The Charioteer Read Free Page B

it straight away, will you?”
    “Yes, Odell.” Barnes gazed up at the window, like a dog on trust. He had a face like a Spanish madonna with steel spectacles. When frightened he had a heavy sullen look; the contrast between features and expression was more unpleasant than ugliness. At the moment, a strained vacancy made him classic. Laurie felt in his pocket for the coppers and the chit.
    “Stand on one leg or the other,” he said encouragingly. “You look as if your pants were wet. Of course, don’t let me keep you if they are.”
    At first overwhelmed by this condescension, Barnes presently essayed a kind of grin. Mixed with its servility, traces of gratitude, humor, and even intelligence appeared. He looked almost human, Laurie thought.
    “Here you are. And don’t lose it.”
    “No, Odell.”
    “Hi, stop, you’ve not got the chit yet, you fool.”
    “Sorry, Odell.”
    “Have the baths shut?”
    “Yes, please, I think so, Odell.”
    “Curse. I meant to get over. What was that extraordinary roaring going on?”
    “I don’t know, Odell. Mr. Peters was coaching.”
    “Oh, ah. I didn’t know he used a megaphone now.”
    A flickering smile, in dread of presuming, appeared on Barnes’s face like an anxious rabbit ready to bolt back down the hole.
    “The thing with Peters, once you’re on the board, is just to carry on as if he wasn’t there. He likes that really, you’ll find. It soothes his nerves.”
    Laurie, a steady but unsensational performer at other games, was the House’s white hope at swimming and was expected to get his School colors next year. Barnes said, “Yes, Odell,” with an expression of almost inert stupidity. The awe of this heavenly message had stunned him. Laurie observed it with approval; it was no good if encouragement made them fresh.
    “Here’s the chit. And you can take this bottle back.” The bottle was a gratuity. There was a penny refund on it.
    “Oh, thanks very much, Odell.”
    Barnes sprinted off, with a new animation. Laurie, looking after him, felt a warmth at the heart which he hastened to shed. A little drip like that. Perhaps he reminded one of dogs, or something. Dismissing Barnes from his mind, he was about to get back to the essay again, when Carter appeared outside. Luckily Laurie had the last paragraph in his head.
    Carter climbed in, leaving two more scratches and some fresh dirt on the sill. He suffered from the disability of being already almost six feet tall, and not having caught up with it. Even his voice hadn’t finished breaking. Laurie’s had settled quite firmly, but he ran to compactness and was still at the five-foot-seven mark. You could see by his build that five-foot-nine would probably be about his limit. He had to look up to Carter to talk to him; to the onlooker, this had a somewhat incongruous effect.
    Carter uncoiled himself from the window. He had to use the arts of a contortionist to get through it; but he would have shunned the eccentricity of using the door. “Now, now,” he said, jerking his head toward the receding Barnes. “You want to sublimate, you know. Collect antique doorknobs, or something.”
    “It’s too strong for me,” said Laurie movingly. “I can’t get him out of my head. Those long eyelashes. Would he look at me, do you think?”
    Carter followed this up, but rather half-heartedly. He was not the only one to find Laurie’s conversation disconcertingly uninhibited. The innuendo, more generally approved, was apt when it reached him to be smacked into the open with the directness of a fives ball. Lacking in some social instinct, he seemed never to know the difference.
    “He’s the worst drip we’ve had in years,” Carter pursued. “And anyway, it’s hardly quite the moment, when you come to think.”
    “Think what of?” Laurie put his feet on the table and rocked the back legs of his chair.
    “You don’t mean you’ve not heard?” Carter had so far been only at the receiving end of a sensational