Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 50

"I've got you at last," cried Poppy. "You're a shop-walker at Russell's."

He could not help laughing very much at this, and the queer pink room seemed to become more faded at the sound of his merriment. Poppy looked offended by the reception of her guess, and Michael hastened to restore her good temper by asking questions of her.

"You're on the stage, aren't you?"

"I usually get into panto," she admitted.

"Aren't you acting now?"

"Yes, I don't think. You needn't be funny."

"I wasn't trying to be funny."

"You mind your business," she said bitterly. "And I'll look after mine."

"There doesn't seem to be anything very rude in asking if you're acting now," said Michael.

"Oh, shut up! As if you didn't know."

"Know what?" he repeated.

He looked so genuinely puzzled that Poppy seemed to make an effort to overcome her suspicion of his mockery.

"It's five years since I went on the game," she said.

Michael blushed violently, partly on her account, partly for his own stupidity, and explained that Mrs. Murdoch had told him she was in the profession.

"Well, you didn't expect her to say 'my ground-floor front's a gay woman,' did you?"

He agreed that such an abrupt characterization would have surprised him.

"Well, I'm going out to get dinner now," she announced.

"Why don't you dine with me?" Michael suggested.

She looked at him doubtfully.

"Can you afford it?"

"I think I could manage it."

"Because if we _are_ in the same house that doesn't say you've got to pay my board, does it?" she demanded proudly.

"Once in a way won't matter," Michael insisted. "And we might go on to a music hall afterward."

"Yes, we might, if I hadn't got to pay the woman who's looking after my kid for some clothes she's made for him," said Poppy. "And sitting with you at the Holborn all night won't do that. No, you can give me dinner and then I'll P.O. I'm not going to put on a frock even for you, because I never get off only when I'm in a coat and skirt."

Michael rose to leave the room while Poppy got ready.

"Go on, sit down. As you're going to take me out to dinner, you can talk to me while I dress as a reward."

In this faded pink room where the sun was by now s.h.i.+ning with a splendor that made all the strewn clothes seem even more fusty and overblown, Michael could not have borne to see a live thing take shape as it were from such corruption. He made an excuse therefore of letters to be written and left Poppy to herself, asking to be called when she was ready.

Michael's own room upstairs had a real solidity after the ground-floor front. He wondered if it were possible that Lily was inhabiting at this moment such a room as Poppy's. It could not be. It could not be. And he realized that he had pictured Lily like Manon in the midst of luxury, craving for magnificence and moving disdainfully before gilded mirrors.

This Poppy Carlyle of Neptune Crescent belonged to another circle of the underworld. Lily would be tragical, but this little peaked creature downstairs was scarcely even pathetic. Indeed, she was almost grotesque with the coat and skirt that was to insure her getting off. Of course her only chance was to attract a jaded glance by her positive plainness, her schoolma'am air, her decent un.o.btrusiveness. Yet she was plucky, and she had accepted the responsibility of supporting her child. There was, too, something admirable in the candor with which she had treated him.

There was something friendly and birdlike about her, and he thought how when he had been first aware of her movements below he had compared them to a bird's fidgeting. There was something really appealing about the gay woman of the ground-floor front. He laughed at her description; and then he remembered regretfully that he had allowed her to forego what might after all have been for her a pleasant evening because she must pay for some clothes the woman who was looking after her child. He could so easily have offered to give her the money. No matter, he could make amends at once and offer it to her now. It would be doubtless an unusual experience for her to come into contact with someone whose rule of life was not dictated by the brutal self-interest of those with whom her commerce must generally lie. She would serve to bring to the proof his theory that so much of the world's beastliness could be cleansed by having recourse to the natural instincts of decent behavior without any grand effort of reformation. Nevertheless, Michael did feel very philanthropic when he went down to answer Poppy's summons.

