I
We have left all the hills behind; our faces are turned towards the long strands, salted and whistling, of the North Sea. Here, the land is a great saucer, patterned with dykes and arrowy roads. To the north and to the south are smudges of smoke, the bright webbing of railway lines, towers that are older than the distant fields they chime to, Peterborough, Ely, Cambridge. We are on the edge of the Fens. It is a place plucked from the water. Only here and there remains the old darkly gleaming chaos of marsh and reeds, alders and bulrushes, the sudden whirr and scream of wildfowl. All else is now deep pasturage and immense fields bright with stubble, feeding the windmills and the scattered redbrick farms. It is a country to make a farmer fat; these are fields to put beef and pudding and ale on a man’s table. Yet it seems to be still haunted by its old desolation. Perhaps the sky, which can show a spread of cloud and blue by day, a glitter of stars by night, not to be matched elsewhere between Berwick and Penzance, is too big, too masterful, for a man’s peace of mind, unless, like so many in the old days, he comes here simply to worship God. Perhaps too much is heard of its bitter neighbour, the North Sea, and of winds that come from the Steppes. Perhaps it is only because it is a hollow land, which every darkness turns again into a place of spectral marshes and monkish ghosts. Something desolating certainly remains, a whisper not to be drowned by the creaking of the heaviest harvest-wagons. The little farms seem lonelier than lighthouses. The roads go on and on, one ruled mile after another, but would never appear to arrive anywhere. The very trains, cautiously puffing along a raised single track, seem to be without either starting-places or destinations, and so wander undramatically across the landscape, only heightening, by their passing, the long silences. The vague sadness of a prairie has fallen upon this plain of dried marshes. Like a rich man who gives but never smiles, this land yields bountifully but is at heart still a wilderness.
Somewhere in the middle of this region, a narrow side-road finds its way to a hamlet, made up of about twenty houses, a tiny shop, and an alehouse, and then wanders on another mile or so in order to arrive at a house of some size, where it stops, despairingly. This is easily the largest house in the neighbourhood, a redbrick building in no recognizable style of architecture, and perhaps sixty or seventy years old. It was built by a strange gentleman from Australia, who had for years dreamed of a country mansion, and, once he was installed in it, proceeded very quietly to drink himself to death. Now, as certain sheds and newer outhouses, goalposts and worn fields testify, it is no longer a country mansion. It is some years since James Tarvin, M.A. (Cantab.), married a woman ten years older than himself, bought with her money the desirable property known as Washbury Manor, and transformed it into Washbury Manor School, in which some fifty or sixty boys, preferably the sons of gentlemen, are prepared for the public schools and whatever else may befall them in this life. Letters from all over the world arrive now at Washbury Manor. Men and women in far-distant bungalows receive little scrawls from there and are very proud and boring about them. Quite a number of the small boys at Washbury have parents who are in India and Africa and such places, and not a few of the rest have no parents at all but merely guardians, persons who are conscientious enough but cannot be expected to discover the relative merits of all the preparatory schools in England. Not that Washbury Manor is a bad school; but, on the other hand, it is certainly not one of the best. One visiting uncle, a master in the merchant service, put it to himself and to anybody who might be listening: ‚ÄúIt don‚Äôt smell right.‚Äù But he himself was not the kind of person that Mr.¬ÝTarvin‚ÅÝ‚Äîit is his own phrase‚ÅÝ‚Äîwished to have associated with the school. Mr.¬ÝTarvin could afford to be contemptuous of such criticism. He had references from public men, including a Colonial Bishop; some scholarships to the school‚Äôs credit; pure air and water, a bracing atmosphere, perfect sanitation, good playing fields; and a teaching staff of three university graduates, Robert Fauntley, M.A. (Oxon.), Inigo Jollifant, B.A. (Cantab.), Harold Felton, B.A. (Bristol); a matron, Miss Callander, with a diploma in the domestic sciences; and an ex-regular noncommissioned officer, Sergeant Comrie, to take drill and carpentering. Moreover, the health and comfort of the boys are the care of no less a person than Mrs.¬ÝTarvin herself, the daughter of the Rev. George Betterby. If you are a parent in India, is it not worth cutting things down a little, depriving yourself of a few holidays in the hills, we will say, merely to know that your boy is in such hands as these? Term by term, Mr.¬ÝTarvin received tribute from the very frontiers of our Empire, and rarely had he to complain that one of his little iron bedsteads was without its weight of boy.
