The Charioteer

  “But, darling, I shall always need you, just the same as ever.” He had made her doubts too articulate; she would escape from him now. “What am I doing,” she cried, “keeping you up in the cold, just out of hospital? Good night, darling, we shall all be so busy tomorrow, try to sleep well. Good night.”

  The light from the door grew narrow behind her, turning to a strip, to a line, to a memory drawn on a slab of darkness. Now he could see that the faint glimmer they had been standing in came partly also from the stars.

  In the old days, if one slept downstairs, after the house was quiet Gyp would get cautiously out of his basket, and one would hear his claws on the flags in the hall. He would put his nose to the crack under the door, and make a faint whistly snuffle till it was opened. For a big dog, he took up very little room.

  Laurie fell asleep between two and three in the morning. The moon had risen by then, and frost was growing up the window-glass, opening pointed leaves and flowers to the light.

  For the last hour he had tried to think of nothing, and in the end had almost succeeded. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it was impossible to empty the mind entirely. So at last he thought of what was next to nothing, the recollection of a dream, which tomorrow need not be remembered. A cold pool of moonlight trickled over to where he lay; but by then he was out of reach, his eyes pressed down on the pillow, and one arm thrown over it in a gesture which, even in the relaxation of sleep, looked abrupt and possessive.

  In the morning, as soon as he was awake, it became increasingly like getting ready for a general inspection, except that he himself had been promoted to C.S.M. Almost before he had time to brush himself down, his mother was being dressed by Aunt Olive and people were arriving. Relations whom he felt he had seen quite recently, and who seemed to him very little changed, exclaimed with wonder at not finding him still a schoolboy. Others asked him if he was on leave. Suddenly they all began disappearing; in what seemed no time at all the house was empty even of Aunt Olive; there was only a stray caterer’s man arguing with Mrs. Timmings, and then the car was at the door. Hurrying upstairs he nearly fell, recovered with his heart in his mouth, precipitated himself into his mother’s room after a perfunctory knock, and came face to face with her in her wedding dress.

  “How do I look, darling?”

  “You look lovely. Everyone who doesn’t know will think I’m your brother.”

  For a moment united as one, each was silently begging the other, “Take it quickly, take it lightly, God forbid we should go through that again.”

  Softly and musically, the clock in the hall struck two. Time is, time was, time is past.

  “We must go.” She made a little movement toward her ivory-and-gold prayer-book.

  “No,” he said. “You have to keep him waiting.”

  Her hand in its pearl-gray glove, resting on his arm, looked small and naïvely formal, the hand of a Du Maurier child who has watched fans and trains from the top of the stairs.

  “… not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly …”

  Laurie gazed at the line of little gray buttons that ran down the back of his mother’s dress. He was glad, after all, that he had come, that circumstances had presented him with no excuse. She had needed him, a thing which in his hurt pride and abandonment he had forgotten to expect. He couldn’t think, indeed, how she would have managed without him.

  “… and, forsaking all other, keep thee only to her, as long as ye both shall live?”

  In a round, announcing voice, Mr. Straike said, “I will.”

  The full realization of his physical presence hit Laurie like a blow. He stared at the floor and reminded himself that he was in church. But church had become a smell of hassocks and furnace coke and, ubiquitously, of Mr. Straike. It was an extension of him.

  “Wilt thou obey and serve him, love, honor, and …”

  Oh, God, make her say no.

  “I will.”

  He heard Aunt Olive behind him give a satisfied sigh.

  “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

  “I do,” Laurie said. Now that it had come he could feel nothing at all, except a proud determination to do it properly. He took a measured pace forward and handed his mother to Canon Rosslow to hand to Mr. Straike. He fell a pace back again. With a dry, empty relief, he realized that this was all. He had spoken his line; he could get back into the chorus. There was his place ready for him, beside Aunt Olive in the corner of the front pew. He moved toward it.

  Aunt Olive put away her handkerchief, and seemed to cross an invisible threshold to festivity. The moment the psalm had started she nudged him and whispered, “Beautiful.”

