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James Hilton

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Beschreibung

"Ah, am yes, Mr. Speed, is it not?... Welcome, sir! Welcome to Millstead!" Kenneth Speed gripped the other's hand and smiled. He was a tall passably good-looking fellow in his early twenties, bright-eyed and brown-haired. At the moment he was feeling somewhat nervous, and always when he felt nervous he did things vigorously, as if to obscure his secret trepidation. Therefore when he took hold of the soft moist hand that was offered him he grasped it in such a way that its possessor winced and gave a perceptible gasp.

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THE PASSIONATE YEAR

BY

JAMES HILTON

1924
© 2022 Librorium Editions
ISBN : 9782383834793

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

BOOK I

The Summer Term

BOOK II

The Winter Term

INTERLUDE

Christmas At Beachings Over

BOOK III

The Lent Term

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOOK I

THE SUMMER TERM

CHAPTER ONE I

"Ah, am yes, Mr. Speed, is it not?... Welcome, sir! Welcome to Millstead!" Kenneth Speed gripped the other's hand and smiled. He was a tall passably good-looking fellow in his early twenties, bright-eyed and brown-haired. At the moment he was feeling somewhat nervous, and always when he felt nervous he did things vigorously, as if to obscure his secret trepidation. Therefore when he took hold of the soft moist hand that was offered him he grasped it in such a way that its possessor winced and gave a perceptible gasp.

"Delighted to meet you, sir," said the young man, briskly, and his voice, like his action, was especially vigorous because of nervousness. It was not nervousness of interviewing a future employer, or of receiving social initiation into a new world; still less was it due to any consciousness of personal inferiority; it was an intellectual nervousness, based on an acute realisation of the exact moment when life turns a fresh corner which may or may not lead into a blind alley. And as Kenneth Speed felt the touch of this clammy elderly hand, he experienced a sudden eager desire to run away, out of the dark study and through the streets to the railway-station whence he had come. Absurd and ignoble desire, he told himself, shrugging his shoulders slightly as if to shake off an unpleasant sensation. He saw the past kaleidoscopically, the future as a mere vague following-up of the immediate present. A month ago he had been a resident undergraduate at Cambridge. Now he was Kenneth Speed, B.A., Arts' Master at Millstead School. The transformation seemed to him for the time being all that was in life.

It was a dull glowering day towards the end of April, most appropriately melancholy for the beginning of term. It was one of those days when the sun had been bright very early, and by ten o'clock the sky dappled with white clouds; by noon the whiteness had dulled and spread to leaden patches of grey; now, at mid-afternoon, a cold wintry wind rolled them heavily across the sky and piled them on to the deep gloom of the horizon. The Headmaster's study, lit from three small windows through which the daylight, filtered by the thick spring foliage of lime trees, struggled meagrely, was darker even than usual, and Speed, peering around with hesitant inquisitive eyes, received no more than a confused impression of dreariness. He could see the clerical collar of the man opposite gleaming like a bar of ivory against an ebony background.

The voice, almost as soft and clammy as the hand, went on: "I hope you will be very comfortable here, Mr. Speed. We are—um yes—an old foundation, and we have our—um yes—our traditions—and—um—so forth.... You will take music and drawing, I understand?"

"That was the arrangement, I believe."

His eyes, by now accustomed to the gloom, saw over the top of the dazzling white collar a heavy duplicated chin and sharp clean-cut lips, lips in which whatever was slightly gentle was also slightly shrewd. Above them a huge promontory of a nose leaned back into deep-set eyes that had each a tiny spark in them that pierced the dusk like the gleaming tips of a pair of foils. And over all this a wide blue-veined forehead curved on to a bald crown on which the light shone mistily. There was fascination of a sort in the whole impression; one felt that the man might be almost physically a part of the dark study, indissolubly one with the leather-bound books and the massive mahogany pedestal-desk; a Pope, perhaps, in a Vatican born with him. And when he moved his finger to push a bell at his elbow Speed started as if the movement had been in some way sinister.

"Ah yes, that will be all right—um—music and drawing. Perhaps—um—commercial geography for the—um—lower forms, eh?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about commercial geography."

"Oh, well—um yes—I suppose not. Still—easy to acquire, you know. Oh yes, quite easy... Come in...."

This last remark, uttered in a peculiar treble wail, was in response to a soft tap at the door. It opened and a man stepped into the shadows and made his way to the desk with cat-like stealthiness.

"Light the gas, Potter... And by the way, Mr. Speed will be in to dinner." He turned to the young man and said, as if the enquiry were merely a matter of form: "You'll join us for dinner to-night, won't you?"

Speed replied: "I shall be delighted."

