Chapter TWO: I

In the morning he was awakened by Hartopp the School House porter ringing his noisy hand-bell through the dormitories. He looked at his watch; it was half-past six. There was no need for him to think of getting up yet; he had no early morning form, and so could laze for another hour if he so desired. But it was quite impossible to go to sleep again because his mind, once he became awake, began turning over the incidents of the day before and anticipating those of the day to come. He lay in bed thinking and excogitating, listening to the slow beginnings of commotion in the dormitories, and watching bars of yellow sunshine creeping up the bed towards his face. At half-past seven Hartopp tapped at the door and brought in his correspondence. There was a letter from home and a note, signed by the Head, giving him his work time-table. He consulted it immediately and discovered that he was put down for two forms that morning; four _alpha_ in drawing and five _gamma_ in general supervision.

His letter from home, headed "Beachings Over, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32. Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles," ran as follows:

"MY DEAR KEN,--This will reach you on the first morning of term, won't it, and your father and I both want you to understand that we wish you every success. It seems a funny thing to do, teaching in a boarding-school, but I suppose it's all right if you like it, only of course we should have liked you to go into the business. I hope you can keep order with the boys, anyhow, they do say that poor Mr. Rideaway in the village has an awful time, the boys pour ink in his pockets when he isn't looking. Father is going on business to Australia very soon and wants me to go with him, perhaps I may, but it sounds an outlandish sort of place to go to, doesn't it. Since you left us we've had to get rid of Jukes--we found him stealing a piece of tarpaulin--so ungrateful, isn't it, but we've got another under-gardener now, he used to be at Peverly Court but left because the old duke was so mean. Dick goes back to Marlborough to-day--they begin the same day as yours. By the way, why did you choose Millstead? I'd never heard of it till we looked it up, it isn't well-known like Harrow and Rugby, is it. We had old Bennett and Sir Guy Blatherwick with us the last week-end, Sir Guy told us all about his travels in China, or Japan, I forget which. Well, write to us, won't you, and drop in if you get a day off any time--your affectionate mother, FANNY."

After he had read it he washed and dressed in a leisurely fashion and descended in time for School breakfast at eight. Hartopp showed him his place, at the head of number four table, and he was interested to see by his plate a neatly folded _Daily Telegraph_. Businesslike, he commented mentally, and he was glad to see it because a newspaper is an excellent cloak for nervousness and embarrassment. His mother's hint about his being possibly a bad disciplinarian put him on his guard; he was determined to succeed in this immensely important respect right from the start. Of course he possessed the enormous advantage of knowing from recent experience the habits and psychology of the average public-schoolboy.

But breakfast was not a very terrible ordeal. The boys nearest him introduced themselves and bade him a cheerful good morning, for there is a sense of fairness in schoolboys which makes them generous to newcomers, except where tradition decrees the setting-up of some definite ordeal. Towards the end of the meal Pritchard walked over from one of the other tables and enquired, in a voice loud enough for at any rate two or three of the boys to hear: "Well, Speed, old man, did you have a merry carousal at the Head's last night?"

Speed replied, a little coldly: "I had a pleasant time."

"I suppose now," went on Pritchard, dropping his voice a little, but still not sufficiently to prevent the nearest boys from hearing, "you realise what I meant yesterday."

"What was that?"

"When I said that you'd find out soon enough what she was like."

Speed said crisply: "You warned me yesterday against talking shop. I might warn you now."

"But that isn't shop."

"Well, whether it is or not I don't propose to discuss it--_now_--and _here_."

Almost without his being aware of it his voice had risen somewhat, so that at this final pronouncement the boys nearest him looked up with curiosity tinged with poorly-concealed amusement. It was rather obvious that Pritchard was unpopular.

Speed was sorry that he had not exercised greater control over his voice, especially when Pritchard, reddening, merely shrugged his shoulders and went away.

The boy nearest to Speed grinned and said audaciously: "That'll take Mr. Pritchard down a peg, sir!"

Speed barked out (to the boy's bewilderment): "Don't be impertinent!"

For the rest of the meal he held up the _Telegraph_ as a rampart between himself and the world.

II

He knew, at the end of the first school day, that he had been a success, and that if he took reasonable care he would be able to go on being a success. It had been a day of subtle trials and ordeals, yet he had, helped rather than hindered by his peculiar type of nervousness, got safely through them all.

