The Passionate Year (6 page)

The immediate result of the incident was an invitation to
dine at the Head’s a few days later. “It was very—um,
yes—thoughtful and considerate of you, Mr. Speed,” said the Head,
mumblingly. “My daughter—a heedless child—just like her to omit
the—um—precaution of taking some—um, yes—protection
against any possible change in the weather.”

“I was rather in the same boat myself, sir,” said Speed, laughing. “The
thunderstorm was quite unexpected.”

“Um yes, quite so.
Quite
so.” The Head paused and added, with
apparent inconsequence: “My daughter is quite a child, Mr. Speed—loves
to gather flowers—um—botany, you know, and—um—so
forth.”

Speed said: “Yes, I have noticed it.”

Dinner at the Head’s house was less formal than on the previous occasion.
It was a Monday evening and Clare Harrington was there. Afterwards in the
drawing-room Speed played a few Chopin studies and Mazurkas. He did not
attempt to get into separate conversation with Miss Ervine; he chatted
amiably with the Head while the two girls gossiped by themselves. And at ten
o’clock, pleading work to do before bed, he arose to go, leaving the girls to
make their own arrangements. Miss Ervine said good-bye to him with a shyness
in which he thought he detected a touch of wistfulness.

When he got up to his own room he thought about her for a long while. He
tried to settle down to an hour or so of marking books, but found it
impossible. In the end he went downstairs and let himself outside into the
school grounds by his own private key. It was a glorious night of starshine,
and all the roofs were pale with the brightness of it. Wafts of perfume from
the flowers and shrubbery of the Head’s garden accosted him gently as he
turned the corner by the chapel and into the winding tree-hidden path that
circumvented the entire grounds of Millstead. It was on such a night that his
heart’s core was always touched; for it seemed to him that then the strange
spirit of the place was most alive, and that it came everywhere to meet him
with open arms, drenching all his life in wild and unspeakable loveliness.
Oh, how happy he was, and how hard it was to make others realise his
happiness! In the Common-Room his happiness had become proverbial, and even
amongst the boys, always quicker to notice unhappy than happy looks, his
beaming smile and firm, kindling enthusiasm had earned him the nickname of
“Smiler.”

He sat down for a moment on the lowest tier of the pavilion seats, those
seats where generations of Millsteadians had hurriedly prepared themselves
for the fray of school and house matches. Now the spot was splendidly silent,
with the cricket-pitch looming away mistily in front, and far behind, over
the tips of the high trees, the winking lights of the still noisy
dormitories. He watched a bat flitting haphazardly about the pillars of the
pavilion stand. He could see, very faintly in the paleness, the score of that
afternoon’s match displayed on the indicator. Old Millstead parish bells, far
away in the town, commenced the chiming of eleven.

He felt then, as he had never felt before he came to Millstead, that the
world was full, brimming full, of wonderful majestic beauty, and that now, as
the scented air swirled round him in slow magnificent eddies, it was
searching for something, searching with passionate and infinite desire for
something that eluded it always. He could not understand or analyse all that
he felt, but sometimes lately a deep shaft of ultimate feeling would seem to
grip him round the body and send the tears swimming into his eyes, as if for
one glorious moment he had seen and heard something of another world. It came
suddenly to him now, as he sat on the pavilion seats with the silver
starshine above him and the air full of the smells of earth and flowers; it
seemed to him that something mighty must be abroad in the world, that all
this tremulous loveliness could not live without a meaning, that he was on
the verge of some strange and magic revelation.

Clear as bells on the silent air came the sound of girls’ voices. He heard
a rich, tolling “Good night, Clare!” Then silence again, silence in which he
seemed to know more things than he had ever known before.

