Sinister Street

They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a great constructive force?

Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to stand as a dark antechamber with ma.s.sive curtains drawn against the light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the c.h.i.n.ks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante's obscure wood of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events.

Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance; at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that through her salvation he would save himself.

Michael did not reenter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex himself over the failure to discover Lily's whereabauts. Having placed himself at the nod of destiny, he was content to believe that if he never found her he must be content to look elsewhere for the expression of himself. September became October. It would be six years this month since first they met, and she was twenty-two now. Could seventeen be captured anew?

One afternoon from his window Michael was pondering the etiolated season whose ghostliness was more apparent in Leppard Street, because no fall of leaves marked material decline. Hurrying along the brindled walls from the direction of Greenarbor Court was a parson whose walk was perfectly familiar, though he could not affix it to any person he knew.

Yes, he could. It was Chator's, the dear, the pious and the bubbling Chator's; and how absurdly the same as it used to be along the corridors of St. James'. Michael rushed out to meet him, and had seized and shaken his hand before Chator recognized him. When he did, however, he was twice as much excited as Michael, and spluttered forth a fountain of questions about his progress during these years with a great deal of information about his own. He came in eagerly at Michael's invitation, and so much had he still to ask and tell that it was a long time before he wanted to know what had brought Michael to Leppard Street.

"How extraordinary to find you here, my dear fellow! This isn't my district, you know. But the Senior Curate is ill. Greenarbor Court! I say, what a dreadful slum!" Chator looked very intensely at Michael, as if he expected he would offer to raze it to the ground immediately. "I never realized we had anything quite so bad in the parish. But what really is extraordinary about running across you like this is that a man who's just come to us from Ely was talking about you only yesterday. My goodness, how..."

"It's no larger than a grain of sand," Michael interrupted quickly.

"What is?" asked Chator, with his familiar expression of perplexity at Michael.

"You were going to comment on the size of the world, weren't you?"

"I suppose you'll rag me just as much as ever, you old brute." Chator was beaming with delight at the prospect. "But seriously, this man Stewart--Nigel Stewart. I think he was at Trinity, Oxford. You do know him?"

"Nigel isn't here, too?" Michael exclaimed.

"He's our deacon."

"Oh, how priceless you'll both be in the pulpit," said Michael. "And to-morrow's Sunday. Which of you will be preaching at Ma.s.s?"

"My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Ma.s.s. I shall be preaching at Evening Prayer. Why don't you come to supper in the Clergy House afterward?"

"How do you like your Vicar?"

"Oh, very sound, very sound," said Chator, shaking his head.

"Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?" asked Michael, twinkling.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He's very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he's not. Not a bit.

We had a procession this

And of course we've got the children."

They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.

"You will come on Sunday?"

"Of course. But what's the name of your church?"

"My dear fellow, that shows you haven't heard your parochial Ma.s.s," said Chator, with mock seriousness. "St. Chad's is our church."

"It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron," said Michael.

"I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield."

Michael laughed loudly.

"My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven't changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad's--Sunday."

From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.

Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference to Michael's wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior of St. Chad's with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any other material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing deliberately beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat thawing in a stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in London streets, and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves. The Stations of the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians was familiar music.

As the Office proceeded, Michael glanced from time to time toward his companion. At first Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom, but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous wors.h.i.+p, still less by the craving of his soul for G.o.d.

Chator's discourse was a simple one delivered with all the spluttering simplicity he could bring to it. Michael was not sure of the effect upon the congregation, but himself found it moving in a gently pathetic way.

The sermon had the nave obviousness and the sweet seriousness of a child telling a long tale of imaginary adventure. It was easy to see that Chator had never known from the moment of his Ordination, or indeed from the moment he began to suppose he was thinking for himself, a single doubt of the absolute truth of his religion, still less of its expediency. Michael wondered again what effect the sermon was having upon the congregation, which was sitting all round him woodenly in a sort of browse. Did one sentence reach it, or was the whole business of the sermon merely an excuse to sit here basking in the stuffiness of the homely church? Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were in his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with its tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael's opinion of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his eloquence: these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse one so deep in the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that a positive sanct.i.ty abode in this church? He would be glad to believe it did; he would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of truth was posited among these perishable streets.

The sermon was over, and as the congregation rose to sing the hymn, Michael was aware, he could not have said how, that these people pouring forth this sacred jingle were all very weary. They had come here to rest from the fatigue of dullness, and in a moment now the chill vapors of the autumn night would wreathe themselves round their journey home.

Sunday was a day of pause when the people of the city had leisure to sigh out their weariness: it was no shutting of theaters or shops that made it sad. This congregation was composed of weaklings fit for neither good nor evil, and every Sunday night they were gathered together for a little while in the smell of warm wax and incense. Now already they were trooping out into the frore evening; their footsteps would shuffle for a s.p.a.ce over the dark pavements; a few would have pickled cabbage and cheese for supper, a few would not; such was life in this limbo between h.e.l.l and Heaven. Barnes, however, was not to be judged with the bulk of the congregation: another reason must be found for the influence of Evening Prayer or of Chator's words upon him.

"Did you like the sermon?" Michael asked in the porch.

"I didn't listen to a word of it," said Barnes emphatically.

"Oh, really? I thought you were interested. You seemed interested," said Michael.

"I was thinking what a mug I'd been not to back The Clown for the Cesarewitch. I had the tip. You know, Fane, I'll tell you what it is.

I'm not used to money, and that's a fact. I don't know how to spend it.

I'm afraid of it. So bang it all goes on drinks."

"I thought you enjoyed the service," said Michael.

"Oh, I'm used to services. You know. On and off I've done a lot of churchifying, I have. It would take something more than that fellow preaching to curdle me up. I've gone through it. Religion, love, and measles; they're all about the same. I don't reckon anybody gets them more than once properly."

Michael told Barnes he was going on to supper at the Clergy House, and though he had intended to invite him to come as well, he was so much irritated by his unconscious deception that he let him go off, and went back into the empty church to wait for Chator and Nigel Stewart. What puzzled Michael most about Barnes was how himself had ever managed to be impressed by his unusual wickedness. As he beheld him nowadays, a mean and common little squirt of exceptional beastliness really, he was amazed to think that once he had endowed him with almost diabolical powers. He remembered to this day the gleam in Brother Aloysius' blue eyes when he was gathering the blackberries by that hazel-coppice.

Perhaps it had been the monkish habit, which by contrast with his expression had made him seem almost supernaturally evil; and yet when he met him again at Earl's Court he had been kindled by those blue eyes.

Henry Meats had been very much like Henry Barnes; but where was now that lambent flame in the eyes? He had looked at them many times lately, but they had always been cold and unintelligent as a doll's.

"I really must have been mad when I was young," Michael said to himself.

"And yet other people have preserved the influence they used to have over me. Other people haven't changed. Why should he? I wonder whether it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?"

Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes' lapse into unimportance, and together they pa.s.sed through the sacristy into the Clergy House.

Nigel Stewart's room, which they visited in the minutes before supper, had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.

The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to a brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going to sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar and two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the same sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met that walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or treasurer of club accounts or vicar's churchwarden, is always to be found attached to the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened, and found he had a deep voice and was unable to get nearer to "th" than "v."

"We're raver finking," he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate, "of starting Benediction, vis year."

"That will be wonderful," said Michael politely.

"Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver."

The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart, and Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar was left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.