The Passionate Year (13 page)

“Eleven,” he said, breaking the rapt silence.

She said, half humorously, half sadly: “Are you pleased with me?—Are
you satisfied?—Do I quite come up to expectations?”

He started, looked towards her, and laughed. The laugh disturbed the
silence of the room like the intrusion of something from millions of miles
away. He made a humorous pretence of puzzling it out, as if it were a
baffling problem, and said, finally, with mocking doubtfulness: “Well, on the
whole, I think you do.”

“If I had been on trial for a month you’d still keep me, then?” she went
on, without moving her head out of her hands.

He answered, in the same vein as before: “If you could guarantee always to
remain up to sample, I dare-say I would.”

She raised her head and gave him such a look as, if he had not learned to
know it, would have made him think she was angry with him; it was sharp with
bladelike eagerness, as if she were piercing through his attitude of
jocularity.

Then, wondering why she did not smile when he was smiling, he put his arm
round her and drew her burning lips to his. “Bedtime,” he said gaily, “for
we’ve got to be up early in the morning.”

Over about them as they clung together the spirit of Millstead, like a
watchful friend, came suddenly close and intimate, and to Speed, opening his
soul to it joyously, it appeared in the likeness of a golden-haired child,
shy yet sombrely passionate—a wraith of a child that was just like
Helen. Above all, they loved each other, these two, with a love that
surrounded and enveloped all things in a magic haze: they were the perfect
lovers. And over them the real corporeal Millstead brooded in constant
magnificent calm.

Soon he was swallowed up in the joyous routine of term-
time. He had never imagined that a housemaster had such a large amount of
work to do. There were no early-morning forms during the winter term,
however, and as also it was a housemaster’s privilege to breakfast in his own
rooms, Speed began the day with a happy three-quarters of an hour of
newspaper-scanning, envelope-tearing, and chatting with Helen. After
breakfast work began in earnest. Before term had lasted a week he discovered
that he had at least twice as many duties as in the preceding term; the Head
was certainly not intending to let him slack. There was the drawing and music
of the whole school to superintend, as well as the choir and chapel-services
which, as the once-famous Raggs became more and more decrepit, fell into
Speed’s direction almost automatically. Then also there were a large number
of miscellaneous supervisory duties which the housemasters shared-between
them, and one or two, at least, which tradition decreed should be performed
entirely by the junior housemaster. The result of it all was that Speed was,
if he had been in the mood to desire a statutory eight hours’ day,
considerably overworked.

It was fortunate that the work was what he loved. He plunged into it with
terrific zest. Lavery’s was a large House, and Lavery himself had judged all
its institutions by the test of whether or not they conduced to an economy in
work for him. The result was an institution that managed itself with
rough-and-ready efficiency, that offered no glaring scandal to the intrusive
eye, yet was, in truth, honeycombed with corruption of a mild sort, and
completely under the sway of powerfully vested interests. Against this and
these Speed set himself out to do final battle. A prudent housemaster, and
certainly one who valued his own personal comfort, would have postponed the
contest, at any rate, until he had become settled in his position. But Speed,
emboldened by the extraordinary success of his first term, and lured by his
own dreams of a Lavery’s that should be
the
great House at Millstead,
would not delay. In his first week he found five of the prefects enjoying a
pleasant little smoking-party in the Senior prefect’s study.

They explained to him that Lavery had never objected to their smoking,
provided they did it unostentatiously, and that Lavery never dreamed of
“barging in upon them” during their evening study-hours. Speed, stung by
their slightly insolent bearing, barked at them in his characteristic
staccato voice when annoyed: “It doesn’t matter to me a bit what Lavery used
to let you do. You’ve got to obey me now, not Lavery. Prefects must set the
example to the others. I shall ask for an undertaking from all of you that
you don’t smoke again during term-time. I’ll give you till to-morrow night to
decide. Those who refuse will be degraded from prefecture.”

“You can’t degrade without the Head’s authority,” said Smallwood, the most
insolent of the party.

