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

used to live in these rooms last year,” said Lonsdale lightly, as if that were the most satisfactory description for these freshmen, as indeed for all its youthful heartlessness it was.

“Let’s all yell and tell him to shut up that infernal row,” suggested Wedderburn sternly. Already from sitting in an armchair at the head of a table of freshmen he was acquiring an austere seniority of his own.

“To a second-year blood?” whispered somebody in dread surprise.

“Why not take away the coach-horn?” Lonsdale added.

However, this the freshmen were not prepared to do, although with unanimity they invited Templeton-Collins to refrain from blowing it.

“Keep quiet, little boys,” shouted Templeton-Collins down the stairs.

The sixteen freshmen retreated well pleased with their audacity, and the long-legged Wykehamist proclaimed delightedly that this was going to be a hot year. “I vote we have a bonner.”

“Will you light it, Sinclair?” asked another Wykehamist in a cynical drawl.

“Why not?” Sinclair retorted.

“Oh, I don’t know. But you always used to be better at theory than practice.”

“How these Wykehamists love one another,” laughed an Etonian.

This implied criticism welded the four Winchester men present in defiance of all England, and Michael was impressed by their haughty and bigoted confidence.

“Sunday night is the proper time for a bonner,” said Wedderburn. “After the first ‘after.’ ”

“ ‘After’?” queried another.

“Oh, don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?” several well-informed freshmen began, but Wedderburn with his accustomed gravity assumed the burden of instruction, and the others gave way.

“Every Sunday after hall,” he explained, “people go up to the J.C.R. and take wine and dessert. Healths are drunk, and of course the second-year men try to make the freshers blind. Then everybody goes round to one of the large rooms in Cloisters for the ‘after Common Room.’ People sing and do various parlor tricks. The President of the J.C.R. gives the first ‘after’ of the term. The others are usually given by three or four men together. Whisky and cigars and lemon-squash. They usually last till nearly twelve. Great sport. They’re much better than private wines, better for everybody. That’s why we have them on Sunday night,” he concluded rather vaguely.

The unwieldy bulk of sixteen freshmen was beginning to break up into bridge fours. Friendships were already in visible elaboration. The first evening had wonderfully brought them together. Something deeper than the superficial amity of chance juxtaposition at the same table was now begetting tentative confidences that would ultimately ripen to intimacies. Etonians were discovering that all Harrovians were not the dark-blue bedecked ruffians of Lords nor the aggressive boors of Etonian tradition. Harrovians were beginning to suspect that some Etonians might exist less flaccid, less deliberately lackadaisical, less odiously serene than the majority of those they had so far only encountered in summer holidays. Carthusians found that athletic prowess was going to count pleasantly in their favor. Even the Wykehamists extended a cordiality that was not positively chilling, and though they never lost an opportunity to criticize implicity all other schools, and though their manners were so perfect that they abashed all but the more debonair Etonians, still it was evident they were sincerely trying to acknowledge a little merit, a little good-fellowship among these strange new contemporaries, however exuberantly uneducated they might appear to Wykeham’s adamantine mold.

Michael did not thrust himself upon any of these miniature societies in the making, because the rather conscious efforts of diverse groups to put themselves into accord with one another made him shy and restless. Nobody yet among these freshmen seemed able to take his neighbor for granted, and Michael fancied that himself as the product of a day-school appeared to these cloistered catechumens as surprising and disconcerting and vaguely improper as a ballet-girl or a French count. At the same time he sympathized with their bewilderment and gave them credit for their attempt not to let him think he confused their social outlook. But the obviously sustained attempt depressed him with a sense of fatigue. After all, his trousers were turned up at the bottom and the last button of his waistcoat was undone. Failure to comply with the Draconic code of dress could not be attributed to him, as mercilessly it had served to banish into despised darkness a few scholars whose trousers frayed themselves upon their insteps and whose waistcoats were ignobly buttoned to the very end.

“An Old Giggleswickian,” commented someone in reference to one of these disgraced scholars, with such fanatic modishness that Michael was surprised to see he wore the crude tie of the Old Carthusians; such inexorable scorn consorted better with the rich sobriety of the Old Wykehamist colors.

“Why, were you at school with him?” asked Michael quickly.

“Me? At Giggleswick?” stammered the Carthusian.

“Why not?” said Michael. “You seem to know all about him.”

“Isn’t your name Fane?” demanded the Carthusian abruptly, and when Michael nodded, he said he remembered him at his private school.

“That’ll help me along a bit, I expect,” Michael prophesied.

“We were in the same form at Randell’s. My name’s Avery.”

“I remember you,” said Michael coldly. And he thought to himself how little Avery’s once stinging wit seemed to matter now. Really he thought Avery was almost attractive with his fresh complexion and deep blue eyes and girlish sensitive mouth, and when he rose to go out of Lonsdale’s room, he was not sorry that Avery rose too and walked out with him into the quad.

“I say,” Avery began impulsively. “Did I make an ass of myself just now? I mean, do you think people were sick with me?”

“What for?”

“I mean did I sound snobbish?” Avery pursued.

“Not more than anybody else,” Michael assured him, and as he watched Avery’s expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess and wore combinations instead of pants and vest.

“I say, aren’t you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I’m in Cloisters. Are you going out? You’ll have to buck up. It’s