He had got into such a curious state of excitement as the time neared for her arrival that when she did come he was almost speechless. She smiled and shook hands with him and said, immediately: “I’m so sorry to hear you haven’t been very well. I feel partly responsible, since I dragged you all that way in the fog the other night. But I’m not going to waste too much pity on you, because I think you waste quite enough on yourself, don’t you?”
He laughed weakly and said that perhaps he did.
Then there was a long pause which she broke by saying suddenly: “What’s the matter with you?”
“Matter with me? Oh, nothing serious—only a chill—”
“That’s not what I mean. I want to know what’s the matter with you that makes you look at me as you were doing just then.”
“I—I-I didn’t know I was. I—I—”
He stopped. What on earth were they going to talk about? And what was this look that he had been giving her? He felt his cheeks burning; a fire rising up all around him and bathing his body in warmth.
She said, obviously with the desire to change the subject: “What are you and Helen going to do at Christmas?”
Pulling himself together with an effort, he replied: “Well, we’re not certain yet. My—er—my people have asked us down to their place.”
“And of course you’ll go.”
“I’m not certain.”
“But why not?”
He paused. “Well, you see—in a way, it’s a private reason. I mean—”
“Oh, well, if it’s a private reason, you certainly mustn’t tell me. Let’s change the subject again. How are the House-Matches going?”
“Look here, I didn’t mean to be rude. And I do want to tell you, as it happens. In fact, I wouldn’t mind your advice if you’d give it me. Will you?”
“Better put the case before me first.”
“Well, you see, it’s like this.” He was so desperately and unaccountably nervous that he found himself plunging into the midst of his story almost before he realised what he was doing. “You see, my people were in Australia for a holiday when I married Helen. I had to marry her quickly, you remember, because of taking this housemastership. And I don’t think they quite liked me marrying somebody they’d never seen.”
“Perfectly natural on their part, my dear man. You may as well admit that much of their case to start with.”
“Yes, I suppose it is rather natural. But you don’t know what my people are like. I don’t think they’ll care for Helen very much. And Helen is bound to be nervous at meeting them. I expect we should have a pretty miserable Christmas if we went.”
“I should think in your present mood you’d have a pretty miserable Christmas whatever you did. And since you asked for my advice I’ll give it you. Buck yourself up; don’t let your imagination carry you away; and take Helen to see your people. After all, she’s perfectly presentable, and since you’ve married her there’s nothing to be gained by keeping her out of their sight, is there? Don’t think I’m callous and unfeeling because I take a more practical view of things than you do. I’m a practical person, you see, Mr. Speed, and if I had married you I should insist on being taken to see your people at the earliest possible opportunity.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she answered, “I should be anxious for them to see what an excellent choice you’d made.”
That was thoughtlessly said and thoughtfully heard. After a pause Speed said, curiously: “That brings one to the question—supposing I had married you, should I have made an excellent choice?”
With a touch of surprise and coldness she replied:
“That wasn’t in my mind, Mr. Speed. You evidently misunderstood me.”
And at this point Helen came into the room.
II
During that strange twilight hour while the three of them were tea-drinking and conducting a rather limp conversation about local matters, Speed came suddenly to the decision that he would not see Clare again. Partly, perhaps, because her last remark just before Helen entered had hurt him; he felt that she had deliberately led him into a position from which she could and did administer a stinging snub. But chiefly his decision was due to a careful and pitiful observation of Helen; he saw her in a dazzling white light of admiration, for she was deliberately (he could see) torturing herself to please him. She was acutely jealous of Clare, and yet, because she thought he liked Clare, she was willing to give her open hospitality and encouragement, despite the stab that every word and gesture must mean to her. It reminded him of Hans Andersen’s story about the mermaid who danced to please her lover-prince even though each step cost her agonies. The pathos of it, made more apparent to him by the literary comparison, overwhelmed him into a blind fervour of resolution: he would do everything in his power to bring happiness to one who was capable of such love and such nobility. And as Helen thus swung into the focus of his heroine-worship, so Clare, without his realising it, took up in his mind the other inevitable position in the triangle; she was something, at least, of the adventuress, scheming to lure his affections away from his brave little wife. The fact that he was not conscious of this conventional outlook upon the situation prevented his reason from assuring him that Clare, so far from scheming to lure his affections from Helen, had just snubbed him unmercifully for a remark which any capable adventuress would have rejoiced over.
Anyway, he decided there and then, he would put a stop to this tangled and uncomfortable situation. And after tea, when Helen, on a pretext which he knew quite well to be a fabrication, left him alone again with Clare, he could think of no better method of procedure than a straightforward request.
So he summed up the necessary determination to begin: “Miss Harrington, I hope you won’t be offended at what I’m going to say—”
Whereat she interrupted: “Oh, I don’t often take offence at what people say. So please don’t be frightened.”
