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

expect you’re anxious to revive old memories and visit old haunts with Alan. I’m going to stay here and talk to Kenneth while Nurse has her tea.”

Michael lingered for a moment in the doorway to watch the two. Then he said abruptly, breathlessly:

“Mrs. Ross, I think painters and sculptors are lucky fellows. I’d like to paint you now. I wish one could understand the way people look, when one’s young. But I’m just beginning to realize how lucky I was when you came to us. And yet I used to be ashamed of having a governess. Still, I believe I did appreciate you, even when I was eight.”

Then he fled, and to cover his retreat sang out loudly for Alan all the way downstairs.

“I say, Aunt Enid wants to talk to you,” said Alan.

“Aunt Enid?” Michael echoed.

“Mrs. Carthew,” Alan explained.

“I vote we go for a walk afterwards, don’t you?” Michael suggested.

“Rather,” said Alan. “I’ll shout for you, when I think you’ve jawed long enough.”

Michael found Mrs. Carthew in her sun-coloured garden, cutting down the withering lupins whose silky seedpods were strewn all about the paths.

“Can you spare ten minutes for an old friend?” asked Mrs. Carthew.

Michael thought how tremendously wise she looked, and lest he should be held to be staring unduly, he bent down to sweep together the shimmering seedpods, while Mrs. Carthew snipped away, talking in sentences that matched the quick snickasnack of her weapon.

“I must say you’ve grown up into an attractive youth. Let me see, you must be seventeen and a half. I suppose you think yourself a man now? Dear me, these lupins should have been cut back a fortnight ago. And now I have destroyed a hollyhock. Tut-tut, I’m getting very blind. What did you think of Maud’s son? A healthy rosy child, and not at all amenable to discipline, I’m glad to say. Well, are you enjoying school?”

The old lady paused with her scissors gaping, and looked shrewdly at Michael.

“I’m getting rather fed up with it,” Michael admitted. “It goes on for such a long time. It wasn’t so bad this term, though.”

Then he remembered that whatever pleasures had mitigated the exasperation of school last term were decidedly unscholastic, and he blushed.

“I simply loathed it for a time,” he added.

“Alan informs me he acquired his first eleven cap this term and will be in the first fifteen as Lord Treasurer or something,” Mrs. Carthew went on. “Naturally he must enjoy this shower of honours. Alan is decidedly typical of the better class of unthinking young Englishman. He is pleasant to look at⁠—a little colt-like perhaps, but that will soon wear off. My own dear boy was very like him, and Maud’s dear husband was much the same. You, I’m afraid, think too much, Michael.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think very much,” said Michael, disclaiming philosophy, and greatly afraid that Mrs. Carthew was supposing him a prig.

“You needn’t be ashamed of thinking,” she said. “After all, the amount you think now won’t seriously disorganize the world. But you seem to me old for your age, much older than Alan for instance, and though your conversation with me at any rate is not mature, nevertheless you convey somehow an impression of maturity that I cannot quite account for.”

Michael could not understand why, when for the first time he was confronted with somebody who gave his precocity its due, he was unable to discuss it eagerly and voluminously, why he should half resent being considered older than Alan.

“Don’t look so cross with me,” Mrs. Carthew commanded. “I am an old woman, and I have a perfect right to say what I please to you. Besides, you and I have had many conversations, and I take a great interest in you. What are you going to be?”

“Well, that’s what I can’t find out,” said Michael desperately. “I know what I’m not going to be, and that’s all.”

“That’s a good deal, I think,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Pray tell me what professions you have condemned.”

“I’m not going into the Army. I’m not going into the Civil Service. I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer.”

“Or a parson?” asked Mrs. Carthew, crunching through so many lupin stalks at once that they fell with a rattle on to the path.

“Well, I have thought about being a parson,” Michael slowly granted. “But I don’t think parsons ought to marry.”

“Good gracious,” exclaimed Mrs. Carthew, “you’re surely not engaged?”

“Oh, no,” said Michael; but he felt extremely flattered by the imputation. “Still, I might want to be.”

“Then you’re in love,” decided Mrs. Carthew. “No wonder you look so careworn. I suppose she’s nearly thirty and has promised to wait until you come of age. I can picture her. If I had my stick with me I could draw her on the gravel. A melon stuck on a bell-glass, I’ll be bound.”

“I’m not in love, and if I were in love,” said Michael with dignity, “I certainly shouldn’t be in love with anyone like that. But I could be in love at any moment, and so I don’t think I shall be a parson.”

“You’ve got plenty of time,” said Mrs. Carthew. “Alan says you’re going to Oxford next year.”

Michael’s heart leapt⁠—next year had never before seemed so imminent.

“I suppose you’ll say that I’m an ignorant and foolish old woman, if I attempt to give you advice about Oxford; but I gave you advice once about school, and I’ll do the same again. To begin with, I think you’ll find having been to St. James’ a handicap. I have an old friend, the wife of a don, who assures me that many of the boys who go up from your school suffer at Oxford from their selfish incubation by Dr. Brownjohn. They’re fit for killing too soon. In fact, they have been forced.”

“Ah, but I saw that for myself,” said Michael. “I had a row with Brownjohn about my future.”

“How delighted I am to hear that!” said Mrs. Carthew. “I think that I’ll cut back the delphiniums also. Then you’re not going in for a scholarship?”

“No,” said Michael. “I don’t want to