The Passionate Year (5 page)

He did not sentimentalise over it. He was not old enough to think
regretfully of his own school-days. It was the present, the present leaning
longingly in the arms of the future, that wove its subtle and gracious spell.
He did not kindle to the trite rhapsodies of middle-aged “old boys.” The
“Thoughts of an Old Millsteadian on Revisiting the School Chapel,” published
in the school magazine, stirred him not at all. But to wander about on a dark
night and to find his feet beautifully at ease upon curious steps and
corridors gave him pangs of exquisite lover-like intimacy; he was a “new
boy,” eager for the future, not an “old boy” sighing for the past.

And all this was accomplished so swiftly and effortlessly, within a few
weeks of his beginning at the school it was as if Millstead had filled a void
in his soul that had been gaping for it.

Only one spot in the whole place gave him a feeling of discomfort, and
that was the Headmaster’s study. The feeling of apprehension, of sinister
attraction, that had come upon him when first he had entered it, lessened as
time and custom wore it away; yet still, secretly and in shadow, it was
there. All the sadness and pathos of a world seemed to be congregated in the
dark study, and to come out of it into the sunlit corridors of the school was
like the swift passing from the minor into the major key.

On Fridays he had an early morning form before breakfast and
then was completely free until four o’clock in the afternoon, so that if the
weather were sufficiently enticing he could fill the basket on his bicycle
‘with books and go cycling along the sweet-smelling sunlit lanes. Millstead
was just on the edge of the fen district; in one direction the flat lands
stretched illimitably to a horizon unbroken as the sea’s edge; a stern and
lonely country, with nothing to catch the eye save here and there the glint
of dyke-water amongst tall reeds and afar off some desert church-tower stiff
and stark as the mast of a ship on an empty sea. Speed did not agree with the
general Common-Room consensus of opinion that the scenery round Millstead was
tame and unattractive; secretly to him the whole district was rich with wild
and passionate beauty, and sometimes on these delectable Fridays he would
cycle for miles along the flat fen roads with the wind behind him, and return
in the afternoon by crawling romantic-looking branch-line trains which always
managed to remind him of wild animals, so completely had the civilised thing
been submerged in the atmosphere of what it had sought to civilise.

But that was only on one side of Millstead. On the other side, and beyond
the rook-infested trees that were as ramparts to the south-west wind, the
lanes curved into the folds of tiny hills and lifted themselves for a space
on to the ridge of glossy heaths and took sudden twists into the secrecies of
red-roofed tree-hidden hamlets. And amidst this country, winding its delicate
way beneath arches of overhanging greenery, ran the river Wade.

One Friday morning Speed cycled out to Parminters, a village about three
miles out of Millstead. Here there was a low hill (not more than a couple of
hundred feet), carpeted with springy turf and overlooking innumerable coils
of the glistening stream. At midday on a May morning there was something
indescribably restful, drowsy almost, in the scene; the hill dropped by a
sudden series of grassy terraces into the meadows, and there was quite a
quarter of a mile of lush grass land between the foot of the slope and the
river bank. It was an entrancing spectacle, one to watch rather than to see;
the silken droop of the meadows, the waves of alternate shadow and sunlight
passing over the long grasses, the dark patches on the landscape which
drifted eastwards with the clouds. The sun, when it pierced their white edges
and came sailing into the blue, was full of warmth and beauty, warmth that
awakened myriads of insects to a drowsy buzzing contentment and beauty that
lay like a soft veil spread across the world. Speed, with a bundle of four
alpha
geography essays in his pocket (he had, after all, decided that
he was competent to teach commercial geography to the lower forms), lay down
amongst the deep grass and lit a pipe.

He marked a few of the essays and then, smoking comfortably, settled to a
contented gaze across the valley. It was then, not until he had been there
some while, though, that he saw amidst the tall grasses of the meadows a
splash of blue in the midst of the deep green. It is strange that at first he
did not recognise her. He saw only a girl in a pale-blue dress stooping to
pick grasses. She was hatless and golden-haired, and in one hand she bore a
bunch of something purple, some kind of long grass whose name he did not
know. He watched her at first exactly as he might have watched some perfect
theatrical spectacle, with just that kind of detached admiration and rich
impersonal enchantment. The pose of her as she stooped, the flaunt of the
grasses in her hand, the movement of her head as she tossed back her laughing
hair, the winding yellow path she trampled across the meadows: all these
things he watched and strangely admired.

