The Passionate Year (26 page)

Still, of course, it was Clare that was worrying her. She kept insisting
that he wanted Clare more than he wanted her, and he kept denying it, and she
obviously liked to hear him denying it, although she kept refusing to believe
him. And as a simple denial would never satisfy her, he had perforce to
elaborate his denials, until they were not so much denials as elaborately
protestant speeches in which energetically expressed affection for her was
combined with subtle disparagement of Clare. As time went on her demands
increased, and the kind of denial that would have satisfied her a fortnight
before was no longer sufficient to pacify her for a moment. He would say,
passionately: “My little darling Helen, all I want is you—why do you
keep talking about Clare? I’m tired of hearing the name It’s Helen I want, my
old darling Helen.” He became eloquent in this kind of speech.

But sometimes, in the midst of his acting, an awful, hollow moment of
derision would come over him; a moment when he secretly addressed himself:
You hypocrite. You don’t mean a word of all this! Why do you say it? What
good is it if it pleases her if it isn’t true? Can you—are you prepared
to endure these nightly exhibitions of extempore play-acting for ever?
Mustn’t the end come some day, and what is to be gained by the postponement
of it?

Then the hollow, dreadful, moment would leave him, and he would reply in
defence of himself: I love Helen, although the continual protestation of it
is naturally wearisome. If she can only get rid of the obsession about Clare
we shall live happily and without this emotional ferment. Therefore, it is
best that I should help her to get rid of it as much as I can. And if I were
to protest my love for her weakly I should hinder and not help her.

Sometimes, after he had been disparaging Clare, a touch of real vibrant
emotion would make him feel ashamed of himself. And then, in a few sharp,
anguished sentences he would undo all the good that hours of argument and
protestation had achieved. He would suddenly defend Clare, wantonly,
obtusely, stupidly aware all the time of the work he was undoing, yet,
somehow, incapable of stopping the words that came into his mouth. And they
were not eloquent words; they were halting, diffident, often rather silly.
“Clare’s all right,” he would say sometimes, and refuse to amplify or
qualify. “I don’t know why we keep dragging her in so much. She’s never done
us any harm and I’ve nothing against her.”

“So. You love her.”

“Love her? Rubbish! I don’t love her. But I don’t
hate
her—surely you don’t expect me to do that!”

“No, I don’t expect you to do that. I expect you to marry her, though,
some day.”

“Marry her! Good God, what madness you talk, Helen! I don’t want to marry
her, and if I did she wouldn’t want to marry me! And besides, it happens that
I’m already married. That’s an obstacle, isn’t it?”

“There’s such a thing as divorce.”

“You can’t get a divorce just because you want one.”

“I know that.”

“And besides, my dear Helen, who wants a divorce? Do you?”

“Do
you
?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“Kenneth, I know it seems to you that I’m terribly unreasonable. But it
isn’t any satisfaction to me that you just don’t
see
Clare. What I
want is that you shan’t
want
to see her.”

“Well, I don’t want to see her.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Well—well—what’s the good of me telling you I don’t want to
see her if you can’t believe me?”

“No good at all, Kenneth. That’s why it’s so awful.”

He said then, genuinely: “Is it
very
awful, Helen?”

“Yes. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that all the time one’s
happiness in the world is hanging by a thread. Kenneth, all the time I’m
watching you I can see Clare written in your mind. I
know
you want
her. I know she can give you heaps that I can’t give you. I know that our
marriage was a tragic mistake. We’re not suited to one another. We make each
other frightfully, frightfully miserable. More miserable than there’s any
reason for, but still, that doesn’t help. We’re misfits, somehow, and though
we try ever so hard we shall never be any better until we grow old and are
too tired for love any more. Then we shall be too disinterested to worry. It
was
my
fault, Kenneth-I oughtn’t to have married you. Father wanted me
to, because your people have a lot of money, but I only married you because I
loved you, Kenneth. It was silly of me, Kenneth, but it’s the truth!”

“Ah!” So the mystery was solved. He softened to her now that he heard her
simple confession; he felt that he loved her, after all.

