The passionate year

by James Hilton

I

"BEACHINGS OVER, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32. Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles."

So ran the inscription on Lady Speed's opulent bluish notepaper. The house was an old one, unobtrusively modernised, with about a half-mile of upland carriage-drive leading to the portico. As Helen saw it from the window of the closed Daimler that had met them at Framlingay station, her admiration secured momentary advantage of her nervousness.

In another moment Speed was introducing her to his mother.

Lady Speed was undoubtedly a fine woman. "Fine" was exactly the right word for her, for she was just a little too elderly to be called beautiful and perhaps too tall ever to have been called pretty. Though she was upright and clear-skinned and finely-featured, and although the two decades of her married life had seemed to leave very little conspicuous impression on her, yet there was a sense, perhaps, in which she looked her age; it might have been guessed rightly as between forty and fifty. She had blue eyes of that distinctively English hue that might almost be the result of gazing continually upon miles and miles of rolling English landscape; and her nose, still attractively retroussé, though without a great deal of the pertness it must have had in her youth, held just enough of patricianly bearing to enable her to manage competently the twenty odd domestics whose labours combined to make Beachings Over habitable.

She kissed Helen warmly. "My dear, I'm so pleased to meet you. But you'll have to rough it along with us, you know—I'm afraid we don't live at all in style. We're just ordinary country folks, that's all.... And when you've had your lunch and got refreshed I must take you over the house and show you everything...."

Speed laughed and said: "Mother always tells visitors that they've got to rough it. But there's nothing to rough. I wonder what she'd say if she had to live three months at Lavery's."

"Lavery's?" said Lady Speed, uncomprehendingly.

"Lavery's is the name of my House at Millstead. I was made housemaster of it at the beginning of the term." He spoke a little proudly.

"Oh, yes, I seem to know the name. I believe your father was mentioning something about it to me once, but I hardly remember—"

"But how on earth did he know anything about it? I never wrote telling him."

"Well, I expect he heard it from somebody.... I really couldn't tell you exactly.... I've had a most awful morning before you came—had to dismiss one of the maids—she'd stolen a thermos-flask. So ungrateful of her, because I'd have given it to her if she'd only asked me for it. One of my best maids, she was."

After lunch Richard arrived. Richard was Speed's younger brother, on vacation from school; a pleasant-faced, rather ordinary youngster, obviously prepared to enter the soap-boiling industry as soon as he left school. In the afternoon Richard conducted the pair of them round the grounds and outbuildings, showing them the new Italian garden and the pergola and the new sunken lawn and the clock-tower built over the garage and the new gas-engine to work the electric light plant and the new pavilion alongside the rubble tennis courts and the new wing of the servants' quarters that "dad" was "throwing out" from the end of the old coach-house. Then, when they returned indoors, Lady Speed was ready to conduct them over the interior and show them the panelled bed-rooms and the lacquered cabinets in the music-room and the bathroom with a solid silver bath and the gramophone worked by electricity and the wonderful old-fashioned bureau that somebody had offered to buy off "dad" for fifteen hundred guineas.

"Visitors always have to go through it," said Speed, when his mother had left them. "Personally I'm never the least bit impressed, and I can't understand anyone else being it."

Helen answered, rather doubtfully: "But it's a lovely house, Kenneth, isn't it? I'd no idea your people were like this."

"Like what?"

"So—so well-off."

"Oh, then the display has impressed you?" He laughed and said, quietly: "I'd rather have our own little place at Lavery's, wouldn't you?"

While he was saying it he felt: Yes, I'd rather have it, no doubt, but to be there now would make me utterly miserable.

She replied softly: "Yes, because it's our own."

He pondered a moment and then said: "Yes, I suppose that's one of the reasons why I would."

