It was a Wednesday and Helen had gone with her mother to visit some friends in the town and would not be back until, perhaps, dinner-time. It was almost four o’clock, and that hour, or at any rate, a few seconds or minutes afterwards, three youngsters would be coming to tea. Their names were Felling, Fyfield, and Graham. All were Juniors, as it happened, and they would be frightfully nervous, and assuredly would not know when to depart.
Speed, liking them well enough, but feeling morbid for some reason or other, pictured them plastering their hair down and scrambling into their Sunday jackets in readiness for the ordeal. Poor little kids! he thought, and he almost longed to rush into the cold dormitories where they were preparing themselves and say: “Look here, Felling, Fyfield and Graham—you needn’t come to tea with me this afternoon—you’re excused!”
The hour of four boomed into the wind and rain outside. Speed looked round to see if Burton had set the correct number of cups, saucers and plates, and had obtained a sufficient quantity of cake and fancy pastry from the tuck-shop. After all, he ought to offer them some compensation for having to come to tea with him.
Tap at the door. “Come in…Ah, that you, Felling…and you, Graham…I expect Fyfield will be here in a minute…Sit down, will you?…Take that easy-chair, Felling…Isn’t it depressing weather?…I suppose you saw the game against Oversham? That last try of Marshall’s was a particularly fine one, I thought…Come in…Ah, here you are, Fyfield: now we can get busy with the tea, can’t we?…How’s the Junior Debating Society going, Fyfield?” (Fyfield was secretary of it.) “I must come round to one of your meetings, if you’ll promise to do exactly as you would if I weren’t there…Come in…You might bring me some more hot water, Burton…By the way, Graham, congratulations on last Saturday’s match: I didn’t see it, but I’m told you did rather well.”
And so on. They were nice boys, all three of them, but they were nervous. They answered in monosyllables or else embarked upon tortuous sentences which became finally embedded in meringues and chocolate éclairs. Felling, in particular, was overawed, for he was a new boy that term and had only just emerged from six weeks in the sanatorium with whooping-cough. Virtually, this was his first week at school.
In the midst of the ponderously jocular, artificially sustained conversation a knock came on the door. Speed shouted out “Come in,” as usual. The door opened and somebody came in. Speed could not see who it was. He thought it must be a boy and turned back the red lampshade so that the rays, nakedly yellow, glanced upwards. Then he saw Clare.
II
She was dressed in a long flowing mackintosh which had something in it reminiscent still of the swirl of wind and rain. She came forward very simply, held out her hand to Speed, and said: “How are you, Mr. Speed? I thought perhaps I should find Helen in.”
He said, overmastering his astonishment: “Helen’s out somewhere with Mrs. Ervine…I’m quite well. How—how are you?”
“Quite as well as you are,” she said, laughing. “Tell Helen I’ll call round some other time, then, will you?—I mustn’t interrupt your tea-party.”
That made him say: “Indeed you’re not doing that at all. Won’t you stay and have a cup of tea? Surely you won’t go back into the rain so soon! Let me introduce you—this is Felling…Miss Harrington…and this is Fyfield…and Graham…”
What on earth had made him do that? He wondered, as he saw the boys shaking hands with her so stiffly and nervously; what was possessing him? Yet, accepting his invitation calmly and decisively, she sat down in the midst of them as soon as she had taken off her wet mackintosh, and appeared perfectly comfortable and at home. Speed busied himself in obtaining a cup of tea for her, and by the time he had at last succeeded he heard her talking in the most amazing way to Graham, and, which was more, Graham was answering her as if they had known each other for weeks. She had somehow found out that Graham’s home was in Perth, and they were indulging in an eager, if rather vacuous, exchange of “Do-you-know’s.” Then quite suddenly she was managing to include Fyfield in the conversation, and in a little while after that Felling demonstrated both his present cordiality and his former absent-mindedness by calling her “Mrs. Speed.” She said, with perfect calmness and without so much as the faintest suggestion in her voice of any but the mere literal meaning of her words: “I’m not Mrs. Speed; I’m Miss Harrington.”
