Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 60

"Oh, Gard, don't ask me," said Daisy. "She's got in with a fellow who kept a fried-fish place in the Caledonian Road, and I've never even seen her since."

"And what's happened to Dolly?" asked Michael.

"Oh, good job if that love-boy of hers does punch into her. Silly cow!

She ought to know better. Fancy going off as soft as you like with that big-mouthed five-to-two, and after I'd just given her six of my new handkerchiefs."

Michael wished he could have an opportunity of explaining to Barnes that on account of Daisy's friendship for Dolly, he and she and the cast-off had spent a night in the police-cells. He thought it would have amused him.

"Where's the Half Moon?" he asked instead.

Daisy said it was a place in Gla.s.shouse Street for which she had no very great affection. However, Michael was anxious to see it; and soon they left the Orange to visit the Half Moon.

It was a public-house with nothing that was demirep in its exterior; but upstairs there was a room frequented after eleven o'clock by ladies of the town. They walked up a narrow twisting staircase carpeted with bright red felt and lit by a red-shaded lamp, and found themselves in a room even more densely fumed with tobacco smoke than downstairs at the Orange. In a corner was an electric organ which was fed with a stream of pennies and blared forth its repertory of ten tunes with maddening persistence. One of these tunes was gay enough to make the girls wish to dance, and always with its recurrence there was a certain amount of cake-walking which was immediately stopped by a commissionaire who stood in the doorway and shouted "Order, please! Quiet, please! No dancing, ladies!" To the nearest couple he always whispered that the police were outside.

Daisy, having stigmatized the Half Moon as the rottenest hole within a mile of the Dilly, proceeded to become more cheerful with every penny dropped into the slot; and finally she invited Michael to come back with her to Judd Street, as her boy had gone down to Margate to see Young Sancy, a prospective lightweight champion, who was training there.

"Anyway, you can see me home," she said. "Even if you don't come in.

Besides, my flat's all right. It is, really. You know. Comfortable. He's very good to me, is Bert, though he's a bit soppified. He dresses very nice, and he earns good money. Well, three pound a week. That's not so bad, is it?"

"That's all right," said Barnes. "With what you earn as well."

"There's a nerve," said Daisy. "Well, I can't stay moping indoors all the evening, can I? But he's most shocking jealous is Bert. And he calls me his p.u.s.s.y-cat. Puss, puss! There's a scream. He's really a bit soft, and his eyes is awful. But it's nice, so here's luck." She drained her gla.s.s. "'Do you love me, puss?' he says. Silly thing! But they think a lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see him the other morning about something he's been writing. I don't know what it was. I hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him something dreadful, and then he says, 'My p.u.s.s.y-cat mustn't disturb me.'"

Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a good move.

"I shan't go if you don't come back with me," she declared.

Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and he promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however; nor would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and Michael went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm September night.

Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey. He flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here at last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship with a woman of that cla.s.s with whom mere friendship would be more improbable than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with her homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on while she chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any other relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was proud as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign trees that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he felt a thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings of Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this friendship that was giving to all the houses they pa.s.sed a strange peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.

"Our flat's in here. Agnes House, it's called. Come in and have one before you go home," she invited.

Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his confidence in their new friendship.

Agnes House was only ent.i.tled to the distinction of a name rather than a number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby, small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain.

Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt in itself apart from any a.s.sociation with depravity: it was like a young person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without arousing pity.

"Rather nice, eh?" said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the flat. "Sit down. I'll get some whisky. There's a bathroom, you know. And it's grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we was upstairs. I always swore I'd never live in a flat. Well, I don't really call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever be found out."

Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Ill.u.s.trated strewn about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great deal of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Ill.u.s.trated to fright her fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at the sound of a key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike existence of the underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael could see the villainous paper used for every kind of domestic service--to wrap up a piece of raw meat, to contain the sc.r.a.ps for the cat's dinner, and spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon the disks of grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very natural, when the eyes never rested from these views of sordid violence, to expect evil everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was already half inclined to accept the underworld's preoccupation with crime as a truer judgment of human nature than was held by a sentimental civilization, and he began to wonder whether a good deal of his own privacy had not been spent in a fool's paradise of security. The moated grange and the dark tower were harmless rococo terrors beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes House.

"The kitchen's in a rare old mess, isn't it?" said Daisy looking round her. "It gives Bert the rats to see it like this."

"Are you fond of him?" Michael asked. He was anxious to display his friendly interest.

"Oh, he's all right. But I wouldn't ever get fond of _any_body. It doesn't pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they can do as they like with you."

"I don't understand why you live with him, if he's nothing better than all right," said Michael.

"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 Francois 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.