Clanwell asked him in to coffee that night: from half-past ten till half-past eleven Speed lounged in one of Clanwell’s easy chairs and found a great difficulty in paying attention to what Clanwell was saying. In the end his thoughts burst, as it were, their barriers: he said: “D’you know, Clanwell, I’ve had an idea—some time, you know—to write a tale about Millstead?”
“Really?—A school story, you mean?”
“Yes. You see—I feel—oh, well—there’s a sort of atmosphere about the place, if you know what I mean—a rather wonderful sort of atmosphere. If somebody could only manage to express it in words they’d make rather a fine story, I should think.”
Clanwell said: “Yes, I’ve known that atmosphere for a dozen years, but I’m quite certain I could never write about it. And you think you could?”
“I thought of trying, anyway, Millstead in summertime”—Speed’s voice quivered with rapture—“it’s simply divine!”
“But you haven’t seen it in winter-time yet. You can’t write a story about one summer-term.”
“No.” Speed pondered, and said doubtfully: “No, I suppose not. It does sound rather arrogant, doesn’t it, for me to talk of writing a school-story about Millstead after a few weeks at it, while you, after a dozen years, don’t feel equal to the task?”
“When one is young and in love,” declared Clanwell slowly, “one feels arrogant.”
Speed laughed uproariously: it was as if Clanwell’s remark had let loose a cataract of emotion in him. “You despise my condition a little, don’t you?” he said.
“No,” answered Clanwell, “I don’t despise it at all: I just recognise it, that’s all.” He paused and began again: “I wonder if you’ll let me speak to you a trifle seriously, Speed, without getting offended with me?”
“Of course I will. Fire away!”
Clanwell knocked out his pipe on the bars of the empty firegrate and said, rather curtly: “Don’t see too much of Miss Ervine.”
“What!”
Speed jerked forward in his chair and a sharp light entered his eyes. Clanwell continued, unmoved: “You said yon weren’t going to get offended, Speed. I hope you’ll keep your promise. Understand, I’ve nothing to say against Miss Ervine at all, and if I had, I shouldn’t take on the job of telling you about it. All that concerns me is just the matter of—of expediency, if you like to put it that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this. It doesn’t do you any good in the school to be seen continually meeting her. The Common-Room, which liked you immensely at first when you came, is just beginning to be slightly amused at you. And the boys have noticed it, you may be sure. Probably you’ll find yourself beginning to be ragged about it soon.”
“But I’m not frightened of being ragged.”
“Oh no, I daresay not…Still, I’ve said all I wanted to say. Don’t forget, Speed, that you’re pledged not to take offence.”
“Oh, I’ll not do that.”
Just before Speed left Clanwell said: “I wouldn’t start that tale of Millstead life just yet if I were you, Speed. Better wait till you’re out of love, at any rate. After all, it’s rather a highly coloured Millstead that you see at present, isn’t it?”
“You think I’m sentimental, eh?”
“My dear fellow, I think you’re by far the most sentimental chap I’ve ever come across!—Don’t be hurt: it’s not a crime. But it’s just a bit of a danger, especially in writing a school-story. That atmosphere you talk about certainly does exist, and if I had the gift of self-expression I might try to write about it. I can see it clearly enough, even though I’m not a scrap in love, and even on the dreariest of days in the winter term. My advice to you is to wait and see if you can do the same…Good night, Speed!”
“Good night,” Speed called out, laughing.
Down Clanwell’s corridor and up the stone flight of stairs and along his own corridor to the door of his own room his heart was thumping violently, for he knew that as soon as he was alone he would be drenched in the wild, tumultuous rapture of his own thoughts. Clanwell’s advice, hazily remembered, faded before the splendour of that coming onrush; the whole interview with Clanwell vanished as if it had never happened, as if there had been a sort of cataleptic vacuum intervening between that scene by the Head’s gateway and the climb upstairs to his room.
When he got to bed he could hardly sleep for joy.
* * *
CHAPTER IV
I
Tim first thing that Clare Harrington said to him when they met a few days later in Millstead High Street was: “Oh, congratulations, Mr. Speed!”
“Congratulations?” he echoed. “What for?” She replied quietly: “Helen has told me.”
