It was the morning of the day before Helmsworth broke up; examinations
were over, lists had been read out, and places and removes assigned to
those who would reassemble in September, and just now the whole school
was employed in the joyful task of packing play-boxes. This was not an
affair that usually demanded anxious consideration: it consisted in
shying your books into your box and shaking it until the lid consented
to close or burst in the attempt. But David on this particular occasion
was not sure that it was very joyful, and, as an outward and visible
sign of his doubts, he was actually packing his books, fitting them in
one with another, that is to say, instead of making salad. Glorious
things had happened, and a dazzling future was no doubt to follow, but
he was dimly aware that a chapter in life was closing, which in spite of
its drawbacks and terrors and annoyances had been jolly. He had been
happy, he was aware, without knowing it, and whatever the future held it
would not hold this again. No such scruples afflicted Ferrers, who was
emptying his locker into his play-box in the manner of a cheerful
cataract, holding up for competition anything he did not want.
“Old Testament Maclear,” he said. “_Quis_ for an old Testament Maclear?
List of kings of Israel and Judah in it, with lots of noughts and
crosses over it. Lord, I’d like to make a parcel of it and send it to
Dubs without any stamps on.”
David was considering the question of a catapult. In the famous visit to
Marchester he had discovered that catapults were scuggy inventions, but
he had at present been unable to bring himself to part with this one, so
great was its calibre. The stag-beetles he had given to Ferrers Minor
the day after his return, and their new owner had sat down on them with
total loss of life, a few hours subsequently. And now he hardened
himself again.
“_Quis_ for a catapult?” he said heroically, and a chorus of “Ego”
answered him. He threw it to Stone, who had clearly been first with his
“Ego.”
“Rotten things, catapults,” he said, to strengthen himself, “only scugs
use them at Marchester.”
Then he came upon the Smoking Club badge. Since his return from
Marchester he had broken with the S. C., but since, as a leaving gift,
he had made the club a magnificent present of twenty-five cigarettes and
a cherry-wood holder, his defection had not roused unpleasant comment.
But the badge had still something of the preciousness of the past about
it; he remembered the pride with which, by the assistance of a pair of
tweezers, he had shaped the copper wire into the mystic letters. He
slipped it into his play-box.
There was a loose cricket scoring-sheet, which he had craftily torn out
of the book, because it showed his own analysis on the day of the Eagles
match, and did not record the fact that he had missed the catch which
lost them the game. Well, there was no use for that now, any more than
for catapults or stag-beetles, since the fellows at Marchester would
care precious little what his bowling-analysis had been against a
private school of which nobody had ever heard. They had not heard of him
either, and at that thought David saw just where his vague regrets and
melancholy came from. He had to start all over again on a new page, to
part with everything that for its own sake or from familiarity had
become dear, to be a nobody again instead of being a big boy in his
circle. He had been used to consider himself rather a swell, with an
assured position; now he was nobody again, with no position at
all. . . . The school sergeant, the minister of fate who brought round
the slips of blue paper on which the Head had written the name of
culprits whose attendance was required, looked in at this moment.
“Master Blaize to go to the Head at once,” he said.
David’s heart stood still, not with fear but with suspense. For the last
three days he had hourly expected that news would come of the result of
the Marchester scholarship examination, and perhaps this meant its
arrival. But his friends thought otherwise, and Ferrers Major rattled
his keys and slapped a book with suggestive resonance.
“Don’t bully me, sir,” he said. “The other hand, sir. Whack, whack,
whack, all in the same place! The fellow who was going to take all the
wickets in the old boys’ match won’t be able to bowl a ball. Whack,
whack. Sobs and cries!”
“Oh, piffle,” said David getting up.
That was a word he had brought back from Marchester and was new to the
Helmsworth vocabulary. He had distinctly overworked it, with the result
that two days ago there had been a “piffle conspiracy” against him.
Whatever question, that is to say, that David asked anybody was answered
by “Piffle,” which became rather wearing to the nerves. But the
conspiracy was short-lived; it had lasted, indeed, only a few hours,
since David distinctly announced that he would firmly hit in the face
the next fellow who said “Piffle” to him. That checked off the juniors
at once; but, unfortunately there were others, and when David the moment
after said to Stone, “Will you come and bathe?” Stone said “Piffle.”
Immediately afterwards Stone had a black eye, and David a bleeding nose.
But he went for the next piffler with undiminished zeal, and the thing
had dropped, for it was not worth while fighting David over a little
thing like that. He also had dropped the use of the word, and this time
it slipped out by accident.
“And if anybody says ‘Piffle,’” he remarked cheerfully, “there’s heaps
of time to smash him silly before I go to the Head.”
This was too high-handed.
“One, two, three,” said Stone, and the whole class-room simultaneously
shouted “Piffle!” at the tops of their voices. That was a manœuvre
previously agreed on, in case David used the word again, and he was
scored off.
“Oh, funny asses,” he said witheringly, which was about the best thing
that could be done under the circumstances.
