The Passionate Year

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• Book I.
  The Summer
  Term
  
• Chapter I
  
• Chapter II
  
• Chapter III
  
• Chapter IV
  
• Book II.
  The Winter Term
  
• Chapter I
  
• Chapter II
  
• Chapter III
  
• Chapter IV
  
• Interlude.
  Christmas at Beachings Over
  
• Book III.
  The Lent Term
  
• Chapter I
  
• Chapter II
  
• Chapter III
  
• Chapter IV
  
• Chapter V
  
• Chapter VI
  

“Ah, um yes, Mr. Speed, is it not?…Welcome, sir! Welcome
to Millstead!” Kenneth Speed gripped the other’s hand and smiled. He was a
tall passably good-looking fellow in his early twenties, bright-eyed and
brown-haired. At the moment he was feeling somewhat nervous, and always when
he felt nervous he did things vigorously, as if to obscure his secret
trepidation. Therefore when he took hold of the soft moist hand that was
offered him he grasped it in such a way that its possessor winced and gave a
perceptible gasp.

“Delighted to meet you, sir,” said the young man briskly, and his voice,
like his action, was especially vigorous because of nervousness. It was not
nervousness of interviewing a future employer, or of receiving social
initiation into a new world; still less was it due to any consciousness of
personal inferiority; it was an intellectual nervousness, based on an acute
realisation of the exact moment when life turns a fresh corner which may or
may not lead into a blind alley. And as Kenneth Speed felt the touch of this
clammy elderly hand, he experienced a sudden eager desire to run away, out of
the dark study and through the streets to the railway-station whence he had
come. Absurd and ignoble desire, he told himself, ‘shrugging his shoulders
slightly as if to shake off an unpleasant sensation. He saw the past
kaleidoscopically, the future as a mere vague following-up of the immediate
present. A month ago he had been a resident undergraduate at Cambridge. Now
he was Kenneth Speed, B.A., Arts’ Master at Millstead School. The
transformation seemed to him for the time being all that was in life.

It was a dull glowering day towards the end of April, most appropriately
melancholy for the beginning of term. It was one of those days when the sun
had been bright very early, and by ten o’clock the sky dappled with white
clouds; by noon the whiteness had dulled and spread to leaden patches of
grey; now, at mid-afternoon, a cold wintry wind rolled them heavily across
the sky and piled them on to the deep gloom of the horizon. The Headmaster’s
study, lit from three small windows through which the daylight, filtered by
the thick spring foliage of lime trees, struggled meagrely, was darker even
than usual, and Speed, peering around with hesitant inquisitive eyes,
received no more than a confused impression of dreariness. He could see the
clerical collar of the man opposite gleaming like a bar of ivory against an
ebony background.

The voice, almost as soft and clammy as the hand, went on: “I hope yon
will be very comfortable here, Mr. Speed. We are—urn yes—an old
foundation, and we have our—um yes—our
traditions—and—um—so forth…You will take music and
drawing, I understand?”

“That was the arrangement, I believe.”

His eyes, by now accustomed to the gloom, saw over the top of the dazzling
white collar a heavy duplicated chin and sharp clean-cut lips, lips in which
whatever was slightly gentle was also slightly shrewd. Above them a huge
promontory of a nose leaned back into deep-set eyes that had each a tiny
spark in them that pierced the dusk like the gleaming tips of a pair of
foils. And over all this a wide blue-veined forehead curved on to a bald
crown on which the light shone mistily. There was fascination of a sort in
the whole impression; one felt that the man might be almost physically a part
of the dark study, indissolubly one with the leather-bound books and the
massive mahogany pedestal-desk; a Pope, perhaps, in a Vatican born with him.
And when he moved his finger to push a bell at his elbow Speed started as if
the movement had been in some way sinister.

“Ah yes, that will be all right—um—music and drawing.
Perhaps—um—commercial geography for the—um—lower
forms, eh?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about commercial geography.”

“Oh, well—um yes—I suppose not. Still—easy to acquire,
you know. Oh yes, quite easy…Come in…”

This last remark, uttered in a peculiar treble wail, was in response to a
soft tap at the door. It opened and a man stepped into the shadows and made
his way to the desk with cat-like stealthiness.

“Light the gas, Potter…And by the way, Mr. Speed will be in to dinner.”
He turned to the young man and said, as if the enquiry were merely a matter
of form: “You’ll join us for dinner to-night, won’t you?”

Speed replied: “I shall be delighted.”

He wondered then what it was in the dark study that made him feel eerily
sensitive and observant; so that, for instance, to watch Potter standing on a
chair and lighting the incandescent globes was to feel vividly and uncannily
the man’s feline grace of movement. And what was it in the Headmaster’s
quivering blade-like eyes that awakened the wonder as to what these dark
book-lined walls had seen in the past, what strange, furtive conversations
they had heard, what scenes of pity and terror and fright and, might be, of
blind suffering they had gazed upon?

The globes popped into yellow brilliance The dark study took sudden shape
and coherence; the shadows were no longer menacing. And the Headmaster, the
Reverend Bruce Ervine, M.A., D.D., turned out to be no more than a plump
apoplectic-looking man with a totally bald head.

