“Well, I’m used to him, and he’s not always in the way like some fellows are.”
Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches of François Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably despise it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the quality of the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove to her the reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the relation in which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.
“There’s something extraordinarily attractive about being friends,” he began. “Isn’t it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to be nothing more than a friend?”
“Friends,” Daisy repeated. “I don’t know that I think much of friends. You don’t get much out of them, do you?”
“Is that all anybody is for,” Michael asked in disappointment. “To get something out of?”
“Well, naturally. Anyone can’t live on nothing, can they?”
“But I don’t see why a friend shouldn’t be as profitable as an ephemeral ... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at eleven and say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as generous.”
“I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted twice as much back in return,” said Daisy.
“Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine in the police court?” he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was so anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he could not help making the allusion.
“I suppose you wanted to,” she said.
“As a friend,” he persisted.
“Oh, all right,” she agreed with him lazily. “Have it your own way. I’m too sleepy to argue.”
“Then we are friends?” Michael asked gravely.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a clothes-line. Get on with it, Roy—or what’s your name? Michael, eh? That’s right.”
“Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?”
“Advice is very cheap,” said Daisy.
“I used to know a girl,” Michael began.
“A straight-cut?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was.”
“I see. And now she’s got a naughty little twinkle in her eye.”
“Look here. Do listen seriously,” Michael begged. “She isn’t a straight-cut any longer.”
“Well, what did I tell you? That’s what I said. She’s gone gay.”
“I want to get her away from this life,” Michael announced, with such solemnity that Daisy was insulted.
“Why, what’s the matter with it? You’re as bad as a German ponce I knew who joined the Salvation Army. Don’t you try taking me home to-night to our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick.”
“But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a ‘lady.’”
“More shame for her then,” said Daisy indignantly. “She ought to have known better.”
It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily’s fall gave to one so deeply plunged. There was in Daisy’s attitude something of the unionist’s toward foreign blackleg labor.
“Well, you see,” Michael pointed out. “As even you have no pity for her, wouldn’t it be right for me to try to get her out of the life altogether?”
“How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade all day, before you sprang it on her....”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Michael interrupted. “At least not directly.”
“Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?” she demanded in surprise.
“I feel a certain responsibility,” he explained. “Go on with what you were saying.”
“If she left a nice home,” Daisy continued, “to live gay, she isn’t going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now, is she?”
“But I want to marry her,” said Michael simply.
Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.
“You must be worse than potty over her,” she gasped.
“Why?”
“Why? Why, because it doesn’t pay to marry that sort of girl. She’ll only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you’ll wish you hadn’t been such a grass-eyes.”
A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael sitting in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was right. Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was coeval with all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility, so that he felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal pessimism. Yet in the same instant he was aware of the need for him to do something, even if his action were to carry within itself the potential destruction of more than he was setting out to accomplish.
“When do you see her?” asked Daisy. “And what does she say about being married?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her for nearly five years,” Michael explained rather apologetically. “I’m searching for her now. I’ve got to find her.”
“Strike me, if you aren’t the funniest —— I ever met,” Daisy exclaimed.
She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing. The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter seemed to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of emptiness was due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of the room, whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so homely was the behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast suddenly they made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no more substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its hollowness. It became an interior very much like those glimpses of interiors in Crime Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would have shown Daisy Palmer cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even in sanguinary death to display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped edge of a white petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to dream in Leppard Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither as here he would enter sensationally.
Daisy ceased to rock herself with mirth.
“No, really,” she said. “It’s a shame to laugh, but you are the limit. Only you did ask my advice, and I tell you straight you’ll be sorry if you do marry her. What’s she like, Wandering Willie? Have some cocoa if I make it? Go on, do. I’ll boil it on the gas-ring.”
Michael was touched by her attention, and he accepted the offer of cocoa. Then he began to describe Lily’s appearance. He could not, however much she might laugh, keep off the object of his quest. Lily was, after all, the only rational explanation of his present mode of life.
“She sounds a bit washed out according to your description of her,” Daisy commented. “Still, everyone to their own fancy, and if you like blue-eyed bottles of peroxide, that’s your look-out.”
