The Charioteer: A Novel

2

IN THE DENSE SUNLIGHT, an inkstain on the table showed up in impasto, an iridescent peacock green. Between it and the window suspended dust shaped the path of the light; Laurie, who had written nothing for five minutes, wondered why of these seemingly weightless particles some should elect to rise and others to fall. It was like Jacob’s Ladder. He had moved around the table once already to get the sun out of his eyes. Even its refracted heat was making him drowsy; and the ink, flowing incontinently from his warmed pen, made blots on the page. He shook his nib over the linoleum, yawned, pulled his brows together, and wrote: “Julius Cæsar shows that Shakespeare understood politics, but saw them chiefly as a field for the study of human …”

Unable as always to remember where the h came in “psychology,” he reached for the dictionary. It offered its usual distractions to a mind already relaxed. “Pedant,” he read with approval “(It. pedante, a schoolmaster) n., One who makes a show of learning, or lays undue stress on formulae; one with more book-learning than practical experience or common sense.”

A lullaby sound of distant cricket floated with the dust in the heavy air. The study furniture, deal dressed with a dark toffeelike varnish, its wounds explored by the light, looked weary, loveless and revealed. Laurie, to whom it was the emblem of luxury and prestige, balanced his rickety chair on one leg, listening to the creak of its strained joints with a vague affection. He was tunelessly, cozily bored. The muted sounds were like those that filter through to a sickroom during a placid convalescent doze, pleasanter than the exercises of recovery for which one pretends to be eager. Summer cradled him, the lap of a kind nurse whose knitting-needles click in the rhythm of sleep.

“Psychology,” he wrote, rousing himself. “Cassius, for example, is a familiar type, whose temperament modern science links with gastric ulcers.” He paused on this, wondering whether the English master would guess it had been inspired by the science master, or, if he guessed, would care. Rather than be at the trouble of erasing it neatly, he decided to take a chance. He inked a groove on the table, turning it into a miniature canal.

A yelped “Owzat?” came from the cricket-field; the quiet flowed back and closed. The thought of the work he would have to do next year gave flavor to the moment’s impressed ease. His mother had already begun telling him not to worry himself into nerves about the exhibition for Oxford; she had been alarmed by reading a newspaper report of a boy who had hanged himself, it was thought from this cause. Laurie had given suicide, its ends and means, the abstract meditation proper to sixteen; but, as he had assured her, he didn’t feel drawn to it. He took the exhibition seriously, knowing that if he failed she would make economies to send him up without it; but mainly he wished to prove that one could do these things without getting in a panic.

He had been too young when his father went to fear economic changes; and in fact there had been none. Mrs. Odell had been a beloved only child, and her parents, though they had thought her marriage in every respect beneath her, did not allow her to suffer for her mistake in any way they could control, either during their lifetimes or afterwards. Laurie knew his mother’s side of the story so well that on the thinking surface of his mind it was the only one. His father had been dead for ten years now; pneumonia, helped by acute alcoholism, had taken only three days to finish him off. His family responsibilities had seemed to sit on him lightly; but, detached from them, he had gone downhill with the steady acceleration of a stone loosened on a cliff.

Laurie was used to the idea that his father had been a bad lot. It did not consciously disturb him, since he had been brought up, for almost as long as he could remember, to think of himself as wholly his mother’s child.

A clock struck; it was later than he had thought. If he didn’t get the thing done, there wouldn’t have been much point in staying in to get the study to himself. As it was, Harris or Carter might be back any time now.

The subject of the essay was “Compare the character of Brutus’s dilemma with that of Hamlet.” In his private mind, Laurie thought poorly enough of both. In Hamlet’s place he wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment; and Brutus he thought a cold, joyless type, with his moral searchings in the orchard. Not thus, in Laurie’s view, should a cause be embraced. If it were worth anything, it would come down on you like a pentecostal wind, not the better but the only thing; it would sweep you up. “Over thy wounds now do I prophesy …” That, he felt, should be the stuff; though all that calculated demagogy afterwards was revolting. He gave up the effort to express this. “Portia,” he mentioned coldly, “is the ideal Roman wife.”

He disposed of Portia quickly, and counted the pages he had filled. One more, written large, should get him by. He got up to stretch, and strolled to the window. The pitch-pine sill on which he leaned was plowed and seamed with boot-marks; this was a ground-floor study. The window had the social as well as the practical functions of a front door. The actual door served as a kind of tradesman’s entrance, for junior boys, cleaners, and the Housemaster.

A straggle of boys carrying towels was crossing the grass from the baths. Laurie watched them idly, smelling the dry summer scents of earth, piled mowings, and wallflowers from the Head’s garden out of sight. The sense of a wasted afternoon suddenly oppressed him; he craved for the water, but it was too late now, the House’s time had run out. Depressed, he was about to turn away when he noticed young Barnes, noticeably isolated as usual. Peters would have been coaching him again, if, thought Laurie, you liked to call it that. It was a pity about Peters. The inter-school cups came in all right, but he shouldn’t be let loose on these wretched little twirps, bawling them into a panic and then telling the world they were scared of the water. Barnes, poor little runt, probably thought himself a marked man and it was giving him a bad start in the House. Peters always seemed to crack down extra hard on these pretty-pretty types, who after all soon grew out of it if you let them alone.

