by George Moore
About two o’clock, holding her ball-skirts out of the dirt, a lady entered.
“How do you do, Emily?” said Mike. “Just fancy seeing you here, and at this hour!” He was glad of the interruption; but his pleasure was dashed by the fear that she would ask him to come home with her.
“Oh, I have had such a pleasant party; So-and-so sang at Lady Southey’s. Oh, I have enjoyed myself! I knew I should find you here; but I am interrupting. I will go.” She put her arm round his neck. He looked at her diamonds, and congratulated himself that she was a lady.
“I am afraid I am interrupting you,” she said again.
“Oh no, you aren’t, I shall be done in half an hour; I have only got a few more pages to read through. Escott went away, selfish brute that he is, and has left me to do all the work.”
She sat by his side contentedly reading what he had written. At half-past two all the pages were passed for press, and they descended the spiral iron staircase, through the grease and vinegar smell of the ink, in view of heads and arms of a hundred compositors, in hearing of the drowsy murmur of the reading-boy. Her brougham was at the door. As she stepped in Mike screwed up his courage and said good-bye.
“Won’t you come?” she said, with disappointment in her eyes.
“No, not to-night. I have been slaving at that paper for the last four hours. Thanks; not to-night. Good-bye; I’ll see you next week.”
The brougham rolled away, and Mike walked home. The hands of the clocks were stretching towards three, and only a few drink-disfigured creatures of thirty-five or forty lingered; so horrible were they that he did not answer their salutations.
CHAPTER IV
MIKE WAS IN his bath when Frank entered.
“What, not dressed yet?”
“All very well for you to talk. You left me at eleven to get the paper out as best I could. I did not get away from the printer’s before half-past two.”
“I’m very sorry, but you’ve no idea how ill I felt. I really couldn’t have stayed on. I heard you come in. You weren’t alone.”
The room was pleasant with the Eau de Lubin, and Mike’s beautiful figure appealed to Frank’s artistic sense; and he noticed it in relation to the twisted oak columns of the bed. The body, it was smooth and white as marble; and the pectoral muscles were especially beautiful when he leaned forward to wipe a lifted leg. He turned, and the back narrowed like a leaf, and expanded in shapes as subtle. He was really a superb animal as he stepped out of his bath.
“I wish to heavens you’d dress. Leave off messing yourself about. I want breakfast. Lizzie’s waiting. What are you putting on those clothes for? Where are you going?”
“I am going to see Lily Young. She wrote to me this morning saying she had her mother’s permission to ask me to come.”
“She won’t like you any better for all that scent and washing.”
“Which of these neckties do you like?”
“I don’t know…. I wish you’d be quick. Come on!”
As he fixed his tie with a pearl pin he whistled the “Wedding March.” Catching Frank’s eyes, he laughed and sang at the top of his voice as he went down the passage.
Lizzie was reading in one of the arm-chairs that stood by the high chimney-piece tall with tiles and blue vases. The stiffness and glare of the red cloth in which the room was furnished, contrasted with the soft colour of the tapestry which covered one wall. The round table shone with silver, and an agreeable smell of coffee and sausages pervaded the room. Lizzie looked up astonished; but without giving her time to ask questions, Mike seized her and rushed her up and down.
“Let me go! let me go!” she exclaimed. “Are you mad?”
Frank caught up his fiddle. At last Lizzie wrenched herself from Mike.
“What do you mean? … Such nonsense!”
Laughing, Mike placed her in a chair, and uncovering a dish, said —
“What shall I give you this happy day?”
“What do you mean? I don’t like being pulled about.”
“You know what tune that is? That’s the ‘Wedding March.’”
“Who’s going to be married? Not you.”
“I don’t know so much about that. At all events I am in love. The sensation is delicious — like an ice or a glass of Chartreuse. Real love — all the others were coarse passions — I feel it here, the genuine article. You would not believe that I could fall in love.”
“Listen to me,” said Lizzie. “You wouldn’t talk like that if you were in love.”
