by Hugh Walpole
Traill had been attached to Birkland from the first. The man had definite personality — aggressive in its influence — and contempt of the rest of the common room, but they justified it to some extent by their own terror of his tongue and their eager criticism of him behind his back.
He had treated Traill like the rest, but then Traill never noticed it. He was not afraid of Birkland, he never resented his criticism, and he appreciated his humor.
And then suddenly one evening Birkland asked him to come and see him. His room was untidy — littered with school-books, exercise-books, stacks of paper to be corrected; but behind this curtain of discomfort there were signs of other earlier things: some etchings, dusty and uncared for, sets of Meredith and Pater, some photographs, and a large engraving of Whistler’s portrait of his mother. The latticed window was open, and from the night outside, blowing into the gusty candles, there were the scent of decaying leaves and a faint breath of the distant sea.
Birkland was thin — sticks of legs and arms; a short, wiry mustache; heavy, overhanging eyebrows; thin, straight, stiff hair turning a little gray. He gave Traill a drink, watched him fill a pipe; and then, huddled in his armchair, his legs crossed under him, his eyes full on the open window and the night sky, he asked Traill questions.
“And so you like it?”
“Yes — immensely!”
“Why?”
“Well — why not? After all, it gives a fellow what he wants. There’s plenty of exercise — the hours are healthy — the fellows are quite nice fellows. I like teaching.”
Traill gave a sigh of satisfaction, and, after all, he had omitted his principal reason.
“Yes. How long do you mean to stay here?”
“Oh! a year, I suppose. Then I ought to get to Clifton.”
“Yes. You’d better not tell the Head that, though. How do you like the other men?”
“Oh, I think they’re very good fellows. Dormer’s splendid.”
“Yes — and Perrin?”
“Oh! he’s all right. He seems to get annoyed pretty easily. As a matter of fact, I have felt rather irritated once or twice.”
“Yes — everyone’s wanted to cut Perrin’s throat some time or other. As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t the other way round — one day.”
There was a pause, and then Birkland said, “And so you like it.”
“Yes, of course; don’t you?”
Birkland laughed. There was a long pause. Then Traill said again, rather uncertainly, “Don’t you?”
He had never thought of Birkland as an unhappy man — as a matter of fact he never thought of people as being definite kinds of people, and he scarcely ever read novels.
Then Birkland spoke: “You had better not ask me that, young man, if you want an encouraging answer.”
Then very slowly, after another pause, the words came out: “I’m going to speak the truth to you to-night for the good and safety of your soul, and I haven’t cared for the good and safety of anyone’s soul for — well! — I should be afraid to say how long. I’m afraid — I don’t really care very much about the safety of yours — but I care enough to speak to you; and the one thing I say to you is — get out — get away. Fly for your life.” His voice sank to a whisper. “If you don’t, you will die very soon — in a year perhaps. We are all dead here, and we died a great many years ago.”
Traill moved uncomfortably in his chair. He smiled across the flickering candles at Birkland.
“Oh! I say,” he said, “that’s a bit of exaggeration, isn’t it? I suppose one is tired sometimes, of course; but, after all, there are a good many men in the country who make a pretty good thing out of mastering and aren’t so very miserable.”
It was evident that he thought that it was all a kind of joke on Birkland’s part. He pulled contentedly at his pipe.
But the other man went on: “I shouldn’t have said this at all if I hadn’t meant it, and if I hadn’t got twenty years of experience behind me to prove what I say. I don’t know why I’m bothering you, I’m sure; but now I’ve begun I’m going on, and you’ve got to listen. You can’t say you haven’t been given your chance. Have you ever looked round the common room and seen what kind of men they are?”
“Of course,” said Traill; “but,” he added modestly, “I’m not observant, you know. I’m not at all a clever kind of chap.”
“Well, you would have seen what I’m telling you written in their faces right enough. Mind you — what I’m saying to you doesn’t apply to the first-class public school. That’s a different kind of thing altogether. I’m talking about places like Moffatt’s — places that are trying to be what they are not — to do what they can’t do — to get higher than they can reach. There are thousands of them all over the country — places where the men are underpaid, with no prospects, herded together, all of them hating each other, wanting, perhaps, towards the end of term, to cut each other’s throats. Do you suppose that that is good for the boys they teach?”
He paused and relit his pipe, and his voice was, too, measured, but showing in its tensity his emotion.
“It’s a different thing with the bigger places. There, there is more room; the men don’t live so close together; they are paid better; there is a chance of getting a house; there is the esprit de corps of the school... but here, my God!”
Birkland bent forward, his face white, over the candles.
“Get out of it, Traill, you fool! You say, in a year’s time. Don’t I know that? Do you suppose that I meant to stay here for ever when I came? But one postpones moving. Another term will be better, or you try for a thing, fail, and get discouraged... and then suddenly you are too old — too old at thirty-three — earning two hundred a year... too old! and liable to be turned out with a week’s notice if the Head doesn’t like you — turned out with nothing to go to; and he knows that you are afraid of him and he has games with you.”
Traill stared at the little man’s burning eyes. How odd of Birkland to talk like this!
