'MOP FAUCIBUS HÆSIT'
Boys in the fifth form at Fernhall shared a study with one companion.
Monitors of course lived in solitary splendour, with a bed which
would stand on its head, and allowed itself to be shut up in a
cupboard in the corner. Small boys who had not attained even to the
fringe of the school aristocracy lived in herds in bare and
exceedingly untidy rooms round the inner quads. Even in those days
there were monitors who were worshippers of art. Some of them had
curtains in their rooms of rich and varied colouring; one of them had
a plate hung up which he declared was a piece of undoubted old
Worcester. Tomlinson was a great authority on objects of _virtù_,
and a rare connoisseur, but we changed his plate for one which we
bought for sixpence at Newby's, and he never knew the difference.
Then there was one fellow who had several original oil paintings.
These represented farmyard scenes and were attributed indifferently
to Landseer, Herring, and a number of other celebrated artists.
Whoever painted them, these pictures were the objects of more
desperate forays than any other property within the school limits. I
remember them well as adorning the room of a certain man of muscle,
to whom, of course, they belonged merely as the spoils of war. The
rightful owner lived three doors off, but I don't think that he ever
had the pluck to attempt to regain his own.
However, in the small boys' rooms there were none of these luxuries
of an effete civilisation. There was a book-shelf full of ragged
books, none of which by any chance ever bore the name of anyone in
that study; there was a table, a gas-burner, a frying-pan, and a
kettle. These last-named articles might have been seen in every
study at Fernhall, from the study of the monitor to that of the
pauper, as we called that unfortunate being who had not yet emerged
from the lower school. In the long nights of winter, when the wild
sea roared just beyond the limits of their quad, and the spray came
flying over the sea-wall to be dashed against their study windows,
all Fernhall boys had a common consolation. They called it brewing:
not the brewing of beer or of any intoxicating liquor, but of that
cheering cup of tea which consoles so many thousands, from the London
charwoman to the pig-tailed Chinaman, from the enervated Indian to
the half-frozen Russian exile in Siberia. At first the headmasters
of Fernhall tried hard to put down this practice. Sergeants lurked
about our passages, confiscated our kettles, carried away the
frying-pans full of curly rashers from under our longing eyes, and
'lines' and flagellations were all we got in exchange. At last a new
era began. A great reformer arrived, a 'Head' of liberal leanings
and wide sympathy. This man frowned on coercion, and, instead of
taking away our kettles, gave us a huge range of stoves on which to
boil them. From a cook's point of view, no doubt, the range of
stoves was a great improvement on the old gas-burner, but, in spite
of the liberality of the 'Head,' small clusters of boys still stood
night after night on those old study tables and patiently fried their
bacon over the gas.
Unfortunately this was not the worst of their misdoings. Besides the
appetising smell of the bacon and the delicious aroma of chicory or
tea, there was too often a strong flavour of 'bird's-eye' or
'latakia' about the passages. Almost to a man, the school smoked.
How it had crept in I don't pretend to know, but the habit had been
growing in the school for years until it was almost universal. This
was the one thing which our new head-master would not tolerate at any
price, and it was pretty well understood throughout the school that
his dealings with the first offender detected in the act would be
short and severe. About the time of the Loamshire match he had taken
to beating up our quarters in person, not, I think, from any desire
to detect the smokers in the act, but from a hope that the fear of
his coming might act as a deterrent. About a week after Snap Hales's
great bowling feat, Fernhall was brewing as usual. The dusk had
fairly set in; a crowd of boys were jostling one another with the
cans and frying-pans at the great public stoves, and Snap and many
others were breaking school-rules as usual in their own studies.
Mind, I am pledged to serve up my boys _au naturel_ and not smothered
in white sauce, so that if you don't like my menu you had better take
warning in time. The bacon had been finished, the hot rolls from the
tuckshop had been submitted to digestions which were capable of
dealing even with hot rolls and butter, and now Snap Hales, Billy
Winthrop, and one Simpson were desperately endeavouring to enjoy, or
appear to enjoy, the forbidden pleasures of tobacco. Billy had an
elaborately carved meerschaum between his teeth, while Snap lay full
length on an extemporised divan, making strange noises and strange
faces in his endeavours to get on terms with a 'hubble-bubble.'
Billy's jaws ached with the weight of the meerschaum, and Snap was as
blown with trying to make his instrument of torture draw as if he had
been running the school mile. Simpson was in a corner cutting up
some 'sun-dried honeydew,' which he had procured in a cake--'such,'
he said, 'as the trappers of the North-West always use.' To tell the
truth, he liked 'whittling' at that cake of tobacco with his knife a
great deal better than smoking it, for the first two or three whiffs
invariably sent a cold chill through his frame and a conviction that,
like Mark Twain, he had inadvertently swallowed an earthquake.
Suddenly the boys stopped talking; there was a heavy rap at the door,
preceded by a vain attempt to open it, and followed by the command,
in deep tones, to 'open this door.'
