She kissed Helen warmly. “My dear, I’m so pleased to meet you. But you’ll have to rough it along with us, you know—I’m afraid we don’t live at all in style. We’re just ordinary country folks, that’s all…And when you’ve had your lunch and got refreshed I must take you over the house and show you everything…”
Speed laughed and said: “Mother always tells visitors that they’ve got to rough it. But there’s nothing to rough. I wonder what she’d say if she had to live three months at Lavery’s.”
“Lavery’s?” said Lady Speed, uncomprehendingly.
“Lavery’s is the name of my House at Millstead. I was made housemaster of it at the beginning of the term.” He spoke a little proudly.
“Oh, yes, I seem to know the name. I believe your father was mentioning something about it to me once, but I hardly remember—”
“But how on earth did he know anything about it? I never wrote telling him.”
“Well, I expect he heard it from somebody…I really couldn’t tell you exactly…I’ve had a most awful morning before you came—had to dismiss one of the maids—she’d stolen a thermos-flask. So ungrateful of her, because I’d have given it to her if she’d only asked me for it. One of my best maids, she was.”
After lunch Richard arrived. Richard was Speed’s younger brother, on vacation from school; a pleasant-faced, rather ordinary youngster, obviously prepared to enter the soap-boiling industry as soon as he left school. In the afternoon Richard conducted the pair of them round the grounds and outbuildings, showing them the new Italian garden and the pergola and the new sunken lawn and the clock-tower built over the garage and the new gas-engine to work the electric light plant and the new pavilion alongside the rubble tennis courts and the new wing of the servants’ quarters that “dad” was “throwing out” from the end of the old coach-house. Then, when they returned indoors, Lady Speed was ready to conduct them over the interior and show them the panelled bedrooms and the lacquered cabinets in the music-room and the bathroom with a solid silver bath and the gramophone worked by electricity and the wonderful old-fashioned bureau that somebody had offered to buy off “dad” for fifteen hundred guineas.
“Visitors always have to go through it,” said Speed, when his mother had left them. “Personally I’m never the least bit impressed, and I can’t understand anyone else being it.”
Helen answered, rather doubtfully: “But it’s a lovely house, Kenneth, isn’t it? I’d no idea your people were like this.”
“Like what?”
“So—so well-off.”
“Oh, then the display has impressed you?” He laughed and said, quietly: “I’d rather have our own little place at Lavery’s, wouldn’t you?”
While he was saying it he felt: Yes, I’d rather have it, no doubt, but to be there now would make me utterly miserable.
She replied softly: “Yes, because it’s our own.”
He pondered a moment and then said: “Yes, I suppose that’s one of the reasons why I would.”
After a pleasant tea in the library he took Helen into the music-room, where he played Chopin diligently for half-an-hour and then, by special request of Richard, ran over some of the latest revue songs. Towards seven o’clock Lady Speed sailed in to remind Richard that it was getting near dinner-time. “I wish you’d run upstairs and change your clothes, dear—you know father doesn’t like you to come in to dinner in tweeds…You know,” she went on, turning to Helen, “Charles isn’t a bit fussy—none of us trouble to really dress for dinner, except when we’re in town—only—only you have to put a limit somewhere, haven’t you?”
As the hour for dinner approached it seemed as if a certain mysteriously incalculable imminence were in the air, as if the whole world of Beachings Over were steeling itself in readiness for some searching and stupendous test of its worth. It was, indeed, ten minutes past eight when the sound of a motor-horn was heard in, the far distance. “That’s Edwards,” cried Lady Speed, apprehensively. “He always sounds his horn to let us know…Now, Dick dear, don’t let him know we’ve been waiting for him-you know how he hates to think he’s late…”
And in another moment a gruff voice in the hall could be heard dismissing the chauffeur with instructions for the morrow. “Ten-thirty sharp, Edwards. The Daimler if it’s wet. Gotter go over and see Woffenheimer.”
