Fathers of Men
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Title: Fathers of Men
Author: E. W. Hornung
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATHERS OF MEN ***
FATHERS OF MEN
BOOKS BY E. W. HORNUNG
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_The Raffles Series_
The Amateur Cracksman. 12mo, $1.25
Raffles. Illustrated. 12mo, 1.50
A Thief In the Night. Illustrated, 12mo, 1.50
Mr. Justice Raffles. 12mo, 1.50
Fathers of Men. _net_, 1.30
(postage extra)
The Camera Fiend. Illustrated. 12mo, _net_, 1.25
Stingaree. Illustrated. 12mo, 1.50
No Hero. 12mo, 1.25
At Large. 12mo, 1.50
Some Persons Unknown. 12mo, 1.25
Young Blood. 12mo, 1.25
My Lord Duke. 12mo, 1.25
A Bride from the Bush. 16mo, .75
The Rogue’s March. A Romance. 12mo, 1.50
FATHERS OF MEN
BY
E. W. HORNUNG
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published February, 1912
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BEHIND THE SCENES 1
II. CHANGE AND CHANCE 11
III. VERY RAW MATERIAL 21
IV. SETTLING IN 33
V. NICKNAMES 43
VI. BOY TO BOY 53
VII. REASSURANCE 62
VIII. LIKES AND DISLIKES 75
IX. CORAM POPULO 90
X. ELEGIACS 105
XI. A MERRY CHRISTMAS 123
XII. THE NEW YEAR 133
XIII. THE HAUNTED HOUSE 146
XIV. “SUMMER-TERM” 163
XV. SPRAWSON’S MASTERPIECE 174
XVI. SIMILIA SIMILIBUS 186
XVII. THE FUN OF THE FAIR 196
XVIII. DARK HORSES 212
XIX. FAME AND FORTUNE 225
XX. THE EVE OF OFFICE 240
XXI. OUT OF FORM 250
XXII. THE OLD BOYS’ MATCH 259
XXIII. INTERLUDE IN A STUDY 266
XXIV. THE SECOND MORNING’S PLAY 277
XXV. INTERLUDE IN THE WOOD 290
XXVI. CLOSE OF PLAY 304
XXVII. THE EXTREME PENALTY 317
XXVIII. “LIKE LUCIFER” 328
XXIX. CHIPS AND JAN 336
XXX. HIS LAST FLING 349
XXXI. VALE 360
FATHERS OF MEN
CHAPTER I
BEHIND THE SCENES
The two new boys in Heriot’s house had been suitably entertained at his
table, and afterwards in his study with bound volumes of _Punch_.
Incidentally they had been encouraged to talk, with the result that one
boy had talked too much, while the other shut a stubborn mouth tighter
than before. The babbler displayed an exuberant knowledge of
contemporary cricket, a more conscious sense of humour, and other little
qualities which told their tale. He opened the door for Miss Heriot
after dinner, and even thanked her for the evening when it came to an
end. His companion, on the other hand, after brooding over Leech and
Tenniel with a sombre eye, beat a boorish retreat without a word.
Heriot saw the pair to the boys’ part of the house. He was filling his
pipe when he returned to the medley of books, papers, photographic
appliances, foxes’ masks, alpen-stocks and venerable oak, that made his
study a little room in which it was difficult to sit down and impossible
to lounge. His sister, perched upon a coffin-stool, was busy mounting
photographs at a worm-eaten bureau.
“How I hate our rule that a man mayn’t smoke before a boy!” exclaimed
Heriot, emitting a grateful cloud. “And how I wish we didn’t have the
new boys on our hands a whole day before the rest!”
“I should have thought there was a good deal to be said for that,”
remarked his sister, intent upon her task.
“You mean from the boys’ point of view?”
“Exactly. It must be such a plunge for them as it is, poor things.”
“It’s the greatest plunge in life,” Heriot vehemently agreed. “But here
we don’t let them make it; we think it kinder to put them in an empty
bath, and then turn on the cold tap—after first warming them at our own
fireside! It’s always a relief to me when these evenings are over. The
boys are never themselves, and I don’t think I’m much better than the
boys. We begin by getting a false impression of each other.”
Heriot picked his way among his old oak things as he spoke; but at every
turn he had a narrow eye upon his sister. He was a lanky man, many years
her senior; his beard had grown grey, and his shoulders round, in his
profession. A restless energy marked all his movements, and was
traceable in the very obstacles to his present perambulations; they were
the spoils of the inveterate wanderer from the beaten track, who wanders
with open hand and eye. Spectacles in steel rims twinkled at each alert
turn of the grizzled head; and the look through the spectacles, always
quick and keen, was kindly rather than kind, and just rather than
compassionate.
“I liked Carpenter,” said Miss Heriot, as she dried a dripping print
between sheets of blotting-paper.
“I like all boys until I have reason to dislike them.”
“Carpenter had something to say for himself.”
“There’s far more character in Rutter.”
“He never opened his mouth.”
“It’s his mouth I go by, as much as anything.”
Miss Heriot coated the back of the print with starch, and laid it
dexterously in its place. A sheet of foolscap and her handkerchief—an
almost unfeminine handkerchief—did the rest. And still she said no
more.
“You didn’t think much of Rutter, Milly?”
“I thought he had a bad accent and——”
“Go on.”
“Well—to be frank—worse manners!”
“Milly, you are right, and I’m not sure that I oughtn’t to be frank with
you. Let the next print wait a minute. I like you to see something of
the fellows in my house; it’s only right that you should know something
about them first. I’ve a great mind to tell you what I don’t intend
another soul in the place to know.”
Heriot had planted himself in British attitude, heels to the fender.
Miss Heriot turned round on her stool. She was as like her brother as a
woman still young can be like a rather elderly man; her hair was fair,
and she had not come to spectacles; but her eyes were as keen and kindly
as his own, her whole countenance as sensible and shrewd.
“You can trust me, Bob,” she said.
“I know I can,” he answered, pipe in hand. “That’s why I’m going to tell
you what neither boy nor man shall learn through me. What type of lad
does this poor Rutter suggest to your mind?”
There was a pause.
“I hardly like to say.”
“But I want to know.”
“Well—then—I’m sure I couldn’t tell you why—but he struck me as more
like a lad from the stables than anything else.”
“What on earth makes you think that?” Heriot spoke quite sharply in his
plain displeasure and surprise.
“I said I couldn’t tell you, Bob. I suppose it was a general association
of ideas. He had his hat on, for one thing, when I saw him first; and it
was far too large for him, and crammed down almost to those dreadful
ears! I never saw any boy outside a stable-yard wear his hat like that.
Then your hunting was the one thing that seemed to interest him in the
least. And I certainly thought he called a horse a 'hoss’!”
“So he put you in mind of a stable-boy, did he?”
“Well, not exactly at the time, but he really does the more I think
about him.”
“That’s very clever of you, Milly—because it’s just what he is.”
Heriot’s open windows were flush with the street, and passing footfalls
sounded loud in his room; but at the moment there were none; and a clock
ticked officiously on the chimneypiece while the man with his back to it
met his sister’s eyes.
“Of course you don’t mean it literally?”
“Literally.”
“I thought his grandfather was a country parson?”
“A rural dean, my dear; but the boy’s father was a coachman, and the boy
himself was brought up in the stables until six months ago.”
“The father’s dead, then?”
“He died in the spring. His wife has been dead fourteen years. It’s a
very old story. She ran away with the groom.”
“But her people have taken an interest in the boy?”
“Never set eyes on him till his father died.”
“Then how can he know enough to come here?”
Heriot smiled as he pulled at his pipe. He had the air of a man who has
told the worst. His sister had taken it as he hoped she would; her face
and voice betokened just that kind of interest in the case which he
already felt strongly. It was a sympathetic interest, but that was all.
There was nothing sentimental about either of the Heriots; they could
discuss most things frankly on their merits; the school itself was no
exception to the rule. It was wife and child to Robert Heriot—the
school of his manhood—the vineyard in which he had laboured lovingly
for thirty years. But still he could smile as he smoked his pipe.
“Our standard is within the reach of most,” he said; “there are those
who would tell you it’s the scorn of the scholastic world. We don’t go
in for making scholars. We go in for making men. Give us the raw
material of a man, and we won’t reject it because it doesn’t know the
Greek alphabet—no, not even if it was fifteen on its last birthday!
That’s our system, and I support it through thick and thin; but it lays
us open to worse types than escaped stable-boys.”
“This boy doesn’t look fifteen.”
“Nor is he—quite—much less the type I had in mind. He has a head on
his shoulders, and something in it too. It appears that the vicar where
he came from took an interest in the lad, and got him on as far as Cæsar
and Euclid for pure love.”
“That speaks well for the lad,” put in Miss Heriot, impartially.
“I must say that it appealed to me. Then he’s had a tutor for the last
six months; and neither tutor nor vicar has a serious word to say
against his character. The tutor, moreover, is a friend of Arthur
Drysdale’s, who was captain of this house when I took it over, and the
best I ever had. That’s what brought them to me. The boy should take
quite a good place. I should be very glad to have him in my own form, to
see what they’ve taught him between them. I confess I’m interested in
him; his mother was a lady; but you may almost say he never saw her in
his life. Yet it’s the mother who counts in the being of a boy. Has the
gentle blood been hopelessly poisoned by the stink of the stables, or is
it going to triumph and run clean and sweet? It’s a big question, Milly,
and it’s not the only one involved.”
Heriot had propounded it with waving pipe that required another match
when he was done; through the mountain tan upon his face, and in the
eager eyes behind the glasses, shone the zeal of the expert to whom boys
are dearer than men or women. The man is rare; rarer still the woman who
can even understand him; but here in this little room of books and
antique lumber, you had the pair.
“I’m glad you told me,” said Miss Heriot, at length. “I fear I should
have been prejudiced if you had not.”
“My one excuse for telling you,” was the grave rejoinder. “No one else
shall ever know through me; not even Mr. Thrale, unless some special
reason should arise. The boy shall have every chance. He doesn’t even
know I know myself, and I don’t want him ever to suspect. It’s quite a
problem, for I must keep an eye on him more than on most; yet I daren’t
be down on him, and I daren’t stand up for him; he must sink or swim for
himself.”
“I’m afraid he’ll have a bad time,” said Miss Heriot, picking a print
from the water and blotting it as before. Her brother had seated himself
at another bureau to write his letters.
“I don’t mind betting Carpenter has a worse,” he rejoined without
looking up.
“But he’s so enthusiastic about everything?”
“That’s a quality we appreciate; boys don’t, unless there’s prowess
behind it. Carpenter talks cricket like a _Lillywhite_, but he doesn’t
look a cricketer. Rutter doesn’t talk about it, but his tutor says he’s
a bit of a bowler. Carpenter beams because he’s got to his public school
at last. He has illusions to lose. Rutter knows nothing about us, and
probably cares less; he’s here under protest, you can see it in his
face, and the chances are all in favour of his being pleasantly
disappointed.”
Heriot’s quill was squeaking as he spoke, for he was a man with the
faculty of doing and even thinking of more than one thing at a time; but
though his sister continued mounting photographs in her album with
extreme care, her mind was full of the two young boys who had come that
night to live under their roof for good or ill. She wondered whether her
brother was right in his ready estimate of their respective characters.
She knew him for the expert that he was; these were not the first boys
that she had heard him sum up as confidently on as brief an
acquaintance; and though her knowledge had its obvious limitations, she
had never known him wrong. He had a wonderfully fair mind. And yet the
boy of action, in whom it was possible to stimulate thought, would
always be nearer his heart than the thoughtful boy who might need
goading into physical activity. She could not help feeling that he was
prepared to take an unsympathetic view of the boy who had struck her as
having more in him than most small boys; it was no less plain that his
romantic history and previous disadvantages had already rendered the
other newcomer an object of sympathetic interest in the house-master’s
eyes. The material was new as well as raw, and so doubly welcome to the
workman’s hand. Yet the workman’s sister, who had so much of his own
force and fairness in her nature, felt that she could never like a sulky
lout, however cruel the circumstances which had combined to make him
one.
She felt a good deal more before the last print was in her album; in the
first place that she would see really very little of these two boys
until in years to come they rose to the Sixth Form table over which she
presided in hall. Now and then they might have headaches and be sent in
to keep quiet and look at the _Punches_; but she would never be at all
in touch with them until they were big boys at the top of the house; and
then they would be shy and exceedingly correct, of few words but not too
few, and none too much enthusiasm, like all the other big boys. And that
thought drew a sigh.
“What’s the matter?” came in an instant from the other bureau, where the
quill had ceased to squeak.
“I was thinking that, after all, these two boys have more individuality
than most who come to us.”
“One of them has.”
“Both, I think; and I was wondering how much will be left to either when
we run them out of the mould in five years’ time!”
Heriot came to his feet like an exasperated advocate.
“I know where you get that from!” he cried with a kind of jovial
asperity. “You’ve been reading some of these trashy articles that every
wiseacre who never was at a public school thinks he can write about them
now! That’s one of their stock charges against us, that we melt the boys
down and run them all out of the same mould like bullets. We destroy
individuality; we do nothing but reduplicate a type that thinks the same
thoughts and speaks the same speech, and upholds the same virtues and
condones the same vices. As if real character were a soluble thing! As
if it altered in its essence from the nursery to the cemetery! As if we
could boil away a strong will or an artistic temperament, a mean soul or
a saintly spirit, even in the crucible of a public school!”
His breezy confidence was almost overwhelming; but it did not overwhelm
his hearer, or sweep her with him to his conclusion. She had her own
point of view; more, she had her own coigne of observation. Not every
boy who had passed through the house in her time was the better for
having been there. She had seen the weak go under—into depths she could
not plumb—and the selfish ride serenely on the crest of the wave. She
had seen an unpleasant urchin grow into a more and more displeasing
youth, and inferiority go forth doubly inferior for the misleading
stamp—that precious stamp—which one and all acquired. She loved the
life as she saw it, perforce so superficially; it was a life that
appealed peculiarly to Miss Heriot, who happened to have her own
collegiate experience, an excellent degree of her own, and her own ideas
on education. But from the boys in her brother’s house she held
necessarily aloof; and in her detachment a clear and independent mind
lay inevitably open to questionings, misgivings, intuitions, for which
there was little time in his laborious days.
“But you admit it is a crucible,” she argued. “And what’s a crucible but
a melting-pot?”
“A melting-pot for characteristics, but not for character!” he cried.
“Take the two boys upstairs: in four or five years one will have more to
say for himself, I hope, and the other will leave more unsaid; but the
self that each expresses will be the same self, even though we have
turned a first-rate groom into a second-rate gentleman. 'The Child,’
remember, and not the school, 'is father of the Man.’”
“Then the school’s his mother!” declared Miss Heriot without a moment’s
hesitation.
Heriot gave the sudden happy laugh which his house was never sorry to
hear, and his form found the more infectious for its comparative rarity.
“Does she deny it, Milly? Doesn’t she rub it into every one of them in
Latin that even they can understand? Let’s only hope they’ll be fathers
of better men for the help of this particular _alma mater_!”
The house-master knocked out his pipe into a wooden Kaffir bowl, the
gift of some exiled Old Boy, and went off to bid the two new boys
good-night.
CHAPTER II
CHANGE AND CHANCE
Rutter had been put in the small dormitory at the very top of the house.
Instead of two long rows of cubicles as in the other dormitories, in one
of which he had left Carpenter on the way upstairs, here under the roof
was a square chamber with a dormer window in the sloping side and a
cubicle in each of its four corners. Cubicle was not the school word for
them, according to the matron who came up with the boys, but
“partition,” or “tish” for short. They were about five feet high,
contained a bed and a chair apiece, and were merely curtained at the
foot. But the dormitory door opened into the one allotted to Rutter; it
was large enough to hold a double wash-stand for himself and his
next-door neighbour; and perhaps he was not the first occupant whom it
had put in mind of a loose-box among stalls.
He noted everything with an eye singularly sardonic for fourteen, and as
singularly alive to detail. The common dressing-table was in the dormer
window. The boy had a grim look at himself in the glass. It was not a
particularly pleasant face, with its sombre expression and stubborn
mouth, but it looked brown and hard, and acute enough in its dogged way.
It almost smiled at itself for the fraction of a second, but whether in
resignation or defiance, or with a pinch of involuntary pride in his new
state of life, it would have been difficult even for the boy to say.
Certainly it was with a thrill that he read his own name over his
partition, and then the other boys’ names over theirs. Bingley was the
fellow next him. Joyce and Crabtree were the other two. What would they
be like? What sort of faces would they bring back to the glass in the
dormer window?
Rutter was not conscious of an imagination, but somehow he pictured
Joyce large and lethargic, Crabtree a humorist, and Bingley a bully of
the Flashman type. He had just been reading _Tom Brown_ by advice. He
wondered would the humorist be man enough to join him in standing up to
the brutes, and whether pillow-fights were still the fashion; he did not
believe they were, because Master Evan had never mentioned them; but
then Master Evan had only been at a preparatory school last spring, and
he might have found it quite otherwise at Winchester. The new boy
undressed with an absent mind. He was wondering what it would have been
like if he had been sent to Winchester himself, and there encountered
Master Evan on equal terms. He had never done so much wondering in his
life; he found a school list in the dormitory, and took it to bed with
him, and lay there doing more.
So there was an Upper Sixth and a Lower Sixth, and then a form called
the Remove; and in the Remove, by the way, was friend Joyce of the
corner opposite. Then came the Fifths—three of them—with Crabtree top
of the Lower Fifth. Clever fellow, then, Crabtree! The bully Bingley was
no doubt notoriously low in the school. The Middle Remove came next, and
through each column of strange names the boy read religiously, with a
fascination he could not have explained, here and there conjuring an
incongruous figure from some name he knew. He had got down to the Middle
Fourth when suddenly his breath was taken as by a blow.
Heriot came in to find a face paler than it had looked downstairs, but a
good brown arm and hand lying out over the coverlet, and a Midsummer
List tightly clutched. The muscles of the arm were unusually developed
for so young a boy. Heriot saw them relax under his gaze as he stood
over the bed.
“Got hold of a school list, have you?”
“Yessir,” said Rutter with a slurring alacrity that certainly did not
savour of the schoolroom. Heriot turned away before he could wince; but
unluckily his eyes fell on the floor, strewn with the litter of the new
boy’s clothes.
“I like the way you fold your clothes!” he laughed.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but where am I to put them?”
It was refreshingly polite; but, again, the begging-pardon opening was
not the politeness of a schoolboy.
“On this chair,” said Heriot, suiting the action to the word. The boy
would have leapt out of bed to do it himself. His shyness not only
prevented him, but rendered him incapable of protest or acknowledgement;
and the next moment he had something to be shy about. Mr. Heriot was
holding up a broad and dirty belt, and without thinking he had cried,
“What’s this?”
Rutter could not answer for shame. And Heriot had time to think.
“I can sympathise,” he said with a chuckle; “in the holidays I often
wear one myself. But we mustn’t betray each other, Rutter, or we shall
never hear the last of it! I’ll give you an order for a pair of braces
in the morning.”
“I have them, sir, thanks.”
“That’s right.” Heriot was still handling the belt as though he really
longed to buckle it about himself. Suddenly he noticed the initials, “J.
R.”
“I thought your name was Ian, Rutter?”
“So it is, sir; but they used to call me Jan.”
Heriot waited for a sigh, but the mouth that appealed to him was
characteristically compressed. He sat a few moments on the foot of the
bed. “Well, good-night, and a fair start to you, Jan! The matron will
put out the gas at ten.”
The lad mumbled something; the man looked back to nod, and saw him lying
as he had found him, still clutching the list, only with his face as
deep a colour as his arm.
“Have you come across any names you know?”
“One.”
“Who’s that?”
“He won’t know me.”
They were the sullen answers that had made a bad impression downstairs;
but they were strangely uttered, and Rutter no longer lay still.
“He must have a name,” said Heriot, coming back into the room.
No answer.
“I’m sorry you’re ashamed of your friend,” said Heriot, laughing.
“He’s not my friend, and——”
“I think that’s very likely,” put in Heriot, as the boy shut his lips
once more. “What’s in a name? The chances are that it’s only a namesake
after all.”
He turned away without a sign of annoyance or of further interest in the
matter. But another mumble from the bed intercepted him at the door.
“Name of Devereux,” he made out.
“Devereux, eh?”
“Do you know him, sir?”
“I should think I do!”
“He’ll not be in this house?”
Rutter was holding his breath.
“No, but he got my prize last term.”
“Do you know his other name?”
It was a tremulous mumble now.
“I’m afraid I don’t. Wait a bit! His initials are either E. P. or P. E.
He only came last term.”
“He only would. But I thought he was going to Winchester!”
“That’s the fellow; he got a scholarship and came here instead, at the
last moment.”
