The Passionate Year (27 page)

With Helen it was not so easy.

He said to her, on the same night, when the house had gone up to its
dormitories: “Helen, I’ve been rather a brute lately. I’m sorry. I’m going to
be different.”

She said: “I wish I could be different too.”

“Different?
You
different? What do you mean?”

“I wish I could make you fond of me again.” He was about to protest with
his usual eagerness and with more than his usual sincerity, but she held up
her hand to stop him. “Don’t say anything!” she cried, passionately. “We
shall only argue. I don’t want to argue any more. Don’t say anything at all,
please, Kenneth!”

“But—Helen—why not?”

“Because there’s nothing more to be said. Because I don’t believe anything
that you tell me, and because I don’t want to deceive myself into thinking I
do, any more.”

“Helen!”

She went on staring silently into the fire, as usual, but when he came
near to her she put her arms round his neck and kissed him “I don’t believe
you love me, Kenneth. Goodness knows why I kiss you. I suppose it’s just
because I like doing it, that’s all. Now don’t say anything to me. Kiss me
if
you like, but don’t speak. I hate you when you begin to talk to
me.”

He laughed.

She turned on him angrily, suddenly like a tiger. “What are you laughing
at? I don’t see any joke.”

“Neither do I. But I wanted to laugh—for some reason. Oh, if I
mustn’t talk to you, mayn’t I even laugh? Is there nothing to be done except
kiss and be kissed?”

“You’ve started to talk. I hate you now.”

“I shouldn’t have begun to talk if you’d let me laugh.”

“You’re hateful.”

“What—because I laughed? Don’t you think it’s rather funny that a
man may kiss his wife and yet not be allowed to talk to her?”

“I think it’s tragic.”

“Tragic things are usually funny if you’re in the mood that I’m in.”

“It’s your own fault that you’re in such a hateful mood.”

“Is it my fault? I wasn’t in the mood when I came into this room.”

“Then it’s my fault, I presume?”

“I didn’t say so. God knows whose fault it is. But does it matter very
much?”

“Yes, I think it does.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt all the strength and
eagerness and determination and hope for the future go out of him and leave
him aching and empty. And into the void—not against his will, for his
will did not exist at the time—came Clare.

Once again he knew that he loved her. A storm came over him,
furious as the storm outside! he knew that he loved and wanted her,
passionately this time, because his soul was aching. To him she meant the
easing of all the strain within him; he could not think how it had been
possible for him to go on so long without knowing it. Helen and he were like
currents of different voltages; but with Clare he would be miraculously
matched. For the first time in his life he recognised definitely and simply
that his marriage with Helen had been a mistake.

But what could he do? For with the realisation of his love for Clare came
the sudden, blinding onrush of pity for Helen, pity more terrible than he had
ever felt before; pity that made him sick with the keenness of it. If he
could only be ruthless and leave her with as few words and as little
explanation as many men left their wives! But he could not. Somehow, in some
secret and subtle way, he was tied to her. He knew that he could never leave
her. Something in their intimate relationship had forged bonds that would
always hold him to her, even though the spirit of him longed to be free. He
would go on living with her and pitying her and making her and himself
miserable.

He went out into the storm of wind for a few moments before going to bed.
Never, till then, had Lavery’s seemed so desolate, so mightily cruel. He
walked in sheer morbidness of spirit to the pavilion steps where he and
Helen, less than a year ago, had thought themselves the happiest couple in
the world. There was no moonlight now, and the pavilion was a huge dark
shadow. Poor Helen—poor Helen! He wished he had never met her.

The torture of his soul went on. He lost grip of his House;
he was unpopular now, and he knew it. Smallwood and other influential members
of the school openly cut him in the street. A great silence (so he often
imagined, but it could not have been really so) fell upon the Masters’
Common-Room whenever he entered it. Pritchard, so he heard, was in the habit
of making cheap jokes against him with his class. Even Clanwell took him
aside one evening and asked him why he had dropped the habit of coming up to
coffee. “Why don’t you come up for a chat sometime?” he asked, and from the
queer look in his eyes Speed knew well enough what the chat was likely to be
about.

