Chapter 15

LOVE IN THE STREETS.

Lewisham was not quite clear what course he meant to take in the high
enterprise of foiling Lagune, and indeed he was anything but clear
about the entire situation. His logical processes, his emotions and
his imagination seemed playing some sort of snatching game with his
will. Enormous things hung imminent, but it worked out to this,
that he walked home with Ethel night after night for--to be
exact--seven-and-sixty nights. Every week night through November and
December, save once, when he had to go into the far East to buy
himself an overcoat, he was waiting to walk with her home. A curious,
inconclusive affair, that walk, to which he came nightly full of vague
longings, and which ended invariably under an odd shadow of
disappointment. It began outside Lagune's most punctually at five, and
ended--mysteriously--at the corner of a side road in Clapham, a road
of little yellow houses with sunk basements and tawdry decorations of
stone. Up that road she vanished night after night, into a grey mist
and the shadow beyond a feeble yellow gas-lamp, and he would watch her
vanish, and then sigh and turn back towards his lodgings.

They talked of this and that, their little superficial ideas about
themselves, and of their circumstances and tastes, and always there
was something, something that was with them unspoken, unacknowledged,
which made all these things unreal and insincere.

Yet out of their talk he began to form vague ideas of the home from
which she came. There was, of course, no servant, and the mother was
something meandering, furtive, tearful in the face of troubles.
Sometimes of an afternoon or evening she grew garrulous. "Mother does
talk so--sometimes." She rarely went out of doors. Chaffery always
rose late, and would sometimes go away for days together. He was mean;
he allowed only a weekly twenty-five shillings for housekeeping, and
sometimes things grew unsatisfactory at the week-end. There seemed to
be little sympathy between mother and daughter; the widow had been
flighty in a dingy fashion, and her marriage with her chief lodger
Chaffery had led to unforgettable sayings. It was to facilitate this
marriage that Ethel had been sent to Whortley, so that was counted a
mitigated evil. But these were far-off things, remote and unreal down
the long, ill-lit vista of the suburban street which swallowed up
Ethel nightly. The walk, her warmth and light and motion close to him,
her clear little voice, and the touch of her hand; that was reality.

The shadow of Chaffery and his deceptions lay indeed across all these
things, sometimes faint, sometimes dark and present. Then Lewisham
became insistent, his sentimental memories ceased, and he asked
questions