They were drinking the cocoa she had made, and the flame of the gas-ring gave just the barren comfort that the kitchen seemed to demand. Another blackbeetle hurried over the oilcloth. A belated fly buzzed angrily against the shade of the electric light. Daisy yawned and looked up at the metal clock with its husky tick.
Suddenly there was the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. She leaped up.
“Gard, supposing that’s Bert come back from Margate!”
She pushed Michael hurriedly across the passage into the front room, commanding him to keep quiet and stay in an empty curtained recess. Then she hurried back to the kitchen, leaving him in a very unpleasant frame of mind. He heard through the closed door Daisy’s voice in colloquy with a deeper voice. Evidently Bert had come back; but his return had been so abrupt that he had had no time to prevent himself being placed in this ridiculous position. Would he have to stay in this recess all night? He peered out into the room, which was in a filigree of bleak shadows made by the street lamp shining through the muslin curtains of the window. Through a desolation of undrawn blinds the houses of Little Quondam Street were visible across the road. The unused room smelt moldy, and if Michael had ever pictured himself in the complexity of a clandestine affair, this was not at all the romantic environment he would have chosen for his drama. This was really damned annoying, and he made a step in the direction of the kitchen to put an end to the misunderstanding. Surely Saunders would have realized that his visit to Daisy was harmless: and yet would he? How stupid she had been to hustle him out of the way like this. Naturally the fellow would be suspicious now. Would that hum of conversation never stop? It reminded him of the fly which had been buzzing round the lamp. Supposing Saunders came in here to fetch something? Was he to hide ignominiously behind this confounded curtain, and what on earth would happen if he were discovered? Michael boiled with rage at the prospect of such an indignity. Saunders would probably want to fight him. A man who spent his life helping to produce Crime Illustrated was no doubt deep-dyed himself in the vulgar crudity of his material.
Ten minutes passed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten more minutes passed; and Michael began to estimate the difficulty of climbing out of the window into the street. It had been delightful, this experience, until he had entered this cursed flat. He should have parted from Daisy on the doorstep, and then he would have carried home with him the memory of a friendship that belonged to the London starlight. The whole relation had been ruined by entering this scabrous building.
He must have been here for more than an hour. It was insufferable. He would go boldly into the kitchen and brave Saunders’ violence. Yet he could not do that because Daisy would be involved by such a step. What could they be talking about? It was really unreasonable for people who lived together to sit up chatting half the night. At last he heard the sound of an opening door; there were footsteps in the passage; another door-opened; after a minute or two somebody walked out into the street. Michael had just sighed with relief, when he heard footsteps coming back; and the buzz of conversation began again in a lighter timbre. This was simply intolerable. He was evidently going to stay here until the filigree of shadows faded in the dawn. Saunders must have brought in a friend with him. Another half hour passed and Michael had reached a stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friendship. Not again would he so easily let himself be made ridiculous. Then he became conscious of a keen desire to see this Saunders whom, by the way, he was supposed to resemble. It was tantalizing to miss the opportunity of comparison.
The hum of conversation stopped. Soon afterward Daisy came into the room and whispered that he could creep out now, but that he must not slam the front door. She would see him at the Orange to-morrow.
When they reached the passage, she called back through the kitchen:
“Bert, do you know you left the front door open?”
Idiotically and uxoriously floated from the inner bedroom: “Did I, pussy cat? Puss must shut it then.”
Daisy dug Michael violently in the ribs to express her inward hilarity; then suddenly she pulled him to her and kissed him roughly. In another second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.
Barnes was sitting in Michael’s room, when he got back to Leppard Street.
“What ho,” he said sleepily. “You’ve been enjoying yourself with that piece, then?”
Michael regarded him angrily.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn’t look so solemn; she’s not a bad bit of goods, either. I’ve heard of her before.”
Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover, if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld’s distorting mirror.
On the following night Michael went to the Café d’Orange, and heard Daisy’s account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert Saunders.
“But really, you know,” she said. “It did give me a turn. Fancy him coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert’s all right with his pussy-cat.”
“But why didn’t you let me stay where I was?” Michael asked. “And introduce me quite calmly. He couldn’t have said anything.”
“Couldn’t he?” Daisy cried. “I reckon he could then. I reckon he could have said a lot. If he hadn’t, I’d have given him the chuck right away. I don’t want no fellow hanging around me that hasn’t got the pluck to go for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. Couldn’t he have said anything?”
Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time to meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from the standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes, Daisy—they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer. They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a great constructive force?
Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against the light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante’s obscure wood of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events. Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance; at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that through her salvation he would save himself.
Michael did not reënter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex himself over the failure to discover Lily’s whereabauts. Having placed himself at the nod of destiny, he was content to believe that if he never found her he must be content to look elsewhere for the expression of himself. September became October. It would be six years this month since first they met, and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be captured anew?
One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated season whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because no fall of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled walls from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk was perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he knew. Yes, he could. It was Chator’s, the dear, the pious and the bubbling Chator’s; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the corridors of St. James’. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized and shaken his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however, he was twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a fountain of questions about his progress during these years with a great deal of information about his own. He came in eagerly at Michael’s invitation, and so much had he still to ask and tell that it was a long time before he wanted to know what had brought Michael to Leppard Street.
“How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn’t my district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I say, what a dreadful slum!” Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. “I never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a man who’s just come to us from Ely was talking about you only yesterday. My goodness, how ...”
“It’s no larger than a grain of sand,” Michael interrupted quickly.
“What is?” asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at Michael.
“You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren’t you?”
“I suppose you’ll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute.” Chator was beaming with delight at the prospect. “But seriously, this man Stewart—Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know him?”
“Nigel isn’t here, too?” Michael exclaimed.
“He’s our deacon.”
“Oh, how priceless you’ll both be in the pulpit,” said Michael. “And to-morrow’s Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Mass?”
“My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be preaching at Evening Prayer. Why don’t you come to supper in the Clergy House afterward?”
“How do you like your Vicar?”
“Oh, very sound, very sound,” said Chator, shaking his head.
“Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?” asked Michael, twinkling.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He’s very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he’s not. Not a bit. We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it. And of course we’ve got the children.”
They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.
“You will come on Sunday?”
“Of course. But what’s the name of your church?”
“My dear fellow, that shows you haven’t heard your parochial Mass,” said Chator, with mock seriousness. “St. Chad’s is our church.”
“It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron,” said Michael.
“I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield.”
Michael laughed loudly.
“My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven’t changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad’s—Sunday.”
From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.
Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference to Michael’s wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior of St. Chad’s with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any other material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing deliberately beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat thawing in a stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in London streets, and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves. The Stations of the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians was familiar music.
As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom, but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the craving of his soul for God.
Chator’s discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect upon the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic way. The sermon had the naïve obviousness and the sweet seriousness of a child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself, a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of the homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were in his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with its tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael’s opinion of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his eloquence: these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse one so deep in the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that a positive sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe it did; he would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of truth was posited among these perishable streets.
The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn, Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people pouring forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come here to rest from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the chill vapors of the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their journey home. Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had leisure to sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or shops that made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit for neither good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered together for a little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now already they were trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps would shuffle for a space over the dark pavements; a few would have pickled cabbage and cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life in this limbo between Hell and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be judged with the bulk of the congregation: another reason must be found for the influence of Evening Prayer or of Chator’s words upon him.
“Did you like the sermon?” Michael asked in the porch.
“I didn’t listen to a word of it,” said Barnes emphatically.
“Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested,” said Michael.
“I was thinking what a mug I’d been not to back The Clown for the Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m not used to money, and that’s a fact. I don’t know how to spend it. I’m afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks.”
“I thought you enjoyed the service,” said Michael.
“Oh, I’m used to services. You know. On and off I’ve done a lot of churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow preaching to curdle me up. I’ve gone through it. Religion, love, and measles; they’re all about the same. I don’t reckon anybody gets them more than once properly.”
Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to be impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a mean and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius’ blue eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice. Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when he met him again at Earl’s Court he had been kindled by those blue eyes. Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was now that lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times lately, but they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll’s.
“I really must have been mad when I was young,” Michael said to himself. “And yet other people have preserved the influence they used to have over me. Other people haven’t changed. Why should he? I wonder whether it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?”
Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes’ lapse into unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the Clergy House.
Nigel Stewart’s room, which they visited in the minutes before supper, had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.
The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to a brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going to sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar and two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the same sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met that walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or treasurer of club accounts or vicar’s churchwarden, is always to be found attached to the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened, and found he had a deep voice and was unable to get nearer to “th” than “v.”
