Sinister Street

"Well, it is," said Michael. "I think I used to like it, but nowadays everything gets fearfully stale almost at once."

"Already your life has been lived?" queried Mr. Wilmot very anxiously.

"Well, not exactly," Michael replied, with a quick glance towards his host to make sure he was not joking. "I expect that when I leave school I shall get interested again. Only just lately I've given up everything.

First I was keen on Footer, and then I got keen on Ragging, and then I got keen on Work even (this was confessed apologetically), and just lately I've been keen on the Church--only now I find that's pretty stale."

"The Church!" echoed Mr. Wilmot. "How wonderful! The dim Gothic glooms, the sombre hues of stained gla.s.s, the incense-wreathed acolytes, the muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah, elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!"

"Then I got keen on Swinburne," said Michael.

"You advance along the well-worn path of the Interior and Elect," said Mr. Wilmot.

"I'm still keen on Swinburne, but he makes me feel hopeless. Sad and hopeless," said Michael.

"Under the weight of sin?" asked Mr. Wilmot.

"Not exactly--because he seems to have done everything and----"

"You'd like to?"

"Yes, I would," said Michael. "Only one can't live like a Roman Emperor at a public school. What I hate is the way everybody thinks you ought to be interested in things that aren't really interesting at all. What people can't understand about me is that I _could_ be keener than anybody about things schoolmasters and that kind don't think right or at any rate important. I don't mean to say I want to be dissipated, but----"

"Dissipated?" echoed Mr. Wilmot, raising his eyebrows.

"Well, you know what I mean," blushed Michael.

"Dissipation is a condition of extreme old age. I might be dissipated, not you," said Mr. Wilmot. "Why not say wanton? How much more beautiful, how much more intense a word."

"But wanton sounds so beastly affected," said Michael. "As if it was taken out of the Bible. And you aren't so very old. Not more than thirty."

"I think what you're trying to say is that, under your present mode of life, you find self-expression impossible. Let me diagnose your symptoms."

Michael leaned forward eagerly at this proposal. Nothing was so entertaining to his egoism just now as diagnosis. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot seemed inclined to take him more seriously than Mr. Viner, or, indeed, any of his spiritual directors so far. Mr. Wilmot prepared himself for the lecture by lighting a very long cigarette wrapped in brittle fawn-coloured paper, whose spirals of smoke Michael followed upward to their ultimate evanescence, as if indeed they typified with their tenuous plumes and convolutions the intricate discourse that begot them.

"In a sense, my dear boy, your charm has waned--the faerie charm, that is, which wraps in heedless silver armour the perfect boyhood of man.

You are at present a queer sort of mythical animal whom we for want of a better term call 'adolescent.' Intercourse with anything but your own self shocks both you and the world with a sense of extravagance, as if a centaur pursued a nymph or fought with a hero. The soul--or what we call the soul--is struggling in the bondage of your unformed body. Lately you had no soul, you were ethereal and cold, yet withal in some remote way pa.s.sionate, like your own boy's voice. Now the silly sun is melting the snow, and what was a little while since crystalline clear virginity is beginning to trickle down towards a headlong course, carrying with it the soiled acc.u.mulation of the years to float insignificantly into the wide river of manhood. But I am really being almost intolerably allegorical--or is it metaphorical?"

"Still, I think I understand what you mean," Michael said encouragingly.

"Thrown back upon your own resources, it is not surprizing that you attempt to allay your own sense of your own incongruity by seeking for its a.n.a.logy in the decorative excitements of religion or poetry. Love would supply the solution, but you are still too immature for love. And if you do fall in love, you will sigh for some ample and unattainable matron rather than the slim, shy girl that would better become your pastoral graces. At present you lack all sense of proportion. You are only aware of your awkwardness. Your corners have not yet been, as they say, knocked off. You are still somewhat proud of their Gothic angularity. You feel at home in the tropic dawns of Swinburne's poetry, in the ceremonious exaggerations of Ma.s.s, because neither of these conditions of thought and behaviour allow you to become depressed over your oddity, to see yourself crawling with bedraggled wings from the coc.o.o.n of mechanical education. The licentious ingenuity of Martial, Petronius and Apuleius with their nightmare comedies and obscene phantasmagoria, Lucian, that _boulevardier_ of Olympic glades, all these could allow you to feel yourself more at home than does Virgil with his peaceful hexameters or the cold relentless narrations of Thucydides."