And in yet another moment Lady Speed was rushing forward with an eager, wifely kiss. “You aren’t late, Charles. All the clocks are a little fast…Kenneth has come…and this…” she spoke a trifle nervously…“this is Helen…”
Sir Charles distributed a gruff nod to the assembly, afterwards holding out his hand to be shaken. “Ahdedoo, Kenneth, my lad…How are you? Still kicking eh?…Ahdedoo, Helen…don’t mind me calling you Helen, do you? Well, Richard, my lad…”
A bald-headed, moustached, white-spatted, morning-coated man, Sir Charles Speed.
Dinner opened in an atmosphere of gloomy silence. Lady Speed kept inaugurating conversations that petered out into a stillness that was broken only by Sir Charles’ morose ingurgitation of soup. Something was obviously amiss with him. Over the entrée it came out.
“Had to sack one of the foremen to-day.”
Lady Speed looked up with an appropriate gesture of horror and indignation. “And I had to dismiss one of my maids too! What a curious coincidence! How ungrateful people are!”
“Sneaking timber out of the woodyard,” continued Sir Charles, apparently without the least interest in his wife’s adventure with the maid.
But with the trouble of the sacked foreman off his chest Sir Charles seemed considerably relieved, though his gloom returned when Richard had the misfortune to refer to one of the “fellows” at his school as “no class at all—an absolute outsider.”
“See here, my lad,” exclaimed Sir Charles, holding up his fork with a peach on the end of it, “don’t you ever let me hear you talking that sort of nonsense! Don’t you forget that I started life as an office-boy cleaning out inkwells!” Richard flushed deeply and Lady Speed looked rather uncomfortable. “Don’t you forget it,” added Sir Charles, mouthing characteristically, and it was clear that he was speaking principally for the benefit of Helen. “I don’t want people to think I am what I’m not. If I hadn’t been lucky—and—and” he seemed to experience a difficulty in choosing the right adjective—“and smart—smart, mind—I might have been still cleaning out ink-wells. See?” He filled up his glass with port and for a moment there was sultry silence again. Eventually, he licked his lips and broke it. “You know,” turning to address Kenneth, “it’s all this education that’s at the root of the trouble. Makes the workers too big for their shoes, as often as not…Mind you, I’m a democrat, I am. Can’t abide snobbery at any price. But I don’t believe in all this education business. I paid for you at Cambridge and what’s it done for you? You go an’ get a job in some stuffy little school or other—salary about two hundred a year—and God knows how long you’d stay there without a promotion if I hadn’t given somebody the tip to shove you up!”
“What’s that?” Kenneth exclaimed, almost under his breath.
Sir Charles appeared not to have heard the interruption. He went on, warming to his subject and addressing an imaginary disputant: “No, sir, I do not believe in what is termed Education in this country. It don’t help a man to rise if he hasn’t got it in him…Why, look at me! I got on without education. Don’t you suppose other lads, if they’re smart enough, can do the same? Don’t you think I’m an example of what a man can become when he’s had no education?”
The younger Speed nodded. The argument was irrefutable.
II
After dinner Speed managed to get his father alone in the library. “I want to know,” he said, quietly, “what you meant when you said something about giving somebody the tip to shove me up. I want to know exactly, mind.”
Sir Charles waved his arm across a table.
“Don’t you talk to me like that, my lad. I’m too old for you to cr
oss-examine I’m willin’ to tell you anythin’ you like, only I won’t be bullied into it. So now you know. Light yourself a cigar an’, for God’s sake, sit down and look comfortable.”
“Perhaps I could look it if I felt it.”
“Your own fault if you don’t feel it. Damned ingratitude, I call it. Sit down. I shan’t answer a question till you’re sitting down and smoking as if you was a friend of mine an’ not a damned commercial traveller.”
Speed decided that he had better humour him; he sat down and toyed with a cigar. “Now, if you’ll please tell me.”
“What is it you want me to tell you?” grunted Sir Charles.
“I want you to tell me what you meant by saying that you gave somebody a tip to shove me up?”