By falling behind the others and edging sideways, Barnes had come within a few yards of the window. He looked horrible, Laurie thought; furtive and squinting, as if he had been caught pawning the spoons. It was worse, somehow, than if he had been grizzling.

Laurie had no theories about the dignity of man. He assented cheerfully to a social code which decreed that he should barely acknowledge Barnes’s existence, except as a featureless unit in a noxious swarm. Something, however, seemed to him to need doing. He leaned half out of the window. Laurie never considered his own compromises. His methods of defying convention were as a rule so conventional that they passed unnoticed by most people, including himself.

“Hi!” he bawled.

Barnes turned, with a hunted start. When he saw who it was, he registered a modified relief, mingled with awe and a paralyzed hesitation lest someone else might after all have been addressed.

“You!” shouted Laurie. “Whoever you are.” Only the prefects, whose job it was, were supposed to know their names. Barnes came up to the window.

“Barnes, J. B., please, Odell.”

“I want a chit paid at the shop. Do it straight away, will you?”

“Yes, Odell.” Barnes gazed up at the window, like a dog on trust. He had a face like a Spanish madonna with steel spectacles. When frightened he had a heavy sullen look; the contrast between features and expression was more unpleasant than ugliness. At the moment, a strained vacancy made him classic. Laurie felt in his pocket for the coppers and the chit.

“Stand on one leg or the other,” he said encouragingly. “You look as if your pants were wet. Of course, don’t let me keep you if they are.”

At first overwhelmed by this condescension, Barnes presently essayed a kind of grin. Mixed with its servility, traces of gratitude, humor, and even intelligence appeared. He looked almost human, Laurie thought.

“Here you are. And don’t lose it.”

“No, Odell.”

“Hi, stop, you’ve not got the chit yet, you fool.”

“Sorry, Odell.”

“Have the baths shut?”

“Yes, please, I think so, Odell.”

“Curse. I meant to get over. What was that extraordinary roaring going on?”

“I don’t know, Odell. Mr. Peters was coaching.”

“Oh, ah. I didn’t know he used a megaphone now.”

A flickering smile, in dread of presuming, appeared on Barnes’s face like an anxious rabbit ready to bolt back down the hole.

“The thing with Peters, once you’re on the board, is just to carry on as if he wasn’t there. He likes that really, you’ll find. It soothes his nerves.”

Laurie, a steady but unsensational performer at other games, was the House’s white hope at swimming and was expected to get his School colors next year. Barnes said, “Yes, Odell,” with an expression of almost inert stupidity. The awe of this heavenly message had stunned him. Laurie observed it with approval; it was no good if encouragement made them fresh.

“Here’s the chit. And you can take this bottle back.” The bottle was a gratuity. There was a penny refund on it.

“Oh, thanks very much, Odell.”

Barnes sprinted off, with a new animation. Laurie, looking after him, felt a warmth at the heart which he hastened to shed. A little drip like that. Perhaps he reminded one of dogs, or something. Dismissing Barnes from his mind, he was about to get back to the essay again, when Carter appeared outside. Luckily Laurie had the last paragraph in his head.

Carter climbed in, leaving two more scratches and some fresh dirt on the sill. He suffered from the disability of being already almost six feet tall, and not having caught up with it. Even his voice hadn’t finished breaking. Laurie’s had settled quite firmly, but he ran to compactness and was still at the five-foot-seven mark. You could see by his build that five-foot-nine would probably be about his limit. He had to look up to Carter to talk to him; to the onlooker, this had a somewhat incongruous effect.

Carter uncoiled himself from the window. He had to use the arts of a contortionist to get through it; but he would have shunned the eccentricity of using the door. “Now, now,” he said, jerking his head toward the receding Barnes. “You want to sublimate, you know. Collect antique doorknobs, or something.”

“It’s too strong for me,” said Laurie movingly. “I can’t get him out of my head. Those long eyelashes. Would he look at me, do you think?”

Carter followed this up, but rather half-heartedly. He was not the only one to find Laurie’s conversation disconcertingly uninhibited. The innuendo, more generally approved, was apt when it reached him to be smacked into the open with the directness of a fives ball. Lacking in some social instinct, he seemed never to know the difference.

“He’s the worst drip we’ve had in years,” Carter pursued. “And anyway, it’s hardly quite the moment, when you come to think.”

“Think what of?” Laurie put his feet on the table and rocked the back legs of his chair.

