Chapter THREE: 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 some 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' duty for him. For one thing, he was always slightly nervous of doing things in public. And for another thing, he would have to practice 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 limply 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 he 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 hair 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 Millstead 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 roadside; 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 tea-time 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.

Then dinner, conversational and sometimes boisterous, in the Masters' Common-Room, and afterwards, unless it were his evening for taking preparation, an hour at least of silence before the corridors and dormitories became noisy. During this hour he would often sit by the open window in his room and hear the rooks cawing in the high trees and the _clankety-clank_ of the roller on the cricket-pitch and all the mingled sounds and commotions that seemed to him to make the silence of the summer evenings more magical than ever. Often, too, he would hear the sound of the Head's piano, a faint half-pathetic tinkle from below.

Half-past eight let loose the glorious pandemonium; he could hear from his room the chiming of the school-bell, and then, softly at first, but soon rising to a tempestuous flood, the tide of invasion sweeping down the steps of the Big Hall and pouring into the houses. Always it thrilled him by its mere strength and volume of sound; thrilled him with pride and passion to think that he belonged to this heart that throbbed with such onrushing zest and vitality. Soon the first adventurous lappings of the tide reached the corridor outside his room; he loved the noise and commotion of it; he loved the shouting and singing and yelling and the boisterous laughter; he loved the faint murmur of conflicting gramophones and the smells of coffee and cocoa that rose up from the downstairs studies; he loved the sound of old Hartopp's voice as he stood at the foot of the stairs at ten o'clock and shouted, in a key that sent up a melodious echoing through all the passages and landings: "Time, gentlemen, time!"--And when the lights in the dormitories had all been put out, and Millstead at last was silent under the stars, he loved above all things the strange magic of his own senses, that revealed him a Millstead that nobody else had ever seen, a Millstead rapt and ethereal, one with the haze of night and the summer starshine.

He told himself, in the moments when he reacted from the abandonment of his soul to dreaming, that he was sentimental, that he loved too readily, that beauty stirred him more than it ought, that life was too vividly emotional, too mighty a conqueror of his senses. But then, in the calm midst of reasoning, that same wild, tremulous consciousness of wonder and romance would envelop him afresh like a strong flood; it was a fierce, passionate ache in his bones, only to be forgotten for unreal, unliving instants. And one moment, when he sat by the window hearing the far-off murmur of Chopin on the Head's piano, he knew most simply and perfectly why it was that all this was so. It was because he was very deeply and passionately in love. In his dreams, his wild and bewitching dreams, she was a fairy-child, ethereal and half unreal, the rapt half-embodied spirit of Millstead itself, luring him by her sweet and fragrant vitality. He saw in the sunlight always the golden glint of her hair; in music no more than subtle and exquisite reminders of her; in all the world of sights and sounds and feelings a deep transfiguring passion that was his own for her.

And in the flesh he met her often in the school grounds, where she might say: "Oh, Mr. Speed, I'm so glad I've met you! I want you to come in and hear me play something." They would stroll together over the lawns into the Head's house and settle themselves in the stuffy-smelling drawing-room. Doctor and Mrs. Ervine were frequently out in the afternoons, and Potter, it was believed, dozed in the butler's pantry. Speed would play the piano to the girl and then she to him, and when they were both tired of playing they talked awhile. Everything of her seemed to him most perfect and delicious. Once he asked her tactfully about reading novelettes, and she said: "I read them sometimes because there's nothing in father's library that I care for. It's nearly all sermons and Latin grammars." Immediately it appeared to him that all was satisfactory and entrancingly explained; a vague unrestfulness in him was made suddenly tranquil; her habit of reading novelettes made her more dear and lovable than ever. He said: "I wonder if you'd like me to lend you some books?--_Interesting_ books, I promise you."--She answered, with her child-like enthusiasm: "Oh, I'd love that, Mr. Speed!"

He lent her Hans Andersen's fairy tales.

Once in chapel, as he declaimed the final verse of the eighty-eighth Psalm, he looked for a fraction of a second at the Head's pew and saw that she was watching him. "Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness."--He saw a blush kindle her cheeks like flame.

