“There is the ‘Horseshoe’. What a place! When I was at London University, that’s where we used to foregather. What a time that was! Well! Well! Well!”

Emily fixed her eyes on the sacred spot. A vision of our hero in the first flush of his youth, ingenuous, idealistic, rose before her:

A young Apollo, golden haired,

Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,

Magnificently unprepared

For the long littleness of life.

As the appropriate lines recurred to her, she saw him, blushing a little in the attempt to overcome his boyish self-consciousness, kindling the divine fire in the ardent, though lesser, breasts of his admiring companions, as he told them in ringing tones of his determination to leave the world better than he’d found it. To that inspiring picture succeeded a softer one, and she saw the band of young students sitting pensive and enthralled, as one of their number, probably that same one, sang the old sweet song, with which, as she had read in Trilby, the Paris art students were wont to melt each other’s tender hearts — ‘My Sister Dear’.

“What would I not have given,” thought Emily, “to have been one of that golden company: to have shared their studies, their vicissitudes, their evenings of grave discussion or innocent mirth! To have been, perhaps, as far as modesty permits, the dear platonic friend of each of them, and, as time went on, something more to one! For the day might have come, when, suddenly breaking off in describing the generous Utopia of his latest dream, he would have hesitated, and, all his swift rhetoric gone, would have said, bluntly and clumsily, ‘I need you.’ And I, meeting his eyes. . . .” But here the bus jolted on, and Emily awoke from her reverie to hear him say:

“And here’s the Charing Cross Road. This is where all the secondhand book shops are. Many’s the hour I’ve spent poking about in some of these places, standing, sometimes, for the whole of lunch-time, reading some book I couldn’t afford to buy. Yes, you can stand there as long as you like, reading, and no one says a word.”

Emily heard his words with something of a thrill. She determined to avail herself at the first opportunity of the facilities of this enlightened, courteous street.

“How appearances deceive!” she thought, looking at the tall fronts of the dwellinghouses, grayly lustrous in the sun, which rose like cliffs of mud above the sluggish ditch through which they were crawling. It revived memories of her trip down the Congo. A few old booklovers, looking like those dull and crippled water insects which resemble bits of old dry stick, which, again, are exactly like booklovers, hung precariously at the shop fronts, as if in fear of being swept away by the slowly drifting scum, for this is a great street for actors. Here a policeman, dark, shining and clumsy as a huge dytiscus beetle, hung stationary in the middle of the hot colorless stream. Billy and Bertie and Kitty and Gertie coming from rehearsal in their cream and vermilion Mercedes, open and shallow, looked like four pale electric grubs in a water lily. High above the mud banks an airplane, or loud dragonfly, split in relatively wide freedom the limited ashy blue.

“And the palpitations of this slime,” thought Emily, “are the effects of mind! The rich silt of all the mental progress of mankind is collected here, radioactive with the living truth. Decidedly I must come. Perhaps,” she thought, “I may find a priceless first edition among the musty contents of one of those boxes marked fourpence. I should like to do that.”

And so they came to Trafalgar Square, where Emily smiled, for she was no prude, at the statue of Lord Nelson, and where she gazed with regret, though, of course, she had never stayed there herself, at what was once the site of Morley’s Hotel.

And so they went down Whitehall on the open-topped bus, and on into the sun’s eye, their different figures black and ragged in silhouette as they advanced, on their high and jolty car, solemnly and slowly into that radiance, till at length they drew up in Pimlico, from which they were to start out for a walk along the Chelsea Embankment.

Looking forward, it is possible to catch other glimpses of them, on various of the afternoons when Amy was engaged with her friends. They are either strolling under the sugary flowering chestnuts of Bushey, their slightly unfashionable attire lending a stiff verisimilitude to the beauty of the avenue, or skipping, hand in hand, hurriedly across Fleet Street on their way to Saint Paul’s, or emerging, blinking and feeling pale, from the hot maggoty darkness of an Oxford Street movie show, or, what they did more often than was really worthwhile, passing from showcase to showcase in some museum or other, happy in virtuous headaches and the silent friendliness between them.

Chapter 9

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage,

thought Emily on certain thundery afternoons of hot July, when, after lunch, Amy now regularly hurried her upstairs, and locked her in the narrow lumber-room where her poor straw bed was, before going out herself to concerts, matinees, or picture exhibitions, or perhaps to tea with a party of friends. For Mr. Fatigay’s brief holiday was over, and he had leisure no longer to take the chimp for walks in the afternoons, and Amy, when he had hinted that she might occasionally do this, had replied woundingly that she did not usually take menials about with her, even when they happened to be human, and that since the apes at the zoo managed to exist very comfortably without exercise, she saw no reason why Emily should not do the same.

“And what’s more,” she had added, with a stern glance at the poor dumb creature, who was powerless to contradict, “Emily does not show, in the sweeping and scrubbing she sometimes has to do, such an excess of pent-up energy as might indicate any pressing need for additional exercise. No, Alfred! The chimp is mine now, and though, as you know, I am incapable of cruelty, even to the humblest and least prepossessing of God’s creatures, I don’t see why I should make an exhibition of myself by dragging her about with me, especially into the company of my friends. And I won’t. And that’s that!”

To which Mr. Fatigay had nothing to reply, and Emily, though she had much, was, of course, unable to put it into words.

It was, therefore, without the satisfaction of having been able to point out that she would far rather spend her afternoons quietly in her room than in the company of Amy, even at the most famous of London’s places of interest, that she was now guided, under the humiliating appearance of compulsion, to the very seclusion of her choice. And such is the suggestive power of a conventional standpoint, which can make a terror out of a long period of free board and lodging, that, on the first afternoon that Amy locked her up, Emily felt quite dejected at her confinement, and was actually hurt at not being held fit company for a person for whom she could feel neither respect nor liking.

As the key turned in the lock she could not prevent herself from standing close to the door, facing it, on the inside, as if appealing that it should be opened — an attitude which exposed her fully to all implied in its forbidding blankness and in the grinding turn of the key. She had to bite her lip very hard to repress a flood of irrational tears.

“After all, though,” she said to herself, “I am not a child, though I may not be as old as some people are, and I ought think shame on myself for behaving as such. What wish could I conceive, of all that are handy and practicable, more to my taste than that a locked door should be interposed between me and my oppressor, and though if I had the locking of it, and stood upon the other side, it might be somewhat longer before it was opened, the present arrangement is a very tolerable second-best, and if the gusto with which she thus suits my convenience springs from her belief that she is making me miserable, why, what a fool I should be to make it a reality merely because she imagines it to be one!”

And with a cheerfulness considerably restored, the agile creature bounded lightly about the room, indulging in a series of handsprings, pirouettes, and somersaults, which would have proclaimed clearly, to anyone with an eye to the inner significance of dancing, that she felt herself empress of at least this nutshell and had no intention of becoming prey to heavy dreams.

When her girlish high spirits had abated a little, and something of her usual pensiveness had reasserted its sway, she sat down soberly in the middle of the floor and surveyed her bedroom in its new light as a hermit’s or a prisoner’s cell.

“And what though some would consider it to be the latter?” she reflected, for her race-consciousness made her unusually sensitive to the suggestion of being caged, so that the idea stuck like a burr to her thoughts.