ONE afternoon he called at Harrington’s, in the High Street,
to buy a book. It was a tiny low-roofed shop, the only one of its kind in
Millstead, and with the sale of books it combined that of newspapers,
stationery, pictures and fancy goods. It was always dark and shadowy, yet,
unlike the Head’s study at the school, this gloom possessed a cheerful
soothing quality that made the shop a pleasant haven of refuge when the
pavements outside were dazzling and sun-scorched. It was on such an afternoon
that Speed visited the shop for the first time. Usually he had no occasion
to, for, though he dealt with Harrington’s, an errand-boy visited the school
every morning to take orders and saved him the trouble of a walk into the
village. This afternoon, however, he recollected a text-book that he wanted
and had forgotten to order; besides, the heat of the mid-afternoon tempted
him to seek shelter in one or other of the tranquil diamond-windowed shops
whose sun-blinds sprawled unevenly along the street. It was the hottest day
of the term, so far. A huge thermometer outside Harrington’s gave the shade
temperature as a little over seventy-nine; all the roadway was bubbling with
little gouts of soft tar. The innumerable dogs of Millstead, quarrelsome by
nature, had called an armistice on account of the heat, and lay languidly
across shady sections of the pavement. Speed, tanned by a week of successive
hot days, with a Panama pushed down over his forehead to shield his eyes from
dazzle, pushed open the small door and entered the cool cavern of the
shop.

His eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, were blind for a moment, but he heard
movement of some kind behind the counter. “I want an atlas of the British
Isles,” he said, feeling his way across the shop. “A school atlas, I mean.
Cheap, rather, you know—about a shilling or one-and-sixpence.”

He heard Clare’s voice reply: “Yes, Mr. Speed, I know what you want. Hot
weather, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

She went on, searching meanwhile along same shelves: “Nice of you not to
bother about seeing me home the other night, Mr. Speed.”

He said, with a touch of embarrassment: “Well, you see, you told me.
About—about Miss Ervine getting jealous, you know.”

“It was nice of you to take my information without doubting it.”

He said, rather to his own surprise: “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure
that I don’t doubt it. Miss Ervine seems to me a perfectly delightful and
natural girl, far too unsophisticated to be jealous of anybody. The more I
see of her the more. I like her.”

After a pause she answered quietly: “Well, I’m not surprised at that.”

“I suppose,” he went on, “with her it’s rather the opposite. I mean, the
more she sees of me the less she likes me. Isn’t that it?”

“I shouldn’t think she likes you any less than she did at first…Here’s
the atlas. It’s one and three—I’d better put it on your account,
eh?”

“Yes, yes, of course…So you think—”

She interrupted him quickly with: “Mr. Speed, you’d better not ask me what
I think. You’re far more subtle in understanding people than I am, and it
won’t take you long to discover what Helen thinks of you if you set about
with the intention…Those sketch-blocks you ordered haven’t come in
yet…Well, good afternoon!”

Another customer had entered the shop, so that all he could do was to
return a rather dazed “Good afternoon” and emerge into the blazing High
Street. He walked back to the school in a state of not unpleasant
puzzlement.

The term, progressed, and towards the end of May occurred
the death of Sir Huntly Polk, Bart., Chairman of the Governors of Millstead
School. This would not have in any way affected Speed (who had never even met
Sir Huntly) had not a Memorial Service been arranged at which he was to play
Chopin’s Funeral March on the chapel organ. It was a decent modern
instrument, operated usually by Raggs, the visiting organist, who combined a
past reputation of great splendour with a present passion for the
vox
humana
stop; but Speed sometimes took the place of Raggs when Raggs
wanted time off. And at the time fixed for the Sir Huntly Polk Memorial
Service Raggs was adjudicating with great solemnity at a Northern musical
festival.

Speed was not a particularly good organist, and it was only reluctantly
that he undertook Raggs’s duty for him For one thing, he was always slightly
nervous of doing things in public. And for another thing, he would have to
practise a great deal in order to prepare himself for the occasion, and he
had neither the time nor the inclination for hours of practice. However, when
the Head said: “I know I can—um, yes—rely upon you, Mr. Speed,”
Speed knew that there was no way out of it. Besides, he was feeling his way
in the school with marvellous ease and accuracy, and each new duty undertaken
by special request increased and improved his prestige.

After a few days’ trial he found it was rather pleasant to climb the
ladder to the organ-loft amid the rich cool dusk of the chapel, switch on the
buzzing motor that operated the electric power, and play, not only Chopin’s
Funeral March but anything else he liked. Often he would merely improvise,
beginning with a simple theme announced on single notes, and broadening and
loudening into climax. Always as he played he could see the shafts of
sunlight falling amidst the dusty pews, the many-coloured glitter of the
stained-glass in the oriel window, and in an opaque haze in the distance the
white cavern of the chapel entrance beyond which all was light and sunshine.
The whole effect, serene and tranquillising, hardly stirred him to any
distinctly religious emotion, but it set up in him acutely that emotional
sensitiveness to things secret and unseen, that insurgent consciousness,
clear as the sky, yet impossible to translate into words, of deep wells of
meaning beneath all the froth and commotion of his five passionate
senses.