The new boy in the top dormitory made no remark when the matron put out
the gas. He was lying on his back with his eyes wide open, and his lips
compressed out of sight, just as Heriot had left him. It was almost a
comfort to him to know the worst for certain; and now that he did know
it, beyond all possibility of doubt, he was beginning to wonder whether
it need necessarily be the worst after all. It might easily prove the
best. He had always liked Master Evan; that was as much as this boy
would admit even in his heart. The fact would have borne a warmer
recognition. Best or worst, however, he knew it as well as though Evan
Devereux had already come back with the rest of the school, and either
cut him dead or grasped his hand. The one thing not to be suspected for
an instant was that the lean oldish man, with the kind word and the
abrupt manner, could possibly know the secret of a new boy’s heart, and
have entered already into his hopes and fears.
It was very quiet in the top dormitory. Rutter wondered what it would be
like when all the boys came back. Carpenter’s dormitory was downstairs,
but they were all within earshot of each other. He wondered what it
would have been like if Master Evan had been in that house, in that
little dormitory, in the partition next his own. Master Evan! Yet he had
never thought of him as anything else, much less addressed him by any
other name. What if it slipped out at school! It easily might; indeed,
far more easily and naturally than “Devereux.” That would sound very
like profanity, in his ears, and on his lips.
The new boy grinned involuntarily in the dark. It was all too absurd. He
had enjoyed ample opportunity of picking up the phraseology of the class
to which he had been lately elevated: “too absurd” would certainly have
been their expression for the situation in which he found himself. He
tried to see it from that point of view. He was not without a wry humour
of his own. He must take care not to magnify a matter which nobody else
might think twice about. A public school was a little world, in which
two boys in different houses, even two of an age, might seldom or never
meet; days might elapse before Evan as much as recognised him in the
throng. But then he might refuse to have anything to do with him. But
then—but then—he might tell the whole school why!
“He was our coachman’s son at home!”
The coachman’s son heard the incredible statement as though it had been
shouted in his ear. He felt a thousand eyes on his devoted face. He knew
that he lay blushing in the dark. It took all his will to calm him by
degrees.
“If he does,” he decided, “I’m off. That’s all.”
But why should he? Why should a young gentleman betray a poor boy’s
secret? Rutter was the stable-boy again in spirit; he might have been
back in his trucklebed in the coachman’s cottage at Mr. Devereux’s. The
transition of standpoint at any rate was complete. He had always liked
Master Evan; they had been very good friends all their lives. Incidents
of the friendship came back in shoals. Evan had been the youngest of a
large family, and that after a gap; in one sense he had been literally
the only child. Often he had needed a boy to play with him, and not
seldom Jan Rutter had been scrubbed and brushed and oiled to the scalp
in order to fill the proud position of that boy. He must have known how
to behave himself as a little kid, though he remembered as he grew older
that the admonition with which he was always dispatched from the stables
used to make it more difficult; there were so many things to “think on”
not to do, and somehow it was harder not to do them when you had always
to keep “thinking on.” Still, he distinctly remembered hearing
complimentary remarks passed upon him by the ladies and gentlemen,
together with whispered explanations of his manners. It was as easy to
supply as to understand those explanations now; but it was sad to feel
that the manners had long ago been lost.
And, boy as he was, and dimly as may be, he did feel this: that in the
beginning there had been very little to choose between Evan and himself,
but that afterwards the gulf had been at one time very wide. He could
recall with shame a phase in which Master Evan had been forbidden, and
not without reason, to have anything to do with Jan Rutter. There was
even a cruel thrashing which he had received for language learnt from
the executioner’s own lips; and it was characteristic of Jan that he had
never quite forgiven his father for that, though he was dead, and had
been a kind father on the whole. Later, the boy about the stables had
acquired more sense; the eccentric vicar had taken him in hand, and
spoken up for him; and nothing was said if he bowled to Master Evan
after his tea, or played a makeshift kind of racquets with him in the
stable-yard, so long as he kept his tongue and his harness clean. So the
gulf had narrowed again of late years; but it had never again been
shallow.
It was spanned, however, by quite a network of mutual offices. In the
beginning Evan used to take all his broken toys to Jan, who was a fine
hand at rigging ships and soldering headless horsemen. Jan’s reward was
the reversion of anything broken beyond repair, or otherwise without
further value to its original owner. Jan was also an adept at roasting
chestnuts and potatoes on the potting-shed fire, a daring manipulator of
molten lead, a comic artist with a piece of putty, and the pioneer of
smoking in the loft. Those were the days when Evan was suddenly
forbidden the back premises, and Jan set definitely to work in the
stables when he was not at the village school. Years elapsed before the
cricket stage that drew the children together again as biggish boys; in
the interim Jan had imbibed wisdom of more kinds than one. On
discovering himself to be a rude natural left-hand bowler, who could
spoil the afternoon at any moment by the premature dismissal of his
opponent, he was sagacious enough to lose the art at times in the most
sudden and mysterious manner, and only to recover it by fits and starts
when Evan had made all the runs he wanted. And as Jan had but little
idea of batting, there was seldom any bad blood over the game. But in
all their relations Jan took care of that, for he had developed a real
devotion to Evan, who could be perfectly delightful to one companion at
a time, when everything was going well.
And then things had happened so thick and fast that it was difficult to
recall them in their chronological order; but the salient points were
that Rutter the elder, that fine figure on a box, with his bushy
whiskers and his bold black eyes, had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia
after a bout of night-work in the month of February, and that the son of
an ironmaster’s coachman by a northern town awoke to find himself the
grandson of an East Anglian clergyman whose ancient name he had never
heard before, but who sent for the lad in hot haste, to make a gentleman
of him if it was not too late.
The change from the raw red outworks of an excessively modern and
utilitarian town, to the most venerable of English rectories, in a
countryside which has scarcely altered since the Conquest, was not
appreciated as it might have been by Jan Rutter. He had nothing against
the fussy architecture and the highly artificial garden of his late
environment; on the contrary, he heartily preferred those familiar
immaturities to the general air of complacent antiquity which pervaded
his new home. That was the novelty to Jan, and there was a prejudice
against it in his veins. It was the very atmosphere which had driven his
mother before him to desperation. Her blood in him rebelled again; nor
did he feel the effect the less because he was too young to trace the
cause. He only knew that he had been happier in a saddle-room that still
smelt of varnish than he was ever likely to be under mellow tiles and
mediæval trees. The tutor and the strenuous training for a public school
came to some extent as a relief; but the queer lad took quite a pride in
showing no pride at all in his altered conditions and prospects. The new
school and the new home were all one to him. He had not been consulted
about either. He recognised an authority which he was powerless to
resist, but there the recognition ended. There could be no question of
gratitude for offices performed out of a cold sense of duty, by beings
of his own blood who never so much as mentioned his father’s death, or
even breathed his mother’s name. There was a tincture of their own pride
even in him.
He had heard of public schools from Evan, and even envied that gilded
child his coming time at one; but, when his own time came so
unexpectedly, Jan had hardened his heart, and faced the inevitable as
callously as any criminal. And then at its hardest his heart had melted
within him: an arbitrary and unkind fate held out the hope of amends by
restoring to his ken the one creature he really wished to see again. It
was true that Jan had heard nothing of Evan since the end of the
Christmas holidays; but then the boys had never exchanged a written word
in their lives. And the more he thought of it, the less Jan feared the
worst that might accrue from their meeting on the morrow or the day
after. Not that he counted on the best: not that his young blood had
warmed incontinently to the prospect which had chilled it hitherto.
Master Evan as an equal was still an inconceivable figure; and the whole
prospect remained grey and grim; but at least there was a glint of
excitement in it now, a vision of depths and heights.
So the night passed, his first at a public school. The only sounds were
those that marked its passage: the muffled ticking of his one treasure,
the little watch under his pillow, and the harsh chimes of an outside
clock which happened to have struck ten as he opened the Midsummer List.
It had since struck eleven; he even heard it strike twelve. But life was
more exciting, when he fell asleep soon after midnight, than Jan Rutter
had dreamt of finding it when he went to bed.
CHAPTER III
VERY RAW MATERIAL
It was all but a summer morning when Jan got back into the trousers
without pockets and the black jacket and tie ordained by the school
authorities. Peculiarly oppressive to Jan was the rule about trouser
pockets; those in his jacket were so full in consequence that there was
barely room for his incriminating belt, which he rolled up as small as
it would go, and made into a parcel to be hidden away in his study when
he had one. This was his last act before leaving the dormitory and
marching downstairs at an hour when most of the household were
presumably still in bed and asleep; but Jan was naturally an early
riser, and he had none of the scruples of conventionality on the score
of an essentially harmless act. He was curious to see something of his
new surroundings, and there was nothing like seeing for oneself.
At the foot of the lead-lined stairs, worn bright as silver at the
edges, there was a short tiled passage with a green baize door at one
end and what was evidently the boys’ hall at the other. The baize door
communicated with the master’s side of the house, for the new boys had
come through it on their way up to dormitory. The hall was a good size,
with one very long table under the windows and two shorter ones on
either side of the fireplace. On the walls hung portraits of the great
composers, which Jan afterwards found to be house prizes in part-singing
competitions discontinued before his time; at the moment, however, he
took no kind of interest in them, and but very little in the two
challenge cups under the clock. What did attract him was the line of
open windows, looking like solid blocks of sunlight and fresh air. On
the sill of one a figure in print was busy with her wash-leather, and
she accosted Jan cheerily.
“You _are_ down early, sir!”
“I always am,” remarked Jan, looking for a door into the open air.
“You’re not like most of the gentlemen, then,” the maid returned, in her
cheerful Cockney voice. “They leaves it to the last moment, and then
they 'as to fly. You should 'ear ’em come down them stairs!”
“Is there no way out?” inquired Jan.
“You mean into the quad?”
“That’s the quad, is it? Then I do.”
“Well, there’s the door, just outside this door; but Morgan, 'e keeps
the key o’ that, and I don’t think 'e’s come yet.”
“Then I’m going through that window,” announced the new boy, calmly; and
carried out his intention without a moment’s hesitation.
Had his object been to run away on his very first morning, before his
house-master was astir, as the maid seemed to fear by the way she leant
out of her window to watch him, the next step would have taxed all Jan’s
resources.
Heriot’s quad was a gravel plot very distinctively enclosed, on the left
by the walls of buildings otherwise unconnected with the house, on the
right by the boys’ studies. At the further extremity were twin gables
over gothic arches which left the two interiors underneath open at one
end to all the elements; never in his life had Jan beheld such
structures; but he had picked up enough from his tutor to guess that
they were fives-courts, and he went up to have a look into them. To the
right of the fives-courts was an alley ending at a formidable spiked
gate which was yet the only obvious way of escape, had Jan been minded
to make his. But nothing was further from his thoughts; indeed, there
was a certain dull gleam in his eyes, and a sallow flush upon his face,
which had not been there the previous evening. At all events he looked
wider awake.
The studies interested him most. There was a double row of little
lattice windows, piercing a very wall of ivy, like port-holes in a
vessel’s side. Not only were the little windows deep-set in ivy, but
each had its little window-box, and in some of these still drooped the
withered remnant of a brave display. Jan was not interested in flowers,
or for that matter in anything that made for the mere beauty of life;
but he peered with interest into one or two of the ground-floor studies.
There was little to be seen beyond his own reflection broken to bits in
the diamond panes. Between him and the windows was a border of shrubs,
behind iron palings bent by the bodies and feet of generations, and
painted green like the garden seats under the alien walls opposite. On
the whole, and in the misty sunlight of the fine September morning, Jan
liked Heriot’s quad.
“You’re up early, sir!”
It was not the maid this time, but a bearded man-servant whom the boy
had seen the previous night. Jan made the same reply as before, and no
sort of secret of the way in which he had got out into the quad. He
added that he should like to have a look at the studies; and Morgan,
with a stare and a smile quite lost on Jan, showed him round.
They were absurdly, deliciously, inconceivably tiny, the studies at
Heriot’s; each was considerably smaller than a dormitory “tish,” and the
saddle-room of Jan’s old days would have made three or four of them. But
they were undeniably cosy and attractive, as compact as a captain’s
cabin, as private as friar’s cell, and far more comfortable than either.
Or so they might well have seemed to the normal boy about to possess a
study of his own, with a table and two chairs, a square of carpet as big
as a bath-sheet, a book-shelf and pictures, and photographs and
ornaments to taste, fretwork and plush to heart’s content, a flower-box
for the summer term, hot-water pipes for the other two, and above all a
door of his own to shut at will against the world! But Jan Rutter had
not the instincts of a normal schoolboy, nor the temperament favourable
to their rapid growth. He had been brought up too uncomfortably to know
the value of comfort, and too much in the open air to appreciate the
merits of indoor sanctuary. Artistic impulse he had none; and the
rudimentary signs of that form of grace, to be seen in nearly all the
studies he was shown, left him thoroughly unimpressed.
“Is it true,” he asked, “that every boy in the school has one of these
holes?”
“Quite true,” replied Morgan, staring. “You didn’t say 'holes,’ sir?”
“I did,” declared Jan, enjoying his accidental hit.
“You’d better not let Mr. Heriot hear you, sir, or any of the gentlemen
either!”
“I don’t care who hears me,” retorted Jan, boastfully; but it must not
be forgotten that he had come to school against his will, and that this
was his first opportunity of airing a not unnatural antagonism.
“You wait till you’ve got one of your own,” said the well-meaning man,
“with a nice new carpet and table-cloth, and your own family portraits
and sportin’ picters!”
“At any rate I should know a horse from a cow,” returned Jan, examining
something in the nature of a sporting print, “and not hang up rot like
that!”
“You let Mr. Shockley hear you!” cried Morgan, with a laugh. “You’ll
catch it!”
“I’ve no doubt I shall do that,” said Jan, grimly. He followed Morgan
into an empty study, and asked if it was likely to be his.
“Not unless you take a pretty high place in the school. It’s only the
top dozen in the house that get these front studies upstairs. You can
make up your mind to one at the back, and be glad if it’s not
downstairs, where everybody can see in and throw in stones.”
Jan felt he had not made a friend of Morgan; and yet in his heart he was
more favourably impressed with what he had seen than his peculiar
temperament permitted him to show. Little as their adventitious
attractions might appeal to him, there was something attractive to Jan
about this system of separate studies. It appealed, and not without
design, to that spirit of independence which happened to be one of his
stronger points. Moreover he could conceive a very happy intimacy
between two real friends in one of these little dens; and altogether he
brought a brighter face to the breakfast-table than he had shown for an
instant overnight. Heriot glanced at it with an interested twinkle, as
though he had been at the explorer’s elbow all the morning; but whatever
he might have known, he betrayed his knowledge neither by word nor sign.
After breakfast the two boys sallied forth with orders signed by Heriot
for a school cap apiece; and saw the long old-fashioned country street
for the first time in broad daylight. It gave the impression of a street
with nothing behind it on either side, the chance remnant of a vanished
town. Nothing could have been more solid than the fronts of the drab
stone houses, and nothing more startling than the glimpses of vivid
meadowland like a black-cloth close behind. The caps were procured from
the cricket professional, a maker of history whose fame provided
Carpenter with a congenial topic on the way, but sat sadly on the
failing giant who was there to serve them in the little shop. The caps
were black but not comely, as Carpenter more than once remarked; they
were a cross between a cricket-cap and that of a naval officer, with the
school badge in red above the peak. Jan chose the biggest he could find,
and crammed it over his skull as though he was going out to exercise a
horse.
The day was fully occupied with the rather exhaustive examination
designed to put the right boy in the right form. There were no fewer
than three papers in the morning alone. There was, however, a short
break between each, which Carpenter was inclined to spend in boring
Rutter with appreciative comments upon the striking mural decorations of
the great schoolroom in which the examination was held. There were
forty-two new boys, some of them hulking fellows of fifteen or more,
some quite small boys in Eton jackets; and the chances are that none
among them was more impressed than Carpenter by the reproductions of
classical statuary hung upon the walls of Pompeian red, or by the frieze
of ancient and modern authors which a great mind had planned and a
cunning hand had made; but it is certain that none thought less of them
than Jan Rutter. To pacify his companion he did have a look at the
frieze, but it was exactly the same look as he had cast into the studies
before breakfast. The two had more in common when they compared notes on
the various papers.
“I didn’t mind the Latin grammar and history,” said Jan. “I’ve had my
nose in my grammar for the last six months, and you only had to answer
half the history questions.”
Jan’s spirits seemed quite high.
“But what about the unseen?” asked Carpenter.
“I happened to have done the hardest bit before,” said Jan, chuckling
consumedly; “and not so long since, either!”
Carpenter looked at him.
“Then it wasn’t unseen at all?”
“Not to me.”
“You didn’t think of saying so on your paper?”
“Not I! It’s their look-out, not mine,” chuckled Jan.
The other made no comment. It was the long break in the middle of the
day, and the pair were on their way back to Heriot’s for dinner.
“I wish they’d set us some verses,” said Carpenter. “They’d be _my_ best
chance.”
“Then you’re a fool if you take it,” put in a good-humoured lout who had
joined them in the street.
“But it’s the only thing I can do at all decently,” explained the
ingenuous Carpenter. “I’m a backward sort of ass at most things, but I
rather like Latin verses.”
“Well, you’re another sort of ass if you do your best in any of these
piffling papers.”
“I see! _You_ mean to make sure of a nice easy form?”
“Rather!”
“There’s no fagging over the Upper Fourth, let me tell you, even for
us.”
“Perhaps not, but there’s more kinds of fagging than one, you take my
word for it; and I prefer to do mine out of school,” said the big new
boy, significantly, as their ways parted.
Carpenter wanted to discuss his meaning, but Jan took no interest in it,
and was evidently not to be led into any discussion against his will. He
had in fact a gift of silence remarkable in a boy and not a little
irritating to a companion. Yet he broke it again to the extent of asking
Heriot at table, and that _à propos_ of nothing, when the other boys
would “start to arrive.”
“The tap will be turned on any minute now,” said Heriot, with a look at
his sister. “In some houses I expect it’s running already.”
“Which house is Devereux in?” asked Rutter, always direct when he spoke
at all.
“Let me think. I know—the Lodge—the house opposite the chapel with the
study doors opening into the quad.”
Carpenter’s silence was the companion feature of this meal.
The boys had time for a short walk afterwards, and more than a hint to
take one. But they only went together because they were thrown together;
these two had obviously as little else in common as boys could have; and
yet, there was something else, and neither dreamt what a bond it was to
be.
“Do you know Devereux?” Carpenter began before they were out of their
quad.
“Why? Do you know him?”
Jan was not unduly taken aback; he was prepared for anything with regard
to Devereux, including the next question long before it came.
“We were at the same preparatory school, and great pals there,” replied
Carpenter, wistfully. “I suppose you know him at home?”
“I used to, but only in a sort of way,” said Jan, warily. “I don’t
suppose we shall see anything of each other here; he mayn’t even
recognise me, to start with.”
“Or me, for that matter!” cried Carpenter, with less reserve. “He’s
never written to me since we left, though I wrote to him twice last
term, and once in the holidays to ask him something.”
It was on the tip of Jan’s tongue to defend the absent Evan with
injudicious warmth; but he remembered what he had just said, and held
his tongue as he always could. Carpenter, on the other hand, apparently
regretting his little show of pique, changed the subject with ingenuous
haste and chattered more freely than ever about the various school
buildings that they passed upon their way. There was a house at the end
of the street with no fewer than three tiers of ivy-covered study
windows; but it had no quad. There were other houses tucked more out of
sight; but Carpenter knew about them, and which hero of the Cambridge
eleven had been at this, that, or the other. His interest in his school
was of the romantic and imaginative order; it contrasted very favourably
with Jan’s indifference, which grew the more perversely pronounced as
his companion waxed enthusiastic. It appeared that Carpenter was
following a number of youths from his part of the world, who had been
through the school before him, and from whom he had acquired a
smattering of its lore. The best houses of all, he had heard, were not
in the town at all, but on the hill a quarter of a mile away. The pair
went to inspect, and found regular mansions standing back in their own
grounds, their studies and fives-courts hidden from the road; for the
new boys trespassed far enough to see for themselves; and Rutter at once
expressed a laconic preference for the hill houses, whereat Carpenter
stood up as readily for the town.
“There’s no end of rivalry between the two,” he explained, as they
trotted down into the valley, pressed for time. “I wouldn’t be in a hill
house for any money, or in any house but ours if I had my choice of all
the lot.”
“And I wouldn’t be here at all,” retorted Jan, depriving his companion
of what breath he had as they hurried up the hill towards the town. By
turning to the left, however, in the wake of other new boys in a like
hurry, they found themselves approaching the chapel and the great
schoolroom by a shorter route. It led through a large square quad with
study doors opening upon it down two sides, and nothing over these
studies but their own roof.
“There’s plenty of time,” said Jan, with rather a furtive look at a
little gold lady’s watch that he pulled out in his fist. “I wonder if
this is the Lodge?”
