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

violin. The bones in that lean body of his might have been of catgut, so much did he play with his whole frame, so little observably with his hands merely. As for Stella, apart from the simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances, could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion, however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.

There was something consolatory to Michael in the way Stella’s piano part corrected the extreme yearning of the violin. On ascending notes of the most plangent desire the souls of the listeners were drawn far beyond the capacity of their own artistic revelation. It became almost tragical to watch their undisciplined soaring regardless of the height from which they must so swiftly fall. Yet when the violin had thoughtlessly lured them to such a zenith that had the music stopped altogether on that pole a reaction into disappointed sobs might not have been surprising, Stella with her piano brought them back to the normal course of their hopes, seemed to bear tenderly each thwarted spirit down to earth and to set it back in the lamps and shadows of this long riverside room, while with the wistfulness of that cool accompaniment she mitigated all the harshness of disillusion. Michael looked sharply across at Ayliffe during this rescue and wondered how often by Stella herself had he been just as gently treated.

The duet came to an end, and was followed by absurd games and absurdly inadequate refreshments, until almost all together the guests departed. From the street below fainter and fainter sounded their murmurous talk, until it died away, swallowed up in the nightly whisper of the city.

Ayliffe stayed behind for a time, but he could not survive Michael’s too polite “Mr. Ayliffe,” although he did not perhaps realize all the deadliness of this undergraduate insult. Clarissa went off to bed after expressing once more her wish that Michael would sit for her.

“Oh, what for? Of course he will, Clarie,” cried Stella.

“Of course I won’t,” said Michael, ruffling.

“What do you want him to sit for?” Stella persisted, paying not the least regard to Michael’s objection.

“Oh, something ascetic,” said Clarie, staring earnestly into space as if the pictorial idea was being dangled from the ceiling.

“Just now it was to be something passionate,” Michael pointed out scornfully. He suspected Clarissa’s courage in the presence of Stella’s disdainful frankness.

“Ah, perhaps it will be both!” Clarie promised, and “Good night, most darling Stella,” she murmured intensely. Then with one backward look of reproach for Michael she walked with rather self-conscious sinuousness out of the room and up to bed.

“My hat, Stella, where did you pick up that girl? She’s like a performing leopard!” Michael burst out. “She’s utterly stupid and utterly second-rate and she closes her eyes for effect and breathes into your face and doesn’t wear stays.”

“I get something out of all these queer people,” Stella explained.

“New-art flower-vases, I should think,” scoffed Michael. “Why on earth you wanted to fetch me from Cornwall to look after you in this crowd of idiots I can’t imagine. I may not be a great pianist in the making, and I’m jolly glad I’m not, if it’s to make one depend on the flattery of these fools.”

“You know perfectly well that most of the evening you enjoyed yourself very much. And you oughtn’t to be horrid about my friends. I think they’re all so dreadfully touching.”

“Yes, and touched,” Michael grumbled. “You’re simply playing at being in Bohemia. You’d be the first to laugh at me, if I dressed up Alan and Maurice Avery and half a dozen of my friends in velvet jackets and walked about Paris with them, smelling of onions.”

“My dear Michael,” Stella argued, “do get out of your head the notion that I dressed these people up. I found them like that. They’re not imported dolls.”

“Well, you’re not bound to know them. I tell you they all hang on to you because you have money. That compensates for any jealousy they might feel because you are better at your business than any of them are at theirs.”

“Rot!” Stella ejaculated.

However, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions. No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into elusive specters of a legendary paradise.

“I suppose what’s really been the matter with me all the evening,” confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, “is that I’ve felt out of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that for them I simply didn’t exist. That’s rather galling. Now at Oxford, supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of men in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be out of sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we should all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella, why did you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these unappreciative enthusiasts?”

“Perhaps I wanted a standard measure,” Stella whispered, with