“Is anybody defending him?” Michael asked.
“Oh, he’ll be awarded a counsel,” said the detective indignantly. “For which you and me has to pay. That’s a nice thing, isn’t it? But he doesn’t stand an earthly.”
“Where will he be hanged?”
Michael thought how Mrs. Murdoch in Neptune Crescent would shudder some Tuesday morning in the near future.
“I’m sorry you should have had to come all this way to find me,” Michael said. He hated himself for being polite to the inspector, but he could not help it. He rang the bell.
“Oh, Dawkins, will you give Inspector—what is your name, by the bye?”
“Dawkins,” said the inspector.
“How curious!” Michael laughed.
“Yes, sir,” the inspector laughed.
“Lunch in the gun room, Dawkins. You must be hungry.”
“Well, sir, I could do with a snack, I daresay.” He followed his namesake from the room, and outside Michael could hear them begin to chatter of the coincidence.
“But supposing I’d been in the same state of life as Meats,” Michael said to himself. “What devil’s web wouldn’t they be trying to spin round me?”
He was seized with fury at himself for his cowardice. He had thought of nothing but his own reputation ever since Meats had been arrested. He had worried over the opinion of a police inspector; had been ashamed of the appearance of the rooms; had actually been afraid that he would be implicated in the disgraceful affair. So long as it had been easy to flatter himself with the pleasure he was giving or the good he was doing to Meats, he had kept him with money. Now when Meats had been dragged away, he was anxious to disclaim the whole acquaintanceship for fear of the criticism of a big man with a bristly mustache. The despair in Meats’ last cry to him echoed round this library. He had seen society in action: not all the devils and fiends imagined by mediæval monks were so horrible as those big men with bristly mustaches. What did they know of Meats and his life? What did they care, but that they were paid by society to remove rubbish? Justice had decreed that Meats should be arrested, and like a dead rat in the gutter he was swept up by these scavengers. What compact had he broken that men should freeze to stones and crush him? He had broken the laws of men and the laws of God; he had committed murder. And were not murders as foul being committed every moment? Murdered ambition, murdered love, murdered pity, murdered gratitude, murdered faith, did none of these cry out for vengeance?
Society had seized the murderer, and it was useless to cry out. Himself was as impotent as the prisoner. Meats had sinned against the hive: this infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he felt to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was become a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by fear. Something was needed to destroy this gregarious organism. War and pestilence must come; but in the past these two had come often enough, and mankind was the same afterward. This ant-hill of a globe had been ravaged often enough, but the ants were all busy again carrying their mean little burdens of food hither and thither in affright for the comfort of their mean little lives.
“And I’m as bad as any of them,” said Michael to himself. “I know I have obligations in Leppard Street, and I’ve run away from them because I’m afraid of what people will think. Of course, I always fail. I’m a coward.”
He could not stay any longer at Hardingham. He must go and see about Mrs. Smith now. Society would be seizing her soon and bringing her miserable life to an end in whitewashed prison corridors. He must do something for Meats. Perhaps he would not be able to save him from death, but he must not sit here ringing bells for butlers called Dawkins to feed inspectors called Dawkins.
Stella came in with the first roses of the year.
“Aren’t they beauties?”
“Yes, splendid. I’m going up to town this afternoon.”
“But not for long?”
“I don’t know. It depends. Do you know, Stella, it’s an extraordinary thing, but ever since you’ve practically given up playing, I feel very much more alive. How do you account for that?”
“Well, I haven’t given up playing for one thing,” Stella contradicted.
“Stella do you ever feel inspired nowadays?”
“Not so much as I did,” she admitted.
“I feel now as if I were on the verge of an inspiration.”
“Not another Lily,” she said quickly, with half a laugh.
“You’ve no right to sneer at me about that,” he said fiercely. “You must be very careful, you know. You’ll become flabby, if you aren’t careful, here at Hardingham.”
