The Passionate Year (9 page)

“Really?—A school story, you mean?”

“Yes. You see—I feel—oh, well—there’s a sort of
atmosphere about the place, if you know what I mean—a rather wonderful
sort of atmosphere. If somebody could only manage to express it in words
they’d make rather a fine story, I should think.”

Clanwell said: “Yes, I’ve known that atmosphere for a dozen years, but I’m
quite certain I could never write about it. And you think you could?”

“I thought of trying, anyway, Millstead in summertime”—Speed’s voice
quivered with rapture—“it’s simply divine!”

“But you haven’t seen it in winter-time yet. You can’t write a story about
one summer-term.”

“No.” Speed pondered, and said doubtfully: “No, I suppose not. It does
sound rather arrogant, doesn’t it, for me to talk of writing a school-story
about Millstead after a few weeks at it, while you, after a dozen years,
don’t feel equal to the task?”

“When one is young and in love,” declared Clanwell slowly, “one feels
arrogant.”

Speed laughed uproariously: it was as if Clanwell’s remark had let loose a
cataract of emotion in him. “You despise my condition a little, don’t you?”
he said.

“No,” answered Clanwell, “I don’t despise it at all: I just recognise it,
that’s all.” He paused and began again: “I wonder if you’ll let me speak to
you a trifle seriously, Speed, without getting offended with me?”

“Of course I will. Fire away!”

Clanwell knocked out his pipe on the bars of the empty firegrate and said,
rather curtly: “Don’t see too much of Miss Ervine.”

“What!”

Speed jerked forward in his chair and a sharp light entered his eyes.
Clanwell continued, unmoved: “You said yon weren’t going to get offended,
Speed. I hope you’ll keep your promise. Understand, I’ve nothing to say
against Miss Ervine at all, and if I had, I shouldn’t take on the job of
telling you about it. All that concerns me is just the matter of—of
expediency, if you like to put it that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just this. It doesn’t do you any good in the school to be seen
continually meeting her. The Common-Room, which liked you immensely at first
when you came, is just beginning to be slightly amused at you. And the boys
have noticed it, you may be sure. Probably you’ll find yourself beginning to
be ragged about it soon.”

“But I’m not frightened of being ragged.”

“Oh no, I daresay not…Still, I’ve said all I wanted to say. Don’t
forget, Speed, that you’re pledged not to take offence.”

“Oh, I’ll not do that.”

Just before Speed left Clanwell said: “I wouldn’t start that tale of
Millstead life just yet if I were you, Speed. Better wait till you’re out of
love, at any rate. After all, it’s rather a highly coloured Millstead that
you see at present, isn’t it?”

“You think I’m sentimental, eh?”

“My dear fellow, I think you’re by far the most sentimental chap I’ve ever
come across!—Don’t be hurt: it’s not a crime. But it’s just a bit of a
danger, especially in writing a school-story. That atmosphere you talk about
certainly
does
exist, and if I had the gift of self-expression I might
try to write about it. I can see it clearly enough, even though I’m not a
scrap in love, and even on the dreariest of days in the winter term. My
advice to you is to wait and see if you can do the same…Good night,
Speed!”

“Good night,” Speed called out, laughing.

Down Clanwell’s corridor and up the stone flight of stairs and along his
own corridor to the door of his own room his heart was thumping violently,
for he knew that as soon as he was alone he would be drenched in the wild,
tumultuous rapture of his own thoughts. Clanwell’s advice, hazily remembered,
faded before the splendour of that coming onrush; the whole interview with
Clanwell vanished as if it had never happened, as if there had been a sort of
cataleptic vacuum intervening between that scene by the Head’s gateway and
the climb upstairs to his room.

When he got to bed he could hardly sleep for joy.

Tim first thing that Clare Harrington said to him when they
met a few days later in Millstead High Street was: “Oh, congratulations, Mr.
Speed!”

“Congratulations?” he echoed. “What for?” She replied quietly: “Helen has
told me.”

He began to blush, and to hold his breath in an endeavour to prevent his
cheeks from reddening to an extent that, so he felt, would be observed by
passers-by. “Oh!” he gasped, with a half-embarrassed smile. Then, after a
pause, he queried: “What has she told you?”