Numerous were the pitfalls which he had carefully avoided. At school meals he had courteously declined to share jam and delicacies which the nearest to him offered. If he had he would have been inundated immediately with pots of jam and boxes of fancy cakes from all quarters of the table. Many a new Master at Millstead had finished his first meal with his part of the table looking like the counter of an untidy grocer's shop. Instinct rather than prevision had saved Speed from such a fate. Instinct, in fact, had been his guardian angel throughout the day; instinct which, although to some extent born of his recent public-school experience, was perhaps equally due to that curious barometric sensitiveness that made his feelings so much more acute and clairvoyant than those of other people.

At dinner in the Masters' Common-Room he had met the majority of the staff. There was Garforth, the bursar, a pleasant little man with a loving-kindness overclouded somewhat by pedantry; Hayes-Smith, housemaster of Milner's, a brisk, bustling, unimaginative fellow whose laugh was more eloquent than his words; Ransome, a wizened Voltairish classical master, morbidly ashamed of being caught in possession of any emotion of any kind; Lavery, housemaster of North House (commonly called Lavery's), whose extraordinary talent for delegating authority enabled him to combine laziness and efficiency in a way both marvellous and enviable; and Poulet, the French and German Master, who spoke far better English than anybody in the Common-Room, except, perhaps, Garforth or Ransome. Then, of course, there was Clanwell, whom Speed had already met; Clanwell, better known "Fish-cake," a sporting man of great vigour who would, from time to time, astonish the world by donning a black suit and preaching from the Millstead pulpit a sermon of babbling meekness. Speed liked him; liked all of them, in fact, better than he did Pritchard.

At dinner, Pritchard sat next to him on one side and Clanwell on the other. Pritchard showed no malice for the incident of that morning's breakfast-time, and Speed, a little contrite, was affable enough. But for all that he did not like Pritchard.

Pritchard asked him if he had got on all right that day, and Speed replied that he had. Then Pritchard said: "Oh, well of course, the first day's always easy. It's after a week or so that you'll find things a bit trying. The first night you take prep, for instance. It's a sort of school tradition that they always try and rag you that night."

Clanwell, overhearing, remarked fiercely: "Anyway, Speed, take my tip and don't imagine it's a school tradition that any Master lets himself be ragged."

Speed laughed. "I'll remember that," he said.

He remembered it on the following Wednesday night when he was down to take evening preparation from seven until half-past eight. Preparation for the whole school, except prefects, was held in Millstead Big Hall, a huge vault-like chamber in which desks were ranged in long rows and where the Master in charge sat on high at a desk on a raised dais. No more subtle and searching test of disciplinary powers could have been contrived than this supervision of evening preparation, for the room was so big that it was impossible to see clearly from the Master's desk to the far end, and besides that, the acoustics were so peculiar that conversations in some parts of the room were practically inaudible except from very close quarters. A new master suffered additional handicap in being ignorant of the names of the vast majority of the boys.

At dinner, before the ordeal, the Masters in the Common-Room had given Speed jocular advice. "Whatever you do, watch that they don't get near the electric-light switches," said Clanwell. Pritchard said: "When old Blenkinsop took his first prep they switched off the lights and then took his trousers off and poured ink over his legs." Garforth said: "Whatever you do, don't lose your temper and hit anybody. It doesn't pay." "Best to walk up and down the rows if you want them to stop talking," said Ransome. Pritchard said: "If you do that they'll beat time to your steps with their feet." Poulet remarked reminiscently: "When I took my first prep they started a gramophone somewhere, and I guessed they'd hidden it well, so I said: 'Gentlemen, anyone who interrupts the music will have a hundred lines!' They laughed and were quite peaceable afterwards."

Speed said, at the conclusion of the meal: "I'm much obliged to everybody for the advice. I'll try to remember all of it, but I guess when I'm in there I shall just do whatever occurs to me at the moment." To which Clanwell replied, putting a hand on Speed's shoulder: "You couldn't do better, my lad."

