But that evening, about eleven o’clock, all his fears and shynesses were over, and he felt the most deeply contented man in the world. A fire was flickering a cheerful glow over the tiny drawing-room; Helen had complained of chilliness so he had told Burton to light it. He was glad now that this had been done, for it enabled him to grapple with his dreams more comfortably. Helen sat in an armchair opposite to him on the other side of the fire; she was leaning forward with her head on her hands, so that the firelight shone wonderfully on her hair. He looked at her from time to time, magnificently in love with her, and always amazed that she belonged to him.
The long day of ordeals had passed by. He had dined that evening in the Masters’ Common-Room, and everybody there had pressed round him in a chorus of eager congratulation. Afterwards he had toured his House, introducing himself to those of the prefects whom he had not already met, and strolling round the dormitories to shake hands informally with the rank and file. Then he had interviewed new boys (there were nineteen of them), and had distributed a few words of pastoral advice, concluding with the strict injunction that if they made tea in the basements they were on no account to throw the slops down the waste-pipes of the baths. Lastly of all, he had put his head inside each of the dormitories, at about half-past ten, to bestow a brisk but genial good night.
So now, at eleven o’clock, rooted at last in everything that he most loved in the world, he could pause to gloat over his happiness. Here, in the snug firelit room, secret and rich with warm shadows; and there, down the short corridor into the bleak emptiness of the classrooms, was everything that his heart desired: Helen and Millstead: the two deities that held passionate sway over him.—Eleven began to chime on the school clock. The dormitories above were almost silent. She did not I speak, did not look up once from the redness of the fire; she was often like that, silent with thoughts whose nature he could guess from the dark, tossing passion that shook her sometimes when, in the midst of such silences, she suddenly clung to him. She loved him more than ever he could have imagined: that, more perhaps than anything else, had been the surprise of that month in Cornwall.
“Eleven,” he said, breaking the rapt silence.
She said, half humorously, half sadly: “Are you pleased with me?—Are you satisfied?—Do I quite come up to expectations?”
He started, looked towards her, and laughed. The laugh disturbed the silence of the room like the intrusion of something from millions of miles away. He made a humorous pretence of puzzling it out, as if it were a baffling problem, and said, finally, with mocking doubtfulness: “Well, on the whole, I think you do.”
“If I had been on trial for a month you’d still keep me, then?” she went on, without moving her head out of her hands.
He answered, in the same vein as before: “If you could guarantee always to remain up to sample, I dare-say I would.”
She raised her head and gave him such a look as, if he had not learned to know it, would have made him think she was angry with him; it was sharp with bladelike eagerness, as if she were piercing through his attitude of jocularity.
Then, wondering why she did not smile when he was smiling, he put his arm round her and drew her burning lips to his. “Bedtime,” he said gaily, “for we’ve got to be up early in the morning.”
Over about them as they clung together the spirit of Millstead, like a watchful friend, came suddenly close and intimate, and to Speed, opening his soul to it joyously, it appeared in the likeness of a golden-haired child, shy yet sombrely passionate—a wraith of a child that was just like Helen. Above all, they loved each other, these two, with a love that surrounded and enveloped all things in a magic haze: they were the perfect lovers. And over them the real corporeal Millstead brooded in constant magnificent calm.
II
Soon he was swallowed up in the joyous routine of term- time. He had never imagined that a housemaster had such a large amount of work to do. There were no early-morning forms during the winter term, however, and as also it was a housemaster’s privilege to breakfast in his own rooms, Speed began the day with a happy three-quarters of an hour of newspaper-scanning, envelope-tearing, and chatting with Helen. After breakfast work began in earnest. Before term had lasted a week he discovered that he had at least twice as many duties as in the preceding term; the Head was certainly not intending to let him slack. There was the drawing and music of the whole school to superintend, as well as the choir and chapel-services which, as the once-famous Raggs became more and more decrepit, fell into Speed’s direction almost automatically. Then also there were a large number of miscellaneous supervisory duties which the housemasters shared-between them, and one or two, at least, which tradition decreed should be performed entirely by the junior housemaster. The result of it all was that Speed was, if he had been in the mood to desire a statutory eight hours’ day, considerably overworked.
It was fortunate that the work was what he loved. He plunged into it with terrific zest. Lavery’s was a large House, and Lavery himself had judged all its institutions by the test of whether or not they conduced to an economy in work for him. The result was an institution that managed itself with rough-and-ready efficiency, that offered no glaring scandal to the intrusive eye, yet was, in truth, honeycombed with corruption of a mild sort, and completely under the sway of powerfully vested interests. Against this and these Speed set himself out to do final battle. A prudent housemaster, and certainly one who valued his own personal comfort, would have postponed the contest, at any rate, until he had become settled in his position. But Speed, emboldened by the extraordinary success of his first term, and lured by his own dreams of a Lavery’s that should be the great House at Millstead, would not delay. In his first week he found five of the prefects enjoying a pleasant little smoking-party in the Senior prefect’s study.