They are all in bed now, these boys, but they are not all asleep. Mr.¬ÝFelton has already looked in once at the older ones, who may be subject to the vaguely disturbing influences of Saturday night, and has told them to be quiet. All the other adult persons in the house are trying to forget the existence of boys. Mrs.¬ÝTarvin has commanded the presence of Miss Callander in her drawing-room and is pleasantly occupied in bullying her. Mr.¬ÝTarvin himself, having been told to keep out of the way for half an hour after dinner, has retired to what he calls his study, and there, pasty, damp, and breathing heavily, he has cast off both the schoolmaster and the anxious husband and has turned himself into a dozing middle-aged sedentary man, with a weak stomach lulled for a little while into a false peace. Mr.¬ÝFauntley has disappeared on one of his mysterious Saturday night excursions. Sergeant Comrie is walking over the fields to the village inn, where he is regarded as a rich cosmopolitan character. Mr.¬ÝJollifant is in his bed-sitting-room, a very small and stuffy apartment not far from the roof, which he prefers to the equally small and stuffy common-room because at this moment he is engaged in what he imagines to be literary composition.
He is sitting in a Windsor chair that he has tilted back to a very perilous angle, and his feet, enclosed in vivid green carpet slippers, are resting on the sill of the open window. There is about both his attitude and his apparel that elaborate carelessness of the undergraduate, though Inigo Jollifant, now in his twenty-sixth year, left Cambridge three years ago. He is a thin loose-limbed youth, a trifle above medium height. His face does not suggest the successful preparatory-school master. It seems rather too fantastic. A long lock of hair falls perpetually across his right eyebrow; his nose itself is long, wandering, and whimsical, and his grey eyes are set unusually wide apart and have in them a curious gleam. He wears a blue pullover, no coat, a generous bow-tie, and baggy and rather discoloured flannel trousers. He is smoking a ridiculously long cherrywood pipe. There is about him the air of one who is ready to fail gloriously at almost anything. We realize at once that his History, French, English Literature, his cricket and football, are dashing but sketchy. At this moment he is ostensibly engaged in writing an elaborate essay‚ÅÝ‚Äîin a manner of the early Stevenson‚ÅÝ‚Äîentitled ‚ÄúThe Last Knapsack,‚Äù an essay that he began many weeks ago, in the middle of the long vacation. His right hand grasps a fountain pen and there is a writing block on his knees, but never a word does he set down. He blows out clouds of smoke, keeps his feet on the windowsill, and balances his chair at a still more alarming angle.
There is a knock at the door, and then a face looks in, bringing with it a flash of eyeglasses.
“Hello! Who’s that?” he cries, without turning round. “Come in.”
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Jollifant.” And the visitor enters.
“Oh, it’s you, Felton, is it?” Inigo twists his head round, and grins. “Come in and sit down.”
Felton is about the same age, but after that there is no further likeness. He is a pleasant, earnest young man, whose rimless eyeglasses give him a rather misleading look of energy and alertness. Two years ago, he left the University of Bristol, at which he had spent four undistinguished years, with the determination to do his duty, speak the truth, and be friendly with everybody; and a certain sense of anxiety discovered in his face, voice, manner, suggests that he has not found it easy. Already he is beginning to approach life, or at least every succeeding new manifestation of it, with a slightly halting step and a little prefatory cough. He goes warily through the term, occasionally reading large dull biographies and smoking non-nicotine cigarettes and always agreeing with everybody, and then tries to forget his responsibilities in cautious foreign travel.
He sat down, then cleared his throat. “Look here, Jollifant, I’m sorry to trouble you.”
“Felton, you do not trouble me,” said Inigo, regarding his companion as if he were a fairly intelligent fox terrier. “It’s true I was in the throes of composition. Throes! What damned silly words we use! Have you ever been in throes?”
“Yes, I see you were,” replied Felton, looking with something like reverence at the writing block. He had a deep veneration for literature, so deep that he hardly ever made acquaintance with it. He did not know whether these things that Jollifant was always trying to write were literature or not, but as usual he was not taking any risks. “It’s about the washing lists,” he added apologetically.