There was a mirror just above the level of his eyes as he sat at the
keyboard, a mirror by means of which he could keep a casual eye on the pulpit
and choir-stalls and the one or two front pews. And one golden afternoon as
he was playing the
adagio
movement out of Beethoven’s “Sonata
Pathétique,” a stray side-glance into the mirror showed him that he had an
audience—of one. She was sitting at the end of the front pew of all,
nearest the lectern; she was listening, very simply and unspectacularly.
Speed’s first impulse was to stop; his second to switch off from the “Sonata
Pathétique” into something more blatantly dramatic. He had, with the first
kindling warmth of the sensation of seeing her, a passionate longing to touch
somehow her emotions, or, if he could not do that, to stir her
sentimentality, at any rate; he would have played the most saccharine
picture-palace trash, with
vox humana
and
tremolo
stops
combined, if he had thought that by doing so he could fill her eyes. Third
thoughts, however, better than either the second or first, told him that he
had better finish the
adagio
movement of the Sonata before betraying
the fact that he knew she was present. He did so accordingly, playing rather
well; then, when the last echoes had died away, he swung his legs over the
bench and addressed her. He said, in a conversational tone that sounded
rather incongruous in its surroundings: “Good afternoon, Miss Ervine!”

She looked up, evidently startled, and answered, with a half-smile: “Oh,
good afternoon, Mr. Speed.”

He went on: “I hope I haven’t bored you. Is there anything in particular
you’d like me to play to you?”

She walked out of the pew and along the tiled arena between the
choir-stalls to a point where she stood gazing directly up at him. The organ
was on the south side of the choir, perched rather precipitously in an
overhead chamber that looked down on to the rest of the chapel rather as a
bay-window looks on to a street. To Speed, as he saw her, the situation
seemed somewhat like the balcony scene with the positions of Romeo and Juliet
reversed. And never, he thought, had she looked so beautiful as she did then,
with her head poised at an upward angle as if in mute and delicate appeal,
and her arms limply at her side, motionless and inconspicuous, as though all
the meaning and significance of her were flung upwards into the single
soaring glance of her eyes. A shaft of sunlight, filtered through the crimson
of an apostle’s robe, struck her hair and kindled it at once into flame; her
eyes, blue and laughing, gazed heavenwards with a look of matchless
tranquillity. She might have been a saint, come to life out of the
sun-drenched stained-glass.

She cried out, like a happy child: “Oh, I
have
enjoyed it, Mr.
Speed!
All
of it. I
do
wish I could come up there and watch you
play!”

With startled eagerness he answered: “Come up then—I should be
delighted! Go round into the vestry and I’ll help you up the ladder.”

Instinct warned him that she was only a child, interested in the merely
mechanical tricks of how things were done; that she wanted to see the working
of the stops and pedals more than to hear the music; that this impulse of
hers did not betoken any particular friendliness for him or admiration for
his playing. Yet some secondary instinct, some quick passionate enthusiasm,
swept away the calculating logic of that, and made him a prey to the wildest
and raptest of anticipations.

In the vestry she blushed violently as he met her; she seemed more a child
than ever before. And she scampered up the steep ladder into the loft with an
agility that bewildered him.

He never dreamt that she could so put away all fear and embarrassment of
his presence; as she clambered up on to the end of the bench beside him (for
there was no seating-room anywhere else) he wondered if this were merely a
mood of hers, or if some real and deep change, had come over her since their
last meeting. She was so delicately lovely; to see her there, with her eyes
upon him, so few inches from his, gave him a curious electrical pricking of
the skin. Sometimes, he noticed, her eyes watched his hands steadily;
sometimes, with a look half-bold, half-timid, they travelled for an instant
to his face. He even wondered, with an egotism that made him smile inwardly,
if she were thinking him good-looking.