Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (great books to read TXT) 📕

clothes, and Michael in the surging corridor gripped his arm for a moment, saying he would wait for him in the “quarter.”

“Is your mater fearfully cut up?” he asked when they had met and were strolling together along the “gravel.”

“I think she was,” said Alan. “She’s going up to Cobble Place this morning to see Aunt Maud.”

“I wrote to her last night,” said Michael.

“I spent nearly all yesterday in writing to her,” said Alan. “I couldn’t think of anything to say. Could you?”

“No, I couldn’t think of very much,” Michael agreed. “It seemed so unnecessary.”

“I know,” Alan said. “I’d really rather have come to school.”

“I wish you had. I made an awful fool of myself in the morning. I got in a wax with Abercrombie and the chaps, and said I’d never play football again.”

“Whatever for?”

“Oh, because I didn’t think they appreciated what it meant for a chap like your Uncle Kenneth to be killed.”

“Do you mean they said something rotten?” asked Alan, flushing.

“I don’t think you would have thought it rotten. In fact, I think the whole row was my fault. But they seemed to take everything for granted. That’s what made me so wild.”

“Look here, we can’t start a conversation like this just before school. Are you going home to dinner?” Alan asked.

“No, I’ll have dinner down in the Tuck,” said Michael, “and we can go for a walk afterwards, if you like. It’s the first really decent day we’ve had this year.”

So after a lunch of buns, cheesecakes, fruit pastilles, and vanilla biscuits, eaten in the noisy half-light of the Tuckshop, accompanied by the usual storm of pellets, Michael and Alan set out to grapple with the situation Michael had by his own hasty behaviour created.

“The chaps seem rather sick with you,” observed Alan, as they strolled arm-in-arm across the school-ground not yet populous with games.

“Well, they are such a set of sheep,” Michael urged in justification of himself.

“I thought you rather liked them.”

“I did at first. I do still in a way. I do when nothing matters; but that horrible line in the paper did matter most awfully, and I couldn’t stick their bleating. You see, you’re different. You just say nothing. That’s all right. But these fools tried to say something and couldn’t. I always did hate people who tried very obviously. That’s why I like you. You’re so casual and you always seem to fit.”

“I don’t talk, because I know if I opened my mouth I should make an ass of myself,” said Alan.

“There you are, that’s what I say. That’s why it’s possible to talk to you. You see I’m a bit mad.”

“Shut up, you ass,” commanded Alan, smiling.

“Oh, not very mad. And I’m not complaining. But I am a little bit mad. I always have been.”

“Why? You haven’t got a clot on your brain, have you?”

“Oh, Great Scott, no! It’s purely mental, my madness.”

“Well, I think you’re talking tosh,” said Alan firmly. “If you go on thinking you’re mad, you will be mad, and then you’ll be sorry. So shut up trying to horrify me, because if you really were mad I should bar you,” he added coolly.

“All right,” said Michael, a little subdued, as he always was, by Alan’s tranquil snubs. “All right. I’m not mad, but I’m excitable.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” said Alan.

“I can’t help my character, can I?” Michael demanded.

“You’re not a girl,” Alan pointed out.

“Men have very strong emotions often,” Michael argued.

“They may have them, but they don’t show them. Just lately you’ve been holding forth about the rotten way in which everybody gets hysterical over this war. And now you’re getting hysterical over yourself, which is much worse.”

“Damn you, Alan, if I didn’t like you so much I shouldn’t listen to you,” said Michael, fiercely pausing.

“Well, if I didn’t like you, I shouldn’t talk,” answered Alan simply.

As they walked on again in silence for a while, Michael continually tried to get a perspective view of his friend, puzzling over his self-assurance, which was never offensive, and wondering how a person so much less clever than himself could possibly make him feel so humble. Alan was good-looking and well-dressed; he was essentially debonair; he was certainly in appearance the most attractive boy in the school. It always gave Michael the most acute thrill of admiration to see Alan swinging himself along so lithe and so graceful. It made him want to go up and pat Alan’s shoulder and say, “You fine and lovely creature, go on walking forever.” But mere good looks were not enough to explain the influence which Alan wielded, an influence which had steadily increased during the period of their greatest devotion to each other, and had never really ceased during the period of their comparative estrangement. Yet, if Michael looked back on their joint behaviour, it had always been he who apparently led and Alan who followed.

“Do you know, old chap,” said Michael suddenly, “you’re a great responsibility to me.”

“Thanks very much and all that,” Alan answered, with a mocking bow.

“Have you ever imagined yourself the owner of some frightfully famous statue?” Michael went on earnestly.

“Why, have you?” Alan countered, with his familiar look of embarrassed persiflage.

Michael, however, kept tight hold of the thread that was guiding him through the labyrinth that led to the arcana of Alan’s disposition.

“You’ve the same sort of responsibility,” he asserted. “I always feel that if I were the owner of the Venus of Milo, though I could move her about all over the place and set her up wherever I liked, I should be responsible to her in some way. I should feel she was looking at me, and if I put her in a wrong position, I should feel ashamed of myself and half afraid of the statue.”

“Are you trying to prove you’re mad?” Alan enquired.

“Do be serious,” Michael begged, “and tell me if you think you understand what I mean. Alan, you used to discuss everything with me when we were kids, why won’t you