“Well, my lad, you don’t want to stay an assistant-master all your life, do you?”
“That’s not the point. I want to know what you did.”
“Why, I did the usual thing that I’d always do to help somebody I’m interested in.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know. Pull a few wires…Man like me has a few wires he can pull. I know people, you see—and if I just mention a little thing—well, they generally remember it all right.”
And he spread himself luxuriously in the arm-chair and actually smiled!
The other flushed hotly. “I see. May I ask whose help you solicited on my behalf?”
“Don’t talk like a melodrama, my lad. I’m your best friend if you only knew it. What is it you want to know now?”
“I want to know whose help you asked for?”
“Well, I had a little conversation with Lord Port-way. And I had five minutes’ chat over the telephone with old Ervine. Don’t you see “—he leaned forward with a touch of pleading in his voice—“don’t you see that I want you to get on? I’ve always wanted you to do well in the world. Your brother’s doing well and there’s not a prouder father in England to-day than I am of him. And when young Richard leaves school I hope he’ll get on well too. Now, you’re a bit different. Dunno why you are, but you are, an’ I’ve always recognised it. You can’t say I’ve ever tried to force you to anythin’ you didn’t want, can you? You wanted to go to the ‘varsity—well, I don’t believe it’s a good thing for a young man to waste his years till he’s twenty-two—nevertheless it was your choice, an’ I let you do it. I paid for you, I gave you as much money as you wanted, an’ I didn’t complain. Well, then you wanted to be a Master in a school. You got yourself the job without even consulting me about it, but did I complain? No, I let you go your own way. I let you do what I considered an absolutely damsilly thing. Still, I thought, if you’re going to be a teacher you may as well have ambitions an’ rise to the top of the profession. So I thought I’d just put in a word for you. That was all. I want you to get on, my lad, no matter what line you’re in. I’ve always bin as ambitious for you as I have bin for myself.”
The other said: “I can see you meant well.”
“Meant well? And is it extraordinary that I should mean well to my own son? Then, there’s another thing. You go and get married. Well, I don’t mind that. I believe in marriage. I was married myself when I was nineteen an’ I’ve never once regretted it. But you go an’ get married all of a hurry while I’m travellin’ the other side o’ the world, an’ you don’t even send me so much as a bit o’ weddin’-cake! I don’t say: is it fair? I just say: is it natural? I come home to England to find a letter tellin’ me you’ve married the Headmaster’s daughter!”
“Well, why shouldn’t I?”
“I’m not sayin’ you shouldn’t, my lad. I’m not a snob, an’ I don’t care who you marry s’long as she’s as good as you are. I don’t want you to marry a duchess. I don’t even care if the girl you marry hasn’t a cent. See—I don’t mind if she’s a dustman’s daughter, s’long—s’long, mind, as she’s your equal! That’s all. Now you understand me. Do you?”
“I think I understand you.”
“Good. Now have some more port. An’ while you’re spendin’ Christmas with us, for God’s sake, have a good time and give the girl a good time, too. Is she fond of theatres?”
“I—I don’t know—well—she might be—”
“Well, you can have the closed Daimler any night you like to take you into town and bring you back. And if she’s fond of motorin’ you can have the Sunbeam durin’ the daytime. Remember that. I want you to have a dam’ good time…Dam’ good…See? Now have some more port before we join your mother…”
“No thanks. I should be drunk if I had any more.”
“Nonsense, my lad. Port won’ make you drunk. Dam’ good port, isn’ it?…Wouldn’ make you drunk, though…Don’ talk dam’ nonsense to me…”
He was slightly drunk himself.
III
That interview with his father had a disturbing effect upon Speed. He had expected a row in which his father would endeavour to tyrannise over him, instead of which Sir Charles, if there had been any argument at all, had certainly got the better of it. In a sort of way it did seem rather unfair to have married without letting his parents know a word about it beforehand. But, of course, there had been good reasons. First, the housemastership. He couldn’t have been given Lavery’s unless he had married. Ervine had stressed very strongly the desirability of married housemasters. And it had therefore been necessary to do everything rather hurriedly in order to be able to begin at Lavery’s in the September.
