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

“Well, not exactly,” Michael replied, with a quick glance towards his host to make sure he was not joking. “I expect that when I leave school I shall get interested again. Only just lately I’ve given up everything. First I was keen on Footer, and then I got keen on Ragging, and then I got keen on Work even (this was confessed apologetically), and just lately I’ve been keen on the Church⁠—only now I find that’s pretty stale.”

“The Church!” echoed Mr. Wilmot. “How wonderful! The dim Gothic glooms, the sombre hues of stained glass, the incense-wreathèd acolytes, the muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah, elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!”

“Then I got keen on Swinburne,” said Michael.

“You advance along the well-worn path of the Interior and Elect,” said Mr. Wilmot.

“I’m still keen on Swinburne, but he makes me feel hopeless. Sad and hopeless,” said Michael.

“Under the weight of sin?” asked Mr. Wilmot.

“Not exactly⁠—because he seems to have done everything and⁠—”

“You’d like to?”

“Yes, I would,” said Michael. “Only one can’t live like a Roman Emperor at a public school. What I hate is the way everybody thinks you ought to be interested in things that aren’t really interesting at all. What people can’t understand about me is that I could be keener than anybody about things schoolmasters and that kind don’t think right or at any rate important. I don’t mean to say I want to be dissipated, but⁠—”

“Dissipated?” echoed Mr. Wilmot, raising his eyebrows.

“Well, you know what I mean,” blushed Michael.

“Dissipation is a condition of extreme old age. I might be dissipated, not you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Why not say wanton? How much more beautiful, how much more intense a word.”

“But wanton sounds so beastly affected,” said Michael. “As if it was taken out of the Bible. And you aren’t so very old. Not more than thirty.”

“I think what you’re trying to say is that, under your present mode of life, you find self-expression impossible. Let me diagnose your symptoms.”

Michael leaned forward eagerly at this proposal. Nothing was so entertaining to his egoism just now as diagnosis. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot seemed inclined to take him more seriously than Mr. Viner, or, indeed, any of his spiritual directors so far. Mr. Wilmot prepared himself for the lecture by lighting a very long cigarette wrapped in brittle fawn-coloured paper, whose spirals of smoke Michael followed upward to their ultimate evanescence, as if indeed they typified with their tenuous plumes and convolutions the intricate discourse that begot them.

“In a sense, my dear boy, your charm has waned⁠—the faerie charm, that is, which wraps in heedless silver armour the perfect boyhood of man. You are at present a queer sort of mythical animal whom we for want of a better term call ‘adolescent.’ Intercourse with anything but your own self shocks both you and the world with a sense of extravagance, as if a centaur pursued a nymph or fought with a hero. The soul⁠—or what we call the soul⁠—is struggling in the bondage of your unformed body. Lately you had no soul, you were ethereal and cold, yet withal in some remote way passionate, like your own boy’s voice. Now the silly sun is melting the snow, and what was a little while since crystalline clear virginity is beginning to trickle down towards a headlong course, carrying with it the soiled accumulation of the years to float insignificantly into the wide river of manhood. But I am really being almost intolerably allegorical⁠—or is it metaphorical?”

“Still, I think I understand what you mean,” Michael said encouragingly.

“Thrown back upon your own resources, it is not surprising that you attempt to allay your own sense of your own incongruity by seeking for its analogy in the decorative excitements of religion or poetry. Love would supply the solution, but you are still too immature for love. And if you do fall in love, you will sigh for some ample and unattainable matron rather than the slim, shy girl that would better become your pastoral graces. At present you lack all sense of proportion. You are only aware of your awkwardness. Your corners have not yet been, as they say, knocked off. You are still somewhat proud of their Gothic angularity. You feel at home in the tropic dawns of Swinburne’s poetry, in the ceremonious exaggerations of Mass, because neither of these conditions of thought and behaviour allow you to become depressed over your oddity, to see yourself crawling with bedraggled wings from the cocoon of mechanical education. The licentious ingenuity of Martial, Petronius and Apuleius with their nightmare comedies and obscene phantasmagoria, Lucian, that boulevardier of Olympic glades, all these could allow you to feel yourself more at home than does Virgil with his peaceful hexameters or the cold relentless narrations of Thucydides.”

“Yes, that’s all very well,” objected Michael. “But other chaps seem to get on all right without being bored by ordinary things.”

“Already spurning the gifts of Apollo, contemptuous of Artemis, ignorant of Bacchus and Aphrodite, you are bent low before Pallas Athene. Foolish child, do not pray for wisdom in this overwise thin-faced time of ours. Rather demand of the gods folly, and drive ever furiously your temperament like a chariot before you.”

“I met an odd sort of chap the other day,” Michael said thoughtfully. “A monk he was, as a matter of fact⁠—who told me a skit of things⁠—you know⁠—about a bad life. It’s funny, though I hate ugly things and common things, he gave me a feeling that I’d like to go right away from everything and live in one of those horrible streets that you pass in an omnibus when the main road is up. Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean?”

Mr. Wilmot’s eyes glittered through the haze of smoke.

“Why shouldn’t I understand? Squalor is the Parthenope of the true Romantic. You’ll find it in all the poets you love best⁠—if not in their poetry, certainly in their lives. Even romantic critics are not without temptation. One day you