Adrian Glynde (11 page)

As he lay open-eyed in his dark, lonely bedroom, the sharp, unforgettable memories of the Crowhursts spread once more like a disease through his mind, immensely more appalling now than in that early morning reverie three weeks ago. Because they were now not mere memories, but imminent and inexorable realities, they assumed in his shrinking regard fantastically horrible proportions. His heart flinched: he dared not face them. It was impossible to believe that the day after tomorrow that nightmare was going to repeat itself. The thought that his mother would be there too was no
consolation: rather, it made the prospect more dreadful still. And now another misery faced him. The defence of present happiness being suddenly withdrawn, the impending threat of Charminster, where in a month's time he would begin life as a public-schoolboy, grew large and terrible. He was so utterly wretched that he could not sleep, but lay tossing till after midnight.

Next day, nothing was seen of him between breakfast and lunch. He returned, hot and breathless, when they had already been seated at lunch for about ten minutes, and replied, when interrogated, that he had been for a walk. After lunch he vanished again, and did not reappear for tea. As dinner-time approached, the three grown-ups began to look grim, and when at dinner there were still no signs of him, their anxiety was apparent in their faces and in the strained silence which held them, with hardly a break, throughout the meal. Clara's acute anxiety aroused in her a growing anger against Minnie, while Minne's guilty conscience could not afford to feel scared and reassured itself by anger against Adrian.

“It's simply monstrous to behave like this,” she exclaimed irritably as they crossed the hall from the dining-room to the drawing-room. “I can't think what he means by it.”

Clara's nerves were beyond restraint. “Can't you, Minnie?” she replied. “Then you must be extremely stupid. What he means by it, as you know well enough, is that you have goaded him beyond endurance. But goodness knows what exactly
that
means. That's what's keeping us on tenterhooks now. I hope you'll profit by the experience.”

“It seems to me, Clara,” answered Minnie hotly, “that you're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, and so is Adrian if he's really behaving like this just because I'm taking him to stay with the Crowhursts.”

“One person's molehill is another person's mountain, Minnie. I warned you yesterday and your reply was' Fiddlededee.' Well, now we are enjoying the consequences of your fiddlededeeing.”

Minnie ignored this. “Adrian's just doing this to frighten us,” she said.

“Us? You, you mean. Well, I only hope he is.”

Unable, in her agitation, to endure Minnie any longer, Clara sailed out of the room and joined Bob, who was smoking a pipe in the morning-room. As she entered the room, the telephone bell rang. Bob took down the receiver.

“Yes.… Right.… Yes.… Yes,” said Bob, as Clara stood waiting expectantly. “Yes.… Yes.… I've got that. Yes.… Thank you.” He replaced the receiver and turned to Clara. “It's a wire from that young monkey,” he said. “
Am all right. Don't worry. Writing
.”

Clara heaved a deep sigh of relief. Then a smile curled her lips. “He's decided, of course, not to go to the Crowhursts,” she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I suppose I ought to tell her, though it would serve her right if I waited till to-morrow.” She turned and went out of the room.

When she had closed the door, Bob went to the telephone again. “Hallo,” he called. “You phoned me a telegram just now. Barlton, Yarn. Will you please tell me where it was handed in. Abbot's Randale? Thank you.”

The woman who served at the Wilmore Junction refreshment room had laid aside her knitting that evening at the sound of the opening door. She knew the boy who asked for a cup of tea, though he showed no sign of knowing her. At first she could not remember where she
had seen him before; but when he raised his dark-fringed grey eyes to hers, she knew at once.

“You were here a few months ago, weren't you?” she said.

“Yes, last April,” said Adrian.

She thought him looking less forlorn. He was sunburnt now and he was more manly, more self-possessed than on the former occasion.

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “You bought a ham sandwich, a bun, and a banana.”

He smiled at her, and once more she wished she had a little chap of her own like this, who would be looking out for her when she went home, or perhaps waiting for her outside the station to walk home with her.

