Still walking swiftly in the direction of Hassocks he swore silently that he would not. “I will only warn her,” he said, “and go.” Only by not seeing her again he felt could he prevent her ruin.
And yet how different it would have been if Carlyon had been his father. It did not seem odd to him so to think of the man who was seeking to kill him. Carlyon would have satisfied his mother’s heart, and he himself would have been born with will and backbone. He remembered his first meeting with Carlyon.
He was walking by himself away from the school. He had one hour of freedom and exhilarated by it ran up the hill beyond the school, the sooner to escape the sight of the red brick barrack-like buildings, the sooner to see the moors stretching away, sweep beyond sweep of short heather, into the sunset. He ran with his eyes on the ground, for then he always seemed to move faster. He knew from experience that when he had counted two hundred and twenty-five he would be within a few feet of the summit. Two hundred and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. He raised his eyes. A man stood with his back to him, in much the same way as he had stood a few days before at the turn of the road beyond Hassocks. He was dressed in black and as then he gave the impression of bulk poised with incongruous lightness. He was staring at the sunset, but when he heard a step behind him he turned with remarkable swiftness, as though footsteps were associated in his mind with danger. Andrews saw then for the first time the broad shoulders, short thick neck, low receding apelike brow and the dark eyes that in a flash tumbled to the ground the whole of the animal impression which the body had raised. The eyes could on occasion, laugh, be merry, but their prevailing tone, Andrews found later, was a brooding sadness. They were smiling, however, when he first saw them with a kind of happy wonder.
“Have you seen it?” Carlyon had said with a hushed, trembling ecstasy and outflung finger, and Andrews had looked beyond him at a sky tumultuous with flame, an angry umber, rising from the grey ashes of the moor, spumed up in tottering pinnacles into the powdery blue smoke of the sky.
They stood in silence and stared at it, and then the stranger turned to him and said, “The school. I’m looking for the school.” It was as though he had mentioned the word prison to an escaped convict. “I’ve come from there,” Andrews said. “It’s down there.”
“One can’t see the sun set from there,” Carlyon remarked, and had the air in those few words of condemning the whole institution, masters, boys, buildings. He frowned a little and said contemptuously, “Do you belong there?” Andrews nodded.
“Do you like it?” Andrews hearing the tone gazed at the stranger with a peculiar fascination. Others had asked him that question as it were rhetorically, assuming a fervent assent. They generally added some jolly reference to beatings and a dull anecdote of their schooldays. But the stranger spoke to him as though they were both of one age, with a slight contempt as though there would be something ignoble in answering “yes.”
“I hate it,” he said.
“Why do you stay?” the question, quietly put, was stunning to the boy in its implications of free will.
“It’s worse at home,” he said. “My mother’s dead.”
“You should run away,” the stranger said carelessly and turning his back stared again at the sunset. Andrews watched him. At that moment his heart, barren of any object of affection, was ready open to hero worship. The man stood in front of him with his legs a little apart as though balancing himself upon the spinning globe. A sailor, Andrews thought, remembering that his father stood so.
After a little the man turned again and seeing that the boy was still there asked him whether he happened to know a boy at the school called Andrews.
Andrews looked at him in amazement. It was as though a figure from a dream had suddenly stepped into reality and claimed acquaintanceship with him. “I’m Andrews,” he said.
“That’s strange,” the man said, watching him with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, “you are pale. You don’t look strong. Unlike your father. I was your father’s friend,” he said.
The past tense caught Andrews’s attention. “I’m glad you are not his friend now,” he said. “I hate him.”
“He’s dead,” Carlyon said.
There was a pause and then Andrews said slowly, “I suppose you’d be shocked if I said I was glad.”
The stranger laughed. “Not in the least. I imagine that he’d be a particularly unlovely character on shore. He was a great sailor though. Let me introduce myself—my name’s Carlyon, skipper and owner of the Good Chance, your father’s ship.” He held out his hand. Andrews took it. The grip was firm, brief and dry.
“How did he die?” he asked.
“Shot. You knew what your father was?”
“I guessed,” Andrews said.
“And now,” Carlyon asked, “what do you want to do?” He suddenly made a twisted embarrassed motion with his hands. “Your father left me everything.” He added quickly, turning a little away, “Of course you have only to ask. You can have anything but the ship.” His voice dropped on the last word to the same hushed note which he had used in speaking of the sunset. His voice was extraordinarily musical, even in the shortest, most careless sentence. It had a concentration, a clear purity suggesting depth and tautness, which utterly unlike in timbre, yet suggested the note of