Speed was very nervous as he took his seat on the dais at five to seven and watched the school straggling to their places. They came in quietly enough, but there was an atmosphere of subdued expectancy of which Speed was keenly conscious; the boys stared about them, grinned at each other, seemed as if they were waiting for something to happen. Nevertheless, at five past seven all was perfectly quiet and orderly, although it was obvious that little work was being done. Speed felt rather as if he were sitting on a powder-magazine, and there was a sense in which he was eager for the storm to break.

At about a quarter-past seven a banging of desk-lids began at the far end of the hall.

He stood up and said, quietly, but in a voice that carried well: "I don't want to be hard on anybody, so I'd better warn you that I shall punish any disorderliness very severely."

There was some tittering, and for a moment or so he wondered if he had made a fool of himself.

Then he saw a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy in one of the back rows deliberately raise a desk-lid and drop it with a bang. Speed consulted the map of the desks that was in front of him and by counting down the rows discovered the boy's name to be Worsley. He wondered how the name should be pronounced--whether the first syllable should rhyme with "purse" or with "horse." Instinct in him, that uncanny feeling for atmosphere, embarked him on an outrageously bold adventure, nothing less than a piece of facetiousness, the most dangerous weapon in a new Master's armoury, and the one most of all likely to recoil on himself. He stood up again and said: "Wawsley or Wurssley--however you call yourself--you have a hundred lines!"

The whole assembly roared with laughter. That frightened him a little. Supposing they did not stop laughing! He remembered an occasion at his own school when a class had ragged a certain Master very neatly and subtly by pretending to go off into hysterics of laughter at some trifling witticism of his.

When the laughter subsided, a lean, rather clever-looking boy rose up in the front row but one and said, impudently: "Please sir, I'm Worsley. I didn't do anything."

Speed replied promptly: "Oh, didn't you? Well, you've got a hundred lines, anyway."

"What for, sir"--in hot indignation.

"For sitting in your wrong desk."

Again the assembly laughed, but there was no mistaking the respectfulness that underlay the merriment. And, as a matter of fact, the rest of the evening passed entirely without incident. After the others had gone, and when the school-bell had rung for evening chapel, Worsley came up to the dais accompanied by the pleasant-faced boy who dropped the desk-lid. Worsley pleaded for the remission of his hundred lines, and the other boy supported him, urging that it was he and not Worsley who had dropped the lid.

"And what is your name?" asked Speed.

"Naylor, sir."

"Very well, Naylor, you and Worsley can share the hundred lines between you." He added smiling: "I've no doubt you're neither of you worse than anybody else but you must pay the penalty of being pioneers."

They went away laughing.

That night Speed went into Clanwell's room for a chat before bedtime, and Clanwell congratulated him fulsomely on his successful passage of the ordeal. "As a matter of fact," Clanwell said, "I happen to know that they'd prepared a star benefit performance for you but that you put them off, somehow, from the beginning. The prefects get to hear of these things and they tell me. Of course, I don't take any official notice of them. It doesn't matter to me what plans people make--it's when any are put into execution that I wake up. Anyhow, you may be interested to know that the member's of School House subscribed over fifteen shillings to purchase fireworks which they were going to let off after the switches had been turned off! Alas for fond hopes ruined!"

Clanwell and Speed leaned back in their armchairs and roared with laughter.

III

At the end of the first week of life at Millstead, Speed was perfectly happy. He seemed to have surmounted easily all the difficulties that had confronted or that could confront him, and now there stretched away into the future an endless succession of glorious days spent tirelessly in the work that he loved. For he loved teaching. He loved boys. When he got over his preliminary, and in some ways rather helpful nervousness he was thoroughly at home with all of them. He invited those in his house to tea, two or three at a time, almost every afternoon. He took a deep and individual interest in all who showed distinct artistic or musical abilities. He plunged adventurously into the revolutionising of the School's arts curriculum; he dreamed of organising an exhibition of art work in time for Speech Day, of reviving the moribund School musical society, of getting up concerts of chamber music, of entering the School choir for musical festivals. All the hot enthusiasm of youth he poured ungrudgingly into the service of Millstead, and Millstead rewarded him by liking him tremendously. The boys liked him because he was young and agreeable, yet not condescendingly so; besides, he could play a game of cricket that was so good-naturedly mediocre that nobody, after witnessing it, could doubt that he was a fellow of like capabilities with the rest. The Masters liked him because he was energetic and efficient and did not ally himself with any particular set or clique among them.

