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

would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches of François Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably despise it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the quality of the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove to her the reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the relation in which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.

“There’s something extraordinarily attractive about being friends,” he began. “Isn’t it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to be nothing more than a friend?”

“Friends,” Daisy repeated. “I don’t know that I think much of friends. You don’t get much out of them, do you?”

“Is that all anybody is for,” Michael asked in disappointment. “To get something out of?”

“Well, naturally. Anyone can’t live on nothing, can they?”

“But I don’t see why a friend shouldn’t be as profitable as an ephemeral⁠ ⁠… as a lover⁠ ⁠… well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at eleven and say goodbye to next morning. A friend could be quite as generous.”

“I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted twice as much back in return,” said Daisy.

“Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine in the police court?” he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was so anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he could not help making the allusion.

“I suppose you wanted to,” she said.

“As a friend,” he persisted.

“Oh, all right,” she agreed with him lazily. “Have it your own way. I’m too sleepy to argue.”

“Then we are friends?” Michael asked gravely.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A couple of old talk-you-deads joring over a clothesline. Get on with it, Roy⁠—or what’s your name? Michael, eh? That’s right.”

“Good! Now, supposing I ask your advice, will you give it to me?”

“Advice is very cheap,” said Daisy.

“I used to know a girl,” Michael began.

“A straight-cut?”

“Oh, yes. Certainly. Oh, rather. At least in those days she was.”

“I see. And now she’s got a naughty little twinkle in her eye.”

“Look here. Do listen seriously,” Michael begged. “She isn’t a straight-cut any longer.”

“Well, what did I tell you? That’s what I said. She’s gone gay.”

“I want to get her away from this life,” Michael announced, with such solemnity that Daisy was insulted.

“Why, what’s the matter with it? You’re as bad as a German ponce I knew who joined the Salvation Army. Don’t you try taking me home tonight to our loving heavenly father. It gives me the sick.”

“But this girl was brought up differently. She was what is called a ‘lady.’ ”

“More shame for her then,” said Daisy indignantly. “She ought to have known better.”

It was curious this sense of intrusion which Lily’s fall gave to one so deeply plunged. There was in Daisy’s attitude something of the unionist’s toward foreign blackleg labor.

“Well, you see,” Michael pointed out. “As even you have no pity for her, wouldn’t it be right for me to try to get her out of the life altogether?”

“How are you going to do it? If she was walking about with a sunshade all day, before you sprang it on her.⁠ ⁠…”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Michael interrupted. “At least not directly.”

“Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?” she demanded in surprise.

“I feel a certain responsibility,” he explained. “Go on with what you were saying.”

“If she left a nice home,” Daisy continued, “to live gay, she isn’t going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now, is she?”

“But I want to marry her,” said Michael simply.

Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.

“You must be worse than potty over her,” she gasped.

“Why?”

“Why? Why, because it doesn’t pay to marry that sort of girl. She’ll only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you’ll wish you hadn’t been such a grass-eyes.”

A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael sitting in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was right. Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was coeval with all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility, so that he felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal pessimism. Yet in the same instant he was aware of the need for him to do something, even if his action were to carry within itself the potential destruction of more than he was setting out to accomplish.

“When do you see her?” asked Daisy. “And what does she say about being married?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her for nearly five years,” Michael explained rather apologetically. “I’m searching for her now. I’ve got to find her.”

“Strike me, if you aren’t the funniest ⸻ I ever met,” Daisy exclaimed.

She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing. The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter seemed to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of emptiness was due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of the room, whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so homely was the behavior of the people in the pictures that