He wondered then what it was in the dark study that made him feel eerily sensitive and observant; so that, for instance, to watch Potter standing on a chair and lighting the incandescent globes was to feel vividly and uncannily the man's feline grace of movement. And what was it in the Headmaster's quivering blade-like eyes that awakened the wonder as to what these dark book-lined walls had seen in the past, what strange, furtive conversations they had heard, what scenes of pity and terror and fright and, might be, of blind suffering they had gazed upon?

The globes popped into yellow brilliance. The dark study took sudden shape and coherence; the shadows were no longer menacing. And the Headmaster, the Reverend Bruce Ervine, M.A., D.D., turned out to be no more than a plump apoplectic-looking man with a totally bald head.

Speed's eyes, blinking their relief, wandered vacantly over the bookshelves. He noticed Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" in twelve volumes, the Expositor's Bible in twenty volumes, the Encyclopædia Britannica in forty volumes, a long shelf of the Loeb classical series, and a huge group of lexicons surmounting like guardian angels a host of small school text-books.

"Dinner is at seven, then Mr. Speed. We—we do not dress—except for—um yes—for special occasions.... If you—um—have nothing to do this afternoon—you might find a stroll into the town interesting—there are some Roman—um—earthworks that are extremely—um yes—extremely fascinating. Oh yes, really... Harrington's the stationers will sell you a guide.... I don't think there are any—um—duties we need trouble you with until to-morrow ... um yes ... Seven o'clock then, Mr. Speed..."

"I shall be there, sir."

He bowed slightly and backed himself through the green-baize double doors into the stone corridor.

II

He climbed the stone flights of steps that led to the School House dormitories and made his way to the little room in which, some hours earlier, the school porter, squirming after tips, had deposited his trunks and suit-case. Over the door, in neat white letters upon a black background, he read: "Mr. K. Speed."—It seemed to him almost the name of somebody else. He looked at it, earnestly and contemplatively, until he saw that a small boy was staring at him from the dormitory doorway at the end of the passage. That would never do; it would be fatal to appear eccentric. He walked into the room and shut the door behind him. He was alone now and could think. He saw the bare distempered walls with patches of deeper colour where pictures had been hung; the table covered with a green-baize cloth; the shabby pedestal-desk surmounted by a dilapidated inkstand; the empty fire-grate into which somebody, as if in derision, had cast quantities of red tissue-paper. An inner door opened into a small bedroom, and here his critical eye roved over the plain deal chest of drawers, the perfunctory wash-hand stand (it was expected, no doubt, that masters would wash in the prefects' bathroom), and the narrow iron bed with the hollow still in it that last term's occupant had worn. He carried his luggage in through the separating door and began to unpack.

But he was quite happy. He had always had the ambition to be a master at a public-school. He had dreamed about it; he was dreaming about it now. He was bursting with new ideas and new enthusiasms, which he hoped would be infectious, and Millstead, which was certainly a good school, would doubtless give him his chance. Something in Ervine's dark study had momentarily damped his enthusiasm, but only momentarily; and in any case he was not afraid of an uncomfortable bed or of a poorly-furnished room. When he had been at Millstead a little while he would, he decided, import some furniture from home; it would not, however, be wise to do everything in a hurry. For the immediate present a few photographs on the mantelpiece, Medici prints on the walls, a few cushions, books of course, and his innumerable undergraduate pipes and tobacco-jars, would wreak a sufficiently pleasant transformation.

He looked through the open lattice-windows and saw, three storeys below, the headmaster's garden, the running-track, and beyond that the smooth green of the cricket-pitch. Leaning out and turning his head sharply to the left he could see the huge red blocks of Milner's and Lavery's, the two other houses, together with the science buildings and the squat gymnasium. He felt already intimate with them; he anticipated in a sense the peculiar closeness of their relationship with his life. Their very bricks and mortar might, if he let them, become part of his inmost soul. He would walk amongst them secretly and knowingly, familiar with every step and curve of their corridors, growing each day more intimate with them until one day, might be, he should be a part of them as darkly and mysteriously as Ervine had become a part of his study. Would he? He shrank instinctively from such a final absorption of himself. And yet already he was conscious of fascination, of something that would permeate his life subtly and tremendously—that must do so, whether he willed it or not. And as he leaned his head out of the window he felt big cold drops of rain.

He shut the windows and resumed unpacking. Just as he had finished everything except the hanging up of some of the pictures, he heard the School clock chime the hour of four. He recollected that the porter had told him that tea could be obtained in the Masters' Common-Room at that hour. It was raining heavily now, so that a walk into the town, even with the lure of old Roman earthworks, was unattractive. Besides, he felt just pleasantly hungry. He washed his hands and descended the four long flights to the ground-floor corridors.

