The Passionate Year by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page B

and Mazurkas. He did not
attempt to get into separate conversation with Miss Ervine; he chatted
amiably with the Head while the two girls gossiped by themselves. And at ten
o’clock, pleading work to do before bed, he arose to go, leaving the girls to
make their own arrangements. Miss Ervine said good-bye to him with a shyness
in which he thought he detected a touch of wistfulness.
    When he got up to his own room he thought about her for a long while. He
tried to settle down to an hour or so of marking books, but found it
impossible. In the end he went downstairs and let himself outside into the
school grounds by his own private key. It was a glorious night of starshine,
and all the roofs were pale with the brightness of it. Wafts of perfume from
the flowers and shrubbery of the Head’s garden accosted him gently as he
turned the corner by the chapel and into the winding tree-hidden path that
circumvented the entire grounds of Millstead. It was on such a night that his
heart’s core was always touched; for it seemed to him that then the strange
spirit of the place was most alive, and that it came everywhere to meet him
with open arms, drenching all his life in wild and unspeakable loveliness.
Oh, how happy he was, and how hard it was to make others realise his
happiness! In the Common-Room his happiness had become proverbial, and even
amongst the boys, always quicker to notice unhappy than happy looks, his
beaming smile and firm, kindling enthusiasm had earned him the nickname of
“Smiler.”
    He sat down for a moment on the lowest tier of the pavilion seats, those
seats where generations of Millsteadians had hurriedly prepared themselves
for the fray of school and house matches. Now the spot was splendidly silent,
with the cricket-pitch looming away mistily in front, and far behind, over
the tips of the high trees, the winking lights of the still noisy
dormitories. He watched a bat flitting haphazardly about the pillars of the
pavilion stand. He could see, very faintly in the paleness, the score of that
afternoon’s match displayed on the indicator. Old Millstead parish bells, far
away in the town, commenced the chiming of eleven.
    He felt then, as he had never felt before he came to Millstead, that the
world was full, brimming full, of wonderful majestic beauty, and that now, as
the scented air swirled round him in slow magnificent eddies, it was
searching for something, searching with passionate and infinite desire for
something that eluded it always. He could not understand or analyse all that
he felt, but sometimes lately a deep shaft of ultimate feeling would seem to
grip him round the body and send the tears swimming into his eyes, as if for
one glorious moment he had seen and heard something of another world. It came
suddenly to him now, as he sat on the pavilion seats with the silver
starshine above him and the air full of the smells of earth and flowers; it
seemed to him that something mighty must be abroad in the world, that all
this tremulous loveliness could not live without a meaning, that he was on
the verge of some strange and magic revelation.
    Clear as bells on the silent air came the sound of girls’ voices. He heard
a rich, tolling “Good night, Clare!” Then silence again, silence in which he
seemed to know more things than he had ever known before.
----

CHAPTER III
I
    ONE afternoon he called at Harrington’s, in the High Street,
to buy a book. It was a tiny low-roofed shop, the only one of its kind in
Millstead, and with the sale of books it combined that of newspapers,
stationery, pictures and fancy goods. It was always dark and shadowy, yet,
unlike the Head’s study at the school, this gloom possessed a cheerful
soothing quality that made the shop a pleasant haven of refuge when the
pavements outside were dazzling and sun-scorched. It was on such an afternoon
that Speed visited the shop for the first time. Usually he had no occasion
to, for,