The boy was very tired when he arrived in London, and not capable of the
hot interest he expected to feel in the great muddy capital, which was
one muddle of mean houses, noisy roads, carts and carriages, and
crowding people, to his tired perceptions. The day after, he and his
grandfather went to Windsor through the mild soft country, half veiled
in the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” that distinguish autumn, and warm
with the all-pervading and diffused sunshine of the season. How
different was the calm slow river, lingering between its placid banks,
seeking no coy concealment under cliff or tree, but facing the daylight
with gentle indifference, from the wild shy Esk, which played at
hide-and-seek with the sunshine, like a flying nymph among the woods!
The old lord seemed half inspired by this return to scenes which he
remembered so well, though he had not been himself brought up at Eton.
“I brought your father here, as I’m bringing you,” he said, as they
rolled along round the curves of the railway, looking out upon the
distant castle and the river. “You will see plenty of boats on the river
in another day, my boy; and if your grandma and I come here next summer,
I daresay we shall see you strutting along in all your finery, with
flowers in your hat, and a blue shirt.” Innocent old lord! he thought
his little rustic, just out of the nest, might reach the celestial
heights of Eton in a few months, and perhaps--for what limits are there
to the presumption of ignorance?--find a place in the Eight in his first
summer. But, indeed, I don’t really think Lord Eskside’s ignorance went
so far as this. He said it, not knowing what else to say, to please the
boy. They went down together to the great dame’s house, full already of
small boys settling into their familiar quarters, upon whom Val looked
with all the wondering envy and respect natural to a freshman. He had
himself assumed the tall hat for the first time in his life, and the
sight of so many tall hats moving about everywhere confused yet excited
him. His tutor, who was not his “dame,” lived in a tiny house attached
to a big pupil-room, and had no accommodation for boys or for much else,
except the blue-and-white china in which his soul delighted. Mr Gerald
Grinder, like his brother Mr Cyril Grinder, who had been Val’s tutor at
Eskside, had one of the finest minds of his time; but the chief way in
which this made itself evident to the outer world was in his furniture,
and the fittings-up of his little house, every “detail” in which he
flattered himself was a study. It was a very commonplace little house,
but the thought that had been expended on its decoration might have
built pyramids--if anything so rude and senseless as building pyramids
could have occurred to the refined intelligence of a man of Mr Gerald
Grinder’s day. Val gazed at all the velvet brackets, and all the antique
cabinets (which had been “picked up” in holiday travels all over the
world, and were each the subject of a tale), and all the china, with a
sense of failing breath and space too small for him; while his
grandfather engaged Mr Grinder in conversation, and pointed out the
boy’s peculiarities, as if these characteristics could be of any
particular interest to any one out of Val’s own family--and the young
tutor listened with a smile. “I don’t doubt we shall soon know each
other,” he said suavely, and shook hands with Val, and dismissed him: to
receive just such a description of another boy next moment from another
anxious parent. “Whether is it Ross or Smith now, that is the
self-willed one, and which is the boy that catches cold?” the young
tutor asked himself, when the audience was over. He concluded, finally,
that the latter case must be Smith’s, since he was brought by his
mother--a generalisation which perhaps was justifiable. Poor Mr Grinder!
he knew all the marks of his china as well as these tiresome people
knew, so to speak, the manufacturer’s marks on their boys; but how much
more interesting was one than the other! He took a walk up to Windsor to
an old furniture shop, where bargains of precious ware were now and
then to be had, with a delicious sense of relief when it was too late to
expect more pupils--and fell upon a bit of real Nankin there which
refreshed his very soul.
Meanwhile the old lord and his boy strayed about the narrow streets.
They went to the bookseller’s and bought pictures for Val’s room--which,
I need not say, were chiefly Landseers, though, granting the subject,
Val was not particular as to the artist; and then they walked to the
castle, the grandfather making a conscientious but painful attempt to
remember who built the Round Tower, and who was responsible for St
George’s Chapel. As to these points, however, Val was not at all
exacting, and had no thirst for information. He liked to walk on the
terrace better, where the great sunny misty plain before him made his
young heart expand with a delightful sense of space and distance, but
did not care for the splendid alleys of the Long Walk, which were too
formal to please his ill-regulated fancy. And then they went to the
river, along the green bank of the Brocas, which touched Lord Eskside’s
heart with many recollections. “I have walked with your father here
fifty times, I should think,” said the old lord. “He was not much of a
boating man himself, but he was fond of the river. Your father had
always what is called a fine mind, Val.”
