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,” he would say. She should know immediately that he was not deceived about her life. So vividly had he conjured the scene that when he rounded the wall on his way down Buckingham Palace Road, he was disappointed to see no cab, no Lily standing perplexed; merely a tabid woman clothed in a cobweb of crape, asleep over her tray of matches and huddled against the wall of the King’s garden. He put a sixpence among her matchboxes, and wondered of what were her dark dreams. The stars were blue as steel in the moonless sky above the arc-lamps; and a cold parching wind had sprung up. Michael deviated from the nearest way to Leppard Street, and walked on quickly into the heart of Pimlico. This kind of clear-cut air suited the architecture of the ashen streets. One after another they stretched before him with their dim checkers of doors and windows. Sometimes, where they were intersected by wider thoroughfares, an arc-lamp fizzed above the shape of a solitary policeman, and the corner-houses stood out sharper and more cadaverous. And always in contrast with these necropolitan streets, these masks of human dwellings, were Michael’s own thoughts thronged with fancies of himself and Lily.

It was nearly one o’clock when he walked over the arcuated bridge across the lake of railway lines and turned the corner into Leppard Street. From the opposite pavement a woman’s figure stepped quickly toward him out of a circle of lamplight. The sudden shadow lanced across the road made him start. Perhaps she noticed him jump, for she stopped at once and stared at him owlishly. He felt sick for a moment, and yet he could not, from an absurd compassion for her, do as he would have liked and run.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he heard her say.

It was too late to avoid her now. He only had two sovereigns in his pocket. It would be ridiculous and cowardly to escape by offering her one of them. He had given his last silver coin to the match-seller. Yet it would have been just as cowardly to have offered her that. He pitied the degradation that prompted her so casual question; the diffidence in her tones marked the fear of answering brutality which must always haunt her. Now that she was close to him, he no longer dreaded her. She was not an ancient drab, a dreadful old woman with black cotton gloves, as at first he had shuddered to suppose her. If those raddled smears and that deathly blanch of coarse powder were cleared from her cheeks, there would be nothing to attract or repel: she would scarcely become even an individual in the multitude of weary London women.

“Where are you off to, dearie, in such a hurry?” she repeated.

“Home. I’m going home,” he said.

“Let’s walk a bit of the way together.”

He could say nothing to her, and if he hurried on, he would hear her voice whining after him like a cat in a yard. He did not wish to let her know where he was living; for every evening he would expect to see her materialize from a quivering circle of lamplight so close to Leppard Street.

“Why don’t you come back with me? I live quite near here,” she murmured. “Go on. You look as if you wanted someone to make a fuss of you.”

Already they were beside the five houses that rose jet-black against the star-incrusted sky.

“Come on, dear. I live in the corner house.”

Michael looked at her in astonishment, and she mistaking his scrutiny smiled in pitiable allurement. He felt as if a marionette were blandishing him. The woman evidently thought he was considering the question of money, and she sidled close up to him.

“Go on, dear, you’ve got some money with you?”

“It’s not that,” said Michael. “I don’t want to come in with you.”

Yet he knew that he must enter Number One with her in order to find in what secret room she lived. And tomorrow morning he would leave the house forever, since it would be unimaginable to stay there longer with the consciousness that perhaps they were creatures like this, who slammed the doors in passages far upstairs. He would not sleep comfortably again with the sense that women like this were creeping about the stairs like spiders. He must probe her existence, and he put his foot on the steps of the front door.

“Not that door,” she said. “Down here.”

She pushed back the gate of the area-steps, and led the way down into the basement. It was incredible that she could live on the same floor as the Cleghornes. Yet obviously she did.

“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered. “Because the woman who keeps the house sleeps down here.”

She opened the back door, and he followed her into the frowsty passage. When the door was dosed behind them, the blackness was absolute.

“Got a vesta with you?” she whispered.

Michael felt her hands pawing him, and he shrank back against the greasy wall.

“Here you are. Here you are.”

The match flamed, but went out before he could light the nodulous candle she proffered. In the darkness he felt her spongy lips upon his cheek, but disengaging himself from her assiduousness, he managed to light the candle. They went along the corridor past the front room where Cleghorne snored the day away; past the kitchen whose open door exhaled an odorous breath of habitation; and through a stone pantry. Then she led him down three steps and up another, unlocked a rickety door, and welcomed him.

“I’m quite on my own, you see,” she said, in a voice of tentative satisfaction.

Michael looked round at the room which was small and smelt very damp. The ceiling sloped to a window closely curtained with the cretonne of black and crimson fruits which Michael recognized as the same stuff he had seen in Barnes’ room above. He tried to recall how much of this room he could see from his bedroom window, and he connected it in his mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.

