The Passionate Year (3 page)

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 necessarily 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.

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 cant 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 yon. 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.

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
marvelously 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.

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 yon get a
day off any time—your affectionate mother, FANNY.”