Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 61

"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 att.i.tude 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 gra.s.s-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 acc.u.mulations, 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 Ill.u.s.trated. 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 d.a.m.ned 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 Ill.u.s.trated was no doubt deep-dyed himself in the vulgar crudity of his material.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed. Still that maddening hum of talk rose and fell. Ten more minutes pa.s.sed; 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage; 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 pa.s.sed and Michael had reached a stage of cynicism which disclaimed any belief in friends.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sage, 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, p.u.s.s.y 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 Cafe 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 bas.h.i.+ng your face. Oh, but Bert's all right with his p.u.s.s.y-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.