“You don’t mean you’ve not heard?” Carter had so far been only at the receiving end of a sensational stop press. He dashed into it headlong. “Jeepers is happy at last. He’s really found something. This is the stink to end all stinks for all time. There’s going to be hell let loose in this House by tomorrow.”

Laurie brought his feet down with a clump, and shoved back his chair. “Look here,” he said. “No, this is getting not to be funny. He’ll turn this place into a loony-bin, before he’s done. He ought to be analyzed. Doesn’t he ever think about anything else?”

“Shut up and let—”

“How for heaven’s sake did he ever get given a House? Know what Jones II told me? Jeepers went down to the bogs yesterday and threw a school blazer over one of the doors, and sat locked in there all the time the changing was going on, to see if the conversation was pure. It’s too bad he’s got such big feet.”

“Well, that’s nothing to—”

“Nothing is it?” said Laurie, whom something had rendered perverse. In this mood he was apt to become Irish. His brogue, however, was of literary origin, consisting of stock phrases carefully acquired. The Celtic period had set in about eighteen months ago; he had even gone through a phase, till stopped, of spelling his name O’Dell, and had opted out of the O.T.C., which was theoretically allowed but almost never done except by boys with rheumatic hearts. At about this time, his mother had been receiving attentions from a retired colonel; but, in the end, nothing had come of it.

“Sure, then,” he continued, “it’s more than enough for me.” Forgetting about it, he dropped back into English. “If Lanyon weren’t the best Head the House has had in years, the place would just be a sewer. I can’t think how he sticks Jeepers without going nuts.”

“Well,” said Carter, triumphantly getting it out at last, “he won’t have to much longer.”

Laurie stared, abruptly sobered up. Presently he said, “Why not?”

“Because he’s due for the sack, as soon as the Head comes back from London tomorrow.”

“Lanyon?” Laurie sat with empty face and dropped jaw; turned; stared at Carter; saw that he meant it. “Whatever for?”

Carter shrugged his shoulders, expressively.

“Look,” said Laurie, “if this is a joke, I’ve laughed now, ha-ha. Is it?”

“Far from it for Lanyon, I should think. They say he’s shut up in the isolation ward in the sicker, and they’re only letting him out to pack his room.”

There was a short silence. Presently Laurie said slowly, “Jeepers ought to be in a strait waistcoat. Is he drunk, or loopy, or what?”

“Personally,” said Carter, with some reluctance, “I think Lanyon’s cooked. It seems Hazell went to Jeepers about him.”

“Hazell? Hazell, did you say? Don’t make me laugh. Everyone knows Hazell. Hazell, I ask you. They never ought to have sent him to a proper school. He ought to be at one of these crank places where they run about naked and have their complexes gone over every day. Hazell, of all things. Good Lord, Lanyon only keeps an eye on him because he’s such a misfit and people were giving him hell. No one would be surprised if Hazell came down one morning saying he was Mussolini, or a poached egg.”

“He may be a drip, but he isn’t absolutely ravers. You know that go of religion he had last term. When he had that rosary. You know. I should think now he’s had a go of this Buchman thing, where they confess everything in public. Anyway that’s what he did. Not in public, pity he didn’t, he could have been shut up. Then afterwards he got cold feet, and went bleating off to Somers, I don’t know why Somers, to confess he’d confessed. So everyone knows now.”

“Hazell would confess to anything. It’s a thing people have. When there’s been a murder, dozens of loonies write up and confess to it. It’s well known. I bet he didn’t confess to Lanyon, anyway.”

“He asked Somers whether he ought to, Green says.”

Laurie got up abruptly from the table. He knew the feeling, though he hadn’t had it for years: exalted, single-minded rage. Laurie was all for moderation, as people can be who have learned early some of their more painful capacities. It had become an accepted fact that nothing ever ruffled Spuddy. He had enjoyed this reputation, so inwardly reassuring, and made the most of it. This was different. He felt, suddenly, the enormous release of energy which comes when repressed instincts are sanctioned by a cause. Down Hamlet, up Antony. Over thy wounds now do I prophesy.

“Something,” said Laurie, “has darn well got to be done about this.”

Carter looked uncomfortable. Laurie’s tacitly acknowledged position as a leader of public opinion had been founded not on spectacular escapades, which in real life are often a nuisance, but by a quiet positiveness and a knack of settling other people’s quarrels without getting involved in them. This irrational incandescence wasn’t in the contract. “Well, but—”

“Well, but what? At our age where d’you think we’d be if our people were poor? Doing men’s jobs and belonging to unions and sticking together. If we were in a mine or something, and a chap got the sack who didn’t deserve to, we’d call a strike till they reinstated him. Well—this is worse.”

“Yes, well, but—” Carter looked increasingly uncomfortable; there were times when Spuddy seemed not to see where to stop. “I mean, when miners strike they state their grievances, don’t they, and all that? You could hardly jump up in the Day Room and make a speech about this sort of thing.”

“Why on earth not, if Lanyon can be sacked for it? That’s how people like Jeepers get away with what they do. It’s playing into his hands.”