‚ÄúThe washing lists!‚Äù the other cried, in an ecstasy of scorn. ‚ÄúThis is Saturday night, Felton. Think of that, Saturday night! Remember your orgies at Bristol. Now I‚Äôm prepared, as you see, to devote myself, in stern seclusion, to Art, searching for the exact Phrase. Don‚Äôt forget that‚ÅÝ‚Äîthe exact phrase. Takes a devil of a lot of finding. Again‚Äù‚ÅÝ‚Äîand he looked very severely at his visitor and took out the cherrywood pipe‚ÅÝ‚Äî‚ÄúI‚Äôm prepared to come down from yonder height, as it were, to make merry with you, to exchange ideas, to hear you talk of the old wild days of Bristol. But no washing lists! Not on Saturday night!‚Äù
‚ÄúI see what you mean,‚Äù said Felton. ‚ÄúIt‚Äôs an awful nuisance, of course. But still, Mrs.¬ÝTarvin said‚ÅÝ‚Äî‚Äù
Inigo held up his hand. “Her words fall on deaf ears. That woman’s a gorgon. Tonight, I refuse to believe she exists.”
‚ÄúWell, we told you what she was like,‚Äù said the other. This was his fourth term at the school, and it was Inigo‚Äôs third. Mrs.¬ÝTarvin had been away, for a long rest-cure, during both the previous terms, so that Felton had known her for about eleven weeks, whereas Inigo had only known her for one. ‚ÄúWe told you what it would be like when she came back,‚Äù he added, with all the irritating complacency of the successful prophet.
“What you told me was a mere nothing,” Inigo cried. “You said, for instance, that the food would be cut down a bit when she came back. It’s not been cut down, it’s been cut out, clean out. There’s nothing left but the smell, which is worse than ever. Look at tonight’s mess!”
“I know. Pretty bad, wasn’t it?”
‚ÄúShepherds‚Äô pie‚ÅÝ‚Äîand no shepherd would ever touch it‚ÅÝ‚Äîfor the second time this week, and prunes for the third or fourth! And she calls that a dinner‚ÅÝ‚Äîon Saturday night, too! And there she sits, the shapeless old guzzler, choking herself right under our noses with cutlets and cream and God knows what. That‚Äôs the last refinement of torture. If she was in the trough with us, groping amongst the minced stuff and prunes and muck, it wouldn‚Äôt be so bad. But to sit there, letting us see that real food still exists, letting us watch it being converted into that fat of hers, it‚Äôs simply piling on the insult, it‚Äôs devilish! If there‚Äôs another dinner like that, I shall take sandwiches and chocolate down and eat them in front of her. It isn‚Äôt that I care so much about food. My soul, Felton, is like a star and dwells apart, absolutely. But I ask you! Can you worthily instruct the young, can you wrestle with the problems of French and History, day after day, on prunes? It can‚Äôt be done.‚Äù
“No. I see what you mean, of course. Though as a matter of fact,” he added hesitantly, “I rather like prunes.”
“Under which king, Besonian? Speak or die!” Inigo shouted, pointing his pipe-stem at the startled Felton. “He that is not with us is against us. Do you ask for prunes, Felton? Do you creep down to that wretched female Tarvin, with your tongue lolling out, and say, ‘More prunes. Custard or no custard, more prunes’?”
“Don’t be an ass, Jollifant,” Felton wriggled. “Besides, I hate shepherds’ pie as much as you do. It’ll be like that all the term. I told you what it would be.”
‚ÄúThe whole subject,‚Äù the other began loftily, ‚Äúis profoundly distasteful to me. Let me read you a sentence or two from ‚ÄòThe Last Knapsack,‚Äô an essay celebrating‚ÅÝ‚Äîmournfully, you understand‚ÅÝ‚Äîthe final extinction of the walking tour. Have you an ear for a phrase, Felton?‚Äù
‚ÄúI don‚Äôt know. Yes, I think so. But, look here‚ÅÝ‚ÄîI‚Äôd like to slip up later and hear that‚ÅÝ‚Äîbut what about those washing lists?‚Äù
Before Inigo could express his opinion again on the subject, there came a little knock at the door. It was Miss Callander, and she looked as if she had just retreated to her room in a shower of tears and had hastily quitted it in a cloud of powder. She was a distant connection of Mr.¬ÝTarvin‚Äôs, a tall, rather plump girl of twenty-seven, who would not have been noticeable in the nearest town but who seemed in this wilderness almost a beauty, and was certainly too well-favoured to be successful as the school matron, especially since she had been appointed by Mr.¬ÝTarvin during his wife‚Äôs absence at the beginning of the year. She had only spent ten days so far trying to please Mrs.¬ÝTarvin, but already she was beginning to realize the hopelessness of the task. For the past four years, she had been engaged off and on to a cousin who was out in Egypt. During the last three months, the engagement had been off, but even now she was meditating a letter that would put it on again.
