Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 59

Michael suddenly experienced a sense of affection for Barnes, the affection of the missionary for the prospective convert. He forgave him his cynical acceptance of the five pounds a week, and he made up his mind not to refer to Lily again until Barnes should be able to esteem at its true value the step he proposed to take.

Michael looked round at the new rooms he had succeeded in creating out of the ground floor of 1 Leppard Street. These novel surroundings would surely be strong enough to make the first impression upon Barnes. He could not fail to be influenced by this whiteness and cleanliness, so much more white and clean where everything else was dingy and vile. It was all so spare and simple that it surely must produce an effect.

Barnes would see him living every day in perfect contentment with a few books and a few pictures. He must admire those cherry-red curtains and those green shelves. He must respect the cloistral air Michael had managed to import even into this warren of queer inhabitants whom as yet he had scarcely seen. It was romantic to come like this into a small secluded world which did not know him; to bring like this a fresh atmosphere into a melancholy street of human beings who lived perpetually in a social twilight. Michael's missionary affection began to extend beyond Barnes and to embrace all the people in this house. He felt a great fondness for them, a great desire to identify himself with their aspirations, so that they would be glad to think he was living in their midst. He began to feel very poignantly that his own existence hitherto had been disgracefully unprofitable both to himself and everybody else. He was grateful that destiny had brought him here to fulfill what was plainly a purpose. But what did fate intend should be his effect upon these people? To what was he to lead them? Michael had an impulse to kneel down and pray for knowledge. He wished that Barnes were not in this white room. Otherwise he would surely have knelt down, and in the peace of the afternoon sunlight he might have resigned himself to a condition of spirit he had coveted in vain for a very long time.

Just then there was a tap at the door, and a middle-aged man with blinking watery eyes and a green plush smoking-cap peeped round the corner.

"Come in," Michael cheerfully invited him.

The stranger entered in a slipshod hesitant manner. He looked as if all his clothes were on the verge of coming off, so much like a frayed accordion did his trousers rest upon the carpet slippers; so wide a s.p.a.ce of shirt was visible between the top of the trousers and the bottom of the waistcoat; so utterly amorphous was his gray alpaca coat.

"What I really came down for was a match," the stranger explained.

Michael offered him a box, and with fumbling hands he stored it away in one of his pockets.

"You don't go in for puzzles, I suppose?" he asked tentatively. "But any time I can help. I'm the Solutionist, you know. Don't let me keep you.

Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes. I'm worrying out this week's lot in The Golden Penny very slowly. I've really had a sort of a headache the last few days--a very nasty headache. Do you know anything about cricketers?"

he asked, turning to Michael. "Famous cricketers, of course, that is?

For instance, I cannot think what this one can be."

He produced after much uncertainty a torn and dirty sheet of some penny weekly.

"I've got all the others," he said to Michael. "But one picture will often stump you like this. No joke intended." He smiled feebly and pointed to a woman holding in one hand the letter S, in the other the letter T.

"What about Hirst?" Michael asked.

"Hirst," repeated the Solutionist. "Her S T. That's it. That's it." In his excitement he began to dribble. "I'm very much obliged to you, sir.

Her S. T. Yes, that's it."

He began to shuffle toward the door.

"Anything you want solved at any time," he said to Michael. "I'm only just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be most delighted to solve anything--anything!"

He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his problems would puzzle the Solutionist.

"What's his name?" he inquired of Barnes.

"Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a living at it."

"At what?" Michael asked.

"Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his advertis.e.m.e.nt in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be a conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me more like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You should see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular dust-hole, that's what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve anything--anything!

He hasn't solved how to earn more than ten bob a week, year in year out.

Silly----! That's what he is, barmy."

Michael's hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers of 1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to observe them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the ma.s.s. No doubt Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained by Michael's subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael how Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers ultimately escaped owing her money.

It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the landlady's strict regulation no longer to take them in could be relaxed.

All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted by children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer's shop of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to the bas.e.m.e.nt of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear below at twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above the walls of the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered what sort of a desolate appearance these five houses must present for voyagers to and from Victoria. They must surely stand up very forbidding in abandonment to those who were traveling back to their cherished dolls-houses in Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not actually see the trains, but always he could hear their shrieking and their clangor, and he looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in her high serene four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall. Nothing except the trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a perpetual silence.

Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing with her husband, the noise of her rage down in the bas.e.m.e.nt among the quilts and coverlets never penetrated beyond the door at the head of the inclosing staircase, save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So silent was the house that had it not been for the variety of the smells, Michael might easily have supposed that it really was empty and that life here was indeed an illusion. The smells, however, of onions or hot blankets or machine-oil or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed emphatically that a community shared these ascending mustard-colored walls, that human beings pa.s.sed along the stale landings to frowst behind those finger-stained doors of salmon-pink. Sometimes, too, Michael emerging into the pa.s.sage from his room would hear from dingy alt.i.tudes descend the noise of a door hurriedly slammed; and sometimes he would see go down the ulcerous steps in front of the house depressing women in black, or unshaven men with the debtor's wary and furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be permanent were Barnes and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength of Michael's allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every night. He used to a.s.sure Michael, when toward two o'clock of the next afternoon he extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with the greatest pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The Solutionist occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of newspaper, and often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple of Belgian hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the nettles of the back-yard.

After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any rate into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish, would be welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger of being drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting surface. He felt inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer, and to hear from her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and Hungarian Dave. He found her card with the Guilford Street address and went over to Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady looked surprised when he inquired for Miss Palmer.

"Oh, she's been gone this fortnight," the woman informed him. Michael asked where she was living now.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said the landlady, and as she was already slowly and very unpleasantly closing the door, Michael came away a little disconsolate. These abrupt dematerializations of the underworld were really very difficult to grapple with. It gave him a sense of the futility of his search for Lily (though lately he had prosecuted it somewhat lazily) when girls, who a month ago offered what was presumably a permanent address, could have vanished completely a fortnight later.

Perhaps Daisy would be at the Orange. He would take Barnes with him this evening and ask his opinion of her and Dolly and Hungarian Dave.

The beerhall downstairs looked exactly the same as when he had visited it a month ago. Michael could sympathize with the affection such places roused in the hearts of their frequenters. There was a great deal to be said for an inst.i.tution that could present, day in, day out, a steady aspect to a society whose life was spent in such extremes of elation and despair, of prosperity and wretchedness, and whose actual lodging was liable to be changed at any moment for better or worse.

"Not a bad place, is it?" said Barnes, looking round in critical approval at the prost.i.tutes and bullies h.o.a.rded round the tables puddly with the overflow of mineral waters and froth of beer.

"You really like it?" Michael asked.

"Oh, it's cheerful," said Barnes. "And that's something nowadays."

Michael perceived Daisy before they were halfway across the room. He greeted her with particular friendliness as an individual among these hard-eyed constellations.

"Hulloa!" she cried. "Wherever have you been all this time?"

"I called at Guilford Street, but you were gone."

"Oh, yes. I left there. I couldn't stand the woman there any longer. Sit down. Who's your friend?"

Michael brought Barnes into the conversation, and suggested moving into one of the alcoves where it was easier to talk.

"No, come on, sit down here. Fritz won't like it, if we move."

Michael looked round for the protector, and she laughed.

"You silly thing! Fritz is the waiter."

Michael presently grew accustomed to being jogged in the back by everyone who pa.s.sed, and so powerful was the personality of the Orange that very soon he, like the rest of the crowd, was able to discuss private affairs without paying any heed to the solitary smoking listeners around.

"Where's Dolly?" he asked.

"Oh, I had to get rid of her very sharp," said Daisy. "She served me a very nasty trick after I'd been so good to her. Besides, I've taken up with a fellow. Bert Saunders. He does the boxing for Crime Ill.u.s.trated."

"You told me I was like him," Michael reminded her.

"That's right. I remember now. I'm living down off Judd Street in a flat. Why don't you come round and see me there?"

"I will," Michael promised.

"Wasn't Bert Saunders the fellow who was keeping Kitty Metcalfe?" asked Barnes.

"That's right. Only he gave her the push after she hit Maudie Clive over the head with a port-wine gla.s.s in the Half Moon upstairs."

"I knew Kitty," said Barnes, shaking his head to imply that acquaintance with Kitty had involved a wider experience than fell to most men.

"What's happened to her?"