Adrian Glynde (15 page)

“Certainly you could. It's … er … very … er … simple.” He paused, and then added: “And, like all very … er … simple things, it's … er … very … er …
difficult
. I will tell you something, Glynde, that I have no … er … no business to tell you. Dr. Yardley-Tritton could never … er … play,
play
you understand, that piece, even if he practised it for … er … for a hundred years.” He turned Donne's death mask upon Adrian. “You
see
, boy?” His kindly smile illuminated the mask. “You
see
?”

“Yes, sir,” said Adrian.

“But you, I think, with a little practise, will … er … play it. I'll play it through to you again.” He did so, and paused in his usual way when he had finished it. “Well,” he said after the pause, “it's … it's … er … it's … You
see
, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Adrian.

“Well, it's … er … it's a jewel. Take it and practise it.” He handed the music to Adrian.

So the term passed. After the small life at Waldo, this new life seemed to Adrian strenuous, full, packed with continually varying activities and emotions. There were the pleasures and drudgeries of school work. He hated mathematics and science: the hours spent over them were almost unbearable. But in classics, and English, and French he caught fugitive glimpses of something that he was looking for, something indefinable and ecstatic, which he found in Ronny Dakyn, in the music into which Old Hell was initiating him, in the thrilling abandonment of football.

His absorption in Ronny Dakyn resulted in a complete duality of attitude towards him. For Adrian cherished in
his mind an ideal Ronny, his greatest friend, who loved him as much as he himself loved Ronny, to the exclusion of everyone else. With this Ronny he would have long, happy, intimate talks. They would go about arm in arm, as the real Dakyn did with superior persons of his own standing; they would sit together all evening in a study from which Ellenger was for ever excluded, and they would spend the holidays alone together on some blessed island inaccessible to the rest of humanity.

Such was Adrian's secret Ronny, a being kept alive and credible in his mind by the bodily presence of Dakyn, that smart young man who sometimes presided over prep., who stood with the other prefects facing the rest of the house during prayers, and who occasionally dropped a kindly and condescending word or two to an adoring Adrian who blacked his shoes, brushed his clothes, swept out his study, and obeyed his lightest wish with grateful alacrity. For the first time for many years his heart had found a resting-place. When he had fixed it on his absent mother, he had found not satisfaction nor happiness, but only hunger, and, when the real mother came at last, disillusionment. But now his heart was fixed not on a vague hope, but on a human being, and although he still allowed comforting fantasies to lend what reality denied him, he felt blissfully secure; for having been so long denied all, he was content, supremely content, with little. His love was busy and warmly housed and he was too young and inexperienced to realise how insecure was his tenure. But, insecure or not, it gave him, while it lasted, just that basis which at the time he so urgently needed. It spurred him into games-playing, of which he had previously been afraid, and it enabled him to possess his soul humbly but stoically in the ceaseless, internecine rowdyism of Common-room, by which, shy and nervous as he
was, he would otherwise have been utterly cowed. Even as it was, the rowdyism harrowed him: but he endured it: he had his compensations.

The chief blot on his happiness was Ellenger. He hated him, not merely because Ellenger, with the bully's instinct, treated him harshly and contemptuously, but yet more because he invaded his paradise and came between him and Dakyn, and because—worse still—Dakyn obviously liked him. And when he learned one day just before the end of term, from a conversation between them which he overheard when preparing tea for them in the study, that Dakyn was to spend the latter part of the coming holidays with Ellenger, he was filled with a jealousy which poisoned his life for several days. He longed for Ellenger to leave Charminster, he longed for him to die. If hate could kill, Ellenger's days would certainly have been numbered.

Just as his infatuation had imprinted on Adrian's mind every detail of Dakyn's face and form, so had his hatred done with those of Ellenger. Every crease, every curve of Ellenger's face, the very hues and texture of its flesh, were engraved with horrible vividness on his mind's eye—the square, fleshy cheeks, mottled and grained with red; the smouldering brown eyes; the low brow fringed with lank black hair like the hair of a Japanese doll.

