Crescendo (12 page)

“No,” said Richard. He hesitated, wondering whether he might perhaps venture to say: “Not yet,” but decided against it—he had no right to presuppose Dorothea's consent.

“Have you any intention of marrying?”

There was a movement of protest round the table.

“Mr. Chairman, I hardly think——” objected the schoolmistress.

The Chairman, coughing, began: “Perhaps, Mr. Barraclough, that hardly comes within our——”

Richard interrupted. He was extremely angry and had turned very pale.

“Nothing is settled yet,” he said.

“I thought not,” muttered Barraclough. He glared directly into Richard's eyes, his whole face expressing contempt and hate.

The tenour of the last few questions seemed clear to Richard; they were meant to show him as feeble, sapless, morally effete, and therefore quite unsuited to be in charge of boys. He resented these insulting implications strongly, and debated with himself whether or not to voice his resentment. But after all, he had come to this interview to be questioned. His habitual fairness and modesty restrained him; he remained silent, but looked round urgently at the other Governors, hoping for a decent question to which he could give an honourable reply and thus reinstate himself in their good opinion. But some of the Governors returned his glance doubtfully, while others looked down in an embarrassed way and doodled on their notes. The Chairman coughed, looked around and collected his colleagues' glances.

“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Cressey,” he said in a dismissing tone.

Richard rose, gave a quick formal bow, and left the room.

“They gave you a good long dose,” said Piers enviously when he returned to the library.

“You need not be troubled,” said Richard coldly. “They will not appoint me.”

“Really? I'm surprised. I thought you had it in the bag. But you can usually tell how the interview's going, I agree. Turned against you, did they? Any tips you can give me?” said Piers with unconcealed relief.

Richard was silent.

For the next hour he would not allow himself to think about his disappointment; he concentrated on maintaining a decent appearance of composure. He sat in an armchair in a relaxed attitude, and turned the leaves of the week's
Times Literary Supplement
, which he had read before, with a nonchalant air,
while the other candidates came and went between study and library. He presumed that Piers would now receive the appointment—certainly he himself had lost it. All the same his heart beat fast and he had difficulty in remaining in his chair when the Clerk at length entered the room. To whom would he turn?

The Clerk looked towards one of the younger men and said: “The Governors would like to see Mr. Seldon again, gentlemen.”

3

The hand-shaking, the goodbyes, the playful mutual commiserations, the walk to the bus and the journey back to Ashworth with some of his colleagues were really torture. The younger applicants took their rejection philosophically; they would apply again elsewhere, they had time before them. Piers was extremely, almost uncontrollably, angry and disappointed; like Richard he had thought himself sure of the job once Richard was rejected. Richard could not help remembering their conversation before the interviews, when he had voiced the hope that Arnold Barraclough would prove a good judge of character. An unfriendly observer, he thought sardonically, might consider that Barraclough had proved too good a judge for the pair of them. Naturally he kept this thought to himself.

At last he was alone in his rooms and able to allow his disappointment expression. He paced up and down with his light, slightly uneven step, turning quickly in the confined space, while an immense flood of bitterness rolled agonisingly through his body. He found the situation too painful to be borne with any pretence of equanimity. The man the Governors had chosen was, perhaps, the best of the younger bunch—on that point Richard was prepared to grant him the benefit of the doubt. But he was younger than Richard, with far less
teaching experience and a much inferior degree. If the Governors had chosen Piers their choice would have been less of a personal slight to Richard. Piers' degree was good; his knowledge of the school of course much more extensive, his teaching experience longer, than Richard's. The choice of such a man, though it would have been a serious mistake in Richard's view because of Piers' cynical and ambiguous character, would have been a natural mistake, a justifiable choice, for which many reasons could be offered. But to choose young Seldon!

“I ought to be glad for the boys' sake, that they'll have a cheerful honest young man instead of Piers who is tainted by defeat,” thought Richard.

