The Charioteer Read Free Page A

him off. His family responsibilities had seemed to sit on him lightly; but, detached from them, he had gone downhill with the steady acceleration of a stone loosened on a cliff.
    Laurie was used to the idea that his father had been a bad lot. It did not consciously disturb him, since he had been brought up, for almost as long as he could remember, to think of himself as wholly his mother’s child.
    A clock struck; it was later than he had thought. If he didn’t get the thing done, there wouldn’t have been much point in staying in to get the study to himself. As it was, Harris or Carter might be back any time now.
    The subject of the essay was “Compare the character of Brutus’s dilemma with that of Hamlet.” In his private mind, Laurie thought poorly enough of both. In Hamlet’s place he wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment; and Brutus he thought a cold, joyless type, with his moral searchings in the orchard. Not thus, in Laurie’s view, should a cause be embraced. If it were worth anything, it would come down on you like a pentecostal wind, not the better but the only thing; it would sweep you up. “Over thy wounds now do I prophesy …” That, he felt, should be the stuff; though all that calculated demagogy afterwards was revolting. He gave up the effort to express this. “Portia,” he mentioned coldly, “is the ideal Roman wife.”
    He disposed of Portia quickly, and counted the pages he had filled. One more, written large, should get him by. He got up to stretch, and strolled to the window. The pitch-pine sill on which he leaned was plowed and seamed with boot-marks; this was a ground-floor study. The window had the social as well as the practical functions of a front door. The actual door served as a kind of tradesman’s entrance, for junior boys, cleaners, and the Housemaster.
    A straggle of boys carrying towels was crossing the grass from the baths. Laurie watched them idly, smelling the dry summer scents of earth, piled mowings, and wallflowers from the Head’s garden out of sight. The sense of a wasted afternoon suddenly oppressed him; he craved for the water, but it was too late now, the House’s time had run out. Depressed, he was about to turn away when he noticed young Barnes, noticeably isolated as usual. Peters would have been coaching him again, if, thought Laurie, you liked to call it that. It was a pity about Peters. The inter-school cups came in all right, but he shouldn’t be let loose on these wretched little twirps, bawling them into a panic and then telling the world they were scared of the water. Barnes, poor little runt, probably thought himself a marked man and it was giving him a bad start in the House. Peters always seemed to crack down extra hard on these pretty-pretty types, who after all soon grew out of it if you let them alone.
    By falling behind the others and edging sideways, Barnes had come within a few yards of the window. He looked horrible, Laurie thought; furtive and squinting, as if he had been caught pawning the spoons. It was worse, somehow, than if he had been grizzling.
    Laurie had no theories about the dignity of man. He assented cheerfully to a social code which decreed that he should barely acknowledge Barnes’s existence, except as a featureless unit in a noxious swarm. Something, however, seemed to him to need doing. He leaned half out of the window. Laurie never considered his own compromises. His methods of defying convention were as a rule so conventional that they passed unnoticed by most people, including himself.
    “Hi!” he bawled.
    Barnes turned, with a hunted start. When he saw who it was, he registered a modified relief, mingled with awe and a paralyzed hesitation lest someone else might after all have been addressed.
    “You!” shouted Laurie. “Whoever you are.” Only the prefects, whose job it was, were supposed to know their names. Barnes came up to the window.
    “Barnes, J. B., please, Odell.”
    “I want a chit paid at the shop. Do