The Charioteer Read online

  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 hea
d 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—”