices of the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic finale. After a time the various groups and individuals were separated in his mind, so that in their movements he began to take an easily transferred interest, endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant characteristics in turn. Round him in the alcove there were strange contrasts of behavior. At one table four offensive youths were showing off with exaggerated laughter for the benefit of nobody’s attention. Behind them in the crepuscule of two broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl; ivory white and cloying the air with her heavy perfume, was arguing in low passionate tones with a cold-eyed listener who with a straw was tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a moist surface of cigarette-ash. In the deepest corner a girl with a high complexion and bright eyes was making ardent love to a partially drunk and bearded man, winking the while over her shoulder at whoever would watch her comedy. The other places were filled by impersonal women who sipped from their glasses without relish and stared disdainfully at each other down their powdered noses. At Michael’s own table was a blotchy man who alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and immediately opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat pale face of the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat trimmed with daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not catch her eye, and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward the raffish and rutilant assemblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall were large mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in reflection the throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications. Advertisements of drink decorated the rest of the space on the walls, and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.
Michael was not allowed to maintain his attitude of disinterested commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him, and he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.
“You’re very silent, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll give you a penny for them.”
“I really wasn’t thinking about anything in particular,” said Michael. “Will you have a drink?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Alphonse!” she shouted, tugging at the arm of the overloaded waiter who was accomplishing his transit. “Bring me a hot whisky-and-lemon. There’s a love.”
Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and passed on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a fountain of glass.
“I’ve taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot,” she informed Michael. “You know. Anyone does, don’t they? Get a sudden fit and keep on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This’ll be my sixth to-night. But I’m a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I reckon it’ll bring me luck.”
“I expect it will,” Michael said.
“You are serious, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you was the spitting image of a fellow I know—Bert Saunders, who writes about the boxing matches for Crime Illustrated. He’s more of a bright-eyes than you are, though.”
The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael’s health.
“Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it,” she said meditatingly. “What’s your name, kiddie?”
He told her.
“Michael,” she repeated. “You’re a Jew, then?”
He shook his head.
“Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name, isn’t it? Michael? Of course it is. I don’t mind Jew fellows myself. One or two of them have been very good to me. My name’s Daisy Palmer.”
The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very cautious.
“You look rather French,” was his most audacious sally toward the personal.
“Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself.”
Again the conversation dropped.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” Daisy volunteered. “She’s been having a row with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and tell me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here by now. What’s the time, kid?”
It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.
“I’m rather worried over Doll,” she confided to Michael, “because this fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, ‘Doll, that dirty rotter you’re so soft over’ll swing for you before he’s done. Why don’t you leave him,’ I said, ‘and come and live along with me for a bit?’”
“And what did she say?” Michael asked.
But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.
“Oh, doesn’t she look shocking white,” exclaimed Daisy. “Doll!” she shouted, waving to her. “Over here, duck.”
The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in exaggerated falsetto.
“—— to you,” she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was a savage directness, a simple coarseness in the phrase that pleased Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said to these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Café d’Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on otherwise indescribable humanity.
By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend’s side. She began immediately a voluble tale:
“Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told him off so as he could hardly look me in the face. ‘You call yourself a man,’ I said, ‘why, you dirty little alien.’ That’s what I called him. I did straight, ‘you dirty little——’”
“This is my friend,” interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed. It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember the convention of their profession.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand with half-a-simper.
“What will you drink?” asked Michael.
“Mine’s a brandy and soda, please. ‘You dirty little alien,’ I said.” Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.
“Go on, did you? And what did he say?” asked Daisy admiringly.
“He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?”
“That’s right,” nodded Daisy wisely.
“‘For two years,’ I said, ‘you’ve let a girl keep you,’ I said, ‘and then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get hold of her,’ I said. ‘I’ll tear her eyes out.’ ‘No, you won’t, now then,’ he said. ‘Won’t I? I will, then,’ and with that I just lost control of my feelings, I felt that wild....”
“What did you do, Doll?” asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe the outraged memory.