"I say," he began at once. "It was stupid of me just now not to suggest that I should find the money for your kid's clothes. Look here, we'll go to the Holborn after dinner and----" he paused. He felt a delicacy in inquiring how much exactly she might expect to lose by giving him her company--"and--er--I suppose a couple of pounds would buy something?"

"I say, kiddie, you're a sport," she said. "Only look here, don't go and spend more than what you can afford. It isn't as if we'd met by chance, as you might say."

"Oh no, I can afford two pounds," Michael a.s.sured her.

"Where shall we go? I know a nice room which the woman lets me have for four s.h.i.+llings. That's not too much, is it?"

He was touched by her eager consideration for his purse, and he stammered, trying to explain as gently as he could that the two pounds was not offered for hire.

"But, kiddie, I can't bring you back here. Not even if you do lodge here. These aren't gay rooms."

"I don't want to go anywhere with you," said Michael. "The money is a present."

"Oh, is it?" she flamed out. "Then you can keep your dirty money.

Thanks, I haven't come down to charity. Not yet. If I'm not good enough for you, you can keep your money. I believe you're nothing more than a dirty ponce. I've gone five years without keeping a fellow yet. And I'm not going to begin now. That's very certain. Are you going out or am I going out? Because I don't want to be seen with you. You and your presents. Gard! I should have to be drunk on claret and lemon before I went home with you."

Michael had nothing to say to her and so he went out, closing the front door quickly upon her rage. His first impression when he gained the fresh air was of a fastidious disgust. Here in the Crescent the orange lucency of the evening shed such a glory that the discoloration of the houses no longer spoke of miserably drawn-out decay, but took on rather the warmth of live rock. The deepening shadows of that pa.s.sage where the little peaked creature had spat forth her fury made him shudder with the mean and vicious pa.s.sions they now veiled. Very soon, however, his disgust died away. Looking back at Neptune Crescent, he knew there was not one door in all that semicircle which did not putatively conceal secrets like those of Number Fourteen. Like poisonous toadstools in rankness and gloom, the worst of human nature must flourish here. It was foolish to be disgusted; indeed, already a half-aroused curiosity had taken its place, and Michael regretted that he had not stayed to hear what more she would have said. How far she had been from appreciating the motives that prompted his offer of money. Poppy's injustice began to depress him. He felt, walking southward to Piccadilly, an acute sense of her failure to be grateful from his point of view. It hurt him to find sincerity so lightly regarded. Then he realized that it was her vanity which had been touched. _h.e.l.l knows no fury like a woman scorned._ The ability to apply such a famous generalization directly to himself gave Michael a great satisfaction. It was strange to be so familiar with a statement, and then suddenly like this to be staggered by its truth. He experienced a sort of pride in linking himself on to one of the great commonplaces of rhetoric. He need no longer feel misjudged, since Poppy had played a universal part. In revulsion he felt sorry for her. He hated to think how deeply her pride must have been wounded. He could not expect her to esteem the reason which had made him refuse her. She could have little comprehension of fastidiousness and still less could she grasp the existence of an abstract morality that in its practical expression must have seemed to her so insulting. That, however, did not impugn the morality, nor did it invalidate the desire to befriend her.

Impulse had not really betrayed him: the mistake had been in his tactlessness, in a lack of worldly knowledge. Moreover, Poppy was only an incident, and until Lily was found he had no business to turn aside.

Nevertheless, he had learned something this evening; he had seen proved in action a famous postulate of feminine nature, and the truth struck him with a sharpness that no academic demonstration had ever had the power to effect.

On the whole, Michael was rather pleased with himself as he rode on the front seat of the omnibus down Tottenham Court Road in the cool of the evening.

At the Horseshoe he alighted and went into the saloon bar on the chance of seeing what Mr. Murdoch looked like; but there was no sign of the landlady and her husband. The saloon bar smelt very strongly of spilt stout; and a number of men, who looked like draymen in tailcoats and top-hats, were arguing about money. He was glad to leave the tavern behind; and in a Soho restaurant he ate a tranquil dinner, listening with much amus.e.m.e.nt to the people round him. He liked to hear each petty host a.s.sure his guests that he had brought them to a place of which very few but himself knew. All the diners under the influence of this a.s.surance stared at one another like conspirators.

