Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

Jenkins looked searchingly at Adrian. “Is it a case?” he asked.

  Adrian had no idea what they were talking about. “I don’t know,” he said vaguely.

  Both the boys laughed, and the one with the big mouth mimicked Adrian’s “I don’t know,” exaggerating its tone into one of farcical demureness.

  Adrian’s duties as prefect’s fag afforded him some respite from the incessant rowdiness of Common-room. He had to polish Dakyn’s shoes, brush his clothes, keep his study clean, get tea ready for him there on certain occasions and wash up afterwards, as well as perform various other jobs which kept him pleasantly and not too onerously employed.

  Though these things brought him into touch with Ronny Dakyn several times a day, he did not become familiar with him. It was not to be expected and Adrian had not expected it. He was far too much in awe of Dakyn to have dared to respond with much success even if Dakyn had encouraged him to talk. But he was quite content, in his state of humble adoration, to black Daykn’s shoes and brush his clothes; indeed merely to handle these intimate possessions of his hero gave him an ecstatic happiness. He polished the shoes until they shone like jet, brushed black coats and waistcoats and pressed grey trousers until Dakyn looked immaculate. Nor was Dakyn unappreciative.

  “I must say, Glynde,” he said one day, when Adrian had brought him his shoes, “you’re a marvel with shoes.”

  Adrian soon found that he could craftily take advantage of his job to enjoy a little of the peace and quietness which it was so difficult to find downstairs. In the middle of tidying Dakyn’s study he would choose a book from the top shelf where Dakyn kept novels and stories, and kneeling on a chair with his elbows on the table he would read happily, keeping one ear open for footsteps in the passage. There was just time, at the first sound of a step, to snap the book shut, pop it back in its place, and be dusting a picture-frame before the study door opened.

  But one day he had incautiously allowed himself to become so engrossed in Mr. Polly, which he had been reading in this way by short stages, that Dakyn was standing in the doorway watching him before he could pull himself together. He sat back on his heels on the chair, the book blatantly open on the table before him, scarlet in the face. Dakyn was looking at him with eyebrows raised and a smile on his face. Adrian gazed back at him helplessly. At last he found a voice.

  “I … I’m very sorry,” he stammered. “I … I’m afraid I was reading one of your books.”

  Dakyn shut the door. “Well, why shouldn’t you?” he said. “I don’t mind. You can always come in here when the place is empty. Except of course in the afternoon when you ought to be out,” he added with mock severity, and Adrian knew he was referring to the afternoon when he had caught him in Common-room. He turned red with shame; but Dakyn, seeing his mortification, gave him a fatherly pat on the back. “All right,” he said. “I didn’t really think you would.” He bent over Adrian’s shoulder and looked at the book. “What was it?” he said. “Oh, Mr. Polly. Yes, a damned good book. No wonder I caught you bending. Well, I’ve got to work now, so you must scoot. Leave Mr. Polly here on the table, under these others. Then he’ll be handy when you want him.”

  It was not long before Adrian became conscious of Ellenger. He was continually looking into Dakyn’s study and Adrian would sometimes find him sitting there alone, reading or writing. On such occasions, unless he had something to do for Dakyn that could not be postponed, Adrian would retire discomfited. Often when Adrian was reading there, it would be Ellenger’s step which interrupted him, and Adrian got to know that step so well, to distinguish it so clearly from the light, cheerful step of Dakyn, that he would have his book put away and be emerging from the study before Ellenger was half-way down the passage.

  Ellenger was too low in the upper school to have a study of his own, and so he made use of Dakyn’s, for Dakyn was a particular friend of his. He was a large, thick-set, square-faced boy with dark brown smouldering eyes and straight black hair which hung low over his forehead and reminded Adrian of the hair of a Japanese doll. There was something scornful and brutal in the closed, enigmatical expression of his large, square face, his harsh voice, and his incessant use of bad language. The younger boys regarded him with awe and dislike, and Adrian disliked him as much as any. He resented Ellenger’s intrusion on Dakyn’s study and on Dakyn himself, for unconsciously Adrian already looked upon both the study and Dakyn as his own particular property. It was clear to him that Ellenger disliked him, for he never spoke to him unless it was unavoidable and behaved always as though he were a creature beneath his notice.