He made one of his customary mental efforts, tried to compel himself to feel the decent gladness he postulated. But he failed. To be rejected for that insignificant, inexperienced lad, who had hardly been distinguishable from the other three young candidates! What on earth would Richard's present headmaster think? Only some prejudice against his person could have rejected Richard in favour of young Seldon. And of course, thought Richard angrily, it was clear what that prejudice was. The unlucky question of the schoolmistress about his health had brought it on the
tapis
, he supposed, and the Barraclough man, hearty well-fed animal that he was, had picked it up and high-lighted it and tossed it round the table, and the Governors had made the usual conventional response. Once again Richard was turned down, rejected, because he had prevented his baby brother from falling downstairs and spoiled his own spine in doing so.

“It's been the same tune all the time,” said Richard to himself in anguish.

He had heard this phrase in a wartime revue and always remembered it because it seemed so relevant to his case, but never had it seemed so bitterly, terribly relevant as today.

For today, for the first time, the disadvantage of his physique
had invaded his own chosen, intellectual sphere.
From him that hath not, shall be taken even that which he hath
, remembered Richard bitterly. It could be borne that he was a mediocre performer in the physical world, it could be borne that he was slight and plain; it could be borne, though Richard winced at the thought, that he was not even considered as an entrant in the lists of love. But that his professional standing should also be adversely affected was not to be endured. His innermost stronghold, his ultimate hope and confidence, his pride and joy in his good brain, his soundly based learning, his rational powers, his professional ability—all this was pierced, broken, tumbled. It was too much. What was the use of his long years of cheerful outward acceptance? (The struggles to maintain which had in early life been so painfully severe.) His so-to-say “sporting” behaviour? His firm rejection of all jealousy and resentment? His victory over all the envious impulses of his baser self? All useless; such moral victories counted for nothing beside a florid cheek, a straight spine. Why try any more? Why not let himself slip into the jaundiced envy which—with, Richard felt sure, much less cause—Piers showed? Head-masterships and marriage were clearly not for Richard Cressey; they were mere castles in the air for him, groundless as a rainbow and as evanescent. He must return to reality, content himself with a lonely, sterile life, an undistinguished and merely moderately useful career. But he could not so content himself. He could not! He struck his fist hard into the palm of his other hand, beside himself with grief and rage.

As he wheeled angrily about the room, the clock on the mantelpiece caught his eyes and reminded him of his engagement with Dorothea. They were to dine early, he remembered, so as to catch the opening sequences of a film.

For a moment he laid his hand on the telephone. He was no fit companion for any woman that evening; like a wounded animal he wished only to lick his sores alone in the obscurity of his lair; besides, all that notion of love and marriage was
nonsense, nonsense! He coloured with shame to think that he had ever for a moment entertained such a preposterous, such a presumptuous, such a really wrong, idea.

But presently he took his hand from the instrument again. It was not in his nature deliberately to cause humiliation to any living being, he hoped, especially not to a woman, especially not to a woman for whom he had experienced such tender and protective feelings as he had for Dorothea. Besides, the only telephone in the house where Dorothea lived was her landlady's telephone; it stood downstairs in the hall, and when Mrs. Eastwood had summoned her guest to the instrument, she was apt to hang around in the middle distance, pretending not to listen to the conversation and hoping to be told about it in full when it closed. No, Richard could not subject Dorothea to the humiliation of such a public cancellation by her escort.

With angry, jerky movements he shaved and dressed; he was, he felt, defeated by life, but he would pretend not to be, he would keep up these minor defiances, these minor outposts against despair, as long as he could. He hurried off to the bus; by swift walking at either end of the journey, he contrived to reach the Hart just as the Town Hall clock struck the hour; he was not late.

1

All the dean family were tall, healthy, determined, unsentimental people, reflected Dorothea, gazing with eager question into the rather spotty mirror which was all that Mrs. Eastwood provided.