Speed had hardly anything to do with the talk at all. He kept supplying the participators with fuel in the way of cakes and éclairs, but he was content to leave the rest of the management in Clare’s hands. She paid little attention to him, reserving most of her conversation for the three boys. The chatter developed into a gossip that was easy, yet perfectly respectful; Speed, putting in his word or two occasionally, was astonished at the miracle that was being performed under his eyes. Who could have believed that Felling, Fyfield and Graham could ever be induced to talk like that in their house-master’s drawing-room? Of course, a man couldn’t do it at all, he thought, in self-defence: it was a woman’s miracle entirely.
The school-clock began the chime of five, and five was the hour when it was generally considered that housemasterly teas were due to finish. Speed waited till ten minutes past and then interjected during a pause in the conversation: “Well, I’m sorry you can’t stay any longer…”
The three boys rose, thankful for the hint although the affair had turned out to be not quite such an ordeal as they had expected. After hand-shaking with Clare they backed awkwardly out of the room followed by Speed’s brisk “Good night.”
When they had gone Clare cried, laughing: “Oh, fancy getting rid of them like that, Mr. Speed!—I should be insulted if you tried it on with me.”
Speed said: “It’s the best way with boys, Miss Harrington. They don’t like to say they must go themselves, and they’d feel hurt if you told them to go outright. Really they’re immensely grateful for a plain hint.”
Now that he was alone in the room with her he began to feel nervous in a very peculiar and exciting way; as if something unimaginably strange were surely going to happen. Outside, the wind and rain seemed suddenly to grow loud, louder, terrifically loud; a strong whiff of air came down the chimney and blew smoke into the room. All around, everywhere, there were noises, clumping of feet on the floor above, chatter and shouting in the corridors, the distant jangle of pianos in the practice-rooms; and yet, in a deep significant sense, it was as if he and Clare were quite alone amidst the wind and rain. He poked the fire with a gesture that was almost irritable; the flames prodded into the red-tinted gloom and revealed Clare perfectly serene and imperturbable. Evidently nothing was going to happen at all. He looked at her with keen quickness, thinking amazedly: And, by the way, what could have happened?
“How is Helen?” she asked.
He answered: “Oh, she’s quite well. Very well, in fact.”
“And I suppose you are, also.”
“I look it, don’t I?”
She said, after a pause: “And quite happy, of course.”
He started, kicked the fender with a clatter that, for the moment, frightened him, and exclaimed: “Happy! Did you mean am I happy?”
“Yes.”
He did not answer immediately. He gave the question careful and scrupulous weighing-up. He thought deliberately and calculatingly of Helen, pictured her in his mind, saw her sitting opposite to him in the chair where Felling had sat, saw her and her hair lit with the glow of the fire, her blue eyes sparkling; then, for a while, he listened to her, heard her rich, sombre whisper piercing the gloom; lastly, as if sight and hearing were not evidence enough, he brought her close to him, so that his hands could touch her. He said then, with deep certainty: “Yes, I’m happy.”
“That’s fine,” she replied. “Now tell me how you’re getting on with Lavery’s?”
He chatted to her for a while about the House, communicating to her something of his enthusiasm but not touching upon any of his difficulties. Then he asked her what she had been doing in F
rance. She replied: “Combining business with pleasure.”
“How?”
“Well, you see, first of all I bought back from my father’s publishers all transcription rights. (They’d never used them themselves.) Then, with the help of a French friend, I translated one or two of the Helping-Hand-Books into French and placed them with a Paris agent. Business, you see. He disposed of them fairly advantageously, and on part of the proceeds I treated myself to a holiday. I had an excellent time. Now I’ve come back to Millstead to translate a few more of my father’s books.”
“But you’re continuing to run the shop, I suppose?”