He began to blush, and to hold his breath in an endeavour to prevent his cheeks from reddening to an extent that, so he felt, would be observed by passers-by. “Oh!” he gasped, with a half-embarrassed smile. Then, after a pause, he queried: “What has she told you?”
And Clare answered: “That you are going to marry her.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed involuntarily, and he saw her eyes focussed on him strangely. A slow sensation of warmth began to envelop him; joy rose round him like a tide as he realised all the pivotal significance of what Clare had said. He was going to marry Helen!—Strange that, even amidst his most secret raptures, he had hardly dared to think of that! He had dreamed exquisite and fragile dreams of her, dreams in which she was too fairy-like and ethereal for marriage; doubtless, after some while, his ambitions would have crystallised normally, but up to the present they had no anchorage on earth at all. And to think that she had travelled in mind and intention more swiftly and further than he, to think that she had dared to deduce the final and ultimate reality, gave him, along with a surging overmastering joy, just a faint tinge of disappointment as well. But the joy, deepening and spreading, soon blotted out everything else: he sought Clare’s hand and gripped it triumphantly. Tears were in his eyes and emotion clutching at his voice as he said: “I’m—I’m glad—she’s told you. It’s—it’s fine, isn’t it?—Don’t you think we shall be—happy?”
“You ought to be,” said Clare.
He struggled with the press of feeling for a moment and then said: “Oh, let’s go into Mason’s and have a cup of coffee or something. I want to talk to you.”
So they sat for a quarter of an hour at a little green-tiled table in Mason’s highly respectable café. The room was over the shop, and besides affording from the window a panoramic view of the High Street, contained a small fire-grate, a framed picture of the interior of Mason’s Hygienic Bakery, and a large ginger-and-white cat with kittens. Altogether it was a most secluded and comfortable rendezvous.
All the while that they conversed he was but slowly sizing up the situation and experiencing little alternating wafts of disappointment and exhilaration. Disappointment, perhaps, that he had not been left the bewitching task of bringing Helen’s mind, along with his own, out of the clouds and mists of dreams; exhilaration also, because her mind, womanishly direct, had evidently not needed such guidance.
He talked rhapsodically to Clare; lashed himself, as it were, into a state of emotional fervour. He seemed eager to anticipate everything that anybody could possibly say to Helen’s disadvantage, and to explain away the whole; it was as if he were championing Helen against subtle and inevitable disparagements. Once or twice he seemed to realise this, and to realise that he was defending where there was no attack, and then he stopped, looked confused, and waited for Clare to say something. Clare, as a matter of fact, said very little, and when she spoke Speed took hardly any notice, except, perhaps, to allow her words to suggest to him some fresh rhapsodical outbreak. He said, in a sudden outpouring: “Of course I know she’s only a child. That’s the wonderful charm of her—part of the wonderful charm, at any rate. Some people might say she wasn’t clever, but she is really, you know. I admit she doesn’t show up very well in company, but that’s because she’s nervous
. I’m nervous and I don’t show up well. She’s got an acute little brain though. You should hear the things she says sometimes. Simple little things, some people might think, but really, when you think about them, they’re clever. Of course, she hasn’t been educated up to a good many things, but then, if she had been, she wouldn’t have kept her child-like simplicity, would she?—She’s very quick at picking things up, and I’m lending her heaps of books. It’s the most beautiful job in the world, being teacher to her. I’m rapturously happy about it and so is she. I could never stand these empty-headed society kind of women who can jabber superficially in drawing-rooms about every subject under the sun, and really, you know, haven’t got an original idea in their heads. Helen has the most wonderful and childlike originality, you know. You’ve noticed it yourself, I daresay. Haven’t you noticed it?—Yes, I’m sure you must have. And to think that she really does want to marry me!”
“Why shouldn’t she want to marry you?” interjected Clare, but that was one of the remarks of which he took little notice. He went on eagerly: “I don’t know what the Head will think when he gets to know about it. Most probably he’ll be fearfully annoyed. Clanwell warned me the other night. Apparently”—a faint touch of bitterness came into his voice—“apparently it isn’t the thing to treat your Headmaster’s daughter with anything but the most distant reserve.”
“Another question,” said Clare shrewdly, “is what your people will think about it.”
