Chapter Four I
The first thing that Clare Harrington said to him when they met a few days later in Millstead High Street was: “Oh, congratulations, Mr. Speed!”
“Congratulations?” he echoed. “What for?”
She replied quietly: “Helen has told me.”
He began to blush, and to hold his breath in an endeavour to prevent his cheeks from reddening to an extent that, so he felt, would be observed by passers-by. “Oh!” he gasped, with a half-embarrassed smile. Then, after a pause, he queried: “What has she told you?”
And Clare answered: “That you are going to marry her.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed involuntarily, and he saw her eyes focussed on him strangely. A slow sensation of warmth began to envelop him; joy rose round him like a tide as he realised all the pivotal significance of what Clare had said. He was going to marry Helen!—Strange that, even amidst his most secret raptures, he had hardly dared to think of that! He had dreamed exquisite and fragile dreams of her, dreams in which she was too fairy-like and ethereal for marriage; doubtless, after some while, his ambitions would have crystallised normally, but up to the present they had no anchorage on earth at all. And to think that she had travelled in mind and intention more swiftly and further than he, to think that she had dared to deduce the final and ultimate reality, gave him, along with a surging overmastering joy, just a faint tinge of disappointment as well. But the joy, deepening and spreading, soon blotted out everything else: he sought Clare’s hand and gripped it triumphantly. Tears were in his eyes and emotion clutching at his voice as he said: “I’m—I’m glad—she’s told you. It’s—it’s fine, isn’t it?—Don’t you think we shall be—happy?”
“You ought to be,” said Clare.
He struggled with the press of feeling for a moment and then said: “Oh, let’s go into Mason’s and have a cup of coffee or something. I want to talk to you.”
So they sat for a quarter of an hour at a little green-tiled table in Mason’s highly respectable café. The room was over the shop, and besides affording from the window a panoramic view of the High Street, contained a small fire-grate, a framed picture of the interior of Mason’s Hygienic Bakery, and a large ginger-and-white cat with kittens. Altogether it was a most secluded and comfortable rendezvous.
All the while that they conversed he was but slowly sizing up the situation and experiencing little alternating wafts of disappointment and exhilaration. Disappointment, perhaps, that he had not been left the bewitching task of bringing Helen’s mind, along with his own, out of the clouds and mists of dreams; exhilaration also, because her mind, womanishly direct, had evidently not needed such guidance.
He talked rhapsodically to Clare; lashed himself, as it were, into a state of emotional fervour. He seemed eager to anticipate everything that anybody could possibly say to Helen’s disadvantage, and to explain away the whole; it was as if he were championing Helen against subtle and inevitable disparagements. Once or twice he seemed to realise this, and to realise that he was defending where there was no attack, and then he stopped, looked confused, and waited for Clare to say something. Clare, as a matter of fact, said very little, and when she spoke Speed took hardly any notice, except, perhaps, to allow her words to suggest to him some fresh rhapsodical outbreak. He said, in a sudden outpouring: “Of course I know she’s only a child. That’s the wonderful charm of her—part of the wonderful charm, at any rate. Some people might say she wasn’t clever, but she is really, you know. I admit she doesn’t show up very well in company, but that’s because she’s nervous. I’m nervous and I don’t show up well. She’s got an acute little brain, though. You should hear the things she says sometimes. Simple little things, some people might think, but really, when you think about them, they’re clever. Of course, she hasn’t been educated up to a good many things, but then, if she had been, she wouldn’t have kept her child-like simplicity, would she?—She’s very quick at picking things up, and I’m lending her heaps of books. It’s the most beautiful job in the world, being teacher to her. I’m rapturously happy about it and so is she. I could never stand these empty-headed society kind of women who can jabber superficially in drawing-rooms about every subject under the sun, and really, you know, haven’t got an original idea in their heads. Helen has the most wonderful and child-like originality, you know. You’ve noticed it yourself, I daresay. Haven’t you noticed it?—Yes, I’m sure you must have. And to think that she really does want to marry me!”
“Why shouldn’t she want to marry you?” interjected Clare, but that was one of the remarks of which he took little notice. He went on eagerly: “I don’t know what the Head will think when he gets to know about it. Most probably he’ll be fearfully annoyed. Clanwell warned me the other night. Apparently—” a faint touch of bitterness came into his voice—“apparently it isn’t the thing to treat your Headmaster’s daughter with anything but the most distant reserve.”
“Another question,” said Clare shrewdly, “is what your people will think about it.”
“My people,” he replied, again with the note of bitterness in his voice, “will probably do what they have always done whenever I have proposed taking any fresh step in life.”
“I can guess what that is. They oppose you, eh?”
“Oh, not absolutely that. They recognise my right to do what I want, but they think I’m a fool, all the same. They don’t quarrel with me. They just go on wishing I was like my elder brother.”
“What is he?”
“He works in my father’s office in town. My father, you know—” he became suddenly confidential in tone—“is a rather typical sort of business-man. Materialist outlook—wanted me to manage a soap-works. We never got on absolutely well together. When I told him I was going to get a mastership at a public school he thought I was mad.”
“And what will he think when you tell him you are going to marry the Headmaster’s daughter?”
He looked at her curiously, for the first time intent upon her personally, for something in the way she had uttered that last question set up in him the suspicion that she was laughing at him. A careful scrutiny of her features, however, revealed no confirmation: he looked away again, shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Probably he’ll think I’m madder than ever.”
She gave him a curious glance with uptilted lips which he could not properly interpret. “Anyway,” she said, quietly, “I shouldn’t tell him that Helen’s a child.”
“Why not?”
Clare gave him again that curious, uninterpretable glance. “Because she isn’t, that’s all.”
He was recovering from his surprise and was about to say something when she interrupted him with, perhaps, the first touch of animation that had so far distinguished her side of the conversation. “I told you,” she said, “on the first night of term that you didn’t understand Helen. And still you don’t. If you did, you’d know that she was a woman, not a child at all.”
“I wish you’d explain a little—”
“It doesn’t need any explanation. You either know it or don’t know it. Apparently you don’t know it.... And now, Mr. Speed, I’m afraid I’ll have to go—I can’t leave the boy to manage the shop by himself all morning.”
Speed had the sensation that she was slightly out of patience with him.