Speed replied, colouring suddenly (for he realised that Smallwood had
spoken the truth): “I know my own business, thank you, Smallwood.”

During the following twenty-four hours four out of the half-dozen
House-prefects gave the required undertaking. The other two, Smallwood and a
fellow named Biffin, refused, “on principle,” as they said, without
explaining what exactly the qualification meant. Speed went promptly to the
Head and appealed for authority to degrade them. He found that they had
already poured their tale into the Head’s receptive ears, and that they had
given the Head the impression that he (Speed) in a tactless excess of
reforming zeal, had been listening at keyholes and prying around the
study-doors at night. The Head, after listening to Speed’s indignant protest,
replied, suavely: “I think, Mr. Speed”—(Speed’s relationship as
son-in-law never tempted either of them to any intimacy of address)—“I
think you must—um, yes—make some allowance for
the—um—the natural inclination of elder boys to—um—to
be jealous of privileges. Smoking is, of course, an—um, yes—an
offence against school rules, but Mr. Lavery was perhaps—um, yes,
perhaps—wise in turning the—um—the blind eye, when the
offender was near the top of the school and where the offence was not
flagrant. You must remember, Mr. Speed, that Smallwood is eighteen years of
age, not so very many years younger than you are yourself. Besides, he
is—um, yes, I think so—captain of the First Fifteen, is he
not?—and I—um—I assure you—his degradation through
you would do you an—um—an incalculable amount of harm in the
school. Don’t make yourself unpopular, Mr. Speed. I will send a note round
the school, prefects—um, yes—included,
drawing—um—attention to the school rule against smoking. And I
will talk to Smallwood and the other boy—Biffin, isn’t he?—um,
yes—privately. Privately, you see—a quiet friendly conversation
in—um—in private, can achieve wonders.”

Speed felt that he was being ever so gently snubbed.

He left the Head’s study in a state of subdued fury, and his temper was
not improved when Helen seemed rather thoughtlessly inclined to take
Smallwood’s side. “Don’t get people into trouble, Kenneth,” she pleaded. “I
don’t think you ought to complain to father about them. After all, it isn’t
frightfully wicked to smoke, is it? and I know they all used to do it in
Lavery’s time. Why, I’ve seen them many a time when I’ve passed the
study-windows in the evenings.”

He stared at her for a few seconds, half indignantly half incredulously:
then, as if on sudden impulse, he smiled, and placed his hands on her
shoulders and looked searchingly into her eyes. “Soft-hearted little kid!” he
exclaimed, laughing a slightly forced laugh. “All the same, I don’t think you
quite understand my position, dear.”

“Tell me about it then,” she said.

Perhaps instinct forewarned him that if he went into details, either his
indignation would break its bounds or else she would make some further casual
and infuriating comment. From both possibilities he shrank nervously. He
said, with an affectation of nonchalance: “Oh, never mind about it, dear. It
will all come right in the end. Don’t you worry your pretty head about it.
Kiss me!”

She kissed him passionately.

But Speed was still, in the main, happy, despite occasional
worries. There was a wonderful half-sad charm about those fading autumn
afternoons, each one more eager to dissolve into the twilight, each one more
thickly spread with the brown and yellow leaves. To Speed, who remembered so
well the summer term, the winter term seemed full of poignancies and regrets.
And yet surrounding it all, this strange atmosphere which for want of a
better designation must be called simply Millstead, was no less apparent; it
pervaded all those—autumn days with a subtle essence which made Speed
feel that this life that he was living would be impossible to forget, no
matter what the world held in store for him. He could never forget the
clammy, earthy smell of the rugger pitch after a match in rain; the steam
rising from the heavy scrum; the grey clouds rolling over the sky; the patter
of rain-drops on the corrugated-iron roof of the pavilion stand. Nor could
anything efface the memory of those grey twilights when the afternoon games
were finished; the crowded lamp-lit tuck-shop, a phantasy of chromatic
blazers and pots of jam and muddy knees; the basements, cloudy with steam
from the bathrooms; the bleak shivering corridors along which the Juniors
scampered and envied the cosy warmth of the studies which might one day be
their own. Even the lock-ups after dark held some strange and secret comfort:
Burton and his huge keys and his noisy banging of the door were part of the
curious witchery of it all.