“Do wake up, Spud.” Earnestness and embarrassment made Carter’s voice leap from the lower register to a cracked alto. “You know perfectly well you’re just talking for the sake of it. How could you possibly go making a b.f. of yourself in front of the whole House? If you run round talking about strikes, they’ll think you’ve been reading a boys’ comic or something. And if you did manage to start anything, it would only raise the most appalling stink. And this is about the last House that can afford it.”

“But we can all afford to sit tight while Lanyon gets kicked out of the back door in a whisper. After all he’s done pulling the place together. How many years since the last time this House put up a Head of the School? No one remembers. You make me sick. Will you come in if the others do?”

“What others? They’d think you were nuts. Half of them wouldn’t know what you were talking about, even.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ll bet you ten bob, if you like, there’s not a living soul in the place who wouldn’t know. All Jeepers’ tactful little talks about clean living. You can spot the clean livers afterwards, beetling off to ask whoever’s got the dirtiest mind they know what it was all about. It would just about serve Jeepers right.”

“But that’s not the point,” said Carter helplessly. It wouldn’t get anywhere. And it wouldn’t do Lanyon any good. Anything but, I should think.”

His will kicked impotently at Laurie’s obtuseness. He propped his big-jointed, awkward frame against the mantelshelf with a knobby hand, and rubbed a patch of acne on his chin. He was of an age to find male good looks mentionable only by way of a joke, and in respect of one’s friends not at all. Only pressure of circumstances made him admit even to himself that he thought Laurie strikingly handsome. Carter, who would come into a fine presence in a few years’ time, did not perceive that Laurie had merely escaped, or got over early, the more unsightly physical disturbances of adolescence. Between now and, say, eighteen, he would be at the climacteric of his looks, such as they were. The auburn lights in his hair were darkening already, and their copper would dim to bronze. His coloring would lose its vivacity; he would remain clean-looking, no doubt, with hair of a pleasant texture, soft and crisp; on the strength of his mouth and eyes, people would describe his face vaguely as nice. Carter could hardly be expected just now to consider this prospect.

“I mean,” he said, doing his best within the limits of decency, “when a row starts in a House they always get to know who’s at the bottom of it. If they didn’t think you were bats, they might think—”

“Shut up,” said Laurie, who had not been listening. “I’m working something out. Oh, boy, I’ve got it!”

“Now look here, Spud.” The telepathic message which Carter was straining to convey was, “Lanyon likes you, and other people have noticed it if you haven’t.” But Spud must know this, he wasn’t a fool; since he would talk, it seemed, about anything, why couldn’t he think? “Now just calm down and—”

“Shut up and listen. This is what we do. A protest meeting’s not enough, you’re right there, what we want is more of a sort of psychological war. Now the whole thing about Jeepers is that he’s terrified of scandal. It’s himself he has cold feet about, really, and his job. So that’s where we hit him. We’ll just all go along to him in a body and say the whole House is immoral, one and all, and we’ve come to confess like Hazell did. Then he won’t sack anyone, he’ll fall over himself to hush it up. Even if it got to the Head, he’d have to hush it up. He might sack Jeepers, and good riddance too. It’s foolproof. It—”

“Oh, really, Spud. For heaven’s sake.” Overwhelmed, Carter struck for the first time the basso profundo of his adult voice. A moment’s partial enlightenment touched him, eluding his terms of speech. He recognized a paradox: the surface acceptance of unimagined evil, the deep impenetrability of a profound innocence. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes I do; it’s absolutely sound psychology. They couldn’t sack Lanyon without sacking the rest of us, and they can’t sack a whole House without ruining the School. And as for Jeepers, it serves him right. The way he puts ideas into people’s heads, nothing that went on here would astonish me.”

Wouldn’t it? thought Carter to himself. Perhaps other people too were a little bit careful what they told Spuddy. “Seriously, how could you possibly expect people to stand up and say—”

“What of it? Everyone’s immoral. It’s immoral you doing my maths, or me doing your French prose. We can’t help Jeepers’ one-track mind.”

Emergency had inspired Carter to psychological tactics of his own. “You know what he’ll think it means, so it’s a lie; you can’t get out of that”

“Yes,” said Laurie at once. “But then it’s a lie about Lanyon too, so it cancels out. You know, in Euclid: then A equals B, which is absurd, Q.E.D.”

To Carter this offered for the first time some promise of reason. “Well, that might be all right if”—touched by a sudden loss of confidence, he swallowed quickly—“if we were certain it is a lie about Lanyon. I mean, we don’t know.”

Laurie, who was sitting on the table, didn’t get up. He looked at Carter with no conscious effort at annihilation. He simply felt what his face expressed, that the world was a meaner place than he had supposed, but that one got nowhere by making a fuss about it. Carter withered; he felt rubbishy, a mess of poorly articulated bones in an unsavory envelope. He said, “Of course, I don’t mean to say—”

“It’s all right,” said Laurie, with unconsciously devastating quiet. “I’m sorry I said anything. My mistake. I should forget all about it if I were you. I’ll manage on my own.”