“You see…” He paused, watching her. He noticed, curiously enough for the first time, that she was—well, not perhaps pretty, but certainly—in a way-attractive. In the firelight especially, she seemed to have the most searching and diabolically disturbing eyes. They made him nervous. At last he continued: “You see, I’m in somewhat of a dilemma. A quandary, as it were. In fact—in fact I—”
“Supposing we use our ordinary English language and say that you’re in a mess, eh? ‘Quandary’! ‘Dilemma’!” She laughed with slight contempt.
“I don’t—I don’t quite see the point of—of your—objection,” he said, staring at her with a certain’ puzzled ruefulness. “What has my choice of a word got to do with it?”
“To do with what?” she replied, instantly.
“With what—with what we’re going to talk about.”
“Since I haven’t the faintest idea what we’re going to talk about, how can I say?”
“Look here!” He got up out of his chair and stood with his back to the fire. He kept a fretful silence for a moment and then said, with a sharp burst of exasperation: “Look here, I don’t know what you’re driving at! I only know that you’re being most infernally rude!”
“Don’t forget that a moment ago you were asking me not to take offence.”
“You’re damned clever, aren’t you?” he almost snarled.
That was all he could think of in the way of an answer to her. He stood there swaying lightly in front of the fire, nursing, as it were, his angry bafflement.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I regard that as a very high attribute. And I’m nearly as pleased at one other thing-I seem to have shaken you partly out of your delightful and infuriating urbanity…But now, we’re not here to compliment each other. You’ve got something you want to say to me, haven’t you?”
He stared at her severely and said: “Yes, I have. I want to ask you not to come here any more.”
“Why?” She shot the word out at him almost before he had finished speaking.
“Because I don’t wish you to.”
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“You forget that I come at Helen’s invitation, not at yours.”
“I see I shall have to tell you the real reason, then. I would have preferred not to have done. My wife is jealous of you.”
He expected her to show great surprise, but the surprise was his when she replied almost casually: “Oh yes, she was jealous of you once-that first evening we met at the Head’s house—do you remember?”
No, he did not remember. At least, he did now that she called it to his memory, but he had not remembered until then. Curious…
He was half-disappointed that she was so calm and unconcerned about it all. He had anticipated some sort of a scene, either of surprise, remorse, indignation, or sympathy. Instead of which she just said “Oh, yes,” and indulged in some perfectly irrelevant reminiscence.
Well, not perhaps irrelevant, but certainly inappropriate in the circumstances.
“You see,” he went on, hating her blindly because she was so serene; “you see she generously invites you here, because she thinks I like you to come. Well, of course, I do, but then, I don’t want to make it hard for her. You understand what I mean? I think it is very generous of her to—to act as she does.”
“I think it is very foolish unless she has the idea that in time she can conquer her jealousy…But I quite understand, Mr. Speed. I won’t come any more.”
“I hope you don’t think—”
“Fortunately I have other things to think about. I assure you I’m not troubling at all. Even loss of friendship—”
“But,” he interrupted eagerly, “surely it’s not going to mean that, Miss Harrington? Just because you don’t come here doesn’t mean that you and I—”
She laughed in his face as she replied, cutting short his remarks: “My dear Mr. Speed, you are too much of an egoist. It wasn’t your friendship I was thinking about—it was Helen’s. You forget that I’ve been Helen’s friend for ten years…Well, goodbye…”
The last straw! He shook hands with her stiffly.
When she had gone his face grew hard and solemn, and he clenched his fists as he stood again with his back to the fire. He felt—the word came to his mind was a staggering inevitability-he felt dead. Absolutely dead. And all because she had gone and he knew that she would not come again.
III
Those were the dark days of the winter term, when Burton came round the dormitories at half-past seven in the mornings and lit all the flaring gas-jets. There was a cold spell at the beginning of December when it was great fun to have to smash the film of ice on the top of the water in the water-jugs, and one afternoon the school got an extra half-holiday to go skating on one of the neighbouring fens that had been flooded and frozen over. Now Speed could skate very well, even to the point of figure-skating and a few easy tricks, and he took a very simple and human delight in exhibiting his prowess before the Millstead boys. He possessed a good deal of that very charming boyish pride in athletic achievement which is so often mistaken for modesty, and there was no doubt that the reports of his accomplishments on the wide expanse of Dinglay Fen gave a considerable fillip to his popularity in the school.
A popularity, by the way, which was otherwise very distinctly on the wane. He knew it, felt it as anyone might have felt it, and perhaps, additionally, as only he in all the world could feel it; it was the dark spectre in his life. He loved success; he was prepared to fight the sternest of battles provided they were victories on the road of progress; but to see his power slipping from him elusively and without commotion of any kind, was the sort of thing his soul was not made to endure. Fears grew up in him and exaggerated reality. He imagined all kinds of schemes and conspiracies against him in his own House. The enigma of the Head became suddenly resolved into a sinister hostility to himself. If a boy passed him in the road with a touch of the cap and a “Good morning” he would ask himself whether the words contained any ominous subtlety of meaning. And when, on rare occasions, he dined in the Masters’ Common-Room he could be seen to feel hostility rising in clouds all about him, hostility that would not speak or act, that was waiting mute for the signal to uprise.
