The Passionate Year (7 page)

“Now,” he said, beginning to pull out the necessary stops, “what shall we
have?—‘The Moonlight Sonata,’ eh?”

“Yes,” she assented, eagerly. “I’ve heard Clare talk about it.”

He played it to her; then he played her a medley of Bach, Dvorak, Mozart,
Mendelssohn and Lemare. He was surprised and pleased to discover that, on the
whole, she preferred the good music to the not so good, although, of course,
her musical taste was completely unsophisticated. Mainly, too, it was the
music that kept her attention, though she had a considerable childish
interest in his manual dexterity and in the mechanical arrangement of the
stops and couplings. She said once, in a pause between two pieces: “Aren’t
they strange hands?” He replied, laughing away his embarrassment: “I don’t
know. Are they?”

After he had played, rather badly but with great verve, the
Ruy
Blas
Overture of Mendelssohn, she exclaimed: “Oh, I wish I could play
like that!”

He said: “But you do play the piano, don’t you? And I prefer the piano to
the organ: it’s less mechanical.”

She clapped her hands together in a captivatingly childish gesture of
excitement and said: “Oh yes, the piano’s lovely, isn’t it? But I can’t play
well—oh, I wish I could!”

“You could if you practised hard enough,” he answered, with prosaic
encouragement. “I can hear you sometimes, you know, when I’m in my room at
nights and the window’s open. I think you could become quite a good
player.”

She leaned her elbow on the keys and started in momentary fright at the
resulting jangle of sound. “I—I get so nervous,” she said. “I don’t
know why. I could never play except to myself—and Clare.” She added,
slowly, and as if the revelation had only barely come to her: “Do you
know—it’s strange, isn’t it—I think—perhaps—I think I
might be able to play in front of you—
now
—without being
nervous!”

He laughed boisterously and swung himself off the bench. “Very well, then,
that’s fine news! You shall try. You shall play some of the Chopin waltzes to
me. Not very suitable for an organ, but that doesn’t matter. Sit further on
this bench and play on the lower keyboard. Never mind about the pedals. And
I’ll manage the stops for you.”

She wriggled excitedly into the position he had indicated and, laughing
softly, began one of the best-known of the waltzes. The experiment was not
entirely successful, for even an accomplished pianist does not play well on
an organ for the first time, nor do the Chopin waltzes lend themselves aptly
to such an instrument. But one thing, and to Speed the main thing of all, was
quite obvious: she was, as she had said she would be, entirely free from
nervousness of him. After ploughing rather disastrously through a dozen or so
bars she stopped, turned to him with flushed cheeks and happy eyes, and
exclaimed: “There! That’s enough! It’s not easy to play, is it?”

He said, smiling down at her: “No, it’s rather hard, especially at
first…But you weren’t nervous then, were you?”

“Not a bit,” she answered, proudly. She added, with a note of warning:
“Don’t be surprised if I am when you come in to our house to dinner I’m
always nervous when father’s there.”

Almost he added: “So am I.” But the way in which she had mentioned future
invitations to dinner at the Head’s house gave him the instant feeling that
henceforward the atmosphere on such occasions would be subtly different from
ever before. The Head’s drawing-room, with the baby grand piano and the
curio-cabinets and the faded cabbage-like design of the carpet, would never
look quite the same again; the Head’s drawing-room would look, perhaps, less
like a cross between a lady’s boudoir and the board-room of a City company;
even the Head’s study might take on a kindlier, less sinister hue.

He said, still with his eyes smiling upon her: “Who teaches you the
piano?”

“A Miss Peacham used to. I don’t have a teacher now.”

“I don’t know,” he said, beginning to flush with the consciousness of his
great daring, “if you would care to let me help you at all. I should be
delighted to do so, you know, at any time. Since”—he laughed a
little—“since you’re no longer a scrap nervous of me, you might find me
useful in giving you a few odd hints.”

He waited, anxious and perturbed, for her reply. After a sufficient pause
she answered slowly, as if thinking it out: “That would
be—rather—fine—I think.”

Most inopportunely then the bell began to ring for afternoon school, and,
most inopportunely also, he was due to take five
beta
in drawing. They
clambered down the ladder, chatting vivaciously the while, and at the vestry
door, when they separated she said eagerly: “Oh, I’ve had
such
a good
time, Mr. Speed. Haven’t you?”