Clanwell said to him one evening: "I hope you won't leave at the end of the term, Speed."

Speed said: "Why on earth should I?"

"We sometimes find that people who're either very good or very bad do so. And you're very good."

"I'm so glad you think so." His face grew suddenly boyish with blushes.

"We all think so, Speed. And the Head likes you. We hope you'll stay."

"I'll stay all right. I'm too happy to want to go away."

Clanwell said meditatively: "It's a fine life if you're cut out for it, isn't it? I sometimes think there isn't a finer life in the whole world."

"I've always thought that."

"I hope you always will think it."

"And I hope so too."

Summer weather came like a strong flood about ten days after the opening of term, and then Millstead showed herself to him in all her serene and matchless beauty. He learned to know and expect the warm sunshine waking him in the mornings and creeping up the bed till it dazzled his eyes; he learned to know and to love the _plick-plock_ of the cricket that was his music as he sat by the open window many an afternoon at work. And at night time, when the flaring gas jets winked in all the tiny windows and when there came upwards the cheerful smell of coffee-making in the studies, it was all as if some subtle alchemy were at work, transforming his soul into the mould and form of Millstead. Something fine and mighty was in the place, and his soul, passionately eager to yield itself, craved for that full possession which Millstead brought to it. The spell was swift and glorious. Sometimes he thought of Millstead almost as a lover; he would stroll round at night and drink deep of the witchery that love put into all that he saw and heard; the sounds of feet scampering along the passage outside his door, the cold lawns with the moon white upon them, the soft delicious flower-scents that rose up to his bedroom window at night. The chapel seemed to him, to put it epigrammatically, far more important because it belonged to Millstead than because it belonged to Christ. Millstead, stiff-collared and black-coated on a Sunday morning, and wondering what on earth it should do with itself on Sunday afternoon, touched him far more deeply than did the chatter of some smooth-voiced imported divine who knew Millstead only from spending a bored week-end at the Head's house. To Speed, sitting in the Masters' pew, and giving vent to his ever-ready imagination, Millstead seemed a personification of all that was youthful and clear-spirited and unwilling to pay any more than merely respectful attention to the exhortations of elders.

He did not sentimentalise over it. He was not old enough to think regretfully of his own school-days. It was the present, the present leaning longingly in the arms of the future, that wove its subtle and gracious spell. He did not kindle to the trite rhapsodies of middle-aged "old boys." The "Thoughts of an Old Millsteadian on Revisiting the School Chapel," published in the school magazine, stirred him not at all. But to wander about on a dark night and to find his feet beautifully at ease upon curious steps and corridors gave him pangs of exquisite lover-like intimacy; he was a "new boy," eager for the future, not an "old boy" sighing for the past.

And all this was accomplished so swiftly and effortlessly, within a few weeks of his beginning at the school it was as if Millstead had filled a void in his soul that had been gaping for it.

Only one spot in the whole place gave him a feeling of discomfort, and that was the Headmaster's study. The feeling of apprehension, of sinister attraction, that had come upon him when first he had entered it, lessened as time and custom wore it away; yet still, secretly and in shadow, it was there. All the sadness and pathos of a world seemed to be congregated in the dark study, and to come out of it into the sunlit corridors of the school was like the swift passing from the minor into the major key.

IV

On Fridays he had an early morning form before breakfast and then was completely free until four o'clock in the afternoon, so that if the weather were sufficiently enticing he could fill the basket on his bicycle with books and go cycling along the sweet-smelling sunlit lanes. Millstead was just on the edge of the fen district; in one direction the flat lands stretched illimitably to a horizon unbroken as the sea's edge; a stern and lonely country, with nothing to catch the eye save here and there the glint of dyke-water amongst tall reeds and afar off some desert church-tower stiff and stark as the mast of a ship on an empty sea. Speed did not agree with the general Common-Room consensus of opinion that the scenery round Millstead was tame and unattractive; secretly to him the whole district was rich with wild and passionate beauty, and sometimes on these delectable Fridays he would cycle for miles along the flat fen roads with the wind behind him, and return in the afternoon by crawling romantic-looking branch-line trains which always managed to remind him of wild animals, so completely had the civilised thing been submerged in the atmosphere of what it had sought to civilise.