He lay watching for a long while, still without guessing who she was, till
the sun went in behind a cloud and he felt drowsy. He closed his eyes and
leaned back cushioned amongst the turf.

He woke with a sensation of intense chilliness; the sun had
gone in and even its approximate position in the sky could not be determined
because of the heaviness of the clouds. He looked at his watch; it was ten
minutes past one; he must have slept for over an hour.

The sky was almost the most sinister thing he ever saw. In the east a
faint deathly pallor hung over the horizon, but the piling clouds from the
west were pushing it over the edge of the world. That faint pallor dissolved
across the sky into the greyness deepening into a western horizon of pitch
black. Here and there this was shot through with streaks of dull and sombre
flame as if each of the hills in that dark land was a sulky volcano. It was
cold, and yet the wind that blew in from the gloom was strangely oppressive;
the grasses bent low as if weighed down by its passing. Deep in the cleft by
Parminters the river gleamed like a writhing venomous snake, the sky giving
it the dull shimmer of pewter. To descend across those dark meadows to the
coils of the stream seemed somehow an adventure of curious and inscrutable
horror. Speed stood up and looked far into the valley. The whole scene seemed
to him unnatural; the darkness was weird and baffling; the clouds were the
grim harbingers of a thunderstorm. And to him there seemed momentarily a
strangeness in the aspect of everything; something deep and fearsome,
imminent, perhaps, with tragedy. He felt within him a sombre presaging
excitement.

It began to rain, quietly at first, then faster, faster, and at last
overwhelmingly. He had brought no mackintosh. He stuffed the essays into his
coat pocket, swung his bicycle off the turf where he had laid it, and began
to run down the hill with it. His aim was to get to the village and shelter
somewhere till the storm was over. Halfway down he paused to put up his
coat-collar, and there, looking across the meadows, he saw again that girl in
the pale-blue dress. He was nearer to her now and recognised her immediately.
She was dressed in a loose-fitting and rather dilapidated frock which the
downpour of rain had already made to cling to the soft curves of her body;
round her throat, tightly twined, was a. striped scarf which Speed, quick to
like or to dislike what he saw, decided was absolutely and garishly ugly. And
yet immediately he felt a swift tightening of his affection for her, for
Millstead was like that, full of stark uglinesses that were beautiful by
their intimacy…She saw him and stopped. Details of her at that moment
encumbered his memory ever afterwards. She was about twenty yards from him
and he could see a most tremendous wrist-watch that she wore—an
ordinary pocket watch clamped on to a strap. And from the outside pocket of
her dress there protruded the chromatic cover of a threepenny novelette. (Had
she read it? Was she going to read it? Did she like it? he wondered swiftly.)
She still carried that bunch of grasses, now rather soiled and bedraggled,
tightly in her hand. He imagined, in the curiously vivid way that was so easy
to him, the damp feel of her palm; the heat and perspiration of it: somehow
this again, a symbol of secret and bodily intimacy, renewed in him that
sudden kindling affection for her.

He called out to her: “Miss Ervine!”

She answered, a little shyly: “Oh, how are you, Mr. Speed?”

“Rather wet just at present,” he replied, striding over the tufts of thick
grass towards her. “And you appear to be even wetter than I am. I’m afraid
we’re in for a severe thunderstorm.”

“Oh well, I don’t mind thunderstorms.”

“You ought to mind getting wet.” He paused, uncertain what to say next.
Then instinct made him suddenly begin to talk to her as he might have done to
a small child. “My dear young lady, you don’t suppose I’m going to leave you
here to get drenched to the skin, do you?”

She shrugged her shoulders and said: “I don’t know what you’re going to
do.”