III

The Masters' Common-Room was empty save for a diminutive man reading the Farmer and Stockbreeder. As Speed entered the little man turned round in his chair and looked at him. Speed smiled and said, still with a trace of that almost boisterous nervousness: "I hope I'm not intruding."

The little man replied: "Oh, not at all. Come and sit down. Are you having tea?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps we can have it together. You're Speed, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Thought so. I'm Pritchard. Science and maths."

He said that with the air of making a vivid epigram. He had small, rather feminine features, and a complexion dear as a woman's. Moreover he nipped out his words, as it were, with a delicacy that was almost wholly feminine, and that blended curiously with his far-reaching contralto voice.

He pressed a bell by the mantelpiece.

"That'll fetch Potter," he said. "Potter's the Head's man, but the Head is good enough to lend him to us for meals. I daresay we'll be alone. The rest won't come before they have to."

"Why do you, then?" enquired Speed, laughing a little.

"Me?—Oh, I'm the victim of the railway time-table. If I'd caught a later train I shouldn't have arrived here till to-morrow. I come from the Isle of Man. Where do you come from?"

"Little place in Essex."

"You're all right then. Perhaps you'll be able to manage a week-end home during the term. What's the Head put you on to?"

"Oh, drawing and music. And he mentioned commercial geography, but I'm not qualified for that."

"Bless you, you don't need to be. It's only exports and imports... Potter, tea for two, please.... And some toast... Public-school man yourself, I suppose."

"Yes."

"Here?"

"No."

"Where, then, if you don't object to my questions?"

"Harrow."

Pritchard whistled.

After Potter had reappeared with the tea, he went on: "You know, Speed, we've had a bit of gossip here about you. Before the vac. started. Something that the Head's wife let out one night when Ransome—he's the classics Master—went there to dinner. She rather gave Ransome the impression that you were a bit of a millionaire."

Speed coloured and said hastily: "Oh, not at all. She's quite mistaken, I assure you."

Pritchard paused, teacup in hand. "But your father is Sir Charles Speed, isn't he?"

"Yes."

The assent was grudging and a trifle irritated. Speed helped himself to toast with an energy that gave emphasis to the monosyllable. After munching in silence for some minutes he said: "Don't forget I'm far more curious about Millstead than you have any right to be about me. Tell me about the place."

"My dear fellow, I——" his voice sank to a melodramatic whisper—"I positively daren't tell you anything while that fellow's about." (He jerked his head in the direction of the pantry cupboard inside which Potter could be heard sibilantly cleaning the knives.) "He's got ears that would pierce a ten-inch wall. But if you want to make a friend of me come up to my room to-night—I'm over the way in Milner's—and we'll have a pipe and a chat before bedtime."

Speed said: "Sorry. But I'm afraid I can't to-night. Thanks all the same, though. I'm dining at the Head's."

Pritchard's eyes rounded, and once again he emitted a soft whistle. "Oh, you are, are you?" he said, curiously, and he seemed ever so slightly displeased. He was silent for a short time; then, toying facetiously with a slab of cake, he added: "Well, be sure and give Miss Ervine my love when you get there."

"Miss Ervine?"

"Herself."

Speed said after a pause: "What's she like?" Again Pritchard jerked his head significantly towards the pantry cupboard. "Mustn't talk shop here, old man. Besides you'll find out quite soon enough what she's like."

He took up the Farmer and Stockbreeder and said, in rather a loud tone, as if for Potter's benefit to set a label of innocuousness upon the whole of their conversation: "Don't know if you're at all interested in farming, Speed?—I am. My brother's got a little farm down in Herefordshire..."

They chatted about farming for some time, while Potter wandered about preparing the long tables for dinner. Speed was not especially interested, and after a while excused himself by mentioning some letters that he must write. He came to the conclusion that he did not want to make a friend of Pritchard.

IV

At a quarter to seven he sank into the wicker armchair in his room and gazed pensively at the red tissue-paper in the fire-grate. He had just a few minutes with nothing particular to do in them before going downstairs to dinner at the Head's. He was ready dressed and groomed for the occasion, polished up to that pitch of healthy cleanliness and sartorial efficiency which the undergraduate of not many weeks before had been wont to present at University functions of the more fashionable sort. He looked extraordinarily young, almost boyish, in his smartly cut lounge suit and patent shoes; he thought so himself as he looked in the mirror—he speculated a little humorously whether the head-prefect would look older or younger than he did. He remembered Pritchard's half-jocular reference to Miss Ervine; he supposed from the way Pritchard had mentioned her that she was some awful spectacled blue-stocking of a girl—schoolmasters' daughters were quite often like that. On the whole he was looking forward to seven o'clock, partly because he was eager to pick up more of the threads of Millstead life, and partly because he enjoyed dining out.

