Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (great books to read TXT) 📕

soft, and his eyes is awful. But it’s nice, so here’s luck.” She drained her glass. “ ‘Do you love me, puss?’ he says. Silly thing! But they think a lot of him at the office. His governor came down to see him the other morning about something he’s been writing. I don’t know what it was. I hate the sight of his writing. I carry on at him something dreadful, and then he says, ‘My pussycat mustn’t disturb me.’ ”

Daisy shrieked with laughter at the recollection, and Michael who was beginning to be rather fearful for her sobriety suggested home as a good move.

“I shan’t go if you don’t come back with me,” she declared.

Since their incarceration Michael had a tender feeling for Daisy, and he promised to accompany her. She would not go in a hansom, however; nor would she allow Barnes to make a third; and in the end she and Michael went wandering off down Shaftesbury Avenue through the warm September night.

Michael enjoyed walking with her, for she rambled on with long tales of her past that seemed the inconsequent threads of a legendary Odyssey. He flattered himself with her companionship, and told himself that here at last was a demonstration of the possibility of a true friendship with a woman of that class with whom mere friendship would be more improbable than with any woman. It was really delightful to stroll with her homeward under this starlit sky of London; to wander on and on while she chattered forth her history. There had been no hint of any other relation between them; she was accepting him as a friend. He was proud as they walked through Russell Square, overshadowed by the benign trees that hung down with truculent green sprays in the lamplight; he felt a thrill in her companionship, as they dawdled along the railings of Brunswick Square in the acrid scent of the privet. It was curious to think that from the glitter and jangle of the Half Moon could rise this friendship that was giving to all the houses they passed a strange peacefulness. He fancied that here and there the windows were blinking at them in drowsy content, when the gas was extinguished by the unknown bedfarer within. Judd Street shone before them in a lane of lamps, and beyond, against the night, the gothic cliff of St. Pancras Station was indistinctly present. They turned down into Little Quondam Street, and presently came to a red brick house with a pretentious portico.

“Our flat’s in here. Agnes House, it’s called. Come in and have one before you go home,” she invited.

Michael entered willingly. He was glad to show so quickly his confidence in their new friendship.

Agnes House was only entitled to the distinction of a name rather than a number, because the rest of the houses in Quondam Street were shabby, small, and old. It was a new building three stories high, and it was already falling to pieces, owing to work which must have been exceptionally dishonest to give so swiftly the effect of caducity. This collapse was more obvious because it was not dignified by the charm of age; and Agnes House in its premature dissolution was not much more admirable than a cardboard box which has been left out in the rain. Upon Michael it made an impression as of something positively corrupt in itself apart from any association with depravity: it was like a young person with a vile disease whose condition nauseated without arousing pity.

“Rather nice, eh?” said Daisy, as she lit the gas in the kitchen of the flat. “Sit down. I’ll get some whisky. There’s a bathroom, you know. And it’s grand being on the ground floor. I should get the hump, if we was upstairs. I always swore I’d never live in a flat. Well, I don’t really call them safe, do you? Anything might happen and nothing ever be found out.”

Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great deal of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to fright her fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at the sound of a key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike existence of the underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael could see the villainous paper used for every kind of domestic service⁠—to wrap up a piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the cat’s dinner, and spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon the disks of grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very natural, when the eyes never rested from these views of sordid violence, to expect evil everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was already half inclined to accept the underworld’s preoccupation with crime as a truer judgment of human nature than was held by a sentimental civilization, and he began to wonder whether a good deal of his own privacy had not been spent in a fool’s paradise of security. The moated grange and the dark tower were harmless rococo terrors beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes House.

“The kitchen’s in a rare old mess, isn’t it?” said Daisy looking round her. “It gives Bert the rats to see it like this.”

“Are you fond of him?” Michael asked. He was anxious to display his friendly interest.

“Oh, he’s all right. But I wouldn’t ever get fond of anybody. It doesn’t pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they can do as they like with you.”

“I don’t understand why you live with him, if he’s nothing better than all right,” said Michael.

“Well, I’m used to him, and he’s not always in the way like some fellows are.”

Michael