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Well, I suggest that we get into the village as quick as we can and stay
there till the rain stops. I was also going to suggest that we spent the time
in having lunch, but as you don’t want anything, we needn’t.”

“But I don’t want to wait in the village, Mr. Speed. I was just going to
start for home when it came on to rain.”

Speed said: “Very well, if you want to get home you must let me take you.
You’re not going to walk home through a thunderstorm. We’ll have a cab or
something.”

“And do you really think you’ll get a cab in Par-minters?”

He answered: “I always have a good try to get anything I want to.”

For all her protests she came with him down the meadow and out into the
sodden lane. As they passed the gate the first flash of lightning lit up the
sky, followed five seconds after by a crash of thunder.

“There!” he exclaimed triumphantly, as if the thunder and lightning
somehow strengthened his position with her: “You wouldn’t like to walk to
Millstead through that, would you?”

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at him as if she hated his
interference yet found it irresistible.

It was altogether by good luck that he did get a cab in the
village; a Millstead cab had brought some people into Parminters and was just
setting back empty on the return journey when Speed met it in the narrow
lane. Once again, this time as he opened the cab-door and handed her inside,
he gave her that look of triumph, though he was well aware of the luck that
he had had. Inside on the black leather cushions he placed in a conspicuously
‘central position his hat and his bundle of essays, and, himself occupying
one corner, invited her to take the other. All the time the driver was
bustling round lifting the bicycle on to the roof and tying it securely down,
Speed sat in his corner, damp to the skin, watching her and remembering that
Miss Harrington had told him that she hated men. All the way during that
three-mile ride back to Millstead, with the swishing of the rain and the
occasional thunder and the steady jog-trot of the horse’s hoofs mingling
together in a memorable medley of sound, Speed sat snugly in his corner,
watching and wondering.

Not much conversation passed between them. When they were nearing
Millstead, Speed said: “The other day as I passed near your drawing-room
window I heard somebody playing the Chopin waltzes. Was it you?”

“It might have been.”

He continued after a pause: “I see there’s a Chopin recital advertised in
the town for next Monday week. Zobieski, the Polish pianist, is coming up.
Would you care to come with me to it?”

It was very daring of him to say that, and he knew it. She coloured to the
roots of her wet-gold hair, and replied, after a silence: “Monday, though,
isn’t it?—I’m afraid I couldn’t manage it. I always see Clare on
Mondays.”

He answered instantly: “Bring Clare as well then.”

“I—I don’t think Clare would be interested,” she replied, a little
confused. She added, as if trying to make up for having rejected his offer
rather rudely: “Clare and I don’t get many chances of seeing each other. Only
Mondays and Wednesday afternoons.”

“But I see you with her almost every day.”

“Yes, but only for a few minutes. Mondays are the only evenings that we
have wholly to ourselves.”

He thought, but did not dare to say: And is it absolutely necessary that
you must have those evenings wholly to yourselves?

He said thoughtfully: “I see.”

He said nothing further until the cab drew up outside the main gate of
Millstead School. He was going to tell the driver to proceed inside as far as
the porch of the Head’s house, but she said she would prefer to get out there
and walk across the lawns. He smiled and helped her out. As he looked inside
the cab again to see if he had left any papers behind he saw that the
gaudily-coloured novelette had fallen out of her pocket and on to the floor.
He picked it up and handed it to her. “You dropped this,” he said merely. She
stared at him for several seconds and then took it almost sulkily.

“I suppose I can read what I like, anyway,” she exclaimed, in a sudden hot
torrent of indignation.

He smiled, completely astonished, yet managed to say, blandly: “I’m sure I
never dreamt of suggesting otherwise.”

He could see then from her eyes, half-filling with tears of humiliation,
that she realised that she had needlessly made a fool of herself.

“Please—please—don’t come with me any further,” she said,
awkwardly. “And thanks—thanks—very much—for—for
bringing me back.”

He smiled again and raised his hat as she darted away across the wet
lawns. Then; after paying the driver, he walked straightway into the school
and down into the prefects’ bathroom, where he turned on the scalding hot
water with jubilant anticipation.