After a pleasant tea in the library he took Helen into the music-room, where he played Chopin diligently for half-an-hour and then, by special request of Richard, ran over some of the latest revue songs. Towards seven o'clock Lady Speed sailed in to remind Richard that it was getting near dinner-time. "I wish you'd run upstairs and change your clothes, dear—you know father doesn't like you to come in to dinner in tweeds.... You know," she went on, turning to Helen, "Charles isn't a bit fussy—none of us trouble to really dress for dinner, except when we're in town—only—only you have to put a limit somewhere, haven't you?"

As the hour for dinner approached it seemed as if a certain mysteriously incalculable imminence were in the air, as if the whole world of Beachings Over were steeling itself in readiness for some searching and stupendous test of its worth. It was, indeed, ten minutes past eight when the sound of a motor-horn was heard in the far distance. "That's Edwards," cried Lady Speed, apprehensively. "He always sounds his horn to let us know.... Now, Dick dear, don't let him know we've been waiting for him—you know how he hates to think he's late...."

And in another moment a gruff voice in the hall could be heard dismissing the chauffeur with instructions for the morrow. "Ten-thirty sharp, Edwards. The Daimler if it's wet. Gotter go over and see Woffenheimer."

And in yet another moment Lady Speed was rushing forward with an eager, wifely kiss. "You aren't late, Charles. All the clocks are a little fast.... Kenneth has come ... and this ..." she spoke a trifle nervously ... "this is Helen...."

Sir Charles distributed a gruff nod to the assembly, afterwards holding out his hand to be shaken. "Ahdedoo, Kenneth, my lad.... How are you? Still kicking eh? ... Ahdedoo, Helen ... don't mind me calling you Helen, do you? Well, Richard, my lad...."

A bald-headed, moustached, white-spatted, morning-coated man, Sir Charles Speed.

Dinner opened in an atmosphere of gloomy silence. Lady Speed kept inaugurating conversations that petered out into a stillness that was broken only by Sir Charles' morose ingurgitation of soup. Something was obviously amiss with him. Over the entrée it came out.

"Had to sack one of the foremen to-day."

Lady Speed looked up with an appropriate gesture of horror and indignation. "And I had to dismiss one of my maids too! What a curious coincidence! How ungrateful people are!"

"Sneaking timber out of the woodyard," continued Sir Charles, apparently without the least interest in his wife's adventure with the maid.

But with the trouble of the sacked foreman off his chest Sir Charles seemed considerably relieved, though his gloom returned when Richard had the misfortune to refer to one of the "fellows" at his school as "no class at all—an absolute outsider." "See here, my lad," exclaimed Sir Charles, holding up his fork with a peach on the end of it, "don't you ever let me hear you talking that sort of nonsense! Don't you forget that I started life as an office-boy cleaning out ink-wells!" Richard flushed deeply and Lady Speed looked rather uncomfortable. "Don't you forget it," added Sir Charles, mouthing characteristically, and it was clear that he was speaking principally for the benefit of Helen. "I don't want people to think I am what I'm not. If I hadn't been lucky—and—and" he seemed to experience a difficulty in choosing the right adjective—"and smart—smart, mind—I might have been still cleaning out ink-wells. See?" He filled up his glass with port and for a moment there was sultry silence again. Eventually, he licked his lips and broke it. "You know," turning to address Kenneth, "it's all this education that's at the root of the trouble. Makes the workers too big for their shoes, as often as not.... Mind you, I'm a democrat, I am. Can't abide snobbery at any price. But I don't believe in all this education business. I paid for you at Cambridge and what's it done for you? You go an' get a job in some stuffy little school or other—salary about two hundred a year—and God knows how long you'd stay there without a promotion if I hadn't given somebody the tip to shove you up!"

"What's that?" Kenneth exclaimed, almost under his breath.

Sir Charles appeared not to have heard the interruption. He went on, warming to his subject and addressing an imaginary disputant: "No, sir, I do not believe in what is termed Education in this country. It don't help a man to rise if he hasn't got it in him.... Why, look at me! I got on without education. Don't you suppose other lads, if they're smart enough, can do the same? Don't you think I'm an example of what a man can become when he's had no education?"

The younger Speed nodded. The argument was irrefutable.