“You must have a very good memory,” he said.

“Was I right?”

“Just about,” he said, “but, as a matter of fact, it was two bananas.”

“Why, so it was,” she replied. “Fancy me forgetting that.” And then, after a moment, she repeated, with a touch of sadness in her voice, as though it seemed to her a serious matter: “Just fancy me forgetting that.”

It is half-past two on a Monday afternoon, the first Monday of the autumn term at Charminster. The warm sunlight of late September falls through the half-open windows of the great bare, empty common-room of Taylor's, one of the ten houses of Charminster, on to bare boards, bare walls, bare benches and tables, and the two tiers of stained and varnished lockers that form a high wainscot to two of the four walls of the room. The other walls are painted drab, and on them hang framed photographs of cricket and football house-elevens. It is easy to see that it is the beginning of term, for the wide fireplace shows immaculately clean in a bright searchlight-shaft of sunshine that illuminates it. The fireback is sootless, there is not a sign of ash or dust or paper under the grate, and the bars are newly black-leaded. The brass of the doorknobs and the knobs on the lockers shine like sunlight solidified, the speckless windows are limpid as the air itself: everything is inexorably clean, bare, comfortless, Spartan. The room has two doors, the second leading into Hall, the living-room of the upper school, and where the floor of Common-room is raised, at the far end, nine inches above the rest, stands the high table at which the upper school sits for lunch. They take their other meals in Hall, leaving Common-room to the boys of the lower school.

Not a sound breaks the silence except the mechanical heart-beats of a clock hung on the wall over the door that leads to Hall, for all the boys are out playing or watching games. In a little over an hour they will come,
all sixty of them, swarming into the house to change and get their books for afternoon school.

Then into this airy, mechanically measured silence fall the sounds of small footsteps on the stone-paved passage. They are hard and hollow and regular, as if another and larger clock had joined its beats for a moment with the softer tic-toc of the clock on the wall. They approach, and round the half-open door Adrian looks cautiously into the empty room. He enters, and then pauses for a moment and glances at the ticking clock as if in doubt whether to go or stay. Obviously he ought not to be there, since no one else is there. He is probably committing some monstrous breach of rules or school etiquette. If discovered he will find himself an object of reprimand or ridicule. Then, deciding that it is more bearable to risk this and be surreptitiously alone, than to be publicly and patently alone out-of-doors, where every boy who is not playing a game has a companion, he tiptoes forward and sits down on one of the long forms, his elbows on the table, his chin cupped in his hands.

Since his arrival at Charminster three days ago. Adrian had lived in a state of bewilderment. He felt as if he were being swept along on a great stream, in which before he had mastered one novelty, he was swept on to the next. He kept discovering, to his horror, things he was supposed to have done which he had not done. That very morning, on going into school, he found that he was supposed to have prepared a chapter of Job as well as learnt by heart the Collect during prep, on the previous evening. He had waited in fearful expectation for his turn for a question, and when Mr. Storer, his form-master, had asked it, he had been able to do nothing but blush. The boy next him had answered it and had gone up above him.

This afternoon he had discovered that if you did not
want to be left in the lurch all afternoon, you had to book a companion before-hand. He had heard boys inviting other boys to “come out this afternoon,” but had not known how necessary it was to do the same. How was it that the other new boys had known? For he seemed to be the only one who was left alone. But whom could he have asked? He had made no friend yet, and he would not have dared to invite a boy he hardly knew.

Still, though he felt bewildered and very much alone, Adrian felt too that the great flood did carry you along to whatever you were expected to do; that though you omitted things and made minor mistakes on the way, you did arrive, merely by following the stream, at the various destinations at which it was your duty to arrive. And it was generally easy, too, in the crowd, to avoid appearing as lonely as you really were. This was the first time he had found himself actually isolated.

