Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

That mood of deep dissatisfaction with his life which had been growing upon Alistair Stuart of late was strongly with him as he left the Underground Railway-station at Westminster, and walked across the bridge on his way to see Des Louvres.

The night was misty, but not dark, the lamps were lit, and the Palace showed up grey and spectral beside the water, while farther on there stretched a dim line of river-shore unillumined by any spark of light, as though night and slumber had overcome and blotted out that quarter of the city, while the other parts were still awake with feverish life.

As Alistair reached the southern foot of the bridge all the lights and sounds of Lambeth burst upon him with an effect of squalid but stirring energy.

He plunged into the bustling thoroughfare, with its noisy street-stalls, its jostling tramcars, and its hurrying passengers, as a bather plunges into the sea, and took his way along the road which branches southwards in the direction of Kennington. The sense of bankruptcy and failure no longer affected him disagreeably as it still did in the region he had just quitted. Here his poverty seemed to bring him into touch with the life about him, and he looked at everything with pleased, expectant eyes, like a traveller wandering through the picturesque slums of some romantic town of Spain or Italy in which he thinks of settling for a time.

He drew a deep breath of anticipation, like a man about to be released from prison, as he reflected that the poverty which he had been afraid of might become a glorious incognito, under which his nature would have freer play than it had ever had in the world which had held him hitherto. The thought of this new, strange freedom caused his blood to tingle. Strange, formless instincts and yearnings began to stir within him. He glanced curiously to right and left as he walked along, down dark, narrow turnings with narrower courts and alleys leading out of them, and the impulse grew upon him to throw off the ways and hampering conventions of his class, and mingle in the mysterious, half-naked life of this underground world of which he seemed to catch glimpses all around him.

“There are adventures to be met with here!” he whispered to himself. “There are men who commit crimes!”

All the old lawless blood of a hundred generations of highland manslayers and freebooters surged up into his brain, and he fidgeted in his civilized bonds as a boy on a hot summer’s day fidgets in his clothes before the splash and sparkle of the sea.

For a moment he stopped in front of a house which was to let, but a glance at his watch caused him to move on at a quickened pace. He was amused with the idea that the watch, which he had bought in Paris, would pay for a year’s rent of the house.

By this time the character of the thoroughfare had begun to change. He was passing by terraces of lodging-houses standing back behind long narrow strips that had once been gardens. In some of them the sickly grass still struggled for existence, in others it had frankly given up the ghost and been replaced by gravel. Decayed notice-boards behind the railings announced the various ways in which the tenants of these houses struggled for a livelihood; one aspired to be a coal-merchant, one deemed himself a dentist, others would have liked to give lessons in shorthand or book-keeping; none of them, it was to be feared, got much beyond the stage of expectation.

Presently Stuart came to a street in which the houses seemed to be of a better class; it was a street which still preserved some features from the time when this neighbourhood had ranked as a residential suburb for the prosperous middle class, on a level with Dulwich or Finchley of to-day. The name painted on the side-wall was Chestnut-Tree Walk, and the first house in the street was detached, and surrounded by a high wall, over which a few straggling shoots of dirty ivy hung their heads, while at the side of the house rose up one or two trees which, if the thick black crust upon their limbs and stunted foliage could have been washed off, might have proved even to be chestnuts.