The Passionate Year (4 page)

After he had read it he washed and dressed in a leisurely fashion and
descended in time for School breakfast at eight. Hartopp showed him his
place, at the head of number four table, and he was interested to see by his
plate a neatly folded
Daily Telegraph
. Businesslike, he commented
mentally, and he was glad to see it because a newspaper is an excellent cloak
for nervousness and embarrassment. His mother’s hint about his being possibly
a bad disciplinarian put him on his guard; he was determined to succeed in
this immensely important respect right from the start. Of course he possessed
the enormous advantage of knowing from recent experience the habits and
psychology of the average public-schoolboy.

But breakfast was not a very terrible ordeal. The boys nearest him
introduced themselves and bade him a cheerful good morning, for there is a
sense of fairness in schoolboys which makes them generous to newcomers,
except where tradition decrees the setting-up of some definite ordeal.
Towards the end of the meal Pritchard walked over from one of the other
tables and enquired, in a voice loud enough for at any rate two or three of
the boys to hear: “Well, Speed, old man, did you have a merry carousal at the
Head’s last night?”

Speed replied, a little coldly: “I had a pleasant time.”

“I suppose now,” went on Pritchard, dropping his voice a little, but still
not sufficiently to prevent the nearest boys from hearing, “you realise what
I meant yesterday.”

“What was that?”

“When I said that you’d find out soon enough what she was like.”

Speed said crisply: “You warned me yesterday against talking shop. I might
warn you now.”

“But that isn’t shop.”

“Well, whether it is or not I don’t propose to discuss
it—
now
—and
here
.”

Almost without his being aware of it his voice had risen somewhat, so that
at this final pronouncement the boys nearest him looked up with curiosity
tinged with poorly-concealed amusement. It was rather obvious that Pritchard
was unpopular.

Speed was sorry that he had not exercised greater control over his voice,
especially when Pritchard, reddening, merely shrugged his shoulders and went
away.

The boy nearest to Speed grinned and said audaciously: “That’ll take Mr.
Pritchard down a peg, sir!”

Speed barked out (to the boy’s bewilderment): “Don’t be impertinent!”

For the rest of the meal he held up the
Telegraph
as a rampart
between himself and the world.

He knew, at the end of the first school day, that he had
been a success, and that if he took reasonable care he would be able to go on
being a success. It had been a day of subtle trials and ordeals, yet he had,
helped rather than hindered by his peculiar type of nervousness, got safely
through them all.

Numerous were the pitfalls which he had carefully avoided. At school meals
he had courteously declined to share jam and delicacies which the nearest to
him offered. If he had he would have been inundated immediately with pots of
jam and boxes of fancy cakes from all quarters of the table. Many a new
Master at Millstead had finished his first meal with his part of the table
looking like the counter of an untidy grocer’s shop. Instinct rather than
prevision had saved Speed from such a fate. Instinct, in fact, had been his
guardian angel throughout the day; instinct which, although to some extent
born of his recent public-school experience, was perhaps equally due to that
curious barometric sensitiveness that made his feelings so much more acute
and clairvoyant than those of other people.

At dinner in the Masters’ Common-Room he had met the majority of the
staff. There was Garforth, the bursar, a pleasant little man with a
loving-kindness overclouded somewhat by pedantry; Hayes-Smith, housemaster of
Mllner’s, a brisk, bustling, unimaginative fellow whose laugh was more
eloquent than his words; Ransome, a wizened Voltairish classical master,
morbidly ashamed of being caught in possession of any emotion of any kind;
Lavery, housemaster of North House (commonly called Lavery’s), whose
extraordinary talent for delegating authority enabled him to combine laziness
and efficiency in a way both marvellous and enviable; and Poulet, the French
and German Master, who spoke far better English than anybody in the
Common-Room, except, perhaps, Garforth or Ransome. Then, of course, there was
Clanwell, whom Speed had already met; Clanwell, better known “Fish-cake,” a
sporting man of great vigour who would, from time to time, astonish the world
by donning a black suit and preaching from the Millstead pulpit a sermon of
babbling meekness. Speed liked him; liked all of them, in fact, better than
he did Pritchard.

At dinner, Pritchard sat next to him on one side and Clanwell on the
other. Pritchard showed no malice for the incident of that morning’s
breakfast-time, and Speed, a little contrite, was affable enough. But for all
that he did not like Pritchard.

Pritchard asked him if he had got on all right that day, and Speed replied
that he had. Then Pritchard said: “Oh, well of course, the first day’s always
easy. It’s after a week or so that you’ll find things a bit trying. The first
night you take prep, for instance. It’s a sort of school tradition that they
always try and rag you that night.”