"Yes, that's all very well," objected Michael. "But other chaps seem to

"Already spurning the gifts of Apollo, contemptuous of Artemis, ignorant of Bacchus and Aphrodite, you are bent low before Pallas Athene. Foolish child, do not pray for wisdom in this overwise thin-faced time of ours.

Rather demand of the G.o.ds folly, and drive ever furiously your temperament like a chariot before you."

"I met an odd sort of chap the other day," Michael said thoughtfully. "A monk he was, as a matter of fact--who told me a skit of things--you know--about a bad life. It's funny, though I hate ugly things and common things, he gave me a feeling that I'd like to go right away from everything and live in one of those horrible streets that you pa.s.s in an omnibus when the main road is up. Perhaps you don't understand what I mean?"

Mr. Wilmot's eyes glittered through the haze of smoke.

"Why shouldn't I understand? Squalor is the Parthenope of the true Romantic. You'll find it in all the poets you love best--if not in their poetry, certainly in their lives. Even romantic critics are not without temptation. One day you shall read of Hazlitt and Sainte-Beuve. And now, dear boy, here is my library which holds as many secrets as the Spintrian books of Elephantis, long ago lost and purified by the sea. I am what the wise world would call about to corrupt your mind, and yet I believe that for one who like you must some day make trial of the uttermost corruption, I am prescribing more wisely than Chiron, that pig-headed or rather horse-bodied old prototype of all schoolmasters, who sent his hero pupils one after another into the world, proof against nothing but a few spear-thrusts. I offer you better than fencing-bouts and wrestling-matches. I offer you a good library. Read every day and all night, and when you are a man full grown, you will smile at the excesses of your contemporaries, at their divorces and disgraces. You will stand aloof like a second Aurelius, coining austere aphorisms and mocking the weakness of your unlearned fellows. Why are priests generally so inept in the confessional? Because they learn their knowledge of life from, a frowsy volume of Moral Theology that in the most utterly barbarous Latin emits an abstract of humanity's immeasurable vice. In the same way most young men encounter wickedness in some sudden shock of depravity from which they retire blus.h.i.+ng and mumbling, 'Who'd have thought it!' ' Who'd have thought it!' they cry, and are immediately empanelled on a jury.

"Not so you, O more subtle youth, with the large deep eyes and secret sidelong smile.

"There on my shelves are all the ages. I have spoken to you of Petronius, of Lucian and Apuleius. There is Suetonius, with his incredibly improper tales that show how beastliness takes root and flowers from the deposited muck of a gossip's mind. There is Tacitus, ever willing to sacrifice decency to ant.i.thesis, and Ausonius, whose ribald verses are like monkish recreation; yet he had withal a pretty currency of honest silver Latin, Christian though he was. You must read your Latin authors well, for, since you must be decadent, it is better to decay from a good source. And neglect not the Middle Ages. You will glide most easily into them from the witches and robbers of Apuleius.

You will read Boccaccio, whose tales are intaglios carved with exquisitely licentious and Lilliputian scenes. Neither forget Villon, whose light ladies seem ever to move elusively in close-cut gowns of cloth-of-gold and incredibly tall steeple-hats. But even with Villon the world becomes complicated, and you will soon reach the temperamental entanglements of the nineteenth century, for you may avoid the coa.r.s.e, the beery and besotted obviousness of the Georgian age.

"But I like the eighteenth century almost best of all," protested Michael.

"Then cure yourself of that most lamentable and most demode taste, or I shall presently believe that you read a page or two of Boswell's Life of Johnson every morning, while the water is running into your bath. You can never be a true decadent, treading delicately over the garnered perfection of the world's art, if you really admire and enjoy the eighteenth century."