“My people,” he replied, again with the note of bitterness in his voice, “will probably do what they have always done whenever I have proposed taking any fresh step in life.”
“I can guess what that is. They oppose you, eh?”
“Oh, not absolutely that. They recognise my right to do what I want, but they think I’m a fool, all the same. They don’t quarrel with me. They just go on wishing I was like my elder brother.”
“What is he?”
“He works in my father’s office in town. My father, you know”—he became suddenly confidential in tone—“is a rather typical sort of business-man. Materialist outlook—wanted me to manage a soap-works. We never got on absolutely well together. When I told him I was going to get a mastership at a public school he thought I was mad.”
“And what will he think when you tell him you are going to marry the Headmaster’s daughter?”
He looked at her curiously, for the first time intent upon her personally, for something in the way she had uttered that last question set up in him the suspicion that she was laughing at him. A careful scrutiny of her features, however, revealed no confirmation: he looked away again, shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Probably he’ll think I’m madder than ever.”
She gave him a curious glance with uptilted lips which he could not properly interpret. “Anyway,” she said, quietly, “I shouldn’t tell him that Helen’s a child.”
“Why not?”
Clare gave him again that curious, uninterpretable glance. “Because she isn’t, that’s all.”
He was recovering from his surprise and was about to say something when she interrupted him with, perhaps, the first touch of animation that had so far distinguished her side of the conversation. “I told you,” she said, “on the first night of term that you didn’t understand Helen. And still you don’t. If you did, you’d know that she was a woman, not a child at all.”
“I wish you’d explain a little—”
“It doesn’t need any explanation. You either know it or don’t know it. Apparently you don’t know it…And now, Mr. Speed, I’m afraid I’ll have to go—I can’t leave the boy to manage the shop by himself all morning.”
Speed had the sensation that she was slightly out of patience with him.
II
Clare brought him to earth; his dreams crumpled when he was with her; his emotional outlook sagged, as it were, with the perhaps imagined pricklings of her shrewdness. He hated her, ever so slightly, because he felt sometimes between her and himself a subtle and secret hostility, a hostility in which, because of her cool imperturbability, she had all the advantage. But when he was not with her his imagination soared and flamed up higher than ever; it was a fire that Clare’s temperament could only make sulky. Those final weeks of the summer term were glorious beyond words. He took Clanwell’s advice to the extent of not meeting Helen on the school premises, but hardly a day passed without some wonderful and secret assignation; the two of them would arrange afternoon excursions together, picnics, at Parminters, strolls along the Millstead road at dusk. It was all deeply and inexpressibly lovely. He told her a great many of his own dreams and ambitions, making her share them with him; she kindled aptly to his own enthusiasms, readily as a child might have done. For he was certain that Clare was wrong in that: Helen was only a child. To marry her seemed a thing of almost unearthly delicacy; he found himself pitying her sometimes because of the future. Above all, that she should wish to marry him, that her love should be capable of such a solemn and ineffable desire, seemed to him nearly a miracle. “Fragile little thing!” he said to her once, as he kissed her—“I’m almost afraid of breaking you!”—She answered, in that wistful childlike voice that was perhaps incongruously sombre in tone: “Am I fragile?”
Once, towards dusk, they met the Head along the Millstead road. He raised his hat and passed them, muttering: “Taking an—um—stroll, Helen—um—beautiful evening—um, yes—good evening, Mr. Speed!”
He wore the air of being marvellously discreet.
III
Conversation at dinner in the Masters’ Common-Room turned one evening upon Harrington. “Old Harrington’s pretty bad again,” Pritchard had said. “I heard in the town to-day that he’d had another stroke.”
Speed, curiously startled by the utterance of the name, exclaimed: “What, the Harringtons who keep the bookshop?—I didn’t know he was ill.”
“Been ill ever since I can remember,” replied Pritchard laconically.
Then Speed remembered something that the Head had once told him about Harrington being a littérateur and an author of books on ethics.
“I never met him,” he said, tentatively, seeking to guide the conversation into a discussion of the man.
Pritchard, ever ready to follow up a lead given to him, remarked: “You missed something, then. He was quite a character. Used to teach here once, you know.”
“Really?”
“Used to try to, anyway, when they’d let him. Couldn’t keep any sort of discipline. During his first prep they poured ink down his neck.”
