Chapter ONE: I

"The worst term uv the three, sir, that's my opinion," said Burton, pulling the curtains across the window at dusk.

"What makes you think that?" asked Speed, forcing himself to be affable.

"Well, you see, sir, the winter term--or, prop'ly speakin', sir, I should say the Michaelmas term--isn't so bad because there's the Christmas 'olidays to look forward to. But the Lent Term always seems to me to be ten times worse, because there's nothin' at the end of it to look forward to. Is there now, sir?"

"There's the Easter holidays and the spring weather."

Burton grinned. "That's if you're an optimist, sir."

He was an old man, deeply attached to the school and very reliable, but prone to take odd liberties on the strength of age and service. Speed always felt that in Burton's eyes he was a youngster, hardly less a youngster than one of the prefects, and that Burton considered himself as the central planet of Lavery's round which Speed revolved as merely a satellite. The situation had amused him until now; but on this afternoon of the return from Beachings Over a whole crowd of sinister suspicions assailed him. In Burton's attitude he seemed to detect a certain carefully-veiled mockery; was it possible that Burton knew or guessed the secret of his appointment to Lavery's? Was it also possible that Burton had pierced through his marriage with Helen and had seen the sinister scheme behind it?

He stared hard at Burton. The man was old in a rather theatrical way; he clumped about exactly like the faithful retainer in the old-fashioned melodrama; if you addressed him he would turn round, put one hand to his ear, to leer at you, and say grotesquely: "Sir?" He was the terror of all the housemaids, the pet of all the Junior boys, and a sort of communal butler and valet to the prefects. And, beyond all doubt, he was one of the sights of Lavery's. For the moment Speed detested him.

"I say, Burton."

The turn, the hand to ear, the leer, and the grotesque interrogative: "Sir?"

"How long have you been at Millstead?"

"Fifty-one year, sir, come next July. I started when I was fourteen year old, sir, peelin' potaties in the old kitchins that used to be underneath Milner's. I come to Lavery's when I was twenty-four as underporter. I remember old Mr. Hardacre that wuz 'ousemaster before Mr. Lavery, Sir. Mr. Lavery was 'ousemaster for thirty-eight year, sir, an' a very great friend of mine. He came to see me only larst Toosday, sir, a-knockin' at the pantry door just like an old pal o' mine might. He wuz wantin' to know 'ow the old place was gettin' on."

Speed's glance hardened. He could imagine Lavery and Burton having a malicious conversation about himself.

Burton went on, grinning: "He was arskin' after you, Mr. Speed. I told 'im you wuz away spendin' the Christmas with Sir Charles and Lady Speed. An' I told him you wuz doin' very well an' bein' very popular, if you'll pard'n the liberty I took."

"Oh, certainly," said Speed, rather coldly.

When Burton had gone out he poked up the fire and pondered. Now that he was back at Millstead he wished he had stayed longer in Beachings Over. Millstead was absolutely a dead place in vacation time, and in the Christmas vacation nothing more dreary and uniformly depressing had ever come within his experience. Dr. and Mrs. Ervine, so Potter informed him, had gone to town for a few days and would not be back until after the New Year. None of the other housemasters was in residence. The huge empty footer pitches, hardly convalescent after the frays of the past term, were being marked off for hockey by the groundsman; the chapel was undergoing a slothful scrubbing by a platoon of chattering charwomen; the music-rooms were closed; the school organ was in the hands of the repairers; the clock in the chapel belfry had stopped, apparently because it was nobody's business to wind it up during vacation-time.

Perhaps it would freeze enough for skating on Dinglay Fen, was his most rapturous hope. Helen was shopping in the village, and he expected her back very soon. It was nearly dark now, but the groundsman was still busy. There was something exquisitely forlorn in that patient transference from cricket to footer, from footer to hockey, and then from hockey to cricket again, which marked the passage of the years at Millstead. He wondered how long it would all last. He wondered what sort of an upheaval would be required to change it. Would famine or pestilence or war or revolution be enough?

Helen came in. It was curious that his suspicion of her, at first admitted to be without confirmation, had now become almost a certainty; so that he no longer felt inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, or even that there was any doubt whose benefit he could give her.

While they were having tea he suddenly decided that he would go out that evening alone and walk himself into a better humour. A half-whimsical consciousness of his own condition made him rather more kind to her; he felt sorry for anybody who had to put up with him in his present mood. He said: "I think I'll have a walk after tea, Helen. I'll be back about eight. It'll do me good to take some exercise."

