Adrian Glynde (21 page)

Adrian laughed, but even though he laughed he knew there was a good deal of truth under Aunt Clara's banter, and, in fact, even more than she knew. For the ferment of unexpressed feelings, to which he was at present a prey, found vent in the music he was writing, and so immediately, so nakedly, that at moments he could
hardly believe that the music did not betray him, that it would not communicate explicitly the feelings it so vividly symbolised for him. The work relieved him greatly, for the intellectual labour of expressing his pent feelings in artistic form brought a warm, secret satisfaction. It was not that this expression of his emotions mitigated their sharpness: it seemed rather that it increased it. But it also did something else: it transformed for him the idle drift of unavoidable but useless emotion into what seemed to him something positive, shapely, and valuable. In Bach, on the other hand—the stern intellectual Bach which he selected for his practising—he escaped for a while from all particular and personal feelings into a kind of mathematical ecstasy which was positively invigorating.

But in all three of these preoccupations of his, the anxieties about Ronny, the composition of the trio, and the practising of Bach, he was haunting worlds unknown to Yarn. During most of the hours he spent in his room he was quite unconscious of his surroundings: indeed, except during meals and the hours he spent with his aunt and uncle, he was more truly absent from the familiar house and garden than when, at Charminster, his thoughts often haunted them. He lived suspended in a sort of limbo of feelings not happy, not quite unhappy, but certainly deep, certainly acute. No wonder they thought him listless and moody. Clara was right: he was very like Bond Street on Sunday. His blinds were drawn, he presented closed shutters to the world, and the things within, the precious and the cheap, the beautiful, the ugly, the fantastic, were hidden in an artificial twilight.

As soon as he was back at Charminster Adrian's way of life changed completely. He no longer lived in those detached worlds he had haunted during the holidays. Old Heller had been amazed and delighted at the results of his assiduous piano practice at Yarn, but now Adrian practised barely enough to content him. He seemed to have lost most of his interest in music. The completed fragment of the trio was shut away in a drawer. All his windows were unshuttered: he looked outward, not inward. His whole existence was concentrated on Ronny. He became ingenious in making plots for seeing him: he discovered beforehand what his movements were to be and then planned his own so as to meet Ronny as if by accident. This patient and elaborate craftiness succeeded surprisingly: he saw much more of Ronny than ever before, and Ronny showed no signs of resenting it. No doubt he never suspected the craft that lay behind: if he had stopped to consider the matter at all he would probably have believed that it was the result of his own will and pleasure.

But despite the success of his schemes, Adrian was not happy. It was not merely the fast approaching separation from Ronny that disturbed him. Much more it was his peculiar relation to him. The increase in their intimacy only served to show him more clearly the unreality of his attitude. For he and Ronny had little in common. Ronny was as kind-hearted, as easy, as cheerful, and as charming as ever, but he was not interested
in most of the things that interested Adrian. He lived, it seemed, on the surface of life. He loved games and he loved people, but his love of people was diffused. He had neither the capacity nor the need for intimate friendship. He liked to be the centre of a moving crowd, or rather a revolving crowd, a crowd of familiar individuals with each of which, as in a game, he came into brief, frequent, and lively contact. But it was impossible not merely for Adrian but for anyone else at Charminster to get at him. He remained secluded and elusive behind his screen of cheerfulness and charm. By slow degrees Adrian had begun to realise this, but unhappily the realisation did not detach him from Ronny. His feelings for him remained stubbornly unaltered. The sight of him, the sound of his approaching footsteps, produced in him the same acute emotions as ever. An unexpected meeting with him thrilled him no less profoundly than in early days. It was almost, he sometimes felt, as if he were caught in a trap. If only he could escape, if only, by some sudden miracle, he could be cured, what a relief it would be. But what he could not do was deliberately to make the effort to escape, to impose upon himself, against the instinct of his heart, the long, dreary mental discipline which in the end might cure him. It is only when the heart is warmly housed that we can obey the stern and arduous dictates of the mind, for then heart and mind work in unison. But in Adrian heart and mind were at variance. If his mother, when he met her after all those years at Yarn, had fulfilled his cherished image of her—that image which, in the sharpness of his need, he had made out of forgetfulness of the worst of her and remembrance of the best—his heart, at that critical time, would perhaps have found safe anchorage, and never drifted rudderless, to strand at last on this bright but desert island. But for Adrian himself his predicament
was a mystery. He knew only that he was impaled on a dilemma. He suffered, and clung desperately to the cause of his suffering. His one thought now was to bind Ronny to him, so as to hold him even though they were separated at the end of the term. If he could get him to come and stay during the holidays, that, he felt, would form an additional bond. His grandfather had told him that he could always bring a friend when he went to him in the summer. He determined to invite Ronny. But no sooner had he conceived the idea than he began to feel how difficult it would be to do so. At the mere thought of it he was overcome with a kind of fear. It was a matter of such urgency, such tremendous importance, to him that it seemed to him that it would be impossible to control himself to an ordinary composure when asking it. He spent much time in planning beforehand what he would say so that he should avoid becoming confused and inarticulate under the stress of his feelings. He would begin by talking of his grandfather: that would be the best way. Ronny knew, of course, everybody at Taylor's knew, that his grandfather was Oliver Glynde. If they were talking of his grandfather it ought to be easy to suggest, as if the idea had just occurred to him, that Ronny should come to Abbot's Randale. But days passed, and weeks, and he could not bring himself to speak. When he tried to brace himself to do so, panic seized him, his heart beat furiously, and he took cowardly refuge in postponement.

