Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 37

They drove together to the railway station five miles away. In the sleepy September heat the slow train puffed in. Hot people with bunches of dahlias were bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.

Michael sighed.

"Don't go," said Guy. "It's much too hot."

Michael shook his head.

"I must."

Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.

"Some of my books," he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the wine-dark dahlias of the platform.

"What fun unpacking them," he thought, and leaned back regretfully to survey the placid country gliding past.

Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children, leaning over scabrous walls to salute the pa.s.sing train. Always, as one entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible. To Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and emerged in that s.p.a.ce of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering legions of children, was still in Michael's ears when the hansom pulled up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.

The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been unaware of his sister's arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer conspicuous in his memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and the webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant dream. He was in fact back in town.

Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very moment the parlormaid told him of Stella's return he had feared such a return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by its demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably glad to see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side would have made him kiss her.

"Hullo, I didn't expect to see you," was, however, all he said.

"Nor did I you," was what she answered.

Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey from Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.

Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella back from Vienna?

"Did you come this morning?" he asked.

"Oh, no. Last night. Why?" she demanded. "Do I look as crumpled as all that?"

For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather wished she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his own explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment. Useless indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as the lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life where nothing really happens.

After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than he had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray satin or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at him for not putting on a dinner jacket.

"Don't look so horrified at the notion," she cried petulantly. "Can't you realize that after a year with long-haired students I want a change?"

After dinner Michael asked her to come and play in the studio.

"Play?" she echoed. "I'm never going to play again."

"What perfect rot you are talking," said Michael, in a d.a.m.natory generalization which was intended to cover not merely all she had been saying, but even all she had been doing almost since she first announced her intention of going to Vienna.

Stella burst into tears.

"Come on, let's go to the studio," said Michael. He felt that Stella's tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked to the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an outrage to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin, even though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to himself "Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante stark mad in white muslin."

"Come along, come along," he begged her. "You must come to the studio."

Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly than before.

"Look here, I say, why don't you tell me what you're crying about? You can't go on crying forever, you know," Michael pointed out. "And when you've stopped crying, you'll feel such an a.s.s if you haven't explained what it was all about."

"I couldn't possibly tell anybody," said Stella, looking very fierce.

Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that Michael scarcely stopped to think that her att.i.tude was rather unusually dramatic.

"But I'm d.a.m.ned if I _will_ give up playing," she proclaimed; and, sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her weakness.

It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella's calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished, she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily Haden.

"I don't know--really--they've left Trelawny Road," he said, feeling vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.

"And you never think of her, I suppose?" demanded Stella.

"Well, no, I don't very much."

"Yet I can remember," said Stella, "when you were absolutely miserable because she had been flirting with somebody else."

"Yes, I was very miserable," Michael admitted. "And you were rather contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more proud."

"And don't you realize," Stella said, "that just because I did remember what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?"

Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half hidden by a cus.h.i.+on could be her handkerchief.

Michael made up his mind that Stella's unhappiness was due to a love-affair which had been wrecked either by circ.u.mstance or temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation against the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the fellow's head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could picture himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian n.o.blemen. He went so far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale requesting their secondary a.s.sistance. Then the memory of Lily began to dance before him.

He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily. Time had softened the trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had been guilty. Time with night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal charm. He had been reading this week of the great imaginative loves of the Middle Ages, and of that supple and golden-haired girl he began to weave an abstraction of pa.s.sion like the Princess of Trebizond. He slept upon the evocation of her beauty just as he was setting forth upon a delicate and intangible pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested to Stella they should revisit Carlington Road.

"My G.o.d, to think we once lived here!" exclaimed Stella, as they stood outside Number 64. "To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of course I was much more away from it than you ever were."

Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.

"Well, thank heaven, everything does change," she murmured. "And that ugly things become even more ugly."

"Only for a time," objected Michael. "In twenty years if we visit Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it all is."

"I wasn't thinking so much of Carlington Road," said Stella. "I was really thinking of people."

"Even they become beautiful again after a time," argued Michael.

"It would take a very long time for some," said Stella coldly.

Michael had rather dreaded his mother's return, with Stella in this mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if she and not herself had suffered lately.

"I'm so glad you're back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you aren't going to Petersburg to-morrow, because the man at Vienna whose name begins with that extraordinary letter...."

"Oh, mother," Stella laughed, "the letter was quite ordinary. It was only L."