Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 54

"It's no good arguing with you," Alan said. "Because what you call impulse I call reason, and what you call reason I call imperfect logic."

"Alan, I can't believe you only got a third. For really, you know, your conversation is a model of the philosophic manner. Anyway, I'm not going to try to be a Fellow of All Souls and you are going to be a country squire. Let's hold on to what certainties we can."

Michael would have liked to lead him into a discussion of the problem of evil, so that he might ascertain if Alan had ever felt the intimations of evil which had haunted his own perceptions. However, he thought he had tested to the utmost that third in Greats, and therefore he refrained.

There was a discussion that evening about going away. August was already in sight and arrangements must be made quickly to avoid the burden of it in London. In the end, it was arranged that Mrs. Fane and Stella and Alan should go to Scotland, where Michael promised to join them, if he could get away from London.

"If you can get away!" Stella scoffed. "What rot you do talk."

But Michael was not to be teased out of his determination to stay where he was, and in three or four days he said good-bye to the others northward bound, waving to them from the steps of 173 Cheyne Walk on which already the August sun was casting a heavy heat untempered by the stagnant sheen of the Thames.

That evening Michael went again to the Orient Promenade; but there was no sign of Lily, and it seemed likely that she had gone away from London for a while. After the performance he visited the Cafe d'Orange in Leicester Square. He had never been there yet, but he had often noticed the riotous exodus at half-past twelve, and he argued from the quality of the frequenters who stood wrangling on the pavement that the Cafe d'Orange would be a step lower than any of the night-resorts he had so far attended. He scarcely expected to find Lily here. Indeed, he was rather inclined to think that she was someone's mistress and that Drake's view of her at the Orient did not argue necessarily that she had yet sunk to the promiscuous livelihood of the Promenade.

Downstairs at the Cafe d'Orange was rather more like a corner of h.e.l.l than Michael had antic.i.p.ated. The tobacco smoke which could not rise in these subterranean airs hung in a blue murk round the gaudy hats and vile faces, while from the roof the electric lamps shone dazzlingly down and made a patchwork of light and shade and color. In a corner left by the sweep of the stairs a quartet of unkempt musicians in seamy tunics of beer-stained scarlet frogged with debilitated braid were grinding out ragtime. The noisy tune in combination with the talking and laughter, the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.ses and the shouted acknowledgments of the waiters made such a din that Michael stood for a moment in confusion, debating the possibility of one more person threading his way through the serried tables to a seat.

There were three arched recesses at the opposite end of the room, and in one of these he thought he could see a table with a vacant place. So paying no heed to the women who hailed him on the way he moved across and sat down. A waiter pounced upon him voraciously for orders, and soon with an unrequited drink he was meditating upon the scene before him in that state of curious tranquillity which was nearly always induced by ceaseless circ.u.mfluent clamor. Sitting in this tunnel-shaped alcove, he seemed to be in the box of a theater whence the actions and voices of the contemplated company had the unreality of an operatic finale. After a time the various groups and individuals were separated in his mind, so that in their movements he began to take an easily transferred interest, endowing them with pleasant or unpleasant characteristics in turn. Round him in the alcove there were strange contrasts of behavior. At one table four offensive youths were showing off with exaggerated laughter for the benefit of n.o.body's attention. Behind them in the crepuscule of two broken lamps a leaden-lidded girl; ivory white and cloying the air with her heavy perfume, was arguing in low pa.s.sionate tones with a cold-eyed listener who with a straw was tracing niggling hieroglyphics upon a moist surface of cigarette-ash. In the deepest corner a girl with a high complexion and bright eyes was making ardent love to a partially drunk and bearded man, winking the while over her shoulder at whoever would watch her comedy. The other places were filled by impersonal women who sipped from their gla.s.ses without relish and stared disdainfully at each other down their powdered noses. At Michael's own table was a blotchy man who alternately sucked his teeth and looked at his watch; and immediately opposite sat a girl with a merry, audacious and somewhat pale face of the Gallic type under a very large and round black hat trimmed with daisies. She was twinkling at Michael, but he would not catch her eye, and he looked steadily over the brim of her hat toward the raffish and rutilant a.s.semblage beyond. Along two sides of the wall were large mirrors painted with flowers and bloated Naiads; here in reflection the throng performed its antics in numberless reduplications.

Advertis.e.m.e.nts of drink decorated the rest of the s.p.a.ce on the walls, and at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay longer than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, that they must not move to another table unless accompanied by a gentleman, and with a final stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless accompanied by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of alcohol and fog of tobacco smoke, with its harborage of all the flotsam of the underworld, must preserve a fiction of polite manners.

Michael was not allowed to maintain his att.i.tude of disinterested commentary, for the girl in the daisied hat presently addressed him, and he did not wish to hurt her feelings by not replying.

"You're very silent, kiddie," she said. "I'll give you a penny for them."

"I really wasn't thinking about anything in particular," said Michael.

"Will you have a drink?"