“Oh, I’m busy,” he excused himself. He added: “Perhaps I’ll drop in
sometime, though.”

“Yes, do,” said Clanwell encouragingly. But Speed never did.

Then one morning Speed was summoned into the dark study. The Head smiled
and invited him to sit down. He even said, with ominous hospitality: “Have a
cigarette—um, no?” and pushed the cigarette-box an inch or so away from
him. Then he went on, unbuttoning the top button of his clerical coat: “I
hope—um—you will not think me—um—impertinent—if
I mention a matter which has—um—which has not reached my
ears-um—through an official channel. You had, I—um—I
believe,—an—um-altercation with one of the house-porters the
other day. Am I—am I right?”

“Yes, quite right.”

“Well, now, Mr. Speed—such—um—affairs are rather
undignified, don’t you think? I’m not—um—apportioning
blame—oh, no, not in any way, but I do—um, yes—I most
certainly
do
think that a housemaster should avoid such incidents if
he can possibly do so. No—um—no personal reflection on you at
all, Mr. Speed—merely my advice to you, as a somewhat elderly man to
an—um, yes—to a friend. Yes, a friend. Perhaps I might add
more—um—significantly—to an—um—son-in-law.”

He smiled a wide, sly smile. Speed clenched his hands on his knees. The
dark study grew almost intolerable. He felt he would like to take Ervine’s
mottled neck in his hands and wring it—carefully and
calculatingly…

When he was outside the room, in the darkness between the inner and the
outer doors, his resentment rose to fever-pitch. He stopped, battling with
it, half inclined to re-enter the study and make a scene, yet realising with
the sane part of him that he could not better his position by so doing.
Merely as an outlet for tempestuous indignation, however, the idea of
returning to the fray attracted him, and he paused in the darkness, arguing
with himself. Then all at once his attention was riveted by the sound, sharp
and clear, of Mrs. Ervine’s voice. She had entered the study from the other
door, and he heard soft steps treading across the carpet. “Did you tell him?”
he heard her say. And the Head’s voice boomed back: “Yes, my dear. Um
yes—I told him.”

A grim, cautious smile crept over Speed’s mouth. He put his ear to the
hinge of the inner door and listened desperately.

He heard again the voice of Mrs. Ervine. “Did you tell him he might have
to quit Lavery’s at the end of the term?”

“I—um—well—I didn’t exactly put it to
him—so—um—so definitely. It seemed to me there was
no—um—no necessity. He
may
be all right, even yet, you
know.”

“He won’t. He’s too young. And he’s lost too much ground already.”

“I always thought he was too—urn—too youthful, my dear. But
you overruled my—”

“Well, and you know why I did, don’t you? Oh, I’ve no patience with you.
Nothing’s done unless
I
do it.”

“My dear, I—um—I assure you—”

He heard footsteps approaching along the outside corridor and feared that
it might be people coming to see the Head. In that case they would pull open
the outer door and find him eavesdropping. That would never do. He quietly
pushed the outer door and emerged into the corridor. A small boy, seeing him,
asked timidly: “Is the Head in, sir?” Speed replied grimly: “Yes, he’s in,
but he’s busy at present.”

After all, he had heard enough. Behind the Head, ponderous and archaic,
stood now the sinister figure of Mrs. Ervine, mistress of malevolent
intrigue. In a curious half-humorous, half-contemptuous sense, he felt sorry
for the Head. Poor devil!—everlastingly chained to Millstead, always
working the solemn rhythmic treadmill, with a wife beside him as sharp as a
knife-edge…Speed walked across to Lavery’s, pale-faced and smiling.

The Annual Athletic Sports.

It was raining hard. He stood by the tape, stopwatch in hand, distributing
measured encouragement and congratulation, and fulfilling his allotted role
of timekeeper. “Well run, Herbert,” he managed to say, with a show of
interest. “Not bad, indeed, sir…eleven and two-fifths seconds.”…“Well
done, Roberts…Hard luck, Hearnshaw—pity you didn’t sprint harder at
the finish, eh?…Herbert first, Roberts second, Hearnshaw third.”