One week-day morning he met the Head in the middle of the quadrangle. The Head beamed on him cordially and said: "I understand, Mr. Speed, that you--um--give my daughter--occasional--um, yes--assistance with her music. Very kind of you, I'm sure--um, yes--extremely kind of you, Mr. Speed."

He added, dreamily: "My daughter--still--um, yes--still a child in many ways--makes few friends--um, yes--very few. Seems to have taken quite an--um, yes--quite a _fancy_ to you, Mr. Speed."

And Speed answered, with an embarrassment that was ridiculously schoolboyish: "Indeed, sir?--Indeed?"

IV

Speech Day at Millstead.

Speed sat shyly on his chair on the platform, wrapping his gown round him nervously, and gazing, every now and then, at the fashionably-dressed throng that crowded the Big Hall to its utmost capacity. It was a day of ordeals, but his own chief ordeal was safely past; the school-choir had grappled quite creditably with Stanford's _Te Deum_ at the chapel service that morning. He was feeling very happy, even amidst his nervousness. His eyes wandered to the end of the front row of the auditorium, where Helen Ervine and Clare Harrington sat together. They were gossiping and laughing.

The Chairman, Sir Henry Briggs, rose to introduce the principal guest, Lord Portway. Lord Portway, so said Sir Henry Briggs, needed no introduction. Lord Portway....

Speed listened dreamfully.

Then Lord Portway. Lord Portway confessed himself to be a poor speaker, but hoped that it would not always be those with a glib tongue that got on in the world. (Laughter and cheers.) When he (Lord Portway) was at school he was ashamed to say that he never received a single prize. (More laughter.) He hoped that all the boys of Millstead, whether they had prizes or not, would remember that it wasn't always the prize-winners at school who did best in the battle of life. (Hear, hear.) He would just like to give them all a word or two of advice. Be thorough. (Cheers.) Brilliance wasn't everything. If he were engaging an employee and he had the choice of two men, one brilliant and the other thorough, he should choose the thorough one. He was certain that some, at least, of those Millstead boys who had won no prizes would do great things and become famous in after-life....

Speed watched Doctor Ervine's face; saw the firm mouth expand, from time to time, into a mirthless automatic smile whenever the audience was stirred to laughter. And Mrs. Ervine fidgeted with her dress and glanced about her with nervously sparkling eyes.

Finally, said Lord Portway, he would like to ask the Headmaster to grant the boys of Millstead a whole holiday.... (Cheers, deafening and continuous.)

It was, of course, the universal custom that Speech Day should be followed by a week-end's holiday in which those boys who lived within easy reach might go home. Many boys had already made their arrangements and chosen their trains, but, respecting the theory that the holiday depended on Lord Portway's asking for it, they cheered as if he had conferred an inestimable boon upon them.

The Head, raising his hand when the clamour had lasted a sufficient time, announced: "My Lord, I have--um--great pleasure in granting your request."

More deafening cheers. The masters round about Speed, witnesses of this little farce for a number of successive years varying from one to thirty, smiled and whispered together condescendingly.

Sir Henry Briggs, thick-voiced and ponderous. "I--I call upon the Headmaster ..."

