The Passionate Year (23 page)

The thought had not been in his mind before. But now he was at the mercy
of it; it invaded him; after all, why shouldn’t he visit Clare? Furthermore,
what right had Helen to stop him? He put on his hat and coat in secret
tingling excitement; he would go down into the village and visit Clare.
Curious that he hadn’t thought of it before! Helen had simply no
right
to object. And as he turned his mind to all the suspicions that had so lately
crowded into it, he felt that he was abundantly justified in visiting a
friend of his, even if his wife were foolishly jealous of her.

“Back about eight,” he repeated, as he opened the door to go out. Somehow,
he wanted to kiss her. He had always kissed her before going out from
Lavery’s. But now, since she made no reply to his remark, presumably she did
not expect it.

The Millstead road was black as jet, for the moon was hidden
behind the thickest of clouds. It was just beginning to freeze, and as he
strode along the path by the school railings he thought of those evenings in
the winter term when he had seen Clare home after the concert rehearsals.
Somehow, all that seemed ages ago. The interlude at Beachings Over had given
all the previous term the perspective of immense distance; he felt as if he
had been housemaster at Lavery’s for years, as if he had been married to
Helen for years, and as if Clare were a friend whom he had known long years
ago and had lost sight of since.

As he reached the High Street he began to feel nervous. After all, Clare
might not want to see him. He remembered vaguely their last interview and the
snub she had given him. He looked further back and remembered the first time
he had ever seen her; that dinner at the Head’s house on the first evening of
the summer term…

But he could not help being nervous. He tried to think that what he was
doing was something perfectly natural and ordinary; that he was just paying a
call on a friend as anybody might have done on a return from a holiday. He
was angry with himself for getting so excited about the business. And when he
rang the bell of the side-door next to the shop he had the distinct hope that
she would not be in.

But she was in.

She came to the door herself, and it was so dark outside that she could
not see him. “Who is it?” she asked, and he replied, rather fatuously
expecting her to recognise his voice immediately: “Me. I, hope I’m not
disturbing you.”

She answered, in that characteristically unafraid way of hers: “I’m sure I
don’t know in the least who you are. Will you tell me your name?”

Then he said, rather embarrassedly: “Speed, my name is.”

“Oh?”

Such a strange surprised little “Oh?” He could not see her any more than
she could see him, but he knew that she was startled.

“Am I disturbing you?” he went on.

“Oh, no. You’d better come inside. There’s nobody in except myself, so I
warn you.”

“Warn me of what?”

“Of the conventions you are breaking by coming in.”

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

“Oh, don’t trouble about me. It’s yourself you must think about.”

“Very well then, I’ll come in.”

“Right. There are five steps, then two paces along the level, and then two
more steps. It’s an old house, you see.”

In the dark and narrow lobby, with the front door closed behind him, and
Clare somewhere near him in the darkness, he suddenly felt no longer nervous
but immensely exhilarated, as if he had taken some decisive and long
contemplated step—some step that, wise or unwise, would at least bring
him into a new set of circumstances.

Something in her matter-of-fact directions was immensely reassuring; a
feeling of buoyancy came over him as he felt his way along the corridor with
Clare somewhat ahead of him. She opened a door and a shaft of yellow
lamplight came out and prodded the shadows.

“My little sitting-room,” she said.

It was a long low-roofed apartment with curtained windows at either end.
Persian rugs and tall tiers of bookshelves and some rather good pieces of old
furniture gave it a deliciously warm appearance; a heavily shaded lamp was
the sole illumination. Speed, quick to appreciate anything artistic, was
immediately impressed; he exclaimed, on the threshold: “I say, what a
gloriously old-fashioned room!”

“Not all of it,” she answered quietly. She turned the shade of the lamp so
that its rays focussed themselves on a writing-desk in an alcove. “The
typewriter and the telephone are signs that I am not at all an old-fashioned
person.”

“I didn’t say that, did I?” he replied, smiling.

She laughed. “Please sit down and be comfortable. It’s nice to have such
an unexpected call. And I’m glad that though I’m banned from Lavery’s you
don’t consider yourself banned from here.”

