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

smoked and with what skill he concealed in every sort of receptacle the stained and twisted stumps that were left over. That habit would be disastrous to their friendship, and Michael knew that each fresh cigarette lighted by him would consume a trace more of the friendship, until at last he would come to the state of observing him with a cold and mute resentment. He was in this attitude of mind toward his prospective companion, when Maurice came to see him. He seemed nervous, lighting and concealing even more cigarettes than usual.

“About digs in Longwall,” he began.

“I won’t live in Longwall,” affirmed Michael.

“Do you think you could find anybody else?”

“Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?” asked Michael hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long as the third person was a tolerably good egg.

Maurice seemed embarrassed.

“No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me. The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but of course I said I was digging with you, and there’s no room for a third.”

“I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny,” said Michael quickly.

Maurice looked much relieved.

“As long as you don’t feel I’ve treated you badly,” he began.

“That’s all right,” said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice’s obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice’s invitation to stay at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the penitence which had prompted it.

Stella’s unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery’s adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram. Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully pressed trousers.

“Dear Mrs. Avery,” he wrote, preening himself upon the recuperative solitude of empty Cheyne Walk whence his mother had just departed to France. “I enjoyed my visit so much, and so much wish I had not been called away on tiresome business. I hope the garden-party at the Nevilles was a great success, and that the High Towers croquet pair distinguished themselves. Please remember me to Mr. Avery.”

“Thank Heaven that’s done!” he sighed, and lazily turned the pages of Bradshaw to discover how to reach Wedderburn in the depths of South Wales.

The vacation went by very quickly with quiet intervals in London between his visits, of which he enjoyed most the fortnight at Cressingham Hall⁠—a great Palladian house in the heart of the broad Midlands. It was mid-August with neither shooting nor golf to disturb the pastoral calm. Lonsdale was trying under Lord Cleveden’s remonstrances to obtain a grasp of rural administration. So he and his sister Sylvia with Michael drove every day in a high dogcart to various outlying farms of the estate. Lonsdale managed to make himself very popular, and after all as he confided to Michael that was the main thing.

“And how’s his lordship, sir?” the tenant would inquire.

“Oh, very fit,” Lonsdale would reply. “I say, Mr. Hoggins, have you got any of that home-brewed beer on draught? My friend Mr. Fane has heard a good deal about it.”

In a cool farm-parlor Lonsdale and Michael would toast the health of agriculture and drink damnation to all Radicals, while outside in the sun were Sylvia with Mrs. Hoggins, looking at the housewife’s raspberries and gooseberries.

“I envy your life,” said Michael.

“A bit on the slow side, don’t you think?”

“Plenty of time for thinking.”

“Ah,” said Lonsdale. “But then I’ve got no brains. I really haven’t, you know. The poor old governor’s quite worried about it.”

However, when after dinner Lord Cleveden bade his son and his guest draw up their chairs and when, as he ceremoniously circulated the port, he delivered majestic reminiscences of bygone celebrities and notorieties, Michael scarcely thought that anything would ever worry him very much, not even a dearth of partridges, still less a dearth of brains in his only son.

“Dear Lady Cleveden,” he wrote, when once again he sat in the empty house in Cheyne Walk. “London is quite impossible after Cressingham.”

And so it was with the listless August people drooping on the Embankment, the oily river and a lackluster moon.

Michael was surprised at such a season to get a telegram from Prescott, inviting him to dine at the Albany. His host was jaded by the hot London weather, and the soldier-servant waited upon him with more solicitude than usual. Prescott and Michael talked of the commonplace for some time, or rather Michael talked away rather anxiously while Prescott lent him a grave attention. At last Michael’s conversation exhausted itself, and for a few minutes there was silence, while Prescott betrayed his nervousness by fidgeting with the ash on his cigar. At last he burnt himself and throwing away the cigar leaped forthwith into the tide of emotion