The Charioteer (4 page)

As he began, draggingly, to mount the stairs, Laurie’s dominant wish was that he were not too senior to be beaten, which would have been quick, simple and relatively unembarrassing.

He had got to the door. His footsteps must have been heard by now; there could be no more procrastination. He knocked.

“Come in,” said Lanyon briskly. At this point Laurie ceased to feel any awkwardness. Fright had swallowed everything. Concerned only not to show it, he walked in.

Lanyon was sitting in his armchair, doing something with a penknife to a propelling pencil. He looked up. He was slight and lean, with dusty-fair hair and eyes of a striking light blue which were narrowed by the structure of the orbit above, giving him a searching look even when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Odell. Shut the door.”

Laurie shut it, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, and waited. The length of the wait was always proportioned to the offense; but he was past measuring time. Lanyon made some further adjustment of the pencil, screwed down the lead, shut the knife and put it in his pocket. As always he was extremely neat, his hair brushed and recently trimmed, his shirt looking as if he had just put it on. He had spent last year’s summer holidays working his passage to Iceland and back in a trawler, and had recently been accepted for a projected research expedition to the Arctic. The biggest toughs in the School, when they stood against Lanyon, looked muscle-bound or run to seed. Lines of decision showed around his eyes and mouth; at nineteen, he was marked already with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic. Laurie, who was in no state to be analytical, only thought that Lanyon looked more than usually like chilled steel. Suddenly it seemed certain that the prevailing rumor had got garbled in transit, and almost certainly didn’t even refer to Lanyon at all. Laurie waited as if at the stake, clenching his lower jaw.

Having disposed of the penknife, Lanyon looked up again. His light eyes raked Laurie, coldly, from head to foot.

They tell me,” he said, “that you appear to be going out of your mind. Is there anything you want to say about it?”

“No, Lanyon,” said Laurie mechanically. He could have feigned noncomprehension, but with Lanyon one didn’t try anything on.

“Had it occurred to you,” said Lanyon evenly, “that if anything needs organizing in this House, the prefects are capable of seeing to it without any help from you?”

“Yes, Lanyon.” Laurie looked, for relief, away to the work table in the window. It was very tidy, like Lanyon himself.

“Of course, the prefects are only used to routine work. If they ever decide to get up a revival meeting, or some other form of mass hysteria, no doubt they’ll ask for your expert advice before they begin.”

Laurie said nothing. His gaze fell from the work table to the waste-paper basket standing under it.

“Do you often,” Lanyon asked, “have attacks like this?”

“No,” said Laurie. The wastepaper basket was full. It would have been overflowing if the contents had not been rammed down. The mass of torn papers stirred in his mind some dimly remembered sense of dread.

“Well, another time”—he could feel a hard blue stare tugging his own eyes back—“if you find your exhibitionism getting too much for you, I suggest you join the Holy Rollers, and give yourself some scope. You don’t want to waste your gifts, merely landing one school in a mess it wouldn’t live down in ten years.”

“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” But Laurie was hardly aware of speaking. He had seen, among the papers, the torn boards of the cloth-bound notebooks only issued to the Senior School, in which permanent material, the indispensable stuff of exam revision, was kept. There were three or four of them, probably more.

“Don’t stand there like a dummy.” The compressed snap in Lanyon’s voice was more alarming than a shout. “Do you realize you’ve been behaving like a dangerous lunatic, yes or no?”

“Yes,” said Laurie. To his own amazement he added, “I suppose so.”

Lanyon rested his hand with the pencil on the arm of the chair and leaned forward slightly. His eyes looked like chips of blue enamel. “You suppose so?” he said softly. “You
suppose so
?”

“Sorry,” said Laurie quickly.

“So I should hope.” Lanyon leaned back again, looking as if he had just brushed off some dirt and supposed it had been worth the trouble. In the slanting light from the window, the lines around his mouth were deepened to hollows. “Very well, then. When I have your word there’ll be no more of this nonsense, you can go.” There was a pause. Laurie swallowed; it seemed to him that it must be audible across the room. “Well? Have you got softening of the brain, Odell? You heard what I said.”

Pushing his voice up through his throat, which felt as if it were lined with sandpaper, Laurie said, “I’m sorry, Lanyon. I’ll give my word if—if it isn’t true about you leaving.”

