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

her and kissed him roughly. In another second he was in the lamplight of Little Quondam Street. As in a nightmare it converged before him: a lean dog was routing in some garbage: a drunken man, reeling along the pavement opposite, abused him in queer disjointed obscenities without significance.

Barnes was sitting in Michael’s room, when he got back to Leppard Street.

“What ho,” he said sleepily. “You’ve been enjoying yourself with that piece, then?”

Michael regarded him angrily.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, chuck it, Fane. You needn’t look so solemn; she’s not a bad bit of goods, either. I’ve heard of her before.”

Michael turned away from him. He knew it would be useless to try to convince Barnes that there was nothing between him and Daisy. Moreover, if he told the true tale of the evening, he would only make himself out utterly absurd. It was a pity that an evening which had promised such a reward for his theories should now be tainted. But when Barnes had slouched upstairs to bed, Michael realized how little his insinuations had mattered. The adventure had been primarily a comic experience; it had displayed him once more grotesquely reflected in the underworld’s distorting mirror.

On the following night Michael went to the Café d’Orange, and heard Daisy’s account of the wonderful way in which she had fooled Bert Saunders.

“But really, you know,” she said. “It did give me a turn. Fancy him coming back all of a sudden like that, and bringing in that fighting fellow. What a terrible thing, if Bert had found out you was in there and put him up to bashing your face. Oh, but Bert’s all right with his pussycat.”

“But why didn’t you let me stay where I was?” Michael asked. “And introduce me quite calmly. He couldn’t have said anything.”

“Couldn’t he?” Daisy cried. “I reckon he could then. I reckon he could have said a lot. If he hadn’t, I’d have given him the chuck right away. I don’t want no fellow hanging around me that hasn’t got the pluck to go for anyone he finds messing about with his girl. Couldn’t he have said anything?”

Michael was again face to face with topsyturvydom. It really was time to meditate on the absurdity of trying to control these people of the underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from the standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes, Daisy⁠—they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer. They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a great constructive force?

Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against the light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante’s obscure wood of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events. Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance; at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that through her salvation he would save himself.

Michael did not reenter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex himself over the failure to discover Lily’s whereabauts. Having placed himself at the nod of destiny, he was content to believe that if he never found her he must be content to look elsewhere for the expression of himself. September became October. It would be six years this month since first they met, and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be captured anew?

One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated season whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because no fall of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled walls from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk was perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he knew. Yes, he could. It was Chator’s, the dear, the pious and the bubbling Chator’s; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the corridors of St. James’. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized and shaken his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however, he was twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a fountain of questions about his progress during these years with a great deal of information about his