“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” Laurie felt he must sound like a cracked gramophone record. “I know it’s cheek. I’m sorry. Only I can’t promise if I don’t know.”
Lanyon put the pencil away and stood up. He had the whippy, dangerous spring of a bent rapier let go.
“For your information, I shall probably be leaving sometime tomorrow. Is that enough for you? And if I don’t have your word within one minute, I’m going to lay you out cold, here and now, and you’ll spend the time between now and then in the sicker, and that will settle that. Well?”
He could do it, Laurie thought, with one hand tied behind him. It would probably be too quick to hurt very much. The odd thing was that whereas he had entered the study almost paralyzed with fright, now he was hardly frightened at all. His admiration for Lanyon had soared to the point of worship. This is the happy warrior, this is he whom every man in arms would wish to be.
“Have you taken that in?” Lanyon asked. “Because I mean it.”
That’s all right” Laurie’s voice was suddenly clear and free. “You’ve got to, I see that. But you can’t actually kill me, so it won’t stop me for long.”
Lanyon took a step up to him, as if he were measuring his distance. Laurie very nearly threw up his fists by instinct. No, he thought, Lanyon couldn’t be found fighting in his room after all this, besides he very likely wouldn’t hit so hard in cold blood. He was just about right now for a straight one to the point of the jaw. Laurie hoped there was room enough behind for him to fall without hitting the door or something. One couldn’t turn to look. There was time for all this because it took so long for anything to happen. Lanyon must be hoping he’d crack up yet and save having to do it. He felt, standing like this, eyes front, that he had never really seen Lanyon before. His face was a clear light even brown, toning with his dusty-fair hair. There was a little triangular scar, old and colorless, on his forehead above the left eyebrow. His mouth was tight and straight, a horizontal line between two verticals. His eyes fixed Laurie, stilly.
He stepped back.
With a spent force in which sounded the flaw of a desperate weariness, he said, “You bloody fool.”
Laurie had reached a pitch of tension where no inhibitions touched him. The frame of convention, with its threats and its supports alike, was broken. He was left, a single-handed individual, to take things as they came.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “If you’re leaving, somebody’s got to cope. I know I’m not a prefect, and if Treviss and the others were doing anything, that would be all right. Only they won’t, I know what this House is when it comes to something like that, they’ve been got down like everyone else.” Lanyon was looking at him, quiet, almost relaxed, incalculable, but now for some reason unterrifying. Laurie went on with a rush, “It makes me sick, the way people will let anything by, even something like this, sooner than come into the open about—anything you’re supposed not to.”
“I see,” said Lanyon. “And tell me, what makes you so cheerful about coming out into the open yourself?”
“I don’t know. Well, somebody’s got to. It stands to reason Jeepers can’t be let get away with this.”
“Mr. Jepson to you,” said Lanyon mechanically.
“Mr. Jepson. Sorry. It isn’t only even that it’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to the House either. Till this year, it’s been going down ever since Mr. Stuart left. Jeep—Mr. Jepson can’t even see how you’ve pulled the place together. You are the House really, everybody knows that. He doesn’t seem ever to notice the things that really matter, the feeling in the place, and giving the new people a start. You know the sort of thing that was thought to be smart here before you took over. Peterson and that lot. Jeepers hasn’t a clue. He’s all taken up with the moral tone. There wasn’t any moral tone when Mr. Stuart was here. The place was just normal.”
“Quite the budding analyst.” Laurie knew suddenly that he had been talking too much, too loudly, and too long, to someone who was very tired. “So you think that Mr. Jepson has an anxiety neurosis, due to being oversensitive to a certain weakness in the system he represents.”
“Yes,” said Laurie recklessly.
“In view of which, you’re proposing to take on the whole foundations of society single-handed. My strength is as the strength of ten …” He gave a tight little smile, which went out quickly. With a change of tone he said, “You’re an orphan, I take it?”
“No,” said Laurie. “It’s only my father who’s dead.”
“Your surviving family,” said Lanyon carefully, “will be putting down the red carpet, I suppose, when you go home expelled in a couple of days’ time?”
Laurie said nothing. He had a sudden, horribly clear vision of his mother’s face.
Watching him, Lanyon said, “Yes, it’s about time you woke up.”
“I could explain,” said Laurie dully. He tried, desperately, not to imagine it.
“Oh, don’t be a fool. Admit it’s washed up, and let’s finish with this nonsense. You’re wasting my time, I’ve got a lot to do.”
Suddenly Laurie’s exhilaration returned. It was worth it; anything was worth it. Tomorrow could take care of itself.
“No,” he said. “You’re Head of the House, and you’ve got to stop a row if you can. But the House isn’t bound to stand by and see them do this to you and do nothing about it. We’d look like a lot of worms if we did. It doesn’t matter what happens. It just isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
Laurie noticed that he had got the pencil out again, and was screwing the lead up and down. He seemed absorbed in this. It made Laurie feel as if he were confronting a vacuum. He wondered if he were meant to go. But one always waited for explicit permission. “Of course it’s not fair,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
“And being such a good psychologist”—Lanyon pushed down the lead more firmly—“you feel sure that a poor helpless type like myself will naturally let himself be expelled for something he hasn’t done, unless people like you dash up with a rescue party?”
A bright ray of hope shot up in Laurie’s mind. How absurd not to have thought that Lanyon could look after himself; and why should he confide his plans to his inferiors? So long as it was going to be all right … but he wished Lanyon would look up. “I only thought,” he said to fill in the pause, “it was a thing the House ought to get together on.”
“So I gathered.” Lanyon raised his eyes. The hard, blue shine had gone. They looked tired, almost gray. “Let me see; is it Cambridge, or Oxford, you’re going to sit for?”
“Oxford,” said Laurie, now quite at sea.
Lanyon leaned an arm on the empty mantelshelf: the room, Laurie realized now, was stripped almost to the bareness of vacant possession. “Yes,” he said unemotionally. “Oxford, of course. You ought to fit in well there. It’s the home of lost causes, so they say.”
There was silence. In the last ten minutes, Laurie had almost exhausted his capacity for taking in new experience. He knew what he was being told, and it seemed now that he must have known for at least some seconds beforehand. But he had reached a full stop. He couldn’t make it mean anything.
“Too bad, Spuddy.” Lanyon smiled, it seemed from a long way off. “You’ll have to hang the shillelagh up again.”
At this point, in one of those moments which seem crucial only because they complete long, hidden processes, a man disappeared: a right-thinking, crisply defined, forcible person, rather dogmatic and intolerant in a decent, humorous way; the nearest in succession of Laurie’s potential selves. A usurper moved in, all unaware of himself, concerned only with his sudden perception of the fact that Lanyon’s steady gaze was being held up with tightened muscles, like a weight. At the higher-barbarian phase of adolescence, it comes as unwanted, dismaying news that the gods feel pain. But it seemed to Laurie that something had to be done, and no one else was here to do it All the rest would have to be thought about later.