Out in the corridor and in the dormitories and down the stone steps various sounds told him, even though he did not know Millstead, that the term had at last begun. He could hear the confused murmur of boyish voices ascending in sudden gusts from the rooms below; every now and then footsteps raced past his room and were muffled by the webbing on the dormitory floor; he heard shouts and cries of all kinds, from shrillest treble to deepest bass, rising and falling ceaselessly amid the vague jangle of miscellaneous sound. Sometimes a particular voice or group of voices would become separate from the rest, and then he could pick up scraps of conversation, eager salutations, boisterous chaff, exchanged remarks about vacation experiences, all intermittent and punctuated by the noisy unpacking of suit-cases and the clatter of water-jugs in their basins. He was so young that he could hardly believe that he was a Master now and not a schoolboy.

The school-clock commenced to chime the hour. He rose, took a last view of himself in the bedroom mirror, and went out into the corridor. A small boy carrying a large bag collided with him outside the door and apologised profusely. He said, with a laugh: "Oh, don't mention it."

He knew that the boy would recount the incident to everybody in the dormitory. In fact, as he turned the corner to descend the steps he caught a momentary glimpse of the boy standing stock still in the corridor gazing after him. He smiled as he went down.

V

He went round to the front entrance of the Headmaster's house and rang the bell. It was a curious house, the result of repeated architectural patchings and additions; its ultimate incongruity had been softened and mellowed by ivy and creeper of various sorts, so that it bore the sad air of a muffled-up invalid. Potter opened the door and admitted him with stealthy precision. While he was standing in the hall and being relieved of his hat and gloves he had time to notice the Asiatic and African bric-a-brac which, scattered about the walls and tables, bore testimony to Doctor Ervine's years as a missionary in foreign fields. Then, with the same feline grace, Potter showed him into the drawing-room.

It was a moderate-sized apartment lit by heavy old-fashioned gas chandeliers, whose peculiar and continuous hissing sound emphasised the awkwardness of any gap in the conversation. A baby-grand piano, with its sound-board closed and littered with music and ornaments, and various cabinets of china and curios, were the only large articles of furniture; chairs and settees were sprinkled haphazard over the central area round the screened fireplace. As Speed entered, with Potter opening the door for him and intoning sepulchrally: "Mr. Speed," an answering creak of several of the chairs betrayed the fact that the room was occupied.

Then the Head rose out of his armchair, book of some sort in hand, and came forward with a large easy smile.

"Urn, yes—Mr. Speed—so glad—um, yes—may I introduce you to my wife?—Lydia, this is Mr. Speed!"

At first glance Speed was struck with the magnificent appropriateness of the name Lydia. She was a pert little woman, obviously competent; the sort of woman who is always suspected of twisting her husband round her little finger. She was fifty if she was a day, yet she dressed with a dash of the young university blue-stocking; an imitation so insolent that one assumed either that she was younger than she looked or that some enormous brain development justified the eccentricity. She had rather sharp blue eyes that were shrewd rather than far-seeing, and her hair, energetically dyed, left one in doubt as to what colour nature had ever accorded it. At present it was a dull brown that had streaks of black and grey.

She said, in a voice that though sharp was not unpretty: "I'm delighted to meet you, Mr. Speed. You must make yourself at home here, you know."

The Head murmured: "Um, yes, most certainly. At home—um, yes... Now let me introduce you to my daughter... Helen, this is—um—Mr. Speed."

A girl was staring at him, and he did not then notice much more than the extreme size and brightness of her blue eyes; that, and some astonishingly vague quality that cannot be more simply described than as a sense of continually restrained movement, so that, looking with his mind's eye at everybody else in the world, he saw them suddenly grown old and decrepit. Her bright golden hair hung down her back in a rebellious cascade; that, however, gave no clue to her age. The curious serene look in her eyes was a woman's (her mother's, no doubt), while the pretty half-mocking curve of her lips was still that of a young and fantastically mischievous child. In reality she was twenty, though she looked both older and younger.

She said, in a voice so deep and sombre that Speed recoiled suddenly as though faced with something uncanny: "How are you, Mr. Speed?"

He bowed to her and said, gallantly: "Delighted to be in Millstead, Miss Ervine."

The Head murmured semi-consciously: "Um, yes, delightful place—especially in summer weather—trees, you know—beautiful to sit out on the cricket ground—um, yes, very beautiful indeed..."

Potter opened the door to announce that dinner was served.

