He went round to the front entrance of the Headmaster’s house and rang the bell. It was a curious house, the result of repeated architectural patchings and additions; its ultimate incongruity had been softened and mellowed by ivy and creeper of various sorts, so that it bore the sad air of a muffled-up invalid. Potter opened the door and admitted him with stealthy precision. While he was standing in the hall and being relieved of his hat and gloves he had time to notice the Asiatic and African bric-a-brac which, scattered about the walls and tables, bore testimony to Doctor Ervine’s years as a missionary in foreign fields. Then, with the same feline grace, Potter showed him into the drawing-room.
It was a moderate-sized apartment lit by heavy old-fashioned gas chandeliers, whose peculiar and continuous hissing sound emphasised the awkwardness of any gap in the conversation. A baby-grand piano, with its sound-board closed and littered with music and ornaments, and various cabinets of china and curios, were the only large articles of furniture; chairs and settees were sprinkled haphazard over the central area round the screened fireplace. As Speed entered, with Potter opening the door for him and intoning sepulchrally: “Mr. Speed,” an answering creak of several of the chairs betrayed the fact that the room was occupied.
Then the Head rose out of his armchair, book of some sort in hand, and came forward with a large easy smile.
“Um, yes—Mr. Speed—so glad—um, yes—may I introduce you to my wife?—Lydia, this is Mr. Speed!”
At first glance Speed was struck with the magnificent appropriateness of the name Lydia. She was a pert little woman, obviously competent; the sort of woman who is always suspected of twisting her husband round her little finger. She was fifty if she was a day, yet she dressed with a dash of the young university blue-stocking; an imitation so insolent that one assumed either that she was younger than she looked or that some enormous brain development justified the eccentricity. She had rather sharp blue eyes that were shrewd rather than far-seeing, and her hair, energetically dyed, left one in doubt as to what colour nature had ever accorded it. At present it was a dull brown that had streaks of black and grey.
She said, in voice that though sharp was not unpretty: “I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Speed. You must make yourself at home here, you know.”
The Head murmured: “Um, yes, most certainly. At home—um, yes…Now let me introduce you to my daughter…Helen, this is—um—Mr. Speed.” A girl was staring at him, and he did not then notice much more than the extreme size and brightness of her blue eyes; that, and some astonishingly vague quality that cannot be more simply described than as a sense of continually restrained movement, so that, looking with his mind’s eye at everybody else in the world, he saw them suddenly grown old and decrepit. Her bright golden hair hung down her back in a rebellious cascade; that, however, gave no clue to her age. The curious serene look in her eyes was a woman’s (her mother’s, no doubt), while the pretty half-mocking curve of her lips was still that of a young and fantastically mischievous child. In reality she was twenty, though she looked both older and younger.
She said, in a voice so deep and sombre that Speed recoiled suddenly as though faced with something uncanny: “How are you, Mr. Speed?”
He bowed to her and said, gallantly: “Delighted to be in Millstead, Miss Ervine.”
The Head murmured semi-consciously: “Um, yes, delightful place—especially in summer weather—trees, you know—beautiful to sit out on the cricket ground—um, yes, very, very beautiful indeed…”
Potter opened the door to announce that dinner was served.
VI
As Mrs. Ervine and the girl preceded them out of the room Speed heard the latter say: “Clare’s not come yet, mother.” Mrs. Ervine replied, a trifle acidly: “Well, my dear, we can’t wait for her. I suppose she knew it was at seven…”
The Head, taking Speed by the arm with an air of ponderous intimacy, was saying: “Don’t know whether you’ve a good reading voice, Speed. If so, we must have you for the lessons in morning chapel.”
Speed was mumbling something appropriate and the Head was piloting him into the dining-room when Potter appeared again, accompanied by a dark-haired girl, short in stature and rather pale-complexioned. She seemed quite unconcerned as she caught up the tail end of the procession into the dining-room and remarked casually: “How are you, Doctor Ervine?—So sorry I’m a trifle late. Friday, you know—rather a busy day for the shop.”