“No—it’s the next—opposite the chapel. This is the School House. Do
come on!”
The School House and the Lodge were like none of the other houses.
Instead of standing by themselves in the town or on the hill, each
formed a part of the distinctive group of which the chapel and the great
schoolroom were the salient features. Their quadrangles not only
adjoined, but there was no line of demarcation to show where one began
or the other ended. In both the study doors opened straight into the
fresh air; but in neither was a boy to be seen as Carpenter and Rutter
caught up the flying remnant of the forty-two.
“Let’s go back by the Lodge,” said Jan, when at last they were let out
for good. But now the scene was changing. Groups of two and three were
dotted about in animated conversation, some still in their journey hats,
others in old school caps with faded badges, but none who took the
smallest notice of the new boys with the new badges, which they had
still to learn to crease correctly over the peak.
And now it was that Rutter horrified his companion by accosting with
apparent coolness a big fellow just emerged from one of the Lodge
studies.
“Do you mind telling us if a boy they call Devereux has got back yet?”
asked Jan, with more of his own idioms than he had often managed to
utter in one breath.
“I haven’t seen him,” the big fellow answered civilly enough. But his
stare followed the retreating couple, one of whom had caught the other
by the arm.
“I shouldn’t talk about 'a boy,’ if I were you,” Carpenter was saying as
nicely as he could.
But Rutter was quite aware of his other solecisms, though not of this
one, and was already too furious with himself to brook a gratuitous
rebuke.
“Oh! isn’t it the fashion? Then I’ll bet you wouldn’t!” he cried, as he
shook off the first arm which had ever been thrust through his by a
gentleman’s son.
A ball like a big white bullet was making staccato music in Heriot’s
outer fives-court; two school caps were bobbing above the back wall; and
a great thick-lipped lad of sixteen or seventeen, who was hanging about
the door leading to the studies, promptly asked the new boys their
names.
“What’s your gov’nor?” he added, addressing Carpenter first.
“A merchant.”
“A rag-merchant, I should think! And yours?”
Jan was not embarrassed by the question; he was best prepared at all his
most vulnerable points. But his natural bluntness had so recently caused
him such annoyance with himself, that he replied as politely as he
possibly could:
“My father happens to be dead.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” cried the other with a scowl. “Well, if you
happen to think it funny to talk about 'happening’ to me, you may jolly
soon happen to wish you were dead yourself!”
The tap had indeed been turned on, and the water was certainly rather
cold; the more fortunate for Rutter that his skin was thick enough to
respond with a glow rather than a shiver.
CHAPTER IV
SETTLING IN
Jan’s impressions were not the less vivid for his determination not to
be impressed at all; for no attitude of mind is harder to sustain than
one of deliberate indifference, which is not real indifference at all,
but at best a precarious pose. Jan was really indifferent to a large
extent, but not wholly, and the leaven of sensibility rendered him
acutely alive to each successive phase of his experience; on the other
hand, the fact that he was not too easily hurt was of immense value in
keeping his wits about him, and his whole garrison of senses at
attention. Sensitive he was, and that to the last degree, on a certain
point; but it was a point no longer likely to arise that night. And
meanwhile there was quite enough to occupy his mind.
There was the long-drawn arrival of the house, unit by unit, in bowler
hats which changed as if by magic into old school caps, and even in
“loud” ties duly discarded for solemn black. Then there was tea, with
any amount of good cheer in hall, every fellow bringing in some delicacy
of his own, and newcomers arriving in the middle to be noisily saluted
by their friends. Nobody now took the slightest notice of Jan, who
drifted into a humble place at the long table, which was still far from
full, and fell to work upon the plain bread and butter provided, until
some fellow pushed a raised pie across the table to him without a word.
The matron dispensed tea from a gigantic urn, and when anybody wanted
another cup he simply rattled it in his saucer. Jan could have made even
more primitive use of his saucer, for the tea was hot if not potent. But
fortunately there were some things it was not necessary for Carpenter to
tell him, for that guide and counsellor was not in hall; he had gone out
to tea with another new boy and his people, who knew something about him
at home.
Jan was allowed to spend the evening in an empty study which he might or
might not be able to take over next day, according to the place assigned
to him in the school; meanwhile the bare boards, table, Windsor chair,
and book-shelf, with an ironically cold hot-water pipe, and the nails
with which the last occupant had studded the walls, looked dismal enough
in the light of a solitary candle supplied by Morgan. The narrow passage
resounded with shouts of laughter and boyish badinage from the other
studies; either the captain of the house had not come back, or he was
not the man to play the martinet on the first night of the term; and
Jan, left as severely alone as even he could have wished, rose with
alacrity when one in passing pounded on his door and shouted that it was
time for prayers. He was in fact not sorry to mingle with his kind again
in the lighted hall, where the fellows were already standing in their
places at table, armed with hymn-books but chatting merrily, while one
of the small fry stood sentinel in the flagged passage leading to the
green baize door. Jan had scarcely found a place when in flew this
outpost with a sepulchral “hush!” In the ensuing silence came Miss
Heriot followed by her brother, who began by giving out the hymn which
she played on the piano under the shelf with the cups, and which the
house sang heartily enough.
It was one of the many disadvantages of Jan’s strange boyhood that he
had been brought up practically without religion. Mention has been made
of an eccentric clergyman who was the first to take an interest in Jan’s
intellectual welfare; unhappily, his eccentricities had been of such a
character as almost to stultify his spiritual pretensions; and in his
new home the boy had encountered another type of clerical example which
had been but little better in its effect upon his mind. Prayer had never
been to him the natural practice which it is to young English schoolboys
of all shades of character and condition. So he paid very little
attention to the prayers read by Heriot, at this first time of hearing;
but even so the manly unaffected voice, and a few odd phrases on which
it dwelt in gentler tones, were not altogether lost upon Jan.
Nevertheless, when he went up to dormitory, after biscuits (which he
heard called “dog-rocks”) and milk, and another dreary half-hour in the
empty study, the last thing he feared or thought about was the kind of
difficulty which had beset little Arthur in a certain chapter of _Tom
Brown_ which had not appealed to Jan. And all this may be why he was so
much impressed by what happened in the little dormitory at the top of
the house, when he and his three companions were undressing for bed.
Joyce, the captain of the dormitory, who proved to be a rather delicate
youth with a most indelicate vocabulary, suddenly ceased firing, as it
were, and commanded silence for “bricks.”
“Know what 'bricks’ are?” asked Bingley, who occupied the “tish”
adjoining Jan’s, and turned out to be a boy of his own age, instead of
the formidable figure of his imagination.
“It’s your prayers,” said Joyce, with such an epithet that Jan could not
possibly believe him.
“You _are_ a brute, Joyce!” cried Crabtree, poking a clever red head
through his curtains.
“Nevertheless, my boy,” rejoined Joyce, imitating a master through his
nose, “I know what bricks are, and I say them.”
“Obvious corruption of _prex_,” began Crabtree, in didactic fashion,
when Joyce cut him short with a genial malediction, and silence reigned
for the best part of a minute.
Jan went on his knees with the others, though he had not done so the
night before, and his lips moved through the Lord’s Prayer; but in his
heart he was marvelling at the language of the nice tall fellow in the
far corner. It was the kind of language he had often heard in the
stables, but it was the last kind that he had expected to hear in a
public school; and somehow it shocked him, for the first time in his
life. But on the whole he was thankful to find himself in such pleasant
company in dormitory, and it came to him to express his thankfulness
while he was on his knees.
Nothing occurred, as they lay talking in the dark, to modify the new
boy’s feeling on this point; nor had he subsequent occasion to revise a
triple opinion which might well have proved premature in one case or the
other. It revealed on the contrary an unusually sound instinct for
character. Joyce’s only foible was his fondness for free language. He
had a redeeming sense of humour, and it was in treatment rather than in
choice of subject that he erred. Crabtree was irreproachable in
conversation, and a kindly creature in his cooler moods; but he suffered
from the curse of intellect, was precociously didactic and dogmatic, and
had a temperament as fiery as his hair. Bingley was a lively,
irresponsible, curly-headed dog, who enjoyed life in an insignificant
position both in and out of school. The other two had nicknames which
were not for the lips of new boys; but Jan called Bingley “Toby” after
the first night.
Prayers were in houses on the first morning of the term, and nothing
else happened before or after breakfast until the whole school assembled
in the big schoolroom at ten o’clock to hear the new school order. Jan
pulled his cap over his eyes as he found himself wedged in a crowd from
all the houses, converging at the base of the worn stone spiral stair up
and down which he had trotted at his ease between the papers of the
previous day. Now he was slowly hoisted in the press, the breath crushed
from his body, his toes only occasionally encountering a solid step, a
helpless atom in a monster’s maw. At the top of the stone stairs,
however, and through the studded oak door, there was room for all; but
here it was necessary to uncover face and head; and yet none that he
knew of old was revealed to Jan’s close though furtive scrutiny.
Carpenter, who had come with him, and squeezed into the next seat,
watched the watcher in his turn, and then whispered:
“He’s not come back yet.”
“Who’s not?”
“Evan Devereux. I asked a fellow in his house.”
“What made you think of him now?”
“Oh, nothing. I only thought you might be looking to see if he was
here.”
“Well, perhaps I was,” said Jan, with grumpy candour. “But I’m sure I
don’t care where he is.”
“No more do I, goodness knows!” said Carpenter.
And between three and four hundred chattered on all sides with subdued
but ceaseless animation; the præpostors keeping order more or less, but
themselves chatting to each other as became the first morning of the
term. Then suddenly there fell an impressive silence. The oak door
opened with a terrible click of the latch, like the cocking of a huge
revolver, and in trooped all the masters, cap in hand and gown on
shoulders, led by a little old man with a kindly, solemn, and imperious
air. And Jan felt that this could only be Mr. Thrale, the Head Master,
but Carpenter whispered:
“That’s Jerry!”
“Who?”
“Old Thrale, of course, but everybody calls him Jerry.”
And Jan liked everybody’s impudence as Mr. Thrale took his place behind
a simple desk on the dais, and read out the new list, form by form, as
impressively as Holy Writ.
The first names that Jan recognised were those of Loder, the captain of
his house, and Cave _major_, its most distinguished representative on
tented field; they were in the Upper and Lower Sixth respectively. Joyce
was still in the Remove, as captain of the form, but Crabtree had gained
a double remove from the Lower to the Upper Fifth. Next in Jan’s ken
came Shockley—the fellow who had threatened to make him wish he was
dead—and then most thrillingly—long before either expected
it—Carpenter’s name and his own in quick succession.
“What form will it be?” whispered Jan into the other’s ear.
“Middle Remove,” purred Carpenter. “And we don’t have to fag after all!”
Devereux was the next and the last name that Jan remembered hearing: it
was actually in the form below his!
The new boys had already learnt that it was customary for the masters to
take their forms in hall in their own houses; they now discovered that
Mr. Haigh, the master of the Middle Remove, had just succeeded to the
most remote of all the hill houses—the one house in fact on the further
slope of the hill. Thither his new form accordingly repaired, and on the
good ten minutes’ walk Carpenter and Rutter had their heads violently
knocked together by Shockley, for having the cheek to get so high and to
escape fagging their first term.
“But you needn’t think you have,” he added, ominously. “If you young
swots come flying into forms it takes the rest of us two years to get
to—by the sweat of our blessed brows—by the Lord Harry you shall have
all the swot you want! You’ll do the construe for Buggins and me and
Eyre _major_ every morning of your miserable lives!”
Buggins (who rejoiced in a real name of less distinction, and a strong
metropolitan accent) was climbing the hill arm-in-arm with Eyre _major_
(better known as Jane), his echo and his shadow in one distended skin.
Buggins embroidered Shockley’s threats, and Eyre _major_ contributed a
faithful laugh. But Jan heard them all unmoved, and thought the less of
Carpenter when his thinner skin changed colour.
Mr. Haigh gave his new form a genial welcome, vastly reassuring those
who knew least about him by laughing uproariously at points too subtle
for their comprehension. He was a muscular man with a high colour and a
very clever head. His hair was turning an effective grey about the
temples, his body bulging after the manner of bodies no longer really
young and energetic. Energy he had, however, of a spasmodic and
intemperate order, though he only showed it on this occasion by savagely
pouncing on a rather small boy who happened to be also in his house. Up
to that moment Carpenter and Rutter were ready to congratulate
themselves and each other upon their first form-master; but, though he
left them considerately alone for a day or two, they were never sure of
Mr. Haigh again.
This morning he merely foreshadowed his scheme of the term’s work, and
gave out a list of the new books required; but some of these were enough
to strike terror to the heart of Jan, and others made Carpenter look
solemn. Ancient Greek Geography was not an enticing subject to one who
had scarcely beheld even a modern map until the last six months; and to
anybody as imperfectly grounded as Carpenter declared himself to be, it
was an inhuman jump from somebody’s _Stories in Attic Greek_ to
Thucydides and his Peloponnesian War.
“I suppose it’s because I did extra well at something else,” said
Carpenter with unconscious irony on their way down the hill. “What a
fool I was not to take that fat chap’s advice! Why, I’ve never even done
a page of Xenophon, and I’m not sure that I could say the Greek alphabet
to save my life!”
“I only hope,” rejoined Jan, “that they haven’t gone and judged me by
that unseen!”
But their work began lightly enough, and that first day the furnishing
of their studies was food for much more anxious thought, with Carpenter
at any rate. As for Jan, he really was indifferent to his surroundings,
but the excitable enthusiasm of his companion made him feign even
greater indifference than he felt. He was to retain the back upstairs
study in which he had spent the previous evening, and Carpenter had the
one next it; after dinner Heriot signed orders for carpet, curtains,
candles and candlesticks, a table-cloth and a folding arm-chair apiece,
as well as for stationery and a quantity of books; and Carpenter led the
way to the upholsterer’s at a happy trot. He was an age finding
curtains, carpet and table-cloth, of a sufficiently harmonious shade of
red; and no doubt Jan made all the more point of leaving the choice of
his chattels entirely to the tradesman.
“Send me what you think,” he said. “It’s all one to me.”
Carpenter rallied him in all seriousness on their way back to the house.
“I can’t understand it, Rutter, when you have an absolute voice in
everything.”
“I hadn’t a voice in coming here,” replied Rutter, so darkly as to close
the topic.
“I suppose I go to the other extreme,” resumed Carpenter, with a
reflective frankness which seemed a characteristic. “I shall have more
chairs than I’ve room for if I don’t take care. I’ve bought one already
from Shockley.”
“Good-night!” cried Jan. “Whatever made you do that?”
“Oh, he would have me into his study to have a look at it; and there
were a whole lot of them there—that fellow Buggins, and Jane Eyre, and
the one they call Cranky—and they all swore it was as cheap as dirt.
There are some beasts here!” added Carpenter below his breath.
“How much was it?”
“Seven-and-six; and I didn’t really want it a bit; and one of the legs
was broken all the time!”
“And,” added Jan, for his only comment, “the gang of them are in our
form and all!”
They met most of the house trooping out of the quad, with bats and pads,
but not in flannels. They were going to have a house-game on the Middle
Ground, as the September day was warmer than many of the moribund
summer, and there was no more school until five o’clock. Nor did it
require the menaces of Shockley to induce the new pair to turn round and
accompany the rest; but their first game of cricket was not a happy
experience for either boy. Cave _major_, who was in the Eleven, was
better employed among his peers on the Upper. Loder, who was no
cricketer, picked up with a certain Shears _major_, who was not much of
one. Nobody took the game in the least seriously except a bowler off
whom the unlucky Carpenter managed to miss two catches. The two new men
were chosen last on either side. They failed to make a run between them,
and of course had no opportunity of showing whether they could bowl.
Both were depressed when it was all over.
“It served me right for dropping those catches,” said Carpenter,
however, with the stoicism of a true cricketer at heart.
“I only wish it was last term instead of this!” muttered Jan.
There was another thing that disappointed both boys. The Lodge happened
to be playing a similar game on an adjacent pitch. But Devereux was not
among the players, and Carpenter heard somebody say that he was not
coming back till half-term. Jan’s heart jumped when he heard it in his
turn: by half-term he would have settled down, by half-term many things
might have happened. Yet the deferred meeting was still fraught in his
mind with opposite possibilities, that swung to either extreme on the
pendulum of his mood; and on the whole he would have been glad to get it
over. At one moment this half-term’s grace was a keen relief to him; at
another, a keener disappointment.
CHAPTER V
NICKNAMES
The ready invention and general felicity of the public-school nickname
are points upon which few public-school men are likely to disagree. If
it cannot be contended that either Carpenter or Rutter afforded a
supreme example, at least each was nicknamed before he had been three
days in the school, and in each case the nickname was too good an
accidental fit to be easily repudiated or forgotten. Thus, although
almost every Carpenter has been “Chips” in his day, there was something
about a big head thrust forward upon rather round shoulders, and a
tendency to dawdle when not excited, that did recall the most dilatory
of domestic workmen. Chips Carpenter, however, albeit unduly sensitive
in some things, had the wit to accept his immediate sobriquet as a
compliment. And in the end it was not otherwise with Rutter; but in his
case there were circumstances which made his nickname a secret
bitterness, despite the valuable stamp it set upon his character in the
public eye.
It happened that on the Saturday afternoon, directly after dinner, the
majority of the house were hanging about the quad when there entered an
incongruous figure from the outer world. This was a peculiarly debased
reprobate, a local character of pothouse notoriety, whose chief haunt
was the courtyard of the Mitre, and whom the boys in the quad saluted
familiarly as “Mulberry.” And that here was yet another instance of the
appropriate nickname, a glance was enough to show, for never did richer
hue or bigger nose deface the human countenance.
The trespasser was only slightly but quite humorously drunk, and the
fellows in the quad formed a not unappreciative audience of the type of
entertainment to be expected from a being in that precise condition.
Mulberry, however, was not an ordinary stable sot; it was obvious that
he had seen better days. He had ragged tags of Latin on the tip of a
somewhat treacherous tongue: he inquired quite tenderly after the
_binominal theororum_, but ascribed an unpleasant expression correctly
enough to a _lapsus linguae_.
“I say, Mulberry, you are a swell!”
“We give you full marks for that, Mulberry!”
“My dear young friends,” quoth Mulberry, “I knew Latin before any of you
young devils knew the light.”
“Draw it mild, Mulberry!”
“I wish you’d give us a construe before second school!”
Jan remembered all his days the stray strange picture of the debauched
intruder in the middle of the sunlit quad, with the figures of young and
wholesome life standing aloof from him in good-natured contempt, and
more fresh faces at the ivy-mantled study windows. Jan happened to be
standing nearest Mulberry, and to catch a bloodshot eye as it flickered
over his audience in a comprehensive wink.
“You bet I wasn’t always a groom,” said Mulberry; “an’ if I had ha’
been, there are worse places than the stables, ain’t there, young
fellow?”
Jan looked as though he only wished the ground would open and engulf
him; and the look did not belie his momentary feeling. But he had a
spirit more easily angered than abased, and the brown flush which swept
him from collar to cap was not one of unmixed embarrassment.
“How should I know?” he cried in a voice shrill with indignation.
“He seems to know more about it than he’ll say,” observed Mulberry, and
with another wink he fastened his red eyes on Jan, who had his cap
pulled over his eyes as usual, and arms akimbo for the want of trousers
pockets. “Just the cut of a jock!” added Mulberry, in quite a
complimentary murmur.
“You’re an ugly blackguard,” shouted Jan, “and I wonder anybody can
stand and listen to you!”
It was at this point that Heriot appeared very suddenly upon the scene,
took the intruder by either shoulder, and had him out of the quad in
about a second; in another Heriot rejoined the group in the sun, with a
pale face and flashing spectacles.
“You’re quite right,” he said sharply to Jan. “I wonder, too—at every
one of you—at every one!”
And he turned on his heel and was gone, leaving them stinging with his
scorn; and Jan would have given a finger from his hand to have gone as
well without more words; but he found himself hemmed in by clenched
fists and furious faces, his back to the green iron palings under the
study windows.
“You saw Heriot coming!”
“You said that to suck up to him!”
“The beastly cheek, for a beastly new man!”
“But we saw through it, and so did he!”
“Trust old Heriot! You don’t find that sort o’ thing pay with _him_.”
“I never saw him,” said Jan steadily, despite a thumping heart, “so you
can say what you like.”
And he took a heavy buffet from Shockley without wincing.
“And why should you lose your wool with poor old Mulberry?” that worthy
demanded with a fine show of charity. “One would think there was
something in what he said.”
“You fairly stink of the racing-stables,” said Buggins. “You know you
do, you brute!”
And Eyre _major_ led a laugh.
“Racing-stables!” echoed Shockley. “There’s more of the stable-boy about
him than the jock.”
Jan folded his arms and listened stoically.