But that was only on one side of Millstead. On the other side, and beyond the rook-infested trees that were as ramparts to the south-west wind, the lanes curved into the folds of tiny hills and lifted themselves for a space on to the ridge of glossy heaths and took sudden twists into the secrecies of red-roofed tree-hidden hamlets. And amidst this country, winding its delicate way beneath arches of overhanging greenery, ran the river Wade.

One Friday morning Speed cycled out to Parminters, a village about three miles out of Millstead. Here there was a low hill (not more than a couple of hundred feet), carpeted with springy turf and overlooking innumerable coils of the glistening stream. At midday on a May morning there was something indescribably restful, drowsy almost, in the scene; the hill dropped by a sudden series of grassy terraces into the meadows, and there was quite a quarter of a mile of lush grass land between the foot of the slope and the river bank. It was an entrancing spectacle, one to watch rather than to see; the silken droop of the meadows, the waves of alternate shadow and sunlight passing over the long grasses, the dark patches on the landscape which drifted eastwards with the clouds. The sun, when it pierced their white edges and came sailing into the blue, was full of warmth and beauty, warmth that awakened myriads of insects to a drowsy buzzing contentment and beauty that lay like a soft veil spread across the world. Speed, with a bundle of four _alpha_ geography essays in his pocket (he had, after all, decided that he was competent to teach commercial geography to the lower forms), lay down amongst the deep grass and lit a pipe.

He marked a few of the essays and then, smoking comfortably, settled to a contented gaze across the valley. It was then, not until he had been there some while, though, that he saw amidst the tall grasses of the meadows a splash of blue in the midst of the deep green. It is strange that at first he did not recognise her. He saw only a girl in a pale blue dress stooping to pick grasses. She was hatless and golden-haired, and in one hand she bore a bunch of something purple, some kind of long grass whose name he did not know. He watched her at first exactly as he might have watched some perfect theatrical spectacle, with just that kind of detached admiration and rich impersonal enchantment. The pose of her as she stooped, the flaunt of the grasses in her hand, the movement of her head as she tossed back her laughing hair, the winding yellow path she trampled across the meadows: all these things he watched and strangely admired.

He lay watching for a long while, still without guessing who she was, till the sun went in behind a cloud and he felt drowsy. He closed his eyes and leaned back cushioned amongst the turf.

V

He woke with a sensation of intense chilliness; the sun had gone in and even its approximate position in the sky could not be determined because of the heaviness of the clouds. He looked at his watch; it was ten minutes past one; he must have slept for over an hour.

The sky was almost the most sinister thing he ever saw. In the east a faint deathly pallor hung over the horizon, but the piling clouds from the west were pushing it over the edge of the world. That faint pallor dissolved across the sky into the greyness deepening into a western horizon of pitch black. Here and there this was shot through with streaks of dull and sombre flame as if each of the hills in that dark land was a sulky volcano. It was cold, and yet the wind that blew in from the gloom was strangely oppressive; the grasses bent low as if weighed down by its passing. Deep in the cleft by Parminters the river gleamed like a writhing venomous snake, the sky giving it the dull shimmer of pewter. To descend across those dark meadows to the coils of the stream seemed somehow an adventure of curious and inscrutable horror. Speed stood up and looked far into the valley. The whole scene seemed to him unnatural; the darkness was weird and baffling; the clouds were the grim harbingers of a thunderstorm. And to him there seemed momentarily a strangeness in the aspect of everything; something deep and fearsome, imminent, perhaps, with tragedy. He felt within him a sombre presaging excitement.

It began to rain, quietly at first, then faster, faster and at last overwhelmingly. He had brought no mackintosh. He stuffed the essays into his coat pocket, swung his bicycle off the turf where he had laid it, and began to run down the hill with it. His aim was to get to the village and shelter somewhere till the storm was over. Halfway down he paused to put up his coat-collar, and there, looking across the meadows, he saw again that girl in the pale-blue dress. He was nearer to her now and recognised her immediately. She was dressed in a loose-fitting and rather dilapidated frock which the downpour of rain had already made to cling to the soft curves of her body; round her throat, tightly twined, was a striped scarf which Speed, quick to like or to dislike what he saw, decided was absolutely and garishly ugly. And yet immediately he felt a swift tightening of his affection for her, for Millstead was like that, full of stark uglinesses that were beautiful by their intimacy.... She saw him and stopped. Details of her at that moment encumbered his memory ever afterwards. She was about twenty yards from him and he could see a most tremendous wrist-watch that she wore--an ordinary pocket watch clamped on to a strap. And from the outside pocket of her dress there protruded the chromatic cover of a threepenny novelette. (Had she read it? Was she going to read it? Did she like it? he wondered swiftly.) She still carried that bunch of grasses, now rather soiled and bedraggled, tightly in her hand. He imagined, in the curiously vivid way that was so easy to him, the damp feel of her palm; the heat and perspiration of it: somehow this again, a symbol of secret and bodily intimacy, renewed in him that sudden kindling affection for her.