David walked down the path that led to the Head’s study with a suspended
heart, feeling certain that this was scholarship news, and not one of
his private misdeeds that was to be set before him, but yet hurriedly
attempting to recollect the omissions and trespasses of which he had
lately been guilty. But he credited himself with so stainless a record
that he was really open to the damning imputation of having become a
saint. For the effect of that glimpse of public school life had been
magical on his conduct: he had literally not cared to do the sort of
things any more that spelt trouble at Helmsworth. At Marchester, for
example, only scugs smoked, and therefore the temptation of so doing
(especially since he did not like it) had ceased to beckon him. The only
reason for indulging in it had really been the notion that it was grand,
and if by a higher standard it was not grand at all, the point of it was
gone. Again, the fact that at Adams’s house it was the thing to work,
had made industry a perfectly palatable mode of passing the time. Or
where, when he had once seen a master like Adams, was the use of
cheeking that dreary ass Dubs? You couldn’t cheek Dubs any more: it was
beneath you to do any such thing. Dubs was pure piffle.
There had been a paralysing row in the school a few days before, at
which the Head had appeared in his most terrific light; but David had
had nothing to do with that. A series of small thefts had been going on,
and the culprit had eventually been caught red-handed in a dormitory
deserted for cricket, had been held up to public execration, and
expelled. That scene had made David feel sick with terror: personally he
did not in the least desire to steal other fellows’ things, but he
quaked at the thought of being made the scorn of the assembled school as
had happened to Anstruther. He supposed that his whole subsequent life
would be cursed and blasted, as indeed the Head had assured Anstruther
that his was.
David tapped at the door, and entered in obedience to a stern, gruff
permission. The Head looked up, frowning.
“Blaize; yes, wait a moment.”
He finished a letter, reread it and directed it, and threw it on the
floor. That was one of his great ways: he just threw letters on the
floor, if he wanted them to be posted, and they were picked up and
stamped.
“I have just heard from Marchester,” he said. “You have done well, but
you have not got a scholarship. There were six given, and you were
eighth on the list. Don’t be discouraged; you have done well. But I am
recommending your father to send you to Mr. Adams’s house, anyhow. It is
more expensive than an in-boarder’s, and I wish you had got a
scholarship, so as to begin helping in your own education. But I think
you may consider that you will go to Mr. Adams’s next September.”
The Head suddenly took his keys from his pocket, and rattled them in the
lock of the drawer that held the canes. But he was doing it, so it
seemed to David, in a sort of absence of mind and not to be thinking of
what lay within. Then, leaving them there, he got up and rocked across
to the fireplace, where he stood on the hearthrug, looking gigantic. He
began a portentous, terror-breathing discourse.
“David,” he said, “a few days ago you saw a schoolfellow publicly
expelled. I saw you turn white; I saw your horror at the task that was
forced on me. Now you are on the point of going out into the bigger life
of a public school, and when you have been a week at Marchester you will
look back on the time you have passed here as a sort of babyhood, and
wonder whether it was you who smoked half a cigarette now and then, and
cheeked Mr. Dutton, and put—er—put resurrection pie into envelopes and
burned it.”
(“Good Lord,” thought David. “Is it going to be a caning for sundries?”)
Apparently it wasn’t.
“But you will find,” continued the Head, “that there are worse things
than smoking, and all the misdeeds you may or may not have been punished
for, and you will find out that there are even worse things than
stealing, and that many quite good chaps, as you would say, don’t think
there is any harm in them. Do you know what I mean?”
David looked up in quite genuine bewilderment.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Thank God for it, then,” said the Head. Then he moved across the room
to his cabinet of cigars, and broke his own rule, for he took one out
and lit it and smoked it in silence for a moment in the sacred presence
of one of the boys. Then he turned to David again.
“You don’t understand me now,” he said, “but you will. And when you do
understand, try to remember for my sake, if that is anything to you, or
for your own sake, which certainly is, or for God’s sake, which is best
of all, that there are worse things than stealing. Things that damn the
soul, David. And now, forget all I have said till the time comes for you
to remember it. You will know when it comes. And don’t listen to any
arguments about it. There is no argument possible.”
“Yes, sir,” said David blankly.
He could not understand why it was the Head had thanked God; but there
was no time for wonder, for instantly the Head’s whole gravity and
seriousness vanished.
“That is all I wanted to say to you,” he said, “and I feel sure you
won’t forget it. Now when does the old boys’ match begin? Twelve, isn’t
it? I hope you’ll be in form to-day with your bowling. We haven’t beaten
the old boys for six years, but I don’t think we’ve ever had such a good
chance as we have to-day. The wicket ought to suit you, if the sun comes
out.”
Gradually the sense of this dawned on David, its tremendous import. He
flushed with incredulous pride.
“Oh, but fellows like Hughes will hit me all round the clock, sir,” he
said.
“They will if you think they are going to,” remarked the Head. “That’s
all then, David. Hughes is staying with me over the night. You’ll sup
with us.”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” said David.
