The Charioteer Read Online Free PDF Page A

effect.
    Laurie took a turn around Big Field, and, finding it was almost tea-time, bought a bottle of lemonade at the tuck shop and half a dozen buns in a bag before setting out again. These he took to a retreat of his behind a haystack, slightly out of bounds, where he spent the next hour or so planning his campaign. By the time he turned homeward, shadows were lengthening on the grass. He wished he could do it all now, before he started to cool off. When one started to think of difficulties, they cropped up. But there was prep to finish, and Harris, who would be in the study by now, to be rallied to the cause. A pity Carter would have had time to get at him first.
    As he walked the last lap to the House, Laurie realized sinkingly that the last of his effervescence had subsided, and that from now on only stone-cold will-power would push him through. He wished, for the first time in nearly four years, that during the next hour the School could be burnt down.
    From the study window he heard Harris saying, “Get your eyes seen to. Odell’s there.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry, Harris.” The small boy at the door took a nervous step into the room. “Please, Odell, Lanyon says will you see him in his study, please?”
    “What, now?” drawled Laurie with the calm convention expected. For a moment this summons—which usually meant trouble of a disciplinary kind—only struck him as embarrassingly ill-timed. It wasn’t till the fag had gone that he saw Harris looking at him, and Carter at the floor. There was a dragging silence where the usual pleasantries should have been.
    Laurie remarked casually, “What the heck does he want, I wonder?” and, as no one answered, went out into the corridor. For this purpose it was in order to use the door.
    At the foot of the stairs, surrounded by dark green paint of the resistant kind used in station waiting rooms, he stood still. This, he knew with a certainty exceeding all the other certainties of the day, was the most awful thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Carter must have told someone, and somehow … The palms of his hands felt sticky and cold. He had been prepared to face Jeepers, even the Headmaster. He had been ready for anything, except this.
    From the moment of conceiving Lanyon as a cause, there hadn’t been much time to contemplate him as a human being; perhaps because the thought of him in any kind of equivocal or humiliating situation was so improbable, and indeed hardly bore thinking of. That Lanyon might be grateful for the campaign on his behalf was the last thing Laurie had contemplated. Lanyon would never so compromise his dignity; it would be a sufficient gesture if he ignored the episode. Head prefects didn’t thank people for starting riots in Houses; on the contrary. And no Head of any House had ever stood for less nonsense than he. It was an academic question whether anyone would get fresh with Lanyon twice, for no one, as far as Laurie knew, had tried it once.
    As he began, draggingly, to mount the stairs, Laurie’s dominant wish was that he were not too senior to be beaten, which would have been quick, simple and relatively unembarrassing.
    He had got to the door. His footsteps must have been heard by now; there could be no more procrastination. He knocked.
    “Come in,” said Lanyon briskly. At this point Laurie ceased to feel any awkwardness. Fright had swallowed everything. Concerned only not to show it, he walked in.
    Lanyon was sitting in his armchair, doing something with a penknife to a propelling pencil. He looked up. He was slight and lean, with dusty-fair hair and eyes of a striking light blue which were narrowed by the structure of the orbit above, giving him a searching look even when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling.
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “Odell. Shut the door.”
    Laurie shut it, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, and waited. The length of the wait was always proportioned to the offense; but he was past measuring time. Lanyon