"My dear, I—um—I assure you——"
He heard footsteps approaching along the outside corridor and feared that it might be people coming to see the Head. In that case they would pull open the outer door and find him eavesdropping. That would never do. He quietly pushed the outer door and emerged into the corridor. A small boy, seeing him, asked timidly: "Is the Head in, sir?" Speed replied grimly: "Yes, he's in, but he's busy at present."
After all, he had heard enough. Behind the Head, ponderous and archaic, stood now the sinister figure of Mrs. Ervine, mistress of malevolent intrigue. In a curious half-humorous, half-contemptuous sense, he felt sorry for the Head. Poor devil!—everlastingly chained to Millstead, always working the solemn, rhythmic treadmill, with a wife beside him as sharp as a knife-edge.... Speed walked across to Lavery's, pale-faced and smiling.
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?"