“We’re raver finking,” he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate, “of starting Benediction, vis year.”
“That will be wonderful,” said Michael politely.
“Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver.”
The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart, and Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar was left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.
“I envy you people,” said Michael, as the three of them sank down into deep wicker chairs. “I envy this power you have to bring Oxford—or Cambridge—into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action, isn’t it? And you’re free from the thought which must often worry dons that perhaps they are having a very good time without doing very much to deserve it.”
“We work hard in this parish,” spluttered Chator. “Oh, rather. Very hard.”
“That’s what I say. You have the true peace that thrives on activity,” said Michael. “But at the same time, what I’m rather anxious to know is how nearly you touch the real sinners.”
Stewart and Chator looked at one another across his chair.
“How much do we, brother?” asked Stewart.
“No, really,” protested Michael. “My dear Nigel, I can’t have you being so affected. Brother! You must give up being archaic now that you’re a pale young curate.”
“What do you call the real sinners?” asked Chator. “You saw our congregation to-night. All poor, of course.”
“Shall I say frankly what I think?” Michael asked.
The other two nodded.
“I’m not sure if that congregation is worth a very great deal. I’m not trying to be offensive, so listen to me patiently. That congregation would come whatever you did. They came not because they wanted to worship God or because they desired the forgiveness of their sins, nor even because they think that going to church is a good habit. No, they came in a sort of sad drift of aimlessness; they came in out of the dreariness of their lives to sit for a little while in the glow that a church like yours can always provide. They went out again with a vague memory of comfort, material comfort, I mean; but they took away with them nothing that would kindle a flame to light up the gray week-days. Do you know, I fancy that when these picture-theaters become more common, as they will, most of your people will get from them just the same sensation of warmth and material comfort. Obviously if this is a true observation on my part, your people regard church from a merely negative attitude. That isn’t enough, as you’ll admit.”
“But it’s not fair to judge by the evening congregation,” Chator burst out. “You must remember that we get quite a different crowd at Mass.”
“But do you get the real sinners?” Michael repeated.
“My dear Michael, what does this inquisition forebode?” said Stewart. “You’re becoming wrapped in mystery. You’re found in Leppard Street for no reason that I’ve yet heard. And now you attack us in this unkind way.”
“I’m not attacking you,” Michael said. “I’m trying to extract from you a point of view. Lately it happens that I’ve found myself in the company of a certain class, well—the company of bullies and prostitutes. You must have lots of them in this parish. Do you get hold of them? I don’t believe you do, because the chief thing which has struck me is the utter remoteness of the Church or indeed of any kind of religion from the life of that class. And their standards are upside-down—actually upside-down. They’re handed over entirely to the powers of darkness. Now, as far as I can see, the Devil—or whatever you choose to call him—only cares about people who are worth his while. He hands the others over to anybody that likes to deal with them. Equally I would say that God is a little contemptuous of the poor intermediates. The Church, however, in these hard times for religion is glad to get hold even of them, and this miserable spirit of mediocrity runs through the whole organization. The bishops are moderate; the successful parsons are moderate; and the flock is moderate. To come back to the sinners. You know, they would be worth getting. You’ve no idea what a force they would raise. And now, all their industry, all their ingenuity, all their vitality is devoted to the service of evil.”
Chator could contain himself no longer.
“My dear fellow, you don’t understand how impossible it is to get in touch with the people you’re talking about. They elude one. Of course, we should rejoice to get them. But they’re impossible.”
“Christ moved among sinners,” said Michael.
“It’s not because we don’t long to move among them,” Chator spluttered in exasperation. “We would give anything to move among them. But we can’t. I don’t know why. But they won’t relax any of their barriers. They’re notoriously difficult.”
“Then it all comes down to a ‘no’ in answer to my question,” said Michael. “You don’t get the real sinners. That’s what’s the matter with St. Chad’s—until you can compel the sinner to come in, you’ll stay in a spiritual backwater.”
“If you were a priest,” said Chator, “you’d realize our handicap better.”
