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

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 tomorrow morning.

X The Old World

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.

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 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