She gave him a sudden, swift, challenging look, and he could see exactly what was in her eyes. She thought he was going to see Clare.

The thought had not been in his mind before. But now he was at the mercy of it; it invaded him; after all, why shouldn't he visit Clare? Furthermore, what right had Helen to stop him? He put on his hat and coat in secret tingling excitement; he would go down into the village and visit Clare. Curious that he hadn't thought of it before! Helen had simply no right to object. And as he turned his mind to all the suspicions that had so lately crowded into it, he felt that he was abundantly justified in visiting a friend of his, even if his wife were foolishly jealous of her.

"Back about eight," he repeated, as he opened the door to go out. Somehow, he wanted to kiss her. He had always kissed her before going out from Lavery's. But now, since she made no reply to his remark, presumably she did not expect it.

II

The Millstead road was black as jet, for the moon was hidden behind the thickest of clouds. It was just beginning to freeze, and as he strode along the path by the school railings he thought of those evenings in the winter term when he had seen Clare home after the concert rehearsals. Somehow, all that seemed ages ago. The interlude at Beachings Over had given all the previous term the perspective of immense distance; he felt as if he had been housemaster at Lavery's for years, as if he had been married to Helen for years, and as if Clare were a friend whom he had known long years ago and had lost sight of since.

As he reached the High Street he began to feel nervous. After all, Clare might not want to see him. He remembered vaguely their last interview and the snub she had given him. He looked further back and remembered the first time he had ever seen her; that dinner at the Head's house on the first evening of the summer term....

But he could not help being nervous. He tried to think that what he was doing was something perfectly natural and ordinary; that he was just paying a call on a friend as anybody might have done on a return from a holiday. He was angry with himself for getting so excited about the business. And when he rang the bell of the side-door next to the shop he had the distinct hope that she would not be in.

But she was in.

She came to the door herself, and it was so dark outside that she could not see him. "Who is it?" she asked, and he replied, rather fatuously expecting her to recognise his voice immediately: "Me. I hope I'm not disturbing you."

She answered, in that characteristically unafraid way of hers: "I'm sure I don't know in the least who you are. Will you tell me your name?"

Then he said, rather embarrassedly: "Speed, my name is."

"Oh?"

Such a strange surprised little "Oh?" He could not see her any more than she could see him, but he knew that she was startled.

"Am I disturbing you?" he went on.

"Oh, no. You'd better come inside. There's nobody in except myself, so I warn you."

"Warn me of what?"

"Of the conventions you are breaking by coming in."

"Would you rather I didn't?"

"Oh, don't trouble about me. It's yourself you must think about."

"Very well then, I'll come in."

"Right. There are five steps, then two paces along the level, and then two more steps. It's an old house, you see."

In the dark and narrow lobby, with the front door closed behind him, and Clare somewhere near him in the darkness, he suddenly felt no longer nervous but immensely exhilarated, as if he had taken some decisive and long contemplated step--some step that, wise or unwise, would at least bring him into a new set of circumstances.

Something in her matter-of-fact directions was immensely reassuring; a feeling of buoyancy came over him as he felt his way along the corridor with Clare somewhat ahead of him. She opened a door and a shaft of yellow lamplight came out and prodded the shadows.

"My little sitting-room," she said.

It was a long low-roofed apartment with curtained windows at either end. Persian rugs and tall tiers of bookshelves and some rather good pieces of old furniture gave it a deliciously warm appearance; a heavily shaded lamp was the sole illumination. Speed, quick to appreciate anything artistic, was immediately impressed; he exclaimed, on the threshold: "I say, what a gloriously old-fashioned room!"

"Not all of it," she answered quietly. She turned the shade of the lamp so that its rays focussed themselves on a writing-desk in an alcove. "The typewriter and the telephone are signs that I am not at all an old-fashioned person."

"I didn't say that, did I?" he replied, smiling.

She laughed. "Please sit down and be comfortable. It's nice to have such an unexpected call. And I'm glad that though I'm banned from Lavery's you don't consider yourself banned from here."

"Ah," he said. He was surprised that she had broached the question so directly. He flushed slightly and went on, after a pause: "I think perhaps the ban had better be withdrawn altogether."

"Why?"

"Oh, well--well, it doesn't matter--I didn't come here to talk about it."