  One day, coming down the passage without shoes, he caught Adrian reading in the study.

  “Hallo, what’s this?” he said, regarding Adrian loweringly from the door.

  Adrian was tongue-tied.

  “What are you up to?” Ellenger asked more aggressively.

  “I was reading,” faltered Adrian.

  “And who the hell said you could read in here?”

  “Dakyn did.”

  “Hm, Dakyn did, did he? I don’t think that’s very likely.”

  “If you ask him …” Adrian began.

  “You’d better clear out now, anyhow,” Ellenger broke in brutally, and Adrian slunk out, trembling with thwarted hatred.

  What on earth, he wondered, as he retreated down the passage and downstairs to Common-room, could Ronny like in a beast like that.

  Ellenger sat down in the easy chair and reached for a book on the table. When, after some minutes, Dakyn came in he looked up lazily.

  “Hallo, Len; give me a pencil,” said Dakyn, taking a piece of paper from a pad on the table.

  Ellenger fumbled in his pocket and handed over a pencil, and Dakyn began to scribble a note. When he had finished, Ellenger said:

  “I found that young water-rat reading in here just now.”

  “Who? Young Glynde?”

  “Hm.”

  “Well, what of it?”

  Ellenger shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, nothing; so long as you don’t mind.”

  Dakyn from where he stood at the table examined Ellenger. “Which means, I suppose, that you do, you surly old devil. Well, you’ll damned well have to put up with it.”

  Ellenger met Dakyn’s straight, lively gaze and his face cleared, as if briefly illuminated by some inner glow, into a smile of extraordinary sweetness.

  X

  Adrian settled down at Charminster much more easily than he had expected. The prospect, the arrival, and the first few days there had been rather dreadful. During his four years at Waldo there had never been more than twenty boys there, and for some time only twelve. It had not been much of a preparation for this seething ocean of noisy and often hostile youth into which he had been so suddenly plunged.

  Waldo had come to be a sort of home to him, but there was nothing of home about Charminster. It was more like a jungle in which there was a ceaseless struggle for existence and only the fit—the self-assertive and physically strong—survived to enjoy any but the most meagre and harassed existence.

  Though Adrian had not at the time much minded bidding farewell to Waldo, the uprooting had in the end upset him a good deal, and still more he had been upset by the meeting with his mother and the disillusionment it had brought. It was as if his life had lost its centre. He felt lonely and unsettled, and it was in this defenceless state that he had had to face Charminster.

  In these forlorn circumstances the sudden entry into his life of Ronny Dakyn had been his salvation. It was inevitable, in the lonely state in which he was, that he should set his forlorn heart and unused affections on someone, and it was fortunate that he should chance to set them, attracted perhaps by nothing more than his outward charm, on the pleasant, kind-hearted Dakyn, who, by a casual word, had urged him to turn his energies to the things in which he was most deficient. It was doubtless nothing more than chance that Dakyn should have remarked that he must try to improve his football-playing. He had said it lightly, without any insistence or earnestness;
but Adrian had accepted it as a sacred duty imposed upon him by one who had suddenly become the most important being in his life. Games at Charminster were regarded by the boys as the only things of importance. A boy was judged and approved or not by whether he was good or bad at games. Work and the things of the mind did not count. Urged by that casual remark of Ronny Dakyn, Adrian saved himself from contempt and nonentity at Charminster and, in a single hour, in that first game of football, freed himself from a tangle of inhibitions also. For his sudden discovery of the rapture of the game turned out to be permanent. He had set himself to obey Dakyn, but it had not occurred to him to speculate on whether Dakyn would ever know that he had done so. He had obeyed without thought of reward: his own consciousness that he had fulfilled what Dakyn had commanded was its own reward. He was astonished when, as he entered the study with a note one evening, Dakyn, having read the note and thrown it aside, said to him:

  “You play a nice game of footer, young man. I saw you on Ground 5 this afternoon.”

