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

said Michael, “and now she’s as fussy and practical as a vicar’s wife.”

“I think I know why that is,” Stella theorized meditatively. “I think if I ever gave up everything for one man I should get to rely on him so utterly that when he wasn’t with me any sort of contact with other people would make me vague.”

“Yes, but then she would be more vague than ever now,” Michael argued.

“No; the reaction against dependence on one person would be bound to make her change tremendously, if, as I think, a good deal of the vagueness came after she ran away with father.”

Michael looked rather offended by Stella’s blunt reference.

“I rather wish you wouldn’t talk quite so easily about all of that,” he said. “I think the best thing for you to do is to forget it.”

“Like mother, in fact,” Stella pointed out. “Do you know, Michael, I believe by this time she is entirely oblivious of the fact that in her past there has been anything which was not perfectly ordinary, almost dull. Really by the way she worries me about the simplest little things, you’d think⁠—however, as I know you have rather a dread of perfect frankness in your only sister, I’ll shut up and say no more.”

“What things?” asked Michael sharply. Stella’s theories about the freedom of the artist had already worried him a good deal, and though he had laughed them aside as the extravagant affectations of a gifted child, now that, however grudgingly he must admit the fact, she was really grown up, it would never do for her without a protest from him to turn theories into practice.

“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly sympathetic.”

Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.

“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”

For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a rage.

A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into the country.

“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.

Michael sighed.

“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up Mental Science⁠—so interesting and quite different from Christian Science.”

“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.

Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.

“But why don’t you and Stella go away somewhere together? Stella has been quite long enough in London for the present.”

“I’ve got to practice hard for my next concert,” said Stella, looking coldly at her brother. “You and Michael are so funny, mother. You grumble at me when I don’t practice all day, and yet when it’s really necessary for me to work, you always suggest going away.”

“I never suggested your coming away,” Michael contradicted. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been asked to join a reading-party in Cornwall, and I think I’ll go.”

The reading-party in question consisted besides Michael of Maurice Avery, Guy Hazlewood, Castleton, and Stewart. Bill Mowbray also joined them for the first two days, but after receiving four wires in reference to the political candidature of a friend in the north of England, he decided that his presence was necessary to the triumph of Tory Democracy and left abruptly in the middle of the night with a request to forward his luggage when it arrived. When it did arrive, the reading-party sent it to await at Univ Mowbray’s arrival in October, arguing that such an arrangement would save Bill and his friends much money, as he would indubitably spend during the rest of the vacation not more than forty-eight hours on the same spot.

The reading-party had rooms in a large farmhouse near the Lizard; and they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing, cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.

“I’m doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall,” Avery announced one evening.

“What, a sort of potted guide?” Hazlewood asked.

Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.

“No, no; it’s an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall.”

“I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,” Castleton observed. “The signposts are like incantations.”

“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects me profoundly sometimes.”

Hazlewood laughed.

“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by anything,” he prophesied.

Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.

“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist⁠—”

“Maurice is plumbing the lead tonight,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”

“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I shall ever come to Cornwall again.”

With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.

“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish novelists⁠—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”

“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.

“Of course I do,” said Hazlewood. “And I’d believe in the inherent weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn’t always go there to