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

abrupt, “I’m too comfortably off to worry much about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face. Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of myself as sixteen and seventeen.” Michael was building brick by brick a bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. “I seem to see myself,” he persevered, “with very untidy hair, with very loose joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say to the second-year table in hall.” Michael paused for a moment, half hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self, but as she said nothing, he continued: “When I came up to Oxford I found that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St. James’, but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, ‘By gad, Valérie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,’ and my mother disagreeing, ‘No, no, I’m sure you were right when you said St. James’.’ That’s so like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James’ and Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any alteration. I’m telling you all this because, you know, you provided as it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I’m perfectly sure I could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, if I’d not been at a London day-school.”

“But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?” asked Mrs. Ross. “Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as normality is concerned, through St. James’.”

“Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman. Possibly he benefited by St. James’. Possibly at Eton, and with a prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. Now I was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn’t always possessed a sort of curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality. No astounding gift of genius, I mean.”

“But, Michael,” interrupted Mrs. Ross, “I don’t fancy the greatest geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or seventeen.”

“No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of Keats’ letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment I try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done.”

“But still, I don’t see why a day-school should have militated against the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty.”

“It did in this way,” said Michael. “It gave me too much with which to sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I was unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I’m sure of that, because since I’ve been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism so very much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say, there’s no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it’s partly due to being older.”

“Really, Michael,” Mrs. Ross protested, “if you talk like this I shall begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up self-confidence seems to me not quite normal either.”

“Ah, that’s only because I’m criticizing my earlier self. I really am now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right mean between the two extremes. I’m enjoying Oxford enormously. I can’t tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a struggle to find that wide normal road on which I’m strolling along now. I’m so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England, and that the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to apply to the world the same standards we tacitly respect⁠—we undergraduates. I believe every problem of life can be solved by the transcendency of the spirit which has transcended us up here. You remember I used to say you were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those qualities in you which made me think of that resemblance I find in Oxford. Don’t ask me to say what they are, because I couldn’t explain.”

“I think you have a great capacity for idealization,” said Mrs. Ross gravely. “I wonder how you are going to express it practically. I wonder what profession you’ll choose.”

“I don’t suppose I shall choose a profession at all,” said Michael. “There’s no financial reason⁠—at any rate⁠—why I should.”

“Well, you won’t have to decide against a profession just yet,” said Mrs. Ross. “And now tell me, just to gratify my curiosity, why you think Stella’s playing has deteriorated⁠—if you really think it has.”

“Oh, I didn’t say it had,” Michael contradicted in some dismay. “I merely said that tonight it did not seem up to her level. Perhaps she was anxious. Perhaps she felt