They explained to him that Lavery had never objected to their smoking, provided they did it unostentatiously, and that Lavery never dreamed of “barging in upon them” during their evening study-hours. Speed, stung by their slightly insolent bearing, barked at them in his characteristic staccato voice when annoyed: “It doesn’t matter to me a bit what Lavery used to let you do. You’ve got to obey me now, not Lavery. Prefects must set the example to the others. I shall ask for an undertaking from all of you that you don’t smoke again during term-time. I’ll give you till to-morrow night to decide. Those who refuse will be degraded from prefecture.”
“You can’t degrade without the Head’s authority,” said Smallwood, the most insolent of the party.
Speed replied, colouring suddenly (for he realised that Smallwood had spoken the truth): “I know my own business, thank you, Smallwood.”
During the following twenty-four hours four out of the half-dozen House-prefects gave the required undertaking. The other two, Smallwood and a fellow named Biffin, refused, “on principle,” as they said, without explaining what exactly the qualification meant. Speed went promptly to the Head and appealed for authority to degrade them. He found that they had already poured their tale into the Head’s receptive ears, and that they had given the Head the impression that he (Speed) in a tactless excess of reforming zeal, had been listening at keyholes and prying around the study-doors at night. The Head, after listening to Speed’s indignant protest, replied, suavely: “I think, Mr. Speed”—(Speed’s relationship as son-in-law never tempted either of them to any intimacy of address)—“I think you must—um, yes—make some allowance for the—um—the natural inclination of elder boys to—um—to be jealous of privileges. Smoking is, of course, an—um, yes—an offence against school rules, but Mr. Lavery was perhaps—um, yes, perhaps—wise in turning the—um—the blind eye, when the offender was near the top of the school and where the offence was not flagrant. You must remember, Mr. Speed, that Smallwood is eighteen years of age, not so very many years younger than you are yourself. Besides, he is—um, yes, I think so—captain of the First Fifteen, is he not?—and I—um—I assure you—his degradation through you would do y
ou an—um—an incalculable amount of harm in the school. Don’t make yourself unpopular, Mr. Speed. I will send a note round the school, prefects—um, yes—included, drawing—um—attention to the school rule against smoking. And I will talk to Smallwood and the other boy—Biffin, isn’t he?—um, yes—privately. Privately, you see—a quiet friendly conversation in—um—in private, can achieve wonders.”
Speed felt that he was being ever so gently snubbed.
He left the Head’s study in a state of subdued fury, and his temper was not improved when Helen seemed rather thoughtlessly inclined to take Smallwood’s side. “Don’t get people into trouble, Kenneth,” she pleaded. “I don’t think you ought to complain to father about them. After all, it isn’t frightfully wicked to smoke, is it? and I know they all used to do it in Lavery’s time. Why, I’ve seen them many a time when I’ve passed the study-windows in the evenings.”
He stared at her for a few seconds, half indignantly half incredulously: then, as if on sudden impulse, he smiled, and placed his hands on her shoulders and looked searchingly into her eyes. “Soft-hearted little kid!” he exclaimed, laughing a slightly forced laugh. “All the same, I don’t think you quite understand my position, dear.”
“Tell me about it then,” she said.
Perhaps instinct forewarned him that if he went into details, either his indignation would break its bounds or else she would make some further casual and infuriating comment. From both possibilities he shrank nervously. He said, with an affectation of nonchalance: “Oh, never mind about it, dear. It will all come right in the end. Don’t you worry your pretty head about it. Kiss me!”
She kissed him passionately.
III
But Speed was still, in the main, happy, despite occasional worries. There was a wonderful half-sad charm about those fading autumn afternoons, each one more eager to dissolve into the twilight, each one more thickly spread with the brown and yellow leaves. To Speed, who remembered so well the summer term, the winter term seemed full of poignancies and regrets. And yet surrounding it all, this strange atmosphere which for want of a better designation must be called simply Millstead, was no less apparent; it pervaded all those—autumn days with a subtle essence which made Speed feel that this life that he was living would be impossible to forget, no matter what the world held in store for him. He could never forget the clammy, earthy smell of the rugger pitch after a match in rain; the steam rising from the heavy scrum; the grey clouds rolling over the sky; the patter of rain-drops on the corrugated-iron roof of the pavilion stand. Nor could anything efface the memory of those grey twilights when the afternoon games were finished; the crowded lamp-lit tuck-shop, a phantasy of chromatic blazers and pots of jam and muddy knees; the basements, cloudy with steam from the bathrooms; the bleak shivering corridors along which the Juniors scampered and envied the cosy warmth of the studies which might one day be their own. Even the lock-ups after dark held some strange and secret comfort: Burton and his huge keys and his noisy banging of the door were part of the curious witchery of it all.