“Ostler’s lad,” said one satirist.
“Nineteenth groom,” from another.
“The tiger!” piped a smaller boy than Jan. “The tiger that sits behind
the dog-cart—see how he folds his arms!”
And the imp folded his at the most untimely moment; for this was more
than Jan was going to stand. Submission to superior force was a law of
nature which his common sense recognised and his self-control enabled
him to keep; but to take from a boy inches shorter than himself what had
to be taken from one as many inches taller, just because they were all
against him, was further than his forbearance would go. His flat left
hand flew out as the smaller boy folded his arms, and it fell with a
resounding smack upon the side of an undefended head.
Within the fewest possible moments Jan had been pinned against the
palings by the bigger fellows, his arm twisted, his person violently
kicked, his own ears soundly boxed and filled with abuse. This was
partly because he fought and kicked as long as he had a free leg or arm.
But through it all the satisfaction of that one resounding smack
survived, and kept the infuriated Jan just sane enough to stop short of
tooth and nail when finally overwhelmed.
“Tiger’s the word,” panted Shockley, when they were about done with him.
“But if you try playing the tiger here, ever again, you son of a gun,
you’ll be killed by inches, as sure as you’re blubbing now! So you’d
better creep into your lair, you young tiger, and lie down and die like
a mangy dog!”
It had taken some minutes to produce the tears, but the tears did not
quench the fierce animosity of the eyes that shed them, and they were
dry before Jan gained his study and slammed the door. And there you may
picture him in the chair at the table, on the still bare boards: hot,
dishevelled, aching and ashamed, yet rejoicing in his misery at the one
shrewd left-hand smack he had somehow administered upon an impudent
though defenceless head.
He could hear it for his consolation all the afternoon!
The studies emptied; it was another belated summer’s day, and there was
a game worth watching on the Upper. Soon there was no sound to be heard
but those from the street, which came through the upper part of the
ground-glass window, the only part of the back study windows that was
made to open; but Jan sat staring at the wall before his eyes, as though
the fresh air was nothing to him, as though he had not been brought up
in his shirtsleeves in and out of the open air in all weathers.... And
so he was still sitting when a hesitating step came along the passage,
paused in the next study, and then, but not for a minute or two, at
Jan’s door.
“What do you want?” he demanded rudely, when he had responded to a
half-hearted knock by admitting Chips Carpenter. Now, Chips had
witnessed just the bitter end of the scene in the quad, but Jan did not
know he had been there at all.
“Oh, I don’t exactly want anything. I can clear out if you’d rather,
Rutter.”
“All right. I’d rather.”
“Only I thought I’d tell you it’s call-over on the Upper in
half-an-hour.”
“I’m not going to call-over.”
“_What?_”
“Damn call-over.”
Carpenter winced: he did not like swearing, and he did like Rutter well
enough to wince when he swore. But the spirit of the oath promptly
blotted the letter from his mind. Carpenter was a law-abiding boy who
had been a few terms at a good preparatory school; he could scarcely
believe his ears, much less a word of Rutter’s idle boast. Rutter
certainly looked as though he meant it, with his closed lid of a mouth,
and his sullen brooding eyes. But his mad intention was obviously not to
be carried out.
“My dear man,” said Carpenter, “it’s one of the first rules of the
school. Have you read them? You’d get into a frightful row!”
“The bigger the better.”
“You might even get bunked,” continued Chips, who was acquiring the
school terminology as fast as he could, “for cutting call-over on
purpose.”
“Let them bunk me! Do you think I care? I never wanted to come here. I’d
as soon’ve gone to prison. It can’t be worse. At any rate they let you
alone—they got to. But here ... _let_ them bunk me! It’s the very thing
I want. I loathe this hole, and everything about it. I don’t care
whether you say it’s one of the best schools going, or what you say!”
“I say it’s _the_ best. I know _I_ wouldn’t swop it for any other—or
let a little bullying put me against it. And I have been bullied, if you
want to know!”
“Perhaps you’re proud of that?”
“I hate it, Rutter! I hate lots of things more than you think. You’re in
that little dormitory. You’re well off. But I didn’t come here expecting
to find it all skittles. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else if it was
twenty times worse than it is!”
Rutter looked at the ungainly boy with the round shoulders and the
hanging head; for the moment he was improved out of knowledge, his flat
chest swelling, his big head thrown back, a proud flush upon his face.
There was a touch of consciousness in the pride, but it was none the
less real for that, and Jan could only marvel at it. He could not
understand this pride of school; but he could see it, and envy it in his
heart, even while a fresh sneer formed upon his lips. He wished he was
not such an opposite extreme to Carpenter: he could not know that the
other’s attitude was possibly unique, that few at all events came to
school with such ready-made enthusiasm for their school, if fewer still
brought his own antagonism.
But, after all, Carpenter did not understand, and never would.
“You weren’t in the quad just now,” said Jan, grimly.
Chips looked the picture of guilt.
“I was. At the end. And I feel such a brute!”
“You? Why?” Jan was frowning at him. “You weren’t one of them?”
“Of course I wasn’t! But—I might have stood by you—and I didn’t do a
thing!”
The wish to show some spirit in his turn, the envious admiration for a
quality of which he daily felt the want, both part and parcel of one
young nature, like the romantic outlook upon school life, were equally
foreign and incomprehensible to the other. Jan could only see Carpenter
floundering to the rescue, with his big head and his little wrists; and
the vision made him laugh, though not unkindly.
“You _would_ have been a fool,” he said.
“I wish I had been!”
“Then you must be as big a one as I was.”
“But you weren’t, Rutter! That’s just it. You don’t know!”
“I know I was fool enough to lose my wool, as they call it.”
“You mean man enough! I believe the chaps respect a chap who lets out
without thinking twice about it,” said Carpenter, treading on a truth
unawares. “I should always be frightened of being laughed at all the
more,” he added, with one of his inward glances and the sigh it fetched.
“But you’ve done better than you think. The fellows at the bottom of the
house won’t hustle _you_. I heard Petrie telling them he’d never had his
head smacked so hard in his life!”
Jan broke into smiles.
“I did catch him a warm 'un,” he said. “I wish you’d been there.”
“I only wish it had been one of the big brutes,” said Chips, conceiving
a Goliath in his thirst for the ideal.
“I don’t,” said Jan. “He was trading on them being there, and by gum he
was right! But they didn’t prevent me from catching him a warm 'un!”
And in his satisfaction the epithet almost rhymed with _harm_.
Nevertheless, Jan looked another and a brighter being as he stood up and
asked Carpenter what his collar was like.
Carpenter had to tell him it was not fit to be seen.
Jan wondered where he could find the matron to give him a clean one.
“Her room’s at the top of the house near your dormitory. I daresay she’d
be there.”
“I suppose I’d better go and see. Come on!”
“Shall we go down to the Upper together?” Chips asked as they reached
the quad.
“I don’t mind.”
“Then I’ll wait, if you won’t be long.”
And the boy in the quad thought the other had quite forgotten his mad
idea of cutting call-over—which was not far from the truth—and that he
had not meant it for a moment—which was as far from the truth as it
could be. But even Carpenter hardly realised that it was he who had put
Rutter on better terms with himself, and in saner humour altogether, by
the least conscious and least intentional of all his arguments.
Jan meanwhile was being informed upstairs that he was not supposed to go
to his dormitory in daytime, but that since he was there he had better
have a comfortable wash as well as a clean collar. So he came down
looking perhaps smarter and better set-up than at any moment since his
arrival. And at the foot of the stairs the hall door stood open, showing
a boy or two within looking over the new illustrated papers; and one of
the boys was young Petrie.
Jan stood a moment at the door. Either his imagination flattered him, or
young Petrie’s right ear was still rather red. But he was a good type of
small boy, clear-skinned, bright-eyed, well-groomed. And even as Jan
watched him he cast down the _Graphic_, stretched himself, glanced at
the clock, and smiled quite pleasantly as they stood face to face upon
the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” said Jan, not as though he were unduly sorry, but yet
without a moment’s thought.
“That’s all right, _Tiger_!” replied young Petrie, brightly. “But I
wouldn’t lose my wool again, if I were you. It don’t pay, Tiger, you
take my tip.”
CHAPTER VI
BOY TO BOY
The match on the Upper, although an impromptu fixture on the strength of
an Indian summer’s day, was exciting no small interest in the school. It
was between the champion house at cricket and the best side that could
be got together from all the other houses; and the interesting point was
the pronounced unpopularity of the champions (one of the hill houses),
due to the insufferable complacency with which they were said to have
received the last of many honours. The whole house was accused of having
“an awful roll on,” and it was the fervent hope of the rest of the
school that their delegates would do something to diminish this
offensive characteristic. Boys were lying round the ground on rugs, and
expressing their feelings after almost every ball, when Chips and Jan
crept shyly upon the scene. But within five minutes a bell had tinkled
on top of the pavilion; the game had been stopped because it was not a
real match after all; and three or four hundred boys, most of them with
rugs over their arms, huddled together in the vicinity of the heavy
roller.
It so happened that Heriot was call-over master of the day. He stood
against the roller in a weather-beaten straw hat, rapping out the names
in his abrupt, unmistakable tones, with a lightning glance at almost
every atom that said “Here, sir!” and detached itself from the mass. The
mass was deflating rapidly, and Jan was moistening his lips before
opening them for the first time in public, when a reddish head, whose
shoulders were wedged not far in front of him, suddenly caught Jan’s
eye.
“Shockley.”
“Here, sir.”
“Nunn _minor_.”
“Here, sir.”
“Carpenter.”
“Here, sir.”
“Rutter.”
No answer. Heriot looking up with pencil poised.
“Rutter?”
“Here, sir!”
And out slips Jan in dire confusion, to join Carpenter on the outskirts
of the throng; to be cursed under Shockley’s breath; and just to miss
the stare of the boy with reddish hair, who has turned a jovial face on
hearing the name for the second time.
“I say, Carpenter!”
“Yes?”
“Did you see who that was in front of us?”
“You bet! And they said he wasn’t coming back till half-term! I’m going
to wait for him.”
“Then don’t say anything about me—see? He never saw me, so don’t say
anything about me.”
And off went Jan to watch the match, more excited than when he had lost
self-control in the quad; the difference was that he did not lose it for
a moment now. He heard the name of Devereux called over in its turn. He
knew that Carpenter had joined Devereux a moment later. He wondered
whether Devereux had seen him also—seen him from the first and
pretended not to see him—or only this minute while talking to Chips?
Was he questioning Chips, or telling him everything in a torrent?
Jan felt them looking at him, felt their glances like fire upon his neck
and ears, as one told and the other listened. But he did not turn round.
He swore in his heart that no power should induce him to turn round. And
he kept his vow for minutes and minutes that seemed like hours and
hours.
It was just as well, for he would have seen with his eyes exactly what
he saw in his mind, and that was not all there was to see. There was
something else that Jan must have seen—and might have seen through—had
his will failed him during the two minutes after call-over. That was the
celerity with which Heriot swooped down upon Devereux and Carpenter;
laid his hand upon the shoulder of the boy who had won his last term’s
prize; stood chatting energetically with the pair, chatting almost
sharply, and then left them in his abrupt way with a nod and a smile.
But Jan stood square as a battalion under fire, watching a game in which
he did not follow a single ball; and as he stood his mind changed,
though not his will. He wanted to speak to Evan Devereux now. At least
he wanted Evan to come and speak to him; in a few minutes, he was
longing for that. But no Evan came. And when at length he did turn
round, there was no Evan to come, and no Chips Carpenter either.
The game was in its last and most exciting stage when Jan took himself
off the ground; feeling ran high upon the rugs, and expressed itself
more shrilly and even oftener than before; and such a storm of cheering
chanced to follow Jan into the narrow country street, that two boys
quite a long way ahead looked back with one accord. They did not see
Jan. They were on the sunny side; he was in the shade. But he found
himself following Devereux and Carpenter perforce, because their way was
his. He slackened his pace; they stopped at the market-place, and
separated obviously against Carpenter’s will. Carpenter pursued his way
to Heriot’s. Devereux turned to the left across the market-place, into
the shadow of the old grey church with the dominant spire, with the
blue-faced clock that struck in the night, and so to the school
buildings and his own quad by the short cut from the hill. And Jan
dogged him all the way, lagging behind when his unconscious leader
stopped to greet a friend, or to look at a game of fives in the School
House court, and in the end seeing Devereux safely into his study before
he followed and gave a knock.
Evan had scarcely shut his door before it was open again, but in that
moment he had cast his cap, and he stood bareheaded against the dark
background of his tiny den, in a frame of cropped ivy. It was an
effective change, and an effective setting, in his case. His hair was
not red, but it was a pale auburn, and peculiarly fine in quality. In a
flash Jan remembered it in long curls, and somebody saying, “What a pity
he’s not a girl!” And with this striking hair there had always been the
peculiarly delicate and transparent skin which is part of the type;
there had nearly always been laughing eyes, and a merry mouth; and here
they all were in his study doorway, with hardly any difference that Jan
could see, though he had dreaded all the difference in the world. And
yet, the smile was not quite the old smile, and a flush came first; and
Evan looked past Jan into the quad, before inviting him in; and even
then he did not shake hands, as he had often done on getting home for
the holidays, when Jan’s hand was not fit to shake.
But he laughed quite merrily when the door was shut. And Jan,
remembering that ready laugh of old, and how little had always served to
ring a hearty peal, saw nothing forced or hurtful in it now, but joined
in himself with a shamefaced chuckle.
“It is funny, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “Me being here!”
“I know!” said Evan, with laughing eyes fixed none the less curiously on
Jan.
“When did you get back?” inquired Jan, speedily embarrassed by the comic
side.
“Only just this afternoon. I went and had mumps at home.”
“That was a bad job,” said Jan, solemnly. “It must have spoilt your
holidays.”
“It did, rather.”
“You wouldn’t expect to find me here, I suppose?”
“Never thought of it till I heard your name called over and saw it was
you. I hear you’re in Bob’s house?”
“In Mr. Heriot’s,” affirmed Jan, respectfully.
“We don’t 'mister’ ’em behind their backs,” said Evan, in tears of
laughter. “It’s awfully funny,” he explained, “but I’m awfully glad to
see you.”
“Thanks,” said Jan. “But it’s not such fun for me, you know.”
“I should have thought you’d like it awfully,” remarked Evan, still
looking the new Jan merrily up and down.
“After the stables, I suppose you mean?”
Evan was more than serious in a moment.
“I wasn’t thinking of them,” he declared, with an indignant flush.
“But I was!” cried Jan. “And I’d give something to be back in them, if
you want to know!”
“You won’t feel like that long,” said Evan, reassuringly.
“Won’t I!”
“Why should you?”
“I never wanted to come here, for one thing.”
“You’ll like it well enough, now you are here.”
“I hate it!”
“Only to begin with; lots of chaps do at first.”
“I always shall. I never wanted to come here; it wasn’t my doing, I can
tell you.”
Evan stared, but did not laugh; he was now studiously kind in look and
word, and yet there was something about both that strangely angered Jan.
Look and word, in fact, were alike instinctively measured, and the
kindness perfunctory if not exactly condescending. There was, to be
sure, no conscious reminder, on Evan’s part, of past inequality; and yet
there was just as little to show that in their new life Evan was
prepared to treat Jan as an equal; nay, on their former footing he had
been far more friendly. If his present manner augured anything, he was
to be neither the friend nor the foe of Jan’s extreme hopes and fears.
And the unforeseen mien was not the less confusing and exasperating
because Jan was confused and exasperated without at the time quite
knowing why.
“You needn’t think it was because you were here,” he added suddenly,
aggressively—“because I thought you were at Winchester.”
“I didn’t flatter myself,” retorted Evan. “But, as a matter of fact, I
should be there if I hadn’t got a scholarship here.”
“So I suppose,” said Jan.
“And yet I’m in the form below you!”
Evan was once more openly amused at this, and perhaps not so secretly
annoyed as he imagined.
“I know,” said Jan. “That wasn’t my fault, either. I doubt they’ve
placed me far too high.”
“But how did you manage to get half so high?” asked Evan, with a further
ingenuous display of what was in his mind.
“Well, there was the vicar, to begin with.”
“That old sinner!” said Evan.
“I used to go to him three nights a week.”
“Now I remember.”
“Then you heard what happened when my father died?”
“Yes.”
“It would be a surprise to you, Master Evan?”
It had been on the tip of his tongue more than once, but until now he
had found no difficulty in keeping it there. Yet directly they got back
to the old days, out it slipped without a moment’s warning.
“You’d better not call me that again,” said Evan, dryly.
“I won’t.”
“Unless you want the whole school to know!”
“You see, my mother’s friends——”
“I know. I’ve heard all about it. I always had heard—about your
mother.”
Jan had only heard that pitiful romance from his father’s dying lips; it
was then the boy had promised to obey her family in all things, and his
coming here was the first thing of all. He said as much in his own
words, which were bald and broken, though by awkwardness rather than
emotion. Then Evan asked, as it were in his stride, if Jan’s mother’s
people had a “nice place,” and other questions which might have betrayed
to a more sophisticated observer a wish to ascertain whether they really
were gentlefolk as alleged. Jan answered that it was “a nice enough
place”; but he pointed to a photograph in an Oxford frame—the
photograph of a large house reflected in a little artificial lake—a
house with a slate roof and an ornamental tower, and no tree higher than
the first-floor windows.
“That’s a nicer place,” said Jan, with a sigh.
“I daresay,” Evan acquiesced, with cold complacency.
“There’s nothing like that in Norfolk,” continued Jan, with perfect
truth. “Do you remember the first time you took me up to the tower?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“What! not when we climbed out on the roof?”
“I’ve climbed out on the roof so often.”
“And there’s our cottage chimney; and just through that gate we used to
play 'snob’!”
Evan did not answer. He had looked at his watch, and was taking down
some books. The hint was not to be ignored.
“Well, I only came to say it wasn’t my fault,” said Jan. “_I_ never knew
they were going to send me to the same school as you, or they’d have had
a job to get me to come.”
“Why?” asked Evan, more stiffly than he had spoken yet. “I shan’t
interfere with you.”
“I’m sure you won’t!” cried Jan, with the bitterness which had been
steadily gathering in his heart.
“Then what’s the matter with you? Do you think I’m going to tell the
whole school all about you?”
Jan felt that he was somehow being put in the wrong; and assisted in the
process by suddenly becoming his most sullen self.
“I don’t know,” he answered, hanging his head.
“You don’t know! Do you think I’d think of such a thing?”
“I think a good many would.”
“You think I would?”
“I don’t say that.”
“But you think it?”
Evan pressed him hotly.
“I don’t think anything; and I don’t care what anybody thinks of me, or
what anybody knows!” cried Jan, not lying, but speaking as he had
suddenly begun to feel.
“Then I don’t know why on earth you came to me,” said Evan scornfully.
“No more do I,” muttered Jan; and out he went into the quad, and crossed
it with a flaming face. But at the further side he turned. Evan’s door
was still open, as Jan had left it, but Evan had not come out.
Jan found him standing in the same attitude, with the book he had taken
down, still unopened in his hand, and a troubled frown upon his face.
“What’s the matter now?” asked Evan.
“I’m sorry—Devereux!”
“So am I.”
“I might have known you wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“I think you might.”
“And of course I don’t want a soul to know. I thought I didn’t care a
minute ago. But I do care, more than enough.”
“Well, no one shall hear from me. I give you my word about that.”
“Thank you!”
Jan was holding out his hand.
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“Won’t you shake hands?”
“Oh, with pleasure, if you like.”
But the grip was all on one side.
CHAPTER VII
REASSURANCE
Jan went back to his house in a dull glow of injury and anger. But he
was angriest with himself, for the gratuitous and unwonted warmth with
which he had grasped an unresponsive hand. And the sense of injury
abated with a little honest reflection upon its cause. After all, with
such a different relationship so fresh in his mind, the Master Evan of
the other day could hardly have said more than he had said this
afternoon; in any case he could not have promised more. Jan remembered
his worst fears; they at least would never be realised now. And yet, in
youth, to escape the worst is but to start sighing for the best. Evan
might be loyal enough. But would he ever be a friend? Almost in his
stride Jan answered his own question with complete candour in the
negative; and having faced his own conclusion, thanked his stars that
Evan and he were in different houses and different forms.
Shockley was lounging against the palings outside the door leading to
the studies; the spot appeared to be his favourite haunt. It was an
excellent place for joining a crony or kicking a small boy as he passed.
Jan was already preparing his heart for submission to superior force,
and his person for any violence, when Shockley greeted him with quite a
genial smile.
“Lot o’ parcels for you, Tiger,” said he. “I’ll give you a hand with
’em, if you like.”
“Thank you very much,” mumbled Jan, quite in a flutter. “But where will
they be?”
“Where _will_ they be?” the other murmured under his breath. “I’ll show
you, Tiger.”
