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

boy bought one for three shillings and sixpence in Paddington, the price one would expect to pay, if not a Levy; and there were rumours of a copy in Kensington High Street. To Michael the mart of London from earliest youth had been Hammersmith Broadway, and thither he hurried, hopeful of discovering Buttmann’s dingy Lexilogus, for the purchase of which he had thoughtfully begged a sovereign from his mother. Michael did not greatly covet Buttmann, but he was sure that the surplus from three shillings and sixpence, possibly even from fourpence, would be very welcome.

He found at last in a turning off Hammersmith Broadway a wonderful bookshop, whose rooms upon rooms leading into one another were all lined and loaded with every kind of book. The proprietor soon found a copy of Buttmann, which he sold to Michael for half a crown, leaving him with fifteen shillings for himself, since he decided that it would be as well to return his mother at least half a crown from her sovereign. The purchase completed, Michael began to wander round the shop, taking down a book here, a book there, dipping into them from the top of a ladder, sniffing them, clapping their covers together to drive away the dust, and altogether thoroughly enjoying himself, while the daylight slowly faded and street-lamps came winking into ken outside. At last, just as the shop-boy was putting up the shutters, Michael discovered a volume bound in half-morocco of a crude gay blue, that proved on inspection to contain the complete poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, for the sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence.

What was now left of his golden sovereign that should have bought so much beside Buttmann’s brown and musty Lexilogus?

Michael approached the proprietor with the volume in his hand.

“How much?” he asked, with a queer choking sensation, a throbbing excitement, for he had never before even imagined the expenditure of seventeen shillings and sixpence on one book.

“What’s this?” said the proprietor, putting on his spectacles. “Oh, yes, Swinburne⁠—pirated American edition. Seventeen shillings and sixpence.”

“Couldn’t you take less?” asked Michael, with a vague hope that he might rescue a shilling for his mother, if not for cigarettes.

“Take less?” repeated the bookseller. “Good gracious, young man, do you know what you’d have to pay for Swinburne’s stuff separate? Something like seven or eight pounds, and then they’d be all in different volumes. Whereas here you’ve got⁠—lemme see⁠—Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Poems and Ballads, Songs Before Sunrise, Bothwell, Tristram of Lyonesse, Songs of Two Nations, and heaven knows what not. I call seventeen shillings and sixpence very cheap for what you might almost call a man’s lifework. Shall I wrap it up?”

“Yes, please,” said Michael, gasping with the effect of the plunge.

But when that night he read

Swallow, my sister, O fair swift swallow,

he forgot all about the cost.

The more of Swinburne that Michael read, the more impatient he grew of school. The boredom of Mr. Cray’s class became stupendous; and Michael, searching for some way to avoid it, decided to give up Classics and apply for admission to the History Sixth, which was a small association of boys who had drifted into this appendix for the purpose of defeating the ordinary rules of promotion. For instance, when the Captain of the School Eleven had not attained the privileged Sixth, he was often allowed to enter the History Sixth, in order that he might achieve the intellectual dignity which consorted with his athletic prowess.

Michael had for some time envied the leisure of the History Sixth, with its general air of slackness and its form-master, Mr. Kirkham, who, on account of holding many administrative positions important to the athletic life of the school, was so often absent from his classroom. He now racked his brains for an excuse to achieve the idle bliss of these charmed few. Finally he persuaded his mother to write to the Headmaster and apply for his admission, on the grounds of the greater utility of History in his future profession.

“But what are you going to be, Michael?” asked his mother.

“I don’t know, but you can say I’m going to be a barrister or something.”

“Is History better for a barrister?”

“I don’t know, but you can easily say you think it is.”

In the end his mother wrote to Dr. Brownjohn, and one grey November afternoon the Headmaster sailed into the classroom of the Upper Fifth, extricated Michael with a roar, and marched with him up and down the dusky corridor in a ferocious discussion of the proposal.

“Why do you want to give up your Classics?” bellowed Dr. Brownjohn.

In the echoing corridor Michael’s voice sounded painfully weak against his monitor’s.

“I don’t want to give them up, sir. Only I would like to learn History as well,” he explained.

“What’s the good of History?” roared the Doctor.

“I thought I’d like to learn it,” said Michael.

“You shouldn’t think, you infamous young sluggard.”

“And I could go on reading Classics, sir, I could really.”

“Bah!” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Impudent nonsense, you young sloth. Why didn’t you get your Certificate?”

“I failed in Arithmetic, sir.”

“You’ll fail in your whole life, boy,” prophesied Dr. Brownjohn in bull-deep accents of reproach. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “I don’t think I am, because I worked jolly hard.”

“Worked, you abominable little loafer? You’ve never worked in your life. You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you’re merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste. Bah! What do you expect to do when you leave school? Um?”

“I want to go to Oxford.”

“Then get the Balliol Scholarship.”

“I don’t want to be at Balliol,” said Michael.

“Then get the major scholarship at Trinity, Cambridge.”

“I don’t intend to go to Cambridge,” said Michael.

“Good heavens, boy,” roared Dr. Brownjohn, “are you trying to arrange your own career?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “But I want to go to St. Mary’s, Oxford.”

“Then get a scholarship at St. Mary’s.”

“But I don’t want to be a Scholar of any college. I want to go up as a Commoner.”

The veins on