The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.
“Hideous but rather fascinating,” Michael said. “Look at the queer melancholy light, and look at the view.”
It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they walked out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries of slag and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright green slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city’s breath: the circling of the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.
“In summer this will be wonderful,” Michael predicted.
“On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,” Maurice said.
“Except that they’ll probably have retired to bed,” Michael pointed out.
“I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,” Maurice laughed.
“Let’s ask the housekeeper,” Michael said solemnly.
They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead water without.
“Who lives in the other flats?” Michael inquired of the housekeeper.