Inigo beamed upon her snub nose, round and rapidly doubling chin, and large and rather foolish eyes. They were, he told himself again, the eyes of a stricken deer. “This, Miss Callander,” he announced gravely, “is an honour.”
‚ÄúOh, Mr.¬ÝJollifant,‚Äù she fluttered, ‚Äúis Mr.¬ÝFelton here? Oh, I see he is. Mr.¬ÝFelton, it‚Äôs about the washing lists‚ÅÝ‚Äî‚Äù
“Felton,” said Inigo sternly, turning round, “what about those lists?”
“That’s just what I was asking,” Felton began, hastily coming forward.
Inigo cut him short with a superb gesture, then smiled at Miss Callander with deep tenderness and looked for a moment as if he were about to pat her hand. “You want them now, I take it?”
‚ÄúI do, yes. As soon as possible. Mrs.¬ÝTarvin‚Äôs perfectly furious about everything.‚Äù And her eyes grew and grew and her mouth dropped.
‚ÄúSay no more,‚Äù cried Inigo, with an air of immense benevolence. ‚ÄúWhat man can do, we will do, at least if Felton will condescend to give me a little assistance.‚Äù He rummaged amongst a mass of papers on his table, found what he wanted, then added: ‚ÄúForward to the common-room. And the motto is, ‚ÄòOne for all, and all for one‚Äô‚ÅÝ‚Äîabsolutely. Lead on, Miss Callander. Master Felton, take these papers, and shake off that deep lethargy.‚Äù And off they went, with Miss Callander, giggling a little, in front.
By the time that Inigo had carefully filled and lighted his absurd pipe and had smiled dreamily for a few moments through the haze of smoke at his two colleagues, they had completed the lists. “There now,” he said, as Miss Callander gathered up the papers. “That’s done with. What do we do now? I can’t go back to that beastly little room of mine and try to write. The mood, Miss Callander, the precious mood, is shattered; the golden bowl, Felton, is broken. I shall try a little music.”
Miss Callander, at the door, turned wide eyes upon him. “How can you, though? I mean, where will you go?”
‚ÄúAren‚Äôt you forgetting,‚Äù he replied with dignity, ‚Äúthat there is an instrument‚ÅÝ‚ÄîI won‚Äôt say a piano, but anyhow something in the semblance of a piano‚ÅÝ‚Äîin our rotten schoolroom?‚Äù
‚ÄúOh, but Mr.¬ÝJollifant!‚Äù she gave a tiny giggle that was a mixture of delight and apprehension. ‚ÄúDon‚Äôt you remember Mrs.¬ÝTarvin said it wasn‚Äôt to be used in the evening? She did, didn‚Äôt she, Mr.¬ÝFelton?‚Äù
“She did, you know, Jollifant,” said Felton, with an earnest flash of his glasses. “It’s a shame, of course, but that’s what she said.”
‚ÄúMy friends, my old companions in misfortune, I thank you for these words of warning, but I know nothing of such orders, tyrannical commands which‚ÅÝ‚Äîer‚ÅÝ‚Äîstrike at the very roots of liberty. Is thy servant a dog that he shall not do this thing? The answer is, ‚ÄòNo, decidedly not!‚Äô I go to play‚ÅÝ‚Äîas best I can, and by George, that‚Äôs not saying much because half the keys stick all the time‚ÅÝ‚ÄîI go to play, I repeat, upon the schoolroom piano. Open your ears‚ÅÝ‚ÄîI mean yours, Miss Callander, because Felton‚Äôs, as you can see, are open enough‚ÅÝ‚Äîand they shall drink in melody and harmony and what‚Äôs its name‚ÅÝ‚Äîa spot or two of counterpoint.‚Äù And Inigo marched downstairs to the dismal little schoolroom, once the drawing-room of Washbury Manor and now a cheerless huddle of desks and blackboards and yellowing maps. It was dusk now, and he switched on a naked and shivering electric light, then walked over to the far corner of the room and seated himself before one of those cottage pianos, with ochreous fronts and mournful blue-white keys, that are designed and glued and varnished for no other places but miserly institutions. The pedal creaked, the keys stuck together, the tone was sadly tinny, but it was a piano, and music could be wrung out of it.