In spite of his failure to win a scholarship David walked on air as he
went back to the packing of his play-box, for far more important, from
his own point of view, than the getting of a scholarship was the fact
that he was going to Adams’s. For a minute he wondered about what the
Head had said concerning things that were worse than stealing; but,
having been told to forget all about it, instantly proceeded to put the
question out of his mind in favour of more agreeable topics. And there
was no doubt that the Head implied that it was he who might win the old
boys’ match for the school. Jolly decent of him, considering that it was
he who had certainly lost the Eagles match for them.
Soon after the great men from Eton and Harrow and Marchester began to
arrive, and each appeared more enormous than the last. To-day, however,
there was no baleful father to trouble David’s peace, and in the
half-hour before the match began he went and bowled to Hughes at the
nets, who incontinently hit him three times running out of the field.
But David had the true temper of the slow bowler who expects to be hit,
while he studies the hitter, and observed that Hughes was not nearly so
comfortable with a slightly faster ball pitched a little outside the leg
stump, and (if luck accompanied the intention) breaking in. He quite
mistimed two that David sent down, upon which, having got this valuable
hint, David bowled no more of that variety, lest Hughes should get used
to them. Then, as there were plenty of bowlers at Hughes’s net, he went
on to the next, where Cookson, who had left two years before, was
batting. There, again, the wily David tried the ball which Hughes did
not care about, but found that Cookson had a special affection for it,
and hit it juicily to square leg. But he was less confident with a very
slow ball, such as Hughes had hit so contemptuously; so here was a
second bit of information. David committed that to memory, and tried a
third net, where he had no success of any sort or kind.
There had been six school matches before this; Stone had lost the toss
on five occasions, and on the sixth, when he had won, had put the other
side in with disastrous results. To-day, however, having, contrary to
all expectation, won the toss, he took the innings, and by lunch-time
six wickets were down for a hundred and three, while Cookson, the only
bowler of any real merit, was losing his sting, and David, in the last
over before lunch, had hit him impertinently for twelve, thus bringing
his own contribution up to twenty. During lunch he made a beautiful plan
that he would really go in for hitting hard afterwards; but this
miscarried, and he lost his wicket off the first ball he received, owing
to his hitting hard at it at the moment when his bails were already
whizzing like driven partridges through the air. Three quarters of an
hour later the innings closed for a hundred and thirty-five, a total
which might have easily been worse, but undeniably should have been
better.
David’s heart sank when he saw two immense figures coming out of the
pavilion to open the innings of the old boys, and found that he had to
begin bowling to one with a moustache and a forearm that seemed about as
big as his own leg. But, as the Head had augured might happen, the sun
had come out during lunch-time, and this, after the rain of the night
before, which had rendered the wicket easy this morning, might render it
very difficult (and also very suitable for his mode of attack) during
the afternoon. Without doubt the turf would cake, and a ball, if
judiciously handled, might do very odd things indeed. He felt as if the
Head had ordered the sun on purpose for him, which was a kind thought,
and, suddenly glowing with optimism again, pranced up to the crease with
his usual extravagant action, and was immediately hit clean out of the
ground. The Head had appeared in front of the pavilion just in time to
see this done, and David candidly reflected that it was worth seeing. It
didn’t often happen that the first ball of an innings was slogged for
six. Juicy hit, too!
David approached the crease again in a much more staid manner, and
delivered a second ball exactly like the first. There was really no
reason why it should not have been treated in exactly the same way, but
the giant carefully blocked it instead, for it looked different. That
thoroughly pleased David: he was creating an atmosphere. He did not use
that phrase to himself, he merely thought that the batsman suspected
something.
Again he altered his action, and took hardly any run at all. But this
time he delivered the slightly faster ball which had puzzled Hughes
during the practice at the nets. And it was feebly returned straight
into his hands, where it remained till he buzzed it vertically into the
air.
“Gosh, I’m devilish deep,” said David to himself in a spasm of odious
pride.
By six it was all over. Helmsworth had won by twenty runs, and David had
taken eight wickets. And though, since his return from Marchester, he
had often told himself that this was only a scuggy little private
school, this was a moment worth living for, for not only did the scuggy
little private school roar at him as he came to the pavilion with the
rest of the team, but the disgraced and vanquished giants of public
schools, people of sixteen and seventeen, came out shouting “Well
bowled, Blaize,” with the most generous appreciation. The Head was
there, too, clapping his hands, and Goggles was there, beaming through
her large round spectacles, and Carrots, with her hair shining in the
sun . . . they were all there.
David came up the steps to the pavilion all alone, for the rest of the
eleven suddenly stood away from him and shoved him forward, crimson in
the face with exertion and joy.
“Oh, ’twasn’t me, sir,” he said to the Head, who patted his shoulder.
“It was just the ground: it played awfully queer.”
And he buried his delightful confusion in a quart of lemonade.
So in delicious triumph the last hours of David’s school-life passed,
and from the train next morning he saw between the trees the fleeting
glances of the roofs which for three years had been his home.