There were nine new boys this term besides himself. He did not yet know them all by name nor even by sight, though he had distinguished four, Harting, Jones, Clouston Minor, and Phipps, who seemed to be the nicest. But the names and appearances of new boys were of no real importance. It was his duty, he had already been told, to know who were the captains of the school football and cricket elevens and every member of the teams, and the same of the teams of Taylor's, his own house; who played for the school at racquets and fives, which houses belonged to which games-clubs and what were the colours of those clubs, besides a mass of other facts in which the new boys had to pass an examination in a fortnight's time.

He had not got very far yet in the acquirement of all this knowledge. He did not yet know even the names of the six prefects of his own house. He had already had
two opportunities of gazing at them with awe on Saturday and Sunday evenings when, at house-prayers in Common-room, one of them had stood beside Mr. Wisborough at the high table and read a passage from the Bible and the other five had stood behind them with their backs to the wall, while the rest of the boys were gathered in rows round the lower tables.

Adrian had particularly noticed the sixth prefect, a handsome, merry-looking boy with fair hair and blue eyes. There was something in his gay, good-humoured expression, his quick, determined movements, even in the mere shape of him, that made him seem twice as alive as any of the others. He had just been made a prefect, Adrian discovered, and the others seemed pleased and a little amused by the fact. It was obvious that he was a great favourite. Adrian had gathered at first that his name was Ronny, but soon discovered that it was really Dakyn and that Ronald was his Christian name.

From the first Adrian was captivated by him. He knew well enough that this enchanting person was too far above him ever to become a friend of his: probably he would never so much as speak to him. But that did not trouble him. He was content to admire at a distance.

But now, as he sat in the empty Common-room with his elbows on the table, he was not thinking of Dakyn. He was recalling his sudden arrival at his grandfather's a month ago. He recalled how he had awoken on the morning after his mother had announced her intention of taking him to the Crowhursts with the determination to revolt. It was as if all his misery of the previous night had solidified during his sleep into this firm determination. He would simply refuse to go. She was not very much bigger than he was, and she could not drag him to the Crowhursts by main force if he was determined not to go. But next moment he had realised that it would
be extremely awkward for his uncle and aunt if he made a scene in their house. He was sufficiently aware of the situation between them and his mother to see that his mother would probably blame them for his bad behaviour to her, and that, though they would really agree with him, they would be forced to side with her.

And then he thought of his grandfather. Obviously the best way would be simply to go to his grandfather's without a word to anyone. He decided to walk to the village after breakfast and ring up his grandfather from the post-office.

How delighted the old man had been when he arrived that evening at Abbot's Randale. Adrian had found him waiting on the platform when he got out of the train. He had told his grandfather nothing on the telephone except that it would fit in better if he might come to-day instead of the following week when he was due. But on the drive from the station he explained everything.

The old man had chuckled. “Well, upon my word! The young devil!” he had remarked.

“But wasn't it the best thing to do?” said Adrian.

“Well, if you ask me as man to man,” Oliver had replied, “certainly it was. But by rights I suppose I ought to pack you straight back to your mother.”

“But you won't,” replied Adrian confidently.

“But, as you say, I won't,” said his grandfather. “I shouldn't dream of it. A guest, after all, is sacred. But they'll be in a fearful stew at Yarn, you know, when you don't turn up to-night. What about your aunt and uncle?”

“I'm going to write to Aunt Clara,” said Adrian.

“I'll tell you what,” said his grandfather. “Why not send your uncle a wire saying you're all right. You needn't say where you are, just' Am all right. Don't worry. Writing later,' or something like that.”

Adrian had agreed that it would be a good thing to do,
and they had stopped at the post-office and wired there and then. For some days he had been a little afraid that his mother might find out where he was and come down in a fury. He had pictured her hurrying towards him across the lawn, the angry, black-clothed figure of his dream. But days passed and nothing happened, and he felt as if, by his sudden resolute action, he had woken himself from the bad dream which his mother had haunted.