The Charioteer (3 page)

“He’s the worst drip we’ve had in years,” Carter pursued. “And anyway, it’s hardly quite the moment, when you come to think.”

“Think what of?” Laurie put his feet on the table and rocked the back legs of his chair.

“You don’t mean you’ve not heard?” Carter had so far been only at the receiving end of a sensational stop press. He dashed into it headlong. “Jeepers is happy at last. He’s really found something. This is the stink to end all stinks for all time. There’s going to be hell let loose in this House by tomorrow.”

Laurie brought his feet down with a clump, and shoved back his chair. “Look here,” he said. “No, this is getting not to be funny. He’ll turn this place into a loony-bin, before he’s done. He ought to be analyzed. Doesn’t he ever think about anything else?”

“Shut up and let—”

“How for heaven’s sake did he ever get given a House? Know what Jones II told me? Jeepers went down to the bogs yesterday and threw a school blazer over one of the doors, and sat locked in there all the time the changing was going on, to see if the conversation was pure. It’s too bad he’s got such big feet.”

“Well, that’s nothing to—”

“Nothing is it?” said Laurie, whom something had rendered perverse. In this mood he was apt to become Irish. His brogue, however, was of literary origin, consisting of stock phrases carefully acquired. The Celtic period had set in about eighteen months ago; he had even gone through a phase, till stopped, of spelling his name O’Dell, and had opted out of the O.T.C., which was theoretically allowed but almost never done except by boys with rheumatic hearts. At about this time, his mother had been receiving attentions from a retired colonel; but, in the end, nothing had come of it.

“Sure, then,” he continued, “it’s more than enough for me.” Forgetting about it, he dropped back into English. “If Lanyon weren’t the best Head the House has had in years, the place would just be a sewer. I can’t think how he sticks Jeepers without going nuts.”

“Well,” said Carter, triumphantly getting it out at last, “he won’t have to much longer.”

Laurie stared, abruptly sobered up. Presently he said, “Why not?”

“Because he’s due for the sack, as soon as the Head comes back from London tomorrow.”

“Lanyon?”
Laurie sat with empty face and dropped jaw; turned; stared at Carter; saw that he meant it. “Whatever for?”

Carter shrugged his shoulders, expressively.

“Look,” said Laurie, “if this is a joke, I’ve laughed now, ha-ha. Is it?”

“Far from it for Lanyon, I should think. They say he’s shut up in the isolation ward in the sicker, and they’re only letting him out to pack his room.”

There was a short silence. Presently Laurie said slowly, “Jeepers ought to be in a strait waistcoat. Is he drunk, or loopy, or what?”

“Personally,” said Carter, with some reluctance, “I think Lanyon’s cooked. It seems Hazell went to Jeepers about him.”

“
Hazell?
Hazell, did you say? Don’t make me laugh. Everyone knows Hazell. Hazell, I ask you. They never ought to have sent him to a proper school. He ought to be at one of these crank places where they run about naked and have their complexes gone over every day. Hazell, of all things. Good Lord, Lanyon only keeps an eye on him because he’s such a misfit and people were giving him hell. No one would be surprised if Hazell came down one morning saying he was Mussolini, or a poached egg.”

“He may be a drip, but he isn’t absolutely ravers. You know that go of religion he had last term. When he had that rosary. You know. I should think now he’s had a go of this Buchman thing, where they confess everything in public. Anyway that’s what he did. Not in public, pity he didn’t, he could have been shut up. Then afterwards he got cold feet, and went bleating off to Somers, I don’t know why Somers, to confess he’d confessed. So everyone knows now.”

“Hazell would confess to anything. It’s a thing people have. When there’s been a murder, dozens of loonies write up and confess to it. It’s well known. I bet he didn’t confess to Lanyon, anyway.”

“He asked Somers whether he ought to, Green says.”

Laurie got up abruptly from the table. He knew the feeling, though he hadn’t had it for years: exalted, single-minded rage. Laurie was all for moderation, as people can be who have learned early some of their more painful capacities. It had become an accepted fact that nothing ever ruffled Spuddy. He had enjoyed this reputation, so inwardly reassuring, and made the most of it. This was different. He felt, suddenly, the enormous release of energy which comes when repressed instincts are sanctioned by a cause. Down Hamlet, up Antony. Over thy wounds now do I prophesy.

