The passionate year

by James Hilton

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.