Jan could not help suspecting that Carpenter might be right after all.
He had actually done himself good by his display of spirit in the quad!
Young Petrie had been civil to him within an hour, and here was Shockley
doing the friendly thing before the afternoon was out. He had evidently
misjudged Shockley; he tried to make up for it by thanking him nearly
all the way to the hall, which was full of fellows who shouted an
embarrassing greeting as the pair passed the windows. They did not go
into the hall, however, but stopped at the slate table at the foot of
the dormitory stairs. It was covered with parcels of all sizes, on
several of which Rutter read his name.
“Tolly-sticks—don’t drop ’em,” said Shockley, handing one of the
parcels. “This feels like your table-cloth; that must be tollies; and
all the rest are books. I’ll help you carry them over.”
“I can manage, thanks,” said Jan, uncomfortably. But Shockley would not
hear of his “managing,” and led the way back past the windows, an
ironical shout following them into the quad.
“You should have had the lot yesterday,” continued Shockley in the most
fatherly fashion. “I should complain to Heriot, if I were you.”
Jan’s study had also been visited in his absence. A folding chair, tied
up with string, stood against the wall, with billows of bright green
creton bulging through string and woodwork; an absurd bit of Brussels
carpet covered every inch of the tiny floor; and it also was an
aggressive green, though of another and a still more startling shade.
“Curtains not come yet,” observed Shockley. “I suppose they’re to be
green too?”
“I don’t know,” replied Rutter. “I left it to them.”
“I rather like your greens,” said Shockley, opening the long soft
parcel. “Why, you’ve gone and got a red table-cloth!”
“It’s their doing, not mine,” observed Jan, phlegmatically.
“I wonder you don’t take more interest in your study,” said Shockley.
“Most chaps take a pride in theirs. Red and green! It’ll spoil the whole
thing; they don’t go, Tiger.”
Jan made some show of shaking off his indifference in the face of this
kindly interest in his surroundings.
“They might change it, Shockley.”
“I wouldn’t trust ’em,” said that authority, shaking and scratching a
bullet head by turns. “They’re not too obliging, the tradesmen here—too
much bloated monopoly. If you take my advice you’ll let well alone.”
“Then I will,” said Jan, eagerly. “Thanks, awfully, Shockley!”
“Not that it _is_ well,” resumed Shockley, as though the matter worried
him. “A green table-cloth’s the thing for you, Tiger, and a green
table-cloth you must have if we can work it.”
“It’s very good of you to bother,” said Jan, devoutly wishing he would
not.
Shockley only shook his head.
“I’ve got one myself, you see,” he explained in a reflective voice, as
he examined the red cloth critically. “It’s a better thing than
this—better taste—and green—but I’d rather do a swop with you than
see you spoil your study, Tiger.”
“Very well,” said Jan, doubtfully.
Shockley promptly tucked the new table-cloth under his arm. “Let’s see
your tolly-sticks!” said he, briskly.
“Tolly-sticks?”
“Candle-sticks, you fool!”
Jan unpacked them, noting as he did so that the fatherly tone had been
dropped.
“I suppose you wouldn’t like a real old valuable pair instead of these
meagre things?”
“No, thanks, Shockley.”
“Well, anyhow you must have a picture or two.”
“Why must I?” asked Jan. He had suddenly remembered Carpenter’s story of
the seven-and-sixpenny chair.
“Because I’ve got the very pair for you, and going cheap.”
“I see,” said Jan, in his dryest Yorkshire voice.
“Oh, _I_ don’t care whether you’ve a study or a sty!” cried Shockley,
and away he went glaring, but with the new cloth under his arm. In a
minute he was back with the green one rolled into a ball, which he flung
in Jan’s face. “There you are, you fool, and I’m glad you like your own
colour!” he jeered as he slammed the door behind him.
Neither had Jan much mercy on himself, when he had fitted two candles
into the two new china sticks, and lit them with a wax match from the
shilling box included in his supplies. Shockley’s table-cloth might once
have been green, but long service had reduced it to a more dubious hue;
it was spotted with ink and candle-grease, and in one place cut through
with a knife. To Jan, indeed, one table-cloth was like another; he was
only annoyed to think he had been swindled as badly as Carpenter, by the
same impudent impostor, and with Carpenter’s experience to put him on
his guard. But even in his annoyance the incident appealed to that
prematurely grim sense of the ironic which served Jan Rutter for the fun
and nonsense of the ordinary boy; and on the whole he thought it wiser
to avoid another row by saying no more about it.
But he was not suffered to keep his resolution to the letter: at tea
Buggins and Eyre _major_ were obviously whispering about Jan before
Buggins asked him across the table how he liked his new table-cloth.
“I suppose you mean Shockley’s old one?” retorted Jan at once. “It’ll do
all right; but it’s a good bargain for Shockley.”
“A bargain’s a bargain,” remarked Buggins with his mouth full.
“And a Jew’s a Jew!” said Jan.
The nice pair glared at him, and glanced at Shockley, who was two places
higher up than Jan, but deep in ingratiating conversation with a
good-looking fellow on his far side.
“God help you when the Shocker hears that!” muttered Buggins under his
breath.
“You’ll be murdered before you’ve been here a week, you brute!” added
Eyre _major_ with a titter.
“I may be,” said Jan, “but not by you—you prize pig!”
And, much as he was still to endure from the trio in his form and house,
this was the last Jan heard directly of the matter. Whether his reckless
words ever reached the ears of Shockley, or whether the truth was in
them, Jan never knew. As a good hater, however, he always felt that
apart from thick lips, heavy nostrils, pale eyes and straight light
hair, his arch-enemy combined all the most objectionable characteristics
of Jew and Gentile.
So this stormy Saturday came to a comparatively calm close, and Jan was
left to wrestle in peace with a Latin prose set by Mr. Haigh at second
school. On other nights everybody went back to his form-master after
tea, for a bout of preparation falsely called “private work”; but on
Saturdays some kind of composition was set throughout the school, was
laboriously evolved in the solitude of the study, and signed by the
house-master after prayers that night or on the Sunday morning.
Unfortunately, composition was Jan’s weak point. By the dim light of the
dictionary, with the frail support of a Latin grammar, he could grope
his way through a page of Cæsar or of Virgil without inevitably plunging
to perdition; but the ability to cast English back into Latin implies a
point of scholarship which Jan had not reached by all the forced marches
of the past few months. He grappled with his prose until head and hand
perspired in the warm September evening. He hunted up noun after noun in
his new English-Latin, and had a shot at case after case. And when at
length his fair copy was food for Haigh’s blue pencil, and Jan leant
back to survey his own two candles and his own four walls, he was
conscious, in the first place, that he had been taken out of himself,
and in the second that a study to oneself was a mitigating circumstance
in school life.
Not that he disliked his dormitory either; there, nothing was said to
him about the row in the quad, of which in fact he had heard very little
since it occurred. He was embarrassed, however, by a command from Joyce
to tell a story after the gas was out; stories were not at all in Jan’s
line; and the situation was only relieved by Bingley’s sporting offer to
stand proxy in the discharge of what appeared to be a traditional debt
on the part of all new boys entering that house. Bingley, permitted to
officiate as a stop-gap only, launched with much gusto and more minutiæ
into a really able account of a revolting murder committed in the
holidays. Murders proved to be Bingley’s strong point; his face would
glow over the less savoury portions of the papers in hall; and that
night his voice was still vibrating with unctuous horror when Jan got
off to sleep.
The school Sunday in his time was not desecrated by a stroke of work;
breakfast of course was later, and Heriot himself deliberately late for
prayers, which were held in the houses as on the first day of the term,
instead of in the big school-room. Chapel seemed to monopolise morning
and afternoon. Yet there was time for a long walk after either chapel,
and abundant time for letter-writing after dinner. Not that Jan availed
himself of the opportunity; he had already posted a brief despatch to
the rectory, and nowhere else was there a soul who could possibly care
to hear from him. He spent the latter end of the morning in a solitary
stroll along a very straight country road, and the hour after dinner
over a yellow-back borrowed from Chips.
Morning chapel had been quite a revelation to Jan. He had been forced to
go to church in Norfolk; he went to chapel in the stoical spirit born of
chastening experience. Yet there was something in the very ringing of
the bells that might have prepared him for brighter things; they were
like joy-bells in their almost merry measure. The service proved bright
beyond belief. The chapel itself was both bright and beautiful. It was
full of sunlight and fresh air, it lacked the heavy hues and the solemn
twilight which Jan associated with a place of worship. The responses
came with a hearty and unanimous ring. The psalms were the quickest
thing in church music that Jan had ever heard; they went with such a
swing that he found himself trying to sing for the first time in his
life. His place in chapel had not yet been allotted to him, and he stood
making his happily inaudible effort between two tail-coated veterans
with stentorian lungs. Crowning merit of the morning service, there was
no sermon; but in the afternoon the little man with the imperious air
grew into a giant in his marble pulpit, and impressed Jan so powerfully
that he wondered again how the fellows could call him Jerry, until he
looked round and saw some of them nodding in their chairs. Then he found
that he had lost the thread himself, that he could not pick it up again,
that everything escaped him except a transfigured face and a voice both
stern and tender. But these were flag and bugle to the soldier concealed
about most young boys, and Jan for one came out of chapel at quick
march.
The golden autumn day was still almost at its best, but Jan had no
stomach for another lonely walk. A really lonely walk would have been
different; but to go off by oneself, and to meet hundreds in sociable
twos and threes, with linked arms and wagging tongues, was to cut too
desolate a figure before the world. Carpenter apparently had found a
friend; at least Jan saw him obviously waiting for one after chapel; yet
hardly had he settled to his novel, than a listless step was followed by
the banging of the study door next his own.
“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” said Jan, when he had gained
admission by pounding on Carpenter’s door.
“Did you! You thought wrong, then.”
Carpenter smiled as though to temper an ungraciousness worthier of Jan,
but the effort was hardly a success. He was reclining in a chair with a
leg-rest, under the window opposite the door. He had already put up a
number of pictures and brackets, and photograph frames in the plush of
that period. Everything was very neat and nice, and there was a notable
absence of inharmonious or obtrusive shades.
“How on earth did you open the door from over there?” asked Jan.
“Lazy-pull,” said Carpenter, showing off a cord running round three
little walls and ending in a tassel at his elbow. “You can buy ’em all
ready at Blunt’s.”
“You _have_ got fettled up,” remarked Jan, “and no mistake!”
Carpenter opened his eyes at the uncouth participle.
“I want to have a good study,” he said. “I’ve one or two pictures to put
up yet, and I’ve a good mind to do them now.”
“You wouldn’t like to come for a walk instead?”
The suggestion was very shyly made, and as candidly considered by Chips
Carpenter.
“Shall I?” he asked himself aloud.
“You might as well,” said Jan without pressing it.
“I’m not sure that I mightn’t.”
And off they went, but not with linked arms, or even very close
together; for Chips still seemed annoyed at something or other, and for
once not in a mood to talk about it or anything else. It was very unlike
him; and a small boy is not unlike himself very long. They took the road
under the study windows, left the last of the little town behind them,
dipped into a wooded hollow, and followed a couple far ahead over a
stile and along a right-of-way through the fields; and in the fields,
bathed in a mellow mist, and as yet but thinly dusted with the gold of
autumn, Carpenter found his tongue. He expatiated on this new-found
freedom, this intoxicating licence to roam where one would within bounds
of time alone, a peculiar boon to the boy from a private school, and one
that Jan appreciated as highly as his companion. It was not the only
thing they agreed about that first Sunday afternoon. Jan was in a much
less pugnacious mood than usual, and Carpenter less ponderously
impressed with every phase of their new life. They exchanged some
prejudices, and compared a good many notes, as they strolled from stile
to stile. Haigh came in for some sharp criticism from his two new boys;
the uncertainty of his temper was already apparent to them; but Heriot,
as yet a marked contrast in that respect, hardly figured in the
conversation at all. A stray remark, however, elicited the fact that
Carpenter, who had disappeared in the morning directly after prayers,
had actually been to breakfast with Heriot on the first Sunday of his
first term.
Jan was not jealous; from his primitive point of view the master was the
natural enemy of the boy; and he was not at the time surprised when
Carpenter dismissed the incident as briefly as though he were rather
ashamed of it. He would have thought no more of the matter but for a
chance encounter as they crossed their last stile and came back into the
main road.
Swinging down the middle of the road came a trio arm-in-arm, full of
noisy talk, and so hilarious that both boys recognised Evan Devereux by
his laugh before they saw his face. Evan, on his side, must have been
almost as quick to recognise Carpenter, who was first across the stile,
for he at once broke away from his companions.
“I’m awfully sorry!” he cried. “I quite forgot I’d promised these
fellows when I promised you.”
“It doesn’t matter a bit,” said Carpenter, in a rather unconvincing
voice.
“You didn’t go waiting about for me, did you?”
“Not long,” replied Carpenter, dryly.
“Well, I really am awfully sorry; but, you see, I’d promised these men
at the end of last term, and I quite forgot about it this morning at
Heriot’s.”
“I see.”
“I won’t do it again, I swear.”
“You won’t get the chance!” muttered Carpenter, as Devereux ran after
his companions. He looked at his watch, and turned to Jan. “There’s
plenty of time, Rutter. Which way shall we go?”
Jan came out of the shadow of the hedge; he had remained instinctively
in the background, and had no reason to think that Evan had seen him.
Certainly their eyes had never met. And yet there had been something in
Evan’s manner, something pointed in his fixed way of looking at
Carpenter and not beyond him, something that might have left a doubt in
Jan’s mind if a greater doubt had not already possessed it.
“Which way shall we turn?” Carpenter repeated as Jan stood looking at
him strangely.
“Neither way, just yet a bit,” said Jan, darkly. “I want to ask you
something first.”
“Right you are.”
“There are not so many here that you could say it for, so far as I can
see,” continued Jan, the inscrutable: “but from what I’ve seen of you,
Carpenter, I don’t believe you’d tell me a lie.”
“I’d try not to,” said the other, smiling, yet no easier than Jan in his
general manner.
“That’s good enough for me,” said Jan. “So what did Devereux mean just
now by talking about 'this morning at Heriot’s’?”
“Oh, he had breakfast with Heriot, too; didn’t I tell you?”
“No; you didn’t.”
“Well, I never supposed it would interest you.”
“Although I told you I knew something about him at home!”
The two were facing each other, eye to eye. Those of Jan were filled
with a furious suspicion.
“I wonder you didn’t speak to him just now,” remarked Carpenter, looking
at his nails.
“He never saw me; besides, I’d gone and said all I’d got to say to him
yesterday in his study.”
“I see.”
“Didn’t Devereux tell you I’d been to see him?”
“Oh, I think he said he’d seen you, but that was all.”
“At breakfast this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did Heriot ask him anything about me?”
“No.”
“Has he told you anything about me at home, Chips?”
“Hardly anything.”
“How much?”
“Only that he hardly knew you; that was all,” declared Carpenter,
looking Jan in the face once more. “And I must say I don’t see what
you’re driving at, Rutter!”
“You’d better go and ask Devereux,” said Jan, unworthily; but, as luck
would have it, he could not have diverted his companion’s thoughts more
speedily if he had tried.
“Devereux? I don’t go near him!” he cried. “He promised to wait for me
after chapel, and he cut me for those fellows we saw him with just now.”
“Although you were friends at the same private school?”
“If you call that friendship! He never wrote to me all last term, though
I wrote twice to him!”
“I suppose that would be why Heriot asked you both to breakfast,” said
Jan, very thoughtfully, as they began walking back together. “I mean,
you both coming from the same school.”
“What? Oh, yes, of course it was.”
Jan threw one narrow look over his shoulder.
“Of course it was!” he agreed, and walked on nodding to himself.
“But he didn’t know Evan Devereux, or he’d have known that an old friend
was nothing to him!”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” said Jan with gentle warmth. “I wouldn’t be
too sure, if I were you.”
CHAPTER VIII
LIKES AND DISLIKES
By the beginning of October there was a bite in the air, and either
fives or football every afternoon; and before the middle of the month
Jan began now and then to feel there might be worse places than a public
school. He had learnt his way about. He could put a name to all his
house and form. He was no longer strange; and on the whole he might have
disliked things more than he did. There was much that he did dislike,
instinctively and individually; but there was a good deal that he could
not help enjoying, over and above the football and the fives. There was
the complete freedom out of school, the complete privacy of the separate
study, above all the amazing absence of anything in the way of espionage
by the masters. These were all surprises to Jan; but they were
counterbalanced by some others, such as the despotic powers of the
præpostors, which only revived the spirit of sensitive antagonism in
which he had come to school. The præpostors wore straw hats, had fags,
and wielded hunting-crops to keep the line at football matches. This was
a thing that made Jan’s blood boil; he marvelled that no one else seemed
to take it as an indignity, or to resent the authority of these
præpostors as he did. Then there were boys like Shockley whom he could
cheerfully have attended on the scaffold. And there was one man he very
soon detested more than any boy.
That man was Mr. Haigh, the master of the Middle Remove; and Jan’s view
of him was perhaps no fairer than his treatment of Jan. Haigh, when not
passing more or less unworthy pleasantries, and laughing a great deal at
very little indeed, was a serious and even passionate scholar. He had
all the gifts of his profession except coolness and a right judgment of
boys. His enthusiasm was splendid. The willing dullard caught fire in
his form. The gifted idler was obliged to work for Haigh. He had
hammered knowledge into all sorts and conditions of boys; but here was
one who would get up and wring the sense out of a page of Virgil, and
then calmly ask Haigh to believe him incapable of parsing a passage or
of scanning a line of that page! Of course Haigh believed no such thing,
and of course Jan would vouchsafe no explanation of his inconceivable
deficiencies. Pressed for one, indeed, or on any other point arising
from his outrageously unequal equipment, Jan invariably sulked, and
Haigh invariably lost his temper and called Jan elaborate names. The
more offensive they were, the better care Jan took to earn them. Sulky
he was inclined to be by nature; sulkier he made himself when he found
that it exasperated Haigh more than the original offence.
Loder, the captain of his house, was another object of Jan’s dislike.
Loder was not only a præpostor, who lashed your legs in public with a
hunting-crop, but he was generally accounted a bit of a prig and a
weakling into the bargain, and Jan thought he deserved his reputation.
Loder had a great notion of keeping order in the house, but his actual
tactics were to pounce upon friendless wretches like Chips or Jan, and
not to interfere with stalwarts of the Shockley gang, or even with
popular small boys like young Petrie. Nor was it necessary for Jan to be
caught out of his study after lock-up, or throwing stones in the quad,
in order to incur the noisy displeasure of the captain of the house.
Loder heard of the daily trouble with Haigh; it was all over the house,
thanks to Shockley & Co., whose lurid tales had the unforeseen effect of
provoking a certain admiration for “the new man who didn’t mind riling
old Haigh.” Indifference on such a point implied the courage of the
matador—to all who had been gored aforetime in the Middle Remove—save
and except the serious Loder. Passing Jan’s door one day, this exemplary
præpostor looked in to tell him he was disgracing the house, and stayed
to inquire what on earth he meant by having such a filthy study. The
epithet was inexact; but certainly the study was ankle-deep in books and
papers, with bare walls still bristling with the last tenant’s nails;
and it was not improved by a haunting smell of sulphur and tallow, due
to the recent firing of the shilling box of wax matches.
“It says nothing about untidy studies in the School Rules,” said Jan,
tilting his chair back from his table, and glowering at his interrupted
imposition.
“Don’t you give me any cheek!” cried Loder, looking dangerous for him.
“But it does say,” continued Jan, quoting a characteristic canon with
grim deliberation, “that 'a boy’s study is his castle,’ Loder!”
Jan had to pick himself up, and then his chair, with an ear that tingled
no more than Jan deserved. But this was not one of the events that
rankled in his mind. He had made a swaggering præpostor look the fool he
was; no smack on the head could rob him of the recollection.
With such a temper it is no wonder that Jan remained practically
friendless. Yet he might have made friends among the smaller fry below
him in the house; and there was one unathletic boy of almost his own
age, but really high up in the school, whose advances were summarily
repulsed because they appeared to Jan to betray some curiosity about his
people and his home. It was only human that the lad should be far too
suspicious on all such points; the pity was that this often made him
more forbidding and hostile in his manner than he was at heart. But in
all his aversions and suspicions there was no longer a hard or a
distrustful thought of Evan Devereux, though Jan and he had not spoken
since that first Saturday, and though they often met upon the hill or in
the street without exchanging look or nod.
Otherwise his likes were not so strong as his dislikes, or at any rate
not so ready; and yet in his heart even Jan soon found himself admiring
a number of fellows to whom he never dreamt of speaking before they
spoke to him. Head and chief of these was Cave _major_, who was already
in the Eleven, and who got his football colours after the first match.