“Oh, Michael!” she laughed. “Don’t look at me as if you were a Major Prophet. I won’t become flabby. I shall start composing at once.”
“There you are!” he cried triumphantly. “Never say again that I can’t wake you up.”
“You did not wake me up.”
“I did. I did. And do you know I believe I’ve discovered that I’m an anarchist?”
“Is that your inspiration?”
“Who knows? It may be.”
“Well, don’t come and be anarchical down here, because Alan is going to stand at the next election.”
“What on earth good would Alan be in Parliament?” Michael asked derisively. “He’s much too happy.”
“Michael, why are you so horrid about Alan nowadays?”
He was penitent in a moment at the suggestion, but when he said good-bye to Stella he had a curious feeling that from henceforth he was going to be stronger than her.
On reaching London, Michael went to see Castleton at the Temple, and he found him in chambers at the top of dusty stairs in King’s Beach Walk.
“Lucky to get these, wasn’t I?” said Castleton. By craning out of the window, the river was visible.
“I suppose you’ve never had a murder case yet?” Michael asked.
“Not yet,” said Castleton. “In fact, I’m going in for Chancery work. And I shall get my first brief in about five years, with luck.”
Michael inquired how one went to work to retain the greatest criminal advocate of the day, and Castleton said he would have to be approached through a solicitor.
“Well, will you get hold of him for me?”
Castleton looked rather blank.
“If you can’t get him, get the next best, and so on. Tell him the man I want to defend hasn’t a chance, and that’s why I’m particularly anxious he should get off.”
They discussed details for some time, and Castleton was astonished at Michael’s wish to aid Meats.
“It seems very perverse,” he said.
“Perverse!” Michael echoed. “And what about your profession? That is really the most perverse factor in modern life.”
“But in this case,” Castleton argued, “the victim seems so utterly worthless.”
“Exactly,” said Michael. “But as society never interfered when he was passively offensive, why, the moment he becomes actively offensive, should society have the right to put him out of the way? They never tried to cure him for his own good. Why should they kill him for their own?”
“You want to strike at the foundations of the legal system,” said the barrister.
“Exactly,” Michael agreed; and the argument came to an end because there was obviously nothing more to be said.
Castleton promises to do all he could for Meats, and also to keep Michael’s name out of the business. As Michael walked down the stairs, it gave him a splendid satisfaction to think how already the law was being set in motion against the law. A blow for Inspector Dawkins. And what about the murdered girl? “She won’t be helped by Meats’ death,” said Michael to himself. “Society is not considering her protection now any more than it did when she was alive.” No slops must be emptied here: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a sentimentalist.
Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.
“A nice set-out and no mistake!” she declared. “Half of the neighborhood have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder had been done in here. Mr. Cleghorne’s quite hoarse with hollering out to them to keep off. And it never rains but what it pours. There’s a poor woman gone and died here now. However, a funeral’s a little more lively than the police nosing round, though her not having a blessed halfpenny and owing me three weeks on the rent it certainly won’t be anything better than a pauper’s funeral.”
“What woman?” Michael asked.
“Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I’ve been very good to—a Mrs. Smith.”
“Dead?” he echoed.
“Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body. What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I should say. It quite worried Mr. Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he’s read a lot about these Roman Catholics, and he doesn’t hold with them. They’re that underhand, he says, it makes him nervous.”
“Can I see this priest?” Michael asked.
“Well, it’s hardly the room you’re accustomed to. I’ve really looked at her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old mother has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her.”
“I think I should like to see this priest,” Michael persisted.
Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look up from his Office.
“Is that you, Sister?” he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited for him to explain his business.
“I wanted to ask about this poor woman.”
Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
“I was interested in her,” Michael exclaimed.
“Indeed!” said the priest dryly. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Is her cat here?”
“There was some sort of an animal, but the woman of the house took it off.”
A silence followed, and Michael was aware of the priest’s hostility.
