III
Speed was always inclined to drop out of conversations that were proceeding well enough without him. In a few moments Helen and Clare were chatting together exactly as if he had not been present. He did not mind; he was rather glad, in fact, because it relieved him from the task of mastering his nervousness. He felt too, what he always felt when Helen was talking to another woman; a feeling that women as a sex were hostile to men, and that when they were together there was a sort of secret freemasonry between them which enforced a rigid and almost contemptuous attitude towards the other sex. Nothing in Clare's manner encouraged this belief, but Helen's side of the conversation was a distinct suggestion of it. Not that anything said or discussed was inimical to him; merely that whenever the conversation came near to a point at which he might naturally have begun to take part in it, Helen seemed somehow to get hold of it by the neck and pull it out of his reach. And Clare was quite impassive, allowing Helen to do just what she liked. These were Speed's perhaps exaggerated impressions as he sat very uncomfortably in the armchair, almost frightened to move lest movement on his part might be wrongly interpreted as irritation, fear, or boredom. When he felt uncomfortable his discomfort was always added to by a usually groundless fear that other people were noticing it and speculating as to its reason.
At six the bell rang for school tea in the dining-hall, and this was his week to superintend that function. Most mercifully then he was permitted to leave the red-glowing drawing-room and scamper across the rain-swept quadrangle. "Sorry I must leave you," he said, hastily, rising from his chair. Helen said, as if her confirmation were essential before his words could be believed: "It's his week for reading grace, you know."
"And after that I've got some youngsters with piano-lessons," he said, snatching up his gown and, in his nervousness, putting it on wrong side out. "So I'll say good-bye, Miss Harrington."
He shook hands with her and escaped into the cold rain. It was over a hundred yards to the dining-hall, and with the rain slanting down in torrential gusts he was almost drenched during the few seconds' run. Somehow, the bare, bleak dining-hall, draughty and fireless and lit with flaring gas-jets, seemed to him exhilaratingly cheerful as he gazed down upon it from the Master's rostrum at the end. He leaned his arms over the edge of the lectern, watching the boys as they streamed in noisily, with muddy boots and turned-up collars and wet ruddy cheeks. The long tables, loaded with smeared jam-pots and towers of bread-slices and tins of fruit jaggedly opened, seemed, in their teeming, careless ugliness, immensely real and joyous: there was a simplicity too, an almost mathematical simplicity, in the photographs of all the rugger fifteens and cricket and hockey elevens that adorned the green-distempered walls. The photographs were complete for the last thirty-eight years; therefore there would be four hundred and eighteen plus four hundred and eighteen plus five hundred and seventy separate faces upon the walls. Total: one thousand four hundred and six.... Speed never thought of it except when he stood on the rostrum waiting to read grace, and as he was not good at mental arithmetic he always had a misgiving that he had calculated wrongly, and so would go over it again multiplying with his brain while his eyes were on the clock. And this evening his mind, once enslaved by the numerical fascination of the photographs, obtained no release until a stamping of feet at the far end of the hall awakened him to the realisation that it was time he said grace. He had been dreaming. Silly of him to stand there on the rostrum openly and obviously dreaming before the eyes of all Millstead! He blushed slightly, smiled more slightly still, and gave the knob of the hand-bell a vigorous punch. Clatter of forms and shuffling of feet as all Millstead rose.... "For these and all His mercies the Lord's name we praise...." About the utterance of the word "mercies," conversation, prohibited before grace, began to murmur from one end of the room to the other; the final "praise," hardly audible even to Speed himself, was engulfed in a mighty swelling of hundreds of unleashed voices, clumping of feet, clattering of forms, banging of plates, shrill appeals for one thing and another, and general pandemonium amidst which, Speed, picking his way amongst the groups of servants, made his escape.
How strange was Millstead to-night, he thought, as he made his way along the covered cloisters to the music-rooms. The rain had slackened somewhat, but the wind was still high and shrieking; the floor of the cloisters, wet from hundreds of muddy boots, shone greasily in the rays of the wind-blown lamps. Over the darkness of the quadrangle he could see Lavery's rising like a tall cliff at the other side of an ocean; and the dull red square that was the window of his own drawing-room. Had Clare gone?—Clare! It was unfortunate, perhaps, that he had called her Clare in his excitement; unfortunate because she might think he had done it deliberately with a view to deepening the nature of their friendship. That was his only reason for thinking it unfortunate.
Down in the dark vaults beneath the Big Hall, wherein the piano-rooms were situated, he found Porritt Secundus waiting for him. Porritt was in Lavery's, and therefore Speed was more than ordinarily interested in him.
"Do you have to miss your tea in order to have a lesson at this hour?" Speed asked, putting his hand in a friendly way on Porritt's shoulder, as he guided him through the gloomy corridor into the single room where a small light was showing.
Porritt replied: "I didn't to-day, sir. Smallwood asked me to tea with him."
Speed's hand dropped from Porritt's shoulder as if it had been shot away. His imagination, fanned into sudden perceptivity, detected in the boy's voice a touch of—of what? Impertinence? Hardly, and yet surely a boy could be impertinent without saying anything that was in itself impertinent.... Porritt had been to tea with Smallwood. And Smallwood was Speed's inveterate enemy, as the latter well knew. Was it possible that Smallwood was adopting a methodical policy of setting the Juniors against him? Possibilities invaded Speed's mind in a scorching torrent. Moments afterwards, when he had regained composure, it occurred to him that it was the habit of prefects to invite their Juniors to tea occasionally, and that it was perfectly natural that Porritt, so recently the guest of the Olympian Smallwood, should be eager to tell people about it.