Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 46

"'D luck," Michael muttered in response.

"_My_ lord!" Drake began again. "Fancy meeting you of all people. And not a bit different. I said to myself: 'I'm jiggered if that isn't old Bangs,' and--well, _my_ lord! but I was surprised. Do you often come out on the randan?"

"Not very often," Michael admitted. "I just happened to be alone to-night."

"Good for you, old sport. What have you been doing since you left school?"

"I'm just down from Oxford," Michael informed him.

"Pretty good spree up there, eh?"

"Oh, yes, rather," said Michael.

"Well, I had the chance to go," said Drake. "But it wasn't good enough.

It's against you in the City, you know. Waste of time really, except of course for a parson or a schoolmaster."

"Yes, I expect it would have been rather a waste of time for you,"

Michael agreed.

"Oh, rotten! So you moved from--where was it?--Carlington Road?"

"Yes, we moved to Cheyne Walk."

"Let's see. That's in Hampstead, isn't it?"

"Well, it's rather nearer the river," suggested Michael. "Are you still in Trelawny Road?"

"Yes, still in the same old hovel. My hat! Talking of Trelawny Road, it _is_ a small world. Who do you think I saw last week?"

"Not Lily Haden?" Michael asked, in spite of a wish not to rise so quickly to Drake's hook.

"You're right. I saw the fair Lily. But where do you think I saw her?

Bangs, old boy, I tell you I'm not a fellow who's easily surprised. But this knocked me. Of course, you'll understand the Hadens flitted from Trelawny Road soon after you stopped calling. So who knows what's happened since? I give you three guesses where I saw her."

"I hate riddles," said Michael fretfully.

"At the Orient," said Drake solemnly. "The Orient Promenade. You could have knocked me down with a feather."

Michael stared at Drake, scarcely realizing the full implication of what he just announced. Then suddenly he grasped the horrible fact that revealed to him here in a music-hall carried a double force. His one instinct for the moment was to prevent Drake from knowing into what depths his news had plunged him.

"Has she changed?" asked Michael, and could have kicked himself for the question.

"Well, of course there was a good deal of powder," said Drake. "I'm not easily shocked, but this gave me a turn. She was with a man, but even if she hadn't been, I doubt if I'd have had the nerve to talk to her. I wouldn't have known what to say. But, of course, you know, her mother was a bit rapid. That's where it is. Have another drink. You're looking quite upset."

Michael shook his head. He must go home.

"Aren't you coming down West a bit?" asked Drake, in disappointment.

"The night's still young."

But Michael was not to be persuaded.

"Well, don't let's lose sight of each other now we've met. What's your club? I've just joined the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You ought to join. Or perhaps you're already suited?"

"I belong to the Bath," said Michael.

"Oh, of course, if you're suited, that's all right. But any time you want to join the Primrose just let me know and I'll put you up. The sub isn't really very much. Guinea a year."

Michael thanked him and escaped as quickly as he could. Outside even in Oxford Street the air was full of summer, and the cool people sauntering under the sapphirine sky were as welcome to his vision as if he had waked from a fever. His head was throbbing with the heat of the music-hall, and the freshness of night-air was delicious. He called a hansom and told the driver to go to Blackfriars Bridge, and from there slowly along the Embankment to Cheyne Walk. For a time he leaned back in the cab, thinking of nothing, barely conscious of golden thoroughfares, of figures in silhouette against the glitter, and of the London roar rising and falling. Presently in the quiet of the shadowy cross-streets he began to appreciate what seemed the terrible importance to himself of Drake's news.

"It concerns me," he began to reiterate aloud. "It concerns me--me--me.

It's useless to think that it doesn't. It concerns me."

Then a more ghastly suggestion whispered itself. How should he ever know that he was not primarily responsible? The idea came over him with sickening intensity; and upright now he saw in the cracked mirrors of the cab a face blanched, a forehead clammy with sweat, and over his shoulder like a goblin the wraith of Lily. It was horrible to see so distorted that beautiful memory which time had etherealized out of a reality, until of her being nothing had endured but a tenuous image of earliest love. Now under the shock of her degradation he must be dragged back by this goblin to face his responsibility. He must behold again close at hand her shallow infidelity. He must a.s.sure himself of her worthlessness, hammer into his brain that from the beginning she had merely trifled with him. This must be established for the sake of his conscience. Where the devil was this driver going?