Michael, however, looked very doubtful over his demanded apostasy.

"But, never mind," Mr. Wilmot went on. "When you have read Barbey d'Aurevilly and Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Catulle Mendes and Verhaeren, when the Parna.s.sians and Symbolists have illuminated you, and you become an Interior person, when Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rops have printed their fierce debauchery upon your imagination, then you will be glad you have forsaken the eighteenth century. How crude is the actual number eighteen, how far from the pa.s.sionate mystery of seventeen or the tired wisdom of nineteen! O wonderful nineteenth century, in whose grey humid dusk you and I are lucky enough to live!"

"But what about the twentieth century?" asked Michael.

Mr. Wilmot started.

"Listen, and I will tell you my intention. Two more years have yet to run before that garish and hideous date, prophetic of all that is bright and new and abominably raw. But I shall have fled, how I know not; haply mandragora will lure my weary mind to rest. I think I should like to die as La Gioconda was painted, listening to flute-players in a curtained alcove; or you, Michael, shall read to me some diabolic and funereal song of Baudelaire, so that I may fearfully pa.s.s away."

Michael, sitting in the dim room of peac.o.c.k-blue made tremendously nocturnal by the heavy smoke of all the cigarettes, did not much care for the turn the conversation of Mr. Wilmot had taken. It had been interesting enough, while the discussion applied directly to himself; but all this vague effusion of learning meant very little to him. At the same time, there was an undeniable eccentricity in a member of the Upper Fifth sitting thus in fantastic communion with a figure completely outside the imagination of Mr. Cray or any of his inky groundlings.

Michael began to feel a contemptuous pity for his fellows now buried in bedclothes, hot and heavy with Ciceronian sentences and pious preparation. He began to believe that if he wished to keep pace with this new friends.h.i.+p, he must acquire something of Mr. Wilmot's heightened air. And however mad he might seem, there stood the books, and there stood the cigarettes for Michael's pleasure. It was all very exciting, and it would not have been possible to say that before he met Wilmot.

The friends.h.i.+p progressed through the rest of the autumn-term, and Michael drifted farther away from the normal life of the school than even his incursion into Catholicism had taken him. That phase of his development had penetrated deeper than any other, and from time to time Michael knew bitter repentances and made grim resolutions. From time to time letters would arrive from Dom Cuthbert asking him down to Clere Abbey; Mr. Viner, too, would question him narrowly about his new set of friends, and Michael's replies never seemed perfectly satisfactory to the shrewd priest.

It was by his costume more than by anything else that Michael expressed at first his sense of emanc.i.p.ation. He took to coming to school in vivid bow-ties that raised Mr. Cray's most sarcastic comments.

"The sooner you go to the History Sixth, Fane, and take that loathsome ribbon with you, the better for us all. Where did you get it? Out of the housemaid's trunk, one would say, by its appearance."

"It happens to be a tie," said Michael with insolence in his tone.

"Oh, it happens to be a tie, does it? Well, it also happens to be an excellent rule of St. James' School that all boys, however clever, wear dark suits and black ties. There also happens to be an excellent cure for pretentious and flamboyant youths who disregard this rule. There happens to be a play by one Euripides called the Alcestis. I suggest you write me out the first two hundred lines of it."

Michael's next encounter was with Mr. Viner, on the occasion of his producing in the priest's pipe-seasoned sitting-room a handkerchief inordinately perfumed with an Eastern scent lately discovered by Wilmot.

"Good heavens, Michael, what Piccadilly breezes are you wafting into my respectable and sacerdotal apartment?"

"I rather like scent," explained Michael lamely.

"Well, I don't, so, for goodness' sake don't bring any more of it in here. Pah! Phew! It's worse than a Lenten address at a fas.h.i.+onable church. Really, you know, these people you're in with now are not at all good for you, Michael."

"They're more interesting than any of the chaps at school."

"Are they? There used to be a saying in my undergraduate days, 'Distrust a freshman that's always seen with third-year men.' No doubt the inference is often unjust, but still the proverb remains."

"Ah, but these people aren't at school with me," Michael observed.