“No doubt,” Michael agreed. “But don’t forget that the Salvation Army gets hold of sinners. In fact, I’ll wager that nine out of ten of the people with whom I’ve been in contact lately would only understand by religion the Salvation Army. Personally I loathe the Salvation Army. I think it is almost a more disruptive organization than anything else in the world. But at least it is alive; it’s not suet like most of the Dissenting Sects or a rather rich and heavy plum-pudding like the greater part of the Church of England. It’s a maddening and atrociously bad and cheap alcohol, but it does enflame. I tell you, my dear old Chator and my dear old Nigel, you have the greatest opportunity imaginable for energy, for living and bringing life to others, if only you’ll not sit down and be content because you’ve got the children and can fill the church for Evening Prayer with that colorless, dreary, dreadfully sorrowful crowd I saw to-night.”
Michael leaned back in his chair; the fire crackled above the silence; and, outside, the disheartened quiet of the Sabbath was brooding. Chator was the first to speak.
“Some of what you say may be true, but the rest of it is a mere muddle of heresies and misconceptions and misstatements. It’s absolute blasphemy to say that God is contemptuous of what you called the intermediates, and you apparently believe that evil is only misdirected good. You apparently think that your harlots and bullies are better for being more actively harmful.”
“No, no,” Michael corrected. “You didn’t follow my argument. As a matter of fact, I believe in the absolutism of evil the more, the more I see of evil men and women. What I meant was that in proportion to the harm they have power to effect would be the inspiration and advantage of turning their abilities toward good. But cut out all theological questions and confess that the Church has failed with the class I speak of.”
The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without reaching a conclusion.
“You can’t have friars nowadays,” said Chator in response to Michael’s last expression of ambition. “Conditions have changed.”
“Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an absolute Christianity,” Michael pointed out. “Conditions had changed when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions. Do you believe in Christ?”
“Don’t try to be objectionable, my dear fellow,” said Chator, getting very red.
“Well, if you do,” persisted Michael, “if you accept the Gospels, it is utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make ‘change of conditions’ an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your parish.”
“Michael,” said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator’s obviously rising anger. “Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission are you upon? I believe you’re getting too much wrapped up in private fads and fancies. Why don’t you come and work for us at St. Chad’s?”
“He’s one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense fervor,” said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and Michael felt rather penitent.
“I wish I could work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight of workers in coöperation freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I should probably feel like you that the children were the most important. Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was confirmed by the realization of evil? Usually, it’s the other way about, isn’t it? I’ve met many unbelievers who first began to doubt, because the problem of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency. Chator, you have forgiven me, haven’t you?”
“I ought to have realized that you didn’t mean half you were saying,” said Chator.
Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he let Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.
Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street. Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No doubt, however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would benefit greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael had shut himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan, and he used to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical experiments in his solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on several occasions at Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done the daring of discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was, Nigel was still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he would ever cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his own diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and told him that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.
“All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all,” said Michael. “At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed through it at the age of sixteen.”
“You must have been horribly precocious,” said Nigel disapprovingly.
“Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You’ll be telling me soon that you’ve been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite.”
Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an experience, and Michael laughed:
“Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He’s just the person you ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an æsthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?”
“I really think you are growing very offensive,” said Nigel.
“No, I’m not. I’m illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and Maurice’s encounters with religion would match each other. Both would have a very wide, but also a very superficial area.”
November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist at Stella’s wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully planned sallies of curiosity:
“What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine. Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I’ll tell you quite enough when the moment comes for telling.”
“Michael, you’re getting dreadfully obstinate,” Stella declared. “I remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time.”
“It’s not I who am obstinate,” said Michael. “It’s you who are utterly spoiled by the lovelorn Alan.”
Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin’s summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer’s image in this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.
| Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks |
| In Vallombrosa. |
Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to know them so well:
| Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita |
| Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptæque puellæ. |
There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:
| Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et |
| ... terris apricis. |
Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of youth, to the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that was forever overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their sanctity with sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy and absurdity also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than those deeper moments.
“Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?” he asked.
“Rather,” said Alan, and they both smiled.
“Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst out laughing and had to rush out of the room?”
“Rather,” said Alan. “Boys are ridiculous, aren’t they?”
“Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs. Merivale?” Michael queried.
“I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at anything,” said Alan.
“And yet do you realize that we’re only talking of eight years ago? Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the time when that wedding took place.”
To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life Michael’s calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive mortality.