“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such a stranger.”

Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a pale blue chest next to a washstand.

“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.

“What cat?”

“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”

She called, and a small black cat came out.

“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under the bed like that.”

Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.

“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very well, so she’s got a good home. But he isn’t stinted. Oh, no. He gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have animals, look after them.”

Michael nodded agreement.

“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better than human beings.”

“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.

“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”

The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.

“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the deliberate novelist.

“After my boy.”

“Your boy?” he echoed.

“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened the woman into a fleeting dignity.

“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.

“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the converse was more probable.

“He’s not living with you?”

“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything⁠—not ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil Service. I lived with his father for many years⁠—in fact, from the time I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He’s been dead about six years now.”

“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”

“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a Catholic myself.”

As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility of spirit.

“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short silence.

“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”

Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her health.

“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one, and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave, they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”

Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.

“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a good deal from some of the men?”

“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday⁠—or was it Thursday?⁠—time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count the days, does it? One day last week I did what I’ve never done before: I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man⁠—a very rough sort of a man he was, I’m not surprised poor Peter runs away from them⁠—I heard him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night. And will you believe it, he’d gone to my bag and taken out his six shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it with women like myself. Well now, you can’t say a man like that is any better than my cat. I was very angry about it, but anyone soon forgets. Though I will say it was a warning.”

“I suppose you’d be glad to give up the life,” said Michael, and as he asked the question, it seemed to him in this room and in the presence of this woman a very futile one.

“Oh, I should be glad to give it up. Yes. You see, as I say, I’m really at anyone’s mercy in here. But really what else could I do? You see, in one way, the harm’s done.”

Michael looked at her tarnished hair; at her baggy cheeks raddled and powdered; at the clumsy black upon her lashes that made so much the more obvious the pleated lids beneath; at her neck already flaccid, and at her dress plumped out like an ill-stuffed pillow to conceal the arid flesh beneath. It certainly seemed as if the harm had been done.

“You see,” she went on, “though I have to put up with a great deal, it’s only to be expected, after all. Now I was very severely brought up by my father, and my mother being⁠—well, it’s no use to mince matters as they say⁠—my mother really was a saint. Then of course after this occurred with the Frenchman I told you about⁠—that really was a downward step, though at the time I was happy and though he was always very good to me from the beginning to the end. Still, I’m used to refinement, and I have a great deal to put up with here in this house. Not that I dislike the woman who keeps it. But having paid my rent regular⁠—eight-and-six, that is.⁠ ⁠…”

“Quite enough, too,” said Michael, looking up at the ceiling that was so like the scarred surface of the moon.

“You’re right. It is enough. It is quite enough. But still I’m my own mistress. No one interferes with me. At the same time I don’t interfere with anybody else. I have the right to use the kitchen for my cooking, but really Mrs. Cleghorne⁠—that is the woman who keeps the house⁠—really she is not a clean cook, and very often my stomach is so turned that I go all day with only a cup of tea.”

Michael was grateful to the impulse which had led him to cook his own breakfast on a chafing dish.

“I interrupted you,” he said. “You were going to tell me something about Mrs. Cleghorne.”

“Well, you must know, I had a friend who was very good to me, and this seemed to annoy her. Perhaps she disliked the independence it gave me. Well, she really caused a row between us by telling me she’d seen him going round drinking with another woman. Now that isn’t a nice thing to do, is it? One doesn’t want to go round drinking in public-houses. It looks so bad. I spoke to him about it a bit sharp, and we’ve fallen out over it. In fact, I haven’t seen him for some months. Still I shouldn’t complain, but just lately what with one thing and another I had some extras to get for my boy which was highly necessary you’ll understand⁠—well, as I was saying⁠—what with one thing and another my rent has been a little bit behind. Still, after you’ve paid regular for close on two years, you expect a little consideration.”

“Have you lived in this burrow for two years?” Michael asked in amazement.

“In the week before Christmas it’ll be two years. Yes. Not that Mrs. Cleghorne herself has been so nasty, but she lets her mother come round here and abuse me. Her mother’s an old woman, you’ll understand, and her language⁠—well, really it has sometimes made me feel sick.” She put her hand up to her face with a gesture of disgust. “She stands in that doorway and bullies me until I’m ashamed to sit on this bed and stand it. I really am. You’d hardly believe there was such things to say to anyone. I think I have a right to feel aggravated, and I’ve made up my mind she isn’t going to do it again. I’m not going to have it.” She was nodding at Michael with such energetic affirmation that the springs of the bed creaked.

“The mother doesn’t live here?” he asked.