“Rather!” he answered, with boyish emphasis and enthusiasm.

That afternoon hour, spent bewilderingly with five
beta
in the
art-room that was full of plaster casts and free-hand models and framed
reproductions of famous pictures, went for Speed like the passage of a
moment. His heart and brain were tingling with excitement, teeming with
suppressed consciousness. The green of the lawns as he looked out of the
window seemed greener than ever before; the particles of dust that shone in
the shafts of sunlight seemed to him each one mightily distinct; the glint of
a boy’s golden it in the sunshine was, to his eyes, like a patch of flame
that momentarily put all else in a haze. It seemed to him, passionately and
tremendously, that for the first time in his life he was alive; more than
that even: it seemed to him that for the first time since the beginning of
all things life had come shatteringly into the world.

“I should think, Mr. Speed, you have found out by now
whether Helen likes you or not.”

Those words of Clare Harrington echoed in his ears as he walked amidst the
dappled sunlight on the Mill-stead road. They echoed first of all in the
quiet tones in which Clare had uttered them; next, they took on a subtle,
meaningful note of their own; finally, they submerged all else in a crescendo
of passionate triumph. Speed was almost stupefied by their gradually
self-revealing significance. He strode on faster, dug his heels more
decisively into the dust of the roadside; he laughed aloud; his walking-stick
pirouetted in a joyful circle. To any passer-by he must have seemed a little
mad. And all because of a few words that Clare Harrington, riding along the
lane on her bicycle, had stopped to say to him.

June, lovely and serene, had spread itself out over Millstead like a veil
of purest magic; every day the sun climbed high and shone fiercely; every
night the world slept under the starshine; all the passage of nights and days
was one moving pageant of wonderment. And Speed was happy, gloriously,
overwhelmingly happy. Never in all his life before had he been so happy;
never had he tasted, even to an infinitesimal extent, the kind of happiness
that bathed and drenched him now. Rapturously lovely were those long June
days, days that turned Millstead into a flaming paradise of sights and
sounds. In the mornings, he rose early, took a cold plunge in the
swimming-bath, and breakfasted with the school amidst the cool morning
freshness that, by its very quality of chill, seemed to suggest bewitchingly
the warmth that was to come. Chapel followed breakfast, and after that, until
noon, his time was spent in the Art and Music Rooms and the various
form-rooms in which he contrived to satisfy parental avidity for that species
of geography known as commercial. From noon until midday dinner he either
marked books in his room or went shopping into the town. During that happy
hour the cricket was beginning, and the dining-hall at one o’clock was gay
with cream flannels and variously chromatic blazers. Speed loved the midday
meal with the school; he liked to chat with his neighbours at table, to
listen to the catalogue of triumphs, anxieties, and anticipations that never
failed to unfold itself to the sympathetic hearer. Afterwards he was free to
spend the afternoon as he liked. He might cycle dreamily along the sleepy
lanes and find himself at teatime in some wrinkled little sun-scorched inn,
with nothing to do but dream his own glorious dreams and play with the
innkeeper’s languid dog and read local newspapers a fortnight old. Or he
might stay the whole afternoon at Millstead, lazily watching the cricket from
a deck-chair on the pavilion verandah and sipping the tuck-shop’s iced
lemonade. Less often he would play cricket himself, never scoring more than
ten or a dozen runs, but fielding with a dogged energy which occasionally
only just missed deserving the epithet brilliant. And sometimes, in the
excess of his enthusiasm, he would take selected parties of the boys to
Pangbourne Cathedral, some eighteen miles distant, and show them the immense
nave and the Lady Chapel with the decapitated statues and the marvellous
stained-glass of the Octagon.

Then dinner, conversational and sometimes boisterous, in the Masters’
Common-Room, and afterwards, unless it were his evening for taking
preparation, an hour at least of silence before the corridors and dormitories
became noisy. During this hour he would often sit by the open window in his
room and hear the rooks cawing in the high trees and the
clankety-clank
of the roller on the cricket-pitch and all the mingled
sounds and commotions that seemed to him to make the silence of the summer
evenings more magical than ever. Often, too, he would hear the sound of the
Head’s piano, a faint half-pathetic tinkle from below.