  She had been very kind to his mother. He nodded sociably.

  “You did very well, most correct and dignified.”

  He made a deprecating face, and applied himself to his prayer-book; but she was touching his arm.

  “Just look quickly, dear, and tell me who—”

  He looked quickly, being sure that she wouldn’t let him alone till he did. It was a big church, and the bride’s friends sat with plenty of elbow-room. The parishioners, with the modesty of country people, had left several empty pews in the middle. Laurie had no trouble in following Aunt Olive’s eye to the stranger in the seventh row.

  He was singing from the book, standing very straight and correctly, as if he were at ship’s prayers, and not looking about him. But he must have felt Laurie turn, for their eyes met at once. Ralph’s narrowed in a brief smile, then returned to the page. Laurie became aware of Aunt Olive’s expectancy; he whispered, “Friend of mine.”

  “Very nice,” said Aunt Olive, nodding vigorously.

  The psalm ended. Laurie, who would never pray on his knees again, leaned forward and covered his face.

  “… and forgive us our trespasses,” muttered the congregation; a drowsy, absent-minded sound like the sound of scuffling feet. Laurie looked down through his fingers at a piece of oak smoothed by the hands of six generations, and, the terms of his self-deceit forgotten, thought, I ought not to have sent for him. He knew that he had refused to expect this result, only because that would permit him to make it certain.

  Having accepted this knowledge, he allowed it almost at once to drift out of sight. There is much anodyne to a painful thought in mere lack of concentration. He said to himself, as far as he said anything plainly, that Ralph was here now, that it was more than kind of him to have come, that to be glad to see him was only common decency. Beyond this moment, the future was still free and undetermined.

  Canon Rosslow had what is slanderously called the Oxford accent. He made the Homily sound like a piece of respectable cant. Laurie found it all slipping by him like Monday morning chapel at school. Everything he was capable of feeling about this event had been exhausted; he was empty, waiting only for something different to happen. He was, though he didn’t know this, in the state which at funerals inspires the wake.

  It was over. The bride and groom were on their way to the vestry. Remembering his duty, he got up and followed them.

  He signed the register and kissed his mother. As if she were covered with an impalpable veil, he could feel only that he was kissing a bride. He saw Mr. Straike advancing and wondered for one dislocated minute whether he would expect to be kissed too. But all was well, Mr. Straike gave him a manly handclasp, two hands to Laurie’s one. Soon they were all going back into the church again, and the organ was playing his mother and her husband down the aisle.

  He knew he ought to follow, and did so at first; but the organist had set a good cracking pace, and Mr. Straike couldn’t be expected to remember. The best man, though thirty years Laurie’s senior, had a better turn of speed. People were coming out of the pews and he slid into the stream. He wasn’t much held up by civilities, for everyone was hurrying to see the departure outside. Ralph was waiting for him just inside the pew.

  “Ralph! How did you manage it?” Admitting the wish but not the exp
ectation, he struck a compromise by which Ralph would not be hurt, nor he himself wholly committed; but he did not think of it like this.

  The bridal couple vanished through the west door. Ralph looked him in the eyes and smiled. Someone was here now for whom he came first: it was like a well in the desert.

  “Don’t bother about me,” Ralph said, “you’ve got people to see to out there. Get along and get on with it. I’ll follow the crowd.”

  “It’s only just down the road. I’ll walk with you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Ralph briskly. “You’ve got to be there ahead; you’re the host, he isn’t. Get a move on, I’ll see you presently.”

  There had been photographs outside for the county paper; so no one had missed him. When he walked into the village hall, he knew that his mother’s new life had begun already. If she had been marrying anyone else, the reception would have been at the George. The boards felt gritty underfoot, there were notices about the Guides and the Mothers’ Union. The venerable hired waiters looked like lay helpers at a Sunday-school tea. All this, of course, set the parochial note in which everything centered upon the vicar.

