Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

youth, when called upon to adapt itself to Stella’s temperament.

“I think you’re wrong there,” said Michael. “Alan is rather a rigid person in fundamentals, you know, and his youth will give just that flexibility which Stella would demand. In another five years he would have been ensconced behind an Englishman’s strong but most unmanageable barrier of prejudice. I noticed so much his attitude toward Mrs. Ross when she was received into the Roman Church. I asked him what he would say if Stella went over. He maintained that she was different. I think that’s a sign he’ll be ready to apply imagination to her behavior.”

“Yes, but I hope he won’t think that whatever she does is right,” Mrs. Fane objected.

“Oh, no,” laughed Michael. “Imagination will always be rather an effort for Alan. Mother, would you be worried if I told you I wanted to go away for a while⁠—I mean to say, go away and perhaps more or less not be heard of for a while?”

“Abroad?” she asked.

“Not necessarily abroad. I’m not going to involve myself in a dangerous undertaking; but I’m just sufficiently tired of my very comfortable existence to wish to make an experiment. I may be away quite a short time, but I might want to be away a few months. Will you promise me not to worry yourself over my movements? Some of the success of this undertaking will probably depend on a certain amount of freedom. You can understand, can’t you, that the claims of home, however delightful, might in certain circumstances be a problem?”

“I suppose you’re taking steps to prepare my mind for something very extremely unpleasant,” she said.

“Let’s ascribe it all to my incurably romantic temperament,” Michael suggested.

“And I’m not to worry?”

“No, please don’t.”

“But when are you going away?”

“I’m not really going away at all,” Michael explained. “But if I didn’t come back to dinner one night or even the next night, would you be content to know quite positively that I hadn’t been run over?”

“You’re evidently going to be thoroughly eccentric. But I suppose,” she added wistfully, “that after your deserted childhood I can hardly expect you to be anything else. Yet it seems so comfortable here.” She was looking round at the chairs.

“I’m not proposing to go to the North Pole, you know,” Michael said, “but I don’t want to obey dinner-gongs.”

“Very noisy and abrupt,” she agreed.

Soon they were discussing all kinds of substitutions.

“Mother, what an extraordinary lot you know about noise,” Michael exclaimed.

“Dearest boy, I’m on the committee of a society for the abatement of London street noises.”

“So deeply occupied with reform,” he said, patting her hand.

“One must do something,” she smiled.

“I know,” he asserted. “And therefore you’ll let me ride this new hobbyhorse I’m trying without thinking it bucks. Will you?”

“You know perfectly well that you will anyhow,” said Mrs. Fane, shaking her head.

Michael felt justified in letting the conversation end at this admission. Maurice Avery had invited him to come round to the studio in order to assist at Castleton’s induction, and Michael walked along the Embankment to 422 Grosvenor Road.

The large attic which ran all the width of the Georgian house was in a state of utter confusion, in the midst of which Castleton was hard at work hammering, while Maurice climbed over chairs in eager advice, and at the Bechstein Grand a tall dark young man was playing melodies from Tchaikovsky’s symphonies.

“Just trying to make this place a bit comfortable,” said Castleton. “Do you know Cunningham?” He indicated the player, and Michael bowed.

“Making it comfortable,” Michael repeated. “My first impression was just the reverse. I suppose it’s no good asking you people to give me lunch?”

“Rather, of course,” Maurice declared. “Castleton, it’s your turn to buy lunch.”

“One extraordinary thing, Michael,” said Castleton, “is the way in which Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing something. You’d think he kept a ledger of all our tasks.”

“We can send old Mother Wadman if you’re tired,” Maurice offered. Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.

“I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up,” Maurice explained, “but we shall be three times as comfortable when he’s finished. He’s putting up divans.”

Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton was at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over multitudinous roofs.

“What a great rolling sense of human life they do give,” said Michael. “A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there’s the lighthouse,” he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.

“The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church,” said Maurice. “We’re having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I shall meet the girl who’s meant to share this with me. Then I really think I could work.”

Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were not the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be driven out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They would be suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and yet they would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The windows of the city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly as the stars. Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because to see her in a room like this would be to love her. How well he understood Maurice’s desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody wanted a girl to perfect Plashers Mead. Even Guy’s fairy child at