Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 56

"But you said your hat was going to be lucky," Michael pointed out.

"Yes, I've been properly sucked in over that," Daisy agreed.

"Nothing ever brings me luck," grumbled Dolly resentfully.

As Michael looked at the long retreating chin and down-drawn mouth he was inclined to agree that nothing could invigorate this fatal mournfulness with the prospect of good fortune.

"I reckon I'll go home and have a good lay down," said Daisy. "Are you going to have dinner with me?" she asked, turning to Dolly.

"Dinner?" echoed Dolly. "Nice time to talk to anyone about their dinner, when they've got the sick like I have! Dinner!"

They had reached Piccadilly Circus by now, and Michael wondered if he might not put them into a cab and send them back to Guilford Street. He found it embarra.s.sing when the people slowly turned away from Swan and Edgar's window to stare instead at him and his companions.

Daisy pressed him to come back with them, but he promised he would call upon her very soon. Then he slipped into her hand the change from the second five-pound note into which the law had broken.

"Is this for us?" she asked.

He nodded.

"You are a sport. Mind you come and see us. Come to tea. Doll's going to live with me a bit now, aren't you, Doll?"

"I suppose so," said Doll.

Michael really admired the hospitality which was willing to shelter this lugubrious girl, and as he contemplated her, looking in the sunlight like a moist handkerchief, he had a fleeting sympathy with Hungarian Dave.

When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary appearance by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo was almost to make him incredulous of the night's event, and he could not help paying a visit to the Cafe d'Orange, to verify the alcove in which he had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and he stood for a moment like a person who pa.s.ses a theater which the night before he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the bar, he thought he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes, it was certainly Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder, addressing him by name. Meats turned round with a start.

"Don't you remember me?" asked Michael.

"Of course I do," said Meats nervously. "But for the love of Jerusalem drop calling me by that name. Here, let's go outside."

In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats.

"Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble," said Meats.

"You are a strange chap," said Michael. "When I first met you it was Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now----"

"Look here," said Meats, "give over, will you? I've told you once. If you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now don't forget."

"Come and have a drink, and tell me what you've been doing in the four years since we met," Michael suggested.

"B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?"

Michael a.s.sured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had vanished from his mind.

"Come on, then," said Barnes. "We'll go into the Afrique, upstairs."

Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness which had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had seemed the predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at the round marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled an actor out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was the cheesy complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season too much worn and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with its dismoded exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness; perhaps, thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it had merely been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an exception.

Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a compa.s.sionate amus.e.m.e.nt. How this figure with its grotesque indignity as of a puppet temporarily put out of action testified to his own morbid heightening of common things in the past. How incredible it seemed now that this Barnes had once been able to work upon his soul with influential doctrine.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" Michael asked again.

"Oh, hopping and popping about. I've got the rats at present."

"Where are you living?"

Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. "What do you want to know for?" he asked.

"Mere inquisitiveness," Michael a.s.sured him. "You really needn't treat me like a detective, you know."

"My mistake," said Barnes. "But really, Fane. Let's see, that is your name? Thought it was. I don't often forget a name. No, without sw.a.n.k, Fane, I've been hounded off my legs lately. I'm living in Leppard Street. Pimlico way."

"I'd like to come and see you some time," said Michael.

"Here, straight, what _is_ your game?" Barnes could not conceal his suspicion.

"Inquisitiveness," Michael declared again. "Also I rather want a Sancho Panza."

"Oh, of course, any little thing I can do to oblige," said Barnes very sarcastically.

It took Michael a long time to convince him that no plot was looming, but at last he persuaded him to come to 173 Cheyne Walk, and after that he knew that Barnes could not refuse to show him Leppard Street.

CHAPTER IV

LEPPARD STREET

While they were driving to Cheyne Walk, Michael extracted from Barnes an outline of his adventures since last they had met. The present narrative was probably not less cynical than the account of his life related to Michael on various occasions in the past; but perhaps because his imagination had already to some extent been fed by reality, he could no longer be shocked. He received the most sordid avowals calmly, neither blaming Barnes nor indulging himself with mental goose-flesh. Yet amid all the frankness accorded to him he could not find out why Barnes had changed his name. He was curious about this, because he could not conceive any shamelessness too outrageous for Barnes to reveal. It would be interesting to find out what could really make even him pause; no doubt ultimately, with the contrariness of the underworld, it would turn out to be something that Michael himself would consider trivial in comparison with so much of what Barnes had boasted. Anyway, whether he discovered the secret or not, it would certainly be interesting to study Barnes, since in him good and evil might at any moment display themselves as clearly as a hidden substance to a reagent flung into a seething alembic. It might perhaps be a.s.suming too much to say that there was any good in him; and yet Michael was unwilling to suppose that all his conversions were merely the base drugs of a disordered morality.

Apart from his philosophic value, Barnes might very actually be of service in the machinery of finding Lily.

At 173 Cheyne Walk Barnes looked about him rather bitterly.

"Easy enough to behave yourself in a house like this," he commented.

Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse to be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing in that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the reverse true?

"Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?" Michael asked. "I do wish you could understand it's really so much more difficult. I can't distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly so well as you can."

"Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell you," said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. "In my experience most of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we haven't got. I don't care what it is--a woman or a drink or a new suit of clothes. Money'll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I could be a b.l.o.o.d.y angel."

"Supposing I offered you half as much for three months," suggested Michael. "Do you think you'd find life any easier while it lasted?"

"Well, don't be silly," said Barnes. "Of course I should. If you'd walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody had dropped a threepenny bit, you'd think it was easier. It's not a bit of good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you'd be just the same.

Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man who first said that ought to be walking about h.e.l.l with donkey's ears on his n.o.b. What's it done for me? I ask you. Why, it's made me so that I'd steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid on another."