  Some Straike relatives had arrived. They seemed to Laurie rather hard-eyed, the kind of people one envisages quarrelling over wills, and their overconventionality struck him as faintly vulgar. He stood close to his mother, observing how much bigger Mr. Straike’s family was than theirs. Seeing Aunt Olive appear in a travelling coat (he remembered now that she had to get an early train) he decided she was a great deal nicer than any of them. He fussed over her and found her food. In the midst of all this Ralph walked in.

  He must have waited till now when the bride and groom had ceased to receive at the door, hoping to be inconspicuous; but in a gathering where the younger element was mostly in the forties, his entrance had drawn eyes from all over the room. He looked around for Laurie and went over to him at once. With the tail of his eye, Laurie saw that Mr. Straike had noticed.

  You would have thought that an introduction to Aunt Olive was the one thing Ralph had been hoping for. Laurie remembered suddenly a remark of Bunny’s about Christmas in the orphanage; but he didn’t want to think about Bunny any more.

  It would be untrue to say that Aunt Olive had grown suddenly pretty, because women who employ no make-up miss it at such moments, and it inhibits them; but her self-esteem had climbed steeply. Suddenly she gave an arch little squeak of discovery and delight. “I know!” she cried. “I couldn’t think where I’d seen you! Now I remember!”

  Ralph’s charming smile became just a little less casual. He said, as if he wanted to get in first, “I expect you saw me somewhere about the place at school.” As he spoke, he looked around to see who was in earshot, but so unobtrusively that even Laurie only just noticed it.

  “School!” cried Aunt Olive in triumph. “I was right!” This time no one interrupted her. She turned to Laurie. “Your mother always tells me what a memory for faces I have. He’s the boy in the photograph!”

  She must have taken the short silence that followed as a tribute to her gifts, for she smiled radiantly.

  In the next few minutes, before she left, Laurie had time to think. It had been obvious to him from the first that Andrew couldn’t have come here without the risk of being exposed to insult. It must, he thought, be a symptom of the way his generation had been torn from its roots, that he hadn’t till now perceived the risk to Ralph.

  The Head and the staff had tried, naturally, to hush his expulsion up. It was possible, though unlikely, that they even thought they had succeeded. The fact was, of course, that Hazell’s hysterical confidences had made it the most resounding scandal in the history of the School. The sensation had been proportionate to Ralph’s immense, and rather romantic, prestige; and it was a certainty that there hadn’t been a single boy, down to the lowest and most friendless fag, who hadn’t known at least something about it.

  Although Laurie still felt very close to these events, it was in a purely inward and personal way. Externally, seven years was half a lifetime. He had grown in them from a boy to a man; he had met pain and fear, love and death; his comrades had been men for whom his old world had not at any time existed. Now, looking at the guests around him who had been adults longer than he had been alive, he saw that for most of them seven years must be only the other day. It was unlikely that Ralph hadn’t thought of it. The people who are vulnerable to these things are less absent-minded about them.

  When Aunt Olive had gone Ralph lifted one eyebrow, smiled at Laurie, and murmured, “Whew!”

  “You’ve not had a drink yet.” Laurie gave him one, and as they drank tried to thank him in a glance; but the glance didn’t turn out exactly as he had meant. He said quickly, “Come along and meet my mother.” As they went he saw, for the second time, Mr. Straike turning from his conversation with Canon Rosslow to eye Ralph with curiosity.

  If you knew as much as Laurie had learned by now, you might perhaps get as far as a speculation about Ralph; but even then you wouldn’t be sure. He had reviewed his own weaknesses early in life, and with untender determination trained them as one bends a tree; the resolution this had demanded had stamped his face with most of the lineaments of strength. The fastidious severity of his dress and carriage hid, no doubt, a personal vanity by no means extinct; but it had the air of a fine, unconscious arrogance. Laurie, as he walked beside him up the hall, was looking at Mr. Straike and thinking, He’d have liked to be the one who brought him here, to put me in my place. Too bad he belongs to me.

  At the last moment, Laurie’s mother was caught up by friends, and Mr. Straike came to meet them instead.

