Tom Brown's School Days
by Thomas Hughes · English · Gutenberg #32224 · 621,004 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Tom Brown's School Days
Author: Thomas Hughes
Release date: May 2, 2010 [eBook #32224]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS ***
Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Emmy and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS.
[Illustration: CHAIRING TOM IN THE QUADRANGLE. P. 358.]
TOM BROWN'S
SCHOOL DAYS
BY AN OLD BOY
[Illustration]
With Illustrations by Arthur Hughes and Sydney Prior Hall
New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1880
TO
MRS. ARNOLD,
OF FOX HOWE,
THIS BOOK IS (WITHOUT HER PERMISSION)
Dedicated
BY THE AUTHOR,
WHO OWES MORE THAN HE CAN EVER ACKNOWLEDGE OR FORGET
TO HER AND HERS.
PREFACE
TO THE SIXTH EDITION.
I RECEIVED the following letter from an old friend soon after the last
edition of this book was published, and resolved, if ever another
edition were called for, to print it. For it is clear from this and
other like comments, that something more should have been said expressly
on the subject of bullying, and how it is to be met.
"MY DEAR ----,
"I blame myself for not having earlier suggested
whether you could not, in another edition of Tom
Brown, or another story, denounce more decidedly
the evils of _bullying_ at schools. You have
indeed done so, and in the best way, by making
Flashman the bully the most contemptible
character; but in that scene of the _tossing_, and
similar passages, you hardly suggest that such
things should be stopped--and do not suggest any
means of putting an end to them.
"This subject has been on my mind for years. It
fills me with grief and misery to think what weak
and nervous children go through at school--how
their health and character for life are destroyed
by rough and brutal treatment.
"It was some comfort to be under the old delusion
that fear and nervousness can be cured by
violence, and that knocking about will turn a
timid boy into a bold one. But now we know well
enough that is not true. Gradually training a
timid child to do bold acts would be most
desirable; but _frightening_ him and ill-treating
him will not make him courageous. Every medical
man knows the fatal effects of terror, or
agitation, or excitement, to nerves that are
over-sensitive. There are different kinds of
courage, as you have shown in your character of
Arthur.
"A boy may have moral courage, and a
finely-organized brain and nervous system. Such a
boy is calculated, if judiciously educated, to be
a great, wise, and useful man; but he may not
possess _animal courage_; and one night's
_tossing_, or bullying, may produce such an injury
to his brain and nerves that his usefulness is
spoiled for life. I verily believe that hundreds
of noble organizations are thus destroyed every
year. Horse-jockeys have learnt to be wiser; they
know that a highly nervous horse is utterly
destroyed by harshness. A groom who tried to cure
a shying horse by roughness and violence, would be
discharged as a brute and a fool. A man who would
regulate his watch with a crowbar would be
considered an ass. But the person who thinks a
child of delicate and nervous organization can be
made bold by bullying is no better.
"He can be made bold by _healthy exercise_ and
_games_ and _sports_; but that is quite a
different thing. And even these games and sports
should bear some proportion to his strength and
capacities.
"I very much doubt whether small children should
play with big ones--the rush of a set of great
fellows at football, or the speed of a
cricket-ball sent by a strong hitter, must be very
alarming to a mere child, to a child who might
stand up boldly enough among children of his own
size and height.
"Look at half-a-dozen small children playing
cricket by themselves; how feeble are their blows,
how slowly they bowl. You can measure in that way
their capacity.
"Tom Brown and his eleven were bold enough playing
against an eleven of about their own calibre; but
I suspect they would have been in a precious funk
if they had played against eleven giants, whose
bowling bore the same proportion to theirs that
theirs does to the small children's above.
"To return to the _tossing_. I must say I think
some means might be devised to enable school-boys
to go to bed in quietness and peace--and that some
means ought to be devised and enforced. No good,
moral or physical, to those who bully or those who
are bullied, can ensue from such scenes as take
place in the dormitories of schools. I suspect
that British wisdom and ingenuity are sufficient
to discover a remedy for this evil, if directed in
the right direction.
"The fact is, that the condition of a small boy at
a large school is one of peculiar hardship and
suffering. He is entirely at the mercy of
proverbially the roughest things in the
universe--great school-boys; and he is deprived of
the protection which the weak have in civilized
society; for he may not complain; if he does, he
is an outlaw--he has no protector but public
opinion, and that a public opinion of the very
lowest grade, the opinion of rude and ignorant
boys.
"What do school-boys know of those deep questions
of moral and physical philosophy, of the anatomy
of mind and body, by which the treatment of a
child should be regulated?
"Why should the laws of civilization be suspended
for schools? Why should boys be left to herd
together with no law but that of force or cunning?
What would become of society if it were
constituted on the same principles? It would be
plunged into anarchy in a week.
"One of our judges, not long ago, refused to
extend the protection of the law to a child who
had been ill-treated at school. If a party of
navvies had given _him_ a licking, and he had
brought the case before a magistrate, what would
he have thought if the magistrate had refused to
protect him, on the ground that if such cases were
brought before him he might have fifty a-day from
one town only?
"Now I agree with you that a constant supervision
of the master is not desirable or possible--and
that telling tales, or constantly referring to the
master for protection, would only produce ill-will
and worse treatment.
"If I rightly understand your book, it is an
effort to improve the condition of schools by
improving the tone of morality and public opinion
in them. But your book contains the most
indubitable proofs that the condition of the
younger boys at public schools, except under the
rare dictatorship of an Old Brooke, is one of
great hardship and suffering.
"A timid and nervous boy is from morning till
night in a state of bodily fear. He is constantly
tormented when trying to learn his lessons. His
play-hours are occupied in fagging, in a horrid
funk of cricket-balls and footballs, and the
violent sport of creatures who, to him, are
giants. He goes to his bed in fear and
trembling,--worse than the reality of the rough
treatment to which he is perhaps subjected.
"I believe there is only one complete remedy. It
is not in magisterial supervision; nor in telling
tales; nor in raising the tone of public opinion
among school-boys--but in the _separation of boys_
of _different ages into different schools_.
"There should be at least _three_ different
classes of schools--the first for boys from nine
to twelve; the second for boys from twelve to
fifteen; the third for those above fifteen. And
these schools should be in different localities.
"There ought to be a certain amount of supervision
by the master at those times when there are
special occasions for bullying, _e.g._ in the long
winter evenings, and when the boys are congregated
together in the bedrooms. Surely it cannot be an
impossibility to keep order, and protect the weak
at such times. Whatever evils might arise from
supervision, they could hardly be greater than
those produced by a system which divides boys into
despots and slaves.
"Ever yours, very truly,
F.D."
The question of how to adapt English public school education to nervous
and sensitive boys (often the highest and noblest subjects which that
education has to deal with) ought to be looked at from every point of
view.[A] I therefore add a few extracts from the letter of an old friend
and school-fellow, than whom no man in England is better able to speak
on the subject:--
"What's the use of sorting the boys by ages,
unless you do so by strength: and who are often
the real bullies? The strong young dog of
fourteen, while the victim may be one year or two
years older.... I deny the fact about the
bedrooms: there is trouble at times, and always
will be; but so there is in nurseries;--my little
girl, who looks like an angel, was bullying the
smallest twice to-day.
"Bullying must be fought with in other ways,--by
getting not only the Sixth to put it down, but the
lower fellows to scorn it, and by eradicating
mercilessly the incorrigible; and a master who
really cares for his fellows is pretty sure to
know instinctively who in his house are likely to
be bullied, and, knowing a fellow to be really
victimised and harassed, I am sure that he can
stop it if he is resolved. There are many kinds of
annoyance--sometimes of real cutting persecution
for righteousness' sake--that he can't stop; no
more could all the ushers in the world; but he can
do very much in many ways to make the shafts of
the wicked pointless.
"But though, for quite other reasons, I don't like
to see very young boys launched at a public
school, and though I don't deny (I wish I could)
the existence from time to time of bullying, I
deny its being a constant condition of school
life, and still more, the possibility of meeting
it by the means proposed...."
"I don't wish to understate the amount of bullying
that goes on, but my conviction is that it must be
fought, like all school evils, but it more than
any, by _dynamics_ rather than _mechanics_, by
getting the fellows to respect themselves and one
another, rather than by sitting by them with a
thick stick."
And now, having broken my resolution never to write a Preface, there are
just two or three things which I should like to say a word about.
Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while
saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great
fault of it is, "too much preaching;" but they hope I shall amend in
this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly
decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the
chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his
bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will
spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to
amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn't do so myself.
The fact is, that I can scarcely ever call on one of my contemporaries
now-a-days without running across a boy already at school, or just ready
to go there, whose bright looks and supple limbs remind me of his
father, and out first meeting in old times. I can scarcely keep the
Latin Grammar out of my own house any longer; and the sight of sons,
nephews, and godsons, playing trap-bat-and-ball, and reading "Robinson
Crusoe," makes one ask oneself, whether there isn't something one would
like to say to them before they take their first plunge into the stream
of life, away from their own homes, or while they are yet shivering
after the first plunge. My sole object in writing was to preach to boys:
if ever I write again, it will be to preach to some other age. I can't
see that a man has any business to write at all unless he has something
which he thoroughly believes and wants to preach about. If he has this,
and the chance of delivering himself of it, let him by all means put it
in the shape in which it will be most likely to get a hearing; but let
him never be so carried away as to forget that preaching is his object.
A black soldier, in a West Indian regiment, tied up to receive a couple
of dozen, for drunkenness, cried out to his captain, who was exhorting
him to sobriety in future, "Cap'n, if you preachee, preachee; and if
floggee, floggee; but no preachee and floggee too!" to which his captain
might have replied, "No, Pompey, I must preach whenever I see a chance
of being listened to, which I never did before; so now you must have it
all together; and I hope you may remember some of it."
There is one point which has been made by several of the Reviewers who
have noticed this book, and it is one which, as I am writing a Preface,
I cannot pass over. They have stated that the Rugby undergraduates they
remember at the Universities were "a solemn array," "boys turned into
men before their time," "a semi-political, semi-sacerdotal fraternity,"
&c., giving the idea that Arnold turned out a set of young square-toes,
who wore long-fingered black gloves and talked with a snuffle. I can
only say that their acquaintance must have been limited and exceptional.
For I am sure that every one who has had anything like large or
continuous knowledge of boys brought up at Rugby from the times of which
this book treats down to this day, will bear me out in saying, that the
mark by which you may know them, is, their genial and hearty freshness
and youthfulness of character. They lose nothing of the boy that is
worth keeping, but build up the man upon it. This is their _differentia_
as Rugby boys; and if they never had it, or have lost it, it must be,
not because they were at Rugby, but in spite of their having been there;
the stronger it is in them the more deeply you may be sure have they
drunk of the spirit of their school.
But this boyishness in the highest sense is not incompatible with
seriousness,--or earnestness, if you like the word better.[B] Quite the
contrary. And I can well believe that casual observers, who have never
been intimate with Rugby boys of the true stamp, but have met them only
in the every-day society of the Universities, at wines,
breakfast-parties, and the like, may have seen a good deal more of the
serious or earnest side of their characters than of any other. For the
more the boy was alive in them the less will they have been able to
conceal their thoughts, or their opinion of what was taking place under
their noses; and if the greater part of that didn't square with their
notions of what was right, very likely they showed pretty clearly that
it did not, at whatever risk of being taken for young prigs. They may be
open to the charge of having old heads on young shoulders; I think they
are, and always were, as long as I can remember; but so long as they
have young hearts to keep head and shoulders in order, I, for one, must
think this only a gain.
And what gave Rugby boys this character, and has enabled the School, I
believe, to keep it to this day? I say fearlessly,--Arnold's teaching
and example--above all, that part of it which has been, I will not say
sneered at, but certainly not approved--his unwearied zeal in creating
"moral thoughtfulness" in every boy with whom he came into personal
contact.
He certainly _did_ teach us--thank God for it!--that we could not cut
our life into slices and say, "In this slice your actions are
indifferent, and you needn't trouble your heads about them one way or
another; but in this slice mind what you are about, for they are
important"--a pretty muddle we should have been in had he done so. He
taught us that in this wonderful world, no boy or man can tell which of
his actions is indifferent and which not; that by a thoughtless word or
look we may lead astray a brother for whom Christ died. He taught us
that life is a whole, made up of actions and thoughts and longings,
great and small, noble and ignoble; therefore the only true wisdom for
boy or man is to bring the whole life into obedience to Him whose world
we live in, and who has purchased us with His blood; and that whether we
eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we are to do all in His name and to
His glory; in such teaching, faithfully, as it seems to me, following
that of Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit of meaning what he said,
and who laid down this standard for every man and boy in his time. I
think it lies with those who say that such teaching will not do for us
now, to show why a teacher in the nineteenth century is to preach a
lower standard than one in the first.
However, I won't say that the Reviewers have not a certain plausible
ground for their dicta. For a short time after a boy has taken up such a
life as Arnold would have urged upon him, he has a hard time of it. He
finds his judgment often at fault, his body and intellect running away
with him into all sorts of pitfalls, and himself coming down with a
crash. The more seriously he buckles to his work the oftener these
mischances seem to happen; and in the dust of his tumbles and struggles,
unless he is a very extraordinary boy, he may often be too severe on his
comrades, may think he sees evil in things innocent, may give offence
when he never meant it. At this stage of his career, I take it, our
Reviewer comes across him, and, not looking below the surface (as a
Reviewer ought to do), at once sets the poor boy down for a prig and a
Pharisee, when in all likelihood he is one of the humblest and truest
and most childlike of the Reviewer's acquaintance.
But let our Reviewer come across him again in a year or two, when the
"thoughtful life" has become habitual to him, and fits him as easily as
his skin; and, if he be honest, I think he will see cause to reconsider
his judgment. For he will find the boy, grown into a man, enjoying
every-day life as no man can who has not found out whence comes the
capacity for enjoyment, and who is the Giver of the least of the good
things of this world--humble, as no man can be who has not proved his
own powerlessness to do right in the smallest act which he ever had to
do--tolerant, as no man can be who does not live daily and hourly in the
knowledge of how Perfect Love is for ever about his path, and bearing
with and upholding him.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] For those who believe with me in public school education, the fact
stated in the following extract from a note of Mr. G. De Bunsen, will be
hailed with pleasure, especially now that our alliance with Prussia (the
most natural and healthy European alliance for Protestant England) is
likely to be so much stronger and deeper than heretofore. Speaking of
this hook, he says,--"The author is mistaken in saying the public
schools, in the English sense, are peculiar to England. Schul Pforte (in
the Prussian province of Saxony) is similar in antiquity and
institutions. I like his book all the more for having been there for
five years."
[B] "To him (Arnold) and his admirers we owe the substitution of the
word 'earnest' for its predecessor 'serious'"--_Edinburgh Review_, No.
217, p. 183.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
THE BROWN FAMILY 1
CHAPTER II.
THE VEAST 21
CHAPTER III.
SUNDRY WARS AND ALLIANCES 44
CHAPTER IV.
THE STAGE COACH 68
CHAPTER V.
RUGBY AND FOOTBALL 87
CHAPTER VI.
AFTER THE MATCH 112
CHAPTER VII.
SETTLING TO THE COLLAR 134
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 158
CHAPTER IX.
A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS 184
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
HOW THE TIDE TURNED 213
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW BOY 228
CHAPTER III.
ARTHUR MAKES A FRIEND 245
CHAPTER IV.
THE BIRD-FANCIERS 262
CHAPTER V.
THE FIGHT 279
CHAPTER VI.
THE FEVER 300
CHAPTER VII.
HARRY EAST'S DILEMMAS AND DELIVERANCES 321
CHAPTER VIII.
TOM BROWN'S LAST MATCH 341
CHAPTER IX.
FINIS 367
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THE NIGHT FAG 144
OLD THOMAS IN HIS DEN 155
TOM DISCOVERED BY VELVETEENS 202
CLIMBING THE FIR-TREE AFTER THE KESTREL'S NEST 268
THE DOCTOR'S COUNSEL TO YOUNG BROOKE 296
THE CONVERSATION DURING THE MATCH 351
CHAIRING TOM IN THE QUADRANGLE 366
TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS.
BY AN OLD BOY.
CHAPTER I.
"I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap."
_Ballad._
THE Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the
pencil of Doyle within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now
matriculating at the Universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but
late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with
the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the
British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness
it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun
way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and
leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever
the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of
the Browns have done yeoman's work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard
shaft at Cressy and Agincourt--with the brown bill and pike under the
brave Lord Willoughby--with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards
and Dutchmen--with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under
Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they
have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard
work in plenty, which was on the whole what they looked for, and the
best thing for them; and little praise or pudding, which indeed they and
most of us are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and
such-like folk, have led armies, and made laws time out of mind; but
those noble families would be somewhat astounded--if the accounts ever
came to be fairly taken--to find how small their work for England has
been by the side of that of the Browns.
These latter, indeed, have until the present generation rarely been sung
by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their "sacer vates,"
having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having
been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on
tight to, whatever good things happened to be going,--the foundation of
the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way,
and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs,
seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer having for
many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and moreover
having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently
respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in
him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile.
However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you
should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so
bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put
up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear
at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them;
and then if you don't like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and
let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.
In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question
their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no
question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are
going, there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcase. And
these carcases for the most part answer very well to the characteristic
propensity; they are a square-headed and snake-necked generation, broad
in the shoulder, deep in the chest and thin in the flank, carrying no
lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing
the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the
Browns, to the third and fourth generation. "Blood is thicker than
water," is one of their pet sayings. They can't be happy unless they
are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family
gatherings, which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think
had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of
their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds
on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully
antagonist, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you've
been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but that
they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it; they love and respect one another
ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back,
one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment,
freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the
height of company.
This family training too, combined with their turn for combativeness,
makes them eminently quixotic. They can't let anything alone which they
think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all
easy-going folk; and spend their time and money in having a tinker at
it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave
the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other
folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white
whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old
age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe
reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.
And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up or make
them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the
right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back
feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one
week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he
goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they
will be on the look-out for Bill to take his place.