How the whole house clapped him in hall that night at tea! The only
notice he had ever taken of Jan was to relieve him of Carpenter’s
yellow-back novel, which the great man read and passed on to another
member of the Fifteen in another house. To the owner of the book that
honour was sufficient solace; but neither new boy had ever encountered
quite so heroic a figure as the great Charles Cave. Then there was
Sprawson—Mother Sprawson, to Cave and Loder—reputed a tremendous
runner, but seen to be several things besides. Sprawson amused Jan
immensely by carrying an empty spirit-flask in his pocket, and sometimes
behaving as though he had just emptied it; he was rather a bully, but
more of a humorist, who would administer a whole box of pills prescribed
for himself to some unfortunate urchin in no need of them; and yet when
he drew Jan in the house fives, and was consequently knocked out in the
first round, nobody could have taken a defeat or treated a partner
better. Then there were Stratten and Jellicoe. Stratten seemed a very
perfect gentleman, and Jellicoe a distinct though fiery one; they were
always about arm-in-arm together, or playing fives on the inner court;
and Jan enjoyed watching them when he could not get a game himself on
the outer. At closer range he developed a more intimate appreciation of
Joyce, with his bad language and his good heart, and of Bingley and his
joyous interest in violent crime.
As for old Bob Heriot, he completely upset all Jan’s ideas about
schoolmasters. He was never in the least angry, yet even Cave _major_
looked less dashing in his presence, and the likes of Shockley
ludicrously small. Not that his house saw too much of Heriot. He was not
the kind of master who is continually in and out of his own quad. His
sway was felt rather than enforced. But he had a brisk and cheery word
with the flower of the house most nights after prayers, and somehow Jan
and others of his size generally lingered in the background to hear what
he had to say; he never embarrassed them by taking too much notice of
them before their betters, and seldom chilled them by taking none at
all. The Shockley fraternity, however, had not a good word to say for
poor Mr. Heriot. And that was not the least of his merits in Jan’s eyes.
On Sunday evenings between tea and prayers it was Heriot’s practice to
make a round of the studies, staying for a few minutes’ chat in each;
and on the second Sunday of the term he gave Jan rather more than his
time allowance. But he seemed to notice neither the stark ugliness of
the uncovered walls, nor the heavy fall of waste paper; and though he
did speak of Jan’s difficulties in form, he treated them also in a very
different manner from that employed by the captain of his house. The
truth was that Haigh had said a good deal about the matter to Heriot,
and Heriot very little to Haigh, whose tongue was as intemperate out of
school as it was in form. But to Jan he spoke plainly on this second
Sunday evening of the term.
“It’s obvious that you were placed a form too high. Such mistakes will
occur; there’s no way of avoiding them altogether; the question is,
shall we try to rectify this one? It’s rather late in the day, but I’ve
known it done; the Head Master might allow it again. It would rest with
him, so you had better not speak of it for the present. I mean, of
course, that he might allow you to come down to Mr. Walrond’s form, or
even into mine.”
At which Jan displayed some momentary excitement, and then sat stolidly
embarrassed.
“It would be a desperate remedy, Rutter; it would mean your being a fag,
after first escaping fagging altogether; in fact, it would be starting
all over again. I don’t say it wouldn’t make your work easier for you
during the whole time you’re here. But I shall quite understand it if
you prefer the evils that you know.”
“It isn’t the fagging. It isn’t that I shouldn’t like being in your
form, sir,” Jan blurted out. “But I don’t want to run away from Mr.
Haigh!” he mumbled through his teeth.
“Well, you’d only have to fight another day, if you did,” said Heriot,
with a laugh. And so the matter went no further; and not another boy or
master in the school ever knew that it had gone so far.
But the being of whom Jan saw most, and the only one to whom he spoke
his odd mind freely, was the other new man, Carpenter, now Chips to all
the house. And Chips was another oddity in his way; but it was not Jan’s
way at any single point. Chips had always been intended for a public
school. But in some respects he was far less fit for one than Jan. To be
at this school was to realise the dream of his life; but it was not the
dream that it had been before it came true, and the dreamer took this
extraordinary circumstance to heart, though he had the character to keep
it to himself. Jan was the last person to whom he would have admitted
it; he still stood up for the school in all their talks, and gloried in
being where he was; but it was none the less obvious that he was not so
happy as he tried to appear.
Chips’s troubles, to be sure, were not in form; they were almost
entirely out of school, just where Jan got on best. Chips’s skin was
thinner; the least taunt hurt his feelings, and he hid them less
successfully than Jan could hide his. He was altogether more squeamish;
lying and low talk were equally abhorrent to him; he would not smile,
and had the courage to confess his repugnance under pressure, but not
the force of personality to render a protest other than ineffectual.
Such things ran like water from off Jan’s broader back; he was not
particularly attracted or repelled.
One bad half-hour that the pair spent together almost daily was that
between breakfast and second school. It was the recognised custom for
fellows in the same house and form to prepare their construe together;
this took Carpenter and Rutter most mornings into Shockley’s study,
where Buggins and Eyre _major_ completed the symposium. On a Virgil
morning there would be interludes in which poor Chips felt himself a
worm for sitting still; even when Thucydides claimed closer attention
there was a lot of parenthetical swearing. But Chips—whose Greek was
his weak point—endured it all as long as the work itself was fairly
done.
One morning, however, as Jan was about to join the rest, Chips burst in
upon him, out of breath, and stood with his back to Jan’s bare wall.
“They’ve gone and got a crib!” he gasped.
“What of?”
“Thicksides.”
“And a jolly good job!” said Jan.
Chips looked as though he distrusted his ears.
“You don’t mean to say you’ll use it, Tiger?”
“Why not?”
“It’s so—at least I mean it seems to me—so jolly unfair!”
Chips had stronger epithets on the tip of his tongue; but that of “pi”
had been freely applied to himself; and it rankled in spite of all his
principles.
“Not so unfair as sending you to a hole like this against your will,”
retorted Jan, “and putting you two forms too high when you get here.”
“That’s another thing,” said Chips, for once without standing up for the
“hole,” perhaps because he knew that Jan had called it one for his
benefit.
“No; it’s all the same thing. Is that beast Haigh fair to me?”
“I don’t say he is——”
“Then I’m blowed if I see why I should be fair to him.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Haigh,” said Chips. “I was thinking of the rest of
the form who don’t use a crib, Tiger.”
“That’s their look-out,” said the Tiger, opening his door with the
little red volume of Thucydides in his other hand.
“Then you’re going to Shockley’s study just the same?”
“Rather! Aren’t you?”
“I’ve been. I came out again.”
“Because of the crib?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them so, Chips?”
“I had to; and—and of course they heaved me out, Tiger! And I’ll never
do another line with the brutes!”
He turned away; he was quite husky. Jan watched him with a shrug and a
groan, hesitated, and then slammed his door.
“Aren’t you going, Tiger?” cried Chips, face about at the sound. “Don’t
mind me, you know! I can sweat it out by myself.”
“Well you’re not going to,” growled Jan, flinging the little red book
upon the table. “I’d rather work with an old ass like you, Chips, than a
great brute like Shockley!”
So that alliance was cemented, and Chips at any rate was Jan’s friend
for life. But Jan was slower to reciprocate so strong a feeling; his
nature was much less demonstrative and emotional; moreover, the term he
had applied to Carpenter was by no means one of mere endearment. There
was in fact a good deal about Chips that appealed to Jan as little as to
the other small boys in the house. He was indubitably “pi”; he thought
too much of his study; he took in all kinds of magazines, and went in
for the competitions, being mad about many things including cricket, but
no earthly good at fives, and not allowed to play football. He had some
bronchial affection that prevented him from running, and often kept him
out of first school. “Sloper” and “sham” were neither of them quite the
name for him; but both became unpleasantly familiar in the ears of
Carpenter during the first half of his first term; and there was just
enough excuse for them to keep such a lusty specimen as Jan rather out
of sympathy with a fellow who neither got up in the morning nor played
games like everybody else.
Nevertheless, they could hardly have seen more of each other than they
did. They went up and down the hill together, for Chips was always at
Jan’s elbow after school, and never sooner than when Jan had made a
special fool of himself in form. Chips was as little to be deterred by
the gibes of the rest on the way back, as by the sullen silence in which
the Tiger treated his loyalty and their scorn. If Rutter had recovered
tone enough to play fives after twelve, Carpenter was certain to be seen
looking over the back wall; and as sure as Jan went up to football in
the afternoon, Chips went with him in his top-coat, and followed the
game wistfully at a distance. Down they would come together when the
game was over, as twilight settled on the long stone street, and tired
players shod in mud tramped heavily along either pavement. Now was
Chips’s chance for the daily papers before the roaring fire in hall,
while Jan changed with the rest in the lavatory; and as long as either
had a tizzy there was just time for cocoa and buns at the nearest
confectioner’s before third school.
The nearest confectioner’s was not the fashionable school resort, but it
was quite good enough for the rank and file of the lower forms. The
cocoa was coarse and thick, and the buns not always fresh; but the boys
had dined at half-past one; tea in hall was not till half-past six; and
even then there was only bread-and-butter to eat unless a fellow had his
own supplies. Jan had not been provided with a hamper at the beginning
of the term, or with very many shillings by way of pocket-money; he
would have starved rather than write for either, for it was seldom
enough that he received so much as a letter from his new home. But it
did strike him as a strange thing that a public-school boy should
habitually go hungrier to bed than a coachman’s son at work about his
father’s stables.
Milk and “dog-rocks” were indeed provided last thing at night and first
thing in the morning; but if you chose to get up late there was hardly
time for a mouthful as you sped out of the quad and along the street to
prayers, buttoning your waistcoat as you ran. This was not often Jan’s
case, but it was on the morning after the match between his house and
another in the first round of the Under Sixteen. Heriot’s had won an
exciting game, and Jan was conscious of having done his share in the
bully. He was distinctly muscular for his age, and had grown perceptibly
in even these few weeks at school. His sleep was haunted by an
intoxicating roar of “Reds!” (his side’s colour for the nonce) and
stinging counter cries of “Whites!” Once at least he had actually heard
his own nickname shouted in approval by some big fellow of his house;
and he heard it all again as he dressed and dashed out, on a
particularly empty stomach, into a dark and misty morning, with the last
bell flagging as if it must stop with every stroke; he heard it above
his own palpitations all through prayers; on his knees he was down in
another bully, smelling the muddy ball, thirsting to feel it at his feet
again.
It chanced to be a mathematical morning, and Jan felt thankful as he
went his way after prayers; for he was not in Haigh’s mathematical, but
in the Spook’s; and the Spook was a peculiarly innocuous master, who had
a class-room in his quarters in the town, but not a house.
“The Thirteenth Proposition of the First Book of Euclid,” sighed the
Spook, exactly as though he were giving out a text in Chapel. “Many of
you seem to have found so much difficulty over this that I propose to
run over it again, if you will kindly hold your tongues. Hold your
tongue, Kingdon! Another word from _you_, Pedley, and you’ll have
whipping in front of you—or rather behind you!”
The little joke was a stock felicity of the Spook’s, and it was received
in the usual fashion. At first there was a little titter, but nothing
more until the Spook himself was seen to wear a sickly smile; thereupon
the titter grew into a roar, and the roar rose into a bellow, and the
bellow into one prolonged and insolent guffaw which the cadaverous but
smiling Spook seemed to enjoy as much as the smallest boy in his
mathematical. Jan alone did not join in the derisive chorus; to him it
sounded almost as though it were in another room; and the figure of the
Spook, standing before his blackboard, holding up a piece of chalk for
silence, had become a strangely nebulous and wavering figure.
“'The angles that one straight line makes with another straight line,’”
began the Spook at last, in a voice that Jan could hardly hear, “'are
together equal ... together equal ... together equal ...’”
Jan wondered how many more times he was to hear those two words; his
head swam with them; the Spook had paused, and was staring at him with
fixed eyes and open mouth; and yet the words went on ringing in the
swimming head, fainter and fainter, and further and further away, as Jan
fell headlong into the unfathomable pit of insensibility.
He came to earth and life on a dilapidated couch in the Spook’s study,
where the Spook himself was in the act of laying him down, and of
muttering in sepulchral tones, “A little faint, I fear!”
Jan had never fainted before, and in his heart he was rather proud of
the achievement; but he was thankful that he had chosen the one first
school of the week that was given over to mathematics. He would have
been very sorry to have come to himself in the arms of Haigh. The Spook
was a man who had obviously mistaken his vocation; but it was least
obvious when mere kindness and goodness were required of him. Jan was
detained in his study half the morning, and regaled with tea and toast
and things to read. Heriot also looked in before second school, but was
rather brusque and unsympathetic (after the Spook) until Jan ventured to
say he hoped he would be allowed to play football that afternoon, as he
had never felt better in his life. Heriot said that was a question for
the doctor, who would be in to see Jan during the forenoon.
The doctor came, and Jan could not remember the last time a doctor had
been to see him. This one sat over him with a long face, felt his pulse,
peered into his eyes, looked as wise as an owl at the other end of his
stethoscope, and then began asking questions in a way that put Jan very
much on his guard.
“So you’ve been playing football for your house?”
“Yessir—Under Sixteen.”
“I suppose you played football before you came here?”
“No, sir,” said Jan, beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Weren’t you allowed?”
This question came quickly, but Jan took his time over it as coolly as
he could. Obviously the doctor little dreamt that this was his first
school. On no account must he suspect it now. And it was true, as it
happened, that his father had once and for all forbidden Jan to play
football with Master Evan, because he played so roughly.
“No, sir.”
“You were not allowed?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I think I do,” said the doctor, rising. “And you mustn’t play
here, either, at any rate for the present.”
Jan shot upright on the sofa.
“Your heart isn’t strong enough,” said the doctor.
“My heart’s all right!” cried Jan, indignantly.
“Perhaps you’ll allow me to be the best judge of that,” returned the
doctor. “You may go back to your house, and I shall send a line to Mr.
Heriot. There’s no reason why you should lie up; this is Saturday,
you’ll be quite fit for school on Monday; but no football, mind, until I
give you leave.”
Jan tried to speak, but he had tied his own tongue. He could not explain
to the doctor, he could not explain to Heriot. He did not know why he
had fainted for the first time in his life that morning; he only knew
that it was not his heart, that he had never felt better than after
yesterday’s match. And now he was to be deprived of the one thing he
liked at school, the one thing he was by way of getting good at, his one
chance of showing what was in him to those who seemed to think there was
nothing at all! And another Under Sixteen house-match would be played
next week, perhaps against Haigh, who had also won their tie. And all he
would be able to do would be to stand by yelling “Reds!” and having his
shins lashed by some beastly præpostor, and hearing himself bracketed
with Chips as a “sham” and a “sloper”—and knowing it was true!
That was the worst of it. His heart was all right. It was all a complete
misunderstanding and mistake. It was a mistake that Jan knew he could
have set right by going to Heriot and explaining why he had never played
football before, and why it was barely true to say that he had not been
allowed.
But Jan was not going to anybody to say anything of the kind.
CHAPTER IX
CORAM POPULO
On the notice-board in the colonnade there was a sudden announcement
which no new boy could understand. It was to the effect that Professor
Abinger would pay his annual visit on the Monday and Tuesday of the
following week. Neither Carpenter nor Rutter had ever heard his name
before, and, on the way up the hill to second school, they inquired of
Rawlinson, the small fellow in his own house whom Haigh had begun
reviling on the first morning of the term.
“Who’s Abinger?” repeated Rawlinson. “You wait and see! You’ll love him,
Tiger, as much as I do!”
“Why shall I?” asked Jan, who liked Rawlinson, and only envied him his
callous gaiety under oppression.
“Because he’ll get us off two days of old Haigh,” said Rawlinson,
capering as though the two days would never end.
“Don’t hustle!”
“I’m not hustling. I take my oath I’m not. Grand old boy, Abinger,
besides being just about the biggest bug alive on elocution!”
“Who says so?”
“Jerry, for one! Anyhow he comes down twice a year, and takes up two
whole days, barring first school and private work; that’s why Abinger’s
a man to love.”
“But what does he do? Give us readings all the time?” asked Chips, one
of whose weaknesses was the inane question.
“Give _us_ readings? I like that!” cried Rawlinson, shouting with
laughter. “It’s the other way about, my good ass!”
“Do we have to read to him?”
“Every mother’s son of us, before the whole school, and all the masters
and the masters’ wives!”
Chips went on asking questions, and Jan was only silent because he took
a greater interest in the answers than he cared to show. The ordeal
foreshadowed by Rawlinson was indeed rather alarming to a new boy with
an accent which had already exposed him to some contumely. Yet his ear,
sharpened by continual travesties of his speech, informed Jan that he
was by no means the only boy in the school whose vowels were of
eccentric breadth. It was a point on which he was not unduly sensitive,
but, in his heart, only too willing to improve. He was, however, more on
his guard against the outlandish word and the rustic idiom, which still
cropped up in his conversation, but could not possibly affect his
reading aloud. The result of the last reflection was that Jan subdued
his fears, and rejoiced with Rawlinson at the prospect of a break in the
term’s work.
Their joy was enhanced by the obvious exasperation of Haigh, who
scarcely concealed from his form his own opinion of Professor Abinger
and the impending function. Many were his covert sneers, and loud his
angry laughter, as he hit upon something for the Middle Remove to
declaim piecemeal between them. The chosen passage was taken almost at
random from one of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, which for some reason
formed a standard work throughout the school, and which drew from Haigh
the next thing to a personal repudiation of the volume in his hands. It
was at least plain that means and end shared his cordial disapproval,
but outward loyalty clipped the spoken word, and the form were not
surprised when he finished with a more satisfying fling at Jan.
“Some of you fellows in Mr. Heriot’s house,” said Haigh, “may perhaps
find time to rehearse Rutter in the few words that are likely to fall to
his tender mercies. Otherwise we may trust him to disgrace us before
everybody.”
Indignant glances were cast at Jan’s hangdog head by those who wished to
stand well with Haigh; one within reach dealt him a dexterous kick upon
the shins; and Jan took it all with leaden front, for that was his only
means of getting the least bit even with his adult tormentor.
Nevertheless, on the Sunday evening, when one could sit in another’s
study after lock-up by special leave, and Jan and Chips had availed
themselves of the privilege, Hans Andersen was the author that each had
open before him, as the pair munched their way through a bag of biscuits
bought with their Saturday allowance.
They were not disappointed in the elderly gentleman who opened his
campaign next morning. He had an admirable platform presence, and a fine
histrionic face in a cascade of silvery hair. Nor had he made many of
his opening observations—in a voice like a silver bell—before the
youngest of his new hearers perceived that Professor Abinger was really
as distinguished as he looked. He was evidently the companion of even
more distinguished men. He spoke of the statesmen and the judges whom he
had specially coached for the triumphs of their political and forensic
careers. He mentioned a certain Cabinet Minister as a particularly
painstaking pupil in his younger days. He laid the scene of a recent
personal experience in a ducal mansion, and that led him into an
indiscreet confession involving an even more illustrious name. Professor
Abinger seemed quite embarrassed by his inadvertence; and the Head
Master, who had taken a side seat on his own platform, might have been
seen frowning at his watch, which he closed with a very loud snap. But
the two new boys in the Middle Remove saw how difficult it must be for a
member of such exalted circles to avoid all mention of his most intimate
acquaintance. And when Rawlinson looked at them and laughed, they nodded
their complete agreement with his estimate of the eminent professor.
“When I look about me in this schoolroom,” concluded Mr. Abinger
somewhat hastily, as he beamed upon the serried ranks before him,
“and when I see the future generals and admirals, bishops and
statesmen, lawyers and physicians of high standing—men of mark in
every sphere—even Peers of the Realm itself—who hear me now, whom
I myself am about to hear in my turn—when I dip into your futures
far as human eye can see—then I realise afresh the very wide
responsibility—the—the imperial importance—of these visits to this
school!”
There might have been applause; a certain amount of sly merriment there
was; but Mr. Thrale prevented the one, and cut the other mighty short,
by sternly summoning the Upper Fourth.
There was a scraping and shambling of feet in the rows behind the Middle
Remove, and up to the platform trooped the pioneer force. Jan could only
think of the narrowness of his escape—he had heard that the forms were
called up in any order—and he was wondering whether there was so much
to fear after all, from such a perfect gentleman and jolly old boy, when
Evan Devereux passed quite close to him with the other pioneers. And
Evan’s ears were red to the tip—Evan who looked neat and dapper enough
to stand up before the world—Evan who was a gentleman if there was one
in the school!
The Upper Fourth huddled together on the platform, each boy with a fat
blue volume of Hans Christian Andersen open at the fatal place. Then, at
a sign from the Head Master, the captain of the form took a step
forward, threw out his chest like a man, and plunged into the middle of
one of the tales with a couple of sentences that made the rafters ring.
