Chapter Six I
In the morning there arrived a letter from Clare. He guessed it from the postmark, and was glad that she had the tact to type the address on the envelope. When he tore it open he saw that the letter was also typewritten, and signed merely “C. H.”, so that he was able to read it at the breakfast-table without any fears of Helen guessing. It was a curious sensation, that of reading a letter from Clare with Helen so near to him, and so unsuspecting.
It ran:—
“DEAR KENNETH SPEED—As I told you last night I feel thoroughly disgusted with myself—I knew I should. I’m very sorry I acted as I did, though of course everything I said was true. If you take my advice you’ll take Helen right away and never come near Millstead any more. Begin life with her afresh, and don’t expect it to be too easy. As for me—you’d better forget if you can. We mustn’t ever see each other again, and I think we had better not write, either. I really mean that and I hope you won’t send me any awfully pathetic reply as it will only make things more awkward than they are. There was a time when you thought I was hard-hearted; you must try and think so again, because I really don’t want to have anything more to do with you. It sounds brutal, but it isn’t, really. You have still time to make your life a success, and the only way to do it in the present circumstances is to keep away from my evil influence. So good-bye and good luck. Yours—C.H.”—“P.S. If you ever do return to Millstead you won’t find me there.”
He was so furious that he tore the letter up and flung it into the fire.
“What is it?” enquired Helen.
He forced himself to reply: “Oh, only a tradesman’s letter.”
She answered, with vague sympathy: “Everybody’s being perfectly horrid, aren’t they?”
“Oh, I don’t care,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders and eating vigorously. “I don’t care a damn for the lot of them.”
She looked at him in thoughtful silence.
Towards the end of the meal he had begun to wonder if it had been Clare’s object to put him in just that mood of fierce aggressiveness and truculence. He wished he had not thrown the letter into the fire. He would like to have re-read it, and to have studied the phrasing with a view to more accurate interpretation.
That was about seven-thirty in the morning. The bells were just beginning to ring in the dormitories and the floors above to creak with the beginnings of movement. It was a dull morning in early March, cold, but not freezing; the sky was full of mist and clouds, and very likely it would rain later. As he looked out of the window, for what might be the last time in his life, he realised that he was leaving Millstead without a pang. It astonished him a little. There was nothing in the place that he still cared for. All his dreams were in ruins, all his hopes shattered, all his enthusiasms burned away; he could look out upon Millstead, that had once contained them all, without love and without malice. It was nothing to him now; a mere box of bricks teeming with strangers. Even the terror of it had vanished; it stirred him to no emotion at all. He could leave it as casually as he could a railway station at which he had stopped en route.
And when he tried, just by way of experiment, to resuscitate for a moment some of the feelings he had once had, he was conscious only of immense mental strain, for something inside him that was sterile and that ached intolerably. He remembered how, on the moonlight nights of his first term, his eyes would fill with tears as he saw the great window-lit blocks of Milner’s and Lavery’s rising into the pale night. He remembered it without passion and without understanding. He was so different now from what he had been then. He was older now; he was tired; his emotions had been wrung dry; some of him was a little withered.
An hour later he left Millstead quite undramatically by the 9.5. The taxi came to the door of Lavery’s at ten minutes to nine, while the school was in morning chapel; as he rode away and out of the main gates he could hear, faintly above the purr of the motor, the drone of two hundred voices making the responses in the psalms. It did not bring to his heart a single pang or to his eye a single tear. Helen sat beside him and she, too, was unmoved; but she had never cared for Millstead. She was telling him about Seacliffe.
As the taxi bounded into the station yard she said: “Oh, Kenneth, did you leave anything for Burton?”
“No,” he answered, curtly.
“You ought to have done,” she said.
That ended their conversation till they were in the train.
As he looked out of the window at the dull, bleak fen country he wondered how he could ever have thought it beautiful. Mile after mile of bare, grey-green fields, ditches of tangled reeds, forlorn villages, trees that stood solitary in the midst of great plains. He saw every now and then the long, flat road along which he had cycled many times to Pangbourne. And in a little while Pangbourne itself came into view, with its huge dominating cathedral round which he had been wont formerly to conduct little enthusiastic parties of Millsteadians; Pangbourne had seemed to him so pretty and sunlit in those days, but now all was dull and dreary, and the mist was creeping up in swathes from the fenlands. Pangbourne station...
Again he wished that he had not burnt Clare’s letter.
At noon he was at Seacliffe, booking accommodation at the Beach Hotel.