That first visit to Mr. Heller was for Adrian the beginning of many similar experiences equally wonderful. That room with its close, spicy smell, which he ever afterwards associated in his memory with Mr. Heller, became and remained throughout his life, though five years later he went out of it never to enter it again, one of the sacred places of his spirit. There, for an hour twice a week, he had his music lesson, and there, when the lesson was over, Mr. Heller would play to him, and Adrian would gladly have listened, if there had been time, for as long as the old man cared to play. He played him ancient and modern music of all kinds, and explained the nature of every kind and the life and genius of its composers in a way that entranced Adrian. It was only, he soon discovered, in the preliminaries, the commonplaces, the brief, practical moments of conversation that the old man was so hopelessly inarticulate. When he warmed to a subject in which he was interested he could be coherent and eloquent enough.
“It’s your duty, Glynde,” he would say, beating time softly with a clenched fist on Adrian’s shoulder, “to make yourself acquainted with every composer of good music. I am a narrow and prejudiced old man, and I consider I have every right to be, because I’ve given them all a fair trial and I’ve chosen my gods. My narrowness, you see, comes of breadth. But you have no business to be narrow. A narrowness that comes of inexperience is quite unwarrantable, quite … er … unwarrantable.” He emphasised his quite with a heavier punch on Adrian’s shoulder. “I shall try to prejudice you, but you must not listen to me. You must listen to the music, not to me, and choose what you like best, regardless of what I may say. Don’t ask me who are the best composers. If you do, I shall try … I shall try very hard … not to tell you. You may perhaps notice that I play a lot of Beethoven, a great deal of Bach, Byrd, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, a little of Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, almost none of Schumann or Scriabine or Mendelssohn. You may notice that, and you may begin to draw conclusions. Well, all I can do is to forbid you to draw conclusions; or, if you insist, if your mind will put two and two together, then don’t allow your conclusions to affect your own choice. Remember that your master is a narrow and prejudiced old man—worse, an old man who glories in his narrowness and prejudices.”
Adrian’s early lessons were, of course, very elementary; but Mr. Heller had fired him with a fever to play, and he practised with immense diligence. Sometimes Mr. Heller played him tunes of extreme simplicity by Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, and those pieces, under his hands, became exquisitely carved crystals, perfect in every curve. Adrian saw with surprise that he approached each with the same solemn initiatory pause with which he had approached the Waldstein Sonata, as though even such simple things demanded of him the same seriousness and respect as the most complex.
One day he played a Bourrée by Bach with such irresistible beauty that Adrian begged him to play it again. He did so, and then, turning to Adrian, he asked: “Do you … er … like that one especially?”
Adrian, with a sigh of overflowing satisfaction, said that he did.
“Then,” said Mr. Heller, “you had better learn it.”
“Learn it?” said Adrian. “Could I?”
“Certainly you could. It’s … er … very … er … simple.” He paused, and then added: “And, like all very … er … simple things, it’s … er … very … er … difficult. I will tell you something, Glynde, that I have no … er … no business to tell you. Dr. Yardley-Tritton could never … er … play, play you understand, that piece, even if he practised it for … er … for a hundred years.” He turned Donne’s death mask upon Adrian. “You see, boy?” His kindly smile illuminated the mask. “You see?”
“Yes, sir,” said Adrian.
“But you, I think, with a little practise, will … er … play it. I’ll play it through to you again.” He did so, and paused in his usual way when he had finished it. “Well,” he said after the pause, “it’s … it’s … er … it’s … You see, boy?”
“Yes, sir,” said Adrian.
“Well, it’s … er … it’s a jewel. Take it and practise it.” He handed the music to Adrian.
So the term passed. After the small life at Waldo, this new life seemed to Adrian strenuous, full, packed with continually varying activities and emotions. There were the pleasures and drudgeries of school work. He hated mathematics and science: the hours spent over them were almost unbearable. But in classics, and English, and French he caught fugitive glimpses of something that he was looking for, something indefinable and ecstatic, which he found in Ronny Dakyn, in the music into which Old Hell was initiating him, in the thrilling abandonment of football.
His absorption in Ronny Dakyn resulted in a complete duality of attitude towards him. For Adrian cherished in his mind an ideal Ronny, his greatest friend, who loved him as much as he himself loved Ronny, to the exclusion of everyone else. With this Ronny he would have long, happy, intimate talks. They would go about arm in arm, as the real Dakyn did with superior persons of his own standing; they would sit together all evening in a study from which Ellenger was for ever excluded, and they would spend the holidays alone together on some blessed island inaccessible to the rest of humanity.
Such was Adrian’s secret Ronny, a being kept alive and credible in his mind by the bodily presence of Dakyn, that smart young man who sometimes presided over prep., who stood with the other prefects facing the rest of the house during prayers, and who occasionally dropped a kindly and condescending word or two to an adoring Adrian who blacked his shoes, brushed his clothes, swept out his study, and obeyed his lightest wish with grateful alacrity. For the first time for many years his heart had found a resting-place. When he had fixed it on his absent mother, he had found not satisfaction nor happiness, but only hunger, and, when the real mother came at last, disillusionment. But now his heart was fixed not on a vague hope, but on a human being, and although he still allowed comforting fantasies to lend what reality denied him, he felt blissfully secure; for having been so long denied all, he was content, supremely content, with little. His love was busy and warmly housed and he was too young and inexperienced to realise how insecure was his tenure. But, insecure or not, it gave him, while it lasted, just that basis which at the time he so urgently needed. It spurred him into games-playing, of which he had previously been afraid, and it enabled him to possess his soul humbly but stoically in the ceaseless, internecine rowdyism of Common-room, by which, shy and nervous as he was, he would otherwise have been utterly cowed. Even as it was, the rowdyism harrowed him: but he endured it: he had his compensations.