VI

As Mrs. Ervine and the girl preceded them out of the room Speed heard the latter say: "Clare's not come yet, mother."—Mrs. Ervine replied, a trifle acidly: "Well, my dear, we can't wait for her. I suppose she knew it was at seven..."

The Head, taking Speed by the arm with an air of ponderous intimacy, was saying: "Don't know whether you've a good reading voice, Speed. If so, we must have you for the lessons in morning chapel."

Speed was mumbling something appropriate and the Head was piloting him into the dining-room when Potter appeared again, accompanied by a dark-haired girl, short in stature and rather pale-complexioned. She seemed quite unconcerned as she caught up the tail end of the procession into the dining-room and remarked casually: "How are you, Doctor Ervine?—So sorry I'm a trifle late. Friday, you know,—rather a busy day for the shop."

The Head looked momentarily nonplussed, then smiled and said: "Oh, not at all ... not at all... I must introduce you to our new recruit—Mr. Speed.... This is Miss Harrington, a friend of my daughter's. She—um, yes, she manage—most successfully, I may say—the—er—the bookshop down in the town. Bookshop, you know."

He said that with the air of implying: Bookshops are not ordinary shops.

Speed bowed; the Head went on boomingly: "And she is, I think I may venture to say, my daughter's greatest friend. Eh?"

He addressed the monosyllable to the girl with a touch of shrewdness: she replied quietly: "I don't know." The three words were spoken in that rare tone in which they simply mean nothing but literally what they say.

In the dining-room they sat in the following formation: Dr. and Mrs. Ervine at the head and foot respectively; Helen and Clare together at one side, and Speed opposite them at the other. The dining-room was a cold forlorn-looking apartment in which the dim incandescent light seemed to accomplish little more than to cast a dull glitter of obscurity on the oil-paintings that hung, ever so slightly askew, on the walls. A peculiar incongruity in it struck Speed at once, though the same might never have occurred to anybody else: the minute salt and pepper-boxes on the table possessed a pretty feminine daintiness which harmonised ill with the huge mahogany sideboard. The latter reminded Speed of the board-room of a City banking-house. It was as if, he thought, the Doctor and his wife had impressed their personalities crudely and without compromise; and as if those personalities were so diametrically different that no fusing of the two into one was ever possible. Throughout the meal he kept looking first to his left, at Mrs. Ervine, and then to his right at the Doctor, and wondering at what he felt instinctively to be a fundamental strangeness in their life together.

Potter, assisted by a speckle-faced maid, hovered assiduously around, and the Doctor assisted occasionally by his wife, hovered no less assiduously around the conversation, preventing it from lapsing into such awkward silences as would throw into prominence the continual hissing of the gas and his own sibilant ingurgitation of soup. The Doctor talked rather loudly and ponderously, and with such careful and scrupulous qualifications of everything he said that one had the impressive sensation that incalculable and mysterious issues hung upon his words; Mrs. Ervine's remarks were short and pithy, sometimes a little cynical.

The Doctor seemed to fear that he had given Speed a wrong impression of Miss Harrington. "I'm sure Mr. Speed will be surprised when I tell him that he can have the honour of purchasing his Times from you each morning, Clare," he said, lapping up the final spoonful of soup and bestowing a satisfied wipe with his napkin on his broad wet lips.

Clare said: "I should think Mr. Speed would prefer to have it delivered."

Mrs. Ervine said: "Perhaps Mr. Speed doesn't take the Times, either."

Speed looked across to Clare with a humorous twist of the corners of the mouth and said: "You can book me an order for the Telegraph if you like, Miss Harrington."

"With pleasure, Mr. Speed. Any Sunday paper?"

"The Observer, if you will be so kind."

"Right."

Again the Doctor seemed to fear that he had given Speed a wrong impression of Miss Harrington. "I'm sure Mr. Speed will be interested to know that your father is a great littérateur, Clare."

Clare gave the Doctor a curious look, with one corner of her upper lip tilted at an audacious upward angle.

The Doctor went on, leaning his elbows on the table as soon as Potter had removed his soup-plate: "Mr. Harrington is the author of books on ethics."

All this time Helen had not spoken a word. Speed had been watching her, for she was already to him by far the most interesting member of the party. He noticed that her eyes were constantly shifting between Clare and anyone whom Clare was addressing; Clare seemed almost the centre of her world. When Clare smiled she smiled also, and when Clare was pensive there came into her eyes a look which held, besides pensiveness, a touch of sadness. She was an extremely beautiful girl and in the yellow light the coils of her hair shone like sheaves of golden corn on a summer's day. It was obvious that, conversationally at any rate, she was extremely shy.

Mrs. Ervine was saying: "You're going to take the music, Mr. Speed, are you not?"

Speed smiled and nodded.

