Clear as bells on the silent air came the sound of girls’ voices. He heard a rich, tolling “Good night, Clare!” Then silence again, silence in which he seemed to know more things than he had ever known before.
* * *
CHAPTER III
I
ONE afternoon he called at Harrington’s, in the High Street, to buy a book. It was a tiny low-roofed shop, the only one of its kind in Millstead, and with the sale of books it combined that of newspapers, stationery, pictures and fancy goods. It was always dark and shadowy, yet, unlike the Head’s study at the school, this gloom possessed a cheerful soothing quality that made the shop a pleasant haven of refuge when the pavements outside were dazzling and sun-scorched. It was on such an afternoon that Speed visited the shop for the first time. Usually he had no occasion to, for, though he dealt with Harrington’s, an errand-boy visited the school every morning to take orders and saved him the trouble of a walk into the village. This afternoon, however, he recollected a text-book that he wanted and had forgotten to order; besides, the heat of the mid-afternoon tempted him to seek shelter in one or other of the tranquil diamond-windowed shops whose sun-blinds sprawled unevenly along the street. It was the hottest day of the term, so far. A huge thermometer outside Harrington’s gave the shade temperature as a little over seventy-nine; all the roadway was bubbling with little gouts of soft tar. The innumerable dogs of Millstead, quarrelsome by nature, had called an armistice on account of the heat, and lay languidly across shady sections of the pavement. Speed, tanned by a week of successive hot days, with a Panama pushed down over his forehead to shield his eyes from dazzle, pushed open the small door and entered the cool cavern of the shop.
His eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, were blind for a moment, but he heard movement of some kind behind the counter. “I want an atlas of the British Isles,” he said, feeling his way across the shop. “A school atlas, I mean. Cheap, rather, you know—about a shilling or one-and-sixpence.”
He heard Clare’s voice reply: “Yes, Mr. Speed, I know what you want. Hot weather, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
She went on, searching meanwhile along same shelves: “Nice of you not to bother about seeing me home the other night, Mr. Speed.”
He said, with a touch of embarrassment: “Well, you see, you told me. About—about Miss Ervine getting jealous, you know.”
“It was nice of you to take my information without doubting it.”
He said, rather to his own surprise: “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that I don’t doubt it. Miss Ervine seems to me a perfectly delightful and natural girl, far too unsophisticated to be jealous of anybody. The more I see of her the more. I like her.”
After a pause she answered quietly: “Well, I’m not surprised at that.”
“I suppose,” he went on, “with her it’s rather the opposite. I mean, the more she sees of me the less she likes me. Isn’t that it?”
“I shouldn’t think she likes you any less than she did at first…Here’s the atlas. It’s one and three—I’d better put it on your account, eh?”
“Yes, yes, of course…So you think—”
She interrupted him quickly with: “Mr. Speed, you’d better not ask me what I think. You’re far more subtle in understanding people than I am, and it won’t take you long to discover what Helen thinks of you if you set about with the intention…Those sketch-blocks you ordered haven’t come in yet…Well, good afternoon!”
Another customer had entered the shop, so that all he could do was to return a rather dazed “Good afternoon” and emerge into the blazing High Street. He walked back to the school in a state of not unpleasant puzzlement.
II
The term, progressed, and towards the end of May occurred the death of Sir Huntly Polk, Bart., Chairman of the Governors of Millstead School. This would not have in any way affected Speed (who had never even met Sir Huntly) had not a Memorial Service been arranged at which he was to play Chopin’s Funeral March on the chapel organ. It was a decent modern instrument, operated usually by Raggs, the visiting organist, who combined a past reputation of great splendour with a present passion for the vox humana stop; but Speed sometimes took the place of Raggs when Raggs wanted time off. And at the time fixed for the Sir Huntly Polk Memorial Service Raggs was adjudicating with great solemnity at a Northern musical festival.
