Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

draff of the neighborhood’s rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child’s boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.

“Here we are,” said Barnes. “Here’s Leppard Street that you’ve been so anxious to see.”

“It looks rather exciting,” Michael commented.

“Oh, it’s the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don’t think. Exciting?” Barnes repeated. “You know, Fane, there’s something wrong with you. If you think this is exciting, you’d go raving mad when I showed you some of the places where I’ve lived. Well, here we are, anyhow. Number One⁠—the corner house.”

They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.

Barnes opened the door.

“We’ll take your bag up to my room first, and then we’ll go downstairs and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don’t change your mind when you’ve seen the inside.”

Michael had no time to notice Barnes’ room very much. But vaguely he saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits. After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in the basement.

“She’ll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her,” he said to Michael. “You see, just lately I’ve been very anxious to avoid meeting her.”

He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.

They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by: here a man in shirtsleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury, so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated everything else.

“That’s Cleghorne,” said Barnes. “I reckon he’d sleep Rip van Winkle barmy.”

“What’s he do?” whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.

“He snores for a living, he does,” said Barnes.

They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.

“I’ve brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne,” said Barnes.

“Have you brought your five weeks’ rent owing?” she asked sourly.

He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose angularities seemed to forbid any display of goodwill. Michael thought she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.

“Well, he can have the top-floor back, or he can have the double rooms on the ground floor which of course is unfurnished. Do you want me to come up and show you?”

She inquired grudgingly and rubbed the palm of her hand slowly along her sharp nose as if to express a doubtful willingness.

“Perhaps Mr. Cleghorne⁠ ⁠…” Michael began.

“Mis-ter Cleghorne!” she interrupted scornfully, and immediately she began to dry her arms vigorously on a roller-towel which creaked continuously.

“Oh, I don’t want to disturb him,” said Michael.

“Disturb him!” she sneered. “Why, half Bedlam could drive through his brains in a omnibus before he’d move a little finger to trouble hisself. Yes,” she shouted, “Yes!” Her voice mingling with the creak of the roller seemed to be grating the air itself, and with every word it grew more strident. “Why, the blessed house might burn before he’d even put on his boots, let alone go and show anyone upstairs, though his wife can work herself to the bone for him. Disturb him! Good job if anyone could disturb him. If I found a regiment of soldiers in the larder, he’d only grunt. Asthmatic! Yes, some people ’ud be very pleased to be asthmatic, if they could lie snorting on a bed from morning to night.”

Mrs. Cleghorne’s hands were dry now, and she led the way along the passage upstairs, sniffing as she passed her crapulous husband. She unlocked the door of the ground-floor rooms, and they entered. It was not an inspiring lodging as seen thus in its emptiness, with drifts of fluff along the bare dusty boards. The unblacked grate contained some dried-up bits of orange peel; with the last summons of the late tenant the bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window, catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.

“That’s all I got for two months’ rent,” said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly, surveying it. “And it’s just about fit for my old man to go and bury his good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that’s all. The bedroom’s in here, of course.” She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had been picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far as some child had been able to reach.

The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the windowpanes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.

“Do you want to see