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

as you are for Lily. But of course the real reason I feel I ought to interfere is on account of what people say. If Mr. Haden were not in Burma⁠ ⁠… it would be different.”

Michael pitied himself profoundly for the rest of that day; but after a long luxury of noble grief the image of Lily came to agitate and disconcert his acquiescence, and the insurgent fevers of love goaded his solitude.

Mrs. Fane and Stella returned during the first week of school. The great Steinway Grand that came laboriously in through the unsashed window of the third story gave Michael, as it lay like a boulder over Carlington Road, a wonderful sense of Stella’s establishment at home. Stella’s music-room was next to his bedroom, and when in her nightgown she came to practise in the six o’clock sunshine Michael thought her music seemed the very voice of day. So joyously did the rills and ripples and fountains of her harmony rouse him from sleep that he refrained from criticizing her apparel, and sat contented in the sunlight to listen.

Suddenly Stella wheeled round and said:

“Do tell me about Lily.”

“Well, there’s been rather a row,” Michael began. “You see, I took her to Hampton Court and we drove.⁠ ⁠…” Michael stopped, and for the first time he obtained a cold clear view of his behaviour, when he found he was hesitating to tell Stella lest he might set her a bad example.

“Go on,” she urged. “Don’t stop.”

“Well, we were rather late. But of course it was the first time, and I hope you won’t think you can drive back at eleven o’clock with somebody because I did once⁠—only once.”

“Why, was there any harm in it?” asked Stella quickly, and, as if to allay Michael’s fear by so direct a question, one hand went trilling in scale towards the airy unrealities of the treble.

“No, of course there was no harm in it,” said Michael.

“Then why shouldn’t I drive back at eleven o’clock if I wanted to?” asked Stella, striking elfin discords as she spoke.

“It’s a question of what people think,” said Michael, falling back upon Mrs. Haden’s line of defence.

“Bother people!” cried Stella, and immediately she put them in their place somewhere very far down in the bass.

“Well, anyway,” said Michael, “I understood what Mrs. Haden meant, and I’ve agreed not to see Lily until after I leave school.”

“And then?”

“Well, then I shall see her,” said Michael.

“And drive back at eleven o’clock in hansoms?”

“Not unless I can be engaged,” Michael surrendered to convention.

“And don’t you mind?”

“Of course I mind,” he confessed gloomily.

“Why did you agree, then?” Stella asked.

“I had to think about Lily, just as I should have to think about you,” he challenged.

“Darling Michael, I love you dreadfully, but I really should not pay the least little tiny bit of attention to you⁠—or anybody else, if that’s any consolation,” she added. “As it happens, I’ve never yet met anybody with whom I’d care to drive about in a hansom at eleven o’clock, but if I did, three o’clock in the morning would be the same as three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Stella, you ought not to talk like that,” Michael said earnestly. “You don’t realize what people would suppose. And really I don’t think you ought to practise in your nightgown.”

“Oh, Michael, if I practised in my chemise, I shouldn’t expect you to mind.”

“Stella! Really, you know!”

“Listen,” she said, swinging away from him back to the keyboard. “This is the Lily Sonata.”

Michael listened, and as he listened he could not help owning to himself that in her white nightgown, straight-backed against the shimmering ebony instrument, little indeed would matter very much among those dancing black and white notes.

“Or in nothing at all,” said Stella, stopping suddenly.

Then she ran across to Michael and, after kissing him on the top of his head, waltzed very slowly out of the room.

But not even Stella could for long take away from Michael the torment of Lily’s withheld presence. As a month went by, the image of her gained in elusive beauty, and the desire to see became a madness. He tried to evade his promise by haunting the places she would be likely to frequent, but he never saw her. He wondered if she could be in London, and he nearly wrote to ask. There was no consolation to be gained from books; there was no sentiment to be culled from the spots they had known together. He wanted herself, her fragility, her swooning kisses, herself, herself. She was the consummation of idyllic life, the life he longed for, the passionate life of beauty expressed in her. Stella had her music; Alan had his cricket; Mrs. Ross had her son; and he must have Lily. How damnable were these silver nights of June, how their fragrance musk-like even here in London fretted him with the imagination of wasted beauty. These summer nights demanded love; they enraged him with their uselessness.

“Isn’t Chopin wonderful?” cried Stella. “Just when the window-boxes are dripping and the earth’s warm and damp and the air is all turning into velvet.”

“Oh, very wonderful,” said Michael bitterly.

And he would go out on the dreaming balcony and, looking down on the motionless lamps, he would hear the murmur and rustle of people. But he was starving amid this rich plenitude of colour and scent; he was idle upon these maddening, these music-haunted, these royal nights that mocked his surrender.

And in the silent heart of the night when the sheets were fibrous and the mattress was jagged, when the pillow seared him and his eyes were like sand, what resolutions he made to carry her away from Kensington; but in the morning how coldly impossible it was to do so at eighteen.

One afternoon coming out of school, Michael met Drake.

“Hullo!” said Drake. “How’s the fair Lily? I haven’t seen you around lately.”

“Haven’t you?” said Michael. “No, I haven’t been round so much lately.”

He spoke as if he had suddenly noticed he had forgotten something.

“I asked her about you⁠—over the garden-wall; so don’t get