The Head looked momentarily nonplussed, then smiled and said: “Oh, not at all…not at all…I must introduce you to our new recruit—Mr. Speed…This is Miss Harrington, a friend of my daughter’s. She—um, yes, she manages—most successfully, I may say—the—er—the bookshop down in the town. Bookshop, you know.”
He said that with the air of implying: Bookshops are not ordinary shops.
Speed bowed; the Head went on boomingly: “And she is, I think I may venture to say, my daughter’s greatest friend. Eh?”
He addressed the monosyllable to the girl with a touch of shrewdness: she replied quietly: “I don’t know.” The three words were spoken in that rare tone in which they simply mean nothing but literally what they say.
In the dining-room they sat in the following formation: Dr. and Mrs. Ervine at the head and foot respectively; Helen and Clare together at one side and Speed opposite them at the other. The dining-room was a cold forlorn-looking apartment in which the dim incandescent light seemed to accomplish little more than to cast a dull glitter of obscurity on the oil-paintings that hung, ever so slightly askew, on the walls. A peculiar incongruity in it struck Speed at once, though the same might never have occurred to anybody else: the minute salt and pepper-boxes on the table possessed a pretty feminine daintiness which harmonised ill with the huge mahogany sideboard. The latter reminded Speed of the boardroom of a City banking-house. It was as if, he thought, the Doctor and his wife had impressed their personalities crudely and without compromise; and as if those personalities were so diametrically different that no fusing of the two into one was ever possible. Throughout the meal he kept looking first to his left, at Mrs. Ervine, and then to his right at the Doctor, and wondering at what he felt instinctively to be a fundamental strangeness in their life together.
Potter, assisted by a speckle-faced maid, hovered assiduously around, and the Doctor assisted occasionally by his wife, hovered no less assiduously around the conversation, preventing it from lapsing into such awkward silences as would throw into prominence the continual hissing of the gas and his own sibilant ingurgitation of soup. The Doctor talked rather loudly and ponderously, and with such careful and scrupulous qualifications of everything he said that one had the impressive sensation that incalculable and mysterious issues hung upon his words; Mrs. Ervine’s remarks were short and pithy, sometimes a little cynical.
The Doctor seemed to fear that he had given Speed a wrong impression of Miss Harrington. “I’m sure Mr. Speed will be surprised when I tell him that he can have the honour of purchasing his Times from you each morning, Clare,” he said, lapping up the final spoonful of soup and bestowing a satisfied wipe with his napkin on his broad wet lips.
Clare said: “I should think Mr. Speed would prefer to have it delivered.”
Mrs. Ervine said: “Perhaps Mr. Speed doesn’t take the Times, either.”
Speed looked across to Clare with a humorous twist of the corners of the mouth and said: “You can book me an order for the Telegraph if you like, Miss Harrington.”
“With pleasure, Mr. Speed. Any Sunday paper?”
“The Observer, if you will be so kind.”
“Right.”
Again the Doctor seemed to fear that he had given Speed a wrong impression of Miss Harrington. “I’m sure Mr. Speed will be interested to know that your father is a great littérateur, Clare.”
Clare gave the Doctor a curious look, with one corner of her upper lip tilted at an audacious upward angle.
The Doctor went on, leaning his elbows on the table as soon as Potter had
removed his soup-plate: “Mr. Harrington is the author of books on ethics.”
All this time Helen had not spoken a word. Speed had been watching her, for she was already to him by far the most interesting member of the party. He noticed that her eyes were constantly shifting between Clare and anyone whom Clare was addressing; Clare seemed almost the centre of her world. When Clare smiled she smiled also, and when Clare was pensive there came into her eyes a look which held, besides pensiveness, a touch of sadness. She was an extremely beautiful girl and in the yellow light the coils of her hair shone like sheaves of golden corn on a summer’s day. It was obvious that, conversationally at any rate, she was extremely shy.
Mrs. Ervine was saying: “You’re going to take the music, Mr. Speed, are you not?”
Speed smiled and nodded.
She went on: “Then I suppose you’re fond of music.”
“Doesn’t it follow?” Speed answered, with a laugh.
