Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy, guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal laurels.
Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on account of the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with age, carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals and the iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery, helped the illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old sea-port. A card advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number Fourteen. Michael signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and rang the bell. The Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he could hear the whistle of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but the jingle of the horse"s harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat which was wheedling its lean body in and out of the railings of the falciform garden.
Soon the landlady opened the door and stood inquisitively in the narrow pa.s.sage. She was a woman of probably about thirty-five with stubby fingers; her skin was rather moist, but she had a good-natured expression, and perhaps when the curl-papers were taken out from her colorless hair, and when lace frills and common finery should soften her turgid outlines she would be handsome in a labored sort of way. The discussion with Mrs. Murdoch about her vacant rooms did not take long.
Michael had made up his mind to any horrors of dirt and discomfort, and he was really pleasantly surprised by their appearance. As for Mrs.
Murdoch, she was evidently too much interested to know what had brought Michael to her house to make any difficulties in the way of his accommodation.
"Will you want dinner to-night?" she asked doubtfully.
"No, but I"d like some tea now, if you can manage it; and I suppose you can let me have a latchkey?"
"I"ve got the kettle on the boil at this moment. I was going out myself for the evening. Meeting my husband at the Horseshoe. There"s only one other lodger--Miss Carlyle. And she"s in the profession."
As Mrs. Murdoch made this announcement, she looked up at the fly-frecked ceiling, and Michael thought how extraordinarily light and meaningless her eyes were and how curiously dim and heavy this small sitting-room was against the brilliancy of the external summer.
"Well, then, tea when I can get it," said Mrs. Murdoch cheerfully. "And the double-u is just next your bedroom on the top floor. That"s all, I think."
She left him with a backward smile over her shoulder, as if she were loath to relinquish the study of this unusual visitor to Neptune Crescent.
Michael when he was alone examined the chairs that were standing about the room as stiff as grenadiers in their red rep. He stripped them of their antimaca.s.sars and pulled the one that looked least uncomfortable close to the window. Outside, the yellow cat was still mewing; but the cab was gone and down the gray street that led to Neptune Crescent here and there sad-gaited wayfarers were visible. Two or three sparrows were cheeping in a battered laburnum, and all along the horizon the blue sky descending to the smoke of London had lost its color and had been turned to the similitude of tarnished metal. A luxurious mournfulness was in the view, and he leaned out over the sill scenting the reasty London air.
It was with a sudden shock of conviction that Michael realized he was in Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually been in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him must have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those quixotic resolutions roused by Drake"s legend of Lily. He would not otherwise have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He would have waited to test the truth of Drake"s story. His first emotional despair had vanished with almost unaccountable ease. Certainly he wanted to be independent of the criticism of his friends until he had proved his purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this withdrawal to a desire for a secluded and unflinching contemplation of a life that from Cheyne Walk he could never focus. But ultimately he must acknowledge that his sojourn here, following as it did straight upon his entrance into the underworld through the disappointing portals of the Seven Sisters Road, was due to that ancient lure of the shades. This experience was foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in childish dreams to this day indelible. He could not remember any period in his life when the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for his fear that shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of most ordinary existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat desolately in the pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when on his lonely walks he had pa.s.sed askance by Padua Terrace; the shouting of murders by newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all those dreadful intimations in childhood had procured his present idea of London. With the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they still persisted behind the outward presentation of a normal and comfortable procedure in the midst of money, friends, and well-bred conventions. Nor had that speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of childhood, the endowment by the young of material things with immaterial potencies. Phantoms which had slunk by as terrors invisible to the blind eyes of grown-ups had been abominably incarnate for him. Brother Aloysius had been something more than a mere personification, and that life which the ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below the surface, so easy was it to enter, had he not entered it that one night very easily?
Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the phantoms and the realities of the underworld. There for him lay very easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that he was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of philosophers. He would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion of evil. He would not allow himself to disparage the problem before him by any speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet Lily again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he must not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her. Such an encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental appeal; at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and she would forever elude him, she with secret years within her experience. His instinct first to sever himself from his own world must have been infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now he found himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and scenting the reasty London air.
And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the evening"s end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its red rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar"s Feast glowered above the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two th.o.r.n.y sh.e.l.ls upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless dim circ.u.mnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the bulrushes in their conch of nacreous gla.s.s.
Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him admiringly.
"Do you think you"ll be staying long?" she inquired.
Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
"No. No. I"m really very glad to let them. You"ll find it nice and quiet here. There"s only Miss Carlyle, who"s in the profession and comes in sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of course he hasn"t got his own shop now."
She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch"s loss of independence; so he said, "Of course not," nodding wisely.