“
What
did you say, Odell?” Lanyon stared at him, level-eyed. This time, though he felt as if the back of his neck would crack, Laurie met it without looking away. “Have you gone completely crazy? Who the hell do you think you are, standing here when a prefect sends for you and asking me questions about what I’m going to do? You need to see a doctor, I should think.”

“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” Laurie felt he must sound like a cracked gramophone record. “I know it’s cheek. I’m sorry. Only I can’t promise if I don’t know.”

Lanyon put the pencil away and stood up. He had the whippy, dangerous spring of a bent rapier let go.

“For your information, I shall probably be leaving sometime tomorrow. Is that enough for you? And if I don’t have your word within one minute, I’m going to lay you out cold, here and now, and you’ll spend the time between now and then in the sicker, and that will settle that. Well?”

He could do it, Laurie thought, with one hand tied behind him. It would probably be too quick to hurt very much. The odd thing was that whereas he had entered the study almost paralyzed with fright, now he was hardly frightened at all. His admiration for Lanyon had soared to the point of worship. This is the happy warrior, this is he whom every man in arms would wish to be.

“Have you taken that in?” Lanyon asked. “Because I mean it.”

That’s all right” Laurie’s voice was suddenly clear and free. “You’ve got to, I see that. But you can’t actually kill me, so it won’t stop me for long.”

Lanyon took a step up to him, as if he were measuring his distance. Laurie very nearly threw up his fists by instinct. No, he thought, Lanyon couldn’t be found fighting in his room after all this, besides he very likely wouldn’t hit so hard in cold blood. He was just about right now for a straight one to the point of the jaw. Laurie hoped there was room enough behind for him to fall without hitting the door or something. One couldn’t turn to look. There was time for all this because it took so long for anything to happen. Lanyon must be hoping he’d crack up yet and save having to do it. He felt, standing like this, eyes front, that he had never really seen Lanyon before. His face was a clear light even brown, toning with his dusty-fair hair. There was a little triangular scar, old and colorless, on his forehead above the left eyebrow. His mouth was tight and straight, a horizontal line between two verticals. His eyes fixed Laurie, stilly.

He stepped back.

With a spent force in which sounded the flaw of a desperate weariness, he said, “You
bloody
fool.”

Laurie had reached a pitch of tension where no inhibitions touched him. The frame of convention, with its threats and its supports alike, was broken. He was left, a single-handed individual, to take things as they came.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “If you’re leaving, somebody’s got to cope. I know I’m not a prefect, and if Treviss and the others were doing anything, that would be all right. Only they won’t, I know what this House is when it comes to something like that, they’ve been got down like everyone else.” Lanyon was looking at him, quiet, almost relaxed, incalculable, but now for some reason unterrifying. Laurie went on with a rush, “It makes me sick, the way people will let anything by, even something like this, sooner than come into the open about—anything you’re supposed not to.”

“I see,” said Lanyon. “And tell me, what makes you so cheerful about coming out into the open yourself?”

“I don’t know. Well, somebody’s got to. It stands to reason Jeepers can’t be let get away with this.”

“Mr. Jepson to you,” said Lanyon mechanically.

“Mr. Jepson. Sorry. It isn’t only even that it’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to the House either. Till this year, it’s been going down ever since Mr. Stuart left. Jeep—Mr. Jepson can’t even see how you’ve pulled the place together. You
are
the House really, everybody knows that. He doesn’t seem ever to notice the things that really matter, the feeling in the place, and giving the new people a start. You know the sort of thing that was thought to be smart here before you took over. Peterson and that lot. Jeepers hasn’t a clue. He’s all taken up with the moral tone. There wasn’t any moral tone when Mr. Stuart was here. The place was just normal.”

“Quite the budding analyst.” Laurie knew suddenly that he had been talking too much, too loudly, and too long, to someone who was very tired. “So you think that Mr. Jepson has an anxiety neurosis, due to being oversensitive to a certain weakness in the system he represents.”

“Yes,” said Laurie recklessly.

“In view of which, you’re proposing to take on the whole foundations of society single-handed. My strength is as the strength of ten …” He gave a tight little smile, which went out quickly. With a change of tone he said, “You’re an orphan, I take it?”