The days drew on towards the holidays: the last week had begun, and Adrian was divided against himself. He looked forward more eagerly than ever to release from school. How marvellous, how unbelievable to think that a week hence he would be at Yarn again. After this whirl of new experiences, it seemed more like a year than three months since he had seen Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob. How delicious to think that only a week hence he would be sitting in the evening in the comfortable peace of the drawing-room at Yarn instead of in
the exhausting and homeless riot of Common-room; eating the excellent Yarn food with clean silver, clean, sharp knives, snowy tablecloth and flowers on the table, instead of the rough fare, the dirty cloth, and saw-edged knives and bent-pronged forks of Taylor's. But across this delighted anticipation struck the haunting thought of separation from Dakyn. For five weeks Dakyn would have dropped out of his life. But not out of his thoughts. A hundred times a day he would think of him, and in bed at night when there was nothing else to interrupt him. Yes, at least he would have his thoughts; but thoughts would be a poor substitute for the bright, visible reality. And so he looked forward with equal delight and dread to the final morning.

When at last the eve of the holidays was at hand he saw nothing all day, as it happened, of Dakyn. Each time he went to the study, it chanced that Dakyn was not there, and when at last Adrian settled himself to read there in the desperate hope that Dakyn would come in, the hateful footsteps of Ellenger sounded in the passage, and Adrian, with black disappointment in his heart, fled disconsolate to Common-room. Could it possibly be that he would leave Charminster without a few last moments in the study with Ronny, moments which would probably, as so often, bring nothing but a casual cheerful phrase or two from Ronny and a shy answer from Adrian, but precious moments, for all that? Adrian caught a brief glimpse of him at prayers, and went miserable to bed.

Perhaps Dakyn would want him to do something for him next morning before they started, or even if not, surely he would send for him to say good-bye. But next morning came and there was no summons. Adrian had stubbornly set his heart on a last glimpse of Dakyn, a last word from him. It had become a sheer necessity to
his peace of mind. If he failed of these, he told himself, his whole holiday would be ruined.

When the moment to start for the station had almost arrived, he ran in despair to the study. What excuse he would make when he got there he did not know and in his misery he hardly cared. The door was half open. Timidly, with his heart in his mouth, he looked in. His eyes met the smouldering brown eyes of Ellenger, raised at the sound of his step from a bag in which he was packing something.

“I … I … I looked in,” Adrian stammered, “to see if Dakyn wanted me for anything.”

“I don't think so,” said Ellenger.

Adrian, crestfallen and forlorn, hesitated for a moment and then turned to go, casting a mute, helpless glance at his enemy.

To his amazement Ellenger's face was suddenly transformed, illuminated. “Good-bye,” he said, and for the first time there was no hostility in his voice. “I'll tell him you came.”

Adrian ran downstairs in astonishment. “Why, he might easily have been quite a decent sort of chap,” he thought to himself.

The rush to the station, the scramble for a seat in the special for Waterloo, the hubbub in the crowded carriage that persisted throughout the journey almost made Adrian forget his heartache. But as the train ran into Waterloo, it suddenly flared up inside him, a keen inner wound. “This is the end,” he thought. “I shan't see him now.”

On the platform, Aunt Clara, majestic and smiling, was waiting for him. She spotted him as he got out of the carriage. They walked together in the stream of boys and parents, towards the van, followed by a porter whom Aunt Clara, in her cool, practical way had secured before the train came in. They stood together on the
outskirts of the crowd that seethed about the luggage van, Adrian glancing anxiously among the crowd. But there was no sign of Ronny. The porter had found Adrian's portmanteau and they followed him to the barrier. As they stood together beside the portmanteau while their porter went to secure a cab, Adrian felt a smart tap on his shoulder, and, turning his head, saw Dakyn with Ellenger on the far side of him. They were already past him, but Dakyn was looking back, and now he waved his hand. “Good-bye, little man,” he shouted. “Have a good time.”

Adrian, getting into the cab, felt himself plunged in a warm ocean of happiness.

“Who is your handsome friend, Adrian?” Aunt Clara asked as they drove off.

“He's called Dakyn,” Adrian replied.

“He looks a nice fellow,” said Aunt Clara.

“He is,” said Adrian coolly and judicially; “quite.”