However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular;
so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole
empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take
to be the chief cause of that empire's stability, let us at once fix our
attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched,
and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is
called the Vale of White Horse.
Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as
far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open, have been
aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk
hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go
down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line.
The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come
in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love
English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better, the
next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon road or Shrivenham
station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for
the vague old stories that haunt country sides all about England, will
not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay; for,
glorious as the view is the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for
its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods
thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough
of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe
this to be the case almost throughout the country; but each has a
special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of
and going to introduce you to very particularly; for on this subject I
must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in detail may skip
the chapter.
O young England! young England! You who are born into these racing
railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight,
every year; and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground
for three pound ten, in a five weeks' holiday; why don't you know more
of your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems
to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for
midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not. Going round Ireland,
with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson
on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford
racing-boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the
steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by
the last batch of books from Mudie's library, and half bored to death.
Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or
less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and
have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high
art, and all that; have seen the pictures at Dresden and the Louvre, and
know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chock-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis
which grows in the next wood or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the
stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.
Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or ride of home. And so
we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and
stories by heart; and went over the fields, and woods, and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it's all right--I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.
But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said,
the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large
rich pastures, bounded by fox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow
timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where
abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself
for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the
Old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know
how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and
sterns low with a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such
times. There being little plough-land and few woods, the vale is only an
average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are
straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down
without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners by the
sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden.
They are built chiefly of good grey stone, and thatched; though I see
that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying,
for the vale is beginning to manufacture largely both brick and tiles.
There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every
village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and
ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned homely roads,
very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still
pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great pasture lands, dotted
here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are
feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of
each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and
gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.
One of the moralists whom we sat under in my youth,--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins?--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences, I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill _always_ in
view, if you choose to turn towards him, that's the essence of a vale.
There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion; you
never lose him as you do in hilly districts.
And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but, wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates, and ditch, and
mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old
rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say
you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land,
some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't
bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyry. The ground falls
away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world?
You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is
delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and
here it lies just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east
side left by her Majesty's corps of Sappers and Miners the other day,
when they and the Engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and
their surveys for the Ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a
place that you won't forget--a place to open a man's soul and make him
prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden
of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind;
and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance
along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway"
("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the
highest back of the hills;--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and
told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he
could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who
abide there.
And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the
Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen,
more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie
whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great
battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Æscendum" in the chroniclers), which
broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes
held the camp and the slope where we are standing--the whole crown of
the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher
ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from
London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's
own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they
did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower
ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have
seen)." Bless the old chronicler! does he think nobody ever saw the
"single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day,
just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an
old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least if it isn't the
same tree, it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the
battle must have been won or lost--"around which, as I was saying, the
two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in
this place, one of the two kings of the heathen, and five of his earls
fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same
place."[C] After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might
never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country side, carved out
on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is
almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may
see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale, over which
it has looked these thousand years and more.
Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gulley
called "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series
of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs;" they
are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere
else, with their short green turf, and tender blue-bells, and gossamer
and thistle-down gleaming in the sun, and the sheep-paths running along
their sides like ruled lines.
The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon's Hill, a curious
little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, and
utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of
mankind, St. George, the country folks used to tell me, killed a dragon.
Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed
there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more
by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a
little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet
underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and
peewit, but take care that the keeper isn't down upon you; and in the
middle of it is an old cromlech, a huge flat stone raised on seven or
eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up
on each side. This is Wayland Smith's cave, a place of classic fame now;
but as Sir Walter has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer
you to "Kenilworth" for the legend.
The thick deep wood which you see in the hollow about a mile off,
surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad alleys are cut
through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to one
face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood,
as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes
studded with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all
sides. It was a wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land.
The downs, strictly so called, are no more; Lincolnshire farmers have
been imported, and the long fresh slopes are sheep-walks no more, but
grow famous turnips and barley. One of those improvers lives over there
at the "Seven Barrows" farm, another mystery of the great downs. There
are the barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea,
the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from
the White Horse, too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried
there--who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down
into the vale again, and so away by the Great Western Railway to town,
for time and the printer's devil press, and it is a terrible long and
slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there
is a pleasant public, whereat we must really take a modest quencher, for
the down here is a provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak
which stands before the door.
"What is the name of your hill, landlord?"
"Blawing STWUN Hill, sir, to be sure."
[Reader. "_Sturm?_"
AUTHOR. "_Stone_, stupid--the Blowing _Stone_."]
"And of your house? I can't make out the sign."
"Blawing Stwun, sir," says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a
Toby-Philpot jug, with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass.
"What queer names!" say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and
holding out the glass to be replenished.
"Be'an't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back
our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun his self," putting
his hand on a square lump of stone some three feet and a half high,
perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian
rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We
are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale wondering
what will come next. "Like to hear un, sir?" says mine host, setting
down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We
are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his
mouth to one of the rat-holes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't
burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here
it comes, sure enough, a grewsome sound between a moan and a roar, and
spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the
woods at the back of the house--a ghost-like, awful voice. "Um do say,
sir," says mine host rising purple-faced, while the moan is still coming
out of the "Stwun," "as they used in old times to warn the country-side,
by blawing the stwun when the enemy was acomin'--and as how folks could
make un heered them for seven mile round; leastways, so I've heered
Lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times." We
can hardly swallow Lawyer Smith's seven miles; but could the blowing of
the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross round
the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay
for our beer, and are thankful.
"And what's the name of the village just below, landlord?"
"Kingstone Lisle, sir."
"Fine plantations you've got 'ere?"
"Yes, sir, the Squire's 'mazin' fond of trees and such like."
"No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good day,
landlord."
"Good day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'e."
And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had
enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're convinced, and let me
begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember, I've only been
over a little bit of the hillside yet--what you could ride round easily
on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the vale, by
Blowing Stone Hill, and if I once begin about the vale, what's to stop
me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and
Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the vale was
near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant; full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and
Pyes, and such like, and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read
Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe?" If you haven't you ought
to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived before he went to sea; his
real name was Hampden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at
Farringdon. Then there's Pusey, you've heard of the Pusey horn, which
King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old
squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out
of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to
his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire
nights. And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas
town;--the whole country-side teems with Saxon names and memories! And
the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside,
where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright waterlilies in the
moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced
gardens. There they all are, and twenty things besides; for those who
care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may
find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country
neighbourhood.
Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well,
well; I've done what I can to make you, and if you will go gadding over
half Europe now every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and bred a
west-countryman, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon
kingdom of Wessex, a regular, "Angular Saxon," the very soul of me
"adscriptus glebe." There's nothing like the old country-side for me,
and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it
fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale: and I say with
"Gaarge Ridler," the old west-country yeoman,
"Throo aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast,
Commend me to merry owld England mwoast:
While vools gwoes prating vur and nigh,
We stwops at whum, my dog and I."
Here at any rate lived and stopped at home, Squire Brown, J.P. for the
county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range.
And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and begat sons
and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the
roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico
shirts, and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the old folks with
the "rheumatiz." and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes
clubs going, for yule tide; when the bands of mummers came round,
dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the
Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of
St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound Doctor, who plays his part
at healing the Saint--a relic, I believe, of the old middle-age
mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the
eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse
to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest
child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the
family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty strong boy
from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and
fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions
all round the neighbourhood. And here in the quiet old-fashioned
country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown
was reared, and never left it till he went first to school when nearly
eight years of age,--for in those days change of air twice a year was
not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all Her Majesty's
lieges.
I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the
various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies, those gigantic jobbers
and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together
some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body
and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which
they continually distribute judiciously amongst the Doctors, stipulating
only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every
patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see
their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that
none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty
years ago,--not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the county once
in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a-year, at Assizes
or Quarter Sessions, which the Squire made on his horse with a pair of
saddle-bags containing his wardrobe--a stay of a day or two at some
country neighbour's--or an expedition to a county ball, or the yeomanry
review--made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray
Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from
Oxford, on grave nag, an old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were
looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort
of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky
Mountains, or launched a boat on the Great Lake in Central Africa. The
White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road; nothing but
country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and
this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the
Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem
to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the
country side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long
barges, with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along
the towing path, and the women in bright coloured handkerchiefs standing
in the sterns steering. Standing I say, but you could never see whether
they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being
out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of
the stern, and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable
of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women
were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges and
taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe,
and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the
oft-proffered invitation of these sirens to "young Master," to come in
and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.
Yet why should I after all abuse the gadabout propensities of my
countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now; that's certain, for better for
worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five
distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example--we are
moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in
Clement's Inn gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his
month's hop-picking every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he?
I'm delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich
ones;--couriers and ladies' maids, imperials and travelling carriages,
are an abomination unto me--I cannot away with them. But for dirty Jack,
and every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song,
moves about,
"Comme le limaçon,
Portant tout son bagage,
Ses meubles, sa maison,"
on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry road-side
adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners of road-side inns,
Swiss châlets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else they like to go. So
having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter, (which
gives me great hopes that you will all go on, and think me a good fellow
notwithstanding my crotchet,) I shall here shut up for the present, and
consider my ways; having resolved to "sar' it out," as we say in the
Vale, "holus-bolus" just as it comes, and then you'll probably get the
truth out of me.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] "Pagani editiorem locum præoccupaverant. Christiani ab inferiori
loco aciem dirigebant. Erat quoque in eodem loco unica spinosa arbor,
brevis admodum (quam nos ipsi nostris propriis oculis vidimus). Circa
quam ergo hostiles inter se acies cum ingenti clamore hostiliter
conveniunt. Quo in loco alter de duobus Paganorum regibus et quinque
comites occisi occubuerunt, et multa millia Paganæ partis in eodem loco.
Cecidit illic ergo Boegsceg Rex, et Sidroc ille senex comes, et Sidroc
Junior comes, et Obsbern comes," &c.--_Annales Rerum Gestarum Ælfredi
Magni, Auctore Asserio. Recensuit Franciscus Wise. Oxford_, 1722, p. 23.
CHAPTER II.
THE VEAST.
"And the King commandeth and forbiddeth, that from
henceforth neither fairs nor markets be kept in
Church-yards, for the honour of the
Church."--STATUTES: 13 _Edw. I._ Stat. II. cap.
VI.
AS that venerable and learned poet (whose voluminous works we all think
it the correct thing to admire and talk about, but don't read often),
most truly says, "the child is father to the man;" _à fortiori_,
therefore, he must be father to the boy. So, as we are going at any rate
to see Tom Brown through his boyhood, supposing we never get any
further, (which, if you show a proper sense of the value of this
history, there is no knowing but what we may,) let us have a look at the
life and environments of the child, in the quiet country village to
which we were introduced in the last chapter.
Tom, as has been already said, was a robust and combative urchin, and at
the age of four began to struggle against the yoke and authority of his
nurse. That functionary was a good-hearted, tearful, scatter-brained
girl, lately taken by Tom's mother, Madam Brown, as she was called, from
the village school to be trained as nurserymaid. Madam Brown was a rare
trainer of servants, and spent herself freely in the profession; for
profession it was, and gave her more trouble by half than many people
take to earn a good income. Her servants were known and sought after for
miles round. Almost all the girls who attained a certain place in the
village school were taken by her, one or two at a time, as housemaids,
laundrymaids, nurserymaids, or kitchenmaids, and after a year or two's
drilling, were started in life amongst the neighbouring families, with
good principles and wardrobes. One of the results of this system was the
perpetual despair of Mrs. Brown's cook and own maid, who no sooner had a
notable girl made to their hands, than Missus was sure to find a good
place for her and send her off, taking in fresh importations from the
school. Another was, that the house was always full of young girls, with
clean shining faces; who broke plates and scorched linen, but made an
atmosphere of cheerful homely life about the place, good for every one
who came within its influence. Mrs. Brown loved young people, and in
fact human creatures in general, above plates and linen. They were more
like a lot of elder children than servants, and felt to her more as a
mother or aunt than as a mistress.
Tom's nurse was one who took in her instruction very slowly,--she
seemed to have two left hands and no head; and so Mrs. Brown kept her on
longer than usual, that she might expend her awkwardness and
forgetfulness upon those who would not judge and punish her too strictly
for them.
Charity Lamb was her name. It had been the immemorial habit of the
village, to christen children either by Bible names, or by those of the
cardinal and other virtues; so that one was for ever hearing in the
village street, or on the green, shrill sounds of, "Prudence! Prudence!
thee cum' out o' the gutter;" or, "Mercy! d'rat the girl, what bist thee
a doin' wi' little Faith?" and there were Ruths, Rachels, Keziahs, in
every corner. The same with the boys; they were Benjamins, Jacobs,
Noahs, Enochs. I suppose the custom has come down from Puritan
times--there it is at any rate, very strong still in the Vale.
Well, from early morn till dewy eve, when she had it out of him in the
cold tub before putting him to bed, Charity and Tom were pitted against
one another. Physical power was as yet on the side of Charity, but she
hadn't a chance with him wherever head-work was wanted. This war of
independence began every morning before breakfast, when Charity escorted
her charge to a neighbouring farm-house which supplied the Browns, and
where, by his mother's wish, Master Tom went to drink whey, before
breakfast. Tom had no sort of objection to whey, but he had a decided
liking for curds, which were forbidden as unwholesome, and there was
seldom a morning that he did not manage to secure a handful of hard
curds, in defiance of Charity and of the farmer's wife. The latter good
soul was a gaunt angular woman, who with an old black bonnet on the top
of her head; the strings dangling about her shoulders, and her gown
tucked through her pocket-holes, went clattering about the dairy,
cheese-room, and yard, in high pattens. Charity was some sort of niece
of the old lady's, and was consequently free of the farm-house and
garden, into which she could not resist going for the purposes of gossip
and flirtation with the heir-apparent, who was a dawdling fellow, never
out at work as he ought to have been. The moment Charity had found her
cousin, or any other occupation, Tom would slip away; and in a minute
shrill cries would be heard from the dairy, "Charity, Charity, thee lazy
huzzy, where bist?" and Tom would break cover, hands and mouth full of
curds, and take refuge on the shaky surface of the great muck reservoir
in the middle of the yard, disturbing the repose of the great pigs. Here
he was in safety, as no grown person could follow without getting over
their knees; and the luckless Charity, while her aunt scolded her from
the dairy-door, for being "allus hankering about arter our Willum,
instead of minding Master Tom," would descend from threats to coaxing,
to lure Tom out of the muck, which was rising over his shoes and would
soon tell a tale on his stockings, for which she would be sure to catch
it from missus's maid.
Tom had two abettors in the shape of a couple of old boys, Noah and
Benjamin by name, who defended him from Charity, and expended much time
upon his education. They were both of them retired servants of former
generations of the Browns. Noah Crooke was a keen dry old man of almost
ninety, but still able to totter about. He talked to Tom quite as if he
were one of his own family, and indeed had long completely identified
the Browns with himself. In some remote age he had been the attendant of
a Miss Brown, and had conveyed her about the country on a pillion. He
had a little round picture of the identical grey horse, caparisoned with
the identical pillion, before which he used to do a sort of fetish
worship, and abuse turnpike-roads and carriages. He wore an old
full-bottomed wig, the gift of some dandy old Brown whom he had valeted
in the middle of last century, which habiliment Master Tom looked upon
with considerable respect, not to say fear; and indeed his whole feeling
towards Noah was strongly tainted with awe; and when the old gentleman
was gathered to his fathers, Tom's lamentation over him was not
unaccompanied by a certain joy at having seen the last of the wig: "Poor
old Noah, dead and gone," said he, "Tom Brown so sorry! Put him in the
coffin, wig and all."
But old Benjy was young Master's real delight and refuge. He was a youth
by the side of Noah, scarce seventy years old. A cheery, humorous,
kind-hearted old man, full of sixty years of Vale gossip, and of all
sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but above all for children. It
was he who bent the first pin, with which Tom extracted his first
stickleback out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream which ran through
the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous
red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his
death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the
taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had carried off our hero to the
canal, in defiance of Charity, and between them, after a whole
afternoon's popjoying, they had caught three or four small coarse fish
and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom
bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and she received
like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook
nevertheless, in a private interview, not to prepare the same for the
Squire's dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benjy in the meantime,
representing the dangers of the canal banks; but Mrs. Brown seeing the
boy's inaptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benjy's favour, and
from thenceforth the old man was Tom's dry nurse. And as they sat by the
canal watching their little green and white float, Benjy would instruct
him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early
days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the
Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in
with a big stick in his hand, and held the Petty Sessions by himself.
How his great uncle, the Rector, had encountered and laid the last
ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish
out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's
apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benjy too who
saddled Tom's first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of
horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand
low; and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girls' school, when
Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table, where
the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work.
Benjy himself was come of a family distinguished in the Vale for their
prowess in all athletic games. Some half-dozen of his brothers and
kinsmen had gone to the wars, of whom only one had survived to come
home, with a small pension, and three bullets in different parts of his
body; he had shared Benjy's cottage till his death, and had left him his
old dragoon's sword and pistol, which hung over the mantelpiece, flanked
by a pair of heavy single-sticks with which Benjy himself had won renown
long ago as an old gamester, against the picked men of Wiltshire and
Somersetshire, in many a good bout at the revels and pastime of the
country-side. For he had been a famous back-sword man in his young days,
and a good wrestler at elbow and collar.
Back-swording and wrestling were the most serious holiday pursuits of
the Vale--those by which men attained fame--and each village had its
champion. I suppose that on the whole, people were less worked then than
they are now; at any rate, they seemed to have more time and energy for
the old pastimes. The great times for back-swording came round once
a-year in each village, at the feast. The Vale "veasts" were not the
common statute feasts, but much more ancient business. They are
literally, so far as one can ascertain, feasts of the dedication, _i.e._
they were first established in the churchyard on the day on which the
village church was opened for public worship, which was on the wake or
festival of the patron Saint, and have been held on the same day in
every year since that time.
