The Passionate Year (20 page)

He stared at her severely and said: “Yes, I have. I want to ask you not to
come here any more.”

“Why?” She shot the word out at him almost before he had finished
speaking.

“Because I don’t wish you to.”

“You forget that I come at Helen’s invitation, not at yours.”

“I see I shall have to tell you the real reason, then. I would have
preferred not to have done. My wife is jealous of you.”

He expected her to show great surprise, but the surprise was his when she
replied almost casually: “Oh yes, she was jealous of
you
once-that
first evening we met at the Head’s house—do you remember?”

No, he did not remember. At least, he did now that she called it to his
memory, but he had not remembered until then. Curious…

He was half-disappointed that she was so calm and unconcerned about it
all. He had anticipated some sort of a scene, either of surprise, remorse,
indignation, or sympathy. Instead of which she just said “Oh, yes,” and
indulged in some perfectly irrelevant reminiscence.

Well, not perhaps irrelevant, but certainly inappropriate in the
circumstances.

“You see,” he went on, hating her blindly because she was so serene; “you
see she generously invites you here, because she thinks I like you to come.
Well, of course, I do, but then, I don’t want to make it hard for her. You
understand what I mean? I think it is very generous of her to—to act as
she does.”

“I think it is very foolish unless she has the idea that in time she can
conquer her jealousy…But I quite understand, Mr. Speed. I won’t come any
more.”

“I hope you don’t think—”

“Fortunately I have other things to think about. I assure you I’m not
troubling at all. Even loss of friendship—”

“But,” he interrupted eagerly, “surely it’s not going to mean that, Miss
Harrington? Just because you don’t come here doesn’t mean that you and
I—”

She laughed in his face as she replied, cutting short his remarks: “My
dear Mr. Speed, you are too much of an egoist. It wasn’t your friendship I
was thinking about—it was Helen’s. You forget that I’ve been Helen’s
friend for ten years…Well, goodbye…”

The last straw! He shook hands with her stiffly.

When she had gone his face grew hard and solemn, and he clenched his fists
as he stood again with his back to the fire. He felt—the word
came
to his mind was a staggering inevitability-he felt
dead
.
Absolutely
dead
. And all because she had gone and he knew that she
would not come again.

Those were the dark days of the winter term, when Burton
came round the dormitories at half-past seven in the mornings and lit all the
flaring gas-jets. There was a cold spell at the beginning of December when it
was great fun to have to smash the film of ice on the top of the water in the
water-jugs, and one afternoon the school got an extra half-holiday to go
skating on one of the neighbouring fens that had been flooded and frozen
over. Now Speed could skate very well, even to the point of figure-skating
and a few easy tricks, and he took a very simple and human delight in
exhibiting his prowess before the Millstead boys. He possessed a good deal of
that very charming boyish pride in athletic achievement which is so often
mistaken for modesty, and there was no doubt that the reports of his
accomplishments on the wide expanse of Dinglay Fen gave a considerable fillip
to his popularity in the school.

A popularity, by the way, which was otherwise very distinctly on the wane.
He knew it, felt it as anyone might have felt it, and perhaps, additionally,
as only he in all the world could feel it; it was the dark spectre in his
life. He loved success; he was prepared to fight the sternest of battles
provided they were victories on the road of progress; but to see his power
slipping from him elusively and without commotion of any kind, was the sort
of thing his soul was not made to endure. Fears grew up in him and
exaggerated reality. He imagined all kinds of schemes and conspiracies
against him in his own House. The enigma of the Head became suddenly resolved
into a sinister hostility to himself. If a boy passed him in the road with a
touch of the cap and a “Good morning” he would ask himself whether the words
contained any ominous subtlety of meaning. And when, on rare occasions, he
dined in the Masters’ Common-Room he could be seen to feel hostility rising
in clouds all about him, hostility that would not speak or act, that was
waiting mute for the signal to uprise.

