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

Life isn’t a cricket-match, you know,” said Michael sententiously. “You can’t set your field just as you would like to have it at the moment.”

“You know best what’s good for you,” Alan sighed.

“Yes⁠ ⁠… I think I do. I think it’s better to live than to stagnate as you’re doing.”

“What does your mother say?” Alan asked.

“I haven’t told her anything about Lily.”

“No, because you’re not in earnest. And if you’re in earnest, Lily isn’t.”

“What the devil do you know about her?” Michael angrily demanded.

“I know enough to see you’re both behaving like a couple of reckless kids,” Alan retorted.

“Damn you!” cried Michael in exasperation. “I wish to god you wouldn’t try to interfere with what doesn’t after all concern you very much.”

“You insisted on introducing me,” Alan pointed out.

“Because I thought it would be a rag if we were both in love with sisters. But you’re turning into a machine. Since you’ve swotted up into the Upper Sixth, you’ve turned into a very good imitation of the prigs you associate with. Everybody isn’t like you. Some people develop.⁠ ⁠… I could have been just like you if I had cared to be. I could have been Captain of the School and Scholar of Balliol with my nose ground down to εἱ and ἑἁν, hammering out tenth-rate Latin lyrics and reading Theocritus with the amusing parts left out. But what’s the good of arguing with you? You’re perfectly content and you think you can be as priggish as you like, as long as you conceal it by making fifty runs in the Dulford match. I suppose you consider my behaviour unwholesome at eighteen. Well, I dare say it is by your standards. But are your standards worth anything? I doubt it. I think they’re fine up to a point. I’m perfectly willing to admit that we behaved like a pair of little blighters with those girls at Eastbourne. But this is something altogether different.”

“We shall see,” said Alan simply. “I’m not going to quarrel with you. So shut up.”

Michael walked along in silence, angry with himself for having caused this ill-feeling by his obstinacy in making an unsuitable introduction, and angry with Alan because he would accentuate by his attitude the mistake.

By the steps of his house Michael stopped and looked at Alan severely.

“This is the last time I shall attempt to cure you,” he announced.

“All right,” said Alan with perfect equanimity. “You can do anything you like but quarrel. You needn’t talk to me or look at me or think about me until you want to. I shall feel a bit bored, of course, but, oh, my dear old chap, do get over this lovesickness soon.”

“This isn’t like that silly affair at Bournemouth last Easter,” Michael challenged.

“I know that, my dear chap. I wish it was.”

With the subject of love finally sealed between him and Alan, Michael receded farther and farther from the world of school. He condescended indeed to occupy a distinguished position by the hot-water pipes of the entrance-hall, where his aloofness and ability to judge men and gods made him a popular, if slightly incomprehensible, figure. Towards all the masters he emanated a compassion which he really felt very deeply. Those whom he liked he conversed with as equals; those whom he disliked he talked to as inferiors. But he pitied both sections. In class he was polite, but somewhat remote, though he missed very few opportunities of implicitly deriding the Liberal views of Mr. Kirkham. The whole school with its ant-like energy, whose ultimate object and obvious result were alike inscrutable to Michael, just idly amused him, and he reserved for Lily all his zest in life.

The Lent term passed away with parsimonious February sunlight, with March lying grey upon the houses until it proclaimed itself suddenly in a booming London gale. The Easter holidays arrived, and Mrs. Fane determined to go to Germany and see Stella. Would Michael come? Michael pleaded many disturbed plans of cricket-practice; of Matriculation at St. Mary’s College, Oxford; of working for the English Literature Prize; of anything indeed but his desire to see with Lily April break to May. In the end he had his own way, and Mrs. Fane went to the continent without his escort.

Lily was never eager for the discussions and the contingencies and the doubts of love; in all their walks it had been Michael who flashed the questions, she who let slip her answers. The strange fatigue of spring made much less difference to her than to him, and however insistent he was for her kisses, she never denied him. Michael tried to feel that the acquiescence of the hard, the reasonable, the intellectual side of him to April’s passionate indulgence merely showed that he was more surely and more sanely growing deeper in love with Lily every day. Sometimes he had slight tremors of malaise, a sensation of weakening fibres, and dim stirrings of responsibility; but too strong for them was his heart’s-ease, too precious was Lily’s rose-bloomed grace of submission. The more sharply imminent her form became upon his thought, the more surely deathless did he suppose his love. Michael’s mind was always framing moments in eternity, and of all these moments the sight of her lying upon the vivid grass, the slim, the pastoral, the fair immortal girl stood unparagoned by any. There was no landscape that Lily did not make more inevitably composed. There was no place of which she did not become tutelary, whether she lay among the primroses that starred the steep brown banks of woodland or whether she fronted the great sunshine of the open country; but most of all when she sat in cowslips, looking over arched knees at the wind.

Michael fell into the way of talking to her as if he were playing upon Dorian pipes the tale of his love:

“I must buy you a ring, Lily. What ring shall I buy for you? Rings are all so dull. Perhaps your hands would look wrong with a ring,