“I always talk; it relieves me. You have no idea how nice she is; so frail, so white — a white blonde, a Seraphita. But you haven’t read Balzac; you do not know those white women of the North. ‘Plus blanche que la blanche hermine,’ etc. So pure is she that I cannot think of kissing her without sensations of sacrilege. My lips are not pure enough for hers. I would I were chaste. I never was chaste.”
Mike laughed and chattered of everything. Words came from him like flour from a mill.
The Pilgrim was published on Wednesday. Wednesday was the day, therefore, for walking in the Park; for lunching out; for driving in hansoms. Like a fish on the crest of a wave he surveyed London — multitudinous London, circulating about him; and he smiled with pleasure when he caught sight of trees spreading their summer green upon the curling whiteness of the clouds. He loved the Park. The Park had always been his friend; it had given him society when no door was open to him; it had been the inspiration of all his ambitions; it was the Park that had first showed him ladies and gentlemen in all the gaud and charm of town leisure. There he had seen for the first time the panorama of slanting sunshades, patent leather shoes, horses cantering in the dusty sunlight, or proudly grouped, the riders flicking the flies away with gold-headed whips. He loved the androgynous attire of the horsewomen — collars, silk hats, and cravats. The Park appealed to him intensely and strangely as nothing else did. He loved the Park for the great pasture it afforded to his vanity. It was in the Park he saw the fashionable procuress driving — she who would not allow him to pay even for champagne in her house; it was in the Park he met the little actress who looked so beseechingly in his face; it was in the Park he met fashionable ladies who asked him to dinner and took him to the theatre; it was in the Park he had found life and fortune, and, saturated with happiness, with health, tingling with consciousness of his happiness, Mike passed among the various crowd, which in its listlessness seemed to balance and air itself like a many-petalled flower. But much as the crowd amused and pleased him, he was more amused and pleased with the present vision of his own personality, which in a long train of images and stories passed within him. He loved to dream of himself; in dreams he entered his soul like a temple, seeing himself in various environment, and acting in manifold circumstances.
“Here am I — a poor boy from the bogs of Ireland — poor people” (the reflection was an unpleasant one, and he escaped from it); “at all events a poor boy without money or friends. I have made myself what I am…. I get the best of everything — women, eating, clothes; I live in beautiful rooms surrounded with pretty things. True, they are not mine, but what does that matter? — I haven’t the bother of looking after them…. If I could only get rid of that cursed accent, but I haven’t much; Escott has nearly as much, and he was brought up at an English school. How pleasant it is to have money! Heigho! How pleasant it is to have money! Six pounds a week from the paper, and I could make easily another four if I chose. Sometimes I don’t get any presents; women seem as if they were going to chuck it up, and then they send all things — money, jewelry, and comestibles. I am sure it was Ida who sent that hundred pounds. What should I do if it ever came out? But there’s nothing to come out. I believe I am suspected, but nothing can be proved against me.
“Why do they love me? I always treat them badly. Often I don’t even pretend to love them, but it makes no difference. Pious women, wicked women, stupid women, clever women, high-class women, low-class women, it is all the same — all love me.
That little girl I picked up in the Strand liked me before she had been talking to me five minutes. And what sudden fancies! I come into a room, and every feminine eye fills with sudden emotion. I wonder what it is. My nose is broken, and my chin sticks out like a handle. And men like me just as much as women do. It is inexplicable. True, I never say disagreeable things; and it is so natural to me to wheedle. I twist myself about them like a twining plant about a window. Women forgive me everything, and are glad to see me after years. But they are never wildly jealous. Perhaps I have never been really loved…. I don’t know though — Lady Seeley loved me. There was an old lady at Margate, sixty if she was a day (of course there was nothing improper), and she worshipped me. How nicely she used to smile when she said, ‘Come round here that I may look at you!’ — and her husband was quite as bad; he’d run all over the place after me. So-and-so was quite offended because I didn’t rush to see him; he’d put me up for six months…. Servants hate Frank; for me they’d do anything. I never was in a lodging-house in my life that the slavey didn’t fall in love with me. People dislike me; I speak to them for five minutes, and henceforth they run after me. I make friends everywhere.