“I suppose she didn’t see her son before she died?” Michael went on. “Her son is with the Jesuits.”
“You seem to know a great deal about the poor soul?”
“I thought I had managed to help her,” said Michael, in a sad voice.
“Indeed?” commented the priest, even more dryly.
“And there is nothing I can do now?”
“Almighty God has taken her,” said the priest. “There is nothing you can do.”
“I could have some Masses said for her.”
“Are you a Catholic?” the priest asked.
“No; but I fancy I shall be a Catholic,” Michael said; and as he spoke it was like a rushing wind. He hurried out into the passage where a nun passed him in the gloom. “She will be praying,” Michael thought, and, looking back over his shoulder, he said:
“Pray for me, Sister.”
The nun was evidently startled by the voice, and went on quickly down the three steps and up the other into Mrs. Smith’s den.
Michael climbed upstairs to interview the Solutionist. He found him lying in bed.
“Why wasn’t that money paid regularly?” he asked severely.
“Who is it?” the Solutionist muttered, in fuddled accents. “Wanted the money myself. Had a glorious time. The cat’s all right, and the poor old rabbits are dead. Can’t give everybody a good time. Somebody’s got to suffer in this world.”
Michael left him, and without entering his old rooms again went away from Leppard Street.
The moment had come to visit Rome, and remembering how he had once dissuaded Maurice from going there, he felt some compunction now in telling him that he wanted to travel alone. However, it would be impossible to visit Rome for the first time with Maurice. In the studio he led up to his backing out of the engagement.
“About this going abroad,” he began.
“I say, Michael, I don’t think I can come just now. The editor of The Point of View wants a series of articles on the ballet, and I’m going to start on them at once.”
It was a relief to Michael, and he wished Maurice good luck.
“Yes, I think they’re going to be rather good,” he said confidently. “I’m going to begin with the Opera: then the Empire and the Alhambra: and in September there will be the new ballet at the Orient. Of course, I’ve got a theory about English ballet.”
“Is there anything about which you haven’t got a theory?” Michael asked. “Hullo, you’ve got the Venetian mirror from Ararat House. I’m so glad!”
“I’ve arranged all that,” Maurice said. “Lily Haden has gone to live with a girl called Sylvia Scarlett. Rather a terror, I thought.”
“Yes, I had an idea you’d find her a bit difficult.”
“Oh, but I scored off her in the end,” said Maurice quickly.
“Congratulations,” said Michael. “Well, I’m going to Rome.”
“I say, rather hot.”
“So much the better.”
“I used to be rather keen on Rome, but I’ve a theory it’s generally a disappointment. However, I suppose I shall have to go one day.”
“Yes, I don’t think Rome ought to miss your patronage, Maurice.”
They parted as intimate friends, but while Michael was going downstairs from the studio he thought that it might very easily be for the last time.
His mother was at home for tea; lots of women and a bishop were having a committee about something. When they had all rustled away into the mellow June evening, Michael asked what had been accomplished.
“It’s this terrible state of the London streets,” said Mrs. Fane. “Something has got to be done about these miserable women. The Bishop of Chelsea has promised to bring in some kind of a bill in Parliament. He feels so strongly about it.”
“What does he feel?” Michael asked.
“Why, of course, that they shouldn’t be allowed.”
“The remedy lies with him,” Michael said. “He must take them the Sacraments.”
“My dearest boy, what are you talking about? He does his best. He’s always picking them up and driving them home in his brougham. He can’t do more than that. Really he quite thrilled us with some of his experiences.”
Michael laughed and took hold of her hand.
“What would you say if I told you that I was thinking very seriously of being a priest?”
“Oh, my dear Michael, and you look so particularly nice in tweeds!”
Michael laughed and went upstairs to pack. He would leave London to-morrow morning.