“What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to the Orange. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you can sit drinking tea while you break my heart.’ Don’t you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a straight girl when I first knew him. Straight—well, anyway not on the game like what I am now.” Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter self-compassion. “I’ve slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me like dirt.”
“Go on. Don’t cry, duck,” Daisy begged. “Come home with me to-night and we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn’t cry over him,” she said fiercely. “There’s no fellow worth crying over. The best of them isn’t worth crying over.”
The four offensive youths in the alcove began to mock Dolly’s tears, and Michael, who was already bitten with some of the primitive pugnacity of the underworld, rose to attack them.
“Sit down,” Daisy commanded. “I wouldn’t mess my hands, if I was you, with such a pack of filth. Sit down, you stupid boy. You’ll get us all into trouble.”
Michael managed by a great effort to resume his seat, but for a minute or two he saw the beerhall through a mist of rage.
Gradually Dolly’s tears ceased to flow, and after another brandy she became merely more abusive of the faithless Dave. Her cheeks swollen with crying seemed flabbier than ever, and her long retreating chin expressed a lugubrious misanthropy.
“Rotten, I call it, don’t you?” said the sympathetic Daisy, appealing to Michael.
He agreed with a profound nod.
“And she’s been that good to him. You wouldn’t believe.”
Michael thought it was rather risky to embark upon an enumeration of Dolly’s virtuous acts. He feared another relapse into noisy grief.
At this moment the subject of Daisy’s eulogy rose from her seat and stared very dramatically at a corner of the main portion of the beerhall.
“My God!” she said, with ominous calm.
“What is it, duck?” asked Daisy, anxiously peering.
“My God!” Daisy repeated intensely. Then suddenly she poured forth a volley of obloquy, and with an hysterical scream caught up her glass evidently intending to hurl it in the direction of her abuse. Daisy seized one arm: Michael gripped the other, and together they pulled her back into her chair. She was still screaming loudly, and the noise of the beerhall, hitherto scattered and variable in pitch, concentrated in a low murmur of interest. Round about them in the alcove the neighbors began to listen: the girl who had been arguing so passionately with the cold-eyed man stopped and stared; the partially drunk and bearded man collapsed into a glassy indifference, while his charmer no longer winked over her shoulder at the spectators of her wooing; the four offensive youths gaped like landed trout; even the blotchy-faced man ceased to look at his watch and confined himself to sucking steadily his teeth.
It seemed probable, Michael thought, that there was going to be rather a nasty row. Dolly would not listen to persuasion from him or her friend. She was going to attack that Florrie; she was going to mark that Florrie for life with a glass; she was going to let her see if she could come it over Doll Wearne. It would take more than Florrie to do that; yes, more than half-a-dozen Florries, it would.
The manager of the Orange had been warned, and he was already edging his way slowly toward the table. The friends of Florrie were using their best efforts to remove her from the temptation to retaliate. Though she declared loudly that nothing would make her quit the Orange, and certainly that Dolly less than anybody, she did suffer herself to be coaxed away.
Dolly, when she found her rival had retreated, burst into tears again and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive sympathizers, which made her utterly hysterical. Michael, without knowing quite how it had happened, found that he was involved in the fortunes and enmities and friendships of a complete society. He found himself explaining to several bystanders the wrong which Dolly had been compelled to endure at the hands of Hungarian Dave. It was extraordinary how suddenly this absurd intrigue of the underworld came to seem tremendously important. He felt that all his sense of proportion was rapidly disappearing. In the middle of an excited justification of Dolly’s tears he was aware that he and his surroundings and his attitude were to himself incredible. He was positively in a nightmare, and a prey to the inconsequence of dreams. Or was all his life until this moment a dream, and was this reality? One fact alone presented itself clearly, which was the necessity to see the miserable Dolly safely through the rest of the evening. He felt very reliant upon Daisy, who was behaving with admirable composure, and when he asked her advice about the course of action, he agreed at once with her that Dolly must be persuaded into a cab and be allowed in Daisy’s rooms in Guilford Street a freedom of rage and grief that was here, such was the propriety of the Orange, a very imprudent display of emotion.