“What is a fine mind?” said the boy, who did not know very much about
his father, or care a great deal, if the truth must be told.
“It’s rather hard to define,” said the old lord, “when you don’t possess
the article; and you must not learn to generalise too much, my boy; it’s
a dangerous custom. It is, so far as I’ve been able to remark, an
intellect which pays more attention to the small things than the great
in this life; it cares for what it calls the details, and lets the
bigger matters shift for themselves.”
“Was my father--very good at anything?” asked Val, whom this definition
interested but moderately. He had some difficulty in shaping this
question; for indeed, having just heard that his father was not a
boating man, his curiosity was partially satisfied before expressed.
“Your father has very good abilities,” said Lord Eskside--“very good
abilities. I wish he would put them to more use. I’ve been told he was
an elegant scholar, Val.”
“What is an elegant scholar, grandpa?”
The old lord laughed. “Not me nor you,” he said; “and I doubt if either
you or me are the stuff to make one of; but your father was. I’ll show
you an old school-list at home with his name in it. I’ve heard his Latin
verses were something very fine indeed; Val, Latin verses are grand
things. Poetry in English is a thriftless sort of occupation; but a dead
language makes all the difference. If you ever can make Latin verses
like your father, you’ll be a great man, Val.”
Val never knew whether his grandfather was laughing at him when he
adopted this tone. “Is my father a great man?” he asked, with a serious
face. “I should like to know a little more about him. I have only seen
him once. Once is not much for a fellow to have seen his father; and I
was so small then, and never thought of anything.”
“Most of us are just as well without thinking,” said Lord Eskside, with
a suppressed sigh, “except about your work, my boy. You may be sure you
will want all your thoughts for your work.”
“That is just how you always turn me off,” said Val. “I ask you about my
father, grandpa, and you tell me about my work. I will do my work,” said
the boy, with a dogged air, which he sometimes put on; “but why does my
father never come home?--why doesn’t he care for me? All these fellows
there are with their fathers. I like you a great deal better--but _why_
doesn’t he come?”
“Because he likes his own way,” said the old lord, “better than he likes
you or me--better than he likes his own country or our homely life.
Observe, my boy, this is nothing for you to judge, or make your remarks
upon,” he added, bending his brows at Val, who was not used to be looked
on frowningly. “Your father is no boy like you, but a man, and able to
judge for himself. His profession takes him abroad. He will be an
ambassador one of these days, I suppose, and represent his
sovereign--which is more honour than often falls to the lot of a poor
Scots lord.”
Val did not make any reply, and the pair continued their walk along the
river-side. His father a representative of his sovereign; his
mother----. For the last time before he was engulfed by the practical
schoolboy life which was more congenial to his years, Val felt the whirl
of wonder, the strange chaos of his double life which was made up of
such different elements, and lay as it were between two worlds. His
panic was gone, having worn itself out, and no real interest in his
unknown mother kept her image before him; but he felt the jar in him of
these two existences, so strangely, widely separated. His head felt
giddy, as if the world were turning round with him. But every moment the
river was becoming more gay and bright, and the moving panorama before
him after a while overcame his individual reflections. The “fellows”
newly arrived were already crowding down to the river--little new boys
standing about with their hands in their pockets looking wistfully on;
but the old _habitués_ of the Thames asserted their superiority, and got
afloat in swarms--some in the strange outriggers which Val had heard of,
but had never seen before. Lord Eskside was as eager about the sight as
if it had been he who was the new boy. “Look how light they are, Val!”
he cried--“how cleverly they manage them! If those long oars get out of
balance the thing upsets. Look at that small creature there no bigger
than yourself----”
“Bigger! he’s not up to my elbow,” cried Val, indignant.
“Well, smaller than yourself: but you could not do that, you lout, to
save your life.”
Val’s face grew crimson. “Come back next week, grandpa,” he said, “and
see if I can’t; or come along, I’ll try now; it would only be a
ducking--and what do I care for a ducking? I’ll try this very day.”
“Come back, come back, my boy; they won’t let you try to-day,” cried the
old lord, laughing at the boy’s impetuosity. Val had turned back, and
was rushing down to the “rafts” where boats were to be had; and it was
all that his grandfather could do to restrain him. “You are not, Val
Ross, your own master--not to speak of other people’s--here,” he said,
holding the boy by the arm, “but a member of a corporation, and you must
obey the laws of it. They’ll not give you a boat, or if they do, it will
be because they think you don’t belong to Eton; and if you were to go
out without fulfilling all the regulations, they’d punish you, Val.”