'Nix! by Jove!' whispered Simpson, whiter now than ever with fright.
'Rot!' replied Snap unceremoniously. 'It's only that fool Lane, up
to some of his jokes. Go to Bath, Legs,' he added at the top of his
voice.
'Open this door at once,' thundered someone on the other side, while
lock and hinge rattled beneath the besieger's hands.
'Don't you wish you may get it, old chap,' 'Shove away, and be hanged
to you,' 'Try your skull against the panel, blockhead,' and several
similar remarks, were now hurled at the enemy by those in the study.
Meanwhile, preparations for repelling an assault were rapidly being
made.
'Boys, open this door, don't you know who is speaking to you?' said
the voice once more.
'Oh yes, we know,' laughed Snap, 'and we are getting ready to receive
you, sir.'
'Deuced well old Legs imitates the Head, doesn't he?' whispered Billy
Winthrop.
'Not badly,' answered Snap in the same tone. 'Have you got
everything ready?' he added.
'Yes,' said Billy; 'but let me try my fire-arm first,' and, dipping
the nose of a large squirt into the inkpot, he filled it, and then
discharged it at a venture through the key-hole. The result was
satisfactory. From the sounds of anger and hasty retreat in the
passages the boys guessed that the shot had told, and indulged in a
burst of triumphant laughter in consequence. But the enemy was back
again in a minute wrenching furiously at the door, which now began to
give.
'Let us die in the breach,' cried Snap, catching up a large mop,
which he had used earlier in the day to clean his study floor, and
emptying over it the remains of the cold coffee. 'Billy, stand by
with your blunderbuss. Simpson, at the next shove let the door go!'
he whispered, and the boys took up their places--Snap with his mop in
rest opposite the entrance, Simpson with his hand on the key, and
Billy's deadly weapon peeping over his leader's shoulder. At the
next assault Simpson let the door go, and Hales rushed headlong out
to meet the foe, getting the whole of Billy's charge down the back of
his neck as he went. Someone knocked up the mop, so that it cannoned
from him to another of the attacking party, whom it took fairly in
the face, plastering him up against the opposite wall, a full-length
portrait of 'the Head!'
For once Snap's spirits deserted him. The mop fell from his
nerveless hand. He even forgot to say that he did not do it. It was
too gross a sin even for a schoolboy to find excuses for. Nor had
'the Head' much to say--partly, perhaps, because 'mops and coffee'
was not a favourite dish with him, and he had had rather more of it
at his first essay than he cared to swallow, and partly, no doubt,
because (diplomat though he was) for the life of him he could not
remember what was the dignified thing to do under such unusual
circumstances. The Sergeant recovered himself first.
'They've all been smoking, Sir!' he asserted maliciously. 'I suppose
I'd better take their pipes.'
'Yes, Sergeant, and their names,' replied the Head.
'No need of that,' muttered our implacable foe. 'I know this here
study better nor ever a one in Fernhall.'
'Hales, and you, Winthrop minor, report yourselves to me in my
library after morning school to-morrow,' said the Head, and, slowly
turning, the great man went, his mortar-board somewhat on one side,
while down the long cassock which he wore the streams of coffee ran.
Two minutes after his departure, No. 19, the scene of the fray, was
full of friends and of sympathisers.
'You'll get sacked, of course,' remarked one of these, 'but,' he
added, 'I don't see that there is anything worse than that which Old
Petticoats can do.'
'You don't think he could hang us, for instance, eh, Legs?' asked
Snap sarcastically. 'Well, you are a nice, cheerful chap, you are!'
he added.
'Never mind, old fellow,' urged another, 'they will give you a good
enough character for Sandhurst, and what do you want more?'
'You want a good deal for Sandhurst now, Viper!' replied Snap;
'they'd rather have a blind mathematician than a giant who didn't
know what nine times nine is.'
In spite of their comforters our friends felt for at least five
minutes that there was something in their world amiss. Then suddenly
Snap began to laugh, quite softly and to himself at first, but the
laugh was infectious, so that in half a minute every boy in the
passage was holding his sides, and laughing until the tears ran down
his cheeks. By-and-by inquiries were made for Simpson, who had not
been seen since the opening of the door. In answer to the shouts
addressed to him, a sepulchral voice replied, and after some search
the unfortunate wretch was produced from behind the door, white with
fear and tobacco-smoke, flat as a cake of his own beloved honeydew,
his knees trembling, and his hair on end with terror. Luckily for
him, he had drawn the door back upon himself, and had remained
unnoticed behind it ever since.
In spite of the tragedy with which it had begun, the remainder of the
evening was spent in adding one more to the works of art which adorn
Boot Hall Row, to wit, one life-size portrait of the Very Reverend
the Head-master of Fernhall, drawn upon the wall against which he had
so recently been flattened, in charcoal, by one Snap Hales; while
underneath was written, to instruct future generations:
IN MEMORIAM, JUNE 22, 1874.
'MOP FAUCIBUS HÆSIT'