The Passionate Year (10 page)

“I never met him,” he said, tentatively, seeking to guide the conversation
into a discussion of the man.

Pritchard, ever ready to follow up a lead given to him, remarked: “You
missed something, then. He was quite a character. Used to teach here once,
you know.”

“Really?”

“Used to
try
to, anyway, when they’d let him. Couldn’t keep any
sort of discipline. During his first prep they poured ink down his neck.”

“Pritchard needn’t talk,” interposed Clanwell, laughing. “During
his
first prep they mixed carbide and water under his chair.” The rest
of the Common-Room among whom Pritchard was no favourite, joined in the
laughter. Then Clanwell took up the thread, kinder in his narrative than
Pritchard had been. “I liked Harrington. He was a good sort, but he wasn’t
made for a schoolmaster. I told him so, and after his breakdown he took my
advice and left the profession.”

“Breakdown?” said Speed. “He had a breakdown then?”

“Yes, his wife died when his daughter was born. He never told us anything
about it. One morning he collapsed over a four
alpha
English form. I
was next door. I was used to a row, but the terrible pandemonium made me
wonder if anything had happened. I went in and found the little devils giving
him sportive first-aid. They’d half undressed him My word!—I picked out
those that were in my house and gave them a tidy thrashing. Don’t you
remember, Lavery?”

“I remember,” said the indolent Lavery, “you trying to persuade me to do
the same with my little lot.”

“But Harrington?” queried Speed, anxious that the conversation should not
be diverted into other channels.

“Oh, well,” resumed Clanwell, “he left Millstead and took to—shall
we call it literature?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?—” Clanwell laughed. “D’you mean to tell me you
haven’t heard of Samuel Harrington, author of the famous
‘Helping-Hand-Books’?”

“I haven’t.”

“Then I must lend you one or two of them. They’ll do you good. Lavery and
I attribute our remarkable success in life to our careful study of them,
don’t we, Lavery?”

“Do we, Clanwell?”

Ransome, wizened and Voltairish, and agreeable company when stirred to
anecdote, began: “Ah! ‘How to be Powerful’ was the best, though I think ‘How
to Become a Dominating Personality’ was pretty good. The drollest of all was
‘How to Meet Difficulties.’ Speed has a treat in store if he hasn’t read
them. They’re all in the School-library. The fellow used to send the Head
free autographed copies of each one of them as it appeared.”

Ransome, rarely beguiled into conversation, always secured a respectful
audience. After a silence he went on: “I used to know old Harrington pretty
well after he took to—writing. He once told me the entire circumstances
of his début into the literary profession. It was rather droll.”

Ransome paused, and Speed said: “I’d like to hear it.”

A murmur of assent followed from the rest, and Ransome, not without
pleasure at the flattery of his being eagerly listened to, crumbled a piece
of bread by his plate and resumed. “He told me that one morning after he’d
left Millstead he was feeling especially miserable and having a breakfast of
tea and dry bread. So he
said
, anyway. Remember that, at that time, he
had a baby to look after. The postman brought him, that morning, a letter
from an old school friend of his, a rector in Somerset, asking him if he
would care to earn half-a-guinea by writing for him an address on
‘Self-Control’ for the Young Women’s Sunshine Club at Little Pelthing,
Somerset. I remember the name of the club and the village because I remember
they struck me as being rather droll at the time. Harrington said the letter,
or part of it, went something like this: ‘I have just become the proud father
of a most wonderful little baby boy, and you can imagine how infernally busy
as well as infernally happy I am. Could you oblige me with an address on
“Self-Control”?—You were always rather good at dashing off essays when
we were at school. The address should have a strong moral flavour and should
last from half-an-hour to forty minutes.’…Well, Harrington sat down to
write that address on ‘Self-Control.’ He told me that he knew all that
anybody need know about self-control, because he was using prodigious
quantities of it all the time he was writing. Anyway, it was a fine address.
The Reverend Henry Beauchamp Northcroft—another name droll enough to be
remembered—delivered it to the united assembly of the Little Pelthing
Young Women’s Sunshine Club, and everybody said it was the finest and most
inspiring address they had ever heard from his lips. It glowed, as it were,
from within; it radiated hope; it held a wonderful and sublime message for
mankind. And, in addition, it lasted from half-an-hour to forty minutes. Nor
was this all. A wealthy and philanthropic lady in the Reverend Henry
Beauchamp Northcroft’s congregation—Harrington
did
tell me her
name, but I suspect it was not droll enough for me to remember
it—suggested that, at her expense, the address should be printed and
published in pamphlet form. With Harrington’s consent this was done, and, so
he told me, no fewer than twenty-five thousand copies of ‘Self-Control’ were
despatched to various centres in England, America, the Colonies, and on board
His Majesty’s ships.”