“Something,” said Laurie, “has darn well got to be done about this.”

Carter looked uncomfortable. Laurie’s tacitly acknowledged position as a leader of public opinion had been founded not on spectacular escapades, which in real life are often a nuisance, but by a quiet positiveness and a knack of settling other people’s quarrels without getting involved in them. This irrational incandescence wasn’t in the contract. “Well, but—”

“Well, but what? At our age where d’you think we’d be if our people were poor? Doing men’s jobs and belonging to unions and sticking together. If we were in a mine or something, and a chap got the sack who didn’t deserve to, we’d call a strike till they reinstated him. Well—this is worse.”

“Yes, well, but—” Carter looked increasingly uncomfortable; there were times when Spuddy seemed not to see where to stop. “I mean, when miners strike they state their grievances, don’t they, and all that? You could hardly jump up in the Day Room and make a speech about this sort of thing.”

“Why on earth not, if Lanyon can be sacked for it? That’s how people like Jeepers get away with what they do. It’s playing into his hands.”

“Do wake up, Spud.” Earnestness and embarrassment made Carter’s voice leap from the lower register to a cracked alto. “You know perfectly well you’re just talking for the sake of it. How could you possibly go making a b.f. of yourself in front of the whole House? If you run round talking about strikes, they’ll think you’ve been reading a boys’ comic or something. And if you did manage to start anything, it would only raise the most appalling stink. And this is about the last House that can afford it.”

“But we can all afford to sit tight while Lanyon gets kicked out of the back door in a whisper. After all he’s done pulling the place together. How many years since the last time this House put up a Head of the School? No one remembers. You make me sick. Will you come in if the others do?”

“What others? They’d think you were nuts. Half of them wouldn’t know what you were talking about, even.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ll bet you ten bob, if you like, there’s not a living soul in the place who wouldn’t know. All Jeepers’ tactful little talks about clean living. You can spot the clean livers afterwards, beetling off to ask whoever’s got the dirtiest mind they know what it was all about. It would just about serve Jeepers right.”

“But that’s not the
point
,” said Carter helplessly. It wouldn’t
get
anywhere. And it wouldn’t do Lanyon any good. Anything but, I should think.”

His will kicked impotently at Laurie’s obtuseness. He propped his big-jointed, awkward frame against the mantelshelf with a knobby hand, and rubbed a patch of acne on his chin. He was of an age to find male good looks mentionable only by way of a joke, and in respect of one’s friends not at all. Only pressure of circumstances made him admit even to himself that he thought Laurie strikingly handsome. Carter, who would come into a fine presence in a few years’ time, did not perceive that Laurie had merely escaped, or got over early, the more unsightly physical disturbances of adolescence. Between now and, say, eighteen, he would be at the climacteric of his looks, such as they were. The auburn lights in his hair were darkening already, and their copper would dim to bronze. His coloring would lose its vivacity; he would remain clean-looking, no doubt, with hair of a pleasant texture, soft and crisp; on the strength of his mouth and eyes, people would describe his face vaguely as nice. Carter could hardly be expected just now to consider this prospect.

“I mean,” he said, doing his best within the limits of decency, “when a row starts in a House they always get to know who’s at the bottom of it. If they didn’t think you were bats, they might think—”

“Shut
up
,” said Laurie, who had not been listening. “I’m working something out. Oh, boy, I’ve got it!”

“Now look here, Spud.” The telepathic message which Carter was straining to convey was, “Lanyon likes you, and other people have noticed it if you haven’t.” But Spud must know this, he wasn’t a fool; since he would talk, it seemed, about anything, why couldn’t he think? “Now just calm down and—”

“Shut up and listen. This is what we do. A protest meeting’s not enough, you’re right there, what we want is more of a sort of psychological war. Now the whole thing about Jeepers is that he’s terrified of scandal. It’s himself he has cold feet about, really, and his job. So that’s where we hit him. We’ll just all go along to him in a body and say the whole House is immoral, one and all, and we’ve come to confess like Hazell did. Then he won’t sack anyone, he’ll fall over himself to hush it up. Even if it got to the Head,
he’d
have to hush it up. He might sack Jeepers, and good riddance too. It’s foolproof. It—”

“Oh,
really,
Spud. For heaven’s sake.” Overwhelmed, Carter struck for the first time the
basso profundo
of his adult voice. A moment’s partial enlightenment touched him, eluding his terms of speech. He recognized a paradox: the surface acceptance of unimagined evil, the deep impenetrability of a profound innocence. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes I do; it’s absolutely sound psychology. They couldn’t sack Lanyon without sacking the rest of us, and they can’t sack a whole House without ruining the School. And as for Jeepers, it serves him right. The way he puts ideas into people’s heads, nothing that went on here would astonish
me
.”

