Well, anyway, one thing was comforting; he was getting along much better with Helen. They had not had any of those dreadful, pathetic scenes for over a fortnight. His dreams of happiness were gone; it was enough if he succeeded in staving off the misery. As he entered the drawing-room Helen ran forward to meet him and kissed him fervently. "The first night of our new term," she said, but the mention only gave a leap to his anxieties. But he returned her embrace, willing to extract what satisfaction he could from mere physical passion.
II
An hour later he was dining in the Masters' Common-Room. He would have avoided the ordeal but for the unwritten law which ordained that even the housemasters should be present on the first night of term. Not that there was anything ceremonial about the proceedings. Nothing happened that did not always happen, except the handshaking and the disposition to talk more volubly than usual. Potter arched his long mottled neck in between each pair of diners in exactly the same manner as heretofore; there was the same unchanged menu of vegetable soup, undercooked meat, and a very small tart on a very large plate.
But to Speed it seemed indeed as if everything was changed. The room seemed different; seemed darker, gloomier, more chronically insufferable; Potter's sibilant, cat-like stealthiness took on a degree of sinisterness that made Speed long to fight him and knock him down, soup-plates and all; the food tasted reminiscently of all the vaguely uncomfortable things he had ever known. But it was in the faces of the men around him that he detected the greatest change of all. He thought they were all hating him. He caught their eyes glancing upon him malevolently; he thought that when they spoke to him it was with some subtle desire to insult him; he thought also, that when they were silent it was because they were ignoring him deliberately. The mild distaste he had had for some of them, right from the time of first meeting, now flamed up into the most virulent and venomous of hatreds. And even Clanwell, whom he had always liked exceedingly, he suspected ever so slightly at first, though in a little while he liked him as much as ever, and more perhaps, because he liked the others so little.
Pritchard he detested. Pritchard enquired about his holiday, how and where he had spent it, and whether he had had a good time; also if Mrs. Speed were quite well, and how had she liked the visit to Beachings Over. Somehow, the news had spread that he had taken Helen to spend Christmas at his parents' house. He wondered in what way, but felt too angry to enquire. Pritchard's questions stung him to silent, bottled-up fury; he answered in monosyllables.
"Friend Speed has the air of a thoughtful man," remarked Ransome in his oblique, half-sarcastic way. And Speed smiled at this, not because it amused him at all, but because Ransome possessed personality which submerged to some extent his own.
Finally, when Clanwell asked him up to coffee he declined, courteously, but with a touch of unboyish reserve which he had never previously exhibited in his relations with Clanwell. "I've got such a lot of work at Lavery's," he pleaded. "Another night, Clanwell...."
And as he walked across the quadrangle at half-past eight he heard again those curious sounds that had thrilled him so often before, those sounds that told him that Millstead had come to life again. The tall blocks of Milner's and Lavery's were cliffs of yellow brillance, from which great slanting shafts of light fell away to form a patchwork on the quadrangle. He heard again the chorus of voices in the dormitories, the tinkle of crockery in the basement studies, the swish of water into the baths, the babel of miscellaneous busyness. He saw faces peering out of the high windows, and heard voices calling to one another across the dark gulf between the two houses. It did not thrill him now, or rather, it did not thrill him with the beauty of it; it was a thrill of terror, if a thrill at all, which came to him. And he climbed up the flight of steps that led to the main door of Lavery's and was almost afraid to ring the bell of his own house.
Burton came, shambling along with his unhappy feet and beaming—positively beaming—because it was the beginning of the term.
"Once again, sir," he said, mouthing, as he admitted Speed. He jangled his huge keys in his hand as if he were a stage jailer in a stage prison. "I don't like the 'ockey term myself, sir, but I'd rather have any term than the 'olidays."