The passionate year

by James Hilton

VII

That was why, hearing the singing and shouting in the dormitories that night, Speed did not interfere. With happiness surging all around him how could he have the heart to curtail the happiness of others?—About half-past ten he went round distributing journey-money, and to each dormitory in turn he said farewell and wished a pleasant vacation. The juniors were scampering over one another's beds and pelting one another with pillows. Speed said merely: "If I were you fellows, I should get to sleep pretty soon: Hartopp will ring the bells at six, you know."

Then he went back into his own room, his room that would not be his any more, for next term he would be in Lavery's. Noisy and insincere as had been his protestations at the House Dinner about the superiority of School House over any other, there was yet a sense in which he felt deeply sorry to leave the place where he had been so happy and successful. He looked back in memory to that first evening of term, and remembered his first impression of the room assigned to him; then it had seemed to him lonely, forlorn, even a little dingy. Hardly a trace of that earliest aspect remained with it now. At eleven o'clock on the last night of term it glowed with the warmth of a friendly heart; it held out loving arms that made Speed, even amidst his joy, piteously sorry to leave it. The empty firegrate, in which he had never seen a fire, lured him with the vision of all the cosy winter nights that he had missed.

Outside it was moonlight again, as when, a month before, he had waited by the pavilion steps on the evening of the Speech Day. From his open lattice-window he could see the silver tide lapping against the walls and trees, the pale sea of the pitch on which there would be no more cricket, the roof and turret of the pavilion gleaming with liquid radiance. All was soft and silent, glossy beneath the high moon. It was as if everything had endured agelessly, as if the passing of a term were no more than the half-heard tick of a clock in the life of Millstead.

Leaning out of the window he heard a voice, boyish and sudden, in the junior dormitory below.

"I say, Bennett, are you going by the 8:22?"

An answer came indistinguishably, and then the curt command of the prefect imposing silence, silence which, reigned over by the moon and the sky of stars, lasted through the short summer night until dawn.

[BOOK II]

THE WINTER TERM

CHAPTER ONE
I

He breakfasted with Helen upon the first morning of the winter term, inaptly named because winter does not begin until the term is over. They had returned the evening before from a month's holiday in Cornwall and now they were making themselves a little self-consciously at home in the first-floor rooms that had been assigned to them in Lavery's. The room in which they breakfasted overlooked the main quadrangle; the silver coffee-pot on the table shimmered in the rays of the late summer sun.

Midway through the meal Burton, the porter at Lavery's, tapped at the door and brought in the letters and the Daily Telegraph.

Speed said: "Hullo, that's luck!—I was thinking I should have to run down the town to get my paper this morning."

Burton replied, with a hint of reproach in his voice: "No sir. It was sent up from Harrington's as usual, sir. They always begin on the first day of term, sir."

Speed nodded, curiously conscious of a thrill at the mention of the name Harrington. Something made him suddenly nervous, so that he said, boisterously, as if determined to show Burton at all costs that he was not afraid of him: "Oh, by the way, Burton, you might shut that window a little, will you?—there's a draught."

"Yes, sir," replied Burton, again with a hint of subdued reproachfulness in his tone. While he was shutting the window, moving about very softly and stealthily himself yet making a tremendous noise with everything that had to be done with his large clumsy hands, it was necessary for Speed and Helen to converse on casual and ordinary subjects.

Speed said: "I should think the ground's far too hard for rugger, Helen."

She answered, somberly: "Yes, I daresay it is. It's really summer still, isn't it?—And I'm so glad. I hate the winters."

"You hate the winters, eh?—Why's that?"

"It's so cold, and the pitches are all muddy, and there are horrid locks-up after dark. Oh, I hate Millstead in winter-time."

He said, musingly: "We must have big fires when the cold weather comes, anyway."

Then Burton departed, closing the door very delicately after him, and the conversation languished. Speed glanced vaguely through his correspondence. He was ever so slightly nervous. That month's honeymoon in Cornwall had passed like a rapt and cloudless vision, but ever beyond the horizon of it had been the thought of this return to Millstead for the winter term. How the return to a place where he had been so happy and of which he had such wonderful memories could have taken in his mind the semblance of an ordeal, was a question that baffled him entirely. He felt strangely and unaccountably shy of entering the Masters' Common-Room again, of meeting Clanwell and Ransome and Pritchard and the rest, of seeing once again all the well-known faces of the boys whose summer vacations had been spent so much less eventfully than his. And yet, as he sat at the breakfast-table and saw Helen opposite him, a strange warming happiness surged up within him and made him long for the initial ordeal to be over so that he could pass on to the pure and wonderful life ahead, that life in which Helen and Millstead would reign jointly and magnificently. Surely he could call himself blessed with the most amazing good fortune, to be happily married at the age of twenty-three and installed in just the position which, more than any other in the world, he had always coveted!—Consciousness of his supreme happiness made him quicken with the richest and most rapturous enthusiasm; he would, he decided in a sudden blinding moment, make Lavery's the finest of all the houses at Millstead; he would develop alike the work and the games and the moral tone until the fame of Lavery's spread far beyond its local boundaries and actually enhanced the reputation of Millstead itself. Such achievements were not, he knew, beyond the possibilities of an energetic housemaster, and he, young and full of enthusiasms, would be a living fount of energy. All the proud glory of life was before him, and in the fullness of that life there was nothing that he might not do if he chose.

All that day he was at the mercy alternately of his tumultuous dreams of the future and of a presaging nervousness of the imminent ordeals. In the morning he was occupied chiefly with clerical work, but in the afternoon, pleading a few errands in town, he took his bicycle out of the shed and promised Helen that he would not be gone longer than an hour or so. He felt a little sad to leave her, because he knew that with the very least encouragement she would have offered to come with him. Somehow, he would not have been pleased for her to do that; he felt acutely self-conscious, vaguely yet miserably apprehensive of trials that were in wait for him. In a few days, of course, everything would be all right.