Half-past eight let loose the glorious pandemonium; he could hear from his
room the chiming of the school-bell, and then, softly at first, but soon
rising to a tempestuous flood, the tide of invasion sweeping down the steps
of the Big Hall and pouring into the houses. Always it thrilled him by its
mere strength and volume of sound; thrilled him with pride and passion to
think that he belonged to this heart that throbbed with such onrushing zest
and vitality. Soon the first adventurous lappings of the tide reached the
corridor outside his room; he loved the noise and commotion of it; he loved
the shouting and singing and yelling and the boisterous laughter; he loved
the faint murmur of conflicting gramophones and the smells of coffee and
cocoa that rose up from the downstairs studies; he loved the sound of old
Hartopp’s voice as he stood at the foot of the stairs at ten o’clock and
shouted, in a key that sent up a melodious echoing through all the passages
and landings: “Time, gentlemen, time!”—And when the lights in the
dormitories had all been put out, and Millstead at last was silent under the
stars, he loved above all things the strange magic of his own senses, that
revealed him a Millstead that nobody else had ever seen, a Millstead rapt and
ethereal, one with the haze of night and the summer starshine.

He told himself, in the moments when he reacted from the abandonment of
his soul to dreaming, that he was sentimental, that he loved too readily,
that beauty stirred him more than it ought, that life was too vividly
emotional, too mighty a conqueror of his senses. But then, in the calm midst
of reasoning, that same wild, tremulous consciousness of wonder and romance
would envelop him afresh like a strong flood; it was a fierce, passionate
ache in his bones, only to be forgotten for unreal, unliving instants. And
one moment, when he sat by the window hearing the far-off murmur of Chopin on
the Head’s piano, he knew most simply and perfectly why it was that all this
was so. It was because he was very deeply and passionately in love. In his
dreams, his wild and bewitching dreams, she was a fairy-child, ethereal and
half unreal, the rapt half-embodied spirit of Millstead itself, luring him by
her sweet and fragrant vitality. He saw in the sunlight always the golden
glint of her hair; in music no more than subtle and exquisite reminders of
her; in all the world of sights and sounds and feelings a deep transfiguring
passion that was his own for her.

And in the flesh he met her often in the school grounds, where she might
say: “Oh, Mr. Speed, I’m
so
glad I’ve met you! I want you to come in
and hear me play something.” They would stroll together over the lawns into
the Head’s house and settle themselves in the stuffy-smelling drawing-room.
Doctor and Mrs. Ervine were frequently out in the afternoons, and Potter, it
was believed, dozed in the butler’s pantry. Speed would play the piano to the
girl and then she to him, and when they were both tired of playing they
talked awhile. Everything of her seemed to him most perfect and delicious.
Once he asked her tactfully about reading novelettes, and she said: “I read
them sometimes because there’s nothing in father’s library that I care for.
It’s nearly all sermons and Latin grammars.” Immediately it appeared to him
that all was satisfactory and entrancingly explained; a vague unrestfulness
in him was made suddenly tranquil; her habit of reading novelettes made her
more dear and lovable than ever. He said: “I wonder if you’d like me to lend
you some books?—
Interesting
books, I promise you.”—She
answered, with her child-like enthusiasm: “Oh, I’d
love
that, Mr.
Speed!”

He lent her Hans Andersen’s fairy tales.

Once in chapel, as he declaimed the final verse of the eighty-eighth
Psalm, he looked for a fraction of a second at the Head’s pew and saw that
she was watching him. “Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine
acquaintance into darkness.”—He saw a blush kindle her cheeks like
flame.

One week-day morning he met the Head in the middle of the quadrangle. The
Head beamed on him cordially and said: “I understand, Mr. Speed, that
you—um—give my daughter—occasional—um,
yes—assistance with her music. Very kind of you, I’m sure—um,
yes—extremely kind of you, Mr. Speed.”

He added, dreamily: “My daughter—still—um, yes—still a
child in many ways—makes few friends—um, yes—very few.
Seems to have taken quite an—um, yes—quite a
fancy
to you,
Mr. Speed.”