“Punish me!” cried Val, with nostrils dilating, and a wild fire in his
eyes.
“Ay, punish _you_, though you are such a great man. This will never do,”
said Lord Eskside; “do you mean to struggle with me, sir, in the sight
of all these lads? Master yourself! and that at once.”
The boy came to himself with a gasp, as if he had been drowning. I don’t
think he had ever in his life been spoken to in so severe a voice. He
ceased to resist, and the old lord gave up his hold on his arm, and
continued in a lower tone--
“You must learn this lesson, my boy, at once. You are nobody here, and
you must master yourself. Do it of your own will, and you show the
makings of a man. Do it because you are compelled and what are you but a
slave? The thing is in your own hands, Val,” said Lord Eskside,
softened, and putting off his peremptory tone; “you have almost made an
exhibition, before all these strange lads, of yourself--and me.”
Val did not say anything; his breast was swelling high, his heart
throbbing with the effort he had made; and he was not pleased that he
had been obliged to make the effort, nor did he feel that satisfaction
in having done his duty which is said always to attend that somewhat
difficult operation. He walked along the river-side panting and drawing
his breath hard, as if he really had tried the experiment of a ducking.
How he longed to do this thing which he had been assured he must not do!
He would have liked to jump into the river and swim out to one of the
long slim boats, poised like big dragon-flies on the water, and eject
its rower, and take the vacant place; in which case, no doubt, Val would
have come to signal grief, as he would have deserved--for he had never
been in an outrigger in his life.
Then the pair went and dined at the hotel, where Val recovered his
spirits; and then the old lord took the boy to his little room, where
they found his things unpacked, and his pictures standing in a little
heap against the wall, and his room almost filled up with the bed which
had been folded up out of the way when they were there before. It was
not like the luxurious large airy room which had been Val’s at home, any
more than the house with its long passages, with regiments of doors on
either side, was like the old-fashioned arrangements of Rosscraig. And
here at last the parting so often rehearsed had to be done in earnest.
“Master yourself,” said the old lord, with a voice which was neither so
cheery nor so firm as he meant it to be; “and God bless you, Val!” And
then he was gone, walking up the dark street with a heavy heart in his
old bosom, and his eyebrows working furiously. And Val sat down upon
his bed and looked round him wonderingly, and for the first time
realised that he was left alone.
However, it is needless to enter upon the details of so very common a
scene. Perhaps the boy shed a few tears silently when the maid took away
his candle, and he felt that no soft step, subdued lest he should be
sleeping, no rustling silken garments, could come into his room that
night. In the morning he faced his new existence vigorously, and hung
his pictures, and began his work without any weakness of recollection.
The old people felt it a great deal more, and a great deal longer; but
Val could not have been known from the most accustomed and habitual
schoolboy, and, stranger still, scarcely knew himself for anything else,
after that night. At the end of the week he felt as if he had lived
there all his life--as if he had been there before in some previous kind
of existence. I suppose this readiness of a child to adapt itself to new
habits, and make them its own, does but increase the strange unreality
of life itself to the half-conscious mind--life which changes in a
moment, so that one week seems like years, and years, being past, look
as if they had never been.
At the end of the week Val wrote home; and in his first letter there was
this paragraph, written in his clearest hand:--
“Tell grandpapa I rowed up to Surly Hall, a long way above where we
walked, above locks, _in an outrigger_, this morning. I rowed another
fellow and licked him. I passed swimming on Thursday, and _outriggers is
very_ easy. You have nothing to do but keep steady, and it flies like a
bird.”
“What is an outrigger?” said Lady Eskside, as she gave her husband the
letter. The old lord gave an internal shiver, and thanked heaven that
she did not remember; and Val did not think it necessary to inform his
anxious grand-parents how often he had swamped his little craft on the
Friday, before he succeeded in making that triumphal progress to Surly
on Saturday morning. “He’s a determined rascal, that boy of yours, my
lady,” was all the answer Lord Eskside made.