The chief blot on his happiness was Ellenger. He hated him, not merely because Ellenger, with the bully’s instinct, treated him harshly and contemptuously, but yet more because he invaded his paradise and came between him and Dakyn, and because—worse still—Dakyn obviously liked him. And when he learned one day just before the end of term, from a conversation between them which he overheard when preparing tea for them in the study, that Dakyn was to spend the latter part of the coming holidays with Ellenger, he was filled with a jealousy which poisoned his life for several days. He longed for Ellenger to leave Charminster, he longed for him to die. If hate could kill, Ellenger’s days would certainly have been numbered.
Just as his infatuation had imprinted on Adrian’s mind every detail of Dakyn’s face and form, so had his hatred done with those of Ellenger. Every crease, every curve of Ellenger’s face, the very hues and texture of its flesh, were engraved with horrible vividness on his mind’s eye—the square, fleshy cheeks, mottled and grained with red; the smouldering brown eyes; the low brow fringed with lank black hair like the hair of a Japanese doll.
The days drew on towards the holidays: the last week had begun, and Adrian was divided against himself. He looked forward more eagerly than ever to release from school. How marvellous, how unbelievable to think that a week hence he would be at Yarn again. After this whirl of new experiences, it seemed more like a year than three months since he had seen Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob. How delicious to think that only a week hence he would be sitting in the evening in the comfortable peace of the drawing-room at Yarn instead of in the exhausting and homeless riot of Common-room; eating the excellent Yarn food with clean silver, clean, sharp knives, snowy tablecloth and flowers on the table, instead of the rough fare, the dirty cloth, and saw-edged knives and bent-pronged forks of Taylor’s. But across this delighted anticipation struck the haunting thought of separation from Dakyn. For five weeks Dakyn would have dropped out of his life. But not out of his thoughts. A hundred times a day he would think of him, and in bed at night when there was nothing else to interrupt him. Yes, at least he would have his thoughts; but thoughts would be a poor substitute for the bright, visible reality. And so he looked forward with equal delight and dread to the final morning.
When at last the eve of the holidays was at hand he saw nothing all day, as it happened, of Dakyn. Each time he went to the study, it chanced that Dakyn was not there, and when at last Adrian settled himself to read there in the desperate hope that Dakyn would come in, the hateful footsteps of Ellenger sounded in the passage, and Adrian, with black disappointment in his heart, fled disconsolate to Common-room. Could it possibly be that he would leave Charminster without a few last moments in the study with Ronny, moments which would probably, as so often, bring nothing but a casual cheerful phrase or two from Ronny and a shy answer from Adrian, but precious moments, for all that? Adrian caught a brief glimpse of him at prayers, and went miserable to bed.
Perhaps Dakyn would want him to do something for him next morning before they started, or even if not, surely he would send for him to say good-bye. But next morning came and there was no summons. Adrian had stubbornly set his heart on a last glimpse of Dakyn, a last word from him. It had become a sheer necessity to his peace of mind. If he failed of these, he told himself, his whole holiday would be ruined.
When the moment to start for the station had almost arrived, he ran in despair to the study. What excuse he would make when he got there he did not know and in his misery he hardly cared. The door was half open. Timidly, with his heart in his mouth, he looked in. His eyes met the smouldering brown eyes of Ellenger, raised at the sound of his step from a bag in which he was packing something.
“I … I … I looked in,” Adrian stammered, “to see if Dakyn wanted me for anything.”
“I don’t think so,” said Ellenger.
Adrian, crestfallen and forlorn, hesitated for a moment and then turned to go, casting a mute, helpless glance at his enemy.
To his amazement Ellenger’s face was suddenly transformed, illuminated. “Good-bye,” he said, and for the first time there was no hostility in his voice. “I’ll tell him you came.”
Adrian ran downstairs in astonishment. “Why, he might easily have been quite a decent sort of chap,” he thought to himself.
The rush to the station, the scramble for a seat in the special for Waterloo, the hubbub in the crowded carriage that persisted throughout the journey almost made Adrian forget his heartache. But as the train ran into Waterloo, it suddenly flared up inside him, a keen inner wound. “This is the end,” he thought. “I shan’t see him now.”
On the platform, Aunt Clara, majestic and smiling, was waiting for him. She spotted him as he got out of the carriage. They walked together in the stream of boys and parents, towards the van, followed by a porter whom Aunt Clara, in her cool, practical way had secured before the train came in. They stood together on the outskirts of the crowd that seethed about the luggage van, Adrian glancing anxiously among the crowd. But there was no sign of Ronny. The porter had found Adrian’s portmanteau and they followed him to the barrier. As they stood together beside the portmanteau while their porter went to secure a cab, Adrian felt a smart tap on his shoulder, and, turning his head, saw Dakyn with Ellenger on the far side of him. They were already past him, but Dakyn was looking back, and now he waved his hand. “Good-bye, little man,” he shouted. “Have a good time.”
Adrian, getting into the cab, felt himself plunged in a warm ocean of happiness.
“Who is your handsome friend, Adrian?” Aunt Clara asked as they drove off.
“He’s called Dakyn,” Adrian replied.
“He looks a nice fellow,” said Aunt Clara.
“He is,” said Adrian coolly and judicially; “quite.”