“Pritchard needn’t talk,” interposed Clanwell, laughing. “During his first prep they mixed carbide and water under his chair.” The rest of the Common-Room among whom Pritchard was no favourite, joined in the laughter. Then Clanwell took up the thread, kinder in his narrative than Pritchard had been. “I liked Harrington. He was a good sort, but he wasn’t made for a schoolmaster. I told him so, and after his breakdown he took my advice and left the profession.”
“Breakdown?” said Speed. “He had a breakdown then?”
“Yes, his wife died when his daughter was born. He never told us anything about it. One morning he collapsed over a four alpha English form. I was next door. I was used to a row, but the terrible pandemonium made me wonder if anything had happened. I went in and found the little devils giving him sportive first-aid. They’d half undressed him My word!—I picked out those that were in my house and gave them a tidy thrashing. Don’t you remember, Lavery?”
“I remember,” said the indolent Lavery, “you trying to persuade me to do the same with my little lot.”
“But Harrington?” queried Speed, anxious that the conversation should not be diverted into other channels.
“Oh, well,” resumed Clanwell, “he left Millstead and took to—shall we call it literature?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?—” Clanwell laughed. “D’you mean to tell me you haven’t heard of Samuel Harrington, author of the famous ‘Helpin
g-Hand-Books’?”
“I haven’t.”
“Then I must lend you one or two of them. They’ll do you good. Lavery and I attribute our remarkable success in life to our careful study of them, don’t we, Lavery?”
“Do we, Clanwell?”
Ransome, wizened and Voltairish, and agreeable company when stirred to anecdote, began: “Ah! ‘How to be Powerful’ was the best, though I think ‘How to Become a Dominating Personality’ was pretty good. The drollest of all was ‘How to Meet Difficulties.’ Speed has a treat in store if he hasn’t read them. They’re all in the School-library. The fellow used to send the Head free autographed copies of each one of them as it appeared.”
Ransome, rarely beguiled into conversation, always secured a respectful audience. After a silence he went on: “I used to know old Harrington pretty well after he took to—writing. He once told me the entire circumstances of his début into the literary profession. It was rather droll.”
Ransome paused, and Speed said: “I’d like to hear it.”
A murmur of assent followed from the rest, and Ransome, not without pleasure at the flattery of his being eagerly listened to, crumbled a piece of bread by his plate and resumed. “He told me that one morning after he’d left Millstead he was feeling especially miserable and having a breakfast of tea and dry bread. So he said, anyway. Remember that, at that time, he had a baby to look after. The postman brought him, that morning, a letter from an old school friend of his, a rector in Somerset, asking him if he would care to earn half-a-guinea by writing for him an address on ‘Self-Control’ for the Young Women’s Sunshine Club at Little Pelthing, Somerset. I remember the name of the club and the village because I remember they struck me as being rather droll at the time. Harrington said the letter, or part of it, went something like this: ‘I have just become the proud father of a most wonderful little baby boy, and you can imagine how infernally busy as well as infernally happy I am. Could you oblige me with an address on “Self-Control”?—You were always rather good at dashing off essays when we were at school. The address should have a strong moral flavour and should last from half-an-hour to forty minutes.’…Well, Harrington sat down to write that address on ‘Self-Control.’ He told me that he knew all that anybody need know about self-control, because he was using prodigious quantities of it all the time he was writing. Anyway, it was a fine address. The Reverend Henry Beauchamp Northcroft—another name droll enough to be remembered—delivered it to the united assembly of the Little Pelthing Young Women’s Sunshine Club, and everybody said it was the finest and most inspiring address they had ever heard from his lips. It glowed, as it were, from within; it radiated hope; it held a wonderful and sublime message for mankind. And, in addition, it lasted from half-an-hour to forty minutes. Nor was this all. A wealthy and philanthropic lady in the Reverend Henry Beauchamp Northcroft’s congregation—Harrington did tell me her name, but I suspect it was not droll enough for me to remember it—suggested that, at her expense, the address should be printed and published in pamphlet form. With Harrington’s consent this was done, and, so he told me, no fewer than twenty-five thousand copies of ‘Self-Control’ were despatched to various centres in England, America, the Colonies, and on board His Majesty’s ships.”