It was when he reflected that, but for his father’s intervention, he would probably never have been offered Lavery’s that he felt the keenest feeling of unrest. The more he thought about it the more manifestly certain incidents in the past became explainable to him. The hostility of the Common-Room for instance. Did they guess the sort of “wire-pulling” that had been going on? Probably they did not know anything definitely, but wasn’t it likely that they would conclude that such a startling appointment must have been the result of some ulterior intrigue? And wasn’t it natural that they should be jealous of him?
He hated Ervine because, behind all the man’s kindness to him, he saw now merely the ignoble desire to placate influence. Ervine had done it all to please his father. It was galling to think that that adulatory speech on the Prize-Day, which had given him such real and genuine pleasure, had been dictated merely by a willingness to serve the whim of an important man. It was galling to think that Lord Portway’s smiles and words of commendation had been similarly motivated. It was galling to think that, however reticent he was about being the son of Sir Charles Speed, the relationship seemed fated to project itself into his career in the most unfortunate and detestable of ways.
Then he thought of Helen. Her motives, of all, were pure and untainted; she shared neither her father’s sycophancy nor his own father’s unscrupulousness. She had married him for no other reason than that she loved him. And in the midst of the haze of indecent revelations that seemed to be enveloping him, her love for him and his for her brightened like stars when the night deepens.
And then, slowly and subtly at first, came even the suspicion of her. Was it possible that she had been the dupe of her father? Was it possible that Ervine very neatly and cleverly had Sir Charles hoist with his own petard, making the young housemaster of Lavery’s at the same time his own son-in-law? And if so, had Helen played up to the game? The thought tortured him evilly. He felt it to be such an ignoble one that he must never breathe it to Helen, lest it should be utterly untrue. Yet to keep it to himself was not the best way of getting rid of it. It grew within him like a cancer; it filled all the unoccupied niches of his mind; it made him sick with apprehension.
And then, at last, on Christmas Eve he was cruel to her. There had been a large party at Beachings Over and she had been very shy and nervous all the evening. And now, after midnight, when they had gone up to their bedroom, he said, furiously: “What was the matter with you all to-night?”
She said: “Nothing.”
He said: “Funny reason for no
t speaking a word all the evening. Whatever must people have thought of you?”
“I don’t know. I told you I should be nervous. I can’t help it. You shouldn’t have brought me if you hadn’t been prepared for it.”
“You might have at least said you’d got a headache and gone off to bed.”
She said, frightenedly: “Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, what’s the matter—why are you talking to me like this?”
“I hope I’m not being unfair,” he replied, imperturbably.
She flung herself on the bed and began to sob.
He went on unfastening his dress tie and thinking: She married me because my father has money. She married me because her father told her to. She schemed to get me. The housemastership was a plant to get me married to her before I knew whether I really wanted her or not.
He was carefully silent the whole rest of the night, though it was hard to lie awake and hear her sobbing.
IV
The next evening, Christmas Day, there was another party. She looked rather pale and unhappy, but he saw she was trying to be lively. He felt acutely sorry for her, and yet, whenever he felt in the mood to relent, he fortified his mind by thinking of her duplicity. He thought of other things besides her duplicity. He thought of her stupidity. Why was she so stupid? Why had he married a woman who couldn’t gossip at a small Christmas party without being nervous? Why had he married a woman who never spoke at table unless she were spoken to? Other women said the silliest things and they sounded ordinary; Helen, forcing herself in sheer desperation to do so, occasionally said the most ordinary things and they sounded silly. If she ventured on any deliberate remark the atmosphere was always as if the whole world had stopped moving in order to see her make a fool of herself; what she said was probably no more foolish than what anybody else might have said, yet somehow it seemed outlined against the rest of the conversation as a piece of stark, unmitigated lunacy. Speed found himself holding his breath when she began to speak.