He called out to her: "Miss Ervine!"

She answered, a little shyly: "Oh, how are you, Mr. Speed?"

"Rather wet just at present," he replied, striding over the tufts of thick grass towards her. "And you appear to be even wetter than I am. I'm afraid we're in for a severe thunderstorm."

"Oh well, I don't mind thunderstorms."

"You ought to mind getting wet." He paused, uncertain what to say next. Then instinct made him suddenly begin to talk to her as he might have done to a small child. "My dear young lady, you don't suppose I'm going to leave you here to get drenched to the skin, do you?"

She shrugged her shoulders and said: "I don't know what you're going to do."

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"I don't want anything."

"Well, I suggest that we get into the village as quick as we can and stay there till the rain stops. I was also going to suggest that we spent the time in having lunch, but as you don't want anything, we needn't."

"But I don't want to wait in the village, Mr. Speed. I was just going to start for home when it came on to rain."

Speed said: "Very well, if you want to get home you must let me take you. You're not going to walk home through a thunderstorm. We'll have a cab or something."

"And do you really think you'll get a cab in Parminters?"

He answered: "I always have a good try to get anything I want to."

For all her protests she came with him down the meadow and out into the sodden lane. As they passed the gate the first flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed five seconds after by a crash of thunder.

"There!" he exclaimed triumphantly, as if the thunder and lightning somehow strengthened his position with her: "You wouldn't like to walk to Millstead through that, would you?"

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at him as if she hated his interference yet found it irresistible.

VI

It was altogether by good luck that he did get a cab in the village; a Millstead cab had brought some people into Parminters and was just setting back empty on the return journey when Speed met it in the narrow lane. Once again, this time as he opened the cab-door and handed her inside, he gave her that look of triumph, though he was well aware of the luck that he had had. Inside on the black leather cushions he placed in a conspicuously central position his hat and his bundle of essays, and, himself occupying one corner, invited her to take the other. All the time the driver was bustling round lifting the bicycle on to the roof and tying it securely down, Speed sat in his corner, damp to the skin, watching her and remembering that Miss Harrington had told him that she hated men. All the way during that three-mile ride back to Millstead, with the swishing of the rain and the occasional thunder and the steady jog-trot of the horse's hoofs mingling together in a memorable medley of sound, Speed sat snugly in his corner, watching and wondering.

Not much conversation passed between them. When they were nearing Millstead, Speed said: "The other day as I passed near your drawing-room window I heard somebody playing the Chopin waltzes. Was it you?"

"It might have been."

He continued after a pause: "I see there's a Chopin recital advertised in the town for next Monday week. Zobieski, the Polish pianist, is coming up. Would you care to come with me to it?"

It was very daring of him to say that, and he knew it. She coloured to the roots of her wet-gold hair, and replied, after a silence: "Monday, though, isn't it?--I'm afraid I couldn't manage it. I always see Clare on Mondays."

He answered instantly: "Bring Clare as well then."

"I--I don't think Clare would be interested," she replied, a little confused. She added, as if trying to make up for having rejected his offer rather rudely: "Clare and I don't get many chances of seeing each other. Only Mondays and Wednesday afternoons."

"But I see you with her almost every day."

"Yes, but only for a few minutes. Mondays are the only evenings that we have wholly to ourselves."

He thought, but did not dare to say: And is it absolutely necessary that you must have those evenings wholly to yourselves?

He said thoughtfully: "I see."

