The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave/Owen Wingrave/Chapter 1
OWEN WINGRAVE
I
"Upon my honor, you must be off your head!" cried Spencer Coyle, as the young man, with a white face, stood there panting a little, and repeating, "Really, I've quite decided," and "I assure you I've thought it all out." They were both pale, but Owen Wingrave smiled in a manner exasperating to his interlocutor, who, however, still discriminated sufficiently to see that his grimace (it was like an irrelevant leer) was the result of extreme and conceivable nervousness.
"It was certainly a mistake to have gone so far; but that is exactly why I feel I mustn't go farther," poor Owen said, waiting mechanically, almost humbly (he wished not to swagger, and indeed he had nothing to swagger about), and carrying through the window to the stupid opposite houses the dry glitter of his eyes.
"I'm unspeakably disgusted. You've made me dreadfully ill," Mr. Coyle went on, looking thoroughly upset.
"I'm very sorry. It was the fear of the effect on you that kept me from speaking sooner."
"You should have spoken three months ago. Don't you know your mind from one day to the other?"
The young man for a moment said nothing. Then he replied, with a little tremor: "You're very angry with me, and I expected it. I'm awfully obliged to you for all you've done for me. I'll do anything else for you in return, but I can't do that. Every one else will let me have it, of course. I'm prepared for it—I'm prepared for everything. That's what has taken the time: to be sure I was prepared. I think it's your displeasure I feel most and regret most. But, little by little, you'll get over it."
"You'll get over it rather faster, I suppose!" Spencer Coyle satirically exclaimed.
He was quite as agitated as his young friend, and they were evidently in no condition to prolong an encounter in which they each drew blood. Mr. Coyle was a professional "coach;" he prepared young men for the army, taking only three or four at a time, to whom he applied the irresistible stimulus of which the possession was both his secret and his fortune. He had not a great establishment; he would have said himself that it was not a wholesale business. Neither his system, his health, nor his temper could have accommodated itself to numbers; so he weighed and measured his pupils, and turned away more applicants than he passed. He was an artist in his line, caring only for picked subjects, and capable of sacrifices almost passionate for the individual. He liked ardent young men (there were kinds of capacity to which he was indifferent), and he had taken a particular fancy to Owen Wingrave. This young man's facility really fascinated him. His candidates usually did wonders, and he might have sent up a multitude. He was a person of exactly the stature of the great Napoleon, with a certain flicker of genius in his light blue eye: it had been said of him that he looked like a pianist. The tone of his favorite pupil now expressed (without intention, indeed) a superior wisdom, which irritated him. He had not especially suffered before from Wingrave's high opinion of himself, which had seemed justified by remarkable parts; but to-day it struck him as intolerable. He cut short the discussion, declining absolutely to regard their relations as terminated, and remarked to his pupil that he had better go off somewhere (down to Eastbourne, say; the sea would bring him round) and take a few days to find his feet and come to his senses. He could afford the time, he was so well up—when Spencer Coyle remembered how well up he was he could have boxed his ears. The tall, athletic young man was not physically a subject for simplified reasoning; but there was a troubled gentleness in his handsome face, the index of compunction mixed with pertinacity, which signified that if it could have done any good he would have turned both cheeks. He evidently didn't pretend that his wisdom was superior; he only presented it as his own. It was his own career, after all, that was in question. He couldn't refuse to go through the form of trying Eastbourne, or at least of holding his tongue, though there was that in his manner which implied that if he should do so it would be really to give Mr. Coyle a chance to recuperate. He didn't feel a bit overworked, but there was nothing more natural than that, with their tremendous pressure, Mr. Coyle should be. Mr. Coyle's own intellect would derive an advantage from his pupil's holiday. Mr. Coyle saw what he meant, but he controlled himself; he only demanded, as his right, a truce of three days. Owen Wingrave granted it, though, as fostering sad illusions, this went visibly against his conscience; but before they separated the famous crammer remarked:
"All the same, I feel as if I ought to see some one. I think you mentioned to me that your aunt had come to town?"
"Oh yes; she's in Baker Street. Do go and see her," the boy said, comfortingly.
Mr. Coyle looked at him an instant. "Have you broached this folly to her?"
"Not yet—to no one. I thought it right to speak to you first."
"Oh, what you 'think right!'" cried Spencer Coyle, outraged by his young friend's standards. He added that he would probably call on Miss Wingrave; after which the recreant youth got out of the honse.
