She interrupted him quickly with: "Mr. Speed, you'd better not ask me what I think. You're far more subtle in understanding people than I am, and it won't take you long to discover what Helen thinks of you if you set about with the intention.... Those sketch-blocks you ordered haven't come in yet.... Well, good afternoon!"
Another customer had entered the shop, so that all he could do was to return a rather dazed "Good afternoon" and emerge into the blazing High Street. He walked back to the school in a state of not unpleasant puzzlement.
II
The term progressed, and towards the end of May occurred the death of Sir Huntly Polk, Bart., Chairman of the Governors of Millstead School. This would not have in any way affected Speed (who had never even met Sir Huntly) had not a Memorial Service been arranged at which he was to play Chopin's Funeral March on the chapel organ. It was a decent modern instrument, operated usually by Raggs, the visiting organist, who combined a past reputation of great splendour with a present passion for the vox humana stop; but Speed sometimes took the place of Raggs when Raggs wanted time off. And at the time fixed for the Sir Huntly Polk Memorial Service Raggs was adjudicating with great solemnity at a Northern musical festival.
Speed was not a particularly good organist, and it was only reluctantly that he undertook Raggs' duty for him. For one thing, he was always slightly nervous of doing things in public. And for another thing, he would have to practice a great deal in order to prepare himself for the occasion, and he had neither the time nor the inclination for hours of practice. However, when the Head said: "I know I can—um, yes—rely upon you, Mr. Speed," Speed knew that there was no way out of it. Besides, he was feeling his way in the school with marvellous ease and accuracy, and each new duty undertaken by special request increased and improved his prestige.
After a few days' trial he found it was rather pleasant to climb the ladder to the organ-loft amid the rich cool dusk of the chapel, switch on the buzzing motor that operated the electric power, and play, not only Chopin's Funeral March but anything else he liked. Often he would merely improvise, beginning with a simple theme announced on single notes, and broadening and loudening into climax. Always as he played he could see the shafts of sunlight falling amidst the dusty pews, the many-coloured glitter of the stained-glass in the oriel window, and in an opaque haze in the distance the white cavern of the chapel entrance beyond which all was light and sunshine. The whole effect, serene and tranquillising, hardly stirred him to any distinctly religious emotion, but it set up in him acutely that emotional sensitiveness to things secret and unseen, that insurgent consciousness, clear as the sky, yet impossible to translate into words, of deep wells of meaning beneath all the froth and commotion of his five passionate senses.
There was a mirror just above the level of his eyes as he sat at the keyboard, a mirror by means of which he could keep a casual eye on the pulpit and choir-stalls and the one or two front pews. And one golden afternoon as he was playing the adagio movement out of Beethoven's "Sonata Pathétique," a stray side-glance into the mirror showed him that he had an audience—of one. She was sitting at the end of the front pew of all, nearest the lectern; she was listening, very simply and unspectacularly. Speed's first impulse was to stop; his second to switch off from the "Sonata Pathétique" into something more blatantly dramatic. He had, with the first kindling warmth of the sensation of seeing her, a passionate longing to touch somehow her emotions, or, if he could not do that, to stir her sentimentality, at any rate; he would have played the most saccharine picture-palace trash, with vox humana and tremolo stops combined, if he had thought that by doing so he could fill her eyes. Third thoughts, however, better than either the second or first, told him that he had better finish the adagio movement of the Sonata before betraying the fact that he knew she was present. He did so accordingly, playing rather well; then, when the last echoes had died away, he swung his legs over the bench and addressed her. He said, in a conversational tone that sounded rather incongruous in its surroundings: "Good afternoon, Miss Ervine!"
She looked up, evidently startled, and answered, with a half-smile: "Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Speed."
He went on: "I hope I haven't bored you. Is there anything in particular you'd like me to play to you?"
She walked out of the pew and along the tiled arena between the choir-stalls to a point where she stood gazing directly up at him. The organ was on the south side of the choir, perched rather precipitously in an overhead chamber that looked down on to the rest of the chapel rather as a bay-window looks on to a street. To Speed, as he saw her, the situation seemed somewhat like the balcony scene with the positions of Romeo and Juliet reversed. And never, he thought, had she looked so beautiful as she did then, with her head poised at an upward angle as if in mute and delicate appeal, and her arms limply at her side, motionless and inconspicuous, as though all the meaning and significance of her were flung upwards into the single soaring glance of her eyes. A shaft of sunlight, filtered through the crimson of an apostle's robe, struck her hair and kindled it at once into flame; her eyes, blue and laughing, gazed heavenwards with a look of matchless tranquillity. She might have been a saint, come to life out of the sun-drenched stained-glass.