  The next few minutes did Laurie a world of good. He discovered at once that Ralph hadn’t lost the famous manner; perhaps if one had known him well one might have detected a crease or two and a whiff of moth-balls; but it was more than good enough for Mr. Straike. “By the greatest good luck we happened to run into each other at Dunkirk” (he made it sound rather cosmopolitan, like Shepheard’s or the Long Bar at Shanghai), “so we were able to pick up the threads again.”

  “Now I think of it,” said Mr. Straike suddenly, “I can’t recall that I ever asked your mother the name of your House, Laurence. Very remiss of me.”

  “Stuart’s,” Laurie said. It had been Stuart’s when he first went there.

  “Stuart’s, Stuart’s. That has some association for me. Wait, I have it. That’s the House that was taken over by a school contemporary of my own, dear old Mumps Jepson. Surely that would be within your time?”

  “Yes. Mr. Jepson took it over when I was fairly senior, but you know how the old name sticks.” Almost unconsciously, he had closed his shoulder up to Ralph’s as if they were in battle.

  “Ah, interesting. I wonder what impression he made on you. Poor old Mumps, he was something of a hypochondriac; I remember thinking he had scarcely the requisite—hrm—guts for the job. We’ve lost touch, I’m afraid. But I did meet him, at an Old Boys’ Dinner, if I remember, a year or two after he took up his appointment; he was very full then of his trials and his responsibilities, very full indeed. Would it be in ’33? It might even have been in ’35.” He looked at Ralph again. “I’m afraid I heard your name very imperfectly; Langham, did you say?”

  There was a short and, for Laurie, terrifying pause. He didn’t look at Mr. Straike because he had, in a sense, forgotten about him; and he did not look around because he dared not, for he had felt the finger of some past evasion touch Ralph and dim him, like a quick smudge.

  “No,” said Ralph. “It’s Lanyon.”

  “M-m, no. I fancy it would be a little after your—”

  “Laurie, darling.” It was the measure of Laurie’s feelings that he had been unaware of his mother’s arrival. For the last ten minutes people had been assuring her of her happiness; she had had a glass of champagne; she was expanding like a rose in a warm room. “This is delightful. How could you not tell me that you’d asked the R. R. Lanyon to come? Were you keepin
g him as a surprise?”

  “Yes,” said Laurie, “as a matter of fact I was.” He presented him.

  “Well, my dear boy—because I shall never think of you as more than eighteen even when you’re an admiral—you mustn’t laugh at me, but, really, I can hardly believe you’re true, it’s like meeting a unicorn. Of course, I know it’s all worlds away now to both of you, but to me it seems yesterday when Laurie used to bring home legends about you, just like my generation with the Prince of Wales.”

  “You must let him live it down,” said Ralph, “after all this time.”

  “Hrm,” said Mr. Straike. “Lucy, my dear …” Laurie realized that the healths were about to begin.

  His response for the bride was one of the things that had kept him awake till the small hours. But now he had forgotten all about it, and came to it fresh, with a suddenly revived self-confidence. While the guests were still clapping, and his mother looking at him with pride, he was wondering already whether Ralph had thought it was all right.

  Few men were there and no other young ones; he and Ralph were kept busy. For ten or fifteen minutes they scarcely met. There was probably no moment of this time when, if he had been asked where Ralph was, he couldn’t have given the answer without looking. At last somebody broke a folding chair. With an air of conscientious helpfulness, Laurie went over to the corner where it was and tinkered about with it. Ralph came up and steadied the chair for him, and they bent over the brown varnished wood with their backs to the room.

  “This is what you’re looking for.” Ralph handed him a wing nut from the floor. Laurie couldn’t answer. He had heard in Ralph’s voice that secret overtone only half of which is created by the one who speaks, the other half by the one who listens, and which says in any language, “By and by all these people will have gone.”

  After a while, Laurie said, “This is a hell of a party for you to drive all this way for.”

  “I’m sorry about that just now, Spud. I only hope nothing serious comes of it.”