The professor stood smiling his approval at the intrepid youth’s side,
and Mr. Thrale nodded his head as he called for the second boy in form’s
order. The successful performer sidled to the end of an empty bench
immediately below the platform, and sat down against the wall. His place
was taken by one bent on following his good example, but in too great a
hurry to get it over. “'A myrtle stood in a pot in the window,’” he had
begun in a breath, when the Head Master exclaimed “Three o’clock!” in
portentous tones, and the second performer melted from the platform like
a wraith.
“That’s the worst he does to you,” whispered Carpenter, who had been
making his usual inquiries. “It only means coming in at three for
another shot with the other failures.”
Meanwhile the professor was pointing out the second boy’s mistake. He
laid it down as the first of first principles that a distinct pause must
separate the subject of any sentence from its predicate; he added that
he had preached that doctrine in that place for so many years that he
had hoped it was unnecessary to begin preaching it again; but perhaps he
had never had the advantage of meeting his young friend before? His
young friend had to rise in his place of premature retirement, next but
one to the wall, and confess with burning cheeks that such was not the
case. And when the point had been duly laboured, proceedings were
resumed by a lad who cleared the obstacle with an audaciously protracted
pause after the word “myrtle.”
It was an obstacle at which many fell throughout the morning, the three
o’clock sentence being promptly pronounced upon each; but there were
other interludes more entertaining to the audience and more trying to
the temporary entertainer. There were several stammerers who were made
to beat time and to release a syllable at each beat; and there was more
than one timid child to be paternally conducted by the professor to the
very far end of the huge room, and made to call out, “Can you hear my
voice?” until the Head Master at his end signified that he could. (“No,
I can’t!” he replied very sternly on one occasion.) There were even a
few mirthful seconds supplied by Devereux, of all fellows, over
something which Jan quite failed to follow, but which made him almost as
hot and miserable as Evan had turned upon the platform.
Devereux, however, had looked rather nervous all the time; as he waited
his turn at Abinger’s elbow he seemed uncomfortably conscious of
himself, and he stepped into the breach at last as though the cares of
the school were on his insignificant shoulders. Jan felt for him so
keenly as to hold his breath. Evan had to utter an extravagant statement
about a bottle, but his reading was no worse than nervous until he came
to the word “exhilarated.” He said “exhilyarated.” The professor invited
him to say it again, and with the request his paternal smile broadened
into a grin of less oppressive benevolence. It was a very slight change
of expression, which had occurred more than once before, but on this
occasion it filled Jan with a sudden revulsion of feeling towards
Professor Abinger. Then Evan said “ex-_hill_-yarated,” making a mountain
of the hill, and a stern voice cried “Three o’clock!” The unlucky
culprit looked utterly wretched and crestfallen, and yet so attractive
in his trouble that the professor himself was seen to intercede on his
behalf. But a still sterner voice reiterated “Three o’clock!”
That was all, and it was so quickly over that Devereux was himself again
before the Upper Fourth returned in a body to their place. Indeed, he
came back smiling, and with a jaunty walk, as some criminals foot it
from the dock. But Jan could not catch his eye, though his own were soft
with a sympathy which he longed to show, but only succeeded in betraying
to Carpenter.
“I might have known you were hustling,” Jan said to Rawlinson, as they
got out nearly an hour later than from ordinary second school. “I say,
though, I do bar that old brute—don’t you?”
“What! When he’s coached a Cabinet Minister, and been staying as usual
with the same old dukes and dukesses?”
“If he ever did,” said Jan, his whole mind poisoned by the treatment
meted out to Evan. “It’s easy enough for him to stand up there scoring
off chaps. I’d like to score off him!”
“Well, you wouldn’t be the first. He was properly scored off once, by a
chap called Bewicke in the Upper Sixth. Come my way,” said Rawlinson,
“and I’ll tell you. Bewicke had heard that opening speech about the
Cabinet Minister, and all the rest of it, so often that he knew the
whole thing by heart, and used to settle down to sleep as soon as old
Abinger got a start. So one time Jerry catches him safe in the arms of
Morpheus, and says, 'Bewicke, be good enough to get up and repeat to the
school the substance of Professor Abinger’s last remarks.’ So Bewicke
gets up, blinking, not having heard a blooming word, and begins: 'The
other day, when I had the privilege of being an honoured guest of his
Grace the Duke of ——’ 'Three o’clock!’ says Jerry, and they say
Bewicke was jolly near bunked. It was before my time, worse luck! I wish
I’d heard it, don’t you? I say, we were lucky to escape this morning,
weren’t we? But I’m not sure I don’t wish we’d got it over, myself.”
Four of the lower forms had been polished off between ten and
twelve-thirty, and three more followed in the hour-and-a-half of third
school; but the Middle Remove was not one of the three. There remained
only second school on the second day—a half-holiday—and Carpenter had
heard that much of the morning would be devoted to a Sixth Form
Competition for the Abinger Medal. He had also learnt for a fact that
all the forms were not always called upon, and Jan agreed that in that
case they were beginning to stand an excellent chance of being missed
out. However, no sooner were the proceedings resumed on a pink and
frosty morning, than the bolt fell for the Middle Remove.
The big schoolroom looked abnormally big as Jan took a shy peep down
from the platform. It seemed to contain four thousand boys instead of
four hundred. It felt as cold as an empty church. The Head Master’s
fingers looked blue with a joiner’s pencil poised between them over a
school list; and as he sat with bent head and raised ear his breath was
just visible against his sombre gown. But Professor Abinger in black
spats and mittens was brisker and crisper and more incisive than on the
previous day; his paternal smile broke more abruptly into the grin of
impaired benevolence; his flowing mane looked merely hoary, and his
silvery voice had rather the staccato ring of steel.
He might almost have heard Haigh’s opinion of him, he was so hard upon
that form. The passage which Haigh had chosen was from a story called
“The Mermaid,” and the very first reader had to say “colossal mussel
shells”—perhaps a better test of sobriety than of elocution—but
Abinger would have it repeated until a drunken man could have done it
better and the whole school was in a roar. Jan set his teeth at the back
of the little knot upon the platform: he knew what he would do rather
than make them laugh like that. But no one else made them laugh like
that, though Buggins was asked whether he had been born within sound of
Bow Bells, and created some amusement by the rich intonation of his
denial. Gradually the little knot melted, and the bench below the
platform filled up. Jan began reading over and over to himself the
sentences that seemed certain to fall to him, as he was still doing when
Carpenter left his side and lurched into the centre of the platform.
Now, poor Chips happened to have had a bad night with his tiresome
malady, but on his speech it had the effect of a much more common
disorder.
“The bleached bodes of bed,” he began, valiantly, and was still making a
conscientious pause after the subject of the sentence when a hand fell
on his shoulder and the wretched Chips was looking Professor Abinger in
the face.
“Have you got a cold?” inquired the professor, with his most sympathetic
smile.
“Yes, sir,” said Carpenter, too shy to explain the permanent character
of the cold by giving it its proper name.
“Then stand aside, and blow your nose,” said the professor, grinning
like a fatherly fiend, “while the next boy reads.”
Jan was the next boy, and the last; and he strode forward too indignant
on his friend’s account to think of himself, and cut straight into the
laugh at Carpenter’s expense. Nothing, in fact, could have given Jan
such a moral fillip at the last moment. He cried out his bit
aggressively at the top of his voice, but forgot none of the rules laid
down, and even felt he had come through with flying colours. He saw no
smile upon the sea of faces upturned from the body of the schoolroom.
Not a syllable fell from the Head Master on his right. Yet he was not
given his dismissal, and was consequently about to begin another
sentence when Professor Abinger took the book from Jan’s hand.
“I think you must hear yourself as others hear you,” said he. “Have the
goodness to listen to me.” And he read: “_‘The bleached bawnes of men
who had perished at sea and soonk belaw peeped forth from the arms of
soome, w’ile oothers clootched roodders and sea chests or the skeleeton
of some land aneemal; and most horreeble of all, a little mermaird whom
they had caught and sooffercairted.’_ There!” cried the professor,
holding up his hand to quell the shouts of laughter. “What do you think
of that?”
Jan stood dumfounded by his shame and rage, a graceless and forbidding
figure enough, with untidy hair and a wreck of a tie, and one lace
trailing: a figure made to look even meaner than it was by the spruce
old handsome man at his side.
“What dost tha’ think o’ yon?” pursued the professor, dropping into
dialect with ready humour.
“It’s not what I said,” muttered Jan, so low that his questioner alone
could hear.
“Not what you said, eh? We’ll take you through it. How do you pronounce
'bones’?”
No answer, but a firmer cast to the jaw of Jan, a less abject droop of
the shoulders, a good inch more in actual stature.
“B, o, n, e, s!” crooned the professor, shewing all his teeth.
But Jan had turned into a human mule. And the silence in the great room
had suddenly grown profound.
“Well, we’ll try something else,” said the professor, consulting the
text somewhat unsteadily, and speaking in a rather thin voice. “Let us
hear you say the word 'sunk.’ S, u, n, k—sunk. Now, if you please, no
more folly. You are wasting all our time.”
Jan had forgotten that; the reminder caused him a spasm of satisfaction.
Otherwise he was by this time as entirely aware of his folly as anybody
else present; but it was too late to point it out to him; it was too
late to think of it now; his head was burning, his temples throbbed, his
tongue clave. He could not have spoken now if he had tried. But it would
have taken a better man than Abinger to make him try. And the better man
sat by without a word, pale, stern, and troubled with a complex
indignation.
“I can do nothing with this boy,” said Abinger, turning to him with just
a tremor in his thin high tones. “I must leave him to you, Mr. Thrale.”
“_Twelve_ o’clock!” cried the other with ominous emphasis; and as he
stabbed the school list with his joiner’s pencil, the Middle Remove rose
and returned down the gangway to their accustomed place.
Jan went with them as one walking in his sleep. And Carpenter followed
Jan with a tragic face and tears very near the surface. But as one sees
furthest before rain, so Chips saw a good deal as he walked back
blinking for his life. And one of the things he happened to see was Evan
Devereux and the fellow next him doubled up in fits of laughter.
The Head Master usually sat in judgment on the culprits of the day
without vacating his oaken throne in the Upper Sixth class-room until
the first of them knelt down for his deserts. But the Abinger visitation
upset everything; and on this occasion, when the campaign ended with the
award of a medal to the præpostor who had done least violence to a
leading article in the day’s _Times_, Mr. Thrale remained on his
platform in conversation with Professor Abinger while the school filed
out form by form. Meanwhile three delinquents besides Jan awaited his
arrival on the scene of trial and execution, while a number of the
smaller fry pressed their noses to the diamond panes of the windows
overlooking the school yard; and the public gallery in a criminal court
could not have been better patronised for a notorious case than were
these windows to-day.
One of the other malefactors had brought a slip of paper which he showed
to Jan; on it was set forth a crime of a type which Mr. Thrale was at
that time taking Draconic measures to stamp out of the school. “HORNTON
says πεποιηκασι is a Dative Plural.... I think he deserves a good
flogging,” the committing master had written, and signed the warrant
with his initials. Jan had just reached that hieroglyph when in sailed
their judge and executioner in his cap and gown.
The boy who deserved the good flogging advanced and delivered his
certificate of demerit. Mr. Thrale examined the damning document, and
when he came to the pious opinion at the end, exclaimed with simple
fervour, “So do I!” With that he opened his desk and took out his cane,
and the boy who deserved it knelt down with stolid alacrity. The
venerable executioner then gathered half his gown into his left hand,
and held it away at arm’s length to give free play to his right. And
there followed eight such slashing cuts as fetched the dust from a taut
pair of trousers, and sent their wearer waddling stiffly from the room.
“Wasn’t padded,” whispered one of those left to Jan, who put an obvious
question with a look, which was duly answered with a wink.
Meanwhile a sturdy youth in round spectacles was being severely
interrogated, and replying promptly and earnestly, without lowering his
glasses from the awful aspect of the flogging judge.
“You may go,” said Mr. Thrale at length. “Your honesty has saved you.
Trevor next. I’ve heard about you, Trevor; kneel down, shirker!”
And the wily Trevor not only knelt with futile reluctance, but writhed
impotently during his castigation, though the eight strokes made half
the noise of the other eight; and once up he went his way serenely with
another wink at Jan.
Now by these days Jan had discovered that out of his pulpit Mr. Thrale
was sufficiently short and sharp of speech, rough and ready of humour,
with a trick of talking down to fellows in their own jargon as well as
over their heads in parables. “Sit down, Rutter, and next time you won’t
sit down so comfortably!” he had rapped out at Jan when the Middle
Remove went to construe to the Head Master early in the term. And it was
next time now.
Jan was left alone in the presence, and that instant became ashamed to
find he was already trembling. He had not trembled on the platform
before the whole school; his blood had been frozen then, now it was
bubbling in his veins. He was being looked at. That was all. He was
receiving such a look as he had never met before, a look from wide blue
eyes with hidden fires in them, and dilated nostrils underneath, and
under them a mouth that looked as though it would never, never open.
It did at last.
“Rebel!” said a voice of unutterable scorn. “Do you know what they do
with rebels, Rutter?”
“No, sir.”
It never occurred to Jan not to answer now.
“Shoot them! You deserve to be shot!”
Jan felt he did. The parable was not over his diminished head; it might
have been carefully concocted from uncanny knowledge of his inmost soul.
All the potential soldier in him—the reserve whom this General alone
called out—was shamed and humbled to the dust.
“You are not only a rebel,” the awful voice went on, “but a sulky rebel.
Some rebels are good men gone wrong; there’s some stuff in them; but a
sulky rebel is neither man nor devil, but carrion food for powder.”
Jan agreed with all his contrite heart; he had never seen himself in his
true colours before, had never known how vile it was to sulk; but now he
saw, and now he knew, and the firing-party could not have come too
quick.
The flogging judge had resumed his carved oak seat of judgment behind
the desk. Jan had not seen him do it—he had seen nothing but those
pregnant eyes and lips—but there he was, and in the act of putting his
homely weapon back in the desk. Jan could have groaned. He longed to
expiate his crime.
“Thrashing is too good for you,” the voice resumed. “Have you any good
reason to give me for keeping a sulky rebel in a standing army? Any
reason for not drumming him out?”
Drumming him out! Expelling him! Sending him back to the Norfolk
rectory, and thence very likely straight back to the nearest stables!
More light rushed over Jan. He had seen his enormity; now he saw his
life, what it had been, what it was, what it might be again.
“Oh, sir,” he cried, “I know I speak all wrong—I know I speak all
wrong! You see—you see——”
But he broke down before he could explain, and the more piteously
because now he felt he never could explain, and this hard old man would
never, never understand. That is the tragic mistake of boys—to feel
they can never be understood by men!
Yet already the hard old man was on his feet again, and with one gesture
he had cleared the throng from the diamond-paned windows, and laid
tender hand upon Jan’s heaving shoulder.
“I do see,” he said, gently. “But so must you, Rutter—but so must you!”
CHAPTER X
ELEGIACS
Jan was prepared never to hear the last of his outrageous conduct in the
big schoolroom; that was all he knew about his kind. It cost him one of
the efforts of his school life to show his face again in Heriot’s quad;
and the quad was full of fellows, as he knew it would be; but only one
accosted him, and that was Sprawson, whose open hand flew up in a
terrifying manner, to fall in a hearty slap on Jan’s back. “Well done,
Tiger!” says Sprawson before half the house. “That’s the biggest score
off Abinger there’s been since old Bewicke’s time.” And Jan rushed up to
his study with a fresh lump in his throat, though he had come in vowing
that the whole house together should not make him blub.
That night at tea Jane Eyre of all people (who was splendidly supplied
with all sorts of eatables from home) pushed a glorious game pie across
the table to Jan; and altogether there was for a few hours rather more
sympathy in the air than was good for one who after all had made public
display of a thoroughly unworthy propensity. It is true that Jan had
gone short of sympathy all his life, and that a wave of even misplaced
sympathy may be beneficial to a nature suffering from this particular
privation. But a clever gentleman was waiting to counteract all that,
and to undo at his leisure what Mr. Thrale had done in about two
minutes.
No sooner had the form re-assembled in his hall next day than Haigh made
them a set sarcastic speech on the subject of Jan’s enormity. He might
have seen at a glance that even outwardly the boy was already chastened;
that his jacket and his hair were better brushed than they had been all
the term, his boots properly laced, his tie neatly tied; that in a word
there were more signs of self-respect. Haigh, however, preferred to look
at his favourites at the top of the form, and merely to jerk the thumb
of contempt towards his aversion at the bottom. He reminded them of his
prophecy that Rutter would disgrace them all before the school, and the
triumph of the true prophet seemed at least as great as his indignation
at what had actually happened. Even he, however, had not foreseen the
quality of the disgrace, or anticipated a fit of sulks in public. Yet
for his own part he was not sorry that the headmaster, and Mr. Heriot
and all the other masters and boys in the school, should have had an
opportunity of seeing for themselves what they in that room had to put
up with almost every day of the term. And the harangue concluded with a
plain hint to the form to take the law into its own hands, and “knock
the nonsense out of that sulky bumpkin, who has made us the
laughing-stock of the place.”
To all of which Jan listened without a trace of his old resentment, and
then stood up in his place.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” said he. “I apologise to you and the form.”
Haigh looked unable to believe his eyes and ears. But he was not the man
to revise judgment of a boy once labelled Poison in his mind. He could
no longer fail to note the sudden improvement in Jan’s looks and manner;
all he could do was to put the worst construction upon it that occurred
to him at the moment.
“I shall entertain your apology when you look less pleased with
yourself,” he sneered. “Sit down.”
But Jan’s good resolutions were not to be eradicated any more easily
than the rooted hostility of Haigh, who certainly surpassed himself in
his treatment of the boy’s persistent efforts at amendment. Jan, though
no scholar, and never likely to make one now, could be sharp enough in a
general way when he chose. But he never had chosen under Mr. Haigh. It
was no use attending to a brute who “hotted” you just the same whether
you attended or not. And yet that little old man in the Upper Sixth
class-room, with a single stern analogy, had made it somehow seem some
use to do one’s best without sulking, even without looking for fair
play, let alone reward. And, feeling a regular new broom at heart, Jan
was still determined to sweep clean in spite of Haigh.
It chanced to be a Virgil morning, and of course the new broom began by
saying his “rep” as he had never said it before. Perhaps he deserved
what he got for that.
“I thought you were one of those boys, Rutter,” said Haigh, “who affect
a constitutional difficulty in learning repetition? I only wish I’d sent
you up to Mr. Thrale six weeks ago!”
Yet Jan maintained his interest throughout the fresh passage which the
form proceeded to construe, and being put on duly in the hardest place,
got through again without discredit. It was easy, however, for a member
of the Middle Remove to take an interest in his Virgil, for that poet
can have had few more enthusiastic interpreters than Mr. Haigh, who
indeed might have been the best master in the school if he had been less
of a bullying boy himself. His method in a Virgil hour, at any rate, was
beyond reproach. If his form knew the lesson, there was no embroidery of
picturesque detail or of curious information which it was too much
trouble for him to tack on for their benefit. The _Æneid_ they were
doing was the one about the boat-race; and what Mr. Haigh (who had
adorned both flood and field at Cambridge) did not know about aquatics
ancient and modern was obviously not worth knowing. He could handle a
trireme on the blackboard as though he had rowed in one in the Mays, and
accompany the proceeding with a running report worthy of a sporting
journalist. But let there be one skeleton at the feast of reason, one
Jan who could not or would not understand, and the whole hour might go
in an unseemly duel between intemperate intellect and stubborn
imbecility. Otherwise a gloating and sonorous Haigh would wind up the
morning with Conington’s translation of the lesson; and this was one of
those gratifying occasions; in fact, Jan was attending as he had never
before attended, when one couplet caught his fancy to the exclusion of
all that followed.
“These bring success their zeal to fan;
They can because they think they can.”
“Perhaps _I_ can,” said Jan to himself, “if I think I can. I _will_
think I can, and then we’ll see.”
Haigh had shut the book and was putting a question to the favoured few
at the top of the form. “Conington has one fine phrase here,” he said.
“I wonder if any of you noticed it? _Possunt quia posse videntur_; did
you notice how he renders that?”
The favoured few had not noticed. They looked seriously concerned about
it. The body of the form took its discomfiture more philosophically,
having less to lose. No one seemed to connect the phrase with its
English equivalent, and Mr. Haigh was manifestly displeased. “_Possunt
quia posse videntur!_” he repeated ironically as he reached the dregs;
and at the very last moment Jan’s fingers flew out with a Sunday-school
snap.
“Well?” said Haigh on the last note of irony.
“'They can because they think they can’!” cried Jan, and went from the
bottom to the top of the form at one flight, amid a volley of venomous
glances, but with one broad grin from Carpenter.
“I certainly do wish I’d sent you up six weeks ago!” said Haigh. “I
shall be having a decent copy of verses from you next!”
