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

sweeping down the steps
of the Big Hall and pouring into the houses. Always it thrilled him by its
mere strength and volume of sound; thrilled him with pride and passion to
think that he belonged to this heart that throbbed with such onrushing zest
and vitality. Soon the first adventurous lappings of the tide reached the
corridor outside his room; he loved the noise and commotion of it; he loved
the shouting and singing and yelling and the boisterous laughter; he loved
the faint murmur of conflicting gramophones and the smells of coffee and
cocoa that rose up from the downstairs studies; he loved the sound of old
Hartopp’s voice as he stood at the foot of the stairs at ten o’clock and
shouted, in a key that sent up a melodious echoing through all the passages
and landings: “Time, gentlemen, time!”—And when the lights in the
dormitories had all been put out, and Millstead at last was silent under the
stars, he loved above all things the strange magic of his own senses, that
revealed him a Millstead that nobody else had ever seen, a Millstead rapt and
ethereal, one with the haze of night and the summer starshine.
    He told himself, in the moments when he reacted from the abandonment of
his soul to dreaming, that he was sentimental, that he loved too readily,
that beauty stirred him more than it ought, that life was too vividly
emotional, too mighty a conqueror of his senses. But then, in the calm midst
of reasoning, that same wild, tremulous consciousness of wonder and romance
would envelop him afresh like a strong flood; it was a fierce, passionate
ache in his bones, only to be forgotten for unreal, unliving instants. And
one moment, when he sat by the window hearing the far-off murmur of Chopin on
the Head’s piano, he knew most simply and perfectly why it was that all this
was so. It was because he was very deeply and passionately in love. In his
dreams, his wild and bewitching dreams, she was a fairy-child, ethereal and
half unreal, the rapt half-embodied spirit of Millstead itself, luring him by
her sweet and fragrant vitality. He saw in the sunlight always the golden
glint of her hair; in music no more than subtle and exquisite reminders of
her; in all the world of sights and sounds and feelings a deep transfiguring
passion that was his own for her.
    And in the flesh he met her often in the school grounds, where she might
say: “Oh, Mr. Speed, I’m so glad I’ve met you! I want you to come in
and hear me play something.” They would stroll together over the lawns into
the Head’s house and settle themselves in the stuffy-smelling drawing-room.
Doctor and Mrs. Ervine were frequently out in the afternoons, and Potter, it
was believed, dozed in the butler’s pantry. Speed would play the piano to the
girl and then she to him, and when they were both tired of playing they
talked awhile. Everything of her seemed to him most perfect and delicious.
Once he asked her tactfully about reading novelettes, and she said: “I read
them sometimes because there’s nothing in father’s library that I care for.
It’s nearly all sermons and Latin grammars.” Immediately it appeared to him
that all was satisfactory and entrancingly explained; a vague unrestfulness
in him was made suddenly tranquil; her habit of reading novelettes made her
more dear and lovable than ever. He said: “I wonder if you’d like me to lend
you some books?— Interesting books, I promise you.”—She
answered, with her child-like enthusiasm: “Oh, I’d love that, Mr.
Speed!”
    He lent her Hans Andersen’s fairy tales.
    Once in chapel, as he declaimed the final verse of the eighty-eighth
Psalm, he looked for a fraction of a second at the Head’s pew and saw that
she was watching him. “Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine
acquaintance into darkness.”—He saw a blush kindle her cheeks like
flame.
    One week-day morning he met the Head in the middle of the quadrangle. The