And Clare answered: “That you are going to marry her.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed involuntarily, and he saw her eyes focussed on him
strangely. A slow sensation of warmth began to envelop him; joy rose round
him like a tide as he realised all the pivotal significance of what Clare had
said. He was going to marry Helen!—Strange that, even amidst his most
secret raptures, he had hardly dared to think of that! He had dreamed
exquisite and fragile dreams of her, dreams in which she was too fairy-like
and ethereal for marriage; doubtless, after some while, his ambitions would
have crystallised normally, but up to the present they had no anchorage on
earth at all. And to think that she had travelled in mind and intention more
swiftly and further than he, to think that she had dared to deduce the final
and ultimate reality, gave him, along with a surging overmastering joy, just
a faint tinge of disappointment as well. But the joy, deepening and
spreading, soon blotted out everything else: he sought Clare’s hand and
gripped it triumphantly. Tears were in his eyes and emotion clutching at his
voice as he said: “I’m—I’m glad—she’s told you. It’s—it’s
fine, isn’t it?—Don’t you think we shall be—happy?”

“You ought to be,” said Clare.

He struggled with the press of feeling for a moment and then said: “Oh,
let’s go into Mason’s and have a cup of coffee or something. I want to talk
to you.”

So they sat for a quarter of an hour at a little green-tiled table in
Mason’s highly respectable café. The room was over the shop, and besides
affording from the window a panoramic view of the High Street, contained a
small fire-grate, a framed picture of the interior of Mason’s Hygienic
Bakery, and a large ginger-and-white cat with kittens. Altogether it was a
most secluded and comfortable rendezvous.

All the while that they conversed he was but slowly sizing up the
situation and experiencing little alternating wafts of disappointment and
exhilaration. Disappointment, perhaps, that he had not been left the
bewitching task of bringing Helen’s mind, along with his own, out of the
clouds and mists of dreams; exhilaration also, because her mind, womanishly
direct, had evidently not needed such guidance.

He talked rhapsodically to Clare; lashed himself, as it were, into a state
of emotional fervour. He seemed eager to anticipate everything that anybody
could possibly say to Helen’s disadvantage, and to explain away the whole; it
was as if he were championing Helen against subtle and inevitable
disparagements. Once or twice he seemed to realise this, and to realise that
he was defending where there was no attack, and then he stopped, looked
confused, and waited for Clare to say something. Clare, as a matter of fact,
said very little, and when she spoke Speed took hardly any notice, except,
perhaps, to allow her words to suggest to him some fresh rhapsodical
outbreak. He said, in a sudden outpouring: “Of course I know she’s only a
child. That’s the wonderful charm of her—part of the wonderful charm,
at any rate. Some people might say she wasn’t clever, but she is
really
, you know. I admit she doesn’t show up very well in company,
but that’s because she’s nervous.
I’m
nervous and
I
don’t show
up well. She’s got an acute little brain though. You should hear the things
she says sometimes. Simple little things, some people might think, but
really, when you think about them, they’re clever. Of course, she hasn’t been
educated up to a good many things, but then, if she had been, she wouldn’t
have kept her child-like simplicity, would she?—She’s very quick at
picking things up, and I’m lending her heaps of books. It’s the most
beautiful job in the world, being teacher to her. I’m rapturously happy about
it and so is she. I could never stand these empty-headed society kind of
women who can jabber superficially in drawing-rooms about every subject under
the sun, and really, you know, haven’t got an original idea in their heads.
Helen has the most wonderful and childlike originality, you know. You’ve
noticed it yourself, I daresay. Haven’t you noticed it?—Yes, I’m sure
you must have. And to think that she really does want to marry me!”

“Why shouldn’t she want to marry you?” interjected Clare, but that was one
of the remarks of which he took little notice. He went on eagerly: “I don’t
know what the Head will think when he gets to know about it. Most probably
he’ll be fearfully annoyed. Clanwell warned me the other night.
Apparently”—a faint touch of bitterness came into his
voice—“apparently it isn’t the thing to treat your Headmaster’s
daughter with anything but the most distant reserve.”