“You think you will escape, but already the place has its fingers about you. You will be a different man at the end of the term. You will be allowed no friends here, only enemies. You think the rest of us like you. Well, for a moment perhaps, but only for a moment. Soon something will come... already you dislike Perrin. You must not be friends with the Head, because then we shall think that you are spying on us. You must not be friends with us, because then the Head will hear of it and will immediately hate you because he will think that you are conspiring against him. You must not be friends with the boys, because then we shall all hate you and they will despise you. You will be quite alone. You think that you are going to teach with freshness and interest — you are full of eager plans, new ideas. Every plan, every idea, will be immediately killed. You must not have them — they are not good for examinations — you are trying to show that you are superior.”
Birkland paused. Traill moved uneasily in his chair.
“Wait! You must hear me out. It all goes deeper than these things. It is murder — self-murder. You are going to kill — you have got to kill — every fine thought, every hope, that you possess. You will be laughed at for your ambitions, your desires. You will not even be allowed any fine vices. You must never go anywhere, because you are neglecting your work. You have no time. Here we are — fifteen men — all hating each other, loathing everything that the other man does — the way he eats, the way he moves, the way he teaches. We sleep next door to each other, we eat together, we meet all day until late at night — hating each other.”
“After all,” said Traill, still smiling, “it is only a month or two, and there are holidays.”
“If term lasted another week or two,” went on Birkland quietly, “murder would be committed. The holidays come, and you go out into the world to find that you are different from all other men — to find that they know that you are different. You are patronizing, narrow, egotistic. You realize it slowly; you see them shunning you — and then back you go a
gain. God knows, they should not hate us — these others! they should pity us. If you marry, see what it is — look at Mrs. Dormer, Mrs. Comber, Mrs. Moy-Thompson. Look at their husbands, their life. There is marriage — no money, no prospects, perhaps in the end starvation! And gradually there creeps over you a dreadful and horrible inertia: you do not care — you do not think — you are a ghost. If one of us dies, we do not mind — we do not think about it. Only, towards the end of the term, when the examinations come, there creeps about the place a new devil. All our nerve is gone; our hatred of each other begins to be active. It is the end-of-termy devil.... Another week or two, and there is no knowing what we might do. We are all tired, horribly tired. Be careful then what you do and what you say.”
“My word!” said Traill, filling his pipe, “what a horrible picture of things! You must be out of sorts. Why, it’s hysteria!”
Birkland had crawled back into his chair again. He puffed at his pipe.
“Oh! of course you don’t see it!” he said. “After all, why should you? But it’s true, every word of it. Oh! I’m resigned enough now. Besides, it’s the beginning of the term. I’m inclined to think it’s untrue, myself, just now. Wait and see. Watch White after he’s had an interview with the Head — see Perrin and Comber together later on — study Mrs. Comber. But don’t you bother. You won’t listen to me — why should you? Only, in ten years’ time you’ll remember.”
After that they talked of other things. Birkland was rather amusing in his sharp, caustic way.
“I say,” said Traill as he stood by the door on the way out, “that was all rot; wasn’t it?”
“What was?” asked Birkland.
“Why, about the place — this place.”
“All rot!” said Birkland gravely.
III.
But of course one dismisses these things very soon — especially, and immediately, if the person in question is Archie Traill.
Why think about a problematic and depressing forty? Take these men that Birkland so gloomily points to as disappointing and unsatisfactory exceptions. Life is like that. There are always the riders who collapse into ditches and sit there mumbling, wishing for the company, down in the dirt and the grime, of their fellow-horsemen.
Meanwhile there is this fine autumn weather. Birkland remains a crabbed shadow; life is sharp, pungent — formed with faint blue skies, dim and shining like clear glass with a hard yellow sun stuck like a tethered balloon between saucer-clouds.
Archie Traill, on a free afternoon — an early frost had made the ground too hard for football — in the week after that Birkland evening, stood in the village street as the church clock struck half-past three, and he thanked God for a half-holiday.
The air was so still that the distant mining stamps and the breaking sea had it for the plain of their unceasing war, cannon against cannon, and the withdrawing rattle of their rival shot echoing against the blue horizon and the stiff side of the Brown Hill. The village cobbles shone and glittered; the gray roofs lay like carpets spread to dry. The brown church tower seemed to sway — so motionless was the rest of the world — with the clatter of its chiming clocks.
Suddenly Isabel Desart turned the corner. “Good afternoon, Mr. Traill,” and the clasp of her hand was strong and clean as all the rest of her movements. She smiled at him as she always smiled, a little ironically and also a little seriously, as though she found the world a strange place, ought to think it a solemn one, but couldn’t help finding it funny.
Three old women, their skirts kilted about them, their eyes fixed on vacancy, flung their voices into the silence like balls against a board.
“And she only sixteen — what a size!”
“Only sixteen! — to think of it!”
“With her great legs and all!”
“Only sixteen...!”
The man and woman moved up the road together. She was usually so full of things to say that her silence surprised him. The thought that his presence could possibly be agitating to her, and therefore responsible, drove the blood to his head, and then he rebuked himself for a presumptuous fool. But if he had spoken, he would have had to tell her that he loved her — and it wasn’t time yet.