Speed was not a particularly good organist, and it was only reluctantly that he undertook Raggs’s duty for him For one thing, he was always slightly nervous of doing things in public. And for another thing, he would have to practise a great deal in order to prepare himself for the occasion, and he had neither the time nor the inclination for hours of practice. However, when the Head said: “I know I can—um, yes—rely upon you, Mr. Speed,” Speed knew that there was no way out of it. Besides, he was feeling his way in the school with marvellous ease and accuracy, and each new duty undertaken by special request increased and improved his prestige.
After a few days’ trial he found it was rather pleasant to climb the ladder to the organ-loft amid the rich cool dusk of the chapel, switch on the buzzing motor that operated the electric power, and play, not only Chopin’s Funeral March but anything else he liked. Often he would merely improvise, beginning with a simple theme announced on single notes, and broadening and loudening into climax. Always as he played he could see the shafts of sunlight falling amidst the dusty pews, the many-coloured glitter of the stained-glass in the oriel window, and in an opaque haze in the distance the white cavern of the chapel entrance beyond which all was light and sunshine. The whole effect, serene and tranquillising, hardly stirred him to any distinctly religious emotion, but it set up in him acutely that emotional sensitiveness to things secret and unseen, that insurgent consciousness, clear as the sky, yet impossible to translate into words, of deep wells of meaning beneath all the froth and commotion of his five passionate senses.
There was a mirror just above the level of his eyes as he sat at the keyboard, a mirror by means of which he could keep a casual eye on the pulpit and choir-stalls and the one or two front pews. And one golden afternoon as he was playing the adagio movement out of Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathétique,” a stray side-glance into the mirror showed him that he had an audience—of one. She was sitting at the end of the front pew of all, nearest the lectern; she was listening, very simply and unspectacularly. Speed’s first impulse was to stop; his second to switch off from the “Sonata Pathétique” into something more blatantly dramatic. He had, with the first kindling warmth of the sensation of seeing her, a passionate longing to touch somehow her emotions, or, if he could not do that, to stir her sentimentality, at any rate; he would have played the most saccharine picture-palace trash, with vox humana and tremolo stops combined, if he had thought that by doing so he could fill her eyes. Third thoughts, however, better than either the second or first, told him that he had better finish the adagio movement of the Sonata before betraying the fact that he knew she was present. He did so accordingly, playing rather well; then, when the last echoes had died away, he swung his legs over the bench and addressed her. He said, in a conversational tone that sounded rather incongruous in its surroundings: “Good afternoon, Miss Ervine!”
She looked up, evidently startled, and answered, with a half-smile: “Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Speed.”
He went on: “I hope I haven’t bored you. Is there anything in particular you’d like me to play to you?”
She walked out of the pew and along the tiled arena between the choir-stalls to a point where she stood gazing directly up at him. The organ was on the south side of the choir, perched rather precipitously in an overhead chamber that looked down on to the rest of the chapel rather as a bay-window looks on to a street. To Speed, as he saw her, the situation seemed somewhat like the balcony scene with the positions of Romeo and Juliet reversed. And never, he thought, had she looked so beautiful as she did then, with her head poised at an upward angle as if in mute and delicate appeal, and her arms limp
ly at her side, motionless and inconspicuous, as though all the meaning and significance of her were flung upwards into the single soaring glance of her eyes. A shaft of sunlight, filtered through the crimson of an apostle’s robe, struck her hair and kindled it at once into flame; her eyes, blue and laughing, gazed heavenwards with a look of matchless tranquillity. She might have been a saint, come to life out of the sun-drenched stained-glass.
She cried out, like a happy child: “Oh, I have enjoyed it, Mr. Speed! All of it. I do wish I could come up there and watch you play!”
With startled eagerness he answered: “Come up then—I should be delighted! Go round into the vestry and I’ll help you up the ladder.”
Instinct warned him that she was only a child, interested in the merely mechanical tricks of how things were done; that she wanted to see the working of the stops and pedals more than to hear the music; that this impulse of hers did not betoken any particular friendliness for him or admiration for his playing. Yet some secondary instinct, some quick passionate enthusiasm, swept away the calculating logic of that, and made him a prey to the wildest and raptest of anticipations.
In the vestry she blushed violently as he met her; she seemed more a child than ever before. And she scampered up the steep ladder into the loft with an agility that bewildered him.