“Ah,” he said. He was surprised that she had broached the question so
directly. He flushed slightly and went on, after a pause: “I think perhaps
the ban had better be withdrawn altogether.”

“Why?”

“Oh, well—well, it doesn’t matter—I didn’t come here to talk
about it.”

“Oh, yes, you did. That’s just what you did come here to talk about.
Either that or something more serious. You don’ts mean to tell me that you
pay an unconventional call like this just to tell me what an enjoyable
holiday you’ve had.”

“I didn’t have an enjoyable holiday at all,” he answered.

“There! I guessed as much! After all, you wouldn’t have come home so soon
if you’d been having a thoroughly good time, would you?”

“Helen wanted to come home.”

She ceased her raillery of him and went suddenly serious. For some time
she stared into the fire without speaking, and then, in a different tone of
voice altogether she said: “Why did she want to come home?”

He began to talk rather fast and staccato. “I—I don’t know whether I
ought to tell you this—except that you were Helen’s friend and can
perhaps help me…You see, Helen was very nervous the whole time, and there
were one or two dinner-parties, and she—well, not exactly put her foot
in it, you know, but was—well, rather obviously out of everything. I
don’t know how it is—she seems quite unable to converse in the ordinary
way that people do—I don’t mean anything brilliant—few people
converse brilliantly—what I mean is that—well, she—”

She interrupted: “You mean that when her neighbour says, ‘Have you heard
Caruso in Carmen?’—she hasn’t got the sense to reply: ‘Oh, yes, isn’t
he simply gorgeous?’”

“That’s a rather satirical way of putting it.”

“Well, anyway, it seems a small reason for coming home. If I were
constitutionally incapable of sustaining dinner-party small-talk and my
husband brought me away from his parents for that reason, I’d leave him for
good.”

“I didn’t bring her away. She begged me to let her go.”

“Then you must have been cruel to her. You must have made her think that
it mattered.”

“Well, doesn’t it matter?”

She laughed a little harshly. “What a different man you’re becoming, Mr.
Speed! Before you married Helen you knew perfectly well that she was horribly
nervous in front of strangers and that she’d never show off well at rather
tiresome society functions. And yet if I or anybody else had dared to suggest
that it mattered you’d have been most tremendously indignant. You used to
think her nervousness rather charming, in fact.”

He said, rather pathetically: “You’ve cornered me, I confess. And I
suppose I’d better tell you the real reason. Helen’s nervousness doesn’t
matter to me. It never has mattered and it doesn’t matter now. It wasn’t
that, or rather, that would never have annoyed me but for something
infinitely more serious. While I was at home I found out about my appointment
at Lavery’s.”

“Well, what about it?”

“It was my father got it for me. He interviewed Portway and Ervine and God
knows who else.”

“Well?”

“Well?—Do you think I
like
to be dependent on that sort of
help? Do you think I like to remember all the kind things that people at
Millstead have said about me, and to feel that they weren’t sincere, that
they were simply the result of a little of my father’s wire-pulling?”

She did not answer.

“I left home,” he went on, “because my father wanted to shove me into a
nice comfortable job in a soap-works. I wanted to earn my own living on my
own merits. And then, when I manage to get free, he thoughtfully steps in
front of me, so to speak, and without my knowing it, makes the path smooth
for me!”

“What an idealist you are, Mr. Speed!”

“What?”

“An idealist. So innocent of the world! Personally, I think your father’s
action extremely kind. And also I regard your own condition as one of babyish
innocence. Did you really suppose that an unknown man, aged twenty-three,
with a middling degree, and only one moderately successful term’s experience,
would be offered the Mastership of the most important House at Millstead,
unless there’d been a little private manoeuvring behind the scenes? Did you
think that, in the ordinary course of nature, a man like Ervine would be only
too willing to set you up in Lavery’s with his daughter for a wife?”

“Ah, that’s it! He wanted me to marry Helen, didn’t he?”

“My dear man, wasn’t it perfectly obvious that he did? All through last
summer term you kept meeting her in the school grounds and behaving in a
manner for which any other Master would have been instantly sacked, and all
he did was to smile and be nice and keep inviting you to dinner!”