  Adrian flushed with embarrassment and gratitude. At first he could say nothing. Then, blushing still redder, he replied: “You said I had to improve.”

  “I said so?” Dakyn looked puzzled.

  “Yes. You asked me if I was any good, and I said No, and you said it was a pity and I must improve.”

  Dakyn saw in the little boy’s eyes that look which he was accustomed to see in so many others that he had come to regard it as his rightful tribute. He was flattered, amused, and a little touched.

  “So you improved?” he said, smiling. “Good for you, little man.”

  If Ronny Dakyn was an unconscious saviour of Adrian at Charminster, Mr. Heller was soon, in a very different direction, to become no less. Mr. Heller and Dr. Edward Yardley-Tritton, who was also the school organist, taught the piano at Charminster. It was open to boys who wished, or whose parents wished them to learn the piano to choose either master. Almost all of them chose Dr. Yardley-Tritton, not because he was popular and respected, but because he demanded little and was easy to please. He was also easy to disregard. He was universally looked upon as a fool, and not unjustly. His appearance distressingly bespoke the conventional artist. He wore a double-breasted black coat and a starched turndown collar. His tie had a greater licence than anyone but an artist such as Dr. Yardley-Tritton would permit to his tie. His face was fleshy; he had full, weak, indulgent lips crowned by a greying brown moustache, and from the base of his sagging cheeks flowed an absurd pair of dundreary whiskers, an anachronism which appeared to have been caused by a subsidence of the hair of the head which left his crown almost bare. He wore horn-rimmed pince-nez which were slung round his neck by a black ribbon. His usual expression was that of a fastidious eclectic, but this he was very far from being, for his taste in music was so catholic as to be quite tasteless. His favourite musical adjectives were “charming,” “graceful,” “tasteful,” “melodious.” By the boys he was known, not in affection, but in contempt, as Teddy.

  No one could have been less like Teddy than Mr. Heller, whose name had long since been altered into Old Hell. In appearance he was like an old vulture. His figure was long, thin, and drooping. The thin, bony head and skinny neck were sunk forward between hunched shoulders. His long, blob-ended nose and weedy moustache overhung a mouth, with teeth discoloured by pipe-smoking, which was set, when he was serious, in a permanent death’s-head grin, but curled, when occasionally he smiled, into an expression of great gentleness. He had a pronounced, bony, aristocratic chin and blue, myopic eyes that blinked behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His clothes were unostentatiously good, the clothes of a gentleman; and, despite his half comical, half pitiable appearance, there was about him a distinction which was enhanced by a kindly, old-fashioned courtesy of manner. But the distinction and the courtesy were evident only to those who penetrated his external comicality and became acquainted with him. Few boys did so. He was regarded as a freak, and his reputation as an irritable and exacting purist frightened pupils away to the facile Teddy.

  Adrian did not at once arrange for piano lessons. In the first place he had been too timid to find out how to do so and had decided to wait until he had settled down. But, besides this, he had heard Teddy play the piano at a Sunday concert soon after his arrival, and had been repelled by his fluent and shallow tinkling of Beethoven’s C Sharp Minor Sonata and by the fact that he had followed it up with a piece by Moskowski. Teddy, in all seriousness, played in the manner adopted by entertainers who try hard to be frivolous—that manner which recalls the self-satisfied rider of a short-trotting cob. Adrian decided at once that he would rather not have lessons at all than take them from Teddy.

  These Sunday concerts were occasional events and were never largely attended. There were only a dozen boys and a few masters and their wives at the one at which Old Hell played a Bach Prelude and Fugue and two of Beethoven’s Sonatas, one of them the Appassionata. Adrian was one of the twelve boys. He went alone, and all the time he sat enthralled. He had never before heard such playing.