Clanwell, overhearing, remarked fiercely: “Anyway, Speed, take my tip and
don’t imagine it’s a school tradition that any Master lets himself be
ragged.”

Speed laughed. “I’ll remember that,” he said.

He remembered it on the following Wednesday night when he was down to take
evening preparation from seven until half-past eight. Preparation for the
whole school, except prefects, was held in Millstead Big Hall, a huge
vault-like chamber in which desks were ranged in long rows and where the
Master in charge sat on high at a desk on a raised dais. No more subtle and
searching test of disciplinary powers could have been contrived than this
supervision of evening preparation, for the room was so big that it was
impossible to see clearly from the Master’s desk to the far end, and besides
that, the acoustics were so peculiar that conversations in some parts of the
room were practically inaudible except from very close quarters. A new Master
suffered additional handicap in being ignorant of the names of the vast
majority of the boys.

At dinner, before the ordeal, the Masters in the Common-Room had given
Speed jocular advice. “Whatever you do, watch that they don’t get near the
electric-light switches,” said Clanwell. Pritchard said: “When old Blenkinsop
took his first prep they switched off the lights and then took his trousers
off and poured ink over his legs.” Garforth said: “Whatever you do, don’t
lose your temper and hit anybody. It doesn’t pay.”

“Best to walk up and down the rows if you want them to stop talking,” said
Ransome. Pritchard said: “If you do that they’ll beat time to your steps with
their feet.” Poulet remarked reminiscently: “When I took my first prep they
started a gramophone somewhere, and I guessed they’d hidden it well, so I
said: ‘Gentlemen, anyone who interrupts the music will have a hundred lines!’
They laughed and were quite peaceable afterwards.”

Speed said, at the conclusion of the meal: “I’m much obliged to everybody
for the advice. I’ll try to remember all of it, but I guess when I’m in there
I shall just do whatever occurs to me at the moment.” To which Clanwell
replied, putting a hand on Speed’s shoulder: “You couldn’t do better, my
lad.”

Speed was very nervous as he took his seat on the dais at five to seven
and watched the school straggling to their places. They came in quietly
enough, but there was an atmosphere of subdued expectancy of which Speed was
keenly conscious; the boys stared about them, grinned at each other, seemed
as if they were waiting for something to happen. Nevertheless, at five past
seven all was perfectly quiet and orderly, although it was obvious that
little work was being done. Speed felt rather as if he were sitting on a
powder-magazine, and there was a sense in which he was eager for the storm to
break.

At about a quarter-past seven a banging of desk-lids began at the far end
of the hall.

He stood up and said, quietly, but in a voice that carried well: “I don’t
want to be hard on anybody, so I’d better warn you that I shall punish any
disorderliness very severely.”

There was some tittering, and for a moment or so he wondered if he had
made a fool of himself.

Then he saw a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy in one of the back rows
deliberately raise a desk-lid and drop it with a bang. Speed consulted the
map of the desks that was in front of him and by counting down the rows
discovered the boy’s name to be Worsley. He wondered how the name should be
pronounced—whether the first syllable should rhyme with “purse” or with
“horse.” Instinct in him, that uncanny feeling for atmosphere, embarked him
on an outrageously bold adventure, nothing less than a piece of
facetiousness, the most dangerous weapon in a new Master’s armoury, and the
one most of all likely to recoil on himself. He stood up again and said:
“Wawsley or Wurssley—however you call yourself—you have a hundred
lines!”

The whole assembly roared with laughter. That frightened him a little.
Supposing they did not stop laughing! He remembered an occasion at his own
school when a class had ragged a certain Master very neatly and subtly by
pretending to go off into hysterics of laughter at some trifling witticism of
his.

When the laughter subsided, a lean, rather clever-looking boy rose up in
the front row but one and said, impudently: “Please, sir, I’m Worsley. I
didn’t do anything.”

Speed replied promptly: “Oh, didn’t you? Well, you’ve got a hundred lines,
anyway.”

“What for, sir?”—in hot indignation.

“For sitting in your wrong desk.”

Again the assembly laughed, but there was no mistaking the respectfulness
that underlay the merriment. And, as a matter of fact, the rest of the
evening passed entirely without incident. After the others had gone, and when
the school-bell had rung for evening chapel, Worsley came up to the dais
accompanied by the pleasant-faced boy who dropped the desk-lid. Worsley
pleaded for the remission of his hundred lines, and the other boy supported
him, urging that it was he and not Worsley who had dropped the lid.

