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

he connected it in his mind with a projecting roof of cracked slates which he had often noticed. The action of the rain on the plaster had made it look like a map of the moon in relief. The furniture consisted of a bed, a washstand and a light blue chest. There was also a narrow shelf on which was a lamp with a reflector of corrugated tin, a bald powder-puff, and two boot-buttons. The woman lit the lamp, and as she stooped to look at the jagged flame, Michael saw that her hair was as iridescent as oil on a canal with what remained of henna and peroxide.

“That’s more cheerful. Though I must say it’s a pity they haven’t put the gas in here. Oh, don’t sit on that old box. It makes you look such a stranger.”

Michael said he had a great fondness for sitting on something that was hard; but he thought how absurd he must appear sitting like this on a pale blue chest next to a washstand.

“Are you looking at my cat?” she asked.

“What cat?”

“He’s under the bed, I’ll be bound.”

She called, and a small black cat came out.

“Isn’t he lovely? But, fancy, he’s afraid of me. He always gets under the bed like that.”

Michael felt he ought to make up to the cat what his cordiality had lacked toward the mistress, and he paid so much attention to it that finally the animal lost all fear and jumped on his knee.

“Well, there!” the woman exclaimed. “Did you ever? I’ve never seen him do that before. He knows you’re a gentleman. Oh, yes, they know. His mother ran away. But she comes to see me sometimes and always looks very well, so she’s got a good home. But he isn’t stinted. Oh, no. He gets his milk every day. What I say is, if you’re going to have animals, look after them.”

Michael nodded agreement.

“Because to my mind,” she went on, “a great many animals are better than human beings.”

“Oh, yes, I think they probably are,” said Michael.

“Poor Peter!” she crooned. “I wouldn’t starve you, would I?”

The cat left Michael and went and sat beside her on the bed.

“Why do you call it Peter?” he asked. The name savored rather of the deliberate novelist.

“After my boy.”

“Your boy?” he echoed.

“Oh, he’s a fine boy, and a good boy.” The mention of her son stiffened the woman into a fleeting dignity.

“I suppose he’s about twelve?” Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.

“Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I’m a little older than what I look.” As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the converse was more probable.

“He’s not living with you?”

“Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn’t have him here for anything⁠—not ever. Oh, no, he’s at school with the Jesuits. He’s to go in the Civil Service. I lived with his father for many years⁠—in fact, from the time I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He’s been dead about six years now.”

“I suppose he left money to provide for the boy.”

“Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren’t what they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I’m a Catholic myself.”

As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility of spirit.

“I suppose you don’t care for this life?” he asked after a short silence.

“Well, no, I do not. It’s not at all what I should call a refined way of living, and often it’s really very unpleasant.”

Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her health.

“For one thing,” she continued, “the police are very rough with one, and if anyone doesn’t behave just as they’d like for them to behave, they make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn’t right, is it? It’s really not as it should be, I don’t think.”

Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.

“It’s damnable!” he growled. “And I suppose you have to put up with a good deal from some of the men?”

“Undoubtedly,” she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer’s shop in a provincial town. “Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I’m at anyone’s mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might not. Really, if it wasn’t for the woman who keeps the house being always so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday⁠—or was it Thursday?⁠—time goes by so fast, it seems hardly worth while to count the days, does it? One day last week I did what I’ve never done before: I accepted six shillings. Well, it was late and what with one thing and another I wanted the money. Will you believe it, I very carefully, as I thought, hid it safe away in my bag, and this man⁠—a very rough sort of a man he was, I’m not surprised poor Peter runs away from them⁠—I heard him walking about the room when I woke up in the middle of the night. And will you believe it, he’d gone to my bag and taken out his six shillings, as well as fourpence-halfpenny of my own which was all I had at the moment. He was really out of the house and gone in a flash, as they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a regular trade of it with women like myself. Well now, you can’t say a man like that is any better than my cat. I was very angry