Doctor Ervine rose, cleared his throat, and began: "My Lord,--um--and Ladies and Gentlemen--." A certain sage--he would leave it to his sixth-form boys to give the gentleman's name--(Laughter)--had declared that that nation was happy which had no history. It had often occurred to him that the remark could be neatly and appositely adapted to a public-school--happy was that public-school year about which, on Speech Day, the Headmaster could find very little to say. (Laughter.) Certainly it was true of this particular year. It had been a very happy one, a very successful one, and really, there was not much else to say. One or two things, however, he would like to mention especially. First, in the world of Sport. He put Sport first merely because alphabetically it came before Work. (Laughter.) Millstead had had a very successful football and hockey season, and only that week at cricket they had defeated Selhurst. (Cheers).... In the world of scholarship the year had also been successful, no fewer than thirty-eight Millsteadians having passed the Lower Certificate Examination of the Oxford and Cambridge Board. (Cheers.) One of the sixth-form boys, A. V. Cobham, had obtained an exhibition at Magdalen College, Cambridge. (Cheers.) H. O. Catterwall, who left some years back, had been appointed Deputy Revenue Commissioner for the district of--um--Bhungi-Bhoolu. (Cheers.) Two boys, R. Heming and B. Shales, had obtained distinctions at London University. (Cheers.).... Of the Masters, all he could say was that he could not believe that any Headmaster in the country was supported by a staff more loyal and efficient. (Cheers.) They had to welcome one addition,--he might say, although he (the addition) had only been at Millstead a few weeks--a very valued addition--to the school staff. That was Mr. Speed. (Loud cheers). Mr. Speed was very young, and youth, as they all knew, was very enthusiastic. (Cheers and laughter.) In fact, although Mr. Speed had been at Millstead such a short time, he had already earned and deserved the name of the School Enthusiast. (Laughter.) He had had a very kind letter from Mr. Speed's father, Sir Charles Speed--(pause)--regretting his inability, owing to a previously contracted engagement, to be present at the Speech Day celebrations, and he (the Head) was particularly sorry he could not come because it would have done him good, he felt sure, to see how universally popular at Millstead was his enthusiastic son. (Cheers and laughter.) He hoped Millstead would have the benefit of Mr. Speed's gifts and personality for many, many years to come. (Loud cheers.).... He must not conclude without some reference to the sad blow that had struck the school only a week or so before. He alluded to the lamented passing-away of Sir Huntly Polk, for many years Chairman on the Governing Board....

Speed heard no more. He felt himself beginning to burn all over; he put one hand to his cheek in a vague and instinctive gesture of self-protection. Of course, behind his embarrassment he was pleased, rapturously pleased; but at first his predominant emotion was surprise. It had never occurred to him that the Head would mention him in a speech, or that he would invite his father to the Speech Day ceremonies. Then, as he heard the cheering of the boys at the mention of his name, emotion swallowed his surprise and everything became a blur.

After the ceremony he met the two girls outside the Big Hall. Clare said: "Poor man--you looked _so_ uncomfortable while everybody was cheering you! But really, you know, it is nice to be praised, isn't it?"

And Helen, speaking softly so that no one else should hear, whispered: "I daresay I can get free about nine o'clock to-night. We can go for a walk, eh, Kenneth?--Nine o'clock by the pavilion steps, then."

Her voice, muffled and yet eager, trembled like the note of a bell on a windy day.

Speed whispered, joyously: "Righto, Helen, I'll be there."

To such a pitch had their relationship developed as a result of music-lessons and book-lendings and casual encounters. And now they were living the most exquisite of all moments, when each could guess but could not be quite certain of the other's love. Day had followed day, each one more tremulously beautiful than the one before, each one more exquisitely near to something whose beauty was too keen and blinding to be studied; each day the light in their eyes had grown brighter, fiercer, more bursting from within. But now, as they met and separated in the laughing crowd that squirmed its way down the steps of the Big Hall, some subtle telepathy between their minds told them that never again would they shrink from the vivid joy of confession. To-night ... thought Speed, as he went up to his room and slipped off his cap and gown. And the same wild ecstasy of anticipation was in Helen's mind as she walked with Clare across the lawns to the Head's house.

V

That night the moon was full and high; the leaden roofs and cupola of the pavilion gleamed like silver plaques; and all the cricket-pitch was covered with a thin, white, motionless tide into which the oblong shadows pushed out like the black piers of a jetty. Millstead was silent and serene. A third of its inhabitants had departed by the evening trains; perhaps another third was with its parents in the lounges of the town hotels; the remainder, reacting from the day's excitement and sobered by the unaccustomed sparseness of the population, was more silent than usual. Lights gleamed in the dormitories and basement bathrooms, but there was an absence of stir, rather than of sound, which gave to the whole place a curious aspect of forlornness; no sudden boisterous shout sent its message spinning along the corridor and out of some wide-open window into the night. It was a world of dreams and spells, and to Speed, standing in the jet-black shadow of the pavilion steps, it seemed that sight and sound were almost one; that he could hear moonlight humming everywhere around him, and see the tremor in the sky as the nine o'clock chiming fell from the chapel belfry.

