The Charioteer Read Online Free PDF

made some further adjustment of the pencil, screwed down the lead, shut the knife and put it in his pocket. As always he was extremely neat, his hair brushed and recently trimmed, his shirt looking as if he had just put it on. He had spent last year’s summer holidays working his passage to Iceland and back in a trawler, and had recently been accepted for a projected research expedition to the Arctic. The biggest toughs in the School, when they stood against Lanyon, looked muscle-bound or run to seed. Lines of decision showed around his eyes and mouth; at nineteen, he was marked already with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic. Laurie, who was in no state to be analytical, only thought that Lanyon looked more than usually like chilled steel. Suddenly it seemed certain that the prevailing rumor had got garbled in transit, and almost certainly didn’t even refer to Lanyon at all. Laurie waited as if at the stake, clenching his lower jaw.
    Having disposed of the penknife, Lanyon looked up again. His light eyes raked Laurie, coldly, from head to foot.
    They tell me,” he said, “that you appear to be going out of your mind. Is there anything you want to say about it?”
    “No, Lanyon,” said Laurie mechanically. He could have feigned noncomprehension, but with Lanyon one didn’t try anything on.
    “Had it occurred to you,” said Lanyon evenly, “that if anything needs organizing in this House, the prefects are capable of seeing to it without any help from you?”
    “Yes, Lanyon.” Laurie looked, for relief, away to the work table in the window. It was very tidy, like Lanyon himself.
    “Of course, the prefects are only used to routine work. If they ever decide to get up a revival meeting, or some other form of mass hysteria, no doubt they’ll ask for your expert advice before they begin.”
    Laurie said nothing. His gaze fell from the work table to the waste-paper basket standing under it.
    “Do you often,” Lanyon asked, “have attacks like this?”
    “No,” said Laurie. The wastepaper basket was full. It would have been overflowing if the contents had not been rammed down. The mass of torn papers stirred in his mind some dimly remembered sense of dread.
    “Well, another time”—he could feel a hard blue stare tugging his own eyes back—“if you find your exhibitionism getting too much for you, I suggest you join the Holy Rollers, and give yourself some scope. You don’t want to waste your gifts, merely landing one school in a mess it wouldn’t live down in ten years.”
    “I’m sorry, Lanyon.” But Laurie was hardly aware of speaking. He had seen, among the papers, the torn boards of the cloth-bound notebooks only issued to the Senior School, in which permanent material, the indispensable stuff of exam revision, was kept. There were three or four of them, probably more.
    “Don’t stand there like a dummy.” The compressed snap in Lanyon’s voice was more alarming than a shout. “Do you realize you’ve been behaving like a dangerous lunatic, yes or no?”
    “Yes,” said Laurie. To his own amazement he added, “I suppose so.”
    Lanyon rested his hand with the pencil on the arm of the chair and leaned forward slightly. His eyes looked like chips of blue enamel. “You suppose so?” he said softly. “You suppose so ?”
    “Sorry,” said Laurie quickly.
    “So I should hope.” Lanyon leaned back again, looking as if he had just brushed off some dirt and supposed it had been worth the trouble. In the slanting light from the window, the lines around his mouth were deepened to hollows. “Very well, then. When I have your word there’ll be no more of this nonsense, you can go.” There was a pause. Laurie swallowed; it seemed to him that it must be audible across the room. “Well? Have you got softening of the brain, Odell? You heard what I said.”
    Pushing his voice up through his throat, which felt as if it were lined with sandpaper, Laurie said, “I’m sorry, Lanyon.