It must be said at once that Inigo‚Äôs playing, like his French and History and cricket, was dashing but sketchy. He was not of your cool and impeccable executants, delicately phrasing, to the last grace-note, their Bachs and Mozarts. His technique was faulty and his taste was worse. He himself thought little of his musical powers, and all his serious thought, his fine energies, were devoted to the composition of elaborate prose. In more expansive moments, he saw himself as another Pater or Stevenson. But he was not a writer, and never would be. Try as he might, he only succeeded in putting honest words on the rack, leaving them screaming, though of this he was happily unconscious. He was marked out to be one of those wistful adorers who never even catch a glance from the Muse. He would never create literature, though his life itself might be rich with its scents and flavours. He would always be one of its failures, though perhaps one of its happy failures, that company of humble aspirants‚ÅÝ‚Äîand at heart Inigo was humble enough‚ÅÝ‚Äîwho discover more joy in the sight of a sadly botched manuscript than many a successful writer has found in a row of admired volumes. On the other hand, in his antics at the piano, which had made him so popular at school, at Cambridge, and at odd parties everywhere, those antics that he regarded with smiling contempt, there was really a glint of genius. His touch was light, crisp, and somehow deliciously comic; he could start the keys into elfin life; and not only could he read easily at sight, and improve as he read, the common sort of music, the songs and dance tunes that were so often demanded of him, not only could he play by ear and throw in a trick or two of his own as he played, but he was able to improvise the most amusing little tunes, cynical-sentimental things of the moment, not unlike all the other butterfly melodies that wing their way across the world and then perish obscurely, and yet all his own, with a twist in them, something half wistful, half comic, in their lilt, that belonged to nobody else. He would play these things until every foot was tap-tapping, and many a listener, vainly attempting to catch again the deft little phrases, would be maddened for weeks. But he would only try variations of key and manner until at last his ear was satisfied. He never tried to put them down on paper. It had not occurred to him that the world was being scoured for such tunes; and if it had occurred to him, he would probably have remained indifferent, having a ‚ÄúLast Knapsack‚Äù still to finish.
For several days an unusually impudent and delicious little tune had been capering at the back of his mind, and now, after some preliminary flourishes, he set out to capture it. He fumbled about for a few minutes in the key of D major, but then slid into his favourite E flat. The next moment the poor hulk of a piano leaped into life. The tune was his, and he began toying ecstatically with it. Now it ran whispering in the high treble; now it crooned and gurgled in the bass; and then, off it went scampering, with a flash of red heels and a tossing of brown curls. There was no holding it at all. It pirouetted round the room, mocking the desks and blackboards and maps: the air was full of its bright mischief. Rumpty-dee-tidee-dee, rumpty-dee-tidee. But why try to describe that little tune or make any mystery of it? All the world knows it now, or did yesterday, as “Slippin’ Round the Corner.” What Inigo played that night was not quite the final melody that became so famous as a song and a dance tune afterwards: the butterfly was hardly out of the chrysalis yet; but, on the other hand, the lilt that came out then had not been blared and bleated and howled and vulgarized in every conceivable fashion, and still had all its enchanting mockery of things heavy and dull and lifeless. Inigo twisted it this way and that, sent little glittering showers of high notes over the melody, let it sink down in mock despair to the bass, then made it ring so triumphantly through the schoolroom that it shattered the place altogether and set up in its stead a room that was all long windows and gardens beyond and youth and happy folly. As he did this, Inigo laughed aloud.
‚ÄúMr.¬ÝJollifant!‚Äù A voice at the door.
Rumpty-dee-tidee-dee. This was the best tune yet. It was what Saturday night ought to be. It danced clean over Washbury Manor School at the very first note, cleared the long sullen fields, and then went capering through bright towns that could not be found on any map.
‚ÄúMr.¬ÝJollifant!‚Äù The voice was closer and louder, a screech.