But at last he broke against the silence very quietly. “We must talk, one of us — it is so wonderfully quiet that it’s alarming.”
She turned round to him, and suddenly, so that he stopped in the road and looked at her, she put her hand on his arm.
“We are both so frightfully young,” she said.
“Why, yes,” he said, laughing at her; “but why not?”
“Why, for the things that we’ll have to do. You for the boys, and I for my poor Mrs. Comber. I had thought when I saw you first that you were going to be old enough, but I don’t think you are.”
“I know that I can’t—” he began.
“Oh! it isn’t for anything that you can’t do!” she broke in. “It’s just because you don’t see it — why should you? You’re too much in the middle — I suppose it’s only outsiders who can really understand. But I get so depressed sometimes with it all that I think that I will leave it and go back to London and never come here again. One doesn’t seem to be any use — no use at all. And it all seems worse in the autumn somehow. Poor Mr. Traill! I always happen to be gloomy when you catch me, and I’m not gloomy really in the least.”
“But what is it all about? And don’t go to London, please. You mustn’t think of it.”
He was so much in earnest that she turned and looked at him. “Why?” she said gravely. “Do you like my being here?” And then, before he could say anything, she added, reflectively, “Well, that’s one, at any rate.
“I have to go in here,” she said, stopping before a gate with a drive behind it. “Tea, you understand.” Then she gave him her hand. “Although you don’t in the least know what I mean, you’re a help,” she said; “and I shall look across the chapel floor in the evening and know that I have a friend. Sometimes when I’m down here — out of it — and everything’s so fresh and clear, like to-night, I think that it can’t be true — the things that go on. Oh! I’m so sorry for them, all of them.” She went through the gate and looked back at him. “But I don’t want to have to be sorry for you as well — please,” she added, and was lost in the trees.
But he, in his triumphant, buoyant sensation of things having moved a step — or even a good many steps further — was ready that she should be sorry or have any sensation whatever so long as she thought of him. Her claiming Chapel-time as a meeting-ground made that somewhat irritating and so swiftly recurrent a ceremonial a thrice-blessed moment to which he might eagerly look forward throughout the day. But it is not my intention to give you all his symptoms — his passion is in no way the chief point; it was simply one of the things that helped in the culminating issue.
Isabel, meanwhile, found that throughout the tea-party her little conversation with Traill ran in her head. It was not a very interesting tea-party — three old ladies who regarded her as something very dangerous and alarming and offered her cake as though they expected it to turn into a bomb in her hands. She looked at their comfortable fire, their dark, cozy drawing-room, their caps and shawls, with the eye of someone whose passage through that country was very swift and whose language was not theirs. The dancing glow of the firelight, the tinkle of the tea-things, the softness of the rugs at her feet, were not the expression of her idea of life, and she flung them away from her and thought of Moffatt’s and the night outside. Throughout their soft and courteous speech her mind was with Traill. He had said, “Don’t go to London, please,” and he had meant it — it was almost as though he had appealed to her from a sudden vision that he had of all that was in front of him. She knew, of course — she had seen it happen so very often before; and perceived that for this man, too, with his bright, eager challenge of life, his absurdly young notion of the way that things would be certain to be simple when they were never simple at all, grim, baffling disappointment was at hand. T
o her those red walls of Moffatt’s were alive, moving — crushing, as in some story that she had once read, relentlessly the victims that were hidden within. Perhaps he had suddenly seen or understood something of that — there had come to him some forewarning. Her cheek reddened at the thought and her breath came quickly. She liked him — she had liked him from the first — she liked him very much; and if he wanted her to help him, she would do all that she could. She said good-by to the three old ladies and left them behind her with a little humorous laugh. It was right that there should be three old ladies living like that, so cozily and comfortably, with their fires and their carpets, at the very foot of Moffatt’s. How little people realized! These old ladies with their park gates and long drive! How they would roll up in their carriage!... and the Moffatt’s!
It was dark, and the long hill that stretched above her was black and ominous. The lights of Moffatt’s showed, to the right at the top, and the darker shape of its buildings cut the lighter gray of the sky. There was a lamp-post at the corner of the road, and as she closed the gates behind her with a clang she heard a voice say, “Good evening, Miss Desart,” and saw that Mr. Perrin was at her side. Mr. Perrin always made her feel nervous, and now, in the dark, she instinctively shrank back, but it was only for an instant, and she was immediately ashamed of her fears. She could not see his face, but she fancied that his voice trembled — he seemed troubled about something; and then that feeling of pity that she had for him before came upon her again, and her voice was softer and more tender.
“It was — um — a great piece of good fortune for me that I should be passing just when you were coming out — a great piece of good fortune.”
He seemed very nervous.
“And for me too,” she said; “this hill grows extraordinarily dark, and I stayed on longer than I ought to have done. Have you been paying calls, too?”
“Oh, no! I — um — never pay calls — merely a stroll down to the village to buy some tobacco — merely that — nothing more... yes, merely that... simply some tobacco.”