Speed’s eyes, blinking their relief, wandered vacantly over the
bookshelves. He noticed Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” in twelve volumes, the
Expositor’s Bible in twenty volumes, the Encyclopaedia Britannica in forty
volumes, a long shelf of the Loeb classical series, and a huge group of
lexicons surmounting like guardian angels a host of small school
text-books.

“Dinner is at seven, then, Mr. Speed. We—we do not
dress—except for-um yes—for special occasions…If
you—um—have nothing to do this afternoon—you might find a
stroll into the town interesting—there are some
Roman—um—earthworks that are extremely—um
yes—extremely fascinating. Oh yes, really…Harrington’s the stationers
will sell you a guide…I don’t think there are any-um—duties we need
trouble you with until to-morrow…um yes…Seven o’clock then, Mr.
Speed…”

“I shall be there, sir.”

He bowed slightly and backed himself through the green-baize double doors
into the stone corridor.

He climbed the stone flights of steps that led to the School
House dormitories and made his way to the little room in which, some hours
earlier, the school porter, squirming after tips, had deposited his trunks
and snit-case. Over the door, in neat white letters upon a black background,
he read: “Mr. K. Speed.”—It seemed to him almost the name of somebody
else. He looked at it, earnestly and contemplatively, until he saw that a
small boy was staring at him from the dormitory doorway at the end of the
passage. That would never do; it would be fatal to appear eccentric. He
walked into the room and shut the door behind him. He was alone now and could
think. He saw the bare distempered walls with patches of deeper colour where
pictures had been hung; the table covered with a green-baize cloth; the
shabby pedestal-desk surmounted by a dilapidated inkstand; the empty
fire-grate into which somebody, as if in derision, had cast quantities of red
tissue-paper. An inner door opened into a small bedroom, and here his
critical eye roved over the plain deal chest of drawers, the perfunctory
wash-hand stand (it was expected, no doubt, that masters would wash in the
prefects’ bathroom), and the narrow iron bed with the hollow still in it that
last term’s occupant had worn. He carried his luggage in through the
separating door and began to unpack.

But he was quite happy. He had always had the ambition to be a master at a
public-school. He had dreamed about it; he was dreaming about it now. He was
bursting with new ideas and new enthusiasms, which he hoped would be
infectious, and Millstead, which was certainly a good school, would doubtless
give him his chance. Something in Ervine’s dark study had momentarily damped
his enthusiasm, but ()Ely momentarily; and in any case he was not afraid of
an uncomfortable bed or of a poorly-furnished room. When he had been at
Millstead a little while he would, he decided, import some furniture from
home; it would not, however, be wise to do everything in a hurry. For the
immediate present a few photographs on the mantelpiece, Medici prints on the
walls, a few cushions, books of course, and his innumerable undergraduate
pipes and tobacco-jars, would wreak a sufficiently pleasant
transformation.

He looked through the open lattice-windows and saw, three storeys below,
the headmaster’s garden, the running-track, and beyond that the smooth green
of the cricket-pitch. Leaning out and turning his head sharply to the left he
could see the huge red blocks of Milner’s and Lavery’s, the two other houses,
together with the science buildings and the squat gymnasium. He felt already
intimate with them; he anticipated in a sense the peculiar closeness of their
relationship with his life. Their very bricks and mortar might, if he let
them, become part of his inmost soul. He would walk amongst them secretly and
knowingly, familiar with every step and curve of their corridors, growing
each day more intimate with them until one day, might be, he should be a part
of them as darkly and mysteriously as Ervine had become a part of his study.
Would he? He shrank instinctively from such a final absorption of himself.
And yet already he was conscious of fascination, of something that would
permeate his life subtly and tremendously—that must do so, whether he
willed it or not. And as he leaned his head out of the window he felt big
cold drops of rain.

He shut the windows and resumed unpacking. Just as he had finished
everything except the hanging up of some of the pictures, he heard the school
clock chime the hour of four. He recollected that the porter had told him
that tea could be obtained in the Masters’ Common-Room at that hour. It was
raining heavily now, so that a walk into the town, even with the lure of old
Roman earthworks, was unattractive. Besides, he felt just pleasantly hungry.
He washed his hands and descended the four long flights to the ground-floor
corridors.

The Masters’ Common-Room was empty save for a diminutive man
reading the
Farmer and Stockbreeder
. As Speed entered the little man
turned round in his chair and looked at him. Speed smiled and said, still
with a trace of that almost boisterous nervousness: “I hope I’m not
intruding.”

The little man replied: “Oh, not at all. Come and sit down. Are you having
tea?”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps we can have it together. You’re Speed, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I’m Pritchard. Science and maths.”

He said that with the air of making a vivid epigram. He had small, rather
feminine features, and a complexion clear as a woman’s. Moreover he nipped
out his words, as it were, with a delicacy that was almost wholly feminine,
and that blended curiously with his far-reaching contralto voice.

He pressed a bell by the mantelpiece.