But at last, when Ronny chanced to ask him where he was going to spend his holidays, he forced himself to snatch the opportunity. “I'm going to my grandfather's,” he said, and then he heard himself continuing in an absurdly tremulous voice: “It's … it's a ripping place. You … you wouldn't come there for a bit, I suppose?”

Ronny glanced at him. The question had sounded so off-hand that he hardly knew if it was meant. Adrian avoided his eyes. He was waiting in a dumb agony for the result of his immense daring.

“What, stay with you there, you mean?” Ronny asked.

“Yes,” said Adrian, his face suddenly reddening. “I wish you would.” His voice had a curious little break in it. His tongue and lips felt dry.

“It's awfully good of you, Little Man,” said Ronny, and for a moment Adrian's hopes were high. But they were instantly shattered. “But it couldn't be managed,” Ronny went on. “I've always such a lot of things on in the summer hols.”

“You couldn't manage a week even, or just a day or two?” Adrian faltered, and as he spoke the words he remembered that day two years ago when he had come upon Ellenger in the study doorway asking just what he was asking now, almost in the very words. In a moment he would be slinking miserably away as Ellenger had done, and perhaps the same mysterious estrangement would fall between him and Ronny. That memory extinguished his last spark of hope. He hardly heard Ronny's reply. Next moment Ronny had neatly changed the subject and Adrian dared not persist. He pulled himself together and swallowed his bitter disappointment with more grace than Ellenger had done. He even managed to reply cheerfully to Ronny's gay screen of chatter. When, ten minutes later, he left the study, Ronny rewarded his submissiveness.

“We'll be bound to meet later on in London or somewhere, Little Man,” he said. “I'm not going to lose sight of you.”

Adrian paused at the door. “And would you … perhaps … write sometimes?” he asked.

Ronny's brows contracted slightly. “Well … I'm a rotten correspondent, you know,” he said. Then his face cleared. “But if you write, I'll damn well have to answer, won't I?”

Adrian went out. The worst had happened: his scheme had failed, as he might have guessed, all the time, that it would. He sighed, but felt to his surprise that it was a sigh of relief. He was not, for some reason, as miserable as he ought to have been. Perhaps the relief brought by the end of his suspense, the feeling that he had at last got the thing off his chest, counteracted his disappointment. He had allowed it to prey on him and his mind had inflated it, day by day, into a matter of fantastic gravity. Now he was free of it. The blow had fallen and he felt little worse than before. As for the future, it was entirely vague. He hardly believed that Ronny once he had settled down elsewhere, would really want to see him. That was not in his nature.

