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

Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.

“Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play.”

It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the slightest movement on her part or Alan’s as an implication of disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.

When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily’s life would be fatal. He found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother everything else in a great surprise.

“Of course, that’s what I imagined you were thinking of doing,” said Stella. “So you’ve made up your quarrel of five years ago?”

“When are you going to get married?” Alan asked.

“Well, I hoped you’d be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live.”

“Oh, of course she can stay here,” said Stella.

“Oh, rather, of course,” Alan echoed.

Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he was plunged.

A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being slowly chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather anxious to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any opportunity. As for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and saying very little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under the shadow of disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael determined to come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning of strong easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a walk to Stella.

They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.

“I don’t think I care much for this country of yours,” said Michael at last. “It’s flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I should care to live here, I don’t know.”

“There’s a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of the wind there.”

Michael resented Stella’s pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a fortnight.

“I hate badly trained dogs,” he grumbled when Stella turned round to whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.

“So do I,” she agreed.

It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was easier in the shelter of the wood.

“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for having us to stay down here,” he began.

Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:

“Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?” she demanded.

Her use of the word “business” annoyed him: it crystallized all the offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly attitude these two weeks.

“I shall be delighted to talk about this ‘business.’ Though why you should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don’t quite know.”

“Do you want me to speak out frankly⁠—to say exactly what I think of you and Lily and of your marrying her? You won’t like it, and I won’t do it unless you ask me.”

“Go on,” said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers. It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood. Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.

“Go on, I’m waiting for you to begin,” Michael repeated.

“Straight off, then,” she said, “I