The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn was quivering upon the meadows near Chambéry Michael was sure with an almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hardships of thought. Waterfalls swayed from the mountains, and the gray torrents they fed plunged along beside the train. Down through Italy they traveled all day, past the cypresses, and the olive-trees wise and graceful in the sunlight. It was already dusk when they reached the Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset; but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide street in Rome.
“There has been nothing like this,” he said, “since I walked down the High. There will be nothing like this ever again.”
Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups of ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one mighty column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was figured with innumerable horses and warriors.
“We must seek for truth in the past,” he said.
How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues, rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived as shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name. What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.
“All that I have done and experienced so far,” Michael thought, “would not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of other people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have been given knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man. Man for man standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader. The reason why the modern world is so critical of the fruits of Christianity after nineteen hundred years is because they have expected it from the beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to the individual the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is much more anxious about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds are destroyed, whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake, or by the great illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a great war, and everybody will discover it has come either because people are Christians or because they are not Christians. Nobody will think it is because each man wants to interfere with the conduct of his neighbor. That woman in Leppard Street who died in the peace of God, how much more was she a Christian than me, who, without perceiving the beam in my own eye, have trotted round operating on the motes of other people. And once I had to make an effort to kiss her in fellowship. Rome! Rome! How parochial you make my youth!”
The last exclamation was uttered aloud.
“Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?” said a voice.
A man in a black cloak was speaking.
“No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies,” said Michael.
“There is only one tragedy for youth.”
“And that is?”
“Age,” said the stranger.
“And what is the tragedy of age?”
“There is no tragedy of age,” said the stranger.
MY DEAR JOHN,
There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the book.
You will remember that last year “Youth’s Encounter,” the first part of Michael Fane’s story, obtained a great advertisement through the action of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the realities of war will obtain me a pardon in “Sinister Street,” the second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the sensitive or affronted the simple.
Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the question of the form of the English novel. There has lately been noticeable in the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel is thinly disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are peculiarly formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack upon the form of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted in regarding “Youth’s Encounter” merely as an achievement of memory, and I have felt sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of literary Datas, rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist. You know from many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could remember of my childhood, the book would not by this time have reached much beyond my fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public school and my own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I fancy it would have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a place of which I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that nowadays it is a much better university than Oxford, and in thinking thus you are the only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy. Obviously, too, it was unavoidable in writing about St. James’ that I should draw certain characters from the life, and for doing this I have been attacked on grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of schoolmasters to be exempt from the privilege of public men to be sometimes caricatured. Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With regard to the Oxford dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to them what is after all much more likely to be a true impression of their virtues and follies than those formed by a schoolboy of his masters. Therefore, in this second volume, “Sinister Street,” there is not a single portrait of a don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the undergraduate a much less important factor than the schoolmaster is to the schoolboy, and the few shadows of dons which appear in this volume are as vital as most dons in the flesh seem to the normal undergraduate.
The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably will be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as such rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own existence up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth writing at such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of people who can bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the capacity of the spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your authority was said by Aristotle. “Art,” says The Sydney Bulletin, a curious antipodean paper, “is selection.” “It is time to protest,” says an American paper, “against these long books.” At this rate, we shall soon be spending all our time with books. “The enormous length must make it formless,” other critics have decided. Ultimately I believe Aristotle’s remark to be the truest guide, and I am tempted to hope that with the publication of the second volume many irrelevancies have established their relevancy.
It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life, but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same time I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he is not myself in a looking-glass.
I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any “preciousness,” but to efforts at finding the only word that will say what I mean. To take two examples: “Reasty” signifies “covered with a kind of rust and having a rancid taste,” and it seems to me exactly to describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects. “Inquiline” sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been sentimentalized like “pilgrim”; it is not an Americanism like “transients,” and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay; whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given votes.
We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world, and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to a duke.
There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other readers who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second volume have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have seemed above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe there is nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of obligation as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his anonymous critics.
Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our enduring friendship.
Yours ever,
COMPTON MACKENZIE.