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

He began to shuffle toward the door.

“Anything you want solved at any time,” he said to Michael. “I’m only just upstairs, you know, in the room next to Mr. Barnes. I shall be most delighted to solve anything⁠—anything!”

He vanished, and Michael smiled to think how completely some of his problems would puzzle the Solutionist.

“What’s his name?” he inquired of Barnes.

“Who? Barmy Sid? Sydney Carvel, as he calls himself. Yet he makes a living at it.”

“At what?” Michael asked.

“Solving those puzzles and sending solutions at so much a time. He took fifteen-and-six last week, or so he told me. You can see his advertisement in Reynolds. Barmy Sid I call him. He says he used to be a conjurer and take his ten pounds a week easily. But he looks to me more like one of these here soft fellows who ought to be shut up. You should see his room. All stuck over with bits of paper. Regular dust-hole, that’s what it is. Did you hear what he said? Solve anything⁠—anything! He hasn’t solved how to earn more than ten bob a week, year in year out. Silly ⸻! That’s what he is, barmy.”

Michael’s hope of entering into a close relation with all the lodgers of 1 Leppard Street was falsified. None of them except Barmy Sid once visited his rooms; nor did he find it at all easy to strike up even a staircase acquaintance. Vaguely he became aware of the various personalities that lurked behind the four stories of long narrow windows. Yet so fleeting was the population that the almost weekly arrivals and departures perpetually disorganized his attempts to observe them as individuals or to theorize upon them in the mass. No doubt Barnes himself would have left by now, had he not been sustained by Michael’s subsidy; and it was always a great perplexity to Michael how Mrs. Cleghorne managed to pay the rent, since apparently half the inquilines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers ultimately escaped owing her money.

It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the landlady’s strict regulation no longer to take them in could be relaxed. All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted by children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to play in a halfhearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer’s shop of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to the basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear below at twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above the walls of the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered what sort of a desolate appearance these five houses must present for voyagers to and from Victoria. They must surely stand up very forbidding in abandonment to those who were traveling back to their cherished dolls-houses in Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not actually see the trains, but always he could hear their shrieking and their clangor, and he looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in her high serene four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall. Nothing except the trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a perpetual silence. Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing with her husband, the noise of her rage down in the basement among the quilts and coverlets never penetrated beyond the door at the head of the inclosing staircase, save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So silent was the house that had it not been for the variety of the smells, Michael might easily have supposed that it really was empty and that life here was indeed an illusion. The smells, however, of onions or hot blankets or machine-oil or tomcats or dirty bicycles proclaimed emphatically that a community shared these ascending mustard-colored walls, that human beings passed along the stale landings to frowst behind those finger-stained doors of salmon-pink. Sometimes, too, Michael emerging into the passage from his room would hear from dingy altitudes descend the noise of a door hurriedly slammed; and sometimes he would see go down the ulcerous steps in front of the house depressing women in black, or unshaven men with the debtor’s wary and furtive eye. The only lodgers who seemed to be permanent were Barnes and Carvel the Solutionist. Barnes on the strength of Michael’s allowance used to go up West, as he described it, every night. He used to assure Michael, when toward two o’clock of the next afternoon he extracted himself from bed, that he devoted himself with the greatest pertinacity to obtaining definite news of Lily Haden. The Solutionist occasionally visited Michael with a draggled piece of newspaper, and often he was visible in the garden attending to a couple of Belgian hares who lived in a packing-case marked Fragile among the nettles of the backyard.

After he had spent a week or so in absorbing the atmosphere of Leppard Street, Michael felt it was time for him to move forth again at any rate into that underworld whose gaiety, however tawdry and feverish, would be welcome after this turbid backwater. There was here the danger of being drugged by the miasma that rose from this unreflecting surface. He felt inclined to renew his acquaintance with Daisy Palmer, and to hear from her the sequel to the affair of Dolly Wearne and Hungarian Dave. He found her card with the Guilford Street address and went over to Bloomsbury, hoping to find her in to tea. The landlady looked surprised when he inquired for Miss Palmer.

“Oh, she’s been gone this