III
The next afternoon Mrs. Avalon had promised to appear at a charity matinée in a playful duologue between Cleopatra and a hearty gentleman alleged to be Mark Antony’s valet; and as she had never gone to the trouble of acquiring a reputation as unreliable—in fact, Fay Avalon was born with “careless habits of accuracy”—and though she was feeling less like Cleopatra than she had ever felt in her life, it was only after she had done her duty by the charity matinée that she set out for the quiet street in Hampstead.
She gave Nicholas Pavlovitch only the bald outline of the beastly happening. Blackmailer, money. He blushed furiously. Often she had seen him blush, but never as now. He was like a child who had just been smacked and knows he has not deserved it. He couldn’t, he said, bear the indecency, the shame, of it ... that, through loving him, she should have to endure this awful thing. There was only one thing to do. She must “cut him out,” that’s all! And how funnily tragic that slang sounded in his twisted Russian pronunciation.
She laughed at that. Not much, but just enough. “We do not,” she said, “take our tragedies so tragically. But scratch a Russian and you find a baby....” She kissed him.
“It is easier than that,” she explained. “You must move, dear. For weeks you have been complaining of the lighting in this studio—and now you have every excuse for taking steps about leaving it. Long steps are preferable, Nicholas. From Hampstead to Chelsea, in fact....”
Shove-off took steps at once, and these lead him to a little studio in a little street off the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was a little street like another, with a pillar-box at one end and the noise of busses at the other. Near the pillar-box was a lamp-post. And one autumn evening, as Mrs. Avalon walked from her lover’s studio into Cheyne Walk, she saw a man leaning against the lamp-post, and under a soft dilapidated hat she saw the shape of a lean face and a broken nose. He was motionless, indifferent, and he was not looking at her but at the wind that blew the leaves about the little street. Her heart jumped, and then was as still as a cut flower.
“So!” she whispered bitterly. “Blackmailers are like history, then!”
The vile person made the courteous gesture.
“Mr. Beerbohm has it,” the vile person said gravely, “that it is not history that repeats itself but historians who repeat one another. A charming writer, don’t you think?”
“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Avalon very miserably, “I thought you were vile! But I am disappointed in you. I actually thought you would leave me alone. You are even viler than I thought, you who call yourself the cavalier of the streets!”
“Perhaps,” murmured the shabby young man. “Perhaps. It seems always to have been my fate to find out the indecencies of decent people, and so, of course, decent people do not take a very liberal view of me. You find me this evening, Mrs. Avalon, in a conversational vein.”
There was a ghastly sort of subtlety in his neglect to mention why he was there, a thin, rakish hawk by the lamp-post. Impotent, she loathed him. And she passed him resolutely, with a very proud face, one step, two, three.... And then his voice fell harshly on her back:
“You are the kind of woman men dream about in lonely moments. My life is made of lonely moments, and I think this is the loneliest of all. Go away quickly, Fay Avalon!”
Bewilderment wheeled her round.
“What did you say?” she cried.
But he stood as when she had first seen him, the silhouette of a hawk with a broken nose, and he stared not at her but at the wind that blew the leaves about the little street.
“It is not worth repeating,” he said sharply into the middle air. “But to what I said, I added, ‘Go very quickly,’ and I meant it—for your sake. This is a lonely place, Mrs. Avalon, and the cavalier of the streets is as nearly an outlaw as any one outside a cinema. It is a long time since I kissed a lady, and the only thing that restrains me from doing it now is the fact that I have never in my life kissed any one who did not wish to be kissed by me. So you had better go quickly, Fay Avalon.”