He went out, through the window. It might have been more effective to use the door; but he didn’t want to be effective, merely to be rid of Carter; and the very transparency of this fact completed his effect.

Laurie took a turn around Big Field, and, finding it was almost tea-time, bought a bottle of lemonade at the tuck shop and half a dozen buns in a bag before setting out again. These he took to a retreat of his behind a haystack, slightly out of bounds, where he spent the next hour or so planning his campaign. By the time he turned homeward, shadows were lengthening on the grass. He wished he could do it all now, before he started to cool off. When one started to think of difficulties, they cropped up. But there was prep to finish, and Harris, who would be in the study by now, to be rallied to the cause. A pity Carter would have had time to get at him first.

As he walked the last lap to the House, Laurie realized sinkingly that the last of his effervescence had subsided, and that from now on only stone-cold will-power would push him through. He wished, for the first time in nearly four years, that during the next hour the School could be burnt down.

From the study window he heard Harris saying, “Get your eyes seen to. Odell’s there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Harris.” The small boy at the door took a nervous step into the room. “Please, Odell, Lanyon says will you see him in his study, please?”

“What, now?” drawled Laurie with the calm convention expected. For a moment this summons—which usually meant trouble of a disciplinary kind—only struck him as embarrassingly ill-timed. It wasn’t till the fag had gone that he saw Harris looking at him, and Carter at the floor. There was a dragging silence where the usual pleasantries should have been.

Laurie remarked casually, “What the heck does he want, I wonder?” and, as no one answered, went out into the corridor. For this purpose it was in order to use the door.

At the foot of the stairs, surrounded by dark green paint of the resistant kind used in station waiting rooms, he stood still. This, he knew with a certainty exceeding all the other certainties of the day, was the most awful thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Carter must have told someone, and somehow … The palms of his hands felt sticky and cold. He had been prepared to face Jeepers, even the Headmaster. He had been ready for anything, except this.

From the moment of conceiving Lanyon as a cause, there hadn’t been much time to contemplate him as a human being; perhaps because the thought of him in any kind of equivocal or humiliating situation was so improbable, and indeed hardly bore thinking of. That Lanyon might be grateful for the campaign on his behalf was the last thing Laurie had contemplated. Lanyon would never so compromise his dignity; it would be a sufficient gesture if he ignored the episode. Head prefects didn’t thank people for starting riots in Houses; on the contrary. And no Head of any House had ever stood for less nonsense than he. It was an academic question whether anyone would get fresh with Lanyon twice, for no one, as far as Laurie knew, had tried it once.

As he began, draggingly, to mount the stairs, Laurie’s dominant wish was that he were not too senior to be beaten, which would have been quick, simple and relatively unembarrassing.

He had got to the door. His footsteps must have been heard by now; there could be no more procrastination. He knocked.

“Come in,” said Lanyon briskly. At this point Laurie ceased to feel any awkwardness. Fright had swallowed everything. Concerned only not to show it, he walked in.

Lanyon was sitting in his armchair, doing something with a penknife to a propelling pencil. He looked up. He was slight and lean, with dusty-fair hair and eyes of a striking light blue which were narrowed by the structure of the orbit above, giving him a searching look even when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Odell. Shut the door.”

Laurie shut it, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, and waited. The length of the wait was always proportioned to the offense; but he was past measuring time. Lanyon made some further adjustment of the pencil, screwed down the lead, shut the knife and put it in his pocket. As always he was extremely neat, his hair brushed and recently trimmed, his shirt looking as if he had just put it on. He had spent last year’s summer holidays working his passage to Iceland and back in a trawler, and had recently been accepted for a projected research expedition to the Arctic. The biggest toughs in the School, when they stood against Lanyon, looked muscle-bound or run to seed. Lines of decision showed around his eyes and mouth; at nineteen, he was marked already with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic. Laurie, who was in no state to be analytical, only thought that Lanyon looked more than usually like chilled steel. Suddenly it seemed certain that the prevailing rumor had got garbled in transit, and almost certainly didn’t even refer to Lanyon at all. Laurie waited as if at the stake, clenching his lower jaw.

Having disposed of the penknife, Lanyon looked up again. His light eyes raked Laurie, coldly, from head to foot.

They tell me,” he said, “that you appear to be going out of your mind. Is there anything you want to say about it?”

“No, Lanyon,” said Laurie mechanically. He could have feigned noncomprehension, but with Lanyon one didn’t try anything on.

“Had it occurred to you,” said Lanyon evenly, “that if anything needs organizing in this House, the prefects are capable of seeing to it without any help from you?”

“Yes, Lanyon.” Laurie looked, for relief, away to the work table in the window. It was very tidy, like Lanyon himself.