She replied pertly: “Not necessarily at all, Mr. Speed. Do you play an instrument?”
“The piano a little.”
The Head interposed with: “Um, yes—a wonderful instrument. We must have some music after dinner, eh, Lydia?—Do you like Mendelssohn?” (He gave the word an exaggeratedly German pronunciation.) “My daughter plays some of the—um—the Lieder ohne Wörte—um, yes—the Songs Without Words, you know.”
“I like some of Mendelssohn,” said Speed.
He looked across at the girl. She was blushing furiously, with her eyes still furtively on Clare.
VII
After dinner they all returned to the drawing-room, where inferior coffee was distributed round in absurdly diminutive cups, Potter attitudinising over it like a high priest performing the rites of some sinister religious ceremony. Clare and Helen sat together on one of the settees, discoursing inaudibly and apparently in private; the Head commenced an anecdote that was suggested by Speed’s glance at a photograph on the mantelpiece, a photograph of a coloured man attired in loose-fitting cotton draperies. “My servant when I was in India,” the Head had informed Speed. “An excellent fellow—most—um, yes—faithful and reliable. One of the earliest of my converts. I well remember the first morning after I had engaged him to look after me he woke me up with the words Chota Hazra, sahib—”
Speed feigning interest, managed to keep his eyes intermittently on the two girls. He wondered if they were discussing him.
“I said—‘I can’t—um—see Mr. Chota Hazra this time in the morning.”’
Speed nodded with a show of intelligence, and then, to be on the safe side if the joke had been reached, gave a slight titter.
“Of course,” said the Head, after a pause, “it was all my imperfect knowledge of Hindostanee. Chota hazra’ means—um, yes—breakfast!”
Speed laughed loudly. He had the feeling after he had laughed that he had laughed too loudly, for everything seemed so achingly silent after the echoes had died away, silent except for the eternal hiss of the gas in the chandeliers. It was as if his laughter had startled something; he could hear, in his imagination, the faint fluttering of wings as if something had flown away. A curious buzzing came into his head; he thought perhaps it might be due to the mediocre Burgundy that he had drunk with his dinner. Then for one strange unforgettable second he saw Helen’s sky-blue eyes focussed full upon him and it was in them that he read a look of half-frightened wonderment that sent the blood tingling in his veins.
He said, with a supreme inward feeling of recklessness: “I would love to hear Miss Ervine play Mendelssohn.”
He half expected a dreadful silence to supervene and everybody to stare at him as the author of some frightful conversational faux pas; he had the feeling of having done something deliberately and provocatively unconventional. He saw the girl’s eyes glance away from him and the blush rekindle her cheeks in an instant. It seemed to him also that she clung closer to Clare and that Clare smiled a little, as a mother to a shy child.
Of course it was all a part of his acute sensitiveness; his remark was taken to be more than a touch of polite gallantry. Mrs. Ervine said: “Helen’s very nervous,” and the Head, rolling his head from side to side in an ecstasy of anticipation, said: “Ah yes, most certainly. Delightful that will be—um, yes—most delightful. Helen, you must not disappoint Mr. Speed on his first night at Millstead.”
She looked up, shook her head so that for an instant all her face seemed to be wrapped in yellow flame, and said, sombrely: “I cant play—please don’t ask me to.”
Then she turned to Clare and said, suddenly: “I can’t really, can. I, Clare?”
“You can,” said Clare, “but you get nervous.”
She said that calmly and deliberatively, with the air of issuing a final judgment of the matter.
“Come now, Helen,” boomed the Head, ponderously. “Mr. Speed—um—is very anxious to hear yon. It is very—um, yes—silly to be nervous. Come along now.”
There was a note in those last three words of sudden harshness, a faint note, it is true, but one that Speed, acutely perceptive of such subtleties, was quick to hear and notice. He looked at the Head and once again, it seemed to him, the Head was as he had seen him that afternoon in the dark study, a flash of malevolent sharpness in his eyes, a menacing slope in his huge low-hanging nose. The room seemed to grow darker and the atmosphere more tense; he saw the girl leave the settee and walk to the piano. She sat on the stool for a moment with her hands poised hesitatingly over the keyboard; then, suddenly, and at a furious rate, she plunged into the opening bars of the Spring Song. Speed had never heard it played at such an alarming rate. Five or six bars from the beginning she stopped all at once, lingered a moment with her hands over the keys, and then left the stool and almost ran the intervening yards to the settee. She said, with deep passion: “I can’t—I don’t remember it.”