Owen Wingrave didn't however start punctually for Eastbourne; he only directed his steps to Kensington Gardens, from which Mr. Coyle's desirable residence (he was terribly expensive and had a big house) was not far removed. The famous coach "put up" his pupils, and Owen had mentioned to the butler that he would be back to dinner. The spring day was warm to his young blood, and he had a book in his pocket which, when he had passed into the gardens, and, after a short stroll, dropped into a chair, he took out with the slow, soft sigh that finally ushers in a pleasure postponed. He stretched his long legs and began to read it; it was a volume of Goethe's poems. He had been for days in a state of the highest tension, and now that the cord had snapped the relief was proportionate; only it was characteristic of him that this deliverance should take the form of an intellectual pleasure. If he had thrown up the probability of a magnificent career, it was not to dawdle along Bond Street nor parade his indifference in the window of a club. At any rate, he had in a few moments forgotten everything—the tremendous pressure, Mr. Coyle's disappointment, and even his formidable aunt in Baker Street. If these watchers had overtaken him there would surely have been some excuse for their exasperation. There was no doubt he was perverse, for his very choice of a pastime only showed how he had got up his German.
"What the devil's the matter with him, do you know?" Spencer Coyle asked that afternoon of young Lechmere, who had never before observed the head of the establishment to set a fellow such an example of bad language. Young Lechmere was not only Wingrave's fellow-pupil, he was supposed to be his intimate, indeed quite his best friend, and had unconsciously performed for Mr. Coyle the office of making the promise of his great gifts more vivid by contrast. He was short and sturdy, and, as a general thing, uninspired, and Mr. Coyle, who found no amusement in believing in him, had never thought him less exciting than as he stared now out of a face from which you could never guess whether he had caught an idea. Young Lechmere concealed such achievements as if they had been youthful indiscretions. At any rate he could evidently conceive no reason why it should be thought there was anything more than usual the matter with the companion of his studies; so Mr. Coyle had to continue:
"He declines to go up. He chucks the whole thing!"
The first thing that struck young Lechmere in the case was the freshness it had imparted to the governor's vocabulary.
"He doesn't want to go to Sandhurst?"
"He doesn't want to go anywhere. He gives up the army altogether. He objects," said Mr. Coyle, in a tone that made young Lechmere almost hold his breath, "to the military profession."
"Why, it has been the profession of all his family!"
"Their profession? It has been their religion! Do you know Miss Wingrave?"
"Oh yes. Isn't she awful?" young Lechmere candidly ejaculated.
His instructor demurred.
"She's formidable, if you mean that, and it's right she should be; because somehow in her very person, good maiden lady as she is, she represents the might, she represents the traditions and the exploits of the British army. She represents the expansive property of the English name. I think his family can be trusted to come down on him, but every influence should be set in motion. I want to know what yours is. Can you do anything in the matter?"
"I can try a couple of rounds with him," said young Lechmere, reflectively. "But he knows a fearful lot. He has the most extraordinary ideas."
"Then he has told you some of them—he has taken you into his confidence?"
"I've heard him jaw by the yard," smiled the honest youth. "He has told me he despises it."
"What is it he despises? I can't make out."
The most consecutive of Mr. Coyle's nurslings considered a moment, as if he were conscious of a responsibility.
"Why, I think, military glory. He says we take the wrong view of it."
"He oughtn't to talk to you that way. It's corrupting the youth of Athens. It's sowing sedition."
"Oh, I'm all right!" said young Lechmere. "And he never told me he meant to chuck it. I always thought he meant to see it through, simply because he had to. He'll argue on any side you like. It's a tremendous pity—I'm sure he'd have a big career."
"Tell him so, then; plead with him; struggle with him—for God's sake!"
"I'll do what I can—I'll tell him it's a regular shame."
"Yes, strike that note—insist on the disgrace of it."
The young man gave Mr. Coyle a more perceptive glance. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything dishonorable."
"Well—it won't look right. He must be made to feel that—work it up. Give him a comrade's point of view—that of a brother-in-arms."
"That's what I thought we were going to be!" young Lechmere mused, romantically, much uplifted by the nature of the mission imposed on him. "He's an awfully good sort."
"No one will think so if he backs out!" said Spencer Coyle.
"They mustn't say it to me!" his pupil rejoined, with a flush.
Mr. Coyle hesitated a moment, noting his tone and aware that in the perversity of things, though this young man was a born soldier, no excitement would ever attach to his alternatives save, perhaps, on the part of the nice girl to whom at an early day he was sure to be placidly united. "Do you like him very much-do you believe in him?"
Young Lechmere's life in these days was spent in answering terrible questions; but he had never been subjected to so queer an interrogation as this. "Believe in him? Rather!"
"Then save him!"
The poor boy was puzzled, as if it were forced upon him by this intensity that there was more in such an appeal than could appear on the surface; and he doubtless felt that he was only entering into a complex situation when, after another moment, with his hands in his pockets, he replied hopefully but not pompously: "I dare say I can bring him round!"