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

Michael nodded with comprehending gravity of assent.

“Darling boy, I don’t mean that you and darling Stella are not of course much more deeply precious to me. You are. But I can’t help thinking of that poor dear man, and the way he and Charles used to walk up and down the quarterdeck, and I remember once Charles lent him a stud. It’s the silly little sentimental memories like that which are so terribly upsetting when they’re suddenly taken away.”

Now she broke down altogether, and Michael with his arms about her, held her while she wept.

“Dearest mother, when you cry I seem to hold you very safely,” he whispered. “I don’t feel you’ll ever again be able to escape.”

She had ceased from her sobbing with a sudden shiver and catch of the breath and looked at him with frightened eyes.

“Michael, he once said that to me⁠ ⁠… before you were born. Before⁠ ⁠… on a hillside it was⁠ ⁠… how terribly well I remember.”

Michael did not want her to speak of his father. He felt too helpless in the presence of that memory. The death of Prescott was another matter, a trivial and pathetic thing. Quickly he brought his mother back to that, until she was tired with the flowing of many tears.

Michael spent the rest of the Long Vacation with his mother in London, and gradually he made himself a companion to her. They went to theaters together, because it gave her a sentimental pleasure to think how much poor Dicky Prescott would have enjoyed this piece once upon a time. Between them was the unspoken thought of how much somebody else would have enjoyed this piece also. Michael teased his mother lightly about her bazaars, until she told him he was turning into a second Prescott himself. He discussed seriously the problem of Stella, but he did not say a word of his hope that she would fall in love with Alan. Alan, however, who was already back in town, came to spend weekends that were very much like the weekends spent at Carlington Road in the past. Mrs. Fane enjoyed dining with her son and his friend. She asked the same sort of delightfully foolish questions about Oxford that she used to ask about school. In October Mrs. Carruthers arrived back in town, and by this time Mrs. Fane was ready to begin again to flit from charity to charity, and from fad to fad. Yet, however much she seemed to become again her old elusive, exquisite self, Michael never again let her escape entirely from the intimacy which had been created by the sentimental shock of Prescott’s death, and he went up for his third year at Oxford with a feeling that somehow during this vacation he had grown more sure of himself and to his mother more precious.

“What have you done this vac?” they asked him in Venner’s on the night of reunion.

“Nothing very much,” he said, and to himself he thought less than usual in fact, and yet really in one way such a very great deal.

The large room at 202 High Street which Michael shared with Grainger and Lonsdale was perhaps in the annals of university lodgings the most famous. According to tradition, the house was originally part of the palace of a cardinal. Whether it had been the habitation of ecclesiastical greatness or not, it had certainly harbored grandeur of some kind; to this testified the two fireplaces surmounted by coats-of-arms in carved oak that enhanced this five-windowed room with a dignity which no other undergraduate lodging could claim. The house at this period was kept by a retired college cook, who produced for dinner parties wonderful old silver which all his tenants believed to have been stolen from the kitchen of his college. The large room of 202 High gave the house its character, but there were many other rooms besides. Wedderburn, for instance had on the third story a sitting-room whose white paneling and Georgian grace had been occupied by generations of the transitory exquisites of art and fashion. Downstairs in the aqueous twilight created by a back garden was the dining-room which the four of them possessed in common. As for the other lodgers, none were St. Mary’s men, and their existence was only alluded to by Michael and his friends when the ex-cook charged them for these strangers’ entertainments.

Michael was the first to arrive at Two Hundred and Two, and he immediately set to work to arrange in the way that pleased him best the decorative and personal adjuncts contributed by Grainger, Lonsdale, and himself. For his own library he found a fine set of cupboards which he completely filled. The books of Grainger and Lonsdale he banished to the dining-room, where their scant numbers competed for space on the shelves with jars of marmalade, eggcups, and toast-racks. The inconvenience of the confusion was helpfully obviated first by the fact that their collection, or rather their accumulation, was nearly throughout in duplicate owing to the similar literary tastes and intellectual travaux forcés of Grainger and Lonsdale, and secondly by the fact that for a year to neither taste nor intellect was there frequent resort. With their pictures Michael found the same difficulty of duplication, but as there were two fireplaces he took an ingenious delight in supporting each fireplace with similar pictures, so that Thorburn’s grouse, Cecil Aldin’s brilliant billiard-rooms, Sir Galahad and Eton Society were to be found at either end. Elsewhere on the spacious walls he hung his own Blakes and Frederick Walkers, and the engraving of the morning stars singing together he feathered with the photographic souvenirs of Lonsdale’s fagdom. As for the pictures that belonged to the ex-cook, mostly very large photogravures of Marcus Stone such as one sees in the corridors of theaters, these he took upstairs and with them covered Wedderburn’s white-paneled walls after he had removed the carefully hung Dürers to the bathroom. This transference wasted a good deal