“Those Americans wanted me to come and stay six months with them in New York. How she did press me to come! … The Brookes, they want me to come and stay in the country with them; they’d give me horses to ride, guns to shoot, and I’d get the girls besides. They looked rather greedily at me just now. How jealous poor old Emily is of them! She says I’d ‘go to the end of the earth for them’ — and would not raise a little finger for her. Dear old Emily, she wasn’t a bit cross the other night when I wouldn’t go home with her. I must go and see her. She says she loved me — really loved me! … She used to lie and dream of pulling me out of burning houses. I wonder why I am liked! How intangible, and yet how real! What a wonderful character I would make in a novel!”
At that moment he saw Mrs. Byril in the crowd; but notwithstanding his kind thoughts of her, he prayed she might pass without seeing him. Perceiving Lady Helen walking with her husband and Harding, he followed her slim figure with his eyes, remembering what Seymour’s good looks had brought him, for he envied all love, desiring to be himself all that women desire. Then his thoughts wandered. The decoration of the Park absorbed him — the nobility of a group of horses, the attractiveness of some dresses; and amid all this elegance and parade he dreamed of tragedy — of some queen blowing her brains out for him — and he saw the fashionable dress and the blood oozing from the temple, trickling slowly through the sand. Then Lords Muchross and Snowdown passed, and they passed without acknowledging him!
“Cads, cads, damn them!” His face changed expression. “I may rise to any height, queens may fall down and worship me, but I may never undo my birth. Not to have been born a gentleman! That is to say, of a long line — a family with a history. Not to be able to whisper, ‘I may lose everything, all troubles may be mine, but the fact remains that I was born a gentleman!’ Those two men who cut me are lords. What a delight in one’s life to have a name all to one’s self!” And then Mike lost himself in a maze of little dreams. A gleam of mail; escutcheons and castles; a hawk flew from fingers fair; a lady clasped her hands when the lances shivered in the tourney; and Mike was the hero that persisted in the course of this shifting little dream.
The Brookes — Sally and Maggie — stopped to speak to him, and he went to lunch with them. His interest in all they did and said was unbounded, and that he might not be able to reproach himself with waste of time, he contrived by hint and allusion to lay the foundation for a future intrigue with one of the girls.
Lily Young, however, had never been forgotten; she had been as constantly present in his mind as this sense of the sunshine and his own happy condition. She had been parcel of and one with these but now; as he drove to see her, he separated her from the morning phenomena of his life, and began to think definitely of her.
Smiling, he called himself a brute, and regretted his failure. But in her presence his cynicism was evanescent. She sat on a little sofa, covered with an Indian shawl; behind her was a great bronze, the celebrated gift of a celebrated Rajah to her mother. Mrs. Young had been on a tour in the East with her husband, and ever since her house had been frequented by decrepit old gentlemen interested in Arabi, and other matters which they spoke of as Eastern questions.
Lily looked at Mike under her eyes as she passed across the room to get him some tea, and they talked a little while. Then some three or four great and very elderly historians entered, and she had to leave him; and feeling he could not prolong his visit he went, conscious of sensations of purity and some desire of goodness, if not for itself, for the grace that goodness brings. He paid many visits in this house, but conversations with learned Buddhists seemed the only result; a tête-à-tête with Lily seemed impossible. To his surprise he never met her in society, and his heart beat fast when one evening he heard she was expected; and for the first time forgetful of the multitude, and nervous as a school-boy in search of his first love, he sought her in the crowd. He feared to remain with her, and it seemed to him he had accomplished much in asking her to come down to supper. When talking to others his thoughts were with her, and his eyes followed her. An inquisitive woman noted his agitation, and suspecting the cause, said, “I see, I see, and I think something may come of it.” Even when Lily left he did not recover his ordinary humour, and about two in the morning, in sullen weariness and disappointment, he offered to drive Lady Helen home.