Just before nine o'clock. Michael reached the Orient Palace of Varieties, and with excitement bubbling up within him, notwithstanding all his efforts to stay unmoved, he joined the throng of the Promenade.

He looked about him at first in trepidation. Although all the way from Camden Town he had practiced this meeting with Lily, now at its approach his presence of mind vanished, and he felt that to meet her suddenly without a longer preparation would lead him to make a fool of himself.

However, in the first quick glance he could not see anyone who resembled her, and he withdrew to the secluded apex of the curving Promenade whence he could watch most easily the ebb and flow of the crowd. That on the stage a lady of the haute ecole was with a curious wooden rapidity putting a white horse through a number of tricks did not concern his attention beyond the moment. For him the Promenade was the performance.

Certainly at the Orient it was a better staged affair than that weary heterogeneous mob at The Oxford. At the Orient there was an unity of effect, an individuality, and a conscious equipment. At The Oxford the whole business had resembled a suburban parade. Here was a real exposition of vice like the jetty of Alexandria in olden days. Indeed, so cynical was the function of the Orient Promenade that the frankness almost defeated its object, and the frequenters instead of profiting by the facilities for commerce allowed themselves to be drugged into perpetual meditation upon an attractive contingency.

Seen from this secluded corner, the Promenade resembled a well-filled tank in an aquarium. The upholstery of s.h.i.+mmering green plush, the dim foreground, the splash of light from the bar in one corner, the gliding circ.u.mambient throng among the pillars and, displayed along the barrier, the bright-hued ladies like sea-anemones--there was nothing that spoiled the comparison. Moreover, the longer Michael looked, the more nearly was the effect achieved. At intervals women whose close-fitting dresses seemed deliberately to imitate scales went by: and generally the people eyed one another with the indifferent frozen eyes of swimming fish.

There was indeed something cold-blooded in the very atmosphere, and it was from, this rapacious and vivid shoal of women that he was expecting Lily to materialize. Yet he was better able to imagine her in the luxury of the Orient than sleeping down the sun over a crumpled novelette in such a room as Poppy's in Camden Town.

The evening wore itself away, and the motion in that subaqueous air was restful in its continuity. Michael was relieved by the a.s.surance that he had still a little time in which to compose himself to face the shock he knew he must ultimately expect from meeting Lily again. The evening wore itself away. The lady of the haute ecole was succeeded by a band of Caucasian wrestlers, by a troupe of Bolivian gymnasts, by half a dozen cosmopolitan ebullitions of ingenuity. The ballet went its mechanical course, and as each line of dancers grouped themselves, it was almost possible to hear the click of the kaleidoscope's s.h.i.+fting squares and lozenges. Michael wondered vaguely about the girls in the ballet and whether they were happy. It seemed absurd to think that down there on the stage there were eighty or ninety individuals each with a history, so little more did they seem from here than dolls. And on the Promenade where it was quite certain that every woman had a history to account for her presence there, how utterly living had quenched life. The ballet was over, and he pa.s.sed out into the streets.

For a fortnight Michael came every evening to the Orient without finding Lily. They were strange evenings, these that were spent in the heart of London without meeting anyone he knew. It was no doubt by the merest chance that none of his friends saw him at the Orient, and yet he began to fancy that actually every evening he did, as it were, by some enchantment fade from the possibility of recognition. He felt as if his friends would not perceive his presence, so much would they in that circ.u.mambient throng take on the characteristics of its eternal motion.

They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward and forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at any of the restaurants or cafes to which he went after the theater. By the intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself off from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen the night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to Lily; and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a hat, perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never meeting the wearer's glance.

He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not meet in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it was possible to seclude one's self from the claims of human intercourse.

He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out over the sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream to the distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which every afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books indeed that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.

Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.