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

be a young ass. You’ve been brought up quietly. You haven’t got to cut a dash. Don’t get in a mess with women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get out of it.”

“I don’t care much about women,” said Michael. “They’re disappointing.”

“What, already?” exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.

Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to the attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark discreet room, and the Albany’s atmosphere of passion squeezed into the mold of contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of Thackeray’s books, all combined to affect Michael with the idea that his life had been lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his host, and as the rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he beheld the old impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious, the sensitive slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity tomorrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was receding farther and farther every moment, and his conversation reached Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of light, while finally he was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly and with a half-defiant independence of precisely what he wished to say. The evening swam past comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of the cigar smoke the figure of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy armchair took on once again a definite corporeal existence. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed the twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of silvery apology for obtruding the hour. Michael came back into himself with a start of confusion.

“I say, I must go.”

Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.

“I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I think I must have talked an awful lot of rot tonight.”

“No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted Prescott.

And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly entertained his host.

“Nothing,” he finally decided.

Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more beautiful.

After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term before.

Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner.

“You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott,” he affirmed. “I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant.”

“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”

“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his third cigar.”

Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better suit his mantelpiece.

“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.

“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery. “You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”

“What, for example?” Michael asked.

“Oh, write perhaps.”

“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”⁠—he pointed to his bookshelves⁠—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy, what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”

“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”

Michael laughed.

“And you’ll contribute,” Avery went on eagerly.

“How much?”

“I’m talking about articles. I shall call my paper⁠—well, I haven’t thought about the title⁠—but I shall get a good one. It won’t be like the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it won’t be decadent. It will try to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought. I think it might be called The Oxford Looking-Glass.”

“Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production,” said Michael. “I should call it The World Turned Upside Down.”

“I’m perfectly serious about this paper,” said