II
The Annual Athletic Sports.
It was raining hard. He stood by the tape, stopwatch in hand, distributing measured encouragement and congratulation, and fulfilling his allotted rôle of timekeeper. "Well run, Herbert," he managed to say with a show of interest. "Not bad, indeed, sir ... eleven and two-fifths seconds." ... "Well done, Roberts.... Hard luck, Hearnshaw—pity you didn't sprint harder at the finish, eh? ... Herbert first, Roberts second, Hearnshaw third."
The grass oozed with water and the cinder-track with blackish slime; he shivered as he stood, and whenever he stooped the water fell over the brim of his hat and blurred the print on his sports-programme. It was hard to distinguish rain from perspiration on the faces of the runners. The bicycles used in the slow-bicycle race lay in a dripping and rusting pile against a tree-trunk; crystal raindrops hung despairingly from the out-stretched tape. There seemed something unnecessarily, gratuitously, even fatuously dismal about the entire procedure; the weight of dismalness pressed heavily on him—heavily—heavily—and more heavily as the afternoon crawled by. Yet he gave a ghastly smile as he marked a wet note-book with a wet copying pencil and exclaimed: "Well run, Lister Secundus. Four minutes and forty-two and a fifth seconds.... Next race, please. All candidates for the Quarter-Mile Handicap. First Heat.... Answer please.... Arnold, Asplin, Brooks, Carmichael, Cavendish, Cawstone, Primus, Felling, Fyfield...."
But at last there came the end of the dreary afternoon, when grey dusk began to fall somberly upon a grey world, when the last race had been mournfully held, and his outdoor work was over. Mechanically he was collecting into a pile the various impedimenta of the obstacle race; he was alone, for the small, dripping crowd of sight-seers had gone over to the other side of the pavilion to witness the putting of the weight. Pritchard's job, he reflected. Pritchard's staccato tenor voice rose above the murmur: "Thirty-eight feet four inches.... Excellent, Robbins...." And then the scrape of the spade smoothing over the soft, displaced mud, a sound that seemed to Speed to strike the note of utter and inextinguishable misery.
Old Millstead bells began to chime the hour of five o'clock.
And then a voice quite near him said: "Well, Mr. Speed?"
He knew that voice. He turned round sharply. Clare!
Never did he forget the look of her at that moment. He thought afterwards (though it could not have been more than imagination) that as she spoke the downfalling rain increased to a torrent; he saw her cheeks, pink and shining, and the water glistening on the edges of her hair. She wore a long mackintosh that reached almost to her heels, and a sou'wester pulled over her ears and forehead. But the poise of her as she stood, so exquisitely serene with the rain beating down upon her, struck some secret chord in his being which till that moment had been dumb.
He dropped the sacks into a pool of water and stared at her in wistful astonishment.
"You've dropped your things," she said.
He was staring at her so intently that he seemed hardly to comprehend her words. The chord in him that had been struck hurt curiously, like a muscle long unused. When at last his eyes fell to the sopping bundle at his feet he just shrugged his shoulders and muttered: "Oh, they don't matter. I'll leave them." Then, recollecting that he had not yet given her any greeting, he made some conventional remark about the weather.
Then she made another conventional remark about the weather.
Then he said, curiously: "We don't see so much of each other nowadays, do we?"
To which she replied: "No. I wonder why? Are they overworking you?"
"Not that," he answered.
"Then I won't guess any other reasons."
He said jokingly: "I shall come down to the town and give you another of those surprise visits one of these evenings."
The crowd were returning from watching the putting of the weight. She made to leave him, saying as she did so: "Yes, do. You like a talk, don't you?"
"Rather!" he exclaimed, almost boyishly, as she went away.
Almost boyishly! Even a moment of her made a difference in him.