“Another question,” said Clare shrewdly, “is what
your
people will
think about it.”

“My people,” he replied, again with the note of bitterness in his voice,
“will probably do what they have always done whenever I have proposed taking
any fresh step in life.”

“I can guess what that is. They oppose you, eh?”

“Oh, not absolutely that. They recognise my right to do what I want, but
they think I’m a fool, all the same. They don’t quarrel with me. They just go
on wishing I was like my elder brother.”

“What is he?”

“He works in my father’s office in town. My father, you know”—he
became suddenly confidential in tone—“is a rather typical sort of
business-man. Materialist outlook—wanted me to manage a soap-works. We
never got on absolutely well together. When I told him I was going to get a
mastership at a public school he thought I was mad.”

“And what will he think when you tell him you are going to marry the
Headmaster’s daughter?”

He looked at her curiously, for the first time intent upon her personally,
for something in the way she had uttered that last question set up in him the
suspicion that she was laughing at him. A careful scrutiny of her features,
however, revealed no confirmation: he looked away again, shrugged his
shoulders, and said: “Probably he’ll think I’m madder than ever.”

She gave him a curious glance with uptilted lips which he could not
properly interpret. “Anyway,” she said, quietly, “I shouldn’t tell him that
Helen’s a child.”

“Why not?”

Clare gave him again that curious, uninterpretable glance. “Because she
isn’t, that’s all.”

He was recovering from his surprise and was about to say something when
she interrupted him with, perhaps, the first touch of animation that had so
far distinguished her side of the conversation. “I told you,” she said, “on
the first night of term that you didn’t understand Helen. And still you
don’t. If you did, you’d know that she was a woman, not a child at all.”

“I wish you’d explain a little—”

“It doesn’t need any explanation. You either know it or don’t know it.
Apparently you
don’t
know it…And now, Mr. Speed, I’m afraid I’ll
have to go—I can’t leave the boy to manage the shop by himself all
morning.”

Speed had the sensation that she was slightly out of patience with
him.

Clare brought him to earth; his dreams crumpled when he was
with her; his emotional outlook sagged, as it were, with the perhaps imagined
pricklings of her shrewdness. He hated her, ever so slightly, because he felt
sometimes between her and himself a subtle and secret hostility, a hostility
in which, because of her cool imperturbability, she had all the advantage.
But when he was not with her his imagination soared and flamed up higher than
ever; it was a fire that Clare’s temperament could only make sulky. Those
final weeks of the summer term were glorious beyond words. He took Clanwell’s
advice to the extent of not meeting Helen on the school premises, but hardly
a day passed without some wonderful and secret assignation; the two of them
would arrange afternoon excursions together, picnics, at Parminters, strolls
along the Millstead road at dusk. It was all deeply and inexpressibly lovely.
He told her a great many of his own dreams and ambitions, making her share
them with him; she kindled aptly to his own enthusiasms, readily as a child
might have done. For he was certain that Clare was wrong in that: Helen was
only a child. To marry her seemed a thing of almost unearthly delicacy; he
found himself pitying her sometimes because of the future. Above all, that
she should wish to marry him, that her love should be capable of such a
solemn and ineffable desire, seemed to him nearly a miracle. “Fragile little
thing!” he said to her once, as he kissed her—“I’m almost afraid of
breaking you!”—She answered, in that wistful childlike voice that was
perhaps incongruously sombre in tone: “
Am
I fragile?”

Once, towards dusk, they met the Head along the Millstead road. He raised
his hat and passed them, muttering: “Taking an—um—stroll,
Helen—um—beautiful evening—um, yes—good evening, Mr.
Speed!”

He wore the air of being marvellously discreet.

Conversation at dinner in the Masters’ Common-Room turned
one evening upon Harrington. “Old Harrington’s pretty bad again,” Pritchard
had said. “I heard in the town to-day that he’d had another stroke.”

Speed, curiously startled by the utterance of the name, exclaimed: “What,
the Harringtons who keep the bookshop?—I didn’t know he was ill.”

“Been ill ever since I can remember,” replied Pritchard laconically.

Then Speed remembered something that the Head had once told him about
Harrington being a littérateur and an author of books on ethics.