She went on: "Then I suppose you're fond of music."

"Doesn't it follow?" Speed answered, with a laugh.

She replied pertly: "Not neccessarily at all, Mr. Speed. Do you play an instrument?"

"The piano a little."

The Head interposed with: "Um, yes—a wonderful instrument. We must have some music after dinner, eh, Lydia?—Do you like Mendelssohn?" (He gave the word an exaggeratedly German pronunciation). "My daughter plays some of the—um—the Lieder ohne Wörte—um, yes—the Songs Without Words, you know."

"I like some of Mendelssohn," said Speed.

He looked across at the girl. She was blushing furiously, with her eyes still furtively on Clare.

VII

After dinner they all returned to the drawing-room, where inferior coffee was distributed round in absurdly diminutive cups, Potter attitudinising over it like a high-priest performing the rites of some sinister religious ceremony. Clare and Helen sat together on one of the settees, discoursing inaudibly and apparently in private; the Head commenced an anecdote that was suggested by Speed's glance at a photograph on the mantelpiece, a photograph of a coloured man attired in loose-fitting cotton draperies. "My servant when I was in India," the Head had informed Speed. "An excellent fellow—most—um, yes—faithful and reliable. One of the earliest of my converts. I well remember the first morning after I had engaged him to look after me he woke me up with the words 'Chota Hazra, sahib'—"

Speed feigning interest, managed to keep his eyes intermittently on the two girls. He wondered if they were discussing him.

"I said—'I can't—um—see Mr. Chota Hazra this time in the morning.'"

Speed nodded with a show of intelligence, and then, to be on the safe side if the joke had been reached, gave a slight titter.

"Of course," said the Head, after a pause, "it was all my imperfect knowledge of Hindostanee. 'Chota hazra' means—um, yes—breakfast!"

Speed laughed loudly. He had the feeling after he had laughed that he had laughed too loudly, for everything seemed so achingly silent after the echoes had died away, silent except for the eternal hiss of the gas in the chandeliers. It was as if his laughter had startled something; he could hear, in his imagination, the faint fluttering of wings as if something had flown away. A curious buzzing came into his head; he thought perhaps it might be due to the mediocre Burgundy that he had drunk with his dinner. Then for one strange unforgettable second he saw Helen's sky-blue eyes focussed full upon him and it was in them that he read a look of half-frightened wonderment that sent the blood tingling in his veins.

He said, with a supreme inward feeling of recklessness: "I would love to hear Miss Ervine play Mendelssohn."

He half expected a dreadful silence to supervene and everybody to stare at him as the author of some frightful conversational faux pas; he had the feeling of having done something deliberately and provocatively unconventional. He saw the girl's eyes glance away from him and the blush rekindle her cheeks in an instant. It seemed to him also that she clung closer to Clare and that Clare smiled a little, as a mother to a shy child.

Of course it was all a part of his acute sensitiveness; his remark was taken to be more than a touch of polite gallantry. Mrs. Ervine said: "Helen's very nervous," and the Head, rolling his head from side to side in an ecstasy of anticipation, said: "Ah yes, most certainly. Delightful that will be—um, yes—most delightful. Helen, you must not disappoint Mr. Speed on his first night at Millstead."

She looked up, shook her head so that for an instant all her face seemed to be wrapped in yellow flame, and said, sombrely: "I can't play—please don't ask me to."

Then she turned to Clare and said, suddenly: "I can't really, can I, Clare?"

"You can," said Clare, "but you get nervous."

She said that calmly and deliberatively, with the air of issuing a final judgment of the matter.

"Come now, Helen," boomed the Head, ponderously. "Mr. Speed—um—is very anxious to hear you. It is very—um, yes—silly to be nervous. Come along now."

There was a note in those last three words of sudden harshness, a faint note, it is true, but one that Speed, acutely perceptive of such subtleties, was quick to hear and notice. He looked at the Head and once again, it seemed to him, the Head was as he had seen him that afternoon in the dark study, a flash of malevolent sharpness in his eyes, a menacing slope in his huge low-hanging nose. The room seemed to grow darker and the atmosphere more tense; he saw the girl leave the settee and walk to the piano. She sat on the stool for a moment with her hands poised hesitatingly over the keyboard; then, suddenly, and at a furious rate, she plunged into the opening bars of the Spring Song. Speed had never heard it played at such an alarming rate. Five or six bars from the beginning she stopped all at once, lingered a moment with her hands over the keys, and then left the stool and almost ran the intervening yards to the settee. She said, with deep passion: "I can't—I don't remember it."

Clare said protectingly: "Never mind, Helen. It doesn't matter."

Speed said: "No, of course not. It's awfully hard to remember music—at least, I always find it so."

