The Charioteer Read Online Free Page B

vivacity; he would remain clean-looking, no doubt, with hair of a pleasant texture, soft and crisp; on the strength of his mouth and eyes, people would describe his face vaguely as nice. Carter could hardly be expected just now to consider this prospect.
    “I mean,” he said, doing his best within the limits of decency, “when a row starts in a House they always get to know who’s at the bottom of it. If they didn’t think you were bats, they might think—”
    “Shut up ,” said Laurie, who had not been listening. “I’m working something out. Oh, boy, I’ve got it!”
    “Now look here, Spud.” The telepathic message which Carter was straining to convey was, “Lanyon likes you, and other people have noticed it if you haven’t.” But Spud must know this, he wasn’t a fool; since he would talk, it seemed, about anything, why couldn’t he think? “Now just calm down and—”
    “Shut up and listen. This is what we do. A protest meeting’s not enough, you’re right there, what we want is more of a sort of psychological war. Now the whole thing about Jeepers is that he’s terrified of scandal. It’s himself he has cold feet about, really, and his job. So that’s where we hit him. We’ll just all go along to him in a body and say the whole House is immoral, one and all, and we’ve come to confess like Hazell did. Then he won’t sack anyone, he’ll fall over himself to hush it up. Even if it got to the Head, he’d have to hush it up. He might sack Jeepers, and good riddance too. It’s foolproof. It—”
    “Oh, really, Spud. For heaven’s sake.” Overwhelmed, Carter struck for the first time the basso profundo of his adult voice. A moment’s partial enlightenment touched him, eluding his terms of speech. He recognized a paradox: the surface acceptance of unimagined evil, the deep impenetrability of a profound innocence. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Oh yes I do; it’s absolutely sound psychology. They couldn’t sack Lanyon without sacking the rest of us, and they can’t sack a whole House without ruining the School. And as for Jeepers, it serves him right. The way he puts ideas into people’s heads, nothing that went on here would astonish me .”
    Wouldn’t it? thought Carter to himself. Perhaps other people too were a little bit careful what they told Spuddy. “Seriously, how could you possibly expect people to stand up and say—”
    “What of it? Everyone’s immoral. It’s immoral you doing my maths, or me doing your French prose. We can’t help Jeepers’ one-track mind.”
    Emergency had inspired Carter to psychological tactics of his own. “You know what he’ll think it means, so it’s a lie; you can’t get out of that”
    “Yes,” said Laurie at once. “But then it’s a lie about Lanyon too, so it cancels out. You know, in Euclid: then A equals B, which is absurd, Q.E.D.”
    To Carter this offered for the first time some promise of reason. “Well, that might be all right if”—touched by a sudden loss of confidence, he swallowed quickly—“if we were certain it is a lie about Lanyon. I mean, we don’t know. ”
    Laurie, who was sitting on the table, didn’t get up. He looked at Carter with no conscious effort at annihilation. He simply felt what his face expressed, that the world was a meaner place than he had supposed, but that one got nowhere by making a fuss about it. Carter withered; he felt rubbishy, a mess of poorly articulated bones in an unsavory envelope. He said, “Of course, I don’t mean to say—”
    “It’s all right,” said Laurie, with unconsciously devastating quiet. “I’m sorry I said anything. My mistake. I should forget all about it if I were you. I’ll manage on my own.”
    He went out, through the window. It might have been more effective to use the door; but he didn’t want to be effective, merely to be rid of Carter; and the very transparency of this fact completed his