“Of course, the prefects are only used to routine work. If they ever decide to get up a revival meeting, or some other form of mass hysteria, no doubt they’ll ask for your expert advice before they begin.”

Laurie said nothing. His gaze fell from the work table to the waste-paper basket standing under it.

“Do you often,” Lanyon asked, “have attacks like this?”

“No,” said Laurie. The wastepaper basket was full. It would have been overflowing if the contents had not been rammed down. The mass of torn papers stirred in his mind some dimly remembered sense of dread.

“Well, another time”—he could feel a hard blue stare tugging his own eyes back—“if you find your exhibitionism getting too much for you, I suggest you join the Holy Rollers, and give yourself some scope. You don’t want to waste your gifts, merely landing one school in a mess it wouldn’t live down in ten years.”

“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” But Laurie was hardly aware of speaking. He had seen, among the papers, the torn boards of the cloth-bound notebooks only issued to the Senior School, in which permanent material, the indispensable stuff of exam revision, was kept. There were three or four of them, probably more.

“Don’t stand there like a dummy.” The compressed snap in Lanyon’s voice was more alarming than a shout. “Do you realize you’ve been behaving like a dangerous lunatic, yes or no?”

“Yes,” said Laurie. To his own amazement he added, “I suppose so.”

Lanyon rested his hand with the pencil on the arm of the chair and leaned forward slightly. His eyes looked like chips of blue enamel. “You suppose so?” he said softly. “You suppose so?”

“Sorry,” said Laurie quickly.

“So I should hope.” Lanyon leaned back again, looking as if he had just brushed off some dirt and supposed it had been worth the trouble. In the slanting light from the window, the lines around his mouth were deepened to hollows. “Very well, then. When I have your word there’ll be no more of this nonsense, you can go.” There was a pause. Laurie swallowed; it seemed to him that it must be audible across the room. “Well? Have you got softening of the brain, Odell? You heard what I said.”

Pushing his voice up through his throat, which felt as if it were lined with sandpaper, Laurie said, “I’m sorry, Lanyon. I’ll give my word if—if it isn’t true about you leaving.”

“What did you say, Odell?” Lanyon stared at him, level-eyed. This time, though he felt as if the back of his neck would crack, Laurie met it without looking away. “Have you gone completely crazy? Who the hell do you think you are, standing here when a prefect sends for you and asking me questions about what I’m going to do? You need to see a doctor, I should think.”

“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” Laurie felt he must sound like a cracked gramophone record. “I know it’s cheek. I’m sorry. Only I can’t promise if I don’t know.”

Lanyon put the pencil away and stood up. He had the whippy, dangerous spring of a bent rapier let go.

“For your information, I shall probably be leaving sometime tomorrow. Is that enough for you? And if I don’t have your word within one minute, I’m going to lay you out cold, here and now, and you’ll spend the time between now and then in the sicker, and that will settle that. Well?”

He could do it, Laurie thought, with one hand tied behind him. It would probably be too quick to hurt very much. The odd thing was that whereas he had entered the study almost paralyzed with fright, now he was hardly frightened at all. His admiration for Lanyon had soared to the point of worship. This is the happy warrior, this is he whom every man in arms would wish to be.

“Have you taken that in?” Lanyon asked. “Because I mean it.”

That’s all right” Laurie’s voice was suddenly clear and free. “You’ve got to, I see that. But you can’t actually kill me, so it won’t stop me for long.”

Lanyon took a step up to him, as if he were measuring his distance. Laurie very nearly threw up his fists by instinct. No, he thought, Lanyon couldn’t be found fighting in his room after all this, besides he very likely wouldn’t hit so hard in cold blood. He was just about right now for a straight one to the point of the jaw. Laurie hoped there was room enough behind for him to fall without hitting the door or something. One couldn’t turn to look. There was time for all this because it took so long for anything to happen. Lanyon must be hoping he’d crack up yet and save having to do it. He felt, standing like this, eyes front, that he had never really seen Lanyon before. His face was a clear light even brown, toning with his dusty-fair hair. There was a little triangular scar, old and colorless, on his forehead above the left eyebrow. His mouth was tight and straight, a horizontal line between two verticals. His eyes fixed Laurie, stilly.

He stepped back.

With a spent force in which sounded the flaw of a desperate weariness, he said, “You bloody fool.”

Laurie had reached a pitch of tension where no inhibitions touched him. The frame of convention, with its threats and its supports alike, was broken. He was left, a single-handed individual, to take things as they came.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “If you’re leaving, somebody’s got to cope. I know I’m not a prefect, and if Treviss and the others were doing anything, that would be all right. Only they won’t, I know what this House is when it comes to something like that, they’ve been got down like everyone else.” Lanyon was looking at him, quiet, almost relaxed, incalculable, but now for some reason unterrifying. Laurie went on with a rush, “It makes me sick, the way people will let anything by, even something like this, sooner than come into the open about—anything you’re supposed not to.”

