Sinister Street Compton Mackenzie (good novels to read in english .TXT) 📖

Why don’t you punch into him, Alf?” Poppy screamed.

Still that wobbling eye, blank and ferocious, was fixed upon vacancy.

“Let me look after Mrs. Murdoch I don’t think!” shouted Poppy. “And be a man, even if you can’t keep your old woman out of the lodger’s room. ⸻ ⸻! I wouldn’t half slosh his jaw in, if I was a man, the ⸻ ⸻!”

It was a question for Michael either of laughing outright or of being nauseated at the oaths streaming from that little woman’s thin magenta lips. He laughed. Even with her paint, she still looked so respectable. When he began to laugh, he laughed so uncontrollably that he had to hold on to the rail of the balusters until they rattled like ribs.

Michael’s laughter stung the group to frenzied action. Mrs. Murdoch spat in her husband’s face, whereupon he immediately loosed his grip upon her shoulders. In a moment she and Poppy were clawing each other. Michael, though he was still laughing unquenchably, rushed downstairs to part them. He had an idea that both of the women instantly turned and attacked him. The hatstand fell over: the scurfy front-door mat slid up and down the oil cloth: there was a reek of stale scent and dust and spirituous breath.

At last Michael managed to secure Poppy’s thin twitching arms and to hold her fast, though she was kicking him with sharp-heeled boots and he was weak with inward laughter. Mrs. Murdoch in the lull began fecklessly to gather together the strands of her disordered hair. Alf, who had gone to peep from the window of the ground-floor front in case a policeman’s bull’s-eye were glancing on Neptune Crescent, reappeared in the doorway.

“What a smell of gas!” he exclaimed nervously.

There was indeed a smell of gas, and Michael remembered that Poppy in her struggle had grasped the bracket. She must have dislocated the lead pipe rather badly, for the light was already dimming and the gas was rushing out fast. The tumultuous scene was allayed. Mr. Murdoch hurried to cut off the main. Poppy retired into her room, slammed and locked the door. Michael went upstairs to bed, and just as darkness descended upon the house he saw his landlady painfully trying to raise the hatstand, while with the other arm she felt aimlessly for strands of tumbled hair.

Next morning Michael was surprised to see Mrs. Murdoch enter very cheerfully with his tea; her hair that so short a time since had seemed eternally intractable had now shriveled into subjugatory curl-papers: of last night’s tear-smudged face remained no memory in this beaming countenance.

“Quite a set-out we had last night, didn’t we?” she said expansively. “But that Poppy, really, you know, she is the limit. Driving home with my old man in a hansom cab. There’s a nice game to get up to. I was bound to let her have it. I couldn’t have held myself in.”

“I suppose you’ll get rid of her now,” said Michael.

“Oh, well, she’s not so bad in some ways, and very quiet as a rule. She was a bit canned last night, and I suppose I’d had one or two myself. Oh, well, it wouldn’t do, would it, if we never had a little enjoyment in this life?”

She left him wondering how he would ever be able to readjust his standards to the topsyturvy standards of the underworld, the topsyturvy feuds and reconciliations, the hatreds; the loves and jealousies and fears. But today he must leave this looking-glass world for a time.

Mrs. Murdoch was very much upset by his departure from Neptune Crescent.

“It seems such a pity,” she said. “And just as I was beginning to get used to your ways. Oh, well, we’ll meet again some day, I hope, this side of the cemetery.”

Michael felt some misgivings about ordering a hansom after last night, but Mrs. Murdoch went cheerfully enough to fetch one. He drove away from Neptune Crescent, waving to her where she stood in the small doorway looking very large under that rusty frail veranda. He also waved rather maliciously to Poppy, as he caught sight of her sharp nose pressed against the panes of the ground-floor front.

III The Café d’Orange

Michael came back to Cheyne Walk with a sense of surprise at finding that it still existed; and when he saw the parlormaid he half expected she would display some emotion at his reappearance. After Neptune Crescent, it was almost impossible to imagine a female who was not subject to the violence of her mutable emotions. Yet her private life, the life of the alternate Sunday evening out, might be as passionate and gusty as any scene in Neptune Crescent. He looked at the tortoise-mouthed parlormaid with a new interest, until she became waxily pink under his stare.

“Mrs. Fane is in the drawing-room, sir.” It was as if she were rebuking his observation.

His mother rose from her desk when he came to greet her.

“Dearest boy, how delightful to see you again, and so thoughtful of you to send me those postcards.”

If she had asked him directly where he had been, he would have told her about Neptune Crescent, and possibly even about Lily. But as she did not, he could reveal nothing of the past fortnight. It would have seemed to him like the boring recitation of a dream, which from other people was a confidence he always resented.

“Stella and Alan are in the studio,” she told him.

They chatted for a while of unimportant things, and then Michael said he would go and find them. As he crossed the little quadrangle of pallid grass and heard in the distance the sound of the piano he could not keep back the thought of how utterly Alan’s company had replaced his own. Not that he was jealous, not that he was not really delighted; but a period of life was being rounded off. The laws of change were being rather ruthless just now. Both Alan and Stella were so obviously glad to see him that the fleck of bitterness vanished