“And what is your name?” asked Speed.

“Naylor, sir.”

“Very well, Naylor, you and Worsley can share the hundred lines between
you.” He added smiling “I’ve no doubt you’re neither of you worse than
anybody else but you must pay the penalty of being, pioneers.”

They went away laughing.

That night Speed went into Clanwell’s room for a chat before bedtime, and
Clanwell congratulated him fulsomely on his successful passage of the ordeal.
“As, a matter of fact,” Clanwell said, “I happen to know that they’d prepared
a star benefit performance for you but that you put them off, somehow, from
the beginning. The prefects get to hear of these things and they tell me.. Of
course, I don’t take any official notice of them. It doesn’t matter to me
what plans people make—it’s when any are put into execution that I wake
up. Anyhow, you may be interested to know that the members of School House
subscribed over fifteen shillings to purchase fireworks which they were going
to let off after the switches had been turned off! Alas for fond hopes
ruined!”

Clanwell and Speed leaned back in their armchairs and roared with
laughter.

At the end of the first week of life at Millstead, Speed was
perfectly happy. He seemed to have surmounted easily all the difficulties
that had confronted or that could confront him, and now there stretched away
into the future an endless succession of glorious days spent tirelessly in
the work that he loved. For he loved teaching. He loved boys. When he got
over his preliminary, and in some ways rather helpful nervousness he was
thoroughly at home with all of them. He invited those in his house to tea,
two or three at a time, almost every afternoon. He took a deep and individual
interest in all who showed distinct artistic or musical abilities. He plunged
adventurously into the revolutionising of the School’s arts curriculum; he
dreamed of organising an exhibition of art work in time for Speech Day, of
reviving the moribund School musical society, of getting up concerts of
chamber music, of entering the School choir for musical festivals. All the
hot enthusiasm of youth he poured ungrudgingly into the service of Millstead,
and Millstead rewarded him by liking him tremendously. The boys liked him
because he was young and agreeable, yet not condescendingly so; besides, he
could play a game of cricket that was so good-naturedly mediocre that nobody,
after witnessing it, could doubt that he was a fellow of like capabilities
with the rest. The Masters liked him because he was energetic and efficient
and did not ally himself with any particular set or clique among them.

Clanwell said to him one evening: “I hope you won’t leave at the end of
the term, Speed.”

Speed said: “Why on earth should I?”

“We sometimes find that people who’re either very good or very bad do so.
And you’re very good.”

“I’m so glad you think so.” His face grew suddenly boyish with
blushes.

“We all think so, Speed. And the Head likes you. We hope you’ll stay.”

“I’ll stay all right. I’m too happy to want to go away.”

Clanwell said meditatively: “It’s a fine life if you’re cut out for it,
isn’t it? I sometimes think there isn’t a finer life in the whole world.”

“I’ve always thought that.”

“I hope you always will think it.”

“And I hope so too.”

Summer weather came like a strong flood about ten days after the opening
of term, and then Millstead showed herself to him in all her serene and
matchless beauty. He learned to know and expect the warm sunshine waking him
in the mornings and creeping up the bed till it dazzled his eyes; he learned
to know and to love the
plick-plock
of the cricket that was his music
at he sat by the open window many an afternoon at work. And at night time,
when the flaring gas jets winked in all the tiny windows and when there came
upwards the cheerful smell of coffee-making in the studies, it was all as if
some subtle alchemy were at work, transforming his soul into the mould and
form of Millstead. Something fine and mighty was in the place, and his soul,
passionately eager to yield itself, craved for that full possession which
Millstead brought to it. The spell was swift and glorious. Sometimes he
thought of Millstead almost as a lover; he would stroll round at night and
drink deep of the witchery that love put into all that lie saw and heard; the
sounds of feet scampering along the passage outside his door, the cold lawns
with the moon white upon them, the soft delicious flower-scents that rose up
to his bedroom window at night. The chapel seemed to him, to put it
epigrammatically, far more important because it belonged to Millstead than
because it belonged to Christ. Millstead, stiff-collared and black-coated on
a Sunday morning, and wondering what on earth it should do with itself on
Sunday afternoon, touched him far more deeply than did the chatter of some
smooth-voiced imported divine who knew Millstead only from spending a bored
week-end at the Head’s house. To Speed, sitting in the Masters’ pew, and
giving vent to his ever-ready imagination, Millstead seemed a personification
of all that was youthful and clear-spirited and unwilling to pay any more
than merely respectful attention to the exhortations of elders.