More than a fortnight before the beginning of the holidays Clara had written to her sister-in-law. She sat at the writing-desk in the morning-room at Yarn while Bob read the newspaper on the sofa near the window.

“I'm afraid we must ask her,” she said, “for Adrian's sake.”

“For Adrian's sake?” Bob looked up in surprise from the newspaper. “You'll get precious little thanks from Adrian for asking her.”

“I know that, my dear; but if we don't ask her, she may insist on his joining her somewhere else.”

“I don't think she will.”

“Neither do I. She will doubtless remember what happened when she insisted on his going with her to the Crowhursts. But still …!”

Bob chuckled. “Young monkey! You know, I should never have believed he had it in him.”

Clara smiled grimly. “Needs must,” she said, “when the devil drives. You might not have thought, either, that Minnie had it in her to be a first-rate educator of backward youth; and yet—in perfect innocence, it's true—she did more for Adrian last holidays than Waldo did in four years.”

“She taught him, you mean, to stand on his own feet.”

“Not only that. She also taught him to tread on her toes when she kicked his shins. No, I don't think Minnie will come. I hope not, because I've not had long enough yet to recover from her last visit to feel inclined for her
again so soon. But after all, what are we to do? Our position is equivocal.”

“Not at all. Adrian writes to say he's coming for the holidays, and what can we do but welcome him?”

Clara thought for a moment,” H … m. Yes!” she said. “That sounds simple. Unless, of course, Minnie writes to him and insists on his going somewhere else.”

“Well, Adrian would refuse.”

“Yes, in the way he refused last time. But this time he would probably flee not to Father, but to us here, and that would be extremely awkward.”

“It would if Minnie cut up rough, but not if she took it lying down as she did the Crowhurst business.”

“It would be awkward in either case, because, even though she took it lying down, she would bear us a grudge for it, and for Adrian's sake I don't want to get on the wrong side of Minnie.”

Bob burst out laughing. “That, Clara,” he said, “is very difficult for anyone to believe who had the privilege of overhearing one or two of your conversations with her last August.”

Clara smiled broadly. “There are times,” she said, “when my principles break down.”

“And the cat takes over?”

“Yes, the starved cat allows itself a square meal. But that's quite against my principles, and at the moment, my dear, I'm applying my principles. I think, in fact, that I'd better invite her.”

“Yes, I suppose you had.” Bob resumed his newspaper. Then he laid it down to add: “And don't let it be for nothing, Clara, that you're the daughter of a distinguished writer. Turn her out a cordial invitation which she will somehow feel unwilling to accept. Put your heart into it, my dear. I know I can trust you.”

Again he retired behind the newspaper, and Clara,
with eyebrows thoughtfully raised and the expression of a fastidious poet engaged upon a masterpiece, lifted her pen.

Apparently her labours were successful, since for a fortnight they produced no reply. Then she received a letter from Paris. She read it to Bob in the morning-room interjecting glosses of her own:

“
Dearest Clara, What will you think of me?
A dangerous question, my dear Minnie.
I received your letter in Ireland, where I was staying with the Trevises, and not a moment could I get to myself to write and thank you for your very kind invitation. We lived in a whirl, my dear; hunting, shooting, luncheons, and never less than twelve at dinner, not to mention bridge at all hours
. Alas, poor harassed Minnie!
I was to have left there on the 12th, but Sir George insisted on me staying another week, and I felt it would really be too bad to break up the party by refusing
. Beware, Bob, of the crushing responsibilities incurred by charm.
Now, as you see, I am here in Paris, I came over three days ago with Letty Finsbury, to do some shopping before I sail next month. The latest modes are simply incredible, my dear. I shall hardly dare to wear some of the dresses I have got. However, they will expect it of me in India, I suppose. They always rather look to me, you know, and I owe it to Archie not to fall short
. You see, Bob? A martyr to duty, as ever!
Once more, thank you for so kindly inviting me
. Pray don't mention it, Minnie. But, after all, you didn't, for a fortnight.
If I hadn't been so fearfully rushed, I need not say how delighted I should have been to accept. Best Xmas wishes to you and Bob
.