He did not cycle into the town, but along the winding Millstead lane that led away from the houses and into the uplands around Parminters. The sun was glorious and warm, and the trees of that deep and heavy green that had not, so far, more than the faintest of autumnal tints in it. Along the lane twisting into the cleft of Parminters, memories assailed him at every yard. He had been so happy here—and here—and here; here he had laughed loudly at something she had said; here she had made one of her childish yet incomparably wise remarks. Those old serene days, those splendid flaming afternoons of the summer term, had been so sweet and exquisite and fragrantly memorable to him that he could not forbear to wonder if anything could ever be so lovely again.

Deep down beneath all the self-consciousness and apprehension and morbid researching of the past, he knew that he was richly and abundantly happy. He knew that she was still a child in his own mind; that life with her was dream-like as had been the rapt anticipation of it; that the dream, so far from marriage dispelling it, was enhanced by all the kindling intimacies that swung them both, as it were, into the same ethereal orbit. When he thought about it he came to the conclusion that their marriage must be the most wonderful marriage in the world. She was a child, a strange, winsome fairy-child, streaked with the most fitful and sombre passion that he had ever known. Nobody, perhaps, would guess that he and she were man and wife. The thought gratified his sense of the singularity of what had happened. At the Cornish hotel where they had stayed he had fancied that their identity as a honeymoon couple had not been guessed at all; he had thought, with many an inward chuckle, that people were supposing them to be mysteriously and romantically unwedded.

Time passed so slowly on that first day of the winter term. He rode back at the end of the afternoon with the wind behind him, swinging him in through the main gateway where he could see the windows of Lavery's pink in the rays of the setting sun. Lavery's!—Lavery's!—Throughout the day he had found himself repeating the name constantly, until the syllables lost all shred of meaning. Lavery's!—Lav-er-izz.... The sounds boomed in his ears as he entered the tiny drawing-room in which Helen was waiting for him with the tea almost ready. Tea time!—In a few hours the great machine of Millstead would have begun to pound its inexorable way. He felt, listening to the chiming of the quarters, as if he were standing in the engine-room of an ocean liner, watching the mighty shafts, now silent and motionless, that would so soon begin their solemn crashing movement.

But that evening, about eleven o'clock, all his fears and shynesses were over, and he felt the most deeply contented man in the world. A fire was flickering a cheerful glow over the tiny drawing-room; Helen had complained of chilliness so he had told Burton to light it. He was glad now that this had been done, for it enabled him to grapple with his dreams more comfortably. Helen sat in an armchair opposite to him on the other side of the fire; she was leaning forward with her head on her hands, so that the firelight shone wonderfully on her hair. He looked at her from time to time, magnificently in love with her, and always amazed that she belonged to him.

The long day of ordeals had passed by. He had dined that evening in the Masters' Common-Room, and everybody there had pressed round him in a chorus of eager congratulation. Afterwards he had toured his House, introducing himself to those of the prefects whom he had not already met, and strolling round the dormitories to shake hands informally with the rank and file. Then he had interviewed new boys (there were nineteen of them), and had distributed a few words of pastoral advice, concluding with the strict injunction that if they made tea in the basements they were on no account to throw the slops down the waste-pipes of the baths. Lastly of all, he had put his head inside each of the dormitories, at about half-past ten, to bestow a brisk but genial good-night.

So now, at eleven o'clock, rooted at last in everything that he most loved in the world, he could pause to gloat over his happiness. Here, in the snug firelit room, secret and rich with warm shadows; and there, down the short corridor into the bleak emptiness of the classrooms, was everything that his heart desired: Helen and Millstead: the two deities that held passionate sway over him.—Eleven began to chime on the school clock. The dormitories above were almost silent. She did not speak, did not look up once from the redness of the fire; she was often like that, silent with thoughts whose nature he could guess from the dark, tossing passion that shook her sometimes when, in the midst of such silences, she suddenly clung to him. She loved him more than ever he could have imagined: that, more perhaps than anything else, had been the surprise of that month in Cornwall.

"Eleven," he said, breaking the rapt silence.

She said, half humorously, half sadly: "Are you pleased with me?—Are you satisfied?—Do I quite come up to expectations?"

He started, looked towards her, and laughed. The laugh disturbed the silence of the room like the intrusion of something from millions of miles away. He made a humorous pretence of puzzling it out, as if it were a baffling problem, and said, finally, with mocking doubtfulness: "Well, on the whole, I think you do."

"If I had been on trial for a month you'd still keep me, then?" she went on, without moving her head out of her hands.

He answered, in the same vein as before: "If you could guarantee always to remain up to sample, I daresay I would."

She raised her head and gave him such a look as, if he had not learned to know it, would have made him think she was angry with him; it was sharp with blade-like eagerness, as if she were piercing through his attitude of jocularity.

Then, wondering why she did not smile when he was smiling, he put his arm round her and drew her burning lips to his. "Bedtime," he said, gaily, "for we've got to be up early in the morning."

Over about them as they clung together the spirit of Millstead, like a watchful friend, came suddenly close and intimate, and to Speed, opening his soul to it joyously, it appeared in the likeness of a golden-haired child, shy yet sombrely passionate—a wraith of a child that was just like Helen. Above all, they loved each other, these two, with a love that surrounded and enveloped all things in a magic haze: they were the perfect lovers. And over them the real corporeal Millstead brooded in constant magnificent calm.