She came to him like a shy wraith, resolving out of the haze of moonbeams. The bright gold of her hair, drenched now in silver, had turned to a glossy blackness that had in it some subtle and unearthly colour that could be touched rather than seen; Speed felt his fingers tingle as at a new sensation. Something richly and manifestly different was abroad in the world, something different from what had ever been there before; the grey shining pools of her eyes were like pictures in a trance. He knew, strangely and intimately, that he loved her and that she loved him, that there was exquisite sweetness in everything that could happen to them, that all the world was wonderfully in time and tune with their own blind-fold yet miraculously self-guiding inclinations. Tears, lovely in moonlight, shone in her clear eyes, eyes that were deep and dark under the night sky; he put his arm around her and touched his cheek with hers. It was as if his body began to dissolve at that first ineffable thrill; he trembled vitally; then, after a pause of magic, kissed her dark, wet, offering lips, not with passion, but with all the wistful gentleness of the night itself, as if he were afraid that she might fly away, mothlike, from a rough touch. The moonlight, sight and sound fused into one, throbbed in his eyes and ears; his heart, beating quickly, hammered, it seemed, against the stars. It was the most exquisite and tremulous revelation of heaven, heaven that knew neither bound nor end.

"Wonderful child!" he whispered.

She replied, in a voice deep as the diapason note of an organ: "_Am_ I wonderful?"

"_You_ are," she said, after a pause.

He nodded.

"_I_?" He smiled, caressing her hair. "I feel--I feel, Helen, as if nothing in the world had ever happened to me until this night! Nothing at all!"

"_I_ do," she whispered.

"As if--as if nothing in the world had ever happened to anybody until now."

"You love me?"

"Yes, Kenneth."

"I love you."

"I'm--I'm--I'm glad."

They stood together for a long while with the moonlight on their faces, watching and thinking and dreaming and wondering. The ten o'clock chimes littered the air with their mingled pathos and cheer; the hour had been like the dissolving moment of a dream.

As they entered the shadows of the high trees and came in sight of Milner's, a tall cliff of winking yellow windows, they stopped and kissed again, a shade more passionately than before.

"But oh," she exclaimed as they separated in the shadow of the Head's gateway, "I _wish_ I was clever! I wish I was as clever as you! I'm not, Kenneth, and you mustn't think I am. I'm--I'm _stupid_, compared with you. And yet"--her voice kindled with a strange thrill--"and yet you say I'm wonderful! _Wonderful_!--_Am_ I?--Really wonderful?"

"Wonderful," he whispered, fervently.

She cried, softly but with passion: "Oh, I'm glad--glad--I'm glad. It's--it's glorious to--to think that you think that. But oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, don't find out that I'm not." She added, very softly and almost as if reassuring herself of something: "I--I love you very--_very_ much."

They could not tear themselves away from each other. The lights in the dormitories winked out one by one; the quarter-chimes sprinkled their music on the moon-white lawns; yet still, fearful to separate, they whispered amidst the shadows. Millstead, towering on all sides of them vast and radiant, bathed them in her own deep passionless tranquillity; Millstead, a little forlorn that night, yet ever a mighty parent, serenely watchful over her children.

VI

He decided that night that he would write a story about Millstead; that he would do for Millstead what other people had already done for Eton and Harrow and Rugby. He would put down all the magic that he had seen and felt; he would transfer to paper the subtle enchantment of the golden summer days, the moonlit nights, the steamy warmth of the bathrooms, the shouting in the dormitories, the buzz of movement and conversation in the dining hall, the cool gloom of the chapel--everything that came effortlessly into his mind whenever he thought of Millstead. All the beauty and emotion and rapture that he had seen and felt must not, he determined, be locked inside him: it clamoured to be set free, to flow strongly yet purposefully in the channel of some mighty undertaking.

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 summer-time--" 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 recognize 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 you 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.