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

Cher,” Avery asserted. “I don’t know why on earth they want to have a bounder like that at St. Mary’s.”

“A bounder like what?” asked Castleton, who had sloped into the room during Avery’s expression of opinion.

Castleton was greeted with much fervor, and a disjointed account of the evening’s rag was provided for his entertainment.

“But why don’t you let that poor devil alone?” demanded the listener.

At this time of night nobody was able to adduce any very conclusive reason against letting Smithers alone, although Maurice Avery insisted that men like him were very bad for the college.

Dawn was breaking when Michael strolled round Cloisters with Castleton, determined to probe through the medium of Castleton’s common sense and Wykehamist notions the ethical and aesthetic rights of people like Smithers to obtain the education Oxford was held to bestow impartially.

“After all, Oxford wasn’t founded to provide an expensive three years of idleness for the purpose of giving a social cachet to people like Cuffe,” Castleton pointed out.

“No, no,” Michael agreed, “but no institution has ever yet remained true to the principles of its founder. The Franciscans, for instance, or Christianity itself. The point surely is not whether it has evolved into something inherently worthless, but whether, however much it may have departed from original intentions, it still serves a useful purpose in the scheme of social order.”

“Oh, I’m not grumbling at what Oxford is,” Castleton went on. “I simply suggest that the Smitherses have the right, being in a small minority, to demand courtesy from the majority, and, after all, Oxford is serving no purpose at all, if she cannot foster good manners in people who are supposed to be born with a natural tendency toward good manners. I should be the first to regret an Oxford with the Smitherses in the majority, but I think that those Smitherses who have fought their way in with considerable difficulty should not go down with the sense of hatred which that poor solitary creature must surely feel against all of us.”

Michael asked Castleton if he had ever talked to him.

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m afraid I’m too lazy to do much more than deplore theoretically these outbursts of rowdy superiority. Now, as I’m beginning to talk almost as priggishly as a new subeditor of The Spectator might talk, to bed.”

The birds were singing, as Michael walked back from escorting Castleton to his rooms. St. Mary’s tower against the sky opening like a flower seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life toward immortal beauty. In this delicate hour of daybreak all social distinctions, all prejudices and vulgarities became the base and clogging memories of the night before. He felt a sudden guilt in beholding this tranquil college under this tranquil dawn. It seemed, spread out for his solitary vision, too incommunicable a delight. And suddenly it struck him that perhaps Smithers might be standing outside the gate of this dream city, that he, too, might wish to salute the sunrise. He blushed with shame at the thought that he had been of those who rushed to drive him away from his contemplation.

Straightway when Michael reached his own door, he sat down and wrote to invite Smithers to his third terminal dinner, never pausing to reflect that so overwhelming an hospitality after such discourtesy might embarrass Smithers more than ever. Yet, after he had worried himself with this reflection when the invitation had been accepted, he fancied that Smithers sitting on his right hand next to Guy Hazlewood more charming than Michael had ever known him, seemed to enjoy the experience, and triumphantly he told himself that contrary to the doctrine of cynics quixotry was a very effective device.

VI Gray and Blue

When Michael, equipped with the prospect of reading at least fifty historical works in preparation for the more serious scholastic enterprise of his second year, came down for the Long Vacation, he found that somehow his mother had changed. In old days she had never lost for an instant that air of romantic mystery with which Michael as a very little boy for his own satisfaction had endowed her, and with which, as he grew older, he fancied she armed herself against the world of ordinary life. Now after a month or two of Chelsea’s easy stability Mrs. Fane had put behind her the least hint of the unusual and seemed exceptionally well suited by her surroundings. Michael at first thought that perhaps in Carlington Road, to which she always came from the great world, however much apart from the great world her existence had been when she was in it, his mother had only evoked a thought of romance because the average inhabitant was lower down the ladder of the more subtly differentiated social grades than herself, and that now in Cheyne Walk against an appropriate background her personality was less conspicuous. Yet when he had been at home for a week or two he realized that indeed his mother had changed profoundly.

Michael put together the few bits of outside opinion he could muster and concluded that an almost lifelong withdrawal from the society of other women had now been replaced by an exaggerated pleasure in their company. What puzzled him most was how to account for the speed with which she had gathered round her so many acquaintances. It was almost as if his father in addition to bequeathing her money enough to be independent of the world had bequeathed also enough women friends to make her forget that she had ever stood in any other relation to society.

“Where does mother get hold of all these women?” Michael asked Stella irritably, when he had been trapped into a rustling drawing-room for the whole of a hot summer afternoon.

“Oh, they’re all interested in something or other,” Stella explained. “And mother’s interested in them. I expect, you know, she had rather a rotten time really when she was traveling round.”

“But she used always to be so vague and amusing,”