And then at night-time when the sky was black as jet and the wind from the
fenlands howled round the tall chimney-stacks of Lavery’s, Speed could feel
more than ever the bigness of this thing of which he had become a part. The
very days and nights took on characters and individualities of their own;
Speed could, if he had thought, have given them all an identifying sound and
colour: Monday, for instance, was brown, deepening to crimson as night fell:
he was always reminded of it by the chord of E flat on the piano. That, of
course, was perhaps no more than half-imagined idiosyncrasy. But it was
certain that the days and nights were all shaped and conditioned by
Millstead; and that they were totally different from the days and nights that
were elsewhere in the world. On Sunday nights, for instance, Speed, observing
a Lavery’s custom to which he saw no objection, read for an hour to the
Junior dormitory. The book was Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Speed had never heard
of the book until the Juniors informed him that Mr. Lavery had got half-way
through it during the previous term. After about three successive readings
Speed decided that the book was too horrible to be read to Juniors just
before bedtime, and accordingly refused to go on with it. “I shall put it in
the House library,” he said, “so if any of you wish to finish it you can do
so in the daytime. And now we’ll try something else. Can anybody suggest
anything?” Somebody mentioned Stephen Leacock, and in future, Sunday evenings
in the Junior dormitory at Lavery’s were punctuated by roars of laughter. All
the same, the sudden curtailment of
Dracula
was, for a long while, a
sore point with the Juniors.

On the two half-holidays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, Speed had three or
four of his House in to tea, taking them in rotation. This was a custom which
Lavery, seeing in it no more than an unnecessary increase in his duties and
obligations, had allowed to fall into disuse. Nor were the majority of the
boys keen on Speed’s resumption of what had been, more often than not, an
irksome social infliction. They were, however, gratified by the evident
interest that he took in them, and most of them, when they thankfully escaped
from the ordeal back to their fellows in the Common-Room, admitted that he
was “quite a decent sort of chap.” Speed believed in the personal
relationship between each boy and his housemaster with an almost fanatical
zeal. He found out what each boy was interested in, and, without prying into
anybody’s private affairs, contrived to establish himself as a personal
factor in the life of the House and not as a vague and slatternly deity such
as Lavery had been. Four o’clock therefore, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, saw
Speed’s tiny drawing-room littered with cakes and toasted scones, and
populated by three or four nervous youngsters trying desperately to respond
to Speed’s geniality and to balance cups and saucers and plates on their
knees without upsetting anything.

It was part of Speed’s dream of the ideal housemaster and his ideal House
that the housemaster’s wife should fulfil a certain difficult and
scrupulously exact function in the scheme of things. She must not, of course,
attempt any motherly intimacies, or call people by their Christian names, or
do anything else that was silly or effusive; yet, on the other hand, there
was a sense in which her relationship with the boys, especially the Juniors,
might be less formal than her husband’s. And, somehow, Speed was forced to
admit that Helen did not achieve this extraordinarily delicate equipoise. She
was, he came to the conclusion, too young for it to be possible. When she
grew older, no doubt she would, in that particular respect, improve, but for
the present she was, perhaps naturally, nervous in the presence of the elder
boys and apt to treat the Juniors as if they were babies. Gradually she
formed the habit of going over to the Head’s house for tea whenever Speed
entertained the boys in his room; it was an arrangement which, accomplished
silently and without definition, Speed felt to be rather a wise one.

Clare Harrington had left Millstead. One breakfast time a
letter came from her with the Paris postmark. Out of the envelope tumbled a
number of small snapshots; Speed scanned the letter through and remarked,
summing up its contents roughly for Helen’s benefit: “Oh, Clare’s in France.
Been having rather a good time, I should imagine—touring about, you
know.”

Helen looked up suddenly.

“I didn’t know she wrote to
you
,” she said.