He said nothing further until the cab drew up outside the main gate of Millstead School. He was going to tell the driver to proceed inside as far as the porch of the Head's house, but she said she would prefer to get out there and walk across the lawns. He smiled and helped her out. As he looked inside the cab again to see if he had left any papers behind he saw that the gaudily-coloured novelette had fallen out of her pocket and on to the floor. He picked it up and handed it to her. "You dropped this," he said merely. She stared at him for several seconds and then took it almost sulkily.

"I suppose I can read what I like, anyway," she exclaimed, in a sudden hot torrent of indignation.

He smiled, completely astonished, yet managed to say, blandly: "I'm sure I never dreamt of suggesting otherwise."

He could see then from her eyes, half-filling with tears of humiliation, that she realised that she had needlessly made a fool of herself.

"Please--please--don't come with me any further," she said, awkwardly. "And thanks--thanks--very much--for--for bringing me back."

He smiled again and raised his hat as she darted away across the wet lawns. Then, after paying the driver, he walked straightway into the school and down into the prefects' bathroom, where he turned on the scalding hot water with jubilant anticipation.

VII

The immediate result of the incident was an invitation to dine at the Head's a few days later. "It was very--um, yes--thoughtful and considerate of you, Mr. Speed," said the Head, mumblingly. "My daughter--a heedless child--just like her to omit the--um--precaution of taking some--um, yes--protection against any possible change in the weather."

"I was rather in the same boat myself, sir," said Speed, laughing. "The thunderstorm was quite unexpected."

"Um yes, quite so. _Quite_ so." The Head paused and added, with apparent inconsequence: "My daughter is quite a child, Mr. Speed--loves to gather flowers--um--botany, you know, and--um--so forth."

Speed said: "Yes, I have noticed it."

Dinner at the Head's house was less formal than on the previous occasion. It was a Monday evening and Clare Harrington was there. Afterwards in the drawing-room Speed played a few Chopin studies and Mazurkas. He did not attempt to get into separate conversation with Miss Ervine; he chatted amiably with the Head while the two girls gossiped by themselves. And at ten o'clock, pleading work to do before bed, he arose to go, leaving the girls to make their own arrangements. Miss Ervine said good-bye to him with a shyness in which he thought he detected a touch of wistfulness.

When he got up to his own room he thought about her for a long while. He tried to settle down to an hour or so of marking books, but found it impossible. In the end he went downstairs and let himself outside into the school grounds by his own private key. It was a glorious night of starshine, and all the roofs were pale with the brightness of it. Wafts of perfume from the flowers and shrubbery of the Head's garden accosted him gently as he turned the corner by the chapel and into the winding tree-hidden path that circumvented the entire grounds of Millstead. It was on such a night that his heart's core was always touched; for it seemed to him that then the strange spirit of the place was most alive, and that it came everywhere to meet him with open arms, drenching all his life in wild and unspeakable loveliness. Oh, how happy he was, and how hard it was to make others realise his happiness! In the Common-Room his happiness had become proverbial, and even amongst the boys, always quicker to notice unhappy than happy looks, his beaming smile and firm, kindling enthusiasm had earned him the nickname of "Smiler."

He sat down for a moment on the lowest tier of the pavilion seats, those seats where generations of Millsteadians had hurriedly prepared themselves for the fray of school and house matches. Now the spot was splendidly silent, with the cricket-pitch looming away mistily in front, and far behind, over the tips of the high trees, the winking lights of the still noisy dormitories. He watched a bat flitting haphazardly about the pillars of the pavilion stand. He could see, very faintly in the paleness, the score of that afternoon's match displayed on the indicator. Old Millstead parish bells, far away in the town, commenced the chiming of eleven.

He felt then, as he had never felt before he came to Millstead, that the world was full, brimming full, of wonderful majestic beauty, and that now, as the scented air swirled round him in slow magnificent eddies, it was searching for something, searching with passionate and infinite desire for something that eluded it always. He could not understand or analyse all that he felt, but sometimes lately a deep shaft of ultimate feeling would seem to grip him round the body and send the tears swimming into his eyes, as if for one glorious moment he had seen and heard something of another world. It came suddenly to him now, as he sat on the pavilion seats with the silver starshine above him and the air full of the smells of earth and flowers; it seemed to him that something mighty must be abroad in the world, that all this tremulous loveliness could not live without a meaning, that he was on the verge of some strange and magic revelation.

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.