There was no longer any remembrance of why the "veast" had been
instituted, but nevertheless it had a pleasant and almost sacred
character of its own. For it was then that all the children of the
village, wherever they were scattered, tried to get home for a holiday
to visit their fathers and mothers and friends, bringing with them their
wages or some little gift from up the country for the old folk. Perhaps
for a day or two before, but at any rate on "veast day" and the day
after, in our village, you might see strapping healthy young men and
women from all parts of the country going round from house to house in
their best clothes, and finishing up with a call on Madam Brown, whom
they would consult as to putting out their earnings to the best
advantage, or how to expend the same best for the benefit of the old
folk. Every household, however poor, managed to raise a "feast-cake" and
bottle of ginger or raisin wine, which stood on the cottage table ready
for all comers, and not unlikely to make them remember feast time--for
feast-cake is very solid, and full of huge raisins. Moreover, feast-time
was the day of reconciliation for the parish. If Job Higgins and Noah
Freeman hadn't spoken for the last six months, their "old women" would
be sure to get it patched up by that day. And though there was a good
deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty
well confined to those who would have been doing the like, "veast or no
veast," and on the whole, the effect was humanizing and Christian. In
fact, the only reason why this is not the case still, is that gentlefolk
and farmers have taken to other amusements, and have, as usual,
forgotten the poor. They don't attend the feasts themselves, and call
them disreputable, whereupon the steadiest of the poor leave them also,
and they become what they are called. Class amusements, be they for
dukes or plough-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country.
The true charm of cricket and hunting is, that they are still more or
less sociable and universal; there's a place for every man who will come
and take his part.
No one in the village enjoyed the approach of "veast day" more than Tom,
in the year in which he was taken under old Benjy's tutelage. The feast
was held in a large green field at the lower end of the village. The
road to Farringdon ran along one side of it, and the brook by the side
of the road; and above the brook was another large gentle sloping
pasture-land, with a footpath running down it from the churchyard; and
the old church, the originator of all the mirth, towered up with its
grey walls and lancet windows, overlooking and sanctioning the whole,
though its own share therein had been forgotten. At the point where the
footpath crossed the brook and road, and entered on the field where the
feast was held, was a long low road-side inn, and on the opposite side
of the field was a large white thatched farm-house, where dwelt an old
sporting farmer, a great promoter of the revels.
Past the old church, and down the footpath, pottered the old man and the
child hand in hand early on the afternoon of the day before the feast,
and wandered all round the ground, which was already being occupied by
the "cheap Jacks," with their green covered carts and marvellous
assortment of wares, and the booths of more legitimate small traders
with their tempting arrays of fairings and eatables! and penny
peep-shows and other shows, containing pink-eyed ladies, and dwarfs,
and boa-constrictors, and wild Indians. But the object of most interest
to Benjy, and of course to his pupil also, was the stage of rough planks
some four feet high, which was being put up by the village carpenter for
the back-swording and wrestling; and after surveying the whole tenderly,
old Benjy led his charge away to the road-side inn, where he ordered a
glass of ale and a long pipe for himself, and discussed these unwonted
luxuries on the bench outside in the soft autumn evening with mine host,
another old servant of the Browns, and speculated with him on the
likelihood of a good show of old gamesters to contend for the morrow's
prizes, and told tales of the gallant bouts of forty years back, to
which Tom listened with all his ears and eyes.
But who shall tell the joy of the next morning, when the church bells
were ringing a merry peal, and old Benjy appeared in the servants' hall,
resplendent in a long blue coat and brass buttons, and a pair of old
yellow buckskins and top-boots, which he had cleaned for and inherited
from Tom's grandfather; a stout thorn-stick in his hand, and a nosegay
of pinks and lavender in his button-hole, and led away Tom in his best
clothes, and two new shillings in his breeches-pockets? Those two, at
any rate, look like enjoying the day's revel.
They quicken their pace when they get into the churchyard, for already
they see the field thronged with country folk, the men in clean white
smocks or velveteen or fustian coats, with rough plush waistcoats of
many colours, and the women in the beautiful long scarlet cloak, the
usual out-door dress of west-country women in those days, and which
often descended in families from mother to daughter, or in new-fashioned
stuff shawls, which, if they would but believe it, don't become them
half so well. The air resounds with the pipe and tabor, and the drums
and trumpets of the showmen shouting at the doors of their caravans,
over which tremendous pictures of the wonders to be seen within hang
temptingly; while through all rises the shrill "root-too-too-too" of Mr.
Punch, and the unceasing pan-pipe of his satellite.
"Lawk a' massey, Mr. Benjamin," cries a stout motherly woman in a red
cloak, as they enter the field "be that you? Well I never! you do look
purely. And how's the Squire, and Madam, and the family?"
Benjy graciously shakes hands with the speaker, who has left our village
for some years, but has come over for Veast-day on a visit to an old
gossip--and gently indicates the heir apparent of the Browns.
"Bless his little heart! I must gi' un a kiss. Here Susannah, Susannah!"
cries she, raising herself from the embrace, "come and see Mr. Benjamin
and young Master Tom. You minds our Sukey, Mr. Benjamin, she be growed a
rare slip of a wench since you seen her, tho' her'll be sixteen come
Martinmas. I do aim to take her to see Madam to get her a place."
And Sukey comes bouncing away from a knot of old school-fellows, and
drops a curtsey to Mr. Benjamin. And elders come up from all parts to
salute Benjy, and girls who have been Madam's pupils to kiss Master Tom.
And they carry him off to load him with fairings; and he returns to
Benjy, his hat and coat covered with ribands, and his pockets crammed
with wonderful boxes which open upon ever new boxes and boxes, and
popguns and trumpets, and apples, and gilt gingerbread from the stall of
Angel Heavens, sole vendor thereof, whose booth groans with kings and
queens, and elephants, and prancing steeds, all gleaming with gold.
There was more gold on Angel's cakes than there is ginger in those of
this degenerate age. Skilled diggers might yet make a fortune in the
churchyards of the Vale, by carefully washing the dust of the consumers
of Angel's gingerbread. Alas! he is with his namesakes, and his receipts
have, I fear, died with him.
And then they inspect the penny peep-show, at least Tom does, while old
Benjy stands outside and gossips, and walks up the steps, and enters the
mysterious doors of the pink-eyed lady, and the Irish Giant, who do not
by any means come up to their pictures; and the boa will not swallow his
rabbit, but there the rabbit is waiting to be swallowed--and what can
you expect for tuppence? We are easily pleased in the Vale. Now there is
a rush of the crowd, and a tinkling bell is heard, and shouts of
laughter; and Master Tom mounts on Benjy's shoulders and beholds a
jingling match in all its glory. The games are begun, and this is the
opening of them. It is a quaint game, immensely amusing to look at, and
as I don't know whether it is used in your counties, I had better
describe it. A large roped ring is made, into which are introduced a
dozen or so of big boys and young men who mean to play; these are
carefully blinded and turned loose into the ring, and then a man is
introduced not blindfolded, with a bell hung round his neck, and his two
hands tied behind him. Of course every time he moves, the bell must
ring, as he has no hand to hold it, and so the dozen blindfolded men
have to catch him. This they cannot always manage if he is a lively
fellow, but half of them always rush into the arms of the other half, or
drive their heads together, or tumble over; and then the crowd laughs
vehemently, and invents nicknames for them on the spur of the moment,
and they, if they be choleric, tear off the handkerchiefs which blind
them, and not unfrequently pitch into one another, each thinking that
the other must have run against him on purpose. It is great fun to look
at a jingling-match certainly, and Tom shouts, and jumps on old Benjy's
shoulders at the sight, until the old man feels weary, and shifts him to
the strong young shoulders of the groom, who has just got down to the
fun.
And now, while they are climbing the pole in another part of the field,
and muzzling in a flour-tub in another, the old farmer whose house, as
has been said, overlooks the field, and who is master of the revels,
gets up the steps on to the stage, and announces to all whom it may
concern that a half-sovereign in money will be forthcoming for the old
gamester who breaks most heads; to which the Squire and he have added a
new hat.
The amount of the prize is sufficient to stimulate the men of the
immediate neighbourhood, but not enough to bring any very high talent
from a distance; so after a glance or two round, a tall fellow, who is a
down shepherd, chucks his hat on to the stage and climbs up the steps
looking rather sheepish. The crowd of course first cheer, and then chaff
as usual, as he picks up his hat and begins handling the sticks to see
which will suit him.
"Wooy, Willum Smith, thee cans't plaay wi' he arra daay," says his
companion to the blacksmith's apprentice, a stout young fellow of
nineteen or twenty. Willum's sweetheart is in the "veast" somewhere, and
has strictly enjoined him not to get his head broke at back-swording, on
pain of her highest displeasure; but as she is not to be seen, (the
women pretend not to like to see the back-sword play, and keep away from
the stage,) and as his hat is decidedly getting old, he chucks it on to
the stage, and follows himself, hoping that he will only have to break
other people's heads, or that after all Rachel won't really mind.
Then follows the greasy cap lined with fur of a half-gipsy, poaching,
loafing fellow, who travels the Vale not for much good, I fancy:
"Full twenty times was Peter feared
For once that Peter was respected"
in fact. And then three or four other hats, including the glossy castor
of Joe Willis, the self-elected and would-be champion of the
neighbourhood, a well-to-do young butcher of twenty-eight or
thereabouts, and a great strapping fellow, with his full allowance of
bluster. This is a capital show of gamesters, considering the amount of
the prize; so while they are picking their sticks and drawing their
lots, I think I must tell you, as shortly as I can, how the noble old
game of back-sword is played; for it is sadly gone out of late, even in
the Vale, and maybe you have never seen it.
The weapon is a good stout ash-stick with a large basket handle, heavier
and somewhat shorter than a common single-stick. The players are called
"old gamesters"--why, I can't tell you,--and their object is simply to
break one another's heads: for the moment that blood runs an inch
anywhere above the eyebrow the old gamester to whom it belongs is
beaten, and has to stop. A very slight blow with the sticks will fetch
blood, so that it is by no means a punishing pastime, if the men don't
play on purpose, and savagely, at the body and arms of their
adversaries. The old gamester going into action only takes off his hat
and coat, and arms himself with a stick: he then loops the fingers of
his left hand in a handkerchief or strap which he fastens round his left
leg, measuring the length, so that when he draws it light with his left
elbow in the air, that elbow shall just reach as high as his crown. Thus
you see, so long as he chooses to keep his left elbow up, regardless of
cuts, he has a perfect guard for the left side of his head. Then he
advances his right hand above and in front of his head, holding his
stick across so that its point projects an inch or two over his left
elbow, and thus his whole head is completely guarded, and he faces his
man armed in like manner, and they stand some three feet apart, often
nearer, and feint, and strike, and return at one another's heads, until
one cries "hold," or blood flows; in the first case they are allowed a
minute's time, and go on again; in the latter, another pair of gamesters
are called on. If good men are playing, the quickness of the returns is
marvellous; you hear the rattle like that a boy makes drawing his stick
along palings, only heavier, and the closeness of the men in action to
one another gives it a strange interest and makes a spell at
back-swording a very noble sight.
They are all suited now with sticks, and Joe Willis and the gipsy man
have drawn the first lot. So the rest lean against the rails of the
stage, and Joe and the dark man meet in the middle, the boards having
been strewed with sawdust; Joe's white shirt and spotless drab breeches
and boots contrasting with the gipsy's coarse blue shirt and dirty green
velveteen breeches and leather gaiters. Joe is evidently turning up his
nose at the other, and half insulted at having to break his head.
The gipsy is a tough active fellow, but not very skilful with his
weapon, so that Joe's weight and strength tell in a minute; he is too
heavy metal for him: whack, whack, whack, come his blows, breaking down
the gipsy's guard, and threatening to reach his head every moment. There
it is at last--"Blood, blood!" shout the spectators, as a thin stream
oozes out slowly from the roots of his hair, and the umpire calls to
them to stop. The gipsy scowls at Joe under his brows in no pleasant
manner, while Master Joe swaggers about, and makes attitudes, and thinks
himself, and shows that he thinks himself, the greatest man in the
field.
Then follow several stout sets-to between the other candidates for the
new hat, and at last come the shepherd and Willum Smith. This is the
crack set-to of the day. They are both in famous wind, and there is no
crying "hold;" the shepherd is an old hand and up to all the dodges; he
tries them one after another, and very nearly gets at Willum's head by
coming in near, and playing over his guard at the half-stick, but
somehow Willum blunders through, catching the stick on his shoulders,
neck, sides, every now and then, anywhere but on his head, and his
returns are heavy and straight, and he is the youngest gamester and a
favourite in the parish, and his gallant stand brings down shouts and
cheers, and the knowing ones think he'll win if he keeps steady, and Tom
on the groom's shoulder holds his hands together, and can hardly breathe
for excitement.
Alas for Willum! his sweetheart getting tired of female companionship
has been hunting the booths to see where he can have got to, and now
catches sight of him on the stage in full combat. She flushes and turns
pale; her old aunt catches hold of her, saying, "Bless'ee, child,
doan't'ee go a'nigst it;" but she breaks away and runs towards the stage
calling his name. Willum keeps up his guard stoutly, but glances for a
moment towards the voice. No guard will do it, Willum, without the eye.
The shepherd steps round and strikes, and the point of his stick just
grazes Willum's forehead, fetching off the skin, and the blood flows,
and the umpire cries "Hold," and poor Willum's chance is up for the day.
But he takes it very well, and puts on his old hat and coat, and goes
down to be scolded by his sweetheart, and led away out of mischief. Tom
hears him say coaxingly, as he walks off--
"Now doan't'ee, Rachel! I wouldn't ha' done it, only I wanted summut to
buy'ee a fairing wi', and I be as vlush o' money as a twod o' veathers."
"Thee mind what I tells'ee," rejoins Rachel saucily, "and doan't'ee kep
blethering about fairings." Tom resolves in his heart to give Willum the
remainder of his two shillings after the back-swording.
Joe Willis has all the luck to-day. His next bout ends in an easy
victory, while the shepherd has a tough job to break his second head;
and when Joe and the shepherd meet, and the whole circle expect and hope
to see him get a broken crown, the shepherd slips in the first round and
falls against the rails, hurting himself so that the old farmer will not
let him go on, much as he wishes to try; and that impostor Joe (for he
is certainly not the best man) struts and swaggers about the stage the
conquering gamester, though he hasn't had five minutes really trying
play.
Joe takes the new hat in his hand, and puts the money into it, and then
as if a thought strikes him and he doesn't think his victory quite
acknowledged down below, walks to each face of the stage, and looks
down, shaking the money, and chaffing, as how he'll stake hat and money
and another half-sovereign "agin any gamester as hasn't played already."
Cunning Joe! he thus gets rid of Willum and the shepherd, who is quite
fresh again.
No one seems to like the offer, and the umpire is just coming down, when
a queer old hat, something like A Doctor of Divinity's shovel, is
chucked on to the stage, and an elderly quiet man steps out, who has
been watching the play, saying he should like to cross a stick wi' the
prodigalish young chap.
The crowd cheer and begin to chaff Joe, who turns up his nose and
swaggers across to the sticks. "Imp'dent old wosbird!" says he, "I'll
break the bald head on un to the truth."
The old boy is very bald certainly, and the blood will show fast enough
if you can touch him, Joe.
He takes off his long flapped coat, and stands up in a long flapped
waistcoat, which Sir Roger de Coverley might have worn when it was new,
picks out a stick, and is ready for Master Joe, who loses no time, but
begins his old game, whack, whack, whack, trying to break down the old
man's guard by sheer strength. But it won't do,--he catches every blow
close by the basket, and though he is rather stiff in his returns, after
a minute walks Joe about the stage, and is clearly a staunch old
gamester. Joe now comes in, and making the most of his height, tries to
get over the old man's guard at half-stick, by which he takes a smart
blow in the ribs and another on the elbow and nothing more. And now he
loses wind and begins to puff, and the crowd laugh: "Cry 'hold,'
Joe--thee'st met thy match!" Instead of taking good advice and getting
his wind, Joe loses his temper, and strikes at the old man's body.
"Blood, blood!" shout the crowd, "Joe's head's broke!"
Who'd have thought it? How did it come? That body-blow left Joe's head
unguarded for a moment, and with one turn of the wrist the old gentleman
has nicked a neat little bit of skin off the middle of his forehead, and
though he won't believe it, and hammers on for three more blows despite
of the shouts, is then convinced by the blood trickling into his eye.
Poor Joe is sadly crestfallen, and fumbles in his pocket for the other
half-sovereign, but the old gamester won't have it. "Keep thy money,
man, and gi's thy hand," says he, and they shake hands; but the old
gamester gives the new hat to the shepherd, and, soon after, the
half-sovereign to Willum, who thereout decorates his sweetheart with
ribbons to his heart's content.
"Who can a be?" "Wur do a cum from?" ask the crowd. And it soon flies
about that the old west-country champion, who played a tie with Shaw the
Life-guardsman at "Vizes" twenty years before, has broken Joe Willis's
crown for him.
How my country fair is spinning out! I see I must skip the wrestling,
and the boys jumping in sacks, and rolling wheelbarrows blindfolded: and
the donkey-race, and the fight which arose thereout, marring the
otherwise peaceful "veast;" and the frightened scurrying away of the
female feast-goers, and descent of Squire Brown, summoned by the wife of
one of the combatants to stop it; which he wouldn't start to do till he
had got on his top-boots. Tom is carried away by old Benjy, dog-tired
and surfeited with pleasure, as the evening comes on and the dancing
begins in the booths; and though Willum and Rachel in her new ribbons
and many another good lad and lass don't come away just yet, but have a
good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being
sober folk, will just stroll away up through the churchyard, and by the
old yew-tree; and get a quiet dish of tea and a parle with our gossips,
as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.
That's the fair true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger
village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy. They are
much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one these
twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country
towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be
found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may be
read in the pages of Yeast, (though I never saw one so bad--thank God!)
Do you want to know why? It is because, as I said before, gentlefolk and
farmers have left off joining or taking an interest in them. They don't
either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun.
Is this a good or a bad sign? I hardly know. Bad, sure enough, if it
only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty
years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying over-work;
or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London Club-life,
or so-called Society, instead of in the old English home duties; because
farmers' sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers' daughters caring
more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good, perhaps,
if it be that the time for the old "veast" has gone by, that it is no
longer the healthy sound expression of English country holiday-making;
that, in fact, we as a nation have got beyond it, and are in a
transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some better
substitute.
Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don't let
reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of
the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel
whatever, which hasn't some _bonâ fide_ equivalent for the games of the
old country "veast" in it; something to put in the place of the
back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of
men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them
rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans
which I see, this is all left out: and the consequence is, that your
great Mechanics' Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your
Christian Young Men's Societies in religious Pharisaism.
Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn't all beer and
skittles,--but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort,
must form a good part of every Englishman's education. If I could only
drive this into the heads of you rising Parliamentary Lords, and young
swells who "have your ways made for you," as the saying is,--you, who
frequent palaver houses and West-end clubs, waiting always ready to
strap yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John, as soon as the
present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the
great Parliamentary-majorities' pack-saddle, and make belief they're
guiding him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted
off!
I don't think much of you yet--I wish I could; though you do go talking
and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are busy
with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating
libraries and museums, and Heaven only knows what besides; and try to
make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of
the working classes. But, bless your hearts, we "ain't so green," though
lots of us of all sorts toady you enough certainly, and try to make you
think so.
I'll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss,
which is only the old Parliamentary-majority dodge over again--just you
go each of you (you've plenty of time for it, if you'll only give up
t'other line,) and quietly make three or four friends, real friends,
among us. You'll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort,
because such birds don't come lightly to your lure--but found they may
be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor--which
you will; one out of trade, and three or four out of the working
classes--tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers,--there's plenty of
choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your
homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to
theirs: give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at
the bottom of your heart, and box, and run, and row with them, when you
have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you
come to ride old John, you'll be able to do something more than sit on
his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red
tape one.
Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut, I
fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches. It is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More's the pity. I
never came across but two of you, who could value a man wholly and
solely for what was in him; who thought themselves verily and indeed of
the same flesh and blood as John Jones the attorney's clerk, and Bill
Smith the costermonger, and could act as if they thought so.
CHAPTER III.
SUNDRY WARS AND ALLIANCES.
POOR old Benjy! the "rheumatiz" has much to answer for all through
English country sides, but it never played a scurvier trick than in
laying thee by the heels, when thou wast yet in a green old age. The
enemy, which had long been carrying on a sort of border warfare, and
trying his strength against Benjy's on the battle-field, of his hands
and legs, now, mustering all his forces began laying siege to the
citadel, and overrunning the whole country. Benjy was seized in the back
and loins; and though he made strong and brave fight, it was soon clear
enough that all which could be beaten of poor old Benjy would have to
give in before long.
It was as much as he could do now, with the help of his big stick and
frequent stops, to hobble down to the canal with Master Tom, and bait
his hook for him, and sit and watch his angling, telling him quaint old
country stories; and when Tom had no sport, and detecting a rat some
hundred yards or so off along the bank, would rush off with Toby the
turnspit terrier, his other faithful companion, in bootless pursuit, he
might have tumbled in and been drowned twenty times over before Benjy
could have got near him.
Cheery and unmindful of himself as Benjy was, this loss of locomotive
power bothered him greatly. He had got a new object in his old age, and
was just beginning to think himself useful again in the world. He feared
much too lest Master Tom should fall back again into the hands of
Charity and the women. So he tried everything he could think of to get
set up. He even went an expedition to the dwelling of one of those queer
mortals, who--say what we will, and reason how we will--do cure simple
people of diseases of one kind or another without the aid of physic; and
so get to themselves the reputation of using charms, and inspire for
themselves and their dwellings great respect, not to say fear, amongst a
simple folk such as the dwellers in the Vale of White Horse. Where this
power, or whatever else it may be, descends upon the shoulders of a man
whose ways are not straight, he becomes a nuisance to the neighbourhood;
a receiver of stolen goods, giver of love-potions, and deceiver of silly
women; the avowed enemy of law and order, of justices of the peace,
headboroughs, and gamekeepers. Such a man in fact as was recently caught
tripping, and deservedly dealt with by the Leeds justices, for seducing
a girl who had come to him to get back a faithless lover, and has been
convicted of bigamy since then. Sometimes, however, they are of quite a
different stamp, men who pretend to nothing, and are with difficulty
persuaded to exercise their occult arts in the simplest cases.
Of this latter sort was old farmer Ives, as he was called, the "wise
man" to whom Benjy resorted (taking Tom with him as usual), in the early
spring of the year next after the feast described in the last chapter.
Why he was called "farmer" I cannot say, unless it be that he was the
owner of a cow, a pig or two, and some poultry, which he maintained on
about an acre of land enclosed from the middle of a wild common, on
which probably his father had squatted before lords of manors looked as
keenly after their rights as they do now. Here he had lived no one knew
how long, a solitary man. It was often rumoured that he was to be turned
out and his cottage pulled down, but somehow it never came to pass; and
his pigs and cow went grazing on the common, and his geese hissed at the
passing children and at the heels of the horse of my lord's steward, who
often rode by with a covetous eye on the enclosure, still unmolested.
His dwelling was some miles from our village; so Benjy, who was half
ashamed of his errand, and wholly unable to walk there, had to exercise
much ingenuity to get the means of transporting himself and Tom thither
without exciting suspicion. However, one fine May morning he managed to
borrow the old blind pony of our friend the publican, and Tom persuaded
Madam Brown to give him a holiday to spend with old Benjy, and to lend
them the Squire's light cart, stored with bread and cold meat and a
bottle of ale. And so the two in high glee started behind old Dobbin,
and jogged along the deep-rutted plashy roads, which had not been mended
after their winter's wear, towards the dwelling of the wizard. About
noon they passed the gate which opened on to the large common, and old
Dobbin toiled slowly up the hill, while Benjy pointed out a little deep
dingle on the left, out of which welled a tiny stream. As they crept up
the hill the tops of a few birch-trees came in sight, and blue smoke
curling up through their delicate light boughs; and then the little
white thatched home and patch of enclosed ground of farmer Ives, lying
cradled in the dingle, with the gay gorse common rising behind and on
both sides; while in front, after traversing a gentle slope, the eye
might travel for miles and miles over the rich vale. They now left the
main road and struck into a green tract over the common marked lightly
with wheel and horse-shoe, which led down into the dingle and stopped at
the rough gate of farmer Ives. Here they found the farmer, an iron-grey
old man, with a bushy eyebrow and strong aquiline nose, busied in one of
his vocations. He was a horse and cow doctor, and was tending a sick
beast which had been sent up to be cured. Benjy hailed him as an old
friend, and he returned the greeting cordially enough, looking however
hard for a moment both at Benjy and Tom, to see whether there was more
in their visit than appeared at first sight. It was a work of some
difficulty and danger for Benjy to reach the ground, which however he
managed to do without mishap; and then he devoted himself to
unharnessing Dobbin, and turning him out for a graze ("a run" one could
not say of that virtuous steed) on the common. This done, he extricated
the cold provisions from the cart, and they entered the farmer's wicket;
and he, shutting up the knife with which he was taking maggots out of
the cow's back and sides, accompanied them towards the cottage. A big
old lurcher got up slowly from the door-stone, stretching first one hind
leg and then the other, and taking Tom's caresses and the presence of
Toby, who kept however at a respectful distance, with equal
indifference.
"Us be cum to pay'e a visit. I've a been long minded to do't for old
sake's sake, only I vinds I dwont get about now as I'd use to't. I be so
plaguy bad wi' th' rumatiz in my back." Benjy paused, in hopes of
drawing the farmer at once on the subject of his ailment without further
direct application.
"Ah, I see as you bean't quite so lissom as you was," replied the farmer
with a grim smile, as he lifted the latch of his door; "we bean't so
young as we was, nother on us, wuss luck."
The farmer's cottage was very like those of the better class of
peasantry in general. A snug chimney corner with two seats, and a small
carpet on the hearth, an old flint gun and a pair of spurs over the
fireplace, a dresser with shelves on which some bright pewter plates and
crockeryware were arranged, an old walnut table, a few chairs and
settles, some framed samplers, and an old print or two, and a bookcase
with some dozen volumes on the walls, a rack with flitches of bacon, and
other stores fastened to the ceiling, and you have the best part of the
furniture. No sign of occult art is to be seen, unless the bundles of
dried herbs hanging to the rack and in the ingle, and the row of
labelled phials on one of the shelves, betoken it.
Tom played about with some kittens who occupied the hearth, and with a
goat who walked demurely in at the open door, while their host and Benjy
spread the table for dinner--and was soon engaged in conflict with the
cold meat, to which he did much honour. The two old men's talk was of
old comrades and their deeds, mute inglorious Miltons of the Vale, and
of the doings thirty years back--which didn't interest him much, except
when they spoke of the making of the canal, and then indeed he began to
listen with all his ears, and learned to his no small wonder that his
dear and wonderful canal had not been there always--was not in fact so
old as Benjy or farmer Ives, which caused a strange commotion in his
small brain.
After dinner Benjy called attention to a wart which Tom had on the
knuckles of his hand, and which the family doctor had been trying his
skill on without success, and begged the farmer to charm it away. Farmer
Ives looked at it, muttered something or another over it, and cut some
notches in a short stick, which he handed to Benjy, giving him
instructions for cutting it down on certain days, and cautioning Tom not
to meddle with the wart for a fortnight. And then they strolled out and
sat on a bench in the sun with their pipes, and the pigs came up and
grunted sociably and let Tom scratch them; and the farmer, seeing how he
liked animals, stood up and held his arms in the air and gave a call,
which brought a flock of pigeons wheeling and dashing through the
birch-trees. They settled down in clusters on the farmer's arms and
shoulders, making love to him and scrambling over one another's backs to
get to his face; and then he threw them all off, and they fluttered
about close by, and lighted on him again and again when he held up his
arms. All the creatures about the place were clean and fearless, quite
unlike their relations elsewhere; and Tom begged to be taught how to
make all the pigs and cows and poultry in our village tame, at which the
farmer only gave one of his grim chuckles.
It wasn't till they were just ready to go, and old Dobbin was harnessed,
that Benjy broached the subject of his rheumatism again, detailing his
symptoms one by one. Poor old boy! He hoped the farmer could charm it
away as easily as he could Tom's wart, and was ready with equal faith to
put another notched stick into his other pocket, for the cure of his own
ailments. The physician shook his head, but nevertheless produced a
bottle and handed it to Benjy with instructions for use. "Not as 't'll
do'e much good--leastways I be afeared not," shading his eyes with his
hand and looking up at them in the cart; "there's only one thing as I
knows on, as'll cure old folks like you and I o' th' rhumatis."
"Wot be that then, farmer?" inquired Benjy.
"Churchyard mould," said the old iron-grey man, with another chuckle.
And so they said their good-byes and went their ways home. Tom's wart
was gone in a fortnight, but not so Benjy's rheumatism, which laid him
by the heels more and more. And though Tom still spent many an hour with
him, as he sat on a bench in the sunshine, or by the chimney corner when
it was cold, he soon had to seek elsewhere for his regular companions.
Tom had been accustomed often to accompany his mother in her visits to
the cottages, and had thereby made acquaintance with many of the village
boys of his own age. There was Job Rudkin, son of widow Rudkin, the most
bustling woman in the parish. How she could ever have had such a stolid
boy as Job for a child must always remain a mystery. The first time Tom
went to their cottage with his mother Job was not in-doors, but he
entered soon after, and stood with both hands in his pockets staring at
Tom. Widow Rudkin who would have had to cross Madam to get at young
Hopeful--a breach of good manners of which she was wholly
incapable--began a series of pantomime signs, which only puzzled him,
and at last, unable to contain herself longer, burst out with, "Job!
Job! where's thy cap?"
"What! beant'e on ma' head, mother?" replied Job, slowly extricating one
hand from a pocket and feeling for the article in question; which he
found on his head sure enough, and left there, to his mother's horror
and Tom's great delight.
Then there was poor Jacob Dodson, the half-witted boy, who ambled about
cheerfully, undertaking messages and little helpful odds and ends for
every one, which, however, poor Jacob managed always hopelessly to
embrangle. Everything came to pieces in his hands, and nothing would
stop in his head. They nicknamed him Jacob Doodle-calf.
But, above all there was Harry Winburn, the quickest and best boy in the
parish. He might be a year older than Tom, but was very little bigger,
and he was the Crichton of our village boys. He could wrestle and climb
and run better than all the rest, and learned all that the schoolmaster
could teach him faster than that worthy at all liked. He was a boy to be
proud of, with his curly brown hair, keen grey eye, straight active
figure, and little ears and hands and feet, "as fine as a lord's," as
Charity remarked to Tom one day, talking as usual great nonsense. Lords'
hands and ears and feet are just as ugly as other folks' when they are
children, as any one may convince themselves if they like to look. Tight
boots and gloves, and doing nothing with them, I allow make a difference
by the time they are twenty.
Now that Benjy was laid on the shelf, and his young brothers were still
under petticoat government, Tom, in search of companions, began to
cultivate the village boys generally more and more. Squire Brown, be it
said, was a true blue Tory to the backbone, and believed honestly that
the powers which be were ordained of God, and that loyalty and steadfast
obedience were men's first duties. Whether it were in consequence or in
spite of his political creed, I do not mean to give an opinion, though I
have one; but certain it is, that he held therewith divers social
principles not generally supposed to be true blue in colour. Foremost of
these, and the one which the Squire loved to propound above all others,
was the belief that a man is to be valued wholly and solely for that
which he is in himself, for that which stands up in the four fleshly
walls of him, apart from clothes, rank, fortune, and all externals
whatsoever. Which belief I take to be a wholesome corrective of all
political opinions, and, if held sincerely, to make all opinions equally
harmless, whether they be blue, red, or green. As a necessary corollary
to this belief, Squire Brown held further that it didn't matter a straw
whether his son associated with lords' sons, or ploughmen's sons,
provided they were brave and honest. He himself had played football and
gone birds'-nesting with the farmers whom he met at vestry and the
labourers who tilled their fields, and so had his father and grandfather
with their progenitors. So he encouraged Tom in his intimacy with the
boys of the village, and forwarded it by all means in his power, and
gave them the run of a close for a playground, and provided bats and
balls and a football for their sports.
Our village was blessed amongst other things with a well-endowed school.
The building stood by itself, apart from the master's house, on an angle
of ground where three roads met; an old grey stone building with a steep
roof and mullioned windows. On one of the opposite angles stood Squire
Brown's stables and kennel, with their backs to the road, over which
towered a great elm-tree; on the third stood the village carpenter and
wheelwright's large open shop, and his house and the schoolmaster's,
with long low eaves under which the swallows built by scores.
The moment Tom's lessons were over, he would now get him down to this
corner by the stables, and watch till the boys came out of school. He
prevailed on the groom to cut notches for him in the bark of the elm, so
that he could climb into the lower branches, and there he would sit
watching the school door, and speculating on the possibility of turning
the elm into a dwelling-place for himself and friends after the manner
of the Swiss Family Robinson. But the school hours were long and Tom's
patience short, so that soon he began to descend into the street, and go
and peep in at the school door and the wheelwright's shop, and look out
for something to while away the time. Now the wheelwright was a choleric
man, and, one fine afternoon, returning from a short absence, found Tom
occupied with one of his pet adzes, the edge of which was fast vanishing
under our hero's care. A speedy flight saved Tom from all but one sound
cuff on the ears, but he resented this unjustifiable interruption of his
first essays at carpentering, and still more the further proceedings of
the wheelwright, who cut a switch and hung it over the door of his
workshop, threatening to use it upon Tom if he came within twenty yards
of his gate. So Tom, to retaliate, commenced a war upon the swallows who
dwelt under the wheelwright's eaves, whom he harassed with sticks and
stones, and being fleeter of foot than his enemy, escaped all punishment
and kept him in perpetual anger. Moreover his presence about the school
door began to incense the master, as the boys in that neighbourhood
neglected their lessons in consequence: and more than once he issued
into the porch, rod in hand, just as Tom beat a hasty retreat. And he
and the wheelwright, laying their heads together, resolved to acquaint
the Squire with Tom's afternoon occupations; but in order to do it with
effect, determined to take him captive and lead him away to judgment
fresh from his evil doings. This they would have found some difficulty
in doing, had Tom continued the war single-handed, or rather
single-footed, for he would have taken to the deepest part of Pebbly
Brook to escape them; but, like other active powers, he was ruined by
his alliances. Poor Jacob Doodle-calf could not go to school with the
other boys, and one fine afternoon, about three o'clock (the school
broke up at four), Tom found him ambling about the street, and pressed
him into a visit to the school porch. Jacob, always ready to do what he
was asked, consented, and the two stole down to the school together. Tom
first reconnoitred the wheelwright's shop, and seeing no signs of
activity, thought all safe in that quarter, and ordered at once an
advance of all his troops upon the school porch. The door of the school
was ajar, and the boys seated on the nearest bench at once recognised
and opened a correspondence with the invaders. Tom waxing bold, kept
putting his head into the school and making faces at the master when his
back was turned. Poor Jacob, not in the least comprehending the
situation, and in high glee at finding himself so near the school, which
he had never been allowed to enter, suddenly, in a fit of enthusiasm,
pushed by Tom, and ambling three steps into the school, stood there,
looking round him and nodding with a self-approving smile. The master,
who was stooping over a boy's slate, with his back to the door, became
aware of something unusual, and turned quickly round. Tom rushed at
Jacob, and began dragging him back by his smock-frock, and the master
made at them, scattering forms and boys in his career. Even now they
might have escaped, but that in the porch, barring retreat, appeared the
crafty wheelwright, who had been watching all their proceedings. So they
were seized, the school dismissed, and Tom and Jacob led away to Squire
Brown as lawful prize, the boys following to the gate in groups, and
speculating on the result.
The Squire was very angry at first, but the interview, by Tom's
pleading, ended in a compromise. Tom was not to go near the school till
three o'clock, and only then if he had done his own lessons well, in
which case he was to be the bearer of a note to the master from Squire
Brown, and the master agreed in such case to release ten or twelve of
the best boys an hour before the time of breaking up, to go off and play
in the close. The wheelwright's adzes and swallows were to be for ever
respected; and that hero and the master withdrew to the servants' hall,
to drink the Squire's health, well satisfied with their day's work.