And then at night-time when the sky was black as jet and the wind from the fenlands howled round the tall chimney-stacks of Lavery’s, Speed could feel more than ever the bigness of this thing of which he had become a part. The very days and nights took on characters and individualities of their own; Speed could, if he had thought, have given them all an identifying sound and colour: Monday, for instance, was brown, deepening to crimson as night fell: he was always reminded of it by the chord of E flat on the piano. That, of course, was perhaps no more than half-imagined idiosyncrasy. But it was certain that the days and nights were all shaped and conditioned by Millstead; and that they were totally different from the days and nights that were elsewhere in the world. On Sunday nights, for instance, Speed, observing a Lavery’s custom to which he saw no objection, read for an hour to the Junior dormitory. The book was Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Speed had never heard of the book until the Juniors informed him that Mr. Lavery had got half-way through it during the previous term. After about three successive readings Speed decided that the book was too horrible to be read to Juniors just before bedtime, and accordingly refused to go on with it. “I shall put it in the House library,” he said, “so if any of you wish to finish it you can do so in the daytime. And now we’ll try something else. Can anybody suggest anything?” Somebody mentioned Stephen Leacock, and in future, Sunday evenings in the Junior dormitory at Lavery’s were punctuated by roars of laughter. All the same, the sudden curtailment of Dracula was, for a long while, a sore point with the Juniors.
On the two half-holidays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, Speed had three or four of his House in to tea, taking them in rotation. This was a custom which Lavery, seeing in it no more than an unnecessary increase in his duties and obligations, had allowed to fall into disuse. Nor were the majority of the boys keen on Speed’s resumption of what had been, more often than not, an irksome social infliction. They were, however, gratified by the evident interest that he took in them, and most of them, when they thankfully escaped from the ordeal back to their fellows in the Common-Room, admitted that he was “quite a decent sort of chap.” Speed believed in the personal relationship between each boy and his housemaster with an almost fanatical zeal. He found out what each boy was interested in, and, without prying into anybody’s private affairs, contrived to establish himself as a personal factor in the life of the House and not as a vague and slatternly deity such as Lavery had been. Four o’clock therefore, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, saw Speed’s tiny drawing-room littered with cakes and toasted scones, and populated by three or four nervous youngsters trying desperately to respond to Speed’s geniality and to balance cups and saucers and plates on their knees without upsetting anything.
It was part of Speed’s dream of the ideal housemaster and his ideal House that the housemaster’s wife should fulfil a certain difficult and scrupulously exact function in the scheme of things. She must not, of course, attempt any motherly intimacies, or call people by their Christian names, or do anything else that was silly or effusive; yet, on the other hand, there was a sense in which her relationship with the boys, especially the Juniors, might be less formal than her husband’s. And, somehow, Speed was forced to admit that Helen did not achieve this extraordinarily delicate equipoise. She was, he came to the conclusion, too young for it to be possible. When she grew older, no doubt she would, in that particular respect, improve, but for the present she was, perhaps naturally, nervous in the presence of the elder boys and apt to treat the Juniors as if they were babies. Gradually she formed the habit of going over to the Head’s house for tea whenever Speed entertained the boys in his room; it was an arrangement which, accomplished silently and without definition, Speed felt to be rather a wise one.
IV
Clare Harrington had left Millstead. One breakfast time a letter came from her with the Paris postmark. Out of the envelope tumbled a number of small snapshots; Speed scanned the letter through and remarked, summing up its contents roughly for Helen’s benefit: “Oh, Clare’s in France. Been having rather a good time, I should imagine—touring about, you know.”
Helen looked up suddenly.
“I didn’t know she wrote to you,” she said.
Speed answered, casually: “She doesn’t, as a rule. But she knows I’m interested in architecture—I expect that’s why she sent me all these snaps. There’s one here of…” he picked them up and glanced through them…“of Chartres Cathedral…the belfry at Bruges…some street in Rouen…They’re rather good—have a look at them!”
She examined them at first suspiciously, then with critical intensity. And finally she handed them back to him without remark.
* * *
CHAPTER II
I
One dark dusk in November that was full of wind and fine rain Speed stood up at his drawing-room window to pull down the blind. But before doing so he gazed out at the dreary twilight and saw the bare trees black and terrible beyond the
quadrangle and the winking lights of Milner’s across the way. He had seen all of it so many times before, had lived amongst it, so it now seemed to him, for ages; yet to-night there was something in it that he had never seen before: a sort of sadness that was abroad in the world. He heard the wind screaming through the sodden trees and the branches creaking, the raindrops splashing on the ivy underneath the window: it seemed to him that Millstead was full that night of beautiful sorrow, and that it came over the dark quadrangle to him with open arms, drenching all Lavery’s in wild and forlorn pathos.
He let the blind fall gently in front of his rapt eyes while the yellow lamplight took on a richer, serener tinge. Those few weeks of occupation had made the room quite different; its walls were now crowded with prints and etchings; there was a sideboard, dull-glowing and huge for the size of the room, on which silver and pewter and cut glass glinted in tranquillity. Across one corner, a baby-grand piano sprawled its sleek body like a drowsily basking sea-lion, and opposite, in the wall at right angles to the window, a large fire lulled itself into red contentment with flames that had hardly breath for an instant’s flicker. But Speed left the window and stirred the coals into yellow riot that lit his face with tingling, delicious half-tones. In the firelight he seemed very tall and young-looking, with dark-brown, straggling hair, brown, eager eyes that were almost black, and a queer, sad-lipped mouth that looked for the present as if it would laugh and cry in the same way. A leather-seated stool stood by the fireside, and he dragged it in front of the open flames and sat with his chin resting solemnly on his slim, long-fingered hands.