"Don't mind if I do. Alphonse!" she shouted, tugging at the arm of the overloaded waiter who was accomplis.h.i.+ng his transit. "Bring me a hot whisky-and-lemon. There's a love."

Alphonse made the slightest sign of having heard the request and pa.s.sed on. Michael held his breath while the girl was giving her order. He was expecting every moment that the waiter would break over the alcove in a fountain of gla.s.s.

"I've taken quite a fancy to whisky-and-lemon hot," she informed Michael. "You know. Anyone does, don't they? Get a sudden fit and keep on keeping on with one drink, I mean. This'll be my sixth to-night. But I'm a long way off being drunk, kiddie. Do you like my new hat? I reckon it'll bring me luck."

"I expect it will," Michael said.

"You are serious, aren't you? When I first saw you I thought you was the spitting image of a fellow I know--Bert Saunders, who writes about the boxing matches for Crime Ill.u.s.trated. He's more of a bright-eyes than you are, though."

The whisky-and-lemon arrived, and she drank Michael's health.

"Funny-tasting stuff when you come to think of it," she said meditatingly. "What's your name, kiddie?"

He told her.

"Michael," she repeated. "You're a Jew, then?"

He shook his head.

"Well, kid, I suppose you know best, but Michael is a Jewish name, isn't it? Michael? Of course it is. I don't mind Jew fellows myself. One or two of them have been very good to me. My name's Daisy Palmer."

The conversation languished slightly, because Michael since his encounter with Poppy at Neptune Crescent was determined to be very cautious.

"You look rather French," was his most audacious sally toward the personal.

"Funny you should have said that, because my mother was a stewardess on the Calais boat. She was Belgian herself."

Again the conversation dropped.

"I'm waiting for a friend," Daisy volunteered. "She's been having a row with her fellow, and she promised to come on down to the Orange and tell me about it. Dolly Wearne is her name. She ought to have been here by now. What's the time, kid?"

It was after midnight, and Daisy began to look round anxiously.

"I'm rather worried over Doll," she confided to Michael, "because this fellow of hers, Hungarian Dave, is a proper little tyke when he turns nasty. I said to Doll, I said to her, 'Doll, that dirty rotter you're so soft over'll swing for you before he's done. Why don't you leave him,' I said, 'and come and live along with me for a bit?'"

"And what did she say?" Michael asked.

But there was no answer, for Daisy had caught sight of Dolly herself coming down the stairs, and she was now hailing her excitedly.

"Oh, doesn't she look shocking white," exclaimed Daisy. "Doll!" she shouted, waving to her. "Over here, duck."

The four offensive youths near them in the alcove mimicked her in exaggerated falsetto.

"---- to you," she flung scornfully at them over her shoulder. There was a savage directness, a simple coa.r.s.eness in the phrase that pleased Michael. It seemed to him that nothing except that could ever be said to these young men. Whatever else might be urged against the Cafe d'Orange, at least one was able to hear there a final verdict on otherwise indescribable humanity.

By this time Dolly Wearne, a rather heavy girl with a long retreating chin and flabby cheeks, had reached her friend's side. She began immediately a voluble tale:

"Oh, Daisy, I put it across him straight. I give you my word, I told him off so as he could hardly look me in the face. 'You call yourself a man,' I said, 'why, you dirty little alien.' That's what I called him. I did straight, 'you dirty little---- '"

"This is my friend," interrupted Daisy, indicating Michael, who bowed.

It amused him to see how in the very middle of what was evidently going to be a breathless and desperate story both the girls could remember the convention of their profession.

"Pleased to meet you," said Dolly, offering a black kid-gloved hand with half-a-simper.

"What will you drink?" asked Michael.

"Mine's a brandy and soda, please. 'You dirty little alien,' I said."

Dolly was helter-skelter in the track of her tale again.

"Go on, did you? And what did he say?" asked Daisy admiringly.

"He never said nothing, my dear. What could he say?"

"That's right," nodded Daisy wisely.

"'For two years,' I said, 'you've let a girl keep you,' I said, 'and then you can go and give one of my rings to that Florrie. Let me get hold of her,' I said. 'I'll tear her eyes out.' 'No, you won't, now then,' he said. 'Won't I? I will, then,' and with that I just lost control of my feelings, I felt that wild...."

"What did you do, Doll?" asked Daisy, plying her with brandy to soothe the outraged memory.

"What did I do? Why, I spat in his tea and came straight off down to the Orange. 'Yes,' I said, 'you can sit drinking tea while you break my heart.' Don't you ever go and have a fancy boy, Daise. Why, I was a straight girl when I first knew him. Straight--well, anyway not on the game like what I am now." Here Dolly Wearne began to weep with bitter self-compa.s.sion. "I've slaved for that fellow, and now he serves me like dirt."

"Go on. Don't cry, duck," Daisy begged. "Come home with me to-night and we can send and fetch your things away to-morrow. I wouldn't cry over him," she said fiercely. "There's no fellow worth crying over. The best of them isn't worth crying over."