Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 48

"So deeply occupied with reform," he said, patting her hand.

"One must do something," she smiled.

"I know," he a.s.serted. "And therefore you'll let me ride this new hobby-horse I'm trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?"

"You know perfectly well that you will anyhow," said Mrs. Fane, shaking her head.

Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in order to a.s.sist at Castleton's induction, and Michael walked along the Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.

The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from Tchaikovsky's symphonies.

"Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable," said Castleton. "Do you know Cunningham?" He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.

"Making it comfortable," Michael repeated. "My first impression was just the reverse. I suppose it's no good asking you people to give me lunch?"

"Rather, of course," Maurice declared. "Castleton, it's your turn to buy lunch."

"One extraordinary thing, Michael," said Castleton, "is the way in which Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing something.

You'd think he kept a ledger of all our tasks."

"We can send old Mother Wadman if you're tired," Maurice offered.

Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.

"I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up," Maurice explained, "but we shall be three times as comfortable when he's finished. He's putting up divans."

Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton was at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over mult.i.tudinous roofs.

"What a great rolling sense of human life they do give," said Michael.

"A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there's the lighthouse," he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.

"The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church," said Maurice. "We're having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I shall meet the girl who's meant to share this with me. Then I really think I could work."

Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were not the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be driven out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They would be suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and yet they would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The windows of the city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly as the stars.

Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because to see her in a room like this would be to love her. How well he understood Maurice's desire for a secret love-affair here. n.o.body wanted a girl to perfect Plashers Mead. Even Guy's fairy child at Plashers Mead had seemed an intrusion; but here, to protect one's loneliness against the overpowering contemplation of the life around, love was a necessity. And perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the ambition his friends had for his career. It might be so. Perhaps himself might find an inspiration in an attic high up over roofs. It might be. It might be so.

"What are you thinking about?" Maurice asked.

"I was thinking you were probably right," said Michael.

Maurice looked pleasantly surprised. He was rather accustomed to be snubbed when he told Michael of his desire for feminine companionship.

"I don't want to get married, you know," he hastily added.

"That would depend," said Michael. "If one married what is called an impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St.

Thomas' Church at half-past two."

"But why are you so keen about marriage?" Maurice demanded.

"Well, it has certain advantages," Michael pointed out.

"Not among the sparrows," said Maurice.

"Most of all among the sparrows," Michael contradicted. He was becoming absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to remove the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he proposed to take. They would be able to reenter the world after a long retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during that first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily had a.s.sumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire for the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock of disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake's account of her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news had merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.

"It is really extraordinarily romantic up here," Maurice exclaimed, bursting in upon his reverie.

"Yes, I suppose that's the reason," Michael admitted.

"The reason of what?" Maurice asked.

"Of what I was thinking," Michael said.

Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.

Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house still and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a hansom-cab, and told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.

CHAPTER II

NEPTUNE CRESCENT

The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of it at Brother Aloysius' behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.

The quest of Lily was already beginning to a.s.sume the character of a deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his experience.

That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery; that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gruesomeness, for ever since Mrs. Pearcey's blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had held for him a macaber significance: of the h.e.l.lish portals mystery and gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy onward.

Maple's and Shoolbred's, those outposts of shopping civilization, were left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of roguery began. He was not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so disquieting. It was probably a mere trick of contrast between present squalor and the greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim, but it had a nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot from the thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those bright yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he remembered them from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of them skirting the Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the pantomime. Even now their painted destinations affected him with a dismay that real people could be familiar with this sinister route.

Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for years as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a tawdry and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others. Now the cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron railway bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town behind a huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered through the murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the pavement, past a wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of humanity chalked upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was Kentish Town. It lay to the left of this bridge that was the color of stale blood. Michael told the driver to stop for one moment, and he leaned forward over the ap.r.o.n of the cab to survey the cross-street of swarming feculent humanity that was presumably the entering highway. A train roared over the bridge; a piano organ gargled its tune; a wagon-load of iron girders drew near in a clanging tintamar of slow progress. Michael's brief pause was enough to make such an impression of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his original conception of Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb.

But just as the cab reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he caught sight of a slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their mucid heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the stucco was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid arabesques and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town a putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and noise and exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character allotted by his prefiguration.

The Camden Road was, in contrast with what had gone before, a wide and easy thoroughfare which let in the blue summer sky; and it was not for some minutes that Michael began to notice what a queerness came from the terraces that branched off on either side. The suggestion these terraces could weave extended itself to the detached houses of the main road. In the gaps between them long parallelograms of gardens could be seen joining others even longer that led up to the backs of another road behind. Sometimes it seemed that fifty gardens at once were visible, circ.u.mscribed secretive pleasure-grounds in the amount of life they could conceal, the life that could prosper and decay beneath their arbors merely for that conspiracy of gloating windows. It was impossible not to speculate upon the quality of existence in these precise enclosures; and to this the chapels of obscure sects that the cab occasionally pa.s.sed afforded an indication. To these arid little tabernacles the population stole out on Sunday mornings. There would be something devilish about these reunions. Upon these pinchbeck creeds their souls must surely starve, must slowly shrink to desiccated imps.

Anything more spiritually malevolent than those announcements chalked upon the black notice-board of the advent of the hebdomadal messiah, the peregrine cleric, the sacred migrant was impossible to imagine. With what apostolic cleverness would he impose himself upon these people, and how after the gravid midday meal of the Sabbath he would sit in those green arbors like a horrible Chinese fum. The cabman broke in upon Michael's fantastic depression by calling down through the trap that they were arrived at the Nag's Head and what part of Seven Sisters Road did he want.

Michael was disappointed by the Seven Sisters Road. It seemed to be merely the garish mart of a moderately poor suburban population. There was here nothing to support the diabolic legend with which under the suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the streets he had pa.s.sed this afternoon there had been none less inferential of romance than this long shopping street.

"What number do you want, sir?" the driver repeated.

"Well, really I want rooms," Michael explained. "Only this seems a bit noisy."

"Yes, it is a bit boisterous," the cabman agreed.

Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and the quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less surrept.i.tious than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of the parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high into the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of Kentish Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy slum.

"Try turning off to the left," he called to the driver through the roof.

The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses' declension from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.