And the Head, all his harshness gone and placidity restored in its place, murmured. "Hard—um yes—very hard. I don't know how people manage it at all. Oh, very difficult, don't you think so, Lydia?"

"Difficult if you're nervous," replied Mrs. Ervine, with her own peculiar note of acidity.

VIII

Conversation ambled on, drearily and with infinite labour, until half-past nine, when Clare arose and said she must go. Helen then rose also and said she would go with Clare a part of the way into the town, but Mrs. Ervine objected because Helen had a cold. Clare said: "Oh, don't trouble, Helen, I can easily go alone—I'm used to it, you know, and there's a bright moon."

Speed, feeling that a show of gallantry would bring to an end an evening that had just begun to get on his nerves a little, said: "Suppose I see you home, Miss Harrington. I've got to go down to the general post-office to post a letter, and I can quite easily accompany you as far as the High Street."

"There's no need to," said Clare. "And I hope you're not inventing that letter you have to post."

"I assure you I'm not," Speed answered, and he pulled out of his pocket a letter home that he had written up in his room that afternoon.

Clare laughed.

In the dimly-lit hall, after he had bidden good night to Doctor and Mrs. Ervine, he found an opportunity of speaking a few words to Helen alone. She was waiting at the door to have a few final words with Clare, and before Clare appeared Speed came up to her and began speaking.

He said: "Miss Ervine, please forgive me for having been the means of making you feel uncomfortable this evening. I had no idea you were nervous, or I shouldn't have dreamed of asking you to play. I know what nervousness is, because I'm nervous myself."

She gave him a half-frightened look and replied: "Oh, it's all right, Mr. Speed. It wasn't your fault. And anyhow it didn't matter."

She seemed only half interested. It was Clare she was waiting for, and when Clare appeared she left Speed by the door and the two girls conversed a moment in whispers. They kissed and said good night.

As Potter appeared mysteriously from nowhere and, after handing Speed his hat and gloves, opened the front-door with massive dignity, Helen threw her hands up as if to embrace the chill night air and exclaimed: "Oh, what a lovely moon! I wish I was coming with you, Clare!"

There was a strange bewildering pathos in her voice.

Over the heavy trees and the long black pillars of shadow the windows of the dormitories shone like yellow gems, piercing the night with radiance and making a pattern of intricate beauty on the path that led to the Headmaster's gate. Sounds, mysteriously clear, fell from everywhere upon the two of them as they crossed the soft lawn and came in view of the huge block of Milner's, all its windows lit and all its rooms alive with commotion. They could hear the clatter of jugs in their basins, the sudden chorus of boyish derision, the strident cry that pierced the night like a rocket, the dull incessant murmur of miscellaneous sounds, the clap of hands, the faint jabber of a muffled gramophone. Millstead was most impressive at this hour, for it was the hour when she seemed most of all immense and vital, a body palpitating with warmth and energy, a mighty organism which would swallow the small and would sway even the greatest of men. Tears, bred of a curious undercurrent of emotion, came into Speed's eyes as he realised that he was now part of the marvellously contrived machine.

Out in the lane the moon was white along one side of the road-way, and here the lights of Millstead pierced through the foliage like so many bright stars. Speed walked with Clare in silence for some way. He had nothing particular to say; he had suggested accompanying her home partly from mere perfunctory politeness, but chiefly because he longed for a walk in the cool night air away from the stuffiness of the Head's drawing-room.

When they had been walking some moments Clare said: "I wish you hadn't come with me, Mr. Speed."

He answered, a trifle vacantly: "Why do you?"

"Because it will make Helen jealous."

He became as if suddenly galvanised into attention. "What! Jealous! Jealous!—Of whom?—Of what?—Of you having me to take you home?"

Clare shook her head. "Oh, no. Of you having me to take home."

He thought a moment and then said: "What, really?—Do you mean to tell me that——"

"Yes," she interrupted. "And of course you don't understand it, do you?—Men never understand Helen."

"And why don't they?"

"Because Helen doesn't like men, and men can never understand that."

He rejoined, heavily despondent: "Then I expect she dislikes me venomously enough. For it was I who asked her to play the piano, wasn't it?"

"She wouldn't dislike you any more for that," replied Clare. "But let's not discuss her. I hate gossiping about my friends."

They chattered intermittently and inconsequently about books after that, and at the corner of High Street she insisted on his leaving her and proceeding to the general post-office by the shortest route.