The second act of Tom's life may now be said to have begun. The war of
independence had been over for some time: none of the women now, not
even his mother's maid, dared offer to help him in dressing or washing.
Between ourselves, he had often at first to run to Benjy in an
unfinished state of toilet; Charity and the rest of them seemed to take
a delight in putting impossible buttons and ties in the middle of his
back; but he would have gone without nether integuments altogether
sooner than have had recourse to female valeting. He had a room to
himself, and his father gave him sixpence a week pocket-money. All this
he had achieved by Benjy's advice and assistance. But now he had
conquered another step in life, the step which all real boys so long to
make; he had got amongst his equals in age and strength, and could
measure himself with other boys; he lived with those whose pursuits and
wishes and ways were the same in kind as his own.
The little governess who had lately been installed in the house found
her work grow wondrously easy, for Tom slaved at his lessons in order to
make sure of his note to the schoolmaster. So there were very few days
in the week in which Tom and the village boys were not playing in their
close by three o'clock. Prisoner's base, rounders, high-cock-a-lorum,
cricket, football, he was soon initiated into the delights of them all;
and though most of the boys were older than himself, he managed to hold
his own very well. He was naturally active and strong, and quick of eye
and hand, and had the advantage of light shoes and well-fitting dress,
so that in a short time he could run and jump and climb with any of
them.
They generally finished their regular games half an hour or so before
tea-time, and then began trials of skill and strength in many ways. Some
of them would catch the Shetland pony who was turned out in the field,
and get two or three together on his back, and the little rogue,
enjoying the fun, would gallop off for fifty yards, and then turn round,
or stop short and shoot them on to the turf, and then graze quietly on
till he felt another load; others played peg-top or marbles, while a few
of the bigger ones stood up for a bout at wrestling. Tom at first only
looked on at this pastime, but it had peculiar attractions for him, and
he could not long keep out of it. Elbow and collar wrestling as
practised in the western counties was, next to back-swording, the way to
fame for the youth of the Vale; and all the boys knew the rules of it,
and were more or less expert. But Job Rudkin and Harry Winburn were the
stars, the former stiff and sturdy, with legs like small towers, the
latter pliant as india-rubber, and quick as lightning. Day after day
they stood foot to foot, and offered first one hand and then the other,
and grappled and closed and swayed and strained, till a well-aimed crook
of the heel or thrust of the loin took effect, and a fair back-fall
ended the matter. And Tom watched with all his eyes, and first
challenged one of the less scientific, and threw him; and so one by one
wrestled his way up to the leaders.
Then indeed for months he had a poor time of it; it was not long indeed
before he could manage to keep his legs against Job, for that hero was
slow of offence, and gained his victories chiefly by allowing others to
throw themselves against his immoveable legs and loins. But Harry
Winburn was undeniably his master; from the first clutch of hands when
they stood up, down to the last trip which sent him on his back on the
turf, he felt that Harry knew more and could do more than he. Luckily,
Harry's bright unconsciousness, and Tom's natural good temper, kept them
from ever quarrelling; and so Tom worked on and on, and trod more and
more nearly on Harry's heels, and at last mastered all the dodges and
falls except one. This one was Harry's own particular invention and pet;
he scarcely ever used it except when hard pressed, but then out it came,
and as sure as it did, over went poor Tom. He thought about that fall at
his meals, in his walks, when he lay awake in bed, in his dreams,--but
all to no purpose; until Harry one day in his open way suggested to him
how he thought it should be met, and in a week from that time the boys
were equal, save only the slight difference of strength in Harry's
favour which some extra ten months of age gave. Tom had often afterwards
reason to be thankful for that early drilling, and above all for having
mastered Harry Winburn's fall.
Besides their home games, on Saturdays the boys would wander all over
the neighbourhood; sometimes to the downs, or up to the camp, where they
cut their initials out in the springy turf, and watched the hawks
soaring, and the "peert" bird, as Harry Winburn called the grey plover,
gorgeous in his wedding feathers; and so home, racing down the Manger
with many a roll among the thistles, or through Uffington-wood to watch
the fox cubs playing in the green rides; sometimes to Rosy Brook, to cut
long whispering reeds which grew there, to make pan-pipes of; sometimes
to Moor Mills, where was a piece of old forest land, with short browsed
turf and tufted brambly thickets stretching under the oaks, amongst
which rumour declared that a raven, last of his race, still lingered; or
to the sand-hills, in vain quest of rabbits; and bird's-nesting, in the
season, anywhere and everywhere.
The few neighbours of the Squire's own rank every now and then would
shrug their shoulders as they drove or rode by a party of boys with Tom
in the middle, carrying along bulrushes or whispering reeds, or great
bundles of cowslip and meadow-sweet, or young starlings or magpies, or
other spoil of wood, brook, or meadow; and Lawyer Red-tape might mutter
to Squire Straightback at the Board, that no good would come of the
young Browns, if they were let run wild with all the dirty village boys,
whom the best farmers' sons even would not play with. And the Squire
might reply with a shake of his head, that _his_ sons only mixed with
their equals, and never went into the village without the governess or a
footman. But, luckily, Squire Brown was full as stiff-backed as his
neighbours, and so went on his own way; and Tom and his younger
brothers, as they grew up, went on playing with the village boys,
without the idea of equality or inequality (except in wrestling,
running, and climbing,) ever entering their heads, as it doesn't till
it's put there by Jack Nastys or fine ladies' maids.
I don't mean to say it would be the case in all villages, but it
certainly was so in this one; the village boys were full as manly and
honest, and certainly purer, than those in a higher rank; and Tom got
more harm from his equals in his first fortnight at a private school,
where he went when he was nine years old, than he had from his village
friends from the day he left Charity's apron-strings.
Great was the grief amongst the village school-boys when Tom drove off
with the Squire, one August morning, to meet the coach on his way to
school. Each of them had given him some little present of the best that
he had, and his small private box was full of peg-tops, white marbles
(called "alley-taws" in the Vale), screws, birds'-eggs, whip-cord,
jews-harps, and other miscellaneous boys' wealth. Poor Jacob
Doodle-calf, in floods of tears, had pressed upon him with spluttering
earnestness his lame pet hedgehog (he had always some poor broken-down
beast or bird by him); but this Tom had been obliged to refuse by the
Squire's order. He had given them all a great tea under the big elm in
their playground, for which Madam Brown had supplied the biggest cake
ever seen in our village; and Tom was really as sorry to leave them as
they to lose him, but his sorrow was not unmixed with the pride and
excitement of making a new step in life.
And this feeling carried him through his first parting with his mother
better than could have been expected. Their love was as fair and whole
as human love can be, perfect self-sacrifice on the one side, meeting a
young and true heart on the other. It is not within the scope of my
book, however, to speak of family relations, or I should have much to
say on the subject of English mothers,--ay, and of English fathers, and
sisters, and brothers too.
Neither have I room to speak of our private schools: what I have to say
is about public schools, those much-abused and much-belauded
institutions peculiar to England. So we must hurry through Master Tom's
year at a private school as fast as we can.
It was a fair average specimen, kept by a gentleman, with another
gentleman as second master; but it was little enough of the real work
they did--merely coming into school when lessons were prepared and all
ready to be heard. The whole discipline of the school out of lesson
hours was in the hands of the two ushers, one of whom was always with
the boys in their playground in the school, at meals--in fact, at all
times and everywhere, till they were fairly in bed at night.
Now the theory of private schools is (or was) constant supervision out
of school; therein differing fundamentally from that of public schools.
It may be right or wrong; but if right, this supervision surely ought to
be the especial work of the head-master, the responsible person. The
object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to
make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most
important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school
hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just
giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I
a private schoolmaster, I should say, let who will hear the boys their
lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest.
The two ushers at Tom's first school were not gentleman, and very poorly
educated, and were only driving their poor trade of usher to get such
living as they could out of it. They were not bad men, but had little
heart for their work, and of course were bent on making it as easy as
possible. One of the methods by which they endeavoured to accomplish
this, was by encouraging tale-bearing, which had become a frightfully
common vice in the school in consequence, and had sapped all the
foundations of school morality. Another was, by favouring grossly the
biggest boys, who alone could have given them much trouble; whereby
those young gentlemen became most abominable tyrants, oppressing the
little boys in all the small mean ways which prevail in private schools.
Poor little Tom was made dreadfully unhappy in his first week, by a
catastrophe which happened to his first letter home. With huge labour he
had, on the very evening of his arrival, managed to fill two sides of a
sheet of letter-paper with assurances of his love for dear mamma, his
happiness at school, and his resolves to do all she would wish. This
missive, with the help of the boy who sat at the desk next him, also a
new arrival, he managed to fold successfully; but this done, they were
sadly, put to it for means of sealing. Envelopes were then unknown, they
had no wax, and dared not disturb the stillness of the evening
school-room by getting up and going to ask the usher for some. At length
Tom's friend, being of an ingenious turn of mind, suggested sealing with
ink, and the letter was accordingly stuck down with a blob of ink, and
duly handed by Tom, on his way to bed, to the housekeeper to be posted.
It was not till four days afterwards, that that good dame sent for him,
and produced the precious letter, and some wax, saying, "Oh, Master
Brown, I forgot to tell you before, but your letter isn't sealed." Poor
Tom took the wax in silence and sealed his letter, with a huge lump
rising in his throat during the process, and then ran away to a quiet
corner of the playground and burst into an agony of tears. The idea of
his mother waiting day after day for the letter he had promised her at
once, and perhaps thinking him forgetful of her, when he had done all in
his power to make good his promise, was as bitter a grief as any which
he had to undergo for many a long year. His wrath then was
proportionately violent when he was aware of two boys, who stopped close
by him, and one of whom, a fat gaby of a fellow, pointed at him and
called him "Young mammy-sick!" Whereupon Tom arose, and giving vent thus
to his grief and shame and rage, smote his derider on the nose, and made
it bleed--which sent that young worthy howling to the usher, who
reported Tom for violent and unprovoked assault and battery. Hitting in
the face was a felony punishable with flogging, other hitting only a
misdemeanour--a distinction not altogether clear in principle. Tom
however escaped the penalty by pleading "primum tempus;" and having
written a second letter to his mother, enclosing some forget-me-nots,
which he picked on their first half-holiday walk, felt quite happy
again, and began to enjoy vastly a good deal of his new life.
These half-holiday walks were the great events of the week. The whole
fifty boys started after dinner with one of the ushers for Hazeldown,
which was distant some mile or so from the school. Hazeldown measured
some three miles round, and in the neighbourhood were several woods full
of all manner of birds and butterflies. The usher walked slowly round
the down with such boys as liked to accompany him; the rest scattered in
all directions, being only bound to appear again when the usher had
completed his round, and accompany him home. They were forbidden,
however, to go anywhere except on the down and into the woods, the
village being especially prohibited, where huge bulls'-eyes and unctuous
toffy might be procured in exchange for coin of the realm.
Various were the amusements to which the boys then betook themselves. At
the entrance of the down there was a steep hillock, like the barrows of
Tom's own downs. This mound was the weekly scene of terrific combats, at
a game called by the queer name of "mud-patties." The boys who played
divided into sides under different leaders, and one side occupied the
mound. Then, all parties having provided themselves with many sods of
turf, cut with their bread-and-cheese knives, the side which remained at
the bottom proceeded to assault the mound, advancing upon all sides
under cover of a heavy fire of turfs, and then struggling for victory
with the occupants, which was theirs as soon as they could, even for a
moment, clear the summit, when they in turn became the besieged. It was
a good rough dirty game, and of great use in counteracting the sneaking
tendencies of the school. Then others of the boys spread over the downs,
looking for the holes of humble-bees and mice, which they dug up without
mercy, often (I regret to say) killing and skinning the unlucky mice,
and (I do not regret to say) getting well stung by the humble-bees.
Others went after butterflies and birds'-eggs in their seasons; and Tom
found on Hazeldown, for the first time, the beautiful little blue
butterfly with golden spots on his wings, which he had never seen on his
own downs, and dug out his first sand-martin's nest. This latter
achievement resulted in a flogging, for the sand-martins built in a high
bank close to the village, consequently out of bounds; but one of the
bolder spirits of the school, who never could be happy unless he was
doing something to which risk attached, easily persuaded Tom to break
bounds and visit the martin's bank. From whence it being only a step to
the toffy-shop, what could be more simple than to go on there and fill
their pockets; or what more certain than that on their return, a
distribution of treasure having been made, the usher should shortly
detect the forbidden smell of bulls'-eyes, and, a search ensuing,
discover the state of the breeches-pockets of Tom and his ally?
This ally of Tom's was indeed a desperate hero in the sight of the boys,
and feared as one who dealt in magic, or something approaching thereto.
Which reputation came to him in this wise. The boys went to bed at
eight, and of course consequently lay awake in the dark for an hour or
two, telling ghost-stories by turns. One night when it came to his turn,
and he had dried up their souls by his story, he suddenly declared that
he would make a fiery hand appear on the door; and to the astonishment
and terror of the boys in his room, a hand, or something like it, in
pale light, did then and there appear. The fame of this exploit having
spread to the other rooms, and being discredited there, the young
necromancer declared that the same wonder would appear in all the rooms
in turn, which it accordingly did; and the whole circumstances having
been privately reported to one of the ushers as usual, that functionary,
after listening about at the doors of the rooms, by a sudden descent
caught the performer in his night-shirt, with a box of phosphorus in his
guilty hand. Lucifer-matches and all the present facilities for getting
acquainted with fire were then unknown; the very name of phosphorus had
something diabolic in it to the boy-mind; so Tom's ally, at the cost of
a sound flogging, earned what many older folk covet much--the very
decided fear of most of his companions.
He was a remarkable boy, and by no means a bad one. Tom stuck to him
till he left, and got into many scrapes by so doing. But he was the
great opponent of the tale-bearing habits of the school, and the open
enemy of the ushers; and so worthy of all support.
Tom imbibed a fair amount of Latin and Greek at the school, but somehow
on the whole it didn't suit him, or he it, and in the holidays he was
constantly working the Squire to send him at once to a public school.
Great was his joy then, when in the middle of his third half-year, in
October, 183-, a fever broke out in the village, and the master having
himself slightly sickened of it, the whole of the boys were sent off at
a day's notice to their respective homes.
The Squire was not quite so pleased as Master Tom to see that young
gentleman's brown merry face appear at home, some two months before the
proper time, for Christmas holidays: and so after putting on his
thinking cap, he retired to his study and wrote several letters; the
result of which was that one morning at the breakfast-table, about a
fortnight after Tom's return, he addressed his wife with--"My dear, I
have arranged that Tom shall go to Rugby at once, for the last six weeks
of this half-year, instead of wasting them riding and loitering about
home. It is very kind of the Doctor to allow it. Will you see that his
things are all ready by Friday, when I shall take him up to town, and
send him down the next day by himself."
Mrs. Brown was prepared for the announcement, and merely suggested a
doubt whether Tom were yet old enough to travel by himself. However,
finding both father and son against her on this point, she gave in like
a wise woman, and proceeded to prepare Tom's kit for his launch into a
public school.
CHAPTER IV.
"Let the steam-pot hiss till it's hot,
Give me the speed of the Tantivy trot."
_Coaching Song by R. E. E. Warburton, Esq._
"NOW, sir, time to get up, if you please. Tally-ho coach for Leicester
'll be round in half-an-hour, and don't wait for nobody." So spake the
Boots of the Peacock Inn, Islington, at half-past two o'clock on the
morning of a day in the early part of November, 183-, giving Tom at the
same time a shake by the shoulder, and then putting down a candle and
carrying off his shoes to clean.
Tom and his father had arrived in town from Berkshire, the day before,
and finding, on inquiry, that the Birmingham coaches which ran from the
city did not pass through Rugby, but deposited their passengers at
Dunchurch, a village three miles distant on the main road--where said
passengers had to wait for the Oxford and Leicester coach in the
evening, or to take a post-chaise--had resolved that Tom should travel
down by the Tally-ho, which diverged from the main road and passed
through Rugby itself. And as the Tally-ho was an early coach, they had
driven out to the Peacock to be on the road.
Tom had never been in London, and would have liked to have stopped at
the Belle Sauvage, where they had been put down by the Star, just at
dusk, that he might have gone roving about those endless, mysterious,
gas-lit streets, which, with their glare and hum and moving crowds;
excited him so that he couldn't talk even. But as soon as he found that
the Peacock arrangement would get him to Rugby by twelve o'clock in the
day, whereas otherwise he wouldn't be there till the evening, all other
plans melted away; his one absorbing aim being to become a public
school-boy as fast as possible, and six hours sooner or later seeming to
him of the most alarming importance.
Tom and his father had alighted at the Peacock at about seven in the
evening, and having heard with unfeigned joy the paternal order at the
bar, of steaks and oyster sauce for supper in half an hour, and seen his
father seated cozily by the bright fire in the coffee-room with the
paper in his hand--Tom had run out to see about him, had wondered at all
the vehicles passing and repassing, and had fraternised with the boots
and ostler, from whom he ascertained that the Tally-ho was a tip-top
goer, ten miles an hour including stoppages and so punctual that all
the road set their clocks by her.
Then being summoned to supper he had regaled himself in one of the
bright little boxes of the Peacock coffee-room on the beef-steak and
unlimited oyster-sauce and brown stout (tasted then for the first
time--a day to be marked for ever by Tom with a white stone); had at
first attended to the excellent advice which his father was bestowing on
him from over his glass of steaming brandy and water, and then begun
nodding from the united effects of the stout, the fire, and the lecture.
Till the Squire observing Tom's state, and remembering that it was
nearly nine o'clock, and that the Tally-ho left at three, sent the
little fellow off to the chambermaid, with a shake of the hand (Tom
having stipulated in the morning before starting, that kissing should
now cease between them,) and a few parting words.
"And now, Tom, my boy," said the Squire, "remember you are going, at
your own earnest request, to be chucked into this great school, like a
young bear with all your troubles before you--earlier than we should
have sent you perhaps. If schools are what they were in my time, you'll
see a great many cruel blackguard things done, and hear a deal of foul
bad talk. But never fear. You tell the truth, keep a brave and kind
heart, and never listen to or say anything you wouldn't have your mother
and sister hear, and you'll never feel ashamed to come home, or we to
see you."