I would not assert, however, that Val found all his difficulties at
school to be surmounted so easily as the outrigger. He had to go through
the average number of accidents, and perils, and overcome various wild
stirrings of nature within him, before he learned, as a true Etonian
does, to take pride in the penalties and hardships as well as the
pleasures which distinguish his school. Val’s natural pride in his own
person as Val Ross had to be met and routed by his artificial and
conventional pride as a schoolboy, before, for instance, he could
reconcile himself to be some one’s fag, a fate which overtook him
instantly. Little Lord Hightowers, the Duke’s son, who was in the same
house, took to it naturally, without any stirring of repugnance, and
made his master’s toast with conscientious zest, and went his master’s
errands, and accepted his share of the dainties he had fetched when that
potentate was in a liberal mood, without any struggle whatever with
himself. But Val had a struggle, the wild blood in his veins being
unused to obedience and finding subjection hard. I am happy to say,
however, that his powers were equal to the necessary sacrifice, and that
he never made an exhibition of himself as he had been on the eve of
doing on the day of his arrival. Time passed on, and Val grew and
“mastered himself;” but sometimes did not master himself, and got into
disgrace, and scrambled out again, and had no fair-weather voyage, but
all a schoolboy’s troubles at their hardest. Hightowers had a very much
easier time of it; he was neither proud nor ambitious, but was just as
happy at the foot of his division as anywhere else, quite as happy
looking on at a game as playing, and took the floggings which overtook
him periodically with the most heavenly calm; whereas the mere threat of
one wrought Val to the point of desperation. Hightowers was better off
than Val by right of his temperament and calmer blood. He took
everything much more lightly, and used to discourse to his companion on
the vanity of “making a fuss” with ponderous and precocious wisdom. “Why
don’t you take it easy, as I do?” said Hightowers; “what’s the good of
verses, for instance? A fellow never does verses after he leaves school.
If you get complained of, it don’t hurt you; and even a swishing, though
it stings, it’s only for a minute--I don’t mind. There’s a house match
on to-day between Guerre’s and Whiting’s. Put that rubbish away and come
along.”
Val was on the point of going, when a recollection of what he had heard
of his father’s eminence in the way of verse-making returned to his
mind; whereupon he sat down again doggedly to grind the smooth English
into rugged schoolboy Latin. He clenched his teeth at the thought of
being inferior to his father--not from love--for how should he love the
man who had not spent a kind word on him, or seen him, but once in his
life?--but from a violent instinct of opposition which had sprung up in
his soul, he could not tell why. He would not be beaten by his father;
and this visionary jealousy overcame all Hightowers’ philosophisings,
and even the attractions of the match between Whiting’s and Guerre’s.
Thus the boy grew, not perhaps a very amiable boy, though with a side to
his character which was as sweet and soft as the other was rugged; and
with his grandfather’s lesson well learned and bearing fruit. People who
do right by a struggle are not so pleasant as those who do right because
it comes natural to them--or even sometimes as those who do wrong in an
easy and natural way without any effort; and when Val went home he would
carry occasional traces of the conflict, and sometimes showed a chaotic
condition of mind which disturbed the peace of his elders almost as much
as it disturbed his own; and his career at school was of a mixed
character, sometimes almost brilliant, sometimes very doubtful. What
wild impulses would rise in him, longings for he knew not what, desires
almost uncontrollable to rush away out of the routine in which his life
was spent. Sometimes a fierce inclination to go to sea seized upon him;
sometimes he would be suddenly tempted by the sight of the soldiers, of
whom he saw so many, and for the moment the fancy of enlisting and going
off unknown to India, China, or the end of the world, in search of
adventures--a veritable knight-errant--moved the boy. But only himself
knew how sudden and fierce were these temptations. He did not confide
them to any one. He could not tell where they came from, not being
learned enough or clever enough to refer them to his mother’s vagrant
blood, which stirred and rose in spring-tides and periodical
overflowings with the rising of his youth. But his practical schoolboy
life had this excellent effect, that it withdrew him from everything
visionary, giving him only practical difficulties and temptations to
struggle against. He forgot at Eton all about the other strange and
jarring element in his existence which had perplexed him in his
childhood. And, indeed, the boy had no leisure, even had he been
disposed, to brood over his parentage, or ask himself why his father and
mother were unlike those _paters_ and _maters_ of whom his companions
talked. It was so; and what more could be said? He accepted the fact
without further questioning, and thought no more about it. He had enough
to do with his schoolboy occupations, and with that high art in which he
was being trained by all the influences round him--the art of mastering
himself.