"Oh, yes, you did. That's just what you did come here to talk about. Either that or something more serious. You don't mean to tell me that you pay an unconventional call like this just to tell me what an enjoyable holiday you've had."

"I didn't have an enjoyable holiday at all," he answered.

"There! I guessed as much! After all, you wouldn't have come home so soon if you'd been having a thoroughly good time, would you?"

"Helen wanted to come home."

She ceased her raillery of him and went suddenly serious. For some time she stared into the fire without speaking, and then, in a different tone of voice altogether she said: "Why did she want to come home?"

He began to talk rather fast and staccato. "I--I don't know whether I ought to tell you this--except that you were Helen's friend and can perhaps help me.... You see, Helen was very nervous the whole time, and there were one or two dinner-parties, and she--well, not exactly put her foot in it, you know, but was--well, rather obviously out of everything. I don't know how it is--she seems quite unable to converse in the ordinary way that people do--I don't mean anything brilliant--few people converse brilliantly--what I mean is that--well, she--"

She interrupted: "You mean that when her neighbour says, 'Have you heard Caruso in Carmen?'--she hasn't got the sense to reply: 'Oh, yes, isn't he simply gorgeous?'"

"That's a rather satirical way of putting it."

"Well, anyway, it seems a small reason for coming home. If I were constitutionally incapable of sustaining dinner-party small-talk and my husband brought me away from his parents for that reason, I'd leave him for good."

"I didn't bring her away. She begged me to let her go."

"Then you must have been cruel to her. You must have made her think that it mattered."

"Well, doesn't it matter?"

She laughed a little harshly. "What a different man you're becoming, Mr. Speed! Before you married Helen you knew perfectly well that she was horribly nervous in front of strangers and that she'd never show off well at rather tiresome society functions. And yet if I or anybody else had dared to suggest that it mattered you'd have been most tremendously indignant. You used to think her nervousness rather charming, in fact."

He said, rather pathetically: "You've cornered me, I confess. And I suppose I'd better tell you the real reason. Helen's nervousness doesn't matter to me. It never has mattered and it doesn't matter now. It wasn't that, or rather, that would never have annoyed me but for something infinitely more serious. While I was at home I found out about my appointment at Lavery's."

"Well, what about it?"

"It was my father got it for me. He interviewed Portway and Ervine and God knows who else."

"Well?"

"Well?--Do you think I like to be dependent on that sort of help? Do you think I like to remember all the kind things that people at Millstead have said about me, and to feel that they weren't sincere, that they were simply the result of a little of my father's wire-pulling?"

She did not answer.

"I left home," he went on, "because my father wanted to shove me into a nice comfortable job in a soap-works. I wanted to earn my own living on my own merits. And then, when I manage to get free, he thoughtfully steps in front of me, so to speak, and without my knowing it, makes the path smooth for me!"

"What an idealist you are, Mr. Speed!"

"What?"

"An idealist. So innocent of the world! Personally, I think your father's action extremely kind. And also I regard your own condition as one of babyish innocence. Did you really suppose that an unknown man, aged twenty-three, with a middling degree and only one moderately successful term's experience, would be offered the Mastership of the most important House at Millstead, unless there'd been a little private manœuvring behind the scenes? Did you think that, in the ordinary course of nature, a man like Ervine would be only too willing to set you up in Lavery's with his daughter for a wife?"

"Ah, that's it! He wanted me to marry Helen, didn't he?"

"My dear man, wasn't it perfectly obvious that he did? All through last summer term you kept meeting her in the school grounds and behaving in a manner for which any other Master would have been instantly sacked, and all he did was to smile and be nice and keep inviting you to dinner!"

Speed cried excitedly: "Yes, that's what my father said. He said it was a plant; that Ervine in the end proved himself the cleverer of the two."

"Your father told you that?"

"No, I overheard it."

"Your father, I take it, didn't like Helen?"

"He didn't see the best of her. She was so nervous."

He went on eagerly: "Don't you see the suspicion that's in my mind?--That Ervine plotted with Helen to get me married to her! That she married me for all sorts of sordid and miserable reasons!"

And then Clare said, with as near passion as he had ever yet seen in her: "Mr. Speed, you're a fool! You don't understand Helen. She has faults, but there's one certain thing about her--she's straight--_absolutely_ straight! And if you've been cruel to her because you suspected her of being crooked, then you've done her a fearful injustice! She's straight--straight to the point of obstinacy."

"You think that?"

"_Think_ it? Why, man, I'm _certain_ of it!"