He never dreamt that she could so put away all fear and embarrassment of his presence; as she clambered up on to the end of the bench beside him (for there was no seating-room anywhere else) he wondered if this were merely a mood of hers, or if some real and deep change, had come over her since their last meeting. She was so delicately lovely; to see her there, with her eyes upon him, so few inches from his, gave him a curious electrical pricking of the skin. Sometimes, he noticed, her eyes watched his hands steadily; sometimes, with a look half-bold, half-timid, they travelled for an instant to his face. He even wondered, with an egotism that made him smile inwardly, if she were thinking him good-looking.
“Now,” he said, beginning to pull out the necessary stops, “what shall we have?—‘The Moonlight Sonata,’ eh?”
“Yes,” she assented, eagerly. “I’ve heard Clare talk about it.”
He played it to her; then he played her a medley of Bach, Dvorak, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Lemare. He was surprised and pleased to discover that, on the whole, she preferred the good music to the not so good, although, of course, her musical taste was completely unsophisticated. Mainly, too, it was the music that kept her attention, though she had a considerable childish interest in his manual dexterity and in the mechanical arrangement of the stops and couplings. She said once, in a pause between two pieces: “Aren’t they strange hands?” He replied, laughing away his embarrassment: “I don’t know. Are they?”
After he had played, rather badly but with great verve, the Ruy Blas Overture of Mendelssohn, she exclaimed: “Oh, I wish I could play like that!”
He said: “But you do play the piano, don’t you? And I prefer the piano to the organ: it’s less mechanical.”
She clapped her hands together in a captivatingly childish gesture of excitement and said: “Oh yes, the piano’s lovely, isn’t it? But I can’t play well—oh, I wish I could!”
“You could if you practised hard enough,” he answered, with prosaic encouragement. “I can hear you sometimes, you know, when I’m in my room at nights and the window’s open. I think you could become quite a good player.”
She leaned her elbow on the keys and started in momentary fright at the resulting jangle of sound. “I—I get so nervous,” she said. “I don’t know why. I could never play except to myself—and Clare.” She added, slowly, and as if the revelation had only barely come to her: “Do you know—it’s strange, isn’t it—I think—perhaps—I think I might be able to play in front of you—now—without being nervous!”
He laughed boisterously and swung himself off the bench. “Very well, then, that’s fine news! You shall try. You shall play some of the Chopin waltzes to me. Not very suitable for an organ, but that doesn’t matter. Sit further on this bench and play on the lower keyboard. Never mind about the pedals. And I’ll manage the stops for you.”
She wriggled excitedly into the position he had indicated and, laughing softly, began one of the best-known of the waltzes. The experiment was not entirely successful, for even an accomplished pianist does not play well on an organ for the first time, nor do the Chopin waltzes lend themselves aptly to such an instrument. But one thing, and to Speed the main thing of all, was quite obvious: she was, as she had said she would be, entirely free from nervousness of him. After ploughing rather disastrously through a dozen or so bars she stopped, turned to him with flushed cheeks and happy eyes, and exclaimed: “There! That’s enough! It’s not easy to play, is it?”
He said, smiling down at her: “No, it’s rather hard, especially at first…But you weren’t nervous then, were you?”
“Not a bit,” she answered, proudly. She added, with a note of warning: “Don’t be surprised if I am when you come in to our house to dinner I’m always nervous when father’s there.”
Almost he added: “So am I.” But the way in which she had mentioned future invitations to dinner at the Head’s house gave him the instant feeling that henceforward the atmosphere on such occasions would be subtly different from ever before. The Head’s drawing-room, with the baby grand piano and the curio-cabinets and the faded cabbage-like design of the carpet, would never look quite the same again; the Head’s drawing-room would look, perhaps, less like a cross between a lady’s boudoir and the board-room of a City company; even the Head’s study might take on a kindlier, less sinister hue.
He said, still with his eyes smiling upon her: “Who teaches you the piano?”
“A Miss Peacham used to. I don’t have a teacher now.”