CHAPTER TWO I

In the morning he was awakened by Hartopp the School House porter ringing his noisy hand-bell through the dormitories. He looked at his watch; it was half-past six. There was no need for him to think of getting up yet; he had no early morning form, and so could laze for another hour if he so desired. But it was quite impossible to go to sleep again because his mind, once he became awake, began turning over the incidents of the day before and anticipating those of the day to come. He lay in bed thinking and excogitating, listening to the slow beginnings of commotion in the dormitories, and watching bars of yellow sunshine creeping up the bed towards his face. At half-past seven Hartopp tapped at the door and brought in his correspondence. There was a letter from home and a note, signed by the Head, giving him his work time-table. He consulted it immediately and discovered that he was put down for two forms that morning; four alpha in drawing and five gamma in general supervision.

His letter from home, headed "Beachings Over, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32. Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles," ran as follows:

 

"MY DEAR KEN,—This will reach you on the first morning of term, won't it, and your father and I both want you to understand that we wish you every success. It seems a funny thing to do, teaching in a boarding-school, but I suppose it's all right if you like it, only of course we should have liked you to go into the business. I hope you can keep order with the boys, anyhow, they do say that poor Mr. Rideaway in the village has an awful time, the boys pour ink in his pockets when he isn't looking. Father is going on business to Australia very soon and wants me to go with him, perhaps I may, but it sounds an outlandish sort of place to go to, doesn't it. Since you left us we've had to get rid of Jukes—we found him stealing a piece of tarpaulin—so ungrateful, isn't it, but we've got another under-gardener now, he used to be at Peverly Court but left because the old duke was so mean. Dick goes back to Marlborough to-day—they begin the same day as yours. By the way, why did you choose Millstead? I'd never heard of it till we looked it up, it isn't well-known like Harrow and Rugby, is it. We had old Bennett and Sir Guy Blatherwick with us the last week-end, Sir Guy told us all about his travels in China, or Japan, I forget which. Well, write to us, won't you, and drop in if you get a day off any time—your affectionate mother, FANNY."

 

After he had read it he washed and dressed in a leisurely fashion and descended in time for School breakfast at eight. Hartopp showed him his place, at the head of number four table, and he was interested to see by his plate a neatly folded Daily Telegraph. Businesslike, he commented mentally, and he was glad to see it because a newspaper is an excellent cloak for nervousness and embarrassment. His mother's hint about his being possibly a bad disciplinarian put him on his guard; he was determined to succeed in this immensely important respect right from the start. Of course he possessed the enormous advantage of knowing from recent experience the habits and psychology of the average public-schoolboy.

But breakfast was not a very terrible ordeal. The boys nearest him introduced themselves and bade him a cheerful good morning, for there is a sense of fairness in schoolboys which makes them generous to newcomers, except where tradition decrees the setting-up of some definite ordeal. Towards the end of the meal Pritchard walked over from one of the other tables and enquired, in a voice loud enough for at any rate two or three of the boys to hear: "Well, Speed, old man, did you have a merry carousal at the Head's last night?"

Speed replied, a little coldly: "I had a pleasant time."

"I suppose now," went on Pritchard, dropping his voice a little, but still not sufficiently to prevent the nearest boys from hearing, "you realise what I meant yesterday."

"What was that?"

"When I said that you'd find out soon enough what she was like."

Speed said crisply: "You warned me yesterday against talking shop. I might warn you now."

"But that isn't shop."

"Well, whether it is or not I don't propose to discuss it—now—and here."

Almost without his being aware of it his voice had risen somewhat, so that at this final pronouncement the boys nearest him looked up with curiosity tinged with poorly-concealed amusement. It was rather obvious that Pritchard was unpopular.

Speed was sorry that he had not exercised greater control over his voice, especially when Pritchard, reddening, merely shrugged his shoulders and went away.

The boy nearest to Speed grinned and said audaciously: "That'll take Mr. Pritchard down a peg, sir!"

Speed barked out (to the boy's bewilderment): "Don't be impertinent!"

For the rest of the meal he held up the Telegraph as a rampart between himself and the world.

II

He knew, at the end of the first school day, that he had been a success, and that if he took reasonable care he would be able to go on being a success. It had been a day of subtle trials and ordeals, yet he had, helped rather than hindered by his peculiar type of nervousness, got safely through them all.

Numerous were the pitfalls which he had carefully avoided. At school meals he had courteously declined to share jam and delicacies which the nearest to him offered. If he had he would have been inundated immediately with pots of jam and boxes of fancy cakes from all quarters of the table. Many a new Master at Millstead had finished his first meal with his part of the table looking like the counter of an untidy grocer's shop. Instinct rather than prevision had saved Speed from such a fate. Instinct, in fact, had been his guardian angel throughout the day; instinct which, although to some extent born of his recent public-school experience, was perhaps equally due to that curious barometric sensitiveness that made his feelings so much more acute and clairvoyant than those of other people.