She went on, sadly: “I’m not going to stay with you, Kenneth. I’m not
going to ruin your life. You won’t be able to keep me. I’d rather you be
happy and not have anything to do with me.”

Then he began one of his persuasive speeches. The beginning of it was
sincere, but as he used up all the genuine emotion that was in him, he drew
more and more on his merely histrionic capacities. He pleaded, he argued, he
implored. Once the awful thought came to him: Supposing I cried? Doubt as to
his capacity to cry impressively decided him against the suggestion…And
once the more awful thought came to him: Supposing one of these times I do
not succeed in patching things up? Supposing we
do
agree to separate?
Do I really want to win all the time I am wrestling so hard for victory?

And at the finish, when he had succeeded once again, and when she was
ready for all the passionate endearments that he was too tired to take
pleasure in giving, he felt: This cannot last. It is killing me. It is
killing her too. God help us both…

One day he realised that he was a failure. He had had some
disciplinary trouble with the fifth form and had woefully lost his temper.
There had followed a mild sort of scene; within an hour it had been noised
all over the school, so that he knew what the boys and Masters were thinking
of when they looked at him. It was then that the revelation of failure came
upon him.

But, worst of all, there grew in him wild and ungovernable hates. He hated
the Head, he hated Pritchard,
he
hated Smallwood, he hated, most
intensely of all, perhaps, Burton. Burton was too familiar. Not that Speed
disliked familiarity; it was rather that in Burton’s familiarity he always
diagnosed contempt: He wished Burton would leave. He was getting too old.

They had a stupid little row about some trivial affair of house
discipline. Speed had found some Juniors playing hockey along the long
basement corridor. True that they were using only tennis balls; nevertheless
it seemed to Speed the sort of thing that had to be stopped. He was not aware
that “basement hockey” was a time-honoured custom of Lavery’s, and that
occasional broken panes of glass were paid for by means of a “whip round.” If
he had known that he would have made no interference, for he was anxious not
to make enemies. But it seemed to him that this extempore hockey-playing was
a mere breach of ordinary discipline; accordingly he forbade it and gave a
slight punishment to the participators.

Back in his room there came to him within a little while, Burton, eagerly
solicitous about something or other.

“Well, what is it, Burton?” The mere sight of the shambling old fellow
enraged Speed now.

“If you’ll excuse the libutty, sir, I’ve come on be’alf of a few of the
Juniors you spoke to about the basement ‘ockey, sir.”

“I don’t see what business it is of yours, Burton.”

“No, sir, it ain’t any business of mine, that’s true, but I thought
perhaps you’d listen to me. In fact, I thought maybe you didn’t know that it
was an old ‘ouse custom, sir, durin’ the ‘ockey term. I bin at Millstead
fifty-one year come next July, sir, an’ I never remember an ‘ockey term
without it, sir. Old Mr. Hardacre used ‘to allow it, an’ so did Mr. Lavery
‘imself. In fact, some evenings, sir, Mr. Lavery used to come down an’ watch
it, sir.”

Speed went quite white with anger. He was furiously annoyed with himself
for having again trod on one of these dangerous places; he was also furious
with Burton for presuming to tell him his business. Also, a slight scuffle
outside the door of the room suggested to him that Burton was a hired
emissary of the Juniors, and that the latter were eavesdropping at that very
moment. He could not give way.

“I don’t know why you think I should be so interested in the habits of my
predecessors, Burton,” he said, with carefully controlled voice. “I’m sure it
doesn’t matter to me in the least what Hardacre and Lavery used to do. I’m
housemaster at present, and if I say there must be no more basement hockey
then there must be no more. That’s plain, isn’t it?”

“Well, sir, I was only warning you—”

“Thanks, I don’t require warning. You take too much on yourself,
Burton.”

The old man went suddenly red. Speed was not prepared for the suddenness
of it. Burton exclaimed, hardly coherent in the midst of his indignation:
“That’s the first time I’ve bin spoke to like that by a housemaster of
Lavery’s! Fifty years I’ve bin ‘ere an’ neither Mr. Hardacre nor Mr. Lavery
ever insulted me to my face!
They
were gentlemen,
they
were!”