“I don’t know,” he said, beginning to flush with the consciousness of his great daring, “if you would care to let me help you at all. I should be delighted to do so, you know, at any time. Since”—he laughed a little—“since you’re no longer a scrap nervous of me, you might find me useful in giving you a few odd hints.”
He waited, anxious and perturbed, for her reply. After a sufficient pause she answered slowly, as if thinking it out: “That would be—rather—fine—I think.”
Most inopportunely then the bell began to ring for afternoon school, and, most inopportunely also, he was due to take five beta in drawing. They clambered down the ladder, chatting vivaciously the while, and at the vestry door, when they separated she said eagerly: “Oh, I’ve had such a good time, Mr. Speed. Haven’t you?”
“Rather!” he answered, with boyish emphasis and enthusiasm.
That afternoon hour, spent bewilderingly with five beta in the art-room that was full of plaster casts and free-hand models and framed reproductions of famous pictures, went for Speed like the passage of a moment. His heart and brain were tingling with excitement, teeming with suppressed consciousness. The green of the lawns as he looked out of the window seemed greener than ever before; the particles of dust that shone in the shafts of sunlight seemed to him each one mightily distinct; the glint of a boy’s golden it in the sunshine was, to his eyes, like a patch of flame that momentarily put all else in a haze. It seemed to him, passionately and tremendously, that for the first time in his life he was alive; more than that even: it seemed to him that for the first time since the beginning of all things life had come shatteringly into the world.
III
“I should think, Mr. Speed, you have found out by now whether Helen likes you or not.”
Those words of Clare Harrington echoed in his ears as he walked amidst the dappled sunlight on the Mill-stead road. They echoed first of all in the quiet tones in which Clare had uttered them; next, they took on a subtle, meaningful note of their own; finally, they submerged all else in a crescendo of passionate triumph. Speed was almost stupefied by their gradually self-revealing significance. He strode on faster, dug his heels more decisively into the dust of the roadsi
de; he laughed aloud; his walking-stick pirouetted in a joyful circle. To any passer-by he must have seemed a little mad. And all because of a few words that Clare Harrington, riding along the lane on her bicycle, had stopped to say to him.
June, lovely and serene, had spread itself out over Millstead like a veil of purest magic; every day the sun climbed high and shone fiercely; every night the world slept under the starshine; all the passage of nights and days was one moving pageant of wonderment. And Speed was happy, gloriously, overwhelmingly happy. Never in all his life before had he been so happy; never had he tasted, even to an infinitesimal extent, the kind of happiness that bathed and drenched him now. Rapturously lovely were those long June days, days that turned Millstead into a flaming paradise of sights and sounds. In the mornings, he rose early, took a cold plunge in the swimming-bath, and breakfasted with the school amidst the cool morning freshness that, by its very quality of chill, seemed to suggest bewitchingly the warmth that was to come. Chapel followed breakfast, and after that, until noon, his time was spent in the Art and Music Rooms and the various form-rooms in which he contrived to satisfy parental avidity for that species of geography known as commercial. From noon until midday dinner he either marked books in his room or went shopping into the town. During that happy hour the cricket was beginning, and the dining-hall at one o’clock was gay with cream flannels and variously chromatic blazers. Speed loved the midday meal with the school; he liked to chat with his neighbours at table, to listen to the catalogue of triumphs, anxieties, and anticipations that never failed to unfold itself to the sympathetic hearer. Afterwards he was free to spend the afternoon as he liked. He might cycle dreamily along the sleepy lanes and find himself at teatime in some wrinkled little sun-scorched inn, with nothing to do but dream his own glorious dreams and play with the innkeeper’s languid dog and read local newspapers a fortnight old. Or he might stay the whole afternoon at Millstead, lazily watching the cricket from a deck-chair on the pavilion verandah and sipping the tuck-shop’s iced lemonade. Less often he would play cricket himself, never scoring more than ten or a dozen runs, but fielding with a dogged energy which occasionally only just missed deserving the epithet brilliant. And sometimes, in the excess of his enthusiasm, he would take selected parties of the boys to Pangbourne Cathedral, some eighteen miles distant, and show them the immense nave and the Lady Chapel with the decapitated statues and the marvellous stained-glass of the Octagon.