Her own back was as straight as a ramrod, her head was
always high, she walked down the Ashworth streets with a brisk decided step which set her skirts swinging as rhythmically as if she were marching to a band; her skin was clear, her teeth white, her flesh warm and firm; she enjoyed every minute of life, she was never tired.

Her father, whose enlarged photograph, in dress uniform with medals, hung on the wall beside the mirror, had been a “regular” soldier, sergeant-major in his Yorkshire regiment, killed marshalling his men on the beach at Dunkirk when his youngest child was only five; but though Dorothea did not remember him, he looked to her every inch a fine stalwart sergeant-major, with all that rank implies of disciplinary capacity in his large stern features. His close-cut hair betrayed the merest hint of the crisp dark curls which Dorothea had inherited from him.

Dorothea's mother, of whom no photograph existed for she saw no sense in wasting money on photographs, remained in Dorothea's memory also as tall, dark-haired, robust, honest as the day and devoted to her children in the Yorkshire fashion, that is cooking and cleaning and sewing and ironing for them with boundless energy and attending to their morals and manners with unfailing vigour, but not expressing her love much in words—or, as she would have put it, not fussing over them, not indulging in any sloppy nonsense. Everything in the Dean household was perfectly clean, perfectly respectable, perfectly decent, but there were, again as Mrs. Dean would put it, no fancy frills there. Left a widow with three children to bring up on an army pension, Mrs. Dean had taken over the small corner shop previously kept by her father at the end of Naseby Terrace and ran it extremely well. She sold newspapers and cigarettes and chocolates, string and pencils and notepaper and a few toys. The shop window was cleaned rigorously every week and the stock was always good and fresh, but it was set out in plain symmetrical rows, arranged for usefulness, easy access, rather than beauty.

The children in their young days helped occasionally in the shop, but were soon sent out to other work so that the Dean eggs should not be all in one basket: Kathy to a large Ashworth haberdashery establishment, Tom as an engineering apprentice, Dorothea when she presently left school to a stationer's shop, as she had always been, in Mrs. Dean's phrase, “fond of books and such.”

Kathy, who was tall and bouncing, with lots of dark hair very neatly brushed, a bright complexion, a loud voice, a hearty laugh and a big bust, did extremely well in the drapery store; she became particularly skilled incorsetry—the difficulties of her own ample figure inclining her to knowledgeable treatment of customers' problems—and received steady promotion.

Tom grew up before the war was over and entered his father's regiment, but luckily the fighting was over before he could get to the front. When he came back from the occupation forces in Germany he very soon went off, capable and energetic, to Canada, prospered and presently married very suitably there. Mrs. Dean of course missed him, but never thought of objecting to his departure—she would have regarded any such objection as “standing in his light” and altogether “silly work.” She wrote to him regularly once a month, just two sheets of a lined writing pad, signing her letters
your affectionate mother
in a sensible unfussing fashion.

Yes, they were a strong, sensible, healthy family, deeply attached to each other without making any fuss about it. Dorothea as the youngest perhaps received more outward show of affection than the rest. Ten years younger than Tom, eleven years younger than Kathy, she was always something of a pet and a plaything to her brother and sister. They cared a great deal for their little sister, and had a feeling that there was a kind of grace about her which was lacking in themselves. But this did not incline them to be possessive or selfish with Dorothea, and certainly they would never dream of “standing in her light.”

Accordingly when Mrs. Dean a couple of years ago suddenly died of ‘flu, and her daughters' first grief was over and plans had to be made, there were no floods of tears, no outraged protests, on Kathy's part at Dorothea's announcement that she wanted to remain in Ashworth and continue in her present work, though Kathy had decided to move to Scarborough and take up a better job she had been offered there. True, Kathy looked disappointed; true, she pointed out the economic advantages of living together and the beauties of the seaside resort; true, she threw out a blunt word on the dangers of a young girl's living alone. At this Dorothea quietly laughed. Her sister joined in the laughter.