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

young May’s golden green. Those trees, waving with their youthfulness in the wind, extended as far as could be observed on either side. Three in every garden were planted close to the farthest wall. How beautiful they looked, and how the sparrows hopped from branch to branch. Michael let his eyes rove along the pleasant green line whose slightness and evenness caressed the vision, as velvet might have caressed a hand running lightly over the surface. Suddenly, with a sharp emotion of shame, Michael perceived that the middle tree opposite his own window was different from the rest. It was not the same shape; it carried little blobs such as hang from tablecloths and curtains; it scarcely showed a complete leaf. Here was a subject for speculation indeed; and the more Michael looked at the other trees, the more he grew ashamed for the loiterer. This problem would worry him interminably: he would return to it often and often. But the exquisite pleasure he had taken in the trim and equable row was gone; for as soon as the eye caressed it, there was this intolerably naked tree to affront all regularity.

After the trees, Michael examined the trellis that extended along the top of a stuccoed wall without interruption on either side. This trellis was a curiosity, for if he looked at it very hard, the lozenges of space came out from their frame and moved about in a blur⁠—an odd business presumably inexplicable for evermore like everything else. Beyond the trellis was the railway; and while Michael was looking a signal shot down, a distant roar drew near, and a real train rumbled past which, beheld from Michael’s window, looked like a toy train loaded with dolls, one of whom wore a red tam-o’-shanter. Michael longed to be sitting once again in that moving wonderland and to be looking out of the window, himself wearing just such another red tam-o’-shanter. Beyond the railway was surely a very extraordinary place indeed, with mountains of coal everywhere and black figures roaming about; and beyond this, far far away, was a very low line of houses with a church steeple against an enormous sky.

“Dinnertime! Tut-tut,” said Nurse, suddenly bustling into the room to interrupt Stella’s saga and Michael’s growing dread of being left alone in that wilderness beyond the railway lines.

“Could I be left there?” he asked.

“Left where?”

“There.” He pointed to the coal-yard.

“Don’t point!” said Nurse.

“What is that place?”

“The place where coal comes from.”

“Could I be left there?” he persisted.

“Not unless one of the coalmen came over the wall and carried you off and left you there, which he will do unless you’re a good boy.”

Michael caught his breath.

“Can coalmen climb?” he asked, choking at the thought.

“Climb like kittens,” said Nurse.

A new bogey had been created, black and hairy with yellow cat’s eyes and horrid prehensile arms.

Michael and Stella were now lifted out of the cots and dumped on to the cold oilcloth and marched into the adjacent bathroom, where their faces and hands were sponged with a new sponge that was not only rough in itself, but also had something that scratched buried in one of the pores. During this operation, Nurse blew violent breaths through her tightly closed lips. When it was over, Stella was lifted up into Nurse’s arms; Michael was commanded to walk downstairs in front and not to let go of the banisters; then down they went, down and down and down⁠—past three doors opening into furniture-heaped rooms, past a door with upper panels of coloured glass in a design of red and amber sparrows upon a crude blue vegetation⁠—a beautiful door, Michael thought, as he went by. Down and down and down into the hall which was strewn with bits of straw and shavings and had another glass-panelled door very gaudy. Here the floor was patterned with terra-cotta, yellow, black and slate-blue tiles. Two more doors were passed, and a third door was reached, opening apparently on a box into which light was let through windows of such glass as is seen round the bottom of birdcages. This final staircase was even in the fullest daylight very dim and eerie, and was permeated always with a smell of burnt grease and damp cloths. Halfway down Michael shrunk back against Nurse’s petticoats, for in front of him yawned a terrible cavern exuding chill.

“What’s that?” he gasped.

“Bless the boy, he’ll have me over!” cried Nurse.

“Oh, Nanny, what is it⁠—that hole? Michael doesn’t like that hole.”

“There’s a milksop. Tut-tut! Frightened by a coal-cellar! Get on with you, do.”

Michael, holding tightly to the banisters, achieved the ground and was hustled into the twilight of the morning-room. Stella was fitted into her high chair; the circular tray was brought over from behind and thumped into its place with a click: Michael was lifted up and thumped down into another high chair and pushed close up to the table so that his knees were chafed by the sharp edge and his thighs pinched by a loose strand of cane. Nurse, blowing as usual through closed lips, cut up his meat, and dinner was carried through in an atmosphere of greens and fat and warm, milk-and-water and threats of Gregory-powder, if every bit were not eaten.

Presently the tramping of furniture-men was renewed and the morning-room, was made darker still by the arrival of a second van which pulled up at right angles to the first. In the course of dinner, Cook entered. She was a fat masculine creature who always kept her arms folded beneath a coarse and spotted apron; and after Cook came Annie the housemaid, tall and thin and anæmic. These two watched the children eating, while they gossiped with Nurse.

“Isn’t Mrs. Fane coming at all, then?” enquired Cook.

“For a few minutes⁠—for a few minutes,” said Nurse quickly, and Michael would not have been so very suspicious had he not observed the nodding of her head long after there was any need to nod it.

“Is mother going to stay with us?” he