For the brief remainder of the term Adrian lived from day to day; and in a flash, it seemed, the end of term came, Ronny vanished out of his life, and he found himself solitary at his grandfather's taking stern refuge in Bach and in work on the neglected trio. But he did not exist so wholly in Limbo as he had done at Yarn last Easter, for it was impossible to be in the same house as Oliver Glynde and remain entirely detached from life. The old man's company was as stimulating as ever, and it was now wonderfully healing to heart and mind. He felt melancholy but not empty, and he would have asked nothing better than to live on, day after day, as he was living at present, in a kind of emotional convalescence.

The only thing he dreaded now was his return to Charminster. He dreaded the emptiness that he would find there. If only he too could have left at the end of last term. But what excuse could he have offered to his
uncle and aunt and grandfather? He could have given no convincing pretext for his wish to be taken away so early; for he was not yet eighteen and was making excellent progress in everything expected of a schoolboy. No, he would have to go back and make the best of it.

During the twenty minutes wait at Wilmore Junction he went for a cup of tea to the refreshment-room. He liked the Wilmore refreshment-room: it was bare, ugly, old-fashioned, but it was also familiar and hospitable. And he liked the woman who had served there all these years. He and she had become friends. They said nothing but the most commonplace things during their brief meetings, but they were glad to meet. Perhaps he was flattered by her always recognising him, even though, more than once, a year had elapsed between their meetings, and by the obvious fact that she was always so pleased to see him. But it was not only that. He liked her plain, friendly face and her pleasant voice.

When he had gone and she had sat down once more to her knitting, she sighed to herself, for she had thought him looking unhappy. His eyes and his mouth—the sad pierrot's mouth—were the same as they had been when he had first come timidly into the refreshment-room as a little boy. Later he had grown to look happier and more self-reliant, but now the old look had returned. What could have happened, she wondered? But of course there was nothing she could do. Why, when you came to think of it, she hardly knew him, though his rare visits had come to mean so much to her.

An unusually large number of boys had left Taylor's at the end of the summer, and Adrian returned in the
autumn to find himself a prefect. The novelty of this, the change it brought into his life, his preliminary timidity, which however he successfully disguised and soon overcame, and the responsibility and importance of his new status, helped at first to distract his attention from the terrible emptiness of the place. But not for long. His life no longer had any centre. When he was in school or playing football or working at his music all was well, but when he returned to himself and there was no longer anything to distract his thoughts, a dull depression took hold of him and he moped in his study.

The jovial Phipps did his best to rouse him, and occasionally he was successful. When his attempts failed, he lost patience and gave Adrian a piece of his mind.

“The Lord knows what's come over you, Adrian. Why can't you pull yourself together, man? You never used to be like this. Being with you nowaday's as bad as being at a blooming funeral.”

To himself Adrian admitted that Phipps was right. It was not as if all this moping did the slightest good, whereas to pull himself together and do his best to shake himself free of his obsession could not very well make him more miserable than he was already, and might in the end make him happier. But it would be, while it lasted, a thankless job and he felt that he had not the energy to try.

But in the end he did try. He had not yet written to Ronny nor had he heard from him, and now he refrained from writing. He even refrained, so far as he could, from thinking of him. He resumed the string trio, working away with pages of music manuscript spread all over his study table, to the astonishment of Phipps and his other friends. Mr. Heller was pleased to find that his last term's neglect of music was at an end. He practised
furiously now, so that, except when he was playing games or carrying out his duties as prefect, his friends saw almost nothing of him. When they did, they found him touchy and preoccupied: they could not make out what had come over him. It was only when he played games that they saw in him the Glynde they knew, for then he threw off his gloom and, it seemed, concentrated all his energies into those moments. He played football with a frenzied absorption that astonished them. Then, it seemed to him, he got to grips with something, something in himself which he exorcised in a fury of physical action. He played for Taylor's now, and was, in fact, easily their best man, and it was almost certain that, when a vacancy occurred, he would play for the school. Even when the game was over he was, for a while, astonishingly, boisterously cheerful. But this cheerfulness soon exhausted itself and he plunged again into his black mood. There were times when he sickened even of music, but not for long. The sheer mastery of old Heller's playing always drove away his gloom in the end; and when he himself played, the physical exercise soon released his feelings. But he wearied of his attempts at composition and gave up work on the trio.