“I see,” said Lanyon. “And tell me, what makes you so cheerful about coming out into the open yourself?”

“I don’t know. Well, somebody’s got to. It stands to reason Jeepers can’t be let get away with this.”

“Mr. Jepson to you,” said Lanyon mechanically.

“Mr. Jepson. Sorry. It isn’t only even that it’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to the House either. Till this year, it’s been going down ever since Mr. Stuart left. Jeep—Mr. Jepson can’t even see how you’ve pulled the place together. You are the House really, everybody knows that. He doesn’t seem ever to notice the things that really matter, the feeling in the place, and giving the new people a start. You know the sort of thing that was thought to be smart here before you took over. Peterson and that lot. Jeepers hasn’t a clue. He’s all taken up with the moral tone. There wasn’t any moral tone when Mr. Stuart was here. The place was just normal.”

“Quite the budding analyst.” Laurie knew suddenly that he had been talking too much, too loudly, and too long, to someone who was very tired. “So you think that Mr. Jepson has an anxiety neurosis, due to being oversensitive to a certain weakness in the system he represents.”

“Yes,” said Laurie recklessly.

“In view of which, you’re proposing to take on the whole foundations of society single-handed. My strength is as the strength of ten …” He gave a tight little smile, which went out quickly. With a change of tone he said, “You’re an orphan, I take it?”

“No,” said Laurie. “It’s only my father who’s dead.”

“Your surviving family,” said Lanyon carefully, “will be putting down the red carpet, I suppose, when you go home expelled in a couple of days’ time?”

Laurie said nothing. He had a sudden, horribly clear vision of his mother’s face.

Watching him, Lanyon said, “Yes, it’s about time you woke up.”

“I could explain,” said Laurie dully. He tried, desperately, not to imagine it.

“Oh, don’t be a fool. Admit it’s washed up, and let’s finish with this nonsense. You’re wasting my time, I’ve got a lot to do.”

Suddenly Laurie’s exhilaration returned. It was worth it; anything was worth it. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

“No,” he said. “You’re Head of the House, and you’ve got to stop a row if you can. But the House isn’t bound to stand by and see them do this to you and do nothing about it. We’d look like a lot of worms if we did. It doesn’t matter what happens. It just isn’t fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

Laurie noticed that he had got the pencil out again, and was screwing the lead up and down. He seemed absorbed in this. It made Laurie feel as if he were confronting a vacuum. He wondered if he were meant to go. But one always waited for explicit permission. “Of course it’s not fair,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

“And being such a good psychologist”—Lanyon pushed down the lead more firmly—“you feel sure that a poor helpless type like myself will naturally let himself be expelled for something he hasn’t done, unless people like you dash up with a rescue party?”

A bright ray of hope shot up in Laurie’s mind. How absurd not to have thought that Lanyon could look after himself; and why should he confide his plans to his inferiors? So long as it was going to be all right … but he wished Lanyon would look up. “I only thought,” he said to fill in the pause, “it was a thing the House ought to get together on.”

“So I gathered.” Lanyon raised his eyes. The hard, blue shine had gone. They looked tired, almost gray. “Let me see; is it Cambridge, or Oxford, you’re going to sit for?”

“Oxford,” said Laurie, now quite at sea.

Lanyon leaned an arm on the empty mantelshelf: the room, Laurie realized now, was stripped almost to the bareness of vacant possession. “Yes,” he said unemotionally. “Oxford, of course. You ought to fit in well there. It’s the home of lost causes, so they say.”

There was silence. In the last ten minutes, Laurie had almost exhausted his capacity for taking in new experience. He knew what he was being told, and it seemed now that he must have known for at least some seconds beforehand. But he had reached a full stop. He couldn’t make it mean anything.

“Too bad, Spuddy.” Lanyon smiled, it seemed from a long way off. “You’ll have to hang the shillelagh up again.”

At this point, in one of those moments which seem crucial only because they complete long, hidden processes, a man disappeared: a right-thinking, crisply defined, forcible person, rather dogmatic and intolerant in a decent, humorous way; the nearest in succession of Laurie’s potential selves. A usurper moved in, all unaware of himself, concerned only with his sudden perception of the fact that Lanyon’s steady gaze was being held up with tightened muscles, like a weight. At the higher-barbarian phase of adolescence, it comes as unwanted, dismaying news that the gods feel pain. But it seemed to Laurie that something had to be done, and no one else was here to do it All the rest would have to be thought about later.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll promise not to do anything, if you like. But it’s not because I feel any different, or … I mean I’d as soon do it now as ever. Sooner.” Some change in the quality of the pause made him lose the thread of what he was saying. He finished. “I don’t think things ought to be let happen like this.”

“You don’t think at all.” Lanyon paused a moment, blankly. Then his eyes seemed to relax. Slowly a perverse and charming smile, unfamiliar to Laurie, lifted the ends of his mouth. “Your spontaneous reactions are going to land you in a lot of trouble, if you don’t look out.”