He was glad that the term was nearly over, not, he told himself, because he was unhappy at Millstead, but because he needed a holiday after the hard work of his first term of housemastership. The next term, he decided, would be easier; and the term after that easier still, and so on, until a time would come when his work at Millstead would be exactly the ideal combination of activity and comfort. Moreover, the next term he would not see Clare at all. He had made up his mind about that. It would be easier to see her not at all than to see her only a little. And with the absolute snapping of his relations with her would come that which he desired most in all the world; happiness with Helen. He wanted to be happy with Helen. He wanted to love her passionately, just as he wanted to hate Clare passionately. For it was Clare who had caused all the trouble. He hugged the comfortable thought to himself; it was Clare, and Clare only, who had so far disturbed the serenity of his world. Without Clare his world would have been calm and unruffled, a paradise of contentment and love of Helen.
Well, next term, anyway, his world should be without Clare.
IV
On the day that term ended he felt quite boyish and cheerful. For during that final week he and Helen had been, he considered, perfectly happy; moreover, she had agreed to go with him to his parents for Christmas, and though the visit would, in some sense, be an ordeal, the anticipation of it was distinctly pleasant. Somehow—he would not analyse his sensation exactly—somehow he wanted to leave the creeper-hung rooms at Lavery’s and charge full tilt into the world outside; it was as if Lavery’s contained something morbidly beautiful that he loved achingly, but desired to leave in order that he might return to love it more and again. When he saw the railway vans being loaded up with luggage in the courtyard he felt himself tingling with excitement, just as if he were a schoolboy and this the close of his first miserable term. Miserable! Well, yes, looking back upon it he could agree that in a certain way it had been miserable, and in another way it had been splendid, rapturous, and lovely. It had been full, brimming full, of feelings. The feelings had whirled tirelessly about him in the dark drawing-room, had wrapped him amidst themselves, had tossed him high and low to the most dizzy heights and the most submerged depths; and now, aching from it all, he was not sorry to leave for a short while this world of pressing, congesting sensation.
He even caught himself looking forward to his visit to his parents, a thing he had hardly ever done before. For his parents were, he had always considered, “impossible” parents, good and generous enough in their way, but “impossible” from his point of view. They were—he hesitated to use the word “vulgar,” because that word implied so many things that they certainly were not-he would use instead the rather less insulting word “materialist.” They lived in a world that was full of “things “—soap-factories and cars and Turkey carpets and gramophones and tennis-courts. Moreover, they were almost disgustingly wealthy, and their wealth had followed him doggedly about wherever he had tried to escape from it. They had regarded his taking a post in a public-school as a kind of eccentric wild oats, and did not doubt that, sooner or later, he would come to his senses and prefer one or other of the various well-paid business posts that Sir Charles Speed could get for him. Oh, yes, undoubtedly they were impossible people. And yet their very impossibility would be a relief from the tensely charged atmosphere of Lavery’s.
On the train he chatted gaily to Helen and gave her some indication of the sort of people his parents were. “You mustn’t be nervous of them,” he warned her.
“They’ve pots of money, but they’re not people to get nervous about. Dad’s all right if you stick up for yourself in front of him, and mother’s nice to everybody whether she likes them or not. So you’ll be quite safe…and if it freezes there’ll be ice on the Marsh-pond…”
At the thought of this last possibility his face kindled with anticipation. “Cold, Helen?
” he queried, and when she replied “Yes, rather,” he said jubilantly: “I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s started to freeze already.”
Then for many minutes he gazed out through the carriage window at the pleasant monotony of the Essex countryside, and in a short while he felt her head against his shoulder. She was sleeping. “I do love her!” he thought triumphantly, giving her a side-glance. And then the sight of a pond with a thin coating of ice gave him another sort of triumph.
* * *
INTERLUDE. CHRISTMAS AT BEACHINGS OVER
I
“Beachings Over, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32. Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles.”
So ran the inscription on Lady Speed’s opulent bluish notepaper. The house was an old one, unobtrusively modernised, with about a half-mile of upland carriage-drive leading to the portico. As Helen saw it from the window of the closed Daimler that had met them at Framlingay station, her admiration secured momentary advantage of her nervousness.
In another moment Speed was introducing her to his mother.
Lady Speed was undoubtedly a fine woman. “Fine” was exactly the right word for her, for she was just a little too elderly to be called beautiful and perhaps too tall ever to have been called pretty. Though she was upright and clear-skinned and finely-featured, and although the two decades of her married life had seemed to leave very little conspicuous impression on her, yet there was a sense, perhaps, in which she looked her age; it might have been guessed rightly as between forty and fifty. She had blue eyes of that distinctively English hue that might almost be the result of gazing continually upon miles and miles of rolling English landscape; and her nose, still attractively retrousse, though without a great deal of the pertness it must have had in her youth, held just enough of patricianly bearing to enable her to manage competently the twenty odd domestics whose labours combined to make Beachings Over habitable.