The allusion to his mother made Tom feel rather chokey, and he would
have liked to have hugged his father well, if it hadn't been for the
recent stipulation.
As it was, he only squeezed his father's hand, and looked bravely up and
said, "I'll try, father."
"I know you will, my boy. Is your money all safe?"
"Yes," said Tom, diving into one pocket to make sure.
"And your keys?" said the Squire.
"All right," said Tom, diving into the other pocket.
"Well then, good night. God bless you! I'll tell Boots to call you, and
be up to see you off."
Tom was carried off by the chambermaid in a brown study, from which he
was roused in a clean little attic by that buxom person calling him a
little darling, and kissing him as she left the room, which indignity he
was too much surprised to resent. And still thinking of his father's
last words, and the look with which they were spoken, he knelt down and
prayed, that, come what might, he might never bring shame or sorrow on
the dear folk at home.
Indeed, the Squire's last words deserved to have their effect, for they
had been the result of much anxious thought. All the way up to London he
had pondered what he should say to Tom by way of parting advice,
something that the boy could keep in his head ready for use. By way of
assisting meditation, he had even gone the length of taking out his
flint and steel and tinder, and hammering away for a quarter of an hour
till he had manufactured a light for a long Trichinopoli cheroot, which
he silently puffed; to the no small wonder of Coachee, who was an old
friend, and an institution on the Bath road; and who always expected a
talk on the prospects and doings, agricultural and social, of the whole
county when he carried the Squire.
To condense the Squire's meditation, it was somewhat as follows: "I
won't tell him to read his Bible and love and serve God; if he don't do
that for his mother's sake and teaching, he won't for mine. Shall I go
into the sort of temptations he'll meet with? No, I can't do that. Never
do for an old fellow to go into such things with a boy. He won't
understand me. Do him more harm than good, ten to one. Shall I tell him
to mind his work, and say he's sent to school to make himself a good
scholar? Well, but he isn't sent to school for that--at any rate, not
for that mainly. I don't care a straw for Greek particles, or the
digamma, no more does his mother. What is he sent to school for? Well,
partly because he wanted so to go. If he'll only turn out a brave,
helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian,
that's all I want," thought the Squire; and upon this view of the case
framed his last words of advice to Tom, which were well enough suited to
his purpose.
For they were Tom's first thoughts as he tumbled out of bed at the
summons of Boots, and proceeded rapidly to wash and dress himself. At
ten minutes to three he was down in the coffee-room in his stockings,
carrying his hat-box, coat, and comforter in his hand; and there he
found his father nursing a bright fire and a cup of hot coffee and a
hard biscuit on the table.
"Now then, Tom, give us your things here, and drink this; there's
nothing like starting warm, old fellow."
Tom addressed himself to the coffee, and prattled away while he worked
himself into his shoes and his great-coat, well warmed through; a
Petersham coat with velvet collar, made tight, after the abominable
fashion of those days. And just as he is swallowing his last mouthful,
winding his comforter round his throat, and tucking the ends into the
breast of his coat, the horn sounds, Boots looks in and says, "Tally-ho,
sir;" and they hear the ring and the rattle of the four fast trotters
and the town-made drag, as it dashes up to the Peacock.
"Anything for us, Bob?" says the burly guard, dropping down from behind,
and slapping himself across the chest.
"Young genl'm'n, Rugby; three parcels, Leicester; hamper o' game,
Rugby," answers ostler.
"Tell young gent to look alive," says guard, opening the hind-boot and
shooting in the parcels after examining them by the lamps. "Here, shove
the portmanteau up a-top--I'll fasten him presently. Now then, sir, jump
up behind."
"Good-bye, father,--my love at home." A last shake of the hand. Up goes
Tom, the guard catching his hat-box and holding on with one hand, while
with the other he claps the horn to his mouth. Toot, toot, toot! the
ostlers let go their heads, the four bays plunge at the collar, and away
goes the Tally-ho into the darkness, forty-five seconds from the time
they pulled up; Ostler, Boots, and the Squire stand looking after them
under the Peacock lamp.
"Sharp work!" says the Squire, and goes in again to his bed, the coach
being well out of sight and hearing.
Tom stands up on the coach and looks back at his father's figure as long
as he can see it, and then the guard having disposed of his luggage
comes to an anchor, and finishes his buttonings and other preparations
for facing the three hours before dawn; no joke for those who minded
cold, on a fast coach in November, in the reign of his late majesty.
I sometimes think that you boys of this generation are a deal tenderer
fellows than we used to be. At any rate, you're much more comfortable
travellers, for I see every one of you with his rug or plaid, and other
dodges for preserving the caloric, and most of you going in those fuzzy,
dusty, padded first-class carriages. It was another affair altogether, a
dark ride on the top of the Tally-ho, I can tell you, in a tight
Petersham coat, and your feet dangling six inches from the floor. Then
you knew what cold was, and what it was to be without legs, for not a
bit of feeling had you in them after the first half-hour. But it had its
pleasures, the old dark ride. First there was the consciousness of
silent endurance, so dear to every Englishman,--of standing out against
something, and not giving in. Then there was the music of the rattling
harness, and the ring of the horses' feet on the hard road, and the
glare of the two bright lamps through the steaming hoar frost, over the
leaders' ears, into the darkness; and the cheery toot of the guard's
horn, to warn some drowsy pikeman or the ostler at the next change; and
the looking forward to daylight--and last, but not least, the delight of
returning sensation in your toes.
Then the break of dawn and the sunrise; where can they be ever seen in
perfection but from a coach roof? You want motion and change and music
to see them in their glory; not the music of singing-men and
singing-women, but good silent music, which sets itself in your own head
the accompaniment of work and getting over the ground.
The Tally-ho is past St. Alban's, and Tom is enjoying the ride, though
half-frozen. The guard, who is alone with him on the back of the coach,
is silent, but has muffled Tom's feet up in straw, and put the end of an
oat-sack over his knees. The darkness has driven him inwards, and he has
gone over his little past life, and thought of all his doings and
promises, and of his mother and sister, and his father's last words; and
has made fifty good resolutions, and means to bear himself like a brave
Brown as he is, though a young one.
Then he has been forward into the mysterious boy-future, speculating as
to what sort of a place Rugby is, and what they do there, and calling up
all the stories of public schools which he has heard from big boys in
the holidays. He is chock full of hope and life, notwithstanding the
cold, and kicks his heels against the back board, and would like to
sing, only he doesn't know how his friend the silent guard might take
it.
And now the dawn breaks at the end of the fourth stage, and the coach
pulls up at a little road-side inn with huge stables behind. There is a
bright fire gleaming through the red curtains of the bar-window, and the
door is open. The coachman catches his whip into a double thong, and
throws it to the ostler; the steam of the horses rises straight up into
the air. He has put them along over the last two miles, and is two
minutes before his time; he rolls down from the box and into the inn.
The guard rolls off behind. "Now, sir," says he to Tom, "you just jump
down, and I'll give you a drop of something to keep the cold out."
Tom finds a difficulty in jumping, or indeed in finding the top of the
wheel with his feet, which may be in the next world for all he feels;
so the guard picks him off the coach-top, and sets him on his legs, and
they stump off into the bar, and join the coachman and the other outside
passengers.
Here a fresh-looking barmaid serves them each with a glass of early purl
as they stand before the fire, coachman and guard exchanging business
remarks. The purl warms the cockles of Tom's heart, and makes him cough.
"Rare tackle, that, sir, of a cold morning," says the coachman, smiling.
"Time's up." They are out again and up; coachee the last, gathering the
reins into his hands and talking to Jem the ostler about the mare's
shoulder, and then swinging himself up on to the box--the horses dashing
off in a canter before he falls into his seat. Toot-toot-tootle-too goes
the horn, and away they are again, five-and-thirty miles on their road
(nearly half way to Rugby, thinks Tom), and the prospect of breakfast at
the end of the stage.
And now they begin to see, and the early life of the country-side comes
out; a market cart or two, men in smock-frocks going to their work pipe
in mouth, a whiff of which is no bad smell this bright morning. The sun
gets up, and the mist shines like silver gauze. They pass the hounds
jogging along to a distant meet, at the heels of the huntsman's hack,
whose face is about the colour of the tails of his old pink, as he
exchanges greetings with coachman and guard. Now they pull up at a
lodge, and take on board a well-muffled-up sportsman, with his gun-case
and carpet-bag. An early up-coach meets them, and the coachmen gather up
their horses, and pass one another with the accustomed lift of the
elbow, each team doing eleven miles an hour, with a mile to spare behind
if necessary. And here comes breakfast.
"Twenty minutes here, gentlemen," says the coachman as they pull up at
half-past seven at the inn door.
Have we not endured nobly this morning, and is not this a worthy reward
for much endurance? There is the low dark wainscoted room hung with
sporting prints; the hat-stand (with a whip or two standing up in it
belonging to bagmen who are still snug in bed) by the door; the blazing
fire, with the quaint old glass over the mantelpiece, in which is stuck
a large card with the list of the meets for the week of the county
hounds. The table covered with the whitest of cloths and of china, and
bearing a pigeon-pie, ham, round of cold boiled beef cut from a mammoth
ox, and the great loaf of household bread on a wooden trencher. And here
comes in the stout head waiter, puffing under a tray of hot viands;
kidneys and a steak, transparent rashers and poached eggs, buttered
toast and muffins, coffee and tea, all smoking hot. The table can never
hold it all; the cold meats are removed to the sideboard, they were only
put on for show and to give us an appetite. And now fall on, gentlemen
all. It is a well-known sporting-house, and the breakfasts are famous.
Two or three men in pink, on their way to the meet, drop in, and are
very jovial and sharp-set, as indeed we all are.
"Tea or coffee, sir?" says head waiter, coming round to Tom.
"Coffee please," says Tom, with his mouth full of muffin and kidney;
coffee is a treat to him, tea is not.
Our coachman, I perceive, who breakfasts with us, is a cold-beef man. He
also eschews hot potations, and addicts himself to a tankard of ale,
which is brought him by the barmaid. Sportsman looks on approvingly, and
orders a ditto for himself.
Tom has eaten kidney and pigeon-pie, and imbibed coffee, till his little
skin is as tight as a drum; and then has the further pleasure of paying
head waiter out of his own purse, in a dignified manner, and walks out
before the inn door to see the horses put to. This is done leisurely and
in a highly-finished manner by the ostlers, as if they enjoyed the not
being hurried. Coachman comes out with his way-bill, and puffing a fat
cigar which the sportsman has given him. Guard emerges from the tap,
where he prefers breakfasting, licking round a tough-looking doubtful
cheroot, which you might tie round your finger, and three whiffs of
which would knock any one else out of time.
The pinks stand about the inn door lighting cigars and waiting to see us
start, while their hacks are led up and down the market-place on which
the inn looks. They all know our sportsman, and we feel a reflected
credit when we see him chatting and laughing with them.
"Now, sir, please," says the coachman; all the rest of the passengers
are up; the guard is locking the hind boot.
"A good run to you!" says the sportsman to the pinks, and is by the
coachman's side in no time.
"Let 'em go, Dick!" The ostlers fly back, drawing off the cloths from
their glossy loins, and away we go through the market-place and down the
High Street, looking in at the first-floor windows, and seeing several
worthy burgesses shaving thereat; while all the shop-boys who are
cleaning the windows, and housemaids who are doing the steps, stop and
look pleased as we rattle past, as if we were a part of their legitimate
morning's amusement. We clear the town, and are well out between the
hedgerows again as the town clock strikes eight.
The sun shines almost warmly, and breakfast has oiled all springs and
loosened all tongues. Tom is encouraged by a remark or two of the
guard's between the puffs of his oily cheroot, and besides is getting
tired of not talking; he is too full of his destination to talk about
anything else; and so asks the guard if he knows Rugby.
"Goes through it every day of my life. Twenty minutes afore twelve
down--ten o'clock up."
"What sort of a place is it, please?" says Tom.
Guard looks at him with a comical expression. "Werry out-o'-the-way
place, sir; no paving to the streets nor no lighting. 'Mazin' big horse
and cattle fair in autumn--lasts a week--just over now. Takes town a
week to get clean after it. Fairish hunting country. But slow place,
sir, slow place: off the main road, you see--only three coaches a day, and
one on 'em a two-oss wan, more like a hearse nor a coach--Regulator--comes
from Oxford. Young genl'm'n at school calls her Pig and Whistle, and
goes up to college by her (six miles an hour) when they goes to enter.
Belong to school, sir?"
"Yes," says Tom, not unwilling for a moment that the guard should think
him an old boy. But then having some qualms as to the truth of the
assertion, and seeing that if he were to assume the character of an old
boy he couldn't go on asking the questions he wanted, added--"that is to
say, I'm on my way there. I'm a new boy."
The guard looked as if he knew this quite as well as Tom.
"You're werry late, sir," says the guard; "only six weeks to-day to the
end of the half." Tom assented. "We takes up fine loads this day six
weeks, and Monday and Tuesday arter. Hopes we shall have the pleasure of
carrying you back."
Tom said he hoped they would; but he thought within himself that his
fate would probably be the Pig and Whistle.
"It pays uncommon, cert'nly," continues the guard. "Werry free with
their cash is the young genl'm'n. But, Lor' bless you, we gets into such
rows all 'long the road, what wi' their pea-shooters, and long whips,
and hollering, and upsetting every one as comes by; I'd a sight sooner
carry one or two on 'em, sir, as I may be a carryin' of you now, than a
coach-load."
"What do they do with the pea-shooters?" inquires Tom.
"Do wi' 'em! why, peppers every one's faces as we comes near, 'cept the
young gals, and breaks windows wi' them too, some on 'em shoots so hard.
Now 'twas just here last June, as we was a driving up the first-day
boys, they was mendin' a quarter-mile of road, and there was a lot of
Irish chaps, reg'lar roughs, a breaking stones. As we comes up, 'Now,
boys' says young gent on the box (smart young fellow and desper't
reckless), 'here's fun! Let the Pats have it about the ears.' 'God's
sake, sir!' says Bob (that's my mate the coachman), 'don't go for to
shoot at 'em, they'll knock us off the coach.' 'Damme, coachee,' says
young my lord, 'you ain't afraid; hoora, boys! let 'em have it.'
'Hoora!' sings out the others, and fill their mouths chock full of peas
to last the whole line. Bob seeing as 'twas to come, knocks his hat over
his eyes, hollers to his 'osses, and shakes 'em up, and away we goes up
to the line on 'em, twenty miles an hour. The Pats begin to hoora too,
thinking it was a runaway, and first lot on 'em stands grinnin' and
wavin' their old hats as we comes abreast on 'em; and then you'd ha'
laughed to see how took aback and choking savage they looked when they
gets the peas a stinging all over 'em. But bless you, the laugh weren't
all of our side, sir, by a long way. We was going so fast, and they was
so took aback, that they didn't take what was up till we was half-way up
the line. Then 'twas 'look out all,' surely. They howls all down the
line fit to frighten you, some on 'em runs arter us and tries to clamber
up behind, only we hits 'em over the fingers and pulls their hands off;
one as had had it very sharp act'ly runs right at the leaders, as though
he'd ketch 'em by the heads, only luck'ly for him he misses his tip, and
comes over a heap o' stones, first. The rest picks up stones, and gives
it us right away till we gets out o' shot, the young gents holding out
werry manful with the pea-shooters and such stones as lodged on us, and
a pretty many there was too. Then Bob picks hisself up again, and looks
at young gent on box werry solemn. Bob'd had a rum un in the ribs,
which'd like to ha' knocked him off the box, or made him drop the reins.
Young gent on box picks hisself up, and so does we all, and looks round
to count damage. Box's head cut open and his hat gone; 'nother young
gent's hat gone: mine knocked in at the side, and not one on us as
wasn't black and blue somewheres or another; most on 'em all over.
Two-pound-ten to pay for damage to paint, which they subscribed for
there and then, and give Bob and me a extra half-sovereign each; but I
wouldn't go down that line again not for twenty half-sovereigns." And
the guard shook his head slowly, and got up and blew a clear brisk
toot-toot.
"What fun!" said Tom, who could scarcely contain his pride at this
exploit of his future school-fellows. He longed already for the end of
the half, that he might join them.
"'Taint such good fun though, sir, for the folk as meets the coach, nor
for we who has to go back with it next day. Them Irishers last summer
had all got stones ready for us, and was all but letting drive, and we'd
got two reverend gents aboard too. We pulled up at the beginning of the
line, and pacified them, and were never going to carry no more
pea-shooters, unless they promises not to fire where there's a line of
Irish chaps a stone-breaking." The guard stopped and pulled away at his
cheroot, regarding Tom benignantly the while.
"Oh, don't stop! tell us something more about the pea-shooting."
"Well, there'd like to have been a pretty piece of work over it at
Bicester, a while back. We was six mile from the town, when we meets an
old square-headed grey-haired yeoman chap, a jogging along quite quiet.
He looks up at the coach, and just then a pea hits him on the nose, and
some ketches his cob behind and makes him dance up on his hind legs. I
see'd the old boy's face flush and look plaguy awkward, and I thought we
was in for somethin' nasty.
"He turns his cob's head, and rides quietly after us just out of shot.
How that ere cob did step! we never shook him off not a dozen yards in
the six mile. At first the young gents was werry lively on him; but
afore we got in, seeing how steady the old chap come on, they was quite
quiet, and laid their heads together what they should do. Some was for
fighting, some for axing his pardon. He rides into the town close after
us, comes up when we stops, and says the two as shot at him must come
before a magistrate; and a great crowd comes round, and we couldn't get
the 'osses to. But the young uns, they all stand by one another, and
says all or none must go, and as how they'd fight it out, and have to be
carried. Just as 'twas gettin' serious, and the old boy and the mob was
goin' to pull 'em off the coach, one little fellow jumps up and says,
'Here--I'll stay,--I'm only going three miles further. My father's
name's Davis; he's known about here, and I'll go before the magistrate
with this gentleman.' 'What, be thee parson Davis's son?' says the old
boy. 'Yes,' says the young un. 'Well, I be mortal sorry to meet thee in
such company, but for thy father's sake and thine (for thee bi'st a
brave young chap) I'll say no more about it.' Didn't the boys cheer him,
and the mob cheered the young chap--and then one of the biggest gets
down, and begs his pardon werry gentlemanly for all the rest, saying as
they all had been plaguy vexed from the first, but didn't like to ax his
pardon till then, 'cause they felt they hadn't ought to shirk the
consequences of their joke. And then they all got down and shook hands
with the old boy, and asked him to all parts of the country, to their
homes; and we drives off twenty minutes behind time, with cheering and
hollering as if we was county members. But, Lor' bless you, sir," says
the guard, smacking his hand down on his knee and looking full into
Tom's face, "ten minutes arter they was all as bad as ever."