Should he make love to her? He had often wished to. Here was an opportunity.
“You did not see that I was looking at you tonight; you did not guess what I was thinking of?”
“Yes, I did; you were looking at and thinking of my arms.”
Should he pass his arm round her? Lady Helen knew Lily, and might tell; he did not dare it, and instead, spoke of her contributions to the paper. Then the conversation branched into a description of the Wednesday night festivities in Temple Gardens — the shouting and cheering of the lords, the comic vocalists, the inimitable Arthur, the extraordinary Bessie. He told, with fits of laughter, of Muchross’s stump speeches, and how he had once got on the supper-table and sat down in the very centre, regardless of plates and dishes. Mike and Lady Helen nearly died of laughter when he related how on one occasion Muchross and Snowdown, both crying drunk, had called in a couple of sweeps. “You see,” he said, “the look of amazement on their faces, and the black ‘uns were forced into two chairs, and were waited upon by the lords, who tucked their napkins under their arms.”
“Oh don’t, oh don’t!” said Lady Helen, leaning back exhausted.
But Mike went on, though he was hardly able to speak, and told how Muchross and Snowdown had danced the can-can, kicking at the chandelier from time to time, the sweeps keeping time with their implements on the sideboard; the revel finishing up with a wrestling match, Muchross taking the big sweep, and Snowdown the little one.
“You should have seen them rolling over under the dining-room table; I shall never forget Snowdown’s shirt.”
“I should like to see one of these entertainments. Do you ever have a ladies’ night? If you do, and the ladies are not supposed to wrestle with the laundresses in the early light, I should like to come.”
“Oh, yes, do come; Frank will be delighted. I’ll see that things are kept within bounds.” The conversation fell, and he regretted he must forego this very excellent opportunity to make love to her.
Next day, changed in his humour, but still thinking of Lily, he went to see Mrs. Byril, and he stopped a few days with her. He was always strict in his own room, and if Emily sought him in the morning he reprimanded her.
She was one of those women who, having much heart, must affect more; a weak intelligent woman, honest and loyal — one who could not live without a lover. And with her arms about his neck, she listened to his amours, and learnt his poetry by heart. Mike was her folly, and she would never have thought of another if, as she
said, he had only behaved decently to her. “I am sorry, darling, I told you anything about it, but when I got your beastly letter I wrote to him. Tell me you’ll come and stay with me next month, and I’ll put him off…. I hate this new girl; I am jealous because she may influence you, but for the others — the Brookes and their friends — the half-hours spent in summer-houses when the gardener is at dinner, I care not one jot.” So she spoke as she lay upon his knees in the black satin arm-chair in the drawing-room.
But her presence at breakfast — that invasion of the morning hours — was irritating; he hated the request to be in to lunch, and the duty of spending the evening in her drawing-room, instead of in club or bar-room. He desired freedom to spend each minute as the caprice of the moment prompted. Were he a rich man he would not have lived with Frank; to live with a man was unpleasant; to live with a woman was intolerable. In the morning he must be alone to dream of a book or poem; in the afternoons, about four, he was glad to æstheticize with Harding or Thompson, or abandon himself to the charm of John’s aspirations.
John and he were often seen walking together, and they delighted in the Temple. The Temple is escapement from the omniscient domesticity which is so natural to England; and both were impressionable to its morning animation — the young men hurrying through the courts and cloisters, the picturesqueness of a wig and gown passing up a flight of steps. It seemed that the old hall, the buttresses and towers, the queer tunnels leading from court to court, turned the edge of the commonplace of life. Nor did the Temple ever lose for them its quaint and primitive air, and as they strolled about the cloisters talking of art or literature, they experienced a delight that cannot be quite put into words; and were strangely glad as they opened the iron gates, and looked on all the many brick entanglements with the tall trees rising, spreading the delicate youth of leaves upon the weary red of the tiles and the dim tones of the dear walls.