Adrian Glynde (20 page)

Adrian had grown much in the last two years. He was not, even now, big for his age, but the difference in size between him and this young fag was greater, much greater, than the difference between Ronny and him. And he was no longer the helpless victim of Commonroom. Quietly and unassumingly he had acquired a position there that the riot did not disturb. Besides, he was good at football. There was a chance that he might play for the house this term. This and his quiet inscrutability had gained for him the same respect that others gained by violent aggressiveness. He was looked upon as rather a queer bird, but quite all right. It was thought funny that, being good at footer, he should be so good at the piano. But that was a part of his queerness.
Piano-playing by itself—especially Adrian's kind of piano-playing, which was fearfully highbrow, superbly contemptuous of jazz and ragtime—would have been despicable; but even highbrow piano-playing was pardonable when backed by football-playing, and, when done so astonishingly well as Adrian did it, almost a little admirable. He joined Mr. Heller in a Sunday concert, a recital for two pianos, and later in the term gave a recital of his own at which there was an unusually large audience, for the most part made up of Taylor's boys, most of whom came out of curiosity. Even the unmusical ones were impressed, and the verdict was that he was a real pro., a damned sight better than Teddy and Old Hell.

Phipps told him so, and got little thanks from Adrian for the compliment.

“Shows how little you know about it, Flipper,” he said. “Better than Teddy, if you like. Who isn't? But Old Hell's a genius. I shan't cut him out for years, if ever.”

“Well, anyhow, you didn't half knock sparks out of the old box,” said Phipps.

“She's not got many sparks in her to knock,” said Adrian, still grimly resentful of the intractable old school piano.

“What, isn't she a good one? She seemed to make a hell of a noise.”

Adrian grinned. “She'd be all right as a steam-roller,” he said, “or a gas-meter, or a penny-in-the-slot machine, or … or a second-hand set of false teeth, but as a piano she's a bit … a bit out of her element.”

Adrian and Phipps were great friends. Phipps, round-faced, lively, inexhaustibly good-humoured, wide awake, but untroubled by an intellect, roused the gay and irresponsible in Adrian. In Phipps's company he felt
light-hearted and free, marvellously free. He talked cheerful nonsense to Phipps and Phipps received it with loud mirth. The cleft between his actual relationship with Ronny and his feelings for him often oppressed him. He began to realise now, as his mind matured, that his vague and impossible longings could never coincide with reality; that the Ronny of his dreams and the Dakyn with whom, even now, he was not on very intimate terms, were not, and, it seemed, never could be, the same person. This discovery produced in him intermittent fits of despair. He felt profoundly unsettled: he became moody and introspective. Yet he could not detach himself either from the real or the imaginary Dakyn. Both of them had become vital parts of his life.

Nor was this all that disturbed him. A ferment of growth seethed in the hidden places of his mind, new perceptions, new awarenesses, new desires, fed by his deeper knowledge of music and his keen and miscellaneous reading. All these things sprouted and pushed and struggled within him, and there was no one to whom he could talk of them. He felt sometimes as if they were about to rise up and choke him. But in his friendship with Phipps there was none of the stress and hungry dissatisfaction of his relation with Dakyn. Neither demanded of the other more than he received: when together they were free, gay, on equal terms. Though their point of contact was small, their encounters were vivid; like those of a couple of billiard-balls, they resulted in cheerful noise and stimulating shocks. He could not talk to Phipps of the things that germinated within him: if he were to do so, Phipps, he felt, would hardly know what he was talking about. But with Phipps he could escape from them, rest from them, throw off youth's perplexities and growing-pains and refresh himself in its cheerful simplicity. Only to look at Phipps's round,
red-cheeked, smiling face, his dancing, mischievous eyes, to come into contact with his high spirits and irrepressible energy, was a tonic and a holiday. He seemed to be always on the dance, always breathlessly eager, always up to one thing or another. He had many of the qualities that Adrian lacked. Shyness and diffidence were things unknown to him. He was ready for anything or anybody. In his cheerful amiability he was no respecter of persons, and in consequence people liked and respected him. Early in his career at Charminster he had been nicknamed Flipper, a name which suited him as well as his own. He was a kind of boy who invited a nickname, whereas it was typical of Adrian that he should have remained simply “Glynde “until now, when his friends began to call him Adrian. Dakyn, who in fatherly amusement at his small, compact demureness, had at first often called him “little man,” did so still, the title having, in the course of time, become in his mind a proper name; and the patronising endearment it implied was precious to Adrian, who—infatuated creature that he was—heard in it much more than Dakyn put into it.