“I’ve brought over my French friend to do that for me. She’s a clever girl with plenty of brains and no money. She speaks English perfectly. In the daytime she’ll do most of the shop-work for me and she’ll always be handy to help me with translations. You must meet her—you’ll find her most outrageously un-English.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that she’s not sentimental.”
By the time that he had digested that a tap came at the door.
“That’s Helen!” said Speed, joyously, recognising the quiet double rap. He felt delightfully eager to see the meeting of the two friends. Helen entered. Clare rose. Speed cried, like an excited youngster: “Helen, we’ve got a visitor. Who do you think it is?”
Helen replied, puzzled: “I don’t know. Tell me.”
“Clare!” he cried, with boisterous enthusiasm. “It’s Clare!”
Then he remembered that he had never called her Clare before; always it had been Miss Harrington. And yet the name had come so easily and effortlessly to his tongue!
Helen gasped: “Clare! Is it you, Clare?”
And Clare advanced through the shadows and kissed Helen very simply and quietly. Again Speed felt that strange, presaging emotion of something about to happen, of some train being laid for the future. The rain was now a torrent, and the wind a great gale shrieking across the fenlands.
Helen said: “I’m drenched with rain—let me take my coat off.” After a short pause she added: “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming, Clare? If you had I could have stayed in for you.”
III
Speed was always inclined to drop out of conversations that were proceeding well enough without him. In a few moments Helen and Clare were chatting together exactly as if he had not been present. He did not mind; he was rather glad, in fact, because it relieved him from the task of mastering his nervousness. He felt too, what he always felt when Helen was talking to another woman; a feeling that women as a sex were hostile to men, and that when they were together there was a sort of secret freemasonry between them which enforced a rigid and almost contemptuous attitude towards the other sex. Nothing in Clare’s manner encouraged this belief, but Helen’s side of the conversation was a distinct suggestion of it. Not that anything said or discussed was inimical to him; merely that whenever the conversation came near to a point at which he might naturally have begun to take part in it, Helen seemed somehow to get hold of it by the neck and pull it out of his reach. And Clare was quite impassive, allowing Helen to do just what she liked. These were Speed’s perhaps exaggerated impressions as he sat very uncomfortably in the armchair, almost frightened to move lest movement on his part might be wrongly interpreted as irritation, fear, or boredom. When he felt uncomfortable his discomfort was always added to by a usually groundless fear that other people were noticing it and speculating as to its reason.
At six the bell rang for school tea in the dining-hall, and this was his week to superintend that function. Most mercifully then he was permitted to leave the red-glowing drawing-room and scamper across the rain-swept quadrangle. “Sorry I must leave you,” he said, hastily, rising from his chair. Helen said, as if her confirmation were essential before his words could be believed: “It’s his week for reading grace, you know.”
“And after that I’ve got some youngsters with piano-lessons,” he said, snatching up his gown and, in his nervousness, putting it on wrong side out. “So I’ll say good-bye, Miss Harrington.”
He shook hands with her and escaped into the cold rain. It was over a hundred yards to the dining-hall, and with the rain slanting down in torrential gusts he was almost drenched during the few seconds’ run. Somehow, the bare, bleak dining-hall, draughty and fireless and lit with flaring gas-jets, seemed to him exhilaratingly cheerful as he gazed down upon it from the Master’s rostrum at the end. He leaned his arms over the edge of the lectern, watching the boys as they streamed in noisily, with muddy boots and turned-up collars and wet ruddy cheeks. The long tables, loaded with smeared jam-pots and towers of bread-slices and tins of fruit jaggedly opened, seemed, in their teeming, careless ugliness, immensely real and joyous: there was a simplicity too, an almost mathematical simplicity, in the photographs of all the rugger fifteens and cricket and hockey elevens that adorned the green-distempered walls. The photographs were complete for the last thirty-eight years; therefore there would be four hundred and eighteen plus four hundred and eighteen plus five hundred and seventy separate faces upon the walls. Total: one thousand four hundred and six…Speed never thought of it except when he stood on the rostrum waiting to read grace, and as he was not good at mental arithmetic he always had a misgiving that he had calculated wrongly, and so would go over it again multiplying with his brain while his eyes were on the clock. And this evening his mind, once enslaved by the numerical fascination of the photographs, obtained no release until a stamping of feet at the far end of the hall awakened him to the realisation that it was time he said grace. He had been dreaming. Silly of him to stand there on the rostrum openly and obviously dreaming before the eyes of all Millstead! He blushed slightly, smiled more slightly still, and gave the knob of the hand-bell a vigorous punch. Clatter of forms and shuffling of feet as all Millstead rose…“For these and all His Mercies the Lord’s name we praise…” About the utterance of the word “mercies,” conversation, prohibited before grace, began to murmur from one end of the room to the other; the final “praise,” hardly audible even to Speed himself, was engulfed in a mighty swelling of hundreds of unleashed voices, clumping of feet, clattering of forms, banging of plates, shrill appeals for one thing and another, and general pandemonium amidst which, Speed, picking his way amongst the groups of servants, made his escape.
