Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (great books to read TXT) 📕

weather should have broken up. It may be rather dreary in the forest.”

“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”

Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went back to Leppard Street.

V The Innermost Circle

November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.

One evening when the fog was not very dense Michael went up to Piccadilly. Here the lamps were strong enough to shine through the murk with a golden softness that made the Circus like a landscape seen in a dying fire. Michael could not bear to withdraw from this glow in which every human countenance was idealized as by amber limes in a theater. At the O.U.D.S. performance of The Merchant of Venice they had been given a sunset like this on the Rialto. It would be jolly to meet somebody from Oxford tonight⁠—Lonsdale, for instance. He looked round half-expectant of recognition; but there was only the shifting crowd about him. How were Stella and Alan getting on at Compiègne? Probably they were having clear blue days there, and in the forest would be a smell of woodfires. With such unrelated thoughts Michael strolled round Piccadilly, sometimes in a wider revolution turning up the darker side streets, but always ultimately returning to the Island in the middle. Here he would stand in a dream, watching the omnibuses go east and west and south and north. The crowd grew stronger, for the people were coming out of the theaters. Should he go to the Orange and talk to Daisy? Should he call a hansom and drive home? Bewitched as by the spinning of a polychromatic top, he could not leave the Island.

They were coming out of the Orient now, and he watched the women emerge one by one. Their ankles all looked so white and frail under the opera-cloaks puffed out with swans-down; and they all of them walked to their carriages with the same knock-kneed little steps. Soon he must begin to frequent the Orient again.

Suddenly Michael felt himself seized with the powerless excitement of a nightmare. There in black, strolling nonchalantly across the pavement to a hansom, was Lily! She was with another girl. Then Drake’s story had been true. Michael realized that gradually all this time he had been slowly beginning to doubt whether Drake had ever seen her. Lily had become like a princess in a fairy tale. Now she was here! He threw off the stupefaction that was paralyzing him, and started to cross the road. A wave of traffic swept up and he was driven back. When the stream had passed, Lily was gone. In a rage with his silly indecision he set out to walk back to Pimlico. The fog had lifted entirely, and there was frost in the air.

Michael walked very quickly because it seemed the only way to wear out his chagrin. How idiotic it had been to let himself be caught like that. Supposing she did not visit the Orient again for a long time? It would serve him right. Oh, why had he not managed to get in front of those vehicles in time? He and she might have been driving together now; instead of which he was stamping his way along this dull dark pavement. How tall she had seemed, how beautiful in her black frock. At last he knew why all this time women had left him cold. He loved her still. What nonsense it had been for him to think he wanted to marry her in order to rescue her. What priggish insolence! He loved her still: he loved her now: he loved her: he loved her! The railings of Green Park rattled to his stick. He loved her more passionately because the ghost of her whom he had thought of with romantic embellishment all these years was but a caricature of her reality. That image of gossamer which had floated through his dreams was become nothing, now that again he had seen herself with her tall neck and the aureole of her hair and the delicate poise of her as she waited among those knock-kneed women on the pavement. He brought his stick crashing down upon a bin of gravel by the curb that it might clang forth his rage. In what direction had she driven away? Even that he did not know. She might have driven past this very lamppost a few minutes back.

Here was Hyde Park Corner. In London it was overwhelming to speculate upon a hansom’s progress. Here already were main roads branching, and these in their turn would branch, and others after them until the imagination was baffled. Waste of time. Waste of time. He would not picture her in any quarter of London. But never one night should escape without his waiting for her at the Orient. Where was she now? He would put her from his mind until they met. Supposing that round the corner of that wall she were waiting, because the cab horse had slipped. How she would turn toward him in her black dress. “I saw you outside the Orient,”