Clare said protectingly: “Never mind, Helen. It doesn’t matter.”
Speed said: “No, of course not. It’s awfully hard to remember music—at least, I always find it so.”
And the Head, all his harshness gone and placidity restored in its place, murmured: “Hard—um yes—very hard. I don’t know how people manage it at all. Oh, very difficult, don’t you think so, Lydia?”
“Difficult if you’re nervous,” replied Mrs. Ervine, with her own peculiar note of acidity.
VIII
Conversation ambled on, drearily and with infinite labour, until half-past nine, when Clare arose and said she must go. Helen then rose also and said she would go with Clare a part of the way into the town, but Mrs. Ervine objected because Helen had a cold. Clare said: “Oh, don’t trouble, Helen, I can easily go alone—I’m used to it, you know, and there’s a bright moon.”
Speed, feeling that a show of gallantry would bring to an end an evening that had just begun to get on his nerves a little, said: “Suppose I see you home, Miss Harrington. I’ve got to go down to the general post office to post a letter, and I can quite easily accompany you as far as the High Street.”
“There’s no need to,” said Clare. “And I hope you’re not inventing that letter you have to post.”
“I assure you I’m not,” Speed answered, and he pulled out of his pocket a letter home that he had written up in his room that afternoon.
Clare laughed.
In the dimly-lit hall, after he had bidden good night to Doctor and Mrs. Ervine, he found an opportunity of speaking a few words to Helen alone. She was waiting at the door to have a few final words with Clare, and before Clare appeared Speed came up to her and began speaking.
He said: “Miss Ervine, please forgive me for having been the means of making you feel uncomfortable this evening. I had no idea you were nervous, or I shouldn’t have dreamed of asking you to play. I know what nervousness is, because I’m nervous myself.”
She gave him a half-frightened look and replied: “Oh, it’s all right, Mr. Speed. It wasn’t your fault. And anyhow it didn’t matter.”
She seemed only half
interested. It was Clare she was waiting for, and when Clare appeared she left Speed by the door and the two girls conversed a moment in whispers. They kissed and said good night.
As Potter appeared mysteriously from nowhere and, after handing Speed his hat and gloves, opened the front-door with massive dignity, Helen threw her hands up as if to embrace the chill night air and exclaimed: “Oh, what a lovely moon! I wish I was coming with you, Clare!”
There was a strange bewildering pathos in her voice.
Over the heavy trees and the long black pillars of shadow the windows of the dormitories shone like yellow gems, piercing the night with radiance and making a pattern of intricate beauty on the path that led to the Headmaster’s gate. Sounds, mysteriously clear, fell from everywhere upon the two of them as they crossed the soft lawn and came in view of the huge block of Milner’s, all its windows lit and all its rooms alive with commotion. They could hear the clatter of jugs in their basins, the sudden chorus of boyish derision, the strident cry that pierced the night like a rocket, the dull incessant murmur of miscellaneous sounds, the clap of hands, the faint jabber of a muffled gramophone. Millstead was most impressive at this hour, for it was the hour when she seemed most of all immense and vital, a body palpitating with warmth and energy, a mighty organism which would swallow the small and would sway even the greatest of men. Tears, bred of a curious undercurrent of emotion, came into Speed’s eyes as he realised that he was now part of the marvelously contrived machine.
Out in the lane the moon was white along one side of the road-way, and here the lights of Millstead pierced through the foliage like so many bright stars. Speed walked with Clare in silence for some way. He had nothing particular to say; he had suggested accompanying her home partly from mere perfunctory politeness, but chiefly because he longed for a walk in the cool night air away from the stuffiness of the Head’s drawing-room.
When they had been walking some moments Clare said: “I wish you hadn’t come with me, Mr. Speed.”