“Get out!” said Speed, rising from his chair quickly. “Get out of here!
You’re damnably impertinent! Get out!”

He approached Burton and Burton did not move. He struck Burton very
lightly on the shoulder. The old man stumbled against the side of the table
and then fell heavily on to the floor. Speed was passionately frightened. He
wondered for the moment if Burton were dead. Then Burton began to groan.
Simultaneously the door opened and a party of Juniors entered, ostensibly to
make some enquiry or other, but really, as Speed could see, to find out what
was happening.

“What d’you want?” said Speed, turning on them. “I didn’t tell you to come
in. Why didn’t you knock?”

They had the answer ready. “We did knock, sir, and then we heard a noise
as if somebody had fallen down and we thought you might be ill, sir.”

Burton by this time had picked himself up and was shambling out of the
room, rather lame in one leg.

The days that followed were not easy ones for Speed. He knew he had been
wrong. He ought never to have touched Burton. People were saying “Fancy
hitting an old man over sixty!” Burton had told everybody about it. The
Common-Room knew of it. The school doctor knew of it, because Burton had been
up to the Sick-room to have a bruise on his leg attended. Helen knew of it,
and Helen rather obviously sided with Burton.

“You shouldn’t have hit an old man,” she said.

“I know I shouldn’t,” replied Speed. “I lost my temper. But can’t you see
the provocation I had? Am I to put up with a man’s impertinence merely
because he’s old?”

“You’re getting hard, Kenneth. You used to be kind to people, but you’re
not kind now. You’re
never
kind now.”

In his own heart he had to admit that it was true. He had given up being
kind. He was hard, ruthless, unmerciful, and God knew why, perhaps. Yet it
was all outside, he hoped. Surely he was not hard through and through; surely
the old Speed who was kind and gentle and whom everybody liked, surely this
old self of his was still there, underneath the hardness that had come upon
him lately!

He said bitterly: “Yes, I’m getting hard, Helen. It’s true. And I don’t
know the reason.”

She supplied the answer instantly. “It’s because of me,” she said quietly.
“I’m making you hard. I’m no good for you. You ought to have married somebody
else.”

“No, no!” he protested, vehemently. Then the old routine of argument,
protest, persuasion, and reconciliation took place again.

He made up his mind that he would crush the hardness in him,
that he would be the old Speed once more. All his troubles, so it seemed to
him, were the result of being no longer the old Speed. If he could only bring
to life again that old self, perhaps, after sufficient penance, he could
start afresh. He could start afresh with Lavery’s, he could start afresh with
Helen; most of all perhaps, he could start afresh with himself. He
would
be kind. He would be the secret, inward man he wanted to be, and
not the half-bullying, half-cowardly fellow that was the outside of him. He
prayed, if he had ever prayed in his life, that he might accomplish the
resuscitation.

It was a dark sombrely windy evening in February; a Sunday evening. He had
gone into chapel with all his newly-made desires and determinations fresh
upon him; he was longing for the quiet calm of the chapel service, that he
might cement, so to say, his desires and resolutions into a
sufficiently-welded programme of conduct that should be put into operation
immediately. Raggs was playing the organ, so that he was able to sit
undisturbed in the Masters’ pew. The night was magnificently stormy; the wind
shrieked continually around the chapel walls and roof; sometimes he could
hear the big elm trees creaking in the Head’s garden. The preacher was the
Dean of somewhere-or-other; but Speed did not listen to a word of his sermon,
excellent though it might have been. He was too busy registering
decisions.

The next day he apologised to Burton, rather curtly, because he knew not
any other way. The old man was mollified. Speed did not know what to say to
him after he had apologised; in the end half-a-sovereign passed between
them.

Then he summoned the whole House and announced equally curtly that he
wished to apologise for attempting to break a recognised House custom. “I’ve
called you all together just to make a short announcement. When I stopped the
basement hockey I was unaware that it had been a custom in Lavery’s for a
long while. In those circumstances I shall allow it to go on, and I apologise
for the mistake. The punishments for those who took part are remitted. That’s
all. You may go now.”