How strange was Millstead to-night, he thought, as he made his way along the covered cloisters to the music-rooms. The rain had slackened somewhat, but the wind was still high and shrieking; the floor of the cloisters, wet from hundreds of muddy boots, shone greasily in the rays of the wind-blown lamps. Over the darkness of the quadrangle he could see Lavery’s rising like a tall cliff at the other side of an ocean; and the dull red square that was the window of his own drawing-room. Had Clare gone?—Clare! It was unfortunate, perhaps, that he had called her Clare in his excitement; unfortunate because she might think he had done it deliberately with a view to deepening the nature of their friendship. That was his only reason for thinking it unfortunate.
Down in the dark vaults beneath the Big Hall, wherein the piano-rooms were situated, he found Porritt Secundus waiting for him. Porritt was in Lavery’s, and therefore Speed was more than ordinarily interested in him.
“Do you have to miss your tea in order to have a lesson at this hour?” Speed asked, putting his hand in a friendly way on Porritt’s shoulder, as he guided him through the gloomy corridor into the single room where a small light was showing.
Porritt replied: “I didn’t to-day, sir. Smallwood asked me to tea with him.”
Speed’s hand dropped from Porritt’s shoulder as if it had been shot away. His imagination, fanned into sudden perceptivity, detected in the boy’s voice a touch of—of what? Impertinence? Hardly, and yet surely a boy could be impertinent without saying anything that was in itself impertinent…Porritt had been to tea with Smallwood. And Smallwood was Speed’s inveterate enemy, as the latter well knew. Was it possible that Smallwood was
adopting a methodical policy of setting the Juniors against him? Possibilities invaded Speed’s mind in a scorching torrent. Moments afterwards, when he had regained composure, it occurred to him that it was the habit of prefects to invite their Juniors to tea occasionally, and that it was perfectly natural that Porritt, so recently the guest of the Olympian Smallwood, should be eager to tell people about it.
IV
That night, sitting by the fire before bedtime, Helen said: “Was Clare here a long time before I came in?”
Speed answered: “Not very long. She came while I was having three Juniors to tea, and they stayed until after five…After they’d gone she told me about her holiday in France.”
“She’s been bargaining over her father’s books in Paris, so she says.”
“Well, not exactly that. You see, Mr. Harrington’s publishers never arranged for his books to be translated, so she bought the rights off them so as to be able to arrange it herself.”
“I think it’s rather mean to go haggling about that sort of thing after the man’s dead, don’t you? After all, if he’d wanted them to be translated, surely he’d have done it himself while he was alive—don’t you think so? Clare seems to be out to make as much money as she can without any thought about what would have been her father’s wishes.”
“I confess,” replied Speed, slowly, “that it never struck me in that light. Harrington had about as much business in him as a two-year-old, and if he let himself be swindled right and left, surely that’s no reason why his daughter should continue in the same way. Besides, she hasn’t much money and it couldn’t have been her father’s wish that she should neglect chances of getting some.”
“She has the shop.”