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

himself for doing this, but the problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be better to pocket his pride.

Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.

“Look here,” she said. “You absurd old Quixote, listen. I’m going to do all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if you’ll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce I mean that I’ll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win in the end and marry her.”

“Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?”

“Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you in the divorce court with half a dozen corespondents. Then you’ll come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Lily,” said Michael, frowning.

“The truce has begun,” Stella declared. “For a fortnight I’ll be an angel.”

Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning. Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.

“Lily, you look adorable in this glade,” he told her. “I believe, if you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree.”

The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses and brought them to Lily.

“These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you’re going to live in? Will you not be lonely?”

“I like to have you with me always,” she murmured.

He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were usually mute.

“We shall be married in a month,” he cried. “Can you smell violets?”

“Something sweet I smell.”

But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering companies.

“These eves of early Spring are like swords,” Michael exclaimed.

“Like what?” Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.

“Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their sharpness and sweetness.”

“Oh, you mean it’s cold,” she said. “Take my arm.”

“Well, I meant rather more than that, really,” Michael laughed. But because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had been from following his thoughts.

Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.

“Not more than a fortnight, mind,” were Stella’s last words.

He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.

“Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill, Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent’s Canal, Adelphi Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is impossible. But you’re living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to move from there?”

Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who she was or where Michael had met her.

“By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don’t think I’m desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal, if we can find the right one.”

That afternoon they set out.

They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.

“Yes, but we don’t want to start a printing press,” Michael objected. “And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant can manage.”

It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they went off to Regent’s Park.

“I don’t think you’re likely to find anything so good as that house,” Maurice said gloomily. “In fact, I know you won’t. I wish I could afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the Temple just as soon from there.”

“I don’t see why he should bother about the Temple,” said Michael. “That house was rather bigger.”

“You’ll never find another house like it,”