“No,” said Laurie. “It’s only my father who’s dead.”

“Your surviving family,” said Lanyon carefully, “will be putting down the red carpet, I suppose, when you go home expelled in a couple of days’ time?”

Laurie said nothing. He had a sudden, horribly clear vision of his mother’s face.

Watching him, Lanyon said, “Yes, it’s about time you woke up.”

“I could explain,” said Laurie dully. He tried, desperately, not to imagine it.

“Oh, don’t be a fool. Admit it’s washed up, and let’s finish with this nonsense. You’re wasting my time, I’ve got a lot to do.”

Suddenly Laurie’s exhilaration returned. It was worth it; anything was worth it. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

“No,” he said. “You’re Head of the House, and you’ve got to stop a row if you can. But the House isn’t bound to stand by and see them do this to you and do nothing about it. We’d look like a lot of worms if we did. It doesn’t matter what happens. It just isn’t fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

Laurie noticed that he had got the pencil out again, and was screwing the lead up and down. He seemed absorbed in this. It made Laurie feel as if he were confronting a vacuum. He wondered if he were meant to go. But one always waited for explicit permission. “Of course it’s not fair,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

“And being such a good psychologist”—Lanyon pushed down the lead more firmly—“you feel sure that a poor helpless type like myself will naturally let himself be expelled for something he hasn’t done, unless people like you dash up with a rescue party?”

A bright ray of hope shot up in Laurie’s mind. How absurd not to have thought that Lanyon could look after himself; and why should he confide his plans to his inferiors? So long as it was going to be all right … but he wished Lanyon would look up. “I only thought,” he said to fill in the pause, “it was a thing the House ought to get together on.”

“So I gathered.” Lanyon raised his eyes. The hard, blue shine had gone. They looked tired, almost gray. “Let me see; is it Cambridge, or Oxford, you’re going to sit for?”

“Oxford,” said Laurie, now quite at sea.

Lanyon leaned an arm on the empty mantelshelf: the room, Laurie realized now, was stripped almost to the bareness of vacant possession. “Yes,” he said unemotionally. “Oxford, of course. You ought to fit in well there. It’s the home of lost causes, so they say.”

There was silence. In the last ten minutes, Laurie had almost exhausted his capacity for taking in new experience. He knew what he was being told, and it seemed now that he must have known for at least some seconds beforehand. But he had reached a full stop. He couldn’t make it mean anything.

“Too bad, Spuddy.” Lanyon smiled, it seemed from a long way off. “You’ll have to hang the shillelagh up again.”

At this point, in one of those moments which seem crucial only because they complete long, hidden processes, a man disappeared: a right-thinking, crisply defined, forcible person, rather dogmatic and intolerant in a decent, humorous way; the nearest in succession of Laurie’s potential selves. A usurper moved in, all unaware of himself, concerned only with his sudden perception of the fact that Lanyon’s steady gaze was being held up with tightened muscles, like a weight. At the higher-barbarian phase of adolescence, it comes as unwanted, dismaying news that the gods feel pain. But it seemed to Laurie that something had to be done, and no one else was here to do it All the rest would have to be thought about later.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll promise not to do anything, if you like. But it’s not because I feel any different, or … I mean I’d as soon do it now as ever. Sooner.” Some change in the quality of the pause made him lose the thread of what he was saying. He finished. “I don’t think things ought to be let happen like this.”

“You don’t think at all.” Lanyon paused a moment, blankly. Then his eyes seemed to relax. Slowly a perverse and charming smile, unfamiliar to Laurie, lifted the ends of his mouth. “Your spontaneous reactions are going to land you in a lot of trouble, if you don’t look out.”

“Are they?” said Laurie vaguely. Instinct caused him to keep some sort of conversation going; if someone had asked him a second later what he had said, he couldn’t have answered. So this, he was thinking, is what it’s all about, all Jeepers’ snufflings and fidgetings, all that bated breath. In a mingled exaltation, pride, and sheer consuming interest, he smiled back into Lanyon’s eyes. Scarcely aware of continuing the unheard, instead of the heard, conversation, he said, “Jeepers is just a dirty old man. People like that don’t know.”