Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 57

"Tell me about Leppard Street," said Michael, laughing. "What's it like?"

"Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That's what it looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who's lost all his teeth, and you've got what it feels like to be living in it."

"Supposing I said I'd like to try?" asked Michael. "What would you think?"

"Think? I shouldn't think two seconds. I should know you were having a game. What good's Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing up and down all day on cushions?"

"Experience," said Michael.

"Oh, rats! Nothing's experience that you haven't had to do."

"Well, I'll give you five pounds a week," Michael offered, "if you'll keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn't want anything very dreadful, of course," he added.

It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest, so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason for wishing to go to Leppard Street.

"You see, I want to find a girl," he explained.

"Well, if you go and live in Leppard Street you'll lose the best girl you've got straight off. That's all there is to it."

"You don't understand. This girl I used to know has gone wrong, and I want to find her and marry her."

It seemed to Michael that Barnes' manner changed in some scarcely definable way when he made this announcement. He pocketed the five pounds and invited Michael to come to Leppard Street whenever he liked.

He was evidently no longer suspicious of his sincerity, and a perky, an almost cunning cordiality had replaced the disheartened cynicism of his former att.i.tude. It encouraged Michael to see how obviously his resolve had impressed Barnes. He accepted it as an augury of good hap.

Involuntarily he waited for his praise; and when Barnes made no allusion to the merit of his action, he ascribed his silence to emotion. This was proving really a most delightful example of the truth of his theory. And it was clever of Barnes--it was more than clever, it was truly imaginative of him--to realize without another question the need to leave for a while Cheyne Walk.

"But is there a vacant room?" Michael asked in sudden dread of disappointment.

"Look here, you'd better see the place before you decide on leaving here," Barnes advised. "It isn't a cross between Buckingham Palace and the Carlton, you know."

"I suppose it's the name that attracts me," said Michael. "It sounds ferocious."

"I don't know about the name, but old Ma Cleghorne who keeps the house is ferocious enough. Never mind." He jingled the five sovereigns.

"I'll go up and pack," said Michael. "By the way, I haven't told you yet that I was run in last night."

"In quod you mean?" asked Barnes. "Whatever for?"

"Drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square."

"These coppers are the limit," said Barnes emphatically. "The absolute limit. Really. They'll pinch the Archbishop of Canterbury for looking into Stagg and Mantle's window before we know where we are."

Michael left Barnes in the drawing-room, and as he turned in the doorway to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the macaw on its perch were about equally exotic.

They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along the river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the adventurousness of London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the high spring-tide without exulting in the movement of the stream that was washing out with its flood all the listlessness of the hot August afternoon. When Chelsea Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the banks of a great river sweeping through a great city began to be more evident. The whole character of the Embankment changed at every hundred yards. First there was that somber ca.n.a.l which, flowing under the road straight from the Thames, reappeared between a canon of gloomy houses and vanished again underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what was apparently a large private house which had been gutted of the tokens of humanity and filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and pistons, all moving perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of noise. Under Grosvenor Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering forward and a train crashing overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and girders dripping with the excrement of railway-engines, they came into Grosvenor Road. They pa.s.sed the first habitations of Pimlico, two or three terraces and isolated houses all different in character. There could scarcely be another road in London so varied as this. Maurice had been wise to have his studio in Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an epitome of London.

The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the horse's hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose wives kept a.r.s.enic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.

"I wouldn't mind having lodgings here," said Barnes. He had caught sight of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast, occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable decadency.

Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken gla.s.s: these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however, that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the draff of the neighborhood's rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child's boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.

"Here we are," said Barnes. "Here's Leppard Street that you've been so anxious to see."

"It looks rather exciting," Michael commented.

"Oh, it's the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don't think.

Exciting?" Barnes repeated. "You know, Fane, there's something wrong with you. If you think this is exciting, you'd go raving mad when I showed you some of the places where I've lived. Well, here we are, anyhow. Number One--the corner house."

They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a parched tongue: and the iron railings of a bas.e.m.e.nt strewn with potato parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.

Barnes opened the door.

"We'll take your bag up to my room first, and then we'll go downstairs and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don't change your mind when you've seen the inside."

Michael had no time to notice Barnes' room very much. But vaguely he saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits.

After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"She'll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her," he said to Michael. "You see, just lately I've been very anxious to avoid meeting her."

He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.

They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by: here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury, so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated everything else.

"That's Cleghorne," said Barnes. "I reckon he'd sleep Rip van Winkle barmy."

"What's he do?" whispered Michael, as they turned down the pa.s.sage.

"He snores for a living, he does," said Barnes.

They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and c.h.i.n.ked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.

"I've brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne," said Barnes.

"Have you brought your five weeks' rent owing?" she asked sourly.

He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.

"Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to come up and show you?"

She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along her sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.

"Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne ..." Michael began.

"Mis-ter Cleghorne!" she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked continuously.

"Oh, I don't want to disturb him," said Michael.

"Disturb him!" she sneered. "Why, half Bedlam could drive through his brains in a omnibus before he'd move a little finger to trouble hisself.

Yes," she shouted, "Yes!" Her voice mingling with the creak of the roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it grew more strident. "Why, the blessed house might burn before he'd even put on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his wife can work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if anyone could disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the larder, he'd only grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people 'ud be very pleased to be asthmatic, if they could lie snorting on a bed from morning to night."