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

afternoon and seemed a violent and sudden extravagance. However, he paid a visit to the Bank where, after signing his name several times, he was presented with a check book. In order to be perfectly sure he knew how to draw a check, he wrote one then and there, and the five sovereigns the clerk shoveled out as irreverently as if they were chocolate creams, made him feel that his new checkbook was the purse of Fortunatus.

Michael quickly recovered from the slight feeling of guilt that the purchase of the Botticelli print had laid upon his conscience, and in order to assert his independence in the face of Alan’s continuous dissuasion, he bought a hookah, a miniature five-barred gate for a pipe-rack, a mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder which he dropped on the pavement outside the shop and broke in pieces, and finally seven ties of knitted silk.

By this time Michael and Alan had reached the Oriental Café in Cornmarket Street; and since it was now five o’clock and neither of them felt inclined to accept the responsibility of inviting the other back to tea, they went into the café and ate a quantity of hot buttered toast and particolored cakes. The only thing that marred their enjoyment and faintly disturbed their equanimity was the entrance of three exquisitely untidy undergraduates who stood for a moment in the doorway and surveyed first the crowded café in general, and then more particularly Michael and Alan with an expression of outraged contempt. After a prolonged stare one of them exclaimed in throaty scorn:

“Oh, god, the place is chock full of damned freshers!”

Whereupon he and his companions strode out again.

Michael and Alan looked at each other abashed. The flavor had departed from the tea: the brilliant hues of the cakes had paled: the waitress seemed to have become suddenly critical and haughty. Michael and Alan paid their bill and went out.

“Are you coming back to my rooms?” Michael asked. Yet secretly he half hoped that Alan would refuse. Dusk was falling, and he was anxious to be alone while the twilight wound itself about this gray city.

Alan said he wanted to finish unpacking, and Michael left him quickly, promising to meet him again tomorrow.

Michael did not wander far in that dusk of fading spires and towers, for a bookshop glowing like a jewel in the gloom of an ancient street lured him within. It was empty save for the owner, a low-voiced man with a thin pointed beard who as he stood there among his books seemed to Michael strangely in tune with his romantic surroundings, as much in tune as some old painting by Vandyck would have seemed leaning against the shelves of books.

A little wearily, almost cynically, Mr. Lampard bade Michael good evening.

“May I look round?” Michael asked.

The bookseller nodded.

“Just come up?” he inquired.

“Today,” Michael confessed.

“And what sort of books are you interested in?”

“All books,” said Michael.

“This set of Pater for instance,” the bookseller suggested, handing Michael a volume bound in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with a golden monogram. “Nine volumes. Seven pounds ten, or six pounds fifteen cash.” This information he added in a note of disdainful tolerance.

Michael shook his head and looked amused by the offer.

“Of course, nobody really cares for books nowadays,” Mr. Lampard went on. “In the early ’nineties it was different. Then everybody cared for books.”

Michael resented this slur upon the generation to which he belonged.

“Seven pounds ten,” he repeated doubtfully. How well those solid sea-green volumes would become the stately bookshelves of his room.

“What college?” asked Mr. Lampard. “St. Mary’s? Ah, there used to be some great buyers there. Let me see, Lord William Vaughan, the Marquis of Montgomery’s son, was at St. Mary’s, and Mr. Richard Meysey. I published his first volume of poems⁠—of course, you’ve read his books. He was at St. Mary’s. Then there was Mr. Chalfont and Mr. Weymouth. You’ve heard of The Patchbox? I still have some copies of the first number, but they’re getting very scarce. All St. Mary’s men and all great book buyers. But Oxford has changed in the last few years. I really don’t know why I go on selling books, or rather why I go on not selling them.”

Mr. Lampard laughed and twisted his beard with fingers that were very thin and white. Outside in the darkness a footfall echoed along some entry. The sound gave to Michael a sense of communion with the past, and the ghosts of bygone loiterers were at his elbow.

“Perhaps after all I will take the Pater,” he said. “Only I may not be able to pay you this term.”

The bookseller smiled.

“I don’t think I shall worry you. Do you know this set⁠—Boccaccio, Rabelais, Straparola, Masuccio, etc. Eleven guineas bound in watered silk. They’ll always keep their price, and of course all the photogravures are included.”

“All right. You might send them too.”

Michael could not resist the swish of the watered silk as Volume One of the Decameron was put back into its vacancy. And as he hurried down to College the thought that he had spent nineteen pounds one shilling scarcely weighed against the imagination of lamplight making luminous those silken backs of faded blue and green and red and gold, against those silk markers and the consciousness that now at last he was a buyer of books, a buyer whose spirit would haunt that bookshop. He had certainly never regretted the seventeen-and-sixpence he had spent on the pirated works of Swinburne, and then he was a wretched schoolboy balanced on the top of a ladder covetous of unattainable splendors, a pitiable cipher in the accounts of Elson’s bookshop. At Lampard’s he was already a personality.

All that so far happened to Michael not merely in one day at Oxford, but really during his whole life was for its embarrassment nothing in comparison with the first dinner in hall. As he walked through the Cloisters and heard all about him the burble of jolly and familiar conversation, he shuddered to think what in a minute he must face. The list of