“Are they?” said Laurie vaguely. Instinct caused him to keep some sort of conversation going; if someone had asked him a second later what he had said, he couldn’t have answered. So this, he was thinking, is what it’s all about, all Jeepers’ snufflings and fidgetings, all that bated breath. In a mingled exaltation, pride, and sheer consuming interest, he smiled back into Lanyon’s eyes. Scarcely aware of continuing the unheard, instead of the heard, conversation, he said, “Jeepers is just a dirty old man. People like that don’t know.”

“Do you?” asked Lanyon, watching his face.

“Anyway,” said Laurie, “I do now.”

Lanyon seemed about to step forward; and Laurie waited. He didn’t think what he was waiting for. He was lifted into a kind of exalted dream, part loyalty, part hero-worship, all romance. Half-remembered images moved in it, the tents of Troy, the columns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan’s bow.

Still watching him, Lanyon made a little outward movement. He paused, and drew back.

“To give them their due,” he said, his voice suddenly light and crisp, “dirty old men know one or two quite material facts. Incidentally, they’re quite material facts themselves.”

Laurie listened with his eyes. This time there was no need to answer.

“You’ll be taking this study over yourself,” said Lanyon in a businesslike way, “in course of time.”

“Who? Me?” said Laurie, startled.

“Obviously. Who else is there? I expect Jeepers will give you a frank little talk the first evening of term. Watch him carefully while he does it, and you’ll learn a lot. It’s not very edifying and rather a bore. However. Oh, just a minute.”

He turned and went over to the wooden book-box that stood in the window. Instinctively Laurie followed him, and looked over his shoulder. Lanyon straightened abruptly; his light, fine hair flicked across Laurie’s cheek.

“Get out of the light: d’you mind?”

“Sorry.”

“I’m just looking for something. Oh, yes, here it is.” He stood up with a thin leather book. The spine said The Phaedrus of Plato. Laurie hadn’t got much beyond selections from Homer. He thought Lanyon, in this practical mood, was bequeathing him a crib.

“Read it when you’ve got a minute,” said Lanyon casually, “as an antidote to Jeepers. It doesn’t exist anywhere in real life, so don’t let it give you illusions. It’s just a nice idea.”

Laurie was strongly aware that as he took it their hands had touched. He said, “I’ll always keep it. Thank you.”

“It’s a pity you and I couldn’t have talked a bit sooner.”

Laurie looked up from the book. “I wish we had.”

“Well,” said Lanyon briskly, “it’s too late now.”

Laurie continued to look up at him. With a feeling of great strangeness and astonishment he knew that they were no longer the head prefect and a fifth-former, but just two people in a room.

“Is it?” he said.

Lanyon sat down on the edge of the table, looked at Laurie, and shook his head. “Spud,” he said quite gently, “you mustn’t be difficult.”

Laurie didn’t answer. He felt like someone who tries to read a book when the pages are being turned a little too quickly.

“I’ve been watching you,” Lanyon said, “for a long time. You’re on the way to being something, and I don’t know what, not for certain. So I’m not going to interfere with it.”

“I don’t know,” said Laurie slowly. “I feel as if you had already.”

Lanyon smiled at him and he had to look down.

“That’s only because you don’t know what it’s all about. Look, if you want to know, one reason why not is because it would mean too much. To me, too, if that’s any satisfaction to you. Anyway, no. Too much responsibility.”

“I can take my own responsibility. I’m not a child.”

“That’s what you think. Stop making such a bloody nuisance of yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’ll see the point of all this later.”

Laurie turned and looked out of the window. He couldn’t think what had come over him. Lanyon had taken it pretty well.

From over by the fireplace, Lanyon said, “No good getting ideas, Spud. It doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s all just a myth, really.”

Presently Laurie said, “What are you going to do? After you leave, I mean?”

“Merchant seaman.” He spoke with the effortless-seeming decision he might have used on a matter of House routine. “I’m going straight down to Southampton tomorrow.”

“Are you all right for money?” It was strange to feel so natural about asking Lanyon a thing like this. “I’ve got about a pound I could lend you.”

“No, thanks. I can get a ship quite quickly. I know a man who’ll fix me up.”

“Oh,” said Laurie flatly. “That’s all right, then.”

“We ran into each other. He’s not so bad. I don’t know him very well.”

Suddenly they had come to the end of all that there was to say.

“Well, I’d better finish packing,” Lanyon said. He looked at Laurie, telling him to go. Laurie stared at him, mutely; but there wasn’t anything one could say. Lanyon said, briskly, “Take these lists on your way down, will you, and pin them on the board. The usual order. You know how they go.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all, goodbye. What is it, then? Come here a moment. … Now you see what I mean, Spud. It would never have done, would it? Well, goodbye.”

“But when can we—”

“Goodbye.”

After a moment Laurie said, “Goodbye, Lanyon. Good luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” said Lanyon as they parted.