Yet Jan, though quick as a stone to sink back into the mud, made a
gallant effort even at his verses; but that was his last. They were much
better than any attempt of his hitherto; but it was clear to everybody
that Haigh did not believe they were Jan’s own. Rutter was asked who had
helped him. Rutter replied that he had done his verses himself without
help. No help whatever? No help whatever. Haigh laughed to himself, but
said nothing. Jan said something to himself, but did not laugh. And now
at last he might never have been through those two minutes in the Upper
Sixth class-room.
November was a month of the past; another week would finish off the
term’s work, leaving ten clear and strenuous days for the Exams. Haigh
could only set one more copy of Latin verses, and Carpenter was as sorry
on his own account as he was thankful for Jan’s sake. Carpenter had
acquired an undeniable knack of making hexameters and pentameters that
continually construed and invariably scanned; it was the one thing he
could do better than anybody in the form, and it had brought him
latterly into considerable favour with a master whose ardour for the
Muse betrayed a catholicity of intellect in signal contrast to his view
of boys. It was not only the Greeks and Latins whose august measures
appealed to Haigh; never a copy of elegiacs set he, but it was a gem
already in its native English, and his voice must throb with its music
even as he dictated it to his form. All this was another slight mistake
in judgment: the man made a personal grievance of atrocities inevitably
committed upon his favourite poets, and the boys conceived a not
unreasonable prejudice against some of the noblest lyrics in the
language. Carpenter was probably the only member of the form who not
only revelled in the original lines, but rather enjoyed hunting up the
Latin words, and found a positive satisfaction in fitting them into
their proper places as dactyls and spondees.
“That’s the finest thing he’s set us yet,” said Chips, when Haigh had
given them Cory’s “Heraclitus” for the last copy of the term.
“It’ll be plucky fine when I’ve done with it,” Jan rejoined grimly.
“I should start on it early, if I were you,” said Chips, “like you did
last week.”
“And then get told you’ve had ’em done for you? Thanks awfully; you
don’t catch me at that game again. Between tea and prayers on Saturday
night’s good enough for me—if I’m not too done after the paper-chase.”
“You’re not going to the paper-chase, Tiger?”
“I am if I’m not stopped.”
“When you’re not even allowed to play football?”
“That’s exactly why.”
The paper-chase always took place on the last Saturday but one, and was
quite one of the events of the winter term. All the morning, after
second school, fags had been employed in tearing up scent in the
library; and soon after dinner the road under Heriot’s study windows
began to resound with the tramp of boys on their way in twos and threes
to see the start from Burston Beeches. A spell of hard weather had
broken in sunshine and clear skies; the afternoon was brilliantly fine;
and by half-past two the scene in the paddock under the noble beeches,
with the grey tower of Burston church rising behind the leafless
branches, was worthy of the day. Practically all the school was there,
and quite a quarter of it in flannels and jerseys red or white, trimmed
or starred with the colour of some fifteen. Off go the two
hares—gigantic gentlemen with their football colours thick upon them.
Hounds and mere boys in plain clothes crowd to the gate to see the last
of them and their bulging bags of scent. The twelve minutes’ law allowed
them seems much more like half-an-hour; but at last time is up, the
gates are opened, and the motley pack pours through with plenty of plain
clothes after them for the first few fields. In about a mile comes the
first check; it is the first of many, for snow is still lying under the
trees and hedges, and in the distance it always looks like a handful of
waste-paper. The younger hounds take a minute off, leaving their betters
to pick up the scent again, and their laboured breath is so like tobacco
smoke that you fancy that young master in knickerbockers is there to see
that it is not. Off again to the first water-jump—which everybody
fords—and so over miles of open upland, flecked with scent and
snow—through hedges into ditches—a pack of mudlarks now, and but a
remnant of the pack that started. Now the scent takes great zigzags, and
lies in niggardly handfuls that tell their tale. Now it is thick again,
and here are the two fags who met the hares with the fresh bags, and
those gigantic gentlemen are actually only five minutes ahead, for here
is the high road back past the Upper, and if it wasn’t for the red sun
in your eyes there should be a view of them from the top of one of those
hills.
On the top of the last hill, by the white palings of the Upper Ground,
there is a group of boys and masters, and several of the masters’ wives
as well, to see the finish; and it is going to be one of the best
finishes they ever have seen. Here come the gigantic gentlemen, red as
Indians with the sun upon their faces, and one of them plunging headlong
in a plain distress. They rush down that hill, and are half-way up this
one, the wet mud shining all over them like copper, when the first
handful of hounds start up against the sky behind them.
“Surely that’s rather a small boy to be in the first dozen,” says Miss
Heriot, pointing out a puppy in an untrimmed jersey, who is running
gamely by himself between the first and second batches of hounds.
“In no fifteen, either,” says Heriot, noticing the jersey rather than
the boy, who is still a slip of muddy white on the opposite hill.
The hares are already home. They have been received with somewhat
perfunctory applause, the real excitement being reserved for the race
between the leading hounds, now in a cluster at the foot of the last
hill; but half-way up the race is over, and Sprawson is increasing his
lead with every stride.
“Well run, my house!” says Heriot, with laconic satisfaction.
“The house isn’t done with yet, sir,” pants Sprawson, turning his back
to the sun. “There’s young Rutter been running like an old hound all the
way; here he is, in the first ten!”
And there indeed was the rather small boy in the plain jersey whom
neither Heriot nor his sister had recognised as Jan; but then he looked
another being in his muddy flannels; slimmer and trimmer, and somehow
more in his element than in the coat and collar of workaday life; and
the flush upon his face is not merely the result of exercise and a
scarlet sky, it is a flush of perfect health and momentary happiness as
well.
In fact it has been the one afternoon of all the term which Jan may care
to recall in later life; and how it will stand out among the weary walks
with poor Carpenter and the hours of bitterness under Haigh! But the
afternoon is not over yet. Sprawson is first back at the house; his
good-natured tongue has been wagging before Jan gets there, and Jan
hears a pleasant thing or two as he jogs through the quad to change in
the lavatory. But why has he not been playing football all these weeks?
It might have made just the difference to the Under-Sixteen team; they
might have beaten Haigh’s in the second round, instead of just losing as
they had done to his mortification before Jan’s eyes. What did he mean
by pretending to have a heart, and then running like this? It must be
jolly well inquired into.
“Then you’d better inquire of old Hill,” says Jan, naming the doctor as
disrespectfully as he dares to the captain of the house. “It was he said
I had one, Loder, not me!”
And Loder looks as if he would like to smack Jan’s head again, but is
restrained by the presence of Sprawson and Cave _major_, both of whom
have more influence in the house than he. The great Charles Cave has not
been in the paper-chase; he will win the Hundred and the Hurdles next
term, but he is too slender a young Apollo to shine across country, and
is not the man to go in for the few things at which he happens not to
excel. He does not address Jan personally, but deigns to mention him in
a remark to Sprawson.
“Useful man for us next term, Mother,” says Cave, “if he’s under
fifteen.”
“When’s your birthday, Tiger?” splutters Sprawson from the showerbath.
“End of this month,” says Jan.
“Confound your eyes!” cries Mother Sprawson, “then you won’t be under
fifteen for the sports, and I’ll give you a jolly good licking!”
But what Sprawson really does give Jan is cocoa and biscuits at Maltby’s
in the market-place: a most unconventional attention from a man of his
standing to a new boy: who knows enough by this time to feel painfully
out of place in the fashionable shop, and devoutly to wish himself with
Carpenter at one of their humble haunts. But even this incident is a
memory to treasure, and not to be spoilt by the fact that Shockley
waylays and kicks him in the quad for “putting on a roll,” and that
Heriot himself has Jan into his study after lock-up, for the first time
since the term began, and first gives him a severe wigging for having
run in the paper-chase at all, but sends him off with a parting
compliment on having run so well.
“He said he’d only been forbidden to play football,” so Bob Heriot
reported to his sister. “Of course I had to jump on him for that; but I
own I’m thankful I didn’t find out in time to stop his little game. It’s
just what was wanted to lift him an inch out of the ruck. It augurs the
sportsman I believe he’ll turn out in spite of us.”
“But what about his heart?”
“He hasn’t a heart, never had one, and after this can never be accused
of such a thing again.”
“I wonder you didn’t go to Dr. Hill about it long ago, Bob.”
“I did go to him. But Hill said he wouldn’t take the responsibility of
letting the unfortunate boy play football without inquiring into his
past history. That was the last proceeding to encourage, and so my hands
are tied. They always are where poor Rutter is concerned. It was the
same thing with Haigh over his Latin verses. He wanted me to write to
the boy’s preparatory schoolmaster! I haven’t interceded with him since.
Rutter’s the one boy in my house I can’t stick up for. He must sink or
swim for himself, and I think he’s going to swim; if he were in any
other form I should be sure. But I simply daren’t hold out the helping
hand that one would to others.”
Miss Heriot gave an understanding nod.
“I’ve often heard you say you can’t treat two boys alike. Now I see what
you mean.”
“But I can’t treat Rutter as I ever treated any boy before. I’ve got to
keep my treatment to myself. I mustn’t make him conscious, if I know it;
that applies to them all, of course, but it would make this boy
suspicious in a minute. He puts me on my mettle, I can tell you! I’m not
sure that he isn’t putting the whole public-school system on its trial!”
“That one boy, Bob?”
“They all do, of course. They’re all our judges in the end. But this one
is such a nut to crack, and yet there’s such a kernel somewhere! I stake
my place on that. The boy has more character even than I thought.”
“Although he sulks?”
“That’s often a sign. It means at the least courage of one’s mood. But
what you and I know, and have not got to forget, is that his whole point
of view is probably different from that of any fellow who ever went
through the school.”
“As a straw plucked from the stables?” laughed Miss Heriot under her
breath.
“Hush, Milly, for heaven’s sake! No. I was thinking of the absolute
adventure the whole thing must be to him, and has been from the very
first morning when he got up early to look about for himself like a
castaway exploring the coast!”
“Well, I only hope he’s found the natives reasonably friendly!”
The sudden friendliness of the natives was of course Jan’s greatest joy,
as for once he revelled in the peace and quiet of the untidiest study in
the house. He was more tired than he had ever been in his life before,
but also happier than he had ever dreamt of being this term. The
hot-water pipes threw a modicum of grateful warmth upon his aching legs,
outstretched on the leg-rest of the folding-chair. The curtains were
closely drawn, the candles burning at his elbow. On his knees lay a
_Gradus ad Parnassum_, open, upon an open English-Latin; and propped
against the candle-sticks was the exercise book in which he had taken
down the beautiful English version of “Heraclitus.” It is to be feared
that the beauty was lost upon Jan, who was much too weary to make a very
resolute attack upon a position which he was not equipped to capture, or
to lead another forlorn hope in which the least degree of success would
be deemed a suspicious circumstance. But he did make certain idle
demonstrations with a pencil upon a bit of foolscap. And ten minutes
before prayers he pulled himself sufficiently together to write his
eight lines out in ink.
“Let’s have a look,” said Carpenter, as they waited for the Heriots in
hall; and a look was quite enough. “I say, Tiger, you can’t show this
up! You’ll be licked as sure as eggs are eggs,” whispered Chips.
“I don’t care.”
“You would care. You simply shan’t get this signed to-night. I’ll touch
it up after prayers, and let you have it in time to make a clean copy
before ten, and Heriot’ll sign it after prayers in the morning.”
And he put that copy in his pocket as the sentinel in the passage flew
in with his sepulchral “Hush!”
By gulping down his milk and taking his dog-rock with him to his study,
Carpenter was able to devote a good half-hour to Jan’s verses and still
give Jan ten minutes to copy out the revised version; the ten minutes
was ample, but the half-hour was all too short. The very first line
began with a false quantity, and ended with a grammatical blunder.
Carpenter rectified the false quantity by a simple transposition, and
made so bold as to substitute _perisse_ for _moriri_ at the end of the
hexameter. The second half of the pentameter was hopeless: Chips fell
back on his own, merely changing _causa doloris_ to _fletus acerbus_,
and plumed himself on his facility. But in the second couplet every
other foot was a flogging matter if Jan got sent up.
“I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.”
Chips loved the lines well enough to blush for his own respectable
attempt at a Latin rendering; but his blood ran cold at Jan’s—
“Flevi quum memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo
Defessum Phœbum fecimus ire domum.”
He flung himself on the monstrosity, but had to leave it at—
“Cum lacrymis memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo
Hesperias Phœbus fessus adisset aquas.”
Chips did not plume himself on this; but at any rate _nostro loquendo_
was Jan’s own gem, and just bad enough to distract attention from the
suspicious superiority of the rest without invoking the direst
consequences. This was a subtle calculation on the part of Carpenter. He
was quite conscious of the subtlety, and by no means as ashamed of it as
such a desperately honest person should have been. He justified the
means by the end, which was to save Jan a certain flogging; and the
stage after justification was something very like a guilty relish in a
first offence. There was an artistic satisfaction in doing the thing as
deftly as Chips was doing it. The third couplet might almost have passed
muster as Jan had left it; a touch or two and it was safe. But the last
hexameter would never do, and Chips replaced it with a plagiarism of his
own corresponding line which might have sufficed if he himself had not
come curiously to grief over the last hexameter.
“Excellent, as usual, Carpenter,” said Haigh in the fulness of time. “I
could have given you full marks but for an odd mistake of yours towards
the end. You seem to have misread the original penultimate line: 'Still
are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;’ what part of speech
do you take that 'still’ to be?”
“Adjective, sir,” said Chips, beginning to wonder whether it was one.
“Exactly!” cried Haigh, with the guffaw of his lighter moments. “So you
get _Muta silet vox ista placens, tua carmina vivunt_—'Thy pleasant
voices are still; on the other hand, however, thy nightingales are
awake’—eh?”
“Yes, sir,” said Chips, more doubtfully than before.
“Have you a comma after the word 'nightingales’ in the English line as
you took it down?”
“No, sir.”
“_That_ accounts for it! Ha, ha, ha! But it may be my fault.” Nothing
could exceed the geniality of Haigh towards a boy with Carpenter’s
little gift. He was going through the week’s verses on the chimneypiece
in his hall, but now he turned his back to the blazing fire. “Will those
who have a comma after 'nightingales’ be good enough to hold up their
hands?” A forest of hands flew up. “I’m afraid it’s your mistake,
Carpenter,” resumed Haigh, with a final guffaw. “Well, I couldn’t have
pitched upon a finer object-lesson in the importance of punctuation, if
I had tried; but when you come to look at it again, Carpenter, you’ll
find that even without the comma your reading was more ingenious than
plausible.” He turned back to the chimneypiece and the pile of verses.
The incident seemed closed, when suddenly Haigh was seen frowning
thoughtfully into the fire. “Surely there was some other fellow did the
same thing!” he exclaimed, and began glancing through the pile. “Ah!
Rutter, of course! _Jucundæ voces tacitæ sunt, carmina vivunt!_”
His voice was completely changed as it rasped out the abhorred surname;
it changed again before the end of Jan’s hexameter.
“Were you helped in this, Rutter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you help him, Carpenter?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was not an instant’s hesitation before either answer. Yet the very
readiness of the culprits to confess their crime was an evident
aggravation in the eyes of Haigh, who flew into a passion on the spot.
“And you own up to it without a blush between you! And you, Rutter,
expect me to believe that the same thing didn’t happen last week, when
you denied it!”
“It did not happen last week, sir,” said Jan; but all save the first
three words were drowned by Haigh.
“Silence!” he roared. “I don’t believe a word you say. But I begin to
think you’re not such a fool as you pretend to be, Rutter; you saw you
were found out at last, so you might as well make a clean breast of it!
_That_ doesn’t minimise the effect of cheating, or the impudence of the
offence in a brace of beggarly new boys. Perhaps you are not aware how
dishonesty is treated in this school? I would send you both up to Mr.
Thrale at twelve o’clock, but we don’t consider that a flogging meets
this kind of case. It’s rather one in which the whole must suffer for
the corruption of a part. I shall consider the question of a detention
for the entire form, and we’ll see if _they_ can’t knock some
rudimentary sense of honour into you!”
The two delinquents trembled in their shoes; they knew what they were in
for now. Had they entertained a single doubt about the matter, a glance
at the black looks encompassing them would have prepared them for the
worst. But Chips had not the heart to lift his eyes, and so a slip of
paper was thoughtfully passed down to him by Shockley. “I’ll murder you
for this,” it said; and the storm burst upon the hapless couple the
moment they were out in Haigh’s quad after second school.
“What the deuce do you both mean by owning up?”
“I wasn’t going to tell a lie about it,” said Jan, doggedly.
“No more was I!” squealed Chips, as Shockley twisted his arm to breaking
point behind his back.
“Oh, yes, you’re so plucky pious, aren’t you? Couldn’t do Thicksides
with other people; too highly moral and plucky superior for that; but
not above doing the Tiger’s verses, and getting the whole form kept in!”
“It isn’t for getting your verses done,” cried another big fellow,
frankly, as he tried but failed to get a free kick at Rutter: “it’s for
being such infernal young fools as to own up!”
So much for the sense of honour to be knocked into the fraudulent pair
by the rest of the form! It was a revelation to Carpenter and Rutter.
They knew that Shockley and Buggins rarely did a line of any sort of
composition for themselves, and more than once they had heard the pair
indignantly repudiate the slightest suggestion against their good faith
on the part of Haigh. But these poor specimens in their own house and
form were the only fellows whose code of honour they had been hitherto
able to probe. And it did surprise them to find some of the nicest
fellows in the form entirely at one with their particular enemies in
condemning the honesty which had got them all into trouble.
Was it a good system that could bring this about? The two boys did not
ask themselves that question; nor did it occur to them to carry their
grievance to Mr. Heriot, whose expert opinion would have been as
interesting as his almost certain action in the matter. But in the
bitterness of their hearts they did feel that an injustice had been
done; and one of them at any rate was very sorry that he had told the
truth. He would know what to say another time. Yet how human the fury of
the form, threatened with punishment for an offence for which only two
of their number were responsible, and subtly suborned by the master to
do his dirty work by venting their natural anger on the luckless pair!
Could any trick be shabbier in a master? Could any scheme be more
demoralising for boys? The effect on them was easily seen. They were to
inculcate a higher sense of schoolboy honour. And the first thing they
did was to curse and kick you for not piling dishonour on dishonour’s
head!
Chips and Jan did not see the fiendish humour of the situation, any more
than they looked beyond their immediate oppressors for first principles
and causes. But whatever may be said for the punishment of many for the
act of one or two, as the only thing to do in certain cases, it would
still be hard to justify the course pursued by Mr. Haigh, who held his
threat over the whole form until the two boys’ lives had been made a
sufficient misery to them, and then only withdrew it in consideration of
a special holiday task, to be learnt by heart at home and said to him
without a mistake (on pain of further penalties) when they came back
after Christmas.
CHAPTER XI
A MERRY CHRISTMAS
Christmas weather set in before the holidays. Old Boys came trooping
down from Oxford and Cambridge, and stood in front of their old hall
fires in astonishing ties and wondrous waistcoats, patronising the Loder
of the house, familiar only with the Charles Cave. But when they went in
a body to inspect the Upper, it was seen at once that the Old Boys’
Match could not take place for the ground was still thickly powdered
with snow, and a swept patch proved as hard and slippery as the slide in
Heriot’s quad. This slide was a duly authorised institution,
industriously swept and garnished by the small fry of the house under
the personal supervision of old Mother Sprawson, who sent more than one
of them down it barefoot, as a heroic remedy for chilblains rashly urged
in excuse for absence. Indeed it was exceptionally cold, even for a
nineteenth-century December. The fire in the hall was twice its usual
size; the study pipes became too hot to touch, yet remained a mockery
until you had your tollies going as well and every chink stopped up.
Sprawson himself was understood to be relying more than ever on his
surreptitious flask; but as he never betrayed the ordinary symptoms of
indulgence, except before a select and appreciative audience, and could
sham sober with complete success whenever necessary, these
entertainments were more droll than thrilling. It was Sprawson, however,
who lit up the slide with tollies after lock-up on the last night, and
kept the fun fast and furious until the school bell rang sharply through
the frost, and the quad opened to dispatch its quota of glowing faces to
prize-giving in the big schoolroom.
The break-up concert had been given there the night before; but the
final function was more exciting, with the Head Master beaming behind a
barricade of emblazoned volumes, the new school list in his hand. It was
fascinating to learn the new order form by form, and quite stirring to
hear and abet the thunders of applause as the prize-winners went
steaming up for their books and came back with them almost at a run.
Crabtree was the only one whom Jan clapped heartily; he was top of his
form as usual, as was Devereux lower down the school, but Jan was not
going to be seen applauding Evan unduly. Chips could not keep still when
it came to the Middle Remove, and even Jan sat up with a tight mouth
then. On their places depended their chance of a remove out of the
cl
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