Читать книгу The Passionate Year - James Hilton - Страница 5

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"Ah, um yes, Mr. Speed, is it not?...Welcome, sir! Welcome to Millstead!" Kenneth Speed gripped the other's hand and smiled. He was a tall passably good-looking fellow in his early twenties, bright-eyed and brown-haired. At the moment he was feeling somewhat nervous, and always when he felt nervous he did things vigorously, as if to obscure his secret trepidation. Therefore when he took hold of the soft moist hand that was offered him he grasped it in such a way that its possessor winced and gave a perceptible gasp.

"Delighted to meet you, sir," said the young man briskly, and his voice, like his action, was especially vigorous because of nervousness. It was not nervousness of interviewing a future employer, or of receiving social initiation into a new world; still less was it due to any consciousness of personal inferiority; it was an intellectual nervousness, based on an acute realisation of the exact moment when life turns a fresh corner which may or may not lead into a blind alley. And as Kenneth Speed felt the touch of this clammy elderly hand, he experienced a sudden eager desire to run away, out of the dark study and through the streets to the railway-station whence he had come. Absurd and ignoble desire, he told himself, 'shrugging his shoulders slightly as if to shake off an unpleasant sensation. He saw the past kaleidoscopically, the future as a mere vague following-up of the immediate present. A month ago he had been a resident undergraduate at Cambridge. Now he was Kenneth Speed, B.A., Arts' Master at Millstead School. The transformation seemed to him for the time being all that was in life.

It was a dull glowering day towards the end of April, most appropriately melancholy for the beginning of term. It was one of those days when the sun had been bright very early, and by ten o'clock the sky dappled with white clouds; by noon the whiteness had dulled and spread to leaden patches of grey; now, at mid-afternoon, a cold wintry wind rolled them heavily across the sky and piled them on to the deep gloom of the horizon. The Headmaster's study, lit from three small windows through which the daylight, filtered by the thick spring foliage of lime trees, struggled meagrely, was darker even than usual, and Speed, peering around with hesitant inquisitive eyes, received no more than a confused impression of dreariness. He could see the clerical collar of the man opposite gleaming like a bar of ivory against an ebony background.

The voice, almost as soft and clammy as the hand, went on: "I hope yon will be very comfortable here, Mr. Speed. We are—urn yes—an old foundation, and we have our—um yes—our traditions—and—um—so forth...You will take music and drawing, I understand?"

"That was the arrangement, I believe."

His eyes, by now accustomed to the gloom, saw over the top of the dazzling white collar a heavy duplicated chin and sharp clean-cut lips, lips in which whatever was slightly gentle was also slightly shrewd. Above them a huge promontory of a nose leaned back into deep-set eyes that had each a tiny spark in them that pierced the dusk like the gleaming tips of a pair of foils. And over all this a wide blue-veined forehead curved on to a bald crown on which the light shone mistily. There was fascination of a sort in the whole impression; one felt that the man might be almost physically a part of the dark study, indissolubly one with the leather-bound books and the massive mahogany pedestal-desk; a Pope, perhaps, in a Vatican born with him. And when he moved his finger to push a bell at his elbow Speed started as if the movement had been in some way sinister.

"Ah yes, that will be all right—um—music and drawing. Perhaps—um—commercial geography for the—um—lower forms, eh?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about commercial geography."

"Oh, well—um yes—I suppose not. Still—easy to acquire, you know. Oh yes, quite easy...Come in..."

This last remark, uttered in a peculiar treble wail, was in response to a soft tap at the door. It opened and a man stepped into the shadows and made his way to the desk with cat-like stealthiness.

"Light the gas, Potter...And by the way, Mr. Speed will be in to dinner." He turned to the young man and said, as if the enquiry were merely a matter of form: "You'll join us for dinner to-night, won't you?"

Speed replied: "I shall be delighted."

He wondered then what it was in the dark study that made him feel eerily sensitive and observant; so that, for instance, to watch Potter standing on a chair and lighting the incandescent globes was to feel vividly and uncannily the man's feline grace of movement. And what was it in the Headmaster's quivering blade-like eyes that awakened the wonder as to what these dark book-lined walls had seen in the past, what strange, furtive conversations they had heard, what scenes of pity and terror and fright and, might be, of blind suffering they had gazed upon?

The globes popped into yellow brilliance The dark study took sudden shape and coherence; the shadows were no longer menacing. And the Headmaster, the Reverend Bruce Ervine, M.A., D.D., turned out to be no more than a plump apoplectic-looking man with a totally bald head.

Speed's eyes, blinking their relief, wandered vacantly over the bookshelves. He noticed Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" in twelve volumes, the Expositor's Bible in twenty volumes, the Encyclopaedia Britannica in forty volumes, a long shelf of the Loeb classical series, and a huge group of lexicons surmounting like guardian angels a host of small school text-books.

"Dinner is at seven, then, Mr. Speed. We—we do not dress—except for-um yes—for special occasions...If you—um—have nothing to do this afternoon—you might find a stroll into the town interesting—there are some Roman—um—earthworks that are extremely—um yes—extremely fascinating. Oh yes, really...Harrington's the stationers will sell you a guide...I don't think there are any-um—duties we need trouble you with until to-morrow...um yes...Seven o'clock then, Mr. Speed..."

"I shall be there, sir."

He bowed slightly and backed himself through the green-baize double doors into the stone corridor.