And at the sound of her words, spoken so confidently and indignantly, it seemed so to him. Of course she was straight. And he had been cruel to her. He was always the cause of her troubles. It was always his fault. And at that very moment, might be, she was crying miserably in the drawing-room at Lavery's, crying for jealousy of Clare. A sudden fierce hostility to Clare swept over him; she was too strong, too clever, too clear-seeing. He hated her because it was so easy for her to see things as they were; because all problems seemed to yield to the probing of her candid eyes. He hated her because he knew, and had felt, how easy it was to take help from her. He hated her because her sympathy was so practical and abundant and devoid of sentiment. He hated her, perhaps, because he feared to do anything else.

She said softly: "What a strange combination of strength and weakness you are, Mr. Speed! Strong enough to follow out an ideal, and weak enough to be at the mercy of any silly little suspicion that comes into your mind!"

He was too much cowed down by the magnitude of his blunder to say a great deal more, and in a short while he left, thanking her rather embarrassedly for having helped him. And he said, in the pitch-dark lobby as she showed him to the front door: "Clare, I think this visit of mine had better be a secret, don't you?"

And she replied: "You needn't fear that I shall tell anybody."

When the door had closed on him outside and he was walking back along the Millstead lane it occurred to him quite suddenly: Why, I called her Clare! He was surprised, and perhaps slightly annoyed with himself for having done unconsciously what he would never have done intentionally. Then he wondered if she had noticed it, and if so, what she had thought. He reflected that she had plenty of good practical sense in her, and would not be likely to stress the importance of it. Good practical sense! The keynote of her, so it seemed to him. How strong and helpful it was, and yet, in another way, how deeply and passionately opposed to his spirit! Why, he could almost imagine Clare getting on well with his father. And when he reflected further, that, in all probability, his father would like Clare because she had "her wits about her," it seemed to him that the deepest level of disparagement had been reached. He smiled to himself a little cynically; then in a wild onrush came remorse at the injustice he had done to Helen. All the way back to Millstead he was grappling with it and making up his mind that he would be everlastingly kind to her in the future, and that, since she was as she was, he would not see Clare any more.

III

He found her, as he had more than half expected, sitting in the drawing-room at Lavery's, her feet bunched up in front of the fire and her hands clasping her knees. She was not reading or sewing or even crying; she was just sitting there in perfect stillness, thinking, thinking, thinking. He knew, as by instinct, that this was not a pose of hers; he knew that she had been sitting like that for a quarter, a half, perhaps a whole hour before his arrival; and that, if he had come later, she would probably have been waiting and thinking still. Something in her which he did not understand inclined her to brood, and to like brooding. As he entered the room and saw her thus, and as she gave one swift look behind her and then, seeing it was he, turned away again to resume her fireside brooding, a sudden excruciatingly sharp feeling of irritation rushed over him, swamping for the instant even his remorse: why was she so silent and aggrieved? If he had treated her badly, why did she mourn in such empty, terrible silence? Then remorse recovered its sway over him and her attitude seemed the simple and tremendous condemnation of himself.

He did not know how to begin; he wanted her to know how contrite he was, yet he dared not tell her his suspicion. Oh, if she had only the tact to treat him as if it had never happened, so that he in return could treat her as if it had never happened, and the unhappy memory of it all be speedily swept away! But he knew from the look on her that she could never do that.

He walked up to the back of her chair, put his hand on her shoulder, and said: "Helen!"

She shrugged her shoulders with a sudden gesture that made him take his hand away. She made no answer.

He blundered after a pause: "Helen, I'm so sorry I've been rather hard on you lately--it's all been a mistake, and I promise--"

"You've been down to see Clare!" she interrupted him, with deadly quietness, still watching the fire.

He started. Then he knew that he must lie, because he could never explain to her the circumstances in a way that she would not think unsatisfactory.

"Helen, I haven't!" he exclaimed, and his indignation sounded sincere, perhaps because his motive in lying was a pure one.

She made no answer to that.

He went on, more fervently: "I didn't see Clare, Helen! Whatever made you think that?--I just went for a walk along the Deepersdale road--I wanted some exercise, that was all!"

She laughed--an awful little coughing laugh.

"You went to see Clare," she persisted, turning round and, for the first time, looking him in the eyes. "I followed you, and I saw you go in Clare's house."

"You did?" he exclaimed, turning suddenly pale.

"Yes. Now what have you got to say?"