Rumpty-dee-tidee. And friends you had never seen before joined hands with you, and away you went, past lines of laughing girls.‚ÅÝ‚Ää‚Å݂Ķ
‚ÄúMr.¬ÝJollifant!‚Äù
And Inigo let his hands fall from the keys and awoke to make the discovery that Mrs.¬ÝTarvin really existed and was standing before him, very angry indeed. There followed a moment during which he was able to examine distastefully and in silence her shapeless black figure, her grey hair with its odd ribbon in front, her steel spectacles, her long sallow face that always contrasted so dramatically and repellently with her bulk of body.
“Didn’t you hear me calling?” she demanded furiously.
“I’m afraid I didn’t.” Inigo smiled at her in a dazed fashion. The tune was still running through his head.
‚ÄúWell, please stop playing at once, at once,‚Äù cried Mrs.¬ÝTarvin. She had a trick of repeating phrases, raising her voice the second time, that had been meat and drink to mimics at Washbury for years. ‚ÄúI thought it was clearly understood that this piano was not to be played at all, not at all, in the evening.‚Äù
‚ÄúBut that‚Äôs the only time I can play it, absolutely the only time,‚Äù Inigo replied, quite unwittingly falling into mimicry there and then. ‚ÄúAnd after all, I give some of the boys music lessons. Music‚Äôs an extra and‚ÅÝ‚Äîer‚ÅÝ‚Äîwe share the profits. And I can‚Äôt give music lessons unless I play myself sometimes, can I?‚Äù And he gave her a broad smile.
It was not returned. Mrs.¬ÝTarvin had known Inigo only a week, but already she had begun to regard him as another of her husband‚Äôs unfortunate appointments. ‚ÄúThe music lessons are not important, not important, at all,‚Äù she said coldly. ‚ÄúAnd in any case, I don‚Äôt see that it is at all necessary that in order to give them, you must play music-hall tunes as loudly as you can when all the boys are in bed, yes, long ago in bed.‚Äù
“The longer in bed, you know, the deeper the sleep,” he began.
‚ÄúThat will do, please, Mr.¬ÝJollifant. The rule is that this piano shall not be played, not be played, in the evening.‚Äù And she swept round as if she were on a swivel, drew herself up, and marched out.
Inigo followed, whistling softly the night’s tune, which now was not only deliriously lilting but also had a certain rebellious note in it. At the head of the stairs, on the way to his room, he met Miss Callander, who looked as if she had been standing there, listening.
“Oh, I heard her go down. Did she stop you?”
“She did, she did,” he replied. “And just when I was beginning to enjoy myself. Did you hear the thing I was playing? A poor thing, but mine own.”
“Was it really? I thought it was lovely. You are clever.” Then she dropped her voice. “I knew she’d stop you. She’s been fearfully cross all evening and blamed me for all kinds of silly things just after dinner, and I really don’t know what to do.” And she put a hand to her cheek and looked at him forlornly.
He took her hand and held it somewhat absentmindedly. ‚ÄúShe thinks by keeping us on a low diet‚ÅÝ‚ÄîI mean shepherds‚Äô pie and prunes‚ÅÝ‚Äîto crush our spirit. But she won‚Äôt succeed, unless perhaps with Felton, who hasn‚Äôt much spirit anyhow, and likes prunes, or says he does. But you and I, Miss Callander‚ÅÝ‚Äî‚Äù and he completed the sentence by squeezing her hand.
She withdrew her hand, though not hastily. “She’s really awful, isn’t she? And only a week of term gone! And weeks and weeks yet! What will she be like at the end? Better perhaps.”
‚ÄúWorse, decidedly worse,‚Äù said Inigo impressively. ‚ÄúNine weeks more of her‚ÅÝ‚Äîit‚Äôs unthinkable. Believe me‚Äù‚ÅÝ‚Äîand now his voice sank to a fearsome whisper‚ÅÝ‚Äî‚Äúyoung as the term is, short as the acquaintance of this gorgon-like female and myself, the fates have already conspired together and woven a web and laid a train, and very soon‚ÅÝ‚Äîdo you know what will happen here very soon, do you know what there will be?‚Äù
Her round eyes and parted lips were sufficient to frame the question. But Inigo’s sense of the dramatic compelled him to wait a few moments. His stare was heavy with doom.
“A bust-up,” he said at length, “and a bust-up of the most astounding and shattering proportions.” He gave her another fateful glance, then quite suddenly grinned at her, waved his hand, and went striding down the corridor, whistling his tune, that tune which is perhaps the leitmotif of the piece.