The grass oozed with water and the cinder-track with blackish slime; he
shivered as he stood, and whenever he stooped the water fell over the brim of
his hat and blurred the print on his sports-programme. It was hard to
distinguish rain from perspiration on the faces of the runners. The bicycles
used in the slow-bicycle race lay in a dripping and rusting pile against a
tree-trunk; crystal raindrops hung despairingly from the out-stretched tape.
There seemed something unnecessarily, gratuitously, even fatuously dismal
about the entire procedure; the weight of dismalness pressed heavily on
him—heavily-heavily—and more heavily as the afternoon crawled by.
Yet he gave a ghastly smile as he marked a wet note-book with a wet copying
pencil and exclaimed: “Well run, Lister
Secundus
. Four minutes and
forty-two and a fifth seconds…Next race, please. All candidates for the
Quarter-Mile Handicap. First Heat…Answer please…Arnold, Asplin, Brooks,
Carmichael, Cavendish, Caw-stone,
Primus
, Felling, Fyfield…”

But at last there came the end of the dreary afternoon, when grey dusk
began to fall sombrely upon a grey world, when the last race had been
mournfully held, and his outdoor work was over. Mechanically he was
collecting into a pile the various impedimenta of the obstacle race; he was
alone, for the small, dripping crowd of sight-seers had gone over to the
other side of the pavilion to witness the putting of the weight. Pritchard’s
job, he reflected. Pritchard’s staccato tenor voice rose above, the murmur:
“Thirty-eight feet four inches…Excellent, Robbins…” And then the scrape
of the spade smoothing over the soft, displaced mud, a sound that seemed to
Speed to strike the note of utter and inextinguishable misery.

Old Millstead bells began to chime the hour of five o’clock.

And then a voice quite near him said: “Well, Mr. Speed?”

He knew that voice. He turned round sharply. Clare!

Never did he forget the look of her at that moment. He thought afterwards
(though it could not have been more than imagination) that as she spoke the
down-falling rain increased to a torrent; he saw her cheeks, pink and
shining, and the water glistening on the edges of her hair. She wore a long
mackintosh that reached almost to her heels, and a sou’wester pulled over her
ears and forehead. But the poise of her as she stood, so exquisitely serene
with the ran beating down upon her, struck some secret chord in his being
which till that moment had been dumb.

He dropped the sacks into a pool of water and stared at her in wistful
astonishment.

“You’ve dropped your things,” she said.

He was staring at her so intently that he seemed hardly to comprehend her
words. The chord in him that had been struck hurt curiously, like a muscle
long unused. When at last his eyes fell to the sopping bundle at his feet he
just shrugged his shoulders and muttered: “Oh,
they
don’t matter. I’ll
leave them.”

Then, recollecting that he had not yet given her any greeting, he made
some conventional remark about the weather.

Then she made another conventional remark about the weather.

Then he said, curiously: “We don’t see so much of each other nowadays, do
we?”

To which she replied: “No. I wonder why? Are they overworking you?”

“Not that,” he answered.

“Then I won’t guess any other reasons.”

He said jokingly: “I shall come down to the town and give you another of
those surprise visits one of these evenings.”

The crowd were returning from watching the putting of the weight. She made
to leave him, saying as she did so: “
Yes
, do. You like a talk, don’t
you?”

“Rather!” he exclaimed, almost boyishly, as she went away.

Almost boyishly
! Even a moment of her made a difference in him.

That evening, for the first time in his life, he was
“ragged.” He was taking preparation in the Big Hall. As soon as the School
began to enter he could see that some mischief was on foot. Nor was it long
in beginning to show itself. Hardly had the last-comer taken his seat when a
significant rustle of laughter at the rear of the Hall warned him that danger
was near. He left his seat on the rostrum and plunged down the aisle to the
place whence the laughter had come. More laughter…He saw something scamper
swiftly across the floor, amidst exclamations of feigned alarm. Someone had
let loose a mouse.

He was furious with anger. Nothing angered him more than any breach of
discipline, and this breach of discipline was obviously an insult to him
personally. They had never “ragged” him before; they were “ragging” him now
because they disliked him. He saw the faces of all around him grinning
maliciously.

“Anyone who laughs has a hundred lines.”

A sharp brave laugh from somewhere—insolently defiant.