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

damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr. Prescott listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of admiring perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by Mrs. Fane, and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it would fly with greater certainty, until room by room and window by window and corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and appropriately arranged.

“I give full marks to Prescott,” said Stella later in the afternoon to Michael. “He’s like a nice horse.”

“I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room,” said Michael.

“Why?” demanded Stella.

And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find one.

“Well, why not?” he at last very lamely replied.

There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between Michael and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing, while Mrs. Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael, however, after the first thrills of selection had died down, must be thinking about going up again and be content to look forward on the strength of Stella’s energetic promises to coming down for the Easter vacation and entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.

Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather guilty because he had never been near his old school nor even walked over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends. All that Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing past of old associations and of a sense of transition into a new life that though as yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger and worthier experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have happened in Carlington Road.

On the night before he went up Michael dined with Prescott at his rooms in the Albany. He enjoyed the evening very much. He enjoyed the darkness of the room whose life seemed to radiate from the gleaming table in its center. He enjoyed the ghostly motions of the soldier-servant and the half-obscured vision of stern old prints on the walls of the great square room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that brooded outside the heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany Michael was immeasurably aware of the life of London that was surging such a little distance away; but in this modish cloister he felt that the life he was aware of could never be dated, as if indeed were he to emerge into Piccadilly and behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered wigs they would not greatly surprise him. The Albany seemed to have wrung the spirit from the noisy years that swept on their course outside, to have snatched from each its heart and in the museum of this decorous glass arcade to have preserved it immortally, exhibiting the frozen palpitations to a sensitive observer.

“You’re not talking much,” said Prescott.

“I was thinking of old plays,” said Michael.

Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand. Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted tonight and that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a perpetual present.

“Don’t often go to the theater nowadays,” said Prescott. “When Saxby was alive”⁠—Michael fancied that “alive” was substituted for something that might have hurt his feelings⁠—“we used to go a lot, but it’s dull going alone.”

“Must you go alone?” asked Michael.

“Oh, no, of course I needn’t. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,” repeated the host.

Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.

“Oh, yes, I think you are very like,” said Prescott. “Good Lord, what a pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order, you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much more brain than many people thought, but of course,” Prescott hurriedly added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional equipment, “of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary.”

“I like to be ordinary,” Michael said; “but I’m not.”

“Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run over by a train,” said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. “You know, I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he added. “Here you are all provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming sister. Why, you might do anything.”

“What, for example?” queried Michael.

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s the Diplomatic Service. But don’t be in a hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four hundred a year at St. Mary’s. And when you’re twenty-one you come into roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you’ll have at least two thousand a year. But don’t