He was, rather to his own surprise, quite furious with her for having followed him. "I've simply got this to say," he answered, hotly. "You've done no good by following me. You've made me feel I can't trust you, and you've made yourself feel that you can't trust me. You'll never believe the true explanation of why I went to Clare--you'll go on suspecting all sorts of impossible things--you'll worry yourself to death over nothing--and as for me--well, whenever I go out alone I shall wonder if you're following a few hundred yards behind!"

Then she said, still with the same tragic brooding quietness: "You needn't fear, Kenneth. I'll never follow you. I didn't follow you to-night. I only said I did. I found out what I wanted to find out just as well by that, didn't I?"

He was dazed. He had never guessed that she could be so diabolically clever. He sank into a chair and shut his eyes, unable to speak. She went on, without the slightest inflexion in the maddening level of her voice: "I'm going to leave you, Kenneth. You want Clare, and I'm going to leave you to her. I won't have you when you want another woman."

He buried his head in his hands and muttered, in a voice husky with sobbing: "That's not true, Helen. I don't want Clare. I don't want any other woman. I only want you, Helen. Helen, you won't leave me, will you? Promise me you won't leave me, Helen. Helen, don't you--can't you believe me when I tell you I don't want Clare?"

Still she reiterated, like some curious, solemn litany: "I'm going to leave you, Kenneth. You don't really want me. It's Clare you want, not me. You'll be far happier with Clare. And I shall be far happier without you than with you when you're wanting Clare. I--I can't bear you to want Clare, Kenneth. I'd rather you--have her--than want her. So I've decided. I'm not angry with you. I'm just determined, that's all. I shall leave you and then you'll be free to do what you like."

Somehow, a feeling of overwhelming tiredness overspread him, so that for a short moment he felt almost inclined to acquiesce from mere lack of energy to do anything else. He felt sick as he stared at her. Then a curiously detached aloofness came into his attitude; he looked down on the situation a trifle cynically and thought: How dramatic! Something in him wanted to laugh, and something else in him wanted to cry; most of him wanted to kiss her and be comfortable and go to sleep; and nothing at all of him wanted to argue. He wondered just then if such a moment ever came to her as it came to him; a moment when he could have borne philosophically almost any blow, when all human issues seemed engulfed in the passionate desire to be let alone.

Yet some part of him that was automatic continued the argument. He pleaded with her, assured her of his deep and true love, poured infinite scorn on Clare and his relations with her, held up to view a rosy future at Lavery's in which he would live with Helen as in one long, idyllic dream. And as he sketched out this beautiful picture, his mind was ironically invaded by another one, which he did not show her, but which he felt to be more true: Lavery's in deep winter-time, with the wind and rain howling round the walls of it, and the bleak shivering corridors, and the desolation of the afternoons, and the cramped hostility of the Masters' Common-Room, and the red-tinted drawing-room at night, all full of shadows and silence and tragic monotony. And all the time he was picturing that in his mind he was telling her of Lavery's with the sun on it, and the jessamine, and the classrooms all full of the sunlit air, and love, like a queen, reigning over it all. The vision forced itself out; Helen saw it, but Speed could not. As he went on pleading with her he became enthusiastic, but it was an artistic enthusiasm; he was captivated by his own skill in persuasion. And whenever, for a moment, this interest in his own artistry waned, there came on him afresh the feeling of deep weariness, and a desire only to rest and sleep and be friends with everybody.

At last he persuaded her. It had taken from nine o'clock until midnight. He was utterly tired out when he had finished. Yet there seemed to be no tiredness in her, only a happiness that she could now take and caress him as her own. She could not understand how, now that they had made their reconciliation, he should not be eager to cement it by endearments. Instead of which he lit a cigarette and said that he was hungry.

While she busied herself preparing a small meal he found himself watching her continually as she moved about the room, and wondering, in the calmest and most aloof manner, whether he was really glad that he had won. Eventually he decided that he was. She was his wife and he loved her. If they were careful to avoid misunderstandings no doubt they would get along tolerably well in the future. The future! The vision came to him again of the term that was in front of him; a vision that was somehow frightening.

Yet, above all else, he was tired--dead tired.

The last thing she said to him that night was a soft, half-whimpered: "Kenneth, I believe you do want Clare."

He said sleepily, and without any fervour: "My dear, I assure you I don't."

And he fell asleep wondering very vaguely what it would be like to want Clare, and whether it would ever be possible for him to do so.