|SAM had not a dog’s chance of winning the form prize of the Classical
Fifth, and knew it. He learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt;
but the process was slow and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance
of two boys who learnt easily and rapidly.
It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic
justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull,
whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a
merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai
as his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The
prize lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like
ducks to water and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their
form-mates struggled with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were
both unpopular, both prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were
two. Had it been a case of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have
worked heroically on the off-chance, that his rival would be ill at
examination time, but it was too far-fetched to hope that both would
simultaneously ail.
He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a
“sound commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and
mathematics had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical
side because Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream
of Oxford. The gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer
saw in Sam the winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not
abandoned hope that he might carry off one of the close scholarships
which the School commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that
qualified ambition.
But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the
prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she
did not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not
only to a form but to the whole school--a prize for reading.
He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent
elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of
beating Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he
was cocksure. He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always
known it, and from the first day of his school life studied to correct
his accent. He did not, even now, even at the price of being thought
pedantic, indulge in slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a
motherless home, perhaps from a stupid bravado, larded his speech with
silly blasphemies and the current vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it
with an air; but Sam had to guard his tongue. There is a difference, too
easily detected, between correct slang and incorrect English: one must
first speak correctly before one can dare successfully to be incorrect,
and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a home where they used, in
Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we speak in Manchester;”
the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an affectation of the
insincere.
There was a set piece--the opening speech in _Comus_--the inefficients
were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was the “unseens”
that frightened Sam: he rehearsed _Comus_ till a misplaced aitch was
a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his rhythm and the
intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches were elusive
when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of perfection:
the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him.
But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood
would win that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the
hour--classics of course suffering--with a pin in his hand with which he
resolutely drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he
was fortunate. He read _The Spectator_ which he had borrowed by pure
chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage
from _The Spectator_ to read at the unseen test, and one of the great
speeches of Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_, whose thundering music had so much
attracted Sam that he knew the purple patch by heart.
He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall
with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the
school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that
it was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last
“Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the
holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the
crowd.
“Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her.
“Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re
forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a
prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to
show that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended
dryly, “and you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class.
Will they move you up?”
She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that
platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief
talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but
she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the
letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit.
She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing
English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won
against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had
learned his lesson well.
Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a
mother like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger
generation’s contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened
in his belief in the social and economical value of a decent accent and
grew careless in preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an
empty glory, and, in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It
was to lead, indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death.
Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the
last boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it
pleased him. Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the
minnows: in the Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered
there an atmosphere to which he might have responded better than he did.
Discipline was slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and
was assumed to be serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which
was open in the lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry
in the corridors; and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as
well as a scholar.
He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come
on” with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was
a constant discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural
ability and dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable
of shining in this company, and gave up a losing fight the more
readily because the half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to
coruscate.
He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play.
He, Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance
Travers was given Bassanio--salt on the still bleeding wound of his
defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving’s Shylock
from the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes,
Benson’s. He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish “types.” He came
to the first rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his
part--and had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of
the brisk little mathematics master who took the play-in hand.
Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any
case, questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted
unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of
Sam’s audience and Tom another.
Parents were invited to the Conversazione--that was what conversaziones
were for--but Anne and Tom had never accepted the invitation before. It
implied evening dress.
She decided that she could “manage” with her Sunday dress and two yards
of lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She
thought she saw a way.
“Nay, nay,” said Tom, “I couldn’t do it, lass. I’d never dare.”
“You should have thought of that before you became Sam’s father,” she
replied. “I’m going to see him and I’ll none go alone. You’re coming
with me. I reckon Mr. O’Rourke will be in to-night as usual.”
“Aye,” said Tom, suspecting nothing.
One basis of his friendship with O’Rourke was that their evenings off
happened to coincide, Tom’s from Victoria Station and Terry’s from
the old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an
institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection
between his friend’s profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He
was never very bright.
Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful
doctor’s bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial
travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had
a sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he
was explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he
could see from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary.
Manchester was Manchester because it lacked grass. The “good folk”
couldn’t dance on granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings
and only where grass abounded were people blessed.
“You’ll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I
reckon,” said Anne, breaking in without apology.
“Why, no, Mrs. Branstone,” he said. “Wednesday’s the night when I dress
like the public. I’ve gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an
ordinary customer on a Wednesday night.”
“Then you’ll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I
want him to be mistaken for a swell.”
“There’s a shine on them,” objected Terry, “that you can see your face
in.”
“Dress-clothes,” pronounced Anne, “are dressy when they shine. If you’ll
put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I’ll be obliged, and I’ll send
the shirt back washed.”
“But, Anne----” protested Tom.
“You hold your hush,” she said. “It’s settled. Go on about the fairies,
Terry.”
Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation
for those children, men.
Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom’s
transformation from a railway porter into a “swell.” His tie, at any
rate, was nicely tied, but “I feel the awkwardest fool alive,” said Tom,
as well he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne,
had she confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in
no better case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be
brazen for two. Yet even Anne’s high courage failed her in the ladies’
dressing-room: she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had
seen unveiled that, at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and
fled.
But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair,
had taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly
tact increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered
his waifs from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed
company, were directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet,
well-known alderman, who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded
them to their places in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and
accomplished the incredible feat of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in
the midst of the tipping public.
Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam’s
school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence
he acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in
his costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met
with Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not
tremendous reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for
her, Lance and Mr. Travers did for Tom.
Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of
memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to
be associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course,
caused by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have
nothing to do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated
school into the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat
and danced exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented,
so wholly un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes
before Anne recovered enough command of him to put an end to the
discreditable performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she
had danced hand in hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them
ever referred to their pagan capering again.
Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this
should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which
even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping
him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with
death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the
school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to
fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his
hour, and
“men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.”
It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world--only the death of
Anne could have done that--but certainly as a stunning blow. It was
the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed
death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the
detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but
little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his
son. In after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s
death softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and
lovingly bought flowers to put inside the coffin.
It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he
had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the
holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday
he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in
termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an
unjust thrashing from him--if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom
had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked
Sam, and Sam was angry.
Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his
son’s glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam
had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt
enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s
death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown.
Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love
as well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good,
and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness
of a crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead
she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her
business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial
Society and soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge
and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done
to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a
neighbours’ raree-show.
She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at
the inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke)
and, on the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell
him that, of course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little
that Travers was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end
of her dream for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her
world had flopped. And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no
more now than then would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses.
She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said.
Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here
and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and
no favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an
office-boy.”
“Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the
Classical Transitus.”
“Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add
up a row of figures.”
She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school
education.
“I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied,
and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count
for fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he
shapes.” He intended to see very soon.
Anne nodded grimly. “I’ll see he shapes,” she said, and Sam, silent
witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne’s first
words on reaching home. “Get out those old arithmetic text-books of
yours,” she said, “and look up mensuration. I’ve not forgotten it, if
you have.”