He was glad that the term was nearly over, not, he told himself, because
he was unhappy at Millstead, but because he needed a holiday after the hard
work of his first term of housemastership. The next term, he decided, would
be easier; and the term after that easier still, and so on, until a time
would come when his work at Millstead would be exactly the ideal combination
of activity and comfort. Moreover, the next term he would not see Clare at
all. He had made up his mind about that. It would be easier to see her not at
all than to see her only a little. And with the absolute snapping of his
relations with her would come that which he desired most in all the world;
happiness with Helen. He wanted to be happy with Helen. He wanted to love her
passionately, just as he wanted to hate Clare passionately. For it was Clare
who had caused all the trouble. He hugged the comfortable thought to himself;
it was Clare, and Clare only, who had so far disturbed the serenity of his
world. Without Clare his world would have been calm and unruffled, a paradise
of contentment and love of Helen.

Well, next term, anyway, his world should be without Clare.

On the day that term ended he felt quite boyish and
cheerful. For during that final week he and Helen had been, he considered,
perfectly happy; moreover, she had agreed to go with him to his parents for
Christmas, and though the visit would, in some sense, be an ordeal, the
anticipation of it was distinctly pleasant. Somehow—he would not
analyse his sensation exactly—somehow he wanted to leave the
creeper-hung rooms at Lavery’s and charge full tilt into the world outside;
it was as if Lavery’s contained something morbidly beautiful that he loved
achingly, but desired to leave in order that he might return to love it more
and again. When he saw the railway vans being loaded up with luggage in the
courtyard he felt himself tingling with excitement, just as if he were a
schoolboy and this the close of his first miserable term. Miserable! Well,
yes, looking back upon it he could agree that in a certain way it had been
miserable, and in another way it had been splendid, rapturous, and lovely. It
had been full, brimming full, of
feelings
. The feelings had whirled
tirelessly about him in the dark drawing-room, had wrapped him amidst
themselves, had tossed him high and low to the most dizzy heights and the
most submerged depths; and now, aching from it all, he was not sorry to leave
for a short while this world of pressing, congesting sensation.

He even caught himself looking forward to his visit to his parents, a
thing he had hardly ever done before. For his parents were, he had always
considered, “impossible” parents, good and generous enough in their way, but
“impossible” from his point of view. They were—he hesitated to use the
word “vulgar,” because that word implied so many things that they certainly
were not-he would use instead the rather less insulting word “materialist.”
They lived in a world that was full of “things “—soap-factories and
cars and Turkey carpets and gramophones and tennis-courts. Moreover, they
were almost disgustingly wealthy, and their wealth had followed him doggedly
about wherever he had tried to escape from it. They had regarded his taking a
post in a public-school as a kind of eccentric wild oats, and did not doubt
that, sooner or later, he would come to his senses and prefer one or other of
the various well-paid business posts that Sir Charles Speed could get for
him. Oh, yes, undoubtedly they were impossible people. And yet their very
impossibility would be a relief from the tensely charged atmosphere of
Lavery’s.

On the train he chatted gaily to Helen and gave her some indication of the
sort of people his parents were. “You mustn’t be nervous of them,” he warned
her.

“They’ve pots of money, but they’re not people to get nervous about. Dad’s
all right if you stick up for yourself in front of him, and mother’s nice to
everybody whether she likes them or not. So you’ll be quite safe…and if it
freezes there’ll be ice on the Marsh-pond…”

At the thought of this last possibility his face kindled with
anticipation. “Cold, Helen?” he queried, and when she replied “Yes, rather,”
he said jubilantly: “I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s started to freeze
already.”

Then for many minutes he gazed out through the carriage window at the
pleasant monotony of the Essex countryside, and in a short while he felt her
head against his shoulder. She was sleeping. “I
do
love her!” he
thought triumphantly, giving her a side-glance. And then the sight of a pond
with a thin coating of ice gave him another sort of triumph.

“Beachings Over, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32.
Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles.”

So ran the inscription on Lady Speed’s opulent bluish notepaper. The house
was an old one, unobtrusively modernised, with about a half-mile of upland
carriage-drive leading to the portico. As Helen saw it from the window of the
closed Daimler that had met them at Framlingay station, her admiration
secured momentary advantage of her nervousness.

In another moment Speed was introducing her to his mother.

