Sinister Street. Compton Mackenzie

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СКАЧАТЬ Michael asked straight out whether his father was in prison and he was relieved when his mother rippled with laughter and told him he was a stupid boy. At the same time, since he had been positively assured his father was dead, Michael felt that laughter, however convincing it were, scarcely became a widow.

      "I cannot think what has happened to you, Michael. You were perfectly charming all last term and never seemed to have a moment on your hands. Now you hang about the house on these lovely fine days and mope and grumble. I do wish you could enjoy yourself as you used to."

      "Well, I've got no friends down here," Michael declared. "What is there to do? I'm sick of the band, and the niggers are rotten, and Stella always wants to hang about on the pier so that people can stare at her. I wish she'd go back to her glorious Germany where everything is so wonderful."

      "Why don't you read? You used to love reading," suggested Mrs. Fane.

      "Oh, read!" exclaimed Michael. "There's nothing to read. I hate Henty. Always the same!"

      "Well, I don't know anything about Henty, but there's Scott and Dickens and——"

      "I've read all them, mother," Michael interrupted petulantly.

      "Well, why don't you ask Mrs. Rewins if you can borrow a book from her, or I'll ask her, as you don't like going downstairs."

      Mrs. Rewins brought up an armful of books which Michael examined dismally one by one. However, after several gilded volumes of sermons and sentimental Sunday-school prizes, he came across a tattered Newgate Calendar and Roderick Random, both of which satisfied somewhat his new craving for excitement. When he had finished these books, Mrs. Rewins invited him to explore the cupboard in her warm kitchen, and here Michael found Peregrine Pickle, Tom Jones, a volume of Bentley's Miscellany containing the serial of Jack Sheppard by Harrison Ainsworth, and What Every Woman of Forty-five ought to Know. The last work upset him very much because he found it unintelligible in parts, and where it was intelligible extremely alarming. An instinct of shamefulness made him conceal this book in a drawer, but he became very anxious to find out exactly how old his mother was. She, however, was more elusive on this point than he had ever known her, and each elaborate trap failed, even the innocent production of the table for ascertaining anybody's age in a blue sixpenny Encyclopædia: still, the Encyclopædia was not without its entertainment, and the table of diseases at the end was very instructive. Among the books which Michael had mined down in Mrs. Rewins' kitchen was The Ingoldsby Legends illustrated by Cruikshank. These he found very enthralling, for though he was already acquainted with The Jackdaw of Rheims, he now discovered many other poems still more amusing, in many of which he came across with pleasure quotations that he remembered to have heard used with much effect by Mr. Neech in the Shell. The macabre and ghostly lays did not affect him so much as the legends of the saints. These he read earnestly as he read Don Quixote, discerning less of laughter than of Gothic adventure in their fantastic pages, while his brain was fired by the heraldic pomps and ecclesiastical glories.

      About this time he happened to pay a visit to Christchurch Priory and by the vaulted airs of that sanctuary he was greatly thrilled. The gargoyles and brasses and effigies of dead knights called to him mysteriously, but the inappropriate juxtaposition of an early Victorian tomb shocked him with a sense of sacrilege. He could not bear to contemplate the nautical trousers of the boy commemorated. Yet, simultaneously with his outraged decorum, he was attracted to this tomb, as if he detected in that ingenuous boy posited among sad cherubs some kinship with himself.

      In bed that night Michael read The Ingoldsby Legends in a fever of enjoyment, while the shadows waved about the ceiling and walls of the seaside room in the vexed candlelight. As yet the details of the poems did not gain their full effect, because many of the words and references were not understood. He felt that knowledge was necessary before he could properly enjoy the colour of these tales. Michael had always been inclined to crystallize in one strong figure of imagination his vague impressions. Two years ago he had identified Mr. Neech with old prints, with Tom Brown's Schooldays and with shelves of calf-bound books. Now in retrospect he, without being able to explain his reason to himself, identified Mr. Neech with that statue of the trousered boy in Christchurch Priory, and not merely Mr. Neech but even The Ingoldsby Legends as well. He felt that they were both all wrong in the sanctified glooms of the Middle Ages, and yet he rejoiced to behold them there, as if somehow they were a pledge of historic continuity. Without the existence of the trousered boy Michael would scarcely have believed in the reality of those stone ladies and carved knights. The candlelight fluttered and jigged in the seaside room, while Mr. Neech, The Ingoldsby Legends and the oratories of Christchurch became more and more hopelessly confused. Michael's excited brain was formulating visions of immense cathedrals beneath whose arches pattered continually the populations of old prints: the tower of St. Mary's College, Oxford, rose, slim and lovely, against the storm-wrack of a Doré sky: Don Quixote tilted with knights-at-arms risen from the dead. Michael himself was swept along in cavalcades towards the clouds with Ivanhoe, Richard Cœur de Lion, Roderick Random and half a dozen woodcut murderers from the Newgate Calendar. Then, just as the candlelight was gasping and shimmering blue in the bowl of the candlestick, he fell asleep.

      In the sunshine of the next day Michael almost wondered whether like someone in The Ingoldsby Legends he had ridden with witches on a broomstick. All the cool security of boyhood had left him; he was in a turmoil of desire for an astounding experience. He almost asked himself what he wanted so dearly; and, as he pondered, out of the past in a vision came the picture of himself staring at the boy who walked beside the incense with a silver boat. What did the Lay of St. Alois say?

This with his chasuble, this with his rosary,

This with his incense-pot holding his nose awry.

      Michael felt a craving to go somewhere and smell that powerful odour again. He remembered how the boy had put out his tongue and he envied him such familiarity with pomps and glories.

      "Are there any High Churches in Bournemouth?" he asked Mrs. Rewins. "Very high. Incense and all that, you know."

      Mrs. Rewins informed him there was one church so high that some said it was practically 'Roming Catholic.'

      "Where is it?" asked Michael, choking with excitement. Yet he had never before wanted to go to church. In the days of Nurse he had hated it. In the days of Miss Carthew he had only found it endurable if his friends were present. He had loathed the rustle of many women dressed in their best clothes. He had hated the throaty voices of smooth-faced clergymen. He had despised the sleek choir-boys smelling of yellow soap. Religion had been compounded of Collects, Greek Testament, Offertory Bags, varnish, qualms for the safety of one's top-hat, the pleasure of an extra large hassock, ambition to be grown up and bend over instead of kneeling down, the podgy feel of a Prayer Book, and a profound disapproval that only Eton and Winchester among public schools were mentioned in its diaphanous fumbling pages. Now religion should be an adventure. The feeling that he was embarking upon the unknown made Michael particularly reticent, and he was afraid to tell his mother that on Sunday morning he proposed to attend the service at St. Bartholomew's, lest she might suggest coming also. He did not want to be irritated by Stella's affectations and conceit, nor did he wish to notice various women turning round to study his mother's hat. In the end Michael did not go on Sunday to the church of his intention, because at the last moment he could not brace himself to mumble an excuse.

      Late on the afternoon of the following day Michael walked through the gustiness of a swift-closing summer toward St. Bartholomew's, where it stood facing a stretch of sandy heather and twisted pine trees on the outskirts of Bournemouth. The sky was stained infrequently with the red of a lifeless sunset and, as Michael watched the desolation of summer's retreat, he listened sadly to the sibilant heather lisping against the flutes of the pines, while from time to time the wind drummed against the buttresses and boomed against the bulk of the СКАЧАТЬ