“You’ll be writing epitaphs next,” said Alan, in rather an aggrieved voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during the silence.
“At any rate,” Michael said. “You can congratulate yourself upon not having wasted time.”
“My god,” cried Alan, stopping suddenly. “I believe I’m the luckiest man alive.”
“I thought you’d found a sovereign,” said Michael. He had never heard Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment later Alan would be blushing at his want of reserve, he loyally covered up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.
Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble Place, but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy came, and Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously contemplated marrying her. How well he remembered her in short skirts, and here she was a woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold pince-nez.
“You are a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place,” grumbled Nancy. “Do you realize we haven’t met for years?”
“You’re such a woman of affairs,” said Michael.
“Well, do let’s try to meet next time. I say, don’t you think Maud looks terribly ill since she became a Romanist?”
Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.
“I think she’s looking rather well.”
“Absolute destruction of individuality, you know,” said Nancy, shaking her head. “I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must admit that she hasn’t forced her religion down our throats.”
“Did you expect an auto-da-fé in the middle of the lawn?” he asked. She thumped him on the shoulder:
“Silly ass! Don’t you try to rag me.”
They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have regretted the step.
Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the ceremony.
“Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?”
“You’ve admitted I’m a married woman,” she exclaimed. “Now surely you can tell me what you’ve been doing since August and where you’ve been.”
“I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every woman,” said Michael. “Alas, you are not!”
“Michael, you’re perfectly horrid to me.”
“Don’t be too much the young wife,” he advised, with mocking earnestness.
“I won’t listen to anything you say, until I know where you’ve been. Of course, if I hadn’t been so busy, I could easily have found you out.”
“Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,” Michael laughed.
“You shan’t stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me.”
“By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful news,” said Michael. “Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but I’ve never heard.”
“We’re going to Compiègne,” said Stella. “I wrote to little Castéra-Verduzan, and he’s lent us the cottage where you and I stayed.”
That choice of Stella’s seemed to mark more decisively than anything she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.
When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother, talking.
“I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers,” she told him. “But if you’re going to be here, I could put her off.”
Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother’s loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.
“No, no, I’m going away again,” he told her.
“Just as you like, dearest boy.”
“You’re glad about Stella?”
“Very glad.”
“And you like Alan?”
“Of course. Charming—charming.”
The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had been brought up to Mrs. Fane’s sitting-room out of the way of the wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.
“It’s really quite chilly this afternoon,” said Mrs. Fane.
“Yes, there’s a good deal of mist along the river,” said Michael. “A pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather dreary in the forest.”
“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”
Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went back to Leppard Street.
November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.
One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from Oxford to-night—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him. How were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiègne? Probably they were having clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a smell of woodfires. With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round Piccadilly, sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side streets, but always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle. Here he would stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west and south and north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were coming out of the theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to Daisy? Should he call a hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the spinning of a polychromatic top, he could not leave the Island.
They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must begin to frequent the Orient again.
Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost in the air.
Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that. Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It would serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of those vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together now; instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark pavement. How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At last he knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her still. What nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry her in order to rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her still: he loved her now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of Green Park rattled to his stick. He loved her more passionately because the ghost of her whom he had thought of with romantic embellishment all these years was but a caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer which had floated through his dreams was become nothing, now that again he had seen herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and the delicate poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women on the pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of gravel by the curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what direction had she driven away? Even that he did not know. She might have driven past this very lamp-post a few minutes back.
Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the Orient,” he would say. She should know immediately that he was not deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and huddled against the wall of the King’s garden. He put a sixpence among her match-boxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of doors and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous. And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of human dwellings, were Michael’s own thoughts thronged with fancies of himself and Lily.
It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and run.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.
It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always haunt her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She was not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves, as at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears and that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks, there would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become even an individual in the multitude of weary London women.
“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.
“Home. I’m going home,” he said.
“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”
He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard Street.
“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you.”
Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the star-incrusted sky.
“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”
Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the question of money, and she sidled close up to him.
“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”
“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”
Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in what secret room she lived. And to-morrow morning he would leave the house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put his foot on the steps of the front door.
“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”
She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.
“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the house sleeps down here.”
She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage. When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.
“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.
Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy wall.
“Here you are. Here you are.”
The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety door, and welcomed him.
“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp. The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.