Tom showed such undisguised and open-mouthed interest in his narrations,
that the old guard rubbed up his memory, and launched out into a graphic
history of all the performances of the boys on the road for the last
twenty years. Off the road he couldn't go; the exploit must have been
connected with horses or vehicles to hang in the old fellow's head. Tom
tried him off his own ground once or twice, but found he knew nothing
beyond, and so let him have his head, and the rest of the road bowled
easily away; for old Blow-hard (as the boys called him) was a dry old
file, with much kindness and humour, and a capital spinner of a yarn
when he had broken the neck of his day's work and got plenty of ale
under his belt.
What struck Tom's youthful imagination most was the desperate and
lawless character of most of the stories. Was the guard hoaxing him? He
couldn't help hoping that they were true. It's very odd how almost all
English boys love danger; you can get ten to join a game, or climb a
tree, or swim a stream when there's a chance of breaking their limbs or
getting drowned, for one who'll stay on level ground, or in his depth,
or play quoits or bowls.
The guard had just finished an account of a desperate fight which had
happened at one of the fairs between the drovers and the farmers with
their whips, and the boys with cricket-bats and wickets, which arose out
of a playful but objectionable practice of the boys going round to the
public-houses and taking the linch-pins out of the wheels of the gigs,
and was moralising upon the way in which the Doctor, "a terrible stern
man he'd heard tell," had come down upon several of the performers,
"sending three on 'em off next morning, each in a po-chay with a parish
constable," when they turned a corner and neared the milestone, the
third from Rugby. By the stone two boys stood, their jackets buttoned
tight, waiting for the coach.
"Look here, sir," says the guard, after giving a sharp toot-toot,
"there's two on 'em; out and out runners they be. They come out about
twice or three times a week, and spirts a mile alongside of us."
And as they came up, sure enough, away went two boys along the footpath,
keeping up with the horses; the first a light clean-made fellow going on
springs, the other stout and round-shouldered, labouring in his pace,
but going as dogged as a bull-terrier.
Old Blow-hard looked on admiringly. "See how beautiful that there un
holds hisself together, and goes from his hips, sir," said he; "he's a
'mazin' fine runner. Now, many coachmen as drives a first-rate team'd
put it on and try and pass 'em. But Bob, sir, bless you, he's
tender-hearted; he'd sooner pull in a bit if he see'd 'em a gettin'
beat. I do b'lieve too as that there un'd sooner break his heart than
let us go by him afore next milestone."
At the second milestone the boys pulled up short and waved their hats to
the guard, who had his watch out and shouted "4.56," thereby indicating
that the mile had been done in four seconds under the five minutes. They
passed several more parties of boys, all of them objects of the deepest
interest to Tom, and came in sight of the town at ten minutes before
twelve. Tom fetched a long breath, and thought he had never spent a
pleasanter day. Before he went to bed he had quite settled that it must
be the greatest day he should ever spend, and didn't alter his opinion
for many a long year--if he has yet.
CHAPTER V.
RUGBY AND FOOTBALL.
"----Foot and eye opposed
In dubious strife."
SCOTT.
"AND so here's Rugby, sir, at last, and you'll be in plenty of time for
dinner at the School-house, as I tell'd you," said the old guard,
pulling his horn out of its case, and tootle-tooing away; while the
coachman shook up his horses, and carried them along the side of the
school close, round Dead-man's Corner, past the school gates, and down
the High Street to the Spread Eagle; the wheelers in a spanking trot,
and leaders cantering, in a style which would not have disgraced
"Cherry Bob," "ramping, stamping, tearing swearing Billy Harwood," or
any other of the old coaching heroes.
Tom's heart beat quick as he passed the great school field or close,
with its noble elms, in which several games at football were going on,
and tried to take in at once the long line of grey buildings, beginning
with the chapel, and ending with the School-house, the residence of the
head-master, where the great flag was lazily waving from the highest
round tower. And he began already to be proud of being a Rugby boy, as
he passed the school-gates, with the oriel-window above, and saw the
boys standing there, looking as if the town belonged to them, and
nodding in a familiar manner to the coachman, as if any one of them
would be quite equal to getting on the box and working the team down
street as well as he.
One of the young heroes, however, ran out from the rest, and scrambled
up behind; where, having righted himself and nodded to the guard with
"How do, Jem?" he turned short round to Tom, and, after looking him over
for a minute, began--
"I say, you fellow, is your name Brown?"
"Yes," said Tom, in considerable astonishment; glad however to have
lighted on some one already who seemed to know him.
"Ah, I thought so; you know my old aunt, Miss East; she lives somewhere
down your way in Berkshire. She wrote to me that you were coming to-day,
and asked me to give you a lift."
Tom was somewhat inclined to resent the patronizing air of his new
friend--a boy of just about his own height and age, but gifted with the
most transcendent coolness and assurance, which Tom felt to be
aggravating and hard to bear, but couldn't for the life of him help
admiring and envying--especially when young my lord begins hectoring two
or three long loafing fellows, half-porter, half stableman, with a
strong touch of the blackguard, and in the end arranges with one of
them, nicknamed Cooey, to carry Tom's luggage up to the School-house for
sixpence.
"And heark'ee, Cooey, it must be up in ten minutes, or no more jobs from
me. Come along, Brown." And away swaggers the young potentate, with his
hands in his pockets, and Tom at his side.
"All right, sir," says Cooey, touching his hat, with a leer and a wink
at his companions.
"Hullo though," says East, pulling up, and taking another look at Tom,
"this'll never do--haven't you got a hat?--we never wear caps here. Only
the louts wear caps. Bless you, if you were to go into the quadrangle
with that thing on, I----don't know what'd happen." The very idea was
quite beyond young Master East, and he looked unutterable things.
Tom thought his cap a very knowing affair, but confessed that he had a
hat in his hat-box; which was accordingly at once extracted from the
hind boot, and Tom equipped in his go-to-meeting roof, as his new friend
called it. But this didn't quite suit his fastidious taste in another
minute, being too shiny; so, as they walk up the town, they dive into
Nixon's the hatter's, and Tom is arrayed, to his utter astonishment, and
without paying for it, in a regulation cat-skin at seven-and-sixpence;
Nixon undertaking to send the best hat up to the matron's room,
School-house, in half an hour.
"You can send in a note for a tile on Monday, and make it all right, you
know," said Mentor; "we're allowed two seven-and-sixers a half, besides
what we bring from home."
Tom by this time began to be conscious of his new social position and
dignities, and to luxuriate in the realized ambition of being a
public-school boy at last, with a vested right of spoiling two
seven-and-sixers in half a year.
"You see," said his friend, as they strolled up towards the school
gates, in explanation of his conduct--"a great deal depends on how a
fellow cuts up at first. If he's got nothing odd about him, and answers
straightforward and holds his head up, he gets on. Now you'll do very
well as to rig, all but that cap. You see I'm doing the handsome thing
by you, because my father knows yours; besides, I want to please the old
lady. She gave me a half-a-sov. this half, and perhaps'll double it
next, if I keep in her good books."
There's nothing for candour like a lower-school boy; and East was a
genuine specimen--frank, hearty, and good-natured, well satisfied with
himself and his position, and chock full of life and spirits, and all
the Rugby prejudices and traditions which he had been able to get
together, in the long course of one half year, during which he had been
at the School-house.
And Tom, notwithstanding his bumptiousness, felt friends with him at
once, and began sucking in all his ways and prejudices, as fast as he
could understand them.
East was great in the character of cicerone; he carried Tom through the
great gates, where were only two or three boys. These satisfied
themselves with the Stock questions,--"You fellow, what's your name?
Where do you come from? How old are you? Where do you board? and, What
form are you in?"--and so they passed on through the quadrangle and a
small courtyard, upon which looked down a lot of little windows
(belonging, as his guide informed him, to some of the School-house
studies), into the matron's room, where East introduced Tom to that
dignitary; made him give up the key of his trunk that the matron might
unpack his linen, and told the story of the hat and of his own presence
of mind: upon the relation whereof the matron laughingly scolded him,
for the coolest new boy in the house; and East, indignant at the
accusation of newness, marched Tom off into the quadrangle, and began
showing him the schools, and examining him as to his literary
attainments; the result of which was a prophecy that they would be in
the same form, and could do then lessons together.
"And now come in and see my study; we shall have just time before
dinner; and afterwards, before calling over, we'll do the close."
Tom followed his guide through the School-house hall, which opens into
the quadrangle. It is a great room thirty feet long and eighteen high,
or thereabouts, with two great tables running the whole length, and two
large fireplaces at the side, with blazing fires in them, at one of
which some dozen boys were standing and lounging, some of whom shouted
to East to stop; but he shot through with his convoy, and landed him in
the long dark passages, with a large fire at the end of each upon which
the studies opened. Into one of these, in the bottom passage, East
bolted with our hero, slamming and bolting the door behind them, in case
of pursuit from the hall, and Tom was for the first time in a Rugby
boy's citadel.
He hadn't been prepared for separate studies, and was not a little
astonished and delighted with the palace in question.
It wasn't very large certainly, being about six feet long by four broad.
It couldn't be called light, as there were bars and a grating to the
window; which little precautions were necessary in the studies on the
ground floor looking out into the close, to prevent the exit of small
boys after locking-up, and the entrance of contraband articles. But it
was uncommonly comfortable to look at, Tom thought. The space under the
window at the further end was occupied by a square table covered with a
reasonably clean and whole red and blue check table-cloth; a hard-seated
sofa covered with red stuff occupied one side, running up to the end,
and making a seat for one, or, by sitting close, for two, at the table;
and a good stout wooden chair afforded a seat to another boy, so that
three could sit and work together. The walls were wainscoted half-way
up, the wainscot being covered with green baize, the remainder with a
bright-patterned paper, on which hung three or four prints, of dogs'
heads, Grimaldi winning the Aylesbury steeplechase, Amy Robsart, the
reigning Waverley beauty of the day, and Tom Crib in a posture of
defence, which did no credit to the science of that hero, if truly
represented. Over the door were a row of hat-pegs, and on each side
bookcases with cupboards at the bottom; shelves and cupboards being
filled indiscriminately with school-books, a cup or two, a mousetrap,
and brass candlesticks, leather straps, a fustian bag, and some
curious-looking articles, which puzzled Tom not a little, until his
friend explained that they were climbing irons, and showed their use. A
cricket-bat and small fishing-rod stood up in one corner.
This was the residence of East and another boy in the same form, and had
more interest for Tom than Windsor Castle, or any other residence in the
British Isles. For was he not about to become the joint owner of a
similar home, the first place which he could call his own? One's own!
What a charm there is in the words! How long it takes boy and man to
find out their worth! how fast most of us hold on to them! faster and
more jealously the nearer we are to that general home into which we can
take nothing, but must go naked as we came into the world. When shall we
learn that he who multiplieth possessions multiplieth troubles, and that
the one single use of things which we call our own is that they may be
his who hath need of them?
"And shall I have a study like this too?" said Tom.
"Yes, of course, you'll be chummed with some fellow on Monday, and you
can sit here till then."
"What nice places!"
"They're well enough," answered East patronizingly, "only uncommon cold
at nights sometimes. Gower--that's my chum--and I make a fire with paper
on the floor after supper generally, only that makes it so smoky."
"But there's a big fire out in the passage," said Tom.
"Precious little good we get out of that though," said East; "Jones the
præpostor has the study at the fire end, and he has rigged up an iron
rod and green baize curtain across the passage, which he draws at night,
and sits there with his door open, so he gets all the fire, and hears if
we come out of our studies after eight, or make a noise. However, he's
taken to sitting in the fifth-form room lately, so we do get a bit of
fire now sometimes; only to keep a sharp look-out that he don't catch
you behind his curtain when he comes down--that's all."
A quarter-past one now struck, and the bell began tolling for dinner, so
they went into the hall and took their places, Tom at the very bottom of
the second table, next to the præpostor (who sat at the end to keep
order there), and East a few paces higher. And now Tom for the first
time saw his future school-fellows in a body. In they came, some hot and
ruddy from football or long walks, some pale and chilly from hard
reading in their studies, some from loitering over the fire at the
pastrycook's, dainty mortals, bringing with them pickles and
sauce-bottles to help them with their dinners. And a great big-bearded
man, whom Tom took for a master, began calling over the names, while the
great joints were being rapidly carved on a third table in the corner by
the old verger and the housekeeper. Tom's turn came last, and meanwhile
he was all eyes, looking first with awe at the great man who sat close
to him, and was helped first, and who read a hard-looking book all the
time he was eating; and when he got up and walked off to the fire, at
the small boys round him, some of whom were reading, and the rest
talking in whispers to one another, or stealing one another's bread, or
shooting pellets, or digging their forks through the table-cloth.
However, notwithstanding his curiosity, he managed to make a capital
dinner by the time the big man called "Stand up!" and said grace.
As soon as dinner was over, and Tom had been questioned by such of his
neighbours as were curious as to his birth, parentage, education, and
other like matters, East, who evidently enjoyed his new dignity of
patron and Mentor, proposed having a look at the close, which Tom,
athirst for knowledge, gladly assented to, and they went out through the
quadrangle and past the big fives'-court, into the great playground.
"That's the chapel, you see," said East, "and there just behind it is
the place for fights; you see it's most out of the way of the masters,
who all live on the other side and don't come by here after first lesson
or callings-over. That's when the fights come off. And all this part
where we are is the little side-ground, right up to the trees, and on
the other side of the trees is the big side-ground, where the great
matches are played. And there's the island in the furthest corner;
you'll know that well enough next half, when there's island fagging. I
say, it's horrid cold, let's have a run across," and away went East, Tom
close behind him. East was evidently putting his best foot foremost, and
Tom, who was mighty proud of his running, and not a little anxious to
show his friend that although a new boy he was no milksop, laid himself
down to the work in his very best style. Right across the close they
went, each doing all he knew, and there wasn't a yard between them when
they pulled up at the island moat.
"I say," said East, as soon as he got his wind, looking with much
increased respect at Tom, "you ain't a bad scud, not by no means. Well,
I'm as warm as a toast now."
"But why do you wear white trousers in November?" said Tom. He had been
struck by this peculiarity in the costume of almost all the School-house
boys.
"Why, bless us, don't you know?--No, I forgot. Why, to-day's the
School-house match. Our house plays the whole of the School at football.
And we all wear white trousers, to show 'em we don't care for hacks.
You're in luck to come to-day. You just will see a match; and Brooke's
going to let me play in quarters. That's more than he'll do for any
other lower-school boy, except James, and he's fourteen."
"Who's Brooke?"
"Why that big fellow who called over at dinner, to be sure. He's cock of
the school, and head of the School-house side, and the best kick and
charger in Rugby."
"Oh, but do show me where they play? And tell me about it. I love
football so, and have played all my life. Won't Brooke let me play?"
"Not he," said East, with some indignation; "why, you don't know the
rules--you'll be a month learning them. And then it's no joke playing-up
in a match, I can tell you. Quite another thing from your private school
games. Why, there's been two collar-bones broken this half, and a dozen
fellows lamed. And last year a fellow had his leg broken."
Tom listened with the profoundest respect to this chapter of accidents,
and followed East across the level ground till they came to a sort of
gigantic gallows of two poles eighteen feet high, fixed upright in the
ground some fourteen feet apart, with a cross bar running from one to
the other at the height of ten feet or thereabouts.
"This is one of the goals," said East, "and you see the other across
there, right opposite, under the Doctor's wall. Well, the match is for
the best of three goals; whichever side kicks two goals wins: and it
won't do, you see, just to kick the ball through these posts, it must go
over the cross bar; any height'll do, so long as it's between the posts.
You'll have to stay in goal to touch the ball when it rolls behind the
posts, because if the other side touch it they have a try at goal. Then
we fellows in quarters, we play just about in front of goal here, and
have to turn the ball and kick it back before the big fellows on the
other side can follow it up. And in front of us all the big fellows
play, and that's where the scrummages are mostly."
Tom's respect increased as he struggled to make out his friend's
technicalities, and the other set to work to explain the mysteries of
"off your side," "drop-kicks," "punts," "places," and the other
intricacies of the great science of football.
"But how do you keep the ball between the goals?" said he. "I can't see
why it mightn't go right down to the chapel."
"Why, that's out of play," answered East. "You see this gravel walk
running down all along this side of the playing-ground, and the line of
elms opposite on the other? Well, they're the bounds. As soon as the
ball gets past them, it's in touch, and out of play. And then whoever
first touches it, has to knock it straight out amongst the players-up,
who make two lines with a space between them, every fellow going on his
own side. Ain't there just fine scrummages then! and the three trees you
see there which come out into the play, that's a tremendous place when
the ball hangs there, for you get thrown against the trees, and that's
worse than any hack."
Tom wondered within himself as they strolled back again towards the
fives' court, whether the matches were really such break-neck affairs as
East represented, and whether, if they were, he should ever get to like
them and play-up well.
He hadn't long to wonder, however, for next minute East cried out,
"Hurra! here's the punt-about,--come along and try your hand at a kick."
The punt-about is the practice ball, which is just brought out and
kicked about anyhow from one boy to another before callings over and
dinner, and at other odd times. They joined the boys who had brought it
out, all small School-house fellows, friends of East; and Tom had the
pleasure of trying his skill, and performed very creditably, after first
driving his foot three inches into the ground, and then nearly kicking
his leg into the air, in vigorous efforts to accomplish a drop-kick
after the manner of East.