Speed cried excitedly: “Yes, that’s what my father said. He said it was a
plant; that Ervine in the end proved himself the cleverer of the two.”

“Your father told you that?”

“No, I overheard it.”

“Your father, I take it, didn’t like Helen?”

“He didn’t see the best of her. She was so nervous.”

He went on eagerly: “Don’t you see the suspicion that’s in my
mind?—That Ervine plotted with Helen to get me married to her! That she
married me for all sorts of sordid and miserable reasons!”

And then Clare said, with as near passion as he had ever yet seen in her:
“Mr. Speed, you’re a fool! You don’t understand Helen. She has faults, but
there’s one certain thing about her-she’s straight—
absolutely
straight! And if you’ve been cruel to her because you suspected her of being
crooked, then you’ve done her a fearful injustice! She’s
straight—straight to the point of obstinacy.”

“You think that?”

“
Think
it? Why, man, I’m
certain
of it!”

And at the sound of her words, spoken so confidently and indignantly, it
seemed so to him. Of course she was straight. And he had been cruel to her.
He was always the cause of her troubles. It was always his fault. And at that
very moment, might be, she was crying miserably in the drawing-room at
Lavery’s, crying for jealousy of Clare. A sudden fierce hostility to Clare
swept over him; she was too strong, too clever, too clear-seeing. He hated
her because it was so easy for her to see things as they were; because all
problems seemed to yield to the probing of her candid eyes. He hated her
because he knew, and had felt, how easy it was to take help from her. He
hated her because her sympathy was so practical and abundant and devoid of
sentiment. He hated her, perhaps, because he feared to do anything else.

She said softly: “What a strange combination of strength and weakness you
are, Mr. Speed! Strong enough to follow out an ideal, and weak enough to be
at the mercy of any silly little suspicion that comes into your mind!”

He was too much cowed down by the magnitude of his blunder to say a great
deal more, and in a short while he left, thanking her rather embarrassedly
for having helped him. And he said, in the pitch-dark lobby as she showed him
to the front door: “Clare, I think this visit of mine had better be a secret,
don’t you?”

And she replied: “You needn’t fear that I shall tell anybody.”

When the door had closed on him outside and he was walking back along the
Millstead lane it occurred to him quite suddenly: Why, I called her Clare! He
was surprised, and perhaps slightly annoyed with himself for having done
unconsciously what he would never have done intentionally. Then he wondered
if she had noticed it, and if so, what she had thought. He reflected that she
had plenty of good practical sense in her, and would not be likely to stress
the importance of it. Good practical sense! The keynote of her, so it seemed
to him. How strong and helpful it was, and yet, in another way, how deeply
and passionately opposed to his spirit! Why, he could almost imagine Clare
getting on well with his father. And when he reflected further, that, in all
probability, his father would like Clare because she had “her wits about
her,” it seemed to him that the deepest level of disparagement had been
reached. He smiled to himself a little cynically; then in a wild onrush came
remorse at the injustice he had done to Helen. All the way back to Millstead
he was grappling with it and making up his mind that he would be
everlastingly kind to her in the future, and that, since she was as she was,
he would not see Clare any more.

He found her, as he had more than half expected, sitting in
the drawing-room at Lavery’s, her feet bunched up in front of the fire and
her hands clasping her knees. She was not reading or sewing or even crying;
she was just sitting there in perfect stillness, thinking, thinking,
thinking. He knew, as by instinct, that this was not a pose of hers; he knew
that she had been sitting like that for a quarter, a half, perhaps a whole
hour before his arrival; and that, if he had come later, she would probably
have been waiting and thinking still. Something in her which he did not
understand inclined her to brood, and to like brooding. As he entered the
room and saw her thus, and as she gave one swift look behind her and then,
seeing it was he, turned away again to resume her fireside brooding, a sudden
excruciatingly sharp feeling of irritation rushed over him, swamping for the
instant even his remorse: why
was
she so silent and aggrieved? If he
had treated her badly, why did she mourn in such empty, terrible silence?
Then remorse recovered its sway over him and her attitude seemed the simple
and tremendous condemnation of himself.