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

at Compiègne three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always smoothed away the trace of shyness.

“Whether I had come out to Paris or not,” asked Michael earnestly, “there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between you and that fellow Ayliffe?” He had to recur to this uneasy theme.

“There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow to rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people to play about with. It’s the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no need to bother to sustain one’s personality at highest pitch. George used to be grateful for so little. He really wasn’t bad.”

“But didn’t you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might fall in love with him? I don’t want to be too objectionably fraternal, but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of cheapening yourself.”

“Only to other people,” Stella argued, “not to myself. My dear Michael, you’ve no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a composition that is really easy⁠—ridiculously, fatuously easy.”

“But you wouldn’t choose that piece for public performance,” Michael pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking Stella’s extravagance.

“Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn’t very important?” She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.

“Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you make out now?”

“I wanted a corrective,” Stella explained.

“But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I’m your brother? And, you know, I don’t believe you would consider that relationship had much to do with my importance one way or the other.”

“In fact,” said Stella, laughing, “what you’re really trying to do is to work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you’re a corrective to George is that you’re a gentleman.”

“There you are!” cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest excavation of life. “We all half apologize for using the word ‘gentleman,’ but we can’t get on without it. People say it means nothing nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add something to its value. I haven’t been able to talk this out before, because you’re the only person who knows what I was born and at the same time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances rather a lot doesn’t imply any very morbid self-consciousness. You’re all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist up to your level, one doesn’t give a damn for his ancestors or his family or his personal features apart from the security of the art’s consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they incline without support, they’re most of them inclining away from a top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they’ll always have the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be suffocated.”

Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and pale fawn of their last attiring.

“If I could only find in life itself,” said Michael, sighing, “a path leading to something like this cottage.”

“But, meanwhile, go on,” Stella urged. “Do go on with your self-revelation. It’s so fascinating to me. It’s like a chord that never resolves itself, or a melody flitting in and out of a symphony.”

“Something rather pathetic in fact,” Michael suggested.

“Oh, no, much too elusive and independent to be pathetic,” she assured him.

“My difficulty is that by natural inheritance I’m the possessor of so much I can never make use of,” Michael began again. “I’m not merely discontented from a sense of envy. That trivial sort of envy doesn’t enter my head. Indeed, I don’t think I’m ever discontented or even resentful for one moment, but if I were the head of a great family I should have my duties set out in a long line before me, and all my theories of what a gentleman owes to the state would be weighted down with importance, or at any rate with potential significance, whereas now⁠—” he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t see much difference really,” Stella said. “You’re not prevented from being a gentleman and proving it on a smaller scale perhaps.”

“Yes, yes,” Michael plunged on excitedly. “But crowds of people are doing that, and every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up that these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been put into corduroy trousers. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass of humanity, and however superficially useless he may seem, his existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we