“Do you believe all this?” exclaimed Clanwell, laughing, to the
Common-Room in general.

“Whether you believe it or not,” replied Ransome, severely, “it’s
sufficiently droll for it to be worth hearing. And a large part of it is
true, at any rate.”

“Go on then,” said Clanwell.

Ransome (spreading himself out luxuriously), went on: “It seemed to
Harrington that having, to put it vulgarly, scored a fine though anonymous
bull’s-eye with Self-Control,’ he might, with profit, attempt to do similar
business on his own account. Accordingly, he wrote a collection of some
half-dozen didactic essays on such subjects as ‘Immortality,” Health and
Wealth,’ The Art of Happiness,’ and so on, and sent them to a well-known
publisher of works on religion and ethics. This fellow, after a most
unethical delay of several months, returned them with his curt regrets and
the information that such stuff was a drug on the publishing market. Then
Harrington, nothing in the least daunted, sent them straightway off again to
a publisher of sensational novels. This last gentleman, he
was
a
gentleman, for he replied almost immediately, agreeing to publish if Mr.
Harrington would—I’m quoting hazily from the letter which Harrington
showed me—if he would ‘under-take to supply a further eighteen essays
to make up a book of the customary eighty-thousand-word length.’—‘You
have a distinct vein of humour,’ wrote Mr. Potts, of Larraby and Potts,
Limited—that was the firm—‘and we think your work would be very
saleable if you would throw off what appears to be a feeling of
restraint.’—So I guess Harrington just threw off this feeling of
restraint, whatever exactly it was, and began on those eighteen essays…I
hope this tale isn’t boring you.”

“Not at all!”—“Go on!”—came the chorus. Ransome smiled.

“There isn’t much to go on to. The book of essays was called Sky-Signs,’
and it was reviewed rather pleasantly in some of the papers. Then followed
‘About It and About,’ a further bundle of didactic essays which ran into five
editions in six months. And then ‘Through my Lattice Window,’ which was the
sort of book you were not ashamed to take into the pew with you and read
during the offertory, provided, of course, that it was handsomely bound in
black morocco. And lastly came the Helping-Hand-Books, which Mr. Speed must
read if he is to consider his education complete. That’s all. The story’s
over.”

After the first buzz of comment Speed said: “I suppose he made plenty of
money out of that sort of thing?”

Ransome replied: “Yes, he made it and then he lost it. He dabbled in
finance and had a geometrical theory about the rise and fall of rubber
shares. Then he got plentifully in debt and when his health began to give way
he took the bookshop because he thought it would be an easy way to earn
money. He’d have lost on that if his daughter hadn’t been a born
business-woman.”

“But surely,” said Clanwell, “the money kept on trickling in from his
books?”

Ransome shook his head. “No, because he’d sold the copyrights for cash
down. He was a child in finance. But all the same he
knew
how to make
money. For that you should refer to his book ‘How to be Successful,’
passim
. It’s full of excellent fatherly advice.”

Ransome added, with a hardly perceptible smile: “There’s also a chapter
about Courtship and Marriage. You might find it interesting, Mr. Speed.”

Speed blushed furiously.

Afterwards, strolling over to the House with Clanwell, Speed said: “I say,
was that long yarn Ransome told about Harrington true, do you think?”

Clanwell replied: “Well, it may have been. You can never be quite certain
with Ransome, though. But he does know how to tell a story, doesn’t he?”

Speed agreed.

Late that night the news percolated, somehow or other, that old Harrington
was dead.

Curious, perhaps, that Speed, who had never even seen the
man, and whose knowledge of him was derived almost solely from Ransome’s
“droll” story, should experience a sensation of personal loss! Yet it was so,
mysteriously and unaccountably: the old man’s death took his mind further
away from Millstead than anything had been able to do for some time. The
following morning he met Helen in the lane outside the school and his first
remark to her was: “I say, have you heard about old Harrington?”