Lady Speed was undoubtedly a fine woman. “Fine” was exactly the right word
for her, for she was just a little too elderly to be called beautiful and
perhaps too tall ever to have been called pretty. Though she was upright and
clear-skinned and finely-featured, and although the two decades of her
married life had seemed to leave very little conspicuous impression on her,
yet there was a sense, perhaps, in which she looked her age; it might have
been guessed rightly as between forty and fifty. She had blue eyes of that
distinctively English hue that might almost be the result of gazing
continually upon miles and miles of rolling English landscape; and her nose,
still attractively
retrousse
, though without a great deal of the
pertness it must have had in her youth, held just enough of patricianly
bearing to enable her to manage competently the twenty odd domestics whose
labours combined to make Beachings Over habitable.

She kissed Helen warmly. “My dear, I’m so pleased to meet you. But you’ll
have to rough it along with us, you know—I’m afraid we don’t live at
all in style. We’re just ordinary country folks, that’s all…And when you’ve
had your lunch and got refreshed I must take you over the house and show you
everything…”

Speed laughed and said: “Mother always tells visitors that they’ve got to
rough it. But there’s nothing to rough. I wonder what she’d say if she had to
live three months at Lavery’s.”

“Lavery’s?” said Lady Speed, uncomprehendingly.

“Lavery’s is the name of my House at Millstead. I was made housemaster of
it at the beginning of the term.” He spoke a little proudly.

“Oh, yes, I seem to know the name. I believe your father was mentioning
something about it to me once, but I hardly remember—”

“But how on earth did he know anything about it? I never wrote telling
him.”

“Well, I expect he heard it from somebody…I really couldn’t tell you
exactly…I’ve had a most awful morning before you came—had to dismiss
one of the maids—she’d stolen a thermos-flask. So ungrateful of her,
because I’d have given it to her if she’d only asked me for it. One of my
best maids, she was.”

After lunch Richard arrived. Richard was Speed’s younger brother, on
vacation from school; a pleasant-faced, rather ordinary youngster, obviously
prepared to enter the soap-boiling industry as soon as he left school. In the
afternoon Richard conducted the pair of them round the grounds and
outbuildings, showing them the new Italian garden and the pergola and the new
sunken lawn and the clock-tower built over the garage and the new gas-engine
to work the electric light plant and the new pavilion alongside the rubble
tennis courts and the new wing of the servants’ quarters that “dad” was
“throwing out” from the end of the old coach-house. Then, when they returned
indoors, Lady Speed was ready to conduct them over the interior and show them
the panelled bedrooms and the lacquered cabinets in the music-room and the
bathroom with a solid silver bath and the gramophone worked by electricity
and the wonderful old-fashioned bureau that somebody had offered to buy off
“dad” for fifteen hundred guineas.

“Visitors always have to go through it,” said Speed, when his mother had
left them. “Personally I’m never the least bit impressed, and I can’t
understand anyone else being it.”

Helen answered, rather doubtfully: “But it’s a lovely house, Kenneth,
isn’t it? I’d no idea your people were like this.”

“Like what?”

“So—so well-off.”

“Oh, then the display
has
impressed you?” He laughed and said,
quietly: “I’d rather have our own little place at Lavery’s, wouldn’t
you?”

While he was saying it he felt: Yes, I’d rather have it, no doubt, but to
be there now would make me utterly miserable.

She replied softly: “Yes, because it’s our own.”

He pondered a moment and then said: “Yes, I suppose that’s one of the
reasons why
I
would.”

After a pleasant tea in the library he took Helen into the music-room,
where he played Chopin diligently for half-an-hour and then, by special
request of Richard, ran over some of the latest revue songs. Towards seven
o’clock Lady Speed sailed in to remind Richard that it was getting near
dinner-time. “I wish you’d run upstairs and change your clothes,
dear—you know father doesn’t like you to come in to dinner in
tweeds…You know,” she went on, turning to Helen, “Charles isn’t a bit
fussy—none of us trouble to really
dress
for dinner, except when
we’re in town—only—only you have to put a limit somewhere,
haven’t you?”