Wouldn’t it? thought Carter to himself. Perhaps other people too were a little bit careful what they told Spuddy. “Seriously, how could you possibly expect people to stand up and say—”

“What
of
it? Everyone’s immoral. It’s immoral you doing my maths, or me doing your French prose. We can’t help Jeepers’ one-track mind.”

Emergency had inspired Carter to psychological tactics of his own. “You know what he’ll think it means, so it’s a lie; you can’t get out of that”

“Yes,” said Laurie at once. “But then it’s a lie about Lanyon too, so it cancels out. You know, in Euclid: then A equals B, which is absurd, Q.E.D.”

To Carter this offered for the first time some promise of reason. “Well, that might be all right if”—touched by a sudden loss of confidence, he swallowed quickly—“if we were certain it
is
a lie about Lanyon. I mean, we don’t
know.
”

Laurie, who was sitting on the table, didn’t get up. He looked at Carter with no conscious effort at annihilation. He simply felt what his face expressed, that the world was a meaner place than he had supposed, but that one got nowhere by making a fuss about it. Carter withered; he felt rubbishy, a mess of poorly articulated bones in an unsavory envelope. He said, “Of course, I don’t mean to say—”

“It’s all right,” said Laurie, with unconsciously devastating quiet. “I’m sorry I said anything. My mistake. I should forget all about it if I were you. I’ll manage on my own.”

He went out, through the window. It might have been more effective to use the door; but he didn’t want to be effective, merely to be rid of Carter; and the very transparency of this fact completed his effect.

Laurie took a turn around Big Field, and, finding it was almost tea-time, bought a bottle of lemonade at the tuck shop and half a dozen buns in a bag before setting out again. These he took to a retreat of his behind a haystack, slightly out of bounds, where he spent the next hour or so planning his campaign. By the time he turned homeward, shadows were lengthening on the grass. He wished he could do it all now, before he started to cool off. When one started to think of difficulties, they cropped up. But there was prep to finish, and Harris, who would be in the study by now, to be rallied to the cause. A pity Carter would have had time to get at him first.

As he walked the last lap to the House, Laurie realized sinkingly that the last of his effervescence had subsided, and that from now on only stone-cold will-power would push him through. He wished, for the first time in nearly four years, that during the next hour the School could be burnt down.

From the study window he heard Harris saying, “Get your eyes seen to. Odell’s there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Harris.” The small boy at the door took a nervous step into the room. “Please, Odell, Lanyon says will you see him in his study, please?”

“What, now?” drawled Laurie with the calm convention expected. For a moment this summons—which usually meant trouble of a disciplinary kind—only struck him as embarrassingly ill-timed. It wasn’t till the fag had gone that he saw Harris looking at him, and Carter at the floor. There was a dragging silence where the usual pleasantries should have been.

Laurie remarked casually, “What the heck does
he
want, I wonder?” and, as no one answered, went out into the corridor. For this purpose it was in order to use the door.

At the foot of the stairs, surrounded by dark green paint of the resistant kind used in station waiting rooms, he stood still. This, he knew with a certainty exceeding all the other certainties of the day, was the most awful thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Carter must have told someone, and somehow … The palms of his hands felt sticky and cold. He had been prepared to face Jeepers, even the Headmaster. He had been ready for anything, except this.

From the moment of conceiving Lanyon as a cause, there hadn’t been much time to contemplate him as a human being; perhaps because the thought of him in any kind of equivocal or humiliating situation was so improbable, and indeed hardly bore thinking of. That Lanyon might be grateful for the campaign on his behalf was the last thing Laurie had contemplated. Lanyon would never so compromise his dignity; it would be a sufficient gesture if he ignored the episode. Head prefects didn’t thank people for starting riots in Houses; on the contrary. And no Head of any House had ever stood for less nonsense than he. It was an academic question whether anyone would get fresh with Lanyon twice, for no one, as far as Laurie knew, had tried it once.