Presently more boys and bigger came out, and boys from other houses on
their way to calling-over, and more balls were sent for. The crowd
thickened as three o'clock approached; and when the hour struck, one
hundred and fifty boys were hard at work. Then the balls were held, the
master of the week came down in cap and gown to calling-over, and the
whole school of three hundred boys swept into the big school to answer
to their names.
"I may come in, mayn't I?" said Tom, catching East by the arm and
longing to feel one of them.
"Yes, come along, nobody'll say anything. You won't be so eager to get
into calling-over after a month," replied his friend; and they marched
into the big school together, and up to the further end, where that
illustrious form, the lower fourth, which had the honour of East's
patronage for the time being, stood.
The master mounted into the high desk by the door, and one of the
præpostors of the week stood by him on the steps, the other three
marching up and down the middle of the school with their canes, calling
out "Silence, silence!" The sixth form stood close by the door on the
left, some thirty in number, mostly great big grown men, as Tom thought,
surveying them from a distance with awe. The fifth form behind them,
twice their number and not quite so big. These on the left; and on the
right the lower fifth, shell, and all the junior forms in order; while
up the middle marched the three præpostors.
Then the præpostor who stands by the master calls out the names,
beginning with the sixth form, and as he calls, each boy answers "Here"
to his name, and walks out. Some of the sixth stop at the door to turn
the whole string of boys into the close; it is a great match day, and
every boy in the school, will-he, nill-he, must be there. The rest of
the sixth go forwards into the close, to see that no one escapes by any
of the side gates.
To-day, however, being the School-house match, none of the School-house
præpostors stay by the door to watch for truants of their side; there is
_carte blanche_ to the School-house fags to go where they like: "They
trust to our honour," as East proudly informs Tom; "they know very well
that no School-house boy would cut the match. If he did, we'd very soon
cut him, I can tell you."
The master of the week being short-sighted, and the præpostors of the
week small and not well up to their work, the lower school boys employ
the ten minutes which elapse before their names are called, in pelting
one another vigorously with acorns, which fly about in all directions.
The small præpostors dash in every now and then, and generally chastise
some quiet, timid boy who is equally afraid of acorns and canes, while
the principal performers get dexterously out of the way; and so
calling-over rolls on somehow, much like the big world, punishments
lighting on wrong shoulders, and matters going generally in a queer,
cross-grained way, but the end coming somehow, which is after all the
great point. And now the master of the week has finished, and locked up
the big school; and the præpostors of the week come out, sweeping the
last remnant of the school fags--who had been loafing about the corners
by the fives' court, in hopes of a chance of bolting--before them into
the close.
"Hold the punt-about!" "To the goals!" are the cries, and all stray
balls are impounded by the authorities; and the whole mass of boys moves
up towards the two goals, dividing as they go into three bodies. That
little band on the left, consisting of from fifteen to twenty boys, Tom
amongst them, who are making for the goal under the School-house wall,
are the School-house boys who are not to play-up, and have to stay in
goal. The larger body moving to the island goal, are the school-boys in
a like predicament. The great mass in the middle are the players-up,
both sides mingled together; they are hanging their jackets, and, all
who mean real work, their hats, waistcoats, neck-handkerchiefs, and
braces, on the railings round the small trees; and there they go by twos
and threes up to their respective grounds. There is none of the colour
and tastiness of get-up, you will perceive, which lends such a life to
the present game at Rugby, making the dullest and worst-fought match a
pretty sight. Now each house has its own uniform of cap and jersey, of
some lively colour: but at the time we are speaking of, plush caps have
not yet come in or uniforms of any sort, except the School-house white
trousers, which are abominably cold to-day: let us get to work,
bare-headed and girded with our plain leather straps--but we mean
business, gentlemen.
And now that the two sides have fairly sundered, and each occupies its
own ground, and we get a good look at them what absurdity is this? You
don't mean to say that those fifty or sixty boys in white trousers, many
of them quite small, are going to play that huge mass opposite? Indeed I
do, gentlemen; they're going to try at any rate, and won't make such a
bad fight of it either, mark my word; for hasn't old Brooke won the
toss, with his lucky halfpenny, and got choice of goals and kick-off?
The new ball you may see lie there quite by itself, in the middle,
pointing towards the school or island goal; in another minute it will be
well on its way there. Use that minute in remarking how the
School-house side is drilled. You will see in the first place, that the
sixth-form boy, who has the charge of goal, has spread his force (the
goal-keepers) so as to occupy the whole space behind the goal-posts, at
distances of about five yards apart; a safe and well-kept goal is the
foundation of all good play. Old Brooke is talking to the captain of
quarters; and now he moves away; see how that youngster spreads his men
(the light brigade) carefully over the ground, half-way between their
own goal and the body of their own players-up (the heavy brigade). These
again play in several bodies; there is young Brooke and the
bull-dogs--mark them well--they are the "fighting brigade," the
"die-hards," larking about at leap-frog to keep themselves warm, and
playing tricks on one another. And on each side of old Brooke, who is
now standing in the middle of the ground and just going to kick off, you
see a separate wing of players-up, each with a boy of acknowledged
prowess to look to--here Warner, and there Hedge; but over all is old
Brooke, absolute as he of Russia, but wisely and bravely ruling over
willing and worshipping subjects, a true football king. His face is
earnest and careful as he glances a last time over his array, but full
of pluck and hope, the sort of look I hope to see in my general when I
go out to fight.
The School side is not organized in the same way. The goal-keepers are
all in lumps, anyhow and nohow; you can't distinguish between the
players-up and the boys in quarters, and there is divided leadership;
but with such odds in strength and weight it must take more than that to
hinder them from winning; and so their leaders seem to think, for they
let the players-up manage themselves.
But now look, there is a slight move forward of the School-house wings;
a shout of "Are you ready?" and loud affirmative reply. Old Brooke takes
half-a-dozen quick steps, and away goes the ball spinning towards the
School goal; seventy yards before it touches ground, and at no point
above twelve or fifteen feet high, a model kick-off; and the
School-house cheer and rush on; the ball is returned, and they meet it
and drive it back amongst the masses of the School already in motion.
Then the two sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a
swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where
the ball is, and there are the keen players to be met, and the glory and
the hard knocks to be got: you hear the dull thud thud of the ball, and
the shouts of "Off your side," "Down with him," "Put him over," "Bravo!"
This is what we call a scrummage, gentlemen, and the first scrummage in
a School-house match was no joke in the consulship of Plancus.
But see! it has broken; the ball is driven out on the School-house side,
and a rush of the School carries it past the School-house players-up.
"Look out in quarters," Brooke's and twenty other voices ring out; no
need to call though, the School-house captain of quarters has caught it
on the bound, dodges the foremost school-boys, who are heading the rush,
and sends it back with a good drop-kick well into the enemy's country.
And then follows rush upon rush, and scrummage upon scrummage, the ball
now driven through into the School-house quarters, and now into the
School goal; for the School-house have not lost the advantage which the
kick-off and a slight wind gave them at the outset, and are slightly
"penning" their adversaries. You say you don't see much in it all;
nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball, which seems
to excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a bull. My dear sir,
a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be
men, and the balls iron; but a battle would be worth your looking at for
all that, and so is a football match. You can't be expected to
appreciate the delicate strokes of play, the turns by which a game is
lost and won,--it takes an old player to do that, but the broad
philosophy of football you can understand if you will. Come along with
me a little nearer, and let us consider it together.
The ball has just fallen again where the two sides are thickest, and
they close rapidly around it in a scrummage; it must be driven through
now by force or skill, till it flies out on one side or the other. Look
how differently the boys face it! Here come two of the bull-dogs,
bursting through the outsiders; in they go, straight to the heart of the
scrummage, bent on driving that ball out on the opposite side. That is
what they mean to do. My sons, my sons! you are too hot; you have gone
past the ball, and must struggle now right through the scrummage, and
get round and back again to your own side, before you can be of any
further use. Here comes young Brooke; he goes in as straight as you, but
keeps his head, and backs and bends, holding himself still behind the
ball, and driving it furiously when he gets the chance. Take a leaf out
of his book, you young chargers. Here come Speedicut, and Flashman the
School-house bully, with shouts and great action. Won't you two come up
to young Brooke, after locking up, by the School-house fire, with "Old
fellow, wasn't that just a splendid scrummage by the three trees!" But
he knows you, and so do we. You don't really want to drive that ball
through that scrummage, chancing all hurt for the glory of the
School-house--but to make us think that's what you want--a vastly
different thing; and fellows of your kidney will never go through more
than the skirts of a scrummage, where it's all push and no kicking. We
respect boys who keep out of it, and don't sham going in; but you--we
had rather not say what we think of you.
Then the boys who are bending and watching on the outside, mark
them--they are most useful players, the dodgers; who seize on the ball
the moment it rolls out from amongst the chargers, and away with it
across to the opposite goal; they seldom go into the scrummage, but must
have more coolness than the chargers: as endless as are boys'
characters, so are their ways of facing or not facing a scrummage at
football.
Three-quarters of an hour are gone; first winds are failing, and weight
and numbers beginning to tell. Yard by yard the School-house have been
driven back, contesting every inch of ground. The bull-dogs are the
colour of mother earth from shoulder to ankle, except young Brooke, who
has a marvellous knack of keeping his legs. The School-house are being
penned in their turn, and now the ball is behind their goal, under the
Doctor's wall. The Doctor and some of his family are there looking on,
and seem as anxious as any boy for the success of the School-house. We
get a minute's breathing time before old Brooke kicks out, and he gives
the word to play strongly for touch, by the three trees. Away goes the
ball, and the bull-dogs after it, and in another minute there is a shout
of "In touch," "Our ball." Now's your time, old Brooke, while your men
are still fresh. He stands with the ball in his hand, while the two
sides form in deep lines opposite one another: he must strike it
straight out between them. The lines are thickest close to him, but
young Brooke and two or three of his men are shifting up further, where
the opposite line is weak. Old Brooke strikes it out straight and
strong, and it falls opposite his brother. Hurra! that rush has taken it
right through the School line, and away past the three trees, far into
their quarters, and young Brooke and the bull-dogs are close upon it.
The School leaders rush back shouting "Look out in goal," and strain
every nerve to catch him, but they are after the fleetest foot in Rugby.
There they go straight for the School goal-posts, quarters scattering
before them. One after another the bull-dogs go down, but young Brooke
holds on. "He is down." No! a long stagger, and the danger is past; that
was the shock of Crew, the most dangerous of dodgers. And now he is
close to the School goal, the ball not three yards before him. There is
a hurried rush of the School fags to the spot, but no one throws himself
on the ball, the only chance, and young Brooke has touched it right
under the School goal-posts.
The School leaders come up furious, and administer toco to the wretched
fags nearest at hand: they may well be angry, for it is all
Lombard-street to a china orange that the School-house kick a goal with
the ball touched in such a good place. Old Brooke of course will kick
it out, but who shall catch and place it? Call Crab Jones. Here he
comes, sauntering along with a straw in his mouth, the queerest, coolest
fish in Rugby: if he were tumbled into the moon this minute, he would
just pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets or
turning a hair. But it is a moment when the boldest charger's heart
beats quick. Old Brooke stands with the ball under his arm motioning the
School back; he will not kick-out till they are all in goal, behind the
posts; they are all edging forwards, inch by inch, to get nearer for the
rush at Crab Jones, who stands there in front of old Brooke to catch the
ball. If they can reach and destroy him before he catches, the danger is
over; and with one and the same rush they will carry it right away to
the School-house goal. Fond hope! it is kicked out and caught
beautifully. Crab strikes his heel into the ground, to mark the spot
where the ball was caught, beyond which the School line may not advance;
but there they stand, five deep, ready to rush the moment the ball
touches the ground. Take plenty of room! don't give the rush a chance of
reaching you! place it true and steady! Trust Crab Jones--he has made a
small hole with his heel for the ball to lie on, by which he is resting
on one knee, with his eye on old Brooke. "Now!" Crab places the ball at
the word, old Brooke kicks, and it rises slowly and truly as the School
rush forward.
Then a moment's pause, while both sides look up at the spinning ball.
There it flies, straight between the two posts, some five feet above the
cross-bar, an unquestioned goal; and a shout of real genuine joy rings
out from the School-house players-up, and a faint echo of it comes over
the close from the goal-keepers under the Doctor's wall. A goal in the
first hour--such a thing hasn't been done in the School-house match this
five years.
"Over!" is the cry: the two sides change goals, and the School-house
goal-keepers come threading their way across through the masses of the
School; the most openly triumphant of them, amongst whom is Tom, a
School-house boy of two hours' standing, getting their ears boxed in the
transit. Tom indeed is excited beyond measure, and it is all the
sixth-form boy, kindest and safest of goal-keepers, has been able to do,
to keep him from rushing out whenever the ball has been near their goal.
So he holds him by his side, and instructs him in the science of
touching.
At this moment Griffith, the itinerant vendor of oranges from Hill
Morton, enters the close with his heavy baskets; there is a rush of
small boys upon the little pale-faced man, the two sides mingling
together, subdued by the great Goddess Thirst, like the English and
French by the streams in the Pyrenees. The leaders are past oranges and
apples, but some of them visit their coats, and apply innocent looking
ginger-beer bottles to their mouths. It is no ginger-beer though, I
fear, and will do you no good. One short mad rush, and then a stitch in
the side, and no more honest play; that's what comes of those bottles.
But now Griffith's baskets are empty, the ball is placed again midway,
and the School are going to kick off. Their leaders have sent their
lumber into goal, and rated the rest soundly, and one hundred and twenty
picked players-up are there, bent on retrieving the game. They are to
keep the ball in front of the School-house goal, and then to drive it in
by sheer strength and weight. They mean heavy play and no mistake, and
so old Brooke sees; and places Crab Jones in quarters just before the
goal, with four or five picked players, who are to keep the ball away to
the sides, where a try at goal, if obtained, will be less dangerous than
in front. He himself, and Warner and Hedge, who have saved themselves
till now, will lead the charges.
"Are you ready?" "Yes." And away comes the ball kicked high in the air,
to give the School time to rush on and catch it as it falls. And here
they are amongst us. Meet them like Englishmen, you School-house boys,
and charge them home. Now is the time to show what mettle is in you--and
there shall be a warm seat by the hall fire, and honour, and lots of
bottled beer to-night, for him who does his duty in the next half-hour.
And they are well met. Again and again the cloud of their players-up
gathers before our goal, and comes threatening on, and Warner or Hedge,
with young Brooke and the relics of the bull-dogs, break through and
carry the ball back; and old Brooke ranges the field like Job's
war-horse, the thickest scrummage parts asunder before his rush, like
the waves before a clipper's bows; his cheery voice rings over the
field, and his eye is everywhere. And if these miss the ball, and it
rolls dangerously in front of our goal, Crab Jones and his men have
seized it and sent it away towards the sides with the unerring
drop-kick. This is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy
existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a
half-hour worth a year of common life.
The quarter to five has struck, and the play slackens for a minute
before goal; but there is Crew, the artful dodger, driving the ball in
behind our goal, on the island side, where our quarters are weakest. Is
there no one to meet him? Yes! look at little East! the ball is just at
equal distances between the two, and they rush together, the young man
of seventeen and the boy of twelve, and kick it at the same moment. Crew
passes on without a stagger; East is hurled forward by the shock, and
plunges on his shoulders, as if he would bury himself in the ground; but
the ball rises straight into the air, and falls behind Crew's back,
while the "bravos" of the School-house attest the pluckiest charge of
all that hard-fought day. Warner picks East up lame and half stunned,
and he hobbles back into goal conscious of having played the man.
And now the last minutes are come, and the School gather for their last
rush every boy of the hundred and twenty who has a run left in him.
Reckless of the defence of their own goal, on they come across the level
big-side ground, the ball well down amongst them straight for our goal,
like the column of the Old Guard up the slope at Waterloo. All former
charges have been child's play to this. Warner and Hedge have met them,
but still on they come. The bull-dogs rush in for the last time; they
are hurled over or carried back, striving hand, foot, and eyelids. Old
Brooke comes sweeping round the skirts of the play, and, turning short
round, picks out the very heart of the scrummage, and plunges in. It
wavers for a moment--he has the ball! No, it has passed him, and his
voice rings out clear over the advancing tide "Look out in goal." Crab
Jones catches it for a moment; but before he can kick, the rush is upon
him and passes over him; and he picks himself up behind them with his
straw in his mouth, a little dirtier, but as cool as ever.
The ball rolls slowly in behind the School-house goal not three yards in
front of a dozen of the biggest School players-up.
There stand the School-house præpostor, safest of goal-keepers, and Tom
Brown by his side, who has learned his trade by this time. Now is your
time, Tom. The blood of all the Browns is up, and the two rush in
together, and throw themselves on the ball, under the very feet of the
advancing column; the præpostor on his hands and knees arching his back,
and Tom all along on his face. Over them topple the leaders of the rush,
shooting over the back of the præpostor, but falling flat on Tom, and
knocking all the wind out of his small carcase. "Our ball," says the
præpostor, rising with his prize; "but get up there, there's a little
fellow under you." They are hauled and roll off him, and Tom is
discovered a motionless body.
Old Brooke picks him up. "Stand back, give him air," he says; and then
feeling his limbs, adds, "No bones broken. How do you feel, young un?"
"Hah-hah," gasps Tom as his wind comes back, "pretty well, thank
you--all right."
"Who is he?" says Brooke. "Oh, it's Brown; he's a new boy; I know him,"
says East, coming up.
"Well, he is a plucky youngster, and will make a player," says Brooke.
And five o'clock strikes. "No side" is called, and the first day of the
School-house match is over.
CHAPTER VI.
AFTER THE MATCH.
"----Some food we had."--_Shakspere._
[Greek: ês potos hadys.]--THEOCR. _Id._
AS the boys scattered away from the ground, and East leaning on Tom's
arm, and limping along, was beginning to consider what luxury they
should go and buy for tea to celebrate that glorious victory, the two
Brookes came striding by. Old Brooke caught sight of East, and stopped;
put his hand kindly on his shoulder and said, "Bravo, youngster, you
played famously;
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