Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 96

"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.

CHAPTER X

THE OLD WORLD

The train crashed southward from Paris through the night; and when dawn was quivering upon the meadows near Chambery Michael was sure with an almost violent elation that he had left behind him the worst hards.h.i.+ps 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 gra.s.ses s.h.i.+mmered 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 stars.h.i.+ne. 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 pa.s.sions, 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 grat.i.tude for the privilege of service. I have been given knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself to G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ps 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. n.o.body 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 G.o.d, 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 fellows.h.i.+p. 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.

THE END

EPILOGICAL LETTER

TO

JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO

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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sures 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-gla.s.s.

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 a.s.sonances 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 n.o.blest 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 att.i.tude of the plain man who wants to a.s.sert 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 n.o.body, 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 friends.h.i.+p.

Yours ever,

COMPTON MACKENZIE.