Helen said: “Yes, isn’t it terrible?—I’m so sorry for Clare—I
went down to see her last night. Poor Clare!”

He saw tears in her eyes, and at this revelation of her abounding pity and
warm-heartedness, his love for her welled up afresh, so that in a few seconds
his soul was wholly in Millstead again. “You look tired, Helen,” he said,
taking her by the arm and looking down into her eyes.

Then she burst into tears.

“I’m all right,” she said, between gulps of sobbing. “It’s so sad, though,
isn’t it?—Death always frightens me. Oh, I’m so sorry for Clare. Poor
darling Clare!…Oh, Kenneth—I
was
miserable last night when I
came home. I didn’t know what to do, I was so miserable. I—I
did
want to see you, and I—I walked along the garden underneath Clanwell’s
room and I heard your voice in there.”

He said, clasping her arm tightly: “Yes, I went to Clanwell for coffee
after prep.”

She went on pathetically: “You sounded so happy—I heard you
laughing. Oh, it was terrible to hear you laughing when I was miserable!”

“Poor little child!”—He bent down suddenly and kissed her eyes.
“What a sad and forlorn little girl you are this morning!—Don’t yon
guess why I’m so happy nowadays?”

“Why are you?”

He said, very slowly and beautifully: “Because of you. Because you have
made my life utterly and wonderfully different. Because all the beauty in the
world reminds me of you. When I wake up in the morning with the sun on my
face I want to roar with laughter—I don’t know why, except that I’m so
happy.”

She smiled gratefully and looked up into his face with large, tender eyes.
“Sometimes,” she said, “beauty makes me want to cry, not to laugh. Last
night, in the garden, everything was so lovely, and yet so sad. Don’t you
think beautiful things are sad sometimes?”—She paused and went on, with
less excitement: “When I went in, about ten o’clock, I was so miserable I
went in the dining-room to be alone. I was crying and father came in.”

“Well?” he whispered, eagerly.

“He wanted to know what was the matter.”

“And you told him about Clare’s father, I suppose?”

“No,” she answered. “Don’t be angry,” she pleaded, laying a hand on his
arm. “I don’t know what made me do it—I suppose it was instinct.
Anyway, yon were going to, soon, even if I hadn’t. II told father
about—us!”

“You did?”

“Yes. Don’t be angry with me.”

“My darling, I’m not angry with you. What did he say?”

She came so close to him that he could feel her body trembling with
emotion. “He didn’t mind,” she whispered. “He didn’t mind at all. Kenneth,
aren’t you glad?—Isn’t it fine of him?”

“Glorious!” he answered, taking a deep breath. Again the tide of joy
seemed to engulf him, joy immense and stupefying. He would have taken her in
his arms and kissed her had he not seen people coming along the lane. “It’s
wonderful, Helen!” he whispered. Then some secondary thought seemed to strike
him suddenly: he said: “But why were you miserable a little while ago? Didn’t
the good news make you feel happy?”

She answered, still with a touch of sadness: “I didn’t know whether you
would think it was good news.”—“Helen!” he exclaimed remonstratively,
clasping her tightly to him: she went on, smiling at him: “Yes, it’s silly of
me, isn’t it?—But Kenneth, Kenneth, I don’t know how it is, I’m never
quite certain of you—there’s always a funny sort of fear in my mind! I
know it’s silly. I can’t help it, though. Perhaps it will all be different
some day.”

“Some day!” he echoed, gazing into her uplifted eyes.

A vision, secret and excruciatingly lovely, filled their eyes for a
moment. He knew then that to marry her had become his blinding and passionate
ambition.

The
Millstead and District Advertiser
had a long and
sympathetic appreciation of the late Mr. Samuel Harrington in its first July
issue. The Helping-Hand-Books were described as “pleasant little homilies
written with much charm and humour.” Speed took one or two of them out of the
School Library and read them.

About a week after the funeral he called at the shop, ostensibly to buy a
book, but really to offer his condolences. He had been meaning to go, for
several days in succession, but a curious dread of an interview with Clare
had operated each time for postponement. Nor could he understand this dread.
He tried to analyse it, to discover behind it any conceivable reason or
motive; but the search was in vain. He was forced to suppose, vaguely, that
the cause of it was that slight but noticeable temperamental hostility
between himself and Clare which always resulted in a clouding over of his
dreams.