"There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a servant-girl," said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and shaking her curl-papers. "Yes. Though I don"t know why I"m telling you straight off as you might say. But there, I"m funny sometimes. If I take to anybody, there"s nothing I won"t do for them. Alf--that _is_ my old man--he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to get into conversation with him, you"d better not let on you know he used to have a shop of his own."
Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr.
Murdoch was working now.
"In a chemist"s shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know," she said, beaming archly. "It"s what you might call rather a funny place. Only he gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him."
Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch"s reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a postcard.
"Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it"s in the kitchen dresser, that"s a sure thing. Perhaps you"d like to come down and see the kitchen?"
Michael followed her downstairs. There were no bas.e.m.e.nts in Neptune Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above the kitchen.
"Miss Carlyle has her room here," said Mrs. Murdoch, pointing next door to the kitchen. "Nice and handy for her as she"s rather late sometimes.
I hate to hear anybody go creaking upstairs, I do. It makes me nervous."
The kitchen was pleasant enough and looked out upon a narrow strip of garden full of coa.r.s.e plants.
"They"ll be very merry and bright, won"t they?" said Mrs. Murdoch, smiling encouragement at the greenery. "It"s wonderful what you can do nowadays for threepence."
Michael asked what they were.
"Why, sunflowers, of course, only they want another month yet. I have them every year--yes. They"re less trouble than rabbits or chickens. Now where did I see that postcard?"
She searched the various utensils, and at last discovered the postcard stuck behind a mutilated clock.
"What _will_ they bring out next?" demanded Mrs. Murdoch, surveying it with affectionate approbation. "Pretty, I call it."
A pair of lovers in black plush were sitting enlaced beneath a pink frosted moon.
"Just the thing, if you"re writing to your young lady," said Mrs.
Murdoch, offering it to Michael.
He accepted it with many expressions of grat.i.tude, but when he was in his own room he laughed very much at the idea of sending it to his mother in Cheyne Walk. However, as he must write and tell her he would not be home for some time, he decided to go out and buy both writing materials and unill.u.s.trated postcards. When he came back he found Mrs.
Murdoch feathered for the evening"s entertainment. She gave him the latchkey, and from his window Michael watched her progress down Neptune Crescent. Just before her lavender dress disappeared behind the Portugal laurels she turned round and waved to him. He wondered what his mother would say if she knew from what curious corner of London the news of his withdrawal would reach her to-night.
The house was very still, and the refulgence of the afternoon light streaming into the small room fused the raw colors to a fiery concordancy. Upon the silence sounded presently a birdlike fidgeting, and Michael going out onto the landing to discover what it was, caught to his surprise the upward glance of a thin little woman in untidy pink.
"Hulloa!" she cried. "I never knew there was anybody in--you did give me a turn. I"ve only just woke up."
Michael explained the situation, and she seemed relieved.
"I"ve been asleep all the afternoon," she went on. "But it"s only natural in this hot weather to go to sleep in the afternoon if you don"t go out for a walk. Why don"t you come down and talk to me while I have some tea?"
Michael accepted the invitation with a courtesy which he half suspected this peaked pink little creature considered diverting.
"You"ll excuse the general untidiness," she said. "But really in this weather anyone can"t bother to put their things away properly."
Michael a.s.sented, and looked round at the room. It certainly was untidy.
The large bed was ruffled where she had been lying down, and the soiled copy of a novelette gave it a sort of stale slovenry. Over the foot hung an acc.u.mulation of pink clothes. On the chairs, too, there were clothes pink and white, and the door bulged with numberless skirts. Miss Carlyle herself wore a pink blouse whose front had escaped the constriction of a belt. Even her face was a flat unshaded pink, and her thin lips would scarcely have showed save that the powder round the edges was slightly caked. Yet there was nothing of pink"s freshness and pleasant crudity in the general effect. It was a tired, a frowsy pink like a fondant that has lain a long while in a confectioner"s window.
"Take a chair and make yourself at home," she invited him. "What"s your name?"
He told her "Fane."
"You silly thing, you don"t suppose I"m going to call you Mr. Fane, do you? What"s your other name? Michael? That"s Irish, isn"t it? I used to know a fellow once called Micky Sullivan. I suppose they call you Micky at home."
He was afraid he was invariably known as Michael, and Miss Carlyle sighed at the stiff sort of a name it was.
"Mine"s Poppy," she volunteered. "That"s much more free and easy. Or I think so," she added rather doubtfully, as Michael did not immediately celebrate its license by throwing pillows at her. "Are you really lodging here?" she went on. "You don"t look much like a pro."
Michael said that was so much the better, as he wasn"t one.