  When the concert ended with the ending of the Appassionata he returned to himself from a state of rapture in which he had been unconscious of his surroundings, of old Mr. Heller himself, of everything but that revelation of a new world. He immediately resolved that he would brave the legendary terrors of Old Hell, and, made suddenly bold by his enthusiasm, he stayed behind when the rest went out of the Hall, and waited for him at the bottom of the steps that mounted to the platform. The old man was still at the piano, a vulture groping vaguely for scraps on the floor of its cage. He had closed the piano and was slowly gathering his music together, and soon he crossed the platform and came down the steps. He did not notice Adrian till he was right up against him. Then he stopped and made a series of inarticulate noises, as though he were breathing aloud. Adrian for the first time noticed the fixed grin and believed, with embarrassment, that the old man was laughing at him. But when he spoke it was evident that he was not laughing, for his voice was polite and kindly.

  “Did you … er … did you … er …” He gently moved a large, bony hand in the air as if he were conducting what he was trying to say.

  “Yes please, sir,” said Adrian. “I wanted to ask you if I could have music lessons.”

  Mr. Heller breathed aloud again. “The … er … the piano?” he asked. He pronounced it piahno.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You do … er … you do … er … play?”

  “No, not really, sir. Just a little.”

  “But you … er … you like music?”

  “Yes, sir, very much.”

  “Were you … er … here,” he vaguely indicated the air about them, “just now, when … er … when I was … er … playing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And … er … which of the pieces did you … er … like the … er … the best?”

  “That last one, sir—the Appassionata,” said Adrian. Mr. Heller nodded his head slowly several times, as though devoutly agreeing. “You … er … know it, perhaps?”

  “Yes, sir, but I’ve never heard it played like that before. Our head-master’s wife at Waldo played it to us sometimes.”

  “And she … er … she made rather a … hm! … rather a poor job of it?”

  “No, not bad, sir; but nothing like yours.”

  “Most of the boys go … er … to Dr. Yardley-Tritton,” said Mr. Heller, as if gently rebuking Adrian for not doing the same. “Why did you … er …?” He indicated in the air the approach of an invisible Adrian to an invisible Mr. Heller.

  “I heard Dr. Yardley-Tritton play two Sundays ago, sir,” said Adrian without intended cynicism.

  “And that … er … was enough to make you … er … apply … er …?” Mr. Heller was really smiling this time, and Adrian smiled too.

  “Yes, sir; to you.”

  “Of course, you’ll have to … er … speak to your … er … house-master. But meanwhile, perhaps you’d … er … care … to … er …?”

&nb
sp; Adrian gathered that they were to leave the Hall together for some airy destination. “I could give you … er … some … er … some tea.”

  Adrian accepted the invitation, and followed Mr. Heller out through the porch. Outside he looked anxiously about him, for he was ashamed of being seen walking with Old Hell, knowing well that the result would be ridicule and scornful curiosity. But at that hour on a Sunday afternoon there were few boys about the school buildings, and they turned out of the cloisters unobserved, followed the edge of one of the football fields, and, to Adrian’s relief, dived down a hidden path through a close hazel-copse. At the end of it they descended rustic steps into a lane, and half-way down the lane Mr. Heller opened a gate in a close oak fence and let Adrian into a small garden. A cinder path ran straight to the porch.

  They entered the house, and Mr. Heller, putting a hand on Adrian’s shoulder, propelled him gently out of the narrow hall into a small, dim room. It seemed to Adrian, as he entered, to contain little else than a black grand piano and a table with a white cloth on it. The chief thing he noticed about it was its smell, a close, spicy smell which seemed to be made up of the smell of the inside of a piano and of old books, and the rich aroma of loose tobacco in ajar. It reminded him of the smell of the old ebony snuff-box which his grandfather had said was supposed to have belonged to the poet Pope.

  Mr. Heller went to put down the music he was carrying on a chair near the piano. His thin body and hunched shoulders stooped stiffly over the chair, an ancient bird of prey cowering under a cold wind. He fumbled with the music, then, still stooping, spoke to Adrian, his comic, tragic mask peering at him round his bent body; and Adrian suddenly thought of that grim little picture of John Donne in his shroud which hung over the old piano in his grandfather’s study in a black and silver frame. The picture had always horrified and fascinated him, and he had often stared at it as he sat playing to himself.

  “You haven’t yet told me your … er … your name,” Mr. Heller was saying.