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

The argument swayed backward and forward for a long time, without reaching a conclusion.

“You can’t have friars nowadays,” said Chator in response to Michael’s last expression of ambition. “Conditions have changed.”

“Conditions had changed when St. Francis of Assisi tried to revive an absolute Christianity,” Michael pointed out. “Conditions had changed when the Incarnation took place. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Judas, and a host of contemporaries must have tried to point that out. Materialists are always peculiarly sensitive to the change of external conditions. Do you believe in Christ?”

“Don’t try to be objectionable, my dear fellow,” said Chator, getting very red.

“Well, if you do,” persisted Michael, “if you accept the Gospels, it is utterly absurd for you as a Christian priest to make ‘change of conditions’ an excuse for having failed to rescue the sinners of your parish.”

“Michael,” said Stewart, intervening on account of Chator’s obviously rising anger. “Why are you living in Leppard Street? What fiery mission are you upon? I believe you’re getting too much wrapped up in private fads and fancies. Why don’t you come and work for us at St. Chad’s?”

“He’s one of those clever people who can always criticize with intense fervor,” said Chator bitterly. He was still very red and ruffled, and Michael felt rather penitent.

“I wish I could work here. Chator, do forgive me for being so offensive. I really have no right to criticize, because my own vice is inability to do anything in company with other people. The very sight of workers in cooperation freezes me into apathy. If I were a priest, I should probably feel like you that the children were the most important. Have neither of you ever heard of anybody whose faith was confirmed by the realization of evil? Usually, it’s the other way about, isn’t it? I’ve met many unbelievers who first began to doubt, because the problem of evil upset their notions of divine efficiency. Chator, you have forgiven me, haven’t you?”

“I ought to have realized that you didn’t mean half you were saying,” said Chator.

Michael smiled. Should he start the argument again by insisting that he had meant even twice as much as he had said? In the end, however, he let Chator believe in his exaggeration, and they parted good friends.

Nigel Stewart came often to see him during the next fortnight, and he was very anxious to find out why Michael was living in Leppard Street. Michael would not tell him, however, but instead he introduced him to Barnes who with money in his pocket was very independent and gave up sign of his boasted ability to circumvent parsons financially. No doubt, however, when he was thrown back on his own resources, he would benefit greatly by this acquaintance. Stewart had a theory that Michael had shut himself in Leppard Street to test the personality of Satan, and he used to insist that Michael performed all kinds of magical experiments in his solitude there. Having himself been a Satanist on several occasions at Oxford, he felt less than Chator would have done the daring of discussing Baudelaire and Huysmans. Deacon though he was, Nigel was still an undergraduate, nor did it seem probable that he would ever cease to be one. He tried to thrill Michael with some of his own diabolic experiences, but Michael was a little contemptuous and told him that his devil was merely a figure of academic naughtiness.

“All that kind of subjective wickedness is nothing at all,” said Michael. “At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed through it at the age of sixteen.”

“You must have been horribly precocious,” said Nigel disapprovingly.

“Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You’ll be telling me soon that you’ve been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite.”

Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an experience, and Michael laughed:

“Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He’s just the person you ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an aesthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?”

“I really think you are growing very offensive,” said Nigel.

“No, I’m not. I’m illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and Maurice’s encounters with religion would match each other. Both would have a very wide, but also a very superficial area.”

November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist at Stella’s wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully planned sallies of curiosity:

“What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine. Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I’ll tell you quite enough when the moment comes for telling.”

“Michael, you’re getting dreadfully obstinate,” Stella declared. “I remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time.”

“It’s not I who am obstinate,” said Michael. “It’s you who are utterly spoiled by the lovelorn Alan.”

Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin’s summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer’s image in this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa.

Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could remember the lines