Not that Dakyn was indifferent to Adrian. He felt for him an amused affection: he liked to have him about, to find him in his study when he went there. It pleased him to entice him out of his shyness, to draw him out and discover his unsuspected qualities, his liveliness and humour—the Glynde humour—which gradually, under the encouragement of their slowly growing intimacy, emerged in surprising flashes.

At the end of this term Adrian was promoted again. He was in the upper school now: the distance between him and Dakyn had diminished. He was no longer an insignificant child: he was no longer a child at all. He was only three inches less that Dakyn in height. This
closer approach to Dakyn, though it made Adrian extremely happy and diverted him from his tendency to depression and self-absorption, was unfortunate, for it narrowed the unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and the real, awoke again those romantic longings which he was beginning painfully to grow out of, and so postponed his chances of escape. Adrian himself knew it, but how could he deliberately turn his back on this unhoped-for gift of the gods. His starved heart could not bear to forego such chances of happiness, even though it should end, as he foresaw it would end, in misery. But even now it would be misery to reject it: in either case he was in for his portion of misery. Why not, then, recklessly grasp the happiness that waited ready to hand: though the later separation would be still more painful, the happiness he had enjoyed would enable him to bear it more stoutly. Separation was surely coming, for Dakyn was leaving Charminster at the end of the summer term. That prospect loomed like the mountainous pile of a distant storm on the far confines of this brief, radiant spring. At night before he fell asleep and when he awoke in the morning its ghostly presence stood by his bed, breathing the chill of death. It seemed to Adrian almost a foregone conclusion that when Dakyn left Charminster he would lose touch with him. Dakyn's gaiety and charm would attract a cluster of new friends, and he, in his free, easy fashion, would settle down within the new circle. Adrian thought of Ellenger. What, he wondered anxiously, had happened to him? He still wrote to Ronny, though, Adrian noticed, not so often; about once a fortnight now. But did Ronny ever reply? The answer to that question would have told him much, too much perhaps, for his peace of mind. What a couple of besotted fools they were, himself and Ellenger, Adrian thought to himself with a sigh. Other boys, breezy folk
like Flipper, or Ronny himself for that matter, were not bothered by this kind of thing. Flipper regarded it as a harmless lunacy, like piano-playing. The difference between Ronny and Flipper was that Ronny was quite ready to accept adoration, while Flipper would certainly have refused it with amiable but heavy-handed ridicule. Adrian smiled to himself as he imagined Flipper's reception of a worshipper: “Dip the headlights, old man. Switch off the
vox humana
, if you don't mind.” But actually the thing would never reach such explicitness with Flipper. He would have disposed of it at a much earlier stage by mere behaviour. Words would never be needed. No, a fellow who set his affections on Flipper would have a thin time of it; but not, in the end, so thin a time as Adrian himself was going to have, for at least his cure would have been a quick one.

When Easter came Oliver Glynde was abroad and Adrian spent the holidays at Yarn. His uncle and aunt thought him listless and moody, and Clara tried to rouse him, not without occasional success, by discreetly and indiscreetly poking fun at him. Bob's method was to ignore the change and treat him exactly as usual. “Don't bother him too much,” he said to Clara. “The boy's growing up.”

“I thought that growing up meant waking up,” said Clara, “but Adrian seems to be going to sleep.”

“Yes,
seems
,” said Bob. “But don't you believe it. When young people go to sleep outwardly, it generally means that there is a lot of waking up going on inside.”

“My dear Bob!”

Clara glanced at him, surprised, reflective, with raised eyebrows.

“It's a fact, Clara,” he said.