“Oh, no; she simply comes here for the purpose of bullying me. But I’m not going to let it occur again. I don’t consider I’ve been well treated. If I’d spent the money on gin, I shouldn’t so much object to what the old woman calls me, for I don’t say my life isn’t a bit of a struggle. But there’s so many things to use up the money, when I’ve got what’s wanted for my boy, and paid the policeman on this beat his half-crown which he expects, and tried to keep myself looking a little bit smart⁠—really I have to buy something occasionally, or where should I be?⁠—and I never waste money on clothes for clothes’ sake, as they say⁠—well, after that it’s none so easy to find eight-and-six for the week’s rent and buy myself a bit of food and the cat’s milk.”

Michael had nothing to say in commentary. It seemed to him that even by living above this woman he shared in the responsibility for her wretchedness.

“I hope your boy will turn out well,” he ventured at last.

“Oh, he’s a good boy, he really is. And I have had hopes that perhaps the Fathers will make him a Brother. I should really prefer that to his being in the Civil Service.”

“Or even a priest,” Michael suggested.

“Well, you see, he wasn’t born in wedlock. Would that make a difference?”

“I don’t think so,” said Michael gently. “Oh, no, I hope that wouldn’t make a difference.”

He was finding the imagination of this woman’s life too poignant, and he rose from the light blue chest to bid her goodbye. He begged inwardly that she would not attempt to remind him of the relation in which she had expected to stand to him. He feared to wound her, but he would have to repulse her or go mad if she came near him. He plunged down into his pocket for the two sovereigns. Half of this money he had thought an exaggerated and cowardly bribe to buy off her importunity when she had stood in the circle of lamplight, owlishly staring. Now he wished he had five times as much. His pocket was empty! He felt quickly and hopelessly in his other pockets. He could not find the gold. She must have robbed him. He looked at her reproachfully. Was that the thief’s and liar’s film glazing her eyes as they stared straight into his own? Was it impossible to believe that he had pulled the sovereigns out of his pocket, when nervously he had first seen her. But she had pawed him with her hands in the black passage, and if the money had fallen on the road, he must have heard it. He ought to tax her with the unjust theft; he ought to tell her that what she had taken he had meant to give her. And yet supposing she had not taken the money? She had said the cat recognized him as a gentleman. Supposing she had not taken the sovereigns, he would add by his accusation another stone to the weight she bore. And if she had taken them, why not? The cat was not at hand to warn her that he was to be trusted. She had not wanted the money for herself. She had been preyed upon, and had learned to prey upon others in self-defense.

“I find I haven’t any money with me,” said Michael, looking at her.

“That doesn’t matter. I’ve really quite enjoyed our little talk.”

“But I’ll send you some more,” he promised.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t done anything to have you send your money for. I expect when you saw me in the light, you didn’t think I was really quite your style. Of course, I’ve really come down. It’s no use denying it. I’m not what I was.”

If she had robbed him, she wanted nothing more from him. If she had robbed him, it was because in the humility of her degradation she had feared to see him shrink from her in disgust.

“I shall send you some money for your boy,” he said, in the darkness by the door.

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“What’s your name?”

“Well, I’m known here as Mrs. Smith.” Doubtfully she whispered as the cold air came in through the open door: “I don’t expect you’d care about giving me a kiss.”

Michael had never known anything in his life so difficult to do, but he kissed her cold and flaccid cheek and hurried up the area steps.

When he stood again upon the pavement in the menace of the five black houses of Leppard Street, Michael felt that he never again could endure to return to them at night, nor ever again in the day perceive their fifty windows inscrutable as water. Yet he must walk for a while in the stinging northerly air before he went back to his rooms; he must try to rid himself of the oppression which now lay so heavily upon him; he must be braced even by this lugubrious night of Pimlico before he could encounter again the permeating fug of Leppard Street. He walked as far as the corner, and saw in silhouette upon the bridge a solitary policeman thudding his chest for warmth. In this abominable desert of lamps he should have seemed a symbol of comfort, but Michael with the knowledge of the power he wielded over the unfortunates beheld him now as the brutish servant of a dominating class. He was, after all, very much like a dressed-up gorilla, as he stood there thudding his chest in the haggard lamplight.

Michael turned and went back to his rooms.

He stared at the picture of St. Ursula on the white wall, and suddenly in a fit of rage he plucked it from the hook and ground it face downward upon his writing-table. It seemed to him almost monstrous that anything so serene should be allowed any longer to exist. Immediately afterward he thought that his action had been melodramatic, and shamefacedly he put away the broken picture in a drawer.

Lily was in London: and Mrs. Smith was beneath him in this house. In twenty years Lily might be sunk in such a pit, unless he were quick to save her now. All through the night he kept waking up with the fancy that he could hear the rosary rattling in that den beneath; and every time he knew it was only the sound of the broken hasp on his window rattling in the wind.