"But you can't deny I'm right. No clinging drapery has ever been so suggestive, so much the refinement of sensuality, as the crinoline."
Ishmael said nothing; but inwardly he too felt what Killigrew meant, which he would not have done a week earlier. As he sat there, warm and pleasantly stung by the wine he had drunk, the brightness of the scene and the colour of the music and the thoughts they conjured up, as well as the gowns and head-dresses of the pretty women, all awaked in him the glow a child feels at its first pantomime. The dancers were to him not flesh-and-blood women, but magical creatures, and yet he was stirred to a new excitement too. As he sat there all the sense of poise with which he usually so confidently faced the affairs of life, and which, far from failing him, generally served him only too well, began to sway and grow many-coloured.
When they went out into the street again he agreed with Carminow that the night was yet too young to abandon it in mid-air. He did not, however, feel like more drinks; the exhilaration of the play, of his own youth, now for the first time tingling unrestrainedly in his veins, the glamour of the gaily-lit night—they had wandered as far as the Haymarket, which was ablaze till dawn—were all enough for him, and he felt that anything more would have blurred their keenness. Suddenly Carminow had an inspiration.
"Come back with me, you two," he suggested. "I've got quite decent digs in Cecil Stweet, off the Stwand. And I've a little collection that might intewest you…."
"I know, monstrosities in bottles and side elevations of premature babies," surmised Killigrew; "you're a foul old thing! But we'll come and have a yarn over 'em anyway. I'm not in a hurry to face my revered parents and I daren't take this good little boy to some places you and I know of. I'm responsible for him."
Carminow turned a pessimistic eye on Ishmael. "Are you still pure?" he shot at him in his deepest bass. "I see you are; your look answers for you." And he strode on again. He turned to add over his shoulder: "I cannot in the intewests of my pwofession emulate you; it is incumbent on me to know first hand all that is possible, but I consider it an excellent thing for the layman. Keep it up. Don't let Killigrew, who is a commonplace sinner, laugh you out of it."
Ishmael forced himself to reply that he did not intend to forego his own ideas on the subject for Killigrew or anyone else; and, indeed, he was not so outraged by anything Carminow had said as by Killigrew's whispered communication that for his part he believed Carminow was boasting…. "Don't believe he knows the way," added Killigrew, "or only theoretically. He's like a lot of doctors—all theories and no practice." He was so pleased with this joke he had to repeat it aloud to Carminow, who bore it quite unruffled.
They had now reached the house, one of the many little lodging-houses that stood where the Hotel Cecil is to-day, and Carminow let himself in with a large key and, turning up the gas, revealed the usual lodging-house hall that is and was and always shall be eternally the same as long as lodgings and landladies exist. It had a yellowish paper blotted with large blurred flowers of a reddish hue, a steel engraving of the "Derby Day" hung by the hat-stand, and the woodwork was of bright yellow graining.
Carminow's rooms were on the second floor; after the first landing had been passed the stairs suddenly altered in character, and from being carpeted and fairly wide took onto themselves linoleum and a steep straightness that said plainly: "Up to here two guineas a week; above here only thirty shillings, with half-a-crown for extras." Higher still bare boards advertised the fact that only "bed-sitters" or even plain bedrooms were to be found.
Carminow's rooms ran the depth of the house, the front one, his sitting-room, being separated from the bedroom by folding doors of the same bright yellow as the doors in the hall. Into the sitting-room he ushered his guests, and they knocked helplessly up against sharp angles while Carminow pawed and patted round the room for matches, obstinately refusing the offers of their boxes because he said he was trying to train his landlady to keep his in the same place. Killigrew, uninterested in the education of landladies, finally insisted on striking one of his own, and uttered a shriek of joy when the faint gleam revealed a glass jar in which a greenish-white fragment of a body floated forlornly. Finally the gas was lit, the table cleared of papers and books, and bottles of beer placed upon it instead. They had just settled down to villainously strong cigars and the beer when a sound very unexpected to two of them floated out upon the air—the sound of a girl singing. The voice was a rather deep mezzo; it was singing very softly an old ballad, to the accompaniment of a few notes very gently struck now and again on a piano.