"I told you down the Embankment," Michael shouted through the trap.

"I can't go down the Embankment before I gets there, can I, sir?" the cabman asked reproachfully.

Michael closed the trap. He was abashed when he perceived they were still only in Fleet Street. Why had he gone to The Oxford to-night? Why had he spoken to Drake? Why had he not stayed at Wychford? Why had he not returned to London with the others? Such regrets were valueless. It was foredoomed that Lily should come into his life again. Yet there was no reason why she should. There was no reason at all. Men could hardly be held responsible for the fall of women, unless themselves had upon their souls the guilt of betrayal or desertion. It was ridiculous to argue that he must bother because at eighteen he had loved her, because at eighteen he had thought she was worthy of being loved. No doubt the Orient Promenade was the sequel of kissing objectionable actors in the back gardens of West Kensington. Yet the Orient Promenade? That was a d.a.m.nable place. The Orient Promenade? He remembered her kisses. Sitting in this cab, he was kissing her now. She had ridden for hours deep in his arms. Not Oxford could cure this relapse into the past. Every spire and every tower had crashed to ruins around his staid conceptions, so that they too presently fell away. Four years of plastic calm were unfashioned, and she was again beside him. Every pa.s.sing lamp lit up her face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered, pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to turn his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He must remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money, plead with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the hansom kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor Road the onrushing street-lamps flung their b.a.l.l.s of light with monotonous jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to find her. He would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the morning perhaps the problem would present itself in less difficult array.

Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera, and suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day he could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so that he would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful engagement of Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony of their happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the window, staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the generous night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the reflected lamps in golden paG.o.das sprawled across the width of the river and where the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the bridge, nuzzled the shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around the patient barges at their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the surface of the stream, blurring the golden paG.o.das of light so that they jigged and glittered until the motion died away. Eastward in the sky over London hung a tawny stain that blotted out the stars.

From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.

He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion, that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She was walking toward him in Kensington Gardens: not a contour of her delicate progress had been blunted by the rasp of time. Five years ago he had been the first to speak: now, must it be she who sometimes spoke first? Seventeen she had told him had been her age, and they had kissed in the dark midway between two lamps. No doubt she had been kissed before. In that household of Trelawny Road anything else was inconceivable. The gray streets of West Kensington in terrace upon terrace stretched before him, and now as he recalled their barren stones it seemed to him there was not one corner round which he might not expect to meet her face to face. "_Michael, why do you make me love you so?_" That was her voice. It was she who had asked him that question.

Never before this moment had he realized the import of her demand. Now, when it was years too late to remedy, it came out of the past like an accusation. He had answered it then with closer kisses. He had released her then like a ruffled bird, secure that to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow she would nestle to his arms for cherishing. And now if he thought more of her life beneath that lurid stain he would go mad; if he conjured to himself the vision of her now--had not Drake said she was powdered and painted? To this had she come. And she was here in London.

Last week she had been seen. It was no nightmare. It was real, horrible and real. He must go out again at once and find her. He must not sit dreaming here, staring at the silly Thames, the smooth and imperturbable Thames. He must plunge into that phantasmagoric city; he must fly from haunt to haunt; he must drag the depths of every small h.e.l.l; he must find her to-night.

Michael rose, but on the instant of his decision his mother and Stella drove up. Alan was no longer with them. He must have gone home to Richmond. How normal sounded their voices from the pavement below.

Perhaps he would after all go down and greet them. They might wonder otherwise if something had happened. Looking at himself as he pa.s.sed the mirror on his way down, he saw that he really was haggard. If he pleaded a headache, his countenance would bear him out. In the end he shouted to them over the bal.u.s.ters, and both of them wanted to come up with remedies. He would not let them. The last thing his mood desired was the tending of cool hands.

"I'm only f.a.gged out," he told them. "I want a night's sleep."

Yet he knew how hard it would be to fall asleep. His brain was on fire.

Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects. The cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a sense that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had shaken him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that he had wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he could examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going, and the need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still all his impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear view of his att.i.tude.

He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present she appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the loss of beauty, of pa.s.sion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly incapable was Drake's account to change his outward picture of her, he could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night, she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.

Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prost.i.tute in London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no account. Were they of no account? _C'est une douzaine de filles de joie._ When he read Manon this morning--how strange! this morning he had been reading Manon at Oxford--he was moved with pity for all poor light women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New Orleans nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because he was still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was because he had known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the d.a.m.ning weight that in the past she had said, "_Michael, why do you make me love you so?_" If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If there was shame, he was shameful. Others after him had sinned against her casually, counting their behavior no more than a speck of dust in the garbage of human emotion with which she was already smirched. He may not have seduced her, but he had sinned against her, because while loving her he had let her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He had trifled with her sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for blame was cowardly.

It was that very youth which was the sin, because under society's laws, whatever fine figure his love might seem to him to have cut, he should have known that it was a profitless love for a girl. He shared in the guilt. He partook of the shame. That was incontrovertible.

Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott must always have deplored the position in which his friend's mistress had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one's mother. It seemed to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her, if Lady Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which he had soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our rigid divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable times in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen had cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been sinned against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say that the sinner had in the circ.u.mstances behaved very well, that so far as he was able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse his father's initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not wash out his deliberate sin against--and who was she? Who was his mother? Valerie ...

and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a clergyman ... a gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had exposed her to the calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved chivalrously at any rate by the standards of romance. But by what small margin had his own mother escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions of order and safety and custom tottered and reeled at such a thought. Surely such a realization doubled his obligation to atone by rescuing Lily, out of very thankfulness to G.o.d that his own mother had escaped the evil which had come to her. How wretchedly puny now seemed all his own repinings. All he had gained for his own character had been a vague dissatisfaction that he could not succeed to the earldom in order to prove the sanct.i.ty of good breeding. There had been no grat.i.tude; there had been nothing but a hurt conceit. The horror of Drake's news would at least cure him forever of that pettiness. Already he felt the strength that comes from the sight of a task that must be conquered. He had been moved that morning by the tale of Manon Lescaut. This tale of Lily was in comparison with that as an earthquake to the tunneling of a mole beneath a croquet-lawn. And now must he regard his father's memory with condemnation? Must he hate him? He must hate him, indeed, unless by his own behavior he could feel he had accepted in subst.i.tution the burden of his father's responsibility. And he had admired him so much dying out there in Africa for his country. He had resented his death for the sake of thousands more unworthy living comfortably at home.

"All my standards are falling to pieces," thought Michael. "Heroes and heroines are all turning into cardboard. If I don't make some effort to be true to conviction, I shall turn to cardboard with the rest."

He began to pace the room in a tumult of intentions, vows and resolutions. Somehow before he slept he must shape his course. Four years had dreamed themselves away at Oxford. Unless all that education was as immaterial as the fogs of the Isis, it must provide him now with an indication of his duty. He had believed in Oxford, believed in her infallibility and glory, he had worshiped all she stood for. He had surrendered himself to her to make of him a gentleman, and unless these four years had been a delusion, his education must bear fruit now.

Michael made up his mind suddenly, and as it seemed to him at the moment in possession of perfect calm and clarity of judgment, that he would marry Lily. He had accepted marriage as a law of his society. Well, then that law should be kept. He would test every article of the creed of an English gentleman. He would try in the fire of his purpose honor, pride, courtesy, and humility. All these must come to his aid, if he were going to marry a wh.o.r.e. Let him stab himself with the word. Let him not blind himself with euphemisms. His friends would have no euphemisms for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying Queenie Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How everybody would despise his folly. There would not be one friend who would understand.

Least of all would his mother understand. It was a hard thing to do; and yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could be granted the grace of faith to sustain him. Principles were rather barren things to support the soul in a fight with convention. Principles of honor when so very personal were apt to crumple in the blast of society's principles all fiercely kindled against him. Just now he had thought of the thankfulness he owed to G.o.d. Was it more than a figure of speech, an exaggerative personification under great emotion of what most people would call chance? At any rate, here was G.o.d in a cynical mood, and the divine justice of this retributive situation seemed to hint at something beyond mere luck. And if principles were strong enough to sustain him to the onset, faith might fire him to the coronation of his self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and calmly to marry Lily, and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if to hearten him he saw her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for his dreams the ways of night like a gazelle.