Clara smiled. “I take your word for it, my dear,” she said. Then after a meditative pause she added: “I wonder how many of our friends notice that, when it comes to human nature, you know about four times as much as I do.” Again she was silent, her eyebrows arched, her mouth set in the meditative, half-humorous placidity so typical of her. Then again her eyes and mouth grew animated. “The difference between you and me, Bob,” she said, “is that you camouflage your wisdom and I camouflage my ignorance. Most of our friends, I suspect, are like people walking about on a dark night. They bump against something large and solid, which the darkness prevents them from fully comprehending. That's you. Then they turn a corner and come upon a glittering, flashing, rather vulgar edifice which recalls the Crystal Palace. That's me. If they were to return by daylight they would find in place of the Crystal Palace a few scraps of burnt paper, a slight smell of gunpowder, and a vast flat wire skeleton, the wreckage of what the firework-makers call' a set piece'; and they would discover that what they had bumped into in the dark was … well, St. Alban's Abbey.”

Adrian came into the room at that moment, and Bob turned to him. “Adrian, what steps am I to take? Your aunt has just called me a cathedral.”

“That's nothing,” said Adrian. “Yesterday she said I was like Bond Street on a Sunday.”

“And there's no redress?”

“Not for me,” said Adrian, “because I am afraid that, as a matter of fact, I
was
.”

“Poor Adrian,” said Clara. “But you mustn't take too much notice of what I say. You should receive my talk as your grandfather does.”

“And how is that?” asked Adrian.

“He
selects
me,” said Clara; “and then edits me
with copious notes and glosses. I can see him doing it whilst I am talking to him, and the sight is both salutary and stimulating. But when I said you were like Bond Street on Sunday I wasn't complaining: I was only remarking. I didn't mean to imply that you were boring, my dear, but bored. However, it may very well be true that Bond Street is never itself, its true self, except on Sunday. So long as you're enjoying your holidays …!”

“Oh, I'm doing that all right,” said Adrian, and he meant what he said. Yet he could not have said that he was happy, nor, on the other hand, unhappy. The prospect of Ronny's leaving at the end of next term was almost continually present to his mind. He could neither forget nor fully realise it: his mind ached numbly, like chilled hands on a frosty day. He had foreseen that it would be so with him and had determined to provide against it, and so he had asked his aunt if he might hire a piano during the holidays. He would practise hard, he had resolved, at Bach—nothing but Bach, and he would work at a string trio which he had already been ruminating for some time. It was to be a birthday present for his grandfather.

Now the piano was duly bestowed in a room where it was inaudible from the other living-rooms, and every day he worked hard at his practising and composing.

Clara shook her head over both. “I don't know what the Glyndes are coming to,” she said. “For centuries they have been irreproachable Englishmen. Then your grandfather took to poetry and our eighteen or twenty generations of ancestors turned in their graves. Now, as if that were not enough, you threaten the family with a musician. Music, of course, is even more indecent than poetry. To a Glynde, a true Glynde, music implies concertinas, monkeys, and fleas, long hair, an aversion from soap and water, something almost Italian.”

“Do I understand,” replied Adrian, “that you are a true Glynde, Aunt Clara?”

“Half of me is,” she answered, “but the other half isn't: that is your grandfather's fault. He developed my mind, taught me to use my eyes and ears, to be independent, sceptical, discriminating, a disgusting thing to do to a little Glynde. And I was a very promising little Glynde, much more so than your father: so promising, in fact, that your grandfather was only partially successful. The feelings of a Glynde remain in me: they rise instinctively under the amused scrutiny of my father's daughter. I really do, Adrian, in my heart of hearts, think it shocking to write poetry and even prose, though I allow myself the indulgence of enjoying prose. As for music, it seems to me more shocking than either. One might as well walk naked in the streets or blurt out one's most intimate feelings in the Euston Road.”

“Then a true Glynde, I suppose,” said Adrian, “would never express any feelings.”

“Never,” said Clara; “or, rather, only in such a way as never to betray any. Ages ago, my dear Adrian, the Glyndes invented, as safeguards against the betrayal of feeling, a series of useful expressions, such as So sorry, Truly delighted, Kindest regards, Fondest love, and so on. All self-respecting English families have used them ever since, the Glyndes, of course, among them, until your grandfather betrayed us by breaking out into poetry. And now you, as you tell me, are actually exposing yourself in a string trio.”